Protection against infection from a fourth Pfizer vaccine dose wanes to zero in just eight weeks, an Israeli study published in the NEJM has found.
The researchers looked at the records of all 1,252,331 people over 60 in Israel eligible for the fourth dose during the Omicron wave (January 10th to March 2nd 2022). They excluded various groups, including those with prior test-positive Covid to avoid confounding with natural immunity.
They compared infection rates and severe cases in the four-dose group to the three-dose group, and also to an “internal control” in the form of the four-dose group in the first week after the jab (excluding the first two days). They provided estimates of rate ratios (a measure of vaccine effectiveness) adjusted for age, sex, demographic group, and calendar day (to take into account the varying prevalence over the epidemic wave).
They found that although some fleeting protection against infection appeared to occur, it peaked two to three weeks after the injection (blue dots in the chart below) and was gone by the eighth week.
The adjusted rate of infection in the eighth week after the fourth dose was very similar to those in the control groups; the rate ratio for the three-dose group as compared with the four-dose group was 1.1 (95% CI, 1.0 to 1.2), and the rate ratio for the internal control group as compared with the four-dose group was only 1.0 (95% CI, 0.9 to 1.1).
Note that the apparent reduced risk in the first two days after the jab the researchers put down to “transient biases” such as people not getting vaccinated if unwell.
Enhanced protection against severe illness, on the other hand, persisted for the six weeks of the study (red dots above), the researchers observe. However, they sound a note of caution, pointing out that the effectiveness of earlier doses was found to wane quickly. A CDC study found that two doses were only 38% effective against hospitalisation with Omicron after six months, while another study found vaccine effectiveness against emergency department admission with Omicron waned to 41% with two doses after six months and to 48% with three doses after three months.
It’s worth noting that the four dose group in the Israeli study appears to be healthier than the three dose group, which means the vaccine effectiveness against severe disease in the chart above will be overestimated. Compared to the four dose group, the three dose group had 3.5 times the adjusted risk of severe Covid whereas the internal control group (i.e., the four dose group in its first week post-jab) had just 2.3 times the adjusted risk of severe Covid. This is a version of the healthy vaccinee effect, and means the vaccine effectiveness against severe disease above will be overestimated as it does not adjust for it.
It’s also worth noting that the raw (unadjusted) reported infection rate was higher in the internal control group than in the three-dose group (388 vs 361 per 100,000 person-days), which means the four-dose group experienced higher than average infection rate in the week after the jab (a phenomenon noted in many contexts previously). This means many of the susceptible may have been infected at that point, creating a survivorship bias in the four-dose group that lowers its infection rate and artificially increases reported vaccine effectiveness.
The study confirms that additional vaccine doses do little to nothing to reduce infection risk. They appear to have a positive impact on serious disease, though the follow-up time is too short to know how quickly this wanes. There is no reason, however, to think it will differ much from earlier doses, where it dropped to around 40% within six months.
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And….. If it ever came to electricity rationing? The smart meter adverts never seem to mention two salient facts:
1. High usage households (e.g. those using 10kwh per day to put 40 milesworth into their EV) can be identified.
2. It is technically possible to disable a domestic supply remotely via smart meter.
So regional blackouts can be replaced with selective supply disruption via a per-household usage cap. Still, ones EV might still fullfil a significant portion of its function by virtue signalling on your driveway.
Personally I think rationing unlikely. £1/kWh is going to result in a big switch-off. Government intervention in the form of price controlled excepted.
Smart Meters are all about surge pricing, think Economy 7 on steroids.
I don’t really get how surge pricing would “work” without smart appliances that automatically pause during a price surge (laundry, refrigeration, heat pumps). All surge pricing would otherwise accomplish is profit gouging. Look at what happened to Griddy in Texas.
As of 1Jul2022 all new car chargers must be “smart” so that’s one small step towards smart appliances. Only a few hundred million to go …..
And they will make it technically possible to charge extra tax for car charging, rather like excise duty on fuel pumps, with VAT on top.
