For many months now Joe Biden has been pushing vaccinations in order to get the COVID pandemic under control. The Biden administration has argued that Americans who haven’t been vaccinated are responsible for new COVID cases. “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said back in July. “We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination rates because unvaccinated people are at risk.”
When Joe Biden announced his vaccine mandate last month, he made the same claim. “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and it’s caused by the fact that despite America having unprecedented and a successful vaccination program, despite the fact that for almost five months, free vaccines have been available in 80,000 different locations, we still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot.”
But do vaccination rates really make a difference in COVID cases? This summer, Justin Hart, the Chief Data Analyst and founder of RationalGround.com, a site that helps companies, public policy officials, and parents gauge the impact of COVID-19 across the country based on real data, noticed that there appeared to be no correlation between vaccination rates and COVID cases.
Looks at this! I put together cases and vaccination data from the CDC. (Cases are per 100K left Y-axis | vaccinations are increasing % right Y-axis)
Cases drop by 75% or more for every age group BEFORE any group hits 20% vaccination. Something else is going on entirely here.
1/ pic.twitter.com/oI4iKiGlww— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) July 26, 2021
It turns out that this conclusion has been confirmed by a recent study from the European Journal of Epidemiology, which found that there appears to be “no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases.”
This affirms recent data from the UK showing that infection rates among the fully vaccinated “are now higher than those of the unvaccinated in all age cohorts ≥30.” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya noted that the data shows “the COVID vax does not stop infection.” However, the vaccine “provides a private benefit (protection vs. severe disease), but limited public benefit (protection vs. disease spread).”
“So what is the argument for mandates?” Bhattacharya asks.
There is a lot to learn from this graph, but most obviously, the COVID vax does not stop infection.
The vax provides a private benefit (protection vs. severe disease), but limited public benefit (protection vs. disease spread).
So what is the argument for mandates? https://t.co/52JSrEEAyl
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) October 12, 2021
The Harvard study makes the same argument:
In summary, even as efforts should be made to encourage populations to get vaccinated it should be done so with humility and respect. Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good. Importantly, other non-pharmacological prevention efforts (e.g., the importance of basic public health hygiene with regards to maintaining safe distance or handwashing, promoting better frequent and cheaper forms of testing) needs to be renewed in order to strike the balance of learning to live with COVID-19 in the same manner we continue to live a 100 years later with various seasonal alterations of the 1918 Infuenza virus.
So why is Biden pushing the mandate?