does that mean the vaccine is not really effective?
It says 99,7% of the adult population is vaccinated, maybe there was a huge outbreak at a school or something.
It's maybe not as perfect as we might have hoped but I'd say it's certainly having a hugely positive effect.
Some people will have issues with the commentary on this blog. I'm posting it in reference to these UK statistics because it's the only place I've seen the tabular data visualized, if you want to examine the raw UK government data yourself it's linked through from the blog.
0 - https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/ukhsa-efficacy-stats-death-... 1 - https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/ukhsa-efficacy-stats-death-...
I wonder if the willingness to get tested might have something to do with it. If you are unvaccinated and sick, do you go get tested knowing that you'll have to face the onslaught of "told you so"... "this wouldn't have happened if you got vaccinated". So perhaps vaccinated people are more likely to also get tested and therefore skew the data?
Your model of unvaccinated people seems a little too simplistic. There is a cohort of folks who have recovered from covid, seen the published evidence around natural immunity, and consider getting the vaccine to be an unknown risk with a known small benefit. That kind of risk/reward calculation is the kind of thing that might have them avoiding (for example) packed indoor spaces.
> So perhaps vaccinated people are more likely to also get tested and therefore skew the data?
Anecdotal, but I think most of the people in my circles are vaccinated and I never hear of them getting tested, even when they have symptoms. Everyone has their own pet hypothesis in these situations, but who knows if any of them are even close.
The simple model of "no covid vaccine" = "antivaxxer" = "dumb/irresponsible/shameful/etc" may feel satisfying and may be heavily pushed by the talking heads, but I don't think it's actually useful.
I guess this depends on your jurisdiction. Where I live (Alberta) we have a vaccine passport system in place so you need to be vaccinated to get into many places. Therefore my assumption was based upon people not taking their past COVID history into account, and rather get the vaccine based upon their desire to go to a restaurant for example.
My theory on who is getting tested or not is admittedly skewed toward the vocal minority of anti-vax protestors that take up more airtime then they truly occupy. I suspect that small group would be hesitant to get tested in hopes of avoiding the "told you so's".
My anecdotal experience currently is that all my friends are vaccinated and get tested when sick. I know this because it derails plans every weekend..."Have to cancel Saturday plans, family is sick and booked a test for tomorrow". It happens almost every weekend in my life!
The larger point about being effective against severe illness and death still stands, and seems to be so robust that it's not going to change now, so the vaccine is still very much worth it.
The article also gives a much more realistic two-week incidence rate of 404 per 100,000 population, which is about 0.2% of the population per week.
After 4 months the effectiveness waned to 47-67% (depending on the variant). So now the focus on boosters.
My point is that 100% vaccination should never have led to the expectation of 0 cases of covid. But the main thing was reducing ICU numbers/severe infections.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
-Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director 2021-03-21
https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-s...
We have overloaded the very term "vaccine" in a fairly misleading manner. One one hand we have vaccines that are highly effective in the longterm and can virtually eradicate dangerous diseases. On the other hand we have flu & covid vaccines, which can help control the severity of the disease, but are incapable of preventing regular widespread outbreaks.
Childhood vaccines are from the first category. Let's enumerate: polio, smallpox, tetanus, hepatitis b, hepatitis a, rubella, hib, measles, pertussis, pneumococcal strep, rotavirus, varicella, diphtheria, mumps. Some of these had no cases for decades, for others very rare localized outbreaks make the news. From the second category, flu and covid have regular outbreaks in highly vaccinated communities and there is no hope for herd immunity.
Perhaps it's time to clear up the semantic overload and create a new term to delineate the important difference between the two classes of vaccines. For example, use "vaccines" for the first category and "immunity stimulants" for the second.
https://www.healthgrades.com/right-care/vaccines/14-diseases...
A study of almost 800k US veterans showed efficacy drops from ~90% to ~50% after 6 months, depending on vaccine; all the way down to 13% for J&J.
They're still effective for preventing death, but that looks to wane too.
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021110...
As for reduction of adverse symptoms it's unknown since deaths of vaccinated vs unvaccinated within 30 days of COVID is tracked, but not how many deaths occur within 30 days of vaccination for comparison.
Infections, as is the case here, were never rare.
According to Wikipedia, the population of Waterford County is 116,176. With an infection rate of 405.7 per 100,000, that means ~471.3 total infections at present. At 99.7% vaccinated, that leaves 348.528 unvaccinated.
So that could mean all of the unvaccinated got infected + 122.772 breakthrough infections, which would mean the vaccine is approximately 99.895% effective at preventing infection based on these numbers.
Let's assume the worst case scenario from the numbers given, that all the cases are breakthrough cases and none of the unvaccinated are infected (unlikely to say the least). At that point based on these numbers the vaccine can be considered 99.6% effective at preventing transmission. So if you're going to challenge vaccine effectiveness, do it with better data.
I should add that the OP I was responding to was literally questioning vaccine effectiveness, with a vagueness that suggests some sort of anti-vax dog-whistling. And I am sick and tired of the vaccines being questioned by people who refuse to engage even childhood math skills to analyze the crappy data they bring to the table, but yet speak with triumphant, quippy rhetoric like imitating their favorite TV characters somehow lends credence to their argument. Am I projecting too much onto the OP? Maybe, but I've been in enough of these conversations to know what they're likely to sound like.
We do have data on vaccine effectiveness; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253672
All you can say is that the _rank_ of a county by incident rate seems uncorrelated with its vaccination rate _given_ just these two points of evidence.
There are 26 counties and vaccination stats and incident rate stats going back nearly a year which suggests this sample size (2) is too small to draw any kind of useful conclusions about the overall relationship.
In any case it makes little sense to look correlations with the _rank_ (within the counties of Ireland) of the infection rate. The rank will have much higher variance than the underlying rate if the numbers are low for example which could be responsible for more outliers and it's outliers that attract media reports which can create a misleading impression.
Vaccines aren't binary
My understanding it that it had reduced efficacy against infection initially, which could be even more pronounced since Delta became dominant.
I think people who originally got J&J did get the option to get Pfizer later.
The article would be more interesting if it was able to include a breakdown of the types of vaccines in the population for the period of time it's referencing.
If there is a health-pandemic, that suppresses the imune-system (like unrecognized diabetes/ vitamin-d deficiency / rheumatic suppression medication) the disease will wage its attack against a weakened imune-system.
Which creates ideal conditions for a full disease break-through.
So Covid only highlights all sorts of failing health systems.