that's what happens when most people are vaccinated. This whole thing is dumb. We know vaccines work. Let's move on to interesting and productive things.
It's a bit more nuanced but you're generally right. Intramuscular vaccines do not provide long term protection from infection of the mucosal tissues of the upper respiratory tract. So they can be infected and shed virus but the lungs themselves get IgG antibodies seeping in from blood serum and protection from serious disease.
If you want to have resident B and T cells in the upper respiratory mucosa generating IgA antibodies and generally killing infected cells right away you need to use an intranasal vaccination. In the UK they have already realized this (and it was known in the 1960s).
>"Whilst we feel that current vaccines are excellent for reducing the risk of hospital admission and disease, we propose that research be focused on vaccines that also induce high and durable levels of mucosal immunity in order to reduce infection of and transmission from vaccinated individuals. This could also reduce the possibility of variant selection in vaccinated individuals."
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/397 - "the ideal vaccination strategy may use an intramuscular vaccine to elicit a long-lived systemic IgG response and a broad repertoire of central memory B and T cells, followed by an intranasal booster that recruits memory B and T cells to the nasal passages and further guides their differentiation toward mucosal protection, including IgA secretion and tissue-resident memory cells in the respiratory tract."
If vaccines don't stop transmission, then the only reason to get a vaccine is to protect yourself from severe symptoms. That contradicts what I've often been hearing that you should get the vaccine for the benefit of others. When the only effect the vaccine will have is on yourself, it becomes a personal question rather than a societal one.
> That contradicts what I've often been hearing that you should get the vaccine for the benefit of others
I don't know why everyone keeps harping on this to blame the experts and cast doubt on them. The virus changed. What was said in the past was true about the earlier variants. The Delta variant works differently.
This is not casting doubt on what experts said. It's casting doubt on what others have said about what experts have said. It is media and politicians that say people should get the vaccine for others.
Of course, if experts said that too, well, they were wrong if the vaccinated can spread the virus about as much as the unvaccinated.
I'm not saying anything about experts. I'm saying that the concept that you should get the vaccines for others looks like it's moot. That means the only consideration you should have about getting the vaccine is if you want the extra protection for yourself.
You mean by freeing up hospital beds? That's orders of magnitude less of a benefit than stopping exponential contagious spread, so not nearly as compelling of a reason.
Except right there in the report they list the vaccine coverage for Massachusetts to be at 69% (out of the “eligible” population, implying I’m that number is somewhat less for the total population). If 74% of positive COVID tests come from vaccinated people, then we’re already in “being vaccinated is worse than not” territory. Not saying that’s the necessarily the correct conclusion, but it’s something that definitely needs some kind of explanation and shouldn’t be hastily brushed away.
The 69% figure is out of “eligible” people according to the report. As children aren’t eligible, I’d think they aren’t included in the denominator.
Your hypothesis about anti-vaxxers being hesitant to go test is definitely promising, but having a hypothesis alone isn’t enough, this kind of stuff needs to be looked into and not ignored/labeled conspiracy theories as it so often does.
Edit: just realized that even if the 69% was out of the entire population, that would still imply (on the surface) that being vaccinated is worse than not, since COVID doesn’t discriminate about who it spreads to which makes the whole population eligible to get it.
> The 69% figure is out of “eligible” people according to the report.
The vaccinated population is still skewed elderly, and the elderly are more likely to become “cases” than younger people in the same vaccination status. The population isn't a homogeneous blob.
In the US, under 400 kids below the age of 18 have died from Covid since the beginning of the Pandemic. Many had comorbidities as severe as leukemia. What is the case for exposing them to the greater risk presented by the vaccine, when it has been shown that vaccinated adults will still get Covid either way?
Edit: And just like that, the CDC link has been flagged for presenting inconvenient information. Talk about a cult.
> What is the case for exposing them to the greater risk presented by the vaccine...
They tend to live with adults.
> it has been shown that vaccinated adults will still get Covid either way?
