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From Vox

The view is meant to be awe-inducing, and the experience even has its own name: the Overview Effect. “​​When you see Earth from that high up, it changes your perspective on things and how interconnected we are and how we squander that here on Earth,” Wendy Whitman Cobb, a professor at the US Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, told Recode.

Another perk of these trips is that space tourists will feel a few minutes of microgravity, which is when gravity feels extremely weak. That will give them the chance to bounce around a spacecraft weightlessly before heading back to Earth.

But Blue Origin’s and Virgin Galactic’s flights are relatively brief — about 10 and 90 minutes long, respectively. Other space tourism flights from SpaceX, the space company founded by Elon Musk, will have more to offer. This fall, billionaire Jared Isaacman, who founded the company Shift4 Payments, will pilot SpaceX’s first all-civilian flight, the Inspiration4, which will spend several days in orbit around Earth. In the coming years, the company has also planned private missions to the International Space Station, as well as a trip around the moon.

These trips are meant to be enjoyed by space nerds who longed to be astronauts. But there’s another reason rich people want to go to space: demonstrating exclusivity and conspicuous consumption. More than a few people can afford a trip to Venice or the Maldives. But how many people are privileged enough to take a trip to space?

“What a nice way of showing off these days than to post a picture on Instagram from space,” Sridhar Tayur, a Carnegie Mellon business professor, told Recode.

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A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos)

  1. Does commercial space travel have any scientific goals, or is it really just a joyride?

Right now, space tourism flights from Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have only reached suborbital space, which means that flights enter space but do not enter orbit around Earth. Scientifically, that’s not a new frontier. Though these current flights use new technology, suborbital flight with humans aboard was accomplished by NASA back in the early 1960s, Matthew Hersch, a historian of technology at Harvard, told Recode.

Right now, it’s not clear these trips will offer scientists major new insights, but they might provide information that could be used in the future for space exploration. In fact, these trips are also being marketed as potential opportunities for scientific experiments. For instance, the most recent Virgin Galactic flight carried plants and tested how they responded to microgravity.

These private companies primarily see opportunities in their commercial vehicles that can be reused at scale, which will allow the same rockets (or in Virgin Galactic’s case, spaceplanes) to go to space again and again, which lowers the overall cost of space tourism.

Billionaires and their private space companies also see the development of these rockets as an opportunity to prepare for flights that will do even more, and go even farther, into space. Bezos, for instance, has argued that New Shepard’s suborbital flights will help prepare the company’s future missions, including its New Glenn rocket, which is meant for orbital space.

“The fact of the matter is, the architecture and the technology we have chosen is complete overkill for a suborbital tourism mission,” Bezos said at Tuesday’s post-launch briefing. “We have chosen the vertical landing architecture. Why did we do that? Because it scales.”

Beyond potential scientific advancements in the future, suborbital spaceflight might also create new ways to travel from one place on earth to another. SpaceX, for instance, has advertised that long-haul flights could be shortened to just 30 minutes by traveling through space.

  1. Is it safe?

Right now, it’s not entirely clear just how risky space tourism is.

One way space tourism companies are trying to keep travelers safe is by requiring training so that the people who are taking a brief sojourn off Earth are as prepared as possible.

On the flight, people can experience intense altitude and G-forces. “This is sustained G-forces on your body, upwards of what can be 6 G in one direction — which is six times your body weight for upwards of 20 or 30 seconds,” Glenn King, the chief operating officer of the Nastar Center — the aerospace physiology training center that prepared Richard Branson for his flights — told Recode. “That’s a long time when you have six people, or your weight, pressing down on you.”

There’s also the chance that space tourists will be exposed to radiation, though that risk depends on how long you’re in space. “It’s a risk, especially more for the orbital flight than sub-orbital,” explains Whitman Cobb. “Going up in an airplane exposes you to a higher amount of radiation than you would get here on the ground.” She also warns that some tourists will likely barf on the ride.

There doesn’t seem to be an age limit on who can travel, though. The most recent Blue Origin flight included both the youngest person to ever travel to space, an 18-year-old Dutch teenager, as well as the oldest: 82-year- old pilot Wally Funk.

