A COVID outbreak at a conference held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unfolded despite most staffers and attendees being vaccinated.
In April, around 1,800 CDC staffers gathered at a hotel in Atlanta, where the CDC is headquartered, for an epidemiological investigations and strategies conference.
However, on the conference’s final day, several people tested positive for COVID-19.
The CDC and the Georgia Department of Public Health scrambled to determine how many people had tested positive for the virus.
“The goals were to learn more about transmission that occurred and add to our understanding as we transition to the next phase of COVID-19 surveillance and response,” the CDC said in a May 26 statement.
Eighty percent of attendees filled out the survey, and 181 said they tested positive for COVID-19.
However, nearly all of the respondents in attendance at the CDC conference – 99.4 percent – were vaccinated had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose despite the outbreak.
As The Epoch Times reported:
“The number of unvaccinated people who got sick, if any, was not disclosed. Officials also did not break down the vaccination between those who had received a dose of the updated bivalent vaccines and those who had not. The CDC has yet to respond to requests for more information.
About 360 people did not respond to the survey, so the actual outbreak may have been larger.
Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said on Twitter that the numbers made the conference a “superspreader event.”
Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, added that the outbreak shows COVID-19 is “still capable of causing big outbreaks and infecting many.”
A Georgia Department of Public Health spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that many people who attended the conference were not residents of Georgia and that many used tests at home.”
According to the CDC, the survey results “underline the importance of vaccination for protecting individuals against severe illness and death related to COVID-19” because none of the people who said they tested positive reported going to a hospital.
As The Times further notes:
No clinical trial efficacy data are available for the bivalent shots, even though they were first cleared nine months ago. According to observational data, they provide little protection against infection, though officials maintain they protect against severe illness. That protection is short-lived, according to studies, including non-peer-reviewed CDC publications.
The most recent publication, released on May 26, showed poor effectiveness against hospitalization from the Pfizer and Moderna bivalent COVID-19 vaccines, which replaced the old vaccines earlier this year.
Among adults without “documented immunocompromising conditions,” the protection was 62 percent between seven and 59 days but went to 47 percent before plunging to just 24 percent after 120 days.
Among adults with “documented immunocompromising conditions,” the effectiveness peaked at just 41 percent, hitting 13 percent after 120 days.
Researchers did not provide the effectiveness estimates among all adults or the combined population of those with and without “documented immunocompromising conditions.”
They also did not provide the unadjusted vaccine effectiveness (VE) estimates or estimates before adjusting for certain variables.
“Both the crude VE and adjusted VE should be reported so that big discrepancies are evident to the reader and questioned,” David Wiseman, founder, and president of Synechion, told The Epoch Times via email.
Effective against critical illness—defined as admission to intensive care or death—peaked at 85 among the people deemed immunocompetent but plunged to 33 percent after 120 days.
The effectiveness was not estimated above 53 percent among those described as immunocompromised.
Effectiveness was not measured beyond 180 days.
Effectiveness for children was not examined as part of the research.
CDC researchers looked at data from its VISION Network, a network of hospitals in the United States. Exclusions included people under 50 who received four or more old vaccine boosters.
Just 23.5 percent of the immunocompetent and 16.4 percent of the immunocompromised were vaccinated, while the rest had received at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.
According to CDC data, about 8 percent of American adults are still unvaccinated, though that percentage may be a big overestimate (pdf).
Researchers said the data showed that bivalent doses “helped provide protection against COVID-19-associated hospitalization and critical disease,” adding that “waning of protection was evidence in some groups.”
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‘about 8 percent of American adults are still unvaccinated, though that percentage may be a big overestimate ‘ Well, I made it into the ‘upper 10%’ on the IQ test.