Comment by grujicd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grujicd | Hacker News Reader

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We don't have to imagine, we already have an example of fully vaccinated population.

Gibraltar: - vaccination: two doses >99%, boosted: 85% - cases: 145 (7 day avg)

Gibraltar population is 33k. This is pretty good example that vaccines can't stop the spread. With examples from other highly vaccinated countries (e.g. Portugal, Australia), it doesn't look it's a path to end covid.

You should get vaccinated to improve your own chances, but taking it to protect others doesn't really work.

> the harder the people who associated with antivax will push.

Does your definition of antivax include people who are vaccinated but oppose mandates? Because I would fit that definition and don't consider myself antivax since I do recommend vaccination to people who didn't get it yet. With small difference that I don't want to force them.

And one last question for those who propose mandates. When will mandates end? What happens after 6 months when you're no longer considered vaccinated? Do you subscribe to mandatory vaccination indefinitely?

Please don't cite nations with 33K population as evidence of global public health efficacy. Especially if 50% of the people in country are from outside the country on a daily basis. Focus instead on large nations.

I'm not sure what the detailed semantics of "is pro-vax but anti-mandate an anti-vax" position. There's a distinct difference from "anybody should be able to get the vax to protect themselves" and "we should impose mandates because vaccines are most effective when 95+% of the population takes them." If the latter were an extremely strong scientific position (IE, if there was a guarantee of herd immunity at 95% rate) then I think it would be a slam dunk.

I believe the mandates would be done when their effectivity is over. It's not like the people who want to impose these things are doing it because they enjoy exerting power over people. Anyway, there weren't any real large scale mandates forcing people to get vaccinated, so it's kind of moot?

There is a mandate now, in Austria, compulsory for anyone over 18. It would be interesting to compare outcomes in few months with Denmark, which went the completely opposite way.

If you are not a fulltime medical professional I would recommend not armchairing these things.

https://twitter.com/GibraltarGov/status/1488531136506646544

There are 119 new positive cases in Gibraltar today. 71 are vaccinated and 48 are unvaccinated.

If vaccines didn't prevent transmission, one would expect that second number to be 10 or less given the base rate of vaccination.

The fact that covid managed to get to unvaccinated >1% population suggest that at least some of vax population are carriers, probably asymptomatic. It would be quite hard for these 1% to get infected otherwise.

All I sad that vaccines can't stop the spread and it still looks like that. I didn't say they don't reduce it or that they're not beneficial otherwise.

Personal anecdote time: I got covid from person who was fully vaccinated 2 months before and didn't have any symptoms. Btw. since this was second time for me, plus with vaccines in the mean time, it was like a very mild cold, one day of temperature and some coughing afterwards.

Hm, numbers I'm googling for Gibraltar don't really add up - population 2021: 35.120, fully vaccinated: 40.722. One explanation would be that there are non-rezidents who are working there and got vaxed, while not counted as population.

Yes, it's why anyone citing Gibraltar for anything is intellectually dishonest. 15,000 people cross the border every day for work and other reasons.

Re: your other point, no vaccine is 100% effective at "stopping" spread. Absolutely no vaccine is 100% effective. There is no qualitative difference between prevention and reduction. If it reduces spread, then by definition some nonzero number of potential infections were prevented.

I cited Gibraltar as currently the only example of 99% vacc rate. No dishonest thoughts there - I didn't know about 15k people moving every day.

Ok, next bigger countries on vacc list:

- UAE: population 9.3m, 94% fully, 2400 cases 7-day avg

- Portugal: population 10.3m, 89% fully, 55k cases 7-day avg

Especially Portugal's cases don't support that 90% vacc stops spread in any meaningful way.

Even if your thoughts or intents weren't dishonest, it looks like you're just sort of sorting by vax rate and then citing the case rate. Given that you made the mistake with Gibraltar, why should we trust what you're showing us, since it looks like you're cherry picking and misunderstanding stats?

That's exactly what I'm doing. Isn't that the best way to see how high vaccination affects spread?

You're free to present different numbers, but please don't cite anything pre-Omicron since it's not relevant any more.

Once more, my case is that current vaccines are not a way to stop spread and therefore vaccinating low-risk population like kids won't protect the elders. I fully support vaccination for self benefits. As I did for myself.

I can't cite anything pre-Omicron since it's not relevant? Anything? Many attributes of the strains share common things (for example both are not retroviruses, can I cite that?)

It looks like the mainstream health authorities have shared up to date information on the protection against infection by omicron by vaccines. If that's the case, doesn't it mean that vaccinating kids would protect elders?

unlike many public health authorities, grujicd is forming a hypothesis and showing a method to attempt to prove said hypothesis. If you don't like it, you can suggest your own.

In this way, a reader can deduce what they believe is the closest truth available rather than it be shouted down at them. The fact that grujicd did not interpret Gibraltar data accurately is, I believe in this case, not a mark against them but a testament to how well they formulated their argument that flaws can be evaluated easily.

public health authorities on the other hand will begrudgingly hand over data after months of outcry, as well as change testing criteria and engage in many other methods of purposeful/accidental obfuscation, making their arguments hard to decipher.

It's a stretch to call it a hypothesis and certainly you can't use data like this to prove anything. There are far too many variables for this to be scientifically discussed on a hacker chat board.

I can't really help you if your opinion is that public health authorities are working in bad faith.

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