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'Keep your guard up': CDC studies show waning COVID-19 vaccine efficacy as delta variant sweeps US

Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY

Wed, August 25, 2021, 11:54 AM

Immunity to COVID-19 from vaccines might be declining over time as the highly contagious delta variant surges across the country, according to new research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A study released Tuesday showed vaccine effectiveness decreased among health care workers who were fully vaccinated since the time the delta variant became widespread, which could be due to the waning effectiveness of the vaccine over time, the higher transmissibility of the delta variant, or other factors, experts said.

The CDC said the trend should also be “interpreted with caution” because a decline in vaccine effectiveness could be due to “poor precision in estimates due to limited number of weeks of observation and few infections among participants.”

A second study found about a quarter of COVID-19 cases between May and July in Los Angeles were breakthrough cases, but that hospitalizations were significantly lower for those who had been vaccinated. Unvaccinated people were more than 29 times more likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people, and about five times more likely to be infected.

The studies show the importance of being fully vaccinated because the benefit of being vaccinated when it comes to hospitalization did not decline even with the recent wave, Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine and vice president for research at the Scripps Research Institute, told USA TODAY.

"If you take these two studies together, and everything else that’s been reported… you see consistent attrition of protection with people who are fully vaccinated," he said. "But the benefit of vaccination is still there despite the breakthrough infections because hospitalizations are really markedly protected."

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Let the mandates begin: FDA approves of first COVID-19 vaccine

The research comes as the Food and Drug Administration has given its full approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, and soon after the agency and the CDC recommended a third vaccine dose to those who have compromised immune systems. A booster shot is expected to be available to fully vaccinated Americans who got their second dose at least eight months prior beginning on Sept. 20, according to the White House.

That’s too long to wait, Topol said. Based on the research, Topol said immunity may begin to go down at around the five- or six-month mark, leaving vaccinated people more vulnerable to infection.

Justin Bishop, 13, receives the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on May 14, 2021, at the Mount Sinai South Nassau Vaxmobile in Freeport, N.Y.

"If you wait until eight months, you’re two or three months vulnerable while delta is circulating. Whatever you’re doing in life, unless you live in a cave, you're getting incremental exposures," Topol said.

The study among health care personnel and other front-line workers was conducted in eight locations across six states beginning in December 2020 and ending Aug. 14. The research shows vaccine effectiveness was 91% before the dominance of the delta variant, and it has since dropped to 66%.

Topol said he doesn’t believe the decline in effectiveness can be solely attributed to waning immunity over time but has a lot to do with the delta variant’s contagious nature. Other factors, such as laxed mitigation measures – relaxation of masking and distancing – could contribute, but are harder to quantify.

No, a vaccine doesn't make you 'Superman': Breakthrough COVID-19 cases are increasing amid delta variant.

“Although these interim findings suggest a moderate reduction in the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing infection, the sustained two-thirds reduction in infection risk underscores the continued importance and benefits of COVID-19 vaccination,” the CDC said.

Topol said the research underscores the need for vaccines for all, but also the need to protect vaccinated people. The delta wave will pass eventually, but even those who are fully vaccinated need to “keep your guard up,” he said.

“We’re not getting the word out enough that people who have been vaccinated are not protected as much as they think. They need to mask up, they need to do everything they can. Make-believe that there wasn't a vaccine," he said.

 Delta Variant Sweeps Thru the Country

 

 

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

• The delta variant is sweeping through the country, with one in five intensive care units across the country at or above 95 percent capacity and seven states experiencing more hospitalizations than their prior peaks. [NYT / Albert Sun and Giulia Heyward]
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• For health care workers, the new surge is overwhelming and draining, particularly given that the vast majority of hospitalizations they see are among unvaccinated people. [Stat News / Lev Facher]
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• Forty-six states have seen double-digit growth in hospitalizations; nearly all the patients have contracted the delta variant and are unvaccinated. People who were finally getting care for non-Covid health conditions are being told to wait — again. [Washington Post / Frances Stead Sellers, Ariana Eunjung Cha, Hannah Knowles, and Derek Hawkins]
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• In Louisiana, hospitals are so full of Covid patients that people with other conditions have had to be treated at home. Hospital personnel believe they are days away from having to refuse transport to hospitals. [CBS News]
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• Florida, which has seen an explosion of cases, is also struggling with capacity. A viral photo of a clinic in Jacksonville shows patients waiting for monoclonal antibody therapy lying on the ground in pain, with the number of people exceeding the number of chairs. [Florida Times-Union / Katherine Lewin]
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• Alabama has a net negative number of ICU beds, causing patient traffic jams as people who've had heart attacks or been in car accidents have to be diverted to other hospitals. [Montgomery Advertiser / Melissa Brown]

