New data: Two more studies show infected vaccinated people have viral loads similar to the unvaccinated, but...
Allahpundit Jul 31, 2021 2:31 PM ET
There’s good news and bad news. Let’s do the bad news first.
The outlier-ish superspreader event in Provincetown isn’t the only evidence the CDC has that the vaccinated might be just as contagious as the unvaccinated after they’re infected. A new paper published today looked at cases over the past month in Dane County, Wisconsin, and then across the whole state. Result: The P-town finding is confirmed. The vaxxed had viral loads similar to the unvaxxed, high enough that they should have been contagious to others.
To determine whether vaccination reduces virus load in the setting of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough, we compared the threshold cycle (Ct) value in test-positive specimens collected between 28 June 2021 and 24 July 2021 from 83 individuals in Dane County, Wisconsin, which has one of the highest rates of vaccination among populous counties in the United States [6] and high rates of testing per capita…
We detected no significant differences in Ct values between fully vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Previous studies have suggested that Ct values of ~30 or lower are consistent with the recovery of infectious virus in biological specimens, an indication of potential contagiousness…
We then expanded the analysis to include 208 additional samples from other Wisconsin counties that are tested by the same commercial laboratory. Considering all 291 samples from all counties (Supplemental Figure 2), there were 79 infections among individuals who were fully vaccinated (Figure 2A). Sixty-six of these 79 (84%) had Ct values ≤30, while 177 of 212 (83%) unvaccinated individuals had viral loads in this range. Moreover, 26 of 79 (33%) of fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections had extremely low Ct values <20, consistent with very high viral loads. Taken together, these data suggest that a substantial proportion of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections during our study period have levels of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in nasal secretions that are consistent with the ability to transmit the virus to others.
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https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2021/07/31/new-data-two-more-studies-show-infected-vaccinated-people-have-viral-loads-similar-to-the-unvaccinated-but-n405891