Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

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The efficacy is pretty well proven to be > 90% at this point. Per your comment where you admit the number was pulled out of thin air:

> Anecdotal. You do not need to be a meteorologist to know when it's raining. Look outside.

I'll raise you this... where I am 100% of ICU cases are unvaccinated. Read that again 100%. And over 85% of hospitalizations. And before you say "see, 15% of them were breakthrough cases," please learn about base rates. 65% of the people here are vaccinated so to have only 15% of the hospital cases be vaccinated is even more conclusive.

Please, get out of your bubble. If you think it is 10%... or even 50%... or even 70% you need to do some serious introspection.

Please, actually "look outside"! Because if you spent more than 10 seconds actually looking outside, the efficacy is obvious.

Please do not cross into personal attack. That's against the site guidelines and just makes everything worse, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.

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

I am vaccinated - I believe in the early vaccine's efficacy for stopping serious illness. They have saved many lives.

What I am saying here is that the vaccines were marketed as 90% effective for preventing infection. Was I misunderstanding what was being marketed to me all along?

Yes, you have misunderstood this all along, and that misunderstanding has already been pointed out to you in this thread[1]. It is effective at preventing COVID-19 infections, which you get after being infected with SARA-CoV-2. It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter.

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

> It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter.

We had some early data that looked like they were probably about ~70% effective for preventing infection, ~90% effective at preventing symptoms, and >95% effective at preventing severe illness.

These numbers are interesting, because they mean you have less of a chance of becoming infected, but a larger chance, if infected, of being an asymptomatic carrier. So it's difficult to predict the net effect on transmission (probably a benefit, but..)

Now for 2 doses of mRNA vaccine, our best guesses for omicron are more like ~??%, ~30%, and ~70% respectively. Offsetting it slightly is that it looks like omicron may be a bit less likely to cause severe illness at baseline. But, no matter what, this is a big setback.

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