ANALYSIS: Concern about coronavirus nullifying vaccinations is overblown-- experts.

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 that COVID-19 vaccines are not effective, especially against new strains of the coronavirus, some of which had not yet emerged when those vaccines were being developed.

“The mainstream media want to scare people,” Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a pioneer of vaccine science, told Yahoo News. That criticism appears to be bolstered by a recent paper by Dartmouth economist Bruce Sacerdote and his colleagues, which found that 91 percent of media reporting in the U.S. is “negative in tone,” even when news about the pandemic is actually encouraging.

Offit believes that “we need a word different than ‘breakthrough’” because the image of broadly breached defenses is simply not an accurate one. “Those vaccines are doing what they need to do” by keeping people out of the hospital, he said.

“The breakthrough cases will become vanishingly small,” predicted Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor, especially as spread of the more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant — now dominant in the U.S. — is attenuated in the coming weeks.

“Until then, that’s why we recommend masks,” Hotez said, along with other non-pharmaceutical interventions, like social distancing.

For all the publicity its findings have engendered about breakthrough infections, the Israeli study makes clear that non-pharmaceutical measures like the ones Hotez and others have been advocating for months are effective, especially when combined with widespread vaccination. The study says vaccines are “the safest and most effective means of preventing the onwards spread” of the coronavirus — including of the South African and any other strain.

The Biden administration is desperate to ramp up vaccinations so the country can return to a semblance of normalcy come summer (the president has touted a close-to-ordinary Fourth of July holiday). But reports about breakthrough infections could lead people to conclude that vaccination is futile to begin with. Widespread vaccine hesitancy is far more likely to prolong the pandemic than a plague of breakthrough infections. ...