- Wow, okay, we're doing this.

We're making another COVID video.

This feels like dejavu (tingling sounds).

A year and a half after the very first COVID video on this channel, where are we?

We're still in the midst of this pandemic and to put the impact into scale.

As of now here in the US, one in 500 Americans have died of this disease.

Things are getting better, but this is not over and we know you're tired.

I mean, I am too.

Every day it seems like we get new info to take in and then, okay, new info got it.

I get okay, more new info, lots more new info (sighs).

Things just changed again.

You know, some of this new info is uncertain and some of it is downright confusing, boosters, variants, breakthrough cases, rising hospitalization, schools opening, wearing masks or not again.

So what I wanna do in this video, is clear up a few of the things you might be wondering about COVID.

We've done our research, I'm gonna try and simplify some complex things and I'm gonna be honest about what we know and what we don't know and maybe just maybe this will be the last time we do this.

(Joe sighing heavily) I hope I don't regret saying that.

(calm music) Hey smart people, Joe here.

This pandemic has been a lot.

There's not a single one of us that doesn't have questions.

You know, honestly, our brains hate uncertainty but uncertainty is the uncomfortable place that we have to pass through in order to get to understanding.

The most effective way to navigate that uncertainty is science.

It's never perfect, but it's the best tool we've got.

This video is not gonna be a COVID origin story because how we got here is honestly a different question than we're going and how we get out of this.

If you wanna talk about uncertainty, whew.

Anyway, that's not what this video is.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 they're likely here to stay and the way that lots of other viruses are permanent parts of our lives.

Does that mean that everything we've done so far is for nothing?

I mean, reading the news these days is scary but looking just at the numbers and not looking at the why of those numbers that doesn't tell you the whole story and a lot of what we're seeing actually makes sense if we dig below the surface.

Okay, let's start with the fact that vaccinated people are testing positive for COVID.

I mean what gives?

Weren't the vaccines supposed to prevent that?

I mean, does this mean that vaccines are worthless?

The big pharma's been playing tricks on us, that everything's going wrong?

Well, no, it doesn't mean that at all.

There's been a lot of talk recently about breakthrough infections and that term is actually kind of misleading because it makes it sound like something is busting through an impenetrable defense.

Like we were promised absolute protection and that promise is been broken.

I'm not moving the goal posts here.

That's just not how vaccines actually work.

The idea that a vaccine can prevent infection 100% of the time is an idea called sterilization immunity and its origin story, at least some of it starts in the mid 1800s.

When doctors found that some people who survived the measles outbreak of 1781 they didn't get sick when another measles outbreak kicked off many years later they thought those survivors had become invincible to the germ.

That was 100s of years ago.

Today, we know that things like viruses and antibodies exist.

We know a lot more about how the immune system works.

The symphony of process is happening inside our bodies to fight a disease and keep us protected.

All things they didn't know in the 1800s.

Here's the most important thing we know today and this isn't new.

Getting vaccinated might decrease your symptoms or keep you from dying, but it doesn't necessarily mean no infection.

Invincible everlasting immunity is probably a myth.

Vaccines have never and will never mean 100% impenetrable germ armor for every person that get it.

The value of vaccine, going back to the very first days of smallpox inoculations has been not only in some level of individual protection, but also the effect that comes from a large numbers of people getting that protection, reducing the spread and starving a disease so it's no longer a pandemic.

So why are we seeing vaccinated people test positive for COVID?

Well, for one thing, these days we are much better at detecting tiny amounts of infection.

Some testing methods are so sensitive that hypothetically a few viral particles, could be enough to get a positive result even if that's not enough virus to get you sick and we've seen the same thing with a other diseases.

Post vaccination measles infections are common but they do happen.

Vaccines help your immune system respond faster to a germ and usually with little to no illness.

They don't put up a virus force field around your body.

Here's what you need to know, more than 5 billion COVID vaccine doses have been administered globally and as that number goes up, it makes sense that we're going to see more positive cases of COVID in vaccinated people.

