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Hmmm... mild symptoms after being vaccinated. It's almost like the vaccine worked or something. How weird.

spurgu 5y ago
Have a look here: https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectiveness-goes-down-the https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes... tl;dr Vaccine effectiveness around 15% for me at this point. So it was the natural immune response (gasp!), combined hospitalization rates across the world reflects this.
jaywalk 5y ago
Plenty of unvaccinated (the vast majority, in fact) also experience mild symptoms. It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!"
- eli_gottlieb 5y ago
  Yeah we have this thing called a clinical trial. I volunteered in it. Did you?
- stormbrew 5y ago
  > Plenty of unvaccinated (the vast majority, in fact) also experience mild symptoms. This is true of essentially all diseases except some very very rare exceptions that also tend to burn out very quickly. That's just how disease spread works, mild cases help the virus propagate. It's not like the virus is a mustache twirling villain that wants to murder you, it takes a fairly specific balance to obtain long term survival. > It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!" There's plenty of evidence to support the idea that "it works", and actually quite a lot of evidence to contradict the idea that "it doesn't work". Severe outcomes are blatantly more common, per capita, in people who are not vaccinated. The only way you get to any other conclusion is if you just plain don't trust any evidence presented, in which case there is literally nothing that is falsifiable for you and you may as well believe covid-19 is evil unicorns or something.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    > Severe outcomes are blatantly more common, per capita, in people who are not vaccinated. With omicron? I have not seen any data to support that.
    - stormbrew 5y ago
      I mean, it's pretty early to be drawing conclusions about this with omicron. Especially since it hit right as people in most of the vaccinated world were hitting 5-6mo since their second shots. That doesn't mean it's "unfalsifiable" it just means it hasn't been yet. That said, I don't think the null hypothesis is suddenly "vaccines do nothing" for some reason. It's clear enough it spreads more easily but that doesn't suddenly invalidate all prior assumptions about the vaccines' effectiveness against severe outcomes. Edit: I'm very happy to be proven wrong about this but I feel like people should direct some of these replies more to the person I was replying to? I'm not the one who thinks vaccines do nothing here. :P
      - JPKab 5y ago
        It's only too early if, like our public health authorities, you are too bigoted and self-important to trust South African medical scientists because they aren't from a mostly white country. That's my take on why the CDC ignored their scientists, as did the media. From the very beginning, the South African medical authorities were screaming that this variant was producing far fewer hospitalizations OVERALL (despite higher case numbers) than the delta/alpha did. But because they are a third world country, and the news media in the West is biased towards bad news, they chose to treat this positive data as suspect. It the SA scientists had talked about how horrible it was, they would have taken it as gospel. Those of us who were looking at the data knew otherwise.
        MrMan 5y ago
        agreed
        amanaplanacanal 5y ago
- beebmam 5y ago
  When you look at individuals, you'll never be able to truly say any treatment "worked" with certainty for virtually anything. It's same with nearly all medical treatments. Humans, very often, get better on their own with time, and time can't ever be rewinded to test the alternative. The way we know a medical treatment works is by looking at large scale data, controlling for variables, understanding mechanisms of action, and by approaching this science in good faith and not cherry picking data to fit one's own conclusions. There's a concept known as "Number Needed to Treat" that is probably relevant to your concerns here. Vaccinations have historically been extremely effective for many diseases, and COVID is no exception. It's accurate to say (most) "COVID vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 viruses". Omicron is so new that it's hard to be certain of anything regarding it right now, but we'll have a better picture in a few weeks. I do know that we're seeing many hospitals get overwhelmed across the US currently, and many medical workers are out sick with a COVID infection.
