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I'm not clear on how "the vaccine does not effectively prevent transmission" translates into "vaccinate everyone and give booster shots at once". I realize the

I'm not clear on how "the vaccine does not effectively prevent transmission" translates into "vaccinate everyone and give booster shots at once". I realize these vaccines reduce transmission rates, but ~25% is still alarmingly high. From my meager understanding of epidemiology, this is orders of magnitude above what is needed to stop an epidemic. I also realize that they reduce hospitalization and death rates, both of which are extremely valuable, especially to certain populations. But there's also a real ethical dilemma, here. The various approvals for the vaccines (especially with young children) hinge on its purported efficacy; this is what was supposed to offset the known-risks and Knightian uncertainties [0]. I realize this has become a terribly politicized issue, and I also realize there are a disappointing number of pig-headed, foolish anti-vaxxers, but it also seems like there's room for informed debate around mass inoculation with these vaccines in particular. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightian_uncertainty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightian_uncertainty EDIT: I must admit that I am pleasantly surprised by the level-headedness and respect with which you all have responded to this comment. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

gregwebs 5y ago
Vaccine efficacy is against severe COVID illness, not against transmission. The vaccine is still effective, although recent studies indicate that after 6 months it may only be 50% effective against severe illness (this will vary tremendously for each individual). This is a non-sterilizing vaccine. It was never designed to stop transmission. It did surprisingly block transmission pretty well before the Delta variant. The theory presented here is that the vaccine effect takes time and kicks in on around day 5. With Delta the virus has already become highly transmissive by then. Pre-delta that probably was not the case.
- nucleogenesis 5y ago
  50% effective against transmission, severe illness, or both?
- omginternets 5y ago
  You got it before I could edit :) But this is very much my point: we were sold a benefit-risk ratio that assumed the vaccines effectively curb transmission.
  - jrs235 5y ago
    And if what we were/are being sold is reduced severe illness then that seems like a personal issue and the mandates don't make sense. I get it, if beds are in use by severely ill Covid patients that means less beds for others... then let the bed owners decide how they wish to allocate bed usage, just like some doctors are refusing to see non vaccinated patients.
  - pif 5y ago
    And the vaccine _did_ curb transmission of the original variant. Variant Delta came later.
    - omginternets 5y ago
      I don't recall the exact figures, but I believe it wasn't spectacular. Moreover, now that Delta is a thing, aren't the ethical issues nonetheless present.
      - croon 5y ago
        From [0] > A recent study found that vaccinated people infected with the delta variant are 63 per cent less likely to infect people who are unvaccinated. [1] > This is only slightly lower than with the alpha variant, says Brechje de Gier at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, who led the study. Her team had previously found that vaccinated people infected with alpha were 73 per cent less likely to infect unvaccinated people. [2] > What is important to realise, de Gier says, is that the full effect of vaccines on reducing transmission is even higher than 63 per cent, because most vaccinated people don’t become infected in the first place. [0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-likely-are-you-to-spread-covid-19-if-youre-vaccinated/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-l... [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v... [2] https://www.newscientist.com/definition/uk-covid-19-variant-b-1-1-7/ https://www.newscientist.com/definition/uk-covid-19-variant-...
- naasking 5y ago
  > Vaccine efficacy is against severe COVID illness, not against transmission. Since children have very little chance of a severe COVID infection, why the push to vaccinate them then?
  - yehosef 5y ago
    lots of money?
    - yehosef 5y ago
      just to put numbers on that - 28M children[1] * $20/dose [2] * 2 doses >= $1.1 B Considering you can't sue the vaccine manufactures for anything and the vaccines are being mandated in various venues, they are definitely a "safe and effective" way to make lots of money... [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-10-20/white-house-details-plans-to-vaccinate-28m-children-age-5-11 https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-10-20/... [2] https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/the-price-tags-on-the-covid-19-vaccines https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/the-price-ta...
  - gadyke 5y ago
    As I understand it, precisely because they may then pass the infection on to those who may then end up with a severe illness (either because they're unvaccinated or because their protection is waning).
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - naasking 5y ago
      > As I understand it, precisely because they may then pass the infection on to those who may then end up with a severe illness But we've already established that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission. It may slightly attenuate transmission, but nowhere near enough to stop the spread. Given these facts, the vaccine is mainly so the vulnerable populations can protect themselves, but most children aren't among those populations (obviously immunocompromised children are).
- mns 5y ago
