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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection. The story has always been that it reduces symptoms and hospitalization, so there are plenty of opportunities for the disease to get “tickets” in the evolution lottery. Between that, the animal reservoirs (COVID can spread to different species), and the millions of people in undeveloped countries who will never get a vax, COVID was guaranteed to mutate no matter what the public policy. Letting it rip is less a strategy and more an acknowledgement of reality.

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> The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection.

A lot of people believed they were. I've spent some time arguing with people that the punishments for not taking the vaccine were too extreme, and that government-supported firing of people from their jobs was a bad idea.

It was extremely common for people to argue that the vaccine would cut down on transmission (which is basically saying infection) and end the pandemic. Without that pillar it gets quite hard to justify the discrimination against unvaccinated people in Australia. Not sure about the rest of the world but I assume there is a similar story.

this is why i was, and continue to be, against the various vaccine mandates. My employer said to me "upload your vax card or get an exemption else be fired". It was a bridge too far for me and I submitted for an exemption request on grounds of personal conscious. However, a couple weeks later we get another email that says if your exemption request is denied you are fired. I could have taken a moral stand but i have a wife + 2 kids and a MIL dependent on my income and I decided it wasn't worth it. I ended up canceling my request and uploading my vax card.

In the US the politicians know a law mandating the vaccine is a non-starter. So, instead, they encouraged and supported employers threatening their employees. I guess it's ironic that everyone is quitting everywhere anyway.

Who cares about the advertising? The data is in, and the vaccines do both - they decrease your chance to be infected and they make symptoms much more mild if you are infected. The combination of factors is why hospitalisation rates in highly vaccinated countries plummeted.

Or at least they did until omicron. Unfortunately 2 doses of the existing vaccines are pretty ineffective against omicron. 3 doses make the vaccines work better - but I’m honestly a little concerned.

I've heard that but then why do people say we need to get vaccinated to protect the most vulnerable members of society if the vaccine isn't actually slowing the spread and doesn't prevent infection?

EDIT:

To be clear I already had COVID and didn't have any serious symptoms so the argument about a hospital bed doesn't necessarily apply to me. Beyond that I actually got vaccinated, my question centers around the disparity of treatment we are giving individuals who are vaxxed and those who are not if both are capable of spreading. Further it brings in the question of vaccine mandates if they are much less effective then we were led to believe.

If you're vaccinated and become infected, you will have less of a viral load, and thus will spread less viral particles to others. The duration of infection will also be much shorter, thus lessening the time you can spread the infection to others. The vaccine also prevents some, but not all, infections in the first place.

You're also less likely to take up a hospital bed that someone who is more vulnerable than you needs.

> I've heard that but then why do people say we need to get vaccinated to protect the most vulnerable members of society if the vaccine isn't actually slowing the spread and doesn't prevent infection?

Why are you (and others) thinking that since vaccines aren't 100% effective it doesn't help protecting other people ?

What kind of dissonance cognitive gets you there ?

Why are you blind to the fact that a vaccine that mostly works still help reducing infections and why do you equate that to "vaccines don't work to protect others (since some vaccinated people can still infect others) so I shouldn't get vaccinated" ?

How come you are working from a yes/no, full-or-nothing angle ?

A glass of water won't 100% quench your thirst when you haven't drunk in a long time so you won't take it ?

The vaccines do prevent infections and slow the spread. They just don't prevent all infections.

Vaccinated people are between 60-80% less likely to infect others, and they are infectious for less amount of time.

This isn’t true, and the lack of testing during the phase 3 trials to see if there were non-symptomatic cases was a deliberate design choice to avoid answering that question.

I’m all in on vaccination, but let’s not rewrite history.

That’s not completely true either. The UK phase 3 trial of the AZ vaccine included weekly testing to catch asymptomatic cases.

> The thing is, vaccines were never advertised as tools to prevent infection.

In the USA? Yes, they were. There was no mention of a future need for boosters. There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.

No, they were promoted as drastically reducing the chance of severe symptoms and hospitalizations.

Literally everything I read about vaccine efficacy said that the metrics they tracked were about reducing the incidence of symptoms and serious disease. They didn't even test people in the clinical trials for COVID unless they started showing symptoms.

Now, certainly, some media outlets may have been irresponsibly or ignorantly misinterpreting all this and pushing the narrative that it would make everyone immune. But that's not the CDC or WHO's fault.

> There was no mention of a future need for boosters.

Not sure what that has to do with anything. Things change.

> There was a simple promise of safety, and for things to return to normal.

You must have been reading some really watered-down news, and not actually reading what public health officials were saying.

Well, the narrative being disconnected from facts is a different conversation.

We got to return to normal for about 2 months (June and July!) Maybe next year we’ll get 3 months, but I wouldn’t count on it.

the vaccines may not have been advertised as that, since the evidence during development for that was marginal. but recent evidence suggests that it does prevent infection. unfortunately, less true with omicron.

The vaccine was initially sold as the tool to end the pandemic and get life back to 'normal'. The narrative has evolved to suit the deficiencies of the vaccine and keep profits from sinking.

Or if the virus gets irrelevant.

One doesn't exclude the other. People don't see an end with natural evolution, so the vaccine was/is the main focus for a long time.

They could have ended the wildtype pandemic. As soon as delta appeared it was impossible. They have 90% efficiency at best and you need 84% of all people protected to stop delta (1-1/R0 for R0=6). It's impossible to get such high vax rate.

Not necessarily. Eg the Netherlands has ~77% vaccination rate, which is pretty close to the quoted 84%.

I'd go so far as to say 77% is "good enough", ie. it's time to live with the virus and not change our ways because of it.

We’re at 80% vaccination in Spain… I think we can surpass 84%.

37.7M fully vaccinated, 47.35M population -- impressive!

I was initially assuming you were excluding kids or other people ineligible to get vaccinated.

It was kinda-possible to return to normality with delta though. The entire EU is above 70% of the total population, with some countries above 80%. And of the unvaccinated, most are children who are less susceptible in the first place.

But with Omicron, it's literally like we're back to March 2020. Norway (with 81% vaccination rate) went from normality to full lockdown in the past two weeks. I'm pretty sure that's coming everywhere else during the next month or so.

If lockdown is considered then it goes to show how little politicians know about the virus.

We need to treat Corona the same way we treat the flu and we should start now.

As an example the current number of hospitalizations here in Denmark is about 50% of the worst period for the 2017/18 flu.

The thing is that various governments have neglected hospitals and health care, that is the real problem that must be dealt with.

If omicron causes lockdowns again than this will literally happen every winter. Vaccines were the end state. There is nothing left to do but accept the risks and move on with life.

People scared about hospital capacity should be asking strong questions to their politicians about why they squandered 2 years of peoples short life with zero new capacity.

The public shouldn’t shoulder the failures of politicians nor these “experts”.

They pretty much did end the Delta pandemic in the Bay Area. We had a minor spike up and then it subsided without any major restrictions or strain on the healthcare system. Vaccination rates are 95%+ where I am, so 0.95 * 0.9 = 0.855 and it was still over the herd immunity threshold.

Any links to any marketing material "selling" the vaccine as the tool to end the pandemic?

Governments requiring it to work regularly again is the only "marketing material" you need.

The UK government absolutely did this.

> The narrative has evolved to suit the deficiencies of the vaccine and keep profits from sinking.

The narrative may have evolved but that was more due to the virus evolving rather than some conspiracy driven by Pfizer and Moderna to sell more shots. More people being vaccinated benefits everyone, not just the pharmaceutical companies, and saying otherwise is a bit paranoid.

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