Hacker News Reader

Comment by vimy | Hacker News Reader

Since the vaccines don’t seem to stop transmission their only use is to protect the ones who take it. So there is no need anymore for vaccine passports and forcing people to take it.

Unless I’m missing something?

View on HN

The do vastly lower the rate of transmission. That could translate into lower peak hospital utilization (even not accounting for their ability to prevent illness) which is good for everyone.

I do agree that this thing is going to spread in an unbounded manner regardless of what we do now though.

The vaccines don't stop transmission, but they still radically reduce it. Pfizer is 94% effective [1] in reducing transmissions of the original strain. Even with the delta variant it is still 64% effective:

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/israel-may-reimpose-coron...

Total guess: Slows down transmission. Those that are asymptomatic should have a lower viral load, which results in fewer cases.

They don’t stop transmission but reduce its likelihood significantly. It seems someone who is vaccinated and very ill can be very infectious but generally vaccinated people are unlikely to infect others (reduced observed R0).

You may be misremembering the initial releases from last November. The goal of the first round of studies was to establish whether the vaccines were effective in protecting people who received the vaccine. The studies were not designed to determine whether it still spread, and so the statements were very precisely worded as "has not been verified to prevent transmission", or things to that effect.

Unfortunately, the English language doesn't make any distinction between "has not been observed" because it hadn't been studied yet, and "has not been observed" because it doesn't exist. Later studies have determined that vaccination greatly decreased the transmission, but by then the idea that they only protect the individual had taken root.

Vaccines definitely reduce transmission, just to a slightly smaller extent for the Delta variant. The CDC's messaging on this issue has been atrociously bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com