...The statistic in question comes from a
paper published on July 30 in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which documents an outbreak of COVID-19 in Barnstable County, Massachusetts —
elsewhere specified as Provincetown — that primarily occurred in vaccinated people, following large public events in the first half of the month.
According to the report, of the 469 people included in the study who were in the area between July 3 and July 17 and tested positive for the coronavirus, 74% were fully vaccinated.
- A total of five people were hospitalized, four of them vaccinated, and there were no deaths. 90% of the subset of people who had sequencing performed on their samples were infected with the delta variant.
- Although not mentioned in the report, the outbreak overlapped with July Fourth weekend and “Bear Week,” Provincetown’s annual gathering of gay men; 85% of the identified infections were in males. In the summer, the town’s population swells to approximately 60,000 people.
The report noted that at the time of diagnostic testing, the amount of virus appeared to be about the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated people, a finding that the CDC
cited in
its decision on July 27 to
recommend masks for everyone, regardless of vaccination status, in indoor public spaces in areas with
“substantial” or “high” transmission.
But the 74% figure, while correct, can be misleading without the proper context, experts say, because as vaccination rates increase, it’s entirely expected for a larger and larger proportion of people who are infected to be vaccinated. It doesn’t mean the vaccines don’t work.
“The problem is we are only looking at those who got infected, not at everyone in the area who was at risk of being infected,”
Matthew Fox, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, told us in an email. “Provincetown is an area with some of the highest vaccination rates in the country, so if the vaccine was not working, you’d expect the % vaccinated among the infected to be even higher than 75%, but we can’t say that for sure yet because we don’t know the denominators, we’d need more data. That said, all the carefully done studies to date that have included the denominators have shown the vaccine to be highly effective, even outside of the trials.”...
Numerous posts on Instagram and Facebook have nevertheless seized upon the 74% figure,
often using screenshots of news headlines, without the proper context or with additional commentary to give the misleading impression that this is evidence that the vaccines don’t work,
that vaccinated people are just as likely or even more likely to spread the virus as those who are unvaccinated, or that
something nefarious is afoot...
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Summary, even if you're fully vaccinated...vaccines are not 100%, nobody said they're 100% and there never will be a vaccine that's 100% to prevent infection...sometimes called the
efficacy.
In contrast, you want to look at the
effectiveness to prevent you from being Hospitalized, ICU admission, or Death.
Therefore, if you're going to be indoors and outdoors with a large group of people, many of who you do not know...you still need to wear your face mask and social distance.
Simply, this is a Pandemic of those Not Vaccinated.
This is why many stores that have 100% fully vaccination among their employees...they still wear face masks because they know the science that vaccines are
not 100% and there will be breakthrough cases.
wrbtrader