Again:

> You don't have to take the CDC's word for it - other countries can see the same thing in their numbers.

Any way you slice and dice the data comes up with the same answer; vaccination reduces hospitalization and death.

I don't disagree with the directionality you describe but look at the case rates and hospitizalization numbers- even the most highly vaccinated areas of the country are still heavily impacted. Omicron changed everything and our reporting hasn't caught up.

The best way to think about CDC press releases is that they not intended to be read by scientists. They are intended to guide good behavior and may not be 100% accurate in terms of medical/scientific knowledge.

Thus far, every indication we have is that there's a successful decoupling of cases and hospitalization/death. Omicron's been in South Africa long enough for the lagging indicators of hospitalization/death. They remain low.

Good examples here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2022/omicr...

Screenshotted here due to paywall: https://imgur.com/a/gk73qDy

what you're describing is mostly intrinsic to omicron, not vaccines.

That’s trivial to disprove.

https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/covid-hospitaliz...

I don't think that disproves anything. First, I question their stats. IE I think they are straight-up fudging their numbers. Second, there are more people being hospitalized in my area (which has high rates of vax) than there are unvaxxed people. I would have agreed with you until omicron, but it's clear this is hitting vaxxed people are similar rates to unvaxxed, and that the hospitalization rates are similar.

> First, I question their stats. IE I think they are straight-up fudging their numbers.

So, any evidence that contradicts your feeling will be dismissed?

> Second, there are more people being hospitalized in my area (which has high rates of vax) than there are unvaxxed people.

Sure. In a place with 100% vaccinated people, they would be all of the hospitalizations.

Relative proportions matter.

I wasn't talking in proportions, I meant absolutely. I mean, it's extremely improbable that the huge jump in hospitalizations could be explained by massively more vaxxed people, because there aren't actually enough physical people in the state to explain it otherwise.

Just be aware: you're arguing with a scientist who worked for decades on medical biology who has, until recently, generally been quiet when seeing huge amounts of misleading medical knowledge trotted about to justify one procedure or another. I am always open to data and my "feelings" don't matter- except that most of the time, when I dig into the underlying claims, I find that they are misrepresented (usually unintentionally). So I use my own priors, and frankly, all I can say is that finding stats on a government page or a news article and using those to justify policy isn't convincing to scientists (and, it appears, the vast majority of the american public).

Ultimately, our public health people lost the PR war, and they did so through muddled messaging. Literally everything about vaccines has turned out to be less effective that public health leadership predicted, or claims. I'm not really surprised; I've commented many times on HN about how deeply challenging it is to do public health with a noncompliant population.

> Just be aware: you're arguing with a scientist who worked for decades on medical biology...

On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.

(I'm also glad the CDC employs more than just biologists, as statistics seems to be a fault here more than biology.)

> I wasn't talking in proportions, I meant absolutely.

Cool, so entirely pointless.

This popped into my inbox today: average daily cases, per-capita, for Seattle and NYC. Another clear distinction between the two populations. https://imgur.com/a/mjVxIhB

You can dismiss it as faked or rigged or manipulated again, but there's plenty of information out there to validate this sort of thing, and you don't have to take the US's word for it; other countries publish the same sort of information.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v... Table S3 has what you want, it's much closer to useful than any CDC press release with the major caveats that it was done in a Kaiser population (which could be non-representative) and is very new and totally unvetted.

Ultimately I think you're not completely incorrect and I agree with teh directionality of what you're saying, but taken generally, the reality is that omicron does a much better job of infecting people (who were previously infected and have natural immunity, or who were vaccinated) and so much of this entire vaccine exercise has shown that we either need to move quickly/plan for regular 4-month updates (can you imagine trying to get everybody in the world to vaccinate every 4 months?) or maybe acknowledge that vaccination isn't the solution it was pitched as.

> at this point I want better public health evidence from CDC

> At this point I don't really think that pointing at CDC public health releases is going to convince a scientist like me.

I just watched you move the goal posts in realtime.

this is a forum, not a logician's debate club

And we're having a discussion. You asked for proof, then said it wasn't good enough. So why ask for it in the first place?