Unlike earlier expectations, vaccines have not magically pushed out Covid and reverted the world to its pre-Mar’20 glory(little joys and luxuries of life that we didn’t value that much at that time.. like meeting near and dear ones, those hugs, office corner gossips, water parks, life without masks.. sigh!), but have they dramatically cut down on infections? or serious illness that needed hospitalizations? or mortality rates?

While the UK is in news on account of having the highest ever cases, but it also provides one of the strongest case (on a big data set of ~70 Million population) in favor of vaccine effectiveness

source/credits: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

The UK has gone very aggressive on the vaccination front with more than 2/3rd of the population being fully vaccinated (~45% of the target population has also taken a booster jab). Effects of this focus and early leads are clear in terms of lower hospitalizations and Covid related deaths.

Russia, on the other hand, seems to be in a mess. These charts are quite inexplicable:

source/credits: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

What’s happening in Russia?

The fully vaccinated population is at ~35%, and while it is about half the ratio vs UK, but is still significant.

And yet, New Covid cases are higher, absolute deaths/day are at the highest, and the most absurd data point is that even mortality rates(3.5%) are higher than pre-vaccination era(2.1%)??

Other than pointing to the fact that sub 50% vaccination levels hardly provide a deterrent for overall society, Only 2 explanations for this:

1. Russia’s early pandemic era data was of bad/questionable quality

2. Sputnik’s efficacy against newer mutations is questionable

What do you think?

Related read: https://bhanusisodia.com/2021/09/despite-a-bad-pandemic-surge-usa-covid-19-data-presents-overwhelming-evidence-in-support-of-vaccines/

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Math was rather simple, ~1 Bn eligible adults, 2X vaccination doses, and hence we needed 2 Bn vaccination doses to vaccinate all eligible adults in India.

I pointed out at that time as well that this is an over-reaction.

Why? Because it was not a valid assumption that all eligible adults in India will be reached out or will even be willing to go opt for the vaccinations.  Just like all other nations we were supposed to slow down as we get over administering vaccinations to a section of public that is willing/eager to get vaccinated.

If we look the whole vaccination drive, in India, we have now seen all 4 phases of the cycle:

1. Yes we also started …yawn!: In Q1 2021, Covid seemed like a thing of past, Vaccinations were neither open for general public, nor was there a serious interest/pressure for it.
2. Hey! Where are the Vaccines? When Covid second wave engulfed everyone, within a short span of 4 weeks (reported)cases skyrocketed to 4 times the peak of wave 1, casualties piled up and everyone wanted the vaccination shot to save his or her own life. System crashed, vaccination slots were grabbed up within seconds of opening, it was a nightmare with Supply and administering capacity being a tiny fraction of demand.
3. Supply increased and vaccinations accelerated: In this phase, pace of vaccination drive was still governed by available supply availability.
4. Demand and not supply dictating vaccination pace: How to reach more people? (falling new registrations)

I earlier thought that we will hit phase-4 a lot earlier, but the public, authorities and medical/para-medic Infra surprised everyone.

As explained in another post here, examples from around the world show that beyond a threshold, it becomes very difficult to enroll new people for vaccinations.

For countries like US and UK, they saw the first inflection point once they crossed ~50% of vaccine eligible population. For a country like India we had to overcome so many barriers to achieve high vaccination levels:

1. Education/awareness levels of a developing country
2. Poverty, will people be able to afford this? Will govt be able to afford free vaccinations for public?
3. Rumors! of all kinds and gullibility of general masses to fall for them
4. Geographical spread, far flung and relatively inaccessible areas.
5. Politics: Federal structure with vaccines and Covid in general becoming a political issue
6. A weak medical Infrastructure

And yet, looking back, despite all these challenges, India has done so well on the vaccination front.

For India, we passed that barrier of ~50% vaccination levels without any apparent slowdown in the vaccination pace or demand. We finally hit this inflection point(phase 4) at a time when we have vaccinated ~70% of eligible population in India.

This requires all round appreciation for collective efforts of general public, our pharma industry, medical and para medic staff, and government machinery.

Well done India!

The post Why India won’t hit 2Bn doses mark by December, but still has a lot to be proud off appeared first on Bhanu Sisodia.

The pace of vaccination in last ~6 months have been phenomenal, with about ~3.5 Billion people already vaccinated with at least one jab. However, it will be naïve to extrapolate this to assume that the world will be nearly fully vaccinated in next 6-8 months.

As expected, the vaccination drive faces exponential difficulties in reaching more and more people after addressing the most willing one. Below are examples from 3 developed countries (Source: Our World in Data)

Somehow even in developed countries with a high degree of awareness, education and ease of access, ~50% of eligible population is where the first resistance is met.

This is a point where the (eagerly) ‘waiting to get jabbeb’ part of population finishes.. what remains is ‘Not so Sure’ and ‘Vaccine Resistance’ groups. As you see, beyond this most countries are struggling to cover even ~5% additional population per month, and given that vaccines are showing signs of diminished effectiveness post 6 to 10 months of getting first set of shots, our ability to get out of this pandemic by full vaccinating the world seems questionable.

The post Is ‘Vaccinating the Whole World’ a distant dream now? appeared first on Bhanu Sisodia.

Looking closely at the data, USA numbers on face value raises some obvious questions.. with vaccination levels now touching ~55% mark(~65% for people with at least 1 dose), the number of cases and deaths defy basic logic. The peak of recent wave was ~70% as high as the last one seen in early this year, even mortality numbers show a grim picture with recent peak being ~60% of previous peak.

So, are the vaccines really 10X – 20X effective as being claimed in several earlier studies?

Luckily in recent weeks, lot of new data has been published to answer this question more effectively.

To understand why this recent wave is so devastating despite high vaccination levels in population, we need to first acknowledge the presence of more contagious and deadlier variants of the virus.

The Delta variant that contributed ~30% of all cases till mid-Jun now contributes almost all cases.

This new composition of virus variants dramatically affects our susceptibility to new infections and related complications. Hence comparison with previous peaks are to be taken in that light

CDC( Center for Disease Control and Prevention) has come up with a new study in September that further clarifies on significant(though reduced) effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines vs new infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

Below is a summary of published data:

This data overwhelmingly supports the case for vaccines and even with reduced effectiveness, vaccines reduces the risks by 10+ times when it comes to hospitalization or deaths.

Only caveat is that the study compares the data of Jun20th-Jul17th vs previous base.. while this recent data captures impact of newer variants, but as the cases in USA actually peaked in Aug/early Sept (hopefully), and the fact that Delta variant prevalence in Jun was still lower, maybe the real extent of the dip in vaccine effectiveness is not captured. We need to wait a bit longer to see a similar study with Aug-Sept data.

Or alternatively, we can already see data from other countries and look for patterns.

One interesting case is UK, where with marginally higher vaccination levels(65% fully vaccinated vs 56% in USA) the country was able to cut the mortality by 90%.

What explains this? Different Vaccines? Different mix of variants? Perhaps Yes for both.

But more importantly, above marginal difference in vaccination levels actually mean that there are ~30% less unvaccinated person for the virus to spread in the population.

So I guess pushing fully vaccinated levels beyond ~65% levels is the first step.

If you haven’t taken the jab, please do so.. with the overwhelming evidence pouring from across the world about Vaccine Effectiveness and Safety.

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