This hasn't actually been shown, at least not anywhere near as universally as you're portraying. Breakthroughs were expected; what we won't know for a while (and is subject to change) is how common they are.
I intend to point that that that is what the data in this report implies at a surface level. I think that alone makes it very important for professionals to carefully follow up on this data. The worst thing to do would be to brush this away and ignore it.
1) People who are vaccinated are more likely to get tested.
2) People who are vaccinated are more likely to be in positions where they are exposed to COVID (remember who got vaccines first?).
3) People who are vaccinated are probably more likely to be around other people in general because they are at low risk of severe COVID reactions and are following guidelines (multiple state health officials: if you're fully vaccinated, it's ok to not wear a mask).
This is a story because it is showing something is wrong. This data implies that the vaccine isn’t effective enough to drop precautions. Vaccinated people need to know that and guidelines need to be adjusted, lest they become bigger spreaders than the unvaccinated, as this data is implying.
At the very least, this data needs to be very carefully followed up on.
If 100% of people are vaccinated, 100% of covid infections will be among vaccinated people. In MA, ~70% of people are vaccinated. Vaccination rates are higher in some places. Given this, it's not surprising that most infections in certain places are among vaccinated people. The absolute number and how sick people are getting have to be considered as well.
There are some blind areas. You are not counting people that weren't tested, or, people in different categories that were exposed but didn't got the disease, or people that got the disease previously, but it was asymptomatic or with mild enough symptoms to be noticed.
If 100 unvaccinated people (that really didn't got the vaccine) get exposed in the same way than 100 vaccinated people, the numbers that will get infected would be the same?
The data does not at all imply that something is wrong or that we need to do more than is already being done. Vaccines are not 100% effective and we were never going to prevent infections entirely. The only real issue here is that way too many people are refusing to get vaccinated so that infections are still having a large impact on the population as a whole. Among people who are vaccinated, severe complications from COVID are extremely rare.
People need to stop thinking about COVID as a disease like polio that we can relatively easily eradicate, and more like a bad flu that we simply coexist with even though annual vaccines are widely available.
Missing from this headline "Associated with Large Public Gatherings".
Its worth noting...
- Vaccination is not equal to 100% immunity as some folks appear to think.
- Vaccination means a significant reduced risk of getting COVID.
- Vaccination means that if you get COVID your risk for death is significantly lower.
With Delta variants right now, it is worth noting...
- Variants will continue to mutate as a significant % of people go unvaccinated.
- Variants seem to pose higher risk for all, but vaccination still reduces risk.
- Vaccinated folks with a COVID variant are equally contagious - but possibly for a shorter period of time (early days).
Summary: You're not special. Get a vaccination. We are in this together.
Am not interested in rebutting every issue someone flags with this - its a high-level generalization. Am not a doctor etc. Look to CDC for guidance and authority.
> Am not interested in rebutting every issue someone flags with this - its a high-level generalization. Am not a doctor etc. Look to CDC for guidance and authority.
I understand, but you have a glaring bit of misinformation:
> - Variants will continue to mutate as a significant % of people go unvaccinated.
The virus mutates in vaccinated people as well. If the entire population was vaccinated, we would still get new variants, mutating enough to defeat vaccines.
Common sense would have it that if the virus was under attack from the moment it entered your body, it’s less likely to mutate, than if it’s lingering for weeks in an unvaccinated person doing its thing?
I would assume any sort of attack, if it's not able to outright kill the virus, would accelerate mutation. The experts have conceded for a while now that the vaccine has been proven to reduce symptoms, but not necessarily reduce spread, so probably the right environment for mutation.
I'm not saying there should be mutations. Just that if there are mutations, it's not clear whether the vaccinated or unvaccinated would be stronger drivers of it.
I’m curious why people think vaccinations will solve the mutated variants problem. We’ve been told from the very beginning that the vaccines only reduce symptoms and only marginally prevent you from getting COVID in the first place. If people are still getting it, why would there be any less of a chance for SARS-cov-2 to mutate? In fact, if the vaccines specifically only target spike, that would, if anything cause a selective pressure for the virus to mutate it’s spike protein.
