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Delta variant 'extraordinarily dangerous' for unvaccinated and 'a problem' for vaccinated: Doctor

Brigham and Women’s Hospital Emergency Medicine Physician Dr. Jeremy Faust joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss the latest coronavirus developments.

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ADAM SHAPIRO: A new COVID milestone in the United States, 75% of adults here in the USA have at least one of their vaccine doses. So we're going to hear President Biden talk about this. He's expected to tomorrow. We also have the WHO urging nations like ours not to proceed with booster shots. We're going to talk about all of this with Dr. Jeremy Faust. He is Emergency Medicine Physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital. It's good to have you here, Doctor.

Want to ask you a simple question. Article in "The New York Times," I think it was yesterday, that one in five, there's a 1 in 5,000 chance for a breakthrough case, that we're all getting very worked up, if you're vaccinated, about breakthrough cases. And then they went on to say it's really one in 10,000. If that's the reality, are we all overreacting to what's happening with this different variant that sent so many people to the hospital?

JEREMY FAUST: Thanks for having me. I think that we have to be very clear about who we're talking about. The Delta variant is extraordinarily dangerous for the unvaccinated. And it presents a problem for the vaccinated that the previous variants did not. But they're not in the same ballpark.

When we see the implications of most breakthrough infections, it is a small fraction of the problem that we saw without vaccination. So yeah, I think that Delta is an uncomfortable development because it makes it much worse for people who have no protection, who are unvaccinated. And it causes more breakthrough cases than any other variant has in the past. And a small subset of those people do have severe illness.

The question is to what to do about it. And I'm not convinced that boosting everybody is actually what's necessary, given the numbers that I've been crunching.

SEANA SMITH: So what do you think is necessary then at this point? I guess, who should be getting a booster shot right now?

JEREMY FAUST: Well, anyone who tells you the answer to that question is making it up because it hasn't been studied carefully enough for anyone to really say. We know from Israel data that boosting seniors has a short-term benefit in terms of decreasing infections. But we have no idea how long that benefit lasts. And it's very likely that it's a very short-term benefit. And that's fine if you want to flatten the curve. But I don't think that we would expect that boost to suddenly render everyone impervious to infection forever again. It seems like a Band-Aid.

Now, again, if you are a very small country with a limited hospital capacity, that might be worth doing. But you can only do it so often.

In terms of younger people, we really need to know what the benefit added is because the booster, the vaccine already provides tremendous protection against severe illness and worse. And we now know that the vaccine also decreases long COVID, we think. And so what is a third dose going to do to young people?

And we'd like to know if a third dose has any side effects that really start to crop up. After the first dose, we had a couple of side effects, small numbers in young people. After the second dose, it went up. Will a third dose make it go further, or is it so far in time spaced away that it's more like the first dose? We don't know. And that's a great study question, but it's a bad thing to just roll it out and see.

So I think that given that we don't have a real emergency on our hands with respect to breakthrough hospitalizations in the sense of we're not having hospitals overflowing with that, it would be very wise to study what we should actually do rather than guessing.

ADAM SHAPIRO: With all of these people who are unfortunately getting the new variant and becoming ill, are we not also though, building immunity as a larger population? I mean, when do we get to the point where it's like the flu? There are obviously tragic cases of the flu, but we all live a normal life without freaking out.

JEREMY FAUST: That's a great question. And I think the answer to that is going to be emerging in the coming weeks when we see what kind of rates we actually are recording in terms of serious illness. What I can tell you here in Massachusetts is that we have had a rise in cases and in hospitalizations during the Delta era. But we have not had excess mortality. We have not actually had a real catastrophic increase in overall deaths the way we did in every other wave so far. And that's because the vaccine does what it was meant to do, which is, for the most part, keep people from being hospitalized and having severe illness and death.

So the question as to what risk we accept, I think that has to be something that every community has for itself. But one thing I would say is, I think it's a very different conversation to have when everybody's eligible because I still think that even though pediatric cases that go bad are relatively rare, it's tragic to think of a five or six-year-old having a bad outcome when we know that once we have safety data on the vaccine, 95% of those outcomes would be preventable.

So once everyone's eligible, I think it's a different conversation to say, well, risk tolerance in one place is different than the next. But until everyone is eligible, to me, it seems a little unfair to have that. And we're close. So I think that in the next few weeks to months, we should be able to do that.

SEANA SMITH: Doctor, we're expecting to hear from President Biden tomorrow. He's supposed to speak on the Delta variant also where we stand with vaccinations. What do you think his message should be, or what do you think his message needs to be tomorrow?

JEREMY FAUST: His message absolutely needs to be that people with zero doses of vaccine in their body are the ones who are at-risk and that therefore, the number one priority actually has to be getting the unvaccinated a first and second dose of the mRNA vaccines because that's what's going to really change the numbers that we see on our screens every day of how many deaths there are. That is number one.

Focusing on boosting, I think, is not a great idea because just those are at the margins. The marginal return on that is actually probably pretty limited and probably pretty short-lived. I think that he needs to focus on that.

I think he needs to focus on the idea of using our national resources to make tests available at the point of use. So a rapid test at school is a lot better than a PCR test that's a day or two old. And I think the government has a role in paying for that.

I think that until we have everyone vaccinated, we need to try to limit spread. So testing and providing masks to people who don't have access to good masks, those are the things that I would like to see in the plan. But I think that there's been so much conversation about boosting that we've kind of forgotten about the basic things, which is let's slow this down until everyone is fully protected.

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