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Comment by malcolmgreaves | Hacker News Reader

mRNA vaccine creation is humanity's most impressive technology. We'd be absolutely screwed right now if we didn't have this tech. (Or, more accurately: a lot more people would be dead otherwise).

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I don't really think so. Omicron is what did it. I think in Africa only 24% received at least one dose, and Africa is not a giant heaping pile of covid19 bodies.

If I recall correctly (its possible I do not), the latest booster is for BA-5, which was effectively extinct by the time the booster came out. Why its extinct is important: the existing variants had immune escape over BA-5.

The age of the average African is significantly younger than the rest of the world. There's a lot of variables to account for, you'd need a proper study, not just a single data point, to determine if omicron is significantly less deadly than older COVID variants.

As for GP's claim that vaccines saved a lot of lives, that's very well supported at this point https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2022/two-years-covid-v....

That's a continental average. Rates varied (June 2022) from nearly 72% in Rwanda to near zero in neighboring Burundi. You are unfortunately parroting a bad/malicious over-generalization.

This is common sense and goes without saying. GP does not need to recite the litany about the fact that things are different in different parts of Africa. We're aware.

> You are unfortunately parroting a bad/malicious over-generalization.

Yawn.

While the mRNA vaccines were great and developed a few months faster, the non mRNA vaccines also worked quite well. At least the J&J vaccine did (although they gave fewer doses and therefore it didn't get as strong a protection).

There's no scientific evidence to support this. Even in the Pfizer RCTs, there were more deaths in the vaccinated group than in the control group (but this wasn't statistically significant, as the overall sample size wasn't large enough to make a conclusion WRT death reduction).

Please don't post this nonsense "no scientific evidence"? There's overwhelming evidence that mRNA vaccines significantly reduced hospitalisations and deaths.

Just for example: https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj-2021-069761

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