A possible downside to heavy vaccine use is “imprinting” — where the vaccine-induced antibodies worked pretty well to neutralize an original strain or variant, but they subsequently failed to “keep up with the times” after new variants arose.
In essence, vaccines have the potential to “lock-in” a certain kind of immune response, even if the underlying disease in circulation has mutated.
They also have the potential to ramp-up humoral or antibody-based immunity at the expense of dampening down cell-mediated immunity, such as that which you would get from your memory T cells.
But battling a disease without strong recruitment of your T cells is like fighting a war with only half of your army: there is a good chance that you will lose. When vaccines lead to less-adaptive immune responses, they can actually counterproductively enhance a disease.
Whether because of imprinting or merely because of imbalanced immune response (antibody response ramped-up at the expense of a dampened T cell response), whenever the vaccines counterproductively enhance a disease, it is called Vaccine-mediated Enhanced Disease, or VMED.
In Marsaille, France, researchers noted that the only Omicron death in the first 1100 cases followed was in someone who had been triple-vaccinated (2-dose + booster). They also noted that one fourth of all cases were found within 3 weeks of taking a vaccine dose.
Both of these findings indicate that COVID vaccines could be working counterproductively, effectively fueling the pandemic, rather than quenching it. In Ohio, average daily COVID deaths disturbingly peaked at a time when the circulating COVID variant had the least lethality of all major variants:
Prior to the vaccine rollout, average daily deaths in Ohio never reached higher than about 140 or 150. Deaths rose to over 150 once vaccines rolled out, but didn’t peak near 200 until after most of Ohio had become fully-vaccinated against COVID (and the circulating variant, Omicron, had the lowest-ever lethality).
Data indicate that COVID vaccines appear to be causing deaths in Ohio.
To get a pre-Delta variant infection fatality rate (IFR) on COVID, data from the UK technical briefing #5 were used, where over 50,000 Alpha-variant COVID cases were followed through time to count how many of them died — and 104 of them died, leading to a pre-Delta COVID IFR of 0.2%.
To get the IFR of Delta variant, data from the UK technical briefing #25 were used, where almost 700,000 sequenced cases revealed that Delta was only 42% as lethal as Alpha (IFR=0.08%).
To get the IFR of Omicron variant, 1.5 million confirmed cases were analyzed and the highest possible lethality of Omicron was still just 41% as lethal as Delta (IFR=0.034%). This inferred IFR for Omicron also matches what was found in a large study in Ontario.
I created a 99.99% credible interval using the 37,000+ Omicron cases followed in Ontario, where only 12 total deaths were found:
As you can see, the most likely Omicron IFR was 0.035%, almost exactly what you’d expect by inferring IFR values from Alpha (0.2%), to Delta (0.08%), to Omicron (0.034%) — using just the relative lethality of each variant, compared to the next. I add details of this stepping-down process below, all from sample sizes reaching at least into the tens of thousands.
It’s interesting that lethality stepped down by 60%, with each new dominant variant, so that Omicron is not even one-fifth as lethal as Alpha was. Even the Delta variant had an IFR that is lower than seasonal flu.
Using the most-likely IFR for Omicron, it takes about 2900 Omicron infections to produce one death. The projected infection attack rate in Ohio (to cover their recently-reported COVID deaths) would mean that 162% of Ohio got COVID in the last 3 months.
That’s more than 100% of Ohio, though, indicating that COVID deaths in Ohio cannot be explained by COVID (it’d take too many infections to explain it). The most-likely culprit is vaccine-mediated enhanced disease (VMED) in Ohio.
End Notes
Method utilized so as to discover that Average Seasonal Flu IFR = 0.11%:
While the flu IFR for the 2010-2011 season (computation shown above) was really high, I only used the latest 7 years of data to arrive at an average IFR of 0.11%. Individual years were navigated to, instead of using this summary table, where numbers are rounded for easier reading.
Data showing that the Instrinsic IFR for Alpha variant = 0.2%:
By 19 Jan 2021, as reported in UK Technical Briefing #5, about 52,000 cases of Alpha variant (genotyped by S-gene target failure, or SGTF) were followed through time and 104 of them died — leading to a maximum, intrinsic, pre-Delta COVID IFR of 0.2%.
