[xienze]

> Vaccines reduce spread because of lower viral load. Also reduces severity.

And yet, case counts have never been higher than now, a year into vaccines and infections.

Ah, but Omicron you may say. Well doesn’t that imply that the vaccine isn’t terribly effective against that strain? Yet the answer seem to be “just keep getting more injections of the same vaccine formulation.”

Perhaps one or more of our fundamental assumptions are wrong. Maybe the vaccines aren’t actually that effective (Israel is on dose number 4 within a calendar year…). Or maybe PCR tests cranked to an absurd number of cycles aren’t actually detecting what we think they are (an actual infection versus some dead cells in the nasal passage).

[MiroF]

> maybe PCR tests cranked to an absurd number of cycles

c'mon, you're at least a year behind the conspiracy theory state of the art, we're on vaccine infertility now.

[mardifoufs]

I guess you should email the NYT and ask them to stop peddling conspiracy theories:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...?

[MiroF]

> Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. “I’m shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive,” she said.

I'm a bit confused by this article. AFAIK PCR tests are only reporting a positive at 35 cycles. The author of the article is correct that it is run for 40 cycles often, but this is only because a positive between 36-40 cycles indicates "unclear result" and the test is repeated with a different assay targeting a different component of the virus. Positive is only reported at 35 cycles max.

This should not pick up any "dead cells", it will pick up viral mRNA. There is a concern over picking up low loads, but the mRNA is still there.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

Even in omicron, vaccinated people are less likely to catch Covid than unvaccinated people. It can be simultaneously true that vaccinated people are less likely to have Covid and that Covid vases are rising due to a highly infectious variant.