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Comment by bboygravity | Hacker News Reader

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> As far as I know nobody (other than bs "news" outlets) ever claimed covid-19 vaccinations would diminish the risk of getting covid-19.

> Nor vaccine manufacturers, nor virologists, nor doctors.

I... what?? The CDC literally still says this. (And they are correct to say it!)

The week of Feb 12, 2023, the incidence of COVID in the unvaccinated population was 137.32 per 100,000. The incidence of COVID in the vaccinated population without the updated booster shot was only 52.61 per 100,000. (With the booster, only 39.95 per 100,000.)

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...

In other words, being vaccinated continues to massively diminish the risk of catching COVID. And vaccination was, of course, much more effective in the early days before the spread of vaccine resistant variants.

Yes, I agree, but my point was that this partially sterilizing immunity was a "bonus" of a vaccine designed to mainly prevent hospitalization and death.

The main goal of vaccine manufacturers was never to make a vaccine that would stop the spread. And certainly not to stop the spread entirely, as in: if you're vaccinated there's 0 chance that you'll get the virus or spread it (this is simply not the case, despite what you quote).

As it turns out it DOES prevent spread, but it was never the main goal.

> being vaccinated continues to massively diminish the risk of catching COVID

Yes. I agree.

All these numbers are completely riddled with various kinds of biases and confounders, not the least of which is that someone who gets an mRNA shot is much more likely to socially isolate themselves in an effort to avoid infection.

70% of the population in the US have had two or more shots at this point. IDK if you've been outside recently but I'm pretty sure vaccinated people aren't hiding away in numbers that would cause anything even close to the massive discrepancies in hospitalization and death between vaxxed and unvaxxed.

is the data probably confounded to some degree? sure. Is it overwhelming despite that? yes.

In case you care to look at smaller amounts of data that won't have as many confounding variables, you could check out any of the many studies evaluating vaccine effectiveness among healthcare workers who would all have regular exposure to the virus.

Your comment above was in reference to infection risk, and now you've jived to discussing hospitalization and death.

The president said that if you get the vaccine you won't get the virus: "You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations."

Early on they would kick you off social media for saying otherwise.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-health-governm...

Initial efficacy was ~95% against infection.

A close examination of Pfizer trial results has called this figure into question. See thread https://twitter.com/Jikkyleaks/status/1633937931319787520?s=...

Forgive me if I'm not up-to-date on all the, uhh, stinky cheese, do they address the fact that we saw very similar effectiveness numbers in real-world tests after the roll out of the vaccine? e.g. 91%, 94%, 95.3% in these three studies?

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-ri...

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7020e2.htm

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

So his whole complaint is that covid tests used in the trial were done at a single central lab?

I mean, yeah? Reduce variables?

Did the president know that when he made the statement?

Why is it that Faccui, the CDC, and the WHO are so hated but I haven't heard for an investigation into Pfizer.

People whine about them because they hear about it on Fox news and social media. Reality doesn't matter if you get a 20 way forwarded email.

Even if that figure is correct, that statement was unequivocally and demonstrably false. We really should not be making excuses for politicians lying to the public; it is never acceptable, and we have every right to demand better.

Turn it around. The antivaxxer types can now claim, correctly even, that officials lied multiple times about the efficacy of the countermeasures. That is not the kind of ammunition you want to be giving out during the next public health crisis.

It was way more effective against pre-omicron variants.

No, even by the time of Delta it was clear the efficacy against infection was marginal at best. The CDC acknowledged this in its Provincetown study in late July 2021 and recommended the reimposition of mask mandates as a result.

The Provincetown study does not say that, it says that people who do get infected likely carry a similar viral load regardless of vaccination status, which was a reversal from what was seen in the initial strain. This represented an increased risk of transmission on its own that they felt warranted an increase in precaution.

> data from this report are insufficient to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, including the Delta variant, during this outbreak.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm?s_cid=mm...

too lazy to look it up right now but VE against infection was around 60-80% within 4 months of taking the shot

If there was any substance whatsoever to these sorts of numbers then highly vaxxed jurisdictions would show significantly better case rates, and they absolutely do not.

and he got it how many times, after ?

