His comments came as new figures showed that 55% people in hospital with the Delta variant – which is dominant in the UK – have not been jabbed.
The data from Public Health England (PHE) also shows that 74% of people under 50 in hospital with the variant had not been vaccinated.
Almost two thirds of people in the same age group who died in England with the Delta variant were not vaccinated against the virus, the figures show.
The UK’s vaccine programme has so far seen around
three-quarters of adults in the UK double-jabbed.
Of the 113 deaths of people under 50, 72 (64%) were unvaccinated, 11 (10%) had received one jab and 27 (24%) had received both.
Of the 3,173 people aged 50 or over admitted to hospital in England up to the middle of this month who were either confirmed or likely to have had the Delta variant, 989 (31%) were not jabbed.
A total of 318 (10%) had received one dose of vaccine and 1,838 (58%) had received two.
Most of the 4,112 people aged under 50 had not had a jab, making up 3,044 (74%) of the total.
A total of 631 (15%) had received one dose of vaccine and 366 (9%) had received both doses.
So 3/4 of adults have been vaccinated, and yes there are breakthrough infections. No one is saying there hasn't been. I have seen 80 year olds with co-morbidities double vaccinated and are dying anyway. Look at Colin Powell.
Even with trials on tens of thousands of people, the absolute risk reductions in Covid-19 vaccine trials are teensy-tiny—a reduction in the risk of getting severe Covid of just 1.2% for Moderna and a scant 0.84% for Pfizer. “One of the main reasons why absolute risk reduction is not shown is because of the numbers. If you say, ‘It’s 95% effective’—wow!” says Piero Olliaro, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health and one of the authors of the
Lancet Microbe article. “But if your absolute risk reduction is like 0.8% or whatever it was, so what?”
You could also, of course, calculate the
absolute risk reduction. That’s simply the difference in risk for someone in the treatment group versus someone in the control group. Here’s an example: Say you have 100 people who don’t get a vaccine, and you find that 10 of them catch the disease. So the baseline risk of getting it is 10%. And suppose that 100 other people get the vaccine, and only one of these gets sick. Their risk is 1%. The
absolute risk reduction (ARR) is then just 9% (10% minus 1%), because the risk was already pretty low. But the
relative risk reduction (RRR) is 90%—that reduction of 9% divided by the baseline risk of 10%.
The key here, though, is that absolute risk reduction
does change according to how at-risk the groups of people were in the first place. This pandemic has widely varying risks across populations, and those change over time. (For example, viral variants change how infectious Covid can be, and young people’s risk of severe illness and death
has changed as social policies and infection rates have fluctuated. It’s a hard problem!)