A breakthrough infection is just a COVID case in someone who's been vaccinated. In that particular sentence they're just saying that people who developed a breakthrough infection did have a nonzero risk of death, but the vaccines were still fairly protective.
"Breakthrough infection" means tested positive for COVID despite vaccination.
However, it's important to note that "breakthrough infection" is different from "breakthrough disease". It is possible, and likely common with the delta variant, to be a carrier with zero symptoms.
"A breakthrough infection is a case of illness in which a vaccinated individual becomes sick from the same illness that the vaccine is meant to prevent. Simply, they occur when vaccines fail to provide immunity against the pathogen they are designed to target."
As far as "breakthrough infection increased risk of death", that's explained a little further down on the page in the article linked here on HN:
Risk of death after SARS-CoV-2 infection was highest in unvaccinated Veterans regardless of age and comorbidity (Fig. 3). However, breakthrough infections were not benign, as shown by the higher risk of death in fully vaccinated Veterans who became infected compared to vaccinated Veterans who remained infection-free.
This is a pretty long-winded way of saying that some people who were vaccinated still became infected, and some of those infected people did die.
The importance of a study like this is to understand how the efficacy of the vaccine holds up over time, which can help inform public health recommendations and policy-making decisions.
> However, breakthrough infections were not benign, as shown by the higher risk of death in fully vaccinated Veterans who became infected compared to vaccinated Veterans who remained infection-free.
This seems to be a longwinded way of saying that it's better not to get Covid than to get Covid, regardless of whether you're vaccinated or not.
Wherever you stand on the debate I think it's hard to deny that the vaccines have turned out to be a lot less effective than we were initially led to believe.
We don't have much to compare against since the vaccine is so ubiquitous at this point, but I would bet Delta did more to turn the tide by out competing the original deadly variant.
The vaccine certainly helped, but the tide would have turned regardless. The Amish are a good example of a completely unvaccinated community that "beat" Covid.
> We don't have much to compare against since the vaccine is so ubiquitous at this point, but I would bet Delta did more to turn the tide by out competing the original deadly variant.
We can compare areas of low versus high rates of vaccinations:
> The incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, hospitalization, and death is higher in unvaccinated than vaccinated persons, and the incidence rate ratios are related to vaccine effectiveness.
> The Amish are a good example of a completely unvaccinated community that "beat" Covid.
This works well if you're isolated away from the rest of society, and less so if you wish to mingle with everyone else. So if you wish to enact a self-imposed lockdown you're free to do so, but good luck with your social life.
Consider many rural populations are self isolating since the beginning of time, and not so much as the Amish but 99% in that direction when compared to the city centers.
Seems once it (eventually) gets into a community, it can spread quite quickly, and the more isolated nature of the community means reduced readily-available treatment options.
The 99:1 numbers are very strange. Latest data from UK, which admittedly has a higher vaccination rate than US, gives a death ratio of 1:9 unvax:vax. Caution, Simpson's paradox is at play, older populations where the bulk of the deaths are, are significantly more vaccinated than younger populations. Unfortunately it is really difficult to find equivalent detailed reports (breakdown by age, date & vax status) in US either federally (CDC) or at state level.
Edit. Oh, I see now. From the fourth article: "99% of Alabama’s 2,379 COVID deaths from January to June were unvaccinated". Alabama had a covid wave in Jan, which then subsided. Mass vaccination only started in Jan, by the time the wave was over maybe 10-20% of the population was vaccinated. The numbers are dominated by the pre-vaccination wave, plus VE is high early on which limits the vaccinated deaths. Verdict: technically correct, but highly misleading.
> The numbers are dominated by the pre-vaccination wave
YES this right here is such a deliberate sleight of hand by the media, and as GP demonstrated they get away with it a lot!
> 1:9 unvax:vax
Shouldn't this be the other way around? 9 unvaxxed dying for every 1 vaxxed? Otherwise I'm not seeing the quoted claim in the report you linked.
The closest I've been able to find for the U.S. is this Connecticut report on hospitalization. Unfortunately it omits unvaccinated deaths, but we see hospitalizations at a rate of 4:1 (unvax:vax)
Good call. Turns out I did make an error, reading just the >80 column thinking it's 'total', because it happened that that line dominated the table. There are definitely more vax deaths than unvax covid deaths in week 40-44 in UK, but the ratio is smaller that 1:9. Brb, running excel to sum the whole columns. Table 4b, page 19 for raw data.
Edit: The totals come at 669 unvax deaths vs. 3011 vax deaths. The raw numbers ratio is roughly 2:8 unvax:vax. This is not VE, as it is not adjusted to vax levels in the population. It is just a sanity check of certain claims in the US media.
Not sure how you could draw that conclusion. The vaccines have been instrumental at reducing the incidence of severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death.
Yes, a lot of laypeople were expecting them to outright prevent infection at much higher rates, but that was never the deal from the start. Consider that the clinical trial protocols only called for testing participants for COVID if they started showing symptoms; the numbers presented were never about preventing infection entirely.
The lower percentages quoted in the article are still pretty fantastic, despite their drop from the initial 90%+ numbers from the clinical trials. Remember that the clinical trials were also done pre-delta variant. It's pretty impressive that they've held up so well against delta.
> Yes, a lot of laypeople were expecting them to outright prevent infection at much higher rates, but that was never the deal from the start.
It wasn't just laypeople, it's trivial to go back and find prominent public health officials promising that vaccinated people will not transmit the disease, the vaccines will be 100% effective against death, etc. They shouldn't have been saying that given that what you say about the trials is true, but hey, they haven't paid any price for getting it wrong since this whole thing began so why would they now?
In general I have noticed there's this pattern where the public will sometimes be clearly and strongly led to believe a certain thing, but if it later turns out to be false, 100% of the blame is placed on the masses. If there's any rebuke for the officials or institutions which led them into error it's always in the most vague and general terms, with no one ever indicted (or, heaven forbid, punished) by name.
There no longer exists any real debate. Effectiveness of the vaccines have waned over time but as stated in the article "Our findings support the conclusion that COVID-19 vaccines remain the most important tool to prevent infection and death."
> These findings suggest that among persons with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, full vaccination provides additional protection against reinfection. Among previously infected Kentucky residents, those who were not vaccinated were more than twice as likely to be reinfected compared with those with full vaccination. All eligible persons should be offered vaccination, including those with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, to reduce their risk for future infection.
