(2021-08-02) How Major Media Outlets Screwed Up The Vaccine Breakthrough Story

How big media outlets screwed up the vaccine ‘breakthrough’ story. Late Thursday, the Washington Post landed what looked like a big scoop: the paper obtained an unpublished slide presentation from inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggesting that the Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads as easily as chickenpox, and that fully vaccinated people who become infected with the variant may be able to pass it on in a way similar to unvaccinated people who become infected.

Meijer took aim, in particular, at an NBC headline declaring that “at least 125,000 fully vaccinated Americans have tested positive” for COVID-19; the fact that this figure represents less than 0.08 percent of fully vaccinated Americans was relegated to a subheading.

• Silver: they are only looking at people who chose to be tested, which is a lot different than all breakthrough infections. Presumably people with symptoms are much more likely to be tested... the sample sizes here are tiny, leading to very wide confidence intervals. And the "real life" confidence intervals are likely even wider given that (as the study authors say) the sample isn't very diverse. (P-town = mostly affluent middle-aged gay men.)

Silver, for one, expressed skepticism about the methodology and representativeness of the Provincetown study, and took news outlets to task for failing to emphasize its “several major caveats.”

As I wrote last week, when it comes to contextualizing the breakthrough-infection problem, there isn’t a centralized repository of data documenting its scale, since the CDC moved, in May, to stop monitoring all such cases and focus only on the small subset that preceded hospitalization and death

The agency could have published its data before—not three days after—changing its mask guidance for vaccinated people, and before the data appeared in partial form in the pages of a national newspaper.

Last week wouldn’t be the first time that the CDC has allowed confusion to pool at a key point of the pandemic. The agency’s failures, however, do not absolve the journalists who have channeled this confusion into their copy.