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 average, 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 that 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 the 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.

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 Wednesday alone. I can’t tell you specifically what happened 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.

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 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 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.

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Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com

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