Vermont is as European as American states get: mostly white, slow-growing, and left-leaning. It even has a socialist senator.

Vermont has European rates of Covid vaccination, too. About 90 percent of adults over 30 in Vermont are have been jabbed. Most of those are boosted – including about 85 percent of adults over 65.

Yet Vermont is now suffering its second major outbreak of Omicron in five months. Since late March, Covid hospitalizations have soared to the second-highest level ever in the state, trailing only the initial Omicron peak. The number of patients in intensive care is up even more.

Covid hospitalizations in Vermont (because Vermont is so small, 100 hospitalizations statewide translates into about 53,000 for the United States):

The surge is occurring almost exclusively in vaccinated people.

Each week, Vermont reports data on hospitalizations by vaccination status. They have shown a remarkable change in the last several weeks.

In the spring and summer of 2021, the happy vaccine valley, almost no vaccinated people were hospitalized statewide. Only a handful even contracted Covid.

During the Delta wave in the fall of 2021 and the first Omicron surge in December and January, hospitalizations jumped in both the unvaccinated and vaccinated and reached a roughly 50/50 split. But because so many more people were vaccinated, vaccinated people still had a much lower risk per-person.

Not anymore.