Don't worry about coronavirus variants overpowering vaccines, experts say
https://news.yahoo.com/dont-worry-about-coronavirus-variants-overpowering-vaccines-experts-say-201248029.html
Don't worry about coronavirus variants overpowering vaccines, experts say
Alexander Nazaryan
Mon, April 12, 2021, 3:12 PM
WASHINGTON Over the weekend, seemingly troubling news emerged from Israel, with a study suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine manufactured by Pfizer and BioNTech was less effective against B.1.351, a variant first encountered in South Africa. One headline called the study alarming.
Meanwhile, two of the New York Posts most-read stories as of Monday morning were about a 31-year-old woman in New York City who tested positive for the coronavirus three weeks after receiving the vaccine and a 52-year-old man who ended up in the hospital with COVID-19, despite having also been vaccinated.
Together, such reports in the mainstream media of breakthrough infections of the vaccinated can foster the inaccurate narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are not effective, especially against new strains of the coronavirus, some of which had not yet emerged when those vaccines were being developed.
The mainstream media want to scare people, Dr. Paul Offit of the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, a pioneer of vaccine science, told Yahoo News. That criticism appears to be bolstered by a recent paper by Dartmouth economist Bruce Sacerdote and his colleagues, which found that 91 percent of media reporting in the U.S. is negative in tone, even when news about the pandemic is actually encouraging.
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