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Vaccine doubters’ strange fixation with Israel
Today at 9:51 a.m. EDT
From the start of the worldwide coronavirus vaccination campaign, the anti-vaccine movement and vaccine skeptics picked an unfortunate case study: Israel. The country shot to the lead of the pack with an aggressive vaccination campaign, but its results weren’t as instantaneous as these critics suggested they should have been. Cases in Israel kept rising for a little while! So they pitched Israel
as evidence that maybe the vaccines didn’t really work that well.
But then the vaccination effort actually took hold. Israel dropped from a high of around 10,000 new daily cases in January to a seven-day average of as low as 10 last month. It began
logging some days with zero deaths in April, and has recorded about 100 confirmed deaths in the last three months. If there is one country that reinforced the efficacy of the vaccines, it became Israel. And if there was one country that epitomized the sloppiness of the anti-vaccine movement, it, too, was Israel.
But old habits apparently die hard. A vaccine skeptic community that often focuses on unverified data, innuendo and false and misleading comparisons is suddenly pointing to Israel again. The reason: The country is suddenly seeing an uptick in cases, and
most of them are among vaccinated people.
Over the last week, charts have abounded on social media bearing out this latter fact. A prominent vaccine skeptic who appears often on Fox News went so far as to claim Israel’s data showed something amounting to a “complete vaccine failure on every level.”
A cardiologist on Fox News pointed to Israel’s data while claiming “the delta variant really is not ... protected at all by the vaccines,” and said, “There is no reason right now —
no clinical reason to go get vaccinated.” And vaccine skeptics have misleadingly promoted a quote from Israeli Prime Minister
Naftali Bennett in which he said, “
We do not know exactly to what degree the vaccine helps, but it is significantly less,” while ignoring that he was
specifically comparing the delta variantto others, not making a broad point about vaccines failing.
The reality, as it often is with such claims, is quite different from how it’s being pitched.
While cases are indeed rising significantly in Israel because of the more vaccine-resistant delta variant, that’s from a very low baseline. The country remains at a fraction of its former case numbers. The seven-day average is at about 800 new daily cases, or less than one-tenth of the January peak.
Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina last week
explained this misleading use of data, which is known as a
base rate fallacy — or base rate bias in epidemiology:
The more vaccinated a population, the more we’ll hear of the vaccinated getting infected. For example, say there’s a community that’s 100% vaccinated. If there’s transmission, we know breakthrough cases will happen. So, by definition, 100% of outbreak cases will be among the vaccinated. It will just be 100% out of a smaller number.
Cue Israel. They are one of the global leaders in vaccinations; 85% of Israeli adults are vaccinated. So, say we have the following scenario:
...
With an infection rate among the vaccinated of 2% and infection rate of 13% among the unvaccinated, this would give us an efficacy rate of 85%.
The most important numbers to consider, though, are not the overall case rates, but rather the serious cases. And those, too, remain extremely low — even lower than the case rates, relatively speaking.
Israel is averaging about 120 weekly hospital admissions, which is down from a peak of nearly 2,000 in January. So while cases are less than one-tenth of what they were then, hospitalizations are about one-sixteenth. And admissions to the intensive care unit are about one-twentieth, according to data collected
by the University of Oxford.
All told, Israeli government data show the Pfizer vaccine is indeed significantly less effective at preventing
coronavirus cases of the delta variant (64 percent) than it was for previous variants (95 percent). It’s also significantly less effective at preventing symptomatic cases (64 percent vs. 97 percent). But it performs much more similarly when it comes to
preventing serious cases and hospitalization (93 percent vs. 97.5 percent).
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