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I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bub

I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick. The whole point was to prime the immune system so that when exposed, the likelihood of extreme effects would be drastically reduced. That’s it. (E: I don’t get why people downvote this - all of the benefits of vaccination are precisely due to what I describe. Lower likelihood of individual bad outcomes, which reduces burdens on healthcare, and ideally, reduces community spread by reducing the amount of virus that replicates in an individual and can be passed on. This is why I was one of the first in line when I could get the vaccine. Perhaps daring to critique people with unrealistic vaccine expectations is unacceptable?)

ianai 5y ago
Right. It’s like a hardware update for an immune system.
TobTobXX 5y ago
But all the regulations around us create this covid-proof impression. Eg. where I live, hospitals consider introducing vaccination requirements for visitors. But that somehow defies logic. The vaccine only reduces symptoms (and might thus save yourself, or others, when extended with the hospital-bed-limit-thought), but it wouldn't stop you from transmitting the disease if you are infected (and vaccinated) but you aren't aware. So I don't even blame the public, but rather the regulators. They ought to know better. Edit: I might need to support this claim. The most trustworthy source I found was this article by the JHU [1] (2021-08-02). While there are many that claim different numbers (ranging from stopping roughly 60% to 0%), for transmission, no one claimed that virus infection is influenced. [1]: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-transmission-by-vaccinated-individuals https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-trans...
- thephyber 5y ago
  The vaccine does a reasonable job at reducing transmission in the aggregate. It lessens the average viral load, shortens the average time a person is infectious, etc. Treating transmission as a boolean ignores the large-but-not-100-percent improvement. Better to treat it as a distribution. I don’t see what you are blaming regulators for.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  No. Vaccine reduces viral load and transmissibility, but in close contact situations you're still going to transmit it.
- uh_uh 5y ago
  > The vaccine only reduces symptoms (and might thus save yourself, or others, when extended with the hospital-bed-limit-thought), but it wouldn't stop you from transmitting the disease if you are infected (and vaccinated) but you aren't aware Are you sure about that? Even this article refers to a study which says that vaccinated people are 5 times less likely to test positive than non-vaccinated. _Some_ asymptotic transmission will still occur in the vaccinated but it's reasonable to expect that it happens to a lesser degree. I'd be very curious to see studies that claim that there's no difference in asymptomatic transmission between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
  - matwood 5y ago
    Correct. Whenever people talk about the vaccine not slowing spread they forget that vaccinated people are 5x less likely to catch covid to start with. They only seem to focus on viral loads of break through infections.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      Those stats are all point-in-time and the result of very brittle analysis. Not surprisingly, you can therefore find stats that state the opposite. In the UK this weekend there was a little blowup on Twitter because a TV journalist had his own breakthrough case, which caused him to do some journalism and download the data tables from Public Health England. He was surprised to discover that in the UK the proportion of vaccinated people getting infected is now higher than the proportion of unvaccinated people, i.e. the UK is experiencing the exact opposite of what your stat claims. Actually he was so surprised by this he posted it on Twitter and openly wondered why there was no debate about it, at which point he found out why not: he was mobbed, shouted down and ended up posting a grovelling apology. https://dailysceptic.org/2021/09/12/robert-peston-shocked-by-lack-of-debate-on-vaccine-effectiveness-before-caving-to-critics-and-apologising-for-questioning-vaccine-effectiveness/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/09/12/robert-peston-shocked-by... Part of the problem was that his Twitter followers are innumerate. They assumed that this stat was overall percentage of people getting infected, but it's not. It's proportions of both groups. Therefore, the fact that more people are vaccinated than not in the UK is irrelevant. The vaccinated are - at this point in time - getting it more often than the rest. And journalists are afraid to report on it because they get attacked so you just don't know about it. Reasons? Unclear. Scientists also seem to mostly refuse to do studies that might undermine vaccine messaging. Most likely the vaccine protection wanes so fast that it simply split the delta wave in two, with the unvaccinated getting it first, leading to lots of headlines about "pandemics of the unvaccinated" etc, and then the vaccinated wave coming second, leading to stats like this one which are simply ignored.
- nwvg_7257 5y ago
  This is NOT true. https://www.nytimes.com/article/breakthrough-infections-covid-19-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/breakthrough-infections-covi... "after an outbreak among vaccinated and vaccinated workers at the Singapore airport, tracking studies suggested that most of the spread by vaccinated people happened when they had symptoms" The vaccines substantially help to reduce spread. Doesn't eliminate it, but obviously something a hospital would want to require.
  - gridspy 5y ago
