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Comment by drno123 | Hacker News Reader

How does 30% compare to flu vaccine? I heard that the flu vaccine is also around 30% effective.

It varies from year to year. The traditional seasonal flu intramuscular contains 4 different variants it targets, and sometimes the predictions of which sequences to include are wrong. In those years you see sub 50% vaccine efficiencies against infection. Vaccine efficiency versus hospitalization is much better.

But the same situation re: igG humoral antibodies from intramuscular vaccination not getting in your nose/throat/etc mucosa apply to flu vaccines. Most people only get intramuscularly vaccinated and so get upper respiratory flu infections and spread but are mostly asymptomatic and unaware. Actual vaccine efficiency for flu intramusculars is probably lower than reported due to the asymptomatic cases.

I personally alternate between intramuscular flu vaccines and the Flu Mist intranasal flu vaccine (which you can get by request).

> I heard that the flu vaccine is also around 30% effective.

The flu vaccine is so ineffective that if we actually applied evidence-based medicine standards to it / actually looked at a real cost:benefit analysis, we would never be pushing the flu vaccine.

https://www.cochrane.org/CD001269/ARI_vaccines-prevent-influ...

> Injected influenza vaccines probably have a small protective effect against influenza and ILI (moderate-certainty evidence), as 71 people would need to be vaccinated to avoid one influenza case, and 29 would need to be vaccinated to avoid one case of ILI. Vaccination may have little or no appreciable effect on hospitalisations (low-certainty evidence) or number of working days lost.

So: a miniscule reduction in actual flu cases (granted, a slightly-better-but-still-weak reduction in general ILI), with no appreciable difference on hospitalizations or working days lost, meaning that the economic benefit of giving the flu vaccine is basically zero.

It's pretty great that the first world (at least America) has been so heavily socialized to accept the flu vaccine as effective and necessary, because it makes arguing for the effectiveness of the COVID vaccine much easier, since the bar is so incredibly low.

Flu vaccine has zero side effects for many and if you do have side effects you are free to skip it. Otherwise, I like getting a little less sick statistically with no downside. Current COVID vaccines are different in that many have days of quite significant side effects. Absolutely worth it for initial 2-3 shots without preexisting immunity, not so much once one's immune system is already trained through vaccination and repeated exposure.

Remember these vaccines are more intended to reduce the severity of the virus.

> Remember these vaccines are more intended to reduce the severity of the virus.

People could be forgiven for thinking otherwise: https://tinyapps.org/blog/202201040700_gaslighting.html

Was that really the intention? Pretty sure they intended for something better and just settled on this because it was the only feather left in the cap.

Well the original trials only tested if there were symptoms, they never even measured the ability to stop transmissions. So it never really said on the tin that it did. It the bullshit echochamber of journalists and politicians that ended up defining the vaccine “working” as stopping transmissions, rather than serious cases. But that was not a claim from the manufacturers of the vaccines.

> It the bullshit echochamber of journalists and politicians that ended up defining the vaccine “working” as stopping transmissions, rather than serious cases. But that was not a claim from the manufacturers of the vaccines.

Pfizer stated[0] on Jan 26, 2021 that their vaccine "has been authorized for emergency use to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 16+." [emphasis added]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210126223727/https://twitter.c...

I am the wrong person for this debate but I think we laymen refer to the virus as covid but in medical terms covid is the disease/symptoms caused by the virus, not the virus itself. So that statement may still be compatible with the vaccine stopping getting sick from it, not transmissions.

wtf

cm2187 is correct. It was, and is, incredibly frustrating to see the news media and laymen talking about sars-cov-2 by saying covid or covid-19. That's always been the disease that sars-cov-2 causes. You can be infected with sars-cov-2 without having covid-19. In fact, based on China's latest massive population wide PCR testing about 90% of people infected with sars-cov-2 are asymptomatic and will spread it without ever having covid-19.

I'm sorry the science communication during the pandemic has been so terrible but there's really nothing suspicious or disengenous going on here.

Here is someone who should certainly know what they're talking about:

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, March 29, 2021:

"[O]ur data from the CDC today suggests, um, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it's also in real world data."

Video: https://tinyapps.org/screenshots/20220104-walensky.mp4

Which papers did the CDC rep cite in her speech?

> Which papers did the CDC rep cite in her speech?

Dr. Walensky is much more than a CDC "rep"; she is[1] "an American physician-scientist who is the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Prior to her appointment at the CDC, she was the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Walensky is an expert on HIV/AIDS."

So Americans are supposed to not trust the imminently qualified head of the CDC unless she cites specific papers, which they should then go and read to "do their own research" and second guess her?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochelle_Walensky

>So Americans are supposed to not trust the imminently qualified head of the CDC

Unfortunately, yes, name and status does not mean anything. Papers and replicable findings matter. Press conferences held by media figures don't. Arguments from authority require the authority figure to be talking in a non-laymen context. Video press conferences are for people that don't know science and, frankly, they're very dumbed down.

Scientists have known about immune compartmentalization and the how to evoke the different types of antibodies since the 1960s (and T-cell residence in 1980s). It just hasn't made it into public messaging about vaccines for aerosol spread viruses until recently because it wasn't a world stage issue.

There's no doubt intramuscular vaccination still does help against infection in other immune compartments. It's just not the best at it. This has been shown in large scale studies re: sars-cov-2 from Israel in terms of likelyhood of being infected if someone in your residence gets infected. ref: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4292 "Vaccination with BNT162b2 reduces transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to household contacts in Israel"

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