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  • What Is the True Vaccine Breakthrough Rate? The CDC Doesn’t Want You to Know

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Over a recent 12-day period the Milwaukee Brewers had nine players test positive for COVID-19.

    While we don’t know the vaccination status of all the players, the team disclosed that most of the players were vaccinated for COVID-19, including former MVP Christian Yelich, who tested positive after experiencing mild flu-like symptoms.

    “He did the right thing and reported those mild symptoms,” Brewers GM David Stearns said when it was announced Yelich was heading to the disabled list. “We got him a test … .The test returned positive and we got a confirmation test, which also came back positive.”

    The Brewers are not an isolated example of Major League Baseball teams experiencing a rash of vaccination breakthroughs. Teams across the league have experienced similar problems, including the New York Yankees, who saw nine vaccinated players sidelined in May with COVID-19.

    “This is the vaccine working,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos at the time, adding that those who tested positive didn’t get a severe infection.

    Walensky is correct that data show vaccinated individuals are far less likely to die or become hospitalized with COVID-19 than unvaccinated individuals.

    Yet breakthrough cases also appear to be more common than the CDC, media, and public health officials suggest.

    CNN says the breakthrough rate is less than one percent, while CBS News reports that 99.7 percent of new COVID cases involve unvaccinated people. The Hill, meanwhile, agrees that CDC data show less than one percent of fully vaccinated people get COVID.

    How does this data mesh with anecdotal evidence that suggests many vaccinated people are contracting COVID? To be sure, it’s not just Major League Baseball teams who are seeing spikes of COVID cases among vaccinated individuals.

    A recent outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for example found that the vast majority of COVID cases involved vaccinated individuals.

    “Overwhelmingly, the affected individuals have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19,” Town Manager Alex Morse told NBC.

    The outbreak, attributed to the rise of the Delta variant, was serious enough to prompt the CDC—which published a report on the outbreak—to reverse its recommendation that vaccinated individuals needn’t wear masks indoors.

    But that wasn’t all. The CDC’s study also found, the Washington Post noted, individuals “carried as much virus in their noses as unvaccinated individuals.”

    “High viral loads suggest an increased risk of transmission and raised concern that, unlike with other variants, vaccinated people infected with Delta can transmit the virus,” Walensky said.

    All of this data suggests two important things.

    First, COVID cases among vaccinated individuals appear to be higher than the “less than 1 percent” many claim. Two, vaccinated individuals appear quite capable of transmitting the virus to others, as Walensky states. Indeed, viral loads in nasal passages suggest they could transmit the virus at rates similar to unvaccinated carriers.

    In the world today, we often hear that data is king. The problem is, the data have been a total mess throughout the pandemic. COVID, the New York Times recently observed, has shown the CDC is utterly broken.

    Perhaps because of this, I decided to see how the CDC tracks and defines breakthrough cases.

    “As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause,” a statement says. “This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance.”

    Does this mean the CDC isn’t tracking breakthrough cases anymore unless someone is hospitalized or dies? I asked the CDC for clarification. I didn’t hear back from them.

    But if one goes to the CDC site, you’ll find information on vaccine breakthroughs that includes only hospitalizations and deaths. The figure—as of August 2—stands at 7,525, which is below the 9,245 breakthrough infections the CDC had documented as of April 26. (The CDC noted the true rate was higher, due to a lack of surveillance and testing.) Since then, three and a half months have eclipsed and nearly 70 million more people have been vaccinated—and the Delta variant has arrived in force.

    Unfortunately, what the actual breakthrough rate is, nobody knows—because the CDC stopped collecting and publishing the data, choosing instead “to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases.”

    In making this decision, the CDC arrived at the strange conclusion that public health would be better served by providing the public with less information.

    Because of this, the media are left guessing what the breakthrough rate is.

    CNN points out that roughly half of US states report data on breakthroughs, and in those states official statistics put the COVID infection rate of vaccinated people at less than 1 percent, “ranging from 0.01% in Connecticut to 0.9% in Oklahoma.”