  - Buttons840 5y ago
    I have some skeptical family members who like to talk about 3rd party anecdotes. "A nurse told me she saw blah blah blah happen". As you say, stories like this are not a way to know a thing, but I can't get them to understand. It's like we rolled a die once, and it came up 6, and now we're all forming our own special opinions on whether or not the die is fair. We just can't know. Of course, if someone rolled the dice 30,000 times and reported what they found, that would be great (wink wink). Instead of using Calc 1 as a filter course, we should use Statistics instead.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  It's almost like hospitalization statistics might just back this assertion up with actual irrefutable data.
- betterunix2 5y ago
  Yet it is predominantly the unvaccinated who are overwhelming hospitals with more severe cases. In NYC it is something like 15x difference -- 30 per 100000 unvaccinated versus 2 per 100000 vaccinated people wind up requiring hospital care. Those may be small numbers, but with omicron clearly being both more contagious and evading prior immunity it rapidly becomes problematic.
- virgilp 5y ago
  Well you can look at this: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a566b53-9e8b-46ef-817b-7b775ad2af29_909x518.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q... (it's recent data, from NY, so - likely a lot of omicron)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jollybean 5y ago
  "Plenty of unvaccinated (the vast majority, in fact) also experience mild symptoms. It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!"" Yes, it's called 'Science'. The vaccine absolutely helps to reduce symptoms, hospitalizations and death, even 5 months in. There are millions of Omicron cases around the world measure up against various vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
- dwaltrip 5y ago
  For crying out loud… Go look up the frickin statistics. The vaccines are very effective.
  - spurgu 5y ago
    Really? See https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectiveness-goes-down-the https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes... Those "frickin" statistics? Or which ones?
    - dwaltrip 5y ago
      From own your link: > [The] vaccines likely (and evidence shows they) still have great protection against severe disease; … This exactly what we were talking about above.
      - spurgu 5y ago
        Like 15% effective, after 2 jabs, for me personally?
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        On a personal level it's gonna be either 100% or 0%. You either got severe disease, or you didn't. You can't extrapolate a population-level percentage from a single data point. Luckily, we've got information on hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of hospitalizations, and billions of shots.
        spurgu 5y ago
        That doesn't make any sense. If the immune response didn't wane on a personal level we wouldn't be needing any boosters.
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        You can't get 15% of a case of severe COVID. At a personal level, the vaccine either worked at preventing it, or it didn't. We can compute a population-level probability of those two scenarios for you, but you can't really say "15% effective, after 2 jabs, for me personally".
potatoman22 5y ago
That's the point. It's often a mild cold for the vaccinated
- spurgu 5y ago
  It's mild for non-vaccinated South Africans as well. The same still applies as always: Vaccinate the risk groups.
  - mullingitover 5y ago
    SA had very high numbers of previous infections, so there was a ton of pre-existing immunity.
