South African variant can break through Pfizer vaccine, Israeli study says

It seems like this study has two groups of 400, so 800 people total, 1% of which had the South African variant, so 8 people. How can we draw any conclusions from this?

One of the authors explains the result a more clearly than the article[0]. The short version is that the headline makes the result sound much worse than it is, the reduced protection is offset by reduced fitness of the virus variant, and apparently there's significant protection +14 days after 2nd dose.

[0] https://twitter.com/SternLab/status/1380922920734711811

Not peer reviewed. Small numbers. Nothing to see here but FUD, move on.

Numbers from the article...

Israel Study (not peer reviewed yet):

  - size of study = 800 (infected with covid 19)
  - size of control (unvaccinated) = 400
  - size of vaccinated (1 or 2 shots) = 400
  - size of b.1.351 infected of those fully vaccinated (2 shots) = ? <= 21.6 (5.4%)
  - size of b.1.351 infected of those unvaccinated = 2.8 (.7%)

South Africa Study (not much info, group make up is not given):

  - size of participants = 800
  - participants infected with covid 19 = 9 (.7% of all participants) (all unvaccinated)
  - participants infected with b.1.351 = 6 (1.1% of participants)

It's really important to check sources. What Reuters isn't sharing is that they're quoting YNet. No one in this country takes that paper seriously. It's literally a garbage tabloid. They literally publish articles for the sake of publishing article updates. Their Hebrew articles say the exact reverse - that the Pfizer vaccine is very effective against the South African variant, yet still a garbage newspaper.

Original ynet English Article: https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/HJMpKyeLO

I'll need to dig up the study but this has been looked at. At the end of the day it doesn't matter if some fraction of people can still get sick what matters is the reduction.

I think that I've seen (again i need to dig good up) is the vaccines reduce likelihood of getting sick substantially. Much more important is the reduction of death and severe illness. Which I think most vaccines do well against.

Also in any case none of the variants have been so different that one would need a substantially different vaccine. So a variant vaccine can be produced much easier now

This stuff will never end... I give up with everything...

Unfortunately, the article doesn't tell us how many of the people had to be hospitalised. The vaccine may provide imperfect immunity against a variant, but still prevent the vast majority of serious cases in those people that get the variant despite being vaccinated.

Are there any studies or wisdom on getting multiple types of vaccines?

Be that as it may, Covid vaccines have a second line of defense by reducing the severity of the illness.

In other words if someone vaccinated gets a cough from Covid, that person has a very good chance to overcome it in a few days. Just isolate and sit it out.

To know this is extremely comforting, at least for me.

Quote: "The study, released on Saturday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine, against the same number of unvaccinated patients with the disease"

14 days is too early. Do the study properly, 21 days after the 2nd shot. Now you can claim that indeed the variant pierces through, otherwise I'd file this study under FUD.

'break through'???

It irks me that we call it the South African variant or the UK variant, but it was sooooo off limits to say China virus.

This is why there are already plans afoot for a third booster shot: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/third-pfizer-dose...

I haven't seen much press about this outside of South Africa, but our government just sold something like 1 Million AstraZenica vaccines (the first bulk order of vaccines we received) because of a local study showing they were ineffective here.

Then we ordered something like 10 million of the Pfizer to start again... Now this.

And you can guess which variant of the virus is doing the rounds here!

The study shows that the Pfizer vaccine given in Israel is having similar lower efficacy for the South Africa and Brazil variants as has been the case with other vaccines.

Unfortunate but kind of expected. Why would Pfizer be special?

well if there's still evolution skeptics I give up because people will now get to experience it in real-time. Any given strain that is even moderately resistant against vaccines will quickly become the dominant variant, and with enough new hosts evolve further, and so on and so forth.

If there was ever actually any hope of quelling the disease distancing measures would have been needed to be sustained throughout the vaccination campaign as to avoid having to roll to many dice.

The article uses the term COVID-19 sloppily.

It says,

"The study, released on Saturday, compared almost 400 people who had tested positive for COVID-19, 14 days or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine"

and

"The companies said on April 1 that their vaccine was around 91% effective at preventing COVID-19"

COVID-19 is the disease whereas testing checks for presence of portions of the virus. The Phase III clinical trials looked for symptomatic infection. Without details on the clinical progression of the vaccinated who tested positive, there's nothing to see here.

Also,

"But among patients who had received two doses of the vaccine, the variant’s prevalence rate was eight times higher than those unvaccinated - 5.4% versus 0.7%."

This indicates that if the immune system is primed to identify a certain variant, its performance is hindered as opposed to a naive immune system.

The actual paper is at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.06.21254882v... From what I can tell, the median age of the fully vaccinated is 61 and 46 for the unvaccinated. (table 1). And the comparison for the SA variant is between 8 in the former vs 1 in the latter. Sensationalist reporting.