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There is an enormous body of knowledge proving vaccines did reduce transmissions, you can easily find them online. So a claim that goes counter to the outcome of hundreds of studies should have some backup, otherwise it no better than saying 'here is a snowball that proves 100% of climate scientists are wrong'
Given that lens, the ultimate outcome of the pandemic is "almost everyone eventually gets covid." As a result, the vaccines -- in reducing mortality -- saved an absolutely immense amount of lives.
They also could have stopped the spread for the early variants, but the later ones were simply too contagious. There simply was no chance to keep transmission fully down at that point.
That’s changing the goalposts. The vaccines were not necessary for the vast majority of the population or society as a whole to “open up”.
That’s assuming you analyze only physical harm from the spreading virus. After months of brainwashing, they were definitely required for large swathes of the population to given them a mental protection to come out of their shells.
> They also could have stopped the spread for the early variants, but the later ones were simply too contagious. There simply was no chance to keep transmission fully down at that point.
There was never a chance to keep transmission fully down. It was like trying to prevent a cold or the flu from spreading.
COVID was a major threat to a significant part of the population. The vaccines were effective and reduced the threat to those people enormously.
It would have been very nice and useful to stop transmission and achieve herd immunity. But even without that the vaccines were a huge win and saved a lot of lives.
"There were 11 COVID‑19 cases in the Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine group and 185 cases in the placebo group, with a vaccine efficacy of 94.1% (95% confidence interval of 89.3% to 96.8%)."
It's easy to create false memories because the politicians and pharma industry simultaneously swapped the narrative to stopping hospitalization and death once it became completely clear the vaccines were not stopping infection, but that is not what their initial purpose was.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20210202223626/https://www.moder...
Your summary: "They claimed vaccination would completely prevent infection."
Perhaps you just can't read?
> The median length of follow up for efficacy for participants in the study was 9 weeks post Dose 2. There were 11 COVID‑19 cases in the Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine group and 185 cases in the placebo group, with a vaccine efficacy of 94.1% (95% confidence interval of 89.3% to 96.8%).
> Cases of COVID‑19, starting 14 days after Dose 2, were defined as symptomatic COVID‑19 requiring positive RT-PCR result and at least two systemic symptoms or one respiratory symptom.
A SARS-CoV-2 infection and a COVID-19 case aren't the same thing, for the same reason a HIV infection is not the same as having AIDS. The 94.1% number comes from counts of actual sickness, despite your assertions to the contrary.
You complain about that, but proceed to doing it yourself, and you don't even address the point unlike the person you responded to.
> It was like trying to prevent a cold or the flu from spreading.
Which is funny, because even the very mild measures we had here in the Netherlands totally succeeded in preventing the flu from spreading. Haven't had a cold or flu in 1.5 years whereas normally would be sick at least 2-3 times. One strain of the flu was completely eradicated.
When you say stuff like this, it makes me think you have the wrong idea about who was the victim of brainwashing.
[1] - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6191...
The "summary" of the article is that "COVID-19 can cause severe illness in children and adolescents" followed by numbers talking about a shocking increase in rates. The fact it's talking about people hospitalized with COVID is hidden in a wall of text written in language that most people wouldn't be able to decipher. That more people tested positive for a more contagious variant, in any setting, is the most unremarkable news imaginable - spun into a terrifying headline, by the CDC no less.
I see no way to imagine that article was written in good faith. And it's been the absolute norm for the past 3 years now.
By how much, in numbers?
If you want to look at dodgy science, anything around "moral hazards" is on very shaky grounds...
Blaming and labelling has the opposite effect though.
Covid and climate science denial can be strengthened by having a 'discussion'.
This is because conspiracy thinking is actually immune to evidence. The denialist will subvert your evidence in a way that it proves the conspiracy. In here they will probably complain that 'correlation is not causation' or some other methodology 101 trope, whereas the audience will think "oh, yeah, this is complicated, smart people are debating it, I guess the jury is still out and we don't know for certain if climate change is real or not, and the vaccines are not a silver bullet either, lets just wait until the debate is over'.
But, in fact, the debate is over.
So no, in this case the onus is one the person attacking a vast body of scientific literature proving beyond reasonable doubt that vaccines are effective to come up with something supporting those wild claims. It is not up to me to provide a literature list that nobody will ever read anyway, and anyone who is even remotely interested in finding the truth can google such a list in 5 min.
It would just be nice to get a finger pointing in a direction, not the middlefinger.
"Actual data from US prisons" took me about 20 seconds to find a reputable source for (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37736396), likely less time than your comment asking for it took to type.
Do you really think that behavior will improve the knowledge gap?
> Unvaccinated, infected inmates had an estimated 36% risk of spreading the virus, compared with 28% among infected vaccinees. After adjustment, any vaccination, previous infection alone, and both vaccination and previous infection cut the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by 22%, 23%, and 40%, respectively.
> Booster doses and more recent vaccination further lowered infectiousness among vaccinated inmates, with each dose conferring an 11% risk reduction; the risk of transmission rose 6% for every 5 weeks that had elapsed since the last shot.
(That's what makes it such a good observational study population; a whole bunch of variables are controlled away by default.)
And now we have the opposite situation with those who have had the most boosters and now more likely to catch the new variant that is out.
It is not. The study is available for you to review if you like.
> And now we have the opposite situation with those who have had the most boosters and now more likely to catch the new variant that is out.
I’d like to see that study. Cite, please.
It is not.
Erm yes it is ... from the study:
> In adjusted analyses, we estimated that any vaccination ... reduced an index case’s risk of transmitting infection by 22% (6–36%)
CI is much wider than 8pp and the estimated absolute transmission risk CIs actually overlap at 31%. So the study results are consistent with there being no actual difference, also.
If this is the best evidence of a difference in transmission it's not very good.
Also this is Omicron which hardly matters. The justification was the earlier variants.
Sure:
www.NewEarthTimes.com/publications/VaccinesKill/New-vaccine-makes-more-infections.html
/this is a joke
Do your own research.
>Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates.
China also claims they've found it in fomites (inanimate objects) like frozen food shipments. Though, I dunno if I believe that one.
There was a discussion here too, but it was hot garbage so I'm not linking to it.
The higher the vaccination rate in a state, the lower the deaths after the vaccine was introduced. This is unaffected by the age of the state.
The fact that this shift only emerges after the introduction of the vaccine means we can pretty much rule out any demographics-based causes. The "low vax" and "high vax" states were pretty much even before the vaccine. The only reasonable conclusion is that high vax rates directly caused lower death rates.
I see a lot of armchair quarterbacks making statements about public health, but it ussually ends up being poorly informed speculation.
Nobody will worry about transmission when it provably reduces mortality
> So I don't think they saved lives at all
Thank deity we have data proving otherwise
And even bigger thanks to Darwin who rarely disappoints