7 ms·

Increases in Covid-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination

66 points by raptorraver 5y ago

roca 5y ago
This report makes no attempt to control for lockdowns or other restrictions. Countries with high levels of vaccination relax those restrictions, increasing COVID infection rates. And of course focusing on infection rates is really the wrong thing. We know antibody immunity declines over time, but protection against serious illness stays strong.
- PaulKeeble 5y ago
  One think I noticed when getting my vaccine shot was the line going in was very socially distanced with everyone wearing masks. That changed the moment someone was vaccinated. They would come out of the centre, take off their mask, walk right next to the queue, their behavior instantly changed from getting the jab. Almost everyone did this. There is a social impact of having the vaccine that increases transmission behavior in my experience and it was almost everyone that did this. These social impacts, from countries opening up more due to high vaccination rates are very important factors as clearly they do and have controlled the spread throughout this pandemic and if you don't control for them you can't compare transmission. Even if you compared countries measures you would still end up with this behavioral change meaning people were more likely to spread and catch once vaccinated.
  - josephg 5y ago
    That behaviour is quite culturally specific. I didn’t see any of that sort of thing here in Australia when I went to the vaccination hub. And I’ve had two people refuse social interaction recently because of vaccines. One person because she’s only had her first shot, and the other because it’s only been a couple days since getting the second dose and it takes 7-9 days for the vaccine to do it’s thing. Both highly neurotic people. I’m sure there’s also plenty of Australians acting recklessly - but the ratios are probably very different country to country.
  - n4r9 5y ago
    There's definitely an element of false security after having the vaccine. But standing near someone in a queue is a very different risk profile than simply walking past them.
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  > We know antibody immunity declines over time, but protection against serious illness stays strong. Reference?
  - ralfn 5y ago
    https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-coronavirus-vaccines-hospital-cases-rates-unvaccinated https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-coronavirus-vaccin... For example. Not intended to be exhaustive. It's still is an important insight though. The vaccines do not lead to herd immunity. There isn't a viable herd immunity strategy yet, which implies very young, very old and immuno compromised individuals are still at risk. It also means 'encouraging' people to take the vaccine won't help, except to keep those people out of the ICU, and if that's the intent it seems more 'freedomy' to me to just not treat unvaccinated covid patients when it peaks. Because herd immunity is the argument used to defend mandatory vaccinations, and it appears to be a false argument.
    - cudgy 5y ago
      “… it seems more 'freedomy' to me to just not treat unvaccinated covid patients when it peaks.” What an abhorrent statement. Your definition of freedom is surely different than mine.
      - ralfn 5y ago
        Then i'm curious what your definition would be? Because when you run out of ICU space, there is triage. There was triage last week. There is triage next week. Who gets care first? My point is that many people who are unvaccinated would prefer this, than to be forced to be vaccinated. (and they are effectively forced now in many places) There were two arguments used to justify this imposition: (a) - the herd immunity helps protect those can't protect themselves (too young, too old, immuno compromised) (b) - it overwelms the health care infrastructure making it so that in certain places people can't get emergency care because the ICU's are full Now the first argument (a) seems to be not true, and the second argument (b) seems to me like 'personal responsibility'. If you want to freedom to make these decisions for yourself (such as to get vaccinated), you are only accountable for the consequences of that for yourself. The idea that you demand to not be vaccinated, but still get first-come-first-served emergency medical care at the expense of others, sounds to me entitled, spoiled and selfish.
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  Yeah, countries absolutely have a negative feedback loop. In the UK, society is largely open and free to intermingle, yet the virus isn't spreading exponentially. In my mind, that's because the vaccine has significantly lowered the ability of the virus to spread, and society has opened up just as much as will cancel that gain out.
  - nikolay 5y ago
    Not really the case. Vaccinated people get light recurrences and frequent encounters with the virus keeps the antibodies circulating almost indefinitely.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Another thing: Hemispheres. They specifically mention South Africa. It’s summer there, pretty much every country (at least those I looked at) in the world had lower numbers in summer with cases going up in winter.
  - nojokes 5y ago
    Reporting from Africa is complete junk unfortunately. Take Africa out and you will have clear signal. Also worth mentioning: population pyramid is really a pyramid in Africa. There are over billion people in Africa but only 75 million of 60 and older.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > We know antibody immunity declines over time, but protection against serious illness stays strong. The article specifically mentions that that is not the case. > the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated > This report makes no attempt to control for lockdowns or other restrictions Haven’t we seen previous reports that basically state that lockdowns and or massive restrictions seem to have a negligible effect on spread? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
  - roca 5y ago
