8 ms·

Vaccine do not prevent spreading, their main advantage is reduce hospitalization and death

by fbn79 5y ago

_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
It’s all about probabilities. Vaccinated people have less of a viral load and infect fewer people. It’s never all or nothing. Reducing the r-value even by just 0.1 compounds in huge returns in exponential growth scenarios.
- lambdaba 5y ago
  I can see that in theory, but when you look at the cases curve in the US pre and post-vaccination you can't really tell there has been a "huge" effect, I would even call that a failure, frankly if we had given everybody enough vitamin D to fix the significant average deficiencies, that would have a much more dramatic effect on reducing infection and spread. Maybe we could even have a vitamin D pass :P...
  - telchar 5y ago
    You’re not seeing how the delta variant would have spread in a fully unvaccinated population. Notice how the original variant and the more infectious alpha variant failed to thrive post-vaccine. There was some competition effect from delta but it isn’t as if one variant directly suppresses another. Delta would have ravaged the country without vaccination reducing its rate of spread.
    - lambdaba 5y ago
      Bulgaria has a very low vaccination rate (27%) and the curve doesn't look that much different from the US's: https://www.google.com/search?q=bulgaria+covid https://www.google.com/search?q=bulgaria+covid It does seem better, but can we know for sure to what this can be attributed? Usually places that had an easier time in 2020 got worse this year, and vice-versa, which makes sense...
      - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
        US vaccination rate is not great, and will be patchy (some places quite well vaccinated, some well below average). A better comparison would be Bulgaria to Portugal.
      - Zigurd 5y ago
        The Economist tracks excess deaths, which is a more accurate measure of how deadly COVID is, especially in places with iffy stats. Bulgaria looks like reporting is not reliable: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
- yehosef 5y ago
  The research I saw shows the viral load of vaccinated people is the same if not higher. https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-similar-between-vaccinated-and-unvaccinated-people https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim... Do you have other references?
  - belltaco 5y ago
    First, vaccinated folks clear the virus faster, so the overall time of infectiousness is lower. https://globalbiodefense.com/2021/12/04/vaccinated-people-clear-covid-faster-less-time-with-high-virus-levels/ https://globalbiodefense.com/2021/12/04/vaccinated-people-cl... Second, fewer vaccinated people have breakthrough infections in the first place, so overall spread is lowered because of vaccinations.
senectus1 5y ago
arguable they will slow down spreading. though omicron makes it look negligible.
lukastr0 5y ago
"Do not prevent spreading" suggests a kind of black-and-white perspective. This is not about fully preventing, it's about reducing the risk. Vaccines substantially reduce the risk of spreading or catching Covid. 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...
- Jansen312 5y ago
  Isn't without vaccines the death rate from Covid is around 4%? I read earlier 80% of unvaccinated in 2018-2020 stage, won't even show much symptoms. Singapore even gone thru extensive testing and their death rate was very low well below 1% and this was before availability of vaccines. So reducing the risk of that 4% chunk isn't significant.
  - nradov 5y ago
    The death rate is nowhere near 4%. The CDC estimated the infection fatality rate in the US at 0.6% back when almost no one was vaccinated. The vaccines and other improved treatments have now cut that risk way down. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
    - fivea 5y ago
      > The death rate is nowhere near 4%. Your own source shows quite clearly that the estimated death rate for >65yo lies between 3.8% and 4.0%. The >65yo cohort is both the one reporting the lowest number of total infections (~18M) and the highest death count (~700k).
      - retrac 5y ago
        Yes and the CFR in people 20 - 30 appears to be about 0.01% (very roughly). Obviously some subpopulations are more or less vulnerable. Averaged over the whole population it generally comes to somewhat under 1%. Check out the CFR for RSV (a common cold virus) or influenza in people over 80. Viruses that almost never incapacitate let alone kill healthy younger adults can often kill the medically weak.
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
