5 ms·

You are arguing over semantics. In reality, the Pfizer vax has proven to be less than 10% effective at stopping a future infection.

jjulius 5y ago
- jmarbach 5y ago
  You are completely wrong -- totally warped by the narrative. Look at the Pfizer press release, Nov 9, 2020 - the first sentence: "Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis" https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-vaccine-candidate-against https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
  - junon 5y ago
    Your own misunderstanding of the difference between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 do not entitle you to assert anything about the subject.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      It matters not. The public was lead to believe that the vaccines were highly effective and safe. Now they are realized to be not so effective (against Delta/Omicron) and not so safe (J&J/Janssen recently "de-preferenced" by CDC due to clotting). We are still wearing masks, when we were once told the vaccinated didn't need to mask. Two years later, there is no end in sight. If you want to build trust, don't oversell the product when you don't really know what you are talking about.
      - jjulius 5y ago
        >The public was lead to believe that the vaccines were highly effective and safe. Now they are realized to be not so effective (against Delta/Omicron)... You mean how they typically clarified they didn't know how efficacy would play out in future variants? Because that was definitely a thing.
      - maxerickson 5y ago
        The vaccines are highly effective and safe. A low rate of people suffer any significant issues from vaccination, and very few vaccinated people become severely ill. They work great. If the other vaccines were not available, the J&J vaccine would make sense for most people compared to not taking it.
      - junon 5y ago
  - heyitsguay 5y ago
    For the variants at the time. The spread of the delta and omicron variants was tracked so closely and garnered so much attention in large part due to their abilities to at least partially evade vaccine-induced immunity, but this was always a known risk. The larger the infected population, the more chances for such an event to occur, hence the importance of measures like vaccinations, social distancing, and lockdowns to curb the spread.
    - jmarbach 5y ago
      In this case we should edit the title of the post to clarify, "for the variants as of x date" - agree or disagree? As to not spread misinformation.
      - heyitsguay 5y ago
        Yeah that's a big omission that i don't see addressed in the article. In particular given the development timeline, does it have the same efficacy for the omicron variant? I doubt the trials being reported here tested it.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    First, as another user pointed out, for the variants of the time. Second, "completely" is a strong word there; your link, and the part you quoted, still clarifies that it's possible to get infected. Edit: You are also misreading what you're quoting[1]. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347
    - jmarbach 5y ago
      You're right. I will never question Pfizer again. There could be infinite mutations of the virus moving forward which would impact the weight of their claims.
      - jjulius 5y ago
        >I will never question Pfizer again. I didn't say you, nor myself or anyone else, shouldn't question them, just that they haven't been incorrect in this instance as you've suggested. I'm not sure why your snark is needed in your multiple responses here.
        jmarbach 5y ago
        The Pfizer vaccine is not 90% effective. That’s a fact.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        mthoms 5y ago
        They didn’t claim it would be. They claimed it was 90% effective in the (time limited) study which they performed. It’s fair that you might have misinterpreted that as meaning it will be 90% effective. Especially if you don’t know how viruses work, but that’s not what was actually claimed.
  - someotherperson 5y ago
    Maybe I'm misinformed, but as I understood it, COVID-19 is the disease brought upon by SARS-Cov-2 infection. That line on its own doesn't suggest it prevents infection, it suggests it prevents the COVID-19 disease (i.e 90% chance of being left with a asymptomatic infection).
