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Comment by whafro | Hacker News Reader

This is quite cynical. I think the vaccines are doing pretty dang well considering they were developed in a matter of weeks following discovery of the virus, and work very robustly against not only the variants that were targeted, but also many that were not.

HIV has decades of study and literature behind it, so why not be more optimistic about the prospects for progress?

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First think that poped in DDG:

>Israel reinstates some virus restrictions to avoid a full lockdown.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/04/world/israel-covid-restri...

Sorry it's a paywall but the title is enough. Doesn't scream vaccine efficacy to me since they are in the top vaccinated country list.

You're not addressing the point you're replying to; that these vaccines were developed in weeks as an emergency. They're non-sterilizing. We wish they were sterilizing vaccines, but that's gonna be the next round now.

They're also not at 80% of the full population; most of the vaccination percentages you see batted around are in adults only, because most countries have vaccinated 0% of their under-12s.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-644288348135

> Israel has a population of approximately 9.3 million people, of which more than 60% are fully vaccinated, according toJuly 21 numbers from the online scientific publication, Our World In Data. The country has had one of the swiftest vaccine rollouts in the world. By February, 80% of those over 60 had already received shots.

Almost no vaccines are sterilising and that is a very high threshold to meet.

Polio and measles vaccines are not even sterilising. It is much more realistic to achieve herd immunity with vaccines than it is to create a sterilising vaccine.

Government reaction to case spikes does not reflect at all on the efficiency of vaccines. Vaccines don't stop you getting a disease they prepare your immune system for it, so when it happens you are more likely to survive.

Seems to me Spanish government bodies (where I live) look at headline case rates and then start making bizarre rules without talking to the scientists.

> Government reaction to case spikes does not reflect at all on the efficiency of vaccines.

Living in France I can agree on that.

Yet vaccinated people are still having severe problems up to dying from COVID.

The vaccine could have stopped the disease if they'd opted for IgA immunity instead of IgG. That means getting drops in your nose rather than a jab, so that immmune cells are activated in the mucosas rather than in the blood. Right now someone who's been vaccinated can continue to replicate and transmite the virus from the glial cells in the nose mucosa, because the immune cells there haven't been trained to fight the virus.

Infection rate is just an umbrella stat. Hospitalization and death rates are much improved for those with the vaccine.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-brea...

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