All categrories – Page 17 – The New Observer

Covid – towards a bio-security state

This is a stub. I really want to write a lot on this subject but I don’t have time at the moment. Why do I want to write about this? Because it touches on topics of interest to me; science and freedom. Freedom in the sense of living a life which more or less is not controlled moment to moment by some authority. Science as a way of arriving at reliable, verifiable, knowledge of the world.

The Covid situation in the UK is moving into farcical territory.

I saw a headline today “one person has died from Omicron”. This is just hysteria. If the projections that it is going to grow exponentially are correct then within a few weeks 50 people a day will be dying from Omicron.

Wow, you say, that’s serious. That is because they (the authorities and the media classes – the PR arm of power) want you to be scared. But consider this; in a bad flu year up to 30,000 people die from flu in the UK (if we include pneumonia) [1] Most deaths occur in the Winter months but if we take the year as a whole the average is 82 deaths a day. People die.

Of course flu + Covid will kill more people than flu alone. But it seems highly likely that there will be considerable overlap. Covid will kill people who otherwise might have died of flu. (Though there is no doubt that Covid has a higher death rate than flu for people over 70).

There are many strange features as to how the pandemic is being managed in the UK. Here are some of them:

Capacity – the bottleneck which can’t be touched

It seems to depend how you calculate it but approximately speaking there are 6000 critical care beds in the NHS. Before Covid at peak times the resource could be at 95% capacity. That is just 300 spare beds. It really doesn’t take much to cause a crisis. If the policy is, as indeed it is, to “protect the NHS” this explains the draconian measures.

What is strange perhaps is that no new capacity has been built since the start of the pandemic. There were the Nightingale hospitals which were hardly used (and then probably only so they could say they had been used a little). This was of course another money-laundering exercise. When asked why they weren’t used the public was told by the Health Authorities that there were no staff. I found that implausible at the time – there are army doctors and nurses available. It would have been possible to import nurses. But now – more than 18 months into the pandemic there is no possible convincing explanation as to why no additional capacity has been built. (Including hiring and training staff). Money can’t be the blocker; they’ve poured £37+ billion into the failing Test and Trace system with most of the money swelling the coffers of private companies. I think the blocker is probably the “closed shop” mentality of the health bureaucracy. They endlessly issue warnings about the imminent collapse of the NHS but at the same time will do everything they can to prevent any other health solutions from arising which might threaten their monopoly.

One option – which I believe was used by China and I think was used during the Spanish Flu pandemic – is to build dedicated and separate facilities to handle the pandemic cases. This has the advantage that you preserve at least some of your normal capacity to carry out operations, thus reducing the number of people who die because their non pandemic related treatment has been cancelled. It also reduces cross-infection. A 1/5 of people in NHS hospitals in the UK with Covid caught it in hospital. Which is a rather shocking figure and of course contributes significantly to the overall death rates. In Russia the tendency seems to be to dedicate one hospital in a town or city to Covid and leave the others to carry on. At least they seem to be thinking about nosocomial infection. (As an aside we can somewhat anecdotally suggest that a measure of this kind could potentially have reduced overall deaths by numbers in the tens of thousands: The Telegraph claims 11,600 people died from hospital acquired Covid by 11/21 and this report suggests 9,000 non-Covid excess deaths in just three months in March-May 2020 – and non Covid excess deaths continue to be a problem now – suggesting that non-Covid excess deaths alone may number tens of thousands).

Update 26-12-21. On 18 December the London Mayer Sadiq Kahn ordered a state of emergency in London because of rising Covid cases. On that day there were 1,534 Covid patients in London hospitals. Out of a population of approximately 9 million. The fact is; there is in normal times virtually no spare capacity in hospitals. A tiny increase can push them into crisis. The “crisis” which is leading to lockdowns (themselves indisputably harmful) is not that the hospitals are being flooded with tens of thousands of desperately ill patients. This is the impression you might get if you don’t look at the numbers. But in reality the crisis is that there is basically no capacity in the system and no willingness to expand it.

