Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by javagram 1744 days ago
> I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick.

No, it’s because until the Delta variant became the most common variant, the vaccines essentially did create a covid-proof bubble around the recipient. The trials for Comirnaty and the Moderna vaccine both showed >90% effectiveness against PCR positive infections, not just against hospitalization and death.

1 comments

> The trials for Comirnaty and the Moderna vaccine both showed >90% effectiveness against PCR positive infections

I don't believe the official trials for Moderna and Pfizer measured PCR positive infections at all. (They involved thousands of people, it was a time when PCR test were difficult to obtain; they remain expensive at that scale).

I have not heard of Comirnaty, not sure about that.

There may have been pre-delta studies that showed PCR infection effectiveness (Cite?), I don't think they were the official trials.

Comirnaty is the brand name of the Pfizer vaccine.

According to this article, all of the major vaccine trials studied PCR positivity, not deaths/hospitalizations. https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m4058.full.pdf

> The first question is whether the right endpoints are being studied. Contrary to prevailing assumptions (including those of a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner8), none of the vaccine trials are designed to detect a significant reduction in hospital admissions, admission to intensive care, or death.9 Rather than studying severe disease, these mega-trials all set a primary endpoint of symptomatic covid-19 of essentially any severity: a laboratory positive result plus mild symptoms such as cough and fever count as outcome events (table 1).

Ah, thanks for the correction.

"a laboratory positive result plus mild symptoms" was the thing being measured, ok.