Day 973: Deja Poo

Credit for today's title goes to the Boston Herald, reporting on the MWRA COVID spike:

The seven-day COVID wastewater average for the north-of-Boston region has jumped more than 100% within the last week, according to Wednesday’s update from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority tracker.

The daily average for the north-of-the-city area is now 1,016 copies per milliliter, a 104% spike from the average of 497 copies last Wednesday.

The seven-day COVID wastewater average for the south-of-Boston region has increased 56% within the last week. The average is now 993 copies, which is up from 637 copies last Wednesday.

Why a sudden spike when the weather hasn't changed much this month? Well, it is booster season, and the Daily Skeptic has picked up Alex Berenson's reporting on a paper in the Lancet showing immune suppression immediately after the shots, as well as the general negative efficacy of COVID vaccination:

The top two [figures from the paper's supplementary data] show that in the two weeks following the first jab individuals were three to four times more likely to test positive for Covid than their unvaccinated counterparts. This is further confirmation of the post-jab spike in infections that has often been noted and which there is evidence is a result of the vaccination temporarily reducing immunity.

The third figure shows that two weeks or more after the second jab – which during 2021 was regarded as ‘fully vaccinated’ – individuals were 44% more likely to be infected than their unvaccinated counterparts. This is negative vaccine effectiveness (where infections are higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated) of minus-44%. This negative effectiveness is in line with what was seen in the raw data from England at the time and also in studies from other countries, but contradicts the Government’s official estimates, which claimed effectiveness to be 60-85% against Delta infection. The new study indicates that the negative effectiveness was not just a result of confounding factors or a ‘catch-up’ effect, where the vaccinated have lower infection rates initially then higher infection rates as the effect of the vaccine wears off, as some have claimed.

Acknowledging the figures, the authors write: “Surprisingly, we observed a higher risk of test positivity after vaccination with one or two doses across all BMI groups, which is contrary to evidence reported by the U.K. ONS.” What they don’t mention is that it is fully in line with data from the UKHSA, nor that the ONS is known to overestimate infection rates in the unvaccinated because it underestimates the population – the ONS puts the unvaccinated adult population at 8% whereas the NIMS database puts it at 19% (and surveys higher still at 26%).

Or we could just blame it all on innocent schoolchildren, again.