That was shocking, several readers started about it. Because what was there in the newspapers (not this one by the way)? ‘About a year after the vaccinations, the so-called vaccine effectiveness has fallen to zero,’ wrote ANP news agency, by order of the RIVM. You are also ‘hardly more protected’ against admission to hospital if you have only had the first injections and not the booster.
It’s even worse, turns out as I grab the numbers† The protection of the corona vaccine against IC recording is in the red: minus 20 percent protection. A negative protection! There it says, if you read it to the letter: those who have been vaccinated have 20 percent more chance of ending up in the IC with corona than those who have not been vaccinated.
See, that’s how the talk comes into the world. ‘Does this mean that vaccines have some kind of adverse effect on the course of the disease?’ someone asks me anxiously. “The vaccines probably even have negative effects against the current variants,” I read in one of the many heated corona discussions on the internet. So it has already become an established fact, an argument that you put on the table: those vaccines only make it worse.
‘We want to be transparent. But these are indeed confusing figures’, says RIVM epidemiologist Brechje de Gier, when I call her. What is at stake here has not so much to do with vaccines, but with the simple fact that RIVM no longer knows who has and who has not had a corona infection.
To measure the effectiveness of vaccines, people compare how many vaccinated and how many unvaccinated people end up in hospital because of corona. But now many unvaccinated people have also had the virus. Immunologically ‘undescribed’ people are becoming rare. While among those who have been vaccinated, there are relatively many people with an underlying condition that increases the risk of serious illness.
In short, it is becoming increasingly difficult to calculate the effectiveness of vaccines. ‘We are not the only country that encounters this problem,’ says De Gier. ‘But what should we do differently: if we no longer like the results, no longer present them?’
But wait: what if the numbers are just right, and the vaccine really makes more, instead of less, sick? That is very unlikely, according to data from countries that have their figures more in order. Take the United Kingdom. About a year later, the basic series of vaccines still protects about 35 percent against hospitalization and 82 percent against IC admission. the British reported last weektwo days after the RIVM.
One solution is to do other research, says De Gier. Like the so-called Vaccination study Corona, creatively shortened to ‘Vasco’, which follows 60 thousand volunteers for five years with blood tests, questionnaires – the whole thing. But that group is again too small to be able to say anything meaningful about the risk of hospital admissions. Which in itself is of course encouraging: corona has long ceased to be the disease with which 1 in 50 ends up in hospital.
In the meantime, the number of hospital admissions has gradually increased, we are now at a hundred a day† Don’t panic, without vaccination there would have been many more. Those who have been boosted are also protected for about 65 and 75 percent against hospital and IC admission, respectively, according to the RIVM figures, which do have a firmer basis. In the elderly who received a fourth shot, this is even 77 and 80 percent.
But explain that. ‘So the vaccine won’t prevent anything at all’, ‘stop that bullshit’, the reactions rattle online, when I post a graph of the increasing hospital admission figures.
Maybe we’ve gotten spoiled, I think as I watch the comments. When we think of vaccines, we think of smallpox and measles and mumps: once injected, never again. While the corona vaccine is more like the flu shot. A vaccine that improves chances and takes the edge off the disease. A leaky umbrella. Not an infallible power shield, unfortunately.