Crappy Vaccines - A Thought Experiment

Imagine a useless or even harmful vaccine. How would you know?

Let’s say you decided (for lols?) to make a deliberately crappy vaccine. This vaccine would do nothing to stop a person getting the virus in question. In fact, you’ve actually designed your crappy vaccine to suppress a person’s immune system for several weeks after taking it so they become more likely to catch the virus, rather than less likely. A dastardly act, you’ll agree, but let’s go with it.

Well, no one would think much of your vaccine would they? Pretty quickly, its ineptitude would be discovered and you would have some tough questions to answer.

Well, maybe not. What if you somehow managed to have all the cases, hospitalisations, and deaths caused by your immuno-suppressive vaccine assigned as “unvaccinated”. You insist that only those people who are two weeks post their second vaccine are officially counted as “vaccinated”. So, for the 5 weeks or so between a person taking the first dose of your crappy vaccine and getting to 2 weeks post their second dose, anything that happens to them has happened to an “unvaccinated” person. Only when the immuno-suppressive effect of your vaccine ends, would you start assigning outcomes as “vaccinated”. Only after many of these people have gotten the virus because of (not in spite of) your vaccine and are now genuinely unlikely to get it again anytime soon, would you welcome them into your vaccinated club where they can be trusted not to muck up the place by testing positive.

Yes, yes, no regulatory body would ever let you get away with such a thing but let’s just imagine they did. Let’s imagine they’re actually that dumb or that incompetent or that compromised. It would be quite the thing, wouldn’t it? You could actually have an objectively harmful vaccine, one actively making people sick and the statistics would make it look wonderful. You could point at graphs and say, “Look, all the people getting the virus are unvaccinated. The vaccinated people are doing great!” Your vaccine would be actively making them catch the virus but you could claim the exact opposite. Not so much a miracle of science but a miracle of marketing. And people would believe you. Why wouldn’t they? You’d have impressive graphs to show them.

Now, let’s remember that we’re talking about a theoretical vaccine here. One that is categorically “crappy”, i.e. harmful. And this is how you could make it look. Remarkable. But we are, of course, not talking about the Covid vaccines. Definitely not.

Or are we? I get confused sometimes – even within my own thought experiment. If something like this was the case with the Covid vaccines, it might never be discovered unless you did something completely mad like bring in a third “booster” shot several months later. Because, you see, if you did that with a crappy vaccine like we’re imagining here, you’d see something quite strange.

The hitherto fully vaccinated group, those who had their first two doses months ago, would suddenly start displaying high case levels of virus. A third dose of an immuno-suppressive vaccine would again make them more susceptible to catching the virus and the resulting cases would, for the same reason as before, be classed as “unboosted” until 2 weeks after the third shot is complete. So, all these cases would fall into the “Double-vaccinated” category - those people who had two doses of the vaccine, have now had a third dose, but have not yet reached that 2-week post dose point to be considered “Boosted”. The actual boosted category, on the other hand, would look okay because, as above, you would only count them as boosted after the immuno-suppressive effect of your crappy vaccine had mostly subsided.

But the really interesting part is that the unvaccinated group, those who never took a single shot, would suddenly look pretty good. You see, you wouldn’t be able to push cases arising from the booster shot onto them. You can only push the cases back one step and this time that is onto the double-vaccinated category. The unvaccinated would be free from your data manipulation – the “Double-vaccinated” group are blocking you from reaching them. In theory then, you would end up with strange graphs looking like this – huge case counts in the double vaccinated category contrasting with more modest numbers in the unvaccinated and boosted categories.

Although, hold on, that’s actually a real graph showing the Covid case rates per 100k in the UK last month. I’m trying to keep this theoretical. Try this one – again, the point is that if you have a crappy vaccine and a 2-week post dose classification, you would see the highest cases by far in the double vaccinated category.

Ugh, I’m sorry, that’s a real one too, based on Covid data from the Robert Koch Institute in Germany in December 2021.

Not sure why I keep messing that up. I guess, it’s because the real graphs look so much like the theoretical ones – the ones that are assuming a crappy vaccine. How strange…I can only apologise. My fact and fiction are blurring together. It’s a confusing world.

Let’s just forget it. Ultimately, the only thing that really matters is that there’s less virus around after the vaccine, right?

Ugh.

Okay, well, less deaths anyway. I mean, an awful lot of the really susceptible people died already before the vaccines came along. Now that they’re here and they’re definitely not crappy and people have two, three, even four doses of them, deaths will be way, WAY down. Right?

Oh, jeez, I’m going to have to lie down and take a nap…excuse me.