From my own experience, I see that vaccinated people are less fearful of mixing with large groups of people. That's one way the vaccinated can be more easily infected.
It's not a physiological effect but I think it's probably the crux of the whole issue here.
Behaviour-wise this is definitely true - not for everyone, but many. But I don't think it wouldn't matter for the comparison because they're looking at rates of serious illness, rather than absolute number of people catching it.
Saying that, if seriousness of disease is related to initial exposure amount, perhaps being vaxxed and overly brave could mean you get a higher initial dose?
Interesting. It seems that this was actually a concern and considered during initial development of COVID vaccines. It seems it was considered not likely to happen but there is this interesting part here from 2019 that caught my attention:
"Consensus summary report for CEPI/BC March 12–13, 2020 meeting: Assessment of risk of disease enhancement with COVID-19 vaccines"
"A syndrome of “disease enhancement” has been reported in the past for a few viral vaccines where those immunized suffered increased severity or death when they later encountered the virus or were found to have an increased frequency of infection. Animal models allowed scientists to determine the underlying mechanism for the former in the case of Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine and have been utilized to design and screen new RSV vaccine candidates. Because some Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and SARS-CoV-1 vaccines have shown evidence of disease enhancement in some animal models, this is a particular concern for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.
To address this challenge, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the Brighton Collaboration (BC) Safety Platform for Emergency vACcines (SPEAC) convened a scientific working meeting on March 12 and 13, 2020 of experts in the field of vaccine immunology and coronaviruses to consider what vaccine designs could reduce safety concerns and how animal models and immunological assessments in early clinical trials can help to assess the risk. This report summarizes the evidence presented and provides considerations for safety assessment of COVID-19 vaccine candidates in accelerated vaccine development."
Hopefully somebody will be able to comment further. In the meanwhile...I found this a good quality overview of the issue. Reference includes video and transcript for quicker read.
The TL;DR is that is considered unlikely for reasons explained. ( but not completely impossible )
"Do COVID-19 Vaccines Cause Antibody-dependent Enhancement (ADE)?"
Can someone who knows more than me comment on my impression that the likelihood of ADE is much reduced with the very narrow (ie. spike-only) targeting of mRNA vaccines?
No it really wouldn’t, some vaccine candidates including for MERS and SARS have exhibited ADE (a phenomenon that isn’t well understood to begin with) in some animal models. It so far hasn’t been observed in humans with any of the approved COVID vaccines but it doesn’t mean that it can’t happen either with some new mutation or in some rare cases with existing variants.
In general if you Google this without a pretty in depth understanding of biology and immunology you’ll go down a rabbit hole that would just reinforce your current position.
Asking a question shouldn’t be downvoted and even if you haven’t you shouldn’t excuse this behavior.
It's often really tough to make the call on whether someone is genuinely asking and when they're seeding doubt (people going back and forth on a topic makes something seem under debate) or even plain trolling and trying to waste other's time (since it's so much quicker to ask the question than to adequately answer it). This particular case is a pretty plain question, I'm more speaking of the general case.
What might also be worth to realize that the illusory truth effect is a thing, i.e. "the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure." "[A 2015] study suggested that the truth effect can influence participants who actually knew the correct answer to begin with, but who were swayed to believe otherwise through the repetition of a falsehood." (From Wikipedia.) I can understand why one might choose to downvote such a "genuine" question when it's easy to find that the answer is "no" (it's mentioned on the COVID-19 misinformation Wikipedia page).
>the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure.
Like when someone say "vaccines are safe and effective", "vaccines are safe and effective", repeatedly, when the statement itself is very wrong because of the generalisation of "vaccines"...
Anything they're likely to get in a rich country will be safe and effective. Can't speak for places like Egypt of course, but you make it sound as if there is real risk involved for people on HN which there generally is not.
Some vaccine candidates can do this, but it would have been caught early on as it's one of the things researchers will look out for.
There are some citations here[1] when it comes to this phenomenon and COVID vaccines. It hasn't been observed in clinical trials, nor after mass inoculations.
Its called ADE and if Vaccine generated anti-bodies are not sterilising (as current COVID vaccines are), then the antibodies with the bonded virus, can take the virus to places that otherwise would be off limits to it, making it much more lethal..
i'm amazed at the number of people still believing high vaccination rates will get us rid of the covid, despite all the evidences of the previous year pointing in the opposite directions (people getting infected multiple times in a short period, variants mutating the spike protein a lot, and more recently vaccinated people still proven to be both carrier and transmitter of the virus). The final nail in the coffin being country-sized experiments like israel, showing no sign of any kind of victory over the epidemic.
What surprise me most is the slow rate at which government adjust their strategy.. As an example, my country (france) still is deep in its "vaccine pass" controversial measure, splitting the country in half, and the government seems to show no sign of hesitation or even doubts whether it really is the best thing to do... They're running this strategy based on 6-months old assertions, and half the population doesn't seem to notice it.
> That means only 58% of Israel's total citizenry is fully vaccinated. Experts say that's not nearly high enough.
58% isn't that much higher than most other countries. France actually has a higher vaccination rate at 61%! So I'm not sure what you think the "country-sized experiment" is.
that's a very different take on the situation than what israel experts were saying just a few months ago. They reopened everything thanking the vaccine for that, and being happy of being the first country to heavily bet on mass vaccination.
(note that the country is closed to people who don't have a pass, and people have to quarantine when they arrive).
It looks a bit like they're changing the narrative now that the next wave is coming, saying vaccination rates aren't high enough after all (i'm curious to see one expert provide a definitive number on the "good enough" threshold, based on models or anything else, but maybe 100% it is ?)
I don't know who Israel experts means. But public health experts in different countries said we wouldn't know until people got vaccinated. Some estimated it could be up to 90% of the population. Governments set lower targets like 70% of adults. But the government targets weren't herd immunity estimates.
Green pass in France is not a health measure but a politics one. They will stop it if they think thats going to prevent macron be re elected and keep it if it will help him be reelected.
There are not one valid health reason to let people not wear a mask if they are vaccinated (if you believe mask works as the governement thinks)
sure, i'm not talking about preventing vulnerable people from getting a serious case. This part seems to be working just fine, even in france. Hospitals aren't saturated anymore (except in some islands were people didn't vaccinate themselves for various reasons).
It seems to me that life could already be "back to normal" here, simply making sure old / obese people get regular shots.
It's the long-term strategy of wanting to get everyone a vaccine, including children who have close to 0 risks, in the hope of getting rid of the virus that i'm talking about.