> Vaccine do not prevent spreading, Vaccines do not entirely prevent spreading. But nothing does. Vaccines are not entirely useless to prevent spreading. It's one of the few measures that has an effect. Less so with Omicron, to be sure. Would you say "When wearing a bulletproof vest, you can still be shot in the arm or head, so bulletproof vests do not prevent injury" (and might as well not wear one when in a dangerous situation) Medicine is not Boolean logic, none of this is binary, all or nothing. We need risk reduction, not sweeping reductive statements.
- Jansen312 5y ago
  Mask? Many places mandate that as though as it prevent spreading. So vaccines weren' exclusivity of that.
- lambdaba 5y ago
  Admittedly these are preprint studies, but it seems the analogy with bulletproof vests doesn't hold: Vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals have similar viral loads in communities with a high prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 delta variant: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v... No Significant Difference in Viral Load Between Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, Asymptomatic and Symptomatic Groups Infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v...
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    Viral load is not the only factor; there is also a) how long that infectious viral load is present for, and b) chance of getting infected with that viral load in the first place. No analogy is perfect, but I think that this one is instructive, as it breaks the binary logic. The statement "vaccines don't prevent..." conflates two very different statements, i.e. "vaccines don't prevent all occurrence of $outcome" (which is often true but not the point) and "vaccines don't have any impact on $outcome, prevent any occurrences of $outcome" (which is false, but is often implied). It's clear that COVID-19-Omicron is infectious to a crazy degree, but that's a different statement to "this defensive measure does nothing".
quaffapint 5y ago
I wonder if it would be less confusing if we simply stopped referring to these as vaccines and just as shots.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  That would be the opposite of clarifying or helpful.
paul_f 5y ago
That is not the correct definition of a vaccine. Nobody would say that about a polio or diphtheria vaccine. COVID shots should NEVER have been called a vaccine. They are instead similar to seasonal flu shots. Flu shots do not prevent spreading, their main advantage is reduce hospitalization and death.
- rsfern 5y ago
  Cancer immunotherapy candidates have been referred to as cancer vaccines for a long time without controversy, and they are generally not intended to prevent cancers. They are medicines that work via an immune response. Sure, public health communication could use some improvement, but arguing over the definition “vaccine” I think is not productive
  - peteradio 5y ago
    Ask someone why they'd support mandatory vaccination and generally you will hear: to stop unvaccinated people from spreading the disease. Definitions do matter here. Governments are leaning heavily on this misunderstanding.
    - rsfern 5y ago
      I agree that definitions matter, and it’s important to have a clear discourse on policy implications of public health research. But my point is that it’s incorrect to call the current Covid vaccines “not vaccines” just because they don’t 100% prevent transmission or infection. That’s only muddying the waters at the expense of a real discussion of the evidence and trade offs for any given policy position. See pre-pandemic wiki, for example: https://web.archive.org/web/20170403082447/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine https://web.archive.org/web/20170403082447/https://en.m.wiki...
      - anamax 5y ago
        > I agree that definitions matter, and it’s important to have a clear discourse on policy implications of public health research. And yet, you insist on using "vaccine" to push mandates, knowing that most people think you're promising that that said "vaccine" will keep people from spreading covid, knowing full well that it doesn't.
zamalek 5y ago
Vaccines do prevent spreading [1]. The problem is that we didn't achieve herd immunity prior to Omicron. The current COVID vaccine is not effective at preventing the spread of Omicron, specifically. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine
- evv555 5y ago
  Not in this case. The covid vaccines just turned the vaccinated into asymptomatic delta superspreaders. There was no likely endgame where we reach herd immunity with the current vaccines.
- nradov 5y ago
  We knew that it would be impossible to achieve any meaningful level of herd immunity even prior to Omicron. https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immunity-not-possible-astrazeneca-developer-2021-8?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
yehosef 5y ago
So all vaccinated individuals are super-spreaders?
panarky 5y ago
Traffic laws do not eliminate all car crashes.

