New Czech government plans to roll back the vaccine mandate for people 60 or over.
Guess they saw Germany and Austria succeeding with their mandate and went, “Nope we’re not gonna be smart like them!”
I guess this is connected to COVID declining rapidly here. Reproductive rate is currently 0.79. Pretty sure things will kick up soonish though.
That app is embarrassingly bad.
Couldn’t spring for a QR code I guess.
This could go into the poor media outlet choices thread, because the point about protection from severe illness should be the headline, and not preventing infections as well is much less important.
People being stupid and not reading the whole article are well-known things, though. As a communicator, it’s your job to take that into account and structure your writing so the most important information is understood clearly by the most people.
I’d say preventing infections is pretty important because of unvaccinated under 5s and higher probability for new variants, but we are well past the point where there’s any political will to do any mitigation strategies about that.
I guess I see the hierarchy of importance as:
It’s your lucky day! (pre-print, 26 people, etc)
(NEXSTAR) – Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University say they’ve found evidence to suggest that breakthrough infections create “super immunity” to the virus that causes COVID-19.
“You can’t get a better immune response than this,” senior author Fikadu Tafesse, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the OHSU School of Medicine, said in a news release. “These vaccines are very effective against severe disease. Our study suggests that individuals who are vaccinated and then exposed to a breakthrough infection have super immunity.”
Specifically, Tafesse and his team of researchers found that antibodies in the blood of a vaccinated person who experienced a breakthrough case could be 1,000% more effective than those found in some fully vaccinated individuals who did not get infected.
They further believe the antibodies generated from breakthrough cases are “likely” to be more effective against SARS-CoV-2 variants, though the researchers did not specifically examine their effectiveness against the omicron variant.
The study, however, examined blood samples from only 26 people with breakthrough cases — all of whom were OHSU employees, and all of whom had been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine. Still, when compared to a sample of 26 vaccinated employees who had not experienced breakthrough cases, the antibodies from the infected group were found to be in larger numbers, and “more effective at neutralizing the live virus.”
Study co-author Marcel Curlin, M.D., said the results may indicate an “eventual end game” for the pandemic.
“It doesn’t mean we’re at the end of the pandemic, but it points to where we’re likely to land: Once you’re vaccinated and then exposed to the virus, you’re probably going to be reasonably well-protected from future variants,” Curlin said.
They didn’t study vaccinated + boosted + natural infection. That might be super crazy insane immunity.
Which sounds great until an arm starts growing out of your head.
The article is about research results showing the decline in efficacy against infection. They did an article about research showing continued effectiveness against serious illness a few days ago, headlined as one would expect:
The NYT job is to sell media, get hits, whatever or however it is that they make money. The bit about the vaccines providing protection appears to be prominent, based on how the article displays here. (I can’t get to the full article.)
The federal and state govts should be waging a public service add campaign imo. That is their job, not the NYT or other media.
oh so there’s continued benefit towards serious illness now? Awesome!
Easier to wave at people so I can brag about my super elite immunity.
Yet another good data point that the efficacy of vaccines such as AZ has not been reduced to zero. Thank you for sharing.
Probably the NYT readers don’t really need to hear it again, but I can’t see a downside to not pushing forward the message that these vaccines still offer strong protection against serious health outcomes vs the omegatron variant.
We really need to switch over to talking about them akin to the way we talk about seasonal flu shots. People should at least be able to understand that.
The messaging on flu shots is terrible.