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Comment by Roonerelli | Hacker News Reader

one thing about the Oxford vaccine is that when vaccinated you are still able to pass on the virus , despite having the anti-bodies to fight it. It's excellent news nonetheless

edited with some references

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-vaccin...

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You are reporting very misleading information as if it were a fact. No one knows that to be true in humans, not even the creators of the vaccine.

In a very limited test of a small number of monkeys who were directly injected with high levels of the virus, those monkeys still had the virus in their noses and might have been able to pass it on (in theory).

That has very little value in telling us what the vaccine will do in humans in the real world. No one will know until the Phase 3 trials are complete. It's still possible that the vaccine will be totally effective, partially effective or completely ineffective in protecting humans. That's why we need the Phase 3 trial results to know if this vaccine "works".

That was true for the monkeys that were challenged with huge viral loads. We don’t know if it will still be true for humans who encounter normal loads.

This is a little bit of a misnomer. Anybody can pass on the virus. If you have it in your nose and you sneeze, you'll spread it everywhere. If you have it on your hands and you touch high-traffic surface areas, you'll spread it. The point is that if a high number of people are vaccinated, then it won't matter if the virus fragments are spread, as long as it's not causing disease then it doesn't matter.

Why is that the case with the Oxford vaccine? Can you elaborate?

I'm curious what they meant as well. Perhaps what they meant was the potential period where the virus is replicating in the body before the immune system detects it and kills it. I suppose even someone with the vaccine would have a very short-lived period of viral replication? Or perhaps they simply meant that humans could be fomites (eg, it gets on someone's hand, then they shake your hand, etc?)

Honestly I'm just guessing here. I suspect this is not a real concern.

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