  1. How much will tickets cost?

The leaders in commercial space tourism already claim they have a market to support the industry. While Bezos hinted on Tuesday the price would eventually come down — as eventually happened with the high prices of the nascent airline industry — for now, ticket prices are in the low hundreds of thousands, at least for Virgin Galactic. That price point would keep spaceflight out of reach for most of humanity, but there are enough interested rich people that space tourism seems to be economically feasible.

“If you bring it down to $250,000, the wait times [to buy a ticket] will be very long,” Tayur, of Carnegie Mellon, told Recode.

  1. What impact will commercial space travel have on the environment?

The emissions of a flight to space can be worse than those of a typical airplane flight because just a few people hop aboard one of these flights, so the emissions per passenger are much higher. That pollution could become much worse if space tourism becomes more popular. Virgin Galactic alone eventually aims to launch 400 of these flights annually.

“The carbon footprint of launching yourself into space in one of these rockets is incredibly high, close to about 100 times higher than if you took a long-haul flight,” Eloise Marais, a physical geography professor at the University College London, told Recode. “It’s incredibly problematic if we want to be environmentally conscious and consider our carbon footprint.”

These flights’ effects on the environment will differ depending on factors like the fuel they use, the energy required to manufacture that fuel, and where they’re headed — and all these factors make it difficult to model their environmental impact. For instance, Jeff Bezos has argued that the liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel Blue Origin uses is less damaging to the environment than the other space competitors (technically, his flight didn’t release carbon dioxide), but experts told Recode it could still have significant environmental effects.

There are also other risks we need to keep studying, including the release of soot that could hurt the stratosphere and the ozone. A study from 2010 found that the soot released by 1,000 space tourism flights could warm Antarctica by nearly 1 degree Celsius. “There are some risks that are unknown,” Paul Peeters, a tourism sustainability professor at the Breda University of Applied Sciences, told Recode. “We should do much more work to assess those risks and make sure that they do not occur or to alleviate them somehow — before you start this space tourism business.” Overall, he thinks the environmental costs are reason enough not to take such a trip.

  1. Who is regulating commercial space travel?

Right now, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has generally been given the job of overseeing the commercial space industry. But regulation of space is still relatively meager.

One of the biggest areas of concern is licensing launches and making sure that space flights don’t end up hitting all the other flying vehicles humans launch into the sky, like planes and drones. Just this June, a SpaceX flight was held up after a helicopter flew into the zone of the launch.

There’s a lot that still needs to be worked out, especially as there are more of these launches. On Thursday, the Senate hosted a hearing with leaders of the commercial space industry focused on overseeing the growing amount of civil space traffic.

At the same time, the FAA is also overseeing a surging number of spaceports — essentially airports for spaceflight — and making sure there’s enough space for them to safely set up their launches.

But there are other areas where the government could step in. “I think the cybersecurity aspect will also play a very vital role, so that people don’t get hacked,” Tayur said. The FAA told Recode that the agency has participated in developing national principles for space cybersecurity, but Congress hasn’t given it a specific role in looking at the cybersecurity of space.

At some point, the government might also step in to regulate the environmental impact of these flights, too, but that’s not something the FAA currently has jurisdiction over.

In the meantime, no government agency is currently vetting these companies when it comes to the safety of the human passengers aboard. An FAA official confirmed with Recode that while the agency is awarding licenses to companies to carry humans to space, they’re not actually confirming that these trips are safe. That’s jurisdiction Congress won’t give the agency until 2023.

There doesn’t seem to be an abundance of travelers’ insurance policies for space. “Passengers basically sign that they’re waiving all their rights,” Whitman Cobb said. “You’re acknowledging that risk and doing it yourself right now.”

So fair warning, if you decide to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a joyride to space: You’d likely have to accept all responsibility if you get hurt.

Simone Biles is performing the most complicated feats women’s gymnastics has ever seen — and not being fully rewarded for it.