1. 21.2% of the population (unvaccinated people older than 12) make up 40% of the hospitalizations. It's even more stark when you remove the immune compromised from the statistic.
2. For the delta-variant we need a higher vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. Estimates vary, but most put this around 85%.
3. While vaccinated people still can get sick (and why won't they, the immune system can only start to act after encountering the pathogen), but... the time of being infectious is lower and (see above) hospitalization and death rates are much lower.
Upon (very basic) scrutiny the numbers from Israel point to the high efficiency of the vaccines not the opposite.
> 2. For the delta-variant we need a higher vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. Estimates vary, but most put this around 85%.
That's not how herd immunity works. You don't set a moving goalpost out of nowhere. We should be measuring R instead, and I suspect R is hardly impacted by vaccines at least for the Delta variant.
Yeah. The math is wonky. Vaccinations reduce transmission by about 50%. They don't reach herd immunity even at 100% vaccination, but they do help. Vaccinations + N95 masks + modest social distancing likely would do it.
But we'll probably do vaccinations, wait for more aggressive mutations, add facemasks, wait for more aggressive mutations, and so on, until we have a super-virus.
> The good news is that among Israel's serious infections on Thursday of this week, according to Health Ministry data, the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) was nine times more than the rate among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) was a little more than double the rate among vaccinated people in that age bracket.
Under 60 is not a specific enough age group for comparison of vaccinated vs unvaccinated cases. A 55 year old and a 12 year old have vastly different odds of serious disease, so much so that an unvaccinated 12 year old is less likely to get severe disease than a vaccinated 55 year old.
This easily could be biased by the older end of that range being significantly more vaccinated than the younger end.
If you want to compare vaccinated efficacy, look for 10 year age group comparisons. Anything else is really leaving you wide open to misleading interpretations.
There is a similar story in the UK. This isn't all that surprising for the UK at least (I'm not familiar with how Israel is doing things): "freedom day" was now a month ago so of course more infections will happen.
The questions now are: will we see a variant that can escape the vaccines? Will the vaccines becomes significantly less effective at stopping hospitalisation/death within a few months?
I mean, don't you feel like this at least somewhat changes your conclusion then? Yes, the vaccines are quite effective, but now it means that the unvaccinated are only doubly overrepresented in new cases, which at least changes the calculus in my mind.
The vaccinated folks are mostly old people and people with comorbidities, and the unvaccinated are mostly young and healthy people, so you're not comparing like for like.
I do properly grasp statistics, and your conclusion is unwarranted. If 79% of people are vaccinated, then if hypothetically 79% of the hospitalized people were vaccinated, it would mean the vaccine had absolutely 0% effectiveness.
The fact that only 60% of the hospitalized are vaccinated means the vaccine is more effective than nothing (and the data on death is even better), but as time goes on it becomes clearer the vaccines are not the silver bullet many of us thought they would be.
> If 79% of people are vaccinated, then if hypothetically 79% of the hospitalized people were vaccinated, it would mean the vaccine had absolutely 0% effectiveness.
Incorrect. The vaccinations are targeted at the most vulnerable not distributed uniformly so this is not exactly right.
Just to be clear, I agree with your point that there is a difference in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated population (e.g. average age).
But when you say "targeted" at the most vulnerable, I'm not sure how true that is. There's a pretty big push to get everyone vaccinated, including populations that have been reluctant to get vaccinated until now.
You're misrepresenting the situation. As the article says, only 58% of the population is vaccinated. Only 78.8% of the eligible population is vaccinated.
The vaccinated folks are mostly old people and people with comorbidities, and the unvaccinated are mostly young and healthy people, so you're not comparing like for like.
I will get downvoted... but really, 60% of the hospitalizations come from vaccinated population, does that really count as "incredibly effective"? Is that really what people were hoping for when Pfizer & Moderna announced 94%+ effectiveness?
In addition to the clear example of Simpson’s paradox presented here: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-... , I offer you the following intuition: if only 4 people in Israel were unvaccinated and 2 were in the hospital with 2 vaccinated patients, would you consider the vaccine effective? It’s important to look at the right numbers.
I didn't say that the vaccine isn't effective. I'm saying this is nowhere near "incredibly effective".
The post you cited is helpful. However, it is confusing the definition of efficacy. There were debates on what the efficacy meant when Pfizer and Moderna reported their high numbers. But there was *NO* definition saying that 94% efficacy means 94% of vaccinated people won't get SERIOUSLY sick. Most commonly, it meant either (1) 94% people will have lower chance of getting COVID (i.e. getting tested positive)[1], or (2) 94% people will have a lower chance of getting sick [2].
Now the post you cited essentially says 94% people won't get SERIOUSLY sick. This just proves that neither (1) or (2) above is true.
Did the root comment say this is "INCREDIBLY" effective before Delta? Why is it so hard to understand what I'm trying to convey here? It's not "INCREDIBLY" effective now.
Now waning immunity - did Pfizer or Moderna warn the world about it? Did they warn us about potential variants? Absolutely no, right? They posted the high numbers to pump their stock price. Vaccines are effective to some extent. But those two companies are not credible.
The other important piece of information is that vaccinations were not given out homogeneously.
The older and more vulnerable were vaccinated FIRST and at a higher rate, so seeing more of them hospitalized now 6 months later with a variant is not unexpected.
What it really means, is that those same patients would probably be in the morgue, not the hospital if it wasn't for the vaccine.
Pro-vaxxer will not answer your original question. The fact is it is not incredibly effective now as Pfizer and Moderna effectiveness have drop to 70%+ and 40%+ respectively from their earlier 95%. 60% are hospitalize that means it is severe that warrant hospitalization. If it is incredibly effective, "hospitalization" for vaccinated should be under a few percentage point. Take a look at historical smallpox and polio vaccination. Now that is incredible effective. Vast majority of pro-vaxxer aren't aware of old stats, while predominantly getting over excited by media outlet or their less informed doctors acquintances. To be fair, those vaccines originally targeting earlier variant of Covid. Now you have Delta, likely Delta+ and Lambda or some more deadlier version of variants, the vaccine can only go down in effectiveness in coming 6mths. In fact, you should be hearing people getting those vaccines died due to immunity waning in coming 6mths. Expect booster shots and annual jabs just like flu shots.
“Pro-vaxxed” aka people who believe in science and social responsibility.
Also, the effectiveness is lower against variants like delta, and does naturally decrease over time. If we had higher vaccination rates, the spread of covid would be significantly reduced, and variants wouldn’t be such a large problem.
