I tried to read this with an open mind but there’s some pretty big flaws in the analysis. To note some that stood out: The author looks at the percentage chang

I tried to read this with an open mind but there’s some pretty big flaws in the analysis. To note some that stood out: The author looks at the percentage change in daily cases in the US vs latitude and finds a mildly strong correlation (R^2 = 0.25). Critically though this ignores that US southern states already have high daily case levels, so any increase is going to look smaller as a percentage. You can see this flaw clearly in the State Trends table the author presents. Most of the states seeing large percentage increases have daily case levels per 100,000 people that are well _below_ the US average. The only two states in that table above the US average are Idaho and West Virginia, and low-and-behold they have very low vaccination rates. The author’s analysis of % change in daily cases vs vaccination rates suffers from the same flaw, and has an even weaker correlation (R^2 = 0.021 for hospitalisation % change and 0.084 for case numbers % change). Of course you’re going to see these trends when southern states with low vaccination rates are already in large outbreaks. The fact that correlation is so weak despite this flaw to me seems like evidence that vaccination does in fact work. To me the common sense approach here would be took at daily cases/hospitalisations/deaths vs vaccination status within the same geographic area to control for covariates such as potential seasonality and other measures to control spread. Now to be fair to the author he does in fact attempt to do this in a separate post, and does indeed in his own analysis find that vaccines are effective at preventing death/hospitalisation. Contrary to other analyses though he find that vaccines correlate with higher infection rates. I’d argue though this result is because the authors analysis is again flawed. In particular he uses population level case numbers without any attempt to control for the prior probability of taking a test, or the error rates on the tests. Overall I’m much more inclined to trust peer reviewed studies that find that vaccines are partially effective in preventing transmission. I also think the large outbreaks in SEA and the southern US suggest that seasonality doesn’t effect delta transmission as much.