    > The article specifically mentions that that is not the case. The citation they're using doesn't load for me. I'm looking at results like this: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/pfizerbiontech-covid-19-vaccine-effectiveness-drops-after-6-months-study-2021-10-04/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... > The analysis showed that the vaccine's effectiveness in preventing hospitalization and death remained high at 90% for at least six months, even against the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus. > Haven’t we seen previous reports that basically state that lockdowns and or massive restrictions seem to have a negligible effect on spread? Those reports, even if they're completely valid which is questionable, only show that government-mandated lockdowns have similar effects to voluntary behavior changes in response to waves of COVID infection, which again the OP does not control for.
- nojokes 5y ago
  This is deeper level of stupid. They take data, then throw in random junk and claim there is no signal in data. When you look at each continent separately, then there is clear pattern except in Africa. It is sad but expected. There are also 3 clear and explainable outliers: Israel, Mongolia and Malaysia. Take them out and Asia has also clear signal.
mirekrusin 5y ago
Interesting (and confusing), normal person would expect that linear regression line to have opposite sign on the slope. Aren't they feeding it apples and oranges data? There must be more dimentions to this data.
bsaul 5y ago
how did this study end up being high voted on HN. I am very doubtful about mandatory vaccine for everyone, and know vaccines aren't the perfect solutions. However, this study is probably one of the worst i've ever seen. It compares countries being in totally different situations regarding the infection spread. Some are done with delta, others are just starting..
- necovek 5y ago
  When numbers being looked at are large, they can tell us something even if we admit to them not being perfect in many ways. At worst, we can figure out trends or, at best, get a negative correlation to learn that something is not positively correlated or even causal. But everyone reading a statistical analysis, esp on HN, should know it for what it is: it does not account for many things (people have mentioned age, you bring up phase of the pandemic, my thought was how this doesn't account for probability of vaccinated people intermingling more which is related to someone else bringing up people in rural areas...). The entire study, based on the data it covered, does not proclaim that vaccines are bad (even though anti-vax people will take it as such), it's just that they are at an early phase and might need more development to increase their effectiveness, and that we'll need other solutions in addition to vaccines if we want to get back to any semblance of normalcy. I think it's of utmost importance to understand who is exactly at risk from a COVID infection (other than "old folk", which is not really saying much) so we can better prepare for dealing with them (us? :) in the future. While this study does not answer this, keeping a critical mind is important in science.
  - ImaCake 5y ago
    While it is sometimes true that larger sample sizes can overcome many insufficiencies in the data I don’t think that is the case here. The data is still noisy and any attempt at statistics here would result in a non-significant result. The authors appear to be drawing their conclusions based on a lack of statistical significance. This is a basic fallacy, you can’t say something is not there because your data is too crap to see it. There are statistical tests that determine if something is not different from zero, the authors did not use those tests.
thriftwy 5y ago
What about levels of deaths?
- Arnt 5y ago
  Will tell the same story. This analysis is of change, not of level. Say you have one country with 90% vaccination and one with 9%, and much higher incidence in the latter, but both are stable during the summer. Then the weather grows cold and people move indoors, and the number of infections double in both countries. This report says that's so: The number of infections double in both countries. It doesn't say "they arrive at the same number" or "this is an equally big problem in both countries" or anything of the sort.
  - yorwba 5y ago
    > This report says that's so: The number of infections double in both countries. Not even that. It says the number of infections is roughly equally likely to increase in both places, but they don't say anything about the magnitude of the increase.
    - Arnt 5y ago
      My bad. Sorry.
practice9 5y ago
Why is handwashing still promoted as an effective safety measure? I thought it accounts for negligible amount of Covid infections. Does anybody have a link to some good research about that?
- mirekrusin 5y ago
  Thank god durex didn't try to save the world with hand protection gloves.
twarge 5y ago
Subramanian and Kumar discover that COVID cases are not correlated with vaccination rate. But everyone knows that the vaccine doesn't stop you from getting infected; rather, it reduces hospitalization and case severity. The problem with this paper is not the result, but the authors' tone punching through, which expresses surprise at this result. This paper should have been rejected for revision on that basis.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Not really - the authorities are driving vaccination in order to reduce propagation, indicating that the vaxx is supposed to materially reduce R0. The authors are not making any claims about anything, other than demonstrating the rate of vaccination doesn't seem to affect the case rate. The most obvious thing I see is that places with lower case rates and remote not dense populations tend to be less vaccinated in the first place. I have family in rural areas with almost zero case rates and as a result they're just less concerned and less vaxxed. This is an important consideration for policy because it's generally not been about making sure workers have protected themselves (although that's one issue) it's really about preventing outbreaks. Looking forward to further commentary.
  - cudgy 5y ago
