If transmission between vaccinated people is happening relatively easy, that should totally change the narrative.
- Herd immunity becomes unrealistic.
- My vaccine doesn’t protect you and vice versa. Our own does however protect us very well.
- Vaccine passports are essentially pointless and possibly dangerous if they give a false sense of security. Only asymptomatic, more infectious people will be allowed in.
- The messaging should change towards “take a vaccine to protect yourself and not burden the health service with your own illness.”
I wonder if messaging will change to reflect the new “the science” or if too much political face would be lost at this point?
> Only asymptomatic, more infectious people will be allowed in.
I don't see anything in the study that would indicate that people with the vaccine are more infectious than those without. Rather, the study says they are infectious.
The variable in this study was alpha vs delta variant and the result is that while the vaccine prevented the transmission of alpha variant it does not prevent the transmission of the delta variant.
This study does not address the question of whether those with the vaccine are more or less likely to spread the delta variant than those without the vaccine.
Well it seems like simple logic no? If the vaccine decreases symptoms but not viral load, vaccinated are more likely to transmit it. Right? Maybe I’m being dumb again. Happens. :)
I'm not following the logic. Why would decreased symptoms mean you're more likely to spread? You're thinking that asymptomatic people are more likely to not wear masks/be in more populous places whereas symptomatic people are more likely to quarantine/wear a mask? I could see that line of reasoning, although, as a counterpoint, I understood that the main virality of COVID stems from the long lag between being infectious & symptoms. In other words, basically everyone is asymptomatic for the first 7-10 days that they're infectious anyway.
If the vaccine confers a reduction in symptoms, that's still valuable. The danger of COVID is the sudden spike needed in hospital resources & deaths. Sounds like the vaccine still decreases both, even for delta. Not getting infected at all is a secondary benefit that's a nice to have & important for eradicating the virus totally. I suspect that's a pipe dream at this point & the question is how quickly we can transition it to an endemic disease like the flu.
The paper does not make conclusions about whether the vaccinated are more likely to be asymptomatic - but in case you are interested the results are presented in Table 1.
Of The 69 cases infected, 47 developed symptoms (median 4 days post diagnosis), which is 68% of cases. Viral loads for symptomatic cases was higher (page 11).
Key points: there is not enough information here to draw conclusions about the infectiousness of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated individuals, or about whether vaccinated individuals are more likely to be asymptomatic. This paper does not even try to draw such conclusions.
> vaccinated are more likely to transmit it. Right?
The vaccinated are also less likely to have it in the first place, so no, not right.
There are "similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients" _who have symptoms_ - that's a huge selection bias right there. You can still assume that there are very different rates at which vaccinated and unvaccinated are prone to getting infected in the first place, then developing symptoms.
This conclusion is also wrong: "My vaccine doesn’t protect you and vice versa." - yet more simplistic, all or nothing, black or white thinking. Delta means that my vaccination doesn't protect you _as much as it did_ but it is incorrect to leap to "it doesn't protect you at all"
It's clear that at present, vaccination alone is not the answer, but it would be very wrong to disparage vaccination, e.g. to say that "vaccination is not the answer" - vaccination is part of the answer, likely the largest part.
I agree overall and think total vaccination would end the crisis given that it reduces mutations. But at least one health agency has put the protection of the mRNA vaccines for delta as low as ~40% and if the first 10 days everyone is infectious while the second 10 days the unvaccinated are in bed/quarantine then it sounds like the transmission rate could be about the same for both groups.
> But at least one health agency has put the protection of the mRNA vaccines for delta as low as ~40%
> then it sounds like the transmission rate could be about the same for both groups.
Assuming those numbers, then transmission would be 40% lower in the vaccinated group? The 40% who get protected, do not then transmit. That's not "about the same".
And the other ~60% have behavior changes like twice the time not in quarantine, so no real difference.
I think delta is probably at this reproductive optimum and that makes it very hard for a variant that isn't successful in both vaccinated and unvaccinated to survive in a place where vaccination is ~50% that adapts behaviors based on monitoring delta.
This study implies R>1 for consistent transmission of specific strain in vaccinated staff in Vietnam. The Massachusetts study is consistent with the in vivo R being similar between vaccinated and unvaccinated, so nothing supports drawing the conclusion that lower risk of infection dominates the results AFA safety for other people.
It is perfectly rational for vaccinated people to take more risks around infection since the infection is less likely and lower risk to the vaccinated. I think we shouldn't pretend there is adequate evidence that we provide any form of herd immunity to the unvaccinated as far as we know they are just as unsafe among us as among themselves.
That could be a valid concern, same way as evolutionary pressure pushes viruses to minimize symptoms (symptoms that are not it's spreading mechanism).
But the special party trick of Sars-Cov-2 has always been spreading before symptoms even appear (it just wasn't very good at spreading, before delta) which amongst other things ruins that evolutionary pressure effect.
The simplest explanation, and one that no data I've seen yet clearly contradicts, is that vaccines (most vaccines?) work just as well against delta than against its cousins. Even before delta, we knew that vaccinated could become infected. It just happened to be quite unlikely that they pass it on. Delta greatly increases the odds that you catch it when breathing air that contains a given viral load (earlier variants were so bad at making landfall that aerial spread was ruled out for months, based on the observed spread speed that was much lower than you'd expect for aerial) and now apparently you can have spread even in vaccinated communities. But their immune systems know how to deal with it, they'll clean it out faster than toddlers. Just not fast enough for spread to be completely ruled out.
