Oddly, there is still a lot of vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories even though that has all been debunked. What’s even more puzzling are the number of people who will claim that it hasn’t been tested adequately (it’s been tested far more than any other vaccine at launch), but then they will go on to take drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, that hadn’t been tested much for COVID initially, and after they have been tested and found not to provide any benefit, they still insist that it’s a cover up. Another study was published in JAMA this week indicating that ivermectin is no better than placebo.
So are vaccines better at preventing COVID infection, hospitalizations, and death? The data paints a very cleart picture.
Infection
This graphs represents cases by vaccination status per 100,000 people.
At first glance, the green line at the bottom right doesn’t seem to any benefit from the bivalent boosters. However, this is due to the big surge of cases at the start of 2022, which changes the scale of the y-axis. This is a view of just the part of the graph when the bivalent data became available.
Of course, there were legitimate concerns about the safety of the vaccine in adolescents and children. Views of the data can be found in the link in the sources section below. This is what the case data looks like for the <5 year old cohort, suggesting efficacy among this age group as well
Hospitalization
This is hospitalizations per 100,000 among the >18 year old population by vaccination status.
Hospitalization data isn’t available in their visualization tool for the <5 age group, but this is how hospitalizations look for 5-11 year olds by vaccination status.
Deaths
This represents deaths per 100,000 among those over 18 by vaccination status.
Again, it’s useful to zoom in to see the imapact of the bivalent boosters.
Data Sources
Rates of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations by vaccination status
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitalizations-vaccination
Rates of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Status
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
