You've probably seen lots of reports of 'breakthrough infections', people who have been vaccinated but have still been infected with Covid. The more alarming reports talk about vaccinated people being hospitalised and dying and suggest that we are on the cusp of losing protection. This is wildly misleading.
Vaccines are doing a fantastic job at protecting. The protection we are seeing in real life [EDIT: especially for serious cases & deaths] is very close to what was expected based on the vaccine trials. There is a modest decrease because the Delta variant is worse.
Imagine a population of 100 people, with 90 vaccinated and 10 unvaccinated. All get exposed to the virus. If 5 vaccinated people and 5 unvaccinated people get infected, the story is not "Half of all infected people are vaccinated!". It's that the infection rate is about 10 times higher among the unvaccinated: ~6% among the vaccinated (5/90) but 50% among the unvaccinated (5/10). This is roughly the situation developed countries are in now.
As vaccination increases, the proportion of new cases among the vaccinated will increase as well. If everyone was vaccinated, by definition 100% of all new cases would be among the vaccinated - but there would be very few cases and very few would die! Communicating this properly is desperately important to get the remaining unvaccinated on board, and to maintain some perspective when deciding on other protection measures.
Get your vaccines so that you are protected and protect those around you - especially the immunocompromised, many of whom cannot get vaccinated or get less protection from vaccines. And so we can finally focus on vaccinating the billions that are desperately waiting (less than 2% of Africa has been fully vaccinated) instead of this stupid personal liberty debate that is sucking up so much attention.
Vaccines are doing a fantastic job at protecting. The protection we are seeing in real life [EDIT: especially for serious cases & deaths] is very close to what was expected based on the vaccine trials. There is a modest decrease because the Delta variant is worse.
Imagine a population of 100 people, with 90 vaccinated and 10 unvaccinated. All get exposed to the virus. If 5 vaccinated people and 5 unvaccinated people get infected, the story is not "Half of all infected people are vaccinated!". It's that the infection rate is about 10 times higher among the unvaccinated: ~6% among the vaccinated (5/90) but 50% among the unvaccinated (5/10). This is roughly the situation developed countries are in now.
As vaccination increases, the proportion of new cases among the vaccinated will increase as well. If everyone was vaccinated, by definition 100% of all new cases would be among the vaccinated - but there would be very few cases and very few would die! Communicating this properly is desperately important to get the remaining unvaccinated on board, and to maintain some perspective when deciding on other protection measures.
Get your vaccines so that you are protected and protect those around you - especially the immunocompromised, many of whom cannot get vaccinated or get less protection from vaccines. And so we can finally focus on vaccinating the billions that are desperately waiting (less than 2% of Africa has been fully vaccinated) instead of this stupid personal liberty debate that is sucking up so much attention.