    A highly cited Kaiser report similarly puts the breakthrough rate at “well below” 1 percent.

    An NBC News analysis covering 38 states, meanwhile, found 125,682 breakthrough cases, which represents about 0.08 percent of the 164 million vaccinated Americans.

    The actual breakthrough rate appears to be much higher than .08 percent based on anecdotal evidence, however, and a more careful perusal of state data.

    Let’s start with Major League Baseball. There are about 750 professional ball players on 30 MLB teams. Applying that rate (0.08%) to MLB baseball players would mean we could expect less than one player (0.6) to experience a breakthrough case. A rate of 1 percent would mean 7 or eight players. But as previously mentioned, the New York Yankees alone had nine breakthroughs in May, and many other teams racked up breakthrough cases.

    One could argue that perhaps Major League ball players, for some reason we may not yet understand, are more likely to contract the virus after being vaccinated, but plenty of other examples can be found, including the six vaccinated Texas Democrats who tested positive for COVID after taking a charter plane to Washington, DC. Ask yourself this: how many people do you personally know who contracted the virus after being vaccinated? (I know many.)

    A thorough review of the evidence strongly suggests breakthrough cases are far likelier than the claims in headlines. A New York Times story published Wednesday exploring the Delta variant—which now accounts for more than half of COVID cases in the US—hinted at this.

    The paper noted that the CDC “does not tally national figures on breakthrough infections that don’t result in hospitalization or death,” so the precise incidence “is unknown” even though the CDC says breakthroughs are “extremely rare.”

    Seeking comment, the Times received a vague response from Walensky in reply to an email inquiring on breakthrough incidence.

    “A modest percentage of people who are fully vaccinated will still get Covid-19 if they are exposed to the virus that causes it,” Dr. Walensky said in reply to a Times email.

    But infectious disease experts hinted that breakthrough cases are more likely than the current data suggest. “I think that if we started to test people just randomly on the street, we would find a lot more people who test positive,” Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious diseases fellow at Stanford, told the newspaper.

    On Thursday, New York magazine published an article under the headline “Don’t Panic, But Breakthrough Cases May Be a Bigger Problem Than You’ve Been Told.”

    Journalist David Wallace-Wells, who spoke to scientists at Harvard and Scripps’s, said public health officials may be “overstating the vaccine effect on transmission and understating the scale and risk of breakthrough infections.”

    “The message that breakthrough cases are exceedingly rare and that you don’t have to worry about them if you’re vaccinated — that this is only an epidemic of the unvaccinated — that message is falling flat,” Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina told Wallace-Wells.

    Eric Topol, an American cardiologist and author, was more blunt, saying he estimated the vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic transmission had fallen to roughly 60 percent for the Delta variant.

    “The breakthrough problem is much more concerning than what our public officials have transmitted,” Topol said.

    Wallace-Wells notes it’s impossible to estimate the true breakthrough rate because the CDC stopped tracking and reporting most breakthroughs in May, but the data he assembled paint a much different picture.

    “In Delaware, between July 1 and July 22, ‘breakthrough’ cases were 13.8 percent of the total,” he writes. “In Michigan, between June 15 and July 30, the figure was 19.1 percent. In this period, there were 2,369 breakthrough cases and 12,409 in total. In Utah, 8 percent of new cases were breakthroughs in early June, but by late July, as Delta grew, the share grew, too, to 20 percent (even while the total number of cases almost doubled).”

    None of this is to say Americans shouldn’t get vaccinated. Evidence suggests it significantly reduces one’s chances of dying of or becoming hospitalized with COVID-19. A New York Times analysis of 40 states found that fully immunized people accounted for less than 6 percent of COVID deaths and less than 5 percent of hospitalizations. (Other data is even more promising, including statistics Dr. Fauci cited in June which claimed 99.2 percent of COVID deaths involved unvaccinated individuals.)