> In fact, if the vaccines specifically only target spike, that would, if anything cause a selective pressure for the virus to mutate it’s spike protein.
My understanding is that changes to the spike protein significant enough to escape vaccines entirely are likely to also render it unable to enter the cell.
> We’ve been told from the very beginning that the vaccines only reduce symptoms and only marginally prevent you from getting COVID in the first place.
No, we’ve been told that the mRNA vaccines are, based on the current evidence, both “ highly effective against hospitalization and death for a variety of strains, including Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), Gamma (P.1), and Delta (B.1.617.2)” and that they make the vaccinated
“less likely than unvaccinated persons to acquire SARS-CoV-2 or to transmit it to others”, though they have “lower effectiveness against confirmed infection and symptomatic disease caused by the Beta, Gamma, and Delta variants compared with the ancestral strain and Alpha variant.”
So if that is the current understanding of how the vaccine works, isn’t it important to follow up on data that seems to not align with those statements? If 69% of people are vaccinated, I would expect <69% of recent COVID cases to be from the vaccinated.
When we get data that contradicts what we expect, it needs to be taken seriously, it needs to be broadcast, it needs to be followed up on, and the correct conclusions need to be drawn from experts in a transparent way.
> So if that is the current understanding of how the vaccine works, isn’t it important to follow up on data that seems to not align with those statements?
Sure.
> If 69% of people are vaccinated, I would expect <69% of recent COVID cases to be from the vaccinated.
I would expect both vaccination and detection of cases to overrepresent people with better access to and inclination toward medical services
In addition vaccinations are biased towards the elderly, and (because vaccines haven't been approved, even on an emergency basis, for this population) completely exclude young children. This also biases the figures.
Basically, the media reporting of “contradictory” findings is pretty much completely abuse of statistics rather than actual contradictory findings.
I am familiar with Simpson’s Paradox but I carefully read your linked article anyway and it truely is enraging to me when statistics is twisted to lie to people. I totally agree there is a very large amount of really bad headlines and non-expert pundit conclusions from right wing media. And it is harmful. I wish more people took the time to understand what statistics are actually saying. Unfortunately I think some portion of the population might just be incapable of properly understanding stats, it really is a hard and tricky subject.
That said, I don’t think the data from the OP’s CDC article is a case of Simpson’s paradox. The quoted statistic in the CDC article is that 74% of infected people were vaccinated. I am comparing that to the vaccination rate in MA of 69% (also from the article). The denominator in one stat is a strict subset of the denominator of the second stat. Simpson’s paradox requires disjoint denominators.
So that being the case, I would still like for actual experts to follow up on this data and come to some conclusion.
If you simplify it to threads * execution time, the more parallel processes running, for a longer duration, means more opportunity. Everything here is almost always a spectrum not a binary solved/unsolved.
If less people have covid, less severely, for less time, that is less mutation potential.
> - Vaccination means a significant reduced risk of getting COVID.
Can you provide a source for this?
To be clear, I’m absolutely not arguing that you’re wrong. What I am saying is that I’ve not seen a source for this oft-repeated assertion, and that the data in the linked article contradicts it - a larger proportion of people in that cohort who were fully vaccinated got COVID than those those who were unvaccinated.
It seems like a glaring omission to me that they didn’t enumerate the number of unvaccinated people who had recovered from previous COVID infections. If that number is substantial it would explain why the proportions are so different from what you might expect.
“If the CDC has increased their Delta Ro because of the Ptown cohort, then they are overstating it for the general population. The cohort was 85% male (WaPo and NYT have both failed to mention this). Hello, it was Bear Week.
@apoorva_nyc rightly mentions packed bars, etc., but /1
... everyone is missing the horny bear in the room. Bears go to Ptown to have lots of fun which includes lots of sex. News flash, gay men KISS when they have sex. /2”
Delta strain reproduces at ~1,200x faster rate than the already contagious original COVID19 strain. This is an absolutely massive difference and works on quasi-exponential scale! The body cannot detect and react immediately in force to a virii intrusion, hence a vaccinated person can be infectious, but with everything else being equal, he or she will have lower viral load (hence level of infectiousness) and shorter period of infectiousness compared to an unvaccinated person.
