Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

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>For a brief while after getting vaccinated, before Delta and Omicron, my friends, coworkers, and I felt we were out of the woods. We are actively going out together to our favorite hangouts and being normal. I didn't think we would need this site.

You seem to be describing what journalist Alex Berenson has coined the "happy vaccine valley":

>the three-to four-month period following the second dose when antibodies are high enough that the vaccines actually appear to work. (For those of you keeping score at home, that’s two weeks of negative efficacy after the first shot, a month of maybe 50% efficacy, three months of near-complete protection, and then a rapid fall to what looks like 0% protection within three months. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/so-you-understand-whats-...

Of course that description was written in Sept 2021 based on pre-Omicron data, and the picture is different now. The latest data: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.07.22268919v...

See Figures 1 and 2 above. This study from California in December shows much lower protection from the current vaccines against Omicron compared to Delta: 0% effectiveness of a 2-dose regimen at 6+ months, and 49% effectiveness of a 3-dose regimen at ~2+ months.

Alex Berenson is not a journalist but a conspiracy theorist with no relevant training or experience. He is not a good source of advice on vaccination.

The Kaiser-Permanente study you linked is by actual medical experts and it paints a more nuanced perspective which is why it contradicts his claims — for example, they have the two dose effectiveness at preventing infection by Delta over 50% even a year out.

Most importantly, and the main reason I'm replying to this, is that it's _really_ important to also remember that there are two reasons to get vaccinated. One is to prevent infection entirely (largely a product of neutralizing antibodies, which fade relatively quickly) but the other is to lower the severity of an infection (a product of T cells, which is longer lasting) and the data continues to show that vaccines remain highly effective considerably longer than 3 months:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/01/studies-...

Promoting the voices of antivaxers like Alex Berenson is the single most effective way to prolong the pandemic since the thing which will allow us to return to normal will be high levels of vaccination reducing the severity of an infection to manageable levels.

Berenson did a turn on the pharmaceutical and healthcare beat at the New York Times, that has to count for something. However I will remember to censor myself better in the future. bows reverently to a shrine of the approved narrative

Thanks for at least looking at the data and not dismissing it out of hand.

The article you link above to support vaccine effectiveness refers to three studies, all of which are pre-Omicron (the first looks at Jul '21 to Oct '21, the second specifically at Alpha and Delta variants, and the third from Dec '20 to Sep '21). A key point of my comment was do show that, with the advent of Omicron, the playing field has changed substantially, which your data do not address - but my data did.

I didn't and wasn't telling people not to get vaccinated. I believe, though, that there is a world where we can simultaneously talk about how the vaccine doesn't work as well as it should or could, and look to better solutions, including a new or improved vaccine.

> Berenson did a turn on the pharmaceutical and healthcare beat at the New York Times, that has to count for something.

Not really, he was a business reporter with no medical training — he came to the NYT from The Street, and after he left to become a novelist his only subsequent non-fiction (kind of) work was a book alleging that cannabis usage causes psychosis, which got him considerable criticism from actual scientists.

> However I will remember to censor myself better in the future. bows reverently to a shrine of the approved narrative

It's not censorship to suggest being less credulous and finding people who know what they're talking about to get advice from. It's not hard to find scientists who disagree with each other — it's a defining characteristic! — but he's not a scientist or even amplifying a significant group of scientists, and the ones who mention him do so to say that he's dangerously wrong. The most obvious giveaway is that he started with a paranoid conclusion rather than a falsifiable theory and when whatever he's saying is debunked he switches to something else which conveniently still supports the same conclusion. Even Fox News backed away from giving him a pulpit!

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...

Measuring vaccine effectiveness in terms of protection against infection (as in the article you linked) is pointless. We expect almost everyone to get infected. What actually matters is protection against severe symptoms, and even with the Omicron variant the vaccines are still pretty good at that.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072548446/public-health-expe...

I was responding to a specific comment, which seemed to be referring to rising case counts. I agree it's likely that almost everyone will get infected, many have been saying this for two years.

As for "what actually matters," that entirely depends on the problem you are trying to solve, the solutions you are putting on the table, and the human value systems at play.

Omicron has been strikingly mild, regardless of vaccination status. A new study of over 52,000 infected found "zero cases with Omicron variant infection received mechanical ventilation." https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...

From the paper: Conclusions: VE of 3 mRNA-1273 doses against infection with delta was high and durable, but VE against omicron infection was lower. VE against omicron infection was particularly low among immunocompromised individuals. No 3-dose recipients were hospitalized for COVID-19.

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