    A close loved one of mine was vaccinated this week after I suggested it was a good idea; the same day, I encouraged several other loved ones to get the vaccine. This is not about being “pro-vax” or “anti-vax”; it’s about the CDC not being forthright on vaccine breakthroughs.

    Choosing to not count vaccinated people who tested positive for COVID as breakthrough cases is little different than choosing to not count positive COVID cases as actual cases. Imagine how much lower US numbers would be if the CDC stopped tracking cases, and instead only counted deaths and hospitalizations.

    The great American writer Mark Twain popularized a well-known saying on stats.

    “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” Twain said. (Twain and others attributed the quote to British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, but it’s unclear if Disraeli ever said this.)

    We’ve seen throughout the pandemic how authorities have manipulated statistics to serve their own agendas—most notably New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who changed public health reporting to cover up the number of New Yorkers who died in nursing homes because of his policies.

    By only tracking breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization and death, the CDC is depriving the public of crucial information on the efficacy of vaccines and fueling the vaccine wars. Increasingly, these wars are a bipartisan chorus of vaccinated voices who paint the unvaccinated as either crazy people—there are no microchips in it, Times columnist Charles Blow recently quipped—or filthy creatures who are prolonging the pandemic because of their selfishness.

    “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks,” Alabama’s Republican Governor Kay Ivey said in July.

    Ivey was echoing sentiments President Joe Biden had expressed days earlier.

    “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden had said while speaking to reporters on the White House lawn.

    This chorus has had its desired effect. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found that 80 percent of Americans blame the unvaccinated for rising cases—even though the US has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world—which has fueled efforts to force Americans to get vaccinated by requiring “vaccine passports” to travel or do business.

    Blaming the unvaccinated for the drawn out pandemic may be popular and politically convenient, but as the Times points out, the CDC’s own data suggest that “vaccinated people can carry as much virus in their nose and throat as unvaccinated people.” Moreover, breakthrough transmissions appear to be more common than the CDC has let on—which is undoubtedly why they stopped tracking most breakthrough cases.

    The CDC’s effort to hide breakthrough cases not involving death or hospitalization from the public eye might serve its presumed goal—getting more Americans vaccinated—but it undermines the truth and further erodes public trust in government, which is already at historic lows.

    The silver lining in the story is that a full analysis of the science of vaccination makes an even stronger case that the decision of whether to vaccinate or not should be made by one person: the individual getting the vaccine.

    Jon Miltimore


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Fauci’s Mask Flip-Flop, Explained (by Economics)

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Last summer in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell, Dr. Anthony Fauci said he had no regrets over advising Americans against wearing masks in public spaces early in the pandemic, even though his recommendations changed months later.

    “I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct,” said Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease advisor. “We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm’s way every day to take care of sick people.”

    Fauci was referring to comments he made on 60 Minutes in March 2020. During that interview, Fauci said “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” noting they should be used only for sick people as source control.

    “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is,” said Fauci. “And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

    Fauci’s about-face on masks was not without controversy, but it had some excuse given its context. A public health official lying to the public he is responsible for protecting (for whatever the reason) is no small matter. But one could also see Fauci’s explanation as a “noble lie” designed to make sure the people who needed masks most would get them.

    Newly released emails, however, suggest that when Fauci said in March that there was no reason for healthy individuals to wear masks, it wasn’t to prevent a mask shortage—it was because he believed it.

    This week the Washington Post and BuzzFeed News released hundreds of pages of Fauci’s emails, which were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

    The emails contain many revelations. Among them is an email reply Fauci sent to one Sylvia Burwell, presumably the same Sylvia Burwell who served under President Barack Obama as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

    Burwell, who was slated to travel, had asked Dr. Fauci for his advice on the use of face masks. Fauci’s reply, dated February 5, 2020, is included in its entirety below.

    “Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location.”

    The email is important because it shows Fauci was saying privately in February 2020 precisely what he was saying publicly in March 2020. The fact that Fauci was sharing this information privately with Burwell undermines his claim that his recommendation to not wear masks was motivated by fear of causing a mask-purchasing stampede.

