WASHINGTON — Over the weekend, seemingly troubling news emerged from Israel, with a study suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine manufactured by Pfizer and BioNTech was less effective against B.1.351, a variant first encountered in South Africa. One headline called the study “alarming.”
Meanwhile, two of the New York Post’s most-read stories as of Monday morning were about a 31-year-old woman in New York City who tested positive for the coronavirus three weeks after receiving the vaccine and a 52-year-old man who ended up in the hospital with COVID-19, despite having also been vaccinated.
Together, such reports in the mainstream media of “breakthrough” infections of the vaccinated can foster the inaccurate narrative