Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens (2015)

It's a virus where transmission is heavily influenced by water droplets. Masks limit the reach of water droplets from the nose and mouth.

Also it is unlikely for there to be a large study for ethical reasons (if wearing a mask might help, you can't get a control group).

> it at a minimum establishes the very real risks of cloth mask wearing

That is a pretty gross misreading of a study which has no non-mask control group and looked very different conditions to the pandemic

https://www.nih.gov/how-immunity-generated-covid-19-vaccines...

The only "news" pieces I could find about Gibraltar having some massive surge were from hardcore antivax websites - the top one was something called welovetrump.

I touched on this a bit in another comment but there's more factors than lethality at play. If a virus makes you sufficiently symptomatic you're much more likely to isolate. Conversely if it remains completely asymptomatic you will spread very little. So they're targeting a sweet spot of symptomaticity. You can very easily imagine a strain that would lead to the sweet spot of symptomaticity in a vaccinated person, which therefore would tend to "overshoot" and be excessively pathogenic in an equivalent unvaccinated individual.

In fact, this is a bit of a tangent, but I suspect part of the reason the vaccinated are spreading Delta so much, is that it causes normal cold symptoms in them (which btw the original SARS-2 did too despite how people would act like it's way different); and imo because the media and the "expert" class has so sufficiently scared them that SARS-2 is this scary supervirus, they assume their run-of-the-mill cold symptoms can't be COVID and keep engaging in society without getting tested or anything *

As very circumstantial evidence of the above hypothesis, I would point to https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787. This was before vaccination but it's a case report of people who actually had SARS-2 (if we can trust PCR; given the symptoms I think in this case they really did have it), and indeed had COVID (+ pre-existing risk factors) bad enough that they ended up developing strokes. And yet even though these were actual covid patients who eventually developed strokes:

> "Social distancing, isolation, and reluctance to present to the hospital may contribute to poor outcomes. Two patients in our series delayed calling an ambulance because they were concerned about going to a hospital during the pandemic."

So my interpretation of the above (this is me reading between the lines) is that even though they felt like shit, they thought actual COVID was even worse than that and thus avoided going to the hospital so they wouldn't catch COVID, not knowing that they already had it...

* Note I don't necessarily think this (unintentional spread) is even a bad thing, I am firmly on the side of "SARS-CoV-2 will propagate through the population no matter what we do and the more we flail about and needlessly damage ourselves the worse it will be". But from the perspective of the average vaccinated person, they are probably very against the concept of spreading it and thus if they were aware that their "cold" was really SARS-2 they'd act way differently

An alternative assumption is that there are strict quality guidelines that are well-enforced by good moderators.

In any case, we aren’t done yet when it comes down to it, if the numbers are correct.

The short of it, is suspect a substantial sub population here are holding a variety of opinions that ultimately result in vaccine reluctantance. While the numbers aren’t so fast as to be significant to public health, I do think it forms a sort of idea laundering or affirmation by social proof. In other words people are using the reputation of hacker news for having smart people to launder and promote anti vax.

This is why I and others have opposed the concept of mass vaccination for an endemic highly-spreading respiratory virus. It simply doesn't make sense unless you can develop a vaccine comparable to natural immunity (both in magnitude of immune response but also robustness/resiliency to mutations; over the long-term the current vaccines offer neither).

SARS-2's risk is incredibly well bounded; we have a great idea of who is truly vulnerable and who would have to get struck by lightning 8 times in a row to be seriously harmed. We should have recognized that fact from the beginning; but recognizing that fact runs counter to the narrative required to scare the whole population enough to accept lockdowns/etc.