But I am not vaccinated for health reasons. When are we going to start differentiating? Were I not a freelancer, I would have lost my job because I am not vaccinated, for health reasons. It is a pretty shitty thing to do to people.
There are allergies to vaccines (not to the dose, but to everything else that is in the concoction that enables it to work). Also, immunocompromised people often can't take vaccines.
Usually you can get a doctor's note explaining this, and you can participate in daily life normally (like going to school or college, which rightfully require vaccinations).
I don't know if policy around the COVID vaccine is different... But I'd be surprised if it were?
* Immunocompromised people have poor efficacy with the vaccine even with boosters, like my dad who has SLL.
* Other people who have autoimmune and inflammatory conditions are often immunocompromised (because of taking low dose chemotherapy, etc, to manage their conditions). Also, recommending a vaccine for these people is complicated, because vaccines can kick up immune and inflammatory responses and make their conditions worse. Most are still better off with the vaccine but I can understand both providers and patients being hesitant.
In all these cases, though, the immunocompromised person who is not greatly benefiting from the vaccine is at much greater risk of dying from COVID. The sane response for them is to be very very careful about any potential exposure, NOT to get exempted from the vaccine requirement and then go do insanely risky face-to-face activities that otherwise would have a vaccine mandate.
My friend is immunocompromised from chemotherapy, has had (I believe) at least 4 COVID shots by now, and just had to go to the hospital for monoclonal antibodies after catching COVID. Not getting vaccinated, then getting a vaccine waiver instead of the vaccine, then going and doing in-person stuff that would've otherwise required the vaccine would've been practically suicidal for her.
In the second case, the person choosing the vaccine has a high risk of, say, a debilitating RA flareup and an uncertain amount of protection given their immunocompromised status. I can totally understand why some in this position choose not to.
They probably should, but this is not as clear-cut of a decision as for those of us with normal immune capability. No one knows the exact efficacy they can expect nor the amount of risk of side effect they are shouldering.
> NOT to get exempted from the vaccine requirement and then go do insanely risky face-to-face activities that otherwise would have a vaccine mandate.
Yah, I don't think anyone advocated for quite that-- just some middle ground where they can choose to assume some risk. A lot of us hoped that perhaps population immunity could do the work of shielding these people, but it looks like that ship has sailed.
> because vaccines can kick up immune and inflammatory responses and make their conditions worse
This is what I am really worried about. If my immune system is poked even so slightly, I get symptoms although not as bad as I imagine I would get after the vaccines. I already have mobility issues. I do not want to be wheelchair-bound, even though that is a very likely outcome anyways.
With over 300mm Americans, there is no one treatment plan for the entire country.
Not every physician is recommending every single one of their patients get this or any other vaccine. There are public policy implications for serving those people.
> There are allergies to vaccines (not to the dose, but to everything else that is in the concoction that enables it to work).
There are multiple vaccine formulations available, and they largely do not overlap in terms of potential allergy triggers. If you're allergic to a component of the mRNA vaccines, that does not preclude you from taking an adenovirus vaccine, or vice versa. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...
> So yea. I have no interest in it. Though if I hadn’t had covid already I would definitely get vaccine.
Well I guess the mandate is working, because based on this response you are an individual that I would prefer not to be exposed to in the workplace without the mandated testing.
This is not a judgement of personal worth, just an observation that you are not behaving rationally. Top down policies such as the mandate are helpful for the whole in the these situations.
IIRC Vaccination seems to do a poor job of preventing person-to-person transmission of delta (and likely, even less, omicron). If you are currently getting vaccinated, you should be doing it for selfish reasons, and you should not count on it to protect, say, a vulnerable or unvaccinated person you live with.
> It's not perfect, but the vaccinated people shed way less virus, and are contagious for a much shorter window of time.
And are significantly less likely to get infected in the first place.
My dad has SLL, which some of the worst breakthrough cases have been in. He's vaccinated (with likely poor efficacy). His children and grandchildren are vaccinated. We're careful with our overall level of exposure and wear a mask around him even in situations where this seems paranoid. Us being vaccinated is one of the many layers (and one of the most effective, pre-Omicron) in protecting my dad.
The Lancet data suggests the effect is pretty small in terms of transmission. And the fact that countries like Singapore with 95%+ of eligible vaccinated, strict distancing measures still had a ton of cases demonstrates that in the real world.
That sounds good. Someone commented that my employer is supposed to consider the contraindication and whatnot, but it really is not the case, at least not as far as the law goes. My employer could consider it, but does not have to. I am going to the dentist and I need a negative PCR test every 48h, and it is expensive. :/
There is already a differentiation. Your employer would still need to accommodate your vaccine allergy/contradiction, so long as there is medical documentation backing your claim. You would then go into weekly testing protocol if you needed to be onsite[1]. If you're 100% remote you could even get out of doing the weekly testing[2].
Ivermectin acts on glutamate chloride ion channels. It is not a protease inhibitor. And even if it were (which it is not), something that inhibits one protease doesn't work on other proteases. We can't use HIV protease inhibitors to fight covid, for example.
"in silico" doesn't mean that is actually real. We are almost getting into 2022 now and there is ample evidence from prospective double-blind studies proving that Ivermectin doesn't work against covid. And here in Brazil we have a pile of corpses showing what happens when the government tries to use innefective drugs as the main answer to the pandemic.
>Good luck! I look forward to your references to peer-reviewed, reproduced, double-blind studies upending decades of well established medical science.
Why is my burden of proof higher than yours? I at least linked one study in my sibling comment.
I haven't seen that from anyone, studying anything, in years. Around 2018 there were actually a ton of articles and discussions right here on HN about the reproducibility problem in science, and that there's no funding for reproducing studies anymore. Everything is just cite and move on. We were actually making significant progress in reforming our ideas of science, and the effects that scientific funding sources have on our knowledge, as a species (hint if it's not profitable we probably aren't studying it).
That all got thrown by the wayside as "trust the science" became the political rallying cry of half the population over the last year.
Oh no don't try to throw in "reproducibility crisis" here. The fact that some studies in some areas are hard to reproduce (which is not news to anyone) does not suddenly mean that we should go back to cheap armchair philosophy as the main source of "knowledge". This is the equivalent of saying that the fossil record is slightly incomplete therefore Christian creationism.
"Science" in general is one of those things that you can safely rally behind, because there is nothing more accurate by definition.
And of course by that you mean your critical thinking which is pure and thoughtful and sublime, while their critical thinking is biased and full of crisis and smells foul because it contradicts you.
Because that is what armchair discussions actually are. No real critical thinking, just scratching one's own ass.
By definition, critical thinking is questioning what you are told. I am questioning what I am told, by assessing
* Who is telling me this information?
Pfizer, the FDA
* Who stands to benefit from this?
Pfizer, the maker of the drug, and the downstream finances from them - namely the FDA (who gets most of their funding from drug makers), lobbied politicians in DC, as well as the nightly news, which sure does seem to show a lot of ads for Pfizer products.
So, from those questions, I have become skeptical. I am completely open to other lines of critical thinking, but so far I have just met resistance for questioning things at all.
So who is doing critical thikning? Am I actually denigrating someone elses critical thinking? Because there seems to be relatively little of it in this thread.
... which if analysed properly, result in the inevitable conclustion that it works as an anti-parasitic and improves outcomes, especially in nations where parasites are common.
To say anything else about it strictly puts the burden of proof on you. If you say it cures COVID, you need to demonstrate this. You also need to demonstrate how this effect isn't the well-demonstrated anti-parasitic benefit that the drug provides.
Look.
This is like saying that plaster casts are pain killers and we should all start eating plaster, despite the well-known use and benefit of plaster casts to physically stabilise broken bones. Moving broken bones hurt. Plaster casts stop the movement. Hence... plaster is a pain killer and should be taken orally to stop any pain -- oh wait -- no, it's only useful for broken bones! Because duh!. To say otherwise makes you look like a lunatic.
I mean... sure... there's a teeny tiny chance that plaster of paris somehow -- magically -- has a pain killing effect. But you'd have to have awfully good evidence that this is so, otherwise people are right to ignore you. Not to mention that ranting and raving and pointing to the studies done on patient pain before and after having been put into casts won't get you anywhere if those studies were done on motor vehicle crash victims only.
You didn't link a "peer reviewed, reproduced, double blind study". You linked a meta-analysis of other studies. One that admits near it's conclusion
"[...]the trends really are in ivermectin’s favor, but once you eliminate all the questionable studies there are too few studies left to have enough statistical power to reach significance."