I don't know enough about immunology to say whether "binding more broadly" confers more immunity or not.
It would certainly go against prior knowledge about human immune responses for a single spike protein (vaccine) to elicit a greater immune response than _the actual virus_.
That CDC study is so bad I'm surprised they had the gall to publish it with the conclusion they did. Testing positive says nothing about severity of infection.
> were about five times more likely to test positive for the infection than people who had been vaccinated
Testing positive is not a very good metric. Were they hospitalized? Was it severe? Did they even get sick, or just test positive?
They even admit to a sampling flaw in the discussion:
> Second, persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated.
The best study on this so far is from Israel with a much larger sample in a highly vaccinated country. Here's a Harvard doctor discussing the contradictory studies.
> For a low-risk person, which includes most people with natural immunity, a 35% risk reduction is more marginal in terms of absolute risk.
> Based on the solid evidence from the Israeli study, the Covid recovered have stronger and longer-lasting immunity against Covid disease than the vaccinated. Hence, there is no reason to prevent them from activities that are permitted to the vaccinated. In fact, it is discriminatory.
I found a Feb 2021 piece from Derek Lowe a good 30k ft overview of how the immune system works. tl;dr it is stochastic, with a wide range of antibodies having different effects against an infection, some of them even negative (OAS). Usually the aggregate effect is positive, and the infection is cleared out.
"It's important to realize, though, that all immune responses to a viral infection generate a mixture of neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies. That's one of the things about the immune system - it revs up production of a wide variety of antibodies, selected from the untold billions of them circulating around in your bloodstream. Some of them bind to one part of the pathogen, and some to another. And they bind in different conformations, sticking to different parts of the surface of the invading virus from different directions."
It is conceivable that a targeted vaccine is more effective at shutting down an infection than natural immunity by focusing the immune system to produce a narrow band of very effective antibodies. The tradeoff is that a virus mutation can create a catastrophic situation where the same antibodies are less effective, possibly having negative efficiency enhancing the infection. The risk is amplified by vaccinating the entire population with the exact same protein sequence, creating hundreds of millions of living incubators for the virus to learn how to evade the narrow antibody response.
We are creating a biological landscape prone to black swan events. Good luck convincing any total vaxer that this is a very real risk. They will laugh and sneer and maybe call you criminal because obviously the data shows the vaccines are safe and effective. "Hahaha, I've been told that we're all going to be dead by now, look at those peddling conspiracy theories." Just like the Wall Street crowd created the run-up to the 2008 crisis. Who could have possibly predicted that CDOs were prone to a black swan?
> We are creating a biological landscape prone to black swan events. Good luck convincing any total vaxer that this is a very real risk. They will laugh and sneer and maybe call you criminal because obviously the data shows the vaccines are safe and effective.
If you don't survive the problems of today, then there's no point in worrying about tomorrow's possibilities because you're dead.
The data does show that the COVID vaccines are generally safe and pretty effective. Not 100%, but the perfect is the enemy of the good, and so let's try to improve our lot now so we have a chance to fight for later.
Generally speaking, under 50 populations survive covid fairly well. Under 18 survive almost perfectly, with a higher survivability rate than drowning. Therein lies the problem: we expose the young(er) populations to a black swan event.
Please spend a few minutes to refresh on the data. Some nice dashboards from Singapore (ongoing delta wave), but also e.g. King County, WA (Seattle) shows similar data, though you have to drill down a bit (Demographics tab, then Deaths metric). For example in the past 30 days a total 12 deaths in the under 50 population, for a total of 10% of total covid deaths. Or, since the pandemic started, a death rate of 22/100k or less in all age groups <50, going as low as 0-3/100k for under 30s.
This is not to say that people, especially the elderly, should not get vaccinated if they choose so. It is only a reminder that there is a perception problem around covid and that the long term risk calculus is more complicated.
A charitable interpretation of GP would be that he referred to ending of restrictions (masks, testing, papers please, lockdowns etc.) after a vaccine becomes widely available. These hopes have certainly been raised by politicians in late 2020 and early 2021 ("just have to get herd immunity through the vaccine and we're done"[1]). However, the reality is that e.g. in Germany case numbers and incidence numbers are reaching new all-time-highs every day now despite 70-75 % of all people being vaccinated.
These hopes were probably based on experiences with "normal" vaccines, which are apt to eradicate diseases through sterile immunity (though there are a bunch of exceptions to this, it's not like we're getting rid of the flu and some other stuff by vaccinations [2]). However, we since learned that a vaccine providing sterile immunity against COVID-19 seems to be off the table (as none of them are), so herd immunity against COVID-19 will likely never be a thing and eradicating COVID-19 is just not possible.
[1] Herd immunity was THE talking point in early 2021 in Germany. Also, remember a few countries trying to get herd immunity by intentionally letting the virus spread (great britain cough cough)?
[2] Sterile immunity seems to be difficult with respiratory diseases (flu, covid, cold, pertussis come to mind). Naively I'd guess that's because the critters have some time to multiply on the surface of the airways and be infectious before the immune system gets a chance to nuke 'em. If that's the explanation though I'm kinda wondering why the herd immunity theory was so common, so it's probably more complicated than that.
> However, the reality is that e.g. in Germany case numbers and incidence numbers are reaching new all-time-highs every day now despite 70-75 % of all people being vaccinated.
Which is great, but we're still seeing a large influx to ICUs which will cause problems allocating ICU beds shortly (unless the trend reverses). To get that trend reversal high incidence districts are getting more restrictions again.
Ironically we also had a reduction in ICU capacity during COVID because working conditions didn't improve so people reasonably resigned instead of being continually exploited. There has also been a huge increase in hostility towards nurses, doctors and medical personnel in general (mostly driven by the small but aggressive anti-vaxx "community"), which certainly doesn't help retain people.
Is this true? I've heard claims in both directions but seen no sources for either.
> mostly driven by the small but aggressive anti-vaxx "community
Same question as above. There's a massive push to fire all the essential workers that took the brunt of the pandemic early on if they happen to believe the growing body of evidence showing that they don't need the vaccine if they've already recovered.
The summer waves clobbered various hospital systems in the US on a region by region basis. Winter is likely to be worse. For example, right now Minneapolis is under heavy load, ICUs at >95% across the board. https://covidestim.org concurs, the Midwest is undergoing a wave.
Thanks for the link. I'm not sure if it's showing a large influx due to covid though. For example, the top row in your second link shows 98% beds full, but n/a for covid patients. The second row says 75% ICU beds full, but only 14 positive for covid in the 7 day avg, and its not clear what of those are ICU patients.