 

Despite high vaccination rates, Israel is experiencing a Covid surge

• Two months ago, Israel seemed to have nearly stamped out the coronavirus, with case counts hovering at 200 per day. Now, with more than 50,000 active cases, the country is entering a new wave of infections. [The Times of Israel]
• The new rise in case counts — driven by the delta variant — suggests that the vaccine’s effectiveness is waning, particularly against the more contagious variant. [BBC News]
• The daily new case rate has doubled in two weeks, though vaccine shots — which 78 percent of eligible Israelis have received — are showing strong protection against severe cases, seemingly even more so for those with booster shots. 1.1 million Israelis having already received their third vaccine shot.  [The New York Times / Isabel Kershner]
• Experts say the situation in Israel is a warning to the rest of the world. Israel began its vaccine campaign in December 2020, meaning that early recipients have reached the eight-month mark in which some studies have shown  vaccine effectiveness begins to decrease. [Science / Meredith Wadman]
• Israel is now contending with the possibility of a new lockdown. The country also updated its travel list, banning travelers from hotspots and requiring a quarantine for most. [Haaretz]

Unvaccinated Americans say COVID vaccines are riskier than the virus, even as Delta surges among them

Andrew Romano

·West Coast Correspondent

Tue, July 20, 2021, 5:00 AM

YAHOO NEWS

When asked which poses a greater risk to their health, more unvaccinated Americans say the COVID-19 vaccines than say the virus itself, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll — a view that contradicts all available science and data and underscores the challenges that the United States will continue to face as it struggles to stop a growing “pandemic of the unvaccinated” driven by the hyper-contagious Delta variant.

The survey of 1,715 U.S. adults, which was conducted from July 13 to 15, found that just 29 percent of unvaccinated Americans believe the virus poses a greater risk to their health than the vaccines — significantly less than the number who believe the vaccines represent the greater health risk (37 percent) or say they’re not sure (34 percent).

Over the last 18 months, COVID-19 has killed more than 4.1 million people worldwide, including more than 600,000 in the U.S. At the same time, more than 2 billion people worldwide — and more than 186 million Americans — have been at least partially vaccinated against the virus, and scientists who study data on their reported side effects continue to find that the vaccines are extraordinarily safe.

A supporter of President Donald Trump on Jan. 5 holds an anti-vaccine sign at a protest at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. (Erin Scott/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Yet 93 percent of unvaccinated U.S. adults — the equivalent of 76 million people — say they will either “never” get vaccinated (51 percent); that they will keep waiting “to see what happens to others before deciding” (20 percent); or that they’re not sure (22 percent).

With Delta rapidly becoming dominant nationwide, U.S. COVID-19 cases have surged by 140 percent over the last two weeks. Hospitalizations and deaths — both lagging indicators — are up by one-third over the same period. Missouri, Arkansas, Nevada and Florida are being hit particularly hard, with hospitalization rates soaring to 2-3 times the national average. Nearly all of the Americans who are falling ill, getting hospitalized and dying — 99 percent, according to some estimates — are unvaccinated. And more than half the U.S. population (52 percent) has yet to be fully inoculated.

As the Delta variant surges among the unvaccinated and counties such as Los Angeles reinstitute indoor mask mandates to try to stave it off, Yahoo News and YouGov sought to understand why so many Americans continue to hold off on vaccination — and whether Delta’s rise might change any minds.

The results are complicated. Some unvaccinated Americans recognize the rising threat of Delta. The share who say they are worried about the variant has risen 9 percentage points (from 25 percent to 34 percent) since last month. Yet the share of unvaccinated Americans who say they are not worried about Delta is larger, and it has risen by nearly as much (from 31 percent to 39 percent).

