The latest UKHSA press release on the resurgence of whooping cough is calm, measured, and careful to emphasise that while it might seem there a lot of cases, the disease is cyclical, so this sort of pattern is to be expected:
The sentence "The impact of the pandemic also means there is reduced immunity in the population" doesn't feel quite right to me. It sensibly implies that less people are immune than should be, but doesn't explain why. Looking at the spike, immunity is considerably reduced.
It's more than delayed cases.
It looks like vaccine avoidance or hesitancy, which was not present in previous cycles.
Almost as if people had been going around disinforming that vaccines are dangerous or something, when we know they are much safer than the disease itself 🤔
People will continue to be harmed until we have better controls and penalties for disinformation.
I don't like: “it’s cyclical, don’t worry, we saw it in 2016, it’s happening everywhere” as it makes it sounds like there is nothing that can be done, but clearly higher vaccination rates would reduce the peak of the next cycle. However it MAY be too late for vaccination to make any difference to this cycle, I don't know how long it takes from 1st dose to give a good reduction in transmission and how long the peaks of these cycles last.
There must be data from other countries that indicates how large the peak will be with the vaccination rates we had over the last few years, but I have not seen anyone discussing it. The medical people I expect would be sending out blog posts if they considered this to be a significant issues are not, maybe they know something we don't. Maybe vaccination have already returned to a high enough level to prevent the next peak and we are seeing the effect of unvaccinated children spreading to babies who are too young to be protected by vaccination. (There was a reduction in vaccination rates of babies in the Covid year.)
I expect they also don't want anything that will reduce the focus on catchup MMR vaccinations and are considering how best to use limited resources.
The sentence "The impact of the pandemic also means there is reduced immunity in the population" doesn't feel quite right to me. It sensibly implies that less people are immune than should be, but doesn't explain why. Looking at the spike, immunity is considerably reduced.
It's more than delayed cases.
It looks like vaccine avoidance or hesitancy, which was not present in previous cycles.
Almost as if people had been going around disinforming that vaccines are dangerous or something, when we know they are much safer than the disease itself 🤔
People will continue to be harmed until we have better controls and penalties for disinformation.
I don't like: “it’s cyclical, don’t worry, we saw it in 2016, it’s happening everywhere” as it makes it sounds like there is nothing that can be done, but clearly higher vaccination rates would reduce the peak of the next cycle. However it MAY be too late for vaccination to make any difference to this cycle, I don't know how long it takes from 1st dose to give a good reduction in transmission and how long the peaks of these cycles last.
There must be data from other countries that indicates how large the peak will be with the vaccination rates we had over the last few years, but I have not seen anyone discussing it. The medical people I expect would be sending out blog posts if they considered this to be a significant issues are not, maybe they know something we don't. Maybe vaccination have already returned to a high enough level to prevent the next peak and we are seeing the effect of unvaccinated children spreading to babies who are too young to be protected by vaccination. (There was a reduction in vaccination rates of babies in the Covid year.)
I expect they also don't want anything that will reduce the focus on catchup MMR vaccinations and are considering how best to use limited resources.