    "most of the spread by vaccinated people happened when they had symptoms" Sounds like there is still a cultural / communication issue where people are not getting tested or self-isolating when sick.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "Evidence demonstrates that the authorized COVID-19 vaccines are both efficacious and effective against symptomatic, laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, including severe forms of the disease. In addition, a growing body of evidence suggests that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines also reduce asymptomatic infection and transmission. Substantial reductions in SARS-CoV-2 infections (both symptomatic and asymptomatic) will reduce overall levels of disease, and therefore, viral transmission in the United States. ... Data from multiple studies in different countries suggest that people vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine who develop COVID-19 have a lower viral load than unvaccinated people.(41-44) This observation may indicate reduced transmissibility, as viral load has been identified as a key driver of transmission.(45) Two studies from the United Kingdom found significantly reduced likelihood of transmission to household contacts from people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were previously vaccinated for COVID-19.(25, 46)" https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/fully-vaccinated-people.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... "Two studies1,2 from Israel, posted as preprints on 16 July, find that two doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer, based in New York City, and biotechnology company BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, are 81% effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections. And vaccinated people who do get infected are up to 78% less likely to spread the virus to household members than are unvaccinated people. Overall, this adds up to very high protection against transmission, say researchers." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z "COVID-19 vaccines appear to help prevent transmission between household contacts, with secondary attack rates dropping from 31% to 11% if the index patient was fully vaccinated, according to a Eurosurveillance study yesterday. The population-based data looked at the Netherlands from February to May, when the Alpha variant (B117) was dominant and the available vaccines were by Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca/Oxford, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson." https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/study-ties-covid-vaccines-lower-transmission-rates https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/study-ti... "There has been good news, too, on the subject of viral load in breakthrough cases. Researchers in Israel studied vaccinated people who became infected. The viral load in these breakthrough cases was about three to four times lower than the viral load among infected people who were unvaccinated. Researchers in the U.K. reported a similar result. They also found that vaccinated people who became infected tested positive for about one week less than unvaccinated people." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vaccine-benefit-were-not-talking-about-enough1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vacci...
- poopypoopington 5y ago
  I don't think that's true. The vaccine still reduces the likelihood that you'll be infected so only allowing vaccinated visitors reduces the risk that COVID enters a hospital through visitors. I think the vaccine also reduces the likelihood that people with breakthrough infections infect other people
- ProtoAES256 5y ago
  Ditto. My family and I are all fully 2 dose vaccinated, and I didn't go out from my house for nearly a month. I caught COVID(via my mother) last thursday. The facilities are long overrun since a few months ago, so my symptoms which are: blood coughing, nausea, chest pain, ~93%SpO2 are considered "quite mild" and "home quarantine only". In the wake of other variants like Delta, I doubt that people who didn't/can't get the vaccine can be protected by herd immunity alone. A few of my friends are getting breakthroughs too, which seems like a lot in comparison to the global statistics, so it might be just anomalies.
  - gridspy 5y ago
    Best of luck for your recovery. It sounds like it's "Mild" only in the "You're not about to die just yet" sense. Delta is a cruel variant. I hope all of your family recovers also.
choeger 5y ago
To the contrary, I don't think that's plausible. In the whole COVID-19 decision the question of the initial load has not been discussed well enough, IMO. If you think about the virus passing your various layers of protection it is clearly a numbers game, IMO. A mask, even if imperfect, might reduce your initial viral load below a threshold that allows your immune system to kill all infected cells very quickly so you don't develop strong symptoms. The same goes for distance. So I don't see any reason to not expect a certain "sterile" immunity after a vaccination. The way I see it, the vaccination should prevent some of the low-load infections completely, regardless of the virus variant.
- gridspy 5y ago
  Any discussion of viral load seems too subtle for a general audience, but that's sound. It's kind of like Vaccine + mask + low exposure (social distance, short times, good ventilation) is your "armor class" against the virus. If your armor is good enough, the chance of becoming infected IS very low.
javagram 5y ago
> I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick. No, it’s because until the Delta variant became the most common variant, the vaccines essentially did create a covid-proof bubble around the recipient. The trials for Comirnaty and the Moderna vaccine both showed >90% effectiveness against PCR positive infections, not just against hospitalization and death.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  > The trials for Comirnaty and the Moderna vaccine both showed >90% effectiveness against PCR positive infections I don't believe the official trials for Moderna and Pfizer measured PCR positive infections at all. (They involved thousands of people, it was a time when PCR test were difficult to obtain; they remain expensive at that scale). I have not heard of Comirnaty, not sure about that. There may have been pre-delta studies that showed PCR infection effectiveness (Cite?), I don't think they were the official trials.
  - javagram 5y ago
    Comirnaty is the brand name of the Pfizer vaccine. According to this article, all of the major vaccine trials studied PCR positivity, not deaths/hospitalizations. https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4058.full.pdf https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4058.full.pdf > The first question is whether the right endpoints are being studied. Contrary to prevailing assumptions (including those of a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner8), none of the vaccine trials are designed to detect a significant reduction in hospital admissions, admission to intensive care, or death.9 Rather than studying severe disease, these mega-trials all set a primary endpoint of symptomatic covid-19 of essentially any severity: a laboratory positive result plus mild symptoms such as cough and fever count as outcome events (table 1).
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      Ah, thanks for the correction. "a laboratory positive result plus mild symptoms" was the thing being measured, ok.