A further point. The majority of people who go into hospital with Covid recover. Increasing capacity means more people can be treated and cared for. It does not necessarily mean that we are accepting that more people will die. If 25% of people who are diagnosed as having Covid in hospital die then 75% will recover. If you increase capacity by 1000 beds then 250 more people may die. However; this should be weighed against all the costs of the current policy of refusing to increase capacity. This policy leads to lockdowns and to people staying away from hospitals or having their treatments postponed for non-Covid illnesses. This causes mortality; as we have noted above – substantial levels of mortality. The increased Covid deaths if capacity were increased and more case numbers accepted might well be compensated for by a reduction in the numbers of non Covid deaths caused by the current policy of not increasing capacity.

Vaccines over-sold

The vaccine strategy in the UK is fast unravelling. Predictably enough the virus is mutating and has produced an escape candidate. The data so far suggests significantly reduced protection against Omicron from Pfizer and AstraZeneca. Pfizer is pushing the need for a “booster”. But even with this booster protection is down to 75% [2] and there is doubt about how long this effect will last.

If and when Pi arrives it may be even more successful at evading the vaccine.

Both Pfizer and AstraZeneca offer limited protection against mild infection and transmission. In fact after 3 months AstraZeneca offers no protection against transmission. Pfizer retains some protection against transmission after 3 months but it is reduced. [3] (As an example of the way that the media is running on authoritarian steroids and not science look at this BBC journalist trying to bamboozle a dissenting MP into accepting that “being vaccinated is something you do to protect others”. But given that being vaccinated offers in fact very limited protection against transmission this argument fails. She hasn’t looked at the science and is prioritising her authoritarian agenda).

The messaging on vaccines has changed. No longer are they the “road to freedom” but they are there to protect against serious illness. This new message only appears to be the case if you take multiple and frequent boosters – something which is just not realistic for much of the world unless Pfizer can be made to offer them at cost and the wealthier nations simply club together to pay for a global programme. This is logistically possible but I am not holding my breath. Our leaders lament the deaths caused by Covid but they would lament a socialist initiative saving the world far more.

It is increasingly likely that the situation with vaccines will be as with flu. They help reduce risk in the most vulnerable. But they do not defeat the pandemic. Probably the ultimate answer will be natural immunity supported with vaccines to reduce risk in the most vulnerable.

The situation now is that the government is committed to pouring billions into the profits of the vaccine companies. But in reality the promises of the vaccines are – as with so many other pharmaceutical products- exaggerated. They will ameliorate the situation – not fix it. There is a denial of this reality. Pfizer is not going to enlighten anyone.

The false dichotomy of lockdown or do nothing

It is routine to see scientists making public statements “if we don’t bring in a new lockdown now there will be another 30,000 deaths by Christmas”. It is alarming to see the complete lack of scientific understanding on display here.

What science can do is use data gathered from the real world such as the R number of a virus in e.g. normal urban conditions without restrictions, combine this with clinical data and make some kind of ranged predictions about deaths if the variables do not change. How to reduce transmission (one of the variables) is from a scientific point of view very simple; increase social distancing, avoid contact between infected and uninfected people, increase ventilation etc. The how of how that is achieved is absolutely outside the realm of science. It is a question for civil society. It is not a law of science that the only way to reduce transmission is lockdowns, Covid-passes, fines and all the other authoritarian measures being enacted by government. A reduction in transmission could be obtained by voluntary acts by informed citizens without any of the apparatus of authoritarian control and fines. It is simply a horrible sight to see all these paid public scientists manifesting such ignorance about science – as they do when they make empirically untenable claims that “the science says we must lockdown”. Government is very keen to encourage these false claims because the state is opposed to civil society, which is always a threat to its unlimited power and this gives it an excuse to target civil society “in the name of science”. State power plus fake science (or, to be clear, authoritarian political conclusions falsely claimed to be derived from empirical science but in fact added on afterwards) is in the case of the Covid pandemic absolutely supplanting civil society.

Freedom and fatness

Strangely, it seems that the authoritarian trends which want to force people to wear masks despite them having only absolutely marginal medical benefit [4], which want to fine children (and their parents) life-destroying sums for running about, which want to pressurise children into being vaccinated and deny their parents the right to refuse despite vaccines being more dangerous to children than Covid [5], do not extend to telling fat people to slim down.