Yes, this means herd immunity is off the table (that has been obvious for months). The unvaccinated will immunize the other way (or die trying). We likely won't need regular booster shots, the virus takes care of reminding our immune systems of it's existence. Yes, many dice will be rolled for creating an immune escape variant. We should definitely have mRNA vaccine manufacturing capacities on standby, it might become an arms race treadmill.
To clarify, I didn't assume anything. The article says that breakthrough case were a given, but we were led to believe otherwise.
My point is, the jabbed can carry and spread the virus. Less effectively perhaps, but none the less a carrier with no symptoms is to some extent more dangerous as they are unaware of their status and can likely think they're safe to in contact with more ppl.
The idea that the unjabbed are only getting infected from the unjabbed simply isn't accurate. But that's the gist of the article - and the ongoing rub of many - there's simply too many mixed signals and otherwise lazy reporting and "leadership". People are not responding for a reason, actually plenty of good reasons. To ignore that is text book insanity.
The messaging early in the pandemic seemed less about “not burden the health service with your own illness” directly, and more the indirect impact that burden created in servicing non-covid patients. I don’t think that changes much, does it? Still seems like we need to make sure people need to not be overwhelming hospitals. Either via vaccination or other means.
No, "flatten the curve" was the early goal, but I don't remember any mention of that helping non-corona cases.
In fact, most hospital elective surgeries were cancelled (and the nurses laid off), so I'm not sure where you got your ideas from. You might want to post a link.
This appears to the direction we're headed - a similar steady state as the flu (which a few people hypothesized early on in the pandemic).
- Covid won't go away, we'll just keep having waves move through the population
- A vaccine mostly protects the person who receives it; it likely makes them less contagious, but not enough to stop them from infecting others
- The vaccines work very well in making the disease less severe; again, similar to the flu - sick enough to stay home, but rarely so severe you need to be hospitalized
- Eventually you just live with it. We'll probably have new outbreaks of different variants (just like we have more severe flu seasons)
I'm somewhat optimistic because the vaccines are probably good enough to bring death rates to an acceptable level, we have multiple vaccines, that take different approaches, and covid has hopefully already made all the easy wins for transmission, so it won't get that much more contagious. My fear is that all these countermeasures select for something actually scary, though there's no reason to think it will get significantly more deadly.
And then you have folks like Lamar Jackson who has been infected with the virus already and has a mild experience with delta just like those with the vaccine (similar to the outcome of the flu shot)
Im watching intently as so far the data shows vaccine offers superb reduction in symptoms, while previous natural infection also reduces symptoms and duration (making me wonder what a vaccine passport is really accomplishing)
In my country the passport is issued to those who were previously infected (and diagnosed with an official test) as well, so it shows you are "known to have some level of immunity". I feel that's fair as it applies to both people who were infected and those who were vaccinated.
Where it gets confusing though is it's also issued to people who had a recent PCR negative test (last 48 hours), so those people are "known unlikely to be infectious", but that doesn't apply to the previous groups, and the statement of the previous groups doesn't apply to this group.
I don’t understand the downvotes. Are people really in denial about the fact that covid is endemic and will be with all of us for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives, just like the flu?
We already had our technological miracle (the vaccine) but we’re too stupid as a group to make it work. Barring a sociological miracle, nothing is going to change.
Your interpretation is almost completely wrong, and is a good example of why we layfolk should leave the explaining to experts.
For example, you said "my vaccine doesn't protect you and vice-versa." That is entirely unsupported by this paper which merely says "transmission between vaccinated people is possible." You have interpreted this fact well beyond any actual evidence. For example, the proposition "the vaccine makes it hard to transmit, and makes cases very mild" would be entirely consistent with this study, and is completely in opposition to your incorrect conclusion.
So far, all evidence points to the vaccines working exactly as well as anticipated.
What hypothetical? The comment clearly thinks that the study should be read in the light they present. They even wonder if the narrative will change based on the new science - not whetheriit would change.
> Your interpretation is almost completely wrong, and is a good example of why we layfolk should leave the explaining to experts.
"Don't think too hard, let us, the self appointed exports, do the thinking for you"
I don't believe the original comment had the same direction you think it did. Your response seems to be more saving face of "how not to interpret something". Whereas the parent comment is proposing different messaging if certain things are found to be true with more studying.
Appeal to authority isn't a valid argument and I'm not sure why you think it would be.
>So far, all evidence points to the vaccines working exactly as well as anticipated.
show me where that meager "49% lower risk" was anticipated
- not only it wasn't anticipated, it is even not being paid attention to right now judging by all those vaccine mandates which are completely pointless giving such a low vaccine efficacy:
"Reaching herd immunity is “not a possibility” with the current Delta variant, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said.
Giving evidence to MPs on Tuesday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was “mythical”.
“The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population,” he told the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on coronavirus.
“The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who’s still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus … and we don’t have anything that will [completely] stop that transmission.”
...