But why?

Well, because if we don't look at those numbers correctly we can fall into a statistical trap.

Think about car accidents.

Very few people don't wear seat belts today but they are extremely likely to go to the hospital if they get in an accident.

On the other hand, the vast majority of people in cars, do wear seat belts.

So most people who end up at the hospital after an accident will have been wearing one.

Does that mean that seat belts cause injuries?

Does it mean seat belts offer no protection?

I mean, obviously we know that isn't true.

If you just look at the number of seat belts and the number of hospitalizations you're missing a very important piece of information.

We can take this one step further because it's not just about whether or not someone gets hurt or sick.

It's also about how severe that is.

Imagine a football team with 10 players, just occur to me football teams usually have 11 players, but whatever stick with me here.

During one season, five players wear helmets on the field five don't at the end of that season one of the helmeted players had a head injury but so did three of the unhelmeted players.

The following season, the coach has all 10 players wear helmets but two of them still get head injuries.

More people with helmets had head injuries.

First it was one then it was two.

So did helmets stop preventing injuries?

No, the same fraction of helmeted players got injured but the to total number of head injuries went down from four to two.

Because everyone is wearing a helmet there were 1/2 as many total head traumas.

This statistical trap is called the base rate fallacy and comparing the numbers for recent COVID cases paints a similar picture.

The total number of COVID cases, hospitalizations and even deaths has gone up in vaccinated people.

That sounds really bad but we have to look at what percent those numbers represent of the total number of vaccinated people.

Okay, so COVID vaccines don't offer some holy grail of immunity and that actually makes sense when we look at the numbers in a more detailed way.

The vaccines are delivering on their promise in a big way, by stopping folks from getting really sick or dying.

Being fully vaccinated means you're more than 10 times less likely to die from COVID-19 across all age groups.

That's huge.

Some people think that getting a COVID infection and developing natural immunity offers superior protection from the virus compared to the vaccine and some data tells us that natural immunity may last longer than vaccine immunity.

So that's not totally crazy, but even if natural immunity is stronger against today's COVID.

Will it protect you from a broader range of present and future COVID virus variants?

It's too early to know if that will end up being true for SARS-CoV-2.

Whether natural immunity that works today, will protect you from future variants or not but it kind of doesn't make that much of a difference 'cause even among people who have recovered from COVID and have natural immunity.

Research shows people who go on to also get vaccinated show even stronger protection than people who rely on natural immunity alone.

Getting vaccinated is an added immunity bonus, no matter if you've had COVID or not, but the bottom line is seeking natural immunity is a high stakes game.

You know, you might know the statistics for your age bracket, maybe most people your age end up totally fine, but you have no way of knowing what that virus is going to do in your body.

That is a gamble.

Young, strong people have died from this disease or had lasting symptoms and we don't know all the reasons yet.

Why some people fair better than others and we're really only just starting to unpack what COVID long haulers are going through.

These people whose symptoms affect their quality of life for months.

It's not pretty but the biggest challenge we're facing now is trying to keep up with a changing virus, variants.

Where do they even come from?

Well, we're racing against evolution folks.

Viruses multiply by copying their genomes over and over again and sometimes those copies come with errors.

Each of these tweaked copies is a variant but not all variants are scary.

Each one is its own complicated mix of mutations.

Most of those mutations don't make much of a difference to how a virus interacts with its host.

In fact, a lot of them make the virus worse not more dangerous.

You know, among all the billions of viral particle copies in one infected person, the virus makes enough errors that they probably carry every possible mutation at every single site in one viral particle or another.

So it's not, if variants will continue to arise it's how many of them will escape and infect other people.

Mutations that make the virus more infectious or cause more serious disease, they are rare but this is the key thing the more a virus is allowed to multiply, like when it's spreading through a population whose immune systems aren't prepared to fight it, the more opportunities for a dangerous variant to pop up.

Given enough chances even rare events can happen frequently.

