The only way that we would not be dealing with COVID today is if it was taken seriously early on. China seriously dropped the ball. I don’t believe that the resulting quarantines and lockdowns in other nations (which were for the most part necessary to reduce death tolls pre-vaccine) could have gone any better than they did, as people simply do not care.
> Vaccine efficacy is against severe COVID illness, not against transmission
That is not and never has been - up until literally a few months ago - the definition of vaccine efficacy, nor was it the definition being used for COVID vaccines up until it turned out they can't prevent disease.
Trying to assert what vaccine efficacy is without acknowledging that this is an entirely novel use of the term is going to come across as an attempt to confuse people/make them forget that it was only recently that high efficacy was being proudly announced in terms of "preventing COVID-19".
Also bear in mind that this new definition has no real metrics or science behind it. What exactly is "severe" illness. Don't say hospitalizations because people have to choose to go to hospital and are being told that taking the vaccine means they won't have to go to hospital. That's a massive, massive confounder, and none of the public health agencies suddenly making claims about "severe" disease even recognize it exists, let alone control for it.
I remember something else. At least where I live, since the very beginning of the vaccination programme, people were advised to not wait for Pfizer and Moderna vacinnes that were in short supply, but use already widely available AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines because even though their efficacy against transmission was significantly lower, they still provided very good protection against severe illness; and that protection was always being explicitly stressed out as the most important.
"All of the COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in Canada are effective at preventing symptomatic SARS-CoV infection and COVID-19 related hospitalizations and death."
Because the phrase vaccine efficacy just means how good is a vaccine at something it can be defined relative to any endpoint you want. Nonetheless, both the way the term "vaccine" has been used historically and the way "vaccine efficacy" was being used as recently as this spring were in terms of, it will prevent you from getting infected and sick.
The original claim was that "vaccine efficacy is NOT against transmission" and that this is merely updated information, not an attempt to rewrite history. But it certainly looks that way to a lot of us because to truly accept that the previously distributed information was wrong would imply a major screwup and thus some sort of investigation and accountability. At minimum it means trial failure, for one thing. The pharma companies claimed the trials showed they could prevent COVID-19. They were wrong. That implies other claims made by the trials could be wrong, which implies the government should suspend the rollout until the true facts about what the vaccines actually do can be established.
Obviously no such logic is appearing anywhere in public health. Instead the message has simply shifted to be, vaccines prevent "severe illness and death" and that's why they're awesome and always were. The Pfizer trial at least, didn't actually show that however.
"A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections: 21,720 with BNT162b2 and 21,728 with placebo. There were 8 cases of Covid-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose among participants assigned to receive BNT162b2 and 162 cases among those assigned to placebo; BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6). Similar vaccine efficacy (generally 90 to 100%) was observed across subgroups defined by age, sex, race, ethnicity, baseline body-mass index, and the presence of coexisting conditions. Among 10 cases of severe Covid-19 with onset after the first dose, 9 occurred in placebo recipients and 1 in a BNT162b2 recipient. The safety profile of BNT162b2 was characterized by short-term, mild-to-moderate pain at the injection site, fatigue, and headache. The incidence of serious adverse events was low and was similar in the vaccine and placebo groups." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
Maybe this is legalese, but I am pretty sure your average Joe online, that reads all kind of weird things on Facebook or other places, won't understand the subtleties of this language.
Here is another quote from the same paper [1]: "This report includes 2 months of follow-up after the second dose of vaccine for half the trial participants and up to 14 weeks’ maximum follow-up for a smaller subset. Therefore, both the occurrence of adverse events more than 2 to 3.5 months after the second dose and more comprehensive information on the duration of protection remain to be determined."
Person A >Transmission> Person B >Transmission> Person C
Person A >Transmission> Person B (Prevention)
So the research you are referring to is in regards to other variants of sars-cov2
"A COVID-19 Vaccine May Be Only 50% Effective. Is That Good Enough?"
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/12/9119879...
August 7, 2020:
"Fauci says COVID-19 vaccine may only be 50 percent effective"
https://nypost.com/2020/08/07/fauci-says-covid-19-vaccine-ma...
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prevent?...
If I am reading correctly (but do correct me if I am wrong because I am not 100% certain), only symptomatic cases are counted. Hence, it is quite possible for the vaccine to stop the symptoms, but not the transmission between individuals.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577/suppl_f...
Unfortunately it's a major source of public distrust in science since when someone changes their mind it's perceived as weakness or deception. A dogmatic idiot who never learns anything looks like a stronger person of greater integrity.
The fact that we got any form of vaccine at all in one year is absolutely incredible. That it doesn't work quite as well as we originally thought isn't surprising given that it wasn't out long enough to observe long term efficacy in the wild. Original numbers were based on limited clinical tests and models.
When you have people screaming at the top of their lungs: The Science is Settled!!111 They are Science Deniers!!! Science does not care about your opinion!!! Etc.
And then scientific learning happens, all those people who were screaming look like dogmatic idiots to those who they were screaming at. It doesn't matter they the ones screaming adopted the new position. I will pull out the old and tired mask issue; when this first started, the people on the "side of science" were screaming that the masks did not help and they trotted out all sorts of scientific studies to back this up, from virus size vs mask to saying ti would be harmful due to keeping more virus at your face. Those who thought masks were important all looked around and said "If masks are such a bad idea, then why are the doctors all wearing them". Now we know it was a stupid and harmful lie.
It is incredible what we accomplished in a year but it is also very frustrating to see how stupidly political and how unnecessarily opaque everyone is being. From the mask lie to the vaccination tempo(we pushed for a shorter amount of time between both shots because we were worried about followup, now we need a third shot?). No-one is willing to sit down and frankly state what we know and what we doesn't know. Our media isn't willing to accept it either. Trust is a two way street but We are all so afraid that uncertainty will breed fear that we take strong positions and end up killing trust.
I think calling people "dogmatic idiots" is exactly what actually drives people away from these discussions.
> It was never designed to stop transmission.
I can't find any source confirming or denying that claim, but I can say it's absolutely not the impression I got from governments and the media. Does anyone have a source saying these vaccines were designed as non-sterilizing?
science and history are two distinct things
it's ok to rewrite science
it's not ok to rewrite history
Exactly! Those initial numbers were based on limited clinical trials because time was not on our side. We needed to get something out fast, so we didn't go through all trial options.
With which variant alpha or delta? and how much time after the vaccination?
it's ok to rewrite science
it's not ok to rewrite history