[viraptor]

> so it's not like Covid vaccine has a provable lessen the symptoms effect.

That's not the result that can be inferred from seeing unvaccinated people having no symptoms. In other words, people having no symptoms without vaccine or even having side effects from the vaccine itself does not disprove the statistic of vaccinated people having lesser symptoms on average.

[Ygg2]

Ok, but how do you differentiate asymptomatic carriers from vaccine effectiveness?

And afaik the mRNA vaccines were fast tracked, leaving room for possible errors.

[viraptor]

When testing and during early phases of deployment you'd track a sample of different cohorts more closely. Either explicitly by retesting a selected group, or analysing data from groups sampled anyway (many emergency doctors got a weekly test).

So as Usual in studies - through data collection, statistics, and correcting for bias in cohorts.

> afaik the mRNA vaccines were fast tracked, leaving room for possible errors

There's already lots of information about the details of what the fast tracking meant. I would recommend reading some to understand it better than your summary.

[Ygg2]

> There's already lots of information about the details of what the fast tracking meant.

I just read this: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-tra...

> The same presentation slide describes “Other benefits likely uncertain at approval and only clearer after the vaccine is used” to include the vaccine’s “long term protection,” “prevention of infection (asymptomatic cases),” and “prevention of virus transmission in the community - needs specific studies post-approval necessary to show.”

This implies they only checked it reduces symptoms in affected. Transmission prevention and long term immunity would be tested at later point.

So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated? Weren't vaccines supposed to contain its spread?

When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.

[viraptor]

> When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.

Please double check yours. There's a few common vaccines that people assume are "life long" but actually have a recommendation for boosters when you're an adult.

But yeah, in general the length of immunity differs, some vaccines work forever, some not. It's a limitation of what we can produce.

> So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated?

Multiple reasons. Prevent many deaths, lower symptoms, make recover easier, lower emergency departments load, lower transmission, etc. None of those were going to be perfect or work independently of people's behaviours.

[wolrah]

> When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.

Which works for some diseases. Others are only effective for shorter periods of time and/or against specific variants. The flu vaccine should be a familiar example to most people, needing periodic refreshers that are most effective against certain variants and not others.

It's also worth noting that the diseases that are treated as a "one and done" are generally those where you're unlikely to be exposed in day to day life for a variety of reasons.

[tekknik]

The flu vaccine and mRNA vaccines are very different. One is much more proven than the other. How do you reconcile the heart issues some had?

[panopticon]

The risk of myocarditis is substantially higher in COVID infections than COVID vaccinations.

Yes, it's unfortunate that the vaccine has side effects. But if you're seriously concerned about the risk of heart problems the vaccine is the safer bet.

[etchalon]

Every vaccine has side effects in a limited number of people.

Even the flu vaccine has known potential side effects

[lern_too_spel]

The point was to reduce hospitalizations, which was a measured outcome. You can't let everyone get infected if the hospitals won't be able to handle it.

The flu vaccine also does not grant long term immunity, but it has the same utility for public health.

[tekknik]

That was the point of isolation, to control the spread of the virus to not impact our hospitals. Vaccinations were first meant to eradicate, then when that didn’t happen it was to reduce transmission, then when that didn’t work it was to reduce the symptoms (which still doesn’t work).

[lern_too_spel]

The measured outcomes in the initial vaccine trials were over 90% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths. That is what was known for sure at the time vaccines were rolled out. A reduction in transmission would have been a nice additional benefit, but the trials were not set up to measure if it had happened.

Since you got such a basic fact wrong, you might consider what else you've misunderstood and why. Then you can take steps to correct it.

[jacobolus]

> When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.

Most vaccines are broadly comparable to the Covid vaccines in this respect, requiring multiple doses over months or years and often not entirely blocking infection. They are not perfect at preventing infections or symptoms in all recipients. Indeed, many important vaccines are significantly less effective than the Covid vaccines. Then consider the many viral diseases (e.g. human coronaviruses) that we do not yet have any vaccine for at all: this is because making vaccines is hard, not because we aren’t trying.

Every virus and every vaccine is different, but in broad strokes the way vaccines work is by building herd immunity in the population, enough to drop the reproductive number of a virus below 1 and prevent exponential spread through the population. (Of course, they also protect people individually. But you are the only person vaccinated you end up much less protected than if everyone else also gets vaccinated.)