It also isn't clear if these are patients in hospital for covid or they just happen to have covid (click on the links in the column headers to see the inclusion criteria).
Agreed, it's not a perfect resource. The other tool I know of is https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/minnesota, but its resolution is only state level, can't dig in at county or hospital level. Between 30% covid ICU at state level and red hospitals concentrated in Minneapolis, I'm making a guess that it's probably a covid wave hitting Minneapolis.
Thanks for the links. I get a strong sense from these sources that cases are ticking up in Germany and government is considering more restrictions. I get less strong of a sense that ICUs are primarily filling with severe covid patients. Seems reasonable that if cases are going up, hospital admission (including ICU beds) would go up, but its hard to conclusively validate that from these.
Maybe the second deep link isn't working correctly, but look at the ICU beds used for COVID-19 patients graph. Also the first link. Also from yesterday: "Meanwhile, German authorities issued threats of a new lockdown, while a top virologist called for immediate action in the face of overburdened hospitals. ... Several hospitals have said in recent days that they are again working at their limits and have ICUs so full of COVID-19 patients that they cannot admit new patients at the moment. Charite said Tuesday it had to cancel planned surgeries due to the number of staff members caring for people with COVID-19. Authorities have said most of latest patients are unvaccinated."
I did see the graph from your second link and the projected stats going up and to the right, but I wasn't sure how to interpret it in isolation (for example, what does a graph of ICU usage over time look like historically?)
The media landscape on this topic seems so polluted and untrustworthy that I can't help but wish for some kind of straightforward data supplement to go with statements like
> Several hospitals have said in recent days that they are again working at their limits and have ICUs so full of COVID-19 patients that they cannot admit new patients at the moment
where I can read that and then compare it to a spreadsheet and say yep that adds up. Your second link isn't quite that for me (and I realize its an unrealistic expectation). Another poster in this thread linked to something that was closer, but also didn't quite make the case imo.
Anyways, appreciate the links. It seems clear something is going on in Germany, and I may need to get a hold of my skepticism a bit.
Before these COVID jabs were released, vaccines used to mean that they could "provide immunity" to specific diseases. Now it's been changed to "provides protection, but ooops that protection can wane over time and eventually disappear".
That is fine, medical science is tough, but don't call it a vaccine instead of changing the definition of what outcomes vaccines historically (pre-2021) had provided.
My whole life the pitch behind the flu vaccine has been “it might keep you from getting it, and even if it doesn’t you’ll be better prepared to fight it”
"especially : a condition of being able to resist a particular disease especially through preventing development of a pathogenic microorganism or by counteracting the effects of its products"
Getting vaccinated has never, ever, guaranteed you cannot contract an illness.
I think you've held a misconception as to what a vaccine is. A vaccine has never provided 100% immunity in everyone who's gotten it. Certainly some vaccines have come close, but that doesn't change anything. Hell, consider the annual flu vaccine: it's efficacy falls far, far short of 100% every year; I believe it's usually in the 40%-60% range.
The idea that vaccines provide full immunity is a misconception. No vaccine provides that. They all have different rates of breakthrough infections and protection. There's nothing particularly special about the covid vaccines, except that they were developed and tested in record time. And in case of the mRNA vaccines, it's a new technology for producing vaccines, obviously.
"immunity" in the medical sense always meant "some resistance to" (as opposed to none at all) and never "total protection". Some other colloquial uses of the word (e.g. in legal) have always made this a bit difficult to understand outside the medical community. Cf. the "immune system" being a very active thing and not binary in practice.
No vaccine is 100% effective at providing absolute immunity. Not the MMR. Not Polio. Nobody has claimed otherwise.
> Now it's been changed to "provides protection, but ooops that protection can wane over time and eventually disappear".
Hmm...just like the annual flu "vaccine", right?
And did you forget that other vaccines require boosters, too? Tetanus is an example. It just happens to last several years, rather than several months like a flu or COVID vaccine.
Not all antibodies are the same. We now know that COVID-fighting antibodies last a few months. It doesn't mean the vaccines themselves are weak, it means the antibodies our bodies create don't survive long.
So yeah, not only are you simply wrong, but you're arguing nothing more than semantics as if it's a valid criticism.
The flu vaccine is easily explained by targeting different mutations each year. They also have to choose which mutations they think will be most prevalent before the season starts. Unlike Covid, flu mutations are able to regularly bypass a normal human autoimmune response. I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that’s true of Covid variants, and have first hand experience with several people infected with early variants who had immunity to later variants.
Several years ago there was a flu mutation that was similar enough to a flu from the 1930s (iirc) that people who caught it back then were still immune. It’s not that we need new vaccines for the same virus each year, the virus has just mutated enough that our immune response isn’t trained to identify it.
We don’t know how long natural antibodies for Covid last. In my family, members were still immune 9 months after infection and had higher antibody counts than those who were symptomatic.
Why is there such a push to convince people that our immune system works differently for this particular virus?
>It’s not that we need new vaccines for the same virus each year, the virus has just mutated enough that our immune response isn’t trained to identify it.
The inference here is categorically false. Vaccine protection against the flu begins to wane within weeks, and the reason is not owed to mutations:
>Why is there such a push to convince people that our immune system works differently for this particular virus?
There is no such push. You and others are just misinformed about how the immune system works and, unfortunately, spreading that misinformation--as here.
How does ephemeral immunity from flu vaccines help the case for Covid vaccines and hurt the case against natural immunity?
As mentioned in other comments, however anecdotal, multiple members of my household and extended family have durable immunity 9 months after their infections, without vaccination.
> No vaccine is 100% effective at providing absolute immunity. Not the MMR. Not Polio. Nobody has claimed otherwise.
Sure, it's not 100% for those other vaccines, but it's close. Once you get the polio vaccine as a child, you live the rest of your life the exact same way you would if polio were eradicated, without ever having to take any special precautions against the spread of polio again.
No vaccine has ever been 100% effective, and waning immunity has always been a common phenomenon. Some flu vaccines are only about 50% effective. Polio, tetanus, hepatitis, and smallpox vaccines have all required booster doses due to waning immunity.
I recently had a 10-year tetanus booster and learned that it’s not known if they are necessary, but they don’t hurt (except for the sore arm), so they’re given at ten year intervals.
