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Which horse film is your favorite?
This poll is closed.
Black Beauty 2 1.06%
A Talking Pony!?! 4 2.13%
Mr. Hands 2x Apple Flavor 117 62.23%
War Horse 11 5.85%
Mr. Hands 54 28.72%
Total: 188 votes
[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

 
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haveblue
Aug 15, 2005



Toilet Rascal
They're talking about the difference between sterilizing and non-sterilizing immunity, if you want the official googleable terms

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droll
Jan 9, 2020

by Azathoth
Man, that reminds me when the vaccines were touted as being 90% effective at preventing transmission. Those were good times.

Oracle
Oct 9, 2004

droll posted:

Man, that reminds me when the vaccines were touted as being 90% effective at preventing transmission. Those were good times.

well they were that effective. Against the wild type. In studies at the time. Then mutations happened and efficacy was shown to wane after x months and welp.

Electric Wrigglies
Feb 6, 2015

Tiny Timbs posted:

Requiring proof of vaccination to work in person, travel, etc. were all approaches that at least implied the focus was on reducing transmission in public spaces and workplaces.

Nah, it was to increase vaccination rates to reduce workloads on medical systems.

mojo1701a
Oct 9, 2008

Oh, yeah. Loud and clear. Emphasis on LOUD!
~ David Lee Roth

Oracle posted:

well they were that effective. Against the wild type. In studies at the time. Then mutations happened and efficacy was shown to wane after x months and welp.

Wasn't that the whole point about Omicron being so worrying? We had separate VOC's come out in the meantime that we did slow transmission against.

I admit I find this stuff confusing and have no idea what to think half the time, other than I'm glad I got my booster booked for tomorrow.


Mr Luxury Yacht posted:

Which is a roundabout way of figuring that yes it reduces transmission in that within highly vaccinated people less of them are going to get it and spread it around.

There were also people who kept pushing on the "It was never tested in humans!" poo poo without realizing that while it was true at the time, we now have months of population-level studies that are way better than a lab study ever could be.

Nosre
Apr 16, 2002


Thanks for the education on sterilizing and non-sterilizing immunity, that's very good to know.

Definitely sounds like the testimony is not the bombshell the video claims it to be, though. Maybe some 'technically correct' aspects at most

Oracle
Oct 9, 2004

mojo1701a posted:

Wasn't that the whole point about Omicron being so worrying? We had separate VOC's come out in the meantime that we did slow transmission against.

I admit I find this stuff confusing and have no idea what to think half the time, other than I'm glad I got my booster booked for tomorrow.
omicron was worrying because mutations were making it escape the wild type vaccine even with the booster, yeah. Its why they started recommending second boosters (that and your protection waning after a few months).

Nosre posted:

Thanks for the education on sterilizing and non-sterilizing immunity, that's very good to know.

Definitely sounds like the testimony is not the bombshell the video claims it to be, though. Maybe some 'technically correct' aspects at most

As usual, antivaxxers gonna antivax.

mojo1701a
Oct 9, 2008

Oh, yeah. Loud and clear. Emphasis on LOUD!
~ David Lee Roth

Oracle posted:

omicron was worrying because mutations were making it escape the wild type vaccine even with the booster, yeah. Its why they started recommending second boosters (that and your protection waning after a few months).

I already had Covid in April after my first booster in January, so I'm hoping that the updated vaccine gives us a lot more protection against infection in general, given a good chunk of people have had a prior infection. That's how I always read the original boosters, is that they gave you additional antibodies temporarily but without targeting the spike proteins themselves, they were always going to be limited for that reason.

Oracle posted:

As usual, antivaxxers gonna antivax.

Maybe it's because I've been listening to a lot of Alex Jones lately (via Knowledge Fight, because like hell I'm listening to the man directly), but I'm so goddamned sick of "bombshell reports and testimonies" used by conspiracy theorists because they're almost always colossal duds that are misunderstood either intentionally or just flat-out made up. Like, if there really are amazing conspiracies, do you really think that the so-called proof would be so openly talked about? It's so sickening.