Data from a recent React study conducted by Imperial College London suggests that fully vaccinated people aged 18 to 64 have about a 49% lower risk of being infected compared with unvaccinated people. The findings also indicated that fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%)."
--------- [end of quote] ------
The data and studies from Israel, Singapore, UK as well as my own DIY arithmetic on public MA data (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068532) point to the same - third to half chances for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. CDC data on Provincetown outbreak is also pretty clear, though not for everybody :)
"The higher the amount of coronavirus in the nose and throat, the more likely the patient will infect others. In one Wisconsin county, after Delta became predominant, researchers analyzed viral loads on nose-and-throat swab samples obtained when patients were first diagnosed. They found similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients, with levels often high enough to allow shedding of infectious virus. "
For starters, the vaccines were anticipated to create herd immunity. The fact that we are debating about the conclusion of a study showing multiple vaccinated healthcare workers infecting themselves shows we are pretty far away from what was anticipated or promoted in any shape or form.
Multiple vaccinated people infected, 250x viral load! All vaccinated members sharing the same office were infected, 53 cases in a 900 employee hospital, luckily caught early.
The "experts" say the you need to go back to social distancing, that's how good the vaccine is.
Is working in a hospital, in tight, prolonged, everyday contact with sick covid patients to be considered a normal circumstance from which to draw any conclusion about the effectiveness of what has been promoted?
Considering many other workplaces are similarly space constrained, people often can be contagious before showing symptoms and the extreme transmissibility and pace of the delta variant? Yes, it may be a closer analog than you seem to think, imho.
I don't know. Intuitively a place designed to attract sick people must be qualitatively and quantitatively different. I mean, it's literally full of severe covid patients and your job is literally to care for them. I mean, I'm not an expert, but if if that's indeed similar to the average workplace environment then I need some extraordinary evidence, because this does seem to me as an extraordinary claim
It's an infectious disease hospital. Since it's their job and I assume they don't have a breakout every other day for the other diseases, they may be capable of doing the job they did so far. Which is to say, it is quite extraordinary it happened in there and that it happened to fully vaccinated professionals.
You average meat packing crew will be much less careful about things and have worse equipment and work conditions.
Note there was a doctor 0! It's not like they all got it from patients they had there. All the people in his office, all vaccinated, got infected. Why do you assume they were behaving differently than you would behave in your IT job? If anything, they might have been more careful.
Vaccine help reduce the R0, but if they are not effective enough to reduce transmission so that R0 become < 1, the epidemic go on and almost everyone will still get infected (albeit more slowly).
Let's take an original R0 of 10 to make the number round : meaning that one person would normally transmit to 10 other people.
Let's say they vaccine are 90% effective at reducing transmission (1 vaccinated person transmit it to only one whereas it would have transmitted it to 10 if non-vaccinated).
It mean that even if you have 100% vaccinated population one person will still transmit to one other people and the epidemic can go on (combined R0 of 1).
We are dangerously close to the threshold where vaccine alone won't suffice to stop the epidemic. And the more active cases you currently have, the more chance there are for vaccine resistant mutation, or higher transmissible mutation to occur.
Humanity is currently running on luck, we are one "Antibody-dependent enhancement" mutation away from turning the vaccine from our greatest weapon to our greatest weakness, and by vaccinating while not taking the necessary measures to reduce the number of active cases we are pressure selecting for it to happen.
> Vaccine passports are essentially pointless and possibly dangerous if they give a false sense of security. Only asymptomatic, more infectious people will be allowed in.
Counterargument; mixing of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations is precisely what gives the "training" to the virus variants. Herd immunity works if the duration of the mixture of these herds is minimized. You can achieve that with distance or high and fast vaccine rollout, neither of which happened.
The mistake was opening up too much, too soon, and mixing up too much. We've been focusing on protection "right now" at the expense of protection over time.
I think focusing on personal protection is also a non-scaling approach; I get that it might motivate the rollout but ultimately personal immunity, unless it comes from having survived the real deal, is also a perishable state both from slow decay of vaccine immunity and constant training of variants perspective.
None of these countermeasures make popular policies, so it is less about saving face and more about optimizing re-electibility.
If injury in a car accident where people are wearing seatbelts is relatively likely, that should totally change the narrative:
- expecting seatbelts to prevent all traffic injuries becomes unrealistic (it never was but that doesn’t mean it’s useless - the herd immunity war was lost the moment vaccines became political, which was about 20 years ago)
- My seatbelt won’t protect you from injury in the event of a crash, and vice versa (don’t confuse possibility with likelihood. Vaccines are still reducing severity and likely reducing the amount of virus that’s being shed e.g. through coughing. Seatbelts also protect other occupants from yourself becoming a projectile, but like vaccines, they don’t fully solve the problem)
- seatbelt mandates to enter public roads are essentially pointless and possibly dangerous if they give a false sense of security. Only foolhardy, risk-taking seatbelt-wearing drivers will be on the road. (Passports are a tool to create a mandate in the absence of a mandate. If everyone was vaccinated delta wouldn’t have happened at all. In the absence of that, reducing the load on the hospital system is well worth the cost of the passport system)
- The messaging should change to “wear a seatbelt to protect yourself and not burden the health service with your own injuries” (sure, but that’s kind of what the message already is and always has been)
I wonder if the poster will understand the analogy that’s being made, or if too much face would be lost at this point?
yikes! this is the first I'm reading that Pfizer seems (statistically) significantly inferior to Moderna in efficacy against Delta. seems Moderna has 60% better protection against infection, and 2x better against hospitalization (though ICU admission and deaths are at par between them.)
having gotten Pfizer, I'm getting a little nervous.
having gotten Pfizer, I'm getting a little nervous.
