Why We Need To Compare The Rates Of Death Between Vaccinated And Unvaccinated
During a pandemic, you might see headlines like Half of those who died from the virus were vaccinated.
It would be wrong to draw any conclusions about whether the vaccines are protecting people from the virus based on this headline. The headline is not providing enough information to draw any conclusions.
Lets think through an example to see this.
Imagine we live in a place with a population of 60 people.
Then we learn that of the 10 who died from the virus. And we learn that 50% of them were vaccinated.
The newspaper may run the headline Half of those who died from the virus were vaccinated. But this headline does not tell us anything about whether the vaccine is protecting people or not.
To be able to say anything, we also need to know about those who did not die: how many people in this population were vaccinated? And how many were not vaccinated?
Now we have all the information we need and can calculate the death rates:
- of 10 unvaccinated people, 5 died the death rate among the unvaccinated is 50%
- of 50 vaccinated people, 5 died the death rate among the vaccinated is 10%
We therefore see that the death rate among the vaccinated is 5-times lower than among the unvaccinated.
This example was illustrating how to think about these statistics in a hypothetical case. Below, you can find the real data for the situation in the COVID-19 pandemic now.
Conservative Supreme Court Justices Question Vaccine Mandate
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court appeared unlikely to support the Biden administrations vaccine mandate and testing rules for businesses.
By Adam Liptak
WASHINGTON The Supreme Courts conservative majority seemed to be leaning on Friday toward blocking one of the White Houses main pandemic-fighting strategies, expressing skepticism that the Biden administration has the legal power to mandate that large employers require workers to be vaccinated or to undergo frequent testing.
The oral argument over that mandate, which rocketed to the court on an emergency basis after a flurry of legal challenges around the nation from Republican-led states, business groups and others, raised the prospect that the court might deal a severe blow to the Biden administrations efforts to address the coronavirus as the highly transmissible Omicron variant continues to spread.
The court seemed more likely to allow a separate mandate requiring health care workers at facilities receiving federal money to be vaccinated. That regulation, the subject of a second case, was in keeping with other kinds of federal oversight of medical facilities and was supported by virtually the entire medical establishment, some justices said.
The court may act quickly in the case, which was argued on an exceptionally rapid schedule.
The courts three more liberal justices said the mandate was a needed response to the public health crisis.
Who Are The Unvaccinated In America Theres No One Answer
One segment of people who have avoided shots is vehemently opposed to the idea. But there is a second group, surveys suggest, that is still deciding.
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By , , and Tim Arango
As coronavirus cases rise across the United States, the fight against the pandemic is focused on an estimated 93 million people who are eligible for shots but have chosen not to get them. These are the Americans who are most vulnerable to serious illness from the highly contagious Delta variant and most likely to carry the virus, spreading it further.
It turns out, though, that this is not a single set of Americans, but in many ways two.
In one group are those who say they are adamant in their refusal of the coronavirus vaccines they include a mix of people but tend to be disproportionately white, rural, evangelical Christian and politically conservative, surveys show.
In the other are those who say they are open to getting a shot but have been putting it off or want to wait and see before making a decision they are a broad range of people, but tend to be a more diverse and urban group, including many younger people, Black and Latino Americans, and Democrats.
Steven Harris, 58, who said he believes that the antibodies he has from getting Covid-19 are sufficiently protective.
Percent of residents who are not fully vaccinated
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What’s The Risk For Unvaccinated People
Case and death rates for people who are not vaccinated are higher in the US than for those fully vaccinated, according to data collected by the US Centers for Disease Control .
There are some breakthrough infections which result in death, but unvaccinated Americans have made up the majority of Covid deaths over the past few months.
The CDC found that an unvaccinated American is 14 times more likely to die from Covid-related complications than a fully vaccinated person.
This goes up to 20 times more likely, when compared with someone who has received a booster vaccination.
Unvaccinated people are also nine times more likely to be admitted to hospital compared with fully vaccinated people.
Every adult age group in the US is much more likely to die from Covid if they are unvaccinated.
When Might Nearly Everyone Be Vaccinated

Some experts have estimated that 90 percent or more of the total population adults and children would need to be fully vaccinated for the country to reach a possibly elusive threshold of protection against the coronavirus known as herd immunity, now that the outbreak is driven by the highly contagious Delta variant.
A number of factors will determine if and when this threshold is met, including the pace at which newly vaccinated people join those who are immune after past infections. But the presence of more transmissible virus variants could complicate that progress. And children, who became eligible for the Pfizer vaccine in late October, may be key to reaching herd immunity, experts say.