    - spurgu 5y ago
      Which some would see as a partial argument against lockdowns.
      - mullingitover 5y ago
        Comparing death rates in Australia, which actually did pretty major lockdowns, to South Africa[1], I don't know that this is a great argument against them. South Africa definitely paid for that infection-based immunity in human lives. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=ZAF~AUS https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
        spurgu 5y ago
        Of course heavy and complete lockdowns are effective (at delaying the spread of the virus) - if no one is in contact with anyone else there's no way for the virus to spread. A more apt comparison would be made between countries/states with slight or "normal/average" lockdown to ones without, but that's very difficult to do in practice. And then measure the financial and societal impacts (which is also difficult/impossible).
spurgu 5y ago
4-5 months..... even against Delta that would've been close to 50% efficacy. With Omicron probably non-existent. Also, see most of South Africa.
JPKab 5y ago
My brother had mild symptoms after being unvaccinated. So did my kids. So did my neighbors whose kids play at my house all the time. So did the vast majority of South Africans who aren't vaccinated. I push the vaccine onto all my high-risk family members. I recommend it to anybody as a tool to introduce your immune system to the virus. But let's be honest about this: The vaccines in circulation were created to stop the Alpha variant. The immune system response is too targeted to antigens on the spike protein that are no longer present in the newly evolved, vaccine escaping variants. The vaccine is a useful tool for mitigating severe disease, but it's an outdated vaccine for a variant that no longer exists. Just like the a flu shot for the wrong strain tends to have some positive benefit when you catch a mismatched strain via some cross immunity, that's what we get from this vaccine. And guess what? We get it from infection induced immunity as well.
- MrMan 5y ago
  an honest, but wrong, take in your final paragraph.
  - JPKab 5y ago
    Feel free to state counter arguments. I'd like to hear what statements I said conflict with your understanding of the science.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
HNDen21 5y ago
I have 5 people in the house, 1 vaccinated, 4 not.. the ones that were not had a 2 day fever... the one vaccinated (me) had no fever but just a cough for 3-4 days. All in all just like a mild flu
- twox2 5y ago
  Anecdotal stories don't paint an accurate picture. I live in NYC and had Covid xmas week. It was ROUGH. (I'm double jabbed.) I also know unvaxxed people (0 shots) that just had a little sniffle and bounced back in 2 days. I also know of a seemingly healthy young lady that tested positive and died 3 days later.
  - time_to_smile 5y ago
    > Anecdotal stories don't paint an accurate picture You would have thought that after 800,000+ deaths in the US people would have learned the importance of understanding statistics when dealing with these issues, especially on a place like HN, but pandemic has melted people's brains and now people are arguing anecdotes about what constitutes a "bad cold" and a "mild flu". The funny part is that it doesn't really matter because it's not like we get to collectively vote whether the pandemic will end or not. It's pretty clear that, even given how extremely contagious omicron is, people don't care as much as the used to about a seasonal flu. Even supposing covid sticks around and becomes "only" as bad as the flu, 10 years ago if your said it was fine to double the annual cases of flu and flu death people would have said that was insane. Sadly if people haven't learned to reason about these problems correctly now, it means they very likely never will.
    - brandonmenc 5y ago
      > 10 years ago if your said it was fine to double the annual cases of flu and flu death people would have said that was insane. And if you told them that things like lockdowns and vaccine mandates were still in effect at that point, they'd say that was insane too.
      - 5y ago

