Think of it this way: assume that an unvaccinated person, on average, spreads COVID to 10 people and a fully vaccinated person spreads it to only 1. Then put 92 fully vaccinated people and 8 unvaccinated people (I.e., vaccination in proportion to the Icelandic population.) into a room full of people. The 8 unvaccinated people will infect 80 additional people, while the fully vaccinated will infect 92. Thus, "most" of the transmission was from vaccinated people, even though the vaccine reduced transmission by 10x.
And this is probably obvious, but its worth emphasizing that vaccinating those last 8 (percent of the) people would still have a hugely beneficial effect. If they were all vaccinated, then, in the toy example, they would infect a total of only 8 people instead of 80, leading to only 100 total cases, rather than 172.
Of course, even setting this aside, the bigger issue is that your casual parsing of one country's aggregate statistics is just no substitute for the actual scientific research that GP cited.
Of course not. It's not about the absolute transmission rate of vaccinated people. It's about the reduction in the transmission rate compared to the unvaccinated. Regardless of the absolute effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing transmission, it seems to me it should remain fundamental to protecting public health if unvaccinated people spread the virus several times faster.
Of course, if the effect were only marginal, that would be one thing. But that is not what the data seems to show at this point.
I tried to find the original article about negative effectiveness in the UK but all I could find was this:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/has-covid-vaccine-effica...
This covers Iceland, Denmark and the UK but doesn't really go into much detail about alternative explanations which I remember being covered in the original article I read.
You can't really make that conclusion based on a simple case count chart, because you don't know what those numbers would look like if the vaccination rate was lower.
Iceland also has a higher vaccination rate, I would be very interested in demographic breakdowns of the unvaccinated there vs in California. Is the Iceland group much more atypical in terms of how often they leave their house, say? Is the California group possibly just much more boosted (the Iceland numbers show that the boosted group has still less Covid than the unvaccinated group stil) - but actually, that doesn't seem like it, because that ratio is still far higher than the CA one. Though... even your own link for data on boosted adults in Iceland contradicts your "not even a little" statement.
Actually I bet it's just a small number problem. Iceland has a population of 366K. 8% of that population is just under 30K. California has a population of over 39 million. Much more significant sample for unvaccinated people in CA.
If getting vaccinated reduced your odds of spreading the virus by 90%, and 92% of the population were double-vaccinated, then the majority of the spread would be...
Among, and by the double-vaccinated. (8.28% vs 8%)
Most people that die in car crashes are wearing seatbelts, but you'd be a fool to not wear one. Just like you'd be foolish to not get vaccinated.
Funny enough, I just recently checked the stats for that. According to the first report I found with a simple googling, 47% of people who died in car crashes were not wearing seat belts.
> Among, and by the double-vaccinated. (8.28% vs 8%)
I don't know how you're getting those numbers.
If baseline spread is 100% unvaccinated spreading to 100% unvaccinated, then 92% vaccinated spreading 10% to 92% vaccinated amounts to 8.464% of baseline, 92% vaccinated spreading 10% to 8% unvaccinated is 0.736% of baseline, 8% unvaccinated spreading to 92% vaccinated is 7.36% of baseline and 8% unvaccinated spreading to 8% unvaccinated is 0.64% of baseline. The total sums to 17.2% of baseline, of which vaccinated to vaccinated spread amounts to 49.2%.
(It's not terribly important since the numbers are made-up anyway, but I'd like to know whether I made a mistake somewhere.)