As children, we’re often told that we can do anything we put our minds to. I guess we’re okay with deceiving children because this is a complete lie. No matter how hard we try, there are things Simone Biles can do that none of us will ever achieve.

Over the past eight years, Biles has dominated the competition, winning four Olympic gold medals and 19 world championship medals and getting four maneuvers named after her. She hasn’t lost a major competition since her debut in 2013, a time when Barack Obama was still president. Her talent at strong tumbling combined with execution has made her a transformative and unsurpassed gymnast — she’s taken a sport that is judged to the decimal and won by full points.

At this year’s Olympics, she’ll be the heavy favorite again. Barring injury or getting locked in her hotel room by a jealous rival, little could stop Biles from adding to her gold medal total.

Hence, Biles’s storyline this year isn’t about whether she’ll win, but whether her skills will be fully appreciated. Specifically, the controversy is that Biles is doing moves that few, if any, gymnasts can do, including her male colleagues. But instead of getting full points for her moves, she and those who watch the sport feel that the judges aren’t scoring her fairly and are not giving her moves their proper value. With Biles’s overall dominance, missing a few tenths here and there can feel trivial. But try to imagine the absurdity of shortchanging greatness and why it’s happening to arguably the greatest athlete of all time.

Simone Biles performs two extremely difficult, underscored skills

To understand the controversy over Biles’s score, you have to understand how scoring in gymnastics works. A gymnast’s score on any apparatus is the combination of an execution score graded out of a perfect 10 and a difficulty or starting value score. The latter is the important thing when it comes to Biles.

A routine’s difficulty score is the sum of all a gymnast’s moves in a routine: the higher the difficulty of the move, the more it’s worth, and the higher the total value goes. Provided you attempt those elements, that difficulty score value is yours to keep. What sets Biles apart from mortals is that her difficulty scores are much higher than those of her competitors.

For example, here’s the scoresheet from the 2019 World Championships in Stuttgart. Take note of the figures next to the (D) from each competitor. That’s the difficulty score, and look how Biles is consistently tallying scores of 6s and above on all four apparatuses. Her competitors don’t have the difficulty.

USA Gymnastics
2019 World Championships scoresheet.

This means that Biles’s potential scores are much higher than her competitors. You’ll also notice that in terms of execution (the “E” scores), she’s executing her harder skills at a similar clip, if not better (e.g. the vault in the first column), than her opponents. So she’s not only performing more difficult routines, but also executing them well. That leads to, as it did at the World Championships, a win by more than 2 points in a sport that — until Simone Biles — was decided by tenths and hundredths of a point.

The current controversy surrounding Biles is that she’s added new, more difficult skills but isn’t getting what should be the full credit reflected in her difficulty score. One of those moves is her vault, which has the difficulty value of 6.6.

.@Simone_Biles successfully completed a Yurchenko double pike in vault at last night’s #USClassic.

She is the first woman in HISTORY to perform the move in competition. @OnHerTurf pic.twitter.com/j07ZweTA0f

— #TokyoOlympics (@NBCOlympics) May 23, 2021

“Simone does something that’s called a Yurchenko double pike, which is misleading because she’s actually doing three complete flips during the vault,” said Dave Lease, who runs the gymnastics and figure skating site The Skating Lesson. “This is something that only a handful of men can do without serious bodily harm. She actually did the vault extremely well. But the judges went conservative on the score.”

The other element, as Lease points out, is her dismount off the balance beam: a double-twisting, double-back.

“The double-twisting double on the floor is what Shawn Johnson and Jordyn Wieber were mounting their floor routines with. Ending this off the balance beam is truly mind-boggling,” Lease said.

Johnson and Wieber were Olympic gold medalists in 2008 and 2012, respectively. At their peak, both were considered two of the best gymnasts in the world and, like Biles, they shined in events like the floor routine, which showcases a gymnast’s power and tumbling skills. Biles has taken their best floor routine move and is performing it on a completely different apparatus, a 4-inch-wide platform.

