Dr Collins Never Did His Job

Over the past few days, I've noted an anomaly: Maine is being hammered with COVID cases despite having one of the highest vaccination rates in the US:

A week ago, I noted Maine was having a surge in COVID-related hospitalizations. This happened despite 84% of everyone over 12, 85.3% of everyone over 18, and 98.4% of everyone over 65 are at least partially vaccinated.

Maine's policies on masking follow CDC guidelines. But here's a graph of Maine's COVID cases as of this morning:

On the other side of the country, Los Angeles County's statistics show a remarkable difference:

In contrast to Maine, only 77.9% of the population is fully vaccinated. While the county has an indoor masking requirememt, as opposed to Maine's recommendation, the effectveness of masks is at best debatable -- but given the disparity we see here, so should be the effectiveness of vaccines. In fact, LA County is even mooting dropping its mask mandate:

“I’m very cognizant that when we introduced the mask mandate in June, we noted that it was really related to increased transmission and feeling like we needed to add another layer of protection,” Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told the Board of Supervisors Tuesday. “And I think we did the right thing. But I also am aware when we have very low transmission and more people vaccinated, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to keep that mask mandate everywhere, assuming of course that we don’t have a dangerous variant that we need to protect ourselves from.

So what's the difference between Maine and LA County? As a mere English major who never had an epidemiology course, I would venture the guess that LA County's very high COVID peak in the late 2020 surge left a large proportion of its population with natural immunity, and this was responsible for its unusually low peak in the Delta surge this past summer. Just as an informed observer, I would think that this is confirmation for the consensus that's quietly emerging that vaccines have proven less effective than natural immunity, so much so that vaccines alone haven't performed much better than masks, social distance, or lockdowns in controlling the pandemic.

Notwithstanding, with COVID essentially under control, Los Angeles City, which is only part of the county, just imposed a new vaccine mandate itself thst goes beyond the county.

ABC7 reports that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti signed a city ordinance requiring all people within the city of Los Angeles “to show proof of full COVID-19 vaccination before entering indoor restaurants, bars, gyms, shopping centers, entertainment venues, and personal care establishments.”

Garcetti signed the ordinance a few hours after the Los Angeles City Council passed the COVID-19 vaccination proof measure which is “considered one of the strictest in the nation”[.]

So we have a situation where measures that are clearly overkill are adopted in an area where the problem is generally under control, while vaccinations are proving no more effective than masking, social distance, and business closures in other areas.

What answers can the National Institutes of Health (Dr Collins), which subsumes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Dr Walensky) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Dr Fauci)) give us that might help policymakers and the public understand this problem? Remember, COVID has now been with us for fully two years, yet the effectiveness of this estalishment's solutions, including the wildly expensive and by now overhyped vaccines, has been marginal at best.

In a just universe, Dr Collins's retirement might well have been the result of a quiet request from the administration in light of his poor leadership over this period. A theoretical Trump-like president -- not necesssarily Trump himself -- would initiate a careful and thorough high-priority search for a replacement.

Such a search woukld recognize the need for a leader who could credibly advocate common-sense precautions across the board. Instead, after two years, all we have is a vacuum that allows opportunistic power grabs by local politicians. I can't imagine Dr Collins's replacement will be any improvement.