“There were clues beginning in May and June that the delta variant might upend the nation’s progress against the coronavirus, even as (government officials said “they could remove their masks and President (Joe) Biden vowed a return to normalcy around the Fourth of July if enough Americans got the shots,” the Post reported.
That complacency proved short-lived when high-profile sports figures – and that would include Milwaukee baseball star Christian Yelich – and other celebrities tested positive for Covid even though they had been vaccinated. Break-through infections.
Another alarm bell rang in early August when, as Axios reported, a preliminary report conducted by Mayo Clinic and nference, an affiliated clinical data analytics platform, said that vaccines’ effectiveness against infection dropped sharply in July when the delta variant’s prevalence in Minnesota had risen to over 70 percent.
“Moderna was 76 percent effective against infection and Pfizer was only 42 percent,” the study said. The “good news” in that was that both vaccines were still highly effective – 92 percent and 85 percent – against hospitalizations.
Other studies at summer’s outset in Massachusetts and as early as May in Singapore, found that vaccinated people could still spread the infection even if they were asymptomatic.
