Stanford requires booster shots for all students

Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by peteradio on Thursday December 30, 2021 @01:51PM (#29739939)

Then all you need is bullet-proof evidence that transmission is significantly impacted by the vaccines. It ain't a guessing game, do the measurement. Do it all over the world and compare and contrast.

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Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by ada1981 on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:02PM (#29740076)

This seems to suggest viral loads are the same for everybody - vaxxed, unvaxxed, symptomatic or asymptotic.

https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...

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Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by lamontcg on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:17PM (#29740280)

Vaccinated individuals hit the same peak mRNA loads for the same symptom severity on average. Their time to recover is faster though, and at peak you recover less viable virus indicating they are producing more viral debris.

And that's after fewer people who are vaccinated catch the virus, and there's more aborted infections and asymptomatic infections after vaccination.

All of those studies use PCR Ct values as proxies for viruses and compare vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals with similar symptom severity, and it turns out that correlates at peak because symptoms are on average due to antigen loading. Those studies aren't very good at showing how effective vaccination is at preventing transmission. They just show that its nonzero.

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Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by ada1981 on Saturday January 01, 2022 @05:28PM (#29763530)

Shouldn’t we be distinguishing between unvaxxed who had Covid, and unvaxxed who didn’t?

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Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by Jensson on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:52PM (#29740703)

None of those old studies apply now that omicron is around. Omicron spread all throughout the world at record breaking pace via vaccinated people, so it doesn't seem like vaccines are doing much at all to prevent spread of omicron.

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Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by disgruntledphd2 on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:55PM (#29740729)

You may be correct, but it's too early to tell.

As I have stated elsewhere in this thread, the rate of vaccine escape has gone up by about 5x, (from 6% to 30%), but that's still much better than one would get from no vaccination.

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Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by Jensson on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:58PM (#29740760)

But it spreads so fast that it doesn't seem like that matters. It spreads basically as fast as people are interacting, if it gets into the student body then everyone will be infected in a matter of days even if they are all vaccinated.

I can't see how it could spread any faster than it already does through vaccinated people. A few people there being unvaccinated wont make a difference.

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Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by disgruntledphd2 on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:53PM (#29740715)

> And that's after fewer people who are vaccinated catch the virus, and there's more aborted infections and asymptomatic infections after vaccination.

This is the big one. Conditional on symptoms the viral load may be similar betwee vax/no vax, but if the vax have much less probability of getting symptoms then all is good.

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Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by disgruntledphd2 on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:52PM (#29740707)

I haven't read the full paper, and it's pretty small data (maybe n=120 in total) but this would seem to suggest that there's about a 40% reduction in transmission associated with vaccination: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

I honestly don't understand how there wouldn't be protection from the vaccine. It's not a sterilising vaccine, but it does offer protection.

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Re:Stanford requires booster shots for all students by incrudible on Thursday December 30, 2021 @03:30PM (#29741075)

"SAR among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% [95% CI 15–35] for vaccinated vs 23% [15–31] for unvaccinated)."

In other words, once infected, there is no reduction. How effective are these boosters against Omikron infection, weeks and months down the line?

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