It’s interesting to me that this story does not try to argue that vaccines and boosters inhibit infection or transmission. At one point this was a key benefit claimed by health authorities and the news media. I think it would be more credible to acknowledge this was wrong (if it was) and explain why the mistake happened.<p>The article does state that the new booster, like other vaccines, will make hospitalization and death less likely. As someone not at much risk for an Omicron death or hospitalization, I read this article wondering what the takeaway was. It was not very clear. Reading between the lines, it seems to be that older folks and others who are vulnerable should get boosters, including this new one. It doesn’t explicitly say that it is OK for me to skip it, since lack of the booster doesn’t increase (I guess?) my chance of infecting a vulnerable person. But I hate having to guess about these details. Every time I read a muddled article like this I’m less likely to read or trust the next Covid story. I used to be glued to the coverage but now I actively avoid it. I think the media and CDC have handled themselves pretty poorly in terms of clear and well grounded messaging.
The real question is if we have excess mortality, and if we do, what is the cause?<p>This chart shows excess mortality over the past few years:<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...</a><p>You can see the pre pandemic year 2018, and the impact of the flu that year. It was a bad flu year, and at its peak, excess mortality was higher than many times during covid. Flu's pretty serious.<p>Then during the pandemic, the elevated excess mortality due to covid, but also likely to some extent our responses to covid.<p>This summer, we're almost back to normal.