9 ms·

I tried to reply to a comment criticising Covid vaccines for not being 100% effective but by the time I replied the comment was flagged and I couldn't reply. I

I tried to reply to a comment criticising Covid vaccines for not being 100% effective but by the time I replied the comment was flagged and I couldn't reply. It's a common misconception so I did want to leave my answer here... The text I was replying to was: "Vaccines are also supposed to prevent you from getting a disease. What do you call something that does not prevent you from getting a disease. Does not prevent you from spreading it. Does not guarantee you won't die from it. And only lasts about 4 months?" Have you ever had a flu shot? What about years when the flu shot was a mismatch for the most widely circulating strain of influenza? Scientists need to make predictions on the correct strain and some years they failed in their predictions and the flu shot didn't completely protect against the most common strain. This has been happening for years, before covid. It's the same with covid vaccines, the current mrna covid vaccines were not an exact match for the most common circulating strain right now (omicron). So, of course, those vaccines will not fully prevent you getting the disease. It will reduce the symptoms, reduce the risk of severe illness (but it's a numbers game, less severe illness cannot mean absolutely no deaths at all) in the same way a flu shot doesn't always completely protect you.

jtc331 4y ago
I’m not the commenter you were trying to respond to, but I’m not sure that’s particularly responsive. Many people treated the flu shot as a different category of vaccine well before COVID. Many people who have their kids the standard vaccine program etc. made jokes about the flu vaccine for exactly the reasons you cite. Surely you acknowledge there’s a difference between the expectations people have about the chickenpox vaccine (basically eradicated noticeable childhood chickenpox disease by giving all kids a live viral vaccine with an attenuated strain) and the flu vaccines.
- junon 4y ago
  The only difference is the general public's perception. What you assert as fact is not scientific.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    Colloquial understanding is crucial for trust in science. If the public perception is different for a word then whose fault is that?
    - junon 4y ago
      The public's. That information is widely available in easy to understand formats in every language. People spreading misinformation is not the fault of scientists.
      - peteradio 4y ago
        I recall science journalists spreading the concept of sterilizing immunity with regard to the covid vaccines even comparing them to small pox vaccine and invoking the concept of herd immunity which cannot and will not be possible with this disease. That is not a public fault.
        junon 4y ago
        Source please.
        peteradio 4y ago
        Does my source matter or will you disagree with the point I'm making anyway? As I said, it is recollection of news clips and twitter from CDC officials/accounts, it would take some time to find and I'm not exactly willing to go through the effort if you will not first dispute the point.
        junon 4y ago
        Show me the source then we'll see lol. I can't imagine the CDC pushing out informational materials that claim complete protection/immunity from any of the coronaviruses.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > 1 dose of single-antigen varicella vaccine is: 82% effective at preventing any form of varicella. Almost 100% effective against severe varicella. And that's actually one of the more effective childhood vaccines. People underestimate how much we rely on herd immunity for some of the big childhood illnesses.
  - jtc331 4y ago
    Varicella spreads very easily, but 82% is wildly higher than the effectiveness of any of the COVID vaccines at preventing infection. So the public seeing it as wildly different is justified, and public health authorities have themselves to blame for communicating about this incorrectly and thus causing a dramatic loss of confidence in existing childhood vaccines.
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  >basically eradicated noticeable childhood chickenpox disease by giving all kids a live viral vaccine with an attenuated strain Purely anecdote. I know one kid who had the shot have chickenpox twice. ( cannot recall but there were other kids also in a similar situation) Of course chickenpox was a disease that was near completely harmless (several people and kids that I knew first hand had it) to start with. Then the shots came along, and a new generation that never knew about chickenpox, were told that if the the person who had the shot had chicken pox it was far less worse that what it would have been. My point being that it is marketed to people who are clueless about the original chicken pox to start with. All smoke and mirrors.
