[edmundsauto]

The vaccine doesn't stop transmission but it does reduce risk of passing the virus along by about 20%. Similarly, it does reduce the chance of getting infected by about 20%. This is for Omicron transmission in closely packed prisons - a reasonable "worst case context" that would maximize interaction and transmission. It was also looking at vaccine formulations before the latest booster, so in a free person's normal life the protective effect is higher.

Further complicating things, the more vaccines and boosters you get, the more protection. But that protection wanes pretty quickly over time. You also appear to have more protection if you have been vaccinated and recently infected, although as the article states, this is not without risk itself of long term problems.

The tldr is you don't want to get covid, vaccines help that, boosters help that. Previous infections help. But they all wane pretty quickly over time, so if we don't want to get twice yearly boosters until eternity, we'd better increase our efforts to beat this thing - using vaccines is one important tool, even if they aren't perfect.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02328-0

[mwint]

I think someone needs to point out that 20% is a very different number than many people were sold a vaccine under.

How did we drop so far from the 90+% “effectiveness” claims at the beginning? Feels like there needs to be a massive postmortem on the approval process here.

[edmundsauto]

Can you find any authoritative sources that claimed 90+% effectiveness? I'm not doubting you at all, but I don't trust my own memory of events and constructive conversations depend on concrete examples. Also, initial claims would have been on short-term evidence (long term didn't exist back then) and was before Delta/Omicron - the initial virus prevention rate may have been way higher.

My ask is for a scientific source that made that claim, not a politician promoting them. I totally agree the messaging was confusing, but public health is really really hard to do and it's not possible to message things perfectly, especially given the general environment in the US with 40% of the country unwilling to accept that a dangerous pandemic needed a response.

[lps41]

“Effectiveness” was a measurement of reduction in severe infection, not reduction of transmissibility. Nobody ever claimed there was a 90% reduction in transmission.

[JPLeRouzic]

In the original link there is this:

Al-Aly and two other researchers looked at the health records of 250,000 veterans who had been infected once with COVID; 36,000 who had been infected twice, and 2,000 who had been infected three times.

Using a “hazard ratio” — a measure of how often bad things happen to one group compared to another — the researchers found that the risk of heart, brain, kidney and blood complications all increased with each subsequent infection.

If I were a political leader I would be frightened:

What will happen in terms of healthcare costs after 10 years?

[xupybd]

Do many political leaders care more than one election cycle out?

[cheaprentalyeti]

More importantly, what happens when the gatekeeers can't block news items like this interview with the former head of the CDC any more, talking about how the US helped fund the virus and covered up the fact? [0]

The same people who were lying about treatments, and running faudulent scientific studies like the surgisphere studies [1]

[1] Bugs me a lot, because there was no investigation as to why they did it, and no followup examination of other studies that I beleive were also rigged in an only slightly more sophisticated fashion. Noone looked at why they faked the first one, and noone thought to followup on the Recover trial knowing that someone faked the first one.

You can go to a physical copy of the 2017 Physician's Desk Reference at a small town library branch and look up the safe and unsafe dosages for for HCQ, from before the "gatekeepers" started censoring and altering everything Ministry of Truth style, and if you do you'll see that the Recover Trial authors were using unsafe dosages on late-stage patients and pretending that meant something it didn't.

It also bugged me that noone followed up on the other entire drug _class_ Sugisphere "proved" didn't help for Covid: ACE inhibitors. Or how they remained not part of the standard of care even after subsequent studies showed the Surgisphere study on that wasn't just fabricated but dead wrong. [2] (slashdot article on surgisphere trial) [3] (original tctmed paper) [4] Here's a paper I found the last time I did research on the subject to see if it was followed up on, it's from a crazy nutso conspiracy alt-site called "Nature."

So when everyone finds out that a) they made it, b) they lied about it, c) they lied about treatments, d) they lied about the vaccines, and e) damn, these health costs are kinda too high... there's going to be an immense crisis. On top of it, the people we helped fund to make the virus are a couple of allied nasty dictatorships, one of which has killed tens of thousands of civilians in a neighboring country in a shooting war that's going on now that we're still helping to fund because we made ourselves dependent on them for energy.

I'd link that but stopgas seems to be down or I have the wrong link.

[0]: https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/former-cdc-di...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23403754

[2]: https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/08/04/1815220/retracte...

[3]: https://www.tctmd.com/news/retracted-over-fraud-concerns-sur...

[4]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-020-00221-6

[jjeaff]

That article doesn't come anywhere close to confirming that the virus was man made. Redfield just complains that Fauci didn't want to spend resources investigating the lab leak theory. For which there are a myriad of possible reasons.

[GauntletWizard]

Absolutely, the only things that the documents prove are that Faucci was involved in using US funds to pay Chinese universities to perform gain of function research, and that he covered it up.

The most generous interpretation is more than grounds to charge him with treason.

[dham]

This thing will be here forever. Won't we eventually evolve to not have bad side effects? Maybe the nasal vaccine will be better. Maybe sinus rinses become as common as brushing teeth? I don't know, but somethings going to have to give because we're all going to get this thing once a year for the rest of our lives.

I'm not trying to be the flu person either, but the flu does cause similar issues with the heart

[jjeaff]

Is there any real evidence that nasal rinse work? I use one of those battery powered cleaners, but just to clear out my sinuses.

[dham]

There are a few studies. Some are inconclusive, some say it helps shorten infection and prevent hospitalization, some say it doesn't do anything. It doesn't hurt so why not. I have bad allergies already. The virus is doing all its replication in the nose so if you can reduce particles there, it might be beneficial. I think some of the studies are using a little iodine so maybe that's needed instead of just salt.

[somat]

more that it(the virus) will evolve.

evolve into what? just ask your self what changes are needed to the virus that will maximize it's spread.

[taolegal]

Infection itself seems to reduce the risk reliably too. I suspect at a similar rate & more durably, especially considering that the vaccine only generates an immune response based on a single sub-unit of a protein. Versus infections where every protein is presented to the immune system.

I suspect the human body responding to that complete antigen is doing something much more complex & effective than an admittedly genius human invention. Perhaps we'd be wise to consider that even our best efforts are often (in ways we don't even understand) inferior to millions of years of evolution.