I have seen much discussion of vaccines being less effective at preventing infection with omicron but no indication of them being 0% effective. Of course, it will probably be at least a few more weeks before we have good overall data on this (e.g. December/January case rates among vaccinated vs unvaccinated).

And in a big storm, even everyone being 25% less likely to get infected impacts rate of transmission, which is the big one for resource constraints and such.

> no indication of them being 0% effective

But there is no data to indicate that it's >0% effective either. So until we have data to back things up one way or the other, talking about it just creates more science disinformation.

That's quite the statement.

Early studies suggested that vaccine antibodies were much weaker but boosted individuals still had antibodies that had some effect on omicron, and gave no reason to believe that non-antibody parts of the immune system would have 0% effect. So based on that, and high level of protection against previous strains, my default assumption would be "some, but much lower, protection."

Then, as of Dec 26, being vaccinated in CA still resulted in a much lower case rate per 100K: https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#postvax-status That likely isn't 100% omicron data, but the ratio looks the same as what it was before, so still not reason to drop my belief to 0%.

It is quite the leap to say "new strain, I should restart my assumption at 0% effectiveness."

Not saying restart all assumptions. I am saying that whatever you say should come with the "based on the previous..., it may or may not apply to current..." proviso.