François and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Vaccine Efficacy Numbers
As Quebec's premier tries to direct attention everywhere else, the cause of our latest crisis is exactly where it appears to be.
As described in the last post, Quebec’s management of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in 2021 was singularly focused on a 2-dose vaccination campaign for everyone at least 5 years old. The child and adolescent vaccination campaign in particular was supported by the belief that the injections would suppress infections, helping to reduce the effects of the virus in the people aged 70 and older who have made up the vast majority of SARS-CoV-2-associated deaths.
But by the end of the year, vaccine efficacy in preventing infections had fallen into negative territory, resulting in never before seen positive test counts among the general population and the hospitalized. Very much in a crisis of its own making, the premier François Legault called a press conference to announce a severe lockdown involving a curfew, business closures, and a ban on receiving visitors at home.
However, the story told by Legault (in French, mostly) was quite different from the above. This was a story of “Omicron”, wrecking havoc all over the world, not just here. The hospitalization rate in the US, he said, was twice what it was in Quebec. Governments everywhere were forced into action. And what he had learned in the pandemic was that it was important to act quickly, and so we were going into lockdown the very next day.
His story is less than half true. The half that is completely false is that all other governments were being forced into action. In the past months, no US state has implemented policies from the now generally reviled “lockdown” set of non-pharmaceutical interventions, whatever their SARS-CoV-2 positive hospitalization rates may be.
The premier’s reference to acting quickly is the lampshade hanging over the fact that he is acting first and effectively alone among heads of state in this hemisphere. Ontario has since implemented a slightly less invasive lockdown, but that’s it. From this viewpoint all we can see is that large Canadian provinces seem to have particularly poor health care systems, if they have to shut down society for a hospitalization rate that is lower or similar to those seen elsewhere.
The half of Legault’s story that is somewhat true, but not entirely, is that this crisis is caused by the Omicron variant. That is a simplistic explanation that ignores most of the evidence.
We can attribute the strength of this surge to several factors:
It’s winter.
A fifth significant variant of the virus has emerged.
Quebeckers had been circulating much more than in 2020, by choice and by virtue of fewer mandates being in force.
The vaccines are not providing the hoped-for protection against infection and transmission.
We can’t do much about our world having seasons (1) and viruses that evolve (2). For 3, it’s part of being a country that isn’t North Korea. If we had no freedoms there would be none to be taken away, so 3 is essentially built-in to any lockdown. Policy wise, everything rests on 4, The Vaccines. We wouldn’t be here if the injections still significantly prevented infections, and we also wouldn’t be here if the government hadn’t wrongly assumed that they would.
Omicron is a fascinating variant for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it’s hard to see how it could have evolved naturally, but it’s simply not true that it is responsible for the current inefficacy of vaccination in this province.
Vaccination’s relative efficacy declined quite linearly all through the autumn. It was at its peak when Delta tried to make some headway in September. After that, it. steadily declined. We don’t see an “Omicron plunge” in vaccine efficacy, in fact we see that efficacy hit a floor around the time that the variant arrived here. Would Omicron have lowered efficacy, if efficacy hadn’t already bottomed out?
All we know is that certain unfavorable conditions were in effect: winter, fresh variant, active population, and nil-or-negative vaccine protection. Then, boom.
You can see why people are a bit freaked out here. But for those aware of the SARS-CoV-2 testing numbers for US states during 2021, it’s everything that precedes the recent spike that is the most unusual. We hadn’t broken 3000 positive tests a day, in a province of over 8 million people. Apparently, enthusiastic compliance with strict lockdown measures did suppress infections—except in hospitals and long-term care facilities, but that’s a story for another day.
One critical problem with lockdowns is, as many asked in April 2020, how do you walk them back? Those who thought that the safe answer came in a packet of hastily developed and dubiously tested shots, thought wrong.
So the premier’s three-legged anti-COVID policy of vaccines, vaccines, and more vaccines is evidently in ruins, for anyone who cares to look. Unfortunately, the highly vaccinated and QR-coded population, and their well subsidized media betters, have every incentive not to look.
This eagerness to be deceived allows the premier to use a tactic employed by failed leaders for eons: he declares a scapegoat. A real, live, human scapegoat. Vilifying a greek letter simply doesn’t provide the emotional outlet needed for an increasingly restless public. So in Quebec’s newly fragmented and impressively misinformed society, the choice of whom to scapegoat was clear: the unvaccinated.
In the next post, we’ll see how dubious hospitalization figures are used as a bludgeon to vilify those who decline the shots. Like the vaccines themselves, this tactic will appear to work—but for a pitifully short term.