Nine people affiliated with the New York Yankees have tested positive for COVID-19 in recent days. By all accounts, this is not a vaccine skeptic problem—all nine had been inoculated.
But rather than some kind of disturbing signal that a new normal is more elusive than ever, or that the specific vaccine the mix of staffers and players got was somehow bogus, the apparent outbreak in the baseball team’s clubhouse is a reason for optimism, experts told The Daily Beast.
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It’s true that at least one vaccinated staffer caught COVID badly enough to show symptoms, according to Major League Baseball, and possibly pass along the pathogen. That’s what scientists call a “breakthrough” case—an infection that beats the vaccine and actually makes someone sick.
But the other team members do not appear to have actually become ill. And so far, at least, there’s no indication they passed the virus on to anyone else. In other words, their vaccine-induced immunity worked—and prevented a single breakthrough infection from becoming 10 or 100 other troublesome infections. A bona fide superspreader event in the narrow confines of a baseball clubhouse appears to have been avoided.
“The Yankees situation proves that the vaccine works,” Peter Gerbino, a surgeon and sports-medicine specialist at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, told The Daily Beast. “It is good news.”
Many casual observers were understandably alarmed when news of the Yankees infections broke last week, seemingly getting worse by the day. Last Sunday, third-base coach Phil Nevin reported minor COVID symptoms. He soon tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. By Thursday, he was already said to be feeling better.
The team scrambled to quarantine and test anyone who’d been in contact with Nevin. Over the next few days, eight more Yankees tested positive. The team announced the ninth positive test on Sunday. Seven are coaches or support staff. Just one is a player: shortstop Gleyber Torres.
It’s unclear who started the outbreak—who was, to borrow an epidemiological term, the “index case.” We also don’t know if the index case in the Yankees outbreak was vaccinated.
The team may yet figure it out. “Major League Baseball, its medical experts, and the New York State Department of Health are currently advising and assisting the Yankees, who continue to undergo additional testing and contact tracing,” the league stated on Thursday.
All nine Yankees who tested positive last week reportedly had gotten the single-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson back in early April, shortly before U.S. regulators briefly suspended distribution of that vaccine after a small number of people who received the jab suffered blood clots. The feds have since resumed distribution of the vaccine, which trials and multiple studies have proved is overwhelmingly safe and effective.
Some of the more panicky media coverage described all nine cases as breakthrough infections, implying that the virus consistently and repeatedly evaded the vaccine. But that’s not what happened, Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told The Daily Beast.
“We keep using the word ‘breakthrough’ and that’s the wrong word,” Offit said. Yes, in Nevin’s case, the virus punched through the roughly 70-percent protection provided by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Thus Nevin got sick. Either he or the person who infected him carried enough of the virus to pass it along to others.
But once the virus ran into the vaccine-juiced immune systems of the eight other Yankees, it hit a wall. The team’s extensive testing and contact-tracing didn’t seem to turn up any more cases of actual sickness. “I’d interpret this to mean the vaccine is working,” Offit said.
The key is to understand how the virus and the vaccines interact. “Vaccines significantly reduce acquisition and transmission of SARS-CoV-2, but it is unlikely to eliminate that possibility,” Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global health expert, told The Daily Beast.
The goal with all three vaccines that have authorization for emergency use from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose jab, plus two-dose vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna—is to prevent serious illness, hospitalization, and death.
The vaccine developers, the scientists who assess the shots, and the regulators who oversee their distribution don’t really focus on asymptomatic infections and minor illness that doesn’t land anyone in the hospital, to say nothing of threatening their life.
Nor have they extensively studied how the virus moves—harmlessly, it would appear, in the vast majority of cases—between vaccinated people. “The information about transmission and mild infection was not as well studied,” Jennifer Reich, a University of Colorado sociologist who studies immunization, told The Daily Beast. “As tens of millions of doses are given out, we will inevitably learn more.”
The Yankees outbreak—even that might be too strong a word—is an interesting case study in that the team, like other U.S. sports teams, conducted extensive testing of asymptomatic people. So it found even extremely minor infections: the ones detected after Nevin’s case.
The virus in these cases may have stood little chance of infecting someone else. And probably no chance of sending someone to the hospital. The vaccine kneecapped it. If the general population got tested as extensively as the Yankees did last week, it’s likely a whole lot of these very mild, totally asymptomatic infections would show up, Offit pointed out.
But finding a tiny bit of dead-end virus in vaccinated individuals doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. The vaccines work. A few viral malingerers—registering in a modest number of people after a single, mile breakthrough case—don’t change anything. “That should be the story,” Offit said.
In recognition of the very low risk associated with vaccinated people carrying an extremely low load of the virus, in early May the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tweaked its policy for monitoring breakthrough cases. Instead of tracking all reports of breakthrough infections, the CDC now only tracks severe cases that result in hospitalization or death.
All that said, there’s a possible corollary to the anticlimactic tale of the Yankees “outbreak.” It’s not clear exactly which form of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was responsible for the eight cases. Whether, in other words, it was the “baseline” COVID that most Americans have been dealing with going back 18 months—or one of the newer variants such as B.1.1.7 from the United Kingdom or B.1.351 from South Africa.
By now, B.1.1.7 is predominant in the United States. The vaccines seem to handle it just fine. B.1.351 is somewhat less widespread domestically, and that’s a good thing, because there are some indications it can evade the vaccines—to a limited extent.
“Among the vaccinated, the relatively rare vaccine breakthrough infections would be expected to be more likely to occur with SARS-CoV-2 variants that the vaccine does not protect as well against, such as the B.1.351 variant,” Anthony Alberg, a University of South Carolina epidemiologist, told The Daily Beast.
If the Yankees caught B.1.351, it might help to explain how the virus managed to break through the vaccine in the one symptomatic case among the nine cases so far.
But even if that’s the case, the news is still encouraging. The vaccine still managed to halt the virus, or at least prevent mass sickness. Only one of which, so far as we know, resulted in any kind of illness—and a fleeting one at that.
“One older coach got mild symptoms,” Gerbino mused. “Perfect performance!”