    “The authors are not making any claims about anything, other than demonstrating the rate of vaccination doesn't seem to affect the case rate.” Seems like the reader can at least reasonably deduce that the vaccine does not significantly impact the transmission rate. Mainstream thought and dogma about the vaccine certainly takes a hit based on the observations made in this article. I already see comments dismissing the findings based on personal theories about lockdown impacts and other WAGS.
    - jollybean 5y ago
      Yes, they are providing evidence that maybe the vaxx doens't reduce rates - but they are not saying anything about government claims or expectations up until now. And yes, this data would be damaging to mainstream dogma but it's only one article. My bet is the scientific reality is somewhere in the middle: vaccines prevent transmission, but not by that much. Public Health Policy is always going to err on the side of 'more vaxxes'. If the data really starts to show vaxxes not as useful as we might want for R0 (because one study is just one study), they will change their tune and back off. There are a lot of reasons this data could be odd, including the fact that spread is happening among children right now, so it could be related to school outbreaks, and, areas where there wasn't a lot of COVID previously. In the end, their messaging will primarily be driven by net cases and uptick: if we're seeing breakouts and growth of COVID in certain areas, then you'll hear about vaccines, if case rates stay very low, we'll get back to normal.
d3vmax 5y ago
This is so wrong. You can clearly see the reduction in deaths in a graph when you compare UK pre-vaccination (<30% population) and post vaccination (>60% population). Idiots.
- Zealotux 5y ago
  Your statement isn't contradicting the study, infections and deaths are different things and the study also mentions that in its interpretation: >Even though vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death, the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated [10]. Any study that helps us understand the pandemic better is always welcomed in my book, however I agree that the study seems to be quite opinionated: >In summary, even as efforts should be made to encourage populations to get vaccinated it should be done so with humility and respect. Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good. I don't see how the study proves that last point, even though I don't necessarily disagree with the statement.
sschueller 5y ago
It doesn't appear to account for age groups. Most countries have a much higher vaccination rate for older people which in general are also more likely to get sick. It also direct contradicts data from Switzerland which clearly show a correlation between vaccination rates and infections when comparing different cantons that have higher rates compared to others.
- makomk 5y ago
  The entire mainstream narrative and the tactics being adopted to increase vaccinations don't account for age groups either. If you look at the mainstream media, all the comparisons are based on total vaccination rate regardless of age - I know the UK government has been getting a lot of stick for "falling behind" Europe in vaccinations due to lower vaccination rates which are mostly concentrated in younger age groups. A lot of the vaccine mandates primarily target working-age people who generally aren't the highest priority in terms of age. And there's been a huge push to target under-16s for vaccination even though it's dubious that they benefit from it at all, supposedly because it'll stop them from spreading it - we'd expect that to show up in the increase in Covid-19 for sure.
smorgusofborg 5y ago
> the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated [10]. Looking at the CDC slide I think they are referring to (their link is broken), 15.1% was the percentage of people in hospital who were fully vaccinated. It is fully noted on the slide: one would expect this to climb as vaccination level climbed and especially as high risk people were vaccinated first. So they have provided no basis to care about the pandemic post vaccination. Obviously every country wants to use its resources to the max and open as much of it's economy back up as soon as hospital occupancy and death are down so rates of infection should go up unless you reach something like 95% recent vaccination or booster.
arisAlexis 5y ago
How can they miss the most important variable and that is the ability to freely mingle in society and lockdown measures? It's like making a study about diabetes and a drug and missing to control for diet. The outcome of this faulty study is that vaccines don't work well and that's what we DO NOT want to project. It will become a flag of anti-vaxxers.
ImaCake 5y ago
Wow this paper is a joke. I see multiple conclusions drawn from insignificant statistical tests (if you can’t reject the null you can only say “i can’t see it”, not “its not there”). That alone should be enough to stop reading. There appears to be other elementary mistakes made as well. Also, you can’t draw conclusions about vaccination and covid prevalence from country level data. Different countries report their statistics differently, the prevalence of covid depends on attitudes to testing which varies at the local scale let alone at the scale of countries. Do you think poor people want to get tested when they have to self isolate? A country’s wealth matters a lot for measurements of covid prevalence. As far as I can tell there’s no effort to account for this bias, and even if there was, their data is so noisy it’s all non-significant and thus useless anyway. EDIT: This is bad science and it might be better if it wasn’t on HN.
dragonwriter 5y ago
This does literally nothing to identify and control for other variables that influence the case rate, uses the case rate rather than the hospitalization or death rates (important because that makes it subject to variability in detection of non-severe cases, which may be correlated with vaccine hesistancy because testing hesitancy may be.)
- hertzilm 5y ago
  the thing is though, that many municipalities are using vaccination rates as their sole or primary metric for predicting case loads. and if thats the case then this study basically invalidates that metric.

