‘No discernible relationship’ between high vaccination rates and fewer infections: Harvard scientist
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(LifeSiteNews) — A public health and geographic analysis professor at Harvard University recently published a study that found COVID-19 vaccination rates do not correspond with lower infection rates.
“The sole reliance on vaccination as a primary strategy to mitigate COVID-19 and its adverse consequences needs to be re-examined, especially considering the Delta (B.1.617.2) variant and the likelihood of future variants,” Professor S.V. Subramanian wrote in his September 30 paper, published in the European Journal of Epidemiology.
Subramanian, a professor of Population Health and Geography at Harvard and chair of the university’s Faculty Advisory Group for the Center for Geographic Analysis, has a background is in quantitative analysis and holds degrees in geography and economics.
His research looked at 68 different countries and almost 3,000 counties in the United States. “At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days,” Subramanian said.
“In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people,” he wrote.
While he encouraged other mitigation measures, the professor still encouraged vaccination programs to continue, but “with humility and respect.”
In addition to his conclusion based on a wide-ranging review of COVID data, Professor Subramanian highlighted one example of a country’s inability to control the virus that could cause further concern for other inoculation programs.
“Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days,” Subramanian said. The Middle Eastern country has found that Pfizer’s trial data, which showed a 96 percent efficacy, is one-third of that. “[T]he effectiveness of 2 doses of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine against preventing COVID-19 infection was reported to be 39%, substantially lower than the trial efficacy of 96%,” he wrote, based on a report released by the country’s Ministry of Health.
The paper provided other examples.
“The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal,” the paper said. “Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated.”