Hope is Not a Strategy
In presenting the following information, I am not trying to dispute the observed fact that vaccinated Canadians are much less likely to be hospitalized or die with COVID than unvaccinated Canadians.
What I am wanting to dispute is the almost-religious hope of many of my compatriots that, if we could just get enough Canadians vaccinated, the COVID pandemic will end. I've talked to a large number of Canadians and Americans who believe that the only reason we're still having to deal with this goddamn COVID pandemic is those goddamn anti-vaxxers!
This article of faith is held by many of my fellow Canadians despite the fact that both the vaccine manufacturers and the Canadian Government have (belatedly) back-pedalled from any claims than mass-vaccination will bring the pandemic to a close.
Again, I recognize that Canada's mainstream media make it easy to forget what public health officials told us not that long ago. For instance, the announcement last June that: "B.C. could nearly wipe out COVID-19 by September with 70% contact rate and high vaccine uptake: officials."
First, I think it is useful to place Canada's anti-COVID efforts in a larger context.
If you listen to Canada's mainstream media, you'd think Canada has done a great job combatting COVID.
What's true is that Canada's anti-COVID efforts look great when compared to our Southern neighbour's absolutely abysmal track record. If we look at Canada on the world stage, a different picture emerges.
The Worldometers Coronavirus website has a neat feature: you can order the country display by any of the headings listed. If you click on icon for the Deaths/1 m Pop column, it will instantly arrange the world's countries in a descending list from the highest death rate to the lowest. Do that, and you can scroll down to find Canada:
There's Canada at number 95 on the list, which means Canada did better than 94 jurisdictions at preventing deaths from COVID. That's the good news.
If you look down a few columns, you'll see the world average death rate. That's right: Despite being a rich country, Canada's COVID death rate is higher than the world average. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom you'll find that 126 jurisdictions have done a better job of protecting their citizens of dying from COVID than Canada has. I don't know about you, but I've never seen those two important pieces of data reported in Canada's mainstream press.
One should expect, if higher rates of vaccination are the key to end the COVID pandemic in Canada, that nations with very high rates of vaccination would see a sharp drop in COVID cases.
In recent months, we have seen a number of instances where high rates of vaccination have been associated instead with an increase in COVID cases.
First it was Israel. Then Guam. Then Vermont. Last week, it was Ireland, reporting its highest number of COVID hospitalizations in seven months despite having 91% of its population fully-vaccinated.
This week, it's Gibraltar. More than 99% of Gibraltar's eligible population has been fully-vaccinated. Yet Gibraltar is having to cancel Christmas events because they are seeing so many breakthrough cases of COVID.
All this information is hardly surprising given a recent study in the European Journal of Epidemiology entitled: Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States.
That study found a small positive correlation between vaccination rates and the number of COVID cases across 68 countries, i.e., the higher the rate of vaccination, the more COVID cases.
How can we explain this?
The basic problem is that none of the COVID vaccines currently on the market behave like traditional vaccines. When a person is vaccinated against polio, smallpox, diphtheria, measles, mumps or chickenpox, not only are they immune from catching those diseases, but even if exposed to the disease, they will not spread it: Those were all sterilizing vaccines.
In contrast, all the current COVID vaccines are leaky vaccines. Though they may protect the vaccinated person from serious illness or death, they do not prevent the person from catching COVID and/or passing it on to others.
Why increased rates of vaccination are leading to higher numbers of COVID cases is not entirely clear. We have to suspect that vaccinated people often feel safer to behave in more risky ways than unvaccinated people. (Travelling to other countries, for instance.) Because breakthrough infections in the vaccinated are often mild or asymptomatic, we can also suspect that vaccinated people are much more likely to spread COVID unknowingly.
Truthfully, it doesn't matter why high rates of vaccination have thus far been spectacularly unsuccessful at hammering down the number of COVID cases. What matters is that we now have enough data to be virtually certain that vaccines alone will not bring the pandemic to heel, and to believe otherwise is simply wishful thinking.
If Canada has had a sub-par track record at preventing COVID deaths, what can we learn from countries that currently have much lower death rates than Canada?
Here's Canada compared to a group of 24 countries which together make up more than half of the world's population, as reported by Our World in Data:
For weeks now, Canada has had a higher death rate from COVID than every other country on that list.