Maybe it's nothing, but maybe it's something. So again, why is your burden of proof less than mine? I don't have any studies of my own, I assume you don't either, nor the resources to conduct them. All I hinted at that there was a seeming connection between an off-patent drug that had gotten an exceptional amount of hubbub. It's interesting how aggressively this argument is fought, considering there's a lot of drugs/medicines that are similar in structure and have similar but notably different effect. If this drug is just ivermectin designed more accurately for the coronavirus's protein structures, that should be lauded! It's a family of drugs with a safe track record! But instead it ignites a fiery debate filled with spite-filled comments.
I think it's more accurate to say Ivermectin works _as_ an anti-parasitic which was already known. The WHO does, in fact, recommend its use on covid patients who are at high risk for parasitic infection due to geography and steroid use. This is almost exclusively going to be in poor and tropical regions.
This is precisely the point. It works! Against parasites! That won't save your from COVID itself, but some people have looked at the statistical benefits across all populations and extrapolated from there to claim that it is a wunder-drug that eliminates any requirement for vaccination.
The vaccines were also lauded as 100% effective in the early days by Fauci and others, so just a reminder that time and reproducibility matter before being too confident about it.
You are completely wrong -- totally warped by the narrative.
Look at the Pfizer press release, Nov 9, 2020 - the first sentence:
"Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis"
For the variants at the time. The spread of the delta and omicron variants was tracked so closely and garnered so much attention in large part due to their abilities to at least partially evade vaccine-induced immunity, but this was always a known risk. The larger the infected population, the more chances for such an event to occur, hence the importance of measures like vaccinations, social distancing, and lockdowns to curb the spread.
Yeah that's a big omission that i don't see addressed in the article. In particular given the development timeline, does it have the same efficacy for the omicron variant? I doubt the trials being reported here tested it.
First, as another user pointed out, for the variants of the time. Second, "completely" is a strong word there; your link, and the part you quoted, still clarifies that it's possible to get infected.
Edit: You are also misreading what you're quoting[1].
You're right. I will never question Pfizer again. There could be infinite mutations of the virus moving forward which would impact the weight of their claims.
I didn't say you, nor myself or anyone else, shouldn't question them, just that they haven't been incorrect in this instance as you've suggested. I'm not sure why your snark is needed in your multiple responses here.
They claimed it was 90% effective in the (time limited) study which they performed.
It’s fair that you might have misinterpreted that as meaning it will be 90% effective. Especially if you don’t know how viruses work, but that’s not what was actually claimed.
Maybe I'm misinformed, but as I understood it, COVID-19 is the disease brought upon by SARS-Cov-2 infection. That line on its own doesn't suggest it prevents infection, it suggests it prevents the COVID-19 disease (i.e 90% chance of being left with a asymptomatic infection).
It matters not. The public was lead to believe that the vaccines were highly effective and safe. Now they are realized to be not so effective (against Delta/Omicron) and not so safe (J&J/Janssen recently "de-preferenced" by CDC due to clotting). We are still wearing masks, when we were once told the vaccinated didn't need to mask. Two years later, there is no end in sight.
If you want to build trust, don't oversell the product when you don't really know what you are talking about.
>The public was lead to believe that the vaccines were highly effective and safe. Now they are realized to be not so effective (against Delta/Omicron)...
You mean how they typically clarified they didn't know how efficacy would play out in future variants? Because that was definitely a thing.
You seem very, very attached to a conclusion that isn’t supported by your own information. Are you really sure you haven’t been “warped by a narrative?”
True, but they sure as hell implied it did. For example, this fact check appeared in the search container of google early on: note the use of the double negative in the VERDICT.
In an article that says all of the following very clearly...
>Meanwhile, there is currently no conclusive evidence to claim the COVID-19 vaccine stops people spreading the virus that causes the disease – nor is there for the opposite.
>Scientists do not yet know whether COVID-19 vaccinations will reduce transmission because this was not tested in the trials.
>With the latter, this could mean the virus continues to replicate in the nose and throat, and is still able to spread.
>Scientists are not yet sure of how the vaccine affects transmission – and this is currently undergoing research.
... you are seizing on a single double-negative to claim you've been misled? A double-negative which is equally as accurate as what you would like it corrected to, because in the body of the article it says there's no evidence one way or the other?
This is really the hill you're choosing to die on?
If you read my initial message one more time, you may notice that I mentionned a google serach container. I'm not certain it is the appropriate term but basically, you can ask a question to google and it will select an authoritative answer from a trusted source (Reuters, AP, etc).
Back in the early day of the vaccine, if you were to ask google whether the vaccine prevents the transmission of the disease, you'd get this: "here is no conclusive evidence to claim COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent people spreading the disease." at the top of the index. You could click to have more context, but I hope you are now getting the point.
Let's just not be in denial that misinformation exists on both sides.
>If you read my initial message one more time, you may notice that I mentionned a google serach container.
It's pretty common knowledge within the tech community that those fields are populated automatically, often via scraping (just look at what happened with Google and Genius, re: lyrics). Google is notorious for faulty data being in there, either through questionable sources or misquotes, for an untold number of queries.
I'm not saying this to doubt your claim that that was what was displayed and it appeared misleading; Google needs to fix it because clearly it causes problems. I just think that it's an incredible stretch on your part to suggest it was intentional misinformation placed there by a "side".
Edit: I say this as someone who usually doesn't defend Google whatsoever.
How do you have the exact quotation and why is it phrased as a double negative? That sentence just doesn’t sound authoritative or believable in any way.
Are you paraphrasing? If so, that’s fine but please don’t use quotation marks in that case.
> Infection rate is orthogonal to preventing people from being infected. If you're not exposed, you can never be infected.
Sure, there are confounds: people who choose to be vaccinated don't behave exactly the same way that people who don't choose to be vaccinated do. Therefore, the observational data is somewhat confounded.
Two directions for the confound: people who are vaccinated may choose to take more risk after vaccination. People who are vaccinated may be those who take COVID seriously to begin with and be biased to take less risk in general. Probably the latter "wins", though I certainly do a lot more than I would do if I wasn't vaccinated.
However, IMO this is all moot: we have vaccines that showed massive efficacy in randomized, controlled trials (over a period of time), and case control studies that show ongoing high efficacy against Delta... and the confounded observational data shows a truly massive effect.
Let me get this straight. First, you say the vaccine has been proven to be less than 10% effective. Now you're admitting that you've made it up, while at the same time insisting it's true. Astonishing.
It's a fair critique. But when the Captain of an airplane I'm flying on tells me there's an emergency problem with the flaps, I don't ask him for text book evidence, I just look out at the wings and verify the problem.
So, you cite data showing very high efficacy of the vaccine, and are like -- look at it in a few weeks!
Omicron is going to make it worse, but even unboosted folks in South Africa seem to enjoy about 30% efficacy against infection and much higher efficacy against hospitalization and death. But your gossip trumps the data, I guess...
No, Omicron making it worse is a fact that I already ceded..
but we have data that shows low (but still around 30%, not 10%) efficacy against infection with Omicron.. and still high efficacy (70%) against hospitalization and death.
But you say "has proven less than 10% effective" ... because you are making stuff up.
Further, it may be a mistake to assume South Africa predicts exactly what will happen here (30% fully vaccinated, nearly 0 boosted, 20% HIV incidence, vs. 60% fully vaccinated, 25% boosted, 0.3% HIV incidence).
The data you link says that unvaccinated people have 5x the risk of testing positive as vaccinated (no booster) as of October (Slightly higher for Pfizer, lower for J&J). I believe that's 80% efficacy. How do you get 10%?
Note also that this data is as of October 2021, so it's primarily looking at the efficacy against the Delta, whereas the original 90-whatever % claims were obviously the original virus.
Pfizer et al certainly weren't saying in March 2021 that "Pfizer provide 90-100% protection against COVID and all future variants" and I've never heard anyone suggest they thought that's what the claim was.
The efficacy is pretty well proven to be > 90% at this point. Per your comment where you admit the number was pulled out of thin air:
> Anecdotal. You do not need to be a meteorologist to know when it's raining. Look outside.
I'll raise you this... where I am 100% of ICU cases are unvaccinated. Read that again 100%. And over 85% of hospitalizations. And before you say "see, 15% of them were breakthrough cases," please learn about base rates. 65% of the people here are vaccinated so to have only 15% of the hospital cases be vaccinated is even more conclusive.
Please, get out of your bubble. If you think it is 10%... or even 50%... or even 70% you need to do some serious introspection.
Please, actually "look outside"! Because if you spent more than 10 seconds actually looking outside, the efficacy is obvious.
I am vaccinated - I believe in the early vaccine's efficacy for stopping serious illness. They have saved many lives.
What I am saying here is that the vaccines were marketed as 90% effective for preventing infection. Was I misunderstanding what was being marketed to me all along?