It’s really unclear what the goal is with this campaign. My wife and son recovered last year and has not received a Covid shot. When others in our family caught it 9 months later, they didn’t get sick, as expected, and had an appropriate and measurable antibody response.
Perhaps what we're struggling at is finding words that communicate expectations properly. I just read this Wikipedia article on "Innoculation" and it seems we've been working at better definitions for about 200 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inoculation#Terminology
"Vaccine" when first introduced meant "of the cow", i.e. cowpox used as a weaker form of smallpox to provide immunological protection against the dangers of smallpox.
Vaccines as we knew them for 60+ years were weakened versions of a disease causing agent injected via a needle.
These "vaccines" are MRNA snippets which hijack your body chemistry to produce proteins similar to the proteins of the disease agent. It is an entirely different mechanism, the only similarity is the needle.
Popular dictionaries actually updated their definition of a "vaccine" in 2021 to accommodate this change, but at the end of the day, just because it is administered via a needle, it is not the same and should not get the same mental associations of a hundred years of prior tech.
The result is the same, though: train the immunity system by having it attacking a dummy version of pathogen. The only difference is that newer vaccines are more sophisticated and can cause less side effects while still training the immunity system to the same or even higher degree.
"(immunology) A substance given to stimulate the body's production of antibodies and provide immunity against a disease without causing the disease itself in the treatment, prepared from the agent that causes the disease, or a synthetic substitute."
In this context, I think the mRNA would satisfy the definition of "synthetic substitute".
In either case, this is merely semantics and it's the "GOTCHA!" you think it is.
If we take your reasoning and apply it to other situations one could make the argument that electric vehicles are not vehicles because they don't use gasoline and jet aircraft are not aircraft because they don't use piston engines.
Do you see the problem with your line of thinking?
Or motorcyles. They have wheels and get you from point A to pint B, but maybe have a different risk profile compared to cars. Not necessarily in favor of the alternative tech.
> Popular dictionaries actually updated their definition of a "vaccine" in 2021 to accommodate this change
Some popular dictionaries noticed their definitions were wrong. Merriam Webster's old definition excluded toxoid vaccines like diphtheria and tetanus. And anything produced from a virus.[1] Other popular dictionaries didn't say a vaccine had to be made from certain things.
In American tort law, the standard is what a reasonable person would understand from the statement. A reasonable person understands "vaccine" as something sterilizing against the target. The COVID-19 vaccines wouldn't be called vaccines by the average person who completely understood their effect on a person.
The burden isn't on me, a fan of vaccines that have documented high performance. (There are many of them. They aren't hard to find. Try medRxiv.)
The burden is on you, a person who seems to believe without evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines prevent people from becoming infected with COVID (they don't) perpetually (they don't). There are many fully vaccinated people dying with COVID because (as with most other COVID deaths!) of serious comorbidities.
The best current evidence is that the COVID-19 vaccines have a good effect on preventing hospitalization and death, little effect on preventing infection, and all benefits attenuate materially at between 3 and 9 months.
It's an insanely mediocre product, which is fine because COVID is mediocre at killing people. But its mediocrity means the mandates -- especially for under 30s, especially for young men, especially for those rich in IgG antibodies -- is unjustifiable.
That is what the word vaccine means to ordinary people. Stop accusing me of changing a definition that your side is changing. [1] That kind of behavior belongs on Reddit.
Merriam Webster's old definition excluded many vaccines ordinary people called vaccines. Diphtheria and tetanus most clearly. And other dictionaries had definitions compatible with mRNA vaccines.[1]
The part I agree on is that more people should understand, or at least be aware, of the chemistry in the serum.
The part I disagree is that it's pedantic, its function is to stimulate an immune response, just like traditional vaccines. This argument is the same as people who say we shouldn't call phones phones anymore. Technically correct, but not really useful.
The difference is that influenza isn’t required to work, attend a concert, eat in NYC, ect. When the vaccine is so directly tied to your ability to participate in society, it becomes a concerning scenario because of conflicts of interest, ect. The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t have a great track record of doing what’s best for you, and frankly, neither does the government. See the opioid epidemic for exhibit A and the financial bailouts for exhibit B.
When you doubt a high-quality study of 780,225 veterans because of vague conspiracy theories you need to start questioning how your ideology is leading you astray.
And only to attend school, and until 4 or 5 years ago it was probably very easy to get an exemption. And every one of those vaccines had been in existence and monitored for safety concerns for years before they were ever mandated.
In my state, at least, the restrictions on the tetanus vaccine for school is more restrictive than any covid restriction on public life.
I’m not sure how any of this has to do with using the term “pretext” to describe booster shots. They are a normal and accepted part of public health immunization plans and have been for as long as I’ve been alive. Pretext, at least to me, implies that there is no health reason for boosters and if anything this study suggests the opposite.
The ellipsis seems to imply something else. Is there anything else or have we enumerated them exhaustively?
I know at least a couple of nurses who were able to get around the flu shot requirements, probably because it was pretty well understood they only reduce transmission marginally at best.
> The difference is that influenza isn’t required to work, attend a concert, eat in NYC, ect.
Look at the average number of flu cases and deaths per year, then look at how many COVID cases and deaths just this year, and maybe you'll understand why.
> The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t have a great track record of doing what’s best for you
This argument is so silly to me, because it's CLEARLY not thought through.
A vaccine is NOT in the best interest of Big Pharma. They stand to make MORE money by not making the vaccine and allowing the virus to rip through the population and selling treatments.
When the disease has something like 99.999% survival rate, no. Treating sick people is not as lucrative as forcing 90% of the population to get a shot every 6 months to keep their job.
Focusing on survival rates ignores the overflowing ICUs, not to mention a lot of people coming out of it with long-lasting lung damage.
But what really irks me is the hypocrisy. Everyone crying about not wanting to get the jab because they don't trust the drug companies will run to the hospital and take everything they'll offer when they get COVID.
> Look at the average number of flu cases and deaths per year, then look at how many COVID cases and deaths just this year, and maybe you'll understand why.
I just took another look at the numbers, the flu kills ~27k people total every year and Covid kills ~33k under 50's every year, which largely covers the attend a concert and eat in NYC crowd.
Not that it means anything, I'm deliberately comparing different age groups and those numbers would certainly be higher if not for lock-downs and vaccines. I just find it interesting how close the numbers are.
it's not to minimize the dangers of covid, if anything this reinforces it's many times more dangerous than the flu.
but i think it's interesting context in terms of risk assessment to realize that under 50's account for 2/3 of the population yet only 6.7% of fatal covid cases.
