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Comment by protonbob | Hacker News Reader

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It lowered the chances, and in case of getting sick it also massively lowered the chances of getting the worst side-effects, exactly like any other vaccine does.

It's a shame that even highly educated populations do not understand a basic fact of immunology.

Yeah what a shame. I never claimed that it didn't lower the chances of side effects.

This is what was claimed.

"You become a dead end to the virus." — Fauci, 2021

This was the reality

"[Vaccines against respiratory viruses produce] decidedly suboptimal protection." — Fauci, Cell Host & Microbe journal article, 2023

"The durability of protection against infection and hence transmission was relatively limited." — Fauci, 2024 congressional testimony

Anybody that questioned the religious dogma that the vaccines were super effective and that healthy people needed to get endless boosters were crucified and in many cases, fired from their jobs for refusing an unnecessary medical procedure.

I don't live in the USA, so whatever was claimed is not universal.

Not massively lowering the chances is universal.

I would've been ok with not forcing healthy people to get vaccinated, if they agreed to not seek treatment in case they got Covid.

Natural immunity was just as strong as getting vaccinated though despite what you might have been told.

"All of the included studies found at least statistical equivalence between the protection of full vaccination and natural immunity; and three studies found superiority of natural immunity" --Shenai, Rahme & Noorchashm — Cureus / PubMed, October 2021

Well then you don't need treatment for Covid, right? Stay natural.

Cull the human herd because Bob is too much of an individual to participate. An ironic solution.

There are so many things that went wrong during the pandemic. You were not lied to, that means someone has intent.

The lesson was not that vaccines are bad imho. I do not live in the US, so I just find it tiresome to listen to you guys blaming everything on people. There was no right way.

Vaccines for respiratory illnesses are bad. Even Fauci admitted so. Why do you assume good intent from the United States government when the FDA is bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies.There was so much money to be made on specifically covid vaccines. I am not anti vax in general.

The flu vaccine has saved countless elderly lives.

You don't assume good intent from the US and its institutions, fine, but other countries also rolled out vaccines, are they all bought and paid by pharma companies? Is that really the argument?

Yes exactly. They are great for immunocompromised people. Much less so for healthy people. Which is why it should have been an option and not mandatory.

Herd immunity depends on the most amount of people being vaccinated, it's a numbers game, lowered chances of contracting the disease among the vaccinated translates into dwindling chances for spread.

Just look at measles, to stop spreading it to children who cannot take the vaccine due to other health issues you need almost every children that can be vaccinated to be vaccinated, otherwise the disease spreads.

It's not a really hard concept to grasp. It was crisis time, you don't get to play with lives at that point due to your individualistic convictions.

A measles vaccine is actually effective at containing the spread. People with natural immunity should not have been required to get a vaccine for something they were already inoculated for and had immunity that was greater than what you could get from the vaccines

There was no way to trust someone saying "I have natural immunity, I had COVID" when the crisis was happening, even more given how it was used politically to fan the flames for political gain.

Stop thinking about individuals, think about systems, and societies.

Given that people were refusing basic instructions (keeping distance, for example); that people dying of COVID in a hospital didn't believe the disease was real due to political influences; how do you think governments and their healthcare systems would be able to track if someone had natural immunity or not? There's no way, the only answer is: vaccinate as many people as possible to cover for uncertainties.

Again, it's a numbers game, in a fast moving crisis there's no opening for individualised actions, you are part of a larger whole and the larger whole required for people to get vaccinate to stamp off the crisis.

You could trust them by letting them show you a blood test that showed antigens.

You still only think in individual terms, you are not at all engaging in this discussion with any kind of systems thinking...

All healthcare resources were stretched thin during the height of the pandemic, your proposal is to add yet another resource-intensive test? For what exactly? So people could skip taking the jab? Don't you see any issues with the cost-benefit analysis of this? Not even accounting for the fact of how easy would be to defraud it.

People were faking vaccination cards, faking a blood test showing antigens would be another very common fraud. You cannot trust people when the consequences are much greater than any individual issue...

> Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

Everyday I am infinitely grateful I have the ability to understand nuance, and the mental firepower to be able to comprehend data coming from sources rather than tiktoks, twitter, and hyper-partisan news orgs.