kramerger 4y ago
> "Vaccines are also supposed to prevent you from getting a disease." By now everyone should already know that this is not how vaccines work. You will still get sick, but the vaccine has trained your body to recognise and fight the strain, so you're chance of survival will be much higher.
- refurb 4y ago
  It's not how all vaccines work. But some do. For example we basically eradicated smallpox meaning that the resulting immunity will neutralize any virus when it enters the body preventing infection.
  - nicolas_t 4y ago
    Even the smallpox vaccine had only 95% effectiveness. It turns out that 95% effectiveness, herd immunity and the fact that smallpox is a DNA virus with low mutation rate (RNA viruses like covid19 have much higher mutation rate and as such a lot more variants reducing effectiveness of any given vaccine over time) was enough to eradicate Smallpox. But that doesn't mean that the vaccine was 100% effective, as an other poster pointed out, some vaccinated children still got infected with small but the vaccine reduced the risk drastically https://daraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5a2b8126-e638-49be-8f0a-b222fb74215d.jpg https://daraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5a2b8126-e638-4...
    - refurb 4y ago
      You’re making a different point. Vaccines can be sterilizing (preventing infection) or non-sterilizing (reducing disease severity). Regardless, no vaccine works in 100% of all people who receive it.
- squidbeak 4y ago
  How do you explain the eradication of notorious viral diseases by vaccine?
- taolegal 4y ago
  > so you're (sic) chance of survival will be much higher But if we literally measure the survival by how infinitesimally close to 100% it is, maybe we should just identify the risk profile of who's likely to die. Spoiler: we did that.
qxxx 4y ago
That comment got flagged, probably because HN audience is mostly pro covid vaccine... "trust the science" or whatever. Initially, the only thing stopping me from getting this vaccine was that people died of blood clots / heart attacks / strokes etc... and these vaccines are more like a Russian Roulette than some remedy. Especially Astrazeneca caused many problems. And now after months seeing that these vaccines are not any effective and people are getting covid, especially after being vaccinated / boostered I ask myself, WHY should I get it? Why don't they can make a good and working vaccine - probably because they rushed it in few months. I am a developer and a good software needs time. You can still get the software few months earlier, but it will be full of bugs and could cause many problems. I don't want to have these problems in my body.
- matsemann 4y ago
  Yes, we know the vaccine wasn't perfect. The question isn't if it's perfect or not, though. It's if taking it has a better outcome than not taking it. This goes for all vaccines. They have side effects. But for those in common use, it's been determined the side effects (although sad for those affected) are better on average than people not taking the vaccine.
  - nathanaldensr 4y ago
    No, the question is whether individual health choices matter. I believe they do. Numbers are not necessarily the primary decision-making point for many people. Sorry, authoritarians, but many people do not want to live their lives via what experts tell them to do. This will never change, no matter how much you wish it would.
    - matsemann 4y ago
      No one has said individual health choices doesn't matter, that's a straw man. One can both believe individuals should have a choice in taking it or not, _and_ believe the vaccines is the correct choice. The only authoritarian thing I will do is to tell you to stop with the name calling of those you disagree with..
yucky 4y ago
I'm not trying to be cheeky here, but I've actually never heard of the flu shot being represented as a vaccine before. It's always called on signage and in the common vernacular "the flu shot", precisely because everybody knows it's a crapshoot and probably only worth getting if you're especially vulnerable. From the US if it matters, but I don't think I've ever heard the term "flu vaccine" before. Just - Flu Shot.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Huh, hadn't thought of that, same in my experience in the UK - 'jab' rather than 'shot', but same thing.
- fabian2k 4y ago
  That's a subjective association, and doesn't work e.g. in German where it's "Grippeschutzimpfung" (flu protection vaccination).