Oracle
Oct 9, 2004

mojo1701a posted:

I already had Covid in April after my first booster in January, so I'm hoping that the updated vaccine gives us a lot more protection against infection in general, given a good chunk of people have had a prior infection. That's how I always read the original boosters, is that they gave you additional antibodies temporarily but without targeting the spike proteins themselves, they were always going to be limited for that reason.
No, they all target the spike proteins, (the mRNA ones do anyway) the difference is the updated boosters target the mutations that were making omicron more contagious and immune evasive that the original recipe was missing.

quote:

Maybe it's because I've been listening to a lot of Alex Jones lately (via Knowledge Fight, because like hell I'm listening to the man directly), but I'm so goddamned sick of "bombshell reports and testimonies" used by conspiracy theorists because they're almost always colossal duds that are misunderstood either intentionally or just flat-out made up. Like, if there really are amazing conspiracies, do you really think that the so-called proof would be so openly talked about? It's so sickening.
The whole point of being a conspiracy theorist is to feel special and smarter than the 'sheeple' and being one of an elite few who can see through the bullshit to the REAL goings on that THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW!
Its basically a control issue. Because if this isn't a huge grand conspiracy, then nobody really knows wtf they're doing or how to fix it and that's a hell of a lot scarier than 'they know, they just don't wanna.'

mom and dad fight a lot
Sep 21, 2006

If you count them all, this sentence has exactly seventy-two characters.

Nosre posted:

Definitely sounds like the testimony is not the bombshell the video claims it to be, though. Maybe some 'technically correct' aspects at most

It's like telling someone at 1 AM "man, sure is cold tonight!" and they go "actually it's morning now" before chortling into the darkness.

Tiny Timbs
Sep 6, 2008

Electric Wrigglies posted:

Nah, it was to increase vaccination rates to reduce workloads on medical systems.

That doesn’t sound right. Proof of a negative test was often accepted in lieu of vaccination status, and in the US we had people like CDC Director Walensky telling us that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus.” Businesses were absolutely implementing these policies under the impression that vaccinated people would not transmit the virus.

NoDamage
Dec 2, 2000

Nosre posted:

Been seeing this type of stuff going around in the EU because of a (supposedly bad) hearing Pfizer just had there. Tweet is just one example, for reference:

https://twitter.com/rob_roos/status/1579759795225198593

Can anyone explain what exactly they're mad about? I seriously don't understand. If the vaccine prevents you from getting infected in the first place, obviously it is preventing further transmission, and obviously it is also helping others :psyduck:
This is just anti-vaxx nonsense. As you said, if you prevent infection you also prevent transmission, you don't need to "test" for it separately. That being said, multiple studies on household transmission have found that being vaccinated reduces the odds of transmission if you do get a breakthrough infection. So even if it wasn't an explicit goal of the original trial, being vaccinated does indeed help protect others.


Electric Wrigglies posted:

The vaccine goal was to reduce mortality and incidence of serious sickness, it does this by helping the body respond to an infection effectively, not by preventing any infection in the first place.
Nah, that's where we ended up after Omicron but that's not where we started. The primary endpoint of the Pfizer trial was indeed protection against infection, the secondary endpoint was protection against severe disease:

quote:

The first primary end point was the efficacy of BNT162b2 against confirmed Covid-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose in participants who had been without serologic or virologic evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection up to 7 days after the second dose; the second primary end point was efficacy in participants with and participants without evidence of prior infection. Confirmed Covid-19 was defined according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) criteria as the presence of at least one of the following symptoms: fever, new or increased cough, new or increased shortness of breath, chills, new or increased muscle pain, new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, diarrhea, or vomiting, combined with a respiratory specimen obtained during the symptomatic period or within 4 days before or after it that was positive for SARS-CoV-2 by nucleic acid amplification–based testing, either at the central laboratory or at a local testing facility (using a protocol-defined acceptable test).

