BuT tHe bAsE rAtE fAlLaCy

Pointing out that a high (and apparently growing) share of people dying from covid are vaxxed/boosted made people about as mad as telling them that Elon's "self-driving cars" were a con.

The pandemic’s toll is no longer falling almost exclusively on those who chose not to or could not get shots, with vaccine protection waning over time and the elderly and immunocompromised — who are at greatest risk of succumbing to covid-19, even if vaccinated — having a harder time dodging increasingly contagious strains.

The vaccinated made up 42 percent of fatalities in January and February during the highly contagious omicron variant’s surge, compared with 23 percent of the dead in September, the peak of the delta wave, according to nationwide data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by The Post. The data is based on the date of infection and limited to a sampling of cases in which vaccination status was known.

People learned about the "base rate fallacy" and started saying it in response to everything, supplanting "correlation doesn't mean causation" and "sir thouest hath ad homined me" as the most misused internet retorts.

Yes the vaccines and boosters work, but immunity wanes (as every other country has been trying to tell us) and they are not foolproof. A lot of people died in January and February, and a lot of those people were vaccinated. The "base rate fallacy" is a point about misusing these numbers to argue that the vaccines don't work; as a higher and higher share of the population is vaxxed, a higher share of deaths will tend to be from vaxxed people (if all people are vaxxed, then 100% of covid deaths will be from vaccinated people).

But the US vax rate is not that high and it has not been growing. Instead, immunity has been waning as boosters stalled.