Also also, MRNA vaccines — EVEN AT 70% — far outperform existing vaccines like the one for seasonal influenza.
Also also also, where the hell are you getting 40% for moderna’s VE? I’d love to see a citation.
Oh, regarding “old stats” like the effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine: Surprise! No controlled studies on its effectiveness. Surprise! It has significantly more risk (both in terms of the danger of the adverse side effects and their incidence).
You're getting down voted because you're falling into a statistical fallacy. For example, If 100% of the population was vaccinated, by definition 100% of those in the hospital would be vaccinated. That gives you no information on the effectiveness of the vaccine itself.
My understanding is that the vaccines are mainly here to avoid you to die or to require severe ventilation and, based on the available studies, they are doing the job.
The hospitalisation rates are way lower than any previous wave but the law of big numbers still apply at some point... And the Delta variant is clearly a game change here.
Finally, Israel is in a peculiar position because they have vaccinated - relatively speaking - quite a while ago so protection migh be indeed waning and the overall % is not that high (pretty surprised tbh).
>Dr Kobi Haviv, medical director of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, stated that the majority of coronavirus patients in an Israeli hospital are fully vaccinated, including those with severe disease.
>Dr Haviv further specified that: “95% of the severe patients are vaccinated,” adding “85-90% of the hospitalizations are in fully vaccinated people” and the hospital is “opening more and more COVID wards.” This has led him to conclude that “the effectiveness of the vaccine is fading out.”
Note that I am not point out the fact that 95% is vaccinated. But that they are still overwhelming the hospitals, so it seems that your point no longer hold.
Also from the same article
> In other words, the TGA never saw or requested the patient data from Pfizer and simply accepted their reporting of their study as true.This means that when the head of the TGA John Skerritt said that “the safety evidence is pretty thorough” on February 6, his words would ring hollow to most Australians who have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the TGA had actually looked at the patient data before granting any such approval. As noted by Doctors for Covid Ethics on its website, it is currently not known whether any of the major government agencies around the globe (FDA, MHRA or EMA) has independently verified, or attempted to verify, Pfizer’s data, before proceeding with provisional/emergency authorisation of Pfizer’s mRNA therapy vaccine.
It is possible indeed that the Pfizer vaccine is not particularly efficient against Delta but, at the same time, Israel is only one country among a growing list of countries facing a new wave of Covid and what we can see over there does not show up (yet?) in other countries such as the UK or France.
Even if Dr Haviv is correct and the protection offered by the Pfizer vaccine is only valid for 7/8 months, many lives have still been saved in the meantime (Israel got almost no cases and deaths in Q2 2021 for example).
I guess more data is required to see how it goes but it is ackowledged that not all the vaccines have lifetime effects and some only work against specific variant (like the flu one).
To finish, I would like to reiterate that the Delta variant is a game changer so a quote from February needs to be taken with a grain of salt because the situation has changed completely since then.
The original standard the CDC decided to use before we had data on any of the vaccines was that 50% protection would be the threshhold for "effective"; although I am not sure what level of infection they were planning on measuring (e.g. the vaccines appear more effective at preventing severe disease than symptomatic, and symptomatic than asymptomatic).
Well you're just making up a scenario with no numbers and then asking what people will consider so it's impossible to answer you in any constructive way.
> So even if 100% vaccination does not stop surges in covid hospitalisations, vaccines won't be considered ineffective, right?
Umm, of course?
If we had a vaccine for e.g. the flu, that cut hospitalizations in half, we would call that effective. Or maybe not - effective here is a very vague word. We'd more correctly say "this vaccine reduces hospitalizations by 50%".
If it were a particularly bad flu season and literally everyone got the flu (as well as everyone getting vaccinated), hospitals would be overwhelmed, because cutting in half isn't enough. But that wouldn't change the base fact - this hypothetical vaccine cut hospitalizations in half.
Why even stop smoking if it does not stop 100% of all cases of cancer?
The more people are vaccinated the less people will become infected and will be spread the virus at any time.
The less people are spreaders the less breakthrough infections can happen. It is a feedback loop and not really hard to understand.
>Why even stop smoking if it does not stop 100% of all cases of cancer?
If the intend to ban smoking in a population was to reduce the incidence of lung cancer, and the incidence does not drop after smoking ban, then ban was useless.
Can we stop calling everything an "fallacy" when you're just trying to say he's wrong?
That aside what you're saying doesn't address the issue at all. You have a clear relation between two groups and an outcome and those relations clearly show that it was a bad choice to pretend we can lockdown until a miracle cure happens.
Let's put it this way, did you expect the outcome to be what it currently is? We have MORE deaths with Covid than we had at the same time last year. Is that what you would have predicted when the great results of the trials were published?
I have track record of making predictions on Metaculus.com . And yeah, the new variants were a suprise. We were expecting sars-cov-2 to evolve slower than influenza. I think this will still hold. But from my experience with generic algorithms I also knew that evolution happens the quickest after some breakthrough, when the new solution is not yet optimal. The issue is that we don't know what optimum looks like for this virus.
Besides that experts were also telling us that immunity from vaccine will likely fade.
>the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) was nine times more than the rate among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and the rate of serious cases among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) was a little more than double the rate among vaccinated people in that age bracket.
The question is: What's the difference between un-/vaccinated people >60? Why aren't they vaccinated? Different opinions? Health-related reasons? Without this information, it's tough to draw conclusions.
Extreme example: Person A with perfect health gets vaccinated. Person B undergoes palliative care and chooses not to get vaccinated. Person B's routine SARS-CoV-2 PCR test is positive and they're therefore classified as a hospitalized/severe case.
It's a miracle that Israel even offers age-stratified hospitalizations data. But it's still not enough.
Do you really think scenarios like this could account for skewing the data by a multiple of 9? Come on.
>Without this information, it's tough to draw conclusions.
Oh please. This data overwhelmingly shows that vaccinated people (>60) have better outcomes than non-vaccinated people(>60). The only debate is by how much.
No, it was an extreme example to better express the issue: We do not know why they're not vaccinated. We do not know their medical history. This isn't a randomized controlled trial.
More realistic example: According to this study [1], 4.0% of US citizens (>80) are immunocompromised. We know that ~5.8% of Israelis (>80) are not vaccinated. Is it possible that the unvaccinated in this age cohort have more serious pre-existing conditions and therefore had a way higher chance of being hospitalized? We don't know.