There you have it, folks! @Simone_Biles successfully landed her signature double- double dismount on beam today and the element will be named the “Biles” from now on. #Stuttgart2019 pic.twitter.com/BO38BaCQ8g

— Team USA (@TeamUSA) October 5, 2019

Regardless of how mind-boggling or death-defying her elements appear, some gymnastics insiders say that both elements deserve to be scored higher. Lease says that he would score her around two-tenths higher on both elements and that even her floor routine is underscored. Biles herself said she believes that the International Gymnastics Federation (IGF) and judges are underscoring the elements.

“They’re both too low and they even know it,” Biles told the New York Times in May. “But they don’t want the field to be too far apart. And that’s just something that’s on them. That’s not on me.”

Simone Biles and American dominance in gymnastics have some haters

The IGF has no explanation for why Biles is scored the way she is, but as the New York Times pointed out, one of the reasons inferred was a safety issue. By underscoring Biles, it could have a chilling effect in which other gymnasts don’t attempt those skills and decrease the risk of harming themselves.

A problem with this argument is that there are a lot of skills in gymnastics that aren’t safe. Underscoring some moves doesn’t necessarily make sense in a sport where risk is inherent and handsomely rewarded.

What Biles told the New York Times seems to be a more believable explanation: that by underscoring Biles, the IGF can keep the competition closer and Biles less dominant.

The last time Biles lost a major competition was in 2013 when she first started competing at the Senior level. Since then, it’s been gold medals in every all-around (the individual portion of a competition) and team finals. She’s arguably the most dominant athlete in any sport. But the bonkers thing about her dominance is that Biles turned gymnastics into a sport defined by the slimmest of margins and absolute drama into blowouts. Adding more points to her difficulty would mean even bigger demolitions.

And while she is currently the apex athlete in gymnastics, she’s part of an American dynasty that goes back to 2012. After nabbing silver in the 2008 team competition, the US clinched gold in 2012, thrashed the competition in 2016, and are heavy favorites to win again in 2021.

Lease told me that in 2016, the American team was so stacked that they could have invited anyone as the fourth member and they still would have won. That team won by an astronomical 8 points.

For 2021, “it remains that your next-door neighbor could have been the last person on the team. With Simone, Jordan Chiles, and Sunni Lee, it doesn’t really matter,” Lease said.

Biles was a huge part of that 2016 win and will be a huge part of 2021’s competition. But the US’s key to winning has been to outscore teams in power events like the vault (e.g. McKayla Maroney and the rest of the US team landing the “Amanar” vault in 2012) and floor exercise (e.g. Biles, Wieber, and Aly Raisman’s powerful, high-scoring routines) and to keep pace on their traditionally weaker event, the uneven bars. American dominance has proven that highly difficult, well-executed power gymnastics is a winning formula, but it’s drawn criticism from purists who say the current scoring system is robbing artistry from the sport.

“What happened is that the gymnasts who are good at tumbling and doing really difficult skills wound up being more rewarded than they would have been in the past,” Lease said. “I think that there is some potential backlash from other countries about the athleticism of Americans racking up so many points with tumbling. Yeah, but that’s the way the rules are written. And they pushed through those rules do not have judging scandals, and the Americans are just better at it!”

Sometimes that ire manifests itself in explicitly racist ways, like in Biles’s 2013 debut: Italian gymnast Carlotta Ferlito made a comment that she and her teammates should have donned blackface to win. Ferlito’s federation backed her up, with its spokesperson David Ciaralli saying at the time:

Carlotta was talking about what she thinks is the current gymnastics trend: the Code of Points is opening chances for colored people (known to be more powerful) and penalizing the typical Eastern European elegance, which, when gymnastics was more artistic and less acrobatic, allowed Russia and Romania to dominate the field

Valeri Liukin, who is the former coordinator of the US women’s gymnastics team and current coach of Brazil’s women’s team, said in a 2019 interview that the current scoring system favors black athletes because they’re more “explosive”:

But yes, gymnastics is changing. In the Code of Points, difficulty is very valued now. Of course, this suits African Americans. They’re very explosive — look at the NBA, who’s playing and jumping there?

Yikes!

