The New England Journal of Medicine has a brief article on the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines against the common variants, including DELTA.
They work!
There you have it in @NEJM.
Pfizer is ~90% effective against delta. AstraZeneca is ~70%. This is similar to effectiveness against other variants, including alpha.
Vaccines work, even against variants.
Get vaccinated if you haven't already.https://t.co/FV1Rr5fiVa
— Dr. Angela Rasmussen (@angie_rasmussen) July 22, 2021
Mask up.
Vax up.
And help other people do the same.
Cheryl Rofer
Much too much is made about the delta variant. It’s been shown to be twice as transmissible. Other claims, as far as I can see, have not been supported.
The current surge started about three weeks ago. Things opened up three weeks ago. Masks were doffed. If we’re blindly linking causes and effects, we might throw that in the mix.
There’s no way, mathematically, to separate the causes of the surge. Blaming it all on delta takes away our agency. Forget delta.
Mask up.
Vax up.
And help other people do the same.
Matt McIrvin
The AstraZeneca is more like the J&J vaccine, a viral-vector vaccine (but two-dose, so results don’t necessarily carry over).
I’ve been basically assuming that results for the Pfizer vaccine will be approximately applicable to the Moderna, since they’re so functionally similar and seem to perform similarly in all regards so far.
eclare
I tried to read the article before asking, but I couldn’t figure it out. Should I assume Moderna effectiveness is similar to Pfizer?
Jeffery
There is some studies being done on people with long covid getting the vaccine and feeling better. They are in early stages and how long this will help is unknown as is a lot about long covid. Long covid will be the next challenge the world is going to have to deal with.
Ohio Mom
I am vaccinated of course but I am also counting on my lifestyle to keep me on the safer side: stay-at-home slug.
dmsilev
@eclare: In the absence of evidence to the contrary, that’s a reasonable assumption. They’re very similar in design and function.
Edit: the study just looked at Pfizer and AstraZeneca. From the paper abstract,
BNT is Pfizer/BioNTech, and ChAdOx is Oxford/AstraZeneca. For both vaccines, the takeaway is that one dose alone is not very effective, but the two-dose series is.
Matt McIrvin
@eclare: The takeaway is that for those two vaccines, effectiveness against getting sick from Delta is not that different from with previous versions of COVID… if you have all the shots. There’s a bigger drop in effectiveness if you’re only half-vaxxed.
It’s a British study so they didn’t look at the Moderna; they don’t use it there. I figure it’s very similar to the Pfizer in all respects so far–there’s no reason to suspect any big difference between the two.
Spanky
Bummer that they didn’t test ModeRNA. So I looked it up:
Not as quantitative as I’d like, nor can a direct comparison be made, but it’s what I found
ETA: That ellipsis in there is where a lot of the baseline info is restated, most of which we’ve gone through on this blog. But please hit the link if you’re curious.
PenAndKey
And here I am stuck with the J&J shot, because it was the only one available at the time, wondering when my doctor/hospital will change policy and let J&J recipients get one of the mRNA shots because while we won’t die from COVID our protection from actually catching it is abysmal compared to the two-shot recipients.
MattF
Derek Lowe comments on recent J&J news. Anecdata from here in Maryland, where there is a significant fraction of J&J shots, is that the vaccine is effective at preventing serious cases.
eclare
@dmsilev: Thank you! Yes, I have had both shots.
eclare
Deleted
Cermet
Wondering: since pretty much everyone – most especially unmasked – are likely to get the new covid at some point in a year, isn’t it better to get it sooner rather than later since immunity might fade with time? Once a vaccinated person gets covid the body mounts an all out attack destroying it (for like 97% of the people. And those 3% are likely immune compromised.) That is like getting a booster shot. So, should most of us remained masked?
Cermet
@MattF: J&J is extremely good at preventing serious illness and certainly preventing death, from all the data I’ve seen.
Cheryl Rofer
@Cermet: If you’re okay with the possibility of long covid, go ahead and unmask.
Matt McIrvin
@MattF: love that Twitter discourse:
“Yes, you may have heard A, but there’s more to the story if you consider B and C”
reply guy: “ACTUALLY, A”
Cermet
@Cheryl Rofer: So there is data indicating that occurs? That is bad news if so since most vaccinated people will likely get the delta covid.
Matt McIrvin
@Cermet: I think this is the kind of too-clever-by-half reasoning that gets people in trouble. While getting COVID while vaxxed will likely not land you in the ICU, I don’t think the long-term effects are sufficiently well-understood that people ought to go out of their way to get it. I’m basically assuming that if there are signs of a significant decline in immunity, we’ll end up getting boosters.
I did some stuff in June that I probably wouldn’t do now. My current feeling for how to live while vaxxed in the presence of Delta is: don’t be a prisoner in your house, do mask up in indoor or crowded public situations. Indoor restaurant dining, eh, I’m not too keen on it at this point, but people are going to have different risk tolerance.