Major secondary end points included the efficacy of BNT162b2 against severe Covid-19. Severe Covid-19 is defined by the FDA as confirmed Covid-19 with one of the following additional features: clinical signs at rest that are indicative of severe systemic illness; respiratory failure; evidence of shock; significant acute renal, hepatic, or neurologic dysfunction; admission to an intensive care unit; or death. Details are provided in the protocol.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

Gio
Jun 20, 2005


Electric Wrigglies posted:

Nah, it was to increase vaccination rates to reduce workloads on medical systems.

This is one hell of a retcon.

There was explicit messaging from the CDC that vaccinated people spread COVID less, which was used to rationalize vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. There were people ITT late last summer arguing that breakthrough cases were rare. I can’t tell you how many times I heard family, friends, coworkers (and posts) etc. imply that the unvaccinated were the reason Delta surged.

Here in MI we were inundated with PSAs that emphasized vaccination was to protect your community, with testimonials from kids saying they were getting vaccinated to protect their grandparents.

Unless you think the implication was, “I’m getting vaccinated so there’s a hospital bed available for grams grams.”

BIG-DICK-BUTT-FUCK
Jan 26, 2016

by Fluffdaddy
It seems like the vaccine will soon be more risky than beneficial. Not to say it's especially risky to receive but more and more people are saying that it offers no protection for them

I think the efficacy rates obtained in a laboratory under optimal conditions just wont ever get replicated in real life

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






NoDamage posted:

The primary endpoint of the Pfizer trial was indeed protection against infection, the secondary endpoint was protection against severe disease:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577
This is incorrect. The endpoint was protection against COVID-19, the disease. Not against infection itself. An infection with SARS-CoV-2 does not necessarily lead to contracting the disease and as such protection against infection was never a stated goal.

Electric Wrigglies
Feb 6, 2015

Gio posted:

This is one hell of a retcon.

Unless you think the implication was, “I’m getting vaccinated so there’s a hospital bed available for grams grams.”

It was literally this. Discussion in the earliest days of the pandemic was about methods and techniques to reduce the hospital loads to reduce collatoral health harm from overloaded medical systems. Lockdowns were not to get to pre-covid but to give space for medical systems and population health policy to adjust to the new norm of covid being endemic.

From the earliest days of the vaccine, the language around covid from WHO etc has been that we have to get used to it, live with and unfortunately mitigate but tolerate an ongoing health strain due to Covid - best minimized if everyone has an appropriate vaccine and educating the public on hygine habits conducive to reduced spread (masks when sick, wash your hands, etc). This was because it has always been known that Covid vaccination was not sterilizing like a small pox vaccine but individually protective against the worst outcomes (to be fair, it was also discussed that by happenstance, transmission was indeed reduced to varying degrees depending on strain, vaccine, etc and certainly language leaning into that was also used to motivate by some).

A lot of people that over-invested in the thought that the world would go back to pre-covid have mis-interpretated messaging to mean that pre-covid was ever at all possible after about March 2020. You see this manifested most clearly in people hand-wringing about <7 year olds not having the latest vaccines immediately rolled out for free (to prevent little disease spreading monsters at school bringing it home). The reality is that reduced spread by vaccinating <7 year olds is a complete non-consideration and there is more impactful things at a demographic level to spend money and energy on.

Another way to think about it is that the early flu vaccines were never touted as a protect the community measure. It is applied to old and medically vulnerable people as a priority because they are most at risk and consume the most resources to care for if they have a bad bout of flu. For the longest time, flu vaccines were not prioritized to public facing staff such as check out staff, gym instructors, etc that you would do if the vaccine's primary purpose was to reduce spread as opposed to protect the individual.

NoDamage
Dec 2, 2000

spankmeister posted:

This is incorrect. The endpoint was protection against COVID-19, the disease. Not against infection itself. An infection with SARS-CoV-2 does not necessarily lead to contracting the disease and as such protection against infection was never a stated goal.
I suppose it's true that asymptomatic infection would not be captured under their definition. Either way, prevention of severe disease was not the goal until Omicron came along and blew a hole through vaccine efficacy.

mojo1701a
Oct 9, 2008

Oh, yeah. Loud and clear. Emphasis on LOUD!
~ David Lee Roth

NoDamage posted:

I suppose it's true that asymptomatic infection would not be captured under their definition. Either way, prevention of severe disease was not the goal until Omicron came along and blew a hole through vaccine efficacy.

