Israel was held up as the poster-child for the Pfizer jab. They very quickly vaccinated the majority of their population and then got hit by delta. Last month they began their 3rd shot round of booster jabs.
A recent UK survey by the University of Oxford and the Office for National Statistics looked at the results of more than 3 million PCR tests from a random sample of people to understand what the infection patterns were as delta became the dominant variant. This gave real-world data rather than clinical trial data.
Headline results were:
- Obtaining two vaccine doses remains the most effective way to ensure protection against the COVID-19 delta variant of concern dominant in the UK today.
- With delta, Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines still offer good protection against new infections, but effectiveness is reduced compared with alpha.
- Two doses of either vaccine still provided at least the same level of protection as having had COVID-19 before through natural infection; people who had been vaccinated after already being infected with COVID-19 had even more protection than vaccinated individuals who had not had COVID-19 before.
- However, delta infections after two vaccine doses had similar peak levels of virus to those in unvaccinated people; with the alpha variant, peak virus levels in those infected post-vaccination were much lower.
The evidence that delta increases transmissibility more than other variants even in vaccinated people backs up a recent assessment by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.K. results cast further doubt on the possibility of achieving herd immunity via vaccination, said Sarah Walker, a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Oxford, who helped lead the study.
“The hope was that unvaccinated people could be protected by vaccinating lots of people,” Walker said. “The higher levels of virus that we’re seeing in these infections in vaccinated people are consistent with the fact that unvaccinated people are just going to be at higher risk, I’m afraid.”
Bloomberg
The paper has masses of graphs and diagrams but one that seemed interesting was:
The classic COVID symptoms; cough, fever, loss of smell, loss of taste are the orange data points. The information is in three groups: Left – alpha variant dominant period, Right – delta variant dominant period and the middle – a mixture.
There is a clear downward slope from unvax to fully vax on the left but in the delta period the change in vaccine status is nowhere near as marked in the results. The numbers in the last group in each segment are low hence the large error bars.
The “experts” have put the world on a treadmill of never-ending COVID vaccine shots. Should have bought those Pfizer shares!
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