Is it wrong to ask for better data? We're capable of extracting the smallest detail from a person randomly scrolling through a news feed but we can't get proper stats on hospitalized people? Come on.
None of the reasons you cited come anywhere near to reasonably accounting for a nine-fold difference. You're really reaching. If you can't take something away from a 9x difference (vaxed vs. non-vaxed) I don't what to tell you.
Better data would be great, but based on your anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-science, comment history I'm not convinced that would be enough for you.
I'm not interested in debating people with an obvious idealogical agenda, so good day to you.
Since I'm an anti-science woman on a quest to spread my anti-vax agenda, I've taken a look at the raw data.
We're talking about 137 unvaccinated & 268 vaccinated patients >60 with severe disease (What kind of disease? Who cares, am I right?)
So, based on this enormous (!) sample size with one (!) confounding factor (#FuckMedicalHistory), we conclude that of course there is an undeniable nine-fold difference.
Why are we even doing randomized controlled trials? Just observe 137 & 268 patients retrospectively and frame critics as ideologues. A final word from an anti-vax activist:
> Conversely, there was concern that observational data obtained from nonrandomized studies after vaccine deployment could yield unreliable answers. Observational studies are subject to substantial biases and are much less amenable to unambiguous interpretation. Their limitations are of particular concern during this public health emergency, because vaccinated and unvaccinated people will differ in their risk of exposure to infection and of serious disease, partly because of fluctuating attack rates and because during early phases of vaccine deployment, vaccinees may well be at particular risk of infection. In these circumstances, even carefully analyzed observational studies can yield misleading answers about safety and efficacy. In addition, unrelated events that occur by chance after vaccination may be incorrectly attributed to the vaccine, and such anecdotes may be deliberately promulgated by groups opposed to vaccination. [1]
The under-60 part doesn't really count as the age of vaccinated people is generally higher than the age of unvaccinated people. I trust the over-60 data to represent the efficiency of the vaccine against the Delta variant better.
in principle you shouldn’t be downvoted if you’re adding to the conversation, and whilst i don’t agree with your overall thesis, i think you have a valid concern.
the OP’s statistics line up with the assertion that vaccines are certainly effective. if they weren’t, we’d expect to see similar proportions of vaccinated peoples hospitalised with covid.
certainly, the vaccines have lost some of their efficacy. it can probably be attributed to “slow” rollout, and - probably more significantly - vaccine hesitancy/denial. israel’s high rollout percentage is relatively meaningless in the global context, unfortunately. the virus has more chances to interact with vaccinated individuals. in a similar fashion to not finishing antibiotics, it was inevitable that the virus would mutate to overcome the existing vaccines at some level.
at this point, our only hope is that vaccines will at least make the virus less lethal. it’s not the ideal outcome, but given everything that’s happened thus far, i think it’s the best we can hope for.
If 100% of all people are vaccinated that 100% of all hospitalization would be from vaccinated people. That says nothing about effectiveness of the vaccines.
78.8% of the population we're talking about here are vaccinated.
I got vaccinated over 6 months ago. I'm getting my booster later today. It seems that those who were vaccinated more recently are more likely to be protected against delta as well.
Not sure what “sterilising immunity” is but the vaccines appear to reduce likelihood you will get Covid (not completely make you immune). If you then get it you are much less likely to end up in ICU or die, you may go to hospital though.
If you go by what Simpson wrote, then maybe it is a different paradox. If you go by what most people are being taught the Simpson's paradox is, then no. Ultimately it's besides the point. The conflict is resolved by better statistics.
That's news to me, I seem to remember news stories from last year that people were being infected multiple times and the immunity from having endured COVID-19 was not actually that good. Quickly trying to look this up with 'covid-19 reinfection' as query (trying to avoid confirmation bias in that search), the top hit on DDG is the USA CDC which writes:
> Among Kentucky residents infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, vaccination status of those reinfected during May–June 2021 was compared with that of residents who were not reinfected. In this case-control study, being unvaccinated was associated with 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with being fully vaccinated. --https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm
Reinfection occurs much more frequently if you don't get vaccinated, if I am reading this right. Not sure I'd call "natural" immunity "also" or "incredibly" effective.
> Only vaccinated Palestinians are given permits to enter Israel and Israeli settlements
Many cross from the west bank without permissions, there are known opening in the fence there and the army is not really stopping them since there aren't many terror attacks in the last years.
Some information on which groups among the fully vaccinated are seeing a serious breakthrough infection.
>As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older.
>comorbidities were more frequent in patients with vaccine breakthrough infections in comparison to a large case series on unvaccinated hospitalized patients - including hypertension, diabetes, heart failure, chronic kidney diseases, chronic lung diseases, dementia and cancer. Moreover, 40% of the patients were immunocompromised.
So the serious infections are concentrated in those who are older, immunocompromised, or those who have other conditions already known to be linked to having a more serious case.
> Preliminary research in Israel suggests booster shots significantly increase protection against the coronavirus a week after a person receives the third dose.
Which research? Thanks NPR for citing your sources?
Notwithstanding any fallacies that may exist (can you point out a specific one?), the best available scientific evidence suggests that natural immunity is much stronger than the vaccines against COVID:
"Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection". https://archive.is/RlwBc
Here's a very quick summary of what I linked above: In Israel it would be easy to look at the data and conclude that vaccines are providing ~67% efficacy against severe disease/death.
But, once the data is broken down into buckets that help address confounding variables (i.e. different vaccination rates among different age groups), things look very different. All of a sudden efficacy numbers are looking better than 90% for a lot of people.
This will similarly matter a great deal as people try to figure out how long vaccines provide protection. The groups that got vaccinated the earliest in many places were older people and health care workers -- groups which start out at higher risk, and also have a higher probability of less effective immune response to vaccines (older people).
As a result of that, it will be easy for analysts that don't consider that issue to under-estimate the effective time period of vaccines.
The archive.is link you provided isn't working for me at the moment, but to address your statement in the context of the above framework:
The group of people most likely to have been infected with the virus are not the same as the group of people most likely to have antibodies as a result of immunization. In many places, there are a lot more younger people who have gotten infected with the disease than older people. There are other socioeconomic and behavioural differences too.
Given that young people tend to have a more effective immune responses to begin with, and given that they have been shown to have better outcomes after being infected with this virus, it's easy to see a way to incorrectly conclude that stronger immunity results from infection-acquired antibodies, even if the opposite may be true.
In short: Apparent differences may be better explained by the fact that it's a different group of people who have been infected vs those who have not been infected.
