Im-Politic: More Evidence That the Vaccines are No Cure-All

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Biden, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, death rates, hospitalizations, Im-Politic, public health, vaccination, vaccines, Washington Post, Wuhan virus

Time for a CCP virus update with a focus on the effectivnes of vaccines. And the big takeaway? Good luck to you if you can detect any evidence for the popular view (including President Biden’s) that the United States has been seeing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” lately – and especially during pandemic phase dominated by the highly infectious Delta variant.

Full disclosure: I’m fully vaxxed and have been since late April. I got the shots as soon as I could make an appointment (not easy back then in my state of residence, Maryland). I’ll probably get a booster – and certainly have no inherent objections to these jabs.

But I’m 67 years old and have some underlying conditions that make me more vulnerable than other young seniors (although my physicians tell me I’m still  healthy overall). So I concluded that getting vaccinated made good sense for me. For anyone else? As always, the only medical advice I’m qualified to give is “Use your judgment in consultation with your doctor(s).”

In other words, I’m no anti-vaxxer. Instead, my main concern continues to be the often confusing advice given by public health authorities on dealing with the pandemic, their regular habit of departing from “The Science” in their recommendations, and – especially important – their willingness to push aggressively for policies with major implications for both other public health issues and crucial non-health-related issues based on highly questionable data. (The latest potential problem revealed concerned the hospitalization figures, which I and many others viewed as the most reliable measure of the pandemic’s status and the severity of the virus – though far from perfect.)

Here’s what I’ve just done. I’ve looked at the statistics for the states and territories that have fully vaccinated the highest percentages of their populations and the lowest percentages of their populations, and compared the changes in newly reported deaths and numbers of CCP Virus-related hospitalization rates over the last week as of this morning. My source, as often the case, is the Washington Post‘s very well-designed and thus very convenient interactive virus database. The results are below:

Top 10 vaxxed states   Full Vax rate  new deaths last week  new hospns last week

National average:         54.2 percent        +26 percent                   -6 percent

Vermont:                       68.8 percent      +100 percent             +26.5 percent

Connecticut:                 67.5 percent      +33.3 percent               +4.4 percent

Puerto Rico:                  67.4 percent       +8.3 percent                 -15 percent

Maine:                           67.2 percent            0 percent               +3.1 percent

Massachusetts:                 67 percent     +44.4 percent             +14.5 percent

Rhode Island:                66.5 percent        +50 percent              -11.8 percent

Guam:                            65.1 percent     +200 percent               not available

New Jersey:                   63.1 percent    +12.5 percent               +2.6 percent

Maryland:                         63 percent    +23.1 percent                     0 percent

New York:                      62.1 percent    -29.4 percent               -14.6 percent

Bottom 10 states for vaccination rates

National average:           54.2 percent      +26 percent                    -6 percent

West Virginia:                   40 percent   +91.7 percent                +9.3 percent

Wyoming:                      40.4 percent    +100 percent                 -9.4 percent

Idaho:                            40.5 percent     +120 percent              +10.3 percent

Alabama:                      40.7 percent     +110 percent                -14.5 percent

Mississippi:                  41.7 percent     -15.4 percent                -15.1 percent

North Dakota:              42.9 percent            0 percent                 +7.4 percent

Virgin Islands:             43.1 percent             0 percent              +16.7 percent

Georgia:                       43.5 percent     +50.6 percent               -10.2 percent

Louisiana:                    43.8 percent     +10.4 percent               -17.8 percent

Tennessee:                   43.8 percent      +28.3 percent              -12.2 percent

Before proceeding, another data caution shouldn’t be forgotten. Because most of the states in each group have very small populations, changes in both deaths and hospitalizations are often infinitesimal in absolute terms, which means that even tiny increases or decreases in those terms can produce huge percentage change results. Indeed, in places like Vermont and Wyoming and the Virgin Islands, these changes are only in the single digits in absolute terms.

All the same, as for some of the most obvious comparisons:

The number of top ten vaxxed states whose CCP Virus-related deaths rose during the past week is eight. For the bottom ten, it’s only seven.

The number of top ten vaxxed states where such deaths fell during that week is one. None of the bottom ten saw falling deaths.

The number of top ten vaxxed states whose hospitalizations rose over the last week is five. The comparable figure for the bottom ten vaxxed states is four.

The number of top ten vaxxed states whose hospitalizations fell over the last week is two. For the bottom ten vaxxed states? Six.

If anything, the bottom ten vaxxed states recently have been doing slightly better than the top ten according to these measures.

Also peculiar – and tough to square with the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” claim: Within these two groups, there are some big death and hospitalization variations between states with identical or very similar vaccination rates. Indeed, the fully vaxxed range in the top ten group is between 68.8 percent and 62.1 percent. Yet the trends for New York and Massachusetts, for example, are going in exactly the opposite directions – and very strongly so. Moreover, the top ten state with the best record on both counts combined by far is New York, even though it’s the least fully vaxxed state in this group.

Using the national average as the bar doesn’t produce a better story for the highly vaxxed states.

In that group, the number whose deaths rose faster than the national average is five. For the lowest vaxxed states, the number is six.

As a result, five states in the top ten category saw deaths rising more slowly than the national average, versus four in the bottom ten category.

Turning to hospitalizations, six of the top ten vaxxed states experienced worse changes than the national average, and data were unavailable for Guam. The comparable number for the bottom ten states was the same.

Therefore, three states in the top ten group experienced better hospitalization change results than the national average, versus four in the bottom ten group.

