Last week’s Covid story

Jack Clark
Co-publisher

We received an email from a Member in Costa Mesa who wished to cancel his TC Membership because of a front-page piece in last week’s paper. The Member wrote it was “a vaccine hit piece” that he believed was intended to discourage our readers from being vaccinated by referencing out-of-context statements from scientific sources.

As reported last week, the Centers for Disease Control did publish an article stating that of 469 persons infected with coronavirus during a recent outbreak in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, 346 of them (74%) had been fully vaccinated. But our story left it at that — which to readers may have created the misled impression that vaccines do not work.

Vaccines are not intended to keep a person from becoming infected. Vaccines produce antibodies that attack the virus after a person becomes infected, working to keep the infected person from becoming sick or hospitalized and possibly dying.

Last week’s story did not mention that of the 469 total Covid cases in the Barnstable outbreak, 195 were asymptomatic, i.e., they had no symptoms at all, while 274 did have symptoms — and that, of the total of five people hospitalized, four had been vaccinated and no deaths were reported.

The CDC reports that, currently throughout the U.S., roughly 97% of new Covid hospitalizations and 99.5% of Covid deaths occur in unvaccinated persons.

We apologize for omissions in last week’s Covid story. The Town Crier does not wish to dissuade persons from obtaining Covid vaccinations. We intend to do a better job of editing our own stories, as well as those submitted by others, before publication.