We spent a good chunk of last week covering various school districts in Florida, Texas and elsewhere that are standing up to their governors’ bans on mask policies in schools. The defiance has been interesting to watch play out — most are maintaining their mask policies, despite ongoing threats from the state level.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott just issued an executive order that looks like another escalation of that battle.
We’ve noted a number of times that we are in a period of great uncertainty about the outlines of the COVID Pandemic. How vaccines are holding up over time and how well they protect against the Delta variant are both uncertain, with limited and contradictory data. Yesterday I noted new data out of Israel which appears to show a dramatic improvement in protection with a third shot. But that scale of improvement rests on other data out of Israel suggesting that effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine had dropped significantly since early this year, especially against infection.
Yesterday the CDC published a new report that is at least directionally in line with Israeli data on vaccine effectiveness against infection, albeit showing a less pronounced drop.
