“We’re seeing a lot more spread in vaccinated people,” agreed Scripp’s Eric Topol, who estimated that the vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic transmission, which he estimated to be 90 percent or above for the wild-type strain and all previous variants, had fallen to about 60 percent for Delta. “That’s a big drop.” Later, he suggested it might have fallen to 50 percent, and that new data about to be published in the U.S. would suggest an even lower rate. On Wednesday, a large pre-print study published by the Mayo clinic suggested the efficacy against infection had fallen as far as 42%.

“The breakthrough problem is much more concerning than what our public officials have transmitted,” Topol continued. “We have no good tracking. But every indicator I have suggests that there’s a lot more under the radar than is being told to the public so far, which is unfortunate.” The result, he said, was a widening gap between the messaging from public health authorities and the meaning of the data emerging in real time. “I think the problem we have is people — whether it’s the CDC or the people that are doing the briefings — their big concern is, they just want to get vaccinations up. And they don’t want to punch any holes in the story about vaccines. But we can handle the truth. And that’s what we should be getting.”…

When the Times calculated the risk of covid death among the vaccinated, it found that in Texas and Georgia, vaccination seemed to reduce the risk of death by 85x and 87x, respectively, but that in Maine, Vermont, and Indiana, it was only 7x. In Michigan it was 8x. Even at the low end, this is a dramatic, even miraculous-seeming impact. But, of course, most of the data was collected before the Delta surge, and the variant may be darkening the picture at least somewhat here, too. The figures cited by Fauci and Murthy look reassuring — 99.2 percent of deaths were among the unvaccinated in June, according to Fauci, and 99.5 percent according to Murthy, speaking in July. But between June 25 and July 26, 6,973 Americans died in total from COVID-19, according to the CDC. Also according to the CDC, during that same period (June 25 to July 26), 364 died of breakthrough infections. That’s more than 5 percent — more than six times Fauci’s estimate and ten times Murthy’s.