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Comment by luckydata | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

My God you have it exactly backwards!

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