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Comment by ghoward | Hacker News Reader

We are just finding out that vaccinated people still spread the virus, so getting vaccinated only protects the person who is vaccinated, which means that all of the arguments about how the unvaccinated are going to hurt people is only true if vaccinated people do too.

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This is the kind of confused weak thinking that causes new infections to rise at 150%

Of course vaccination radically reduces the ability of the vaccinated to spread Covid, 90% of them never get it. Sure of the other 10% that might get it some do and wow they can spread it. By the time you get past the IFs vaccination is astoundingly successful but the more vaccinated that are exposed to the unvaccinated the more of those 10% WILL get infected. This seems crystal clear to me and actually I'm surprised at how low the rate of "breakthrough" cases are (I think I heard < 1% but fact check).

It is not necessarily correct that 90% of vaccinated people won't get the virus; they might be asymptomatic because that is what the vaccine is meant to do: help your body fight the virus. It doesn't stop them from catching it.

We knew vaccinated people might spread the virus and official sources didn't make any claims that they don't until research was done that indicated that vaccinated people spread the virus way less than the uncaccinated.

So basically what you wrote is false. Except that vaccinated people also might hurt people. It's just way less likely than dor unvaccinated.

Same way as drunk driver has higher probability of hurting someone then sober driver, but sober driver might hurt someone too. Despite this we still have a strong stance against drunk driving. Which is reasonable.

Whether it is reasonable depends on how much more likely a drunk or unvaccinated person is likely to hurt people. We have good numbers on drunks. We do not yet have good numbers on unvaccinated people.

Also, you may not have heard it, but I heard all over the place from "experts" that vaccinated people would not spread the virus.

At least few times less, up to few dozen times less. Like you said we don't know precisely how much. Drunk driver is around 13 times more dangerous as sober one. [0]

So what if some people are wrong? They are being corrected. Many places didn't allow vaccinated to ditch the masks. And I think nowhere they encouraged them to take unnecessary risk.

[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...

It seems the CDC recently said that the viral load in vaccinated people is the same as unvaccinated [1] so...

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/experts-back-cd...

Even if vaccinated people just as easily infect other people as unvaccinated they'd still spread the virus less because they themselves are less likely to get infected with the virus.

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