The impact of vaccine refusal in the US

[MareofBeasttown]

www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/health/coronavirus-vaccine-refusal.html

Requires subscription. What is the impact? Maybe you could add a few words to your post since this is a discussion forum.

I don't have a subscription and was able to click through? Odd.

Anyway, as infections begin to increase in the US again, the writer writes the following:

Every infected person, anywhere in the world, offers the coronavirus another opportunity to morph into a new variant. The more infections there are globally, the more likely new variants will arise.

The United States will be vulnerable to every one of them until it can immunize millions of people who now refuse to get the vaccine, are still persuadable but hesitant, or have not yet gained access. The unvaccinated will set the country on fire over and over again.

Oh I just got blocked. Found the article elsewhere though. Nothing new really. Didn't realise uptake was so low in the US mind. I get the premise of what they're saying but from what I've seen the vaccines don't stop you getting covid or spreading it. I know people keep saying it Greatly reduces the chances but that's not what I'm seeing in RL. We already know AZ doesn't give great protection against delta. I think future variants will likely evade the vaccines and we will need new updated vaccines anyway.

I didn’t realise the uptake was so patchy

We get criticism a lot of the time but we do have good uptake

I find the fire / burning stuff a bit much but maybe that type of writer

Link copied from another thread:

www.al.com/news/2021/07/im-sorry-but-its-too-late-alabama-doctor-on-treating-unvaccinated-dying-covid-patients.html

I have been reading the writer for a while and find her quite measured.

I am not so sure about that Alabama link, as I think it has been debunked elsewhere?

Some states have really low uptake.. it’s so sad. There is no doubt Covid will find those people.

Large unvaccinated swathes of the US population may not be their only problem though. They've followed a 3 week gap between doses as was originally recommended by Pfizer/Moderna, and the data coming out of Israel shows that their population (also nearly exclusively vaxxed with Pfizer) is exhibiting rapidly dropping levels of vaccine effectiveness. So that for people vaccinated in January the effectiveness has dropped to just 16%. This is very problematic. Fortunately in the UK our controversial decision to lengthen the dose gap to 8-11 weeks has been probably one of the few good decisions made during this pandemic, as for our population vaccine effectiveness is still reasonably high for those vaxxed in January.

See Dr John Campbell's video for more details:

So yes, the US has more than one problem to face over the coming months.

I am not so sure about that Alabama link, as I think it has been debunked elsewhere?

Has it? Where? I got it from a Biden/Trump thread and regular posters on there (which it was) are generally very reliable in their links.

"We already know AZ doesn't give great protection against delta."

I would say that 92% could be described as 'great protection' even if slightly lower than Pfizer's 96% on some studies. See also real life results coming out of Canada.

@amicissimma I agree with you.

@CrunchyCarrot - that’s not entirely true though is it. There’s a potential drop in protection against getting infected. We already know the vaccine isn’t there to stop us catching. The vaccine is still showing to be 90% effective against serious illness, which is hardly bad news!

The vaccine is still showing to be 90% effective against serious illness, which is hardly bad news!

It's very good news - if you think back a year there were no approved vaccines, only trials! But there are enough unvaccinated in the US to cause problems and even vaccinated people going in for a day or so to their local hospital could still put so much pressure on resources. I guess we'll find out! Hope I'm wrong.