2021-08-19 General

Vaccines

I see a lot of anxiety about vaccines decreasing in effectiveness. In the US, Biden announced that third-dose-boosters would start being delivered on 20 August, never mind that the FDA has not yet approved boosters.

Here is an example of someone showing the waning effectiveness of the vaccines:

But some of the studies have issues I have already talked about (and see below!) and some of studies show effectiveness that is still just fine, thank you very much.


Speaking of studies showing strange outcomes, this study out of Denmark (in Danish, sorry for those non-Danish speakers) found the following vaccine effectivenesses:

PfizerModernaAZ or AZ+mRNA
asymptomatic infection with Alpha81.0%95.9%93.2%
asymptomatic infection with Delta78.8%88.1%73.7%
hospitalization with Alpha85.6%97.0%N/A
hospitalization with Delta94.4%N/A96.6%

The authors note that the hospitalization effectiveness looking better for Delta than Alpha is probably due to the younger age of patients during the Delta study, as the old people have all gotten vaccinated.

Vaccine effectiveness calculations depend on the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations having similar characteristics, and they emphatically are frequently not the same. This is what make me a bit suspicious of the OMG THE VACCINES ARE GETTING LESS EFFECTIVE warnings like the previous entry.

Mitigation Measures

This article says that plexiglas barriers might be harmful. (This isn’t really breaking news, but I figured you might not have seen it before.)

Treatments

This paper reports on yet another really great antibody which neutralizes multiple different coronaviruses. (I’ve already mentioned this study and this study.)

Recommended Reading

This article talks about the evolution of COVID over time.