Based on the Economist’s risk calculator (based on reliable US data) we can note that for a man aged 55 with no health conditions the mortality risk from Covid is 0.8% and the hospitalisation risk is 11.5%. Add in obesity and the figures respectively are 0.8% and 20.3%. The staggering difference for obesity in hospitalisation rates seems to be borne out at different ages. Particularly interesting is that there is no difference to mortality rates at age 55. Even for age 75 the difference in mortality is tiny: 7.2% goes to 7.3%. But, again, a huge difference in hospitalisation: 28.1% to 40.1%. I would guess that if the comparison was between being overweight/obese v. being within recommended BMI then the difference would be even larger than just considering obesity. For cross-comparison, adding in ‘other cancers’ does not affect hospitalisation at all at age 55.

In other words; hospitals are being clogged up with people who are at no more risk ultimately of dying (largely) but who need help breathing because their weak and flabby muscles aren’t strong enough. And for this – people are being locked down and businesses destroyed. Obviously I understand that obesity is not the only factor and, conversely, that even people who are not obese can still end up in hospital; nonetheless these very significant differences are going to produce thousands more hospitalisations given the widespread levels of obesity in the population.

To be clear; I’m not advocating for e.g. refusal of treatment to the obese. But it does seem odd that there isn’t even any ‘guidance’ or advice on this question at all. Zero; despite the fact that if there were less obese people there would be far less pressure on the hospital system.

However; it seems that in the UK today while people do not have the right to decide whether or not to wear a mask, to move around and leave their homes at will (during the last lockdown), to travel internationally without huge difficulty, and to decline to let their children be vaccinated even though they may know that it is more dangerous than the disease, they do have the right to be avoidably fat and clog up health resources unnecessarily. The corrupt and self-serving political class will lecture us about how selfish it is not to get vaccinated. But I haven’t heard anything about the overweight people clogging up the hospitals. In our society it seems being fat is a fundamental human right. I would guess this is because fat people are consumers. As always the preferred solution is one which allows the corporate-government nexus to ‘deliver’ something – at profit. But the reality is that doing less of something – in this case eating – would be a much better solution. These solutions are not mentioned because they are not profitable and don’t involve state power. (A similar thing happens with ‘ADHD’. Despite even the best ADHD drugging ‘studies’ showing positive results for behavioural interventions they will still conclude that drugging is the answer. [6] Behavioural interventions can be done at home for free without government. But drugging is just much more profitable and engages the whole apparatus of state power).

Notes

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2514
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/10/two-jabs-give-less-protection-against-catching-omicron-than-delta-uk-data-shows
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/10/13/do-coronavirus-vaccines-prevent-transmission-of-the-virus
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4586/rr-6 Notice how this Reuters report spins the results which actually found no statistically significant benefit to wearing masks to “masks provided limited protection” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-facemasks-idUSKBN27Y1YW – they are just lying.
The study of AstraZeneca showed that for 18-39s there is greater risk of dying from the vaccine than from Covid by a factor of approximately 2:1. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40328123.html – a factor which one imagines is even greater for under 18s. Pfizer is more likely to cause hospitalisation in teenage boys than Covid: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-risk-from-pfizer-jab-side-effect-than-covid-suggests-study
https://newobs.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/part21.pdf

Louder and louder

Beat the drums of war.

I wish these people would think through what they are doing.

This is another ill-informed piece in the Guardian:

Even as Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin were sitting down to talks meant to end the crisis, Russia was inching closer to being ready to launch a full-scale ground invasion of its neighbour

The narrative chunk that Russia is about to “invade” Ukraine has been repeated in the Guardian 100 times so now it is the “truth”.

Are these people stupid or evil? Either they really believe this dirge – an “aggressive” and “expansionist” Russia wants to re-establish the Soviet Union and “invade” Ukraine. Or – they understand that this media line about an imminent invasion is a ploy by Kiev to put pressure on Russia ahead of a possible attack by Kiev on Donbass and they are playing along…. I don’t know.

Putin may still decide not to launch an invasion

Honestly. Talk about the echo chamber. They’ve been talking about the “invasion” for two weeks now and now they absolutely believe it…

And Putin said that the situation in eastern Ukraine “looked like genocide” in a recent meeting, raising fears he could seek a pretext to send his troops into the country

The possibility that Putin simply meant what he said – that the behaviour of Kiev’s battalions (some of which were even too close to Nazism for the US Congress to fund) towards the citizens of Donetsk and Lugansk smacks of genocide – does not seem to have entered the writer’s head.

