Jessica Rose recently highlighted an August 2021 CDC publication for Los Angeles County that defined “unvaccinated” individuals in a manner that distorted COVID hospitalization data and made it look like patients testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 were those who were never injected.
Per the report (Griffin, et al):
“Persons were considered fully vaccinated ≥14 days after receipt of the second dose in a 2-dose series (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines) or after 1 dose of the single-dose Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) COVID-19 vaccine; partially vaccinated ≥14 days after receipt of the first dose and <14 days after the second dose in a 2-dose series; and unvaccinated <14 days receipt of the first dose of a 2-dose series or 1 dose of the single-dose vaccine or if no vaccination registry data were available.”
Rose rightly characterizes these definitions of fully-, partially-, and un-vaccinated as “truly insincere and convoluted beyond belief” and is correct that the definitions distort the reported hospitalization rates (shown below).
Besides the tortuous descriptions for vaccine recipients, “COVID-19–associated hospitalizations” were defined nonsensically in the study solely by the timing of hospital admission and a positive SARS-CoV-2 test. This approach captured incidental hospitalizations, patients hospitalized for unrelated reasons who happened to test positive (which was a problem for interpreting “COVID data” prior to shot deployed as well).
Rose both understates and overstates the definitional issues when she says of the above chart, “Look! It’s the ‘unvaccinated’ who were hospitalized the most! But seeing as how these ‘unvaccinated’ individuals likely received at least 1 dose, then they were certainly qualify as being “vaccinated”, no?”
The unvaccinated group is inflated, but the definitions preclude saying that unvaccinated individuals “likely received at least one dose”. A patient was classified as unvaccinated if they fell into any of the following categories:
- Received first dose of a 2-dose series (Pfizer or Moderna) <14 days ago. So, the patient had dose 1 but was (presumably) hospitalized and/or tested positive within the first 13 days after the dose.
- Received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson shot <14 days ago. The patient wasn’t slated for a second dose but was (presumably) hospitalized and/or tested positive within the first 13 days after the J&J single-dose.
- No vaccination registry data is available for the patient. This would include no record of any vaccinations incomplete, mismatched, or missing records. These patients are best thought of as “unverified status”. Per the report, data were unavailable for individuals who lived in Los Angeles County but were vaccinated outside of California. This would include patients from Mexico who, in contrast to what the authors imply, may not have received any doses at all.
We can’t know how many patients classified as unvaccinated fell into group 3 and had received zero doses of a COVID shot.
Given the definitions for all categories, the study results can be dismissed out of hand. No further analysis or guesswork needed.
Chicago-Style
Like many data issues during the COVID event, the definitional problems weren’t specific to one U.S. city (or to one country, e.g., Fenton et al) and were documented by professional and armchair analysts as they were occurring. Pandemic of the unvaccinated was always a lie.
In September 2021, just after the L.A. study was published, I started to capture how the Chicago health department “breakthrough” reporting also rested on shifting, opaque definitions. (See threads here.) After obtaining raw case, hospitalization, and death data via FOIA, it became clear that partial-dose residents were routinely folded into the “unvaccinated” group (or ignored entirely) while other categories quietly disappeared and were never fully explained.
By March 2022, I had established CDPH’s vaccinated were residents who had completed 2-dose series ≥14 days before testing positive or completed J&J ≥14 days before testing positive and had no positive test in the previous 45 days. (See related article here.)
Unvaccinated was hyper-inflated and included (at various points?):
- 0 doses
- 1 dose of a 2-dose series
- 2 doses but <14 days old
- 1 dose but <14 days old
- Anyone with a positive test in the past 45 days
- Anyone with unverified vaccination status
The partial-dose residents became invisible and near-impossible to disentangle.
Chicago officials used the reports to shame “the unvaccinated,” coerce unnecessary shots, ban people from public places, and threaten city workers’ jobs.
No one has been held accountable for the fraud; local media never reported it properly.
Earlier Still…
The definitional issues were obvious from a CDC national “breakthrough infections” report issued in May 2021: COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Infections Reported to CDC – United States, January 1-April 30 2021.
At the time, I characterized the data as “ridiculous” for reporting asymptomatic COVID hospitalizations and deaths.
A “vaccine breakthrough infection” was defined as “the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after receipt of all recommended doses of an FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.”
This means that any patient who had received all recommended doses but who tested positive and was hospitalized, or was hospitalized and died before 14 days had passed, was excluded from analysis.
By this point, it was well-known that “cases” of the disease called COVID-19 were near-synonymous with testing positive for a “novel” virus named SARS-CoV-2, irrespective of symptoms. The notion of being hospitalized for or dying from something that doesn’t trigger illness or a disease-response never made sense. The language used in the May 2021 report reinforced these ideas and failed to delimit mutually-exclusive patient categories.
Author Leisha Nolan confirmed to me via email that fully-vaccinated patients who were hospitalized and incidentally tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were not counted as “COVID” hospitalizations or deaths – a sharp contrast with how “cases” were treated in 2020, prior to shot deployment.
Nolan also admitted, “In many cases it is challenging to determine the relationship between a SARS-CoV-2 infection and the reason someone was hospitalized or passed away.”
This was always true but had not been accounted for in COVID case, hospitalization, or death data, yet suddenly became important, presumably because the shot could not afford to be shown as inefficacious, or (worse) harmful, or (even worse) never needed by anyone of any age or health condition.
Dr. Nolan never replied to my follow-up question about whether an effort was underway at CDC to apply the same parameters in their vaccine breakthrough analysis to analyzing all SARS-CoV-2 infections, versus only to “breakthrough” infections.1
Constant Reminders
The need to remind people about what was known and when it was known about the COVID event, including what was already obvious from early public data about the COVID shot, will never go away. Admittedly, we are still in a stage where “reminder” applies to the few and “first-time exposure” applies to the majority.
Not only was there never a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, there was never a pandemic involving a sudden-spreading novel SARS virus causative of a unique disease. This makes the lies and coercion around the injections even more criminal.
Circling back to these points in late 2025 and beyond is not a waste of time and will continue to matter until more of the public grasps what the data and documentation actually showed.
- Explanatory visuals, appended below, illustrate the issues. ↩︎
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