As such, just half of the unvaccinated say Delta poses “a serious risk” to “all Americans” (33 percent) or “unvaccinated Americans” (17 percent); the other half says the variant doesn’t pose a serious risk to anyone (30 percent) or that they’re not sure (20 percent). In contrast, a full 85 percent of vaccinated Americans — and 72 percent of all Americans — say Delta poses a serious risk.

Yet while unvaccinated Americans are relatively dismissive of Delta’s dangers — which have been amply proven by massive outbreaks in India and elsewhere — they tend to apply a much lower bar to the COVID vaccines. Asked to pick the “most important reason” they haven’t been vaccinated, for example, few say they lack “easy access to vaccination” (4 percent), “can’t get time off from work” (3 percent), or “already had COVID” (9 percent). More say they’re not worried about getting COVID (12 percent) or — far more frequently — that they don’t trust the COVID vaccines (45 percent).

Anti-vaccine protesters gather at Indiana University's Sample Gates during a demonstration. (Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

But why? The most important reason, according to 37 percent of unvaccinated Americans, is that they’re “concerned about long-term side effects.” That’s followed by “I don’t trust the government” (17 percent), “The vaccines are too new” (16 percent), “The FDA hasn’t fully approved the vaccines yet” (11 percent) and “I don’t trust any vaccines” (6 percent).

The trouble for public health officials is twofold. First, despite the fact that there’s no precedent in the history of vaccines for severe side effects emerging several months after dosage, let alone several years — and no mechanism by which the COVID vaccines would trigger such side effects — it’s difficult to convince skeptics that this time won’t be different. Meanwhile, the pandemic is ongoing and the clock is ticking.

Second, when unvaccinated skeptics are asked to select “all” the reasons they don’t trust the COVID vaccines — as opposed to just the “most important” — many select all of them. Seventy percent say they’re concerned about long-term side effects; 60 percent say the vaccines are too new; 55 percent say they don’t trust the government; 50 percent say they’re concerned about short-term side effects; 45 percent say the FDA hasn’t fully approved the vaccines yet; 45 percent say they don’t trust drug companies; and 26 percent say they don’t trust any vaccines. Hesitancy, in other words, could turn into a game of whack-a-mole: address one concern and another just pops up to replace it.

Whether Delta’s impact softens any of this resistance remains to be seen. Fifteen percent of unvaccinated Americans say the spread of Delta makes them more likely to get vaccinated, particularly Democrats (34 percent) and Latinos (34 percent). Yet another 12 percent of unvaccinated Americans actually say Delta makes them less likely to get a shot, and 73 percent say it makes “no difference.”

Delving deeper, 20 percent of unvaccinated Americans say they would be “much more” (10 percent) or “somewhat more” (10 percent) likely to get vaccinated “if COVID cases start to rise among unvaccinated people in [their] area”; the same goes for rising local hospitalizations and deaths. Likewise, 27 percent of unvaccinated Americans say they’d be either much more (12 percent) or somewhat more (15 percent) likely to get vaccinated when the FDA fully approves the COVID vaccines, which are currently authorized for emergency use to combat the pandemic.

Full FDA approval isn’t expected until next year. COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths, on the other hand, are already rising. We’ll see if either makes a difference.

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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,715 U.S. adults interviewed online from July 13 to 15, 2021. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education based on the American Community Survey, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as well as 2020 presidential vote (or non-vote), and voter registration status. Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.7 percent.

 

Two COVID nations': Delta variant threatens sections of the country where vaccination rates lag

YAHOO

Alexander Nazaryan

·National Correspondent

Tue, June 22, 2021, 5:25 PM·5 min read

WASHINGTON — No state has been as successful in its vaccination effort as Vermont, with 64 percent of its population fully inoculated against the coronavirus. Other Northeastern states, including Massachusetts, Maine and Connecticut, are not far behind, with rates of about 60 percent of residents who have been fully vaccinated.

By contrast, only 28.9 percent of Mississippians are fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and only 31.9 percent of Alabamians (all figures come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Florida, one of the nation’s oldest and most populous states, has vaccinated only 44 percent of its population, even as the governor there, Ron DeSantis, takes a victory lap over his handling of the pandemic.

