[busymom0]

I states

> they have the same (and sometimes higher) viral load

The "same" is surely a fact as has been shown by 3 studies. The sometimes higher doesn't mean always higher - it means it can be sometimes higher, sometimes lower but on average, it's been determined to be the same. So it's not based on my "feelings".

What matters is how these will turn out in 3-6 more months. When vast majority of people around the world still haven't gotten a single dose while us healthy and young people are being pushed to take it, it doesn't seem well advised in my eyes. They should be saving these for the elders and especially the ones in poorer countries.

[dubyah]

The particular issue is, why specifically mention "sometimes higher" if there are no studies to back up that assertion or if you're going to rationalize your assertion on inferences about statistical noise? "Sometimes", "could", and "can" are doing the work of Atlas here. It's a genuinely pointless thing to say and somewhat bewildering to see someone continue to defend.

It's important to note the population of those 3 studies. For generally symptomatic individuals that sought testing, were hospital system patients, or were contact traced individuals, respectively, viral loads(Ct values) are similar between vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Even your first cited paper mentions deficiencies for asymptomatic individuals: >It is also difficult to determine the rate of asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic breakthrough infections and to ascertain whether viral loads in such cases are as high as those in symptomatic breakthrough infections. The “true” proportion of breakthrough infections with high viral loads would require comprehensive, frequent surveillance testing of vaccinated populations to identify these individuals.

The REACT-1 study data is from a large, random sampling of the population.

[andrekandre]

  > They should be saving these for the elders and especially the ones in poorer countries.

dont they just throw away the vaccine if its not used?

if that's true, im not sure how declining to get a free vaccine helps the elderly...