This site has linked and quoted pieces by Alastair Crooke, a 'former' MI6 agent and diplomat. Crooke writes a weekly comment for the allegedly Russian financed Strategic Culture Foundation website.
(Sidenote: Independent writers for the SCF, like Russia expert Patrick Armstrong, have come under undue pressure from the U.S. government to quit. Patrick had reason to fear serious consequences and did so.)
Alastair Crooke is an expert on Middle East issues and an outside of the box thinker. But he also, at times, gets things wrong. In several recent pieces he has combined measures against the Covid-19 pandemic and big money lobbying into some global conspiracy theory in which the Bill Gates' of this world want to enslave all other people.
In his latest piece, The Double Helix of Entwined Pandemic and Economic Strategy, Crooke goes off to even greater nonsense. He writes (emphasis added):
[T]hough ‘following the science’ is the mantra, these measures make no sense: the Omicron variant predominantly infects the double vaxxed, not the unvaxxed. This is never admitted.
That, dear friends, is 'never admitted' because it is utter nonsense.
The link Crooke provides goes to a piece in the Epoch Times, an anti-China rag financed by the Falun Gong cult and best know for promoting Donald Trump. The Epoch Times writer of the piece linked by Crooke is one Naveen Athrappully 'a news reporter covering business and world events at The Epoch Times'.
Headlined – Omicron Spreads Faster Than Delta Within Vaccinated Individuals: Danish Study – the piece is generally correct. However its lead in can be misunderstood:
A Danish study of nearly 12,000 households has discovered that Omicron spreads faster than Delta among those who are fully vaccinated, and even faster between those who have received booster shots, indicating the variant’s ability to better dodge vaccine-induced immunity. Unvaccinated individuals were about as susceptible to infection as vaccinated. Those with a booster were less susceptible.
The highlighted half-sentence is imprecise and leads to misinterpretations.
The half-sentence does NOT mean that those who have had a booster shot get Covid at a higher rate than those who are unvaccinated or had two doses of vaccine. It does mean that the Omicron variant is better at breaking the immunity barrier than the Delta variant even in people who have received a booster shot.
A look into the original of the Danish study at medRXiv, to which Epoch Times provides a link, supports that interpretation.
The study used detailed statistical data, well available in Denmark, to measure the secondary attack rate of Covid cases of the two virus variants.
It looks at households where one person was infected with Covid-19 and then checks if, within a week, a second person in the same household was also infected (a 'secondary attack' in epidemiology speech). This 'Secondary Attack Rate' (SAR) is then differentiated between the Omicron variant of concern (VOC) and Delta as the virus variant that caused the first and secondary infection. The study also looks at the vaccination status of the secondary infected person.
The abstract of the study already contradicts Alastair Crooke's interpretation:
Among 11,937 households (2,225 with the Omicron VOC), we identified 6,397 secondary infections during a 1-7 day follow-up period. The SAR was 31% and 21% in households with the Omicron and Delta VOC, respectively. We found an increased transmission for unvaccinated individuals, and a reduced transmission for booster-vaccinated individuals, compared to fully vaccinated individuals.
Omicron is more prone than Delta to attack additional people in households where one person is infected. Unvaccinated individuals are most susceptible for a secondary infection. Vaccinated people less so and boostered people have the lowest chance of becoming a casualty of a secondary attack. That is the opposite of what Crooke falsely claims.
The main purpose of the study was to see how much more infectious Omicron is when compared to Delta:
Comparing households infected with the Omicron to Delta VOC, we found an 1.17 (95%-CI: 0.99-1.38) times higher SAR for unvaccinated, 2.61 times (95%-CI: 2.34-2.90) higher for fully vaccinated and 3.66 (95%-CI: 2.65-5.05) times higher for booster-vaccinated individuals, demonstrating strong evidence of immune evasiveness of the Omicron VOC.
Our findings confirm that the rapid spread of the Omicron VOC primarily can be ascribed to the immune evasiveness rather than an inherent increase in the basic transmissibility.
The vaccinations protected well, but not completely, against infections with the Delta variant. They however fail to protect more often against the Omicron variant. This does not mean that the vaccinations generally fail to protect. It also does not mean that those vaccinated are more susceptible to get infected than the unvaccinated (i.e. the opposite is true).
It does mean that the Omicron variant is evading the immune protection that the vaccinations created more often than the Delta variant does.
As the results of the Danish study conclude:
Generally, the estimated SAR was higher for the Omicron VOC than for the Delta VOC, for all age groups. Unvaccinated potential secondary cases experienced similar attack rates in households with the Omicron VOC and the Delta VOC (29% and 28%, respectively), while fully vaccinated individuals experienced secondary attack rates of 32% in household with the Omicron VOC and 19% in households with the Delta VOC. For booster-vaccinated individuals, Omicron was associated with a SAR of 25%, while the corresponding estimate for Delta was only 11%.
People vaccinated with two doses (fully vaccinated) became secondary cases just as often as the unvaccinated. (But the severity of the disease is generally less for vaccinated people.) People who had received two doses and a booster shot had much less chance to become a secondary case. The booster shot obviously helped.
This is said even more explicit in the discussion section in that paper:
Furthermore, we show that fully vaccinated and booster-vaccinated individuals are generally less susceptible to infection compared to unvaccinated individuals (Table 2).
Why Crooke misinterpreted the Epoch Times text is hard to understand. It is probably a case where someone wanted to read a confirmation of their preconceived believes even as the text did not confirm those at all.
That can, on a bad day, happen to all of us.
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