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by kspacewalk2 1680 days ago
About that "rare" part... I'm gonna go ahead and say that 5% of the population in a week is no longer "rare", nor can we use the phrase "breakthrough infections" with a straight face anymore. We should just be done with that.

The larger point about being effective against severe illness and death still stands, and seems to be so robust that it's not going to change now, so the vaccine is still very much worth it.
2 comments
ptha 1680 days ago
The vaccine was never touted as being 100% effective. For Pfizer the (Lancet study) efficacy numbers ranged from 88-93%, the first month after full vaccination.

After 4 months the effectiveness waned to 47-67% (depending on the variant). So now the focus on boosters.

My point is that 100% vaccination should never have led to the expectation of 0 cases of covid. But the main thing was reducing ICU numbers/severe infections.

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

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angelzen 1680 days ago
"The vaccine was never touted as being 100% effective."

We have overloaded the very term "vaccine" in a fairly misleading manner. One one hand we have vaccines that are highly effective in the longterm and can virtually eradicate dangerous diseases. On the other hand we have flu & covid vaccines, which can help control the severity of the disease, but are incapable of preventing regular widespread outbreaks.

Childhood vaccines are from the first category. Let's enumerate: polio, smallpox, tetanus, hepatitis b, hepatitis a, rubella, hib, measles, pertussis, pneumococcal strep, rotavirus, varicella, diphtheria, mumps. Some of these had no cases for decades, for others very rare localized outbreaks make the news. From the second category, flu and covid have regular outbreaks in highly vaccinated communities and there is no hope for herd immunity.

Perhaps it's time to clear up the semantic overload and create a new term to delineate the important difference between the two classes of vaccines. For example, use "vaccines" for the first category and "immunity stimulants" for the second.

https://www.healthgrades.com/right-care/vaccines/14-diseases...

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throaway46546 1680 days ago
>And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We're vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, 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.

-Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director 2021-03-21

https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-s...

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Denvercoder9 1680 days ago
The 5% of the population figure is an error.

The article also gives a much more realistic two-week incidence rate of 404 per 100,000 population, which is about 0.2% of the population per week.

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