Yes, you have misunderstood this all along, and that misunderstanding has already been pointed out to you in this thread[1]. It is effective at preventing COVID-19 infections, which you get after being infected with SARA-CoV-2. It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter.
> It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter.
We had some early data that looked like they were probably about ~70% effective for preventing infection, ~90% effective at preventing symptoms, and >95% effective at preventing severe illness.
These numbers are interesting, because they mean you have less of a chance of becoming infected, but a larger chance, if infected, of being an asymptomatic carrier. So it's difficult to predict the net effect on transmission (probably a benefit, but..)
Now for 2 doses of mRNA vaccine, our best guesses for omicron are more like ~??%, ~30%, and ~70% respectively. Offsetting it slightly is that it looks like omicron may be a bit less likely to cause severe illness at baseline. But, no matter what, this is a big setback.
Please do not cross into personal attack. That's against the site guidelines and just makes everything worse, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Clicked through and found quotes of Fauci saying “highly effective” and “extraordinarily effective”. Not 100%
Note that these quotes are in context of the US and Fauci’s publicly announced plan to approve, as part of Operation Warp Speed, vaccines that were at least 50% effective.[1]
The vaccines proving to be 80-90% effective in that context certainly makes it reasonable to call them highly effective.
To be clear, I was just merely trying to track back where this '100%' claim was coming from as I also didn't remember such a bold claim being ever made, let alone by Fauci.
Now, I invite you to make google searches with a date range and you will see that such studies claiming 100% efficacy on the product on kids started to appear in the early days actually:
Since 100% is a pretty awesome figure, my theory is that there must have been quite a bit of press coverage at the time and I have no doubt a lot of people got confused.
Can't see GP's comment (flagged, like 7/11 OP ITT) so I don't know if I'm on-topic or not. After Bourla's appearance on Lex's podcast and the latter's mention of a 100% claim on the blue bird app which the former denied (w.r.t. infection I believe), searching his account I came up with these. They're from March 31st (1) and April 1st (2 & 3, quoting 4), third would be most eye-brow lifting today. It is arguably misleading, or odd, to just mention 100% in a tweet on 95% CI with 53.5-100.0 brackets in the study.
1: 100% efficacy against COVID-19 disease for 12-15 year olds in phase 3
2: 100% efficacy against severe COVID-19 as defined by CDC
3: 100% efficacy in preventing COVID-19 cases in South Africa
Here you go. I don't know anything about this website (found it from a google search) but the video montage has plenty of claims of 100%, and a "virtually 100% efficacious" quote from Fauci. The montage is in a meme format making fun of the situation, which is not my preference, and I don't intend to inflame by sharing such a take, it's just the most succinct thing I found.
It highlights quite clearly what I'd mentioned in my first comment, that time and reproducibility matter. I genuinely don't know why it was flagged.
I'm not a fan of the "virtually 100% efficacious" claim, but the "and others" part of your original comment, to me, meant "high ranking / respected health officials", not random internet articles and PR lines. Science article titles are rarely accurate to their content, for worse, so screenshots of said titles aren't really meaningful to me. I mean, just look at any hackernews post. Usually the first comment is complaining about the title's inaccuracy.
Maybe there was a narrative shift, but I don't recall ever seeing those 100% claims back in February.
Ok, that seems then to be a matter of personal interpretation then and not completely what I meant. I don't know about "February" specifically but clearly 100% claims were being made at some point early on.
People get their information from the newsmedia, and this is what it was reporting. So either our newsmedia isn't truthful or our scientists aren't, or - as my original (flagged) comment was saying - time and reproducibility matter, and may affect the efficacy ultimately reported.
I do agree with the general sentiment of keeping politics out of it.
But sadly there do seem to be some pretty strong correlations at a county level across the US. It could also be rural/urban cultural divides but the more obvious one is simply politics.
Actually, political affiliation is the strongest demographic predictor for Covid-19 vaccine refusal.
Check the actual stats. Unfortunately a lot of GOP leaning media sources including top rated Fox News opinion hosts have been spreading FUD about the vaccine for a year. People listen to their trusted news hosts and media sources…
* “58% percent of White people had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, which was close to the rate for Hispanic people (56%) but higher than the rate for Black people (51%)“
The problem becomes obvious if you compare it now. How could the Republican % be higher than the white, Hispanic, or black %? Not because republicans are more likely than democrats or neutrals to get the vaccine - it’s because you’ve compared total population (including children who aren’t eligible or only became eligible in the last month or two) to adult population.
I have checked the stats. Blacks and Hispanics have a much higher rates per capita of not being vaccinated than whites. It just so happens that whites are the largest race which results in significant numbers of unvaccinated whites.
fox news is the most popular TV news and has like 1-2 million daily viewers. I could be wrong but I don’t think people are going by what they see on TV.
It brings me no pleasure in addressing this reality. Many conservatives are fine people, but the damage done by Republican media outlets is undeniable and it stifles advancement to the detriment of all.
This is why my comment was really about praising the potential of a good therapeutic. Political ideologies fade when all you can think about is survival, in contrast to preventative care which requires forethought.
Unfortunately this is exactly the opposite of what happened. Political ideologies did not fade but got stronger in spite of this one thing that is probably the most apolitical thing to happen to us. A “natural disaster” that wasn’t caused by a natural phenomenon that’s itself become politically charged: climate change.
While I see most of the nuttiness on the right (with regards to the pandemic and attacking public health measures), I have friends who said they’d refuse to take the vaccine because operation warp speed suggested it was rushed (and was a Trump thing). But they were first in line to get it when Biden had been president for a few months. Nothing else had changed with the vaccines.
Unfortunately, the Pfizer pill needs to be taken early in the infection, so when patients may not be yet in the survival mode, but still in "it's just like a flu" mode.
Ideally there would be a treatment for the "I can't breathe" stage. Unfortunately anti-viral drugs' effect depends on inhibiting future exponential replication. Kind of like how fire extinguishers are good if one sees and smothers the first flame but are moot if flames are already shooting out the windows.
Paxlovid might not even be easy to use. Five days might have already passed from infection to first symptoms to urgent care visit to PCR test result. And that's assuming the drug is in stock.
As a vaccinated, boosted republican, this attitude isn't helping. Yeah, there are a bunch of idiotic republican politicians out there. But there are also a lot of idiotic democrat politicians out there who aren't making COVID policy decisions based on science and evidence, but based on their ideological side: outdoor mask mandates, travel bans, blocking people's access to their own private property, etc. So no, not fucking republicans. Fucking tribalism. It's making humans act completely irrationally.
Until a new variant comes along which bypasses natural immunity and we are looking at Populationmortality_rate0.9ish deaths. The problem is we can only push mortality_rate so much with new medicine and hospital bets, missing days at work are other externalities.
Vaccinations move from the population in to the vaccinated bucket which has preferable externality rates and if enough people are vaccinated we might be able to even push 0.9ish fudge factor lower.
That's a false equivalency. Republicans have been far, far worse. They have been anti-science across the board on all kinds of policy. Donald Trump is absolute low point in American history. The guy who said vaccines cause autism, pushed unproven and dangerous treatments, pressured scientists to change their recommendations, called climate change a hoax, wanted to nuke a hurricane and rake a forest. He owns the party right now. I can respect political differences but I can't respect being a republican in 2021. The party is fundamentally irrational and has abandoned reasoned policy discussions. And there a measurable real world consequences measured in death rates for red states.
Please don't take HN threads further into partisan flamewar hell, especially not after someone just tried to get the baby halfway out of the burning tar. We don't want this kind of thing here because it's entirely predictable and nearly always nasty.
You can enable "Show Dead" in your user prefs if you want to see flagged comments.
Spoiler alert: they're all conspiracy theorizing about how this _proves_ that the entire pandemic is all a part of Pfizer's master plan for making money.
You didn't summarize the flagged posts I did see correctly, this is exactly why I don't support censoring them.
Even to your summarization, that's up for those reading to decide. I don't blindly trust a single pharma company after the opioid scandal. Conspiracies are not impossible, and if you want to dispel a theory, do it, don't censor it.
Also at a certain point you cannot see flagged comments, even with "show dead" enabled.
It will be interesting to see if this pill could be used as prophylaxis too, instead of only after the onset of symptoms. Might help with the need to recognize symptoms fairly early on.
Presumably this data is against Delta or an earlier variant but by the time it's in use covid will be 99% Omicron. I wonder how that will effect things.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've done it repeatedly and that's not ok—regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
> Can’t wait for the follow on months of real data disproving their terrible study.
Can you please elaborate on exactly which study are you referring to and your reasoning to accuse it of being "terrible"?
Meanwhile, we've endured at least two strains which are significantly different than the original 2019 Wuhan strain, and thanks to the vaccine the mortality risk has dropped to residual levels.