We have no idea how complete "known to have recovered" is where as the vaccinated population is well known.
It also doesn't say how "known to have recovered" as well as vaccinated is being calculated.
I'm also not sure what the relevance is given the comparative deadliness of the vaccine and "natural" immunity.
Edit: That's actually another statistic issue. You need to consider the "known to have not recovered." The population of "known to have recovered" is itself a biased selection of those with stronger immunities than the general population.
There is more than vaccinated vs unvaccinated. There is also naturally acquired immunity. The best available science points to many interesting things you may not be aware of:
"Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection". https://archive.is/RlwBc
"Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis also reported last month that 11 months after a mild infection immune cells were still capable of producing protective antibodies. The authors concluded that prior Covid infection induces a “robust” and “long-lived humoral immune response,” leading some scientists to suggest that natural immunity is probably lifelong." https://archive.is/DkgW2
"Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic also published a study recently of 1,359 people previously infected with Covid who were unvaccinated. None of the subjects subsequently became infected, leading the researchers to conclude that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination.”" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...
“A natural infection induces hundreds upon hundreds of antibodies against all proteins of the virus, including the envelope, the membrane, the nucleocapsid, and the spike. Dozens upon dozens of these antibodies neutralize the virus when encountered again. Additionally, because of the immune system exposure to these numerous proteins (epitomes), our T cells mount a robust memory, as well. Our T cells are the ‘marines’ of the immune system and the first line of defense against pathogens. T cell memory to those infected with SARSCOV1 is at 17 years and running still.” said Dr. Ryan Cole, a Mayo Clinic-trained pathologist who runs one of the largest independent laboratories in the US who has spent the past 16 months examining and culturing SARS-CoV-2 specimens. https://archive.is/o/4suZi/https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/ho...
A national survey shows 68% of Indians have SARSCoV2 antibodies, compared to 25% in January and 1% last spring. Experts say this is why cases and deaths have plunged so fast since May, even though few Indians are fully vaccinated. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/21/covid-19-antib...
Regarding the Cleveland Clinic link, a random one I picked out to verify, the confidence is actually very low, or more specifically, the statistic most relevant to your quote has a 95% confidence interval of zero and infinity:
> vaccination was associated with a significantly lower risk [...] but not among those previously infected (HR 0.313, 95% CI 0 to Infinity)
I'm no mathematician or statistician, but that sounds like the conclusion should have been that no reliable recommendation can be formulated without more data.
Regarding your chosen quote specifically, there the sentence continues and says
> vaccines can be safely prioritized to those who have not been infected before.
The keyword being "prioritized"; not that they don't recommend vaccinations if you already lived through COVID-19, which (to me) your comment is suggestive of.
Don't know about the rest, I don't have time to check them all out now. Hopefully someone else has more time to properly look at this because your suggestion goes against what most countries are currently implementing so that's interesting.
The reason the CI is like that has to do with divide by zero, not a low sample size. There were ZERO reinfections among previously infected people, regardless of their vaccination status. As the study says:
>COVID-19 did not occur in anyone over the five months of the study among 2579 individuals previously infected with COVID-19, including 1359 who did not take the vaccine.
The conclusions of the researchers are not wrong or mistaken - they accurately represent the data.
As for the "prioritized" comment, that's just the researchers being politically correct. As you point out, indeed these conclusions go against most countries' policies today. It's a tragedy that natural immunity is completely suppressed from the policymaking conversation.
Depressing to read all the anti-vax and pro-Covid comments on this generally enlightened forum while much of the healthcare system of the southern US is being overwhelmed by un-vaccinated Covid patients.
I am not arguing against vaccination or saying you dont have a valid concern.
But I think we need to also make sense of scenarios like for example India. Has only 9.2% of fully vaccinated and if you look at the daily infection rates it dropped dramatically.
I've stopped trying to attribute infection rates to other statistics, especially individual ones. There seems to be very little rhyme or reason to the incidence. Sometimes there is a very clear mistake made, like in the Netherlands they opened up night clubs and bars and suddenly we had the fastest-growing wave so far and anyone outside of 15-25 years old wasn't even participating. But most of the time it's really not so clear what is causing or preventing infections without rigorous research. At a minimum, one should also be looking at test rates and incentives to not get tested (needing to go into quarantine iirc in many countries, having to pay €40 just for a single low-quality nose test as of Oct 1st in the Netherlands, those sorts of things), since merely the incidence does not tell the full story. Then there are weather changes (temperature, humidity, time spent meeting others indoors vs. outdoors), avoidance of close contact or travel, face mask requirements, adherence to rules and recommendations, etc.
It seems the vaccine does little to prevent vaccinated people from spreading the virus. So what is the point of vaccine passports, is that based on outdated data? Preventing serious injury seems unrelated to this question; it seems the unvaccinated are only putting themselves at risk.
So... Since there is a 0.2% chance of dying from covid(adult male in his 40s) you must take a vaccine that wears in 6 months, and take booster shots every year. You can still end up in hospital, you can still infect people, but it lowers the dying risk a bit. Also, government forces you to take this and if you refuse your rights are taken. Yep. Totally not stupid. Truly the work of scientists.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadIt's not a physiological effect but I think it's probably the crux of the whole issue here.
Saying that, if seriousness of disease is related to initial exposure amount, perhaps being vaxxed and overly brave could mean you get a higher initial dose?
I'm not really sure why it is this way. I would think lessening the spread of it would be the highest priority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement
I am not a biologist and have no opinion on the matter, I have just seen it mentioned online.
"Consensus summary report for CEPI/BC March 12–13, 2020 meeting: Assessment of risk of disease enhancement with COVID-19 vaccines"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7247514/
"A syndrome of “disease enhancement” has been reported in the past for a few viral vaccines where those immunized suffered increased severity or death when they later encountered the virus or were found to have an increased frequency of infection. Animal models allowed scientists to determine the underlying mechanism for the former in the case of Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine and have been utilized to design and screen new RSV vaccine candidates. Because some Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and SARS-CoV-1 vaccines have shown evidence of disease enhancement in some animal models, this is a particular concern for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.
To address this challenge, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the Brighton Collaboration (BC) Safety Platform for Emergency vACcines (SPEAC) convened a scientific working meeting on March 12 and 13, 2020 of experts in the field of vaccine immunology and coronaviruses to consider what vaccine designs could reduce safety concerns and how animal models and immunological assessments in early clinical trials can help to assess the risk. This report summarizes the evidence presented and provides considerations for safety assessment of COVID-19 vaccine candidates in accelerated vaccine development."
