The two main COVID-19 vaccines used in the United States are still protecting well against hospitalization and death, even with a new variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 circulating, a trio of new studies out Friday show. At the same time, the effectiveness of the vaccines is down for the elderly, and the Johnson & Johnson jab showed much lower protection than the others, researchers found. And people who are not fully vaccinated have a much higher risk of needing hospital care or dying with COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, the studies indicated. One of them, in which researchers examined over 32,000 encounters at hospitals and urgent care centers across nine states between June and August, found vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization was 86 percent overall, though the difference was significant among adults under the age of 75 (89 percent) and those 75 or older …