What these generalizations missed are extremely talented white athletes like Wieber and Raisman who preceded Biles and benefited from the current scoring system as well as 2012 all-around gold medalist Gabby Douglas, who beat out the likes of Wieber and Raisman and is considered a finesse gymnast. The comments fit a pattern of how transcendent Black athletes (see: the Williams sisters) are spoken about in crude and pseudoscientific terms — that their greatness stems from blackness as a kind of physical advantage rather than greatness being a product of talent, hard work, and practice.

Biles’s underscoring is something that we’d find ridiculous in any other sport, Lease notes. He covers figure skating primarily, a close cousin of gymnastics because it’s also a sport whose elements are subjective and graded. The equivalent would be penalizing skaters for landing “quads” (jumps with four revolutions). And it’s even more absurd when you compare the situation to other sporting events.

“It’s telling Michael Jordan to score 20 points per game and no more,” he said. “You watched the Michael Jordan documentary, right? This is like Justice for John Stockton, who’s just not as good. It’s like if in the early 2000s, we told Venus and Serena [Williams] ‘let’s not break 100 miles per hour, please.’ Could you imagine that?”

I, for one, couldn’t imagine that. But as the gymnastics competition begins, we may all see it for ourselves. And see if and how Biles perseveres.

  1. I am not clear if #ACIP & @CDCgov are legally able to recommend additional doses of #Covid vaccines while @US_FDA‘s EUAs stipulate the mRNA vaccines are 2-dose vaxes & J&J’s is 1 dose. But CDC is making clear it isn’t going to move on this till FDA alters the vaxes’ status. pic.twitter.com/DMMIU0uKfZ

    — Helen Branswell (1) July 22, 2021

As things stand, data from Pfizer indicates that its vaccine — the first to be authorized in the US, and still the most common among US vaccine recipients — declines from 95 percent to 84 percent effectiveness against symptomatic infection after four to six months, according to the Times’ Sharon LaFraniere.

Data from Israel, where Covid cases are once again rising, suggest that an even sharper decline in effectiveness against symptomatic infections is possible — but even then, the vaccine remains “more than 90 percent effective in preventing severe disease,” and the small sample size means there is still uncertainty about Israel’s findings.

“The goal of this vaccine is not to prevent mild or low, moderate infectious disease,” Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s outside advisory committee, told the Times. “The goal is to prevent hospitalization to death. Right now this vaccine has held up to that.”

A booster shot administered at the six-month mark could increase antibody levels as much as tenfold, according to data released earlier this year by both Pfizer and Moderna, underscoring its potential value to older and immunocompromised people.

Israel is already offering a third Pfizer shot for immunocompromised residents — though millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have yet to be vaccinated — and Pfizer has previously suggested that a booster shot could be needed in the US.

Regulatory questions abound

Though the US currently has tens of millions of surplus Covid-19 vaccine doses on hand, making a third Pfizer or Moderna shot available to millions of immunocompromised or elderly Americans likely won’t be a quick process.

Currently, all three Covid-19 vaccines in use in the US are being administered under an emergency use authorization, or EUA, issued by the FDA, which sets specific regimens for each vaccine: two doses several weeks apart for both Pfizer and Moderna, and a single dose for Johnson & Johnson.

Changing that, according to the Washington Post, would require either full FDA approval for the vaccine or an amendment to the EUA. And until that happens, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices can’t go forward with recommending a third shot for vulnerable populations in the US.

According to the New York Times, “doctors would have vastly more leeway to prescribe a booster for their patients” once the vaccine is fully approved by the FDA.

However, there are some potential workarounds to get third shots in arms more quickly. According to Dr.  Amanda Cohn, chief medical officer for the CDC’s immunization and respiratory diseases center, the US is “actively looking into ways … to potentially provide access earlier than any potential change in regulatory decisions” — including through “a study, or through an investigational new drug format.”

As the Washington Post reported after the advisory board meeting earlier this week, that strategy could open up access to a third shot under the FDA’s compassionate use program, which “would require enrolling individuals in a clinical study where additional doses can be given.”

