The Risk of Vaccinated Covid Transmission Is Not Low
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
It's official: Vaccinated people don't transmit COVID-19 https://fortune.com/2021/04/01/its-official-vaccinated-peopl...
> "Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it's also in real-world data," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told Rachel Maddow on Monday, March 29.
Evidence changes with experience and time.
Evidence is subject to errors in method and interpretation. With luck, those are also corrected with time.
What science does not do is choose some ideologically convenient belief, then selectively cherry-pick and selectively ignore evidence or arguments to buttress that.
At the very top of the article you link is this note:
Since CDC Director Rochelle Walensky made the comments discussed below, scientists have pushed back against the idea that vaccinated people “don’t carry the virus.” We've published a deeper analysis of the debate here.
That is: there is disagreement over the evidence.
The upshot of the announcement, in April of 2021, was this:
[T]he most important part of the recent CDC findings is that vaccinated people are very unlikely to suffer asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. Participants in the study who were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines were 90% less likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. Of infections that did occur, only 10.7 percent were asymptomatic. Taken together, this means vaccinated people are highly unlikely to transmit the virus when they are not suffering symptoms. This also means that as vaccination rates continue to rise, the virus will have fewer and fewer possible hosts.
Again, highlighted at the very top of the article you've selected to link here.
You've chosen to highlight the headline, which was not selected by the CDC and may well not have been selected by the authors either. (Traditional practice is that headlines are written by a headlines editor, more recently, headlines are often selected by A/B testing for impact, clicks, and engagement.)
Moreover, the point made gets to another complaint that's been raised repeatedly by the antiempirical crowd: why should vaccinated people need to wear masks if vaccines protect against transmitting or receiving the virus?
What we've learned since this announcement and piece is that even if vaccinated there remain both transmission and infection risks. Vaccines are not some majickal warding spell, but are simply a technological tool that leverages the body's own immune defences. Sometimes more effectively than others.
And I very strongly suspect that you either know all of this, or have chosen deliberately not to based on your submission and comment history.
Intramuscular vaccines do not do much to prevent replication of proteins in your nasal cavities, where as nasally adminsitered vaccines do much more so. So by population vaccinating people with intramuscular vaccines, we have reduced harm significantly, but we have not meaningfully affected the virus ability to spread.
It depends on the viral load you are being it with and your antibody levels. mRNA vaccines are able to induce antibodies in mucus but you are right, nasal vaccines MIGHT do better and I wish there is more focus on developing them.
Therefore, it is crystal clear that vaccinations help reducing the spread of the virus.
As long as we are in the topic of conspiracies, how about the idea that the original spreader of the virus (China) and its allies is making it worse by spreading seriously harmful misinformation in English?
About 90% of positive PCR tests are in fully vaccinated (double or triple). About 8.5% are in unvaccinated.
About 75% of the population is fully vaccinated. About 24% is unvaccinated. Why are the unvaccinated underrepresented in Omicron infections?
Source: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/status-paa-coronavirus-lig...
- Most of the infections come from "superspreader" events such as large gatherings where vaccination is mandatory
- Children, who make most of the unvaccinated, are less affected
- Vaccinated cases are detected earlier, possibly because they get symptoms earlier
- Delta outcompetes omicron among people with no immunity
In case you are just uninformed, lookup 'Typhoid Mary' for a famous example of an asymptomatic carrier of disease.
Just because you aren't showing symptoms or dying doesn't mean you can't spread disease.
That said, I'm not making a claim contrary to yours. But your claim seems based more on your intuition than on fact or history.
If her goal is to completely protect her son from contracting Covid, I find it surprising that she'd allow him to be in contact with any potentially infected people at all. Is it really the case that an infected person can be rendered completely safe by a typical mask? Are there studies that quantify the reduction of risk for different types of masks worn by a infected person?
IMO antivaxxers should be denied admission to a full ER for COVID-related morbidities if they have not taken the vaccine. If they would like to make the bodily choice of not getting the vaccine, they can also make the bodily choice of not getting emergency treatment.
At some point a line has to be drawn. When resources are low, care should be prioritized amongst those that will make the most of it, or rather - those that won't spit in its face.
To clarify, rather than denial of entry, I am suggesting deprioritization in the ER.
If someone got into a car crash tomorrow and the ER is full, given a similar expected mortality between the crash victim and antivaxxer, the antivaxxer should be ejected to make room.
Today we are already seeing that antivaxxers are saturating ERs and people have to wait hours for serious issues. I do not think it is particularly controversial to say that the antivaxxer is less deserving of care.
But if you talk to nurses, visit r/nursing, etc - the sentiment is clear. Front line workers are sick of having to prioritize antivax bed-wasters over people with real issues.
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Many people do not even do the "bare minimum" as a member of society, and they should be treated, to the greatest degree possible, like the people who do the maximum, or even just the usual. High-tax paying people, beloved teachers, famous artists, despised criminals - they should all be treated as humans, with the appropriate medical treatment according to their human needs, not their moral failures or victories.
People are the product of society, and a component in it, and they should not be judged by stereotypes, or even judged at all, when it comes to responding to their medical needs. Ideally, we'd take this approach in every area of life, but this is especially justified when applied to injured and sick people. "Misguided" is a more useful frame for many people than "evil".