    - jjulius 5y ago
      You are 100% correct. You contract SARS-CoV-2, which then turns in to COVID-19[1]. [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00459-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00459-7
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      It's a technical distinction lost on the public. Maybe that's a bad thing, but it is what it is.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        I mean, if you're not noticing infection but noticing only the disease, it makes perfect sense to the public.
        maxerickson 5y ago
        The public pretty much just thinks of both together as 'sick'.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    It's sophistry, but "COVID-19" in that press release means symptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2, not just infection.
  - hamburglar 5y ago
    You seem very, very attached to a conclusion that isn’t supported by your own information. Are you really sure you haven’t been “warped by a narrative?”
    - jmarbach 5y ago
  - dang 5y ago
    Please edit swipes out of your comments here. They only make things worse. Your post would be fine without the first sentence. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- vidoc 5y ago
  > They never claimed it stopped infection True, but they sure as hell implied it did. For example, this fact check appeared in the search container of google early on: note the use of the double negative in the VERDICT. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-transmission/fact-check-scientists-do-not-yet-know-whether-the-covid-19-vaccine-reduces-transmission-of-the-virus-idUSKBN29N1UH https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-transmission/fa...
  - jjulius 5y ago
    >Scientists are not yet sure of how the vaccine affects transmission – and this is currently undergoing research. I don't know how much clearer they can get with that next sentence.
    - vidoc 5y ago
      Do you not understand where the problem is here? If the scientists were, at the time, not yet sure how the vaccine affected transmission. The correct 'fact check' should have been: "There is no conclusive evidence to claim COVID-19 vaccines prevent people from spreading the disease." instead of "There is no conclusive evidence to claim COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent people spreading the disease."
      - jjulius 5y ago
        In an article that says all of the following very clearly... >Meanwhile, there is currently no conclusive evidence to claim the COVID-19 vaccine stops people spreading the virus that causes the disease – nor is there for the opposite. >Scientists do not yet know whether COVID-19 vaccinations will reduce transmission because this was not tested in the trials. >With the latter, this could mean the virus continues to replicate in the nose and throat, and is still able to spread. >Scientists are not yet sure of how the vaccine affects transmission – and this is currently undergoing research. ... you are seizing on a single double-negative to claim you've been misled? A double-negative which is equally as accurate as what you would like it corrected to, because in the body of the article it says there's no evidence one way or the other? This is really the hill you're choosing to die on?
kadoban 5y ago
That sounds low. Where did you get your numbers?
- jmarbach 5y ago
  - zackbloom 5y ago
    There is very good data on this. Infection rates are roughly 5x higher, and death rates 13x higher, among the unvaccinated.
    - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      Infection rate is orthogonal to preventing people from being infected. If you're not exposed, you can never be infected. It also depends how you define efficacy/effectiveness. Does it mean for each exposure, over a period of time, etc.
      - mlyle 5y ago
