There’s an Antarctic research station of entirely triple vaxxed people that is on complete lockdown now because most of them have Covid. I know 22 people who have gotten positive tests in the last two weeks, all vaccinated. Sports leagues practically 100% vaccinated and dozens and dozens and dozens of players out for Covid. I do not believe for one second any public health data today claiming only 1/5 new cases are vaccinated.

Wait, do I understand this correctly that because you have heard of cases happening in vaccinated people, without studying them as broad populations, you think there isn’t a statistical difference in vaccinated and unvaccinated people as a population?

Why?

While I understand where you are coming from, pretty much all the observational evidence is pointing to vaccines not being particularly effective against omicron, which seems to explain the data we are seeing (massive surge in infections and hospitalizations). That alone is enough information to reasonably conclude that the vaccine does not provide a high level of protection against omicron, even if we are nto doing a large-N population comparison.

Another explanation, the one that's more probable, is that omicron is much more infectious than the previous variants.

Actual studies that look at evidence and test hypotheses seem to suggest that mRNA vaccines are effective.

Those studies don't really exist yet for Omicron, so you are working on faith not science.

Nope, here is a study

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270

Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. They're repetitive, tedious, and usually turn nasty.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for, because it destroys what this site is supposed to be for. We ban accounts that do it, so please stop doing it.

Um… I think we have a fundamental disagreement on what sources of information we cite! Do you have non-governmental sources of information we can mutually agree upon to discuss instead? Thank you!

If nearly %100 of the nba is vaccinated, then it's more likely that the break thru cases will outnumber the cases on the un-vaccinated, even if the vaccine is very effective at preventing infection. The vaccine does not need to be %100 effective for it to make sense from a public policy perspective.

we also have multiple cases of players lying about vaccination status

So is the WA state data invalid/faked/wrong? I mean this is literally a handful of anecdotes vs the department of health's data. Data showing similar results as in both nationwide and other countries (global level conspiracy I guess?). It's like me saying 'I can't believe for a second that Biden won the elections because everyone I know voted for Trump'

Rip the nba has been decimated by the virus. At what point do we just accept it?

Acceptance is not just giving up. Minimizing harm is the current goal.

“i’ve heard of ~100 cases therefore statistical data feels irrelevant”

Some months ago, I had to explain to some folks in my neighbourhood that a vaccine is not like some "magic shield" that we see in video games. A vaccine (mRNA or based on an inactive virus) teaches our body to create anti-bodies. The virus enters the body, the body creates anti-bodies, the virus is dealt with.

The vaccine efficacy (how well it teaches the body) and the body's own anti-body efficacy (how effective the anti-bodies are against the virus) also have a role to play.

Thus, a vaccinated person can still be infected, and can even spread the virus around. The sooner the virus is dealt with within their body, the sooner they no longer have a virus to spread. Isolation helps sooner, too. It is therefore possible for a triple vaccinated person to still get infected and to test positive for the infection.

Among various benefits of being vaccinated are the lowered load on hospital staff. The number of hospital beds and even oxygen cylinders does not matter as much as the availability of hospital staff. This pandemic helped highlight that around the world, there are already only a limited number of doctors and nurses, and that both of them are already over-worked. For e.g., I did not know that 30-hour shifts are considered normal. It got me thinking that I wouldn't want to risk receiving care from an over-worked and tired medical care giver whose judgement might have been impaired from sheer exhaustion.

Many of us vaccinated people are now able to safely isolate at home when we are infected with the Covid virus. We rush to hospitals only when the anti-bodies that we create are unable to deal with the Covid 19 virus. Over-worked hospital staff thus focus on a far lesser number of patients. There are now more beds available for those who need them. These included those vaccinated but ill enough to require external medical care, not-yet vaccinated, vaccine-hesitant, those who can't be vaccinated, those who won't be vaccinated.

