Comedian Chris Rock announced on Twitter that he has contracted COVID.
What Chris failed to relay in this tweet is that it is a breakthrough case. The CDC describes a “breakthrough” case thusly,
COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing infection, serious illness, and death. Most people who get COVID-19 are unvaccinated. However, since vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing infection, some people who are fully vaccinated will still get COVID-19. An infection of a fully vaccinated person is referred to as a “vaccine breakthrough infection.”
According to the Associated Press, Rock claimed back in May that he received the jab, which makes him a breakthrough case.
Rock has previously said he was vaccinated. Appearing on “The Tonight Show” in May, he called himself “Two-shots Rock” before clarifying that he received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
“You know, I skipped the line. I didn’t care. I used my celebrity, Jimmy,” he told host Jimmy Fallon. “I was like, ‘Step aside, Betty White. Step aside, old people. … I did ‘Pootie Tang.’ Let me on the front of the line.'”
May he get better, and recover quickly.
Perhaps in hindsight, Rock should have chosen the two-shot Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, since the J&J shot only showed a 72 percent effectiveness rate; and that was before the Delta variant.
Rock has been all over safety measures since the beginnings of the pandemic. In May 2020, he appeared with disgraced, former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and actress Rosie Perez to push New Yorkers to mask up, and get tested. Now that there are vaccines, it is no surprise that Rock feels the need to urge people to get vaccinated, even though the vaccination didn’t prevent him from getting COVID.
This doesn’t really speak well to his case. Even less to the case for vaccination.
According to the CDC,
- Vaccine breakthrough infections are expected. COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing most infections. However, like other vaccines, they are not 100% effective.
- Fully vaccinated people with a vaccine breakthrough infection are less likely to develop serious illness than those who are unvaccinated and get COVID-19.
But according to a new Yale study, there are those who have been vaccinated, yet are experiencing severe disease, and even death.
In a study of hospitalized patients in the Yale New Haven Health System, researchers identified 969 individuals who tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 infection during a 14-week period between March and July 2021. Of that group, 54 were fully vaccinated.
“These cases are extremely rare, but they are becoming more frequent as variants emerge and more time passes since patients are vaccinated,” said Hyung Chun, associate professor of medicine (cardiology) at Yale and senior author of the study published Sept. 7 in Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Which seems to explain the reasoning behind the booster shots.
Not sure if this is a way to convince Black New Yorkers to get the jab. Like Chicago, and Los Angeles, this segment of the population is still vaccine hesitant. But do the vaccine pushers not see that some people would prefer to take their chances on a virus that CDC data shows has a 95 percent survival rate in healthy individuals, than a vaccine that is not living up to its original claims, and that are causing sometimes severe side effects?