The projection below shows the share of the total population that is fully vaccinated based on the current rate of vaccination, and provides a rough indication of when the viruss spread could begin to stall.
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Vaccine Development: Vaccines Approved For Use And In Clinical Trials
The speed at which the first COVID-19 vaccines were developed was extraordinary. We have previously looked into the history of vaccine development. The measles vaccine was found relatively rapidly: it took only 10 years from the discovery of the pathogen to the development of the first vaccine. But for typhoid it took more than a century, and for some diseases for which weve known the pathogens for more than a century we still havent found an effective vaccine.
The development of a vaccine against COVID-19 has been much faster than the development of any other vaccine. Within less than a year several successful vaccines have already been announced and were approved for use in some countries.
The hope is that even more manufacturers develop vaccines for COVID-19. This will be important because eventually a very large share of the world population needs to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
We are on the way to several vaccines against COVID-19 vaccine trackers monitor the progress:
Several institutions maintain websites on which they list COVID-19 candidate vaccines that are currently being developed:
Oxford/AstraZeneca, Sinopharm/Beijing, Sinovac, Sputnik V |
How Many People Are Vaccinated
More than 204 million people in the US are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC. That’s about 61% of the population, with a further 12% partially vaccinated.
On top of this, about 62 million people have been given a booster jab.
However, in some US states, such as the north-western states of Wyoming and Idaho, fewer than 50% of the population are fully vaccinated.
In the southern states of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, upwards of half of their populations are also not fully vaccinated.
Polling suggests resistance to vaccinations is divided down political lines, and the least vaccinated states have consistently voted Republican in recent presidential elections.
The unvaccinated population is now disproportionately made up of those who identify as Republican – 60% compared with 17% who identify as Democrats, according to data collected by the Kaiser Family Foundation , a US-based health research group.
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How Would Differing Assumptions Affect These Results
Changing selected assumptions in our analysis could reduce or increase the estimates we report here. For example, our model assumes that the reopening of businesses and schools, along with the increase in social gatherings that occurred during summer 2021, continued despite the Delta wave. If people had restricted social activities and travel, or businesses or schools had closed in response to the Delta surge, many deaths and hospitalizations could have been averted even in the absence of vaccination. However, it seems unlikely that the entire nation would have returned to the restrictions imposed during the first year of the pandemic.
Conversely, the number of deaths estimated by the model may be too low if hospital capacity were exceeded . Moreover, the model estimates only death attributable to COVID-19. Preventable deaths due to other causes would have increased too, as occurred early in the pandemic in cities like New York City and Los Angeles.5
How The Us Vaccine Rollout Looks Right Now
Some 60.9% of Americans have received both doses of the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna drugs or a single injection of the one-dose Johnson & Johnson/Janssen version. Including “initial doses”those who have received only the first dose of Pfizer or Modernathe figure stands at 72.1%.
Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the Pfizer vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds, the new pool of recipients may push national figures for new vaccine administrations back upward after a . The interactive maps and charts below are updated daily to track the progress of both the shipment of shots in the U.S. and the success in getting them into patients arms.
While a few smaller states say they have administered virtually all of the first doses they have received from the federal government, there remains a nationwide gap between the reported number of surplus doses and ground-level reports of mass shortages. While the Department of Health and Human Services releases weekly figures on vaccine allocations and shipments to every state, territory, and a handful of federal programs, these maps use Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures to show how many of those doses have arrived on site each day.
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Most Nurses Are Vaccinated So Why Do People Think Health Workers Are Vaccine Hesitant
Many registered nurses see vaccination as their moral responsibility and want everyone else to get theirs too
Charlaine was skeptical of the vaccines at first. She wondered how they were created so quickly, and she was wary of the long history of medical experimentation and disregard for Black people like her in the United States.
But then Charlaine, a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, thought about the disparate health outcomes for people of color in the pandemic and knew that she might not receive the same level of care as others if she got sick.
She did her research and determined that the mRNA vaccines, which became available to health workers late last year, are safe and effective. Charlaine, who asked to use only her first name to protect her job, got her vaccine in January. Here we have this virus that is killing, maiming, debilitating people, and I knew that if I was in a position of being sick, I would be treated differently and probably not survive. So that was one layer of protection that I wanted to give myself, she said.
A year and a half into the pandemic, healthcare workers are exhausted, burned out and worried that the worst is far from over. Amid that stress, much attention has been focused on nurses who havent received the vaccine, even though the majority of these essential workers have been inoculated. That has left many nurses feeling betrayed, both by their unvaccinated patients and by public perception.