> I just took another look at the numbers, the flu kills ~27k people total every year and Covid kills ~33k under 50's every year, which largely covers the attend a concert and eat in NYC crowd.
I have never seen a more clear example of "The statistics don't fit my narrative, so I'm going to abuse them".
Compare the COVID deaths under 50 with the Flu deaths under 50.
How am I abusing the data and what narrative am I claiming to have? I know the audience on HN and I know I don't need to hand-hold anyone here when presenting statistics. I even included a disclaimer for people like you.
>The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t have a great track record of doing what’s best for you
I'd say it has a pretty damn good record if you look at the full picture and don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There have been some terrible cases over the years, but At Large, companies have made thousands of new drug and S
Saved hundred of millions of lives, let blind people see, and prevented horrible illnesses.
Sure, they did it for money, but that's how you motivate people to go to work in the morning.
First, vaccinations are required for schools as an example.
Second, this should only be temporary until the burden on the health care is reduced. The fundamental problem is not enough people getting vaccinated. None of this would be necessary if more people were vaccinated.
The latter for sure - there is an ever-increasing number of fingers-in-the-ears crowd here on HN, which is disappointing because tough subjects should be able to be debated, instead of flagged and censored into oblivion.
Odd that an article in the journal Science is flagged?
Also, folks in the comments, calm down. The article in question proves that it is possible to have a reasoned, fact-focused discussion of the benefits and limitations of vaccines. This is HN, not Reddit. Please calm down.
Probably partially my fault, and my now flagged, formally most upvoted, comment below.
I often wondered what kind of outrageous and offensive comment might be hidden behind the portentous "[flagged]" marker. Well, now I know it can be something completely reasonable, inoffensive and civil.
It may be the "we". For example, the public debate in the place I live in was more along the lines of "hopefully the vaccines will bring some relief, but we won't know for sure until large scale implementation" and then "initial results are promising", etc. - in my personal experience the vaccines' performance has matched my expectations based on the information I got from e.g. basic news, and I'm glad they're working so well.
This may be different in other places, and discussing differences in vaccine portrayal/media discussion of vaccines may be quite interesting. But without the context your comment may read somewhat vague or alarmist.
Where do you live? Because that's been the narrative nowhere I'm aware of. Saying "we have to roll it out to the public to find out if it works" is rather the opposite of how it was presented, wasn't it? It was all about the trials prove it's safe and effective and there's no reason to doubt the rollout.
Yes that's changed now with the rollouts to children and the boosters. They realized people will take anything if it's called a vaccine even if the trials were a joke, and even if they say we have to try it out on the public to see what happens. But that's very new.
I'm in Germany. It was always made pretty clear here that there are a lot of things that we wouldn't know until we know it, in particular if vaccine X or Y or Z would be more effective, and how long the vaccines would stay effective. For example I distinctly remember encountering in mainstream press and in talkshows (with public officials and experts) worries like "if you get vaccinated early, there's a risk the efficacy could wane off until the next winter wave" and "there's a risk the virus mutates faster than we can keep up with on the vaccine development front", and so on. Topic #1 among the general population for a long time was probably "which vaccine should I try to get because they're not all created equal".
My bottom line was that I was hoping the vaccines would help, but we would have to see just how much. I was prepared to be disappointed. I still am - but also hopeful we can keep up and progress toward herd immunity with boosters and updated vaccines. It still seems like the best strategy on the table.
To be clear, there were also people taking the stance of "don't talk the vaccines down too much or people won't go out and get their shots", but overall German society enjoys being critical and poking holes into things too much for that. It just causes Streisand effect outcomes.
When I look at the US, I feel like a lot of the political dialog becomes overly simplified and binary. You're either pro or con something, on both sides you pare down your message to a single sentence, complexities be damned, etc. And the distrust generated as a result is immense.
I'm interested to know where Germany got that narrative, because nowhere else had it. The conversation in the USA and elsewhere is quite binary because what the "experts" said was binary. In December 2020 Fauci was saying:
"We know for sure it's very, very good, 94 percent, 95 percent in protecting you against clinically recognizable disease, and almost a 100 percent in protecting you for severe disease."
We know for sure it has 95% protection against disease. As recently as July the world was being told that the vaccines can prevent COVID-19:
"remains highly efficacious in preventing COVID-19"
"has been authorized for emergency use by FDA under an
Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019"
Clearly those statements were wrong and they didn't realize it, despite presenting these claims with extremely high levels of confidence. There certainly wasn't any notion of "we have no idea, gotta try to find out lol".
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadCan someone explain this to me? What is "breakthrough infection"?
However, it's important to note that "breakthrough infection" is different from "breakthrough disease". It is possible, and likely common with the delta variant, to be a carrier with zero symptoms.
As far as "breakthrough infection increased risk of death", that's explained a little further down on the page in the article linked here on HN:
This is a pretty long-winded way of saying that some people who were vaccinated still became infected, and some of those infected people did die.The importance of a study like this is to understand how the efficacy of the vaccine holds up over time, which can help inform public health recommendations and policy-making decisions.
This seems to be a longwinded way of saying that it's better not to get Covid than to get Covid, regardless of whether you're vaccinated or not.
The vaccine certainly helped, but the tide would have turned regardless. The Amish are a good example of a completely unvaccinated community that "beat" Covid.
We can compare areas of low versus high rates of vaccinations:
> The incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, hospitalization, and death is higher in unvaccinated than vaccinated persons, and the incidence rate ratios are related to vaccine effectiveness.
* https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e1.htm
> The Amish are a good example of a completely unvaccinated community that "beat" Covid.
This works well if you're isolated away from the rest of society, and less so if you wish to mingle with everyone else. So if you wish to enact a self-imposed lockdown you're free to do so, but good luck with your social life.
"Rural Americans more likely to die from COVID-19"
* https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/09/rural-am...
"Covid is killing rural Americans at twice the rate of people in urban areas"
* https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-killing-rur...
Seems once it (eventually) gets into a community, it can spread quite quickly, and the more isolated nature of the community means reduced readily-available treatment options.
It's counter intuitive, but due to their religious practices they are all frequently in contact with each other.
Covid reportedly "ripped through" the Amish communities early on because they never locked down and continued going to church.
Being rural didn't prevent them from getting exposed to Covid, it's just their traditions resulted in early development of natural immunity.
