First of all, credit (and apologies) to Bob Dylan for stealing his line.
Now for the main course: it is well known that the issue of ‘vaccinnation’ against Covid-19 is controversial, so much so that public health authorities everywhere have been adamantly opposed to any criticism, however mildly formulated.
Given that autumn is here in full force, let’s examine some of the noteworthy shifts in public policy statements, exemplarily done with a focus on Central and Northern Europe.
No so long ago, the phrase ‘a pandemic of the unvaccinated’ was the main theme echoed all over by politicians and the mainstream media alike. The examples are legion, and it is not necessary to cite any of these.
These days, however, mainstream media writes about the relationship between ‘vaccinated’ (whatever the definition) and ‘unvaccinated’ in the following way (as per Austrian state broadcaster ORF through 26 Oct. 2021):
The caption reads: ‘7 day incidence broken down to age cohorts and vaccination status’, with the dashed/dotted lines relating ‘fully vaccinated’ tendencies and the other lines showing ‘not fully vaccinated’ tendencies. Noteworthy is the fact that ‘unvaccinated’ and ‘partially vaccinated’ are absent as a category on their own (I think they are lumped in with the ‘not fully vaccinated’ category, but the dataset doesn’t say so.)
Leaving aside the idiotic notion of deriving from the use of the adjective here (‘fully’), here’s another example from Austrian centre-left daily Der Standard (op-ed from 24 Oct. 2021), whose author—without citing any data—asserts the following (emphasis added):
‘In Vienna, 86 percent of people who need intensive care treatment for a Covid-19 infection are currently not fully immunised.’
Again, no mention of ‘unvaccinated’, which had been a staple of discourse until, well, some 1-2 weeks ago.
Austria, meanwhile, reported the highest number of ‘cases’ ever recorded (5,526, as of 26 Oct. 2021), according to ORF.
Next up, Scandinavia (see here for updates on Sweden and Denmark, respectively), specifically Norway, whose leading newspaper Aftenposten had this to say about policy:
‘Sweden recommends a third vaccine dose to everyone. This suggests that Norway should do the same.’
Leaving aside questions of agency, why would they simply do that?
Furthermore, here’s the most recent weekly (week 42) update from the Norwegian Public Health Agency (FHI), which contains this nugget (emphasis added):
‘Vaccination status was available for 66 new patients admitted with COVID-19 as the main cause in week 42. Of these 66, 25 (38 %) were unvaccinated and 37 (56 %) were fully vaccinated. The proportion of new fully vaccinated patients per week has, as expected, increased in recent weeks in line with increasing vaccination coverage, but the incidence of new admissions among fully vaccinated has been relatively stable in recent weeks. The median age among 288 fully vaccinated patients with COVID-19 as the main cause until now was 77 years (lower – upper quartile: 63.5–83.5), and 220 (76 %) belonged to risk groups with a high or moderate risk of severe course of COVID-19.
Whatever one may wish to think about the Scandinavians going their own way, all other things being equal, one of the main reasons that this ‘works’ (sort of) appears to be comparatively transparent governments.
Let’s monitor this closely over the next couple of weeks to see what changes now.