ianai 5y ago

Right. It’s like a hardware update for an immune system.

TobTobXX 5y ago

But all the regulations around us create this covid-proof impression. Eg. where I live, hospitals consider introducing vaccination requirements for visitors. But that somehow defies logic. The vaccine only reduces symptoms (and might thus save yourself, or others, when extended with the hospital-bed-limit-thought), but it wouldn't stop you from transmitting the disease if you are infected (and vaccinated) but you aren't aware. So I don't even blame the public, but rather the regulators. They ought to know better. Edit: I might need to support this claim. The most trustworthy source I found was this article by the JHU [1] (2021-08-02). While there are many that claim different numbers (ranging from stopping roughly 60% to 0%), for transmission, no one claimed that virus infection is influenced. [1]: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-transmission-by-vaccinated-individuals https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/new-data-on-covid-19-trans...

thephyber 5y ago
The vaccine does a reasonable job at reducing transmission in the aggregate. It lessens the average viral load, shortens the average time a person is infectious, etc. Treating transmission as a boolean ignores the large-but-not-100-percent improvement. Better to treat it as a distribution. I don’t see what you are blaming regulators for.
R0b0t1 5y ago
No. Vaccine reduces viral load and transmissibility, but in close contact situations you're still going to transmit it.
uh_uh 5y ago
> The vaccine only reduces symptoms (and might thus save yourself, or others, when extended with the hospital-bed-limit-thought), but it wouldn't stop you from transmitting the disease if you are infected (and vaccinated) but you aren't aware Are you sure about that? Even this article refers to a study which says that vaccinated people are 5 times less likely to test positive than non-vaccinated. _Some_ asymptotic transmission will still occur in the vaccinated but it's reasonable to expect that it happens to a lesser degree. I'd be very curious to see studies that claim that there's no difference in asymptomatic transmission between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
- matwood 5y ago
  Correct. Whenever people talk about the vaccine not slowing spread they forget that vaccinated people are 5x less likely to catch covid to start with. They only seem to focus on viral loads of break through infections.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Those stats are all point-in-time and the result of very brittle analysis. Not surprisingly, you can therefore find stats that state the opposite. In the UK this weekend there was a little blowup on Twitter because a TV journalist had his own breakthrough case, which caused him to do some journalism and download the data tables from Public Health England. He was surprised to discover that in the UK the proportion of vaccinated people getting infected is now higher than the proportion of unvaccinated people, i.e. the UK is experiencing the exact opposite of what your stat claims. Actually he was so surprised by this he posted it on Twitter and openly wondered why there was no debate about it, at which point he found out why not: he was mobbed, shouted down and ended up posting a grovelling apology. https://dailysceptic.org/2021/09/12/robert-peston-shocked-by-lack-of-debate-on-vaccine-effectiveness-before-caving-to-critics-and-apologising-for-questioning-vaccine-effectiveness/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/09/12/robert-peston-shocked-by... Part of the problem was that his Twitter followers are innumerate. They assumed that this stat was overall percentage of people getting infected, but it's not. It's proportions of both groups. Therefore, the fact that more people are vaccinated than not in the UK is irrelevant. The vaccinated are - at this point in time - getting it more often than the rest. And journalists are afraid to report on it because they get attacked so you just don't know about it. Reasons? Unclear. Scientists also seem to mostly refuse to do studies that might undermine vaccine messaging. Most likely the vaccine protection wanes so fast that it simply split the delta wave in two, with the unvaccinated getting it first, leading to lots of headlines about "pandemics of the unvaccinated" etc, and then the vaccinated wave coming second, leading to stats like this one which are simply ignored.
nwvg_7257 5y ago
This is NOT true. https://www.nytimes.com/article/breakthrough-infections-covid-19-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/breakthrough-infections-covi... "after an outbreak among vaccinated and vaccinated workers at the Singapore airport, tracking studies suggested that most of the spread by vaccinated people happened when they had symptoms" The vaccines substantially help to reduce spread. Doesn't eliminate it, but obviously something a hospital would want to require.