Depends how you define "getting COVID". To the general population, on a practical level getting COVID = getting sick themselves. You get invaded by gastroenteritis bugs on a daily basis, but you only practically "get" gastroenteritis when it leads to diarrhea.

If you don't get covid you don't spread it. We never got enough people with the vaccine to stop the spread, and we as we learn more about how long the vaccine lasts it seems unlikely we will, but it does reduce the spread.

Reduce does not mean stop though, most people want a black or white stop or do nothing, while the truth is grey

Trump tried to make fun of the pandemic as a "Democratic Hoax" remember, but even he took the vaccine himself. But then his followers booed when he mentioned it. But he was rational, he tried to keep as many as possible of his voters alive at least till the next election.

Trump did many different, sometimes contradictory things. The Democrats made it a point to oppose him. It was a big mess. Eventually things settled down as we figure out how the virus really worked, but most people just cared to see their bias wit no concern to the truth.

Trump made fun of the pandemic, didn't take it seriously, didn't care to warn people about it. Instead he called it a "Democratic Hoax". He said “This is their new hoax”, see below. Let us never forget that.

As a result > 1 million people died of Covid in US. A big mess indeed. > 1 million. Could have been a lot less. Trump was in charge.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-calls-co...

What was all the herd immunity talk about?

> As far as I know nobody (other than bs "news" outlets) ever claimed covid-19 vaccinations would diminish the risk of getting covid-19.

practically all US news outlets said this, the current president of the US said this.

  > As far as I know nobody (other than bs "news" outlets) ever claimed covid-19 vaccinations would diminish the risk of getting covid-19.

Gaslighting at it's finest. Here is the Director of the CDC Rochelle Walensky in her own words:

"Our data from the CDC today suggests 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."

President Biden then echoed the same thing.

So you have the head of the CDC and the President of the US saying the same lie, which then trickled down to essentially every health professional, media outlet etc. until everybody understood this nonsense to be "the truth". Except, it was always a lie.

The statement was walked back just a few days later. It wasn't a lie, it was a mistake. https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/546234-cdc-r...

>Gaslighting at it's finest.

Eek.

  > It wasn't a lie, it was a mistake.

No. The data never showed at any time that vaccines prevented infection or transmission. That was never a thing, we were told it was a thing, but no data sets ever showed that to be true. And making it worse, when this was pointed out at the time people were banned form social platforms and called conspiracy theorists just for saying what was always true.

And it's especially ironic that your link only contains more outright falsehoods such as these gems:

  > “What we know is the vaccines are very substantially effective against infection"

and..

  > “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get COVID-19"

These are still false, because most people who were vaccinated still got Covid which is the opposite of "effective". That's why the argument switched to "well you should still get it because you won't get quite as sick".

You don't seem to understand what a lie is. You are uncharitably interpreting statements made during an evolving situation.

No, in an evolving situation you don't lie, you say "we don't know", or "we are hoping this will help".

When you say "vaccinated people don't carry the virus" and you are the head of the CDC or the President or countless other idiots who repeated the same thing, then you are in fact lying because that statement was never true. It's not that it was true, and then things changed. It was never true and they knew it wasn't true. And the lie was weaponized against anybody who questioned it.

They lied to the public, and there will be no historical revisionism on this.

>No, in an evolving situation you don't lie, you say "we don't know", or "we are hoping this will help".

No, in an evolving situation you explain the facts as you currently know them. Why else would they have walked it back days later if it was a lie? You don't make any sense.

>It was never true and they knew it wasn't true.

Ah, I see you're quite happy to make stuff up in the absense of actual facts. You have nothing to demonstrate it as a lie, you easily make that leap because it suits your narrative. So again, you don't understand what a lie is.

  > No, in an evolving situation you explain the facts as you currently know them.

I'm not sure if you're intentionally missing the point here, so I'll restate the obvious:

There was never a data set that ever indicated at any time that vaccinated people couldn't get or spread the virus. Therefore, stating that vaccinated people didn't carry the virus was a lie.

For it not to have been a lie, they would have had to base the idea that vaccinated people don't carry the virus on some sort of data that indicated that. Except, there has never been data to suggest vaccinated people don't carry virus. Since no data ever indicated that vaccinated people couldn't carry the virus, stating that as a fact was a lie.

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