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Vaccines don't seem to reduce spread and this conclusion - which you could find on blogs long before it was officially admitted - is now the position of e.g. th

Vaccines don't seem to reduce spread and this conclusion - which you could find on blogs long before it was officially admitted - is now the position of e.g. the UK official vaccination committee. In fact they're now arguing that the vaccines were never even designed to do that in the first place, although it would have been good if they'd said that before vaccine passports were invented. Here's a summary of an paywalled interview in the Telegraph with former Vaccine Taskforce chief Clive Dix: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/14/vaccine-taskforce-ex-chief-the-vaccines-were-not-designed-to-end-transmission/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/14/vaccine-taskforce-ex-chi... "The battle over Covid transmission was lost some time ago. I am afraid that the vaccines will not stop the spread of the virus in the short or medium term – but that is not a disaster. Indeed the vaccines were not designed to end transmission. It was evident to me at the time I helped with the procurement of doses, as interim chair of the Vaccine Taskforce, that the intention was to stop people from getting severely ill or dying." "Given that young and healthy people not only have a very low chance of suffering severe Covid in the first place, but also already have substantial immunity from severe disease thanks to the first two jabs, I cannot see how boosting them is more valuable for public health than doubling our focus on the most vulnerable and cracking down on the backlog of chronically sick patients, such as those with hypertension, diabetes or even cancer."

icoder 5y ago
Yes, that indeed is a very good point that I overlooked, I agree it weakens the case for (mandating) vaccinating minors even more. Having said that, I've also seen graphs with 4 quadrants (vaccinated or not on both axis for the two persons involved in a transmission) where the transmission was clearly higher in the case neither were vaccinated. So I'm not sure if it does absolutely nothing for transmission, but at least not enough to be a strong argument in this discussion.
- native_samples 5y ago
  I think the issue may be time related. Immediately after a second shot there seems to be some effectiveness but it decays very fast, and can even go negative. This sounds impossible but the UK data shows very clearly that once the vaccine wears off you're nearly 2.5x as likely to catch COVID than unvaccinated people are! This kind of negative effectiveness has happened before and immunologists know about the effect. They call it "original antigenic sin" and it refers to a type of imprinting effect, whereby the immune system misfires when presented with slightly mutated viruses by re-manufacturing the same antibodies it made before. Thus, if you trick your immune system with a vaccine, it learns to fight whatever the vaccine was targeting but that's a now obsolete and extinct 2019 strain of the virus. Then you get hit with the new strains and the antibodies it makes aren't so effective anymore, creating a delay before the body realizes its mistake and spins up new antibodies (or sometimes it seems, it may never do this - gulp). This can cause negative VE when vaccinating against something that can mutate very quickly.

icoder 5y ago

Yes, that indeed is a very good point that I overlooked, I agree it weakens the case for (mandating) vaccinating minors even more. Having said that, I've also seen graphs with 4 quadrants (vaccinated or not on both axis for the two persons involved in a transmission) where the transmission was clearly higher in the case neither were vaccinated. So I'm not sure if it does absolutely nothing for transmission, but at least not enough to be a strong argument in this discussion.

native_samples 5y ago
I think the issue may be time related. Immediately after a second shot there seems to be some effectiveness but it decays very fast, and can even go negative. This sounds impossible but the UK data shows very clearly that once the vaccine wears off you're nearly 2.5x as likely to catch COVID than unvaccinated people are! This kind of negative effectiveness has happened before and immunologists know about the effect. They call it "original antigenic sin" and it refers to a type of imprinting effect, whereby the immune system misfires when presented with slightly mutated viruses by re-manufacturing the same antibodies it made before. Thus, if you trick your immune system with a vaccine, it learns to fight whatever the vaccine was targeting but that's a now obsolete and extinct 2019 strain of the virus. Then you get hit with the new strains and the antibodies it makes aren't so effective anymore, creating a delay before the body realizes its mistake and spins up new antibodies (or sometimes it seems, it may never do this - gulp). This can cause negative VE when vaccinating against something that can mutate very quickly.