Really, this pandemic won't truly end until we isolate and end the spread of the virus. Being vaccinated planet-wide and reducing the load on the hospital is our next best bet to ensure that those who need the medical care have less-overworked staff and beds and oxygen cylinders.

The various successful track record of anti-vaxx conspiracies, the true stories of the greed of medical companies/hospitals, the CIA messing with the polio vaccine in Pakistan + Afghanistan, the might-is-right approach by which some countries grab vaccines and waste them while other countries do not receive even a single dose, the hiding of data to save "face" and reputation, the political attacks based on data, politicians speaking up instead of scientists, scientists not knowing how to speak to media, media irresponsibly reporting news - all of these contribute to a general decline in the acceptance of vaccines.

In my lifetime, polio was almost-eradicated. Smallpox was eradicated even earlier. I am hopeful that in time, we'll all pull up our socks and eradicate Covid-19 as well.

> The vaccines don’t work at all against omicron

This is just false and if you believe in the science, you believe in the scientific method, the scientific method shows that this is false. See this https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc211927

Plenty of people are going to the hospital with omicron so it isn't mild for everyone. It's milder than previous strains and it's especially mild for vaccinated people.

Link is broken here is the link https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270

Do you mean vaccination isn’t effective in your circle or as a population level? Or do you mean a different definition of effective? The study I linked to shows there is at least an effect.

As a population they don’t work anymore. They need to produce an omicron-targeted vaccine. This current vaccine simply doesn’t work because it’s targets the wrong spike protein and it shows.

Can you define “don’t work”? The study I linked to shows some effect, even in omicron. I’m kind of confused.

Where’s the omicron data? I specifically said omicron. I don’t see anything that shows omicron especially since it’s only prevalent in the US in the last few weeks.

Ahhh never mind. You didn’t actually read the data. You just scanned through it. If you look look more thoroughly it doesn’t address omicron at all. The last data I could see was from December 14. Omicron was not prevalent at that point, delta was. The vaccine offered some, but not much, protection against infection from delta.

Here's a study from December 29th on the effect of the vaccine on Omicron in South Africa. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2119270

it's unlikely anybody has truly actionable data about the vaccine and omicron yet, but companies that produce vaccines are already working against omicron targets.

Here is a definition of "work" form Portugal[1]

If you look at vaccine doses per person over time, and graph of cases per person over time, in one of the most vaccinated countries in the world, you see not only no effect, but the worst effect happening at the most-vaxxed time. If they stop transmission the effect at this point is miniscule. If you didn't label the first graph, you might be tempted to blame it for the second graph.

(nota bene, vaccines show a clear effect in reduction in death.)

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Actually Denmark has even more vaccines, and an even greater case uptick: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

There's no evidence that vaccination is hampering immune response.

Among those infected with Omicron, hospitalization and intensive care rates are much higher in unvaccinated...

“There’s no evidence” is the official weasel words of the pandemic.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

Fortunately for my comment above, I wrote it with a second paragraph characterizing available data, data that contradicts the claim about the vaccines hampering immune response.

This is not what the stats are saying. And what about South-Africa with a vaccination rate of 26%?

What "stats" are you looking at? For instance, 2nd paragraph of this article about Omicron talks about vaccination being protective: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/31/world/europe/omicron-hosp...

If South Africa ended up fairing far better than a country with similar demographics and higher vaccination rates, it would be relevant, but there's not data to make that comparison, because other countries are much earlier in the Omicron wave.

>And what about South-Africa with a vaccination rate of 26%?

Just pointing out that JAMA says SA has a vaccination rate of 44.3% as of Dec 2021; if you're gonna attack statistics it's a good idea to have the right numbers.

If you look, the article I linked was in December 29 published. So it accounts for omicron and still shows a 3x difference at the minimum.

However this is again a casual Google for a single state. If you have more information that says otherwise please let me know. Thank you!

>Because the vaccins 'overwrite' the wider protections of the immune system it is not very wise to vaccinate healthy people for this fast mutating virus.

Bullshit. Stop spreading misinformation.