President Joe Biden also struck an encouraging tone on the prospects for the FDA’s full vaccine approval in coming months, at a recent town hall in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“They’re [the FDA] not promising me any specific date, but my expectation, talking to the group of scientists we put together… plus others in the field, is that sometime, maybe in the beginning of the school year, at the end of August, beginning September, October, they’ll get a final approval,” Biden told CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday.

President Joe Biden gestures on stage at a town hall in Cincinnati, Ohio SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

President Joe Biden participates in a CNN town hall hosted by Don Lemon at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 21, 2021.

Full FDA approval requires a massive amount of data, including at least six months of vaccine efficacy data, and it usually takes about 10 months for the agency to review license applications and reach a decision.

“When we were reviewing applications back when they were on paper, there was so much, it would not fit on the freight elevator,” Norman Baylor, the former head of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review, told CNN. “That’s how big the application is.”

However, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has already been granted a priority review, which shortens the potential timeline to six months, and multiple officials have said approval will likely come even sooner, potentially clearing the way for booster shots for older and immunocompromised people.

Moderna is currently “in the process of completing our rolling submission” to the FDA, according to a Moderna spokesperson, and approval for the Moderna vaccine will almost certainly take longer. The company told CNN this week that it has no specific timeline in place yet.

Full FDA approval could also have a number of other benefits, in addition to opening up the possibility of booster shots for vulnerable groups. As NBC’s Shannon Pettypiece explained on Tuesday, “the official regulatory signoff would remove a significant legal and public relations barrier for businesses and government agencies that want to require vaccinations for their employees and customers,” and could also boost vaccine confidence.

Thus far, the US has largely held back from imposing vaccine mandates, though other countries, such as France, have embraced them to positive effect.

Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday that a proof of vaccination (or a negative test) would very soon be needed to access public events, restaurants, cinemas, stations & airports…

Since then, more than 2.2 million vaccination appointments have been booked in less than 48 hours. pic.twitter.com/9lAr52iDgf

— Edouard Mathieu (@redouad) July 14, 2021

The delta variant is spreading fast

As the Biden administration consensus coalesces behind the need for a booster shot for vulnerable groups, the delta variant of Covid-19 is gaining ground quickly in the US, fueling a sharp rise in new cases.

On Saturday, the US reported a rolling seven- day average of nearly 50,000 cases per day — the highest level since early May, according to CNN’s Ryan Struyk, and almost 39,000 more cases than the same seven-day average in late June.

The United States is now reporting 49,386 new coronavirus cases per day, the highest seven-day average since May 3, according to data from @CNN and Johns Hopkins University.

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) July 24, 2021

Additionally, at a Thursday White House briefing on the pandemic, CDC director Dr.  Rochelle Walensky warned that the delta variant “now represents more than 83 percent of the virus circulating in the United States.”

CDC director Rochelle Walensky said that the infectious Delta variant of COVID-19, which was first found in India, now comprises more than 83% of new cases nationwide https://t.co/77YcbvhKMG pic.twitter.com/dXK699zl6J

— Reuters (@Reuters) July 22, 2021

“Compared to the virus we had circulating initially in the United States at the start of the pandemic, the delta variant is more aggressive and much more transmissible than previously circulating strains,” Walensky said. “It is one of the most infectious respiratory viruses we know of and that I have seen in my 20-year career.”

As Vox’s Umair Irfan explained in late June, when delta accounted for just 20 percent of new Covid cases in the US, the CDC has identified delta as one of five “variants of concern.” Not only does it spread far faster than the original strain of Covid, but it’s better at evading vaccine protections, and, as Irfan reports, there’s some evidence that it can cause “more severe outcomes from Covid-19 compared to the original versions of the virus.”

Despite those breakthrough cases, however, the delta surge is overwhelmingly proving to be “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” as Walensky put it earlier this month. In the US, more than 99 percent of recent deaths and about 97 percent of recent hospitalizations from Covid-19 have been among unvaccinated individuals.

As a result, this latest virus outbreak has been especially bad in parts of the US with low vaccine uptake, such as rural Missouri.

