Thursday, December 30, 2021

Even At Their Peak Of Protection, Vaccines Barely Reduced The Risk of Hospitalizations

 


Vaccines don’t stop Covid hospitalizations or deaths

Even at the peak of their protection earlier in 2021, Covid vaccines barely reduced the risk of hospitalizations in vaccinated people who had “breakthrough” infections, new data show.

Vaccinated people in a study published Tuesday had a nearly 1 in 200 chance of of requiring hospitalization for Covid in the first six months after being “fully vaccinated.”

That stunning risk came even though the median age of people in the study was only 51, and most were relatively healthy.

Deaths, ventilator use, and other severe outcomes also occurred regularly in vaccinated people. The data comes from a study of about 600,000 vaccinated Americans seen at over 100 academic medical centers.

The study was published online Dec. 28 in the Journal of the American Medical Association – JAMA Internal Medicine.

The data in the study also make clear how quickly vaccine protection fades after the second dose – and that the Centers for Disease Control hugely understated the number of vaccinated people hospitalized for Covid earlier this year.

Of the 600,000 fully vaccinated people, about 2,800 required inpatient hospitalization for Covid in the first six months after “full vaccination.” That period starts 14 days after the second dose of mRNA vaccines, when vaccine protection should be at peak. […]

But by far the most interesting figures in the study are contained in a single small table in an appendix.

It compares the outcomes of the roughly 18,000 vaccinated and infected people seem at the medical centers with a much larger group of Covid patients – about 2.5 million people – who were not vaccinated and visited the same centers at any point during the epidemic.

About 84 percent of the vaccinated patients were seen as outpatients, while 16 percent required hospitalization.

In comparison, about 77 percent of unvaccinated patients were seen as outpatients, while 23 percent were hospitalized.

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