As I am sure many of you are already aware, Israel was far out ahead of every other nation when it came to the vaccination of its citizens, and as a consequence has a much longer follow up on its vaccine recipients. The following is from a transcript of an interview with Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, Israel’s director of Public Health Services, that aired on Sunday, August 1, 2021, on “Face the Nation.”
(This piece is already long and so because of space constraints, I have not reproduced her entire interview, but it would be easy find the entire interview, if you suspected that I was selectively reproducing only parts of what she said.)
Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis:
“We are seeing about 50% of the people who are infected right now are vaccinated, fully vaccinated individuals. And so that is obviously of concern. Previously, we thought that vaccinated, fully vaccinated individuals are protected. We’re now see- we now see that the vaccine effectiveness against disease is roughly 40%. It still remains high for severe disease. But we are seeing diminished protection, especially for people who have been vaccinated earlier.
“And what we have been seeing in the past several weeks is actually an evidence that there is waning immunity. If we compare people both over the age of 60, but also between 16 to 59 who were immunized early on, so were fully vaccinated by the end of January, we see infection rate among them that is 90 per 100,000 which is double that of those who were fully vaccinated in March. So we see a drop in- in the vaccine effectiveness against disease for those who have been vaccinated early on. And we see it for both elderly people over the age of 60, but also for younger.
“I will- I have to explain that the decision to make a booster shot available is a combination of two. First is really the evidence of what we think is waning immunity and the difference between the infection rate between those who were vaccinated early on and those who were vaccinated later, but also the evidence that we have increased severe and critical condition in hospitalization with severe and critical conditions among the 60 and above population who are fully immunized. And that’s together with the fact that we are seeing lack of- lack of response to the vaccine over time has led us to suggest to people or actually allow them to be vaccinated a third time. So it’s- it’s not just the fact that we’re seeing more disease, but they’re getting to severe and critical conditions.
“We needed to check if vaccinated individuals can infect others. We know that they can be infected. We see them. They’re 50% of the confirmed cases on a daily basis now. But the question is whether they can infect others. And we actually saw that 80% of vaccinated individuals who have become confirmed cases themselves, 80% of them have zero contacts that have been confirmed and another 10% have- have only one contact that- that was confirmed to be a case because of their connection with this individual. So their ability to- to infect others is 50% lower than those who are not vaccinated.
JOHN DICKERSON: So just so I make it abundantly clear, those- you found that there is some very small amount of those who have been vaccinated who can spread, but it’s quite small. The majority of those have been vaccinated–
DR. ALROY-PREIS: Yeah.
JOHN DICKERSON:–you found are not spreading?
DR. ALROY-PREIS: Exactly, exactly. There is a spread among household contacts, but if we take household contacts out of the equation, the- the- the risk of a confirmed case who is vaccinated to infect others is about 10% for- to infect one other individual and lower than 10% to infect more than one.
From this interview I have two comments:
First; In my opinion, Dr. Alroy-Preis has just easily surpassed Dr. Fauci in terms of credibility.
Second; Is this waning effectiveness of the vaccine in Israel a predilection of things come here in the U.S?
If in fact this turns out to be the case, could it be that those at low risk for Covid-infection hospitalization or death, would be much better off in the long run, if they eschewed vaccination and took their chances, albeit very low, with getting the infection itself.
In my mind this should be a serious consideration.
8/7/21
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