- gridspy 5y ago
  "most of the spread by vaccinated people happened when they had symptoms" Sounds like there is still a cultural / communication issue where people are not getting tested or self-isolating when sick.
mcguire 5y ago
"Evidence demonstrates that the authorized COVID-19 vaccines are both efficacious and effective against symptomatic, laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, including severe forms of the disease. In addition, a growing body of evidence suggests that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines also reduce asymptomatic infection and transmission. Substantial reductions in SARS-CoV-2 infections (both symptomatic and asymptomatic) will reduce overall levels of disease, and therefore, viral transmission in the United States. ... Data from multiple studies in different countries suggest that people vaccinated with Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine who develop COVID-19 have a lower viral load than unvaccinated people.(41-44) This observation may indicate reduced transmissibility, as viral load has been identified as a key driver of transmission.(45) Two studies from the United Kingdom found significantly reduced likelihood of transmission to household contacts from people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were previously vaccinated for COVID-19.(25, 46)" https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/fully-vaccinated-people.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... "Two studies1,2 from Israel, posted as preprints on 16 July, find that two doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer, based in New York City, and biotechnology company BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, are 81% effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections. And vaccinated people who do get infected are up to 78% less likely to spread the virus to household members than are unvaccinated people. Overall, this adds up to very high protection against transmission, say researchers." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z "COVID-19 vaccines appear to help prevent transmission between household contacts, with secondary attack rates dropping from 31% to 11% if the index patient was fully vaccinated, according to a Eurosurveillance study yesterday. The population-based data looked at the Netherlands from February to May, when the Alpha variant (B117) was dominant and the available vaccines were by Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca/Oxford, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson." https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/study-ties-covid-vaccines-lower-transmission-rates https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/study-ti... "There has been good news, too, on the subject of viral load in breakthrough cases. Researchers in Israel studied vaccinated people who became infected. The viral load in these breakthrough cases was about three to four times lower than the viral load among infected people who were unvaccinated. Researchers in the U.K. reported a similar result. They also found that vaccinated people who became infected tested positive for about one week less than unvaccinated people." https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vaccine-benefit-were-not-talking-about-enough1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vacci...
poopypoopington 5y ago
I don't think that's true. The vaccine still reduces the likelihood that you'll be infected so only allowing vaccinated visitors reduces the risk that COVID enters a hospital through visitors. I think the vaccine also reduces the likelihood that people with breakthrough infections infect other people
ProtoAES256 5y ago
Ditto. My family and I are all fully 2 dose vaccinated, and I didn't go out from my house for nearly a month. I caught COVID(via my mother) last thursday. The facilities are long overrun since a few months ago, so my symptoms which are: blood coughing, nausea, chest pain, ~93%SpO2 are considered "quite mild" and "home quarantine only". In the wake of other variants like Delta, I doubt that people who didn't/can't get the vaccine can be protected by herd immunity alone. A few of my friends are getting breakthroughs too, which seems like a lot in comparison to the global statistics, so it might be just anomalies.
- gridspy 5y ago
  Best of luck for your recovery. It sounds like it's "Mild" only in the "You're not about to die just yet" sense. Delta is a cruel variant. I hope all of your family recovers also.

