Hospitalizations and the shot
Hospitalizations due to COVID complications has been a driving point for mandating the vaccine across healthcare, education and now businesses. Studies are beginning to show the fallacy in this thinking.
On Monday, September 13 “Research Square” published a preliminary study that shows that the reports of COVID-19 hospitalizations fail to differentiate between the severity of the patient’s COVID disease. Many of these hospitalizations may be a person who is hospitalized because of a health reason completely independent of COVID, but also happens to test positive for COVID. These are people not hospitalized due to COVID, yet are counted in COVID-19 hospitalizations.
In the study, the authors analyzed a sample of 50,000 hospital admissions in the VA healthcare system from March 2020 through June 2021 that had a positive COVID-19 test result upon admission. Although the VA population is not necessarily representative of the general population, as most patients tend to be male and older in age, the findings are in line with two previous studies on hospitalizations. The Atlantic also had an article in early September of 2021 that summarized the VA study in a more easily understood manner.
Even more surprisingly, it has been found that the CDC is often categorizing vaccinated hospitalizations and deaths as “unvaccinated,” depending on when the hospitalization or death occurs, compounded by a changing set of testing guidelines. According to the CDC, you are not fully vaccinated until fourteen days after having received one shot of the Janssen vaccine or both shots of the Pfizer or Moderna brand. That means that if a patient is COVID positive and has had only one shot or is positive before the fourteen-day timeframe after their second dose, they will be considered, in fact, to be unvaccinated.
What constitutes a positive case? Since the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC has recommended a cycle threshold (CT; page 35 on link) for the PCR test of 40. Yet, previous scientific consensus showed that a CT above 35 will produce 97% false positives. It would seem that the CDC realized the error of their ways in mid-May of 2021, as they did lower the recommended CT count to 28. Yet, that lowering is only for patients who have received one or more of the COVID vaccine shots. If you have not, your PCR cycle test threshold is still run at 40. Obviously, this means those considered to be “vaccinated” are far more likely to have an accurate test result than the “unvaccinated.”
Another problem that has not been widely publicized is that the proof of vaccination is only included in a patients’ medical records if the patient sent their vaccination card to their primary care physician and it was added to their electronic record. If the vaccination was done at a pharmacy, drive-up clinic etc. and was never added to the electronic record, a COVID positive test at a hospital would count as the patient being counted as “unvaccinated.”
Israel has had the gold standard for percentage of vaccinations. Yet in August of 2021, a hospital in Jerusalem reported that 95% of their severely ill COVID-19 patients were indeed fully vaccinated. Of the COVID-related hospitalizations, 85-90% of the patients were fully vaccinated. What does this say about the value of being vaccinated?
Instead of mandating vaccines, let’s look at ways to clarify data and help prevent severe sickness.