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Comment by fsh | Hacker News Reader

Note that this statement predates the emergence of immune escape variants. The CDC director was right at the time.

At the time there were inflated Israeli data that suggested a reduction of risk of asymptomatic infection by 94%. Except, they were extrapolations because they were done on the general population, not on regularly-tested people.

UK's SIREN had a lower risk reduction recorded (60% IIRC), but more importantly, it halved after three months. Governments and others thought, wrongly, that elimination was possible. But the writing was on the wall since March 2020.

Even if that’s true (given how efficacy of the vaccines wanes rapidly I suspect the variants only hastened what would happen anyway), and it’s not obviously true given that Pfizer’s own clinical trials did not have transmission as a measurement or study endpoint, it’s still a huge problem for history to be so easily rewritten like “no one ever said this” when they clearly did say it.

The CDC director referred to their own epidemiological data which (at the time) showed a clear reduction in transmission due to the vaccination. Clinical trials are generally unsuitable for measuring transmission, since the rate of participants infecting each other is essentially zero even with huge sample sizes. Once again: The CDC director accurately reported what was known at the time.

What data exactly?

She says “clinical trials” which is false.

The only trial that measured infection rate was AZ. And it reduced but did not eliminate the risk.

The statement is 100% false and she had no data to back it up.

I think you might have misread the statement. She is explicitly talking about the CDC data, not about clinical trials. Most likely she doesn't make the distinction more clear, since is must be entirely obvious to an expert that clinical trials don't measure transmission rates.

""not just in the clinical trials but it’s also in real world data.”"

She expressly names clinical trials. That statement is false.

And she says "CDC data". What data? The vaccines weren't approved until 14 Feb 2022. What data could the CDC possibly have other than clinical trial data less than 2 months after full approval? It hadn't been used outside trials yet for more than a month or so. What data could they possible *collect and analyze" in less than 2 months?

If you can point me to this data, I'd gladly admit I'm wrong.

The statement is a lie. I'm not sure why you're so aggressively defending it.

The EUAs for BioNTech/Pfizer and for Moderna were approved on December 10th and 17th 2020, respectively. By the beginning of April 2021, the US had fully vaccinated well over a hundred million people. Obviously the CDC had tons of data at this point. This discussion is pointless if you don't even bother to check such simple facts.

You are right but you failed to answer my questions.

Please link to the CDC data. Otherwise I presume it doesn’t exist.

And you failed to address that both trials never tested infection rates.

Just because I got dates wrong doesn’t excuse you from addressing those two questions.

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