choeger 5y ago

To the contrary, I don't think that's plausible. In the whole COVID-19 decision the question of the initial load has not been discussed well enough, IMO. If you think about the virus passing your various layers of protection it is clearly a numbers game, IMO. A mask, even if imperfect, might reduce your initial viral load below a threshold that allows your immune system to kill all infected cells very quickly so you don't develop strong symptoms. The same goes for distance. So I don't see any reason to not expect a certain "sterile" immunity after a vaccination. The way I see it, the vaccination should prevent some of the low-load infections completely, regardless of the virus variant.

gridspy 5y ago
Any discussion of viral load seems too subtle for a general audience, but that's sound. It's kind of like Vaccine + mask + low exposure (social distance, short times, good ventilation) is your "armor class" against the virus. If your armor is good enough, the chance of becoming infected IS very low.

javagram 5y ago

> I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick. No, it’s because until the Delta variant became the most common variant, the vaccines essentially did create a covid-proof bubble around the recipient. The trials for Comirnaty and the Moderna vaccine both showed >90% effectiveness against PCR positive infections, not just against hospitalization and death.

jrochkind1 5y ago
> The trials for Comirnaty and the Moderna vaccine both showed >90% effectiveness against PCR positive infections I don't believe the official trials for Moderna and Pfizer measured PCR positive infections at all. (They involved thousands of people, it was a time when PCR test were difficult to obtain; they remain expensive at that scale). I have not heard of Comirnaty, not sure about that. There may have been pre-delta studies that showed PCR infection effectiveness (Cite?), I don't think they were the official trials.
- javagram 5y ago
  Comirnaty is the brand name of the Pfizer vaccine. According to this article, all of the major vaccine trials studied PCR positivity, not deaths/hospitalizations. https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4058.full.pdf https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4058.full.pdf > The first question is whether the right endpoints are being studied. Contrary to prevailing assumptions (including those of a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner8), none of the vaccine trials are designed to detect a significant reduction in hospital admissions, admission to intensive care, or death.9 Rather than studying severe disease, these mega-trials all set a primary endpoint of symptomatic covid-19 of essentially any severity: a laboratory positive result plus mild symptoms such as cough and fever count as outcome events (table 1).
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Ah, thanks for the correction. "a laboratory positive result plus mild symptoms" was the thing being measured, ok.