5 ms·

That's not how science works.

Daishiman 5y ago
So? The risk profile of vaccines has been researched to death as well as the effects of disease severity. Part of doing science also means having looked at enough papers and conclusions to know which questions merit further research and which questions are of little relevance to public health. It is extremely unlikely that you'll find any surprises here, and considering the open questions of long covid and long-term health effects on the population on COVID, I'd much rather the focus be on the more important questions.
- avalys 5y ago
  We don’t understand nearly enough about Covid, long Covid, or breakthrough cases to draw any conclusion about how much the vaccine mitigates the severity of long-term outcomes in breakthrough cases. We have enough information to form an educated guess. But your attitude here is exactly why public health authorities have damaged their credibility and that of science itself in the past two years. They have repeatedly misrepresented their educated guesses as scientific fact - and then turned out to be wrong.
  - skrbjc 5y ago
    They're not "breakthrough" cases since the vaccine was never intended to stop transmission and very clearly does not stop transmission. They're just cases amongst people who took the vaccine.
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      Vaccines reduce transmission. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v... > We found an increased transmission for unvaccinated individuals, and a reduced transmission for booster-vaccinated individuals, compared to fully vaccinated individuals. And their definition of unvaccinated includes partially vaccinated (1-shot) and probably includes recovered individuals. See table 2 for their results which finds that boosters do significantly reduce transmissibility and susceptibility, but it is just very far from the perfect effect everyone would have hoped and wished for. Vaccines are probably still more effective than masking in preventing transmission (given the average person's adherence to masking guidelines) and the effect would intuitively (to me anyway) seem likely to stack.
  - Daishiman 5y ago
    > But your attitude here is exactly why public health authorities have damaged their credibility and that of science itself in the past two years. They have repeatedly misrepresented their educated guesses as scientific fact - and then turned out to be wrong. Where has that happened for this? Every study that has shown disease severity correlated with vaccine usage has shown the same results, over and over, for each variant: vaccination correlates with symptomatic disease severity which correlates linearly with long-term effects, in every observed metric. This has appeared again and again and again in dozens of studies, to the point where it is the null hypothesis; you'd need to make a real case with novel, contradictory evidence to show that this is not the case. In every domain of medicine there is some degree of guessing and basing off of historical data for a cohort; you can't test every patient for every possible thing that could ever affect them. Instead you pick and choose the most significant factors and use that as your guidelines. Research efforts for COVID are very large, but also limited; there is no evidence to contradict this and it's not worth researching. If you actually kept up with domain experts during the pandemic, you'll see that there were many open questions over which they kept interest, and many open questions where they did not care much. The reason for that has to do with the acquired knowledge of having studied hundreds of other diseases and similar cases; they tell you how to explore the domain, seeing where things are likely to be different, and where they are not.
asveikau 5y ago
It could be exactly how science works! You start out proposing that, perhaps based on intuition, then you do a study to confirm or deny it.

So? The risk profile of vaccines has been researched to death as well as the effects of disease severity. Part of doing science also means having looked at enough papers and conclusions to know which questions merit further research and which questions are of little relevance to public health. It is extremely unlikely that you'll find any surprises here, and considering the open questions of long covid and long-term health effects on the population on COVID, I'd much rather the focus be on the more important questions.

avalys 5y ago
We don’t understand nearly enough about Covid, long Covid, or breakthrough cases to draw any conclusion about how much the vaccine mitigates the severity of long-term outcomes in breakthrough cases. We have enough information to form an educated guess. But your attitude here is exactly why public health authorities have damaged their credibility and that of science itself in the past two years. They have repeatedly misrepresented their educated guesses as scientific fact - and then turned out to be wrong.
- skrbjc 5y ago
  They're not "breakthrough" cases since the vaccine was never intended to stop transmission and very clearly does not stop transmission. They're just cases amongst people who took the vaccine.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Vaccines reduce transmission. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v... > We found an increased transmission for unvaccinated individuals, and a reduced transmission for booster-vaccinated individuals, compared to fully vaccinated individuals. And their definition of unvaccinated includes partially vaccinated (1-shot) and probably includes recovered individuals. See table 2 for their results which finds that boosters do significantly reduce transmissibility and susceptibility, but it is just very far from the perfect effect everyone would have hoped and wished for. Vaccines are probably still more effective than masking in preventing transmission (given the average person's adherence to masking guidelines) and the effect would intuitively (to me anyway) seem likely to stack.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  > But your attitude here is exactly why public health authorities have damaged their credibility and that of science itself in the past two years. They have repeatedly misrepresented their educated guesses as scientific fact - and then turned out to be wrong. Where has that happened for this? Every study that has shown disease severity correlated with vaccine usage has shown the same results, over and over, for each variant: vaccination correlates with symptomatic disease severity which correlates linearly with long-term effects, in every observed metric. This has appeared again and again and again in dozens of studies, to the point where it is the null hypothesis; you'd need to make a real case with novel, contradictory evidence to show that this is not the case. In every domain of medicine there is some degree of guessing and basing off of historical data for a cohort; you can't test every patient for every possible thing that could ever affect them. Instead you pick and choose the most significant factors and use that as your guidelines. Research efforts for COVID are very large, but also limited; there is no evidence to contradict this and it's not worth researching. If you actually kept up with domain experts during the pandemic, you'll see that there were many open questions over which they kept interest, and many open questions where they did not care much. The reason for that has to do with the acquired knowledge of having studied hundreds of other diseases and similar cases; they tell you how to explore the domain, seeing where things are likely to be different, and where they are not.

asveikau 5y ago

It could be exactly how science works! You start out proposing that, perhaps based on intuition, then you do a study to confirm or deny it.