- detaro 4y ago
  But official resources clearly call it a vaccine (and not just in the US either, same with e.g. NHS). And in reverse, aren't any vaccinations called the "xxx shot"(US english)/"xxx jab"(UK english)? E.g. I'm fairly sure I've seen people from the US say they need to get their "shots" for traveling (e.g. yellow fever if you go to at-risk countries)
  - yucky 4y ago
    That hasn't been my experience. Children get their vaccines for school and we refer to those vaccines as being part of their vaccination records.
    - dwaite 4y ago
      The differences can be explained by context and marketing. The place I went to had many signs saying that flu shots were available, while the person who administered it referred to it as a vaccine.
rsynnott 4y ago
Even when the main flu strains are predicted perfectly, the flu vaccines are far from a miracle magic bullet. There are vaccines which are super-ultra-effective (MMR is 97% effective against infection with measles, and it would _want_ to be because measles is incredibly infectious), but they're the exception.
peteradio 4y ago
> the current mrna covid vaccines were not an exact match for the most common circulating strain right now (omicron). So, of course, those vaccines will not fully prevent you getting the disease Please don't propagate "common sense" around these new vaccines. The very limited trials showed outcomes were better getting the original booster vs the new bivalent which contains a closer match to the circulating strain. Why is that? Obviously its counter to initial expectations, but we'll never know if we don't study. We'll never study if people are contented with "common sense".
mike_hock 4y ago
The flu shot is an exceptionally poor-performing vaccine and the Covid vaccines are similarly bad or even worse. Especially the side effects are bad compared to other vaccines. Just like any medical intervention, taking a vaccine is also not completely risk-free, so if I'm taking one, it better protect me from something. Now that Omicron shots are out, it seems to be in order to dispose of the old vaccines against the original, now-extinct, strain. (It's always in order to dispose of expired medication anyway.) Non-expired doses can be given to impoverished nations who would otherwise not have access to any vaccine at all, but that's also waning in significance as those places have acquired natural immunity. Also, neither the vaccines nor natural infection "only lasts 4 months." Antibody titers are expected to wane over time. More meaningful indicators such as the T cell response are not being tested on a large scale, so we don't have any data.
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  >The flu shot is an exceptionally poor-performing vaccine and the Covid vaccines are similarly bad or even worse. Especially the side effects are bad compared to other vaccines. I have a suspicion that every vaccine ever created was poor performing ( yes, I'm an anti-vaxxer if you wish). The flu happens so frequently that most ordinary people can anecdotally compute it's (in) effectiveness. This is less true for the less frequent diseases where the vaccine can always take credit for the non-existence of the disease, And when the disease popups occasionally (clueless) people are told that it would have be far more serious had the shot not being taken. If the rare disease did show up in large numbers, people are told that it's different strain. My point being with so many variables it's difficult to credit the vaccine for its effectiveness. But if one steps aside and looks at the financial/scientific motives for pushing a vaccine (sunken cost fallacy), the vaccine's supposed effectiveness not matching ground reality becomes clear. *sunken cost fallacy= we have spent billions and 5 years of research, and have not effective vaccine to show, what do we do?
  - nicolas_t 4y ago
    So how do you explain this graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#/media/File:Global_number_of_reported_smallpox_cases_(1920-2016).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#/media/File:Global_nu... which shows the global number of reported smallpox cases. There's a pretty dramatic drop in the 1970s. Do you have any explanation for that if the vaccines were poor performing? How about polio? [2] I'm just trying to understand how you reconcile your suspicion with those facts? Are Polio and Smallpox the "less frequent diseases" you mention? They definitely were not less frequent for a long part of human history. My grandmother knew kids who died of Polio and everyone from her generation I've talked to had horror stories about this disease (also why people her generation were a lot less reluctant to vaccines.. ) I'm genuinely curious in your perspective. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_of_poliovirus_cases_by_year.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_of_poliovirus_case...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cm2187 4y ago