        > Infection rate is orthogonal to preventing people from being infected. If you're not exposed, you can never be infected. Sure, there are confounds: people who choose to be vaccinated don't behave exactly the same way that people who don't choose to be vaccinated do. Therefore, the observational data is somewhat confounded. Two directions for the confound: people who are vaccinated may choose to take more risk after vaccination. People who are vaccinated may be those who take COVID seriously to begin with and be biased to take less risk in general. Probably the latter "wins", though I certainly do a lot more than I would do if I wasn't vaccinated. However, IMO this is all moot: we have vaccines that showed massive efficacy in randomized, controlled trials (over a period of time), and case control studies that show ongoing high efficacy against Delta... and the confounded observational data shows a truly massive effect.
  - MatthewMob 5y ago
    So you are lying then. What do you gain out of misleading people with your rhetoric here?
stavros 5y ago
English isn't my native language, but I thought "proven" wasn't a synonym for "I asked my friends".
- jmarbach 5y ago
  It's a fair critique. But when the Captain of an airplane I'm flying on tells me there's an emergency problem with the flaps, I don't ask him for text book evidence, I just look out at the wings and verify the problem. Check this data in a few weeks. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
  - mlyle 5y ago
    So, you cite data showing very high efficacy of the vaccine, and are like -- look at it in a few weeks! Omicron is going to make it worse, but even unboosted folks in South Africa seem to enjoy about 30% efficacy against infection and much higher efficacy against hospitalization and death. But your gossip trumps the data, I guess...
    - jmarbach 5y ago
      "Omicron is making it worse" is gossip to you and a fact for me. That's where we disagree.
      - mlyle 5y ago
        No, Omicron making it worse is a fact that I already ceded.. but we have data that shows low (but still around 30%, not 10%) efficacy against infection with Omicron.. and still high efficacy (70%) against hospitalization and death. But you say "has proven less than 10% effective" ... because you are making stuff up. Further, it may be a mistake to assume South Africa predicts exactly what will happen here (30% fully vaccinated, nearly 0 boosted, 20% HIV incidence, vs. 60% fully vaccinated, 25% boosted, 0.3% HIV incidence).
  - lkbm 5y ago
throwaway2016a 5y ago
The efficacy is pretty well proven to be > 90% at this point. Per your comment where you admit the number was pulled out of thin air: > Anecdotal. You do not need to be a meteorologist to know when it's raining. Look outside. I'll raise you this... where I am 100% of ICU cases are unvaccinated. Read that again 100%. And over 85% of hospitalizations. And before you say "see, 15% of them were breakthrough cases," please learn about base rates. 65% of the people here are vaccinated so to have only 15% of the hospital cases be vaccinated is even more conclusive. Please, get out of your bubble. If you think it is 10%... or even 50%... or even 70% you need to do some serious introspection. Please, actually "look outside"! Because if you spent more than 10 seconds actually looking outside, the efficacy is obvious.
- jmarbach 5y ago
  I am vaccinated - I believe in the early vaccine's efficacy for stopping serious illness. They have saved many lives. What I am saying here is that the vaccines were marketed as 90% effective for preventing infection. Was I misunderstanding what was being marketed to me all along?
  - jjulius 5y ago
    Yes, you have misunderstood this all along, and that misunderstanding has already been pointed out to you in this thread[1]. It is effective at preventing COVID-19 infections, which you get after being infected with SARA-CoV-2. It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347
    - mlyle 5y ago
      > It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter. We had some early data that looked like they were probably about ~70% effective for preventing infection, ~90% effective at preventing symptoms, and >95% effective at preventing severe illness. These numbers are interesting, because they mean you have less of a chance of becoming infected, but a larger chance, if infected, of being an asymptomatic carrier. So it's difficult to predict the net effect on transmission (probably a benefit, but..) Now for 2 doses of mRNA vaccine, our best guesses for omicron are more like ~??%, ~30%, and ~70% respectively. Offsetting it slightly is that it looks like omicron may be a bit less likely to cause severe illness at baseline. But, no matter what, this is a big setback.