Covid is a particularly tricky case because (a) we were starting from limited knowledge of a novel virus and designing vaccines based on new technology, (b) this virus has mutated quickly over time, evading antibodies from vaccines and past infections, (c) this virus, especially later variants, is exceptionally contagious making it hard to drop the reproductive number of the virus below 1 by any single intervention (including vaccines, masking, mass testing, ...), (d) Covid is a very serious diseases especially for the elderly, more than an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu.

> what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated

The point was saving literally tens of millions of lives.

[ericmay]

Easy, you recognize that with infectious viruses some people will get infected and not show symptoms, and some percentage of people will get sick even though they are vaccinated. This is well known in medicine and in everyday popular culture.

The confusion here is your own misunderstanding.

- previously deleted this content because it was too aggressive and condescending but adding back since another replied before I could modify -

> The other issue is that like other vaccine skeptics if you have a particular issue with mRNA (which doesn’t make sense given you don’t know anything about vaccines, or the differences between mRNA vaccines or other vaccines or even how vaccines work) you could have taken a non-mRNA vaccine.

[base698]

> The other issue is that like other vaccine skeptics if you have a particular issue with mRNA (which doesn’t make sense given you don’t know anything about vaccines, or the differences between mRNA vaccines or other vaccines or even how vaccines work) you could have taken a non-mRNA vaccine.

The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.

It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.

Even more puzzling is why China and other countries haven't adopted mRNA vaccines.

[ericmay]

> Even more puzzling is why China and other countries haven't adopted mRNA vaccines.

Why do you find this puzzling? What countries haven’t adopted mRNA vaccines and what do you mean by “adopted”?

> The J&J vaccine was pulled pretty early due to the clotting issues and AZ was not available in the US.

And Johnson&Johnson is still available now in the US. They pulled it out of an abundance of caution and because there were other vaccines on the market. If Johnson & Johnson was the only vaccine on the market it wouldn’t have been pulled because of the risk of clotting.

-edit-

This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.

> It was puzzling to me early on why they'd make a vaccine with a single protein (the case with both mRNA and viral vector vaccine). It seemed obvious a whole virus would have many more opportunities for your body to generate an immune response.

Why would this be puzzling? Can you share some scientific resources that describe the differences in using a “whole virus” versus “part of a virus” and how that affects vaccine effectiveness? I’d like to read the same materials you did.

[base698]

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-reveal-key-differences-i...

> This also doesn’t take into account risk analysis. Extreme likelihood of contracting a highly contagious disease with unknown severity and unknown long-term effects versus the unlikelihood of a blood cloth from Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. Obviously any casual analysis would show that you’d get the vaccine.

There is a saying in aviation: if it hasn't been out five years you're a test pilot. How did you calculate the unknowns of using a vaccine never deployed widely in humans?

In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle.

The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.

[ericmay]

> There is a saying in aviation: if it hasn't been out five years you're a test pilot. How did you calculate the unknowns of using a vaccine never deployed widely in humans?

We routinely widely deploy vaccines. The flu vaccine, vaccines for newborns and children, etc.

> In addition there are other ways to avoid the virus, myself I moved to a less populated area. My interactions in public were limited to one about 3 people. Never personally contracted covid until about two months ago. In addition pretty early on it was obvious the high risks were to the obese and elderly. You could have prioritized a more healthy lifestyle

Alternatively I’ve been vaccinated, and boosted twice, and maintain a health lifestyle and haven’t contracted COVID-19 that I’m aware of while living in a city, interacting with other people, and traveling. These are just anecdotes and don’t generalize. There are also people who are “perfectly healthy” who get severely ill, some people who didn’t know they had an underlying medical condition who died, and people who were otherwise healthy suffering from long COVID. I’m surprised it’s not very clear to you here that you are not in control. Rural areas were some of the hardest hit because of vaccine skepticism.

“It’s ok for me to smoke cigarettes because so and so smoked a pack a day and lived to be 100”

> The risk calculation for someone under about sixty doesn't seem that straight forward, and hedges primarily on how scared you are of the virus vs an industry that routinely kills it's customers and lies about it.

It seems pretty straightforward. You get a vaccine and then you most likely don’t get COVID, or if you do the severity of the virus is typically not as bad as it could be, or you don’t get the vaccine and you roll the dice for no real reason.

> https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-reveal-key-differences-i...

Ok but what is puzzling about this?