As someone that got my 2nd Pfizer dose at the end of February (coming on 6 mo. when efficacy might? drop off some) I'm not saying that I did go get a first round Moderna shot[1], but I'm not saying I didn't either.
1. If doses in my area of the country weren't going un-used and spoiling, and I wasn't in a household with people that aren't eligible, I never would have done something I haven't said I've done.
I don't think you trying to take extra steps to protect yourself should be be looked down on by either side here. It your choice and right to do that especially if you checked that vaccines were being wasted in your area.
I'm not sure how to read the linked abstract, maybe someone with more knowledge could chime in.
The information I'm missing is what the absolute efficacy of those vaccines is against Delta.
If the risk of being hospitalized while vaccinated with Moderna is "very, very low", then the risk of hospitalization while vaccinated with Pfizer, even if twice as high, would still be pretty low.
I think this kind of actually useful info would be very useful in our current climate, where many people argue against vaccination. "Look, Pfizer is twice as bad as the other! Who knows what the other does? Better not get vaccinated at all!".
Right, I should have clarified that both Pfizer and Moderna are quite effective at preventing hospitalization, 85% vs. 91% respectively. But because of base rate Moderna ends up being two-fold more effective.
I'm not in the field, but on page 13 you can see that there's a considerable difference in effectiveness against infection, but not against hospitalization (at least not yet). It's suggested that the recent changes in effectiveness are due to the Delta variant becoming prevalent.
On page 15 there's a table with actual numbers from Minnesota. Drawing from similarly-sized pools of otherwise similar cohorts, they counted outcomes. Look at the bottom half, which covers people (in the vaccinated cohorts) who are considered "fully vaccinated" (14+ days since their second dose). So yeah, breakthroughs with Pfizer might be roughly twice as high, but "hospitalization or worse" is still 1/8th as likely as unvaccinated, and when you're looking at ICU admissions, Pfizer has had 2 and Moderna 1, so... small numbers make it hard to really compare.
But look at that bottom row. 0 deaths for anybody vaccinated.
that is surprising, I'm not sure what to make of it. maybe the "noisiness" of antibodies matters - the response they elicit in the immune system upon binding something, not simply how many of them are binding.
I wish the immune system came with better documentation.
While I’m not an expert and I wouldn't be too surprised to find something different, I would expect exactly that but that neutralizing antibody levels would be inversely correlated with probability of getting a detectable infection at all. Once you limit the universe to detected cases, though, I don't think the absence of relationship reported here is surprising.
Local outbreaks here among vaccinated family members and extended family members supports the emerging data that Delta spreads easily via vaccinated folks. The CDC recommendation for indoor mask wearing is motivated by data from Israel that was derived from testing vaccinated people without symptoms.
Delta is damn good at spreading, it seems. This sucks.
I remember reading that the ideal vaccine location for respiratory illness would be a nasal and lung aerosol so there would be a strong local immune response making it harder for any future infections to replicate effectively. Don’t know if that is still being looked at.
> Vaccines that are injected into arm muscles aren’t likely to be able to protect our nasal passages from marauding SARS-CoV-2 viruses for very long
It might be true, but I would have liked to read more. It's pretty easy to envision a case where that's not true, and the immune system doesn't really care where the vaccine was given.
I still stand by the statement. Three times as contagious sounds significantly worse that the herd immunity achieved with 85-90% vaccination for covid delta vs 93-95% for measles.
A few things that the paper did not mention explicitly, but I think was worth mentioning:
- It was AstraZeneca vaccine for both dose. With 4-5 weeks between doses (as opposed to the recommended 8-12 weeks). We have known now that too early 2nd doses will not be as effective.
- Healthcare workers includes non direct healthcare staffs of the hospital. The majority of the 69 cases was the IT department of the hospital, iirc. Someone was wondering if the healthcares workers might forgot to wear masks or not. Seeing that they are office workers instead of nurses and doctors, it's possible that they didn't. I don't know if they did or not.
> We studied breakthrough infections among healthcare workers of a major infectious diseases hospital in Vietnam
Vaccines greatly reduce your chances of getting infected from a given exposure, but they don't reduce your chances to 0. The more times you are exposed, the more likely you are to eventually get infected.
I assume that workers at a major infectious diseases hospital during an infectious disease pandemic get exposed many more times than a typical member of the general population. (Worse...they are exposed to people who are sick enough to need hospitalization, which probably means that they are dealing with people with higher viral loads than the infected people the general population usually encounters).
This is not COVID specific. There are breakthrough infections for measles and polio, for instance. They are extremely rare in large part because most people are not repeatedly exposed to measles or polio. Measles is ridiculously contagious (9 out of 10 unvaccinated people will get it after just a short exposure to an infected person--R0 for measles is around 12-18), but two doses of measles vaccine are 97% effective so even with it being highly contagious the spread is slow enough in highly vaccinated populations to keep outbreaks small.
