Whatever you do, please understand that if you had the vaccine it doesn't mean that you cannot transmit covid.
Here's a research summary from last month[1] that shows that vaccines continue to perform strongly at transmission reduction.
Edit: A direct link to the NEJM study (9/8/21) showing reduced transmission[2].
[1]: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/09/covid-va...
The second link you provided is actually relevant. Thanks.
If you say it's too old to study the current virus, it's also too old to justify any treatments or policy with the current virus.
The same people saying "close enough" with vaccine transmissibility trials based on the original virus applying to delta, are the same ones saying natural immunity transmissibility studies done on the original virus don't apply to delta.
And now that we've got real numbers on natural immunity that beat vaccination (alone) numbers, that number is no longer "good enough"?
BS. It's not just moving goal posts, it's completely different moving goalposts for each side.
ETA:
>extraordinary for it to be invalidated outright.
Actually, if the whole "vaccinated cases are usually so mild you don't have symptoms" is true, and the Israeli research about viral loads for break through cases being as high as unvaccinated cases is also true...
Then vaccinated workers at a hospital could very well be worse, because they'd be transmitting the virus and infecting patients, while being less likely to have symptoms making them aware that they're likely infected and causing harm.
That's not exactly far fetched, based on current claims.
You know what gives far superior protection than natural immunity gained via infection? Getting vaccinated after having been infected. You're more than twice as likely to be re-infected if you've had COVID once and don't get vaccinated vs. having COVID and then getting vaccinated[1]. So even if you've had COVID, if you take the free, extremely safe vaccine you are now less than half as likely to be re-infected, which likely means you're much less likely to spread it to someone else.
> Then vaccinated workers at a hospital could very well be worse, because they'd be transmitting the virus and infecting patients, while being less likely to have symptoms making them aware that they're likely infected and causing harm.
This is something that anti-vax people seem to like to bring up as a possibility with no data to back it up. The data we actually do have[2], by directly measuring the secondary attack rate ("chance that an infected person infects another person") actually shows that vaccinated people are less likely to infect others.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr... 2. https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
People keep bringing up these studies and links to research that was conducted before the Delta variant became dominant. Are you all simply unaware that it's not relevant anymore?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/the-vaccin...
The impact of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination on Alpha & Delta variant transmission
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...
Another example of a major outbreak in a 96% vaccinated and high PPE setting: https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...
No relationship between case rates and vaccination across 68 countries: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
The CDC prison study says "The attack rate was higher among unvaccinated versus fully vaccinated persons (39 of 42, 93% versus 129 of 185, 70%; p = 0.002)."
The Eurosurveillance article you posted says "The calculated attack rate among all exposed patients and staff was 10.6% (16/151) for staff and 23.7% (23/97) for patients, in a population with 96.2% vaccination rate (238 vaccinated/248 exposed individuals)." Do you think that indicates that vaccines don't reduce spread? What do you think the attack rate would be in an unvaccinated population?
The European Journal of Epidemiology article isn't actually trying to look at vaccine effectiveness in reducing spread. It has some interesting information, but that's not what it's about.
That study cannot be used to disprove the idea that the unvaccinated inmates all gave the virus to the vaccinated ones. That is almost certainly wrong and there should have been some onwards transmission from the vaccinated, but that sentence is quite literally correct. The study says nothing about it.
Meanwhile I've posted elsewhere:
The impact of SARS-CoV-2 vaccination on Alpha & Delta variant transmission
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...
That study is real world contact tracing.
More so if the argument is that the hospital patient population is especially vulnerable.
We don't even know if the likelihood of transmission is reduced enough to affect over number of transmissions.
narrator: "they aren't".
My argument might be more subtle than my comment makes it seem; if so, that's my fault, because I wrote downthread as well and probably assumed people read both comments. A very large cohort of the workers in a regional health chain are not medical professionals, but rather support staff. Those are the employees that I'm saying are relatively low-skilled and replaceable. What's more, our current economic conditions make it straightforward for them to hop to other jobs right now.
What you're saying seems pretty unlikely, given the demographics of vaccination.
This claim was always implausible on its face, but having so adamantly claimed this, public health does not now get to claim that huge numbers of workers can be trivially hired and trained within a few weeks. If that actually is the case then the justification for lockdowns evaporates.
Which is only putting more stress on the ones who stayed, and it's getting to where they are getting burnt out, having gone through a year and a half of COVID and now taking to the slack due to the shortages.
No telling what's going to happen when the vaccine mandate kicks in next month for most of the nurses.
The normal overnight staffing where my wife works is usually one doctor, 3-mid levels and 6 nurses.
They've been down to one doctor and 1-2 nurses for most of the last month.
What makes you more qualified than the people who actually have professional education, training, and experience in running a hospital?
Where did this idea come from that we vaccinated people need to be protected from the unvaccinated? That’s what the vaccine is _for_, protecting us from the unvaccinated. And it’s good at its job!
And delta is so transmissible that herd immunity is no longer achievable even with 100% vaccinated.
For the most part, and if you're healthy. Unfortunately in a hospital you're working with people that are vulnerable.
Why is this such a controversial thing anyways? In the past we've made vaccines mandatory.
And the line drawn isn't even an arbitrary number, but an arbitrary policy with an assumed improvement.
An improvement that we know isn't good enough to prevent spread in populations with near 100% vaccination rates.
It doesn't need to be 100% effective at stopping spread to be an excellent idea.
There is ample evidence that suggests the exact opposite[1].
https://web.archive.org/web/20201101161006/https:/www.who.in...
https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease...
Also, the threshold for herd immunity is based partially on how well the virus spreads, and Delta changed that, which means that the threshold for herd immunity probably changed. When facts change, the messaging needs to change to stay accurate.
Herd immunity is a moving target because people like Fauci change their assessment of it depending on opinion polls. That's by his own words, not anyone else's. The guy admitted it to the New York Times. The "science" is not evolving and people who keep claiming it is, are just hurting the credibility of actual science even more than it's already been hurt. After all, a "science" that is constantly asserting things with 100% confidence and then next week asserts something totally different, also with 100% confidence (which they do), is actually pretty worthless to society.
This is 1.8% of their workforce. Their normal annual turnover is 8%.