I got Covid (again) – is it time I got jabbed?

I got Covid a couple of weeks ago. Second time for me, which was annoying because I’d told Caroline that natural immunity provided better protection than the vaccines. She’s the only member of our household who’s been jabbed and began to feel quite smug as we all tested positive, one after another. It didn’t matter how much data I presented her with showing how quickly vaccine effectiveness against Omicron wanes, not least because I couldn’t prove I’d got Omicron. As far as she was concerned, I’d lost the argument.

While I was ill I read the following sentence in an article by Ed West, which put the wind up me: ‘An unvaccinated man in his fifties has about a one-in-150 chance of dying if he catches Covid, and is much more likely still to be hospitalised, put in ICU and left prematurely aged.’ He didn’t give a source for the one in 150 figure, but that was on the high side, surely? Concerned, I commissioned a professor of epidemiology to calculate Omicron’s infection fatality rate for my Daily Sceptic website and he came up with 0.04 per cent, or one in 2,500, a figure that includes the vaccinated. Slightly higher for men in their fifties no doubt, but not one in 150.

However, the second part of Ed’s sentence — that the unvaccinated are more likely to end up in ICU than the vaccinated — is probably right. Was that where I was headed? I know, I know. My chances of being hospitalised, let alone put on a ventilator, were low, assuming it was Omicron. But what if it wasn’t? Or what if it was and I just got unlucky? I could picture the newspaper headline: ‘Unvaccinated lockdown sceptic in intensive care with severe Covid.’