And even better, the mortality risk has dropped despite increased social activity! While maybe the number of cases has yet to be mitigated, those have at least not spiked significantly despite previously cautious people returning to many normal activities (such as dining in, movies, and travel). It’s a big win :)
This will be useful for the hundreds of thousands of organ transplant recipients like my Dad. The two dose vaccines generally have no effect. Didn't with him or any of the other patients under his doctor's care. Luckily, he was part of the ~40% where the 3rd dose had some effect. Nowhere near healthy folks but at least some. For the other 60%, a drug like this will be life-saving.
Does this mean COVID is over? I thought once the vaccines were available we could move on with life, but somehow the goal posts kept moving. Will people accept the much smaller risk of hospitalization once this pill is available?
The goal posts do keep moving, because vaccination uptake is slow, people keep arguing against public health measures, and while we waste time delaying measures or implementing half baked measures, the virus evolves.
Look at BC Canada, 90% vaccine uptake (2 doses). Very strong public masking. Vax passport checking at most businesses. More restrictions recently introduced. Hospitals on the verge of being overwhelmed.
There's 191 people in the hospital in BC for covid right now[1]. Current preparations are for if omicron has exponential growth over the next several weeks.
Or your understanding skills are weak. I don’t know what you are even trying to reply, I don’t see one mention that says CDC claims vaccinated people do not spread the infection. Yes they said rarely, but that does also mean, vaccinated people are likely to spread disease.
Unlike your statement earlier which implies they claimed vaccinated do not spread disease.
No expert worth his salt will ever say vaccines are 100% effective, what vaccine does is train your body, its up to your body on response. So what CDC said was true, I never said it was wrong. You took the article as an absolute statement which is clearly wrong.
Driving Rt below one will cause any species to go extinct. That’s just basic maths. If it’s not happening, then Rt is not below 1.
As for the rest, you’re taking ideas that have some truth to them, and probably misinterpreting what these things actually mean and taking them unreasonably far or to the extreme:
- Herd immunity is a thing, but I'm not sure how you imagine it in your head, or what you think that means.
- Vaccines do prevent infections, but not perfectly well. This (or the contrary) has been communicated to the public in very confusing ways.
- It is true that vaccinated people have a lower likelihood of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others. I'm not sure if you think that means it should be perfect, but biology is messy.
Yes, those things are infectious disease concepts and they were touted as to how COVID will be dealt with.
Lots of talk of “once we get to 80% vaccination rate we’ll hit here immunity”. You don’t hear that any more huh?
“If we drive R below 1 we can extinguish Covid”. Now it’s “Covid is endemic, it’s not going away”.
“Once everyone is vaccinated, Covid goes away”, then “It really rare for the vaccinated to get Covid” to “holy shit, most new cases are in fully vaccinated”.
You can honestly look at that narrative and NOT completely understand why people are not listening any more?
My response isn’t hand-wavy, it’s pretty categorical: the problem is that people can’t deal with uncertainty, and fill in too many blanks in their minds with over-simplistic assumptions. If you’re looking for a full picture of certainty about the future, that’s not exactly what science will give you.
> the problem is that people can’t deal with uncertainty, and fill in too many blanks in their minds with over-simplistic assumptions.
No, the problem is that this was communicated in imperfect ways to the public (as you said yourself), who then filled in the gaps themselves. Risk communication is complicated and the govt, the experts, and the media all failed the public here.
I don't disagree that there were a lot of communication issues, but I think many people don't appreciate just how difficult public health communications is.
It literally does not matter how right you are or well you communicate something: there will always be groups of people who misinterpret what you say, don't understand what you say, or weaponize what you say for political purposes.
Be careful because R0 and Rt refer to different things: R0 is a property of the pathogen under the assumption of “normal life” and measures how inherently infectious it is.
Rt is a measure of the real-life infectivity of a pathogen at a specific point in time, under no assumption of “normal life”, and possibly within some arbitrary geographical bounds. The purpose of Rt is not to measure the inherent infectivity of a pathogen, but rather its infectivity in a specific environment and set of circumstances: it’s the high-level metric that informs you of the combined impact of public health measures, social behaviour changes, immunity, etc, on the pathogen’s infectivity.
You can see Rt as being equal to R0 times some correction factor that accounts for everything else.
Are you suggesting if everyone was vaccinated we wouldn't have variants at all? Or is there some other measure that can prevent variants? I'm not familiar with a public health policy that can do that.
All the behaviour changes, vaccines, masks and other public health intervention have the effect of reducing Rt, geometrically, by some factor. When Rt goes below 1 for long enough, not only do variants go away, covid goes away. When you do all kinds of halfass measures and either Rt does not go below 1, or keeps going below and above 1, then you’re giving time for the virus to mutate, and this has the effect of moving people from the “immune” bucket back to the “vulnerable” bucket. When you’re beyond the very beginning of the infections S-curve, this results in an increase of Rt, which further prolongs everything. The longer this happens, the more things change (and more likely than not, for the worse), hence goalposts needing to be adjusted.
Right, I'm not disputing the math of herd immunity. What I'm getting at is that we "lost the race". Delta emerged from India in Dec 2020 before vaccines became publicly available. Maybe Rt of the original strain would have been pushed below 1, but the Rt of delta among the vaccinated is way above 1. Omicron is even worse w.r.t immune escape.
We know there are many viruses we can manage with mass vaccination and herd immunity, such as smallpox and measles. But the important difference is those diseases don't mutate as quickly as covid. Therefore it's not a given that covid is something that can be snuffed out with the same methods. We're clearly in a position of playing catch-up and fire-fighting.
Your post implies a sentiment like: "if only we didn't half ass things, we could've beaten this virus. The problems aren't with the measures themselves, just that we didn't go far enough."
Ok, how much further should we go compared to countries that have the strictest measures? Take Australia for example, they have quarantine camps, lockdowns for the unvaccinated, advanced tracing and databases, etc.
For a while this worked pretty well. But their cases have been skyrocketing as of July this year, and it's likely a delta wave. What will omicron look like once it gets there? Would you say their measures were half-baked?
You express indignation but don't say what we should have done differently or what we should do now.
Those who share your mindset come off as having a kind of denial-ism, and an urge to point the finger.
The fact is we're not as "in-control" as we like to think. Nature is inevitable. Our technology and ability to organize is bad.
Let's recognize that an endless state of emergency also has consequences, health measures should be proportional, and for the most part we've done our best. If we can't snuff out the disease and the variants are getting milder anyway, then it's time to start thinking about moving past covid.
Your assumption that we would need to take measures in excess of the countries with the strictest measures in order to have eradicated SARS-CoV-2 is probably wrong, and is definitely not what I would think.
I would take New Zealand, Greenland, Taiwan and even China as models of most of what needed to be done. None of them did things perfectly, but they all had some of the right ideas.
The goal posts change because the variables change while the prior post is never met.
In my world, everyone that could segregate from vulnerable populations already has and vice versa. They moved, and go out with everyone else that wont go home to an immunocompromised or prediabetic or elderly person.
Multiday 300,000+ attendee music festivals have occurred in major US markets without making the news as reckless and welcomed by all levels of government at the time.
Commonwealth countries and major markets in Europe seem to be less tolerant to the idea of governing, I mean a lower threshold to infection to justify continued restrictions.
Many of their citizens are coming to the US if they can, as well.
US is still doing way worse with infections, deaths, ICU capacity, but its a two tiered reality. And as long as emergency services remain available for everyone else I think thats a good enough bar for people to make their own decisions - which is an opinion matched by even the most restrictive major municipalities in the US, for some time. Remote work has been normalized enough for enough people/office jobs to not require a compromise to stay home.
When I took my first jab, the local clinic handed out a flier explaining in no uncertain terms that:
a) the current batch of vaccines work by giving our immune system a workout to be able to experience a COVID infection as either totally unnoticed or at most a mild case,
b) the current batch of vaccines does not nor did ever guaranteed you won't contract and spread COVID,
c) even with all shots we still need to practice basic higiene and health precautions like wearing a mask, wash hands, and social distance.
We're talking about pre-Delta times. This has been widely known from the start.
How come antivaxxers are the only ones repeating cynical comments on how the initial batch of vaccines, which we all are lucky to have but are still at the level of being better than nothing, would be a silver bullet?
> the current batch of vaccines does not nor did ever guaranteed you won't contract and spread COVID
Guarantee, no. But the thought was that it would greatly reduce the risk of spreading the disease, such that once a sufficient number of people were vaccinated herd immunity would kill off the virus and end the pandemic. We're now two years in with a 73% vaccination rate in the US (not counting those with natural immunity), with even higher rates elsewhere; still no end in sight.
