U.K.: High cases but low deaths; Miraculous vaccines; Responding to anti-vaxxers

Following up on Tuesday's e-mail...

I continue to closely follow the pandemic, sending lengthy e-mails to my coronavirus e-mail list roughly once a week. If you'd like to receive them, simply send a blank e-mail to: cv-subscribe@mailer.kasecapital.com.

Below is the first part of the e-mail I sent yesterday. To read the rest of it, click here.

1) To see the extraordinary impact vaccines make (and what the trajectory for cases, hospitalizations, and deaths might look like here), look no further than the U.K., which has been hit hard by the pandemic (deaths per million, at 1,888, is the same as the U.S., 20th worst in the world).

As you can see in this chart, however, they've done an exceptional job on getting the vast majority of the adult population (especially the elderly) vaccinated, exceeding the U.S. and Europe (source):

Cases, however, are spiking, as you can see in this chart (source):

This is almost entirely due to the much-more-contagious delta variant (note how quickly the U.S. is following in the U.K.'s footsteps: The Delta variant makes up an estimated 83% of U.S. cases, the CDC director says):

In light of this, it may seem like madness for the U.K. to have ended all restrictions earlier this week, which has been widely criticized (for example, see: England Is 'Free.' And in Total Chaos).

But when you look at COVID hospitalizations and deaths, which remain very low, maybe it's not so crazy...

This miraculous outcome is almost entirely due to the miraculous vaccines. Eighty-five percent of cases in the U.K. are among the unvaccinated, but these tend to be younger folks, so few require hospitalization (and even fewer die). And of the 15% of cases among the vaccinated, the vaccines provide protection, keeping people out of the hospital (and the morgue).

Here's a brilliant chart showing the difference between the U.K.'s second wave versus the current one: a similar number of cases, but 94% fewer deaths! (source)

This is great news, of course, and bodes well for us. But to be clear, rising cases, even in the absence of rising hospitalizations and deaths, are still a problem because of the troubling "long COVID" effects I discussed in my last e-mail (see: 'Long COVID' Fears Grow in U.K. as Curbs End and Delta Surges).

You do not want to catch this virus, so if you haven't gotten vaccinated, please do so immediately before the delta variant catches you (which is highly likely). I don't want you to end up like the guy I wrote about in my last e-mail: Despite being young (early 40s) and super-fit, he's still in the hospital and nearly died. He's going to live, but will need months to recover fully – if he ever does...

2) Speaking of which, one of my friends wrote this in response to my last e-mail:

One of my friends knows two guys, both in their 30s and working on the buyside in New York City, who are dealing with long-term effects of COVID. One guy lost his toes, the other permanently lost half his lung capacity.

Death is also permanent. I know three people who have died from COVID – and the oldest was only 64.

3) Here's a good example of the disingenuousness of the anti-vaxxers... One of the most prominent is Alex Berenson, who has 292,000 Twitter (TWTR) followers, started a Substack blog with 10,000 subscribers on the first day, and has been a guest on Tucker Carlson's show. On Sunday, he tweeted the following:

At first glance, it seems very impressive, but it's actually dangerously misleading garbage (not that most folks can tell, because most of Berenson's "evidence" is in Hebrew). Here's a brilliant rebuttal (alas, by a guy with only 91,000 Twitter followers):

When most of your people are vaccinated, most of your remaining coronavirus cases will be among the vaccinated. This does not mean that the vaccines "failed." It means that there aren't many unvaccinated people left to infect.

No one has ever claimed that the vaccines stop you from getting infected. They are a certain % effective, as has been repeatedly reported. When most people are vaccinated, you'd expect some people to still get coronavirus, and for most of them to have been vaccinated. It's math.

As I've said here repeatedly, Israel's data suggests the Pfizer (PFE) vaccine is less effective against the Delta variant, though still over 60% effective at preventing infection, and 90%+ at preventing severe disease. So again, you should expect some vaccinated folks to get infected.

Here is a graph that is not in Hebrew and does not require you to take a Twitter troll's word for what it says. This is not what a vaccine failure looks like:

1. Vaccines right now are a ~90% success in preventing severe disease. Turning coronavirus into a bad flu is a huge success.
2. Preventing 60% of infections, like preventing 60% of any deadly disease, is a huge success.

This isn't hard unless you want it to be.

(There isn't really a point in responding to Berenson, since he's not actually interested in being persuaded by vaccine data, so normally I wouldn't bother. But when he starts talking about Israel, which is my beat but which he knows little about, seems worth correcting the record.)

4) Another argument the anti-vaxxers make is that the vaccines were developed so rapidly, so we should be skeptical. One of my friends responds:

There are a lot of reasons why these vaccines could be developed so quickly:

• Prior experience with coronaviruses, advances in genetic sequencing, advances in messenger RNA (mRNA) technology 

• Streamlined regulation (expedited review processes, emergency use authorization)
• Fast enrollment for the tests due to large number of volunteers
• Massive financial support enabling pharma companies to run tests in parallel
• Prevalence of the disease allowing each trial to progress more quickly

I've heard the "lack of longitudinal tests" objection before, and I simply counter with this last bullet point because it's an easy concept for the layperson to grasp. Here are some references:

1) Were the vaccines rushed? | Doctor Wertz Talks Timing of Moderna & Pfizer (three-minute video; start at 1:35)

2) How COVID-19 vaccines were made so quickly without cutting corners, Science News. Excerpt:

Driven by a global urgency and underpinned by decades of prior work on vaccine technology, vaccine developers found a way to chop not just days or months, but years off the timeline. What was jettisoned was not the science, or the safety tests, but rather the wait time baked into the development process – waiting for results and waiting for regulatory approvals.

By comparing the new vaccines with earlier drugs that have used the same tech under more traditional research timelines, it is possible to calculate approximately how much time got chopped off the development process once shots were ready to go into arms: roughly four years. Here's how.

In the rest of my e-mail, I covered:

• On Fox News, Vaccination Pleas Intensify, but Skepticism Persists
• Dr. Kevin Maki answers a reader's question about whether those who've had COVID-19 should get vaccinated
• Why Aren't the Vaccines Approved?
• J&J Vaccine May Be Less Effective Against Delta, Study Suggests

• So much tragedy everywhere: U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans, India's true pandemic death toll is likely to be well over 3 million, a new study finds, and Third Covid Wave Upends Fragile South Africa, a Warning for Developing World 

To read it, click here.

Best regards,

Whitney

P.S. I welcome your feedback at WTDfeedback@empirefinancialresearch.com.