Polio's R0 is around 5-7. The first widespread vaccines for polio (the Salk vaccine and then a little later the Sabin vaccine) were around 90% effective. They reduced the number of cases per year in the US by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude within a few years of their introduction.
For comparison the delta variant of COVID has an R0 about the same as that of polio and the mRNA COVID vaccines are at least as effective as the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines were.
>the mRNA COVID vaccines are at least as effective as the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines were.
that is simply not true. The scientific data has been widely available for several weeks at least, yet ultra-zealot covid vaccine pushers are just ignoring it and continue pushing Moderna/etc. stock up together with political establishment.
"the effectiveness of Moderna's vaccine against infection had dropped to 76% in July - when the Delta variant was predominant - from 86% in early 2021. Over the same period, the effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine had fallen to 42% from 76%, researchers said. "
In general your post does the same propaganda trick that many similar posters here and elsewhere do - tightly associate covid vaccines which are failing for delta (nothing exceptional in such situation, happens all the time with flu vaccines) with success of proven vaccines. What is your point? To undermine the people trust in the proven vaccines like measles and polio and even in the general vaccination principle by forcefully pushing failing covid vaccines upon them?
Actually agree with this person here, "only referring to the mRNA vaccines" is quite a thinly veiled promotion. Until we have more concrete evidence, both types of vaccine should be treated equally.
even at the same level of efficiency - which i don't see really, yet lets allow it for the sake of argument - i hope you do understand that the major difference here is that the covid infected vaccinated people do continue to spread the virus like unvaccinated. See my other comment for related links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28152801 .
Germany is following suite with other European countries and stops free testing in October. Why?
Free testing on a massive scale and using masks felt like the fastest road to normality.
1. Protect children
Even though I am vaccinated i can still catch and transmit the Rona. That chance is even higher as i am potentially asymptomatic. Living together and having often contact with children who cannot be vaccinated makes that a huge problem. I do not want to expose the little ones to serious long term health issues.
2. Go to events / economy
In that regard, i felt safe to go to events or indoor activities where I knew everybody was tested negative. Now we can have super spreader events again. So I will avoid indoors.
3. Stop mutations
Until we have an anti viral that is effective once you are sick, the overarching goal should still be to have as few infected as possible. The more people have it, the higher the chance of further mutations. The kicker is that now when a mutation occurs in a vaccinated person it will favor a variation that properly has immune escape rendering the vaccine efforts useless.
If the government thinks it is an effective instrument to convince anti vaxxers to get a shot (which I doubt) make only them pay for tests.
If the arguments would have been that the tests themselves have become less effective to detect the Delta strain or that too many test centers are scammers, i could totally get behind a discussion. But then the solutions would be much different and not "stop free testing".
Our short sighted government has bet everything on the vaccines to be the ultimate answer to the pandemic. Watch them scramble in 7 month when a omega variant occurs that hits like a hammer and circumvents the immune response of the vaccinated.
Then we will again hear the all to familiar phrases of "who could have seen that? No one predicted that!" We get full lockdowns as there have been no further improvements in the public health departments, IT infrastructure or new concepts to make class rooms safe. In the end our children, teens and 20 somethings will suffer under the measures the most by robbing them of another year of what should have been carefree joyful youth.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] thread- Herd immunity becomes unrealistic.
- My vaccine doesn’t protect you and vice versa. Our own does however protect us very well.
- Vaccine passports are essentially pointless and possibly dangerous if they give a false sense of security. Only asymptomatic, more infectious people will be allowed in.
- The messaging should change towards “take a vaccine to protect yourself and not burden the health service with your own illness.”
I wonder if messaging will change to reflect the new “the science” or if too much political face would be lost at this point?
I don't see anything in the study that would indicate that people with the vaccine are more infectious than those without. Rather, the study says they are infectious.
The variable in this study was alpha vs delta variant and the result is that while the vaccine prevented the transmission of alpha variant it does not prevent the transmission of the delta variant.
This study does not address the question of whether those with the vaccine are more or less likely to spread the delta variant than those without the vaccine.
If the vaccine confers a reduction in symptoms, that's still valuable. The danger of COVID is the sudden spike needed in hospital resources & deaths. Sounds like the vaccine still decreases both, even for delta. Not getting infected at all is a secondary benefit that's a nice to have & important for eradicating the virus totally. I suspect that's a pipe dream at this point & the question is how quickly we can transition it to an endemic disease like the flu.
Of The 69 cases infected, 47 developed symptoms (median 4 days post diagnosis), which is 68% of cases. Viral loads for symptomatic cases was higher (page 11).
Key points: there is not enough information here to draw conclusions about the infectiousness of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated individuals, or about whether vaccinated individuals are more likely to be asymptomatic. This paper does not even try to draw such conclusions.
The vaccinated are also less likely to have it in the first place, so no, not right.
There are "similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients" _who have symptoms_ - that's a huge selection bias right there. You can still assume that there are very different rates at which vaccinated and unvaccinated are prone to getting infected in the first place, then developing symptoms.