If vaccines aren't going to end the pandemic, then something else needs to. Will a pill that reduces the lethality of the disease by 89% be enough that we can finally put this to rest and go back to normal? If not that, then what?
> But the thought was that it would greatly reduce the risk of spreading the disease, such that once a sufficient number of people were vaccinated herd immunity would kill off the virus and end the pandemic. We're now two years in with a 73% vaccination rate in the US (not counting those with natural immunity),
This was very clearly and openly discussed when the vaccines first came out: vaccines would help reduce spread and with a high enough rate that would end the pandemic but that we’d need relatively high vaccination rates to stop something which can spread this easily.
This was correct and the data suggests that it could have worked but we never seriously tried it. As of today, 61% of Americans have been vaccinated. That is far, far below the 90+% threshold used in those first messages — and that was before Delta and the Omicron delivered both higher spread and reduced effectiveness to make the problem harder.
The other thing to remember is that the pandemic ending doesn’t necessarily mean complete eradication. If, as appears to be the case, vaccination and medications significantly reduce the risk of serious illness and/or long COVID, that will probably be enough to get it down to the level of, say, influenza.
That’s not what was messaged to the general public from our leaders. The narrative went from “the vaccinated cant get infected” to “the vaccinated won’t really transmit it”, so “its clearly the unvaccinated who are the problem” to “well it turns out vaccinated people can get and transmit Covid just as well as unvaccinated”.
And if vaccines wouldnt “end” Covid why so much discussion on R values and “herd immunity”. The messaging around that went silent pretty quickly when it was clear that wasn’t happening with Covid.
And the only reason the narrative changed is because it was plainly obvious to the general public things weren’t going as planned.
But I get it, you cant predict how a new infectious disease will pan out, but holy shit has the PR messaging ever been terrible.
But then I wonder if that was intentional? Would the public ever have gone along with all this if the government was honest and said “we’ll continue to have restrictions for the next 5 years”?
I think the CDC was being pragmatic. They recognized that Americans were fatigued after a year. Asking people to still mask and social distance even after vaccinating is a lot to ask for even if it would technically get the virus under control sooner by catching those breakthrough cases too. The prospect of normalcy would increase vaccine acceptance, and then we would hopefully reach herd immunity by vaccine as demonstrated by cases falling off a cliff. Unfortunately unvaccinated people took off their masks and then Delta happened.
If they promote very cautious behavior (keep sheltering in place, wear masks) people will throw the catch phrase of "Trust the science!" back at them and demand why the vaccine has not solved the pandemic. If they loosen up on recommendations and something bad happens and they have to take a step back people say they are being capricious.
IMO the errors that cost 800,000 Americans their lives were made last year.
The President publicly denied the seriousness of the situation. The CDC didn't want to use a foreign test and made their own but they were all contaminated and always read positive. There was minimal contract tracing of travelers. The Surgeon General told Americans not to wear masks saying using masks incorrectly would harm them.
Haven’t most of the deaths happened this year? Sure we may have started off wrong but clearly we could have course corrected? Or are Americans too stupid to understand the risks and trade offs?
The problem was that it was politicized hard early on. Now you have roughly a third of the country who’ve been told that public health measures are an unpatriotic plot, and a lot of belligerence had been encouraged. The rhetoric around this made it a very clear party loyalty test and lots of people rose to that challenge.
How many people are willing to admit that they were so wrong for the better part of two years and many thousands of people died who wouldn’t have? That’s very close to admitting that those same people weren’t just lying about one thing.
I’ve spent months in 4 different countries since Covid hit and it’s politicized everywhere.
Not sure how you can force people to stay at home, kids out of school, then hand out billions in relief (or not in one country) and not have it be political?
I was specifically thinking about the politicization of protection and treatment. The economic impact was definitely always going to be a debate but basic safety measures like masks and vaccination didn’t used to be a strongly partisan issue (think about how American doctors historically leaned Republican for tax reasons).
Different countries matter less in the internet era, too. In the English-speaking world, the Murdoch media set the message in the US & UK, of course, but these days that spreads quickly outside of national borders and it was easy to see those messages jump to other language communities on social media. This was especially accelerated by the early recognition of certain risk factors which were compatible with the strong man posturing common to a lot of right-wing ideology.
> I've spent months in 4 different countries since Covid hit and it’s politicized everywhere.
There's a world of difference between criticizing a government for imposing a lockdown at 10pm instead of 11pm or enforcing a 80% occupancy limit instead of 50%, and attacking basic public health measures like taking a vaccine based on sheer lunacy and conspiracy theories.
I don't know, the idea that the spread of the Delta variant can be attributed to the "unvaccinated", whose morality is so low that they also happen to often be "anti-mask" as well. This is the kind of scapegoating i would imagine CNN do (I'm being unfair here, CNN would probably add a bit of Russian disinformation as well for good culture war mesure.)
I'm ready to change my mind tho if you back your statement with facts.
The spread of Delta is because that variant is more infectious and there is a reservoir of unvaccinated people. The CDC said vaccinated people can take off their masks. They did not say everyone can stop masking. Masking immediately dropped from 75% to 25%. We are not at 75% vaccine coverage even today.
Measles is an example of another highly infectious moderately deadly disease. Wherever we don’t have 97%+ vaccine coverage we have outbreaks.
Even today with the questions about Omicron’s degree of immune escape there’s theoretically a solution available to use. If 95% of people masked we could get spread under control in 6-10 weeks. But masks are a dirty word and public health campaigns have ceilings to adoption.
No. Delta was around before there was even enough vaccine for countries other than the US and Europe. It was completely unavoidable.
And since it’s clearly the fully vaccinated have only a reduced, not eliminated risk of infection and transmission, we could still get another variant.
Sure are a lot of missing comments here. It seems hardcore leftists love diversity in everything except diversity of opinions. Ah this place is basically group think extreme. More interesting than Reddit usually but just as hostile to debate about subjects that go against the TV gods or popular culture. Basically the internet is becoming little clicks of people that dare not even speak up for fear of losing more than something like posting privileges to a website. You think this issue is not political? It has been politics from the very first minute we saw it on TV.
It doesn't help that public is too sensitive about this subject. Government can't scrutinize companies like Pfizer enough if they are worried about public reaction. And I'm not too surprised if some companies rush since a lot of money is on the table.
To be fair, this is the best effort we have ever had to develop a vaccine. So I don't think it's fair to blame these companies if their vaccine wasn't effective on new variants as they initially promised. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't thoroughly scrutinize them.
> So I don't think it's fair to blame these companies if their vaccine wasn't effective on new variants as they initially promised. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't thoroughly scrutinize them.
It depends. On example: If they hid data that propped up their number, then we should blame. Otherwise we should not blame them. Either way, there needs to be scrutiny so that they don’t feel they can easily hide things that matter to public health
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] thread.. and that it also would not cost a fortune in 3rd world where we really need easily accessible and storable countermeasures against the bugger.
This pill is for "high-risk patients who took the antiviral within three days of symptom onset".
The vaccination even seems to be a bit more effective than this pill?
Usually you can get a doctor's note explaining this, and you can participate in daily life normally (like going to school or college, which rightfully require vaccinations).
I don't know if policy around the COVID vaccine is different... But I'd be surprised if it were?
Nope. Immunocompromised people need extra doses of the vaccine, and even then it doesn't work as well.
This is one of those false talking points that antivaxxers love to spread.
* Immunocompromised people have poor efficacy with the vaccine even with boosters, like my dad who has SLL.
* Other people who have autoimmune and inflammatory conditions are often immunocompromised (because of taking low dose chemotherapy, etc, to manage their conditions). Also, recommending a vaccine for these people is complicated, because vaccines can kick up immune and inflammatory responses and make their conditions worse. Most are still better off with the vaccine but I can understand both providers and patients being hesitant.
My friend is immunocompromised from chemotherapy, has had (I believe) at least 4 COVID shots by now, and just had to go to the hospital for monoclonal antibodies after catching COVID. Not getting vaccinated, then getting a vaccine waiver instead of the vaccine, then going and doing in-person stuff that would've otherwise required the vaccine would've been practically suicidal for her.
In the second case, the person choosing the vaccine has a high risk of, say, a debilitating RA flareup and an uncertain amount of protection given their immunocompromised status. I can totally understand why some in this position choose not to.
They probably should, but this is not as clear-cut of a decision as for those of us with normal immune capability. No one knows the exact efficacy they can expect nor the amount of risk of side effect they are shouldering.
> NOT to get exempted from the vaccine requirement and then go do insanely risky face-to-face activities that otherwise would have a vaccine mandate.
Yah, I don't think anyone advocated for quite that-- just some middle ground where they can choose to assume some risk. A lot of us hoped that perhaps population immunity could do the work of shielding these people, but it looks like that ship has sailed.
