Can that headline possibly be correct? Yes; yes it can. Portugal has the second-highest COVID vaccination level of any country in Europe, trailing only tiny Malta, with 94 percent of its citizens receiving at least one dose of the vaccine. Sixty-two percent have opted for boosters.

But as of May 17, Portugal also has the highest case rate in Europe — a daily average of 2,290 new cases per million people. Globally, it boasts the second-highest new daily death toll among countries with more than one million inhabitants.

The numbers registered today for cases of #COVID19 have only previously been exceeded during the so-called fifth wave, when at the end of January there were days with about 65,000 cases in 24 hours.https://t.co/pbSspoZURH

— The Portugal News (@theportugalnews) May 18, 2022

Columnist Daniel Horowitz of the Conservative Review points out that we were told things would unfold quite a bit differently:

We were all told that the shots, despite their plethora of potentially deadly side effects, still protected against critical illness from COVID. However, again and again we are seeing the most vaccinated countries having their worst death curves (not just case curves) precisely after having boosted their population and with a variant that is much less deadly than some of the prior ones.

Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Portugal is faring so badly that the Portugal Resident is reporting that pharmacies will once again offer free rapid antigen tests.

Similar situations are playing out in Iceland, Finland, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. We’re starting to see it here in the US as well. The Wall Street Journal has taken notice, blaring out in a recent headline, “Covid-19 Cases Rise in Parts of U.S. With High Vaccination Rates.”

Horowitz examines the numbers:

The four most vaccinated states are Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont. The top 10 vaccinated states, with the exception of New Mexico, are all in the northeast. Incidentally, according to the New York Times COVID tracker, the 12 states with the highest hospitalization rates (including D.C.) are all in the northeast, except for Michigan. All of the lowest-vaccinated states in the south, Great Plains, and Rocky Mountains have the lowest hospitalization rates.

Hmm, I thought everybody in the south was supposed to be dead by now.

Noted pandemic response critic Alex Berenson, who’s been kicked off Twitter for his views, explained on the Clay and Buck radio show what he thinks is causing this:

You have to look at the worldwide numbers, and you have to look at countries that are really highly vaccinated. Whether it’s South Korea or Denmark or the U.K., there’s a lot of countries that are more highly vaccinated than the United States, and they have tons of infections and lots of deaths right now. The mRNA vaccines have failed.

Even Fauci admits that there are issues. “Some vaccine platforms give a very high degree of protection but the durability isn’t very long,” he said in an interview with CNN. “We got a really great platform with mRNA. But let’s try to be better.” Oh, let’s.

A look back at what they told us to expect:

.@POTUS: “We have a pandemic for those who haven’t gotten a vaccination…If you're vaccinated, you're not going to be hospitalized…you're not going to die. So, it's gigantically important we all act like Americans who care about our fellow Americans.”pic.twitter.com/cpsvzfXENn

— marielsaez46 (@marielsaez46) July 22, 2021

Said Joe Biden at a July 2021 CNN town hall in Cincinnati, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die.”

That certainly hasn’t aged well. (Nor did the AP fact check: “THE FACTS: His remark accurately captures the strong protection the COVID-19 vaccines provide as cases spike among people who have resisted the shots. But it overlooks the rare exceptions.”) Wrong. Those exceptions don’t appear to be “rare” at all.

In the fall, he also angrily yelled at us for months about the supposed “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” You don’t hear that phrase much anymore because it’s simply not true.

The numbers in Portugal are startling because they are the exact opposite of what we were told to expect. There’s a familiar pattern on display here: Biden, the CDC, and Fauci tell us one thing, yell at anyone who disagrees, then say nothing when they turn out (once again) to be dead wrong. Portugal’s numbers–and numbers from other countries and regions–show us just how spectacularly off the mark their predictions have been.

Don’t expect an apology.

RELATED: My colleague Scott Hounsell has also reported extensively on vaccine efficacy:

• The Government and Big Pharma Should Be Prohibited From Calling COVID Shots “Vaccines”
• The Continuing Covidiocy
• New Vaccine Study Suggests mRNA Vaccines Actually Increase Probability of Being Infected With Omicron After 90 Days
• CDC Data, Global Sources Show Majority of Omicron Variant Cases Are Among Fully-Vaccinated
• The Latest COVID Data Offers Yet Another Factual Rejection of COVID Vaccine Effectiveness Narrative