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Comment by AndrewBissell | Hacker News Reader

> Something like 1% of people receiving inoculation would develop full-blown smallpox. No vaccine courts for those folks.

They at least got the benefit of being inoculated against a virus which would have a 30% chance of killing them. This made it very likely for the inoculations to be positive risk tradeoff for all the troops who were ordered to get them. The same is not necessarily true for a healthy 19 year old without comorbidities who is forced to get a Covid vaccination to attend college.

Another point of contrast is that smallpox inoculation was sterilizing and prevented the inoculated from being able to spread the disease.

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> The same is not necessarily true for a healthy 19 year old without comorbidities who is forced to get a Covid vaccination to attend college.

True, if you only narrowly focus on the immediate benefit to the individual there are head-spinning number of laws and rules that don't make sense in civilization.

What other sort of benefit is there supposed to be? The reduction in infection and transmission risk for Delta from the vaccines is marginal at best, wanes quickly, and might well be defeated completely by future variants. If we're acknowledging that the immediate risk tradeoff might be negative, these would be the first vaccines in history that people were widely expected to take on those terms.

> The reduction in infection and transmission risk for Delta from the vaccines is marginal at best

That's not what the New England Journal of Medicine says[1]:

> Only modest differences in vaccine effectiveness were noted with the delta variant as compared with the alpha variant after the receipt of two vaccine doses.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2108891

This study stopped collecting data on May 30, it's way out of date at this point especially wrt Delta and could not have captured the waning efficacy the vaccines have exhibited over time.

> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.

A reduction was also observed in people vaccinated with the jab made by US company Pfizer and German firm BioNTech. The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab was 42%, but increased to 58% with time.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

> vaccine effectiveness

does not mean "effectiveness at preventing the spread of the virus", it means "effectiveness at preventing severe illness and death".

> The reduction in infection and transmission risk for Delta from the vaccines is marginal at best, wanes quickly, and might well be defeated completely by future variants.

In case you are unaware, reducing the spread of a virus also lowers the odds of sparking new variants, not to mention the fact that limiting or eliminating the spread of a virus also contains and limits the risk posed by new variants.

I hear this point raised often with no scientific evidence ever offered to back it up. Actually, some recent research found that the vaccinated were more likely to host antibody-resistant escape variants (in this case Delta): https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.19.21262139v...

A similar effect has been observed for leaky vaccines in chickens, where for Marek's disease they actually encouraged the breeding of hotter and more virulent strains.

In terms of playing host to new variants the biggest risk may be the immunocompromised, who are not able to be vaccinated: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/11/immunocompr...

> I hear this point raised often with no scientific evidence ever offered to back it up.

Oh really? In that case I'm sorry to tell you that you are totally oblivious to how very basic princples of biology work.

Here's a helpful reading.

https://now.tufts.edu/articles/how-viruses-mutate-and-create...

It's litteraly the first search hit from a very basic google search, which goes to show how well informed is your remark on "no scientific evidence".

This isn't scientific evidence, it's theoretical discussion and a priori reasoning.

> In terms of playing host to new variants the biggest risk may be the immunocompromised, who are not able to be vaccinated

The immunocompromised absolutely can be vaccinated, it just might not work as well for them, see: Powell, Colin

The best way to keep these immunocompromised people from becoming infected and playing host to a variant factory is to vaccinate everyone around them, even 19 year olds and elementary students who themselves aren't in as high of a risk category personally. The fact that the vaccine isn't perfect only makes it more essential that everyone is vaccinated - if the vaccine were perfect we might get to herd immunity with 70% of the population vaccinated, but with a less effective vaccine we need even higher numbers to get there. The vaccine hesitant are only dragging out the pandemic further and creating new risks.

"The worse the vaccines work the more we need to mandate them"?

Herd immunity is not going to happen with Covid, it's a pipe dream. Certainly not with vaccines with a peak 37% effectiveness against the currently dominant variant which wanes after a few months (cf. the Nature article I referenced elsewhere in the thread), never mind ones that might arise in the future in response to evolutionary pressures created by mass vaccination.

The vaccine hesitant are not dragging out the "pandemic," the people complying with undemocratic diktats and mandates are. The people running this show have no intention of ever letting you go back to normal -- the draconian restrictions still being applied to 95%+ vaccinated college campuses make this clear.

If you need counterexamples to your baseless notion that mass vaccination will prevent COVID outbreaks have a look at Singapore or Gibraltar, or the case studies of outbreaks in 95% vaccinated hospitals and care homes. But I suppose there is no evidence that could possibly change your mind on this -- after all, the worse the vaccines are, the more we need to push them on people.

You do not get a flu shot to not get killed by flu. Nobody really expects that it would be likely. You take it to not get a bad case of flu. Well, bad case of COVID-19 is worse than bad case of flu. This alone should be enough to get vaccinated but there is more: you may also develop long lasting symptoms (aka long covid) or get some more serious complication like myocarditis (more likely than from a vaccine).

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