This is what I am really worried about. If my immune system is poked even so slightly, I get symptoms although not as bad as I imagine I would get after the vaccines. I already have mobility issues. I do not want to be wheelchair-bound, even though that is a very likely outcome anyways.
Not every physician is recommending every single one of their patients get this or any other vaccine. There are public policy implications for serving those people.
There are multiple vaccine formulations available, and they largely do not overlap in terms of potential allergy triggers. If you're allergic to a component of the mRNA vaccines, that does not preclude you from taking an adenovirus vaccine, or vice versa. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommend...
So yea. I have no interest in it. Though if I hadn’t had covid already I would definitely get vaccine.
Being told I “must” get it is definitely provoking a “hell no” reaction on top of everything.
Well I guess the mandate is working, because based on this response you are an individual that I would prefer not to be exposed to in the workplace without the mandated testing.
This is not a judgement of personal worth, just an observation that you are not behaving rationally. Top down policies such as the mandate are helpful for the whole in the these situations.
Also, it makes you less likely to take a bed in the ICU, preserving that bed for grandma's stroke
And are significantly less likely to get infected in the first place.
My dad has SLL, which some of the worst breakthrough cases have been in. He's vaccinated (with likely poor efficacy). His children and grandchildren are vaccinated. We're careful with our overall level of exposure and wear a mask around him even in situations where this seems paranoid. Us being vaccinated is one of the many layers (and one of the most effective, pre-Omicron) in protecting my dad.
1. https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/ets2/faqs#accordion-81470-c...
2. https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/ets2/faqs#accordion-81493-c...
Just about no matter what it costs, it's cheaper than you dying in an ICU.
Don't go trying blame them for our actions. Assuming ur from the US or EU.
Why is my burden of proof higher than yours? I at least linked one study in my sibling comment.
I haven't seen that from anyone, studying anything, in years. Around 2018 there were actually a ton of articles and discussions right here on HN about the reproducibility problem in science, and that there's no funding for reproducing studies anymore. Everything is just cite and move on. We were actually making significant progress in reforming our ideas of science, and the effects that scientific funding sources have on our knowledge, as a species (hint if it's not profitable we probably aren't studying it).
That all got thrown by the wayside as "trust the science" became the political rallying cry of half the population over the last year.
"Science" in general is one of those things that you can safely rally behind, because there is nothing more accurate by definition.
>"Peer review" rarely means more than "JSTOR search for something that supports my claim, quick skim for obvious errors, cite and publish"
>"Science" is only "accurate by definition" when it's done correctly. Buying scientists is cheaper than buying politicians, in practice.
Heads up I'm not gonna be able to cite a peer reviewed journal on that so you should just [flag] me now <3
(fyi jstor does not even fully cover one single area of knowledge)
Because that is what armchair discussions actually are. No real critical thinking, just scratching one's own ass.
* Who is telling me this information?
Pfizer, the FDA
* Who stands to benefit from this?
Pfizer, the maker of the drug, and the downstream finances from them - namely the FDA (who gets most of their funding from drug makers), lobbied politicians in DC, as well as the nightly news, which sure does seem to show a lot of ads for Pfizer products.
So, from those questions, I have become skeptical. I am completely open to other lines of critical thinking, but so far I have just met resistance for questioning things at all.
So who is doing critical thikning? Am I actually denigrating someone elses critical thinking? Because there seems to be relatively little of it in this thread.
... which if analysed properly, result in the inevitable conclustion that it works as an anti-parasitic and improves outcomes, especially in nations where parasites are common.
To say anything else about it strictly puts the burden of proof on you. If you say it cures COVID, you need to demonstrate this. You also need to demonstrate how this effect isn't the well-demonstrated anti-parasitic benefit that the drug provides.
Look.
This is like saying that plaster casts are pain killers and we should all start eating plaster, despite the well-known use and benefit of plaster casts to physically stabilise broken bones. Moving broken bones hurt. Plaster casts stop the movement. Hence... plaster is a pain killer and should be taken orally to stop any pain -- oh wait -- no, it's only useful for broken bones! Because duh!. To say otherwise makes you look like a lunatic.
I mean... sure... there's a teeny tiny chance that plaster of paris somehow -- magically -- has a pain killing effect. But you'd have to have awfully good evidence that this is so, otherwise people are right to ignore you. Not to mention that ranting and raving and pointing to the studies done on patient pain before and after having been put into casts won't get you anywhere if those studies were done on motor vehicle crash victims only.
Get it?
"[...]the trends really are in ivermectin’s favor, but once you eliminate all the questionable studies there are too few studies left to have enough statistical power to reach significance."
Maybe it's nothing, but maybe it's something. So again, why is your burden of proof less than mine? I don't have any studies of my own, I assume you don't either, nor the resources to conduct them. All I hinted at that there was a seeming connection between an off-patent drug that had gotten an exceptional amount of hubbub. It's interesting how aggressively this argument is fought, considering there's a lot of drugs/medicines that are similar in structure and have similar but notably different effect. If this drug is just ivermectin designed more accurately for the coronavirus's protein structures, that should be lauded! It's a family of drugs with a safe track record! But instead it ignites a fiery debate filled with spite-filled comments.
Get it?
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/11/18/ivermect...
Look at the Pfizer press release, Nov 9, 2020 - the first sentence:
"Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis"
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Edit: You are also misreading what you're quoting[1].
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347
I didn't say you, nor myself or anyone else, shouldn't question them, just that they haven't been incorrect in this instance as you've suggested. I'm not sure why your snark is needed in your multiple responses here.
They claimed it was 90% effective in the (time limited) study which they performed.
It’s fair that you might have misinterpreted that as meaning it will be 90% effective. Especially if you don’t know how viruses work, but that’s not what was actually claimed.
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00459-7
If you want to build trust, don't oversell the product when you don't really know what you are talking about.
You mean how they typically clarified they didn't know how efficacy would play out in future variants? Because that was definitely a thing.
A low rate of people suffer any significant issues from vaccination, and very few vaccinated people become severely ill. They work great.
If the other vaccines were not available, the J&J vaccine would make sense for most people compared to not taking it.
Your post would be fine without the first sentence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
True, but they sure as hell implied it did. For example, this fact check appeared in the search container of google early on: note the use of the double negative in the VERDICT.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-transmission/fa...
I don't know how much clearer they can get with that next sentence.
If the scientists were, at the time, not yet sure how the vaccine affected transmission. The correct 'fact check' should have been:
"There is no conclusive evidence to claim COVID-19 vaccines prevent people from spreading the disease."
instead of
"There is no conclusive evidence to claim COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent people spreading the disease."
>Meanwhile, there is currently no conclusive evidence to claim the COVID-19 vaccine stops people spreading the virus that causes the disease – nor is there for the opposite.
>Scientists do not yet know whether COVID-19 vaccinations will reduce transmission because this was not tested in the trials.
>With the latter, this could mean the virus continues to replicate in the nose and throat, and is still able to spread.
>Scientists are not yet sure of how the vaccine affects transmission – and this is currently undergoing research.
... you are seizing on a single double-negative to claim you've been misled? A double-negative which is equally as accurate as what you would like it corrected to, because in the body of the article it says there's no evidence one way or the other?
This is really the hill you're choosing to die on?
If you read my initial message one more time, you may notice that I mentionned a google serach container. I'm not certain it is the appropriate term but basically, you can ask a question to google and it will select an authoritative answer from a trusted source (Reuters, AP, etc).
Back in the early day of the vaccine, if you were to ask google whether the vaccine prevents the transmission of the disease, you'd get this: "here is no conclusive evidence to claim COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent people spreading the disease." at the top of the index. You could click to have more context, but I hope you are now getting the point.
Let's just not be in denial that misinformation exists on both sides.
It's pretty common knowledge within the tech community that those fields are populated automatically, often via scraping (just look at what happened with Google and Genius, re: lyrics). Google is notorious for faulty data being in there, either through questionable sources or misquotes, for an untold number of queries.
I'm not saying this to doubt your claim that that was what was displayed and it appeared misleading; Google needs to fix it because clearly it causes problems. I just think that it's an incredible stretch on your part to suggest it was intentional misinformation placed there by a "side".
Edit: I say this as someone who usually doesn't defend Google whatsoever.
Are you paraphrasing? If so, that’s fine but please don’t use quotation marks in that case.
It also depends how you define efficacy/effectiveness. Does it mean for each exposure, over a period of time, etc.
Sure, there are confounds: people who choose to be vaccinated don't behave exactly the same way that people who don't choose to be vaccinated do. Therefore, the observational data is somewhat confounded.
