Nate Silver - the freak out about the Israeli vaccine effectiveness is due to poor analysis.

So why does it look like there is no difference until mid-July? @AArgoetti looked at the trends of cases in cities stratified by their vaccination rates.
We can see that cities on the lower quartile had low number of cases until recently, but since mid-July, most cases are coming from those cities.

This is what we got wrong. This “wave” started from cities with high vaccination rate and couldn’t “find” unvaccined adults at risk. The denominator we need to use until mid-July is >95% vaccination rate and not the country’s average.

So to summarize, the vaccines are highly effective in preventing severe cases and probably also symptomatic diseases, even for those vaccinated early.
Just to correct one misconception from my thread - many of you understood that we think there is no waning immunity. This analysis does not reject the waning hypothesis, it just shows that the vaccines are still highly effective even with possible waning.

Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine is just 39% effective in Israel where the delta variant is the dominant strain, but still provides strong protection against severe illness and hospitalization, according to a new report from the country's Health Ministry.

The efficacy figure, which is based on an unspecified number of people between June 20 and July 17, is down from an earlier estimate of 64% two weeks ago and conflicts with data out of the U.K. that found the shot was 88% effective against symptomatic disease caused by the variant.

However, the two-dose vaccine still works very well in preventing people from getting seriously sick, demonstrating 88% effectiveness against hospitalization and 91% effectiveness against severe illness, according to the Israeli data published Thursday.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215656268