A COVID outbreak happened at a CDC conference with 99.4% of attendees “VACCINATED”

At a conference of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) public health agency, a COVID-19 outbreak occurred despite most attendees being vaccinated.

About 1,800 CDC employees and others gathered in April at a hotel in Atlanta, where the CDC is located, for a conference on epidemiological research and strategies.

On April 27, the last day of the conference, several people reported to the organizers that they had tested positive for COVID-19. The CDC and the Georgia Department of Public Health teamed up to survey attendees to find out how many people tested positive.

“The goal was to learn more about the transmission that occurred and increase our understanding as we move into the next phase of COVID-19 surveillance and response,” the CDC said in a May 26 statement.

About 80 percent of the participants completed the survey. Of them, 181 said they tested positive for COVID-19.

Virtually all respondents — 99.4 percent — had received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine.

The number of unvaccinated people who got sick, if any, was not disclosed. The officials also failed to break down those vaccinated into those who had received a dose of the updated bivalent vaccines and those who had not. The CDC has not responded to requests for more information.

You are the unvaccinated - You are to blame

Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said on Twitter that the numbers made the conference a "super-spread event."

Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, added that the outbreak shows that COVID-19 "is still capable of causing large outbreaks and infecting many."

A spokesperson for the Georgia Department of Public Health told The Epoch Times in an email that many of the people attending the conference were not residents of Georgia, and many used home tests.

Bivalent protection

The CDC said the study results "underline the importance of vaccination in protecting individuals from severe illness and death associated with COVID-19," because none of the people who said they tested positive reported going to a hospital .

For the bivalent injections, which were first approved nine months ago, no data on efficacy in clinical trials are available. According to observational data, they offer little protection against infection, although officials claim they protect against serious illness. That protection is short-lived, according to studies including publications not reviewed by the CDC.

The most recent publication, published May 26 , shows that the bivalent COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which replaced the old vaccines earlier this year, have little efficacy against hospitalization.

In adults with no “documented immunocompromising conditions,” protection was 62 percent between seven and 59 days, but dropped to 47 percent before dropping to just 24 percent after 120 days.

In adults with "documented immunocompromising conditions," effectiveness peaked at just 41 percent, with 13 percent after 120 days.

The researchers did not provide estimates of effectiveness among all adults, or the combined population of people with and without "documented immunocompromising conditions." They also did not provide unadjusted estimates of vaccine effectiveness (VE), or pre-adjustment estimates for certain variables.

“Both the raw VE and the adjusted VE should be reported so that major discrepancies are apparent to the reader and questioned,” David Wiseman, founder and chairman of Synechion, told The Epoch Times via email.

Effectiveness against critical illness — defined as intensive care admission or death — peaked at 85 in the people deemed immunocompetent, but fell to 33 percent after 120 days. In those described as immunocompromised, effectiveness was estimated to be no higher than 53 percent.

The effectiveness was not measured after 180 days. Effectiveness for children was not studied as part of the study.

CDC researchers looked at data from the VISION Network, a network of hospitals across the United States. Excluded were people under the age of 50 who received four or more old vaccine boosters.

Only 23.5 percent of immunocompetent individuals and 16.4 percent of immunocompetent individuals had been vaccinated, with the remainder receiving at least two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.

According to data from the CDC, about 8 percent of American adults are still unvaccinated, though that percentage may be a major underestimate ( pdf ).

Researchers said the data showed that bivalent doses “helped protect against COVID-19-associated hospitalization and critical illness” and added that “decreasing protection was shown in some groups.”