re: #45 Dread Pirate Ron

That small study out of Israel doesn’t say what is being implied.

Covid-19 Breakthrough Infections in Vaccinated Health Care Workers (New England Journal of Medicine, July 28, 2021)

Noting a couple things here:

Among 1497 fully vaccinated health care workers for whom RT-PCR data were available, 39 SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections were documented.

2.6% were detected having any disease at all post-vaccination.

They note this is the alpha variant of the virus being tested here.

Most breakthrough cases were mild or asymptomatic, although 19% had persistent symptoms (>6 weeks).

“Most” is a weasel-word, particularly bad in a scientific study. What is 19% of “most?” So of the 39 breakthroughs (and those are expected with any vaccine for any number of reasons), some part greater than 50% of the 39 had mild or asymptomatic disease. So less than 19 had symptoms beyond six weeks.

Conclusions

Among fully vaccinated health care workers, the occurrence of breakthrough infections with SARS-CoV-2 was correlated with neutralizing antibody titers during the peri-infection period. Most breakthrough infections were mild or asymptomatic, although persistent symptoms did occur.

We found some cases of persistence beyond six weeks, but no particular numbers.

From the results section:

Breakthrough Infections

Among 11,453 fully vaccinated health care workers, 1497 (13.1%) underwent RT-PCR testing during the study period. Of the tested workers, 39 breakthrough cases were detected. More than 38 persons were tested for every positive case that was detected, for a test positivity of 2.6%. Thus, this percentage was much lower than the test positivity rate in Israel at the time, since the ratio between positive results and the extensive number of tests that were administered in our study was much smaller than that in the national population.

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