Hacker News Reader

Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

Original title: "Colin Powell, military leader and first Black US secretary of state, dies after complications from Covid-19"

From the article:

> "We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American," they said, noting he was fully vaccinated.

The ongoing high profile, fatal breakthrough Covid-19 cases should not be underestimated. They are to be expected statistically, but taken individually continue to feed into the idea that "vaccines don't work" and conspiracy theories.

View on HN

> The ongoing high profile, fatal breakthrough Covid-19 cases should not be underestimated. They are to be expected statistically, but taken individually continue to feed into the idea that "vaccines don't work" and conspiracy theories.

It's not expected when the administration and other "health agencies" keep parroting that COVID19 would be over tomorrow if everyone was vaccinated. They are lying just as much.

EDIT: a new publication on this very topic:

"Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/

The paper you linked explicitly advocates for increasing vaccination rates. It just says that the effort to vaccinate should be supplemented with hand washing, distancing, and testing.

I hate that phrase: "They are to be expected"

I expect better. I expect a vaccine that would have saved Colin's life.

With ~90% efficacy, how do you expect that to work when rolling the dice thousands of times?

It's a heck of a lot better than none. And sadly people still don't care to treat Covid seriously, and nowhere near high enough vaccination rates in most places - thus no herd protection yet.

> With ~90% efficacy, how do you expect that to work when rolling the dice thousands of times?

The data shows we are very far from 90% efficacy with the Delta variant.

> in a report released from the Ministry of Health in Israel, the effectiveness of 2 doses of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine against preventing COVID-19 infection was reported to be 39%, substantially lower than the trial efficacy of 96%

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/#CR6

If you think the mRNA vaccines aren’t the best we can do right now, then why don’t you use that deep knowledge of vaccine development and make one yourself?

He was 84 and had multiple myeloma, which means he was immunocompromised. If it hadn't been COVID-19, it would have been something else.

I do too, but it may not be realistic to expect better on such a short time frame. Better vaccinations are being developed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com