Are you sure breakthrough infections are as rare as you keep claiming? – Hot air

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A notable example from Friday of a non-Fox mainstream news anchor expressing some polite skepticism about the vaccine’s effectiveness. I understand that vaccines work to prevent hospitalizations and deaths and it’s amazing, says Sara Eisen, but the impression given by public health experts is that they also largely prevent infections, well, the they do ? Quote: “Are you too flippant about vaccine limits?” Because I feel like these breakthroughs happen, they happen on a regular basis, and we haven’t really seen the government paying so much attention or warning too much about it.

Five people from his own family, three of whom were vaccinated, recently contracted COVID. Even larger circles of vaccinated people have experienced epidemics. She’s not talking hypothetically.

The most Fauci can do for her is assure her that infections are less common in vaccines than unvaccinated people, that boosters further reduce the risk, and that the CDC is currently conducting studies to try to better determine the risk of the disease. ‘be infected after vaccination. Okay, says Eisen – but in this case, if the CDC doesn’t know how many revolutionary infections there are and even isn’t regular “mild” cases, why does their own website casually claim that breakthroughs only occur in a small proportion of the vaccinated population?

How can they find out? Watch, then read on.

I wrote more than once on this issue, most recently a month ago, when NYT columnist David Leonhardt estimated that those vaccinated had a one in 5,000 chance of being infected on any given day. If we assume that vaccinees generally show truly mild symptoms when infected; that they are less likely to confirm their infection with a test because they are not afraid of becoming seriously ill; and that they are more likely than the unvaccinated to wear masks and to distance themselves socially in order to avoid exposure in the first place, then the CDC may be missing numerous breakthrough infections and / or to attribute lower infection rates among those vaxxed entirely to vaccine efficacy when in reality this is in part due to more risk averse behavior.

Are breakthrough infections occurring more frequently than initially thought because Delta is so much more contagious than previous strains of the virus, generating a thousand times the viral load in those infected? Or are they occurring more frequently because the decline in immunity is more frequent than we had hoped? A new study points to the latter:

Six months after receiving the second dose of the two-shot vaccine from Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE, many recipients no longer have vaccine-induced antibodies that can immediately neutralize disturbing variants of the coronavirus, a new study suggests. The researchers analyzed blood samples from 46 healthy adults, mostly young or middle-aged, after receiving both doses and again six months after the second dose. “Our study shows that vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine induces high levels of neutralizing antibodies against the original vaccine strain, but these levels decrease almost 10-fold in seven months” after the initial dose, Bali Pulendran of Stanford University and Emory University’s Mehul Suthar said via email. In about half of all subjects, neutralizing antibodies that can block infection against coronavirus variants such as Delta, Beta, and Mu were undetectable six months after the second dose, their team reported Thursday on bioRxiv… ahead of the peer review. Neutralizing antibodies are not the immune system’s only defense against the virus. Yet, they “are critically important for protection against infection with SARS-CoV-2,” Pulendran and Suthar said. “These results suggest that administration of a booster dose approximately 6 to 7 months after the initial vaccination is likely to improve protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants.”

Israel did not begin to see its latest fierce wave of COVID recede until after the deployment of the boosters began. A health official who spoke to the Financial Times defended the move bluntly. “It’s good that the US and UK are giving reminders to their elderly,” he said. “But it’s a political decision not to follow Israel’s example, not a medical decision. It is no longer a secret that the vaccine is not good after six to eight months. “

I don’t know if I would have put it that way. “Not good” implies that they are not effective at all when in reality they still resist serious illness months later. In fact, the NIH today released a model estimating the number of lives saved by immunization in the first four months of the national immunization effort. It’s in the six digits:

Based on the model, COVID-19 vaccines have saved nearly 140,000 lives in the United States through May 2021. Approximately 570,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the United States during this period. The model estimated that there would have been around 709,000 deaths without the vaccines.

Some states have introduced more effective vaccines. They were able to vaccinate more people faster. This has led to greater protection of their population.

The study found that New York had the biggest reduction in deaths from COVID-19. The researchers estimated that the vaccines resulted in nearly 12 fewer deaths per 10,000 people in the state.

Eisen is probably correct that the CDC reduces the number of breakthrough infections, but the greater benefits of two doses are clear. Whether a third dose will lead to stronger, lasting protection against infection, or whether we have a never-ending series of boosters to try to mitigate people’s risk of illness is the next data puzzle to be solved.

I’ll leave you with this short excerpt from another interview Fauci did yesterday, when asked about Merck’s impressive new drug to treat COVID. Once that is available, he asked, will people no longer need to be vaccinated? Of course they will, he replies, because the Merck pill reduces the risk of death by 50 percent. What we want to do is reduce the risk by 100% by preventing people from getting infected in the first place. But… that’s Eisen’s point. Vaccines aren’t 100 percent effective at preventing infection and probably aren’t even close, so why are we suggesting here that they are? The reason you get your vaccines is that they give you an almost 100% chance of not dying from COVID if you are infected. He should focus on that.



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