(Arjun Walia) News of fully vaccinated individuals testing positive for COVID seem to be making headlines everywhere. For example, six people who tested positive in a Sydney hotel quarantine had already been fully vaccinated. According to data from NSW Health’s weekly COVID-19 surveillance report, between April 10 and May 1, six people in quarantine who reported being fully vaccinated were among the 150 overseas cases recorded. One had received a one-shot vaccine, such as Johnson & Johnson, and the remaining cases had received both doses of a two-shot vaccine, such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca or Moderna. University of Sydney epidemiologist Dr. Fiona Stanaway said, given no COVID-19 vaccine is 100 percent effective, it was to be expected that some people who have been vaccinated test positive.
Related The Top Four Reasons Why Many People, Doctors & Scientists Refuse To Take The COVID Vaccine
by Arjun Walia, May 12th, 2021
The New York Yankees recently announced that they had two coaches and one support staff member test positive for COVID despite all of them being fully vaccinated. In Seychelles, East Africa, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that on Tuesday it was reviewing coronavirus data in the region after the health ministry said more than a third of people who tested positive for COVID-19 in the past week had been fully vaccinated.
These are a few of many examples, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise as people have been warned throughout the pandemic that the full dosage of COVID vaccines will not be 100 percent effective. Canada’s Chief Public Health officer Teresa Tam, for example, recently reminded Canadians on Saturday that even those who are fully vaccinated are susceptible to COVID. She did say, however, that the risk of asymptomatic transmission is far lower for anyone who is fully vaccinated, but how much lower? What about asymptomatic individuals who are not vaccinated?
According to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University’s School of Medicine,
The scientific evidence now strongly suggests that COVID-19 infected individuals who are asymptomatic are more than an order of magnitude less likely to spread the disease to even close contacts than symptomatic COVID-19 patients. A meta-analysis of 54 studies from around the world found that within households – where none of the safeguards that restaurants are required to apply are typically applied – symptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 18 percent of instances, while asymptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 0.7 per cent of instances. A separate, smaller meta-analysis similarly found that asymptomatic patients are much less likely to infect others than symptomatic patients.
Asymptomatic individuals are an order of magnitude less likely to infect others than symptomatic individuals, even in intimate settings such as people living in the same household where people are much less likely to follow social distancing and masking practices that they follow outside the household. Spread of the disease in less intimate settings by asymptomatic individuals – including religious services, in-person restaurant visits, gyms, and other public settings – are likely to be even less likely than in the household. (source)
Something to think about.
It’s hard to say. In the United States, for example, the CDC makes it quite clear that “there will be a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19” and that “symptomatic breakthrough cases will occur, even though the vaccines are working as expected. Asymptomatic infections among vaccinated people also will occur.”
But the concern here is the fact that the CDC recently announced the following,
As previously announced, CDC is transitioning to reporting only patients with COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infection that were hospitalized or died to help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance. That change in reporting will begin on May 14, 2021. In preparation for that transition, the number of reported breakthrough cases will not be updated on May 7, 2021.
This means that people who get infected with COVID after being vaccinated will not be reported unless they are hospitalized or died. It begs the question, how can any appropriate data in the United States, for example, be collected regarding the effectiveness of the vaccine if those who test positive and have had the vaccine are not being reported?
It is a bit confusing, because the CDC is requiring that clinical specimens for sequencing should have an RT-PCR Ct value ≤28 when conducting tests for vaccinated individuals. “Ct” refers to cycle threshold. A common occurrence when using this test is a Ct value greater than 35, which makes the probability of “false positives” quite high. Why are they all of a sudden specifying a Ct value for vaccinated individuals? You can read more about that, in depth, here.
Why This Is Important: Prior to the rollout of these vaccines, the vaccine manufacturers claimed to have observed a 95 percent success rate. Dr. Peter Doshi, an associate editor at the British Medical Journal, published a paper titled “Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% effective” vaccines—let’s be cautious and first see the full data.” Even today, there is still not enough data to tell how effective the vaccine is.
A paper recently published by Dr. Ronald B. Brown, School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, outlines how Pfizer and Moderna did not report absolute risk reduction numbers, and only reported relative risk reduction numbers.
Unreported absolute risk reduction measures of 0.7% and 1.1% for the Pfzier/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, respectively, are very much lower than the reported relative risk reduction measures. Reporting absolute risk reduction measures is essential to prevent outcome reporting bias in evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine efficacy.
Brown’s paper also cites Doshi’s paper which makes the same point, “As was also noted in the BMJ Opinion, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna reported the relative risk reduction of their vaccines, but the manufacturers did not report a corresponding absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%.”
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About The Author
I joined the CE team in 2010 shortly after finishing university and have been grateful for the fact that I have been able to do this ever since :) There are many things happening on the planet that don’t resonate with me, and I wanted to do what I could to play a role in creating change. It’s been great making changes in my own life and creating awareness and I look forward to more projects that move beyond awareness and into action and implementation. So stay tuned :) arjun@collective-evolution.com
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