The growth of COVID-19 is not related to the level of vaccination

Another piece of news removed from Russian news sites within
17 hours. Primary source of research: https://bit.ly/3BGUWak
European Journal of Epidemiology (2021), S. V. Subramanian
& Akhil Kumar 
Vaccines currently are the primary mitigation strategy to combat
COVID-19 around the world. For instance, the narrative related
to the ongoing surge of new cases in the United States (US) is
argued to be driven by areas with low vaccination rates. A similar
narrative also has been observed in countries, such as Germany
and the United Kingdom. At the same time, Israel that was hailed
for its swift and high rates of vaccination has also seen a
substantial resurgence in COVID-19 cases. Here investigate the
relationship between the percentage of population fully vaccinated
and new COVID-19 cases across 68 countries and across 2947
counties in the US.
At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship
between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new
COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days. In fact, the trend line suggests
a marginally positive association such that countries with higher
percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19
cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their
population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per
1 million people in the last 7 days. The lack of a meaningful
association between percentage population fully vaccinated and
new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by
comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75%
of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19
cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and
South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully
vaccinated.
Across the US counties too, the median new COVID-19 cases per
100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the
categories of percent population fully vaccinated. Notably there
is also substantial county variation in new COVID-19 cases within
categories of percentage population fully vaccinated. There also
appears to be no significant signaling of COVID-19 cases decreasing
with higher percentages of population fully vaccinated.
Of the top 5 counties that have the highest percentage of population
fully vaccinated (99.9–84.3%), the US Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) identifies 4 of them as “High” Transmission
counties. Chattahoochee (Georgia), McKinley (New Mexico), and
Arecibo (Puerto Rico) counties have above 90% of their population
fully vaccinated with all three being classified as “High”
transmission. Conversely, of the 57 counties that have been
classified as “low” transmission counties by the CDC, 26.3%
have percentage of population fully vaccinated below 20%.
Since full immunity from the vaccine is believed to take about 2
weeks after the second dose, we conducted sensitivity analyses by
using a 1-month lag on the percentage population fully vaccinated
for countries and US counties. The above findings of no discernable
association between COVID-19 cases and levels of fully vaccinated
was also observed when we considered a 1-month lag on the levels of
fully vaccinated.
We should note that the COVID-19 case data is of confirmed cases,
which is a function of both supply (e.g., variation in testing
capacities or reporting practices) and demand-side (e.g., variation in
people’s decision on when to get tested) factors.