https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
If I recall correctly, the Biden administration and the CDC both made public statements telling everyone that they would no longer need to continue wearing masks once they were vaccinated.
"At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days."
Did you think the vaccines would prevent you from contracting covid?
Wear your masks people.
This portion of your comment in particular is false.
People who receive two COVID-19 jabs and later contract the Delta variant are less likely to infect their close contacts than are unvaccinated people with Delta. Relevant Nature article (October 5, 2021).
However, good job on the masks part, please keep wearing them! :-)
"The study shows that people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a COVID-19 vaccine than if they haven’t1. But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot. "
> less likely to infect their close contacts than are unvaccinated people with Delta
I don't see these as contradictory. Vaccines are more effective against transmissions, yet vaccines don't slow down transmissions in a significative way. As per the article:
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
> A reduction was also observed in people vaccinated with the jab made by US company Pfizer and German firm BioNTech. The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab was 42%, but increased to 58% with time.
Fully agree on the mask though. Plus social distancing, if possible.
Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Cambridge, MA USA
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA USA
Turner Fenton Secondary School, Brampton, ON Canada
> Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States
Almost like there's this spot where, once you have enough people vaccinated, the virus can no longer spread.
Hmm. Wonder why that could be. Certainly it couldn't possibly be exactly what experts have been telling us for the past century.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread I don't agree with the lyrics in that video. I find the video itself to be childish and silly but that would basically be 99% of rap and pop music in general.
They have not halted the spread because of vaccine misinformation like this very video which you are defending.
Your question should be directed at the creator of the video, not the HN user.
Regardless of whether the pandemic is over or not, the statement isn't a lie and therefore the quote is incorrect. The vaccine significantly slows ths spread and from both theory and past experience can fully stop it, given a high enough vaccination rate. At best it hasn't come to fruition yet and at worst it won't not because the statement is a lie but because people actively prevented it from coming true, despite all reason and logic.
Based on what data do you come to that conclusion?
The vaccination rate of a country is not correlated with its covid infection rate:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, people are just as likely to spread the virus as unvaccinated people:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
From the article:
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
Across different countries the testing methodologies are too different to meaningfully compare with.
Finally your last paragraph only applies if the vaccinated person gets infected with delta in the first place (in other words has a breakthrough infection).
95% of COVID-19 deaths are happening among the unvaccinated right now, you’re spreading FUD about what’s basically a miracle.
1) "The vaccination rate of a country is not correlated with its covid infection rate". From the article: "The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated." You can interpret this as either the vaccine not working (unlikely) or that high-income countries such as Iceland and Portugal test a larger share of their population than low-income countries such as Vietnam and South Africa (very likely), thus confounding the relationship between vaccination levels and reported Covid cases.
2) "And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, people are just as likely to spread the virus as unvaccinated people". From the article: "The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab [Pfizer] was 42%, but increased to 58% with time." Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
The word "significantly" has a specific statistical meaning. The paper discussed on the Nature article implies it is not a statistically significant difference between 67% and 58% (likely accounting for covariance and measurement error).
Unless you have a different source showing there is statistical significance between those two results?
You may interpret all you want, but I was just pointing out the lack of solid data supporting the claim: "The vaccine significantly slows the spread"
Almost 3 billion people have been fully vaccinated worldwide and yet there is still no evidence that the vaccines have any effect at all in slowing the spread of the virus. I find this rather remarkable.
This situation could very well push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous strains. Like what happened with Marek's disease among chickens:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
> Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
Pfizer buys you a bit more time, but the downward trend in your immunity is unmistakable too:
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/coronavirus/1626980447-vaccin...
https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/vaccine-efficacy-safet...
In New Zealand, the unvaccinated are largely the indigenous Maori, not stereotypical anti-vaxxers.
But yes, there's hard-to-reach people in every ethnicity. What I've enjoyed is the orgs who are vaccinating Māori and Pacific Islanders - always tell the community to come along even if you don't fit in either ethnicity, you'll still get a jab. I just love that. It's the way it should be!
