The Yankees are in the midst of a small COVID-19 outbreak, which has three coaches, four staffers, and shortstop Gleyber Torres out of commission for the time being.
So how could this happen to the Yankees, who have achieved the MLB-desired level of 85 percent of Tier 1 personnel fully vaccinated? Dr.
Brian McDonough, who has joined Moose & Maggie several times during the pandemic, joined the show again Friday to explain a little about the process.
“The good news is that if you get the vaccine, what we’re seeing is the cases are very mild or asymptomatic, like the Yankees’ were,” the doctor said. “Only one of the eight had any symptoms at all – but had they not been vaccinated, you run the risk of having very serious complications like we saw at the beginning of the pandemic. What we know definitely is that if you’re vaccinated, it’s far less likely you get sick, and extremely less likely that you get very sick.”
No vaccine is 100 percent effective in theory, the doctor noted, and the Yankees may have been more “at risk” because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine they received is the least effective of the bunch.
“Because they had the vaccine, the cases weren’t as serious, but the way the vaccines work they are not 100% effective,” Dr. McDonough said.
“Johnson & Johnson’s is about 67 percent effective, so that means 33 percent of the time you could, in fact, get the virus.”
According to Dr. McDonough, that math checks out – if there was one infected person around the Yankees, eight positives means likely 20 to 25 people were exposed to the original infected person.
“That’s how it broke down, almost the way science tells you: you had the chance of getting the virus, and you got it, but had mild symptoms because you’re vaccinated,” he said.
So why, then, are we getting these “breakthrough cases” all around?
“Take something like the measles vaccine: you’d have clusters of people getting the measles if they weren’t vaccinated, but then you’d also find people who were vaccinated who got milder cases,” Dr. McDonough said.
“The whole concept of how a vaccine works is to achieve herd immunity, so essentially, the virus disappears. You’re never 100 percent safe until you get it out of the environment, and the way to do that is vaccinate as many people as possible.”
And, Dr. McDonough says, that all means poor Gleyber Torres, who got COVID in December, is a very rare case.
“That is a very rare occurrence for someone to have the virus, get the vaccine, and still get it again. It shows he’s protected against the serious effects, but you have to believe his percentages of getting it were 10 to 15 percent,” the doctor said.
There is, though, a medical silver lining in this.
“It also tells us that when you have the virus…he should have still had antibodies from December, but it seems that the vaccine immunity is actually holding longer than the natural immunity.”
Listen to Dr. McDonough’s entire appearance on Moose & Maggie below.
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