In the United States, or at least in parts of it, we are moving into a post-COVID era. Or more accurately, we are moving into a post-Crisis COVID era. There’s still COVID. People are still getting sick. People are still dying. But in regions of high vaccination illness and severe disease are becoming rare enough and manageable enough that society can begin to function more or less as normal. Understanding the dynamics of this new era, the precise levels of vaccine efficacy, the specifics of asymptomatic disease and so forth have become a minor obsession of mine. And TPM Reader JL, an academic in the field, has been a helpful.

Here are some basic questions. How effective are the mRNA vaccines and how effective are they against the Delta variant of Covid? To the extent the vaccines are marginally less effective against Delta, do they continue to provide very high levels of protection against symptomatic and severe disease?

Continue reading “Our Global Real-World Test of Vaccines and the Delta Variant” →