Covid in Norway: Vaccine Failure 'too big too hide', with Hospitalisations of 'all-cause jabbed' by far exceeding their 'unvaccinated' peers

Numbers from week 3's report: as hospitalisations for/with Covid-19 rise again, almost 70% of all admissions are 'vaccinated', with esp. triple-jabbed high-risk patients flooding Norway's ICUs

Yesterday, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (IPH) came out with its latest weekly report. Covering the period from 17-23 Jan. 2022 (week 3), there are a couple of noticeable items that are worth posting about before we dive into the update.

First, the IPH’s reports are getting longer and longer. Take, say, the report from week 39 (27 Sept.-3 Oct. 2021), which clocked in at 64 pages in total, and compare it with the current one at 86 pages (a 34-35% increase).

Second, much of the growth in length of these ‘Covid Weekly Reports’ are due to new sections called ‘virological surveillance’ of other respiratory illnesses (p. 51-61) and a comparatively dense section on ‘surveillance of vaccination against Covid-19’ (p. 61-76).

With these two items out of the way, let’s see what the IPH has in store for us this week. (And if you’d like to compare this week’s report with the one from last week, see here.)

Main Points from Week 3

There was a slight uptick in the total number of hospitalisations: there were 141 admissions in week 3 (after 117 in the preceding week, p. 6), but the most important issue is, again and hardly surprising, the very unequal distribution across the country.

As per table 2 (p. 7), the total numbers vary by many times, e.g., in Northern Norway, in the past four weeks, there were 31 new admissions for Covid-19 as main cause while the same number in South-Eastern Norway (which incl. the Oslo metro area) was 392.

There was, however, a slight increase in hospitalisations, which appear to be due to the fact that Omicron is hitting Norway hard, and while the variant itself is generally ‘milder than Delta’, many more people are infected and hence the potential for hospitalisation is higher, too. This means, in other words, that the peak of infection will be reached before the peak of hospitalisations, hence it’s quite early to ascertain that Omicron is, in fact, ‘mild’. It’ll probably take 2-3 more weeks to find out whether or not this is true.

Sidenote: I’ve tested positive for Covid on Monday last week, and while I’m o.k., all my family was ‘infected’. Our run-in with the illness was, indeed, quite ‘mild’, as in none of us developed serious symptoms and recovered within 2-3 days, with the exception of a general feeling of exhaustion. Given that we’re all quite healthy, loaded up with Vitamins C and D etc., the assumption that we’ve made it through because (presumably) Omicron is ‘mild’ is but a hypothesis.

More on Hospitalisations

There were some changes in recent weeks that caught my eye, though, and they all relate to me questioning the ‘mildness’ of the current Omicron wave. For reference, please go back to my longer piece on these trends (pt. 1 is here, pt. 2 is here).

Tables 3 and 4 are generally the most consistently-reproduced ones in the IPH’s reports, they track the age distribution of hospitalisations and ICU admissions (irrespective of vaccination status), and in their current update they are on p. 11.

Now, herein we can discern Omicron’s effect quite clearly (and vaccine efficacy by inference): as per table 3, in the past 4 weeks the share of very old seniors (85+) has increased to 8% of all hospitalisations; the corresponding value in the preceding four weeks as reported in week 52 was 6.8%.

Still, the most glaring change in the past four weeks is visible in the ICU admissions. Again, returning to week 52, here are the shares of the age brackets: 55-64 (26%); 65-74 (16.4%); 75-84 (16%).

This week’s report gives the following shares for the last four weeks: 55-64 (19.6%); 65-74 (23.4%); 75-84 (10.3%). A decrease for the 55-64yo and the 75-84yo, but a sharp uptick for the cohort in-between.

Note that (as per p. 63 of this week’s report), of these three age brackets, vaccination with the ‘booster’ jab stands at between 75.6% (55-64) and 90% (75-84), which brings us to the smoking gun in this report.

Vaccinated Admissions Exceed Unvaccinated (again)

The data on p. 11-13 is stunning in its own right. Of the 141 admissions, vaccination status is known of 130. Of these 130, 38 (29%) were unvaccinated, 37 (28%) were ‘vaccinated with two doses), and 48 (37%) were recently boosted. Six patients were ‘partially vaccinated’.

If you’d lump ‘all-cause vaccinated’ together, the relationship, or distribution, between ‘vaccinated’ vs. ‘unvaccinated’ admissions is roughly 70 : 30, which means that ‘the unvaccinated’ still exceed their share of the general population, but only barely so. Again, as per p. 63, 78% of the entire resident population of Norway falls in the ‘all-cause vaccinated’ category, and it is reasonable to assume that these numbers will eventually align—before the share of ‘all-cause vaccinated’ among the hospitalised Covid-19 patients will rise even further.

Sidenote: This statement, too, is a hypothesis, and we shall all see whether or not I’m correct about it. Given the recent trajectories—with excess deaths among the 35-39yo and older cohorts rising from ‘around mid-September 2021’ onwards (as per Joel Smalley’s recent piece). Similarly, from various inflection points throughout the year, excess mortality is on the rise since around June 2021, which begs the question: would that be correlated to vaccine uptake? It’s certainly a tantalising issue, but this will have to wait for another day.

To visualise the calamity-in-process masquerading as ‘vaccination campaign’, we turn to figure 7 (p. 13).

