Depends how you look at it: relatives or absolutes. If the infection risk of an 18 year old is 10%, half is 5%. If the infection risk of a 70 year old is 40%, half is 20%. In absolute terms, the younger age group benefits less. This, however, is obvious based on all information we've known since almost the start of the pandemic, and is not useful at all.

Even if younger people stopped getting infected with these numbers, they could never have similar benefit compared to the older cohort.

These titles are designed to get clicks, but they are very "dangerous", for a lack of a better word, because of how often the title will be shared without reading and understanding.

If infection is less harmful to younger people, less likely in younger people, or both, then cutting the risk of infection by half across all age groups is less beneficial to younger people.

I see a benefit to not getting sick. Even when it won’t kill you, catching a cold sucks. I have no concern that I’m going to die of Covid but I’ll happily get a booster to avoid getting sick.

My sisters caught Omicron days before their boosters were available and they missed ten days of University and work. The booster doesn’t guarantee you won’t get a breakthrough but every bit helps.

I will offer though that if we’re not seeing a massive public health benefit, as opposed to an individual health benefit, that should factor into how many doses you need when they create vaccination requirements. I don’t think a double dosed 20 year old should be told they can’t eat inside if their risk of death or hospitalization is less than a triple vaccinated 65 year old.

Journalism and statistics, oil and water.

I'd even say journalists don't understand statistics. Without proper math education, they see stats as a game of numbers where the goal is to pick the right numbers to support a desired conclusion. I can't seriously expect a journalist to understand what "2 sigma" means, and even less likely they'd be willing to learn the difference between gaussian and poisson distributions.

Certainly some journalists don't understand basic statistics, but counter to your insinuation, I'd guess the author of this piece does. Among other degrees, she has a Masters of Science in Biochemistry from UW-Madison: https://www.nytimes.com/by/apoorva-mandavilli. Rather than lowering the standards and expectations for science journalists, I think we should raise them, and applaud the people like this who (likely) do understand what they are writing about.

Even when the author understands the topic, the challenge is writing an article such that the reader reaches the same conclusion.

The story continued to talk about hospitalization and death rates in people with a standard vaccine course vs also having a booster (units in instances / 100,000 people):

65+ hospitalization: 27.4 -> 4.9 (-82%) 65+ death: 3.6 -> 0.5 (-86%)

50-64 hospitalization: 9 -> 2 (-78%) 50-64 death: 0.4 -> 0.1 (-75%)

They did not break down the 18-49 hospitalization stats, presumably because they are even lower than the 50-64 group (according to the CDC stats linked from the article, < 5 people / 100k in the vaccinated 18-49 group were hospitalized due to COVID-19 in December, and < 1 person / 100k across all 18-49 died from COVID-19, and that number is well under 1 in a million per week for regularly vaccinated, meaning stats are going to be fairly noisy).

The title may be correct, if you look at the absolute difference instead of the relative difference.

Making up numbers here, but if 10 out of 100 unvaxed people get sick among the elderly, and 6 out of 100 unvaxed get sick among younger folks, then the vaccine "helps" 5 elderly but only 3 younger folks.

But I agree with you that it's certainly misleading.

The risk is not zero.

Also, lots of younger Americans have at-risk relatives, teachers, coaches, taxi drivers, coworkers, etc. Even if they're not worried for themselves, many of them care about their risk to loved ones and acquaintances.

Then those loved ones should vaccine themselves. Time to move on with the virus, as countries in Europe, and even Bill Maher, is realizing