  That is really just rewriting history (see my comment below about some of the original studies from the trials). Vaccines were presented as having an efficiency of around 90% after the second dose - meaning that only around 8% of people (for Pfizer) in the trials actually got sick, all the graphs and charts from the beginning of the year were about this. The fact that now we are rewriting the history books will not help at all in the trust of the public, especially the ones that still didn't get it.
  - AzzieElbab 5y ago
    depends what you read when vaccines came out. I dod not see any claims from scientific sources that vaccines stopped transmissions. Those claims came from the politicians and corporate media
    - mns 5y ago
      Actually they kind of did (see "BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6) below": "A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections: 21,720 with BNT162b2 and 21,728 with placebo. There were 8 cases of Covid-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose among participants assigned to receive BNT162b2 and 162 cases among those assigned to placebo; BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6). Similar vaccine efficacy (generally 90 to 100%) was observed across subgroups defined by age, sex, race, ethnicity, baseline body-mass index, and the presence of coexisting conditions. Among 10 cases of severe Covid-19 with onset after the first dose, 9 occurred in placebo recipients and 1 in a BNT162b2 recipient. The safety profile of BNT162b2 was characterized by short-term, mild-to-moderate pain at the injection site, fatigue, and headache. The incidence of serious adverse events was low and was similar in the vaccine and placebo groups." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 Maybe this is legalese, but I am pretty sure your average Joe online, that reads all kind of weird things on Facebook or other places, won't understand the subtleties of this language.
      - vigilantmav 5y ago
- themaninthedark 5y ago
  >This is a non-sterilizing vaccine. Unfortunately, it was being sold to the public like it was. >Herd immunity against COVID-19 should be achieved by protecting people through vaccination, not by exposing them to the pathogen that causes the disease. Read the Director-General’s 12 October media briefing speech for more detail. >Vaccines train our immune systems to create proteins that fight disease, known as ‘antibodies’, just as would happen when we are exposed to a disease but – crucially – vaccines work without making us sick. Vaccinated people are protected from getting the disease in question and passing on the pathogen, breaking any chains of transmission. Visit our webpage on COVID-19 and vaccines for more detail. >To safely achieve herd immunity against COVID-19, a substantial proportion of a population would need to be vaccinated, lowering the overall amount of virus able to spread in the whole population. One of the aims with working towards herd immunity is to keep vulnerable groups who cannot get vaccinated (e.g. due to health conditions like allergic reactions to the vaccine) safe and protected from the disease. Read our Q&A on vaccines and immunization for more information. https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/herd-immunity-lockdowns-and-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/herd-immunity-lockd... To nit-pick, it is not the vaccine effect take 5 days to kick in but that the vaccine trained immune response takes 5 days to kick in. I would be interested in seeing how long it takes for natural trained immune response for someone who had Covid previously. Maybe the best strategy for herd immunity would be to get double vaccinated to prevent serious effects then contract Covid to gain superior antibody response.
  - phkahler 5y ago
    >> Maybe the best strategy for herd immunity would be to get double vaccinated to prevent serious effects then contract Covid to gain superior antibody response. From reading about Covid, I thought the virus had a couple of genes that make it more deadly, one of which tends to suppress the immune system for example. Why not create another variant that is a full virus without those genes and use that as a live vaccine? Sure it might escape, but so what it's less lethal than the one out there right? Obviously this raises a bunch of ethical issues, but they are similar to the issues around forced vaccination.
    - vigilantmav 5y ago
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  > This is a non-sterilizing vaccine. It was never designed to stop transmission. Nobody really knew in precise terms what the vaccines were going to do because there was initially no long-term data about their efficacy or studies about transmission. But it's simply a fact that the vaccines were sold to the public as The Way to end the pandemic and return to normalcy. Did you completely miss all of the talk about "herd immunity"? Are you not aware of all of the places, like California, that ended their mask mandates and told vaccinated individuals they could gather indoors together? If the vaccines were never intended or thought to significantly reduce if not stop transmission, why was "herd immunity" ever in our pandemic vocabulary? Why did the mask requirements get lifted? Why were vaccinated individuals told they could basically resume normal activities in the company of other vaccinated individuals? And why are some places pushing so hard on vaccine passports? It's okay that the vaccines haven't proven to be as effective as we had hoped in ending the pandemic. But there is a real issue with the way the vaccines were sold to the public. The messaging that was used to encourage people to get vaccinated was way ahead of what we knew in terms of the science and unfortunately, this is likely going to cause long-term issues. Specifically, I think it's going to be harder and harder to get people to take boosters. I'm predicting that each successive round of boosters will see fewer and fewer takers.
jgrahamc 5y ago
