> More than 350 doctors and medical workers have caught COVID-19 in Indonesia despite being vaccinated with Sinovac

This vaccine is known to be less effective but omitting it from the title sure makes for a headline.

its an almost useless vaccine from a few recent reports. Costa Rica has decided to dump it completely its been so bad. I would expect more to follow from what I've seen on Reuters etc.

I wonder how many deals the Chinese got for pushing this useless vaccine via diplomacy.

It's a stretch to call it almost useless. It is certainly effective in reducing the number of intensive care admissions and deaths. The problem is mutations keep popping up before we can obtain herd immunity. The vaccines needs to be continuously updated.

I wish I could find the article I was reading a few days ago. It said something like: zero antibodies found in vaccinated until 2nd jab, then the effectiveness of the 2nd jab seems to struggle to bring it up to 50%.

I would call that nearly useless. If they are ignoring these poor statistics and just rolling back to pre-covid rules I'd say its worse than nearly useless.

50% is much, much better than 0%. Also there is a reason some vaccines need to be administered as 2 doses. It is irrelevant to mention the antibodies after the first dose.

Let's not write this off as due to a less-effective vaccine until we find out whether or not this is in line with the expected effectiveness of that vaccine.

>Kudus, which has about 5,000 healthcare workers, is battling an outbreak believed to be driven by the more transmissible Delta variant, which has raised its bed occupancy rates above 90%.

With each variant, nature gets another shot at obsoleting all existing vaccinations.

> Let's not write this off as due to a less-effective vaccine until we find out whether or not this is in line with the expected effectiveness of that vaccine.

Sinovac does not have usable effectiveness data, due to the manner and place of its development. It is well-known internationally to be less effective than many other options.

> With each variant, nature gets another shot at obsoleting all existing vaccinations.

Please don't hyperbolize. "Obsoleting all existing vaccinations" means a new disease, not a variant. And every mutation is a tradeoff: if COVID-19 "starts over", it may well be much less virulent: less transmissible, or less deadly, or both.

From the article:

>"The data shows they have the Delta variant (in Kudus) so it is no surprise that the breakthrough infection is higher than before, because, as we know, the majority of healthcare workers in Indonesia got Sinovac, and we still don’t know yet how effective it is in the real world against the Delta variant,” said Dicky Budiman, an epidemiologist at Australia's Griffith University.

I really worry about headlines like this. It can lead people to believe that the vaccine isn't worth getting because "SEE breakthrough!" Keeping the nuance in headlines for this matter is key for adoption.

One key unknown is whether the infection of those health workers was better/worse than the normal response post vaccine.

Breath through infections are expected. Vaccination isn't fool proof. The primary goal is herd immunity at the community level, and that those who do have a break through, their experience isn't nearly as bad without the vaccine.

Efficacy test of Sinovac show it has ~50% rate

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-55642648

Why is this surprising? Sinovac-CoronaVac is an inactivated virus vaccine and it is expected to have less protection against mutations.

mRNA vaccines have the instructions to build only the spike protein once inside the body, which is supposed to mutate less as it's a crucial protein for the virus to function properly.

add your:

> Sinovac-CoronaVac is an inactivated virus vaccine and it is expected to have less protection against mutations.

And you should see why its surprising the original title is a clickbait.