If you let a virus continue to circulate and reproduce, it's going to create new variants and some of those are going to be worse than the ones that came before.

It's evolution and natural selection happening right before our eyes.

Right now, there are four, maybe five SARS-CoV-2 so-called variants of concern but that number is going to change.

There are going to be more variants worth monitoring because we're playing whack-a-mole with evolution.

Okay, boosters.

So what is a booster anyway?

Oh, when a virus slips through your first defenses say the physical barriers, like your skin.

Your body unleashes a wave of immune system soldiers to fight it off.

Some of these immune system soldiers attack the virus, others play cleanup, but that's only half the job.

See each time you face one of these germ enemies your body stores a memory of the threat.

So you have the upper hand if that invader sneaks through again.

Not a memory in your brain, but a memory in your immune system.

If you wanna know more about how that immune memory works, just watch this we've got you covered.

Vaccines do the same thing.

They give your body the information you need to be ready for that next attack but if you don't see that threat again, over time there might be fewer and fewer soldiers on patrol looking for that germ or maybe the germ soups up its strategy develops new ways to sneak by your immune patrol.

Boosters work to keep your immune patrol on alert.

Some boosters they're identical to the original vaccine and the idea there is to just tell your immune cells, hey, you should still be on guard.

Other boosters are tweaked to line up better with new variants of a germ like giving your body an updated intelligence briefing.

Do vaccines work without boosters?

Absolutely but COVID boosters might become necessary if a variant shows up that can evade our original immune protection or if we see that protection is fading too fast.

More research is needed but boosters might be in our future and that shouldn't make you less confident in vaccines.

It's just how are immune systems work.

But as of now, the vaccines are meeting the challenge protecting you from serious disease and death.

Even if you are one of the few vaccinated people that gets infected.

I think we can agree not getting sick and not dying is what's most important.

Let's be real.

It's looking likely that SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 are probably here to stay.

They're gonna be part of our lives for a long time maybe even lurking in the background forever but that's true of a lot of viruses.

Like the ones that cause the common cold or the flu and if it sticks around, eventually all of us will meet the virus one way or another.

If most of us us will encounter this virus at some point, vaccines are the safest and easiest way to be primed and ready for that fight.

And if we're stuck with this thing, if masking and distancing and changing our behavior in response to the virus, just delays the inevitable.

Maybe you're asking what's the point.

Well, it buys us time.

Time to learn more about the new variants and how to fight them, time to come up with new treatments and new protections, time for hospitals to treat patients with critical needs that aren't COVID related and time to reach more people with the vaccines that we have plus everything that we do here and everything that we learn along the way it's not just important right now.

This pandemic wasn't the first and it will not be the last.

Each time a new piece of information comes in, that gives us one more tool to fight or prevent the next one.

You know, in the end I really think our biggest enemy might not be the virus.

It might be uncertainty.

Uncertainty is an uncomfortable feeling for us psychologically speaking.

We will go to great lengths to get out of that uncertain feeling.

We'll unconsciously choose the conclusions that we want to be true and then seek out information that supports that conclusion.

Instead of looking at the information and using that to draw our conclusions, we all do this.

We are rarely aware that our minds are doing it, whether it's unconsciously telling ourselves that clothes that look like this are cool and then we only follow fashion influencers that support that conclusion or if we're unconsciously choosing the conclusions that go along with our political beliefs and then filtering the sources and information we view as true in order to support that conclusion.

Our default mental state is being uncomfortable with uncertainty and it takes work to get comfortable being in that strange middle place where you don't know everything, if not being sure and then letting new better information guide you to your conclusion not the other way around.

Science is how we do that.

Uncertainty is what makes science exciting.

It's the fuel that drives it.

Understanding how science works means embracing uncertainty, being aware of your uncertainty and letting it guide you to a better place and we all need to keep practicing that.

For every demographic and age group that the vaccines are currently approved for the benefits of the vaccine vastly outweigh the risks.

I think there are very few things in life we're ever completely certain about but that we know is true.

Stay curious.