It's hard to see how vaccines stop the spread when places like NYC or Israel (some of the most vaccinated places in the world) had record setting numbers in the recent wave.

If vaccines work, shouldn't the "people you love" be vaccinated and thus not impacted by unvaccinated people?

I understand masks can be effective in some cases, but is it really reasonable to demand people wear surgical or N95 masks all the time to prevent "people you love" from getting an illness with a 99.99% survival rate?

This is an extraordinary claim that runs counter to all available evidence and should be backed up by extraordinary evidence.

Our analyses included 52,297 cases with SGTF (Omicron) and 16,982 cases with non-SGTF (Delta [B.1.617.2]) infections, respectively

I forget the source but survey's suggest the average american thinks if they catch covid they have like a 10% chance of dying. This is in some cases 1000x wrong. People are badly, badly mis-informed on how survivable covid is.

If people knew the actual statistics around covid severity, I don't think we'd be doing any of this at all.

0.1 out of 1000 of the entire U.S. population has died of COVID just in the past 19 days.

You are the first person to assert “of” COVID. Substantiate it. Cite primary sources.

If they are one of the 146 million Americans who recovered from Covid, they are at low risk of reinfection and thus transmission.

The same cannot be said for Covid-naive, vaccinated people who can be infected and silently infect others due to symptoms being suppressed by the vaccine.

The issue is not vaccine denial by itself, its resistance to any public health measures, including vaccines, masking and other non-pharmaceutical interventions, and so forth. In short, these folks actively pursue a course of not behaving rationally because (usually) of misguided politics.

It's ill-informed. If you have a prior COVID infection, you should still maintain active vaccination status, including boosters. If you get COVID, you should get tested and try to not get others sicks.

Instead, the pantheon of behaviors we observe from anti-vaxxers is spiteful and irrational. Which supports my initial point that this is a self behavior.

Effective treatment is considered a public health intervention if it prevents the spread. Otherwise its medical treatment. This is why vaccination is far superior to post-infection treatment.

Assessment:

I'm deeply suspicious of this website. It uses pooled effects across several studies, which is an improper approach for this type of meta-analysis. For example, it lists hydroxychloroquine as effective. Some initial underpowered studies showed potential, but further research showed it was not effective.[0]

Items:

[1] By forcing a random effects design, you may give inappropriate weighting to under-powered studies showing an effect (low power results in higher effect sizes). 10 studies of 10 people each, with effect averaged via pooled regression, may well show a pooled effect significantly larger than one study with 100 people.

[2] People not deeply familiar with the treatment literature (such as you, me) cannot confirm that the meta-analysis is appropriately comprehensive (they claim to scrape paper sources, but not the inclusion criteria). Since this is a random website presented without context, without bonafides, and so forth, even if the information presented is real it may be cherry picked. Here is the documentation of some of their exclusion protocol -- note if they were intending to be persuasive instead of objective, exclusion of negative meta-analyses would be intentionally phrased objectively: https://hcqmeta.com/#exc

[3] Differing definitions can impact results. "Early treatment" is prophylaxis typically, but why the individual ends ups in a treatment or control group (and what the term means) may be systemically biased depending on the treatment standard of care adopted locally. The differences may not be random, resulting in selection bias (and other forms of bias, but simply put not an apples-to-apples comparison). And because we're dealing with people with will, the uncertainty compounds. By way of example, prophylaxis "treatment" group might be fully self-selected people who are just scared they may have been exposed, and a "control" group (from a matched pair example selected on few if any demographics) that was known to have the disease -- causing immediate positive bias. RCT designs can help with this approach, but again showing solely the pooled effects instead of reporting fixed effects assessments and other regression output is in err.

Conclusion:

So, for these reasons and because the source actually matters in an era of mis-/dis-information, I remain highly suspicious.

Notes [0] Economics is facing its own replication issues, and the paper is an important read for why statistical power matters: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecoj.12461

> To the end of week 43 in 2021 (to 31 October 2021) 72,264 possible reinfections have been identified ... 7.9 million first positives

For Delta transmission from vaccinated individuals, a study of Vietnamese healthcare workers found that 70% of infections were pre-symptomatic, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3897733

> 69 healthcare workers were tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. 62 participated in the clinical study. 49 were (pre)symptomatic ... Breakthrough Delta variant infections are associated with high viral loads, prolonged PCR positivity, and low levels of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies, explaining the transmission between the vaccinated people. Physical distancing measures remain critical to reduce SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant transmission.