The figures in that PHE report only go up to mid-June as well. Data from the US/Israel seems to indicate <=50% efficacy against symptomatic infection for the vaccines with Delta at present - possibly in part due to the reduction in antibody levels due to the waning immune response. Some queries as to why the UK numbers are a bit better - the data seems from here seems to indicate 8 weeks is the gap which provides the strongest response (with Pfizer, at least) and most in the UK have had an 8 to 12 week gap between doses. That might be it, I suppose, though as time goes on you'd expect efficacy to drop here as well if that was the case. Data from the US seems to indicate that the Moderna vaccine seems to be more effective against Delta now, but how much of that is down to the rollout with more Moderna doses being administered more recently? They do have a higher dosage as well, I seem to think.
Ultimately, I've pretty much resigned myself to catching the virus over the next year (double-vaccinated with the AZ vaccine) which I'm not too worried about personally. I'm more concerned about my young children who are going to have no chance of any protection from the virus. Kids are back at school in a few weeks and my young son with be in classrooms with absolutely no mitigations in place, my daughter in nursery in the same conditions. They aren't even going to be having class bubbles in the same way as last school year - no increased ventilation, isolation of groups is going, no masks, everything. The narrative here in the UK is that the vaccines are too risky to use with young children due to lack of data (which might be the case, pending further research), but also that Covid is pretty much harmless to young children. Around 1 in 200 confirmed cases are being hospitalised at present, so I don't think I really agree, especially as so little is known about the risks of long covid in children as yet. A certain amount of gaslighting seems to be going on from the authorities as well, with scientists at Public Health England making bold statements about safety for children and the status of the pandemic which aren't backed up by their data. In fact, they are contradicted by data from the ONS, a different arm of government. What can we do, though? At this time last summer, cases, deaths and hospitalisations were a fraction of the current level:
The narrative from the authorities is that it is all over, this is pushed by the dominant right-wing media and so this is what the public think. Heaven only knows what will happen once the children are back in school next month. Longer-term, we'll have to get back to carrying on as though nothing has happened, but I'm not sure that doing so when a third of the population (i.e. mostly children) has no protection against infection.
