5 ms·

Edit oops didn’t see it which comment was being referred to at first. the study says severity was controlled for when assessing the impact of vaccination. Tha

• taeric 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't know how to make sense of the quote I pulled out, to be honest. Why say that, if everyone that had the vaccine was lower in symptoms? Seems to be the kind of thing you would only say if the vaccinated people in your study were represented across the spread?
  • mrguyorama 3y ago
    It's pretty clear actually. The point the paper is making about vaccine status is this: If you have strong symptoms, you shed lots of virus, regardless of whether you are vaccinated or not. From separate studies, we know that if you are vaccinated, you are less likely to have serious symptoms. Put the two together. Fewer people seriously ill is fewer people shedding lots of virus, and more people vaccinated is fewer people seriously ill
    • taeric 3y ago
      Having these as carve outs, though, gives me pause there. The claim seems to be that, on average, higher symptoms means more shedding. However, trying to control for any other variable results in no significant finding. This would imply that they did not find a correlation between vaccination and severity of symptoms in their testing. I'm willing to chalk that up to them not having enough vaccinated people in their study. That fits the caveat they give regarding vaccinated people. It does not automatically support your read, though.
      • mint2 3y ago
        I don’t think this is quite right of a reading “This would imply that they did not find a correlation between vaccination and severity of symptoms in their testing.” Instead, I think a more accurate rough understanding of their process is they first backed out the effect of severity and then checked if vaccine was correlated with that adjusted number - they found it wasn’t. They didn’t make an assessment on how vaccines effect severity.
        • taeric 3y ago
          My read wasn't that they made an assessment of vaccine on severity. Rather, I read that they found that it had no impact on transmission. They found that, on average, self reported severity correlated with transmission. However, they then state that transmission does not correlate with vaccination status. I could hope that they mean there is no extra relation between vaccination status and transmission above reduced symptoms. I don't know why they would state it in the way they do if that is what they mean, though.
          • mint2 3y ago
            I agree it is poorly stated, but that is what they mean, no extra impact beyond reduced symptoms and the benefit thereof.
            • taeric 3y ago
              How do you know that?
              • mint2 3y ago
                Because their paper states it. That’s what is meant by “when accounting for etc” in: “We found that vaccinated and unvaccinated participants exhaled similar numbers of SARS-CoV-2 RNA copies (Fig 2C), when accounting for age, sex, presence of co-morbidities, days since symptom onset and symptom severity”
                • 3y ago
  • omginternets 3y ago
    This is consistent with the scenario in which the vaccine trials did not lead to the desired outcome ("the pandemic will be cured by the vaccine"), and so institutional powers tried to dress it up as a success. Note that the researchers and authors of this paper do not need to be involved for this to be true. They simply publish a factual result, but it is somehow deformed/ignored during the course of public service campaigns. "Vaccine lowers severity of symptoms" becomes "vaccines work". More speculatively, with this in mind, it is troubling to think of how the vaccine safety trials may have been interpreted, and why major pharmaceutical companies insisted upon total civil immunity.