It reduces the probability of disease. It isn’t binary.

Apologies for pedantry...

Vaccines reduce the severity of disease, sometimes to the point of no noticeable effect. They may reduce probability of transmission.

Can't both be true? You don't seem to be disagreeing with parent poster?

Some vaccinated people still get severe disease, and others even die (both at significantly lower rates than for the unvaccinated, of course). The reasons why this happens in some cases and not others is uncertain, and, accepting the Bayesian interpretation of probability as I do, I would describe that as reducing the probability of disease (and also death). Put differently, you cannot tell a priori whether being vaccinated will definitely stop you dying, but you can observe that the a posteriori population level rate is reduced. You are correct that it also reduces the probability of transmission.

In Australia, of those in hospital or ICU with covid, more than half are unvaccinated. 92% of the country are vaccinated, so the remainder accounts for half of hospitalisations. That’s a massive difference. Vaccines help, they are not perfect, but they help.

You may be right, but you cannot actually conclude that, because the country is 92% vaccinated and half of ICU are unvaccinated, the vaccines work. You need to stratify at least by age, but also by comorbidities and so on. For example, it could be (not saying it is the case) that most of the ICU patients were considered too frail to be given the vaccine on medical grounds, and thus count as unvaccinated.

Too many politicians make "X is true therefore Y is true" statements that cannot actually be made based on the data being cited. One thing that's been clear from the beginning is the need for nuance and consideration of the details, not just blind jumps. There are health statisticians and mathematicians that do this sort of study for a living and I wish more politicians would cite their work.

> You may be right, but you cannot actually conclude that, because the country is 92% vaccinated and half of ICU are unvaccinated

They're two separate data points, he hasn't done this

He's stated separately that 92% of the country is vaccinated AND (separately) half of ICU admissions are from the unvaccinated, what it means is that that remaining 8% are responsible for more than half of the COVID hospitalisations

Considering how much of a surveillance state AUS has, they likely do have the data to draw these conclusions

It really does show how effective they are in also reducing the severity of the condition, which is a very important point to make

> Considering how much of a surveillance state AUS has, they likely do have the data to draw these conclusions

> It really does show how effective they are in also reducing the severity of the condition, which is a very important point to make

This is exactly what I was referring to in my previous comment. These are hypotheses, and professionals are needed to establish causality. This _is_ a nuanced issue, it's not simple (despite what almost everyone seems to think), and we should start ignoring simplistic sound bites on this topic.

You're still not understanding me, so I'm going to stop replying to you.