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- Apr 24, 2020
Everybody's favorite doomsayer is back!
This time, he says that vaccines help, but not enough and everyone must still wear masks and maintain minimal contact. How long? Who knows!
eand.co
This time, he says that vaccines help, but not enough and everyone must still wear masks and maintain minimal contact. How long? Who knows!
Here’s Why You Can Get Covid — Even If You’ve Been Vaccinated
No, Vaccination Doesn’t Equal Immunity. And No, We Shouldn’t Stop Wearing Masks and Distancing Yet.
eand.co
Here’s Why You Can Get Covid — Even If You’ve Been Vaccinated
No, Vaccination Doesn’t Equal Immunity. And No, We Shouldn’t Stop Wearing Masks and Distancing Yet.
You might recently have read the same startling statistic I did: in Britain, 40% of new hospital admissions have been jabbed, which is to say had at least one dose of a Covid vaccine. And you might be a little startled by that. What’s going on? Aren’t you basically immune if you’ve been vaccinated? And if you aren’t…what does that mean for how long Covid’s going to be with us?
The reason this paradoxical surge, vaccinated people ending up in the hospital, is taking place — and it’s about to hit the States soon, and thereafter Europe, and the rest of the world, is this. Covid vaccines have a relatively low efficacy against new variants, like Delta. You might have even heard that before — but have you really stopped to understand what it means?
Let me explain.
The AstraZeneca vaccine — which is what most Brits have had — has an efficacy against the Delta variant of about 60% after two doses. That means, in real-world terms, that out of every ten people who’ve gotten two doses of it, four of them are still going to get Covid. And, hang on a second, that lines up pretty accurately with hospital admissions.
Yes, you read that right. That’s what vaccine efficacy means. How much a vaccine reduces the prevalence of a disease among a population. Yes, the better vaccines have slightly higher efficacy. The Pfizer vaccine, for example, is somewhere between the high 60s and the low 80s. I’d interpret that as: out of every ten people who’ve had two doses, two to three are going to get Covid.
The conclusion, though, is what everyone needs to know, consider, and understand.
Having had a vaccine — even two doses of one — does not mean “you can’t get Covid.” What does it mean?
First and foremost, what this seems to say is that even if you’ve been double dosed with a vaccine, you still have a 20 to 40% chance of getting Covid. Yes, really. That’s still a serious level of risk, just below 50%, which is random chance.
Yet your chances of getting lethally bad Covid are reduced. Six or seven out of ten people who’ve been double dosed won’t get Covid — and that’s an eminently good thing. It means less pressure on hospitals — maybe, if. I’ll come back to that point. Your chances of getting severely ill with Covid are reduced. Vaccines, for Covid, seem to offer a kind of nonlinear protection. They protect most against the most severe outcomes. Your chances of dying from Covid go way, way down, and your chances of being hospitalised with Covid are also reduced. More people won’t get as sick. But that doesn’t mean you won’t get Covid, and it won’t be bad. As in, life-changingly bad, because “long Covid” is a very real thing, not to mention that myriad of consequences, like pulmonary and vascular damage, that come with even a moderate case.
Let me reiterate the takeaway.
You can still get Covid, even if you’ve been vaccinated. Vaccination, even full vaccination, does not equal immunity. And it can still be seriously bad Covid. Like the 60% of hospitalisations in the UK. Enjoy going to the hospital? Like having a breathing tube forced into you? I didn’t think so.
So why are so many people — even ones who consider themselves well-informed and thoughtful — under the badly mistaken impression that “getting vaccinated means you can’t get Covid?”
Because our public health agencies and media have done a dire, dire job of communicating the realities of vaccine efficacy to their populations. That’s true in America, Europe, Australia, Canada, and especially Britain. (The rest of the world can barely get vaccines to begin with.)
Why have public health agencies and media been so poor at communicating the grim realities of vaccination and the limited protection it offers? Because, well, they (at least the agencies) want everyone to get vaccinated. And the easiest way to do that is not to overcomplicate matters, and simply give people the impression that vaccines equal immunity. It’s understandable. But like so many choices, it’s a short term gain for a long term loss. Now we have populations where confusion reigns. Don’t vaccines equal immunity? If they do, then how can vaccinated people end up in the hospital with Covid?
Let me give you an example of how bad the media coverage of all this has been. In America, the media speaks regularly now of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Sure, there’s that. But that reinforces, over and over again, the mistaken impression that you can’t get Covid if you’ve been vaccinated. Yet America’s about to be hit by a tidal wave of people who’ve been double dosed, and still caught Covid. How do I know? Because that’s where Britain is — where the Delta wave spread first. America’s a little ways behind Britain in the arrival of the Delta wave, but as it spreads, plenty of double dosed people are going to get sick with Covid, end up in the hospital, and get very, very ill.
And Americans will probably be baffled, because right about now, there’s very little understanding in the public mind that vaccinations do not equal a magic bullet of immunity. They offer a limited degree of protection — one which is much more limited than is widely assumed.
Again, that’s not “my opinion.” It’s not even a “prediction” that America’s about to be hit by a wave of double dosed who’ve got Covid, and are baffled as to how. It’s just logic and reason. Science says so. 3 or 4 people out of 10 who’ve been vaccinated are going to get Delta Covid. Not “maybe,” not “could,” not “possibly.” Will. Are going to. Those are the stark and iron-clad statistical realities of what we know about vaccine efficacy versus already vaccine resistant variants.