66 points by raptorraver 5y ago

roca 5y ago

This report makes no attempt to control for lockdowns or other restrictions. Countries with high levels of vaccination relax those restrictions, increasing COVID infection rates. And of course focusing on infection rates is really the wrong thing. We know antibody immunity declines over time, but protection against serious illness stays strong.

PaulKeeble 5y ago
One think I noticed when getting my vaccine shot was the line going in was very socially distanced with everyone wearing masks. That changed the moment someone was vaccinated. They would come out of the centre, take off their mask, walk right next to the queue, their behavior instantly changed from getting the jab. Almost everyone did this. There is a social impact of having the vaccine that increases transmission behavior in my experience and it was almost everyone that did this. These social impacts, from countries opening up more due to high vaccination rates are very important factors as clearly they do and have controlled the spread throughout this pandemic and if you don't control for them you can't compare transmission. Even if you compared countries measures you would still end up with this behavioral change meaning people were more likely to spread and catch once vaccinated.
- josephg 5y ago
  That behaviour is quite culturally specific. I didn’t see any of that sort of thing here in Australia when I went to the vaccination hub. And I’ve had two people refuse social interaction recently because of vaccines. One person because she’s only had her first shot, and the other because it’s only been a couple days since getting the second dose and it takes 7-9 days for the vaccine to do it’s thing. Both highly neurotic people. I’m sure there’s also plenty of Australians acting recklessly - but the ratios are probably very different country to country.
- n4r9 5y ago
  There's definitely an element of false security after having the vaccine. But standing near someone in a queue is a very different risk profile than simply walking past them.
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
> We know antibody immunity declines over time, but protection against serious illness stays strong. Reference?
- ralfn 5y ago
  https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-coronavirus-vaccines-hospital-cases-rates-unvaccinated https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-coronavirus-vaccin... For example. Not intended to be exhaustive. It's still is an important insight though. The vaccines do not lead to herd immunity. There isn't a viable herd immunity strategy yet, which implies very young, very old and immuno compromised individuals are still at risk. It also means 'encouraging' people to take the vaccine won't help, except to keep those people out of the ICU, and if that's the intent it seems more 'freedomy' to me to just not treat unvaccinated covid patients when it peaks. Because herd immunity is the argument used to defend mandatory vaccinations, and it appears to be a false argument.
  - cudgy 5y ago
    “… it seems more 'freedomy' to me to just not treat unvaccinated covid patients when it peaks.” What an abhorrent statement. Your definition of freedom is surely different than mine.
    - ralfn 5y ago
      Then i'm curious what your definition would be? Because when you run out of ICU space, there is triage. There was triage last week. There is triage next week. Who gets care first? My point is that many people who are unvaccinated would prefer this, than to be forced to be vaccinated. (and they are effectively forced now in many places) There were two arguments used to justify this imposition: (a) - the herd immunity helps protect those can't protect themselves (too young, too old, immuno compromised) (b) - it overwelms the health care infrastructure making it so that in certain places people can't get emergency care because the ICU's are full Now the first argument (a) seems to be not true, and the second argument (b) seems to me like 'personal responsibility'. If you want to freedom to make these decisions for yourself (such as to get vaccinated), you are only accountable for the consequences of that for yourself. The idea that you demand to not be vaccinated, but still get first-come-first-served emergency medical care at the expense of others, sounds to me entitled, spoiled and selfish.
