That’s the headline.įor a much more technical take on the efficacy of the vaccines against variants, see virologist Florian Krammer’s long thread. It makes people think the vaccine is six times less effective against the new variants (FALSE!) when the news today is *excellent*: The vaccine continues to work well against the new variants. Plea to media: this isn’t a good headline. People whose job it is to worry about it are on it & we just got confirmation: it works against the variants. That does NOT mean the vaccine is six times less effective. I get it, we want to understand but not how it works. Let’s focus on getting through these months - better masks if indoors with others, more strict attention to our precautions - and the real problem: making more of these amazing vaccines quickly & getting them out there! I know people are tired but needless anxiety isn’t helping us. In a Twitter thread, Zeynep Tufekci is tearing her hair out because of the media’s misunderstanding and sensationalization of the “sixfold drop”. We have miraculously developed a near-perfect medicine for a plague that has significantly disrupted all human life on Earth and we’re flipping out over some technical details that the experts assure us don’t mean much in terms of overall effectiveness?! No thank you. 1 That’s the important news here, that’s the very good news, that’s what you should be taking away from this. Let’s hear that again: “Both the Moderna vaccine and the immunization from Pfizer-BioNTech produce such powerful levels of immune protection…” These vaccines are so good, so potent, that even this sixfold drop in one measure of the vaccines’ ability to neutralize this one SARS-CoV-2 variant isn’t even enough to significantly reduce their overall protective power. infectious diseases official, said Monday on the “Today” show. “There is a very slight, modest diminution in the efficacy of a vaccine against it, but there’s enough cushion with the vaccines that we have that we still consider them to be effective,” Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. This is the important bit, via Stat:īoth the Moderna vaccine and the immunization from Pfizer-BioNTech produce such powerful levels of immune protection - generating higher levels of antibodies on average than people who recover from a Covid-19 infection have - that they should be able to withstand some drop in their potency without really losing their ability to guard people from getting sick. This is, to put it plainly, a bullshit take on what is actually excellent news. You probably read something yesterday, maybe just a headline, about Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine being “six times less effective” against the B.1.351 coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa.

People are amazing