OK
1. I am vaccinated. SUPER Pro-vaccine. Have no idea why someone WOULDN'T get the vaccine.
2. The attached article highlights just how effective the vaccine is against severe infection WHICH WAS THE PROMISE MADE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
3.
However you said that we "know" that there isn't community spread with high vaccinate rates. THis is an example where that didn't pan out. Now..... MAYBE there is a perfectly logical reason for that. I am no expert.
4. But to say that we shouldn't be able to ask questions.... that's just wrong.
Of 129 fully vaccinated prisoners who caught COVID-19, only one was hospitalized. Unvaccinated people at the prison caught COVID-19 at a higher rate.
www.yahoo.com
That article is missing a bunch of stats to know what was really going on. The headline is a good sensational one focused on breakthroughs trying to get clicks.
Assuming I pulled out the numbers correctly. There are 227 prisoners total. Vaccinated 185, unvaccinated 42 for an 81.5% vaccination rate. Then there's a whole bunch of unknown number of stuff with unknown number of vaccination status. Maybe they drive the vaccination rate up, maybe down. It's a prison, so we can probably assume there are relatively close living conditions and generally poor ventilation. Both of which increase risk of spread. The article doesn't say over what time period either. Was this all last week, or over the last 4 months or more of Delta? Maybe the underlying study has more details, I didn't dig in that far.
If we assume the prison staff is vaccinated at exactly the same rate, 81.5%, that would tell us that 81.5% isn't high enough to decrease spread. That the rampant spread occurring in the unvaccinated population along with the reduced spread in the vaccinated population is still able to overwhelm the vaccinated population given whatever timeframe this covered. The vaccine is not a forcefield, wade around in a virus soup long enough and you'll have issues.
If we assume the prison staff is vaccinated at a lower rate than 81.5%, say 62% since that's the Texas over 18 Fully Vaccinated rate in general (I dropped under 18, since they don't normally work at a prison), that would tell us the effective vaccination rate in the prison is somewhere between 81.5% and say 62% depending on how many staff vs prisoners there are. If prison staff are running lower than the public in general, it could be even lower. By now, we're pretty sure everything under 80% and definitely everything under 70% isn't nearly enough to provide protection. They're all before the inflection point.
If we assume the prison staff is some ultra health conscious vaccine fanatics, perhaps they all work for the NFL on weekends and are 100% vaccinated. That would raise the effective vaccination rate in the prison above 81.5%, depending on staff ratio. If it's enough to raise it over 90%, this would truly be a bad sign since we're all hoping that by 90% we're good. Might also not matter, since while they can lower it, the fact they they're not always there probably doesn't help raise the effective rate as well.
The prison staff also transition between the prison community and the general Texas community with a much lower vaccination rate. This dilutes whatever the effective rate in the prison is as new sources of virus are continually introduced. It's possible the prison staff has some vaccine requirement, weekly or daily testing, or some other protocol to avoid bringing in virus and negate this. But, it's Texas, that's not likely.
See, there's a ton of great questions to ask there. Lots of unknowns that would all be super helpful. Notice, none of them were leading questions of "let's just give up, cause it doesn't work".