One possible reason for still taking the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” claim seriously: Many of these results might be explained by the fact that in the top ten vaxxed states, absolute levels of deaths and hospitalizations are starting from very low levels. So as explained just above, their apparently worsening records in many cases can be dismissed as a statistical illusion, and the focus should remain on how good their records in absolute terms remain.

And the converse for the bottom ten: Seeming improvements in their records may stem from death and vaccination rates that stood at very high absolute levels, and remained high despite impressive-looking percentage change drops.

But another possibility deserves at least as much attention: These supposed statistical illusions actually show that the virus is advancing and retreating in waves in many instances – and that to some extent, the results mean that the worst vaxxed states are seeing significant improvements in their numbers, and the best are seeing significant deterioration, for reasons having little to do with vaccinations, and much more to do with the nature of viruses and their natural life cycles.

One particularly notable example is Florida, which has received so much attention because Governor Ron DeSantis has so strongly opposed many mandatory mitigation measures. Its full vaccination rate is now a little higher (55.6 percent) than the national average of 54.2 percent, and actually has been rising somewhat faster.

Its death rate initially rose much more strongly than the U.S. rate as a whole, and has stayed considerably higher (1.69 daily new deaths measured by the seven-day average per hundred thousand residents, versus 0.59 for the nation as a whole). But over the last week, its daily deaths have risen much more slowly (seven percent versus 26 percent).

Similarly, Florida’s hospitalization rate is still higher than the national average (with 45 residents per 100,000 versus 29 per 100,000 for the entire United States). But over the last seven days, Florida daily hospitalizations are down 19 percent, versus six percent for the nation as a whole.

It’s become a commonplace to observe that viruses don’t care what your politics are, or where you live, or what your vaccine views are.  That’s all true.  But it looks like, except for considerations that have long been known, like age and race, certain they care much less about whether you’re vaxxed than where you happen to live at any given time as they appear, surge, and fade (to varying extents) as they always have.    

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: More Crucial Details on the U.S. (and Heavily Female) White Die-Off

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2016 election, Angus Deaton, Anne Case, cities, coal, death rates, Donald Trump, health, Jobs, manufacturing, mortality, mortality crisis, Populism, rural areas, small towns, Trade, wages, whites, women, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Everyone should be grateful to the Washington Post for following up – in heart-breaking detail – on one of the most tragic and important stories of our time: the mounting mortality crisis among working- and middle-class middle-aged white Americans. At the same time, the Post‘s findings raise as many questions as they answer, significantly complicating the story – and the challenge of reversing these dismaying trends.

This white mortality crisis, you’ll recall, first broke into the news last fall, when Princeton University economists Angus Deaton (the latest Nobel prize winner) and Anne Case published a report solidly documenting the trend and linking it to growing economic insecurity combined with ever more paltry pension plans. Deaton and Case noted pointedly that, although other high-income countries, especially in Europe, had also experienced financial crises, productivity slowdowns, and widening inequality, the worsening white death rates in the United States, which provides fewer social and retirement protections, were unique. The authors also suggested that declining economic expectations hit white Americans’ psyches especially hard, and that non-whites, whose expectations were never as high to start with, found harder times easier to cope with.

As observers – like yours truly – noted, the implications for American politics seemed profound. In particular, I wrote, the Deaton-Case results indicated that outsider Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was more on-target than even he suspected when he kept complaining that America was getting “killed” by job- and wage-killing trade policies. And in fact, a strong relationship between rising white mortality and resurgent U.S. populism was made clear by the Post last month, when it found a high correlation between concentrations of the mortality problem and support for Trump.

Today’s report, however, adds crucial details indicating that other factors may be at work as well. One such finding: that “the most extreme changes in mortality have occurred among white women….” Women, after all, haven’t suffered nearly as much manufacturing job loss as men – whether it stems from trade policy mistakes or other causes (like factory automation). At the same time, since so many women have entered the U.S. workforce in recent decades – as manufacturing employment has faced more trade and technology pressure – they could well be affected indirectly by industrial job loss, as laid off manufacturing workers had to start competing for jobs in service sectors where women were more numerous.

Also muddying the picture is the big (and overlapping) rural-urban white health divide found by the Post (with “rural” including “small-town America”). In important ways, this geography of the white mortality crisis is consistent with the trade and manufacturing-centered interpretation. As is known by anyone who has traveled extensively around the “rust belt” or the American South, lots of factories have been and still are located in small towns and semi-rural areas, in part because land is cheap.

And reinforcement for this view is found on this map accompanying the Post article.

So many of the orange-brown and dark grey areas in the map on left — which signify counties and regions with the fastest rising white female mortality rates — are places like southern Michigan (think “auto industry”), northern Ohio (autos, steel, and industrial machinery), northwestern Indiana (steel), north central and western New York State (industrial machinery, heating and cooling equipment, railroad equipment, steel), and the Carolinas (where the plunge in textile and furniture jobs hasn’t nearly been offset by newer – often foreign – investments in sectors like aerospace, automotive, appliances, and electronics assembly). (The map on the right shows counties and region where white female mortality is falling.)

Nonetheless, so many of the biggest orange-brown stretches are regions dominated by other parts of the economy. Clearly, the coal industry’s woes bear lots of blame for the mortality crisis in Kentucky, southern Ohio, and West Virginia. And Nebraska, the eastern half of Utah, and the western half of Kansas have never been manufacturing strongholds (though Wichita has long been a major aerospace center).

The variety of local and regional economies involved shouldn’t be surprising. Anything as big as a mortality crisis in such a large segment of the population is bound to have multiple causes – and to resist talking-point-deep explanations and slapdash remedies. But that doesn’t mean the mainstreams of the two major parties shouldn’t be addressing the rapidly deteriorating health of so many Americans much more comprehensively and energetically.