The Yankees Outbreak Was Good News

Writing at Hot Air, Allahpundit does a pretty decent job of explaining in layman's terms that the recent Covid outbreak among the New York Yankees was both a "nothingburger" in terms of being bad news and "smoking-gun evidence of how effective the vaccines are." This took some explaining, helped along by analysis by a couple of epidemiologists who accounted for the differing conditions in which this outbreak occurred and other more serious ones did, earlier in the pandemic. He sums things up this way:

Image by Daniel Hartwig, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

If 24 people "should have" been infected but only nine were, then vaccination spared 63 percent of those 24 from infection -- an efficacy rate right in line with the 66-72 percent efficacy rate of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is what the Yankees organization used. So 15 people dodged infection after being vaxxed and eight of the nine who tested positive dodged symptoms, and the one who didn't, 50-year-old coach Phil Nevin, apparently shook off his illness in a few days.

I share the author's frustration with the poor messaging by the CDC regarding what the vaccines are supposed to be accomplishing. This practically set things up for people to panic when the inevitable happened: The Major Leagues are testing everyone three times per day! If, as Allahpundit put it, the virus sat "in their throats long enough to show up on a PCR test," after these people were exposed to a super spreader, this is exactly what would happen.

-- CAV