This isn’t remotely what we are dealing with with regard to Covid vaccination. In fact the opposite. That’s my understanding of it.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/11/covid-19...
(The submitted paper is about "highly lethal pathogens" where "host death greatly reduces transmission". That's the opening line of the abstract, and I'm baffled how anyone would link this to covid).
(edit: first version had a horrific typo, /s/incorrect/correct/)
https://www.osfhealthcare.org/blog/fully-vaccinated-less-lik...
>“We do not have conclusive proof. But more and more studies and real-world evidence points to fully vaccinated people, who are not immunocompromised, are less likely to transmit the virus if they become infected,”
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There's also the separate phenomenom of immune escape. The current major vaccines (mRNA and adenovirus-vector) all just make the body's own cells express (generate) the spike protein (S2 subunit), and nothing else. So specifically point mutations in the S2 subunit could allow some degree of artificial immunity evasion (it wouldn't work against those naturally infected because they were infected with whole, live-replicating virus and thus have much more diverse epitopes for their immune system to "learn" and possibly a stronger immune stimulus in the first place)
The short of it is, the window in which the virus can / has an opportunity to mutate is shortened by the vaccine. Thus, vaccinated individuals may be host to mutations if they catch COVID but given fewer “dice rolls” - if you want to call it that - would be similarly less likely to create an especially worse mutation.
Couple that with the reduction of spread given by vaccines, and the difference is staggering.
This paper is being wildly misinterpreted and cherry-picked by people who aren’t involved in the science, or qualified to consume it.
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.
I'm just pointing out how effective the vaccines would have to be for this strategy to make sense (and that's ignoring the whole matter of people that refuse to get vaccinated against COVID, like me).
Simply put the whole strategy doesn't make sense on utilitarian grounds. I don't need to invoke any libertarian principles to argue against why this is so insane.
Side tangent: Unfortunately many who are on my side of the fence as far as skepticism of mass vaccination, believe equally absurd things like the notion that we can eradicate SARS-2 by having the whole world all take ivermectin at the same time. This idea was non-ironically advocated for by Bret Weinstein...
These days everyone is a vaccine expert and climate change scholar.
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.
Many things make it to the front page of HN because they’re interesting. That doesn’t mean that the readership is endorsing problematic viewpoints.
It sounds a lot like you just don't like the conclusion that this classic paper leads to: that the "societal benefit" of mass vaccination with an imperfect vaccine is not nearly as clear-cut as many have been led to believe.
My advice to people is to treat the vaccines as a personal risk reduction tool and little else. The only way to actually guarantee you won't infect someone you interact with, is to have acquired (and recovered from) the natural SARS-2 virus, which will build robust immunity. As far as immunity to reinfection, looking at antibodies alone, IgG levels stay seropositive for ~3.5 years:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.18.20156810v...
> Based on these half-life data, we estimate that the median times for IgM, IgA and IgG to become seronegative are 4.59 (IQR 4.12-5.03), 7.78 (IQR 6.71-9.16) and 42.72 (IQR 33.75-47.96) months post disease onset.
> This study suggests that SARS-CoV-2 infection induces robust neutralizing and binding antibody responses in patients and that humoral immunity against SARS-CoV-2 acquired by infection may persist for a relatively long time.
and furthermore once those IgG levels fade you will still have immunological memory, which lasts basically forever and allows your system to much more rapidly and effectively respond to future infection, leading you to have a much lower peak viral load, lessened symptoms (usually fully asymptomatic) and therefore a near inability to transmit the virus.
For example for the 1918 flu, immunological memory has been shown to persist 60+ years later: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2008/08/research...
Joe Rogan and an afternoon on Google Scholar isn’t a replacement for a couple decades of immunology work.