6 ms·

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

by 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
    The study that you are referring to took place "Between July 27, 2020, and November 14, 2020". The delta variant started in India in late 2020 and wasn't spreading widely within the United States until 2021. It was listed as a variant-of-concern by the WHO on May 31, 2021. So the research you are referring to is in regards to other variants of sars-cov2
  - blackbear_ 5y ago
    There is nothing about stopping transmission in there.
    - mns 5y ago
      prevent: to stop something from happening or someone from doing something https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prevent?q=preventing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prevent?...
      - blackbear_ 5y ago
        In this case the appropriate definition of "prevention" and "what is prevented" is to be found in the protocol of the trial [1], not in a dictionary of the English language. If I am reading correctly (but do correct me if I am wrong because I am not 100% certain), only symptomatic cases are counted. Hence, it is quite possible for the vaccine to stop the symptoms, but not the transmission between individuals. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577/suppl_file/nejmoa2034577_protocol.pdf https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577/suppl_f...
  - fsh 5y ago
    This quote doesn't say anything about whether the vaccine reduces transmission of the virus. Even large phase-3 studies like the ones done for the COVID vaccines don't have anywhere near the statistical power to determine this. Now we have epidemiological data that shows a clear reduction in transmission, but not as much as the vaccines protect against serious disease. Here is another quote from the same paper [1]: "This report includes 2 months of follow-up after the second dose of vaccine for half the trial participants and up to 14 weeks’ maximum follow-up for a smaller subset. Therefore, both the occurrence of adverse events more than 2 to 3.5 months after the second dose and more comprehensive information on the duration of protection remain to be determined." [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
api 5y ago
Science is constantly "rewriting history." It's called learning. Unfortunately it's a major source of public distrust in science since when someone changes their mind it's perceived as weakness or deception. A dogmatic idiot who never learns anything looks like a stronger person of greater integrity. The fact that we got any form of vaccine at all in one year is absolutely incredible. That it doesn't work quite as well as we originally thought isn't surprising given that it wasn't out long enough to observe long term efficacy in the wild. Original numbers were based on limited clinical tests and models.
- mns 5y ago
  What was mentioned in the original comment is not learning, it is rewriting history. It's one thing to say, we now have the data to say that we need boosters, because after a while people are at risk again, and another thing to change the original story and say, we never said the vaccine prevents infection, we said it only prevents severe cases. I think calling people "dogmatic idiots" is exactly what actually drives people away from these discussions.
- rory 5y ago
  I think the "rewriting history" part is: > It was never designed to stop transmission. I can't find any source confirming or denying that claim, but I can say it's absolutely not the impression I got from governments and the media. Does anyone have a source saying these vaccines were designed as non-sterilizing?
- themaninthedark 5y ago
  Science is a process that will get things wrong and is full of experimentation. Unfortunately, this is lost on people, surprisingly some very smart people who should know better. When you have people screaming at the top of their lungs: The Science is Settled!!111 They are Science Deniers!!! Science does not care about your opinion!!! Etc. And then scientific learning happens, all those people who were screaming look like dogmatic idiots to those who they were screaming at. It doesn't matter they the ones screaming adopted the new position. I will pull out the old and tired mask issue; when this first started, the people on the "side of science" were screaming that the masks did not help and they trotted out all sorts of scientific studies to back this up, from virus size vs mask to saying ti would be harmful due to keeping more virus at your face. Those who thought masks were important all looked around and said "If masks are such a bad idea, then why are the doctors all wearing them". Now we know it was a stupid and harmful lie. It is incredible what we accomplished in a year but it is also very frustrating to see how stupidly political and how unnecessarily opaque everyone is being. From the mask lie to the vaccination tempo(we pushed for a shorter amount of time between both shots because we were worried about followup, now we need a third shot?). No-one is willing to sit down and frankly state what we know and what we doesn't know. Our media isn't willing to accept it either. Trust is a two way street but We are all so afraid that uncertainty will breed fear that we take strong positions and end up killing trust.
_kulang 5y ago
That was certainly the case for the original strain, and shortly after the vaccine. What you see today is how the vaccine interacts with newer strains compounded with the effects of time. It’s not rewriting history at all, in fact you can still access all of the original information, it’s just out of date. As it turns out, most people don’t commit the level of critical thought required to process this. The only way that we would not be dealing with COVID today is if it was taken seriously early on. China seriously dropped the ball. I don’t believe that the resulting quarantines and lockdowns in other nations (which were for the most part necessary to reduce death tolls pre-vaccine) could have gone any better than they did, as people simply do not care.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- native_samples 5y ago
  The 'rewriting history' thing is probably a reference to this: > Vaccine efficacy is against severe COVID illness, not against transmission That is not and never has been - up until literally a few months ago - the definition of vaccine efficacy, nor was it the definition being used for COVID vaccines up until it turned out they can't prevent disease. Trying to assert what vaccine efficacy is without acknowledging that this is an entirely novel use of the term is going to come across as an attempt to confuse people/make them forget that it was only recently that high efficacy was being proudly announced in terms of "preventing COVID-19". Also bear in mind that this new definition has no real metrics or science behind it. What exactly is "severe" illness. Don't say hospitalizations because people have to choose to go to hospital and are being told that taking the vaccine means they won't have to go to hospital. That's a massive, massive confounder, and none of the public health agencies suddenly making claims about "severe" disease even recognize it exists, let alone control for it.
  - angelzen 5y ago
    As long as 'severe' covid efficiency rates are in the same ballpark as covid deaths rates, I'm willing to accept the ballpark even if the details may be marginally off. Another credible metric is ICU utilization, because it's an expensive scarce resource, people are not sent there willy nilly.
spyder 5y ago
> only around 8% of people (for Pfizer) in the trials actually got sick With which variant alpha or delta? and how much time after the vaccination?
sjg007 5y ago
It is you rewriting history.
obiwan14 5y ago
> That is really just rewriting history... Science is about rewriting "history". If somebody on HN doesn't understand that, then we're in far deeper hole than I though possible.
- disambiguation 5y ago
  at the risk of sounding overly simplistic .. science is science and history is history it's ok to rewrite science it's not ok to rewrite history
  - obiwan14 5y ago
    You missed the quoted HISTORY.

