Why is there no good statistics over breakthrough infections, not merely how many double vaccinated are in hospital? Why not blast the non-immunity provided by supposed vaccine the same way as "infections per day" is shown everywhere?
Show "failure of vaccine to provide immunity cases per day"
Ouch. Anecdotes like this really scare me. I also have friends with double Pfizer shots who got the COVID and had strong symptoms.
Maybe Pfizer should go back to the drawing board though.
Though I assume, without the vaccine they would have probably ended up in the hospital. Glad I got my 3rd dose now.
Keep in mind that the person you are replying to is here to tell the tale. It is unclear what the vaccine did or did not do but if I was in their shoes I would certainly be glad that I wasn’t facing that infection unvaccinated. That could very well have been the difference between severe and deadly COVID. The effectiveness numbers have been always quoted as against severe illness but I would much prefer to focus on effectiveness against hospitalization and death. It seems that all three vaccines authorized/approved in the US are effective against these two outcomes, more so than merely protecting against a severe case.
Also keep in mind that what a random stranger describes on the internet as “severe” could mean a variety of things. I have had some severe colds. I haven’t had one since the pandemic started due to social distancing and masks. Don’t panic. Get your shots (booster included) and keep an eye on the data.
That’s not quite how vaccine efficacy works. Suppose the risk of getting sick is 0.5% per thousand person hours when unvaccinated. A 90% vaccine efficacy means that the risk of getting sick is reduced to 0.05% per thousand person hours, not that 10% of people who get vaccinated are still vulnerable.
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/vaccine...
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/pandemic-data-initiative/data-ou...
> Maybe Pfizer should go back to the drawing board.
Maybe we should look at the data and see that the vaccines are still pretty effective. Think about the difference in restrictions and people behavior between now and before the vaccines: they have pretty much enabled normal life again and made COVID a much less worrying disease, even with high case numbers again.
The vaccines (on the U.S. market, at least) were never promoted as providing complete protection from Covid. It was about preventing serious illness and keeping people out of the hospital. As others have pointed out, they have been largely successful in those goals.
I'm not claiming the vaccines are perfect, but I think a large part of the population was under the impression that these vaccines were some sort of silver bullet that would end the virus in a few short months.
edit: spelling
Then do not call it a vaccine, because it is not.
I did not take my TBE vaccine, to be greeted a year later by TBE.
Vaccines can be prophylactic (to prevent or ameliorate the effects of a future infection by a natural or "wild" pathogen), or therapeutic (to fight a disease that has already occurred, such as cancer). Some vaccines offer full sterilizing immunity, in which infection is prevented completely.
The key word up there is "ameliorate," which is exactly what the Covid vaccines available in United States promise to do.
Notice anything in particular? While yes, the definition has changed.
I was thinking why one would say this without mentioning that the vaccination rate is pretty high, so one would expect more breakthrough cases than cases in unvaccinated people. For an extreme example, with 100% vaccination rate, all cases would be breakthrough. I can't find the UK data, so can't answer exactly, but not unexpected at all.
> Alex Berenson
And this explains why you didn't include it. I didn't know this person, but apparently he's a writer, no education in stats/biology/medicine, from the US, and apparently has made multitude of wrong claims [1]. I wonder if it's that you don't know better or you're making a bad faith argument.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...
Age is still a significant factor of infection chance and disease severity/outcome.
If older people are more likely to be vaccinated than younger people then it skews to more breakthroughs. You can even get a simpson's paradox where people were seeing higher fatalities in overall vaccinated vs unvaccinated but is not true when you controlled for age.
And these days one would probably also have to consider time since last vaccination since antibody titer wanes with time which is likely important.
Does that really need to be stated? I don't think even the most suspicious among us think the vaccines make a person more likely to catch Covid all else being equal. It seems more a commentary on the narrative (not promulgated by you, but it is out there) that vaccines+distancing will somehow be able to eliminate the novel coronavirus entirely.
To be honest, the only times I've seen this narrative is when people say it's out there and argue against it. I've never seen it seriously supported.