Highly Vaccinated Israel Is Seeing a Dramatic Surge in New Covid Cases

Oops. Yes.

Best case, the Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective at preventing serious illness and death. This has been known since the beginning.

If you vaccinate 100% of the total population, you'll find that 100% of hospitalised and dead patients have been fully vaccinated.

TL;DR: This is only concerning if one doesn't properly grasp statistics. Most of us (self included) fail at this.

You're misrepresenting the situation. As the article says, only 58% of the population is vaccinated. Only 78.8% of the eligible population is vaccinated.

The vaccinated folks are mostly old people and people with comorbidities, and the unvaccinated are mostly young and healthy people, so you're not comparing like for like.

In addition to the clear example of Simpson’s paradox presented here: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-... , I offer you the following intuition: if only 4 people in Israel were unvaccinated and 2 were in the hospital with 2 vaccinated patients, would you consider the vaccine effective? It’s important to look at the right numbers.

You're getting down voted because you're falling into a statistical fallacy. For example, If 100% of the population was vaccinated, by definition 100% of those in the hospital would be vaccinated. That gives you no information on the effectiveness of the vaccine itself.

>the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) was nine times more than the rate among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) was a little more than double the rate among vaccinated people in that age bracket.

From the article. Emphasis is mine.

in principle you shouldn’t be downvoted if you’re adding to the conversation, and whilst i don’t agree with your overall thesis, i think you have a valid concern.

the OP’s statistics line up with the assertion that vaccines are certainly effective. if they weren’t, we’d expect to see similar proportions of vaccinated peoples hospitalised with covid.

certainly, the vaccines have lost some of their efficacy. it can probably be attributed to “slow” rollout, and - probably more significantly - vaccine hesitancy/denial. israel’s high rollout percentage is relatively meaningless in the global context, unfortunately. the virus has more chances to interact with vaccinated individuals. in a similar fashion to not finishing antibiotics, it was inevitable that the virus would mutate to overcome the existing vaccines at some level.

at this point, our only hope is that vaccines will at least make the virus less lethal. it’s not the ideal outcome, but given everything that’s happened thus far, i think it’s the best we can hope for.

If 100% of all people are vaccinated that 100% of all hospitalization would be from vaccinated people. That says nothing about effectiveness of the vaccines.

78.8% of the population we're talking about here are vaccinated.

I got vaccinated over 6 months ago. I'm getting my booster later today. It seems that those who were vaccinated more recently are more likely to be protected against delta as well.

> I will get downvoted... but really,

Can we pelase just automatically downvote all posts starting like this?

Not sure what “sterilising immunity” is but the vaccines appear to reduce likelihood you will get Covid (not completely make you immune). If you then get it you are much less likely to end up in ICU or die, you may go to hospital though.

It's a statistical effect called Simpson's Paradox. The 60% is nothing to be worried about.

https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...

https://twitter.com/jsm2334/status/1427465566210695178

If 100% of people were immunized then 100% of hospitalizations would be vaccinated people. This doesn’t mean vaccines aren’t effective.

That's news to me, I seem to remember news stories from last year that people were being infected multiple times and the immunity from having endured COVID-19 was not actually that good. Quickly trying to look this up with 'covid-19 reinfection' as query (trying to avoid confirmation bias in that search), the top hit on DDG is the USA CDC which writes:

> Among Kentucky residents infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, vaccination status of those reinfected during May–June 2021 was compared with that of residents who were not reinfected. In this case-control study, being unvaccinated was associated with 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with being fully vaccinated. --https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm

Reinfection occurs much more frequently if you don't get vaccinated, if I am reading this right. Not sure I'd call "natural" immunity "also" or "incredibly" effective.

By natural immunity I think you meant to say disease induced immunity. Just to be clear about what that actually entails.

Here's a very quick summary of what I linked above: In Israel it would be easy to look at the data and conclude that vaccines are providing ~67% efficacy against severe disease/death.

But, once the data is broken down into buckets that help address confounding variables (i.e. different vaccination rates among different age groups), things look very different. All of a sudden efficacy numbers are looking better than 90% for a lot of people.

This will similarly matter a great deal as people try to figure out how long vaccines provide protection. The groups that got vaccinated the earliest in many places were older people and health care workers -- groups which start out at higher risk, and also have a higher probability of less effective immune response to vaccines (older people).

As a result of that, it will be easy for analysts that don't consider that issue to under-estimate the effective time period of vaccines.

The archive.is link you provided isn't working for me at the moment, but to address your statement in the context of the above framework:

The group of people most likely to have been infected with the virus are not the same as the group of people most likely to have antibodies as a result of immunization. In many places, there are a lot more younger people who have gotten infected with the disease than older people. There are other socioeconomic and behavioural differences too.

