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Comment by becuzThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that there is very little evidence of vaccinated individuals actually transmitting the original ("wild-type") virus, or even the Alpha variant (obviously, Delta/Gamma are potentially different beasts). This was why we in the United States dropped mask mandates for vaccinated individuals. I don't know why the narrative always reverts to "oh, the vaccines just decrease symptoms", a statement unsupported by evidence.

EDIT: Before I get downvoted completely into oblivion, take a look at the 90% reduction in infections, both symptomatic and asymptomatic, seen in vaccinated individuals in Israel. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33964222/

I think we can all agree that you can't transmit the virus if you yourself don't get infected.

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The amount of abstract certainty present in this comment is truly astonishing. Please just cite the RCT on this.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33964222/

This is not an RCT. The work itself makes this very clear, it's observational, based on what we'll call "pseudo-voluntary" testing. Just provide the RCT for your claims-- this is necessary since the vaccine is known to be effective on a symptomatic level.

Please provide the RCT that shows that vaccinated individuals have similar levels of infection to unvaccinated individuals.

What the RCTs for Pfizer and Moderna showed was that the vaccines reduced the symptomatic infection rate by 95%. But you are misconstruing the language being used if you extend that to say "the vaccine is known to be effective on a symptomatic level". The statement about symptomatic infection just means that it was impractical to have 42,000 people take a COVID nasal swab every day, and therefore they can make no professional scientific statements about the actual rate of infection.

But if you are aware of an RCT that actually established the vaccine as being ineffective at preventing infection, I would love to see it.

EDIT: And yes, I linked to observational data from Israel (TWICE) that showed real-world effectiveness in preventing both symptomatic and asymptomatic infections.

I don't have an RCT which establishes this. But I'm not the one who asserted that the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines prevented transmission. You have the burden of proof in this situation. Hence my reference to the astounding amount of certainty in your comment.

I think it is completely clear from the statement that you made that: the vaccines are effective at treating symptoms of covid and that they will reduce the symptomatic infection rates.

However, symptomatic infection rate and infection rate are decidedly not the same and we've know from the beginning that asymptomatic spread occurs substantially with covid.

The only way you establish the effect on transmission is with a large-scale RCT using a well-designed testing protocol. This may be hard but this is the standard.

Not RCT, but look up infections in Israel.

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