    In other words, there’s every reason to believe that Fauci was simply sharing his genuine medical opinion, which corresponded with the scientific consensus and the World Health Organization at the time, that masks (particularly cloth ones purchased at retail stores) are ineffective at keeping the virus out and may cause riskier behavior by giving wearers a false sense of protection.

    The obvious question, of course, is what would prompt Fauci to change his medical opinion on masks. The answer can perhaps be found in basic economics.

    Public Choice Theory, a field pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning economist James M. Buchanan, applies economic theories and methods to the analysis of political behavior. As Buchanan saw it, public choice is “politics without romance.” It questions the widely accepted notion that those engaged in public service are motivated primarily by “the common good.” This is not to say Buchanan was suggesting that public officials are uniquely malevolent. On the contrary, public choice theory rests on the assumption political actors are pretty much like everyone else in that their decisions are shaped by self-interest and incentives.

    Geoffrey Brennan, a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina and a professor of political science at Duke University, notes there’s a misguided tendency to see public agents as “benevolent despots” instead of regular people.

    “When you ask what should government do, you also imply that those in government are motivated to try to choose the very best policies for the public good,” said Brennan in a 2020 discussion on public choice theory. “When it comes to political agents it’s surely a mistake simply to assume that what motivates a person exclusively is their desire to do good.”

    He continued:

    “After all, the winning assumption in economics is that ordinary folk operating in markets are motivated predominately by self interest. Why should we assume politicians and bureaucrats are motivated any differently than anyone else?”

    Both publicly and privately, early in 2020 Fauci said masks were an ineffective, unhelpful way for individuals to protect themselves from COVID-19. His public opinion on the matter changed, and it changed at a time when masks became bitterly divisive (as they were a century ago during the Spanish Flu).

    Masks became so politically polarizing that even top government officials could be hit with a social media ban for posting that masks were unhelpful. Indeed, this is precisely what happened to Dr. Scott Atlas, who at the time was a top member of the White House coronavirus task force. In that environment, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Fauci flip-flopped to “fall in line” for the sake of his political career.

    To be clear, we don’t know for certain what motivated Fauci’s decisions. It’s certainly possible he became convinced (or convinced himself) masks were necessary because asymptomatic spread was a greater risk than he previously believed. (Though research shows asymptomatic spread cases are rare and are unlikely to contribute to the spread of the virus in a meaningful way.)

    What we do know is that public choice theory can help us better understand what motives besides public health may have helped Fauci change his mind (consciously or subconsciously).

    It shows how political incentives can often be at odds, not only with the public good, but with truth itself.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Why the Push Is on to Make Pandemic Life ‘Permanent’

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    One year after Americans were ordered to close down society for “two weeks to flatten the curve,” Bloomberg columnist Andreas Kluth warned, “We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic.”

    Because new variants of SARS-COV-2 are impervious to existing vaccines, says Kluth, and pharmaceutical companies will never be able to develop new vaccines fast enough to keep up, we will never be able to get “back to normal.”

    “Get back to normal” means recovering the relative liberty we had in our already overregulated, pre-Covid lives. This is just the latest in a long series of crises that always seem to lead our wise rulers to the same conclusion: we just cannot afford freedom anymore.

    Covid-19 certainly wasn’t the beginning. Americans were told “the world changed” after 9/11. Basic pillars of the American system, like the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, were too antiquated to deal with the “new threat of terrorism.” Warrantless surveillance of our phone, e-mail, and financial records and physical searches of our persons without probable cause of a crime became the norm. A few principled civil libertarians dissented, but the public largely complied without protest.

    “Keep us safe,” they told the government, no matter the cost in dollars or liberty.

    Perhaps seeing how willingly the public rolled over for the political right during the “War on Terror,” authoritarians on the left turbocharged their own war on “climate change.” Previously interested in merely significantly raising taxes and heavily regulating industry, they now wish to ban all sorts of things, including air travel, gasoline-powered cars, and even eating meat.