We're all people, let's look after each other.
Given enough time, all populations will eventually attain herd immunity.
How has this been shown?
Countries with a high vaccination rate don't have a lower infection rate than other countries:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, whatever level of immunity you had is completely gone by then:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
The only thing that remains, is some protection against symptomatic disease.
And sever disease needing hospitalization and death. And these indeed the things we want to avoid. Both as individuals and as a society. Because if/when hospitals fill up then you have a trouble. This is what people don't get. (They also don't get that they could end up in a hospital or a morgue with some probability, so I don't even mention that.)
One of my friend's father has been waiting for an operation for half a year here (in Hungary). They couldn't do it in the spring because the hospitals were overcrowded with covid patients. Then they couldn't do it because the waiting lists grew during that period. Then somehow he got in about a week ago with the help of a former high ranking official (yeah, gotta love Eastern Europe) just to be sent home the next morning, because there weren't enough free beds in the ICU any more. Yes, anecdotal, but this is the thing we try to avoid.
Sorry to hear about your friends' father.
The second link is about a study that looks at transmission of the Delta variant from a breakthrough infection. It did not look into wether the chances of getting infected after vaccination decreased.
Finally the vaccine dramatically reduced your chances of dying. I'd say that's some pretty good protection from symptomatic disease, not just some protection.
You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.
It is a remarkable conclusion to suppose that studying individuals in the same society fewer got infected if they were vaccinated because of comparison between different societies.
It would be as if we proved that people didn't smoke in the USA got lung cancer far less than smokers but you sprung up with a study that showed that rates of smoking between societies wasn't highly correlated with lung cancer ergo smoking didn't cause lung cancer. One would logically suppose that your study didn't prove what you think it proved.
At limit you are supposing that if we got 100% vaccinated somehow we would see as much covid spread despite everyone having antibodies which are known to decrease chance of infection and extent of spread ergo effecting the time one remains infectious and how many virions are available to be spread.
Beware of anyone who doesn't feel the need to disprove that raindrops fall in buckets who nevertheless has proven that storms can't cause floods.
More importantly.
The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7038e1.htm
This is even more important than decreasing spread.
Source?
> You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective
I linked to an analysis by a Harvard professor. Who uses official government data of the respective countries. So I think I have good reason to take that seriously.
> because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.
Yes there must be many confounding factors. But your phrase: "doesn't show a high enough correlation" is putting it mildly. How about: no correlation at all?
But I would love to see data that shows a population-level effect of mass vaccination on the covid infection rate.
> The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.
This is the sort of percentage that got thrown around a lot at the start of the vaccination campaign. But for protection against infection/transmission. Just one of many examples:
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-israel-va...
The idea that the vaccinated have become (mostly) asymptomatic spreaders of the viruses, is nothing to celebrate. This is a scenario that can push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous variants:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
A mutation which increased its spread slightly among vaccinated individuals by 10% while increasing the mortality of the unvaccinated by 10x would be fitter yet. This isn't fate because the space the virus explores is driven by its actual difficult to predict particulars not hypothetical thought experiments but I wouldn't bet on covid going away, I wouldn't bet on people choosing to be more likely to die and abandoning vaccination, and I wouldn't bet on covid becoming safer for the unvaccinated in the short term.
The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse. So if you choose to stay among the unvaccinated I would expect your prospects in the next several years range from bad to worse. Make your own decisions accordingly.
Yes. This is what that Quanta article was all about. Here's the link once more: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
> The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse.
Agreed. There's a tragedy of the commons there.
Edit: and while we're here, here is politifact's take:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/oct/14/joe-biden/...
Concluding it's "half true" fits this thread well :)
I say this as someone who's vaccinated; that is not true. It can limit the spread by reducing the viral load you give off, but you can still be vaccinated, get the virus, be asymptomatic (or not) and transmit it.