Triage by prior behaviour is a poor basis for healthcare. Everyone has their own group of people they like less or more, according to their prior experiences. More importantly, the time to judge someone's moral behaviour is not at the point of healthcare delivery. Even if mistakes never happened, and your moral views are correct and correctly applied, it wouldn't be right to apply this rule because it would be the first step away from neutrality.
The status quo of neutrality is a good rule, even if on rare occasions it results in seriously injured violent criminals receiving medical treatment ahead of sick nuns. Because almost all of the time it's the rule that is the most human, on our best behaviour. And especially so when we consider that many of our own views are not solely attributable to our individual choice but are in fact strongly influenced by our place in society. Once immoral individual behaviour is the yardstick for medical behaviour, perhaps based on views about groups, it's difficult to know when you've strayed off the moral path.
Not to mention the associated dangers to staff that come along with the non-vaccinated population. My sister is an ICU nurse in a C19 ward, and has been threatened many times, screamed at countless times, by families of people with C19. They are all, as near as she can tell, of a certain tribe.
Extrapolating SA findings to other countries may be premature, though the actual severity of the Omicron variant remains an area of intense interest and investigation.
Mild or otherwise, the US will all but certainly know within a month. Wishing for the more convenient answer may prove harmful or deadly to many.
With uncontrolled spread, major fractions of the population are infected at the same time, and even with "mild" variants of a disease, a small fraction of a very large number remains a large number.
The excess capacity required to serve a severe outbreak is necessary only for those periods of peak outbreaks. China saw emergency treatment facilities built within two weeks, and demolished several months later.
Structures can be scaled with some efficacy. Staff and equipment (remember the ventilator shortages) not so much. And again, the peak loads are far above any long-term maintenance level.
Graphically represented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic#/media/File%...
There is a lot of fear to go around.
Someone out there has as their biggest fear being forced to have a medical procedure that then gives them lifelong medical problems, problems that might be shrugged off by doctors/family/friends, and even if they can find someone to believe that their plight is real, they can't find anyone that can fix it.
Is that a likely outcome? It doesn't look like it to me or you. But someone out there has that fear just like you have yours. You may believe your fear to be more justified, and it may even be so. But that doesn't change that other people have their fears that they can't get away from, and that no proclamations like yours will cure them of.
Put aside for a second what all the talking heads and the bureaucrats and the internet commenters are saying, and remember that there are people, actual living and breathing people behind such a one dimensional label as "antivaxxer". Whatever cartoon character you dream up when you hear that word, you can bet that it misses more folks than it hits.
Yet, she will still be deprioritized for a liver transplant when compared to a fit individual.
We cannot take people's delusions into account when giving care. But what we can take into account is "will they make the most of this care?" And for both the alcoholic and antivaxxer, the answer is a resounding and objective "no."
Being fat is a co-morbidity and often a lifestyle choice.
And if curing your obesity was as easy as getting a shot, of course you should be deprioritized for related morbidities.
For most people obesity can be resolved by putting down the fork and soda straws. It's a lifestyle choice.
A vanishingly small portion of people for which an exception would obviously be made.
> For most people obesity can be resolved by putting down the fork and soda straws. It's a lifestyle choice.
This is perhaps the most naive thing I've seen on HN. I hope you never have to deal with a serious addiction, where a simple act like "putting down the fork" evolves into requiring Herculean willpower.
As someone that made the journey from morbidly obese to a normal BMI, losing 80lbs, I can assure you it was not "just a lifestyle choice" - it was, by a significant margin, the hardest thing I have ever done and ever will do.
Absolutely not comparable to getting the jab.
Who is this we? I'm not a doctor or nurse or any other kind of healthcare professional, so I (rightfully) have no input into decisions like this. Is it safe to assume the same is true for you?
Who is to say some "antivaxxer" or alcoholic that you're ready to deprioritize wouldn't go on to accomplish great things? You may find that hard to imagine (which is a consequence of thinking in sloppy terms like "antivaxxer") but again, you have to remember that these are people from all walks of life, all different levels of education. To think that you are qualified to judge who will make the most of their lives seems delusional in itself to me.
They might. But the question is not "whether they will accomplish great things," but rather, "whether they will make the best use of the limited care we can provide."
And the answer to that is still "no." It's why obese people and alcoholics are turned away from transplants, and on average, wait years longer - often dying in the process. Could obese and alcoholics go on to do great things? Almost certainly! But, will they make the most use of the transplant? Given their choices so far - no. So, they are frequently turned away.
It is the same situation here.
Maybe I'm being dense, but I don't see how these aren't the same thing. What does it mean to make the best use of medical care then?
I was assuming best use meant something like return on investment of resources (which is certainly a cold way to look at human lives, but I don't know how else to read that). I can think of a couple potential metrics there - years lived after, "value" added to society - but I don't see how vaccine status could be reasonably expected to predict those metrics.
I'm also taking your word that we choose transplant patients this way, since I have no knowledge there. Reading about it a little, it sounds like its not so cut and dry. Are we really disqualifying these people because they have specific conditions, or are we doing it because of some metric like years lived after or odds of the procedure working?
I think this is the most important phrase in the entire article, we know how untrustable is news reporting, specially when talking science, and specially when talking about government agenda.
There's are very important conditional here.