So why would I want to risk being in this group, By February 2022, that percentage had increased to about 25%.
It is, of course, misleading to imply that since the percentage of all deaths that occur among the fully vaccinated is increasing, this casts doubt on the effectiveness of the vaccine.
Let's suppose the vaccine is effective at reducing serious illness to the degree that getting the vaccine decreases your risk of serious illness by a factor of 10 compared to someone who is not vaccinated.
And let us also suppose this does not change over time.
Let us further suppose that, at one point in time, only 20 of 100 people are vaccinated. Let's suppose that the risk of getting seriously ill for a vaccinated person is 5%. So
1 of those 20 vaccinated people gets seriously ill. This means that of the 80 who are not vaccinated,
40 will get seriously ill - each unvaccinated person is 10 times more likely to get seriously ill and there are 4 times as many of them.
So of the 41 who get seriously ill, only 1/41 of them is vaccinated -
less than 2.5%.
Now fast forward in time to a point where
80 are fully vaccinated. Remember: the effectiveness of the vaccine remains the same as before. There will now be
4 ill people who are fully vaccinated. Each of the 20 people not fully vaccinated has a risk of being sick that is 10 times greater than for vaccinated people. So the number of ill unvaxxed will be
10 (remember: the odds of each unvaxxed person getting sick is 10 times the 5% odds for the vaxxed)
. So of total of 4 + 10 = 14 people who ill,
almost a third are vaccinated.
Note that while the vaccine
is as effective as it ever was, the percentage of vaxxed who get sick has
risen from less than
2.5% to about
33%!.
It is therefore entirely misleading to argue that there is a problem with the vaccine because the fractions of illnesses that occur among the unvaxxed in increasing.