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Comment by glogla | Hacker News Reader

People find this difficult to grasp, because of black and white thinking.

COVID vaccines significantly reduce how many people who get exposed to COVID actually get sick. They also reduce just how sick people get. Both of those reduce how COVID spreads, how much it impacts people's lives and how much it impacts society by people being sick.

But some people just have that black and white thinking where if the vaccine doesn't make you completely immune, it "doesn't work and it's all fake". If you get sick with COVID while vaccinated, you can't compare with alternate world where you weren't vaccinated and see whether it would kill you instead.

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>COVID vaccines significantly reduce how many people who get exposed to COVID actually get sick.

The linked article says that Covid boosters, at least, are 26% effective. Personally, I don't call that a significantly effective treatment.

From the study:

> Booster effectiveness relative to primary series was 26·2% (95% CI 23·6–28·6) against infection and 75·1% (40·2–89·6) against severe, critical, or fatal COVID-19, during 1-year follow-up after the booster.

And then you write:

> Personally, I don't call that a significantly effective treatment.

I don’t think you’ve thought this through very well.

I'll quote OP again:

>>COVID vaccines significantly reduce how many people who get exposed to COVID actually get sick.

The boosters are 26% effective at preventing infection.

Sure, they do something if you are particularly at risk of having a bad time with Covid, but that low effectiveness at preventing infection means there isn't much argument that they did much to slow the spread of Covid.

I think a 75% reduction if getting a serious or lethal case of COVID is totally worth it, although, like the flu vaccine, it might make more sense for the over 65 crowd than the under 30 crowd.

>totally worth it

Exactly. That was sort of the point of my original comment, although unfortunately I think I only confused things by mentioning herd immunity.

Another way of making my point might be to say, there’s a “personal standard” (is it worth it for me to take it?) and a “mandatory standard” (is it worth abrogating individual self-determination to make everyone take it?). Influenza clears the “personal” standard for many, but it appears that it does not clear the “mandatory” standard in most jurisdictions, as it has not been made mandatory in most places. On the other hand, smallpox (~7,000 infections per million people before, 0 per million after) and measles (~3,000 per million before, ~1 per million after) are examples where the standard for “mandatory” is cleared with flying colors. My point is not to debate whether the covid vaccine clears the mandatory standard or not - my point is only that we didn’t have that debate.

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