[ggdG]

> The vaccination has been thoroughly shown to work

How has this been shown?

Countries with a high vaccination rate don't have a lower infection rate than other countries:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7

And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, whatever level of immunity you had is completely gone by then:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y

> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.

The only thing that remains, is some protection against symptomatic disease.

[atleta]

> The only thing that remains, is some protection against symptomatic disease.

And sever disease needing hospitalization and death. And these indeed the things we want to avoid. Both as individuals and as a society. Because if/when hospitals fill up then you have a trouble. This is what people don't get. (They also don't get that they could end up in a hospital or a morgue with some probability, so I don't even mention that.)

One of my friend's father has been waiting for an operation for half a year here (in Hungary). They couldn't do it in the spring because the hospitals were overcrowded with covid patients. Then they couldn't do it because the waiting lists grew during that period. Then somehow he got in about a week ago with the help of a former high ranking official (yeah, gotta love Eastern Europe) just to be sent home the next morning, because there weren't enough free beds in the ICU any more. Yes, anecdotal, but this is the thing we try to avoid.

[artificialLimbs]

Not so universal a health care system, it seems. Looks like Hungary has one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the EU.

Sorry to hear about your friends' father.

[rdedev]

So the first link is not a study. There isn't an examination or even a reference of studies that provide evidence to the contrary. Not to say that the article can be dismissed fully but keep in mind it's not painting a full picture.

The second link is about a study that looks at transmission of the Delta variant from a breakthrough infection. It did not look into wether the chances of getting infected after vaccination decreased.

Finally the vaccine dramatically reduced your chances of dying. I'd say that's some pretty good protection from symptomatic disease, not just some protection.

[michaelmrose]

In comparative studies of populations it has been shown to still be substantially effective at preventing infection even after antibodies wane.

You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.

It is a remarkable conclusion to suppose that studying individuals in the same society fewer got infected if they were vaccinated because of comparison between different societies.

It would be as if we proved that people didn't smoke in the USA got lung cancer far less than smokers but you sprung up with a study that showed that rates of smoking between societies wasn't highly correlated with lung cancer ergo smoking didn't cause lung cancer. One would logically suppose that your study didn't prove what you think it proved.

At limit you are supposing that if we got 100% vaccinated somehow we would see as much covid spread despite everyone having antibodies which are known to decrease chance of infection and extent of spread ergo effecting the time one remains infectious and how many virions are available to be spread.

Beware of anyone who doesn't feel the need to disprove that raindrops fall in buckets who nevertheless has proven that storms can't cause floods.

More importantly.

The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7038e1.htm

This is even more important than decreasing spread.

[ggdG]

> In comparative studies of populations it has been shown to still be substantially effective at preventing infection even after antibodies wane.

Source?

> You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective

I linked to an analysis by a Harvard professor. Who uses official government data of the respective countries. So I think I have good reason to take that seriously.

> because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.

Yes there must be many confounding factors. But your phrase: "doesn't show a high enough correlation" is putting it mildly. How about: no correlation at all?

But I would love to see data that shows a population-level effect of mass vaccination on the covid infection rate.

> The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.

This is the sort of percentage that got thrown around a lot at the start of the vaccination campaign. But for protection against infection/transmission. Just one of many examples:

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-israel-va...

The idea that the vaccinated have become (mostly) asymptomatic spreaders of the viruses, is nothing to celebrate. This is a scenario that can push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous variants:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...

[michaelmrose]

Killing hosts isn't beneficial to the virus survival, quite the opposite in fact. An infection that super aggressively reproduces but due to antibodies fails to gain a foothold beyond the nasopharynx in vaccinated people doing little damage to the host but spreading effectively to both vaccinated individuals who largely have the above experience and unvaccinated who get miserably sick and sometimes drown in their own mucus could be very fit in evolutionary terms in a mostly vaccinated population.

A mutation which increased its spread slightly among vaccinated individuals by 10% while increasing the mortality of the unvaccinated by 10x would be fitter yet. This isn't fate because the space the virus explores is driven by its actual difficult to predict particulars not hypothetical thought experiments but I wouldn't bet on covid going away, I wouldn't bet on people choosing to be more likely to die and abandoning vaccination, and I wouldn't bet on covid becoming safer for the unvaccinated in the short term.

The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse. So if you choose to stay among the unvaccinated I would expect your prospects in the next several years range from bad to worse. Make your own decisions accordingly.

[ggdG]

> Killing hosts isn't beneficial to the virus survival, quite the opposite in fact. An infection that super aggressively reproduces but due to antibodies fails to gain a foothold beyond the nasopharynx in vaccinated people doing little damage to the host but spreading effectively to both vaccinated individuals who largely have the above experience and unvaccinated who get miserably sick and sometimes drown in their own mucus could be very fit in evolutionary terms in a mostly vaccinated population.

Yes. This is what that Quanta article was all about. Here's the link once more: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...

> The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse.

Agreed. There's a tragedy of the commons there.

[michaelmrose]

If we make it possible for everyone to be vaccinated if they so choose the only tragedy will be the innocent old and immunocompromised who die despite vaccination because they were effectively murdered by someone else's stupidity.