    Since Covid-19, however, even the freedom to assemble and see each other’s faces may be permanently banned to help the government “keep us safe.”

    Assaulting our liberty isn’t the only characteristic these crisis narratives have in common. They share at least two others: dire predictions that turn out to be false and proposed solutions that turn out to be ineffective.

    George W. Bush warned Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” capable of hitting New York City within 45 minutes. He created the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA to prevent, among other things, a “mushroom cloud” over a major American city.

    Twenty years later, we know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the terrorist threat was grossly exaggerated, and the TSA has still never caught a terrorist, not even the two people who tried to set off explosives concealed in their shoes and underwear, respectively.

    The only effective deterrent of terrorism so far has been the relatively calmer foreign policy during the four years of the Trump administration, during which regime change operations ceased and major terrorist attacks in the United States virtually disappeared.

    Predictions of environmental catastrophe have similarly proven false. Younger people may not remember that in the early 1970s, long before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born, environmentalists were predicting worldwide disasters that subsequently failed to materialize. In 1989, the Associated Press reported, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” The same official predicted the Earth’s temperature would rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years.

    Ocasio-Cortez is famous for predicting in 2019, “The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” But Al Gore had warned in 2006 that “unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” So, isn’t it too late anyway?

    As with the war on terrorism, the war on climate change asks us to give up our freedom for solutions that don’t work. Assuming climate change proponents have diagnosed the problem correctly and haven’t exaggerated the threat—huge assumptions by themselves— implementing their proposed solution won’t solve the problem, even by their own standards.

    Its proponents know this. The U.S. has already led the world in reducing carbon emissions without the draconian provisions of the Green New Deal. If you listen to them carefully, the Green New Deal’s proponents propose the U.S. give up what freedom and prosperity remain to them merely as an example to developing nations, whom they assume will forego the benefits of industrialization already enjoyed by developed countries because of the shining example of an America in chains and brought to its economic knees to “save the earth.”

    Fat chance, that.

    The latest remake of this horror movie is Covid-19. While undeniably a serious pathogen that has likely killed more people than even the worst flu epidemics of the past several decades (although this is hard to confirm since public health officials changed the methodology for determining a virus-caused death), the government and its minions have still managed to grossly exaggerate this threat.

    Gone is any sense of proportion when discussing Covid-19. Yes, it is certainly possible to spread the virus after one has been vaccinated or acquired natural immunity. But how likely is it? Is it any more likely than spreading other pathogens after immunity?

    If not, then why are we treating people with immunity differently than we have during more dangerous pandemics in the past? Similarly, it is likely possible for asymptomatic people to spread the virus—a key pillar of the lockdown argument—but again, how likely is it?

    The theory Covid-19 could be spread by asymptomatic people was originally based on the case of a single woman who supposedly infected four other people while experiencing no symptoms. Anthony Fauci said this case “lays the question to rest.”

    The only problem was no one had asked the woman in question if she had symptoms at the time. When it turned out she did, the study on her was retracted. A subsequent study “did not link any COVID-19 cases to asymptomatic carriers,” and yet another after that concluded transmission of the disease by asymptomatic carriers “is not a major driver of spread.” Yet, policies based on this falsehood, like lockdowns and forcing asymptomatic people to wear masks, remain in place.

    Most importantly, none of the government-mandated Covid-19 mitigation policies work. No retrospective review conducted with any semblance of the scientific method has found a relationship between lockdowns, mask mandates, or social distancing and the spread of Covid-19. In fact, the most recent study suggests lockdowns may have increased Covid-19 infections, in addition to all the non-Covid excess deaths they caused.

    Over and over, authoritarians overhype crises to scare the living daylights out of the public and propose solutions that have two things in common: they demand more of our freedom and they don’t work. It’s always all pain and no gain. One wonders how many repetitions of this crisis drill it will take before the citizens of the so-called “land of the free” finally think to ask:

    Why is freedom always the problem?

    This article was republished with permission.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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