This article was originally published in ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
It needs to be SOP to sequence COVID from anyone who gets it after getting vaccinated, both to screen for new variants and to understand why some individuals remain susceptible after being vaccinated. In either case, it points out how critical it is to get as many vaccinated as possible as quickly as possible.
âŚcommunicate that the battle does not end two weeks after your second vaccination. You can still get infected, you can still infect others, you can still get hospitalized, you can still die. Your odds are just much better than before you were vaccinated. But until the virus is wiped out to ebola levels, you still need to take protective measures.
Well, the vaccines have been reported to have efficacy between what, 65% and 95%? When you have a population of 310 million, even the most effective vaccine will leave tens of millions of folks open to infection⌠just in the US. Multiply that by over a billion and suddenly the exciting story is to make us think no vaccines work.
Moral of story: even if youâre vaccinated, keep your mask on.
and minimize your exposure to groups of people in indoor spaces. Ainât time to go back to partying like itâs 2019.
The large number of mask wearers present in the population due to COVID has apparently greatly suppressed the number of flu cases. We will continue to wear masks, probably through the rest of the year and get them out for flu season every year or whenever another nasty critter raises its head. It will be interesting to see how long range trends develop based on mask wearing/not wearing.
There are rare cases of people getting sick after receiving doses of a vaccine thatâs notoriously finicky about how it is stored and handled?
These vaccines are spoiling us. Lots of other vaccines are 50-60% effective, and we expect some fraction of people to get sick and even die of whatever theyâre vaccinated against. And thatâs even before we get to the immunocompromised.
That said, absolutely we should be throwing resources at studying these cases (as other countries have been doing already). Itâs like the vaccine reactions: we may think we know the explanation, but until we do the work we wonât know. And if some variants are more likely to strike the vaccinated we should darn well know that sooner rather than later. (And if itâs something else that can be relatively easily changed, ditto.)
Meanwhile Iâm a 59 y/o with comorbidities who canât find a vaccine appointment if my life depended on it (which it does) living in a state who is vaccinating perfectly healthy teenagers. Is any of this registering with the people out there who think things are going smoothly?
Ran into a similar dysfunction, got around it by pounding on various pharmaciesâ websites until I got my appointments.
I suspect those 95 and 94 percent numbers are not going to hold up when real world data from millions vaccinated are made public. Look for the UK data after the second shot when they release it.
Under real world conditions with multiple variants circulating, I suspect the the efficacy to be between 80-85 percent. Which is good.
Problem is that studies or clinical trials involving small groups of carefully selected people tend to generate better results than real world data. And the clinical trials ended November 18th , before the variants and the surge.
And when people are told a vaccine has a 95% efficacy rating, perhaps they tend to get overconfident and more careless than they would if they were told it had a 83% efficacy rating.
Just a wild ass guess as to the actual efficacy rating and also on how people might feel over confident after being told a vaccine had a 95% efficacy rating. But obviously, the elderly doctor did feel overconfident according to the story.
As above, I also expect to be wearing a mask for some time. No indoor dining. It will be hell ro keep my spouse out of movie theaters thos summer. Most folks I talk to seem to understand need for continued masks, but not what teal world chances are for an infection. Some of them dont want to undertand, sadly.
This seems a bit hyperbolic on TPMâs part. The vaccines are supposed to have a 95% effectiveness rate and it seems they are much better. It seems the thing to do is to sequence the DNA in viruses of those who get symptoms, look for common factors in those people, and go from there. To put out a splashy headline âWe Have to Learn Whyâ implies there is something particularly menacing. The guy was old and appears not to have been wearing a mask at all times.
Actually, in a recent study of 3,950 mostly white medical workers from 8 carefully selected cities in the US, the efficacy rating was 90%. If they omitted the people from Duluth, MN where the numbers were twice as good as the other cites, that number would be lower than 90%. Regardless, they are still damn good numbers.
This study was done by Pfizer.
Itâs propublica, and whatâs hyperbolic anout it? The articleâs point, beyond that you shouldnât drop your protective measures even after vaccination, is that when the vaccine does fail, we are doing a piss poor job of tracking the events and looking for commonality among them. You know, doing sciencey type things.
Vaccination does not mean 100% immunity. The Pfizer and Moderna offer 90% to 95% antibody response to covid 2 to 3 weeks after the second shot. What this means is a lessening of symptom severity if infected. But with 90% immunity this means there is still a one-in-ten chance to get infected if presented with the virus ⌠variant or not.
DO NOT LET YOUR GUARD DOWN!!! wear that mask and wash up and keep distant.
Itâs a good article and not TPMâs. TPMâs reporting on the epidemic is crude scientifically and opinionated politically, which doesnât ever help. This one is not. This is good stuff. One is always impressed with ProPublicaâs work. So thank you TPM for letting those who know how to handle this subject speak.
The vaccines do NOT have 95% efficacy. The one individual vaccine (Moderna) that hit 95% in initial study is not the major vaccine used. Pfizer shows about 90% efficacy over 6 months. The J&J hits 80%. A/Z 76%. There is Sputnik that allegedly has 90% efficacy. 2 chinese vaccines with efficacy 50-60%. Another 2 Russian vaccines, one that fails thou sold and used. Itâs quite the scandal. And many, many in the works.
So depending on the place on the planet we are looking at combined efficacy at best mid 80% and at worst around 50%. Vaccines to be effective need to be over 50% efficacy threshold.
The places that vaccinate the most people without regard to vaccines efficacy are likely to stop, at least for a time, this epidemic. This is the predominant scientific theory right now, about to be proven or disproved in the city of Serrana in Brazil, where vaccination rate is reaching 90% of adult population. Result of this wedge vaccination in May, I think. Once virus stops circulating, the vaccinated individual with not effective immune protection will be still protected.
But we still have to know and understand what is going on. The point here is that fact that the guy was old and didnât wear mask all the time is irrelevant to the fact that at the peak of the vaccine activity, vaccine with high efficacy, it didnât hold, it didnât protect him. We need to know what caused it. We canât dismiss it to âold ageâ. We need to know old age - what? Otherwise this virus will continue to make holes in the armour we are building for entire society.
The real world data that was released in the UK over a month ago was after one shot. Both Pfizer and AZN did very well considering they waited 12 weeks to give the second shot. The data after the second shot should be interesting as it will also be real world conditions involving millions of people. Iâm hoping it will be out within a few weeks.
Itâs probably not going to be possible to wipe Covid out to Ebola levels because itâs a respiratory virus, unlike Ebola which is spread by direct contact. Weâre probably looking at something more akin to flu, which will wax and wane and have heavier years and lighter years.
The data from Israel suggests that it will be possible to reduce hospitalizations to a very low level and deaths to near zero if we can get a comparable %age of the population vaccinated (they are close to 60% now)⌠Asking people to keep socially distancing forever is simply not going to work.
As for masks, I will wear one in select circumstances especially during winter, but I donât think many people in the West will do it, We have to be realistic.