I wouldn’t rush to use the term “profit gouging”.
If I have an open cycle gas turbine generator, or a grid scale battery, or a Dinorwig style hydro facility, I only make money when the grid is desperate for power, so most of the time my asset is sitting idle. These facilities would never be funded unless they could pay for themselves.
Part of the solution to high prices is levelling out demand and avoiding expensive peaks.
Ah but this article fails to factor in the smugness quotient, there are few things that can provide the level of smugness that is apparently derived from driving an electric car. In terms of smugness points per k/watt per mile, nothing can touch an electric car.
Not so smug when they are stuck on the hard shoulder waiting for the RAC
Exactly. When you run out of liquid fuel in your lovely fossil fuel vehicle, just get a bottle (preferably with a lid), and off you trot.
Go flat in a BEV, and a tow is your only option.
And even less smug if they’re stuck in the middle lane of a “SMART” motorway …… waiting to be demolished by an HGV.
Especially if the car has a green band on its number plate, allowing virtue signalling to a wider audience.
Love this comment.
I am even more smug than the average EV driver because I bought a Tesla two years ago with free supercharging for the lifetime of the car, so Elon is picking up the bill.
I apologise if that has raised anyone’s blood pressure to dangerous levels
I’m sorry but buying an electric car is a very dumb thing to do.
– They are more expensive
– They are actually not that cheap to run
– It takes ages to recharge vs a couple of.minutes for a normal car
– You can’t do long trips with them
An electric car has literally zero practical benefit vs a normal car. Not one.
Electric cars are for virtue signalling and for people who get a buzz from using the latest technology. That’s it.
They’re a massive con.
Please think about the environment before disrespecting EVs. They emit zero CO2, since all their electricity comes from renewables. I know this because my energy company says my lekkie is 100% renewables. Pretty much all energy companies claim 100% renewables.
Since only 43% of UK electricity is zero carbon (renewables and nuclear), it does make me wonder where the other 57% goes.
I also wonder if I plug in an EV, where the incremental load on the grid is met from? That would be gas then…. So that means an EV is a ‘displaced emission vehicle”, powered from a CCGT gas station running at about 50% efficiency. Since modern Atkinson cycle combustion engines are hitting mid-30s efficiency, the environmental benefit of an EV is, at best, marginal. Factor in the manufacturing CO2 overheads, and the energy involved lugging a 500kg battery around and ….
You were right all along…. They are a massive con..
..…. and the child/slave labour involved in mining the rare earth elements
They also refer to Elon Reeve Musk (government subsidy truffle hound par excellence) as “Elon Himself”.
They also write tweets addressed to their hero about their very heavy, very expensive and very badly put together electric sofas. The tweets generally start “Love my Tesla Elon but…” followed by a string of things wrong with their Teslas.
And the proper plural of Tesla is Teslae, don’t you know.
Elon thought he could skip PPAP.
And the only reason the other car manufacturers make BEVs is because greenwashing governments mandate it.
For limited company directors like me, I did the maths and I’m significantly better off with hiring a new EV for 3 years compared to maintaining my previous 10 year old diesel, or hiring a new petrol/diesel inside or outside of the business.
The tax breaks on the Benefit In Kind made it a total no brainer. Trust me, I did some detailed calculations accounting for taxes, maintenance, fuel, depreciation, etc, and EV came out way on top. This was when electricity was about 17p/kWh and diesel about £1.20/litre.
Yes, you need to plan long journeys a bit better, having an idea which service stations you might want to stop for a 20-minute meal at to get a 75% recharge, but I can live with that since I only need to drive that far that 3-4 times a year.
For solar panel owners like me, the increasing electricity prices won’t make much difference, and for the off-grid preppers, the latest cars and chargers, combined with solar panels, let you effectively run your house off-grid, discharging the battery while the rest of the street collapses into a blackout. If you have solar panels, I’d argue these cars make you less dependent, rather than more dependent, on the state.
