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by fsh 1686 days ago
Countries with very high vaccination rates such as Portugal or Singapore show quite clearly that all of these statements have been correct. At this point, antivaxers are the only reason why the pandemic is still an issue in industrialized countries.
1 comments

Singapore may have been a poor choice of example.

In late August it was announced that 80% of the Singapore population was now vaccinated against COVID-19.[1] However, in September and October there has been a dramatic surge in cases and deaths in that country.[2]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/singapore-fully-v...

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore/

It's true that it's a dramatic increase, but the death rate still seems to be considerably lower, which is what you'd expect from a vaccine which is not sterilizing. The big question I'd have is what this would look like adjusted for age since American vaccination rates for the highest-risk age groups were also pretty high.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Nit. CFR may not be the best measure, as it is very sensitive to the level of testing, which I expect is higher in a small homogenous country like Singapore. Alternatively, raw deaths per million shows closer numbers, though unclear if Singapore peaked yet.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Yeah, I definitely would want a professional analyst to compare things. The main one I’d be interested in is age-matched rates since as we saw with the Israeli data it’s easy to hit confounds like Simpson’s paradox.