Vaccine do not prevent spreading, their main advantage is reduce hospitalization and death

by fbn79 5y ago

Vaccine do not prevent spreading, their main advantage is reduce hospitalization and death

It’s all about probabilities. Vaccinated people have less of a viral load and infect fewer people. It’s never all or nothing. Reducing the r-value even by just 0.1 compounds in huge returns in exponential growth scenarios.

lambdaba 5y ago
I can see that in theory, but when you look at the cases curve in the US pre and post-vaccination you can't really tell there has been a "huge" effect, I would even call that a failure, frankly if we had given everybody enough vitamin D to fix the significant average deficiencies, that would have a much more dramatic effect on reducing infection and spread. Maybe we could even have a vitamin D pass :P...
- telchar 5y ago
  You’re not seeing how the delta variant would have spread in a fully unvaccinated population. Notice how the original variant and the more infectious alpha variant failed to thrive post-vaccine. There was some competition effect from delta but it isn’t as if one variant directly suppresses another. Delta would have ravaged the country without vaccination reducing its rate of spread.
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    Bulgaria has a very low vaccination rate (27%) and the curve doesn't look that much different from the US's: https://www.google.com/search?q=bulgaria+covid https://www.google.com/search?q=bulgaria+covid It does seem better, but can we know for sure to what this can be attributed? Usually places that had an easier time in 2020 got worse this year, and vice-versa, which makes sense...
    - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      US vaccination rate is not great, and will be patchy (some places quite well vaccinated, some well below average). A better comparison would be Bulgaria to Portugal.
    - Zigurd 5y ago
      The Economist tracks excess deaths, which is a more accurate measure of how deadly COVID is, especially in places with iffy stats. Bulgaria looks like reporting is not reliable: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
yehosef 5y ago
The research I saw shows the viral load of vaccinated people is the same if not higher. https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-similar-between-vaccinated-and-unvaccinated-people https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim... Do you have other references?
- belltaco 5y ago
  First, vaccinated folks clear the virus faster, so the overall time of infectiousness is lower. https://globalbiodefense.com/2021/12/04/vaccinated-people-clear-covid-faster-less-time-with-high-virus-levels/ https://globalbiodefense.com/2021/12/04/vaccinated-people-cl... Second, fewer vaccinated people have breakthrough infections in the first place, so overall spread is lowered because of vaccinations.

senectus1 5y ago

arguable they will slow down spreading. though omicron makes it look negligible.

lukastr0 5y ago

"Do not prevent spreading" suggests a kind of black-and-white perspective. This is not about fully preventing, it's about reducing the risk. Vaccines substantially reduce the risk of spreading or catching Covid. 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...

Jansen312 5y ago
Isn't without vaccines the death rate from Covid is around 4%? I read earlier 80% of unvaccinated in 2018-2020 stage, won't even show much symptoms. Singapore even gone thru extensive testing and their death rate was very low well below 1% and this was before availability of vaccines. So reducing the risk of that 4% chunk isn't significant.
- nradov 5y ago
  The death rate is nowhere near 4%. The CDC estimated the infection fatality rate in the US at 0.6% back when almost no one was vaccinated. The vaccines and other improved treatments have now cut that risk way down. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
  - fivea 5y ago
    > The death rate is nowhere near 4%. Your own source shows quite clearly that the estimated death rate for >65yo lies between 3.8% and 4.0%. The >65yo cohort is both the one reporting the lowest number of total infections (~18M) and the highest death count (~700k).
    - retrac 5y ago
      Yes and the CFR in people 20 - 30 appears to be about 0.01% (very roughly). Obviously some subpopulations are more or less vulnerable. Averaged over the whole population it generally comes to somewhat under 1%. Check out the CFR for RSV (a common cold virus) or influenza in people over 80. Viruses that almost never incapacitate let alone kill healthy younger adults can often kill the medically weak.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

> Vaccine do not prevent spreading, Vaccines do not entirely prevent spreading. But nothing does. Vaccines are not entirely useless to prevent spreading. It's one of the few measures that has an effect. Less so with Omicron, to be sure. Would you say "When wearing a bulletproof vest, you can still be shot in the arm or head, so bulletproof vests do not prevent injury" (and might as well not wear one when in a dangerous situation) Medicine is not Boolean logic, none of this is binary, all or nothing. We need risk reduction, not sweeping reductive statements.