Putin has spent the last two decades trying to fight Nato expansion, but the possible accession of Ukraine into the military alliance has always touched deeper emotions, and in part motivated him to order the annexation of Crimea and provoke a war in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 14,000 people.

This is a hideous lie and the author’s writing hand is covered in the blood of innocent children. He is attributing all the deaths in the war in Donbass to Putin. He claims that Putin “provoked” the war – without offering any evidence to back this up. I don’t know to what extent Russian intelligence liaised with local leaders in the Donbass in March 2014. But I do know (because I have read up on the subject and talked to people i.e. done what a journalist should do) that there are millions of people in Eastern Ukraine who would prefer closer ties with Russia and who were effectively disenfranchised when the elected President, who had a strong electoral base in this region, was toppled in a Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. The problem as always with these journalists is they simply de-exist the human beings who don’t agree with their Western imperialist worldview. This is a form of genocide in itself. The journalist is adopting the line from the regime in Kiev that 100% of the impetus for the uprising in the East came from the Kremlin. But the reality is that people in this area don’t share the same European dream as the people in the centre. After the Maidan coup committed Ukraine to a European future and, for that matter, immediately tried to pass legislation to downgrade the use of the Russian language in Ukraine, the people in the East, naturally enough, (and incidentally democratically), rebelled. A tiny bit of journalism – for example reviewing this Gallup (US) survey will confirm this. [1] Or this UN source which confirms that Yanukovych’s pro-Russia Party of the Regions was stronger in the East and South – and that it was overthrown in an anti-democratic coup. [2]

In Ukraine, support for joining Nato has jumped considerably in recent years as the country has sought protection from an increasingly aggressive Russia.

This is delusional. He means of course in the centre and West of Ukraine. But then in a way it is logical since the people in Donetsk and Luhansk, where support for NATO probably isn’t growing as they are being killed with Western supplied weapons, don’t exist for him. “Increasingly aggressive Russia” – well, yes, keep repeating it and it becomes “true”.

And the idea of mustering nearly 100,000 troops within striking distance of the Ukrainian border (the US has said that Russia could increase that number to 175,000 by the end of January) just to hold talks with Biden has struck western observers as overkill

The possibility that the troops are here to protect the people of Donbass against aggression from Kiev has not it seems entered the journalist’s mind. But then remember “Russia is aggressive” – and everything Kiev says is just taken as truth. The thing about psychosis is it is always logically internally coherent.

Putin could pull back, but it would be embarrassing to do so without a solid win in hand. And Russia’s demands look impossible to fulfil for the west

Why embarrassing? As we have already been told (by the same newspaper) this is the second time this year that Russia has built up forces in the area.

This journalist seems to have really talked himself into the notion that Russia is about to “invade” Ukraine. Just for the sake of it. Because Russia is, well, “aggressive” and “expansionist”. It just isn’t clear to me if he understands that there is a difference between an invasion of Ukraine for the sake of conquest (which seems to be what he is suggesting) and Russian forces acting to protect the citizens of Donbass if Kiev breaks the internationally mediated Minsk agreements and launches an attack. As I say – either he is playing a cunning hand amplifying the war misinformation of Kiev or he really believes, because he has swallowed the line from Kiev, that at this moment Russia has nothing better to do than conquer Ukraine (a desperately poor basket-case of a country). I think basically that the problem is there is no serious analysis here. Chunks of narrative are being assembled and reassembled but investigation, getting at the truth, analysis. No.

Finally – despite the title of the Guardian piece “New Arms arrive on border” the author manages to get through the article without once mentioning the US weapons which have just arrived in Ukraine. One sided? But this is how this kind of thing works; if you don’t mention the US weapons then the Russian build-up can be presented to readers as “aggressive” rather than perhaps the counter-balance it is. They haven’t told an explicit porky – but nonetheless they have managed to twist reality on its head.