by mns 5y ago

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
  The study that you are referring to took place "Between July 27, 2020, and November 14, 2020". The delta variant started in India in late 2020 and wasn't spreading widely within the United States until 2021. It was listed as a variant-of-concern by the WHO on May 31, 2021. So the research you are referring to is in regards to other variants of sars-cov2
- blackbear_ 5y ago
  There is nothing about stopping transmission in there.
  - mns 5y ago
    prevent: to stop something from happening or someone from doing something https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prevent?q=preventing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prevent?...
    - blackbear_ 5y ago
      In this case the appropriate definition of "prevention" and "what is prevented" is to be found in the protocol of the trial [1], not in a dictionary of the English language. If I am reading correctly (but do correct me if I am wrong because I am not 100% certain), only symptomatic cases are counted. Hence, it is quite possible for the vaccine to stop the symptoms, but not the transmission between individuals. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577/suppl_file/nejmoa2034577_protocol.pdf https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577/suppl_f...
- fsh 5y ago
  This quote doesn't say anything about whether the vaccine reduces transmission of the virus. Even large phase-3 studies like the ones done for the COVID vaccines don't have anywhere near the statistical power to determine this. Now we have epidemiological data that shows a clear reduction in transmission, but not as much as the vaccines protect against serious disease. Here is another quote from the same paper [1]: "This report includes 2 months of follow-up after the second dose of vaccine for half the trial participants and up to 14 weeks’ maximum follow-up for a smaller subset. Therefore, both the occurrence of adverse events more than 2 to 3.5 months after the second dose and more comprehensive information on the duration of protection remain to be determined." [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

api 5y ago

Science is constantly "rewriting history." It's called learning. Unfortunately it's a major source of public distrust in science since when someone changes their mind it's perceived as weakness or deception. A dogmatic idiot who never learns anything looks like a stronger person of greater integrity. The fact that we got any form of vaccine at all in one year is absolutely incredible. That it doesn't work quite as well as we originally thought isn't surprising given that it wasn't out long enough to observe long term efficacy in the wild. Original numbers were based on limited clinical tests and models.