Why is that not clear to most people opposing vaccination on these grounds, is beyond me.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadBut humans can't stop their self flagellation because it gives some groups meaning to their lives and some groups make money from the chaos.
Fatalities have got to be be near zero I bet.
If you want to have resident B and T cells in the upper respiratory mucosa generating IgA antibodies and generally killing infected cells right away you need to use an intranasal vaccination. In the UK they have already realized this (and it was known in the 1960s).
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti... page 5, #8.
>"Whilst we feel that current vaccines are excellent for reducing the risk of hospital admission and disease, we propose that research be focused on vaccines that also induce high and durable levels of mucosal immunity in order to reduce infection of and transmission from vaccinated individuals. This could also reduce the possibility of variant selection in vaccinated individuals."
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/397 - "the ideal vaccination strategy may use an intramuscular vaccine to elicit a long-lived systemic IgG response and a broad repertoire of central memory B and T cells, followed by an intranasal booster that recruits memory B and T cells to the nasal passages and further guides their differentiation toward mucosal protection, including IgA secretion and tissue-resident memory cells in the respiratory tract."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-021-00550-x "Prospects for durable immune control of SARS-CoV-2 and prevention of reinfection" - any of it.
The problem is that people are freaking out about people testing positive on Covid tests while fatalities are still very very low.
Which means the vaccines are working to stop sickness as intended...they're just not working with whatever Covid tests have going on.
I don't know why everyone keeps harping on this to blame the experts and cast doubt on them. The virus changed. What was said in the past was true about the earlier variants. The Delta variant works differently.
Of course, if experts said that too, well, they were wrong if the vaccinated can spread the virus about as much as the unvaccinated.
Thalidomide was highly used by the medical experts.
The view that slaves and Jews were inferior was backed up by 'experts'.
The Vietnam war was sold by 'experts'.
This new found belief that the experts are infallible gods to be worshipped ...is super creepy, ignorant, and authoritarian.
The experts deserve to have doubt cast on them and need to justify their views and be held accountable.
Kids under 12 are 100% unvaccinated at the moment, for example. People who are anti-vaccine may have a tendency to also avoid testing. etc.
Your hypothesis about anti-vaxxers being hesitant to go test is definitely promising, but having a hypothesis alone isn’t enough, this kind of stuff needs to be looked into and not ignored/labeled conspiracy theories as it so often does.
Edit: just realized that even if the 69% was out of the entire population, that would still imply (on the surface) that being vaccinated is worse than not, since COVID doesn’t discriminate about who it spreads to which makes the whole population eligible to get it.
The vaccinated population is still skewed elderly, and the elderly are more likely to become “cases” than younger people in the same vaccination status. The population isn't a homogeneous blob.
Edit: And just like that, the CDC link has been flagged for presenting inconvenient information. Talk about a cult.
They tend to live with adults.
> it has been shown that vaccinated adults will still get Covid either way?
This hasn't actually been shown, at least not anywhere near as universally as you're portraying. Breakthroughs were expected; what we won't know for a while (and is subject to change) is how common they are.
To me, your comment read like being vaccinated itself is some disadvantage to the infection rate, is that how you intended it?
2) People who are vaccinated are more likely to be in positions where they are exposed to COVID (remember who got vaccines first?).
3) People who are vaccinated are probably more likely to be around other people in general because they are at low risk of severe COVID reactions and are following guidelines (multiple state health officials: if you're fully vaccinated, it's ok to not wear a mask).
I don't see why this is a story.
At the very least, this data needs to be very carefully followed up on.
If 100% of people are vaccinated, 100% of covid infections will be among vaccinated people. In MA, ~70% of people are vaccinated. Vaccination rates are higher in some places. Given this, it's not surprising that most infections in certain places are among vaccinated people. The absolute number and how sick people are getting have to be considered as well.
