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Comment by fbhabbed | Hacker News Reader

I would completely agree if it was proven that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus. Unfortunately, recent findings seem to put that assumption in doubt

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It doesn't need to be 100% effective at reducing spread to be useful. That's a high and unnecessary bar to ask any disease prevention intervention to clear.

"This code change reduced response latency by only 50%, so we should probably revert and leave things as they are" is not a thing anyone would say.

Most news articles I have read on the topic has been consistently misleading. Let’s say 1/5 vaccinated people can get asymptomatic infection and they spread at the same rate as unvaccinated people, almost all stories and articles fail to make the distinction that it’s 75% less infectious and treat the two as equally bad.

You can see headlines like “vaccinated people spread coronavirus at the same rate as unvaccinated people”

Why does it matter what article writers who do not have healthcare expertise think?

That's what people read and get their information from.

The current statistics around breakthrough cases are not very clear (we have case studies but are lacking broader studies). We do know that vaccinated people can get the virus, can develop an infection, and spread it. We do not yet know exactly how frequently each of those outcomes occur, but the data seem to show that the possibility of each is definitely lower for each of the steps in spreading it. So until more data arrive to dispute this point, to the best of knowledge vaccinated people spread the virus less by virtue of: reduced ability to contract the infection and reduced time of being able to spread if infected. I don't know how much reduction is offered, but the post to which you are replying is not rendered inaccurate by vaccinated people having the capacity to spread the virus.

What if leaky vaccines create an evolutionary pressure on the virus to become more deadly much like Marek's disease?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease

I definitely think that's a very scary prospect, I'm just not sure what an alternative strategy that is viable.

For me, it's hard to justify a mandate if we don't have a reasonable understanding of how much vaccines actually improves the situation. I agree, they likely do improve it in the ways you say, but if it's a cumulative 25% less likely to spread the disease, a mandate seems like overreach.

Doing driving the speed limit isn’t 100% safe either, but it’s vastly less dangerous to other people than doing 120 MPH on public streets.

Personally I am fine if someone wants to be mask and vaccine free on a deserted island, but when your directly putting others lives at significant risk it’s not just about personal freedom.

This is incorrect. Researchers have rushed out results on Ct counts with disclaimers on them that they don't know how that affects actual viral loads or transmissibility.

What we now know is that viral culturability is lower in vaccinated individuals at the same Ct count:

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.03...

We've also known that Ct counts themselves drop faster in vaccinated individuals:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v...

Nobody has done a study on actual transmissibility and e.g. the household attack rate of Delta in vaccinated individuals. Signs are very clearly pointing to expectations that it would be lower now. It looks like vaccinated individuals with the same amount of symptoms have similar amounts of mRNA loads, but those have less culturable virus and clear faster than unvaccinated infections (which makes like ABSOLUTELY TONS of logical sense since the vaccination allows the immune system to get ahead of the virus and the immune system is dismantling infected cells faster in vaccinated individuals so there's more "dead soldiers" around and the battle is over quicker -- analogy breaks down though because the viral debris stimulates the immune system as well which causes symptoms).

There's statements in the media that "asymptomatic vaccinated individuals might be silently spreading Delta" which have been backed up with no research other than wild extrapolation from the headline Ct values. Meanwhile we know that for a fully asymptomatic course of illness (as opposed to the presymptomatic phase of an illness) that the household attack rate is down by a factor of 10 (although with old-school D614G).

I'm still waiting for evidence that vaccinated individuals are even found to cause superspreading events (where a single vaccinated individual infects > 10 other people at an event). My default hypothesis is that the R0 of delta in vaccinated individuals is probably less than 1.0 and I haven't seen any ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE to suggest otherwise. There was one study done in Israel that found that 80% of breakthrough cases passed it on to nobody and with 1-3 cases for the rest of the 20% that puts the R0 below 1.0, but that was done during Alpha so I always lose that argument in favor of fearmongering over uncertainty.

put the life saving another way: you get the vaccine, you are more likely to stay out of the hospital, and the bed you would otherwise be occupying can now be used to treat the car accident victim, the heart attack patient, the cancer patient, etc.

This has become a mainstream media meme, like the whole "masks don't work" thing from last year.

Yes, masks work. No, they don't grant 100% protection. Yes, vaccines work. No, they don't grant 100% protection.

These things are true at the same time. Learn to think with some nuance.

This is because "work" is a garbage word which is never defined in these discussions. It could mean anything >0%. People have different definitions of work, so they can disagree on if they work even if they believe the % is the same. This is the terrible state of semantics and debate we live in.

>Learn to think with some nuance.

unnecessarily rude

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