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Q&A – The Truth About Breakthrough Cases & Deaths
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email:brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
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Today’s entry: Brian, I’m getting skeptical of this 99% of people dying and hospitalized are unvaccinated. Steve Deace read off 6 states numbers yesterday and on avg about 20% of their deaths are fully vaccinated. Is he wrong or are these hospital people coming on air lying to try and get people to go get vaccinated?
Bottom Line: Well, I’m glad you brought your skepticism to me rather than simply buying into misleading information. As I’ve discussed quite a bit, the problem with narratives is that there’s enough information out there which can be selectively used to support them. If Deace reeled off six states worth of info, why not include info from the other 44 and D.C.? Perhaps it doesn’t fit a desired narrative? Also, which states were they? I can tell you there certainly wouldn’t be any largely populated states among them if there was any validity to it. What’s nice about this conversation is that there’s no mystery when it comes to the truth. We have hard facts.
The CDC keeps a Breakthrough Case database which is updated regularly. While all breakthrough cases aren’t going to be known, as many breakthrough cases have been found to be asymptomatic, we do have hard records of all vaccinated Americans. Every vaccinated person is documented at the state level and issued a CDC vaccination card. The vaccination information is kept in state databases. In the case of Florida, it’s the FloridaShots database. When a patient is admitted for COVID-19 their medical records including COVID-19 vaccination status are evaluated. If a person has been vaccinated, it’s reported by the medical service provider to the state which ties into the CDC’s database. Thus, when anyone is hospitalized or dies of COVID-19 who’s been vaccinated with any of the COVID-19 vaccines – it's known and recorded.
The most recent update from the CDC’s database has results through September 7th. Total COVID-19 breakthrough deaths, since the vaccine rollout began last December, have totaled 2,675. For perspective, there were 2,282 Americans who died of COVID-19 yesterday (Wednesday) alone. I can’t tell you specifically what happened yesterday as that data isn’t yet available, however I can tell you definitively that fewer than 1% of all COVID-19 deaths this year have been breakthrough cases. I’ll provide a fuller illustration.
- Approximately 180 million Americans have been fully vaccinated. 2,675 of them have died from COVID-19. Meaning 1 in every 67,290 fully vaccinated people has died of COVID-19 this year.
- There are 151 million non-fully vaccinated people. Year-to-date, since the vaccine rollout, 346,797 deaths among the unvaccinated have occurred. Meaning 1 in every 435 unvaccinated people have died from COVID-19 this year.
The net-net of it all is that unvaccinated people have been 155 times more likely to die of COVID-19 this year compared to those who’re vaccinated. It’s almost hard to convey how incredibly absurd and irresponsible it is for people in media to attempt to downplay the relative efficacy of vaccines at helping prevent death from the virus. Related, informationally for those who are interested in the truth, not just hearing what they want to hear, this pandemic has provided a real opportunity to see how many people are credible on both sides of the media spectrum. There are two sides to stories and one side to facts. You know where to come for the facts.