Two directions for the confound: people who are vaccinated may choose to take more risk after vaccination. People who are vaccinated may be those who take COVID seriously to begin with and be biased to take less risk in general. Probably the latter "wins", though I certainly do a lot more than I would do if I wasn't vaccinated.
However, IMO this is all moot: we have vaccines that showed massive efficacy in randomized, controlled trials (over a period of time), and case control studies that show ongoing high efficacy against Delta... and the confounded observational data shows a truly massive effect.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Is that meteorologist bit supposed to be a reference to the Weather Underground?
Check this data in a few weeks. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
Omicron is going to make it worse, but even unboosted folks in South Africa seem to enjoy about 30% efficacy against infection and much higher efficacy against hospitalization and death. But your gossip trumps the data, I guess...
But you say "has proven less than 10% effective" ... because you are making stuff up.
Further, it may be a mistake to assume South Africa predicts exactly what will happen here (30% fully vaccinated, nearly 0 boosted, 20% HIV incidence, vs. 60% fully vaccinated, 25% boosted, 0.3% HIV incidence).
Note also that this data is as of October 2021, so it's primarily looking at the efficacy against the Delta, whereas the original 90-whatever % claims were obviously the original virus.
Pfizer et al certainly weren't saying in March 2021 that "Pfizer provide 90-100% protection against COVID and all future variants" and I've never heard anyone suggest they thought that's what the claim was.
> Anecdotal. You do not need to be a meteorologist to know when it's raining. Look outside.
I'll raise you this... where I am 100% of ICU cases are unvaccinated. Read that again 100%. And over 85% of hospitalizations. And before you say "see, 15% of them were breakthrough cases," please learn about base rates. 65% of the people here are vaccinated so to have only 15% of the hospital cases be vaccinated is even more conclusive.
Please, get out of your bubble. If you think it is 10%... or even 50%... or even 70% you need to do some serious introspection.
Please, actually "look outside"! Because if you spent more than 10 seconds actually looking outside, the efficacy is obvious.
What I am saying here is that the vaccines were marketed as 90% effective for preventing infection. Was I misunderstanding what was being marketed to me all along?
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347
We had some early data that looked like they were probably about ~70% effective for preventing infection, ~90% effective at preventing symptoms, and >95% effective at preventing severe illness.
These numbers are interesting, because they mean you have less of a chance of becoming infected, but a larger chance, if infected, of being an asymptomatic carrier. So it's difficult to predict the net effect on transmission (probably a benefit, but..)
Now for 2 doses of mRNA vaccine, our best guesses for omicron are more like ~??%, ~30%, and ~70% respectively. Offsetting it slightly is that it looks like omicron may be a bit less likely to cause severe illness at baseline. But, no matter what, this is a big setback.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: another https://twitter.com/ElnordicoBk/status/1471158531394998273
Note that these quotes are in context of the US and Fauci’s publicly announced plan to approve, as part of Operation Warp Speed, vaccines that were at least 50% effective.[1]
The vaccines proving to be 80-90% effective in that context certainly makes it reasonable to call them highly effective.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/12/9119879...
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Also that press release is not by any possible definition from “early days” nor is it issued by Dr Fauci.
Now, I invite you to make google searches with a date range and you will see that such studies claiming 100% efficacy on the product on kids started to appear in the early days actually:
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
Since 100% is a pretty awesome figure, my theory is that there must have been quite a bit of press coverage at the time and I have no doubt a lot of people got confused.
1: 100% efficacy against COVID-19 disease for 12-15 year olds in phase 3
2: 100% efficacy against severe COVID-19 as defined by CDC
3: 100% efficacy in preventing COVID-19 cases in South Africa
[1] https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377227340011483136
[2] https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377586182519947264
[3] https://twitter.com/AlbertBourla/status/1377618480527257606
[4] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
It highlights quite clearly what I'd mentioned in my first comment, that time and reproducibility matter. I genuinely don't know why it was flagged.
https://news.grabien.com/story-twitter-user-video-showing-sh...
Maybe there was a narrative shift, but I don't recall ever seeing those 100% claims back in February.
People get their information from the newsmedia, and this is what it was reporting. So either our newsmedia isn't truthful or our scientists aren't, or - as my original (flagged) comment was saying - time and reproducibility matter, and may affect the efficacy ultimately reported.
Please take your politically charged discourse elsewhere. This isn't the right place for mudslinging like this.
But sadly there do seem to be some pretty strong correlations at a county level across the US. It could also be rural/urban cultural divides but the more obvious one is simply politics.
Check the actual stats. Unfortunately a lot of GOP leaning media sources including top rated Fox News opinion hosts have been spreading FUD about the vaccine for a year. People listen to their trusted news hosts and media sources…
60 % of Republicans have received at least one dose [1], but only 51 % of blacks have done the same [2].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/17/counties-vot...
[2] https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...
* “ 60% of Republican adults”
* “58% percent of White people had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, which was close to the rate for Hispanic people (56%) but higher than the rate for Black people (51%)“
The problem becomes obvious if you compare it now. How could the Republican % be higher than the white, Hispanic, or black %? Not because republicans are more likely than democrats or neutrals to get the vaccine - it’s because you’ve compared total population (including children who aren’t eligible or only became eligible in the last month or two) to adult population.
Now look at stats that actually compare like for like and you can see GOP members are much less open to vaccination than Black Americans. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/28/republica...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-demogr...
https://www.reuters.com/article/industry-us-news-idUSTRE68D0... notes that in general the average American spends about 60 minutes a day getting news from TV, radio or newspapers and only 9% report they exclusively get news online.
The major networks have a huge impact on the overall media narrative, and Fox News is the biggest.
It’s just as foolish to believe CNN as Fox
This is why my comment was really about praising the potential of a good therapeutic. Political ideologies fade when all you can think about is survival, in contrast to preventative care which requires forethought.
While I see most of the nuttiness on the right (with regards to the pandemic and attacking public health measures), I have friends who said they’d refuse to take the vaccine because operation warp speed suggested it was rushed (and was a Trump thing). But they were first in line to get it when Biden had been president for a few months. Nothing else had changed with the vaccines.
Paxlovid might not even be easy to use. Five days might have already passed from infection to first symptoms to urgent care visit to PCR test result. And that's assuming the drug is in stock.
As a vaccinated, boosted republican, this attitude isn't helping. Yeah, there are a bunch of idiotic republican politicians out there. But there are also a lot of idiotic democrat politicians out there who aren't making COVID policy decisions based on science and evidence, but based on their ideological side: outdoor mask mandates, travel bans, blocking people's access to their own private property, etc. So no, not fucking republicans. Fucking tribalism. It's making humans act completely irrationally.
But it’s undeniable that there are large numbers of republicans that are unvaccinated.
See the below two links
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/import...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828...
Vaccinations move from the population in to the vaccinated bucket which has preferable externality rates and if enough people are vaccinated we might be able to even push 0.9ish fudge factor lower.
Partisan flamewar is not welcome here either, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Same reason it might not be sensible to have sex unprotected with a syphilis patient.
Spoiler alert: they're all conspiracy theorizing about how this _proves_ that the entire pandemic is all a part of Pfizer's master plan for making money.
Even to your summarization, that's up for those reading to decide. I don't blindly trust a single pharma company after the opioid scandal. Conspiracies are not impossible, and if you want to dispel a theory, do it, don't censor it.
Also at a certain point you cannot see flagged comments, even with "show dead" enabled.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can assure you almost all of them are flame-bait.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Data released is with what was present, in time we'll get for the rest as well... Omicron right now is too new to actually know effectiveness...
We also had to warn you about this pretty recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28995867. I don't want to ban you but if you keep doing this, we'll have to, so please fix this. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Can you please elaborate on exactly which study are you referring to and your reasoning to accuse it of being "terrible"?
Meanwhile, we've endured at least two strains which are significantly different than the original 2019 Wuhan strain, and thanks to the vaccine the mortality risk has dropped to residual levels.
The virus changes, so the end conditions change. It's frustrating but it is what it is.
82%
> Hospitals on the verge of being overwhelmed
There's 191 people in the hospital in BC for covid right now[1]. Current preparations are for if omicron has exponential growth over the next several weeks.
[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/a6f23959a8b14bfa989...
The goalposts move because the experts were wrong.
Today is your lucky day, it’s your chance to enlighten me: what were the experts wrong about?
- driving R-value below 1 will cause Covid to extinguish itself
- vaccine will prevent infection
- vaccinated can get infected but don’t really infect others
A simple google search about those points also reveal optimistic opinions by various people and not one instance where experts claim so.
The CDC said that the vaccinated can only “rarely” infect others.
And before you say “but Delta!”, Delta was already dominant around the time of the statement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/health/cdc-vaccinated-del...
