The post you cited is helpful. However, it is confusing the definition of efficacy. There were debates on what the efficacy meant when Pfizer and Moderna reported their high numbers. But there was *NO* definition saying that 94% efficacy means 94% of vaccinated people won't get SERIOUSLY sick. Most commonly, it meant either (1) 94% people will have lower chance of getting COVID (i.e. getting tested positive)[1], or (2) 94% people will have a lower chance of getting sick [2].
Now the post you cited essentially says 94% people won't get SERIOUSLY sick. This just proves that neither (1) or (2) above is true.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-vaccine-efficacy-explai... [2] https://time.com/5945177/covid-19-vaccine-effectiveness/
Not to mention recently discovered waning immunity. So [1] and [2] could definitely have been true at the time.
Now waning immunity - did Pfizer or Moderna warn the world about it? Did they warn us about potential variants? Absolutely no, right? They posted the high numbers to pump their stock price. Vaccines are effective to some extent. But those two companies are not credible.
The older and more vulnerable were vaccinated FIRST and at a higher rate, so seeing more of them hospitalized now 6 months later with a variant is not unexpected.
What it really means, is that those same patients would probably be in the morgue, not the hospital if it wasn't for the vaccine.
Also, the effectiveness is lower against variants like delta, and does naturally decrease over time. If we had higher vaccination rates, the spread of covid would be significantly reduced, and variants wouldn’t be such a large problem.
Also also, MRNA vaccines — EVEN AT 70% — far outperform existing vaccines like the one for seasonal influenza.
Also also also, where the hell are you getting 40% for moderna’s VE? I’d love to see a citation.
Oh, regarding “old stats” like the effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine: Surprise! No controlled studies on its effectiveness. Surprise! It has significantly more risk (both in terms of the danger of the adverse side effects and their incidence).
I’m guessing you’re not an epidemiologist?
https://twitter.com/_MiguelHernan/status/1428014414666420230
Let's put it this way, did you expect the outcome to be what it currently is? We have MORE deaths with Covid than we had at the same time last year. Is that what you would have predicted when the great results of the trials were published?
Besides that experts were also telling us that immunity from vaccine will likely fade.
The more people are vaccinated the less people will become infected and will be spread the virus at any time. The less people are spreaders the less breakthrough infections can happen. It is a feedback loop and not really hard to understand.
If the intend to ban smoking in a population was to reduce the incidence of lung cancer, and the incidence does not drop after smoking ban, then ban was useless.
"Why stop hitting people with cars when the people hit don't die in 100% of cases ?"
The hospitalisation rates are way lower than any previous wave but the law of big numbers still apply at some point... And the Delta variant is clearly a game change here.
Finally, Israel is in a peculiar position because they have vaccinated - relatively speaking - quite a while ago so protection migh be indeed waning and the overall % is not that high (pretty surprised tbh).
As per https://spectator.com.au/2021/08/most-covid-patients-at-isra...
>Dr Kobi Haviv, medical director of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, stated that the majority of coronavirus patients in an Israeli hospital are fully vaccinated, including those with severe disease.
>Dr Haviv further specified that: “95% of the severe patients are vaccinated,” adding “85-90% of the hospitalizations are in fully vaccinated people” and the hospital is “opening more and more COVID wards.” This has led him to conclude that “the effectiveness of the vaccine is fading out.”
Note that I am not point out the fact that 95% is vaccinated. But that they are still overwhelming the hospitals, so it seems that your point no longer hold.
Also from the same article
> In other words, the TGA never saw or requested the patient data from Pfizer and simply accepted their reporting of their study as true.This means that when the head of the TGA John Skerritt said that “the safety evidence is pretty thorough” on February 6, his words would ring hollow to most Australians who have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the TGA had actually looked at the patient data before granting any such approval. As noted by Doctors for Covid Ethics on its website, it is currently not known whether any of the major government agencies around the globe (FDA, MHRA or EMA) has independently verified, or attempted to verify, Pfizer’s data, before proceeding with provisional/emergency authorisation of Pfizer’s mRNA therapy vaccine.