Mostly, a vaccine does not guarantee that you will not get the disease (though some do), it usually reduces the risk you develop a bad form [1]. Which is why the expression “vaccine works” without defining what we mean by work lead to unproductive debates. We ended up with antivaxxers making claims that since the vaccine didn’t prevent infections it was a fraud, and vaxxers claiming that the vaccine would rid us of the virus, and often making public policy on that false assumption. Some vaccines do reduce the chance that will you will get the disease or transmit it enough that if the whole population gets vaccinated the virus won’t circulate anymore but that’s not the case with covid vaccines. [1] a good illustration that help strike the concept is that famous photo of two children who got smallpox but one was vaccinated https://daraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5a2b8126-e638-49be-8f0a-b222fb74215d.jpg https://daraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5a2b8126-e638-4...
- ryandrake 4y ago
  Too much binary thinking. Somehow we got to the point where either it's 100% effective at preventing infection, transmission and serious illness, or "it doesn't work". I've heard people I respect as intelligent software engineers tell me that since the COVID vaccines don't 100% prevent this or that, "they don't work." As if your application "doesn't work" if it has at least one bug in it.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    The problem is that with something as contagious as Omicron, if you reduce transmissions by 10 or 20% you don't really do anything, everyone will get it either way, at best you bought a few days. So you need a materiality threshold.
DannyBee 4y ago
Living in Georgia, i have had an inordinate number of discussions with people who are unvaccinated. I will say that while that kind of talking point gets repeated a lot, deep down, most people know it's not true. The number of people i meet who say that, but really are so ignorant as to believe it when you talk to them in private, is very low. Instead, it's usually because it's socially acceptable to say it. The reason it became acceptable is in large part because of the loss of trust that was caused - go look at all media reports and scientists in the run up to vaccines, and when they started to be distributed. The narrative was 100% "This will end covid by making sure nobody gets sick". Then it suddenly turned out that was not true, and that narrative disappeared and got replaced with the "that won't happen but you should still take it because it helps make sure you don't die" narrative. This has happened with lots of things during covid - claims are made, data later suggests some are correct, some are not, narratives change and adapt, old claims are forgotten, and overall people trust less. I understand this is basically "The scientific method in full view". But that isn't always a good thing :) We aren't built to be socially accepting of this sort of thing, as much as people seem to think that all forms of transparency are uniformly good. It may be a long time before that changes. One of the other major factors is that covid is fairly silent as a killer - it happens mostly behind closed doors (or later on, when "surviving" people discover that lung transplants have an astonishingly low 5 year survival rate, and that lots of lung issues are relatively short-term death sentences). That makes it easy to out-of-sight, out-of-mind it, and humans are very very good at (read newspaper about war, think war is horrible, turn page to the comics and completely place war out of your mind) If covid made people randomly bleed from their eyeballs (IE so that it was hard to not have it be in your face), you would a lot more vaccine uptake, even if the overall death rate was the same.
- sfvegandude 4y ago
  >"This will end covid by making sure nobody gets sick" I honestly don't remember ever having that impression. Could you point me to some old headlines that were around at the time that gave that impression?
  - willcipriano 4y ago
dncornholio 4y ago
I do not consider flu shots as a vaccine. This feels like a cover-up. Instead of supporting criticising, we downplay what a vaccine really is. Fact: A lot of people are disappointed in the effectiveness of a covid vaccine. Disclaimer: Not arguing the use-fullness, only the effectiveness. Covid shots would have been a better term.

