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Well, what you want to see reported in a clinical vaccine trial is the breakthrough percentage, that is, the percentage of vaccinated subjects who then became i

Well, what you want to see reported in a clinical vaccine trial is the breakthrough percentage, that is, the percentage of vaccinated subjects who then became infected. In the case of the smallpox vaccine, this percentage was extremely low, which is why 'vaccination ring' strategies in India were effective in wiping out the disease, so that it now only exists in a few freezers globally (though the genetic sequence is widely available and thus it could be synthesized from scratch using modern molecular biology techniques). Since this wasn't reported to the public, but many official government sources claimed it was a sterilizing vaccine (0% breakthrough), this resulted in great public distrust of the health authorities. It's a lesson for the future: be honest with people.

notahacker 2y ago
None of this is true though is it? The purpose of a vaccine is to induce the immune system to produce antibodies which typically act after infection, this is what is normally published in clinical trials, the vaccines were efficacious in doing this and efficacious against symptomatic COVID, the data was published as were numerous early studies which accurately observed that breakthrough effects were very low, and government officials accurately advised the public that it would significantly increase survival rates and reduce transmission rates. Then it did, despite the best efforts of people who had been sowing public distrust in the health system since long before there was a vaccine, so the last refuge of those particular scoundrels was to insist that the long series of lies they'd told about COVID were actually an honest desire to inform the public that the vaccine wasn't a sterilising one, as if that was a remotely good reason to advise people not to take it.
- photochemsyn 2y ago
  Well, the one thing to keep in mind is that coronaviruses tend to have high mutation rates, and a lot of the breakthrough took place with mutated variants, not the original Sars-CoV-2 virus, the one that escaped from the lab in Wuhan due to poor biosafety controls, and which for all we know may have been synthesized in the Baric Lab in North Carolina and later shipped to Wuhan for testing. Of course, a lot remains unknown.
  - notahacker 2y ago
    Well yes, of course coronaviruses mutate a lot, that's why the insistence the only goal of vaccines is full sterilization against all variants and they promised us nobody would get it any more is pushed by the antivax movement, not public health officials. I see your argument has mutated too Couldn't have been the Baric Lab, it was too busy making the frogs gay. There's a lot that remains unknown, and now the Onion is covering it all up!
    - photochemsyn 2y ago
      There's no need to resort to straw man arguments. It's very likely that the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic was the result of reckless gain-of-function research combined with sloppy biohazard standards. It's also clear that better public communication about the efficacy of the vaccines and in particular the high likelihood that vaccinated people would still contract Covid (but would suffer less severe symptoms) would have done a lot towards maintaining public trust in government proclamations.
      - notahacker 2y ago
        On the contrary it's extremely clear that there was very little the government could have done to maintain trust in their proclamations from the existence of people prepared to blindly distrust health authorities on the basis of things they didn't say about sterilizing immunity and prepared to blindly trust gain-of-function origin theories despite the initial basis for them being a series of arguments that were either trivially wrong like furin cleavage sites not being found in coronaviruses, or fairly quickly discredited like the argument that it was clearly derived from RaTG13. Even being outspokenly critical of the Wuhan lab and favourably disposed towards the leak hypothesis doesn't seem to have spared Barin from being woven into its web of conspiracy. And let's not forget, you started off with every antivaxxers' favourite canard that the only criteria for a successful vaccine is sterilizing immunity (which is brilliant, because it lets them declare most vaccines don't work, which is sorta true if you consider stuff like increasing chances of survival and reducing chances of transmission to be irrelevant) and an insinuation that stats on transmission efficacy from Phase III trials that drug companies were so keen to share they put them in press releases were somehow not studied or withheld from the public. If you don't want to get compared to Alex Jones, maybe don't adopt his style of argument.
- Izkata 2y ago
  > and government officials accurately advised the public that it would significantly increase survival rates and reduce transmission rates. Not true. The only claims by the vaccine manufacturers were that it would stop people getting sick. They made no claims about infection/transmission. So there were two possibilities: Either it did work to reduce infection/transmission, or it only suppressed the symptoms and made asymptomatic transmission more common. Government and media claimed the first without evidence, and we actually got the second.

notahacker 2y ago

None of this is true though is it? The purpose of a vaccine is to induce the immune system to produce antibodies which typically act after infection, this is what is normally published in clinical trials, the vaccines were efficacious in doing this and efficacious against symptomatic COVID, the data was published as were numerous early studies which accurately observed that breakthrough effects were very low, and government officials accurately advised the public that it would significantly increase survival rates and reduce transmission rates. Then it did, despite the best efforts of people who had been sowing public distrust in the health system since long before there was a vaccine, so the last refuge of those particular scoundrels was to insist that the long series of lies they'd told about COVID were actually an honest desire to inform the public that the vaccine wasn't a sterilising one, as if that was a remotely good reason to advise people not to take it.

photochemsyn 2y ago
Well, the one thing to keep in mind is that coronaviruses tend to have high mutation rates, and a lot of the breakthrough took place with mutated variants, not the original Sars-CoV-2 virus, the one that escaped from the lab in Wuhan due to poor biosafety controls, and which for all we know may have been synthesized in the Baric Lab in North Carolina and later shipped to Wuhan for testing. Of course, a lot remains unknown.
- notahacker 2y ago
  Well yes, of course coronaviruses mutate a lot, that's why the insistence the only goal of vaccines is full sterilization against all variants and they promised us nobody would get it any more is pushed by the antivax movement, not public health officials. I see your argument has mutated too Couldn't have been the Baric Lab, it was too busy making the frogs gay. There's a lot that remains unknown, and now the Onion is covering it all up!
  - photochemsyn 2y ago
    There's no need to resort to straw man arguments. It's very likely that the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic was the result of reckless gain-of-function research combined with sloppy biohazard standards. It's also clear that better public communication about the efficacy of the vaccines and in particular the high likelihood that vaccinated people would still contract Covid (but would suffer less severe symptoms) would have done a lot towards maintaining public trust in government proclamations.
    - notahacker 2y ago
      On the contrary it's extremely clear that there was very little the government could have done to maintain trust in their proclamations from the existence of people prepared to blindly distrust health authorities on the basis of things they didn't say about sterilizing immunity and prepared to blindly trust gain-of-function origin theories despite the initial basis for them being a series of arguments that were either trivially wrong like furin cleavage sites not being found in coronaviruses, or fairly quickly discredited like the argument that it was clearly derived from RaTG13. Even being outspokenly critical of the Wuhan lab and favourably disposed towards the leak hypothesis doesn't seem to have spared Barin from being woven into its web of conspiracy. And let's not forget, you started off with every antivaxxers' favourite canard that the only criteria for a successful vaccine is sterilizing immunity (which is brilliant, because it lets them declare most vaccines don't work, which is sorta true if you consider stuff like increasing chances of survival and reducing chances of transmission to be irrelevant) and an insinuation that stats on transmission efficacy from Phase III trials that drug companies were so keen to share they put them in press releases were somehow not studied or withheld from the public. If you don't want to get compared to Alex Jones, maybe don't adopt his style of argument.
Izkata 2y ago
> and government officials accurately advised the public that it would significantly increase survival rates and reduce transmission rates. Not true. The only claims by the vaccine manufacturers were that it would stop people getting sick. They made no claims about infection/transmission. So there were two possibilities: Either it did work to reduce infection/transmission, or it only suppressed the symptoms and made asymptomatic transmission more common. Government and media claimed the first without evidence, and we actually got the second.