Even if Dr Haviv is correct and the protection offered by the Pfizer vaccine is only valid for 7/8 months, many lives have still been saved in the meantime (Israel got almost no cases and deaths in Q2 2021 for example).
I guess more data is required to see how it goes but it is ackowledged that not all the vaccines have lifetime effects and some only work against specific variant (like the flu one).
To finish, I would like to reiterate that the Delta variant is a game changer so a quote from February needs to be taken with a grain of salt because the situation has changed completely since then.
"Pfizer Violation Tracker"
Umm, of course?
If we had a vaccine for e.g. the flu, that cut hospitalizations in half, we would call that effective. Or maybe not - effective here is a very vague word. We'd more correctly say "this vaccine reduces hospitalizations by 50%".
If it were a particularly bad flu season and literally everyone got the flu (as well as everyone getting vaccinated), hospitals would be overwhelmed, because cutting in half isn't enough. But that wouldn't change the base fact - this hypothetical vaccine cut hospitalizations in half.
From the article. Emphasis is mine.
As for health, I think you might be alluding to pre-existing conditions? Can you elaborate on how you would see this affecting the result?
It's a miracle that Israel even offers age-stratified hospitalizations data. But it's still not enough.
>Without this information, it's tough to draw conclusions.
Oh please. This data overwhelmingly shows that vaccinated people (>60) have better outcomes than non-vaccinated people(>60). The only debate is by how much.
More realistic example: According to this study [1], 4.0% of US citizens (>80) are immunocompromised. We know that ~5.8% of Israelis (>80) are not vaccinated. Is it possible that the unvaccinated in this age cohort have more serious pre-existing conditions and therefore had a way higher chance of being hospitalized? We don't know.
Is it wrong to ask for better data? We're capable of extracting the smallest detail from a person randomly scrolling through a news feed but we can't get proper stats on hospitalized people? Come on.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/3/suppl_1/1439/2635779
Better data would be great, but based on your anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-science, comment history I'm not convinced that would be enough for you.
I'm not interested in debating people with an obvious idealogical agenda, so good day to you.
We're talking about 137 unvaccinated & 268 vaccinated patients >60 with severe disease (What kind of disease? Who cares, am I right?)
So, based on this enormous (!) sample size with one (!) confounding factor (#FuckMedicalHistory), we conclude that of course there is an undeniable nine-fold difference.
Why are we even doing randomized controlled trials? Just observe 137 & 268 patients retrospectively and frame critics as ideologues. A final word from an anti-vax activist:
> Conversely, there was concern that observational data obtained from nonrandomized studies after vaccine deployment could yield unreliable answers. Observational studies are subject to substantial biases and are much less amenable to unambiguous interpretation. Their limitations are of particular concern during this public health emergency, because vaccinated and unvaccinated people will differ in their risk of exposure to infection and of serious disease, partly because of fluctuating attack rates and because during early phases of vaccine deployment, vaccinees may well be at particular risk of infection. In these circumstances, even carefully analyzed observational studies can yield misleading answers about safety and efficacy. In addition, unrelated events that occur by chance after vaccination may be incorrectly attributed to the vaccine, and such anecdotes may be deliberately promulgated by groups opposed to vaccination. [1]
the OP’s statistics line up with the assertion that vaccines are certainly effective. if they weren’t, we’d expect to see similar proportions of vaccinated peoples hospitalised with covid.
certainly, the vaccines have lost some of their efficacy. it can probably be attributed to “slow” rollout, and - probably more significantly - vaccine hesitancy/denial. israel’s high rollout percentage is relatively meaningless in the global context, unfortunately. the virus has more chances to interact with vaccinated individuals. in a similar fashion to not finishing antibiotics, it was inevitable that the virus would mutate to overcome the existing vaccines at some level.
at this point, our only hope is that vaccines will at least make the virus less lethal. it’s not the ideal outcome, but given everything that’s happened thus far, i think it’s the best we can hope for.
Waning immunity has nothing to do with the virus mutating, it is just how the immune system works.
78.8% of the population we're talking about here are vaccinated.