Right now, infections are raging among unvaccinated people in Europe and the U.S.—but they are spilling over to the vaccinated as well. Recent CDC data suggest that unvaccinated people are about six times more likely than vaccinated people to get infected and 11 times more likely to die of COVID-19. Applying these ratios to current U.S. data suggests that about 12,000 vaccinated people are becoming infected and 100 are dying every day. While most of those infections come from unvaccinated carriers of the virus, some spread is occurring among the vaccinated too.
The steps we’ve taken in the past to prevent new infections—stopping gatherings, asking people to stay home, shutting down restaurants and bars, mandating masking on a broad scale—are less and less realistic now. Twenty months into the pandemic, neither the public nor our political leaders are likely to adopt these interventions. And that’s where boosters can help.
Israel’s response to the problem is encouraging. That country has administered third shots to about half of its population, and its data demonstrate that boosters restore protection against infections, offering approximately 95 percent protection against infection from the Delta variant, a remarkably high degree of immunity. These data also indicate that boosters reduce hospitalizations and deaths, and seem to boost protection for every age group. Israel has made boosters available to all adults.
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