No one ever said the vaccine would prevent transmission. What they said was that it !could! prevent transmission. But no one would know before studies were done. What they did say is that it would lower mortality rates. Which it did in fact do. But the factors of transmission and spread were dice rolls. And everyone with first hand knowledge knew that from day one.

But, you are in fact correct, you were lied to. But not by anyone with knowledge of the vaccines, but by the grifters you hold up has being "a beacon of truth". The grifters who read "Vaccine has a chance it could slow or stop transmission" and turn around and say "They are promising it will stop transmission!" just so they can tear it down later as "another victory for TRUTH!".

Yes they did say it would. https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...

Also you don’t know anything about me and what media I consume. You can’t quote me on something I didn’t say. They did say it would stop transmission.

Your source clearly says that the likelihood of transmission is reduced, not eliminated.

‘“So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,” Fauci said.‘

Extremely unlikely is a lot stronger than reduced. Calling it breakthrough implies that the norm is prevention. Obviously nothing is 100%.

Preface: I have been in favor of the COVID vaccine and disease mitigations (and wish we would have used this opportunity for clean indoor air...).

I'm willing to accept my memory is wrong here with evidence, but I remember a very strong narrative in the early period claiming that the vaccine did in fact prevent contraction and transmission, to the point where it was supposedly surprising when "breakthrough" cases started being reported.

It's possible there was some loose language around "prevent" as I did see that especially later on, but I have trouble finding reliable information on what they actually believed and if they actually reported this accurately to the public.

There is the unfortunate mark against where they knowingly promoted misinformation around masks - persistent through today - that they were ineffective, in an effort to direct uncontrolled distribution of masks to medical professionals most in need.

As someone else already said, lying requires intent. People can be wrong about things.

We already know that the CDC literally lied about masks not being helpful in the early pandemic in order to protect mask supplies for healthcare workers. We also know that Fauci lied about Gain-of-Function research.

"The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology" -- Fauci, under oath to Congress, May 2021.

NIH's Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak contradicted this in writing five months later, confirming funded experiments had produced findings that met the gain-of-function threshold.

-- https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/nih-eco-health-allian...

If we know that there were deliberate lies were said about certain aspects of the covid pandemic, why should we assume good intent otherwise, especially from a U.S government that is jhighly influenced by well funded lobbyists?

Exactly. IN cases of national or world-level event, governments and government related bodies (WHO) will do whatever they can as not to cause a widespread panic. And if that means lying, they will absolutely do that.

And because the capitalists run the show in a lot of countries, https://ruinmyweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/live-laugh... is a good image that explains why lots of things kept going on as usual.

A world-level 6 week pause would have burned covid and a whole lot of other diseases out. But no. Poor capitalists need their 3rd yacht, 13th vacation home, etc etc etc.

As for me, my SO worked in health care. And Covid is a SARS. We have decades of effects and response. The shit's airborne. WHO knew that. CDC knew that. But they lied and lied and lied.

We take our healthcare in our own hands. I'll critically listen to the "experts" and deal with med doctors for prescription drugs. And Im definitely interested in my own manufacture of pharms https://fourthievesvinegar.org/ . But yeah, the wider and general the message, the more propaganda it likely is.

And we also have a good stock of PPE now, including a few tyvek suits. And everclear is 95% alcohol and $30 here for a handle. Best sanitizer you can easily acquire and food safe to boot.

EDIT as comment to WarmWash:

No. The WHO and CDC lied about Covid being an airborne infection. They refused and refused, up to then redefining what an "airborne infection" is.

https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q985

Covid is a SARS. Airborne. SARS requires BSL3 to handle properly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_leve... "Biosafety level 3 is appropriate for work involving microbes which can cause serious and potentially lethal disease via the inhalation route."

I dont need international experts to tell me a stream of bullshit, when I can look at the type of disease and go "wellll fuck, airborne. time to wear masks outside the home and no parties or events. and go to store when its not busy."

Was Covid as bad as SARS? No. But is SARS response something that can be compared to what we should have did for Covid? Hell yeah.

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