Why Is Chile Experiencing A COVID Wave When It’s Vaccinating At Such A High Rate?https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2021/03/31/chile-experiencing-covid-wave-vaccinating-high-rate/Ed touched on this question yesterday but it deserves its own thread, as it’s one of the great mysteries of the post-vax stage of the pandemic. Why is Chile, which has one of the highest rates of vaccination on Earth, currently mired in a nasty wave of COVID? Only Israel, the UAE, and the UK have partially vaccinated a higher share of their population than Chile has and it’s paid off lavishly for two of those countries. Today the UK’s seven-day average in daily cases is the lowest it’s been since September:
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Israel’s seven-day average is the lowest it’s been since June:
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Chile’s seven-day average is, uhhhhhh:
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To an anti-vaxxer, the data above is easily explained: The vaccines simply don’t work. Whatever’s driving down cases in Israel and Britain, it ain’t the jab. But that’s a hard argument to make at this stage of the game and getting harder. Both countries have seen their cases fall sharply despite the prevalence of the more contagious British variant in each. Meanwhile on the continent, which has also been overrun by the British variant, they’re headed back into national lockdowns to try to tamp down spiking case counts. The obvious difference in those outcomes is vaccination rates. In France, just 12 percent of the population has received its first dose. In the UK, 45.9 percent has.
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As for the pace of vaccinations, although Chile has ramped up quickly, this graph suggests they got a late start compared to Israel and the UK. If so, that would help explain why the epidemic curves in all three countries look different:
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Britain’s and especially Israel’s vaccination efforts had already taken off by early February, before Chile’s got going. It may be that the Chileans were a bit too late with their rollout to stop the coming wave, with summer travel having seeded so much of the virus nationally by the time shots started going out that there was no way to prevent a spike. ...
There’s one other factor which Ed mentioned yesterday. What if Chile’s using a bum vaccine? Ross Clark mentioned that today as well:
According to the Chilean Ministry of Finance, by 3 March the country had taken delivery of 10 million Sinovac doses and only 700,000 Pfizer doses.
Of all vaccines in use in the world, Sinovac is the one with the least impressive and most inconsistent results. A Brazilian study in January suggested that it had an efficacy rate in preventing symptomatic illness of 50.4 per cent, way below the 95 per cent reported for Pfizer and 76 per cent measured for AstraZeneca in its recent US trial.
A victory has a thousand fathers but a defeat is an orphan, or so it's said. IRL Chile's situation probably has multiple contributing causes. IMO, two major and reinforcing probable causes are the very late start of vaccinations (February? Really?!!) and the low effectiveness of the Sinovac vaccine against the varieties of SARS-CoV-2 in circulation in South America.
Sinovac's vaccine uses traditional weakened virus technology. It may be that what is currently circulating in South America is sufficiently different from the weakened version of the virus that the vaccine is not very effective. Or it may be that Sinovac's vaccine works less well with the ethnic (= genetic) diversity in South America.