mnw21cam 5y ago
Yeah, countries absolutely have a negative feedback loop. In the UK, society is largely open and free to intermingle, yet the virus isn't spreading exponentially. In my mind, that's because the vaccine has significantly lowered the ability of the virus to spread, and society has opened up just as much as will cancel that gain out.
- nikolay 5y ago
  Not really the case. Vaccinated people get light recurrences and frequent encounters with the virus keeps the antibodies circulating almost indefinitely.
Semaphor 5y ago
Another thing: Hemispheres. They specifically mention South Africa. It’s summer there, pretty much every country (at least those I looked at) in the world had lower numbers in summer with cases going up in winter.
- nojokes 5y ago
  Reporting from Africa is complete junk unfortunately. Take Africa out and you will have clear signal. Also worth mentioning: population pyramid is really a pyramid in Africa. There are over billion people in Africa but only 75 million of 60 and older.
Aeolun 5y ago
> We know antibody immunity declines over time, but protection against serious illness stays strong. The article specifically mentions that that is not the case. > the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated > This report makes no attempt to control for lockdowns or other restrictions Haven’t we seen previous reports that basically state that lockdowns and or massive restrictions seem to have a negligible effect on spread? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
- roca 5y ago
  > The article specifically mentions that that is not the case. The citation they're using doesn't load for me. I'm looking at results like this: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/pfizerbiontech-covid-19-vaccine-effectiveness-drops-after-6-months-study-2021-10-04/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... > The analysis showed that the vaccine's effectiveness in preventing hospitalization and death remained high at 90% for at least six months, even against the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus. > Haven’t we seen previous reports that basically state that lockdowns and or massive restrictions seem to have a negligible effect on spread? Those reports, even if they're completely valid which is questionable, only show that government-mandated lockdowns have similar effects to voluntary behavior changes in response to waves of COVID infection, which again the OP does not control for.
nojokes 5y ago
This is deeper level of stupid. They take data, then throw in random junk and claim there is no signal in data. When you look at each continent separately, then there is clear pattern except in Africa. It is sad but expected. There are also 3 clear and explainable outliers: Israel, Mongolia and Malaysia. Take them out and Asia has also clear signal.

mirekrusin 5y ago

Interesting (and confusing), normal person would expect that linear regression line to have opposite sign on the slope. Aren't they feeding it apples and oranges data? There must be more dimentions to this data.

bsaul 5y ago

how did this study end up being high voted on HN. I am very doubtful about mandatory vaccine for everyone, and know vaccines aren't the perfect solutions. However, this study is probably one of the worst i've ever seen. It compares countries being in totally different situations regarding the infection spread. Some are done with delta, others are just starting..

