Latest COVID Vaccine Stats

We break down the stats from no dose to 3rd dose
Bottom line: Vaccines work amazingly well

I am using this short post to summarize gobs of recent data on the effectiveness of vaccines. Sources from UK to Israel to Pfizer to Moderna to CDC. Unless you read all this data daily its hard to formulate a summary. So that’s all this is. With varying data sources, I attempted to provide a unified general summary. This is not a peer reviewed research paper. I am not a doctor. I am not suggesting you do anything other than get vaccinated. this is just a post to help people better understand and internalize the data, in general, with charts. We can pick apart each and every data point as to its source and vaccine. But I’d rather you consider these as representative of the range of outcomes reported from multiple sources.

Note that some sources show slightly different data than others. And some vaccines work better and longer than others (Moderna for one). But in general, these charts will help you understand how powerful COVID vaccines are in preventing death, and also how they wane over time protecting from infections but still protect against death.

If you want absolutes, please read the source data from Israel and Pfizer which are easily found on the web and also get updated. this is not a replacement for that.

Let’s start with the overall odds of being infected in the USA today. Even if that protection has waned in the past few months. Here we account for todays current breakthrough infections which are as high as 20% in some areas now. This includes data for known tested cases only from the beginning of COVID and not unknown infections. It’s likely that the total infected numbers would be far higher.

Obviously looking at the above chart even today, with Delta and waning antibodies you’d much rather be vaccinated than not. For this I used recent county and state data on breakthrough infections and extrapolated the whole infection number to vaccinated people and DELTA. If you are qualified, getting the 3rd dose provides even more protection (11X lower infection rate was reported by Israel), at least statistically. There is simply no case to not be vaccinated, save some very rare potential vaccine allergy. A religious exemption is folly and makes no sense in a world where I am certain your religion would wish you to survive rather than perish.
Now you might not realize your real world chances of getting COVID as a vaccinated person are quite low given the headlines (1 in 38) . But it’s quite low, even with waning antibodies.

What about the chance of being hospitalized today? In the end that’s what we really care about.

As the FDA recently noted, current 2-dose vaccines protect against hospitalization very well. Only 1/2000 vaccinated people are hospitalized and that drops to 1/25,000 with a 3rd dose. 1 in 2000. Again, kind of flies in the face of everyday headlines but it’s actually very rare. This is indeed a pandemic of the unvaccinated. It’s clear why the priority is to get unvaccinated people vaccinated. Because that is the big step function in reducing hospitalizations.

Ok so I get COVID today. If we only care about death from COVID what are my odds? Very good odds to live if you have been vaccinated. Only about 1/1000 infected vaccinated people die from COVID. That’s equivalent to the flu. A 3rd dose statistically drops that to about 1/100,000, though the data pool is small so far.

Note that the risk of death in a vaccinated person is less than 1/1000 and likely less than 1/5000. There are so few deaths in vaccinated people, and it’s reported that the majority are immunocompromised people meaning that even with a vaccine they are unable to produce a sufficient number of antibodies. Of course, there are exceptions which we all read about. But dying from COVID post vaccination is rarer than dying from flu. And we don’t really think about seasonal flu as a killer.

So, what’s the chance of getting COVID if you sit next to someone for 15min+ indoors who has DELTA? We can interpret the various data to form an educated guess on this. Of course, it depends on how infected that person was and dozen other factors. But assuming all is the same, there is a noted roll-off of infection-protecting effectiveness based on data from Israel and Pfizer. Moderna performs better statistically than any other vaccine, which given the 3X higher doses isn’t a Big Surprise. But the data below is based on Pfizer in Israel.

While very effective in preventing an infection at 14 days post dose, the data is far different in 8mos. This is almost certainly due to the reduction in antibodies (which can act quickly against viral proteins). But the effectiveness against serious disease is still quite intact with T cells and B cells which take longer to react but in the end do the job of protecting you from death.

T cell and B cell lymphocytes work together to recognize antigens. T cells and B cells are sometimes called the “special ops” of the immune system. BUT they take several days to kick back in. Great at protecting from death. But not great at attacking viral proteins in the first hours. So you get little to no protection from infection but strong protection from death. So, its fine that antibodies have diminished as long as all you care about is serious disease. But if you care about spread, you want maximum antibodies at the ready.

Note that the Polio vaccine is given in 4 doses over time in order to convince your body to have antibodies at the ready for life. So we might assume that if we want to stop COVID spread we may need 3 or 4 doses and perhaps annual boosters for variants.

We now know that a 3rd dose of mRNA vaccines for COVID reduced infection rate by 11X over the 8mo infection rate, suggesting perhaps around a 4% chance of infection when exposed in the same manner.

Pfizer measured this roll off in detail and published the data in late July. They tracked the antibody levels in blood from 7 days after 2nd dose to 8mos after 2nd dose. And then gave those people a 3rd dose to see the response.

You can see that protection falls by 80% (as measured in antibody titers) against DELTA over the 8 months. That does not equate to an 80% increase in infection rate since you don’t need all those antibodies to protect you from infection. However, one gains enormous additional antibody titers from a 3rd dose. Against DELTA it’s 20X over your 8mo old antibodies and almost 4X what you had at the peak of antibody protection 7 days after your 2nd dose.

SUMMARY

Vaccines protect you immensely from serious illness. Even after 8 months. This is not an arguable but a knowable. Risk of death from COVID is lower than the flu. Job one is for everyone to be vaccinated. Period. That’s the fastest way to get cases and hospitalizations under control.

A 3rd dose, at least for now, makes you pretty much immune from infection, serious illness, and death.

I’d expect a 4th dose and perhaps annual boosters. Like the flu.

COVID is here forever. Statistically we will all get COVID in our lifetimes like we all get the common cold (also a coronavirus). But it won’t matter. As it can be effectively managed with vaccines to where the annual loss of life is perhaps 1/10th that of the flu or less. And that we can (and will) live with.