Maybe those 24 other countries have higher vaccination rates. Let's see:
Nope. Canada is almost at the top of the charts in its vaccination rate. China has squeaked ahead of Canada in the share of its population fully or partly vaccinated in just the past few weeks. During the six months prior to that, China had a far lower death rate than Canada despite lower vaccination rates. In the time since China pushed its way to the very top of the vaccination chart, China has (coincidentally?) seen its worst outbreak of COVID in over a year.
Gambia, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Zambia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, and Burundi are currently all doing much better than Canada at preventing COVID deaths, despite having less than 10% of their populations vaccinated. How do we explain that?
Only recently has the mainstream media begun to pay attention to how well African countries have done combatting COVID. A number of scientists had predicted that a continent that couldn't afford to go to extended lockdowns, and didn't have vaccines, would see bodies piled up in the streets like cordwood by this point in the pandemic. Africa's success in keeping COVID deaths low has puzzled many scientists.
Though there is good evidence that case numbers in Africa are severely under-counted, the on-the-ground evidence suggests that any under-counting of COVID deaths is modest. Something is keeping COVID deaths in Africa way lower than what scientists had expected.
We know it wasn't either strict lock-downs or mask-wearing because neither were common in Africa.
A number of possible explanations have been offered. At least part of Africa's success is due to having a younger, less obese population. At the same time, there are also conditions present which should have largely offset favorable demographics: widespread malnutrition, millions of HIV-positive individuals, a range of endemic tropical diseases, and minimalist health-care systems.
One possible explanation for Africa's low death rate is that millions of Africans have been receiving hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic to prevent malaria. There is now a large body of research evidence indicating that HCQ is reasonably effective as an early treatment for COVID.
Another possible explanation is that millions of Africans have also been receiving ivermectin as a prophylactic to prevent river blindness. Despite what the Canadian media will tell you, there's now a large body of research evidence indicating that ivermectin is very effective as a COVID prophylactic, and reasonably effective as an early treatment for COVID.
A third possibility is that because most of Africa is near the Equator, and gets lots of direct sunlight all year, most Africans are have high-levels of sunlight-induced Vitamin D in their blood, despite having dark skin. (Human skin can manufacture Vitamin D in direct sunlight.) There is now also abundant clinical evidence that those with high levels of vitamin D in their blood are far less likely to be hospitalized or die with COVID.
Some people have suggested that Africans have lower COVID death rates because of genetic reasons. But how do we then explain that Afro-Americans have a significantly higher death rate from COVID than white Americans?
Perhaps the answer for that question goes back to Vitamin D. It has long been known that dark-skinned peoples are less able to manufacture Vitamin D from sunlight than lighter-skinned peoples are. In the winter, especially at Northern latitudes, all North Americans are sunlight-deprived enough to have trouble making adequate Vitamin D. For black Americans, this inability to manufacture sufficient Vitamin D is even worse - which could at least partly explain why black Americans are more likely to die of COVID than white Americans.
All of which begs the question: if high-levels of sunlight-induced Vitamin D could at least partly explain lower COVID death rates in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and much of Southeast Asia, why has it not offered the same protective effect in the Middle East, or in tropical Latin America?
In a perverse way, it may have worked to Africa's benefit to be almost completely without vaccines. In the absence of vaccines, African nations have placed a lot more stress on early treatment than we have in North America. Other observers have speculated that that is where the answers to Africa’s success lie.
I suspect that it will take considerable investigation to understand fully why death rates in Africa have remained remarkably low despite minimal levels of vaccination and woefully inadequate healthcare infrastructure.
That said, Canada needs to acknowledge that many nations with far lower rates of vaccination than Canada are showing much greater success in reducing COVID deaths. It seems almost certain there are things Canada could learn from those other nation's successes.
Part of what may have prevented Canada from learning more from other countries, is that, very early on, governments in Canada made the ideological decision that no early treatment of COVID was possible. In the intervening 20 months, it has doubled down on that decision with an almost religious zeal, despite increasingly abundant information to the contrary.
Looking objectively at other nations’ successes may require admitting that that early decision was both premature, and unwarranted. I recognize that no government would want to admit to making a hasty decision that might have resulted in thousands of preventable deaths. But failing to entertain the possibility that such an error occured will only extend that preventable carnage into the future.
Again, I am not suggesting Canada abandon vaccination as a COVID control strategy, only suggesting Canada might do better with a few more arrows in our quiver, and that other nations might have something to teach us in that regard.
And finally, given what we now know, it is probably also an appropriate time for Governments in Canada to back off on trying to bully every last Canadian into getting jabbed.