All the numbers are soft enough that I don't want to try and do a quick analysis and convey any kind of false certainty, but if we can get to that 80-90% total population vaccinated number I ultimately don't think its a big deal. 1) the number of breakthrough events in total seems roughly similar to what we are seeing in the US, and generally in line with the high report efficacy. 2) because the efficacy is so high a relatively small decrease in efficacy for the South African variant you would expect it to make-up a high fraction of the observed breakthrough cases. My bigger concern at the moment would be that the variant is closer to be a real problem, and the longer it can hang around the possibility that it is the mutational jumping off point for something that the vaccine really can't handle is out there (but almost impossible to quantify).

On the plus side I was excited that Pfizer had enough data to start the process of requesting expanding vaccine access down to 12 year olds particularly as the B117 strain seems to spread among them a lot better.