Very positive vaccine news: Israeli HMO Maccabi reports just 20 positive coronavirus tests out of 128,000 people who had their second Pfizer shot a week or more ago. None of the 20 were serious cases.
The HMO says most of the 20 were tested due to a known exposure to a confirmed Covid-19 case. Most were over 55. Half had a preexisting condition. None had a fever over 38.5°C. None needed hospitalisation.
Not all 128k were tested, only people with known exposures or symptoms. So the real number is probably a little higher. But most of the 128k will be over 60, because they got vaccinated first. This suggests the vaccine is extremely effective.
Awaiting more details on this, to see if we're talking about 20 symptomatic cases or, even better, 20 cases total with positive PCR tests. The first would be great, the second would be amazing.
Worth pointing out, too, that Israel is in the midst of its worst Covid-19 wave so far, with around 10% test positivity.
Final point: 40-50% of Israel's Covid-19 cases are the B117 "British" variant. So this is also good news about the vaccine's ability to protect from that mutation.
UPDATE: Israel's Health Ministry, which has data for all HMOs, says that of 428,000 people who are a week or more from their second dose, just 63 have tested positive for the virus. That's an almost identical proportion to the Maccabi sub-set.
Some back-of-the-envelope analysis of those numbers here:
Vaccination stats of over-80s in England revealing huge racial disparity, with white people more than double as likely to have been vaccinated as black people.
A similar pattern has been seen in Israel, where Israeli Arabs have low coronavirus vaccine uptake, despite relatively easy access. Vaccine uptake also lower among Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
In Israel, conspiracy theories about the vaccine are spreading widely on Arab/Palestinian social media, which could be contributing to hesitancy.
1. Let's assume all the 428k vaccinated people are over 60. They aren't, but most will be and this assumption will tend to conservatism in the analysis.
There are 1,471,000 over-60s in Israel. In the last week, 4,723 of them received their first positive coronavirus test, which is 0.3% of the total cohort.
Second Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine shot. Let's do this.
Vaccinated! Two shots, 22 days apart.
I woke up this morning with, basically, a hangover. That tired, groggy, mildly headachey feeling. Now I'm also feeling a bit achey like mild flu. Both of these are common side effects and usually are gone by the second day, so I'm not worried.
In this Covid wave, Israel has seen more young pregnant women with no comorbidities hospitalised than before. Of seven serious cases tested so far, six had the British B117 coronavirus variant.
This could just be a sampling issue. The B117 variant is something like 30-50% of all cases in Israel now. And perhaps it's more prevalent in ultra-Orthodox communities where the birth rate is high so there are a lot of pregnant women.
The UK has not reported that the B117 variant was more dangerous to pregnant women. As far as I know, no other country has seen this (yet).
Congress should immediately subpoena Jeffrey Clark to testify on this matter. The Biden Admin is unlikely to assert Executive Privilege, and attorney-client privilege doesn't apply. If Clark wants to refuse to answer, let him plead the Fifth. nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/…
Probably a good idea for the Judicial Committee to hear from Rosen, too.
A senior DoJ official, with Trump's backing, wrote a letter from the Acting AG to the Georgia Legislature, falsely claiming that they were investigating fraud and asking them to set aside their election result. I think we should see that draft.