We Don't Know Enough About Risks to the Vaccinated

The New York Times recently reported that in a limited number of states that do such reporting, 12% to 24% of people hospitalized for Covid-19 are fully vaccinated. We’ve heard that the vaccine is wearing off fast in Israel, where Covid-19 is in a raging surge, and that in the U.K., the majority of recent deaths have been among the vaccinated. And yet the Centers for Disease Control has used data from Los Angeles County to produce the more reassuring statistic that unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized than the vaccinated. Part of the problem is that numbers can be spun different ways, depending on whether the object is to persuade people to get the vaccine or to persuade the vaccinated to wear masks in public. The other part of the problem is that the data are much more limited than they should be.