Tag: biden

In his September 9, 2021 “Remarks by President Biden on Fighting the COVID-⁠19 Pandemic” US President Biden quoted a remarkably misleading statistic that in fact paints a grim picture of the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines in the United States.

In fact, based on available data from the summer, only one of out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized for COVID per day.

This actually means that over 1,000 fully vaccinated American per day were hospitalized, around 90,000 over the three months of summer if this refers to new hospitalizations per day rather than number of people in a hospital on each day, suggesting around 4-9 million fully vaccinated Americans were infected with the virus during the summer when respiratory viruses are at a seasonal low.

The US federal government currently (Sep 10, 2021) claims about 53 percent of American are fully vaccinated. There are about 330 million people in the United States. This means about 175 million Americans are fully vaccinated. If one (1) in 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized for COVID per day, this works out to (175 million/160,000) about 1,093 American hospitalized per day.

COVID has an infection fatality rate (IFR) of around 0.3 percent (not the case fatality rate or CFR which is often confused with the IFR, which is usually the fractions of deaths among symptomatic cases reported by doctors or hospitals — not people who stay home and recover or simply have no or negligible symptoms). Probably a few percent of people infected with COVID actually are hospitalized.

For example in the recent Provincetown, Cape Cod (Barnstable County, Massachusetts) outbreak four (4) fully vaccinated people out of 346 fully vaccinated persons identified by the CDC and Massachusetts state public health contact tracing were hospitalized, giving a hospitalization rate of about (4/346) 1.16 percent of the fully vaccinated. The hospitalization rate for the unvaccinated in the Provincetown outbreak was statistically the same as the hospitalization rate for the fully vaccinated — about one (1) percent.

Using a one percent hospitalization rate among the fully vaccinated means that nine (9) million fully vaccinated American were infected with COVID-19 during the summer of 2021, despite the vaccines and the seasonal low in respiratory viral diseases. A more conservative hospitalization rate of two (2) percent gives 4.5 million Americans infected.

Even if President Biden’s number refers to the number of fully vaccinated persons in a hospital each day rather than new hospital admissions with COVID, assuming a typical stay of two weeks in a hospital with COVID, this gives about 6,000 hospitalizations over a three month (six two-week periods) summer, meaning 300,000 to 600,000 fully vaccinated persons infected with COVID during the seasonal summer low in respiratory viral diseases.

What Does This Mean?

As with the official CDC report on the Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts outbreak and disappointing result in Israel, President Biden’s highly misleading number strongly suggests the COVID vaccines are failing to prevent infection by COVID and the spread of the disease on a large scale.

(C) 2021 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.

About Me

John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).