necovek 5y ago
When numbers being looked at are large, they can tell us something even if we admit to them not being perfect in many ways. At worst, we can figure out trends or, at best, get a negative correlation to learn that something is not positively correlated or even causal. But everyone reading a statistical analysis, esp on HN, should know it for what it is: it does not account for many things (people have mentioned age, you bring up phase of the pandemic, my thought was how this doesn't account for probability of vaccinated people intermingling more which is related to someone else bringing up people in rural areas...). The entire study, based on the data it covered, does not proclaim that vaccines are bad (even though anti-vax people will take it as such), it's just that they are at an early phase and might need more development to increase their effectiveness, and that we'll need other solutions in addition to vaccines if we want to get back to any semblance of normalcy. I think it's of utmost importance to understand who is exactly at risk from a COVID infection (other than "old folk", which is not really saying much) so we can better prepare for dealing with them (us? :) in the future. While this study does not answer this, keeping a critical mind is important in science.
- ImaCake 5y ago
  While it is sometimes true that larger sample sizes can overcome many insufficiencies in the data I don’t think that is the case here. The data is still noisy and any attempt at statistics here would result in a non-significant result. The authors appear to be drawing their conclusions based on a lack of statistical significance. This is a basic fallacy, you can’t say something is not there because your data is too crap to see it. There are statistical tests that determine if something is not different from zero, the authors did not use those tests.

thriftwy 5y ago

What about levels of deaths?

Arnt 5y ago
Will tell the same story. This analysis is of change, not of level. Say you have one country with 90% vaccination and one with 9%, and much higher incidence in the latter, but both are stable during the summer. Then the weather grows cold and people move indoors, and the number of infections double in both countries. This report says that's so: The number of infections double in both countries. It doesn't say "they arrive at the same number" or "this is an equally big problem in both countries" or anything of the sort.
- yorwba 5y ago
  > This report says that's so: The number of infections double in both countries. Not even that. It says the number of infections is roughly equally likely to increase in both places, but they don't say anything about the magnitude of the increase.
  - Arnt 5y ago
    My bad. Sorry.

practice9 5y ago

Why is handwashing still promoted as an effective safety measure? I thought it accounts for negligible amount of Covid infections. Does anybody have a link to some good research about that?

mirekrusin 5y ago
Thank god durex didn't try to save the world with hand protection gloves.

twarge 5y ago

Subramanian and Kumar discover that COVID cases are not correlated with vaccination rate. But everyone knows that the vaccine doesn't stop you from getting infected; rather, it reduces hospitalization and case severity. The problem with this paper is not the result, but the authors' tone punching through, which expresses surprise at this result. This paper should have been rejected for revision on that basis.

jollybean 5y ago
Not really - the authorities are driving vaccination in order to reduce propagation, indicating that the vaxx is supposed to materially reduce R0. The authors are not making any claims about anything, other than demonstrating the rate of vaccination doesn't seem to affect the case rate. The most obvious thing I see is that places with lower case rates and remote not dense populations tend to be less vaccinated in the first place. I have family in rural areas with almost zero case rates and as a result they're just less concerned and less vaxxed. This is an important consideration for policy because it's generally not been about making sure workers have protected themselves (although that's one issue) it's really about preventing outbreaks. Looking forward to further commentary.
- cudgy 5y ago
  “The authors are not making any claims about anything, other than demonstrating the rate of vaccination doesn't seem to affect the case rate.” Seems like the reader can at least reasonably deduce that the vaccine does not significantly impact the transmission rate. Mainstream thought and dogma about the vaccine certainly takes a hit based on the observations made in this article. I already see comments dismissing the findings based on personal theories about lockdown impacts and other WAGS.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Yes, they are providing evidence that maybe the vaxx doens't reduce rates - but they are not saying anything about government claims or expectations up until now. And yes, this data would be damaging to mainstream dogma but it's only one article. My bet is the scientific reality is somewhere in the middle: vaccines prevent transmission, but not by that much. Public Health Policy is always going to err on the side of 'more vaxxes'. If the data really starts to show vaxxes not as useful as we might want for R0 (because one study is just one study), they will change their tune and back off. There are a lot of reasons this data could be odd, including the fact that spread is happening among children right now, so it could be related to school outbreaks, and, areas where there wasn't a lot of COVID previously. In the end, their messaging will primarily be driven by net cases and uptick: if we're seeing breakouts and growth of COVID in certain areas, then you'll hear about vaccines, if case rates stay very low, we'll get back to normal.

d3vmax 5y ago

This is so wrong. You can clearly see the reduction in deaths in a graph when you compare UK pre-vaccination (<30% population) and post vaccination (>60% population). Idiots.