Yes, you can get vaccinated and still get Covid. In fact, your chances are pretty high. What does that mean you should do?
It’s easy to read all that as some kind of anti-vax manifesto. Let me emphatically state that’s not the case. None of this says you shouldn’t get vaccinated. What it says is precisely the opposite. You need to get vaccinated — and you still need to take precautions, instead of throwing caution to the wind, assuming now you “can’t get Covid.”
Let me continue with the failures of our public health agencies to explain that a little better.
In America, Dr Fauci gave Americans the mistaken idea that “once you’re vaccinated, you don’t need to wear a mask” or social distance and so on. Legions of even liberal Americans believed him, and have become fanatical about the idea of dropping all protections the moment you’re double dosed, because “that’s what science says.”
Wrong. Science does not say anything of the kind. If you’re vaccinated, you still have a 30 to 40% chance of getting Covid, which means that you still need to take further precautions.
If you can still get Covid, you can still transmit it. That means you still need to wear a mask. If you can transmit the new variants, which are far more infectious, you still need to socially distance. You still need to wash your hands and be careful about contact and all the rest of the basic precautions.
Let me make my point crystal clear. I am not saying — science is not saying — “don’t go get a vaccine, because they don’t work.” On the contrary, I’m saying, and science is, saying, that vaccines still offer limited protection, which is better than nothing, but you still need to practice basic pandemic precautions. Masking, distancing, hygiene, contact, and so on. The take-away here isn’t anti-vax, but the precise opposite: vaccination plus.
Just as you still need to take precautions even if you’ve been vaccinated, our societies, do, too. The idea that life is magically going to go back to normal once people have been double dosed, because a threshold of herd immunity is hit, is badly wrong. We are not going to hit herd immunity because the vaccines don’t offer enough immunity yet. At 60% efficacy, and with new variants, the roughly 70% or 80% threshold a population needs to have herd immunity can never be hit.
That means that societies should still mandate all the basic precautions we’ve become accustomed to. Yes, people should mask up — even if they’ve been double dosed. Yes, temperatures should be checked. Yes, social distancing should be practiced. Whether on the street, at bars, restaurants, airports, train stations, offices — everywhere.
That also means, by the way, that the “Covid passport” schemes governments are trialling are not going to work. It’s a nice idea in theory, only letting double dosed people into public spaces, like restaurants and clubs and so forth. Makes sense. The problem is that, again, even of the double dosed, up to 40% are going to be able to get Covid. That means they can spread it. That’s more than enough to produce a never-ending wave of hospitalisations and deaths. Covid passports are only going to be marginally effective at reducing the spread of a disease for whom vaccines are simply not efficacious enough to really stop dead in its tracks yet.
I know that’s a painful message to hear. I don’t particularly like wearing a mask. My One True Love in this life, apart from my lovely wife and amazing magical puppy Snowy Snowball is disco. I need to go to my favourite cafe to write well — and I’ve barely been able to do it in a year and counting.
Social distancing and masking and minimal contact? Yes, they suck. But where we are is where we are. Pretending that we’ve defeated Covid when we haven’t is only going to prolong the situation and make it worse, all over again, as in, another horrific autumn and winter.
You can do that, by the way. Pretend. That’s what Britain’s doing. It just had “Freedom Day” from Covid…while cases exploded to astonishing heights. Britain’s playing a stupid game of make-believe. And it’s foolish because, as you can see, 40% of hospital admissions are now vaccinated people. That should prove, with chilling certainty, something all of us should know, but most of us don’t. Vaccines do not equal immunity.
It’s not just a shame that this message wasn’t communicated, explained, told to people. It’s a failure. I get that our public health agencies wanted to trumpet the virtues of vaccines, so everyone would take them — anti-vaxxers are enough of a pain in the brain as it is. The problem is that they’ve erred on the other side of caution, which is recklessness.
Now, far, far too many believe the myth that “vaccinated means you’re immune! And you don’t need to wear a mask! Or distance. Or practice precautions!!” Even well-meaning and thoughtful people, who think they believe in science and logic and evidence. The problem is that because nobody’s explained the basic facts to them, they really think they’re doing the right thing, throwing caution to the wind, the moment they’re fully vaccinated. They don’t understand that vaccines offer a level of protection at which 3 or 4 people out of 10 are still going to get Covid. And of those 3 or 4 out of 10 who get Covid anyways, 1 is going to end up in the hospital, and many of those are going to get seriously ill, and, yes, die.
So let me say it again. Vaccines do not equal immunity. Not even close. Not for you, and not for society. Not for anybody. This is a dangerous, dangerous myth. Because it’s been promulgated by our public health agencies and the figures who head them, too many believe it, and believing it, are ready to happily throw caution to the wind, the moment they’re vaccinated, abandoning all precautions, mistakenly thinking “they can’t get Covid anymore.” That is emphatically not true, which is why hospitals in Britain are filling up with double-dosed people, and hospitals in America are about to. Your chances of catching Covid, even if you’re double dosed, are around 30 to 40 percent.
Take it seriously. Don’t spread the myth. Or else this pandemic is going to go on that much longer than it needs to.