Matt McIrvin
@Cermet: Nobody really knows. I’ve heard people connect the dots of “most vaxxed people will probably get infected eventually” with “some large fraction of people with mild COVID have long-term damage” and conclude, oh my God, 50% of the entire population will get brain damage (or whatever) and the vaccine won’t protect us. But all the long COVID cases I’ve personally heard about so far have been people who caught it unvaccinated. Most doctors seem to be assuming that vaccination is to some degree protective against long COVID but the solid data just aren’t there.
Spanky
@Matt McIrvin:
Yet. Let’s keep in mind that we’re not that long into Long Covid.
Also, recollecting what I read some time ago, coupled with anecdata from infected cousins; vaccination significantly reduced long covid symptoms in early-infected people. So it looks like the vaccines may significantly reduce long covid if we vaccinated people catch a variant.
Robert Sneddon
@Matt McIrvin: The Moderna vaccine is in use in the UK but very few doses were initially ordered and only some of that has been delivered and deployed. This means there isn’t a large number of people vaccinated with Moderna to give significant results compared to the much larger numbers of people vaccinated in the UK with the Pfizer and OxfordAstraZeneca vaccines.
The J&J vaccine also has approval for use in the UK. Orders for a large number of doses have been placed but none of these have yet been received or deployed.
Robert Sneddon
@Cheryl Rofer:
There’s a report by Chinese researchers, working with an admittedly limited number of cases, who compared the results of testing people in quarantine after exposure but before they were symptomatic. The two groups sampled were each about sixty people.
The first group was tested over a year ago, before the Delta variant existed, providing baseline data for comparison. The second group was tested recently with the researchers looking specifically for Delta variant cases.
The first group’s SARS-CoV-2 positive cases were detected six days from exposure, the second group’s Delta variant cases were detected at four days, two days earlier. The viral loads of the individual Delta variant cases in the second group were over a thousand times greater than the first group’s viral loads of original SARS-CoV-2.
It’s one report and its limited sample size can be considered problematic but if it’s in any way correct we have the double-whammy of Delta being infectious earlier into the asymptomatic development of the disease as well as producing more viruses per individual. These are big evolutionary advantages to any virus and even more reason to take precautions.
Matt McIrvin
@Cheryl Rofer: I’ve mostly been staring at numbers for Massachusetts, and it seems to me that people’s behavior really changed at the end of May (when the CDC revised their mask guidance) but COVID infections were still dropping in this nice exponential way until about the last week of June. Up to that point, just having a fairly high level of vaccination was enough to control it. After that, it wasn’t, and according to most models, that was also the exact moment when Delta overtook Alpha here.
So I think Delta probably was the independent variable. But regardless, behavior should change. I thought the CDC’s unmasking announcement was a bad idea at the time and it pretty clearly was.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
I’ve had both the Moderna and Pfizer vax, both shots of each. I’m truly disappointed that I’m not Magneto, nor do I have a premium cable package running in my head.
Matt McIrvin
Like I said earlier, I think the Provincetown outbreak is the clearest sign so far that under current conditions, vaccination (1) protects well against severe disease, but (2) isn’t anything like a guarantee that you won’t get and transmit infection (though it probably cuts the chances down). Almost all the infections in Provincetown are breakthroughs in fully vaccinated people (because almost everyone there is vaccinated). They’re generally pretty mild, but they’re painting Barnstable County bright red on the maps. All it seemed to take was a lot of mostly vaxxed people cramming into restaurants unmasked. The risk for an *unvaccinated* person in the vicinity would be quite high.
Cheryl Rofer
@Robert Sneddon: Agree. That’s the kind of data I’m seeing, don’t know if it’s that particular study or not, but there are not a lot of studies on this so far.
As I said, delta seems to be more transmissible. But we’ve also removed some of the social protections. Not a good combination.
Cheryl Rofer
@Matt McIrvin: My experience in modeling tells me there are too many variables in play to say it’s one or the other. How about we just put the protections back in place?
ETA: It’s probably both.
burnspbesq
@PenAndKey:
I doubt that CVS or Walmart will deny you the good stuff just because you got J&J.
Big G
@Cheryl Rofer: I have been tracking and modeling our local county data since last year, accounting grossly for under testing early and vaccinations lately, to back out an R factor. Prior to the initial lockdowns in March 2020, we were running at R=3.1 . The onset of masking dropped this to between 1 and 2 for over a year. It started rising to 2.5 to 3 about 3 weeks ago, after Abbot dropped the mask order, so I think before there was significant delta variant in the area. So definitely there was an observable effect from behavior changes- but if you look only a new cases this was masked by the vaccination effect.
Mel
@Spanky: Thanks for this link / information. Much appreciated!
debbie
@Robert Sneddon:
NPR reported on this study this morning. If anyone wanted more info, they could listen to the audio at NPR’s site.
Mel
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Perhaps if you encounter another double vaccinated individual, both of you will suddenly be able to activate your Wonder Twin powers, and take the shape of / form of whatever tickles your fancy. Sky’s the limit!