Have a look here: https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectiveness-goes-down-the https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes... tl;dr Vaccine effectiveness around 15% for me at this point. So it was the natural immune response (gasp!), combined hospitalization rates across the world reflects this.

jaywalk 5y ago

Plenty of unvaccinated (the vast majority, in fact) also experience mild symptoms. It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!"

eli_gottlieb 5y ago
Yeah we have this thing called a clinical trial. I volunteered in it. Did you?
stormbrew 5y ago
> Plenty of unvaccinated (the vast majority, in fact) also experience mild symptoms. This is true of essentially all diseases except some very very rare exceptions that also tend to burn out very quickly. That's just how disease spread works, mild cases help the virus propagate. It's not like the virus is a mustache twirling villain that wants to murder you, it takes a fairly specific balance to obtain long term survival. > It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!" There's plenty of evidence to support the idea that "it works", and actually quite a lot of evidence to contradict the idea that "it doesn't work". Severe outcomes are blatantly more common, per capita, in people who are not vaccinated. The only way you get to any other conclusion is if you just plain don't trust any evidence presented, in which case there is literally nothing that is falsifiable for you and you may as well believe covid-19 is evil unicorns or something.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  > Severe outcomes are blatantly more common, per capita, in people who are not vaccinated. With omicron? I have not seen any data to support that.
  - stormbrew 5y ago
    I mean, it's pretty early to be drawing conclusions about this with omicron. Especially since it hit right as people in most of the vaccinated world were hitting 5-6mo since their second shots. That doesn't mean it's "unfalsifiable" it just means it hasn't been yet. That said, I don't think the null hypothesis is suddenly "vaccines do nothing" for some reason. It's clear enough it spreads more easily but that doesn't suddenly invalidate all prior assumptions about the vaccines' effectiveness against severe outcomes. Edit: I'm very happy to be proven wrong about this but I feel like people should direct some of these replies more to the person I was replying to? I'm not the one who thinks vaccines do nothing here. :P
    - JPKab 5y ago
      It's only too early if, like our public health authorities, you are too bigoted and self-important to trust South African medical scientists because they aren't from a mostly white country. That's my take on why the CDC ignored their scientists, as did the media. From the very beginning, the South African medical authorities were screaming that this variant was producing far fewer hospitalizations OVERALL (despite higher case numbers) than the delta/alpha did. But because they are a third world country, and the news media in the West is biased towards bad news, they chose to treat this positive data as suspect. It the SA scientists had talked about how horrible it was, they would have taken it as gospel. Those of us who were looking at the data knew otherwise.
      - MrMan 5y ago
        agreed
      - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
beebmam 5y ago
When you look at individuals, you'll never be able to truly say any treatment "worked" with certainty for virtually anything. It's same with nearly all medical treatments. Humans, very often, get better on their own with time, and time can't ever be rewinded to test the alternative. The way we know a medical treatment works is by looking at large scale data, controlling for variables, understanding mechanisms of action, and by approaching this science in good faith and not cherry picking data to fit one's own conclusions. There's a concept known as "Number Needed to Treat" that is probably relevant to your concerns here. Vaccinations have historically been extremely effective for many diseases, and COVID is no exception. It's accurate to say (most) "COVID vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 viruses". Omicron is so new that it's hard to be certain of anything regarding it right now, but we'll have a better picture in a few weeks. I do know that we're seeing many hospitals get overwhelmed across the US currently, and many medical workers are out sick with a COVID infection.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  I have some skeptical family members who like to talk about 3rd party anecdotes. "A nurse told me she saw blah blah blah happen". As you say, stories like this are not a way to know a thing, but I can't get them to understand. It's like we rolled a die once, and it came up 6, and now we're all forming our own special opinions on whether or not the die is fair. We just can't know. Of course, if someone rolled the dice 30,000 times and reported what they found, that would be great (wink wink). Instead of using Calc 1 as a filter course, we should use Statistics instead.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
It's almost like hospitalization statistics might just back this assertion up with actual irrefutable data.
betterunix2 5y ago
Yet it is predominantly the unvaccinated who are overwhelming hospitals with more severe cases. In NYC it is something like 15x difference -- 30 per 100000 unvaccinated versus 2 per 100000 vaccinated people wind up requiring hospital care. Those may be small numbers, but with omicron clearly being both more contagious and evading prior immunity it rapidly becomes problematic.
virgilp 5y ago
Well you can look at this: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a566b53-9e8b-46ef-817b-7b775ad2af29_909x518.png https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q... (it's recent data, from NY, so - likely a lot of omicron)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jollybean 5y ago
"Plenty of unvaccinated (the vast majority, in fact) also experience mild symptoms. It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!"" Yes, it's called 'Science'. The vaccine absolutely helps to reduce symptoms, hospitalizations and death, even 5 months in. There are millions of Omicron cases around the world measure up against various vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
dwaltrip 5y ago
For crying out loud… Go look up the frickin statistics. The vaccines are very effective.
- spurgu 5y ago
  Really? See https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectiveness-goes-down-the https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes... Those "frickin" statistics? Or which ones?
  - dwaltrip 5y ago
    From own your link: > [The] vaccines likely (and evidence shows they) still have great protection against severe disease; … This exactly what we were talking about above.
    - spurgu 5y ago
      Like 15% effective, after 2 jabs, for me personally?
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        On a personal level it's gonna be either 100% or 0%. You either got severe disease, or you didn't. You can't extrapolate a population-level percentage from a single data point. Luckily, we've got information on hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of hospitalizations, and billions of shots.
        spurgu 5y ago
        That doesn't make any sense. If the immune response didn't wane on a personal level we wouldn't be needing any boosters.
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        You can't get 15% of a case of severe COVID. At a personal level, the vaccine either worked at preventing it, or it didn't. We can compute a population-level probability of those two scenarios for you, but you can't really say "15% effective, after 2 jabs, for me personally".