jjulius 5y ago

jmarbach 5y ago
You are completely wrong -- totally warped by the narrative. Look at the Pfizer press release, Nov 9, 2020 - the first sentence: "Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis" https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-and-biontech-announce-vaccine-candidate-against https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
- junon 5y ago
  Your own misunderstanding of the difference between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 do not entitle you to assert anything about the subject.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    It matters not. The public was lead to believe that the vaccines were highly effective and safe. Now they are realized to be not so effective (against Delta/Omicron) and not so safe (J&J/Janssen recently "de-preferenced" by CDC due to clotting). We are still wearing masks, when we were once told the vaccinated didn't need to mask. Two years later, there is no end in sight. If you want to build trust, don't oversell the product when you don't really know what you are talking about.
    - jjulius 5y ago
      >The public was lead to believe that the vaccines were highly effective and safe. Now they are realized to be not so effective (against Delta/Omicron)... You mean how they typically clarified they didn't know how efficacy would play out in future variants? Because that was definitely a thing.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      The vaccines are highly effective and safe. A low rate of people suffer any significant issues from vaccination, and very few vaccinated people become severely ill. They work great. If the other vaccines were not available, the J&J vaccine would make sense for most people compared to not taking it.
    - junon 5y ago
- heyitsguay 5y ago
  For the variants at the time. The spread of the delta and omicron variants was tracked so closely and garnered so much attention in large part due to their abilities to at least partially evade vaccine-induced immunity, but this was always a known risk. The larger the infected population, the more chances for such an event to occur, hence the importance of measures like vaccinations, social distancing, and lockdowns to curb the spread.
  - jmarbach 5y ago
    In this case we should edit the title of the post to clarify, "for the variants as of x date" - agree or disagree? As to not spread misinformation.
    - heyitsguay 5y ago
      Yeah that's a big omission that i don't see addressed in the article. In particular given the development timeline, does it have the same efficacy for the omicron variant? I doubt the trials being reported here tested it.
- jjulius 5y ago
  First, as another user pointed out, for the variants of the time. Second, "completely" is a strong word there; your link, and the part you quoted, still clarifies that it's possible to get infected. Edit: You are also misreading what you're quoting[1]. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347
  - jmarbach 5y ago
    You're right. I will never question Pfizer again. There could be infinite mutations of the virus moving forward which would impact the weight of their claims.
    - jjulius 5y ago
      >I will never question Pfizer again. I didn't say you, nor myself or anyone else, shouldn't question them, just that they haven't been incorrect in this instance as you've suggested. I'm not sure why your snark is needed in your multiple responses here.
      - jmarbach 5y ago
        The Pfizer vaccine is not 90% effective. That’s a fact.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        mthoms 5y ago
        They didn’t claim it would be. They claimed it was 90% effective in the (time limited) study which they performed. It’s fair that you might have misinterpreted that as meaning it will be 90% effective. Especially if you don’t know how viruses work, but that’s not what was actually claimed.
- someotherperson 5y ago
  Maybe I'm misinformed, but as I understood it, COVID-19 is the disease brought upon by SARS-Cov-2 infection. That line on its own doesn't suggest it prevents infection, it suggests it prevents the COVID-19 disease (i.e 90% chance of being left with a asymptomatic infection).
  - jjulius 5y ago
    You are 100% correct. You contract SARS-CoV-2, which then turns in to COVID-19[1]. [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00459-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00459-7
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    It's a technical distinction lost on the public. Maybe that's a bad thing, but it is what it is.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      I mean, if you're not noticing infection but noticing only the disease, it makes perfect sense to the public.
      - maxerickson 5y ago
        The public pretty much just thinks of both together as 'sick'.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  It's sophistry, but "COVID-19" in that press release means symptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2, not just infection.
- hamburglar 5y ago
  You seem very, very attached to a conclusion that isn’t supported by your own information. Are you really sure you haven’t been “warped by a narrative?”
  - jmarbach 5y ago
- dang 5y ago
  Please edit swipes out of your comments here. They only make things worse. Your post would be fine without the first sentence. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
vidoc 5y ago
> They never claimed it stopped infection True, but they sure as hell implied it did. For example, this fact check appeared in the search container of google early on: note the use of the double negative in the VERDICT. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-transmission/fact-check-scientists-do-not-yet-know-whether-the-covid-19-vaccine-reduces-transmission-of-the-virus-idUSKBN29N1UH https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-transmission/fa...
- jjulius 5y ago
  >Scientists are not yet sure of how the vaccine affects transmission – and this is currently undergoing research. I don't know how much clearer they can get with that next sentence.
  - vidoc 5y ago
    Do you not understand where the problem is here? If the scientists were, at the time, not yet sure how the vaccine affected transmission. The correct 'fact check' should have been: "There is no conclusive evidence to claim COVID-19 vaccines prevent people from spreading the disease." instead of "There is no conclusive evidence to claim COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent people spreading the disease."
    - jjulius 5y ago
      In an article that says all of the following very clearly... >Meanwhile, there is currently no conclusive evidence to claim the COVID-19 vaccine stops people spreading the virus that causes the disease – nor is there for the opposite. >Scientists do not yet know whether COVID-19 vaccinations will reduce transmission because this was not tested in the trials. >With the latter, this could mean the virus continues to replicate in the nose and throat, and is still able to spread. >Scientists are not yet sure of how the vaccine affects transmission – and this is currently undergoing research. ... you are seizing on a single double-negative to claim you've been misled? A double-negative which is equally as accurate as what you would like it corrected to, because in the body of the article it says there's no evidence one way or the other? This is really the hill you're choosing to die on?

kadoban 5y ago

That sounds low. Where did you get your numbers?

