LogFAQs > #959178814

The study is pretty bad, actually. The data they use is cherry picked, and in some cases faulty (the three counties they name as being the highest vaccinated are all from misreported data - the Puerto Rican county was reporting higher than 100% in some databases).

When looking at the county data shown in Fig 3, you can see that more than half of all the counties in each bracket saw an increase in their 7-day rolling new cases over a two week span, with the exception of the highest bracket of counties with 70%+ vaccination rates, which saw less than half of the counties showing an increase. This is significant because there was a large surge starting in August (perhaps due to schools starting up?) so a broad increase in counties would be expected.

It could simply be that vaccine rates are still not high enough to be effective - no vaccine is 100% effective at preventing transmission of disease, which is why a high level of the population must be vaccinated for them to work. The MMR vaccine, for example, needs somewhere around a 95% vaccination rate to prevent mumps outbreaks from happening. Covid isnt as transmissible as mumps, but depending on how effective the vaccines actually are, we still might simply be below the threshold where we can see outbreak prevention.

As other people have also pointed out, while we havent seen significant decreases in the spread of the disease we can easily see that the vaccines do reduce the severity of the illness and the chances of hospitalization or death. The study tries to hide this by pointing out an increase in hospitalization and deaths of vaccinated patients, but it is measuring a period from January to May, which includes the rollout of the vaccines (meaning the data was skewed). The same source referenced by this study also showed a 25-fold reduction in instances of hospitalization and death for those vaccinated.

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