potatoman22 5y ago

That's the point. It's often a mild cold for the vaccinated

spurgu 5y ago
It's mild for non-vaccinated South Africans as well. The same still applies as always: Vaccinate the risk groups.
- mullingitover 5y ago
  SA had very high numbers of previous infections, so there was a ton of pre-existing immunity.
  - spurgu 5y ago
    Which some would see as a partial argument against lockdowns.
    - mullingitover 5y ago
      Comparing death rates in Australia, which actually did pretty major lockdowns, to South Africa[1], I don't know that this is a great argument against them. South Africa definitely paid for that infection-based immunity in human lives. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=ZAF~AUS https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
      - spurgu 5y ago
        Of course heavy and complete lockdowns are effective (at delaying the spread of the virus) - if no one is in contact with anyone else there's no way for the virus to spread. A more apt comparison would be made between countries/states with slight or "normal/average" lockdown to ones without, but that's very difficult to do in practice. And then measure the financial and societal impacts (which is also difficult/impossible).

spurgu 5y ago

4-5 months..... even against Delta that would've been close to 50% efficacy. With Omicron probably non-existent. Also, see most of South Africa.

JPKab 5y ago

My brother had mild symptoms after being unvaccinated. So did my kids. So did my neighbors whose kids play at my house all the time. So did the vast majority of South Africans who aren't vaccinated. I push the vaccine onto all my high-risk family members. I recommend it to anybody as a tool to introduce your immune system to the virus. But let's be honest about this: The vaccines in circulation were created to stop the Alpha variant. The immune system response is too targeted to antigens on the spike protein that are no longer present in the newly evolved, vaccine escaping variants. The vaccine is a useful tool for mitigating severe disease, but it's an outdated vaccine for a variant that no longer exists. Just like the a flu shot for the wrong strain tends to have some positive benefit when you catch a mismatched strain via some cross immunity, that's what we get from this vaccine. And guess what? We get it from infection induced immunity as well.

MrMan 5y ago
an honest, but wrong, take in your final paragraph.
- JPKab 5y ago
  Feel free to state counter arguments. I'd like to hear what statements I said conflict with your understanding of the science.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

HNDen21 5y ago

I have 5 people in the house, 1 vaccinated, 4 not.. the ones that were not had a 2 day fever... the one vaccinated (me) had no fever but just a cough for 3-4 days. All in all just like a mild flu

twox2 5y ago
Anecdotal stories don't paint an accurate picture. I live in NYC and had Covid xmas week. It was ROUGH. (I'm double jabbed.) I also know unvaxxed people (0 shots) that just had a little sniffle and bounced back in 2 days. I also know of a seemingly healthy young lady that tested positive and died 3 days later.
- time_to_smile 5y ago
  > Anecdotal stories don't paint an accurate picture You would have thought that after 800,000+ deaths in the US people would have learned the importance of understanding statistics when dealing with these issues, especially on a place like HN, but pandemic has melted people's brains and now people are arguing anecdotes about what constitutes a "bad cold" and a "mild flu". The funny part is that it doesn't really matter because it's not like we get to collectively vote whether the pandemic will end or not. It's pretty clear that, even given how extremely contagious omicron is, people don't care as much as the used to about a seasonal flu. Even supposing covid sticks around and becomes "only" as bad as the flu, 10 years ago if your said it was fine to double the annual cases of flu and flu death people would have said that was insane. Sadly if people haven't learned to reason about these problems correctly now, it means they very likely never will.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    > 10 years ago if your said it was fine to double the annual cases of flu and flu death people would have said that was insane. And if you told them that things like lockdowns and vaccine mandates were still in effect at that point, they'd say that was insane too.
    - 5y ago