[amalcon]

You said:

> its the same for every other infectious disease without a vaccine.

To which someone responded:

> But we have a vaccine.

To which you responded:

> Not for omicron, or the next variant, or the one after that.

That last statement is incorrect. Yes, you can still get and spread the virus if you have received the vaccine. The same is true for almost all vaccines; they do not cease to be vaccines because of this.

I do support calling out the hyperbole of other people in the thread. Accepting that everyone likely will get the virus at some point is not remotely the same thing as eugenics. It does not become OK to make dangerous misstatements, if not outright lies, in the service of doing that.

For what it's worth, a little more precision (e.g. "every other infectious disease without a sterilizing vaccine") would have served you well here.

[restingrobot]

>That last statement is incorrect.

Actually it is correct. The mRNA vaccine types target specific spike proteins of the virus. So no we do not currently have a vaccine, so the previous vaccines actually offer quite little protection, (other than any coincidental overlap of proteins). But my statement about it being the same for every other infectious disease is not false. If you have ever had the flu in your life, (or different corona virus cold for that matter), you have some degree of immunity from COVID-19. Just like if you received the vaccine you have some degree of immunity from omicron and future variants.

[amalcon]

So, I was trying to be charitable and assume you were simply being imprecise. I now believe you are intentionally lying, though I dont know why.

"A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease."[0] "Vaccines can be prophylactic (to prevent or ameliorate the effects of a future infection by a natural or "wild" pathogen)..." [0]. This is simply the definition of a vaccine. The mRNA vaccines do provide a substantial prophylactic amelioration of the symptoms of Omicron; this is simply an empirical fact[1]. Therefore we do have a vaccine against Omicron. It does not make the slightest difference whether the vaccine was developed for a slightly different disease.

[0]- wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine

[1]- first duckduckgo result: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-omicron-variant-p... but there's plenty of evidence, of which even a cursory review will lead you to the conclusion that the mRNA vaccines help a lot.

[restingrobot]

First of all, yes your definition of a vaccine is fine, but it doesn't negate what I said. Vaccines serve as a way to "train" your immune system to fight a specific thing by historically providing a weakened or impotent version that is easy to kill. However, mRNA vaccines are a much different methodology and can be very very specific on targeting, by creating individual spike proteins. However, they fail to provide significant protection against mutation in some cases.

The vaccines helped in the way that they prevented the virus from being able to replicate and cause serious illness, your immune system had to still figure out how to kill the thing on its own. So the vaccines on their own did not provide you with immunity, (not even close the level of historic, or "perfect" vaccines do), they did help train your immune system to kill the virus. That is how they are helpful for the symptoms of omicron not the spread. Because the spike proteins that were effective for alpa/delta are less effective for Omicron, it is still causing disease. Again, because your system has most likely already fought off the Alpha and Delta strains, you are unlikely to develop serious illness if you have natural immunity or have been vaccinated.

There is no "lying" here. And your sources of wiki-pedia vaccine definition and a CBS news article are not disproving anything that I have stated.

[amalcon]

You have said two things that are false, one of them repeatedly after being corrected, with evidence. This is lying (and not very effective lying at that).

First, you said that we have no vaccine against Omicron. We do. Your explanation of how vaccines work is... not wrong, per se, but not particularly helpful either. I know how vaccines work; I don't know your credentials but I would say I know better than your average HN user (and less than your average infectious disease researcher) for various reasons.

Your characterization of historic vaccines is not correct at all. They are very rarely "perfect", and no epidemiologist would refer to all historical vaccines in that way. Indeed, almost nothing in medicine is considered "perfect", vaccine or no. Smallpox and polio vaccines are very highly effective against basically everything to do with the disease. Other popular vaccines such as those for Hepatitis B, Pertussis, and the already mentioned Influenza have very high failure rates -- many greater than 50%.

The Influenza vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization for influenza by about 40%, which is substantially less effective than 3-dose Pfizer against Omicron. That vaccine saves at least thousands of lives each year[0]. Those vaccines are vaccines against influenza.

It's no different for the mRNA and adenovirus vaccines that we use for COVID, because the definition of a vaccine has nothing to do with the content of the biological prep: only with the effect it causes (increased immune response). The COVID vaccines (be it Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca, Sinovax, or otherwise) factually do produce an increased immune response against Omicron, and they therefore are vaccines against Omicron. You even acknowledge that the vaccines help train your immune system to kill the virus, which is literally the only requirement for something to be a vaccine.

The second false statement is that "the previous vaccines offer quite little protection". If you had qualified this as "quite little protection against infection" or "quite little protection against spreading the virus", it would have been accurate, but you did not. The previous vaccines offer considerable protection against three things you should definitely care about: severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death. That they provide little protection against some other things you care about is interesting, but not the full story. Leaving this out is misleading, but I am willing to accept that it was accidental.

Anyway, I'm essentially done here. Feel free to respond if you like, and don't take my non-response as agreement.

[0]- https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/vaccineeffect.htm

[restingrobot]

You are trying to argue semantics and claim that I am maliciously lying.

>Your characterization of historic vaccines is not correct at all.

Please point out exactly what I said that is not correct.

>It's no different for the mRNA and adenovirus vaccines that we use for COVID, because the definition of a vaccine has nothing to do with the content of the biological prep: only with the effect it causes (increased immune response)

This is semantic argument. You are saying that because the outcome of the vaccine fits the definition of the word vaccine that we have a designated Omicron vaccine. This on its face is patently ridiculous. We do not have a vaccine for omicron, and if the current vaccines provided sufficient protection, why is Pfizer currently working on a new one[0]? Granted, they have not yet reported the results of the study, but the fact that they are even doing a study to determine variant needs, proves my original point.

>The second false statement is that "the previous vaccines offer quite little protection". If you had qualified this as "quite little protection against infection" or "quite little protection against spreading the virus", it would have been accurate, but you did not.

I did qualify my point here:

>The the current vaccines are not effective at preventing the spread of omicron.

and here:

>That is how they are helpful for the symptoms of omicron not the spread.

It seems that you chose to change the context of our discussion to call me a liar.

[0] - https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...