Zealotux 5y ago
Your statement isn't contradicting the study, infections and deaths are different things and the study also mentions that in its interpretation: >Even though vaccinations offers protection to individuals against severe hospitalization and death, the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated [10]. Any study that helps us understand the pandemic better is always welcomed in my book, however I agree that the study seems to be quite opinionated: >In summary, even as efforts should be made to encourage populations to get vaccinated it should be done so with humility and respect. Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good. I don't see how the study proves that last point, even though I don't necessarily disagree with the statement.

sschueller 5y ago

It doesn't appear to account for age groups. Most countries have a much higher vaccination rate for older people which in general are also more likely to get sick. It also direct contradicts data from Switzerland which clearly show a correlation between vaccination rates and infections when comparing different cantons that have higher rates compared to others.

makomk 5y ago
The entire mainstream narrative and the tactics being adopted to increase vaccinations don't account for age groups either. If you look at the mainstream media, all the comparisons are based on total vaccination rate regardless of age - I know the UK government has been getting a lot of stick for "falling behind" Europe in vaccinations due to lower vaccination rates which are mostly concentrated in younger age groups. A lot of the vaccine mandates primarily target working-age people who generally aren't the highest priority in terms of age. And there's been a huge push to target under-16s for vaccination even though it's dubious that they benefit from it at all, supposedly because it'll stop them from spreading it - we'd expect that to show up in the increase in Covid-19 for sure.

smorgusofborg 5y ago

> the CDC reported an increase from 0.01 to 9% and 0 to 15.1% (between January to May 2021) in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths, respectively, amongst the fully vaccinated [10]. Looking at the CDC slide I think they are referring to (their link is broken), 15.1% was the percentage of people in hospital who were fully vaccinated. It is fully noted on the slide: one would expect this to climb as vaccination level climbed and especially as high risk people were vaccinated first. So they have provided no basis to care about the pandemic post vaccination. Obviously every country wants to use its resources to the max and open as much of it's economy back up as soon as hospital occupancy and death are down so rates of infection should go up unless you reach something like 95% recent vaccination or booster.

arisAlexis 5y ago

How can they miss the most important variable and that is the ability to freely mingle in society and lockdown measures? It's like making a study about diabetes and a drug and missing to control for diet. The outcome of this faulty study is that vaccines don't work well and that's what we DO NOT want to project. It will become a flag of anti-vaxxers.

ImaCake 5y ago

Wow this paper is a joke. I see multiple conclusions drawn from insignificant statistical tests (if you can’t reject the null you can only say “i can’t see it”, not “its not there”). That alone should be enough to stop reading. There appears to be other elementary mistakes made as well. Also, you can’t draw conclusions about vaccination and covid prevalence from country level data. Different countries report their statistics differently, the prevalence of covid depends on attitudes to testing which varies at the local scale let alone at the scale of countries. Do you think poor people want to get tested when they have to self isolate? A country’s wealth matters a lot for measurements of covid prevalence. As far as I can tell there’s no effort to account for this bias, and even if there was, their data is so noisy it’s all non-significant and thus useless anyway. EDIT: This is bad science and it might be better if it wasn’t on HN.

dragonwriter 5y ago

This does literally nothing to identify and control for other variables that influence the case rate, uses the case rate rather than the hospitalization or death rates (important because that makes it subject to variability in detection of non-severe cases, which may be correlated with vaccine hesistancy because testing hesitancy may be.)

hertzilm 5y ago
the thing is though, that many municipalities are using vaccination rates as their sole or primary metric for predicting case loads. and if thats the case then this study basically invalidates that metric.