45% of all #DeltaVariant deaths in England🏴 in the past 1 week (June 8-14th) where among those fully vaccinated with 2 doses & post +14 days. Total Delta #COVID19 deaths up +31 in one week—of 31, 14 deaths in fully vaxxed. #Delta breakthrough concerning🧵
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk
2) To be clear, this is still a large benefit of vaccination. But we cannot say for certain that #DeltaVariant is “nothing to worry” about anymore. It is much faster transmission & 2.5x greater hospitalization risk than #Alphavariant which implies 4x hospitalization vs original.
3) We have to be worried when we see such numbers and the exponential rise of #DeltaVariant worldwide — especially in low vaccinated countries, and under vaccinated parts of US that are vaccine hesitant.
4) We are seeing a lot more #DeltaVariant related breakthrough infections. Israel is also heavily 2 dose vaccinated country too—with Pfizer no less. And it’s seeing more Delta #COVID19 school outbreaks too, and breakthroughs in teachers. Must be vigilant.
haaretz.com
haaretz.com
5) Thinking about these tricky breakthrough deaths, from talking to many other experts I’ve conferred, is that a combination of age related waning of immunity as well as immunocompromised individuals not having sufficient vaccine immunity responses—creates a pool of vulnerable.
6) Canadian federal government has now just declared that AZ is inferior to mRNA vaccines, thus advocating to people to switch to Pfizer and Moderna. Not a peep on J&J 1-shot regimen. (note- J&J is in same adenovirus-vector family as AZ, but J&J has special double-proline splint)
7) The reason we don’t know about J&J is that unlike AstraZeneca, J&J is an enhanced spike vaccine with a “double proline” encode to splint & stabilize the spike protein—Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax has this special enhancement as well. *AstraZeneca does not*. cen.acs.org
8) Thus, J&J is unique. It doesn’t quite fit in with adenovirus vector AstraZeneca due to double-proline difference, and it doesn’t fit in with protein based Novavax, nor mRNA like Pfizer or Moderna. It’s hard to infer what J&J efficacy is—or what to do about it being 1 dose.
9) Vaccine effectiveness against #DeltaVariant according to @PHE_uk — averaging AstraZeneca & Pfizer together (even if different), you can see a substantial drop for 1 dose. But even 2 doses has a ~8% drop as well. Also AZ’s 2 dose is actually 60%.
10) Problem for UK is that while over half of adults are fully vaccinated, 2/3 of all shots are the 60% 2-dose efficacy AstraZeneca vaccine.
11) Doing the math, @GosiaGasperoPhD says we can only stop the fast #DeltaVariant if we have >90% efficacy vaccine used by 70% of the total population (not just by adults). But no country on Earth is at that level yet for 2 doses, and with 90% efficacy for Delta. That’s the worry
12) In addition to deaths, 10% of all hospitalizations in the UK last week were among those fully 2 dose vaccinated. This is not a small handful of breakthroughs anymore.
(Sidenote- hospitalizations is much larger numbers than deaths - more stable (less prone to fluctuations).
(Sidenote- hospitalizations is much larger numbers than deaths - more stable (less prone to fluctuations).
13) Not just severity and vaccine breakthroughs, but #DeltaVariant is also incredibly transmissible via just “fleeting” short casual exposure. Several documented and proven cases of such short “seconds” long exposures from Australia 🇦🇺 detailed tracing. See thread 🧵
14) I would like to point out that while UK has more 1st dose than Israel, it is only 46% vaccinated (~2/3 of which is AstraZeneca), which is decent but not remotely enough to remove mitigations as shown above, for stopping #DeltaVariant via vaccine alone. ourworldindata.org
15) If you think you don’t need the vaccine or the 2nd dose… you’re not paying attention to the #DeltaVariant that is coming up in multiple countries.
16) Dr Fauci warned recently: “The problem you get into … is that a single dose only provides about ~30% effectiveness [against #DeltaVariant]—so that is really an issue you gotta be careful”. Fauci seems to clearly push 2 doses against #DeltaVariant now.
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