Nothing Like Vaccine Misinformation

I saw a video on YouTube from a guy who calls himself Dr. Rick Kelly and claims to represent Novavax. The video compared Covid cases in Jan/Feb and Sep/Oct between low the vaccination states of Idaho and Wyoming and the high vaccinations states of New Hampshire, Connecticut and Maine.

His conclusion basically was that, with the exception of Connecticut, there was no difference in the case numbers between the low and high vaccination states.

He ignored hospitalizations and deaths.

I wouldn't come to too many conclusions using Vermont or even Idaho, Wyoming and Maine for that matter. I'm an engineer with expertise in information analysis and I'll explain why I say that. There are two reasons. The first reason is that Vermont has a very small population and small changes can make big impacts but the second, and far more important reason, is that Vermont never had much of an outbreak. It barely ever hit 200 cases a day. 

Connecticut shows a different story but go to even larger states with high vaccination rates such as Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York to see the differences there (all numbers from Times database). 

The peak 7-day averages between January and September/October for daily cases, hospitalizations and daily deaths are as follows. 

Massachusetts - Jan = 6,363, 2,247, 74 Oct = 2,360, 619, 15 

New Jersey - Jan = 6,480, 3,860, 97 Oct = 2,219, 1,193, 21 

New York - Jan = 15,956, 10,038, 195 Oct = 5,444, 2,876, 41 

New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland all look like Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. So do Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan and California. Texas has about equal numbers in January and October but has slightly lower numbers in October. Florida has much, much worse numbers in October perhaps because its Jan/Feb weather tends to be better than Sep/Oct and more people stay indoors in Sep/Oct in the air conditioning. 

The only thing I can say about Maine is the deaths are much less in Sep/Oct but there doesn't seem to be much difference in cases or hospitalizations.

Two other factors that should be noted but are hard to know how to include in the calculations are January was winter and people spend more time indoors (as noted above this might be the opposite for Florida) and the Delta variant was reportedly much more contagious. So much more contagious that it rapidly became the overwhelming variant in the country. I suspect that the contagion of Delta would dominate and we would have expected to see MORE cases with that variant.

So Dr. Rick Kelly is sort of cherry picking by using small states to arrive at a conclusion that the vaccines don't work.