By World Israel News Staff
“With all due respect to my so-many Israeli friends,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the president in response to an Israeli study on the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine.
Fauci was responding to a study released on Saturday conducted by an Israeli HMO and Tel Aviv University that suggested the South African variant of Covid-19 could break through the protection offered by the Pfizer vaccine in some cases.
The study compared nearly 400 people who had tested positive for Covid-19 up to two weeks or more after they received one or two doses of the vaccine to the same number of unvaccinated patients with Covid.
Reuters reports that “among patients who had received two doses of the vaccine, the [South African] variant’s prevalence rate was eight times higher than those unvaccinated – 5.4% versus 0.7%.”
While admitting at a press briefing that, “There are always breakthroughs regardless of what the efficacy of the vaccine is,” Fauci dismissed the Israeli study’s findings.
“I think that that reprint, or preprint, as it were, was about as confusing as you possibly could be,” said Fauci, who is also director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
“The only thing that wasn’t confusing about that was that you probably need two doses, the way we’ve been saying, absolutely if you want to get protected and get greater protection, because you saw things shifted when you were one or two weeks beyond the second dose,” Fauci said.
Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, who was also at the briefing, said, “What we do know, when these breakthrough infections do occur is they tend to occur with fewer symptoms, less virus — less transmissible virus,” if the person has been vaccinated.
Image: NIAID, CC BY 2.0 <;, via Wikimedia Commons
