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Comment by jmarbach | Hacker News Reader

You are completely wrong -- totally warped by the narrative.

Look at the Pfizer press release, Nov 9, 2020 - the first sentence:

"Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis"

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

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Please edit swipes out of your comments here. They only make things worse.

Your post would be fine without the first sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

First, as another user pointed out, for the variants of the time. Second, "completely" is a strong word there; your link, and the part you quoted, still clarifies that it's possible to get infected.

Edit: You are also misreading what you're quoting[1].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29619347

You're right. I will never question Pfizer again. There could be infinite mutations of the virus moving forward which would impact the weight of their claims.

>I will never question Pfizer again.

I didn't say you, nor myself or anyone else, shouldn't question them, just that they haven't been incorrect in this instance as you've suggested. I'm not sure why your snark is needed in your multiple responses here.

The Pfizer vaccine is not 90% effective. That’s a fact.

They didn’t claim it would be.

They claimed it was 90% effective in the (time limited) study which they performed.

It’s fair that you might have misinterpreted that as meaning it will be 90% effective. Especially if you don’t know how viruses work, but that’s not what was actually claimed.

For the variants at the time. The spread of the delta and omicron variants was tracked so closely and garnered so much attention in large part due to their abilities to at least partially evade vaccine-induced immunity, but this was always a known risk. The larger the infected population, the more chances for such an event to occur, hence the importance of measures like vaccinations, social distancing, and lockdowns to curb the spread.

In this case we should edit the title of the post to clarify, "for the variants as of x date" - agree or disagree? As to not spread misinformation.

Yeah that's a big omission that i don't see addressed in the article. In particular given the development timeline, does it have the same efficacy for the omicron variant? I doubt the trials being reported here tested it.

Maybe I'm misinformed, but as I understood it, COVID-19 is the disease brought upon by SARS-Cov-2 infection. That line on its own doesn't suggest it prevents infection, it suggests it prevents the COVID-19 disease (i.e 90% chance of being left with a asymptomatic infection).

It's a technical distinction lost on the public. Maybe that's a bad thing, but it is what it is.

I mean, if you're not noticing infection but noticing only the disease, it makes perfect sense to the public.

The public pretty much just thinks of both together as 'sick'.

You are 100% correct. You contract SARS-CoV-2, which then turns in to COVID-19[1].

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00459-7

Your own misunderstanding of the difference between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 do not entitle you to assert anything about the subject.

It matters not. The public was lead to believe that the vaccines were highly effective and safe. Now they are realized to be not so effective (against Delta/Omicron) and not so safe (J&J/Janssen recently "de-preferenced" by CDC due to clotting). We are still wearing masks, when we were once told the vaccinated didn't need to mask. Two years later, there is no end in sight.

If you want to build trust, don't oversell the product when you don't really know what you are talking about.

The vaccines are highly effective and safe.

A low rate of people suffer any significant issues from vaccination, and very few vaccinated people become severely ill. They work great.

If the other vaccines were not available, the J&J vaccine would make sense for most people compared to not taking it.

>The public was lead to believe that the vaccines were highly effective and safe. Now they are realized to be not so effective (against Delta/Omicron)...

You mean how they typically clarified they didn't know how efficacy would play out in future variants? Because that was definitely a thing.

It's sophistry, but "COVID-19" in that press release means symptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2, not just infection.

You seem very, very attached to a conclusion that isn’t supported by your own information. Are you really sure you haven’t been “warped by a narrative?”

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