Notes

A shameful day for British ‘justice’

Judges in the High Court have agreed that Assange can be extradited to the US. There is credible evidence that the US spied on Assange and even on his communications with his lawyers. Yahoo News broke a story that the CIA had discussed killing or kidnapping Assange. These factors should, on purely legal grounds, absolutely preclude the extradition. (Regardless of whether the US-UK extradition treaty permits political extraditions or whether Assange’s activities went beyond legitimate journalism or not). UK courts would never agree to extradite someone to a country which had considered kidnapping or killing him – unless that country were our owners, the US. The judges who made this ruling have exhibited an extraordinary degree of spinelessness and cowardice.

This article by a senior figure at Amnesty International covers the main points.

After this of course the UK voids all rights to criticise Russia for its treatment of critics. Especially if the Minister of State confirms the extradition.

Also – see George Galloway. He is right. Had Assange revealed details of Russian or Chinese war crimes and not US ones he would certainly be being feted as a hero (like the amateur internet sleuth Bellingcat regularly is*) – not being destroyed as a human being in Belmarsh. The silence of the British political and media classes is indicative of the true state of British ‘democracy’ and ‘respect for human rights’.

* The analogy is exact. In their recent “exposé” that the FSB had Navalny under surveillance (widely reported, falsely, as evidence that the FSB had poisoned Navalny) Bellingcat – by their own admission – used illegally obtained data. Yet Bellingcat was praised by all sides for this work.

Update

Check the Guardian:

In the ruling, senior judges stated they sided with the US authorities after a near-unprecedented package of assurances was put forward that Assange would not face the strictest measures either pre-trial or post-conviction unless he committed an act in the future that required them

Suck. Suck. Suck.

In reality this “unprecedented package of assurances until we need to change them” means zero. There is no provision (as far as I know) for the British courts to be involved in any future decision about Assange’s treatment. Which means that the judges (and the Guardian) just accept these assurances at face value. From the same government which apparently discussed assassinating Assange. Weird.

Anyway – all this is a clever red herring created by the first trial judge. The actual issues are the political nature of the extradition and the extreme fragility of the US case which all seems to depend on whether Assange helped Manning crack a password (which apparently they failed to do). Apart from this issue Assange has done nothing other than receive and publish secret government information something journalists do quite often. The first judge cunningly ruled that the US case was upheld on the points about the nature of the charges but blocked extradition on health grounds knowing that these could be overcome and that this would make an appeal on the core grounds harder.

Profiteering and Covid – plus – what is the end-game?

Profiteering

The head of the Welcome Trust – an organisation with deep links to big pharma – has called for more vaccines to be purchased and given to developing countries so as to reduce the pool of unvaccinated in which mutations can occur. Gosh. He isn’t of course the only one to see the pandemic as a huge opportunity. Remember the ‘Threat – Opportunity’ matrix which all these revenue masters learn in primary school; of course they analyse the pandemic in terms of the market threats and opportunities. Why not? But all this is coated of course with warm words or, more accurately, false narratives.

Just to correct Sir Jeremy Farrar, (who incidentally was in on the secret call which Dr Fauci arranged to manage and do damage limitation on the first findings by scientists that the virus was manufactured in a lab [1]), current evidence is that most vaccines have very limited efficacy against mild infection and transmission. For example for AstraZeneca (with its “extremely rare” side-effects) after three months it seems to offer no more protection against transmission than not being vaccinated at all. Protection against transmission also drops for Pfizer. [2] Both Pfizer and AstraZeneca also lose efficacy against a “high viral load”* very rapidly. For example Pfizer efficacy against a “high viral load” drops from an initial 92% to 78% after 3 months. [3] Presumably this fall continues over the next 9 months. That is; these two leading vaccines both offer limited or very limited protection against mild infection and transmission.

Unless we get to a point then that everyone in the world is vaccinated or boosted every three months there will continue to be significant global transmission of the virus. Given the cost of the vaccines as well as logistics difficulties even in developed countries in giving every member of the population a dose every three months this is not realistic. The goal proposed by Sir Jeremy Farrar is not a realistic one. By all means let’s increase the distribution of vaccines in developing countries; it will reduce the number of deaths. But, realistically, the goal of reducing transmission to prevent evolution of the virus is a utopia. Sir Jeremy Farrar must understand this (or he is unqualified for his position).