I'm not clear on how "the vaccine does not effectively prevent transmission" translates into "vaccinate everyone and give booster shots at once". Because the vaccination reduces the severity of disease so you don't want the unvaccinated getting very ill, and you don't want people with waning vaccine-induced immunity getting ill.
- omginternets 5y ago
  Agreed. However, once we've vaccinated all the at-risk populations, isn't the benefit of vaccinating everyone else marginal?
  - blackbear_ 5y ago
    No because vaccination still reduces the risk of severe disease and hospitalizations.
    - omginternets 5y ago
      But those were already marginal in children, for example. Aren't you concerned about the risks to children? What benefit do they obtain in exchange for that risk?
      - pacerwpg 5y ago
        Has there been any data suggesting that the vaccines present a significant risk to children?
- Ottolay 5y ago
  Lower hospitalization rates also reduces the issue of not being able to get treatment for non-covid issues when the hospitals are full of covid patients [1]. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/icu-non-covid-patients-wait/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/icu-non-covid-patients-wait/
wycy 5y ago
> I'm not clear on how "the vaccine does not effectively prevent transmission" translates into "vaccinate everyone and give booster shots at once". It translates into "vaccinate everyone" because the fact that transmission can't be eliminated means that it's likely that nearly every person will eventually be exposed to live virus, so we'd better hope everyone is vaccinated so the effects of that exposure are lessened. If it were more effective at reducing spread, vaccinating everyone would be less critical, since we might achieve heard immunity with a smaller vaccinated percentage.
- tomp 5y ago
  It translates into "offer vaccine to everyone" but it also significantly diminishes the justification for forcing people to get vaccinated - it's usually presented as "do it for others" a.k.a. "herd immunity" but currently it seems we won't be able to achieve that even with 100% vaccination rate.
- omginternets 5y ago
  This reasoning completely ignores the reality that COVID does not pose a significant risk to most people. Why not vaccinate those who are at risk, on a voluntary basis? To reiterate: I am not opposed to vaccines, but concerned about the general push towards mandatory vaccination for everyone.
  - hoseja 5y ago
    I'd also be much more sympathetic to vaccine evangelism if the damn things got nationalized/opensourced at some point and didn't translate to pure pharma profit.
  - newsclues 5y ago
    If it doesn’t make sense from a public health or human behaviour standpoint, what other factors should we consider before financial motives?
  - gsich 5y ago
    Long Covid is a gamble.
dv_dt 5y ago
On note is that they say their numbers to too small to note differences between the vaccines, but being a UK study it would seem likely to be predominantly the AZ vaccine which seems to have some potentially significant differences in effectiveness than the Pfizer/Moderna vaccine.
phreezerburn 5y ago
(fact) Over $50B tax payer dollars just to roll out the beta vaccine. (speculation) Indefinite updates are coming because it keeps you poor and others rich. There can be no ladder out of poverty like there was with capitalism in their new world they want to build.
- ranko 5y ago
  Who is "they" in your speculation?
  - phreezerburn 5y ago
    Anyone following the Climate Crisis logic closely are profiting by making steps toward shared goals and foreseeing eventualities. So 'They' could be just about anyone. We are heading toward an eventual global socialist system under the banner of climate crisis. Nothing controls population numbers like crisis, science, and socialism. It may have benefits but it will not go smoothly.
sjg007 5y ago
Comments like this are antivaxx because they attempt to use a misinterpretation of "science" to negate the benefits of vaccination. You also have no idea what the FDA or CDC considers or why. Instead you posit your own interpretation of what an approval is or should be.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Another angle is the redefinition of the term vaccine (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...). The CDC claims they redefined it away from the word “immunity” towards the word “protection” because no vaccine grants perfect immunity. Personally I find that to be a bad answer. By taking a weighty word like “vaccine” and redefining it, the expectations of risks and benefits the public holds were exploited. For the majority of the public, those who are under 50 and healthy, COVID poses little risk - it’s not much different from a typical seasonal flu. Personally I think getting an mRNA vaccine is a reasonable low-risk action but the risk of undergoing any medical intervention is nonzero, and it is higher for a novel technology. I bet that if the COVID vaccines were not called a vaccine, people would evaluate the risk reward trade off differently. The redefinition game seems to be quite frequent in American politics these days. It comes up in culture war activism (definitions for “man”, “woman”, etc) as it has for many years, but it is more disturbing to see it come from public agencies and trusted institutions like universities or hospitals or the CDC. Apart from the word “vaccine”, there is the controversial issue of COVID’s origins. Anthony Fauci repeatedly denied that the NIH was involved with Gain of Function research but they later admitted what was obvious all along, that they had indeed funded GoF (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...). One claim I’ve seen in articles is that the NIH and/or NIAID (the agency Fauci leads) basically came up with a private, narrow definition for GoF that excludes the GoF they were conducting. This is why it is important that definitions remain static unless accepted by an overwhelming majority of the public - it undermines basic communication.