If 100 unvaccinated people (that really didn't got the vaccine) get exposed in the same way than 100 vaccinated people, the numbers that will get infected would be the same?
People need to stop thinking about COVID as a disease like polio that we can relatively easily eradicate, and more like a bad flu that we simply coexist with even though annual vaccines are widely available.
Its worth noting...
- Vaccination is not equal to 100% immunity as some folks appear to think.
- Vaccination means a significant reduced risk of getting COVID.
- Vaccination means that if you get COVID your risk for death is significantly lower.
With Delta variants right now, it is worth noting...
- Variants will continue to mutate as a significant % of people go unvaccinated.
- Variants seem to pose higher risk for all, but vaccination still reduces risk.
- Vaccinated folks with a COVID variant are equally contagious - but possibly for a shorter period of time (early days).
Summary: You're not special. Get a vaccination. We are in this together.
Am not interested in rebutting every issue someone flags with this - its a high-level generalization. Am not a doctor etc. Look to CDC for guidance and authority.
I understand, but you have a glaring bit of misinformation:
> - Variants will continue to mutate as a significant % of people go unvaccinated.
The virus mutates in vaccinated people as well. If the entire population was vaccinated, we would still get new variants, mutating enough to defeat vaccines.
I can tell who has been recommended Darkhorse podcast pretty quickly. I've listened to it too.
My understanding is that changes to the spike protein significant enough to escape vaccines entirely are likely to also render it unable to enter the cell.
No, we’ve been told that the mRNA vaccines are, based on the current evidence, both “ highly effective against hospitalization and death for a variety of strains, including Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), Gamma (P.1), and Delta (B.1.617.2)” and that they make the vaccinated “less likely than unvaccinated persons to acquire SARS-CoV-2 or to transmit it to others”, though they have “lower effectiveness against confirmed infection and symptomatic disease caused by the Beta, Gamma, and Delta variants compared with the ancestral strain and Alpha variant.”
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
When we get data that contradicts what we expect, it needs to be taken seriously, it needs to be broadcast, it needs to be followed up on, and the correct conclusions need to be drawn from experts in a transparent way.
Sure.
> If 69% of people are vaccinated, I would expect <69% of recent COVID cases to be from the vaccinated.
I would expect both vaccination and detection of cases to overrepresent people with better access to and inclination toward medical services
In addition vaccinations are biased towards the elderly, and (because vaccines haven't been approved, even on an emergency basis, for this population) completely exclude young children. This also biases the figures.
Basically, the media reporting of “contradictory” findings is pretty much completely abuse of statistics rather than actual contradictory findings.
A decent discussion is here: https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-07-27/covid-19-infection...
That said, I don’t think the data from the OP’s CDC article is a case of Simpson’s paradox. The quoted statistic in the CDC article is that 74% of infected people were vaccinated. I am comparing that to the vaccination rate in MA of 69% (also from the article). The denominator in one stat is a strict subset of the denominator of the second stat. Simpson’s paradox requires disjoint denominators.
So that being the case, I would still like for actual experts to follow up on this data and come to some conclusion.
If less people have covid, less severely, for less time, that is less mutation potential.
Have major mutations been noted after vaccines are administered in the population?
Can you provide a source for this?
To be clear, I’m absolutely not arguing that you’re wrong. What I am saying is that I’ve not seen a source for this oft-repeated assertion, and that the data in the linked article contradicts it - a larger proportion of people in that cohort who were fully vaccinated got COVID than those those who were unvaccinated.
It seems like a glaring omission to me that they didn’t enumerate the number of unvaccinated people who had recovered from previous COVID infections. If that number is substantial it would explain why the proportions are so different from what you might expect.
Which references a cdc documebt
... everyone is missing the horny bear in the room. Bears go to Ptown to have lots of fun which includes lots of sex. News flash, gay men KISS when they have sex. /2”
https://twitter.com/peterstaley/status/1421215604481142785
Why is that not clear to most people opposing vaccination on these grounds, is beyond me.