Great news! I finally got my vaccination voucher from the City of Kobe! The voucher (which also serves as my vaccination card) features a 10-digit number that I will need to make an appointment to get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, Japanâs vaccination program has finally hit its stride, with about 20% (over 65: 51%) of the population now at one dose and a little over 9% (over 65: 17.5%) fully vaccinated. They are administering a good 700k to 1M doses per day. Still not in good shape for the Olympics, but these numbers have all doubled compared to a month ago.
More data here, with lots of links to primary data
In a nice succinct graphic
And to finish up today with a beautiful tear-jerker.
âIt has been such a good life.â
Not such a terrible epitaph, you know?
Who could have guessed that a vaccine would take care not only of COVID but also of that asshole?
Apparently half of the infected adults were fully vaccinated with the pfizer vaccine.
Yeah, this ainât good.
Somehow I think you wonât find this story on Fox
Where are you getting that? It doesnât seem to be in the linked article.
Youâre right, it wasnât mentioned in that article, but it has been reported elsewhere:
At the moment the numbers are still pretty low there compared to other countries, but itâs still a worrying trend.
Sorry, Iâd seen it elsewhere; had it been in that article I would have block-quoted that part instead of adding a comment from me.
The vaccine(s) do not prevent you catching Covid-19.
Theyâre not 100% effective, but mainly the vaccines do prevent getting infected. The evidence for that is pretty incontrovertible.
The article I posted doesnât say that many vaccinated people are getting infected, it says that many of the relatively small number of infected people in one country with a high vaccination rate have been vaccinated. Big difference.
The point is you can still be infected.
In most cases your immune system will fight off the infection. In some cases you will develop Covid-19 (hopefully mild) but you could still be infectious to others. In some cases you can still be infectious even while not developing any symptoms yourself.
I would urge to differentiate. @timd nails it in short.
Vaccination mainly prevent severe outcomes of an infection, there is very strong evidence for this. Scientific consensus is that they do not create sterile immunity, i.e. that they do not prevent infection.
However, some vaccines have been shown also to be effective against infection. The studies for that are sound, but are not as controlled as one would whish to call them incontrovertible evidence.
OTH, there are many reported cases of infection after vaccination. In general, individual factors including your individual immune response play an important role in creating immunity preventing infection.
Additionally, several variants show signs of so-called immune escape mutations, and evolution of the virus continues with every infection.
Delta is likely to have both a fitness mutation with even higher concentration of infectious viral particles in patients, and an immune escape mutation.
Not 100%, no. But for mRNA vaccines, the number cited (at least in regards to the early version) of 95% is very very good. The concern here is that they are less effective against more recent variants, specifically delta. I have seen numbers as low as 80%, but all are based on small studies and probably not entirely reliable. Incidentally, this phenomenon has also been put forth to explain the lesser effectiveness of J&J And AZ vaccines, which were trialed later, against more later variant viral populations. The fact is, the virus is a moving target, and the more opportunities we give it to adapt, the better it gets at avoiding our efforts to contain it.