Non-Alpha variant (non-SGTF) COVID cases had an even lower IFR than that (65 deaths out of approximately 65,000 infections; IFR = 0.1%).
Data showing that Delta variant was only ever 42% as lethal as Alpha variant:
Only the ratio of sequenced cases to deaths was used in order to estimate the relative lethality of Delta compared to Alpha, because sequencing is a process that takes time.
Delta cases rose faster than Alpha cases did, and this can have the effect of diluting the case fatality rate — because new cases are adding to the total faster than new deaths add to the total.
Using just the “slower-to-count” sequenced cases corrects for the temporal disparity in case growth versus death growth, because sequencing takes approximately the same time as the median “time-to-death” after symptom onset for COVID.
The data showing that Omicron variant was only ever 41% as lethal as Delta variant is found in a cohort study in England, published in The Lancet, where 1.5 million confirmed cases were followed and the crude difference in lethality already showed that Omicron was only 41% as deadly as Delta.
The adjusted difference was even more stark, and after adjusting for confounders, Omicron was discovered to be only about 31% as lethal as Delta. The authors even surmise that Omicron could be even less “relatively-lethal” than that (compared to Delta), after attributing some of the relative Omicron lethality seen to the waning of protection from vaccines.
If the waning of vaccines played a role in Delta deaths, then it played that much more of a role in Omicron deaths, which tended to happen later.
Reference
[In their first 1100 cases of Omicron, the only death was in someone triple-vaccinated] — Houhamdi L, Gautret P, Hoang VT, Fournier PE, Colson P, Raoult D. Characteristics of the first 1119 SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant cases, in Marseille, France, November-December 2021. J Med Virol. 2022 May;94(5):2290-2295. doi: 10.1002/jmv.27613. Epub 2022 Feb 3. PMID: 35060146. Available: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35060146/
[Fraction of flu infections with symptoms = 84%] — Leung NH, Xu C, Ip DK, Cowling BJ. Review Article: The Fraction of Influenza Virus Infections That Are Asymptomatic: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Epidemiology. 2015 Nov;26(6):862-72. doi: 10.1097/EDE.0000000000000340. PMID: 26133025; PMCID: PMC4586318. Available: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4586318/
[Avg. flu IFR from Fall of 2012 to Spring of 2019 = 0.11% (after adjusting symptomatic cases by dividing by 0.84, the background fraction of all flu infections which have symptoms] — CDC Burden of Flu data. Available: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
[As of 19 Jan 2021, from 52,000 COVID infections with Alpha (SGTF) variant, there were 104 deaths (IFR=0.20%)] — UK Technical Briefing #5 (PDF file). Available general: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-novel-sars-cov-2-variant-variant-of-concern-20201201
Available specific page: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/959426/Variant_of_Concern_VOC_202012_01_Technical_Briefing_5.pdf
[In almost 700,000 cases confirmed by sequencing, Delta was 42% as lethal as Alpha (IFR=0.08%)] — UK Technical Briefing #25. Available general: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/investigation-of-sars-cov-2-variants-technical-briefings
Available specific page: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1025827/Technical_Briefing_25.pdf
[From 37,000 Omicron infections, the most likely Omicron IFR = 0.035%] — Ulloa AC, Buchan SA, Daneman N, Brown KA. Estimates of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant Severity in Ontario, Canada. JAMA. Published online February 17, 2022. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.2274. Available: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2789408
[From 1.5 million confirmed cases, Omicron is (at most) 41% as lethal as Delta (IFR = 0.034%)] — Nyberg T, Ferguson NM, Nash SG, Webster HH, Flaxman S, Andrews N, Hinsley W, Bernal JL, Kall M, Bhatt S, Blomquist P, Zaidi A, Volz E, Aziz NA, Harman K, Funk S, Abbott S; COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, Hope R, Charlett A, Chand M, Ghani AC, Seaman SR, Dabrera G, De Angelis D, Presanis AM, Thelwall S. Comparative analysis of the risks of hospitalisation and death associated with SARS-CoV-2 omicron (B.1.1.529) and delta (B.1.617.2) variants in England: a cohort study. Lancet. 2022 Mar 16:S0140-6736(22)00462-7. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00462-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 35305296; PMCID: PMC8926413. Available: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8926413/