The smoothness in the acceleration, compared to the jerking gears of a combustion engine, has impressed every passenger I’ve had.
Once the tax breaks are gone, perhaps a combustion vehicle will become more economically attractive again, but I will miss the convenience of not having to drive to, and queue at, petrol stations.
When the next poor sod delivering the 150th Amazon parcel of the day to your front door in his 10 year old diesel Toyota, having paid 20% VAT on his fuel. Having contributed to your feed in tariff for your solar panels (that he would have liked to have but couldn’t afford). Having paid his excise fuel duty, higher car tax, congestion charges etc, do remember to thank him for contributing to your gargantuan tax breaks you’re enjoying just because you could afford to spaff £70K on a new Polestar/Tesla, whatever. Will he think of you as a eco-warrior saving the planet for his kids or a benefit junkie screwing the working man?
I don’t make the rules, I just learn to operate within them for my own benefit. I don’t get the feed in tariff, but can understand why you would assume so.
£70k hasn’t been ‘spaffed’, the car has been hired. EV simply works out cheaper for me, and I imagine for quite a few other people too, so it’s disingenuous for anyone to say that EVs are a stupid choice. I’m not in this to save the planet, I’m in it to reduce my costs.
FYI my Amazon guy drives a 1 year old BMW.
I, for one, appreciate Caustic highlighting the economic benefits of hiring&driving an EV. Anyone annoyed should direct their grievances towards the government that concocted the “sloped playing field” rules that made this a sensible economic proposition.
I am not familiar with the tax breaks he referred to, but if they’re anywhere near as warped as my solar FIT payments of 60p/kWh then he might be enjoying considerable savings.
I agree. People cannot generate their own petrol at home!
The entire basis of shunning a source of energy which is 14 times more energy dense than electric batteries is, frankly, bonkers.
No it’s about creating a serf class whose movement you can control, which is perfectly if yr part of the predator class.
Now government has seized control of the energy grid through regulation only a fool would buy an electric car. Yr “friendly”
politician can turn yr movement on avd off at will.
If you have an EV as well as sufficient solar panels to provide for all your domestic electricity needs AND the ability/time to trickle-charge your car at home, it might just be worth it. I don’t have any of those things, so I won’t be wasting £25,000+ to get an inefficient, impractical EV ….. when I have a perfectly good 5 yr old, petrol driven Hyundai i10 (which is all I need).
The other aspect is the weight of Electric cars and the fact they do not require road tax. Heavier cars will wear out roads quicker as well as being more dangerous in collisions because of the greater mass.
‘There are no solutions, only trade-offs’ – T. Sowell
Excellent analysis, Nick.
It would be interesting to see these figures net of tax.
I reckon if you remove tax it’s already (ie before the price cap rises) at least twice as expensive to fuel an electric car than a petrol one.
However, if EVs take over the chancellor will need to tax them as heavily as petrol/diesel are taxed now. Oops!
Paul Bird
EV owners use an off peak tariff to charge at home, and most journeys are not long enough to require charging en-route.
But, yes, on the road charging will get more expensive, unless you’re one of those super smug b*stards like me that owns a Tesla with free supercharging for the lifetime of the car.
It’s not free – for the lifetime of your vehicle someone is paying.
No, someone is not paying, Tesla Inc are paying
I guess they did not imagine that electricity prices in Europe could ever go this high.
To update the sums a bit, today I paid 168.7p/l for petrol (21 p/l less than late June). That’s about 17.6 p/kWh thermal, based on 9.5 kWh per litre. Allowing for about 33% efficiency in my Toyota hybrid car (the theoretical peak efficiency is 38%), it’s about 53 p/kWh traction output – not a lot different from the projected day rate mains power charge.
Petrol/electric hybrids have many of the benefits of electric traction, but without the snags of pure battery electric ones, both financial and practical – unless you live in certain areas with special charge regimes.
If you deducted tax (VAT and fuel duty, plus all the congestion charges etc) from the comparison, using petrol or diesel over electricity would be a no brainer.