Here’s vax uptake and waning among the elderly in the US and several European countries.
Note how that red "unvaxxed elderly" segment extends much further right for the US, with millions still vulnerable well into its summer Delta wave.
Far more severely waned second doses, too
And this is after the US got off to a big head-start, getting second doses into elderly arms well ahead of Europe.
(👀 second row of charts here)
But where the black line rose first, it stopped rising at a much lower level than leading European countries.
So what we’ve done in this story is combine all the data we have on age-specific exposure:
• Baseline pre-vaccine risk of severe disease by age
• Share of age group with x doses, and how much waning
• Vaccine efficacy against Delta and Omicron
• For every day of the last year
The result: population-weighted scores for exposure to hospitalisation over time
• Eng & US started rollouts earlier
• But soon overtaken by EU countries (US because rollout slowed, England because AZ)
• Boosters pushed exposure yet lower
• Omi’s immune evasion caused a bump
And that’s where we get these charts showing how one country’s hospitalisation toll might have looked if it had another country’s vax coverage.
We start with the observed data, here for the US, and then multiply it by the ratio between US and Danish exposure scores every day
We can also flip the comparison around and see, for example, how English Covid hospitalisations would have looked if we had US vaccination coverage.
The answer: much worse, coming quite close to last winter’s peak.
Another interesting counterfactual, as also calculated by @PaulMainwood last week for the Omicron period, is what would things look like without boosters?
In England, hospital occupancy would have (un)comfortably exceeded last winter’s peak.
And here’s England with Polish rates of vaccination 😬
There’s an extensive methodology box on our story, and full reproducible code on GitHub github.com/Financial-Time…
So, why does all of this matter?
Because of this chart.
Covid’s IFR in England has fallen steeply since last winter, but that wasn’t by chance, it was [largely] because of vaccines.
In countries with poor vax coverage, Covid will still be far more than twice as lethal as flu.
For example, here are CFRs for England, Portugal and the US (IFRs are only possible for England, thanks to the @ONS infection survey 🙏)
Just like in hospital exposure chart, poor US vax coverage means its CFR has stayed much higher until Omicron, and remains higher with Omicron
And while Omicron’s intrinsic mildness is good news for us all, invaluable data from France (via @nicolasberrod) shows that vaccines still do more to reduce Covid’s lethality than Omicron does.
This matches what we’re hearing more hospital doctors all over the world: even with Omicron, unvaccinated people remain at substantial risk of severe disease and worse
So as long as large numbers of elderly people remain unvaxxed or have waned protection, Covid will continue to be a major burden.
If we want Covid to be over, and to be able to get on with our lives, we need to get everyone vaccinated.
And as many have said, we must also remember Covid is much more transmissible than flu, so even though its lethality per-infection has fallen, the number of infections in any given year is still far, far higher.
It’s also worth noting that Omicron’s intrinsic mildness was a lucky strike for us. If the next variant is an offshoot of Delta, that gift would be revoked, and everything will rest on vaccines (and infection-acquired immunity) again.
Finally, a very interesting randomised controlled trial into vaccines’ impact on sporting performance concluded over the weekend, with striking results...
Researchers took elite athletes, matched on age and Grand Slam titles, and assigned them to one of two conditions:
Novax ⛔️
Needal 💉
Being unvaxxed was associated with:
• Extended periods of inactivity
• Loss of shared Grand Slam record
• Deportation
Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.
What should we make of this?
Nobody would argue that the fundamental biology of the human brain has changed in that time span. People’s underlying intellectual capacity is surely undimmed.
But there is growing evidence that the extent to which people can practically apply that capacity has been diminishing.
For such an important topic, there’s remarkably little long-term data on attention spans, focus etc.
But one source that has consistently tracked this is the Monitoring The Future survey, which finds a steep rise in the % of people struggling to concentrate or learn new things.
NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.
The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west).
In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.
This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.
The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring.
In seven weeks Trump’s America has shattered decades-long western norms and blindsided other western leaders with abrupt policy changes.
This is because many of the values of Trump’s America are not the values of western liberal democracies.
NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:
The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left.
My wish for the next election is that poll trackers look like the one on the right 👉 not the left
This was yet another election where the polling showed it could easily go either way, but most of the charts just showed two nice clean lines, one leading and one trailing. Bad!
Pollsters and poll aggregators have gone to great lengths to emphasise the amount of uncertainty in the polls in recent weeks...
But have generally still put out charts and polling toplines that encourage people to ignore the uncertainty and focus on who’s one point ahead. Bad!
The thing about human psychology is, once you give people a nice clean number, it doesn’t matter how many times you say "but there’s an error margin of +/- x points, anything is possible".
People are going to anchor on that central number. We shouldn’t enable this behaviour!
We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.
Some of those stories may even be true!
But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇
Harris lost votes, Sunak lost votes, Macron lost votes, Modi (!) lost votes, as did the Japanese, Belgian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Lithuanian governments in elections this year.
Any explanation that fails to take account for this is incomplete.
The recent political polarisation of Silicon Valley is really striking.
25 years ago most big tech and VC execs were moderates. Then the whole sector shifted gradually leftwards up until 2020, and now suddenly we have a sharp divide into Democrat-backers and Trump backers.
Chart is from my column this week exploring how the politics of corporate bosses have evolved over time ft.com/content/29426c…
Thanks to a brilliant new analysis from @reillysteel, we know the overall shift has been towards the left, but there are lots of other interesting things going on beneath the surface too