This conclusion is also wrong: "My vaccine doesn’t protect you and vice versa." - yet more simplistic, all or nothing, black or white thinking. Delta means that my vaccination doesn't protect you _as much as it did_ but it is incorrect to leap to "it doesn't protect you at all"
It's clear that at present, vaccination alone is not the answer, but it would be very wrong to disparage vaccination, e.g. to say that "vaccination is not the answer" - vaccination is part of the answer, likely the largest part.
> then it sounds like the transmission rate could be about the same for both groups.
Assuming those numbers, then transmission would be 40% lower in the vaccinated group? The 40% who get protected, do not then transmit. That's not "about the same".
I think delta is probably at this reproductive optimum and that makes it very hard for a variant that isn't successful in both vaccinated and unvaccinated to survive in a place where vaccination is ~50% that adapts behaviors based on monitoring delta.
I do not think that this has actually been quantified.
It is perfectly rational for vaccinated people to take more risks around infection since the infection is less likely and lower risk to the vaccinated. I think we shouldn't pretend there is adequate evidence that we provide any form of herd immunity to the unvaccinated as far as we know they are just as unsafe among us as among themselves.
But the special party trick of Sars-Cov-2 has always been spreading before symptoms even appear (it just wasn't very good at spreading, before delta) which amongst other things ruins that evolutionary pressure effect.
The simplest explanation, and one that no data I've seen yet clearly contradicts, is that vaccines (most vaccines?) work just as well against delta than against its cousins. Even before delta, we knew that vaccinated could become infected. It just happened to be quite unlikely that they pass it on. Delta greatly increases the odds that you catch it when breathing air that contains a given viral load (earlier variants were so bad at making landfall that aerial spread was ruled out for months, based on the observed spread speed that was much lower than you'd expect for aerial) and now apparently you can have spread even in vaccinated communities. But their immune systems know how to deal with it, they'll clean it out faster than toddlers. Just not fast enough for spread to be completely ruled out.
Yes, this means herd immunity is off the table (that has been obvious for months). The unvaccinated will immunize the other way (or die trying). We likely won't need regular booster shots, the virus takes care of reminding our immune systems of it's existence. Yes, many dice will be rolled for creating an immune escape variant. We should definitely have mRNA vaccine manufacturing capacities on standby, it might become an arms race treadmill.
My point is, the jabbed can carry and spread the virus. Less effectively perhaps, but none the less a carrier with no symptoms is to some extent more dangerous as they are unaware of their status and can likely think they're safe to in contact with more ppl.
The idea that the unjabbed are only getting infected from the unjabbed simply isn't accurate. But that's the gist of the article - and the ongoing rub of many - there's simply too many mixed signals and otherwise lazy reporting and "leadership". People are not responding for a reason, actually plenty of good reasons. To ignore that is text book insanity.
In fact, most hospital elective surgeries were cancelled (and the nurses laid off), so I'm not sure where you got your ideas from. You might want to post a link.
- Covid won't go away, we'll just keep having waves move through the population
- A vaccine mostly protects the person who receives it; it likely makes them less contagious, but not enough to stop them from infecting others
- The vaccines work very well in making the disease less severe; again, similar to the flu - sick enough to stay home, but rarely so severe you need to be hospitalized
- Eventually you just live with it. We'll probably have new outbreaks of different variants (just like we have more severe flu seasons)
Im watching intently as so far the data shows vaccine offers superb reduction in symptoms, while previous natural infection also reduces symptoms and duration (making me wonder what a vaccine passport is really accomplishing)
Where it gets confusing though is it's also issued to people who had a recent PCR negative test (last 48 hours), so those people are "known unlikely to be infectious", but that doesn't apply to the previous groups, and the statement of the previous groups doesn't apply to this group.
We already had our technological miracle (the vaccine) but we’re too stupid as a group to make it work. Barring a sociological miracle, nothing is going to change.
For example, you said "my vaccine doesn't protect you and vice-versa." That is entirely unsupported by this paper which merely says "transmission between vaccinated people is possible." You have interpreted this fact well beyond any actual evidence. For example, the proposition "the vaccine makes it hard to transmit, and makes cases very mild" would be entirely consistent with this study, and is completely in opposition to your incorrect conclusion.
So far, all evidence points to the vaccines working exactly as well as anticipated.
"Don't think too hard, let us, the self appointed exports, do the thinking for you"
I don't believe the original comment had the same direction you think it did. Your response seems to be more saving face of "how not to interpret something". Whereas the parent comment is proposing different messaging if certain things are found to be true with more studying.
Appeal to authority isn't a valid argument and I'm not sure why you think it would be.
show me where that meager "49% lower risk" was anticipated - not only it wasn't anticipated, it is even not being paid attention to right now judging by all those vaccine mandates which are completely pointless giving such a low vaccine efficacy:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/10/delta-variant-...
"Reaching herd immunity is “not a possibility” with the current Delta variant, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said.
Giving evidence to MPs on Tuesday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was “mythical”.
“The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population,” he told the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on coronavirus.
“The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who’s still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus … and we don’t have anything that will [completely] stop that transmission.”
...
Data from a recent React study conducted by Imperial College London suggests that fully vaccinated people aged 18 to 64 have about a 49% lower risk of being infected compared with unvaccinated people. The findings also indicated that fully vaccinated people were about half as likely to test positive after coming into contact with someone who had Covid (3.84%, down from 7.23%)."