From my recollection, they said that while the original basic goals of a vaccine were to minimize risk of damage, hospitalization, and death, they found that the vaccines did quite a bit to prevent actual infection which supported the idea of vaccine passports because breakthrough infections were rare.

My question is: did this ever change? I know that the goal changed with the prevalence of Omicron, but was there ever evidence of substantial slowing of transmission?

Also, is there any data yet on that with bivalent boosters?

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010
I don't think it makes sense to talk about "the goal" of the COVID vaccine, because there wasn't just one goal. There were a lot of different organizations and people with a variety of hopes and goals for the COVID vaccine, many of which changed over the year it took to go from "oh poo poo, are we facing a major pandemic" to "we have a working vaccine", and then changed further over the next few months as the actual effectiveness of the vaccine became clear, as did the actual extent of vaccine refusal and the emergence of variants.

NoDamage
Dec 2, 2000
For sure there were multiple goals but I'm mostly referring to the original FDA guidance on vaccine development.

quote:

This guidance describes FDA’s current recommendations regarding the data needed to facilitate clinical development and licensure of vaccines to prevent COVID-19. There are currently no accepted surrogate endpoints that are reasonably likely to predict clinical benefit of a COVID-19 vaccine. Thus, at this time, the goal of development programs should be to pursue traditional approval via direct evidence of vaccine safety and efficacy in protecting humans from SARS-CoV-2 infection and/or clinical disease.

quote:

D. Efficacy Considerations
  • Either laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 or laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection is an acceptable primary endpoint for a COVID-19 vaccine efficacy trial.

    • Acute cases of COVID-19 should be virologically confirmed (e.g., by RT- PCR).
    • SARS-CoV-2 infection, including asymptomatic infection, can be monitored for and confirmed either by virologic methods or by serologic methods evaluating antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 antigens not included in the vaccine.

  • Standardization of efficacy endpoints across clinical trials may facilitate comparative evaluation of vaccines for deployment programs, provided that such comparisons are not confounded by differences in trial design or study populations. To this end, FDA recommends that either the primary endpoint or a secondary endpoint (with or without formal hypothesis testing) be defined as virologically confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection with one or more of the following symptoms:

    • Fever or chills
    • Cough
    • Fatigue
    • Muscle or body aches
    • Headache
    • New loss of taste or smell
    • Sore throat
    • Congestion or runny nose
    • Nausea or vomiting
    • Diarrhea

  • As it is possible that a COVID-19 vaccine might be much more effective in preventing severe versus mild COVID-19, sponsors should consider powering efficacy trials for formal hypothesis testing on a severe COVID-19 endpoint. Regardless, severe COVID-19 should be evaluated as a secondary endpoint (with or without formal hypothesis testing) if not evaluated as a primary endpoint. FDA recommends that severe COVID-19 be defined as virologically confirmed SARS- CoV-2 infection with any of the following:

    • Clinical signs at rest indicative of severe systemic illness (respiratory rate ≥ 30 per minute, heart rate ≥ 125 per minute, SpO2 ≤ 93% on room air at sea level or PaO2/FiO2 < 300 mm Hg)
    • Respiratory failure (defined as needing high-flow oxygen, noninvasive ventilation, mechanical ventilation or ECMO)
    • Evidence of shock (SBP < 90 mm Hg, DBP < 60 mm Hg, or requiring vasopressors)
    • Significant acute renal, hepatic, or neurologic dysfunction
    • Admission to an ICU
    • Death

  • SARS-CoV-2 infection (whether or not symptomatic) should be evaluated as a secondary or exploratory endpoint, if not evaluated as a primary endpoint.
Seems like they did originally recommend evaluating protection against infection but the Pfizer and Moderna trials didn't actually include that endpoint, presumably due to the difficulty of measuring asymptomatic infections?

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane
I support vaccine mandates not because I think they are helpful in preventing transmission but because I believe anti-vaxxers are horrific assholes who peddle bullshit that kills people, and I hate them. May their nights be long and their days be sour.

