Tuesday, August 17, 2021

For weeks, Biden administration officials have been analyzing the rise in Covid-19 cases, trying to figure out if the Delta variant is better able to evade the vaccines or if the vaccines have waned in strength over time. According to some administration experts, both could be true…

[Well, you have time, right? Study it a few more weeks, especially the “long range consequences”; forget about the hear and now.]

Federal health officials have been particularly concerned about data from Israel suggesting that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine’s protection against severe disease has fallen significantly for elderly people who got their second shot in January or February.

[I’m sure it’s nothing. Best to ignore it. And the Mayo study, too.]

Israel can in some ways be viewed as a template for the United States because it vaccinated more of its population faster and has almost exclusively used the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that made up much of the U.S. stock…

The latest Israeli data, posted on the government’s website on Monday, shows what some experts described as continued erosion of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine against mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 infections in general and against severe disease among the elderly who were vaccinated early in the year.

One slide suggests that for those 65 years or older who got their second shots in January, the vaccine is now only about 55 percent effective against severe disease. But researchers noted that the data has a wide margin of error, and some said other Israeli government data suggested the decline in efficacy was less severe.

“It shows a pretty steep decline in effectiveness against infection, but it’s still a bit murky about protection against severe disease,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, a vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who reviewed the data at the request of The New York Times.

[Okay, well, study until the murk clears.]

Dr. Jesse L. Goodman, a former chief scientist with the Food and Drug Administration who also reviewed the data, said it suggests “worrisome trends” that could signal waning of vaccine effectiveness. But he said he would like to see further detail from Israel and, more important, data indicating whether the United States is headed in the same direction.

[Yes. ALWAYS more data. And why would the U.S. be headed in the same direction as Israel when the U.S. didn’t head in the same direction as India on delta?]