When I saw this tweet from the New York Times Guild, asking me to not cross a “digital picket line” and read any material from The New York Times, I knew that I’d have to reference some story from the Grey Lady on my site today. And it actually turned out to be something good; someone who was doing something really radical like telling the truth about COVID-19:

Covid-19 Isn’t a Pandemic of the Unvaccinated Anymore

by David Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Americans received their first Covid-19 vaccine doses in December 2020, which means we are now approaching the beginning of the third year of the pandemic’s vaccine phase. And yet hundreds of Americans are still dying each day. Who are they? The data offers a straightforward answer: older adults.

Though it’s sometimes uncomfortable to say it, mortality risk has been dramatically skewed by age throughout the pandemic. The earliest reports of Covid deaths from China sketched a pattern quickly confirmed everywhere in the world: In an immunologically naïve population, the oldest were several thousand times more at risk of dying from infection than the youngest.

We reported, on November 24^th, how The Washington Post used a similar headline, “Covid is no longer mainly a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Here’s why.“, and even that was an editorial change from the original, “Vaccinated people now make up a majority of covid deaths”. It was that similarity which caught my eye on the Times website.

But the skew is actually more dramatic now — even amid mass vaccinations and reinfections — than it was at any previous point over the last three years. Since the beginning of the pandemic, people 65 and older accounted for 75 percent of all American Covid deaths. That dropped below 60 percent as recently as September 2021. But today Americans 65 and over account for 90 percent of new Covid deaths, an especially large share given that 94 percent of American seniors are vaccinated.

Yet these facts seem to contradict stories we’ve told about what drives vulnerability to Covid-19. In January, Joe Biden warned^[1]Full disclosure: this reference hyperlink was not in the author’s original, but was added by me. that the illness and death threatened by the Omicron variant represented “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” But that month, in which nearly 85,000 Americans died, the unvaccinated accounted for 59 percent of those deaths, down from 77 percent the previous September, according to analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The share of deaths among older adults that January was nearly 74 percent.

There’s more at the original, but, Alas! it is available only to Times subscribers, so if you aren’t one, you’ll just have to take my word for it that what I’ve quoted is the real thing. Several paragraphs further down, after Mr Wallace-Wells goes through some statistics and caveats, we come to this:

That is a very good deal, of course. But it also means that, given the underlying age skew, a vaccinated person in their late 80s shares a similar risk of Covid death as a never-vaccinated 70-year-old. Which is to say, some real risk. If it was ever comfortable to say that the unconscionable levels of American deaths were a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” it is surely now accurate to describe the ongoing toll as a “pandemic of the old.”

So why aren’t we?

One answer is that as a country, we prefer just to not see those deaths at all, regarding a baseline of several hundred deaths a day as a sort of background noise or morbid but faded wallpaper. We don’t need to understand who is dying or why in part because we don’t want to reckon with the fact that around 300 Americans are now dying from Covid-19 every day, at a rough pace of about 100,000 per year, making it the country’s third leading cause of death. This is normalization at work, but it is also a familiar pattern: We don’t exactly track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease either.

At 69½ years old, and having contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus myself, though not very ill at all and seemingly getting over it, I’m not particularly thrilled with it being a “pandemic of the old,” but let’s face it: the elderly are always at greater risks, from everything. Our immune systems are weaker, our reflexes slower. I’m perfectly able to admit that there are things I just can’t do as well as previously. But Mr Wallace-Wells continues to tell us why the government was shading the truth:

Another answer is that — partly to promote good behavior, partly to more easily blame others for our general predicament — the country spent a lot of time emphasizing what you could do to protect yourself, which left us without much of a vocabulary to describe what underlying vulnerability inevitably remained.

Translation: “to promote good behavior” means to try to push people to take a vaccine some were clearly reluctant to take by not telling the whole truth about it. The government were so worried that people might be less willing to take the decision to get vaccinated if they had the complete truth that they preferred to hide part of the truth.

And we’re still seeing that today. Think about the commercials for various prescription drugs that producers say you should “ask your doctor about” if you have a particular condition. They all have one thing in common: they all have a list of potential negative results or reactions that some patients have had.

But not the COVID vaccines! The government is pushing them, every day, through television commercials, but I have yet to see one in which the negative side effects, the documented negative side effects that some people have suffered, have been listed. The percentage of people who have suffered serious side effects is small, but it is not zero.

Then, of course, there was the truly Big Lie, a lie spread by many people:

• Rachel Walensky, Director of the Centers for Disease Control: “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick. And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.” Even some of her minions at the CDC pushed back against that.
• Joe Biden: “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die. “

We found out, of course, that the vaccines did not stop either contracting or transmitting the virus to others. Heck, I’m pretty much the poster boy for that one, in that my wife contracted it first, despite being fully vaccinated, twice ‘normally’ boosted, and having taken the additional, supposedly Omicron-specific booster, . . . and then I contracted it from her, despite being fully vaccinated and twice normally boosted.

By last January, this was known: acting Food and Drug Administration head Commissioner Janet Woodcock told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, last January, that she expected that, eventually, almost everyone would contract the virus. Celebrity doctor Anthony Fauci said that COVID-19 would infect “just about everybody.” But the government have kept up the Big Lie, that if you get vaccinated and boosted, you wouldn’t get COVID.

What if the government had done something really radical and just told the truth? We can’t know whether developing a reputation for telling the truth would have led more or fewer people to choose to take the vaccines, though it surely seems probable that government efforts to force people to get vaccinated increased resistance. And maybe, just maybe, if the government had a reputation for telling the truth, people would trust them more on things other than COVID-19.