Household Pulse Survey Shows Many Dont Trust Covid Vaccine Worry About Side Effects
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that as of December 14, roughly 85% of adults ages 18 and over in the United States had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine but 15% remained unvaccinated.
Who are the unvaccinated and why are they choosing not to get a COVID vaccine?
About 42% reported that they dont trust the COVID-19 vaccine.
According to the U.S. Census Bureaus newest phase of the experimental Household Pulse Survey , those who were unvaccinated against COVID in early December 2021, reported a variety of reasons why.
“Vaccinated” here refers to adults who have received at least one dose of any COVID vaccine, and “unvaccinated” refers to adults who have not received any.
Unvaccinated adults who responded to the survey could select more than one reason:
- About half reported that they were concerned about possible side effects of the vaccine.
- About 42% reported that they dont trust the COVID-19 vaccine.
- Less than 10% reported that they hadnt gotten the vaccine because their doctor had not recommended it.
- About 2% reported not getting the vaccine because of difficulty obtaining it.
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What Share Of The Population Has Been Fully Vaccinated Against Covid
The following chart shows the share of the total population that has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. This represents the share that have received all doses prescribed by the vaccination protocol. If a person receives the first dose of a 2-dose vaccine, this metric stays the same. If they receive the second dose, the metric goes up by 1.
This data is only available for countries which report the breakdown of doses administered by first and second doses.
Regulation Of Vaccine Safety

The United States Food and Drug Administration has the authority to enforce the safety of vaccines. The FDA requires that all new vaccines first be tested in laboratory settings and on animals, and must then carry out a series of increasingly stringent tests in human subjects. Once vaccines are introduced to the market, the FDA regularly inspects their production facilities, tests their quality, and receives reports of adverse reactions.
In the 2012 case of Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs v. Sebelius, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that opponents of thimerosal-preserved vaccines lacked standing to challenge determinations by the Food and Drug Administration that the vaccines and their components were safe and effective. In the opinion, judge Brett M. Kavanaugh therefore rejected the challenge on standing grounds. The court further found it irrelevant that thimerosal was included in some versions of mandated vaccines, because it was possible for those seeking to avoid the ingredient to receive thimerosal-free vaccines.
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Who Are The Hard
Most of the HPS response options are either about information or trust .
However, one involves access: It’s hard for me to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Who are the people in the small subset of adults who responded to the HPS who reported that they had not gotten a vaccine because it was hard to get?
Compared to all HPS respondents, the hard-to-reach:
- Were more likely to be non-White.
- Were less likely to be married .
- Had lower levels of education, on average, and were more economically disadvantaged about half of this hard-to-reach population reported difficulty meeting expenses in the week prior to the survey.
- Were much more likely to report a disability. The HPS asks about difficulty seeing, hearing, remembering or walking or climbing stairs. Those who reported being unvaccinated because they had no access to the vaccine were almost twice as likely to report either complete impairment or a lot of difficulty with one or more of these measures than the general population.
Looking Ahead: Projected Dates For Vaccination Coverage
Researchers have estimated that around 70% to 85% of the country needs to be immune to the coronavirus for COVID-19 to stop spreading through communities and peter out.
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People who have recovered from a coronavirus infection may have existing protection against reinfection. However, it’s unclear how strong this natural immunity is and how long it lasts, so public health officials recommend that everyone aged 12 and up get vaccinated against the disease, including those who were previously infected.
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Biden Covid Vaccine Mandate: Which Us Workers Need Proof Of Vaccination
President Biden’s federal vaccine mandate for large businesses starts next week. Learn which workers will be affected.
The imminent COVID-19 vaccine mandate will require many US workers to prove their vaccination status.
The US federal mandate for COVID-19 vaccines will go into effect on Jan. 10 unless the US Supreme Court decides to declare it unconstitutional — the court discussed oral arguments for four hours Friday, but did not reach a decision. The vaccination requirement will apply to workers in all US private companies with 100 or more employees.
While the Supreme Court’s decision hangs in the balance, many states and cities have already implemented vaccine requirements for government workers and contractors. All Philadelphia city workers must be vaccinated by Jan. 14. On Friday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul joined California and New Mexico in creating a booster mandate for all state health care workers.
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In addition to mandates for government workers, municipalities are enforcing vaccine mandates for public spaces. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu recently declare “B Together,” a plan requiring proof of vaccination for all patrons of Boston’s indoor dining, fitness and entertainment facilities, starting on Jan 15. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced similar COVID-19 vaccine requirements for the Windy City.
The local and state mandates seem to be working. In the US, 78.8% of people 5 and older have had at least one dose, as of Jan. 7.