Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.

Some high points of the article...

"Of the top 5 counties that have the highest percentage of population fully vaccinated (99.984.3%), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies 4 of them as "High" Transmission counties. Chattahoochee (Georgia), McKinley (New Mexico), and Arecibo (Puerto Rico) counties have above 90% of their population fully vaccinated with all three being classified as "High" transmission.

Conversely, of the 57 counties that have been classified as "low" transmission counties by the CDC, 26.3% (15) have percentage of population fully vaccinated below 20%."


"...in a report released from the Ministry of Health in Israel, the effectiveness of 2 doses of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine against preventing COVID-19 infection was reported to be 39% [6], substantially lower than the trial efficacy of 96% [7]. It is also emerging that immunity derived from the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may not be as strong as immunity acquired through recovery from the COVID-19 virus [8]. A substantial decline in immunity from mRNA vaccines 6-months post immunization has also been reported [9]. Even though vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death, the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated [10]."



https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7

What a terrible paper

It's one week of data (Aug 26 to Sep 2) compared to the previous 7 days (Aug 18 to 25). So "no relationship over a single week over week period" is a more accurate framing. Looking at rates this late in the pandemic is a bad metric under any set of conditions, since the standard model of population infection says that, for R_t>1 the higher R_t is, the earlier your epidemic is over.

They also compared infection rate differences across different counties, which all have vastly different cultures and policies. For example, this does not even attempt to characterize mitigation efforts: Israel got rid of nearly all restrictions before delta hit, the same cannot be said for many unvaccinated countries.

These type of unconditional mean comparisons are done holding all else constant. If we know there is non-equivalency of the underlying factors, holding stuff constant is a useless exercise.

Tamu has a world class stats department, perhaps they can teach some basic stats to these authors.

Of course, those on Twitter and Facebook with zero knowledge of stats won't read nor understand this papers fallacies and just spread it.

We just spent the summer watching unvaccinated people in the most unvaccinated states dying by the tens of thousands, but yeah this seems legit.

Where I live it's 90% vaccinated and our delta "surge" has been 100 cases a day in a county of a million people. If we somehow have a winter outbreak that looks like Florida or Texas I'll eat my words, but I don't think that's going to happen.

I'm not really sure how strong this data is when its based on such a small time period.

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We should note that the COVID-19 case data is of confirmed cases, which is a function of both supply (e.g., variation in testing capacities or reporting practices) and demand-side (e.g., variation in people's decision on when to get tested) factors.

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Above is from the article. I wonder if there is any other reason why countries with low vaccination rates would have less confirmed cases and countries with high vaccination rates would have higher confirmed cases. Alternate hypothesis using the same data: countries with good healthcare systems both vaccinate more of their patients and test their populations more than countries with bad healthcare systems. This results in both a higher vaccination rate and higher confirmed positive cases in countries with good healthcare systems.

abram97 said:

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Forum Troll said:

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I'm not really sure how strong this data is when its based on such a small time period.

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Agree - it is hypothesis generating, like most research.

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This board is probably not the most objective place to post hypothesis generating data, imo

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Tamu has a world class stats department, perhaps they can teach some basic stats to these authors.

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Way back in grad school up north, I was wearing my A&M hoodie in the faculty/student cafeteria and one of the stats professors jump up in excitement and asked me to sit with him and another stats prof to talk Aggie football. This is the guy:

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=652103

I of course was really confused as this guy was a Carnegie Mellon/Harvard dude who had moved over from Boston. The other professor was a Brit.

After a bit, he finally told me that his Dad lead the statistics department at Texas A&M and he went to A&M Consolidated for high school prior to heading back north. His dad, Emmanuel Parzen has one of the more distinguished bi-annual statistics research awards named in his honor and wrote groundbreaking stuff regarding probability theory.

TAMU does indeed have a world class department . . . .too bad that is relatively unknown.