jmarbach 5y ago
- zackbloom 5y ago
  There is very good data on this. Infection rates are roughly 5x higher, and death rates 13x higher, among the unvaccinated.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    Infection rate is orthogonal to preventing people from being infected. If you're not exposed, you can never be infected. It also depends how you define efficacy/effectiveness. Does it mean for each exposure, over a period of time, etc.
    - mlyle 5y ago
      > Infection rate is orthogonal to preventing people from being infected. If you're not exposed, you can never be infected. Sure, there are confounds: people who choose to be vaccinated don't behave exactly the same way that people who don't choose to be vaccinated do. Therefore, the observational data is somewhat confounded. Two directions for the confound: people who are vaccinated may choose to take more risk after vaccination. People who are vaccinated may be those who take COVID seriously to begin with and be biased to take less risk in general. Probably the latter "wins", though I certainly do a lot more than I would do if I wasn't vaccinated. However, IMO this is all moot: we have vaccines that showed massive efficacy in randomized, controlled trials (over a period of time), and case control studies that show ongoing high efficacy against Delta... and the confounded observational data shows a truly massive effect.
- MatthewMob 5y ago
  So you are lying then. What do you gain out of misleading people with your rhetoric here?

stavros 5y ago

English isn't my native language, but I thought "proven" wasn't a synonym for "I asked my friends".

jmarbach 5y ago
It's a fair critique. But when the Captain of an airplane I'm flying on tells me there's an emergency problem with the flaps, I don't ask him for text book evidence, I just look out at the wings and verify the problem. Check this data in a few weeks. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
- mlyle 5y ago
  So, you cite data showing very high efficacy of the vaccine, and are like -- look at it in a few weeks! Omicron is going to make it worse, but even unboosted folks in South Africa seem to enjoy about 30% efficacy against infection and much higher efficacy against hospitalization and death. But your gossip trumps the data, I guess...
  - jmarbach 5y ago
    "Omicron is making it worse" is gossip to you and a fact for me. That's where we disagree.
    - mlyle 5y ago
      No, Omicron making it worse is a fact that I already ceded.. but we have data that shows low (but still around 30%, not 10%) efficacy against infection with Omicron.. and still high efficacy (70%) against hospitalization and death. But you say "has proven less than 10% effective" ... because you are making stuff up. Further, it may be a mistake to assume South Africa predicts exactly what will happen here (30% fully vaccinated, nearly 0 boosted, 20% HIV incidence, vs. 60% fully vaccinated, 25% boosted, 0.3% HIV incidence).
- lkbm 5y ago

throwaway2016a 5y ago

The efficacy is pretty well proven to be > 90% at this point. Per your comment where you admit the number was pulled out of thin air: > Anecdotal. You do not need to be a meteorologist to know when it's raining. Look outside. I'll raise you this... where I am 100% of ICU cases are unvaccinated. Read that again 100%. And over 85% of hospitalizations. And before you say "see, 15% of them were breakthrough cases," please learn about base rates. 65% of the people here are vaccinated so to have only 15% of the hospital cases be vaccinated is even more conclusive. Please, get out of your bubble. If you think it is 10%... or even 50%... or even 70% you need to do some serious introspection. Please, actually "look outside"! Because if you spent more than 10 seconds actually looking outside, the efficacy is obvious.

jmarbach 5y ago
I am vaccinated - I believe in the early vaccine's efficacy for stopping serious illness. They have saved many lives. What I am saying here is that the vaccines were marketed as 90% effective for preventing infection. Was I misunderstanding what was being marketed to me all along?
- jjulius 5y ago
  Yes, you have misunderstood this all along, and that misunderstanding has already been pointed out to you in this thread[1]. It is effective at preventing COVID-19 infections, which you get after being infected with SARA-CoV-2. It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347
  - mlyle 5y ago
    > It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter. We had some early data that looked like they were probably about ~70% effective for preventing infection, ~90% effective at preventing symptoms, and >95% effective at preventing severe illness. These numbers are interesting, because they mean you have less of a chance of becoming infected, but a larger chance, if infected, of being an asymptomatic carrier. So it's difficult to predict the net effect on transmission (probably a benefit, but..) Now for 2 doses of mRNA vaccine, our best guesses for omicron are more like ~??%, ~30%, and ~70% respectively. Offsetting it slightly is that it looks like omicron may be a bit less likely to cause severe illness at baseline. But, no matter what, this is a big setback.