Jansen312 5y ago
Mask? Many places mandate that as though as it prevent spreading. So vaccines weren' exclusivity of that.
lambdaba 5y ago
Admittedly these are preprint studies, but it seems the analogy with bulletproof vests doesn't hold: Vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals have similar viral loads in communities with a high prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 delta variant: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v... No Significant Difference in Viral Load Between Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, Asymptomatic and Symptomatic Groups Infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v...
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  Viral load is not the only factor; there is also a) how long that infectious viral load is present for, and b) chance of getting infected with that viral load in the first place. No analogy is perfect, but I think that this one is instructive, as it breaks the binary logic. The statement "vaccines don't prevent..." conflates two very different statements, i.e. "vaccines don't prevent all occurrence of $outcome" (which is often true but not the point) and "vaccines don't have any impact on $outcome, prevent any occurrences of $outcome" (which is false, but is often implied). It's clear that COVID-19-Omicron is infectious to a crazy degree, but that's a different statement to "this defensive measure does nothing".

quaffapint 5y ago

I wonder if it would be less confusing if we simply stopped referring to these as vaccines and just as shots.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
That would be the opposite of clarifying or helpful.

paul_f 5y ago

That is not the correct definition of a vaccine. Nobody would say that about a polio or diphtheria vaccine. COVID shots should NEVER have been called a vaccine. They are instead similar to seasonal flu shots. Flu shots do not prevent spreading, their main advantage is reduce hospitalization and death.

rsfern 5y ago
Cancer immunotherapy candidates have been referred to as cancer vaccines for a long time without controversy, and they are generally not intended to prevent cancers. They are medicines that work via an immune response. Sure, public health communication could use some improvement, but arguing over the definition “vaccine” I think is not productive
- peteradio 5y ago
  Ask someone why they'd support mandatory vaccination and generally you will hear: to stop unvaccinated people from spreading the disease. Definitions do matter here. Governments are leaning heavily on this misunderstanding.
  - rsfern 5y ago
    I agree that definitions matter, and it’s important to have a clear discourse on policy implications of public health research. But my point is that it’s incorrect to call the current Covid vaccines “not vaccines” just because they don’t 100% prevent transmission or infection. That’s only muddying the waters at the expense of a real discussion of the evidence and trade offs for any given policy position. See pre-pandemic wiki, for example: https://web.archive.org/web/20170403082447/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine https://web.archive.org/web/20170403082447/https://en.m.wiki...
    - anamax 5y ago
      > I agree that definitions matter, and it’s important to have a clear discourse on policy implications of public health research. And yet, you insist on using "vaccine" to push mandates, knowing that most people think you're promising that that said "vaccine" will keep people from spreading covid, knowing full well that it doesn't.

zamalek 5y ago

Vaccines do prevent spreading [1]. The problem is that we didn't achieve herd immunity prior to Omicron. The current COVID vaccine is not effective at preventing the spread of Omicron, specifically. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine

evv555 5y ago
Not in this case. The covid vaccines just turned the vaccinated into asymptomatic delta superspreaders. There was no likely endgame where we reach herd immunity with the current vaccines.
nradov 5y ago
We knew that it would be impossible to achieve any meaningful level of herd immunity even prior to Omicron. https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immunity-not-possible-astrazeneca-developer-2021-8?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

yehosef 5y ago

So all vaccinated individuals are super-spreaders?

panarky 5y ago

Traffic laws do not eliminate all car crashes.