Negative vaccine efficacy keeps rearing its ugly head. Now Kaiser admits it.

Daniel Horowitz wrote a fabulous piece on recent studies and alerted me to a Kaiser preprint posted October 1.

Kaiser Permanente is both an insurance company and a healthcare provider company. It negotiates with employers once a year to set its health insurance rates. I wonder if Kaiser started getting worried at the amount of excess illness it was seeing. Once people are too sick to work, they lose their health insurance. But what if they are somewhat sick, but keep working? What if their chronic, mystery illnesses consume a larger amount of medical care than Kaiser bargained for? Kaiser might be willing to do a little truth-telling as it tries to calculate who is going to pay for this unexpected hit, which presumably did not stop in 2021 but continues apace.

Here is Daniel Horowitz’ article. Here is the Kaiser preprint. On page 30, you can see the following table, which shows how well 3 shots worked for over 120,000 Kaiser enrollees who were tested for COVID during Omicron. Kaiser did something unusual: it actually sequenced 16,418 positive COVID samples to determine the Omicron subvariant with which the enrollees were infected.

What it found was that for 4 out of 5 Omicron subvariants by 150 days (5 months) post shot, efficacy had fallen into negative territory, and Kaiser’s thrice-vaccinated enrollees were more likely to get COVID than the unvaccinated.

VE stands for vaccine efficacy (effectiveness). The vertical lines are at the ZERO efficacy mark. You can see how efficacy drops quickly from the 14-30 days post-shot (which is the brief honeymoon period when the shots actually work), lower at 1-3 months, lower still at 3-5 months, and after that you are screwed.

All the dots to the left of the line show negative efficacy—that is when you become more prone to getting a COVID infection. After 5 months, people were more likely to get a case of Omicron BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4 and BA.5 if they had been vaccinated. Each gray bar starts a new subvariant.

There are 2 graphs. The one on the left compares the triple-vaxxed to the unvaxxed, while the graph on the right compares the triple-vaxxed to the double-vaxxed.

Even worse for the boosted, it seems that those with 3 shots are at more risk of COVID after 5 months than those who only got two shots (this is on the right side of the graph). So please stop. It gets worse with each jab.