Pandemic of The Unvaccinated? Who is spreading Covid?

Who is spreading Covid? This is a hard question to answer definitively, but the mainstream narrative is clear – we should blame the unvaccinated. I am going present an analysis that will suggest the opposite.
—1) That the fully vaccinated are potentially/probably responsible for the majority of the spread of DELTA.
—2) That the fully vaccinated are definitely more responsible for the spread of OMICRON.

I don’t mean “responsible” in any blame assigning sense (it’s just the virus doing its thing and there’s not much we seem to be able to do about it). My goal is simply to provide a counter argument to the propaganda that is unfairly scapegoating the unvaccinated.

Some context and then the analysis follows below. Sources are at bottom of the page.

Context

Let’s start with some context on cases. While US sources and newspapers trot out the “blame the unvaccinated” narrative, the data from the UK (more reliable than the CDC) and elsewhere clearly showed that, pre-OMICRON, the majority of infections, hospitalizations and deaths are of vaccinated individuals. Here’s data from Public Health Scotland from December 22nd. With 71.8% of the country vaccinated, vaccinated individuals account for 72.5% of cases, 73.0% of hospitalizations and 82.1% of covid deaths. (Credit: FreedomPodcast for pulling out the data).

And below is a chart lifted from data in the UK Health Security Agency Week 50 vaccine surveillance report (credit for chart: eugypius substack), showing higher rates of infection in the vaxxed vs unvaxxed across most ages. Note – there are some known, but complicated, technical issues with the UK dataset, and the real level of infections in the vaxxed may not be quite this bad. But you get the picture, it’s not looking like a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

Now it would be better to look at 10-year age cohorts and folks with/without co-morbidities and to examine the time elapsed from vaccination more closely, but the data doesn’t easily allow that, so I’m going to walk through a back-of-the-envelope analysis using estimates of vaccine efficacy and the percent of the population that’s vaccinated.

For vaccine coverage, I looked at New York State simply because that’s where I live and I’m also preparing for some discussions with my local school and with politicians.