jtc331 4y ago

I’m not the commenter you were trying to respond to, but I’m not sure that’s particularly responsive. Many people treated the flu shot as a different category of vaccine well before COVID. Many people who have their kids the standard vaccine program etc. made jokes about the flu vaccine for exactly the reasons you cite. Surely you acknowledge there’s a difference between the expectations people have about the chickenpox vaccine (basically eradicated noticeable childhood chickenpox disease by giving all kids a live viral vaccine with an attenuated strain) and the flu vaccines.

junon 4y ago
The only difference is the general public's perception. What you assert as fact is not scientific.
- peteradio 4y ago
  Colloquial understanding is crucial for trust in science. If the public perception is different for a word then whose fault is that?
  - junon 4y ago
    The public's. That information is widely available in easy to understand formats in every language. People spreading misinformation is not the fault of scientists.
    - peteradio 4y ago
      I recall science journalists spreading the concept of sterilizing immunity with regard to the covid vaccines even comparing them to small pox vaccine and invoking the concept of herd immunity which cannot and will not be possible with this disease. That is not a public fault.
      - junon 4y ago
        Source please.
        peteradio 4y ago
        Does my source matter or will you disagree with the point I'm making anyway? As I said, it is recollection of news clips and twitter from CDC officials/accounts, it would take some time to find and I'm not exactly willing to go through the effort if you will not first dispute the point.
        junon 4y ago
        Show me the source then we'll see lol. I can't imagine the CDC pushing out informational materials that claim complete protection/immunity from any of the coronaviruses.
rsynnott 4y ago
> 1 dose of single-antigen varicella vaccine is: 82% effective at preventing any form of varicella. Almost 100% effective against severe varicella. And that's actually one of the more effective childhood vaccines. People underestimate how much we rely on herd immunity for some of the big childhood illnesses.
- jtc331 4y ago
  Varicella spreads very easily, but 82% is wildly higher than the effectiveness of any of the COVID vaccines at preventing infection. So the public seeing it as wildly different is justified, and public health authorities have themselves to blame for communicating about this incorrectly and thus causing a dramatic loss of confidence in existing childhood vaccines.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>basically eradicated noticeable childhood chickenpox disease by giving all kids a live viral vaccine with an attenuated strain Purely anecdote. I know one kid who had the shot have chickenpox twice. ( cannot recall but there were other kids also in a similar situation) Of course chickenpox was a disease that was near completely harmless (several people and kids that I knew first hand had it) to start with. Then the shots came along, and a new generation that never knew about chickenpox, were told that if the the person who had the shot had chicken pox it was far less worse that what it would have been. My point being that it is marketed to people who are clueless about the original chicken pox to start with. All smoke and mirrors.

kramerger 4y ago

> "Vaccines are also supposed to prevent you from getting a disease." By now everyone should already know that this is not how vaccines work. You will still get sick, but the vaccine has trained your body to recognise and fight the strain, so you're chance of survival will be much higher.

refurb 4y ago
It's not how all vaccines work. But some do. For example we basically eradicated smallpox meaning that the resulting immunity will neutralize any virus when it enters the body preventing infection.
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  Even the smallpox vaccine had only 95% effectiveness. It turns out that 95% effectiveness, herd immunity and the fact that smallpox is a DNA virus with low mutation rate (RNA viruses like covid19 have much higher mutation rate and as such a lot more variants reducing effectiveness of any given vaccine over time) was enough to eradicate Smallpox. But that doesn't mean that the vaccine was 100% effective, as an other poster pointed out, some vaccinated children still got infected with small but the vaccine reduced the risk drastically https://daraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5a2b8126-e638-49be-8f0a-b222fb74215d.jpg https://daraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5a2b8126-e638-4...
  - refurb 4y ago
    You’re making a different point. Vaccines can be sterilizing (preventing infection) or non-sterilizing (reducing disease severity). Regardless, no vaccine works in 100% of all people who receive it.
squidbeak 4y ago
How do you explain the eradication of notorious viral diseases by vaccine?
taolegal 4y ago
> so you're (sic) chance of survival will be much higher But if we literally measure the survival by how infinitesimally close to 100% it is, maybe we should just identify the risk profile of who's likely to die. Spoiler: we did that.

qxxx 4y ago

That comment got flagged, probably because HN audience is mostly pro covid vaccine... "trust the science" or whatever. Initially, the only thing stopping me from getting this vaccine was that people died of blood clots / heart attacks / strokes etc... and these vaccines are more like a Russian Roulette than some remedy. Especially Astrazeneca caused many problems. And now after months seeing that these vaccines are not any effective and people are getting covid, especially after being vaccinated / boostered I ask myself, WHY should I get it? Why don't they can make a good and working vaccine - probably because they rushed it in few months. I am a developer and a good software needs time. You can still get the software few months earlier, but it will be full of bugs and could cause many problems. I don't want to have these problems in my body.

matsemann 4y ago
Yes, we know the vaccine wasn't perfect. The question isn't if it's perfect or not, though. It's if taking it has a better outcome than not taking it. This goes for all vaccines. They have side effects. But for those in common use, it's been determined the side effects (although sad for those affected) are better on average than people not taking the vaccine.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  No, the question is whether individual health choices matter. I believe they do. Numbers are not necessarily the primary decision-making point for many people. Sorry, authoritarians, but many people do not want to live their lives via what experts tell them to do. This will never change, no matter how much you wish it would.
  - matsemann 4y ago
    No one has said individual health choices doesn't matter, that's a straw man. One can both believe individuals should have a choice in taking it or not, _and_ believe the vaccines is the correct choice. The only authoritarian thing I will do is to tell you to stop with the name calling of those you disagree with..

yucky 4y ago

I'm not trying to be cheeky here, but I've actually never heard of the flu shot being represented as a vaccine before. It's always called on signage and in the common vernacular "the flu shot", precisely because everybody knows it's a crapshoot and probably only worth getting if you're especially vulnerable. From the US if it matters, but I don't think I've ever heard the term "flu vaccine" before. Just - Flu Shot.