As The Atlantic’s Ed Yong reported from Missouri earlier this month, “ICUs are also filling with younger patients, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, including many with no underlying health problems.”

According to Yong,

Almost every COVID-19 patient in Springfield’s hospitals is unvaccinated, and the dozen or so exceptions are all either elderly or immunocompromised people. The vaccines are working as intended, but the number of people who have refused to get their shots is crushing morale. Vaccines were meant to be the end of the pandemic. If people don’t get them, the actual end will look more like Springfield’s present: a succession of COVID-19 waves that will break unevenly across the country until everyone has either been vaccinated or infected.

A swath of southern states, including Louisiana and Florida, are currently reporting more cases per 100,000 people than anywhere else in the US, with Florida alone contributing more than one-fifth of all new cases in the US.

“Folks [are] supposed to have common sense,” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, said this week. “But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down.”

Currently, only 34 percent of Alabamans are fully vaccinated — the worst vaccination rate of the any state in the US, along with Mississippi.

Getting vaccinated protects individuals — and the whole community

As of Saturday, about 57 percent of the vaccine-eligible population in the US — more than 162 million people — have been fully vaccinated, according to data from the CDC. Another 15 million or so more have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

That level of widespread vaccination is unequivocally good news, but with US Covid cases on the rise and the delta variant running rampant, it invariably also means some of the new Covid cases in the US are “breakthrough infections” — fully vaccinated people nonetheless testing positive for Covid-19.

As Vox’s Umair Irfan explains,

The CDC definition of a breakthrough infection is a laboratory-confirmed infection more than 14 days after the final dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, as it can take a while for the full protection of a vaccine to spool up. This definition includes everything from infections that produce no symptoms at all to cases that result in death. “People often think about ‘infection’ and ‘disease’ as being the same thing, and that is not the case,” said Brianne Barker, a virologist at Drew University.

It’s only when a virus starts causing symptoms that an infected person is said to have disease, so not all SARS-CoV-2 infections cause Covid-19. But as we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, people can carry and transmit the virus without falling ill themselves, creating a major route for the spread of Covid-19. That’s why tracking breakthrough cases is so important.

The good news about breakthrough infections, though, is that if you’re vaccinated and get sick with Covid-19, you’re far less likely to get severely ill than you would without a vaccine. With a vaccine, the chance of hospitalization and death are both reduced compared to unvaccinated individuals, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top infectious disease expert.

“If you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated. About 0.8 percent are vaccinated,” Fauci told NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press earlier this month. “No vaccine is perfect. But when you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death … it’s really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable.”

9/12
Breakthrough infections shouldn’t be taken to mean vaccines don’t work; but they SHOULD be taken as even more reason to get that shot in your arm. If everyone was vaccinated, there would be far less reason for the virus to spread & fewer people for it to spread btwn. #velshi

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) July 24, 2021

Currently, the country is administering about 537,000 doses per day on average, down from more than a million per day on average at the start of July — and that dropoff could fuel a brutal, self-reinforcing cycle.

Specifically, according to Irfan, “with vaccination rates slowing, reports of people becoming infected after their immunizations could feed vaccine hesitancy, which in turn can fuel more breakthrough cases.”

In reality, however, getting vaccinated actually heads off the risk of further breakthrough infections by making it harder for the virus to spread. And by the same token, getting more people vaccinated will also go a long way toward protecting older and immunocompromised people who have already been vaccinated but may now need a booster shot.

  1. #ACIP member Keipp Talbot made an impassioned plea for people to get vaccinated as a way to protect those who cannot get enough protection from the #Covid vaccines. We all know someone in this situation, she said. We live with them, work with them, worship with them.

    — Helen Branswell
  1. July 22, 2021

“Each day, hundreds of thousands of Americans are choosing to protect themselves, their kids, and their neighbors by getting their first shot,” White House Covid czar Jeff Zients said this week. “These Americans are stepping up and doing their part. Each shot matters. Each additional person fully vaccinated is a step closer to putting this pandemic behind us.”

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