gregwebs 5y ago

Vaccine efficacy is against severe COVID illness, not against transmission. The vaccine is still effective, although recent studies indicate that after 6 months it may only be 50% effective against severe illness (this will vary tremendously for each individual). This is a non-sterilizing vaccine. It was never designed to stop transmission. It did surprisingly block transmission pretty well before the Delta variant. The theory presented here is that the vaccine effect takes time and kicks in on around day 5. With Delta the virus has already become highly transmissive by then. Pre-delta that probably was not the case.

nucleogenesis 5y ago
50% effective against transmission, severe illness, or both?
omginternets 5y ago
You got it before I could edit :) But this is very much my point: we were sold a benefit-risk ratio that assumed the vaccines effectively curb transmission.
- jrs235 5y ago
  And if what we were/are being sold is reduced severe illness then that seems like a personal issue and the mandates don't make sense. I get it, if beds are in use by severely ill Covid patients that means less beds for others... then let the bed owners decide how they wish to allocate bed usage, just like some doctors are refusing to see non vaccinated patients.
- pif 5y ago
  And the vaccine _did_ curb transmission of the original variant. Variant Delta came later.
  - omginternets 5y ago
    I don't recall the exact figures, but I believe it wasn't spectacular. Moreover, now that Delta is a thing, aren't the ethical issues nonetheless present.
    - croon 5y ago
      From [0] > A recent study found that vaccinated people infected with the delta variant are 63 per cent less likely to infect people who are unvaccinated. [1] > This is only slightly lower than with the alpha variant, says Brechje de Gier at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, who led the study. Her team had previously found that vaccinated people infected with alpha were 73 per cent less likely to infect unvaccinated people. [2] > What is important to realise, de Gier says, is that the full effect of vaccines on reducing transmission is even higher than 63 per cent, because most vaccinated people don’t become infected in the first place. [0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-likely-are-you-to-spread-covid-19-if-youre-vaccinated/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-l... [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v... [2] https://www.newscientist.com/definition/uk-covid-19-variant-b-1-1-7/ https://www.newscientist.com/definition/uk-covid-19-variant-...
naasking 5y ago
> Vaccine efficacy is against severe COVID illness, not against transmission. Since children have very little chance of a severe COVID infection, why the push to vaccinate them then?
- yehosef 5y ago
  lots of money?
  - yehosef 5y ago
    just to put numbers on that - 28M children[1] * $20/dose [2] * 2 doses >= $1.1 B Considering you can't sue the vaccine manufactures for anything and the vaccines are being mandated in various venues, they are definitely a "safe and effective" way to make lots of money... [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-10-20/white-house-details-plans-to-vaccinate-28m-children-age-5-11 https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-10-20/... [2] https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/the-price-tags-on-the-covid-19-vaccines https://www.managedhealthcareexecutive.com/view/the-price-ta...
- gadyke 5y ago
  As I understand it, precisely because they may then pass the infection on to those who may then end up with a severe illness (either because they're unvaccinated or because their protection is waning).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - naasking 5y ago
    > As I understand it, precisely because they may then pass the infection on to those who may then end up with a severe illness But we've already established that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission. It may slightly attenuate transmission, but nowhere near enough to stop the spread. Given these facts, the vaccine is mainly so the vulnerable populations can protect themselves, but most children aren't among those populations (obviously immunocompromised children are).
mns 5y ago
That is really just rewriting history (see my comment below about some of the original studies from the trials). Vaccines were presented as having an efficiency of around 90% after the second dose - meaning that only around 8% of people (for Pfizer) in the trials actually got sick, all the graphs and charts from the beginning of the year were about this. The fact that now we are rewriting the history books will not help at all in the trust of the public, especially the ones that still didn't get it.
- AzzieElbab 5y ago
  depends what you read when vaccines came out. I dod not see any claims from scientific sources that vaccines stopped transmissions. Those claims came from the politicians and corporate media
  - mns 5y ago
