It's a fair critique. But when the Captain of an airplane I'm flying on tells me there's an emergency problem with the flaps, I don't ask him for text book evidence, I just look out at the wings and verify the problem.
The data you link says that unvaccinated people have 5x the risk of testing positive as vaccinated (no booster) as of October (Slightly higher for Pfizer, lower for J&J). I believe that's 80% efficacy. How do you get 10%?
Note also that this data is as of October 2021, so it's primarily looking at the efficacy against the Delta, whereas the original 90-whatever % claims were obviously the original virus.
Pfizer et al certainly weren't saying in March 2021 that "Pfizer provide 90-100% protection against COVID and all future variants" and I've never heard anyone suggest they thought that's what the claim was.
So, you cite data showing very high efficacy of the vaccine, and are like -- look at it in a few weeks!
Omicron is going to make it worse, but even unboosted folks in South Africa seem to enjoy about 30% efficacy against infection and much higher efficacy against hospitalization and death. But your gossip trumps the data, I guess...
No, Omicron making it worse is a fact that I already ceded..
but we have data that shows low (but still around 30%, not 10%) efficacy against infection with Omicron.. and still high efficacy (70%) against hospitalization and death.
But you say "has proven less than 10% effective" ... because you are making stuff up.
Further, it may be a mistake to assume South Africa predicts exactly what will happen here (30% fully vaccinated, nearly 0 boosted, 20% HIV incidence, vs. 60% fully vaccinated, 25% boosted, 0.3% HIV incidence).
The efficacy is pretty well proven to be > 90% at this point. Per your comment where you admit the number was pulled out of thin air:
> Anecdotal. You do not need to be a meteorologist to know when it's raining. Look outside.
I'll raise you this... where I am 100% of ICU cases are unvaccinated. Read that again 100%. And over 85% of hospitalizations. And before you say "see, 15% of them were breakthrough cases," please learn about base rates. 65% of the people here are vaccinated so to have only 15% of the hospital cases be vaccinated is even more conclusive.
Please, get out of your bubble. If you think it is 10%... or even 50%... or even 70% you need to do some serious introspection.
Please, actually "look outside"! Because if you spent more than 10 seconds actually looking outside, the efficacy is obvious.
Please do not cross into personal attack. That's against the site guidelines and just makes everything worse, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
I am vaccinated - I believe in the early vaccine's efficacy for stopping serious illness. They have saved many lives.
What I am saying here is that the vaccines were marketed as 90% effective for preventing infection. Was I misunderstanding what was being marketed to me all along?
Yes, you have misunderstood this all along, and that misunderstanding has already been pointed out to you in this thread[1]. It is effective at preventing COVID-19 infections, which you get after being infected with SARA-CoV-2. It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter.
> It never claimed to prevent infection of the latter.
We had some early data that looked like they were probably about ~70% effective for preventing infection, ~90% effective at preventing symptoms, and >95% effective at preventing severe illness.
These numbers are interesting, because they mean you have less of a chance of becoming infected, but a larger chance, if infected, of being an asymptomatic carrier. So it's difficult to predict the net effect on transmission (probably a benefit, but..)
Now for 2 doses of mRNA vaccine, our best guesses for omicron are more like ~??%, ~30%, and ~70% respectively. Offsetting it slightly is that it looks like omicron may be a bit less likely to cause severe illness at baseline. But, no matter what, this is a big setback.