You seem to be trying to squirm out of your earlier statement.
As for the rest, you’re taking ideas that have some truth to them, and probably misinterpreting what these things actually mean and taking them unreasonably far or to the extreme:
- Herd immunity is a thing, but I'm not sure how you imagine it in your head, or what you think that means.
- Vaccines do prevent infections, but not perfectly well. This (or the contrary) has been communicated to the public in very confusing ways.
- It is true that vaccinated people have a lower likelihood of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to others. I'm not sure if you think that means it should be perfect, but biology is messy.
Yes, those things are infectious disease concepts and they were touted as to how COVID will be dealt with.
Lots of talk of “once we get to 80% vaccination rate we’ll hit here immunity”. You don’t hear that any more huh?
“If we drive R below 1 we can extinguish Covid”. Now it’s “Covid is endemic, it’s not going away”.
“Once everyone is vaccinated, Covid goes away”, then “It really rare for the vaccinated to get Covid” to “holy shit, most new cases are in fully vaccinated”.
You can honestly look at that narrative and NOT completely understand why people are not listening any more?
No, the problem is that this was communicated in imperfect ways to the public (as you said yourself), who then filled in the gaps themselves. Risk communication is complicated and the govt, the experts, and the media all failed the public here.
It literally does not matter how right you are or well you communicate something: there will always be groups of people who misinterpret what you say, don't understand what you say, or weaponize what you say for political purposes.
Rt is a measure of the real-life infectivity of a pathogen at a specific point in time, under no assumption of “normal life”, and possibly within some arbitrary geographical bounds. The purpose of Rt is not to measure the inherent infectivity of a pathogen, but rather its infectivity in a specific environment and set of circumstances: it’s the high-level metric that informs you of the combined impact of public health measures, social behaviour changes, immunity, etc, on the pathogen’s infectivity.
You can see Rt as being equal to R0 times some correction factor that accounts for everything else.
We know there are many viruses we can manage with mass vaccination and herd immunity, such as smallpox and measles. But the important difference is those diseases don't mutate as quickly as covid. Therefore it's not a given that covid is something that can be snuffed out with the same methods. We're clearly in a position of playing catch-up and fire-fighting.
Your post implies a sentiment like: "if only we didn't half ass things, we could've beaten this virus. The problems aren't with the measures themselves, just that we didn't go far enough."
Ok, how much further should we go compared to countries that have the strictest measures? Take Australia for example, they have quarantine camps, lockdowns for the unvaccinated, advanced tracing and databases, etc.
For a while this worked pretty well. But their cases have been skyrocketing as of July this year, and it's likely a delta wave. What will omicron look like once it gets there? Would you say their measures were half-baked?
You express indignation but don't say what we should have done differently or what we should do now.
Those who share your mindset come off as having a kind of denial-ism, and an urge to point the finger.
The fact is we're not as "in-control" as we like to think. Nature is inevitable. Our technology and ability to organize is bad.
Let's recognize that an endless state of emergency also has consequences, health measures should be proportional, and for the most part we've done our best. If we can't snuff out the disease and the variants are getting milder anyway, then it's time to start thinking about moving past covid.
I would take New Zealand, Greenland, Taiwan and even China as models of most of what needed to be done. None of them did things perfectly, but they all had some of the right ideas.
In my world, everyone that could segregate from vulnerable populations already has and vice versa. They moved, and go out with everyone else that wont go home to an immunocompromised or prediabetic or elderly person.
Multiday 300,000+ attendee music festivals have occurred in major US markets without making the news as reckless and welcomed by all levels of government at the time.
Commonwealth countries and major markets in Europe seem to be less tolerant to the idea of governing, I mean a lower threshold to infection to justify continued restrictions.
Many of their citizens are coming to the US if they can, as well.
US is still doing way worse with infections, deaths, ICU capacity, but its a two tiered reality. And as long as emergency services remain available for everyone else I think thats a good enough bar for people to make their own decisions - which is an opinion matched by even the most restrictive major municipalities in the US, for some time. Remote work has been normalized enough for enough people/office jobs to not require a compromise to stay home.
When I took my first jab, the local clinic handed out a flier explaining in no uncertain terms that:
a) the current batch of vaccines work by giving our immune system a workout to be able to experience a COVID infection as either totally unnoticed or at most a mild case,
b) the current batch of vaccines does not nor did ever guaranteed you won't contract and spread COVID,
c) even with all shots we still need to practice basic higiene and health precautions like wearing a mask, wash hands, and social distance.
We're talking about pre-Delta times. This has been widely known from the start.
How come antivaxxers are the only ones repeating cynical comments on how the initial batch of vaccines, which we all are lucky to have but are still at the level of being better than nothing, would be a silver bullet?
Guarantee, no. But the thought was that it would greatly reduce the risk of spreading the disease, such that once a sufficient number of people were vaccinated herd immunity would kill off the virus and end the pandemic. We're now two years in with a 73% vaccination rate in the US (not counting those with natural immunity), with even higher rates elsewhere; still no end in sight.
If vaccines aren't going to end the pandemic, then something else needs to. Will a pill that reduces the lethality of the disease by 89% be enough that we can finally put this to rest and go back to normal? If not that, then what?
This was very clearly and openly discussed when the vaccines first came out: vaccines would help reduce spread and with a high enough rate that would end the pandemic but that we’d need relatively high vaccination rates to stop something which can spread this easily.
This was correct and the data suggests that it could have worked but we never seriously tried it. As of today, 61% of Americans have been vaccinated. That is far, far below the 90+% threshold used in those first messages — and that was before Delta and the Omicron delivered both higher spread and reduced effectiveness to make the problem harder.
The other thing to remember is that the pandemic ending doesn’t necessarily mean complete eradication. If, as appears to be the case, vaccination and medications significantly reduce the risk of serious illness and/or long COVID, that will probably be enough to get it down to the level of, say, influenza.
And if vaccines wouldnt “end” Covid why so much discussion on R values and “herd immunity”. The messaging around that went silent pretty quickly when it was clear that wasn’t happening with Covid.
And the only reason the narrative changed is because it was plainly obvious to the general public things weren’t going as planned.
But I get it, you cant predict how a new infectious disease will pan out, but holy shit has the PR messaging ever been terrible.
But then I wonder if that was intentional? Would the public ever have gone along with all this if the government was honest and said “we’ll continue to have restrictions for the next 5 years”?
And please, Delta was starting to circulate before the vaccine was widely available outside the US and Europe.
But that’s exactly what I’m talking about. The unvaccinated make a good scapegoat for the failure to properly message.
It’s classic PR rule #1 - don’t lie because the lie will eventually catch up to you. It’s better to say you don’t know.
The President publicly denied the seriousness of the situation. The CDC didn't want to use a foreign test and made their own but they were all contaminated and always read positive. There was minimal contract tracing of travelers. The Surgeon General told Americans not to wear masks saying using masks incorrectly would harm them.
How many people are willing to admit that they were so wrong for the better part of two years and many thousands of people died who wouldn’t have? That’s very close to admitting that those same people weren’t just lying about one thing.
Not sure how you can force people to stay at home, kids out of school, then hand out billions in relief (or not in one country) and not have it be political?
Different countries matter less in the internet era, too. In the English-speaking world, the Murdoch media set the message in the US & UK, of course, but these days that spreads quickly outside of national borders and it was easy to see those messages jump to other language communities on social media. This was especially accelerated by the early recognition of certain risk factors which were compatible with the strong man posturing common to a lot of right-wing ideology.
There's a world of difference between criticizing a government for imposing a lockdown at 10pm instead of 11pm or enforcing a 80% occupancy limit instead of 50%, and attacking basic public health measures like taking a vaccine based on sheer lunacy and conspiracy theories.
That's a CNNesque statement right there.
I'm ready to change my mind tho if you back your statement with facts.
Measles is an example of another highly infectious moderately deadly disease. Wherever we don’t have 97%+ vaccine coverage we have outbreaks.
Even today with the questions about Omicron’s degree of immune escape there’s theoretically a solution available to use. If 95% of people masked we could get spread under control in 6-10 weeks. But masks are a dirty word and public health campaigns have ceilings to adoption.
And since it’s clearly the fully vaccinated have only a reduced, not eliminated risk of infection and transmission, we could still get another variant.
Covid isn’t the measles.
To be fair, this is the best effort we have ever had to develop a vaccine. So I don't think it's fair to blame these companies if their vaccine wasn't effective on new variants as they initially promised. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't thoroughly scrutinize them.
It depends. On example: If they hid data that propped up their number, then we should blame. Otherwise we should not blame them. Either way, there needs to be scrutiny so that they don’t feel they can easily hide things that matter to public health