‘While the vaccines don’t protect against infection as well as they do against severe disease, the shots are keeping people off ventilators and from dying, Kathryn Edwards, an infectious disease pediatrician at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, said August 26 in a news briefing sponsored by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “We cannot lose the forest for the trees.”
Read here (ScienceNews, Aug 31, 2021)
‘In the worst-case scenario, a variant could arise that would “make it like the vaccines did not exist,” Hanage [Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health] said. But at the moment, “there is no such variant like that.” And it would probably be extraordinarily difficult for one to manifest. Even the most evasive variants we know of—the ones that have stumped certain antibodies—aren’t fully duping vaccinated bodies, which harbor a slew of other immunological guards. Hanage also pointed out that many people’s immune systems have been trained on different triggers—distinct brands of vaccines, unique variants, or some combination thereof. A new version of SARS-CoV-2 would find skirting all of those blockades at once to be nearly impossible.
‘Viruses aren’t infinitely mutable; sometimes, to keep themselves in contention, they must make sacrifices. Several experts told me they’re hopeful that the coronavirus might struggle to max out both transmission and immune evasion at once, requiring some sort of trade-off between the two. Some of the most powerful anti-coronavirus antibodies target SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, which the virus uses to unlock and enter our cells. If the virus altered the protein to sidestep those antibodies, it might make itself less recognizable to the immune system. But it could also hurt its ability to infect us at all.’
Read here (The Atlantic, Aug 25, 2021)
‘Vaccination was a reprieve from this calculus of personal danger, at least for a while—get vaccinated, get your family and friends vaccinated, get back to a far more normal version of life. To a certain extent, that logic holds: The vaccines are still doing a fantastic job preventing hospitalization and death from the coronavirus’s far-more-transmissible Delta variant. But as COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations have roared back, concerns about breakthrough cases among the vaccinated and increased transmissibility among kids have muddied a lot of people’s ability to gauge their own day-to-day risk, just as they’d begun to venture back out into the world and hug, eat, and laugh in the same airspace together again. In some ways, pandemic life is more confusing than ever.’
Read here (The Atlantic, August 19, 2021)
‘The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the agency has documented about 5,800 “breakthrough” COVID-19 cases among the millions of Americans who are fully vaccinated, totaling far less than 1 percent of fully vaccinated people.
"Vaccine breakthrough infections make up a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated,” the CDC told The Hill in a statement. “CDC recommends that all eligible people get a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as one is available to them.”
‘The CDC told The Hill on Thursday that about 7 percent of the recorded breakthrough cases resulted in hospitalization and about 1 percent of the people who contracted breakthrough infections died.’
Read here (The Hill, Apr 15, 2021)