Hmmm... mild symptoms after being vaccinated. It's almost like the vaccine worked or something. How weird.
So did the vast majority of South Africans who aren't vaccinated.
I push the vaccine onto all my high-risk family members. I recommend it to anybody as a tool to introduce your immune system to the virus.
But let's be honest about this:
The vaccines in circulation were created to stop the Alpha variant. The immune system response is too targeted to antigens on the spike protein that are no longer present in the newly evolved, vaccine escaping variants. The vaccine is a useful tool for mitigating severe disease, but it's an outdated vaccine for a variant that no longer exists. Just like the a flu shot for the wrong strain tends to have some positive benefit when you catch a mismatched strain via some cross immunity, that's what we get from this vaccine. And guess what? We get it from infection induced immunity as well.
This is true of essentially all diseases except some very very rare exceptions that also tend to burn out very quickly. That's just how disease spread works, mild cases help the virus propagate. It's not like the virus is a mustache twirling villain that wants to murder you, it takes a fairly specific balance to obtain long term survival.
> It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!"
There's plenty of evidence to support the idea that "it works", and actually quite a lot of evidence to contradict the idea that "it doesn't work". Severe outcomes are blatantly more common, per capita, in people who are not vaccinated. The only way you get to any other conclusion is if you just plain don't trust any evidence presented, in which case there is literally nothing that is falsifiable for you and you may as well believe covid-19 is evil unicorns or something.
With omicron? I have not seen any data to support that.
That said, I don't think the null hypothesis is suddenly "vaccines do nothing" for some reason. It's clear enough it spreads more easily but that doesn't suddenly invalidate all prior assumptions about the vaccines' effectiveness against severe outcomes.
Edit: I'm very happy to be proven wrong about this but I feel like people should direct some of these replies more to the person I was replying to? I'm not the one who thinks vaccines do nothing here. :P
From the very beginning, the South African medical authorities were screaming that this variant was producing far fewer hospitalizations OVERALL (despite higher case numbers) than the delta/alpha did.
But because they are a third world country, and the news media in the West is biased towards bad news, they chose to treat this positive data as suspect. It the SA scientists had talked about how horrible it was, they would have taken it as gospel.
Those of us who were looking at the data knew otherwise.
I was amused at the sudden acknowledgement of natural immunity from previous infection in the very publications that have constantly claimed it doesn't exist, the minute it supported their need to keep fear mongering. Same with the younger population point, considering these very organizations have gone out of their way to obfuscate the vast risk stratification by age for most of the pandemic. The terrified 20-somethings wearing respirators in TikTok videos are a result of this.
Can you cite some of these alleged claims?
No it's not. Late November was too early. In mid-December we could start drawing conclusions. At this point things are becoming quite clear - we see similar trends everywhere, not just South Africa.
"The data suggests that three doses of vaccine provided an estimated 68% drop in the risk of being hospitalized with Omicron compared with people who were unvaccinated."
The way we know a medical treatment works is by looking at large scale data, controlling for variables, understanding mechanisms of action, and by approaching this science in good faith and not cherry picking data to fit one's own conclusions. There's a concept known as "Number Needed to Treat" that is probably relevant to your concerns here.
Vaccinations have historically been extremely effective for many diseases, and COVID is no exception. It's accurate to say (most) "COVID vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 viruses". Omicron is so new that it's hard to be certain of anything regarding it right now, but we'll have a better picture in a few weeks. I do know that we're seeing many hospitals get overwhelmed across the US currently, and many medical workers are out sick with a COVID infection.
It's like we rolled a die once, and it came up 6, and now we're all forming our own special opinions on whether or not the die is fair. We just can't know. Of course, if someone rolled the dice 30,000 times and reported what they found, that would be great (wink wink).
Instead of using Calc 1 as a filter course, we should use Statistics instead.
(it's recent data, from NY, so - likely a lot of omicron)
Yes, it's called 'Science'.
The vaccine absolutely helps to reduce symptoms, hospitalizations and death, even 5 months in.
There are millions of Omicron cases around the world measure up against various vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
See https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes...
Those "frickin" statistics? Or which ones?
> [The] vaccines likely (and evidence shows they) still have great protection against severe disease; …
This exactly what we were talking about above.
You can't extrapolate a population-level percentage from a single data point. Luckily, we've got information on hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of hospitalizations, and billions of shots.
Getting Covid or not is binary, yes, but the severity of the disease is on a spectrum. I can surely get a 15% less severe disease thanks to a 4-5 month old vaccination. Just like the severity of the disease depends on the viral load you're exposed to.
Of course there's no way of knowing what the exact percentage is for me personally, so in that sense you're right - it's just an average. But it's surely indicative, which is why you should be getting boosters after a specific amount of time, if you're in a risk group.
You would have thought that after 800,000+ deaths in the US people would have learned the importance of understanding statistics when dealing with these issues, especially on a place like HN, but pandemic has melted people's brains and now people are arguing anecdotes about what constitutes a "bad cold" and a "mild flu".
The funny part is that it doesn't really matter because it's not like we get to collectively vote whether the pandemic will end or not. It's pretty clear that, even given how extremely contagious omicron is, people don't care as much as the used to about a seasonal flu.
Even supposing covid sticks around and becomes "only" as bad as the flu, 10 years ago if your said it was fine to double the annual cases of flu and flu death people would have said that was insane.
Sadly if people haven't learned to reason about these problems correctly now, it means they very likely never will.
And if you told them that things like lockdowns and vaccine mandates were still in effect at that point, they'd say that was insane too.
No, that one is particularly weird right now. Vaccines are essentially mandated for many parts of life, and have been for my entire life. At multiple points throughout my development I've had to get required vaccines to do things. I had never even heard of antivaxxers until my late 20s. They used to be laughed at as an insane fringe group on HN.
Nobody in 2011 would have thought it was weird that vaccines would be mandated. I suspect if I predicted on HN that there would be strong resistance to a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic people would have laughed at me as ridiculous.
People don't like vaccines because they don't like the reality we're in and they strangely think resisting wearing masks and resisting vaccines somehow makes it less real. Unfortunately it has made things much worse.
It's so unprecedented and unpopular an idea that everyone - including Biden - were falling all over themselves assuring us they would under no circumstances mandate the Covid vaccine.
Not ones requiring multiple jabs per year, seemingly forever (unless something like Omicron comes along).
Also not experimental ones rushed out with an EUA. Would you accept a mandate of the Chinese or Cuban vaccine, twice per year, for your whole family, for the whole foreseeable future?
> Nobody in 2011 would have thought it was weird that vaccines would be mandated.
You'd be very wrong. I remember very well that people were highly vocal against the H1N1 vaccine a decade ago and would've (rightfully so) lost their minds with mandates. Turned out the vaccine caused narcolepsy in kids[0], among other things. I never had that vaccine. My pregnant partner did (which turned out to be a lucky gamble).
> resisting wearing masks
Barring N95/FPP2+ masks it's mainly theater. It will be interesting to read all about this in a year or three once the heated political agendas have subsided.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic_vaccin...
Also, see most of South Africa.
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes...
tl;dr Vaccine effectiveness around 15% for me at this point. So it was the natural immune response (gasp!), combined hospitalization rates across the world reflects this.
The same still applies as always: Vaccinate the risk groups.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...