mns 5y ago
What was mentioned in the original comment is not learning, it is rewriting history. It's one thing to say, we now have the data to say that we need boosters, because after a while people are at risk again, and another thing to change the original story and say, we never said the vaccine prevents infection, we said it only prevents severe cases. I think calling people "dogmatic idiots" is exactly what actually drives people away from these discussions.
rory 5y ago
I think the "rewriting history" part is: > It was never designed to stop transmission. I can't find any source confirming or denying that claim, but I can say it's absolutely not the impression I got from governments and the media. Does anyone have a source saying these vaccines were designed as non-sterilizing?
themaninthedark 5y ago
Science is a process that will get things wrong and is full of experimentation. Unfortunately, this is lost on people, surprisingly some very smart people who should know better. When you have people screaming at the top of their lungs: The Science is Settled!!111 They are Science Deniers!!! Science does not care about your opinion!!! Etc. And then scientific learning happens, all those people who were screaming look like dogmatic idiots to those who they were screaming at. It doesn't matter they the ones screaming adopted the new position. I will pull out the old and tired mask issue; when this first started, the people on the "side of science" were screaming that the masks did not help and they trotted out all sorts of scientific studies to back this up, from virus size vs mask to saying ti would be harmful due to keeping more virus at your face. Those who thought masks were important all looked around and said "If masks are such a bad idea, then why are the doctors all wearing them". Now we know it was a stupid and harmful lie. It is incredible what we accomplished in a year but it is also very frustrating to see how stupidly political and how unnecessarily opaque everyone is being. From the mask lie to the vaccination tempo(we pushed for a shorter amount of time between both shots because we were worried about followup, now we need a third shot?). No-one is willing to sit down and frankly state what we know and what we doesn't know. Our media isn't willing to accept it either. Trust is a two way street but We are all so afraid that uncertainty will breed fear that we take strong positions and end up killing trust.

_kulang 5y ago

That was certainly the case for the original strain, and shortly after the vaccine. What you see today is how the vaccine interacts with newer strains compounded with the effects of time. It’s not rewriting history at all, in fact you can still access all of the original information, it’s just out of date. As it turns out, most people don’t commit the level of critical thought required to process this. The only way that we would not be dealing with COVID today is if it was taken seriously early on. China seriously dropped the ball. I don’t believe that the resulting quarantines and lockdowns in other nations (which were for the most part necessary to reduce death tolls pre-vaccine) could have gone any better than they did, as people simply do not care.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
native_samples 5y ago
The 'rewriting history' thing is probably a reference to this: > Vaccine efficacy is against severe COVID illness, not against transmission That is not and never has been - up until literally a few months ago - the definition of vaccine efficacy, nor was it the definition being used for COVID vaccines up until it turned out they can't prevent disease. Trying to assert what vaccine efficacy is without acknowledging that this is an entirely novel use of the term is going to come across as an attempt to confuse people/make them forget that it was only recently that high efficacy was being proudly announced in terms of "preventing COVID-19". Also bear in mind that this new definition has no real metrics or science behind it. What exactly is "severe" illness. Don't say hospitalizations because people have to choose to go to hospital and are being told that taking the vaccine means they won't have to go to hospital. That's a massive, massive confounder, and none of the public health agencies suddenly making claims about "severe" disease even recognize it exists, let alone control for it.
- angelzen 5y ago
  As long as 'severe' covid efficiency rates are in the same ballpark as covid deaths rates, I'm willing to accept the ballpark even if the details may be marginally off. Another credible metric is ICU utilization, because it's an expensive scarce resource, people are not sent there willy nilly.

spyder 5y ago

> only around 8% of people (for Pfizer) in the trials actually got sick With which variant alpha or delta? and how much time after the vaccination?

sjg007 5y ago

It is you rewriting history.

obiwan14 5y ago

> That is really just rewriting history... Science is about rewriting "history". If somebody on HN doesn't understand that, then we're in far deeper hole than I though possible.

disambiguation 5y ago
at the risk of sounding overly simplistic .. science is science and history is history it's ok to rewrite science it's not ok to rewrite history
- obiwan14 5y ago
  You missed the quoted HISTORY.