The TL;DR is that is considered unlikely for reasons explained. ( but not completely impossible )
"Do COVID-19 Vaccines Cause Antibody-dependent Enhancement (ADE)?"
https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-cent...
I think it is the case if the vaccine does not provide sterilising immunity..
In general if you Google this without a pretty in depth understanding of biology and immunology you’ll go down a rabbit hole that would just reinforce your current position.
Asking a question shouldn’t be downvoted and even if you haven’t you shouldn’t excuse this behavior.
What might also be worth to realize that the illusory truth effect is a thing, i.e. "the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure." "[A 2015] study suggested that the truth effect can influence participants who actually knew the correct answer to begin with, but who were swayed to believe otherwise through the repetition of a falsehood." (From Wikipedia.) I can understand why one might choose to downvote such a "genuine" question when it's easy to find that the answer is "no" (it's mentioned on the COVID-19 misinformation Wikipedia page).
Like when someone say "vaccines are safe and effective", "vaccines are safe and effective", repeatedly, when the statement itself is very wrong because of the generalisation of "vaccines"...
Can you show me a rich country where all vaccine AEFIs are strictly reported and followed up and serious ones investigated?
If not, then I am not sure how you can make that claim.
There are some citations here[1] when it comes to this phenomenon and COVID vaccines. It hasn't been observed in clinical trials, nor after mass inoculations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Antibo...
What surprise me most is the slow rate at which government adjust their strategy.. As an example, my country (france) still is deep in its "vaccine pass" controversial measure, splitting the country in half, and the government seems to show no sign of hesitation or even doubts whether it really is the best thing to do... They're running this strategy based on 6-months old assertions, and half the population doesn't seem to notice it.
58% isn't that much higher than most other countries. France actually has a higher vaccination rate at 61%! So I'm not sure what you think the "country-sized experiment" is.
It looks a bit like they're changing the narrative now that the next wave is coming, saying vaccination rates aren't high enough after all (i'm curious to see one expert provide a definitive number on the "good enough" threshold, based on models or anything else, but maybe 100% it is ?)
There are not one valid health reason to let people not wear a mask if they are vaccinated (if you believe mask works as the governement thinks)
It seems to me that life could already be "back to normal" here, simply making sure old / obese people get regular shots.
It's the long-term strategy of wanting to get everyone a vaccine, including children who have close to 0 risks, in the hope of getting rid of the virus that i'm talking about.
1. 21.2% of the population (unvaccinated people older than 12) make up 40% of the hospitalizations. It's even more stark when you remove the immune compromised from the statistic.
2. For the delta-variant we need a higher vaccination rate to reach herd immunity. Estimates vary, but most put this around 85%.
3. While vaccinated people still can get sick (and why won't they, the immune system can only start to act after encountering the pathogen), but... the time of being infectious is lower and (see above) hospitalization and death rates are much lower.
Upon (very basic) scrutiny the numbers from Israel point to the high efficiency of the vaccines not the opposite.
And last, what would have us do instead?
That's not how herd immunity works. You don't set a moving goalpost out of nowhere. We should be measuring R instead, and I suspect R is hardly impacted by vaccines at least for the Delta variant.
So, yes, it kinda works like that.
But we'll probably do vaccinations, wait for more aggressive mutations, add facemasks, wait for more aggressive mutations, and so on, until we have a super-virus.
This easily could be biased by the older end of that range being significantly more vaccinated than the younger end.
If you want to compare vaccinated efficacy, look for 10 year age group comparisons. Anything else is really leaving you wide open to misleading interpretations.
The questions now are: will we see a variant that can escape the vaccines? Will the vaccines becomes significantly less effective at stopping hospitalisation/death within a few months?
We don't celebrate "freedom day" here.
78.8% of the population above 12 are vaccinated. The remaining 21.2% make up about 40% of all hospitalizations.
The vaccines are incredibly effective and the situation in Israel does by no means indicate that they are not.
Edit: Fixed 11.2% to 21.2%.
If you vaccinate 100% of the total population, you'll find that 100% of hospitalised and dead patients have been fully vaccinated.
TL;DR: This is only concerning if one doesn't properly grasp statistics. Most of us (self included) fail at this.
The fact that only 60% of the hospitalized are vaccinated means the vaccine is more effective than nothing (and the data on death is even better), but as time goes on it becomes clearer the vaccines are not the silver bullet many of us thought they would be.
Incorrect. The vaccinations are targeted at the most vulnerable not distributed uniformly so this is not exactly right.
But when you say "targeted" at the most vulnerable, I'm not sure how true that is. There's a pretty big push to get everyone vaccinated, including populations that have been reluctant to get vaccinated until now.
https://twitter.com/_MiguelHernan/status/1428014414666420230
The post you cited is helpful. However, it is confusing the definition of efficacy. There were debates on what the efficacy meant when Pfizer and Moderna reported their high numbers. But there was *NO* definition saying that 94% efficacy means 94% of vaccinated people won't get SERIOUSLY sick. Most commonly, it meant either (1) 94% people will have lower chance of getting COVID (i.e. getting tested positive)[1], or (2) 94% people will have a lower chance of getting sick [2].
Now the post you cited essentially says 94% people won't get SERIOUSLY sick. This just proves that neither (1) or (2) above is true.
[1] https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-vaccine-efficacy-explai... [2] https://time.com/5945177/covid-19-vaccine-effectiveness/
Not to mention recently discovered waning immunity. So [1] and [2] could definitely have been true at the time.
Now waning immunity - did Pfizer or Moderna warn the world about it? Did they warn us about potential variants? Absolutely no, right? They posted the high numbers to pump their stock price. Vaccines are effective to some extent. But those two companies are not credible.
The older and more vulnerable were vaccinated FIRST and at a higher rate, so seeing more of them hospitalized now 6 months later with a variant is not unexpected.
What it really means, is that those same patients would probably be in the morgue, not the hospital if it wasn't for the vaccine.
Also, the effectiveness is lower against variants like delta, and does naturally decrease over time. If we had higher vaccination rates, the spread of covid would be significantly reduced, and variants wouldn’t be such a large problem.
Also also, MRNA vaccines — EVEN AT 70% — far outperform existing vaccines like the one for seasonal influenza.
Also also also, where the hell are you getting 40% for moderna’s VE? I’d love to see a citation.
Oh, regarding “old stats” like the effectiveness of the smallpox vaccine: Surprise! No controlled studies on its effectiveness. Surprise! It has significantly more risk (both in terms of the danger of the adverse side effects and their incidence).
