Hey, remember when Denmark had beaten Covid thanks to the miracle of vaccines?

It was last month. But that was then, this is now…

So, yeah, way back in September, the Danes were in the happy vaccine valley and decided to drop all coronavirus restrictions.

Which led to an entirely predictable set of stories (they were identical to the stories written about Israel and Britain in the spring, because the media learns nothing, ever, about the ro).

Yay Denmark! Yay vaccines! Yay sciencey science! Boo red states! Boo mean no good very bad anti-vaxxers!

But virus gonna virus, and vaccine gonna vaccine - or more accurately stop vaccining - and now the Danes have reached the cliff at the end of the happy vaccine valley just in time for the winter ro season.

Which means their case chart looks like so:

Same thing is happening in the rest of north-central Europe, by the way.

The failure of their policy to work as promised has made the Danish public health authorities grumpy (rather than ashamed, which seems like a more natural response, but part of being a public health expert means never having to say you’re sorry, much less admit you’re wrong).

And when the public health authorities get grumpy, we all know what’s next on the horizon. Lockdowns, baby, lockdowns!

Meanwhile, the Danes will probably load up on boosters for the oldsters and (temporarily) suppress the per-case death rate, but make no mistake.

They are likely following Britain to the unhappy vaccine plateau, with a huge number of cases and a Covid death rate that - although lower than the January 2021 peak - remains stubbornly high and a not-insignificant contributor to the overall death rate. (Which itself is rising, for reasons that we don’t know but DEFINITELY has nothing to do with our population-wide experiment with a completely novel biotechnology rushed to market in less than a year.)

What comes after the unhappy vaccine plateau?

Stay tuned.

But no one - and I mean absolutely no one - could have predicted an 80-percent plus adult vaccine rate would not help Denmark achieve herd immunity or even save it from a massive spike in cases.

It was just impossible to forecast.