I thought the unvaccinated were dying against vaccinated literally 99:1
Am I misinterpreting what you're saying?
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/1017002907/u-s-covid-deaths-a...
https://medicalpartnership.usg.edu/covid-19-staggering-stati...
https://www.cnet.com/health/99-of-covid-deaths-are-now-of-un...
https://www.al.com/news/2021/08/99-of-alabamas-2379-covid-de...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italy-says-99-covid-dea...
I believe with Delta, the ratio is closer to 19:1.
But uh...still certainly a damn good reason to get vaccinated.
I don’t doubt your statement but do you have any sources or articles about this? I’d like to learn more detail.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Edit. Oh, I see now. From the fourth article: "99% of Alabama’s 2,379 COVID deaths from January to June were unvaccinated". Alabama had a covid wave in Jan, which then subsided. Mass vaccination only started in Jan, by the time the wave was over maybe 10-20% of the population was vaccinated. The numbers are dominated by the pre-vaccination wave, plus VE is high early on which limits the vaccinated deaths. Verdict: technically correct, but highly misleading.
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
YES this right here is such a deliberate sleight of hand by the media, and as GP demonstrated they get away with it a lot!
> 1:9 unvax:vax
Shouldn't this be the other way around? 9 unvaxxed dying for every 1 vaxxed? Otherwise I'm not seeing the quoted claim in the report you linked.
The closest I've been able to find for the U.S. is this Connecticut report on hospitalization. Unfortunately it omits unvaccinated deaths, but we see hospitalizations at a rate of 4:1 (unvax:vax)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Edit: The totals come at 669 unvax deaths vs. 3011 vax deaths. The raw numbers ratio is roughly 2:8 unvax:vax. This is not VE, as it is not adjusted to vax levels in the population. It is just a sanity check of certain claims in the US media.
Yes, a lot of laypeople were expecting them to outright prevent infection at much higher rates, but that was never the deal from the start. Consider that the clinical trial protocols only called for testing participants for COVID if they started showing symptoms; the numbers presented were never about preventing infection entirely.
The lower percentages quoted in the article are still pretty fantastic, despite their drop from the initial 90%+ numbers from the clinical trials. Remember that the clinical trials were also done pre-delta variant. It's pretty impressive that they've held up so well against delta.
What was the deal? It seems like there was a lot of vague verbiage forecasting, and un-falsifiable predictions (which is unfortunately the norm).
It wasn't just laypeople, it's trivial to go back and find prominent public health officials promising that vaccinated people will not transmit the disease, the vaccines will be 100% effective against death, etc. They shouldn't have been saying that given that what you say about the trials is true, but hey, they haven't paid any price for getting it wrong since this whole thing began so why would they now?
In general I have noticed there's this pattern where the public will sometimes be clearly and strongly led to believe a certain thing, but if it later turns out to be false, 100% of the blame is placed on the masses. If there's any rebuke for the officials or institutions which led them into error it's always in the most vague and general terms, with no one ever indicted (or, heaven forbid, punished) by name.
"Antibodies elicited by mRNA-1273 vaccination bind more broadly to the receptor binding domain than do those from SARS-CoV-2 infection"
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.abi9915
> These findings suggest that among persons with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, full vaccination provides additional protection against reinfection. Among previously infected Kentucky residents, those who were not vaccinated were more than twice as likely to be reinfected compared with those with full vaccination. All eligible persons should be offered vaccination, including those with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, to reduce their risk for future infection.
* https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm
It would certainly go against prior knowledge about human immune responses for a single spike protein (vaccine) to elicit a greater immune response than _the actual virus_.
That CDC study is so bad I'm surprised they had the gall to publish it with the conclusion they did. Testing positive says nothing about severity of infection.
> were about five times more likely to test positive for the infection than people who had been vaccinated
Testing positive is not a very good metric. Were they hospitalized? Was it severe? Did they even get sick, or just test positive?
They even admit to a sampling flaw in the discussion:
> Second, persons who have been vaccinated are possibly less likely to get tested. Therefore, the association of reinfection and lack of vaccination might be overestimated.
The best study on this so far is from Israel with a much larger sample in a highly vaccinated country. Here's a Harvard doctor discussing the contradictory studies.
https://brownstone.org/articles/a-review-and-autopsy-of-two-...
> For a low-risk person, which includes most people with natural immunity, a 35% risk reduction is more marginal in terms of absolute risk.
> Based on the solid evidence from the Israeli study, the Covid recovered have stronger and longer-lasting immunity against Covid disease than the vaccinated. Hence, there is no reason to prevent them from activities that are permitted to the vaccinated. In fact, it is discriminatory.
"It's important to realize, though, that all immune responses to a viral infection generate a mixture of neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies. That's one of the things about the immune system - it revs up production of a wide variety of antibodies, selected from the untold billions of them circulating around in your bloodstream. Some of them bind to one part of the pathogen, and some to another. And they bind in different conformations, sticking to different parts of the surface of the invading virus from different directions."
It is conceivable that a targeted vaccine is more effective at shutting down an infection than natural immunity by focusing the immune system to produce a narrow band of very effective antibodies. The tradeoff is that a virus mutation can create a catastrophic situation where the same antibodies are less effective, possibly having negative efficiency enhancing the infection. The risk is amplified by vaccinating the entire population with the exact same protein sequence, creating hundreds of millions of living incubators for the virus to learn how to evade the narrow antibody response.
We are creating a biological landscape prone to black swan events. Good luck convincing any total vaxer that this is a very real risk. They will laugh and sneer and maybe call you criminal because obviously the data shows the vaccines are safe and effective. "Hahaha, I've been told that we're all going to be dead by now, look at those peddling conspiracy theories." Just like the Wall Street crowd created the run-up to the 2008 crisis. Who could have possibly predicted that CDOs were prone to a black swan?
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/antibody-dependent...
If you don't survive the problems of today, then there's no point in worrying about tomorrow's possibilities because you're dead.
The data does show that the COVID vaccines are generally safe and pretty effective. Not 100%, but the perfect is the enemy of the good, and so let's try to improve our lot now so we have a chance to fight for later.
Please spend a few minutes to refresh on the data. Some nice dashboards from Singapore (ongoing delta wave), but also e.g. King County, WA (Seattle) shows similar data, though you have to drill down a bit (Demographics tab, then Deaths metric). For example in the past 30 days a total 12 deaths in the under 50 population, for a total of 10% of total covid deaths. Or, since the pandemic started, a death rate of 22/100k or less in all age groups <50, going as low as 0-3/100k for under 30s.
