London: By now you’ve probably heard Scott Morrison’s argument, which goes something like this: Australia can’t yet talk about a post-pandemic future because we still don’t know whether vaccines guarantee a return to normality.
To illustrate the point, the Prime Minister regularly notes COVID-19 cases are climbing in Britain even though 85 per cent of all adults have been given one dose of a vaccine and 62 per cent the full two.
It is true cases are rising: the 23,000 new infections reported on Monday make up the highest figure in four months. Nearly all new cases are the same highly transmissible Delta variant causing panic in Australia.
British authorities here are certainly wary of the trend. But they are not alarmed for two reasons: cases were always going to increase as the UK moved out of a strict four-month lockdown, and the contest between vaccine and virus is much more nuanced than Morrison and others make out.
Here are some facts.
The last time the UK recorded close to 23,000 cases amid a new wave was on December 16. That day, 613 deaths were announced.
On Monday, three deaths were recorded.
“While cases are now ticking up, the number of deaths remains mercifully low,” new Health Secretary Sajid Javid told Parliament on Monday.
Overall, 92,000 people in England have contracted the Delta variant between February 1 and June 21. Seventy per cent had not been vaccinated at all or did not have enough time for an immune response to kick in from their first dose.
Only 7.8 per cent of new Delta cases were among double-vaccinated Britons.
And nobody in England aged under 50 and double jabbed has died from the Delta variant this year.
Professor Francois Balloux, the director of the Genetics Institute at University College London, described the data as “possibly as good as one could have realistically hoped for”.
Public Health England now believes the AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have prevented 7 million people from getting COVID-19. This is a remarkable outcome given the primary purpose of the jabs was to cut serious disease and death, not reduce transmission.
It is also a reality check for those holding out false hope that vaccines will eradicate the virus. They can’t and won’t. But they do make crude case numbers a far less relevant indicator of how the pandemic is playing out.
Of the 92,000 Delta cases, 1320 people were admitted to hospital. Only 190 had been double vaccinated.
People arrive to receive their COVID-19 vaccine in Westminster Abbey, London. Credit:AP
Sadly 117 people died – more than half of whom were partially or fully vaccinated. This sounds worrying but here again another complex story sits behind the headline number.
David Spiegelhalter, the chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge, and Anthony Masters, a statistical ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society, have a simple explanation for why so many fully vaccinated people died: the vaccines are not perfect and older people will always be at most risk.
“The risk of dying from COVID-19 is extraordinarily dependent on age: it halves for each six to seven year age gap,” they wrote in The Guardian. “This means that someone aged 80 who is fully vaccinated essentially takes on the risk of an unvaccinated person of around 50 – much lower, but still [it’s] not nothing, and so we can expect some deaths.”
Morrison – who sometimes but not always acknowledges that vaccines cut the number of people falling seriously ill – told reporters this week that the UK was recording about 100 deaths a week and declared that was “not a situation I’m prepared to countenance”.
He never said influenza and pneumonia now claim 13 times more lives in England and Wales than COVID-19.
The Prime Minister is entitled to defend his strategy. But he also has an obligation to not cherry pick the facts about a vaccination program far more successful than his own.
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Bevan Shields is the Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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2021-06-28 22:37:45Z
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