Is it really 99% unvaccinated in the hospitals???
A story of subsidies and 'you get what you pay for'
Perverse incentives result in terrible, awful, no good outcomes.
In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program intended to exterminate rats by paying people a bounty for each rat tail they brought in instead led to the farming of rats.
19th century paleontologists traveling to China paid peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone that they found. Peasants would dig up the bones and then smash them into many pieces, greatly reducing their scientific value, to maximize their payments.
So, do the unvaccinated really account for 99% of hospitalizations and deaths?
No, even CDC data says that 70 - 90% of the hospitalizations and deaths are currently unvaxxed (and those number are dropping quickly - so much so that the CDC hasn’t reported new numbers since September!).
But even this number is very different from other countries with similar rates of vaccination. Both Israeli and UK data demonstrate only 20-32% of their hospitalized COVID patients are unvaccinated. (UK data table below is from this publication.)
So why does the USA report rates 3-4x higher than this???
Perhaps the vaccines are just that much more effective in the USA?
Obviously not….they are the same vaccines.
Perhaps it is the perverse incentives and purposefully biased differences in the way ‘cases’ are classified in the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated.
The incentives.
The CARES Act authorized hospitals to receive 20% more compensation for COVID cases than for other diseases (e.g., ‘pneumonia’ = $10,000 payment; ‘COVID pneumonia’ = $12,000 payment).
FEMA will reimburse up to $9,000 of funeral expenses for COVID patients - but not for others (source).
‘High impact’ areas (those with more COVID cases and deaths) receive more federal aid (source).
The reporting ‘standards’.
Any unvaccinated patient with a positive COVID test is labeled as a ‘COVID case’, but vaccinated patients have additional requirements to get that label (such as actually having any symptoms of COVID).
The definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ is very specific in ways that ‘help’ the CDC reach their desired results. If you have had only one shot or are less than 14 days out of your second shot (when you are most vulnerable) - the CDC lists you as unvaxxed. Convenient.
The PCR tests of the unvaccinated can be run up to 42 cycles (virtually guaranteed false positive), while the CDC requires that vaccinated patient’s test be limited to 27 or fewer cycles (and they will reject ‘cases’ that are 28 cycles or higher - or simply don’t include the cycle count).
This change alone could reduce ‘case’ numbers by 90% or more!!!
(Essentially the difference between ‘with’ COVID and ‘from’ COVID.)
By the way - the CDC clearly spelled out this information on its website in April, but has since pulled the directive to reduce cycle counts and limit vaccinated ‘case’ standards from its public website. However, it has never withdrawn the original (biased) standards - and it is safe to assume they are still in effect. In fact, if you go to the CDC page on “How to report vaccine breakthrough cases” - you find them hint at these standards very strongly - see screenshot below:
Any of these by themselves would boost the overall number of COVID ‘cases’ (and particularly unvaccinated cases) while simultaneously reducing the number of vaccinated cases, but if you do them all in every hospital across the country and voila’….. 95%+ of cases are unvaccinated!
I don’t know what the real numbers are… but I know they are not what the CDC is reporting.
You do not need vast conspiracies when you have widespread perverse incentives and poor reporting standards.
The hospitals are essentially farming COVID rats to get paid for COVID rat tails.
And public health is much worse off for it.