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The link you provided describes a simulation based on assumed vaccine effectiveness. It's also from 1 year ago. It doesn't seem to reflect any statistically backed insights into what's actually happened over the past year. Or am I missing something?

Trying to find some actual data, I googled "covid deaths by month" and I stumbled upon this: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-...

Notably, the "Growth Factor" plot looks qualitatively very similar from April 2020 until now. Before then, the data looks more noisy to me but not necessarily different on average. I believe folk started getting vaccinated in December 2020? Based on that plot, it doesn't look like the vaccine is helping much for the death rate. Maybe that data source is not legitimate, or maybe "growth factor" isn't the right metric to look at?

Ambolia 1673 days ago

"Covid deaths" are also a very meaningless metric where every country or region does whatever it wants. Excess deaths would be a better metric, but also hard to remove from there all the damage done by lockdowns, stress generated on the population, and by hospitals stopping attending other diseases in some places.

ziml77 1673 days ago

Why would you remove the excess deaths caused by hospitals not being able to handle non-COVID illnesses due to taking care of COVID patients?

Ambolia 1673 days ago

Because those are dependent on the response to the disease, not the disease itself.

So what's the right available metric to look at that statistically quantifies the effectiveness of the vaccines? Or does one not exist?

Ambolia 1673 days ago

Control groups. But most countries and trials seem decided to get rid of them as fast as possible.

bonzini 1673 days ago

The current virus has a natural growth factor that is about 3x larger than the OG. So vaccines are at least 66% effective if they are keeping it at bay. Probably more since lots of countries have very low restrictions compared to last year.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/united-states-rates-of-co...

galaxyLogic 1673 days ago

According to the following graph deaths per 100,000 people are: 18 for unvaccinated 3 for vaccinated. at the peak of the graph between July and October 2021.

Doesn't that tell us that vaccinations help to significantly reduce Covid-deaths?

https://imgur.com/a/QGJqs0S

Thanks for the link. For fun I downloaded the referenced CDC dataset. One thing I noticed is that the fraction of deaths per case for the vaccinated population was higher than for the unvaccinated population until July, at which point it "snapped" to match for the rest of the dataset. It seems like a curious anomaly.

dragonsky 1673 days ago

Where older and more venerable people being vaccinated early? They still are more likely to die if infected. Then a spread of vaccination to the general population. You would have to look at a breakdown of who was vaccinated at the time you saw the lower vaccine benefit.

I thought about that, but it seems like whatever changed must have happened nearly instantaneously. Looking at the plot, it's a rather pronounced step change.

DenisM 1673 days ago

Reduce deaths? yes. But it tells us nothing about reducing spread.

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

galaxyLogic 1672 days ago

Good point.

Theoretically it could be possible that non-vaccinated infect fewer others than those who are vaccinated -- because unvaccinated more readily die after which they can not keep on infecting others. Nevertheless the goal is not to reduce infections but to reduce deaths and serious illness.

Here's an article which says that vaccination does reduce the risk of you infecting others. But this effect diminishes over time quite fast. That would seem like a good reason to get the booster.

DenisM 1672 days ago

> Nevertheless the goal is not to reduce infections but to reduce deaths and serious illness.

Whose goal? There is no shortage of people and organizations that are trying to force others to vaccinate “to prevent spread”. As your link shows the effectives of this is dubious.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

galaxyLogic 1672 days ago

> Whose goal?

My goal. I assume also your goal. And I assume people who try to "prevent spread" do so because spread of Covid-19 causes death and serious illness.

There have been 799,276 Covid-deaths in the US during the short period it's been around. Almost 800k people dead. Dead. If there was no "Covid spread" those people would not have caught Covid and thus would not have died because of it.

To reduce Covid deaths and serious Covid illness you must try to reduce its spread. If you stop it from spreading you stop it from killing people.

0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/gibraltar/

twofornone 1673 days ago

That paper is purely based on a model with [optimistic] assumed effectiveness and transmission parameters. It does not consider any actual infection statistics to come to its conclusion.

I'd love to see a paper explaining why some two months ago cases were already at or approaching record highs in countries with 70-90% vaccination rates, like UK, Israel, multiple EU nations...Gibraltar is particularly interesting because it has a nearly 100% vaccination rate, yet the case rate continues to climb unabated. [0]

People are treating these vaccines as though they were sacrosanct and unquestionable. Meanwhile the pandemic continues nearly unabated and no, this is not a "pandemic among the vaccinated", despite the fervor with which certain interests have attempted to paint such a picture. Public UK data suggests that vaccinated individuals may actually be more likely to be infected some months after their second doses. But no one is talking about that...

1. https://vladtepesblog.com/2021/10/10/is-this-ade-uk-data-sho... - yes, it's a blog, but it links to the data for you to review yourself. Check the last two columns of the chart on page 13.