    Actually they kind of did (see "BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6) below": "A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections: 21,720 with BNT162b2 and 21,728 with placebo. There were 8 cases of Covid-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose among participants assigned to receive BNT162b2 and 162 cases among those assigned to placebo; BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6). Similar vaccine efficacy (generally 90 to 100%) was observed across subgroups defined by age, sex, race, ethnicity, baseline body-mass index, and the presence of coexisting conditions. Among 10 cases of severe Covid-19 with onset after the first dose, 9 occurred in placebo recipients and 1 in a BNT162b2 recipient. The safety profile of BNT162b2 was characterized by short-term, mild-to-moderate pain at the injection site, fatigue, and headache. The incidence of serious adverse events was low and was similar in the vaccine and placebo groups." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 Maybe this is legalese, but I am pretty sure your average Joe online, that reads all kind of weird things on Facebook or other places, won't understand the subtleties of this language.
    - vigilantmav 5y ago
themaninthedark 5y ago
>This is a non-sterilizing vaccine. Unfortunately, it was being sold to the public like it was. >Herd immunity against COVID-19 should be achieved by protecting people through vaccination, not by exposing them to the pathogen that causes the disease. Read the Director-General’s 12 October media briefing speech for more detail. >Vaccines train our immune systems to create proteins that fight disease, known as ‘antibodies’, just as would happen when we are exposed to a disease but – crucially – vaccines work without making us sick. Vaccinated people are protected from getting the disease in question and passing on the pathogen, breaking any chains of transmission. Visit our webpage on COVID-19 and vaccines for more detail. >To safely achieve herd immunity against COVID-19, a substantial proportion of a population would need to be vaccinated, lowering the overall amount of virus able to spread in the whole population. One of the aims with working towards herd immunity is to keep vulnerable groups who cannot get vaccinated (e.g. due to health conditions like allergic reactions to the vaccine) safe and protected from the disease. Read our Q&A on vaccines and immunization for more information. https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/herd-immunity-lockdowns-and-covid-19 https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/herd-immunity-lockd... To nit-pick, it is not the vaccine effect take 5 days to kick in but that the vaccine trained immune response takes 5 days to kick in. I would be interested in seeing how long it takes for natural trained immune response for someone who had Covid previously. Maybe the best strategy for herd immunity would be to get double vaccinated to prevent serious effects then contract Covid to gain superior antibody response.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> Maybe the best strategy for herd immunity would be to get double vaccinated to prevent serious effects then contract Covid to gain superior antibody response. From reading about Covid, I thought the virus had a couple of genes that make it more deadly, one of which tends to suppress the immune system for example. Why not create another variant that is a full virus without those genes and use that as a live vaccine? Sure it might escape, but so what it's less lethal than the one out there right? Obviously this raises a bunch of ethical issues, but they are similar to the issues around forced vaccination.
  - vigilantmav 5y ago
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
> This is a non-sterilizing vaccine. It was never designed to stop transmission. Nobody really knew in precise terms what the vaccines were going to do because there was initially no long-term data about their efficacy or studies about transmission. But it's simply a fact that the vaccines were sold to the public as The Way to end the pandemic and return to normalcy. Did you completely miss all of the talk about "herd immunity"? Are you not aware of all of the places, like California, that ended their mask mandates and told vaccinated individuals they could gather indoors together? If the vaccines were never intended or thought to significantly reduce if not stop transmission, why was "herd immunity" ever in our pandemic vocabulary? Why did the mask requirements get lifted? Why were vaccinated individuals told they could basically resume normal activities in the company of other vaccinated individuals? And why are some places pushing so hard on vaccine passports? It's okay that the vaccines haven't proven to be as effective as we had hoped in ending the pandemic. But there is a real issue with the way the vaccines were sold to the public. The messaging that was used to encourage people to get vaccinated was way ahead of what we knew in terms of the science and unfortunately, this is likely going to cause long-term issues. Specifically, I think it's going to be harder and harder to get people to take boosters. I'm predicting that each successive round of boosters will see fewer and fewer takers.

jgrahamc 5y ago

I'm not clear on how "the vaccine does not effectively prevent transmission" translates into "vaccinate everyone and give booster shots at once". Because the vaccination reduces the severity of disease so you don't want the unvaccinated getting very ill, and you don't want people with waning vaccine-induced immunity getting ill.

