“Yes it kills people and can spread easily, so what”
Is very callous. I think you could take your own advice about SF vs rural towns and maybe consider applying it to other countries.
(OA) US, veterans, 3 months VEaI = 78%, 6 months VEaI = 50%, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620
US, 5 months VEaI = 47%, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
UK, 3 months VEaI = 75%. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01548-7
Qatar, 3 months VEaI = 70%, 6 months VEaI = 12.8%, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114
(preprint) Sweden, <50yo, 2-4 months VEaI = 83%, 4-6 months VEaI = 50%, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410
1. The probability of a BI is not the same as the relative probability of a vaccinated person infecting another person. I also refer to “vaccinated people“ to mean “a population of vaccinated people”, which is where the big gains are.
2. The day before they get their booster shot (6 months) is not the same as the probability overall, counting the best and moderate days of immunity too
2. I expect a vaccine to significantly (VE >90%) reduce infection probability for at least 10 years. These vaccines ain't that. While I'm vaccinated, I have not signed up for an endless stream of "boosters" every 6 months or so. Probably I'll be declared "unvaccinated" with a straight face and excluded from society in the not-so-far future.
Why do you expect this, and do you think it's a reasonable expectation? Do you shrug off flu vaccines because they're only effective for a year or so? (I understand the difference between reduction in efficacy over time against a single strain vs against new variations)
> While I'm vaccinated, I have not signed up for an endless stream of "boosters" every 6 months or so. Probably I'll be declared "unvaccinated" with a straight face and excluded from society in the not-so-far future.
I don't understand this point of view at all. Do you only take the first pill in a course of antibiotics? Why wouldn't you follow the vaccine schedule that offers the best overall protection, and best reduction in total risk, that we're aware of and is available to you?
Is your position the rational position for them to take?
What is the motivation for your position?
Yet we are very careful to not overuse antibiotics. Why?
https://www.pulmonologyadvisor.com/home/topics/pneumonia/bac...
UK data shows vaccinated people are drastically more likely to get it and spread it than the unvaccinated. In other countries VE drops to zero after only about 6-8 months, but the UK programme was ahead of other countries. Raw VE in the UK has kept going down after reaching zero and is currently deeply negative, with it being worse than negative 100% in some age groups. In other words, vaccinated people - for whatever reason - are far more of a problem from an infection control perspective than the unvaccinated.
The public health authorities don't have a good explanation for this and have been reduced to blaming a vague, highly speculative and sometimes unnamed set of confounders, for which they insist everyone make massive adjustments despite not being able to provide any evidence that these confounders are important or even exist at all. And in fact one study in California that did do a lot of these adjustments found they made very little impact (a few percent at most). That's an issue because public health's "adjustments" are now reaching absurd levels, e.g. taking AZ from 4% effectiveness to 73% VE!
It's very unlikely that Austrians are biologically totally different to British people, so we can say with 100% certainty that this latest quasi-Nazi move is going unlikely to have any effect on their case numbers, although we can also say that having taken the leap into such darkness the authorities there will never admit to any type of failure, thus the unvaccinated will continue to be blamed even as the data falls apart around them.
This is not true. Vaccinated people are less likely to get and spread Covid. I’d link you to the CDC but it’s probably redundant.
The US figures do indeed diverge strongly from data in other countries. This is very unlikely to be because the USA is somehow biologically special. US statistical quality is unfortunately garbage w.r.t. vaccines, as the CDC stopped tracking data at a national level a long time ago and the states often don't report in comparable ways. The UK data is of a much higher quality as it breaks out the population in the ways needed for this type of analysis.
Article graphing the UK data showing negative efficacy against disease in the raw data, and discussing the semi-public fighting that's broken out between arms of the civil service over how to disguise or de-emphasise the results:
https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/ukhsa-efficacy-stats-death-...
Norway finds no effectiveness against death (but oddly, some against ICU admittance)
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/14/norway-study-finds-zero-...
Essay discussing how although raw UK data shows negative efficacy, it gets adjusted using a test negative case control design to show high efficacy. This contradicts data not only from Norway but also Sweden and Qatar, so is there a flaw in their approach:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/12/why-are-the-ukhsas-estim...
Another essay showing that the TNCC design requires absence of "viral interference" which may not be the case here:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/13/the-flaw-at-the-heart-of...
Daily Sceptic has been doing a lot of reporting and analysis on the UK data (it's a UK site), usually with very high quality of analysis. A lot of it comes from PhDs and data scientists of various kinds.
* UK shows negative VE
* US and Germany show 90-95% VE
* Medical literature shows 50% VE at six months and waning
Sadly, there is no longterm RCT in place to perform this basic, but extremely valuable measure. We have to rely on epi data, and epi data is very easy to mess up. I wonder how much of this is due to different testing regimens. Like CDC telling vaccinated people to not test unless symptoms, or UK school guidance instructing, on contact with known covid case, vaccinated people to do a PCR, but unvaccinated people to self isolate for two weeks. Plus copious doses of Simpson, as different age groups have vastly different covid outcomes and vastly different vaccination rates.
Medical literature appears to be heavily adjusting the raw data and using a methodology that is known to overstate vaccine effectiveness if a vaccine causes "viral interference", without bothering to show that no such interference is taking place.
The entire thing is just a dystopian nightmare of lying and manipulation, really. In the past I've used the term anti-vaxxer as an insult, as I guess many of us have done. Never again. The whole story around vaccines will eventually have to be revisited - you can't witness this stuff up close and not conclude that public health has a blind, near fanatical ideological bias in favour of vaccination to the extent that any bad news is immediately covered up or obfuscated.
"Decades ago, physicists including Richard Feynman noticed something worrying. New estimates of basic physical constants were often closer to published values than would be expected given standard errors of measurement. They realized that researchers were more likely to 'confirm' past results than refute them — results that did not conform to their expectation were more often systematically discarded or revised."