This wouldn't be the first time that humans failed to solve a complex problem, I don't see why its so difficult for people to accept this possibility.

d0gsg0w00f 1673 days ago

Right, and this is why I have a problem with employer enforced mandates even though I'm vaccinated. The government taking away your right to work and support yourself based on some pretty flimsy data about the public good for something that should be a personal decision. Fact is, the vaccinated really shouldn't be losing much sleep over the unvaccinated other than maybe those dirty people might be taking up an ICU bed when I need one.

Ok fine, you want to enforce this: then just man up and imprison the unvaccinated using force. Don't hide behind employers and make them do your dirty work. Taking away a person's right to work is only 2 degrees separated from making them dependent on the state. It's a fear tactic they're hoping they won't ever have to enforce--not that much different than holding a gun to someone's head.

At the end of the day you're never going to be able make someone do something against their will. People who go against the mainstream will already suffer social consequences. If you have to do something with government resources then beef up the ICU beds .

While you're at it you may as well make it illegal to work if you're a smoker, or obese, or if you've ever had a car accident because those things may lead to eating up an ICU bed for some other person that stands on a higher moral ground.

Comparing failure to vaccinate with smoking or obesity are off the mark because it is not easy to quit smoking or overcome obesity. If there was an effective, cheap, safe and instant cure for smoking addiction or obesity and people refused to take it, societies would indeed by highly critical of those people consuming hospital resources.

Eelongate 1673 days ago

Nah, it's really easy to never smoke. I've been not smoking my entire life. I think his comparison is dead on the mark. If people who choose to be unvaccinated can be vilified for taking up hospital beds, then so can people who choose to pick up a smoking habit.

sushsjsuauahab 1673 days ago

It is not easy for me to vaccinate myself when I've had adverse reactions in the past.

Sorry to hear that, but that's a small minority of people. And I hope you've talked to your doctor about it --- we're lucky with COVID to have a variety of vaccines with different makeups to choose from.

bluefox 1673 days ago

You told sushsjsuauahab that he/she is a small minority of people. I'm sure that makes sushsjsuauahab and others who have their own (gasp) reasons not to get the vaccine feel better... See, it's this one-size-fits-all dictum backed by sanctions that's the problem. The vaccines help prevent sickness, but government policies hurt healthy people.

To mRNA vaccines?

> because it is not easy to quit smoking or overcome obesity

Eat... less?

I lean heavily into personal responsibility, but even I don't tell people struggling with addiction "have you tried NOT taking it?"

refurb 1673 days ago

Why does it have to be easy?

The current situation in Auckland, New Zealand provides very good evidence of vaccines reducing spread, though I don't think it has been written up in a paper yet.

We've had < 10,000 confirmed COVID cases in Auckland so the vast majority of the 2M population cannot have natural immunity. Behavior restrictions have been relaxed gradually over the last two months, yet the COVID case numbers (which were increasing) have actually leveled out at an R value of around 1. Vaccination is the only thing that could plausibly have reduced that infection rate.

Ekaros 1673 days ago

I wonder if seasonal variations have a effect. New Zealand is closing on summer, which my understanding was less bad in Europe.

Auckland's climate is pretty mild year-round.

Seasonality is a confounder, for sure, but I haven't heard any experts claim it as an explanation here.

jschwartzi 1673 days ago

In my state the vaccination rate is above 70% and the hospitalization rate has decoupled from the positive rate. The spike this winter ended in October whereas last winter it didn’t end until January. We’ve been on a downward trend even with shows and restaurants open and people having parties. So I would cite that as evidence the vaccine is protecting our population.

twofornone 1673 days ago

Or perhaps people are acquiring immunity through contact since the majority of cases have been known to be mild or asymptomatic since the pandemic started? And/or the virus is mutating into less infectious substrains?

Cold/flu viruses come and go. This virus will do the same. People will see it as evidence that the vaccines worked when in reality the pandemic very likely would have ended without them, yet here we are facing mandates...

cik2e 1673 days ago

I like this site for COVID data: https://covidactnow.org/

At a glance, infection rates and vaccination rates seem to be uncorrelated at best.

boc 1673 days ago

Current vaccines are non-sterilizing and therefore do not effectively stop the spread/transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) but is very effective at preventing the disease the virus causes (COVID-19). Initially the vaccines were able to keep viral loads low enough to meaningfully stop the spread, but the Delta variant resulting in far higher viral loads and removed that advantage compared to the original virus.

Arguing that the infection rates are uncorrelated is one thing, but serious illness and death is what we really need to care about with this virus. And for those metrics, vaccination is highly-correlated to better outcomes.

maigret 1673 days ago

That’s a common error, reused by antivaxxers. They are indeed because even what we consider relatively high infection levels are just enough to get 15-20% of the population infected per year. This is less than the part of unvaccinated people. That’s why having a very high vaccination rate is critical to kill COVID. Above this threshold you’d see the infection rate affected. Still, vaccinations are good strategies because they still reduce infections, or at least severe forms of it. Without it in many countries would have been totally saturated by Delta.