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Comment by thesis | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why you’re being downvoted all much… well actually no it’s pretty obvious.

I think you’re right though. The current Covid-19 vaccines are proven to lose efficacy over time. Will the same thing happen with this one as well? It’s a good question.

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> well actually no it’s pretty obvious

If you think they're right you may not understand why the comment is being down voted.

> The current Covid-19 vaccines are proven to lose efficacy over time. Will the same thing happen with this one as well?

Like with any vaccine: Probably.

> It’s a good question

It's pretty besides the point. To recycle my car brakes analogy: They also lose efficacy over time, yet are widely considered to be useful.

Thanks for the breaks analogy, it’s one I intend on using when talking to people I. The real world. It’s a good one given how basically everyone has either dealt with or understands this basic yet essential car maintenance issue and the nature of the appropriate response.

Car brake dust is an extremely potent carcinogen, take care when dealing with them.

At least they don't make them from asbestos anymore.

My dad tells me about taking shop class in high school, and they'd be sanding down asbestos brake pads with an angle grinder to remove the high spots to prevent glazing. No masks of course.

OEM might not be asbestos but aftermarket asbestos containing pad can be bought. Who knows that the material does that's in them today?

I'm generally surprised by what I was exposed to at shop class, not necessarily asbestos but machines that could absolutely wreck a body let loose by a bunch of haphazard children. Blinding lights, kids sticking like 4 inches of iron into a hydraulic cutting machine and hitting go. A girl cut her finger off on a bandsaw.

I think it's just the speed at which it has happened though. Most children born in developed countries today receive a slew of vaccines which will provide immunity to catching those diseases for decades. It's discouraging that we're looking at shot no. 4 for the mRNA covid vaccines within a year and a half, and despite even that, infection rates are still very strong.

Because corona viruses are a different kind. There have been no vaccines against them so far and we saw how strongly they mutate. Still, the 3-shot regime seems to be very effective against severe disease. They probably deliver as much protection as possible unless you have a vaccine which targets exactly the strain you are fighting. So it will be interesting how the omicron-specific vaccines will do, if they do get used for larger campaigns.

because the point he's making is wrong. Vaccines are doing a fantastic job at slowing down the progression of the virus which is key to keep mutations at bay. No vaccine is 100% effective, but even 80% effectiveness radically changes the dynamic of a pandemic, it's so easy to see that I don't understand what can lead someone to deny this fact besides bad faith.

I wholeheartedly agree, I downvoted the comment because it appeared to be made in bad faith (and from another comment I posted on this topic, I obviously share the concern that this HIV vaccine may lose efficacy over time).

Also, it's not hard to see how a vaccine for HIV would be much more effective at slowing pandemic progression than a vaccine for an airborne virus, even if the vaccines conferred the same benefits. Right now, if you get HIV, you are essentially contagious for life until you get on antiretrovirals that can bring your viral load to undetectable (and, you also need to be on those antiretrovirals for life). If an HIV vaccine prevented you from having a long term infection, it could potentially fully end the pandemic.

Exactly. The COVID vaccines have been proven over and over again to reliably prevent serious illness across the original strain and every variant of concern we’ve seen since then. The fact that they initially also largely prevented infection against the original strain was a bonus that scientists were never counting on.

Now, just because omicron is better at driving breakthrough infections, that fact is being used in bad faith by some who now say the vaccines “don’t work”, even though they are still as effective at preventing serious illness

I think you may want to revisit your 80%. The vaccine efficacy for sterilization of the virus ended up dropping more quickly than expected and that's even with pre-Delta variants. Look at the Israel data. When you don't understand, I suspect what you are encountering isn't bad faith actors, but more informed people.

But here you're talking about efficacy against infection and mild disease, which is not so relevant if we're talking about preventing new strains. New strains are thought to evolve in immunocompromised people with high viral loads over long periods of time, which allows both many mutations to occur as well as for those mutations to become dominant. So I believe the question should be to what extent the vaccines help prevent serious disease in people with comorbidities - and the answer is that they help to a great extent (whether 70% or 90%).

I seriously doubt it. Show me your "israel data" and tell me how that changes the situation, because I don't believe you and you come with nothing but name calling.

Let's see what you got.

My God you have it exactly backwards!

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