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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

I'm a fully vaccinated Canadian, and it matters to me because the vaccines are effective against Delta, but seemingly only barely so— and the longer it continues to circulate the better a chance it has of evolving further and then us all having to go into lockdown and wait for another booster shot that specifically targets whatever the new vector is:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/3-princip...

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> the vaccines are effective against Delta, but seemingly only barely so

What data are you looking at? Even the waist pessimistic data - Israel - shows the vaccine working at great effectiveness.

Fair fair, yeah perhaps "barely" is excessively dramatic— this is mostly just going from coverage like that in the Atlantic piece:

> But even against Delta, full vaccination—with a heavy emphasis on full—is effective. Two doses of Pfizer’s vaccine are still 88 percent effective at preventing symptomatic Delta infections, according to a U.K. study, and 96 percent effective at preventing hospitalization. (A single dose, however, is only 33 percent effective at stopping symptomatic infection.)

It's the "still" in there— basically that Pfizer effectiveness was 95% against OG COVID, and now thankfully it's "still" 88% against delta, but much lower than that and we're back to a place where the vaccine alone is not enough, it would only be able to work in conjunction with other measures like limiting contact.

Yes, it will evolve further, but human ACE2 receptors aren't evolving rapidly within a generation any time soon. There's a metaphorical window of possible mutations that will allow SARSCov2 to bind to receptors and a huge swath of that window clearly is taken up by protection from vaccines (especially mRNA ones). There is a finite space in which it could still evolve _and_ evade vaccines. That space is likely _extremely_ small. "Too much" evolution renders it ineffective at infecting humans.

Do you have a reputable source which elaborates further on this discussion? My impression thus far is that few are willing to assert with the confidence you're displaying here that we're out of the woods once vaccinated.

Indeed, Pfizer has announced that it is working on a booster that specifically targets Delta, so that says to me that there is very much still a concern here:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/08/pfizer-says-it-is-developing...

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