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Abstract: 

Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, has announced that 40% of people admitted to hospital with COVID in the UK have had two doses of a coronavirus vaccine. At first glance, this rings very serious alarm bells—but it shouldn’t. This article explains how the vaccines are still working very well. There are several factors at play that explain why such a high proportion of cases are in the fully vaccinated. COVID vaccines are extremely effective, but none 100% so. This itself isn’t surprising—flu vaccines aren’t 100% effective either. Yet in the US alone flu vaccines are estimated to prevent millions of cases of illness, tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths every year (CDC1). The COVID vaccines are doing the same in the UK right now—all one has to do is compare the curves from the winter wave with those from this summer.

Keywords: Vaccine Effectiveness

Affiliations:  1: University of Oxford.