omginternets 5y ago
Agreed. However, once we've vaccinated all the at-risk populations, isn't the benefit of vaccinating everyone else marginal?
- blackbear_ 5y ago
  No because vaccination still reduces the risk of severe disease and hospitalizations.
  - omginternets 5y ago
    But those were already marginal in children, for example. Aren't you concerned about the risks to children? What benefit do they obtain in exchange for that risk?
    - pacerwpg 5y ago
      Has there been any data suggesting that the vaccines present a significant risk to children?
Ottolay 5y ago
Lower hospitalization rates also reduces the issue of not being able to get treatment for non-covid issues when the hospitals are full of covid patients [1]. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/icu-non-covid-patients-wait/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/icu-non-covid-patients-wait/

wycy 5y ago

> I'm not clear on how "the vaccine does not effectively prevent transmission" translates into "vaccinate everyone and give booster shots at once". It translates into "vaccinate everyone" because the fact that transmission can't be eliminated means that it's likely that nearly every person will eventually be exposed to live virus, so we'd better hope everyone is vaccinated so the effects of that exposure are lessened. If it were more effective at reducing spread, vaccinating everyone would be less critical, since we might achieve heard immunity with a smaller vaccinated percentage.

tomp 5y ago
It translates into "offer vaccine to everyone" but it also significantly diminishes the justification for forcing people to get vaccinated - it's usually presented as "do it for others" a.k.a. "herd immunity" but currently it seems we won't be able to achieve that even with 100% vaccination rate.
omginternets 5y ago
This reasoning completely ignores the reality that COVID does not pose a significant risk to most people. Why not vaccinate those who are at risk, on a voluntary basis? To reiterate: I am not opposed to vaccines, but concerned about the general push towards mandatory vaccination for everyone.
- hoseja 5y ago
  I'd also be much more sympathetic to vaccine evangelism if the damn things got nationalized/opensourced at some point and didn't translate to pure pharma profit.
- newsclues 5y ago
  If it doesn’t make sense from a public health or human behaviour standpoint, what other factors should we consider before financial motives?
- gsich 5y ago
  Long Covid is a gamble.

dv_dt 5y ago

On note is that they say their numbers to too small to note differences between the vaccines, but being a UK study it would seem likely to be predominantly the AZ vaccine which seems to have some potentially significant differences in effectiveness than the Pfizer/Moderna vaccine.

phreezerburn 5y ago

(fact) Over $50B tax payer dollars just to roll out the beta vaccine. (speculation) Indefinite updates are coming because it keeps you poor and others rich. There can be no ladder out of poverty like there was with capitalism in their new world they want to build.

ranko 5y ago
Who is "they" in your speculation?
- phreezerburn 5y ago
  Anyone following the Climate Crisis logic closely are profiting by making steps toward shared goals and foreseeing eventualities. So 'They' could be just about anyone. We are heading toward an eventual global socialist system under the banner of climate crisis. Nothing controls population numbers like crisis, science, and socialism. It may have benefits but it will not go smoothly.

sjg007 5y ago

Comments like this are antivaxx because they attempt to use a misinterpretation of "science" to negate the benefits of vaccination. You also have no idea what the FDA or CDC considers or why. Instead you posit your own interpretation of what an approval is or should be.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Another angle is the redefinition of the term vaccine (https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...). The CDC claims they redefined it away from the word “immunity” towards the word “protection” because no vaccine grants perfect immunity. Personally I find that to be a bad answer. By taking a weighty word like “vaccine” and redefining it, the expectations of risks and benefits the public holds were exploited. For the majority of the public, those who are under 50 and healthy, COVID poses little risk - it’s not much different from a typical seasonal flu. Personally I think getting an mRNA vaccine is a reasonable low-risk action but the risk of undergoing any medical intervention is nonzero, and it is higher for a novel technology. I bet that if the COVID vaccines were not called a vaccine, people would evaluate the risk reward trade off differently. The redefinition game seems to be quite frequent in American politics these days. It comes up in culture war activism (definitions for “man”, “woman”, etc) as it has for many years, but it is more disturbing to see it come from public agencies and trusted institutions like universities or hospitals or the CDC. Apart from the word “vaccine”, there is the controversial issue of COVID’s origins. Anthony Fauci repeatedly denied that the NIH was involved with Gain of Function research but they later admitted what was obvious all along, that they had indeed funded GoF (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...). One claim I’ve seen in articles is that the NIH and/or NIAID (the agency Fauci leads) basically came up with a private, narrow definition for GoF that excludes the GoF they were conducting. This is why it is important that definitions remain static unless accepted by an overwhelming majority of the public - it undermines basic communication.