I confess that I was quite ‘shocked’ when I first saw it yesterday. I expected this to happen, and for those who require ‘proof’ of my ‘sooth-saying abilities, may I remind you of my end-of-year round-up from 31 Dec. 2021, which held:

Now, with the ‘booster’ campaign running at full speed, it would appear that this 30s : 60s distribution is about the maximum that the current crop of (problematic) jabs can achieve. My expectation is that the trend lines will cross once again in or around mid-January once the recently-boosted move past the 90-120 day expiration date of whatever protection is afforded by a third jab.

Well, here we are.

One more word about my ‘shocked’ stance, though: why would I claim to be shocked? Please let me briefly make three points:

As recently as last week, I wrote that ‘the rate of triple-jabbed with serious progressions of Covid appears to be quickening’, but in no way did I expect such a fast turn-around of the numbers.

Disingenuously, whoever at the IPH writes these weekly reports, went from ‘since week 49, the share of unvaccinated hospitalisations was higher than the share of basic-immunised [grunnvaksinert]’ (in the report from week 2, p. 12) to ‘in the past weeks, the share of hospitalisations among those vaccinated with two and three doses was elevated’ (from this week’s report, p. 11). They IPH did so without any additional statement, as in, say, weighing the evidence from before week 41 (when the trend lines first crossed and vaccinated admissions exceeded unvaccinated ones), week 49 (when these shares inversed—for 4-5 weeks, as we now see), to what this portends for the future.

Hospitalisations for or with Covid-19 are already increasing again, and the expectation among any thinking person must be that the share of vaccinated will, in all likelihood, increase further, and my personal expectation is that it will do so ever-faster before petering out. It does appear to make a difference if you took two or three jabs, for the triple-jabbed seem at particularly high risk for hospitalization and ICU admission, ‘even’ compared to those who called it quits after two jabs.

If there’s any more evidence you’d need, compare the ‘last 4 weeks’ compilation in table 5 (p. 12) with the same tables in recent weeks (for the previous three weeks, see here); for reasons of space, I only contrast table 5 from the report from week 52 with the current one.

Week 52, table 5 (p. 13):

Week 3, table 5:

Thanks to rapid uptake of booster jabs, Covid-19 in Norway is quickly morphing into a ‘pandemic of the jabbed and boosted of middling to senior age’. Do take a good look at the right-most column, though:

Hospitalisations are overwhelmingly a thing among triple-jabbed high-risk patients between 54-77 years of age: 83% of those admitted are in the high-risk groups. The corresponding share of doubly-jabbed is 50%, although with a slightly different age profile (40-69). Yes, Covid-19 may also hit younger and unvaccinated people, and most of them aren’t in the high-risk group.

Still, the main take-aways are this:

While the overall numbers continue to go down, however slightly so, these trends play out quite differently according to vaccination status.

The share of ‘unvaccinated’ is declining: 56% of ‘vanilla admissions’ in week 52, now it’s 46%; ICU admissions: 72% (week 52) vs. 68% (week 3); ventilation required: 71% (week 52) vs. 70% (week 3).

At the same time, the share among ‘triple-vaccinated’ patients is rising fast: they made up 10% of ‘vanilla admissions’ four weeks ago, and now their share stands at 23%, even though their share among ICU admissions declined slightly.

I would assume the numbers for triple-jabbed admissions to rise higher still, due to the combination of a) the eagerness with which double-jabbed Norwegians are lining up to get a booster jab; b) the significant decline of whatever protection such a booster affords; and c) the potential long-term harm repeat boosting with mRNA gene therapeutics entail.

Concluding (Dark) Musings

While I personally commend the Norwegian government to abrogate most, if not all, mandates and measures in the near future, I don’t see a way out of a kind of national reckoning with the fact that the vaccination campaign was a significant public policy blunder.

At some point, the evidence—for now buried in mortality data as highlighted by Joel Smalley—will become impossible to ignore. My personal expectation is twofold, hence the allusions to darkness above:

I’m convinced that someone in government and the bureaucracy has looked at the same data and come to essentially comparable conclusions. Perhaps their ‘hope’ may be that people will rather succumb to ‘all sorts of causes (of death)’, as opposed to clearly vaccine-related implications (this recognition may be simply a factor of carrying out systematic post-mortem autopsies). Still, the jury is out on the medium-to-long-term consequences of this gigantic human experiment, and my personal expectation is that those in power will seek to cover this up for as long as possible, and they might even get away with it.

Yet, why would they quite likely get away with it? Well, any look at the above data indicates that the last ‘sales pitch’ for the jabs (prevention of serious illness and death) is, at best, a questionable-to-untenable proposition. Even the briefest glance at vaccine-connected deaths (as per p. 19 in this week’s report) shows that already 2/3 of all in the past 4 weeks occurred among the ‘all-cause vaccinated’, which is very much in line with the hospitalisation distribution, with the additional kicker being the ‘median time elapsed since the last jab’, which stood at 309 days.

What’s the disgraceful role of the media in all of this? Well, my expectation is that they bear a considerable share of the blame, but I also expect the legacy media to yell ever-louder and point fingers at literally everyone (i.e., government, public health bodies) before they will engage in a bit of soul-searching, thereby further contributing to the destabilisation of state and society.

This will, in all likelihood, not end very well.