Given that young people tend to have a more effective immune responses to begin with, and given that they have been shown to have better outcomes after being infected with this virus, it's easy to see a way to incorrectly conclude that stronger immunity results from infection-acquired antibodies, even if the opposite may be true.

In short: Apparent differences may be better explained by the fact that it's a different group of people who have been infected vs those who have not been infected.

Just off the top, pieces of the puzzle missing...

We have no idea how complete "known to have recovered" is where as the vaccinated population is well known.

It also doesn't say how "known to have recovered" as well as vaccinated is being calculated.

I'm also not sure what the relevance is given the comparative deadliness of the vaccine and "natural" immunity.

Edit: That's actually another statistic issue. You need to consider the "known to have not recovered." The population of "known to have recovered" is itself a biased selection of those with stronger immunities than the general population.

I've stopped trying to attribute infection rates to other statistics, especially individual ones. There seems to be very little rhyme or reason to the incidence. Sometimes there is a very clear mistake made, like in the Netherlands they opened up night clubs and bars and suddenly we had the fastest-growing wave so far and anyone outside of 15-25 years old wasn't even participating. But most of the time it's really not so clear what is causing or preventing infections without rigorous research. At a minimum, one should also be looking at test rates and incentives to not get tested (needing to go into quarantine iirc in many countries, having to pay €40 just for a single low-quality nose test as of Oct 1st in the Netherlands, those sorts of things), since merely the incidence does not tell the full story. Then there are weather changes (temperature, humidity, time spent meeting others indoors vs. outdoors), avoidance of close contact or travel, face mask requirements, adherence to rules and recommendations, etc.

that's a very different take on the situation than what israel experts were saying just a few months ago. They reopened everything thanking the vaccine for that, and being happy of being the first country to heavily bet on mass vaccination. (note that the country is closed to people who don't have a pass, and people have to quarantine when they arrive).

It looks a bit like they're changing the narrative now that the next wave is coming, saying vaccination rates aren't high enough after all (i'm curious to see one expert provide a definitive number on the "good enough" threshold, based on models or anything else, but maybe 100% it is ?)

sure, i'm not talking about preventing vulnerable people from getting a serious case. This part seems to be working just fine, even in france. Hospitals aren't saturated anymore (except in some islands were people didn't vaccinate themselves for various reasons).

It seems to me that life could already be "back to normal" here, simply making sure old / obese people get regular shots.

It's the long-term strategy of wanting to get everyone a vaccine, including children who have close to 0 risks, in the hope of getting rid of the virus that i'm talking about.

> 2. For the delta-variant we need a higher vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. Estimates vary, but most put this around 85%.

That's not how herd immunity works. You don't set a moving goalpost out of nowhere. We should be measuring R instead, and I suspect R is hardly impacted by vaccines at least for the Delta variant.

A day to celebrate the needs of the selfish individual over the needs of the tribe.

From my own experience, I see that vaccinated people are less fearful of mixing with large groups of people. That's one way the vaccinated can be more easily infected.

It's not a physiological effect but I think it's probably the crux of the whole issue here.

A possible mechanism I have seen mentioned is Antibody Dependent Enhancement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement

I am not a biologist and have no opinion on the matter, I have just seen it mentioned online.

Because this hypothesis has already been shown to be false numerous times.

It's often really tough to make the call on whether someone is genuinely asking and when they're seeding doubt (people going back and forth on a topic makes something seem under debate) or even plain trolling and trying to waste other's time (since it's so much quicker to ask the question than to adequately answer it). This particular case is a pretty plain question, I'm more speaking of the general case.

What might also be worth to realize that the illusory truth effect is a thing, i.e. "the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure." "[A 2015] study suggested that the truth effect can influence participants who actually knew the correct answer to begin with, but who were swayed to believe otherwise through the repetition of a falsehood." (From Wikipedia.) I can understand why one might choose to downvote such a "genuine" question when it's easy to find that the answer is "no" (it's mentioned on the COVID-19 misinformation Wikipedia page).

Outcomes suggestive of Antibody Dependent Enhancement (what we are talking about) were seen in animal trials, but the animal trials were canceled.

>95% confidence interval of zero and infinity

The reason the CI is like that has to do with divide by zero, not a low sample size. There were ZERO reinfections among previously infected people, regardless of their vaccination status. As the study says:

>COVID-19 did not occur in anyone over the five months of the study among 2579 individuals previously infected with COVID-19, including 1359 who did not take the vaccine.

The conclusions of the researchers are not wrong or mistaken - they accurately represent the data.

As for the "prioritized" comment, that's just the researchers being politically correct. As you point out, indeed these conclusions go against most countries' policies today. It's a tragedy that natural immunity is completely suppressed from the policymaking conversation.