OJFord 4y ago
Huh, hadn't thought of that, same in my experience in the UK - 'jab' rather than 'shot', but same thing.
fabian2k 4y ago
That's a subjective association, and doesn't work e.g. in German where it's "Grippeschutzimpfung" (flu protection vaccination).
detaro 4y ago
But official resources clearly call it a vaccine (and not just in the US either, same with e.g. NHS). And in reverse, aren't any vaccinations called the "xxx shot"(US english)/"xxx jab"(UK english)? E.g. I'm fairly sure I've seen people from the US say they need to get their "shots" for traveling (e.g. yellow fever if you go to at-risk countries)
- yucky 4y ago
  That hasn't been my experience. Children get their vaccines for school and we refer to those vaccines as being part of their vaccination records.
  - dwaite 4y ago
    The differences can be explained by context and marketing. The place I went to had many signs saying that flu shots were available, while the person who administered it referred to it as a vaccine.

rsynnott 4y ago

Even when the main flu strains are predicted perfectly, the flu vaccines are far from a miracle magic bullet. There are vaccines which are super-ultra-effective (MMR is 97% effective against infection with measles, and it would _want_ to be because measles is incredibly infectious), but they're the exception.

peteradio 4y ago

> the current mrna covid vaccines were not an exact match for the most common circulating strain right now (omicron). So, of course, those vaccines will not fully prevent you getting the disease Please don't propagate "common sense" around these new vaccines. The very limited trials showed outcomes were better getting the original booster vs the new bivalent which contains a closer match to the circulating strain. Why is that? Obviously its counter to initial expectations, but we'll never know if we don't study. We'll never study if people are contented with "common sense".

mike_hock 4y ago

The flu shot is an exceptionally poor-performing vaccine and the Covid vaccines are similarly bad or even worse. Especially the side effects are bad compared to other vaccines. Just like any medical intervention, taking a vaccine is also not completely risk-free, so if I'm taking one, it better protect me from something. Now that Omicron shots are out, it seems to be in order to dispose of the old vaccines against the original, now-extinct, strain. (It's always in order to dispose of expired medication anyway.) Non-expired doses can be given to impoverished nations who would otherwise not have access to any vaccine at all, but that's also waning in significance as those places have acquired natural immunity. Also, neither the vaccines nor natural infection "only lasts 4 months." Antibody titers are expected to wane over time. More meaningful indicators such as the T cell response are not being tested on a large scale, so we don't have any data.

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>The flu shot is an exceptionally poor-performing vaccine and the Covid vaccines are similarly bad or even worse. Especially the side effects are bad compared to other vaccines. I have a suspicion that every vaccine ever created was poor performing ( yes, I'm an anti-vaxxer if you wish). The flu happens so frequently that most ordinary people can anecdotally compute it's (in) effectiveness. This is less true for the less frequent diseases where the vaccine can always take credit for the non-existence of the disease, And when the disease popups occasionally (clueless) people are told that it would have be far more serious had the shot not being taken. If the rare disease did show up in large numbers, people are told that it's different strain. My point being with so many variables it's difficult to credit the vaccine for its effectiveness. But if one steps aside and looks at the financial/scientific motives for pushing a vaccine (sunken cost fallacy), the vaccine's supposed effectiveness not matching ground reality becomes clear. *sunken cost fallacy= we have spent billions and 5 years of research, and have not effective vaccine to show, what do we do?
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  So how do you explain this graph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#/media/File:Global_number_of_reported_smallpox_cases_(1920-2016).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#/media/File:Global_nu... which shows the global number of reported smallpox cases. There's a pretty dramatic drop in the 1970s. Do you have any explanation for that if the vaccines were poor performing? How about polio? [2] I'm just trying to understand how you reconcile your suspicion with those facts? Are Polio and Smallpox the "less frequent diseases" you mention? They definitely were not less frequent for a long part of human history. My grandmother knew kids who died of Polio and everyone from her generation I've talked to had horror stories about this disease (also why people her generation were a lot less reluctant to vaccines.. ) I'm genuinely curious in your perspective. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_of_poliovirus_cases_by_year.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Number_of_poliovirus_case...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cm2187 4y ago