--------- [end of quote] ------
The data and studies from Israel, Singapore, UK as well as my own DIY arithmetic on public MA data (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068532) point to the same - third to half chances for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. CDC data on Provincetown outbreak is also pretty clear, though not for everybody :)
And once infected vaccinated people are spreading the same way as unvaccinated https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
"The higher the amount of coronavirus in the nose and throat, the more likely the patient will infect others. In one Wisconsin county, after Delta became predominant, researchers analyzed viral loads on nose-and-throat swab samples obtained when patients were first diagnosed. They found similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients, with levels often high enough to allow shedding of infectious virus. "
Multiple vaccinated people infected, 250x viral load! All vaccinated members sharing the same office were infected, 53 cases in a 900 employee hospital, luckily caught early.
The "experts" say the you need to go back to social distancing, that's how good the vaccine is.
You average meat packing crew will be much less careful about things and have worse equipment and work conditions.
Note there was a doctor 0! It's not like they all got it from patients they had there. All the people in his office, all vaccinated, got infected. Why do you assume they were behaving differently than you would behave in your IT job? If anything, they might have been more careful.
Vaccine help reduce the R0, but if they are not effective enough to reduce transmission so that R0 become < 1, the epidemic go on and almost everyone will still get infected (albeit more slowly).
Let's take an original R0 of 10 to make the number round : meaning that one person would normally transmit to 10 other people.
Let's say they vaccine are 90% effective at reducing transmission (1 vaccinated person transmit it to only one whereas it would have transmitted it to 10 if non-vaccinated).
It mean that even if you have 100% vaccinated population one person will still transmit to one other people and the epidemic can go on (combined R0 of 1).
We are dangerously close to the threshold where vaccine alone won't suffice to stop the epidemic. And the more active cases you currently have, the more chance there are for vaccine resistant mutation, or higher transmissible mutation to occur.
Humanity is currently running on luck, we are one "Antibody-dependent enhancement" mutation away from turning the vaccine from our greatest weapon to our greatest weakness, and by vaccinating while not taking the necessary measures to reduce the number of active cases we are pressure selecting for it to happen.
Counterargument; mixing of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations is precisely what gives the "training" to the virus variants. Herd immunity works if the duration of the mixture of these herds is minimized. You can achieve that with distance or high and fast vaccine rollout, neither of which happened.
The mistake was opening up too much, too soon, and mixing up too much. We've been focusing on protection "right now" at the expense of protection over time.
I think focusing on personal protection is also a non-scaling approach; I get that it might motivate the rollout but ultimately personal immunity, unless it comes from having survived the real deal, is also a perishable state both from slow decay of vaccine immunity and constant training of variants perspective.
None of these countermeasures make popular policies, so it is less about saving face and more about optimizing re-electibility.
- expecting seatbelts to prevent all traffic injuries becomes unrealistic (it never was but that doesn’t mean it’s useless - the herd immunity war was lost the moment vaccines became political, which was about 20 years ago)
- My seatbelt won’t protect you from injury in the event of a crash, and vice versa (don’t confuse possibility with likelihood. Vaccines are still reducing severity and likely reducing the amount of virus that’s being shed e.g. through coughing. Seatbelts also protect other occupants from yourself becoming a projectile, but like vaccines, they don’t fully solve the problem)
- seatbelt mandates to enter public roads are essentially pointless and possibly dangerous if they give a false sense of security. Only foolhardy, risk-taking seatbelt-wearing drivers will be on the road. (Passports are a tool to create a mandate in the absence of a mandate. If everyone was vaccinated delta wouldn’t have happened at all. In the absence of that, reducing the load on the hospital system is well worth the cost of the passport system)
- The messaging should change to “wear a seatbelt to protect yourself and not burden the health service with your own injuries” (sure, but that’s kind of what the message already is and always has been)
I wonder if the poster will understand the analogy that’s being made, or if too much face would be lost at this point?
having gotten Pfizer, I'm getting a little nervous.
As someone that got my 2nd Pfizer dose at the end of February (coming on 6 mo. when efficacy might? drop off some) I'm not saying that I did go get a first round Moderna shot[1], but I'm not saying I didn't either.
1. If doses in my area of the country weren't going un-used and spoiling, and I wasn't in a household with people that aren't eligible, I never would have done something I haven't said I've done.
The information I'm missing is what the absolute efficacy of those vaccines is against Delta.
If the risk of being hospitalized while vaccinated with Moderna is "very, very low", then the risk of hospitalization while vaccinated with Pfizer, even if twice as high, would still be pretty low.
I think this kind of actually useful info would be very useful in our current climate, where many people argue against vaccination. "Look, Pfizer is twice as bad as the other! Who knows what the other does? Better not get vaccinated at all!".
I'm not in the field, but on page 13 you can see that there's a considerable difference in effectiveness against infection, but not against hospitalization (at least not yet). It's suggested that the recent changes in effectiveness are due to the Delta variant becoming prevalent.
