Portugal: The consequences of deliberately giving men less efficient vaccines.

Four months ago I made a post about how Portugal went against the EMA recommendation and gave men under 50 the Janssen vaccine, which was shown to be particularly ineffective against the Delta variant (which is currently 100% of our Covid cases, back then 90%) and the more effective mRNA vaccines to women.

As my post points out, the data about Janssen being less effective against Delta was already available by then. In fact, it was just after that data was released that the Portuguese government made the decision to split the vaccines by gender. What wasn't known back then is that this gap increases even further with time, with Janssen vaccine's effectiveness going as low as 13% months after inoculation.

4 months later the consequences are unfortunately very clear for everyone to see. After nearly all population has been vaccinated the current rate of infection has been shown to be much higher for men than it is for women, with men in the 20 to 29 age group (vaccinated with Janssen vaccine while women with Pfizer and Moderna) currently have double the rate of infection of women. Experts have attributed this difference to young and middle-aged men being administered the Janssen vaccine (to nobody's surprise) and are recommending booster shots. Source in portuguese.

This is one of the many cases when I hate being right. I knew in advance this was going to happen and so did those responsible. Covid-19 already kills men disproportionately, the Portuguese government managed to extend that gap to the number of infections, and most likely future long-term effects of the disease.