This is not to say that people, especially the elderly, should not get vaccinated if they choose so. It is only a reminder that there is a perception problem around covid and that the long term risk calculus is more complicated.
https://www.moh.gov.sg/covid-19/statistics
https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/daily-summ...
These hopes were probably based on experiences with "normal" vaccines, which are apt to eradicate diseases through sterile immunity (though there are a bunch of exceptions to this, it's not like we're getting rid of the flu and some other stuff by vaccinations [2]). However, we since learned that a vaccine providing sterile immunity against COVID-19 seems to be off the table (as none of them are), so herd immunity against COVID-19 will likely never be a thing and eradicating COVID-19 is just not possible.
[1] Herd immunity was THE talking point in early 2021 in Germany. Also, remember a few countries trying to get herd immunity by intentionally letting the virus spread (great britain cough cough)?
[2] Sterile immunity seems to be difficult with respiratory diseases (flu, covid, cold, pertussis come to mind). Naively I'd guess that's because the critters have some time to multiply on the surface of the airways and be infectious before the immune system gets a chance to nuke 'em. If that's the explanation though I'm kinda wondering why the herd immunity theory was so common, so it's probably more complicated than that.
COVID cases are nearing all-time highs, but COVID deaths remain significantly lower than before. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data?country=~DEU
Ironically we also had a reduction in ICU capacity during COVID because working conditions didn't improve so people reasonably resigned instead of being continually exploited. There has also been a huge increase in hostility towards nurses, doctors and medical personnel in general (mostly driven by the small but aggressive anti-vaxx "community"), which certainly doesn't help retain people.
Is this true? I've heard claims in both directions but seen no sources for either.
> mostly driven by the small but aggressive anti-vaxx "community
Same question as above. There's a massive push to fire all the essential workers that took the brunt of the pandemic early on if they happen to believe the growing body of evidence showing that they don't need the vaccine if they've already recovered.
That certainly doesn't help retain people either.
The summer waves clobbered various hospital systems in the US on a region by region basis. Winter is likely to be worse. For example, right now Minneapolis is under heavy load, ICUs at >95% across the board. https://covidestim.org concurs, the Midwest is undergoing a wave.
https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/covid-19-hospital-capacity...
It also isn't clear if these are patients in hospital for covid or they just happen to have covid (click on the links in the column headers to see the inclusion criteria).
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-hospitals-reach-critical-pande...
https://covid19.healthdata.org/germany?view=resource-use&tab...
https://www.thelocal.de/20211108/german-states-bring-in-toug...
https://www.dw.com/en/covid-german-health-chiefs-call-for-st...
https://thegermanyeye.com/hospitals%3A-the-intensive-care-un...
...
https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-digest-france-tightens-vac...
For every English article mentioning this situation, there are 100 in German.
The media landscape on this topic seems so polluted and untrustworthy that I can't help but wish for some kind of straightforward data supplement to go with statements like
> Several hospitals have said in recent days that they are again working at their limits and have ICUs so full of COVID-19 patients that they cannot admit new patients at the moment
where I can read that and then compare it to a spreadsheet and say yep that adds up. Your second link isn't quite that for me (and I realize its an unrealistic expectation). Another poster in this thread linked to something that was closer, but also didn't quite make the case imo.
Anyways, appreciate the links. It seems clear something is going on in Germany, and I may need to get a hold of my skepticism a bit.
That is fine, medical science is tough, but don't call it a vaccine instead of changing the definition of what outcomes vaccines historically (pre-2021) had provided.
"especially : a condition of being able to resist a particular disease especially through preventing development of a pathogenic microorganism or by counteracting the effects of its products"
Getting vaccinated has never, ever, guaranteed you cannot contract an illness.
Also old vaccines do not all provide lifelong immunity. You have to get tetanus boosters regularly.
No vaccine is 100% effective at providing absolute immunity. Not the MMR. Not Polio. Nobody has claimed otherwise.
> Now it's been changed to "provides protection, but ooops that protection can wane over time and eventually disappear".
Hmm...just like the annual flu "vaccine", right?
And did you forget that other vaccines require boosters, too? Tetanus is an example. It just happens to last several years, rather than several months like a flu or COVID vaccine.
Not all antibodies are the same. We now know that COVID-fighting antibodies last a few months. It doesn't mean the vaccines themselves are weak, it means the antibodies our bodies create don't survive long.
So yeah, not only are you simply wrong, but you're arguing nothing more than semantics as if it's a valid criticism.
Several years ago there was a flu mutation that was similar enough to a flu from the 1930s (iirc) that people who caught it back then were still immune. It’s not that we need new vaccines for the same virus each year, the virus has just mutated enough that our immune response isn’t trained to identify it.
We don’t know how long natural antibodies for Covid last. In my family, members were still immune 9 months after infection and had higher antibody counts than those who were symptomatic.
Why is there such a push to convince people that our immune system works differently for this particular virus?
The inference here is categorically false. Vaccine protection against the flu begins to wane within weeks, and the reason is not owed to mutations:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2018/09/study-fl...
https://www.science.org/content/article/why-flu-vaccines-don...
>Why is there such a push to convince people that our immune system works differently for this particular virus?
There is no such push. You and others are just misinformed about how the immune system works and, unfortunately, spreading that misinformation--as here.
As mentioned in other comments, however anecdotal, multiple members of my household and extended family have durable immunity 9 months after their infections, without vaccination.
Sure, it's not 100% for those other vaccines, but it's close. Once you get the polio vaccine as a child, you live the rest of your life the exact same way you would if polio were eradicated, without ever having to take any special precautions against the spread of polio again.
It’s really unclear what the goal is with this campaign. My wife and son recovered last year and has not received a Covid shot. When others in our family caught it 9 months later, they didn’t get sick, as expected, and had an appropriate and measurable antibody response.
"Vaccine" when first introduced meant "of the cow", i.e. cowpox used as a weaker form of smallpox to provide immunological protection against the dangers of smallpox.
These "vaccines" are MRNA snippets which hijack your body chemistry to produce proteins similar to the proteins of the disease agent. It is an entirely different mechanism, the only similarity is the needle.
Popular dictionaries actually updated their definition of a "vaccine" in 2021 to accommodate this change, but at the end of the day, just because it is administered via a needle, it is not the same and should not get the same mental associations of a hundred years of prior tech.
https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=vaccine&oldid=51...
