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Comment by rvp-x | Hacker News Reader

We have mountains of data about the current vaccine. This amount of disease-tracking is unheard of. Almost any institution in the world has regular discussions about this singular disease. Governments spend huge resources to pinpoint the exact minimum measures that can control the spread enough.

My country attempted a 3rd dose, and within 2 weeks they were already reporting data on reduced risk of catching the virus in comparison to 2, 1, and 0 doses. These are studies done with sample sizes of millions of people.

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Sampling 3rd dose after two weeks would be statistically insignificant and not enough time to record stats from sickness.

I dont understand, why would that be "statiatically insignificant"? for what analysis?

I replied to the last paragraph of parent poster. If you study the few people getting dose 3 two weeks after, you're not going to learn anything about effectiveness of dose 3.

If I understand what you're saying, that's not what was done, at least here in Israel.

After the 3rd vaccine, afaik, they compared the rates of hospitalizations of people do did vs. didn't yet get the 3rd vaccine, as compared to what happened the week before. They saw a drop in 3rd-vaccinated, and only in 3rd-vaccinated, implying that it did have an effect. And this wasn't a small population (I don't know exact numbers but I assume several 10s/100s of thousands).

This is the initial report that was published after two weeks: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Links to studies?

Here's a study with a sample comparing 596,618 vaccinated matched with the same number of unvaccinated people by my own healthcare provider:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2101765

This healthcare provider is able to follow up on people with detail for a really long time - they are notified of any vaccination, PCR test result, hospitalization and death within the country. They've likely made it possible to calculate the same data for the current day within a moment's notice, and use this information for quick decision-making.

I would expect other healthcare providers in other countries to have pooled this information if they are able to do so (and possibly publish it too).

Its unfortunate that they exclude prior infection from study. Why not study them as a separate cohort? 36% of Americans have been infected. What percent of the unvaccinated public have a prior infection? It seems like a 100% prior infected control group would be appropriate. Where is that data?

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