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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

English isn't my native language, but I thought "proven" wasn't a synonym for "I asked my friends".

It's a fair critique. But when the Captain of an airplane I'm flying on tells me there's an emergency problem with the flaps, I don't ask him for text book evidence, I just look out at the wings and verify the problem.

Check this data in a few weeks. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...

So, you cite data showing very high efficacy of the vaccine, and are like -- look at it in a few weeks!

Omicron is going to make it worse, but even unboosted folks in South Africa seem to enjoy about 30% efficacy against infection and much higher efficacy against hospitalization and death. But your gossip trumps the data, I guess...

"Omicron is making it worse" is gossip to you and a fact for me. That's where we disagree.

No, Omicron making it worse is a fact that I already ceded.. but we have data that shows low (but still around 30%, not 10%) efficacy against infection with Omicron.. and still high efficacy (70%) against hospitalization and death.

But you say "has proven less than 10% effective" ... because you are making stuff up.

Further, it may be a mistake to assume South Africa predicts exactly what will happen here (30% fully vaccinated, nearly 0 boosted, 20% HIV incidence, vs. 60% fully vaccinated, 25% boosted, 0.3% HIV incidence).

The data you link says that unvaccinated people have 5x the risk of testing positive as vaccinated (no booster) as of October (Slightly higher for Pfizer, lower for J&J). I believe that's 80% efficacy. How do you get 10%?

Note also that this data is as of October 2021, so it's primarily looking at the efficacy against the Delta, whereas the original 90-whatever % claims were obviously the original virus.

Pfizer et al certainly weren't saying in March 2021 that "Pfizer provide 90-100% protection against COVID and all future variants" and I've never heard anyone suggest they thought that's what the claim was.

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