What is not 100% clear to me from the Guardian article or Observer piece is whether Jeremy Farrar is calling for a) governments to buy more doses and then give them to low-income countries or b) for the vaccine manufacturers to simply provide more at cost to low-income countries. According to this Guardian article the UK government is buying the Pfizer Covid vaccine at £22.00 a dose (I think that is each of the 2 dose regime). Manufacturing cost according to the article £0.76. Pfizer has, according to the same article, given 2% of production to low-income countries. In his article for the Observer Jeremy Farrar writes: “Rich countries, who have the majority of existing supply, must share more doses over the coming months”. In this case this would appear to mean a); the UK should give some of the doses it has bought at a 28x mark-up and then presumably buy more (if he is talking about Pfizer). He also suggests governments increasing funding for a WHO scheme which aims to achieve equitable access to vaccines. In both cases it would appear that Jeremy Farrar is wringing his hands and imploring governments to give more money to pharmaceutical companies (or the WHO – who in turn spend some of the money buying vaccines from pharmaceutical companies) on a project which is very unlikely to achieve the goal of preventing future mutations. I don’t see him in this piece asking Pfizer to increase the share of its production which it makes available to low-income countries via the WHO scheme.

The end-game for the pandemic

The reality looks very much like: Sars-Cov-2 will continue to mutate and throw up new variants. Vaccines may need to be modified and we may get to a point where people will need to take cocktails of multiple vaccines. Vaccines will offer some protection but some vaccinated people will still get ill and die. Due to rapidly waning efficacy of vaccines and the realistic time period between vaccination (the absolute best it seems realistic to hope for in the developed world would be at 6 month intervals) as well as the fact that vaccines have quite limited efficacy against transmission, the virus will not be eliminated. Sars-Cov-2 and variations looks like being here to stay.

We can hope; a miracle may occur; the virus could mutate itself into causing a much, much, milder illness. But, in general, it looks like the situation is quite analogous to the flu virus. Multiple variations, changing each year; some protection from vaccines, but it will remain a killer of the elderly and infirm. The question then is; what restrictions are going to be put in place in the long-term? At the moment we have absurd panicky reactions to Omicron. But next it will be Pi. At some point ‘democratic’ governments will come under pressure (from business) to implement balanced long-term measures instead of these knee-jerk responses. They may even realise this themselves. Right now it looks like these restrictions will probably include: testing for international travel, limited quarantines after international travel, exclusion from participation in social life of the unvaccinated enforced with digital ‘Covid passes’ – and, in some countries, mandatory vaccination, together with requirements to self-isolate when positive (widely ignored for the obvious reason that billions of people around the world cannot afford to stop earning money for two weeks). To his credit, Sir Jeremy Farrar specifically calls for support to enable the less well-off to self-isolate when positive. (There is a limited scheme available in the UK but not enough it seems to persuade everyone).

All this is a classic example of how large corporations (pharma) and governments, both top-down ‘right-wing’ organisations in Illich’s sense, try to ‘deliver’ solutions. These solutions have certain characteristics; they are very expensive; they build in addiction and reuse of the product (repeated vaccinations); they involve coercion rather than voluntary consent; they ameliorate the problem they are trying to solve to sufficient extent to justify the measures but the cost to benefit ratio is huge (mirrored, of course, by the enormous profits made by those at the top).

The alternative, ‘left-wing’ model (in Illich’s sense) would be based on: accurate information dissemination (including about the risks and limited efficacy of the vaccines alongside the benefits) and voluntary actions by individuals to get vaccinated when medically appropriate (i.e. risk groups and those who do not have natural immunity), voluntary social-distancing in realistic ways and self-isolation when ill. The latter would require employers to act in a socially responsible way and give people paid time off to self-isolate. Now, of course, it is my turn to dream.

Notes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3F2ZJGipiE https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/06/17/covid-19-fauci-lab-leaks-wuhan-china-origins/7737494002/ (Details of the meeting referred to in the audio have not been released. So much for democracy.)
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/10/13/do-coronavirus-vaccines-prevent-transmission-of-the-virus [non-peer reviewed study] “Three months after having the AstraZeneca vaccine, those who had breakthrough infections were just as likely to spread the Delta variant as the unvaccinated.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02261-8 [I think this is the same study as 1.]

* I haven’t read the study but I know enough about how these studies are typically rigged by statistical manipulations to understand that what constitutes exactly a “high viral load” is quite likely to have been decided so as to produce the most favourable results for the vaccines.