So UKHSA published their latest numbers yesterday for the week of October 17 through November 14. After getting some recent pressure from the UK’s Office of Statistics Regulation (OSR) for honestly reporting the fact that the vaccinated are getting COVID at a higher rate than the unvaccinated in most age groups, the OSR should be happier with this week’s report (not that I’m insinuating that pressure is being brought to massage these numbers).
After weeks of most numbers trending in directions that make the vaccines look useless at best and damaging at worst, that trend seems to have reversed slightly this week. Here’s the graph I provided last week with the latest updates:
As you can see here, for the first week since June, the percentage of total COVID deaths that were fully vaccinated dropped from 80.1% to 78.8% whereas the percentage of total deaths that were unvaccinated rose from 17.2% to 18.5%. Yay! The vaccines are finally working … right?
What has changed over the past few weeks? Funny you should ask! The beginning of October the UK started its third shot booster program.
As of November 14, 19.2% of the population (12.9m / 67.1m) had received their boosters. So with about a fifth of the population triple vaccinated we’ve reduced the percentage of vaccinated deaths vis-a-vis unvaccinated by 0.3%. Wow!
Having watched all this unfold this year, I would bet that the boosters will offer a measure of “protection” for those who are not injured by them for a few weeks or months, but this won’t be enough to change the overall trends we’ve been seeing in the long run. We’ll see.