General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I talked my wife into not attending the Minnesota State Fair [View all]BumRushDaShow
(139,075 posts)were "designed" to be "research" or "a study" but were more shoe-horned into being one in the midst of ALL reported cases in their respective Counties. They are simply compiled and reported data of what they found out about the outbreaks in those locations in some detail, and adding background info so that readers can get some context for what was found. So a "peer review" is really not something that would be meaningful per se.
I.e., when CDC reports out the data sent to them from all the states and territories, their reporting is not a "study" or "research". It's simply reporting the data, and that data can be broken down into various data sets by location, demographics, etc.
So if I look at the CDC's data and graph of reported cases in say Florida, and see the plot is showing a spike over a 2 week period, I should be safe saying - "Hey that is a spike of cases over the past 2 weeks, so something happened or is happening to cause that", rather than saying - "That line on the plot that is going up over the past 2 weeks means nothing because it hasn't been 'peer reviewed'".
What usually CAN happen in those cases is that someone could do "a study" using what they call "meta-analysis", where they will gather information from numerous topically-related studies and/or topically-related compilations of data, and then analyze that for any trends and/or correlations across data sets.
Your reference to what the UK did, which I assume is this - https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/227713/coronavirus-infections-three-times-lower-double/
doesn't really preclude or negate the findings from Wisconsin or Provincetown. In the case for all 3, they established that the vaccinated CAN contract and shed the virus, but obviously at lower rates. That is EXACTLY what the scatter plot from the Wisconsin report showed -
The little graph at the very bottom right-hand corner has the left side of the plot with gray dots (those dots being the relative amount of virus found in unvaccinated cases) and has the right side with the yellow dots (those dots being the relative amount of virus found in the vaccinated cases), and it's obvious that the "vaccinated" have less "dots" than the "unvaccinated". THAT is the benefit of getting vaccinated in the first place. It shows the vaccines are working.
But the problem here is that the vaccinated even have "that much", which is a new finding compared to previous variants.
But to make it clear, no vaccine is 100%, and I think THAT is the real message. It never has been - even with the so-called "childhood" vaccines. For example, there are some new mutated strains of Polio that are out in the wild nowadays and there is an updated vaccine to deal with that going through trials and an approval process.
So there's nothing that the UK's publication found that is somehow contradictory to what was found in Wisconsin and Provincetown.
The point is that compared to previous variants, Delta has produced a significant ("non-zero" ) amount of itself in vaccinated people, and that amount can (but obviously not ALL of the time) be shed and spread.