I’m guessing you’re not an epidemiologist?
Jeez, what was these vaccines meant for originally?
Just wanted to expose a flaw in this logic that seem to be repeated Ad nauseam
The hospitalisation rates are way lower than any previous wave but the law of big numbers still apply at some point... And the Delta variant is clearly a game change here.
Finally, Israel is in a peculiar position because they have vaccinated - relatively speaking - quite a while ago so protection migh be indeed waning and the overall % is not that high (pretty surprised tbh).
As per https://spectator.com.au/2021/08/most-covid-patients-at-isra...
>Dr Kobi Haviv, medical director of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, stated that the majority of coronavirus patients in an Israeli hospital are fully vaccinated, including those with severe disease.
>Dr Haviv further specified that: “95% of the severe patients are vaccinated,” adding “85-90% of the hospitalizations are in fully vaccinated people” and the hospital is “opening more and more COVID wards.” This has led him to conclude that “the effectiveness of the vaccine is fading out.”
Note that I am not point out the fact that 95% is vaccinated. But that they are still overwhelming the hospitals, so it seems that your point no longer hold.
Also from the same article
> In other words, the TGA never saw or requested the patient data from Pfizer and simply accepted their reporting of their study as true.This means that when the head of the TGA John Skerritt said that “the safety evidence is pretty thorough” on February 6, his words would ring hollow to most Australians who have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the TGA had actually looked at the patient data before granting any such approval. As noted by Doctors for Covid Ethics on its website, it is currently not known whether any of the major government agencies around the globe (FDA, MHRA or EMA) has independently verified, or attempted to verify, Pfizer’s data, before proceeding with provisional/emergency authorisation of Pfizer’s mRNA therapy vaccine.
Even if Dr Haviv is correct and the protection offered by the Pfizer vaccine is only valid for 7/8 months, many lives have still been saved in the meantime (Israel got almost no cases and deaths in Q2 2021 for example).
I guess more data is required to see how it goes but it is ackowledged that not all the vaccines have lifetime effects and some only work against specific variant (like the flu one).
To finish, I would like to reiterate that the Delta variant is a game changer so a quote from February needs to be taken with a grain of salt because the situation has changed completely since then.
"Pfizer Violation Tracker"
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/pfizer
Umm, of course?
If we had a vaccine for e.g. the flu, that cut hospitalizations in half, we would call that effective. Or maybe not - effective here is a very vague word. We'd more correctly say "this vaccine reduces hospitalizations by 50%".
If it were a particularly bad flu season and literally everyone got the flu (as well as everyone getting vaccinated), hospitals would be overwhelmed, because cutting in half isn't enough. But that wouldn't change the base fact - this hypothetical vaccine cut hospitalizations in half.
The more people are vaccinated the less people will become infected and will be spread the virus at any time. The less people are spreaders the less breakthrough infections can happen. It is a feedback loop and not really hard to understand.
If the intend to ban smoking in a population was to reduce the incidence of lung cancer, and the incidence does not drop after smoking ban, then ban was useless.
"Why stop hitting people with cars when the people hit don't die in 100% of cases ?"
Let's put it this way, did you expect the outcome to be what it currently is? We have MORE deaths with Covid than we had at the same time last year. Is that what you would have predicted when the great results of the trials were published?
Besides that experts were also telling us that immunity from vaccine will likely fade.
From the article. Emphasis is mine.
As for health, I think you might be alluding to pre-existing conditions? Can you elaborate on how you would see this affecting the result?
It's a miracle that Israel even offers age-stratified hospitalizations data. But it's still not enough.
>Without this information, it's tough to draw conclusions.
Oh please. This data overwhelmingly shows that vaccinated people (>60) have better outcomes than non-vaccinated people(>60). The only debate is by how much.
More realistic example: According to this study [1], 4.0% of US citizens (>80) are immunocompromised. We know that ~5.8% of Israelis (>80) are not vaccinated. Is it possible that the unvaccinated in this age cohort have more serious pre-existing conditions and therefore had a way higher chance of being hospitalized? We don't know.
Is it wrong to ask for better data? We're capable of extracting the smallest detail from a person randomly scrolling through a news feed but we can't get proper stats on hospitalized people? Come on.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/3/suppl_1/1439/2635779
Better data would be great, but based on your anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-science, comment history I'm not convinced that would be enough for you.
I'm not interested in debating people with an obvious idealogical agenda, so good day to you.
We're talking about 137 unvaccinated & 268 vaccinated patients >60 with severe disease (What kind of disease? Who cares, am I right?)
So, based on this enormous (!) sample size with one (!) confounding factor (#FuckMedicalHistory), we conclude that of course there is an undeniable nine-fold difference.
Why are we even doing randomized controlled trials? Just observe 137 & 268 patients retrospectively and frame critics as ideologues. A final word from an anti-vax activist:
> Conversely, there was concern that observational data obtained from nonrandomized studies after vaccine deployment could yield unreliable answers. Observational studies are subject to substantial biases and are much less amenable to unambiguous interpretation. Their limitations are of particular concern during this public health emergency, because vaccinated and unvaccinated people will differ in their risk of exposure to infection and of serious disease, partly because of fluctuating attack rates and because during early phases of vaccine deployment, vaccinees may well be at particular risk of infection. In these circumstances, even carefully analyzed observational studies can yield misleading answers about safety and efficacy. In addition, unrelated events that occur by chance after vaccination may be incorrectly attributed to the vaccine, and such anecdotes may be deliberately promulgated by groups opposed to vaccination. [1]
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2033538
the OP’s statistics line up with the assertion that vaccines are certainly effective. if they weren’t, we’d expect to see similar proportions of vaccinated peoples hospitalised with covid.
certainly, the vaccines have lost some of their efficacy. it can probably be attributed to “slow” rollout, and - probably more significantly - vaccine hesitancy/denial. israel’s high rollout percentage is relatively meaningless in the global context, unfortunately. the virus has more chances to interact with vaccinated individuals. in a similar fashion to not finishing antibiotics, it was inevitable that the virus would mutate to overcome the existing vaccines at some level.
at this point, our only hope is that vaccines will at least make the virus less lethal. it’s not the ideal outcome, but given everything that’s happened thus far, i think it’s the best we can hope for.
Waning immunity has nothing to do with the virus mutating, it is just how the immune system works.
78.8% of the population we're talking about here are vaccinated.
Can we pelase just automatically downvote all posts starting like this?
