Why are we wasting most of our vaccines?

Last update: Sunday 5/15/22

One million deaths from COVID is a national shame and an ongoing horror. How did a great nation with the most impressive biomedical research facilities in the world allow so many people to die? The endless answers to this question will be laden with accusations and finger pointing for decades to come. The question is equivalent to another mind boggler: Will the gains that we attain when we win our total war against lethal tribes of coronaviruses be worth the losses we sustain? If the answer to this question isn't a resounding "YES!!!", then we will have suffered one of the most bitter Pyrrhic victories in history.

This note considers the possibility that we wasted most of our vaccines. We tried to vaccinate "everybody", but the pattern of our COVID deaths suggests that most of our vaccines have been wasted. 

Losses in context  

Although the note focuses on lost lives, the following bullets provide links to a few articles that remind us of that our death rates are far higher than the rates in other wealthy countries and of some of the massive other losses that our nation has sustained so far

• "U.S. Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries", Benjamin Mueller and Eleanor Lutz, NY Times, 2/1/22
• "After 1 million deaths, covid leaves millions more forever changed", Marc Fisher, Lizzie Johnson, Christine Spolar and Nick Aspinwall, Washington Post, 5/8/22 
• "It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading", Dana Goldstein, NY Times, 3/9/22
  
  

Our vaccines had little or no effect on death rates for people under 50.

Consider the first six rows of the following table that shows CDC data for the percentage of the population in different age groups that died from COVID in the first two years of the pandemic. Notice that the table does not distinguish between deceased who were vaccinated and and deceased who were unvaccinated 

• In the combined five youngest age groups in the first five rows, ages 0 through 29, less than one percent of this aggregated group died from COVID. If vaccines and boosters had any effect, it was barely noticeable. Nevertheless, this group included almost 33 percent of the entire U.S. population.
  
  
• The combined deaths in the next two rows for the 30 to 39 and 40 to 49 age groups represented only 5.9 percent of all COVID deaths, despite the fact that they included 25.8 percent of the entire U.S. population
  

Their youth seemed to protect these younger groups even though they were the least vaccinated groups in our society. They are the most infected, but the least likely to die. Indeed, one has to wonder whether the very small percentage of young people who died had underlying conditions that made them vulnerable to COVID. If so, they would have lived much longer if COVID had not occurred, e.g., diabetics, asthmatics, obese, transplant recipients, etc, etc, etc. 

• "The Coronavirus Has Infected More Than Half of Americans, the C.D.C. Reports", Apoorva Mandavilli, NY Times, 4/27/22 ... Note: The CDC also reported that 75 percent of children have been infected.

Instead of expending time and dollars trying to vaccinate all of the members of these younger groups, we should have focused our vaccination efforts on those who would have really benefited, and worked mightily to develop treatments for those who would not benefit from vaccines, e.g., the immunocompromised. Instead of sending all students into disastrously ineffective Zoom classes, we might have offered small, tutorial, remote classes for immunocompromised students until appropriate treatments were developed.

Table 1. COVID Deaths by Age Groups 

Age Group	COVID Deaths	% COVID Deaths	% US Pop
0-4 Years	479	0.1	6
5-11 Years	356	<0.1	8.7
12-15 Years	378	<0.1	5.1
16-17 Years	307	<0.1	2.5
18-29 Years	6047	0.7	16.4
30-39 Years	15098	1.8	13.5
40-49 Years	34695	4.1	12.3
50-64 Years	153191	18.1	19.2
65-74 Years	191547	22.7	9.6
75-84 Years	219736	26	4.9
85+ Years	223518	26.4	2
TOTAL	845352	99.9	100.2

Source: Data downloaded from CDC Data Tracker's Case & Death Demographic Trends
"Deaths by Age Group" table on 5/6/22

Most of our vaccines should have been given to persons 50 and over

Now let's consider the members of the oldest groups in the last four rows of the table.  We know that, in general, a higher percentage of the members of older age groups die each year than the members of younger groups for a variety of reasons. So what does the table show for those who died from COVID?

• The 50 to 64 age group represented a transition. It's the first and only group whose percentage of all COVID deaths, 18.1 percent, is about equal to its percentage of the U.S. population, 19.2 percent. Each subsequent group thereafter bore an increasingly disproportionate share of all COVID deaths.
  
  
• To be specific, the 65-74 group bore 22.7 percent of all COVID deaths, which is more than twice its 9.6 share of the U.S. population; the 75-84 group bore 26 percent of COVID deaths, which is more than five times its share of the U.S. population; and the 80+ group bore 26.4 percent of COVID deaths, which is 13 times its 2 percent share of the U.S. population 
  
  
• It must be noted that the four oldest age groups combined, age 50 and older, accounted for more than 93 percent of all COVID deaths, even though they included less than 36 percent of the U.S. population. Indeed, time and again since vaccines were first distributed in early 2021, we have been told that over 90 percent of those who were hospitalized and died were people who had not been vaccinated. What they didn't tell us again and again was that the overwhelming majority of these unvaccinated deceased persons were 50 years of age and older.
  
  
• It must also be noted that the three oldest age groups combined, age 65 and older, accounted for more than 75 percent of all COVID deaths, even though they included less than 17 percent of the U.S. population, i.e., their share of deaths was more than four times their share of the population

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Links to related notes on this blog:  

• "Moving another CDC "component" to the Census Bureau ", Last update: 4/28/22