3 ms·
> Vaccine do not prevent spreading, Vaccines do not entirely prevent spreading. But nothing does. Vaccines are not entirely useless to prevent spreading. It's
by 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 agoMask? Many places mandate that as though as it prevent spreading. So vaccines weren' exclusivity of that.
- lambdaba 5y agoAdmittedly 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 agoViral 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".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andrewflnr 5y agoOnly after they get a breakthrough infection, which is still presumably less likely when vaccinated. That still works very nicely with the bulletproof vest analogy.