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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Definitely: they’re safe and effective against severe cases even if the current variants mean we don’t have a chance at a sterilizing vaccine for a while.

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  > they’re safe and effective against severe cases

The majority of people now being hospitalized and dying of Covid are vaccinated.[1]

How is that safe and effective? You want to argue you're better off being vaccinated vs unvaccinated, you make that argument. Nobody gets to call it safe and effective anymore, the data says it's not true.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinate...

This is a common misunderstanding of statistics: your odds of a severe case or death are much lower if you’re fully vaccinated but the size of that population is so much larger that you’ll have more total deaths than the smaller population which has never been vaccinated.

Think of it this way: the odds of a soldier dying if shot are 10% if they’re wearing a bulletproof vest and 80% if not. There’s a battle and afterwards they realize that 20 dead soldiers were wearing body armor and 10 were not. Does that mean armor was bad? To answer that question, you have to know how many there were in both groups: if it was 50:50 that would support questioning the value of those vests but if it was 90:10, the reverse would be true.

The article you linked is well worth reading as it explains this and several other confounds for analysis, namely the higher likelihood for high risk people to get vaccinated even though their failing immune systems still leave them at elevated risk (a vaccinated 80 year old’s risk goes down to a level similar to a 50 year old, not a 20 year old), and the fact that waning immune response and new variants mean that we really need to avoid thinking of vaccination for COVID as a lifetime boolean toggle – someone who got a single dose 2 years ago has a different status than someone fully vaccinated with a bivalent booster.

The problem with that refutation is the direction it's been trending: Proportion of hospitalizations among the vaccinated has been going up while the percent of the population that is vaccinated has pretty much been stable. We're not there yet but if the trend continues then this refutation won't work at all, and we're currently posting on a study that gives one mechanism that could cause this.

That’s a related but separate issue: what I was describing is the base rate fallacy, which is the most important concept for these comparisons, but it’s also important to remember that “vaccinated” isn’t a lifetime Boolean value even if people often treat it that way to simplify discussions. It’s not uncommon for immune response to wane over time (this is one reason why other vaccines need boosters over your life), and there are really two separate responses being talked about: do you have neutralizing antibodies ready to immediately stop the virus (likely with minimal symptoms and less spread), and do you have the memory T cells to prevent an infection from being worse? The former response tapers off relatively quickly compared to the latter, and is less effective as variants change the target. That means that people who have had vaccine doses a while ago are more likely to get a case than someone more recently vaccinated, and treating both of them the same will confuse your analysis.

It's not a misunderstanding of statistics, you just didn't answer the question. How can something be considered "safe and effective" when the majority of people dying have had the vaccine?

You're making the argument that you're better off with the vaccine than without it, and depending on your demographic cohort this is generally true (young males excluded). That's the question you answered, but it's not relevant to the question I asked. How can you call it safe and effective when most people dying are vaccinated? That's not very safe or effective.

The polio vaccine is safe and effective. MMR vaccine is safe and effective. This shit is neither.

I would strongly suggest reading your own link, which explains this, or the replies you’ve been getting summarizing this. The reason people say they’re safe and effective is because that’s what the preponderance of scientific evidence around the world shows.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitali...

> In November 2022, compared to adults ages 18 years and older who received an updated COVID-19 bivalent booster dose, monthly rates of COVID-19-associated hospitalizations were 16.0x Higher in Unvaccinated and 2.7x Higher in Vaccinated Adults without an updated booster.

Let's try it this way, since we're speaking different languages.

Most people have the Polio vaccine, more even than the Covid vaccine. Yet thousands of people aren't regularly dying from polio in the US despite being vaccinated. Same goes for MMR, and the other vaccines we all got.

So the polio vaccine is "Safe and effective". The MMR vaccine is "safe and effective". See the difference?

The only misunderstanding is that you think that you can refute the guy on the n-th time that they trot out the same old known-false talking point. They wanted an argument, because algorithms can't tell it from engagement with the story that they're pushing. They didn't want and don't even known truth, and just give more confident aggressive BS replies to further the con. Don't waste your time, use the "flag" button.

Yeah, I did that too but wanted to say something in case someone else read the thread who wasn’t as familiar with this.

As far as "safe" goes, how many deaths are we seeing from people with the Polio or MMR vaccines?

As far as "effective" goes, how many people with either of those vaccines still get Polio, mumps, measles, rubella?

So Polio, MMR etc are "safe and effective" vaccines. Do you see the difference?

If 100% of the population was vaccinated, 100% of the hospitalization and deaths would be of vaccinated people. Can you see how your argument is so very stupid?

Edit: post limited, so I’m going to dump this here and not further engage in refuting such inane idiocy:

> Full dose vaccination reduced the need for ICU admission by 49.7% (95% CI = 17-70) and mortality by 56.5% (95% CI = 20-77).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36129790/

EVERY study shows that vaccination is extremely effective in reducing hospitalization and mortality.

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