On page 15 there's a table with actual numbers from Minnesota. Drawing from similarly-sized pools of otherwise similar cohorts, they counted outcomes. Look at the bottom half, which covers people (in the vaccinated cohorts) who are considered "fully vaccinated" (14+ days since their second dose). So yeah, breakthroughs with Pfizer might be roughly twice as high, but "hospitalization or worse" is still 1/8th as likely as unvaccinated, and when you're looking at ICU admissions, Pfizer has had 2 and Moderna 1, so... small numbers make it hard to really compare.
But look at that bottom row. 0 deaths for anybody vaccinated.
Not what you would expect is it?
I wish the immune system came with better documentation.
Delta is damn good at spreading, it seems. This sucks.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/scientists-debate-potent...
It leads with this:
> Vaccines that are injected into arm muscles aren’t likely to be able to protect our nasal passages from marauding SARS-CoV-2 viruses for very long
It might be true, but I would have liked to read more. It's pretty easy to envision a case where that's not true, and the immune system doesn't really care where the vaccine was given.
It does not appear to be as good at killing, though. Which is hopeful.
Measles is 3x (300%) more infectious than delta, even if you use the conservative values from Wikipedia
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57431420
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number#cite...
- It was AstraZeneca vaccine for both dose. With 4-5 weeks between doses (as opposed to the recommended 8-12 weeks). We have known now that too early 2nd doses will not be as effective.
- Healthcare workers includes non direct healthcare staffs of the hospital. The majority of the 69 cases was the IT department of the hospital, iirc. Someone was wondering if the healthcares workers might forgot to wear masks or not. Seeing that they are office workers instead of nurses and doctors, it's possible that they didn't. I don't know if they did or not.
Vaccines greatly reduce your chances of getting infected from a given exposure, but they don't reduce your chances to 0. The more times you are exposed, the more likely you are to eventually get infected.
I assume that workers at a major infectious diseases hospital during an infectious disease pandemic get exposed many more times than a typical member of the general population. (Worse...they are exposed to people who are sick enough to need hospitalization, which probably means that they are dealing with people with higher viral loads than the infected people the general population usually encounters).
This is not COVID specific. There are breakthrough infections for measles and polio, for instance. They are extremely rare in large part because most people are not repeatedly exposed to measles or polio. Measles is ridiculously contagious (9 out of 10 unvaccinated people will get it after just a short exposure to an infected person--R0 for measles is around 12-18), but two doses of measles vaccine are 97% effective so even with it being highly contagious the spread is slow enough in highly vaccinated populations to keep outbreaks small.
Polio's R0 is around 5-7. The first widespread vaccines for polio (the Salk vaccine and then a little later the Sabin vaccine) were around 90% effective. They reduced the number of cases per year in the US by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude within a few years of their introduction.
For comparison the delta variant of COVID has an R0 about the same as that of polio and the mRNA COVID vaccines are at least as effective as the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines were.
that is simply not true. The scientific data has been widely available for several weeks at least, yet ultra-zealot covid vaccine pushers are just ignoring it and continue pushing Moderna/etc. stock up together with political establishment.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
"the effectiveness of Moderna's vaccine against infection had dropped to 76% in July - when the Delta variant was predominant - from 86% in early 2021. Over the same period, the effectiveness of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine had fallen to 42% from 76%, researchers said. "
In general your post does the same propaganda trick that many similar posters here and elsewhere do - tightly associate covid vaccines which are failing for delta (nothing exceptional in such situation, happens all the time with flu vaccines) with success of proven vaccines. What is your point? To undermine the people trust in the proven vaccines like measles and polio and even in the general vaccination principle by forcefully pushing failing covid vaccines upon them?
The Salk polio vaccine ranged from 60% to 90+% effective depending on which type of polio virus you were dealing with.
[1] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/heres-how-well-covid-...
Free testing on a massive scale and using masks felt like the fastest road to normality.
1. Protect children
Even though I am vaccinated i can still catch and transmit the Rona. That chance is even higher as i am potentially asymptomatic. Living together and having often contact with children who cannot be vaccinated makes that a huge problem. I do not want to expose the little ones to serious long term health issues.
2. Go to events / economy
In that regard, i felt safe to go to events or indoor activities where I knew everybody was tested negative. Now we can have super spreader events again. So I will avoid indoors.
3. Stop mutations
Until we have an anti viral that is effective once you are sick, the overarching goal should still be to have as few infected as possible. The more people have it, the higher the chance of further mutations. The kicker is that now when a mutation occurs in a vaccinated person it will favor a variation that properly has immune escape rendering the vaccine efforts useless.
If the government thinks it is an effective instrument to convince anti vaxxers to get a shot (which I doubt) make only them pay for tests.
If the arguments would have been that the tests themselves have become less effective to detect the Delta strain or that too many test centers are scammers, i could totally get behind a discussion. But then the solutions would be much different and not "stop free testing".
Our short sighted government has bet everything on the vaccines to be the ultimate answer to the pandemic. Watch them scramble in 7 month when a omega variant occurs that hits like a hammer and circumvents the immune response of the vaccinated.
Then we will again hear the all to familiar phrases of "who could have seen that? No one predicted that!" We get full lockdowns as there have been no further improvements in the public health departments, IT infrastructure or new concepts to make class rooms safe. In the end our children, teens and 20 somethings will suffer under the measures the most by robbing them of another year of what should have been carefree joyful youth.