Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by egg1 1606 days ago
No, the data from the first clinical trials for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines showed 95% efficacy against symptomatic infection. You had Fauci, Birx and countless other talking heads in the media implying or stating outright that the vaccines conferred sterilizing immunity.

Of course, we know now that the variants have evolved some degree of immune escape, that the vaccines no longer prevent infection while still being effective against severe disease, but that's not what the "experts" originally claimed. It's disappointing to see the Hacker News crowd buying into the gaslighting that vaccines are only ever meant to prevent hospitalization. That was not the scientific consensus 2 years ago, and still isn't.
1 comments
_djo_ 1606 days ago
The scientific consensus, as summarised in this Nature article announcing the news, seems pretty clear on what was being looked at and that the trials focused on severe disease outcomes.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03166-8

link
parkingrift 1606 days ago
Nope. The Nature article was written well before the actual results and studies were released. The studies are unequivocally clear that the primary goal of the studies (at that time) were to measure prevention against symptomatic infection.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

link
_djo_ 1606 days ago
I don't understand what you're trying to claim, are you trying to say that the trial results were falsified? Because there's no other way your insistence on this makes sense. That journal article accurately reports on the findings of the Phase III trial, which did show spectacular success against the wild type.

In simple terms, had SARS-CoV-2 not mutated, and we were still dealing with the original wild type, then this pandemic would have been over months ago. They were that all-round effective.

The emergence of variants is what has caused the pandemic to continue, as many scientists warned. As I showed with the Nature article, general scientific consensus was optimistic but cautious and warned about waning immunity and variants.

You seem to think this is all some kind of gotcha, when it's really about adapting to a changing situation and an evasive virus.

link