“We are all in this together” was a popular slogan during the pandemic’s earliest stage, when people applauded essential workers and bonded via Zoom. In truth, however, that sentiment may never have been accurate, given that the coronavirus hit some communities much harder than others. Today, togetherness has all but vanished, with parts of the country having come close to stopping community spread while other regions remain dangerously exposed to the pathogen, in particular its more transmissible Delta variant.

People register for a COVID-19 vaccination at a clinic in Hollandale, Miss. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

That variant, which emerged in India sometime this spring and recently became dominant in the U.K., slowing reopening there, is “the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top pandemic adviser to President Biden, said during Tuesday’s meeting of the White House pandemic response team. The strain is believed to be 60 percent more transmissible than the original version of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. Unvaccinated people are susceptible, but so are those who have received only the first of two vaccine doses.

Fully vaccinated people are about as protected from the Delta variant as they are from other versions of the virus.

The emergence of that variant could mean that while communities with high vaccination rates continue to return to normal, states where vaccinations lag could suddenly find themselves thrust into a new wave of infections and deaths.

“We’re emerging into two COVID nations,” Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, told Yahoo News. Hotez pointed to the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic region and the Pacific Coast as having successfully hit their immunization targets, but he said there are “concerningly low vaccination rates” elsewhere, “especially among young people in Southern states.” Young people infected with the Delta variant were behind the U.K.’s recent rise in cases.

Hotez predicted that those regions might see a resurgence of the coronavirus similar to the one experienced in the summer of 2020 in states like Florida, Texas, Georgia and South Carolina. Eventually, the entire nation became mired in a protracted third pandemic wave that began in the late fall and lasted until the spring of 2021.

Around the time that third wave ended, Joe Biden was president and his vaccination effort was gaining speed, with more than 4 million people vaccinated in a single day in early April. Nationwide, cases fell and kept falling — and then fell even further. Last week saw the fewest average deaths per day since March 27, 2020.

President Biden at the White House on Tuesday. (Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

But because each state is responsible for its own vaccination drive, the pace of recovery has not been even. So while Maryland (53.8 percent of residents fully vaccinated) has just enjoyed two straight days without a single reported coronavirus death, Missouri is seeing cases surge, with hospitalizations rising by 11 percent since June 1.

“We never imagined this big of an increase,” a Missouri hospital executive told CNN.

“There will be local-type, regional spikes and outbreaks,” Fauci said on Tuesday. “I don’t foresee what we refer to as a surge.” He added that “there is a danger — a real danger — that if there is a persistence of a recalcitrance to getting vaccinated that you could see localized surges.”

A recent analysis by Surgo Ventures found that states with the lowest vaccination rates also have populations that are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus, making for a potentially devastating combination.

One mitigating factor, however, is that some of the states now vulnerable to new surges have already experienced them before. “We must take natural immunity into account in our reporting,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California at San Francisco, told Yahoo News. Gandhi has pointed out that “reinfection” is rare, meaning that people who’ve had the coronavirus aren’t likely to get it again, since their immune systems make antibodies against the pathogen. Those antibodies tend to hang around and work against variants, including the dreaded Delta.

States with low vaccination rates, in other words, could have a buffer stemming from previous coronavirus cases. 

A couple enjoys a mask-free stroll along the pier in Huntington Beach, Calif. (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Of course, people freely move between states, meaning that an outbreak in, say, Georgia can easily find its way to Virginia. And even high-vaccination states have areas where inoculations have lagged, either because people there are hesitant or because outreach by public health officials has thus far been insufficient.

“We’re still ‘in this together’ in the sense that there’s no partition between states,” Washington, D.C., pediatrician Lucy McBride told Yahoo News. “We’re watching the regional variability of vaccine uptake dictate the final battlegrounds of the pandemic.”

Those battlegrounds could be states, counties, even neighborhoods. In Colorado, for example, rural Mesa County is seeing an outbreak fueled by the Delta variant and abetted by low vaccination rates there.

Fauci pointed out during Tuesday’s briefing that an obvious solution was at hand. “All of that is totally and completely avoidable by getting vaccinated,” he said.