3/2/2022
Let’s look at two island countries where all they have in common is that they are islands and well vaccinated. The first country is the beautiful country of Iceland. This country has had many vaccinations and their Chief Epidemiologist has been a realist with these vaccines since the beginning. He made statements early saying these vaccines do not slow the spread of the virus and will not help Iceland get to herd immunity much earlier than most health “experts” statements. Iceland has now lifted ALL restrictions for Covid and is living as if it is 2019. This I suspect will be a boom for the tourism industry upon which they rely. They lifted these restrictions despite having the highest amount of cases in their history and the cases are rising. The rational is that they have a socialized healthcare system and it is not being overrun. They are saying Covid in its current form is not nearly the danger that is perceived.
Let’s compare Iceland to Hong Kong. Hong Kong, while currently considered independent from China, has another massively vaccinated population and is going through a case AND death surge, and is currently vaccinating at its highest rate ever. They are boosting at a very high rate. Why are these two countries experiencing significantly different death rates? Could it be the mass vaccine campaign given out during a surge in Covid? We will never know the real answer to this question. Iceland’s data looks like what the current narrative says (doesn’t prevent transmission, but prevents death). Hong Kong looks to be disastrous data for the Covid vaccines. Iceland was one of the first countries to get Moderna off their island and only uses Pfizer. However, Hong Kong is injecting the Chinese Sinovac vaccine to many of their residents along with Pfizer.
As island countries go (Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong, Seychelles, etc.), a country can make sure its visitors and residents quarantine and can delay outbreaks, but they cannot stop them from never interacting with the outside world. This allows them time to vaccinate their population while an outbreak is not happening on their island. An outbreak will get there and if the vaccines worked, you would expect little to no deaths from Covid, and Iceland actually looks this way. Hong Kong looks to be in a scary situation, with a country that is 70% fully vaccinated and 23% boosted. They had very little Covid deaths until now. Presumably the less deadly Omicron strain is circulating and it seems to be pretty deadly for the vaccinated Hong Kong residents. It is currently approaching the daily death rate per capita of Italy, UK, and USA from the beginning of the pandemic. How could this happen in a country where they should be so protected?
We have observed Israel’s example with the Covid death increase as the vaccinations increased. Above graph shows Iceland and Hong Kong’s jabs per day as well as deaths per day (both per capita). The two charts below beak down the different countries. In the case of Hong Kong there was no jump in deaths as they vaccinated the first two shots. This is likely because there was little to no virus circulating on their island, so if you decreased you immunity to Covid, no worries, Covid did not exist on your island at that time. Hong Kong is the case that many people in the “vaccines work” group said was perfect. Vaccinate before the outbreak hit to prevent an outbreak. Hong Kong then decided to start boosting while the virus was circulating and look at the increase in Covid death rate. The problem with looking at Iceland’s data is that their country’s population is so small. There are only 366,000 people on that island, so one or two Covid deaths is a larger percentage of their population. It is difficult to use that small sample size to see any trends.
The data from Hong Kong shows that vaccinating before a pandemic hit with these vaccines doesn’t do much, as their per capita death numbers are some of the highest we have seen in the world during this entire pandemic.