Eight members of the New York Yankees – seven coaches and player Gleyber Torres – have tested positive for COVID-19 this week. All of them had received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at least two weeks ago. The Johnson & Johnson shot is 66.3% effective at preventing positive COVID-19 tests, according to the CDC, so “breakthrough” cases are inevitable. Still, is this cluster cause for concern?
Public health experts don’t think so. In fact, the absence of adverse outcomes among the infected members of the Yankee organization is proof that vaccines work. Seven of the eight were completely asymptomatic. The one outlier briefly experienced mild symptoms, but now feels fine.
In other words, the vaccines may have spared them from a serious infection, hospitalization, and even death. From CNN:
If someone does get Covid-19 after being fully vaccinated, the symptoms will likely be far less severe than if they didn’t get vaccinated at all, said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University. This is similar to how flu vaccines work.
And the fact that almost all of the infected Yankees don’t have symptoms shows how “remarkably great” the vaccine is at preventing people from getting sick from Covid-19, Reiner said.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky was asked about the Yankee outbreak at a White House briefing on Thursday. She said officials are studying the situation, but added, “All real-world data in large studies in settings demonstrate that vaccines are effective against disease.”
The Yankees have exceeded an 85% vaccination rate – the MLB threshold – so they’ve been allowed to relax their COVID-19 precautions.
“Hopefully the fact that we are vaccinated in a pretty large mass … will blunt this and allow a number of us to not get anything and keep the symptoms at a minimum if it does get through,” Yankee manager Aaron Boone said.
Yahoo! Sports provides additional context:
For most people relying on vaccines to protect them from COVID-19 illness, hospitalization and death, the J&J is a perfectly viable option. In fact, as of Friday, the CDC will update its categorization to only count fully vaccinated patients who test positive for COVID as “breakthrough” cases if they’re hospitalized or die, which means the current Yankees cases wouldn’t even be tallied.
But because the Yankees have regimented, robust testing Boone was tested at least three times Thursday), there’s a chance to better understand how COVID-19 spreads between vaccinated individuals. Which brings us back to that key question: Did all of the infected Yankees catch it from a shared, unvaccinated source, or did fully vaccinated individuals pass it to one another?
“I would want to know what happened,” Moore said, “because it’s of interest – not just from a sports fan perspective, although I like sports – it’s of interest from the wider public health perspective to figure out what happened.”