I don't know much about mRNA vaccines, but do mRNA vaccines induce sterilizing immunity?
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
https://twitter.com/jsm2334/status/1427465566210695178
https://twitter.com/_MiguelHernan/status/1428014414666420230
> Among Kentucky residents infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, vaccination status of those reinfected during May–June 2021 was compared with that of residents who were not reinfected. In this case-control study, being unvaccinated was associated with 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with being fully vaccinated. --https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm
Reinfection occurs much more frequently if you don't get vaccinated, if I am reading this right. Not sure I'd call "natural" immunity "also" or "incredibly" effective.
Many cross from the west bank without permissions, there are known opening in the fence there and the army is not really stopping them since there aren't many terror attacks in the last years.
>As of 15 August, 514 Israelis were hospitalized with severe or critical COVID-19, a 31% increase from just 4 days earlier. Of the 514, 59% were fully vaccinated. Of the vaccinated, 87% were 60 or older.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-...
and
>comorbidities were more frequent in patients with vaccine breakthrough infections in comparison to a large case series on unvaccinated hospitalized patients - including hypertension, diabetes, heart failure, chronic kidney diseases, chronic lung diseases, dementia and cancer. Moreover, 40% of the patients were immunocompromised.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210713/Israeli-study-of-...
So the serious infections are concentrated in those who are older, immunocompromised, or those who have other conditions already known to be linked to having a more serious case.
Which research? Thanks NPR for citing your sources?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
Someone that's done some analysis using the above mental models: https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
"Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection". https://archive.is/RlwBc
But, once the data is broken down into buckets that help address confounding variables (i.e. different vaccination rates among different age groups), things look very different. All of a sudden efficacy numbers are looking better than 90% for a lot of people.
This will similarly matter a great deal as people try to figure out how long vaccines provide protection. The groups that got vaccinated the earliest in many places were older people and health care workers -- groups which start out at higher risk, and also have a higher probability of less effective immune response to vaccines (older people).
As a result of that, it will be easy for analysts that don't consider that issue to under-estimate the effective time period of vaccines.
The archive.is link you provided isn't working for me at the moment, but to address your statement in the context of the above framework:
The group of people most likely to have been infected with the virus are not the same as the group of people most likely to have antibodies as a result of immunization. In many places, there are a lot more younger people who have gotten infected with the disease than older people. There are other socioeconomic and behavioural differences too.
Given that young people tend to have a more effective immune responses to begin with, and given that they have been shown to have better outcomes after being infected with this virus, it's easy to see a way to incorrectly conclude that stronger immunity results from infection-acquired antibodies, even if the opposite may be true.
In short: Apparent differences may be better explained by the fact that it's a different group of people who have been infected vs those who have not been infected.
We have no idea how complete "known to have recovered" is where as the vaccinated population is well known.
It also doesn't say how "known to have recovered" as well as vaccinated is being calculated.
I'm also not sure what the relevance is given the comparative deadliness of the vaccine and "natural" immunity.
Edit: That's actually another statistic issue. You need to consider the "known to have not recovered." The population of "known to have recovered" is itself a biased selection of those with stronger immunities than the general population.
"Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection". https://archive.is/RlwBc
"Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis also reported last month that 11 months after a mild infection immune cells were still capable of producing protective antibodies. The authors concluded that prior Covid infection induces a “robust” and “long-lived humoral immune response,” leading some scientists to suggest that natural immunity is probably lifelong." https://archive.is/DkgW2
"Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic also published a study recently of 1,359 people previously infected with Covid who were unvaccinated. None of the subjects subsequently became infected, leading the researchers to conclude that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination.”" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...
A recent study found that the current vaccines do next to nothing to help the body’s CD8 T-cells, which is the key to long-term immunity. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...
“A natural infection induces hundreds upon hundreds of antibodies against all proteins of the virus, including the envelope, the membrane, the nucleocapsid, and the spike. Dozens upon dozens of these antibodies neutralize the virus when encountered again. Additionally, because of the immune system exposure to these numerous proteins (epitomes), our T cells mount a robust memory, as well. Our T cells are the ‘marines’ of the immune system and the first line of defense against pathogens. T cell memory to those infected with SARSCOV1 is at 17 years and running still.” said Dr. Ryan Cole, a Mayo Clinic-trained pathologist who runs one of the largest independent laboratories in the US who has spent the past 16 months examining and culturing SARS-CoV-2 specimens. https://archive.is/o/4suZi/https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/ho...
A national survey shows 68% of Indians have SARSCoV2 antibodies, compared to 25% in January and 1% last spring. Experts say this is why cases and deaths have plunged so fast since May, even though few Indians are fully vaccinated. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/21/covid-19-antib...
Protection of previous SARS-CoV-2 infection is similar to that of BNT162b2 vaccine protection. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.20.21255670v...
> vaccination was associated with a significantly lower risk [...] but not among those previously infected (HR 0.313, 95% CI 0 to Infinity)
I'm no mathematician or statistician, but that sounds like the conclusion should have been that no reliable recommendation can be formulated without more data.
Regarding your chosen quote specifically, there the sentence continues and says
> vaccines can be safely prioritized to those who have not been infected before.
The keyword being "prioritized"; not that they don't recommend vaccinations if you already lived through COVID-19, which (to me) your comment is suggestive of.
Don't know about the rest, I don't have time to check them all out now. Hopefully someone else has more time to properly look at this because your suggestion goes against what most countries are currently implementing so that's interesting.
The reason the CI is like that has to do with divide by zero, not a low sample size. There were ZERO reinfections among previously infected people, regardless of their vaccination status. As the study says:
>COVID-19 did not occur in anyone over the five months of the study among 2579 individuals previously infected with COVID-19, including 1359 who did not take the vaccine.
The conclusions of the researchers are not wrong or mistaken - they accurately represent the data.
As for the "prioritized" comment, that's just the researchers being politically correct. As you point out, indeed these conclusions go against most countries' policies today. It's a tragedy that natural immunity is completely suppressed from the policymaking conversation.
But I think we need to also make sense of scenarios like for example India. Has only 9.2% of fully vaccinated and if you look at the daily infection rates it dropped dramatically.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/india-covid-c...
(Facepalm)
(facepalm)
- There are 21.9 hospitalized in severe condition per 100K vaccinated above the age of 60.
- There are 225.9 hospitalized in severe condition per 100K un-vaccinated above the age of 60.
Vaccines are incredibly effective, you are 10 times as likely to be hospitalized in severe condition if you are above 60 if not vaccinated.