Mostly, a vaccine does not guarantee that you will not get the disease (though some do), it usually reduces the risk you develop a bad form [1]. Which is why the expression “vaccine works” without defining what we mean by work lead to unproductive debates. We ended up with antivaxxers making claims that since the vaccine didn’t prevent infections it was a fraud, and vaxxers claiming that the vaccine would rid us of the virus, and often making public policy on that false assumption. Some vaccines do reduce the chance that will you will get the disease or transmit it enough that if the whole population gets vaccinated the virus won’t circulate anymore but that’s not the case with covid vaccines. [1] a good illustration that help strike the concept is that famous photo of two children who got smallpox but one was vaccinated https://daraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5a2b8126-e638-49be-8f0a-b222fb74215d.jpg https://daraj.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5a2b8126-e638-4...

ryandrake 4y ago
Too much binary thinking. Somehow we got to the point where either it's 100% effective at preventing infection, transmission and serious illness, or "it doesn't work". I've heard people I respect as intelligent software engineers tell me that since the COVID vaccines don't 100% prevent this or that, "they don't work." As if your application "doesn't work" if it has at least one bug in it.
- cm2187 4y ago
  The problem is that with something as contagious as Omicron, if you reduce transmissions by 10 or 20% you don't really do anything, everyone will get it either way, at best you bought a few days. So you need a materiality threshold.

DannyBee 4y ago

Living in Georgia, i have had an inordinate number of discussions with people who are unvaccinated. I will say that while that kind of talking point gets repeated a lot, deep down, most people know it's not true. The number of people i meet who say that, but really are so ignorant as to believe it when you talk to them in private, is very low. Instead, it's usually because it's socially acceptable to say it. The reason it became acceptable is in large part because of the loss of trust that was caused - go look at all media reports and scientists in the run up to vaccines, and when they started to be distributed. The narrative was 100% "This will end covid by making sure nobody gets sick". Then it suddenly turned out that was not true, and that narrative disappeared and got replaced with the "that won't happen but you should still take it because it helps make sure you don't die" narrative. This has happened with lots of things during covid - claims are made, data later suggests some are correct, some are not, narratives change and adapt, old claims are forgotten, and overall people trust less. I understand this is basically "The scientific method in full view". But that isn't always a good thing :) We aren't built to be socially accepting of this sort of thing, as much as people seem to think that all forms of transparency are uniformly good. It may be a long time before that changes. One of the other major factors is that covid is fairly silent as a killer - it happens mostly behind closed doors (or later on, when "surviving" people discover that lung transplants have an astonishingly low 5 year survival rate, and that lots of lung issues are relatively short-term death sentences). That makes it easy to out-of-sight, out-of-mind it, and humans are very very good at (read newspaper about war, think war is horrible, turn page to the comics and completely place war out of your mind) If covid made people randomly bleed from their eyeballs (IE so that it was hard to not have it be in your face), you would a lot more vaccine uptake, even if the overall death rate was the same.

sfvegandude 4y ago
>"This will end covid by making sure nobody gets sick" I honestly don't remember ever having that impression. Could you point me to some old headlines that were around at the time that gave that impression?
- willcipriano 4y ago

dncornholio 4y ago

I do not consider flu shots as a vaccine. This feels like a cover-up. Instead of supporting criticising, we downplay what a vaccine really is. Fact: A lot of people are disappointed in the effectiveness of a covid vaccine. Disclaimer: Not arguing the use-fullness, only the effectiveness. Covid shots would have been a better term.