"(immunology) A substance given to stimulate the body's production of antibodies and provide immunity against a disease without causing the disease itself in the treatment, prepared from the agent that causes the disease, or a synthetic substitute."
In this context, I think the mRNA would satisfy the definition of "synthetic substitute".
In either case, this is merely semantics and it's the "GOTCHA!" you think it is.
His entire commentary is quite interesting. [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lepqvdXoA2E&t=4941s
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lepqvdXoA2E&t=4725s
Do you see the problem with your line of thinking?
Some popular dictionaries noticed their definitions were wrong. Merriam Webster's old definition excluded toxoid vaccines like diphtheria and tetanus. And anything produced from a virus.[1] Other popular dictionaries didn't say a vaccine had to be made from certain things.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28486499
The burden is on you, a person who seems to believe without evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines prevent people from becoming infected with COVID (they don't) perpetually (they don't). There are many fully vaccinated people dying with COVID because (as with most other COVID deaths!) of serious comorbidities.
The best current evidence is that the COVID-19 vaccines have a good effect on preventing hospitalization and death, little effect on preventing infection, and all benefits attenuate materially at between 3 and 9 months.
It's an insanely mediocre product, which is fine because COVID is mediocre at killing people. But its mediocrity means the mandates -- especially for under 30s, especially for young men, especially for those rich in IgG antibodies -- is unjustifiable.
You made up a definition of what ‘vaccine’ means then decided that covid vaccines don’t meet it.
The vaccines do a pretty good job at preventing morbidity and mortality. Feel free to sue someone if you disagree and if American tort law allows it.
That is what the word vaccine means to ordinary people. Stop accusing me of changing a definition that your side is changing. [1] That kind of behavior belongs on Reddit.
[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=50886
Merriam Webster's old definition excluded many vaccines ordinary people called vaccines. Diphtheria and tetanus most clearly. And other dictionaries had definitions compatible with mRNA vaccines.[1]
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=vaccine&oldid=51...
The part I agree on is that more people should understand, or at least be aware, of the chemistry in the serum.
The part I disagree is that it's pedantic, its function is to stimulate an immune response, just like traditional vaccines. This argument is the same as people who say we shouldn't call phones phones anymore. Technically correct, but not really useful.
I’m not sure how any of this has to do with using the term “pretext” to describe booster shots. They are a normal and accepted part of public health immunization plans and have been for as long as I’ve been alive. Pretext, at least to me, implies that there is no health reason for boosters and if anything this study suggests the opposite.
I know at least a couple of nurses who were able to get around the flu shot requirements, probably because it was pretty well understood they only reduce transmission marginally at best.
Look at the average number of flu cases and deaths per year, then look at how many COVID cases and deaths just this year, and maybe you'll understand why.
> The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t have a great track record of doing what’s best for you
This argument is so silly to me, because it's CLEARLY not thought through.
A vaccine is NOT in the best interest of Big Pharma. They stand to make MORE money by not making the vaccine and allowing the virus to rip through the population and selling treatments.
But what really irks me is the hypocrisy. Everyone crying about not wanting to get the jab because they don't trust the drug companies will run to the hospital and take everything they'll offer when they get COVID.
I just took another look at the numbers, the flu kills ~27k people total every year and Covid kills ~33k under 50's every year, which largely covers the attend a concert and eat in NYC crowd.
Not that it means anything, I'm deliberately comparing different age groups and those numbers would certainly be higher if not for lock-downs and vaccines. I just find it interesting how close the numbers are.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
The numbers aren’t remotely close.
but i think it's interesting context in terms of risk assessment to realize that under 50's account for 2/3 of the population yet only 6.7% of fatal covid cases.
I have never seen a more clear example of "The statistics don't fit my narrative, so I'm going to abuse them".
Compare the COVID deaths under 50 with the Flu deaths under 50.
I'd say it has a pretty damn good record if you look at the full picture and don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There have been some terrible cases over the years, but At Large, companies have made thousands of new drug and S Saved hundred of millions of lives, let blind people see, and prevented horrible illnesses.
Sure, they did it for money, but that's how you motivate people to go to work in the morning.
Second, this should only be temporary until the burden on the health care is reduced. The fundamental problem is not enough people getting vaccinated. None of this would be necessary if more people were vaccinated.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...
Is this a manual thing done by the moderators, or are people mass-flagging it because it doesn't fit their world view?
Also, folks in the comments, calm down. The article in question proves that it is possible to have a reasoned, fact-focused discussion of the benefits and limitations of vaccines. This is HN, not Reddit. Please calm down.
I often wondered what kind of outrageous and offensive comment might be hidden behind the portentous "[flagged]" marker. Well, now I know it can be something completely reasonable, inoffensive and civil.
This may be different in other places, and discussing differences in vaccine portrayal/media discussion of vaccines may be quite interesting. But without the context your comment may read somewhat vague or alarmist.
Yes that's changed now with the rollouts to children and the boosters. They realized people will take anything if it's called a vaccine even if the trials were a joke, and even if they say we have to try it out on the public to see what happens. But that's very new.
My bottom line was that I was hoping the vaccines would help, but we would have to see just how much. I was prepared to be disappointed. I still am - but also hopeful we can keep up and progress toward herd immunity with boosters and updated vaccines. It still seems like the best strategy on the table.
To be clear, there were also people taking the stance of "don't talk the vaccines down too much or people won't go out and get their shots", but overall German society enjoys being critical and poking holes into things too much for that. It just causes Streisand effect outcomes.
When I look at the US, I feel like a lot of the political dialog becomes overly simplified and binary. You're either pro or con something, on both sides you pare down your message to a single sentence, complexities be damned, etc. And the distrust generated as a result is immense.
"We know for sure it's very, very good, 94 percent, 95 percent in protecting you against clinically recognizable disease, and almost a 100 percent in protecting you for severe disease."
We know for sure it has 95% protection against disease. As recently as July the world was being told that the vaccines can prevent COVID-19:
https://cdn.pfizer.com/pfizercom/2021-07/Preprint_Post_Hoc_P...
"remains highly efficacious in preventing COVID-19"
"has been authorized for emergency use by FDA under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019"
Clearly those statements were wrong and they didn't realize it, despite presenting these claims with extremely high levels of confidence. There certainly wasn't any notion of "we have no idea, gotta try to find out lol".
"Every professional knows the discomfort and fallout that go along with having to deliver bad news."