EDIT: To be slightly less... truculent, I think we have to remember also that all the decisions made during the pandemic were made with imperfect information under difficult circumstances. Yes, I do wish high-quality masks had taken a higher precedence over mandating vaccines, and I do believe it was absolutely ridiculous and deadly to say "if you're vaccinated you don't need to wear a mask any more." But I also understand that these were flawed people making decisions with flawed information, trying to do their best given the situation at hand.

Frankly, I think we should go back to "vaccination recommended, masking mandatory in public spaces." I will never understand how a society that decided covering your funtime bits was mandatory, and wearing dress shoes and neckties was classy and good, decided masks for the purposes of public health was the hill to die on.

PT6A fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Oct 12, 2022

Gio
Jun 20, 2005


Electric Wrigglies posted:

It was literally this. Discussion in the earliest days of the pandemic was about methods and techniques to reduce the hospital loads to reduce collatoral health harm from overloaded medical systems. Lockdowns were not to get to pre-covid but to give space for medical systems and population health policy to adjust to the new norm of covid being endemic.

From the earliest days of the vaccine, the language around covid from WHO etc has been that we have to get used to it, live with and unfortunately mitigate but tolerate an ongoing health strain due to Covid - best minimized if everyone has an appropriate vaccine and educating the public on hygine habits conducive to reduced spread (masks when sick, wash your hands, etc). This was because it has always been known that Covid vaccination was not sterilizing like a small pox vaccine but individually protective against the worst outcomes (to be fair, it was also discussed that by happenstance, transmission was indeed reduced to varying degrees depending on strain, vaccine, etc and certainly language leaning into that was also used to motivate by some).

A lot of people that over-invested in the thought that the world would go back to pre-covid have mis-interpretated messaging to mean that pre-covid was ever at all possible after about March 2020. You see this manifested most clearly in people hand-wringing about <7 year olds not having the latest vaccines immediately rolled out for free (to prevent little disease spreading monsters at school bringing it home). The reality is that reduced spread by vaccinating <7 year olds is a complete non-consideration and there is more impactful things at a demographic level to spend money and energy on.

Another way to think about it is that the early flu vaccines were never touted as a protect the community measure. It is applied to old and medically vulnerable people as a priority because they are most at risk and consume the most resources to care for if they have a bad bout of flu. For the longest time, flu vaccines were not prioritized to public facing staff such as check out staff, gym instructors, etc that you would do if the vaccine's primary purpose was to reduce spread as opposed to protect the individual.

I feel as though you ignored everything I said and are just continuing to invent this alternate history that matches with the present narrative.

Here is the CDC in June 2021 emphasizing that vaccination reduces the likelihood of infection by 91% and that those who do get infected are less likely to spread the disease to others.

quote:

A new CDC study finds the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) reduce the risk of infection by 91 percent for fully vaccinated people. This adds to the growing body of real-world evidence of their effectiveness. Importantly, this study also is among the first to show that mRNA vaccination benefits people who get COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated (14 or more days after dose 2) or partially vaccinated (14 or more days after dose 1 to 13 days after dose 2).

“COVID-19 vaccines are a critical tool in overcoming this pandemic,” said CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, MD, MPH. “Findings from the extended timeframe of this study add to accumulating evidence that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are effective and should prevent most infections — but that fully vaccinated people who still get COVID-19 are likely to have milder, shorter illness and appear to be less likely to spread the virus to others. These benefits are another important reason to get vaccinated.”

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-risks.html

Here is the Kaiser Family Foundation stating that breakthrough cases are extremely rare (July 30, 2021).

KFF posted:

After a review of the websites of all states and D.C. and other official sources, the new analysis found that half of states (25) report some data on COVID-19 breakthrough events. Within that, 15 states report these data on a weekly basis and one state reports on a daily basis, while the other nine report more infrequently. Overall, the data found that breakthrough events are extremely rare among those who are fully vaccinated, and that the vast majority of reported COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in U.S.

Funny enough, the CDC still states that those who are vaccinated are less likely to spread disease.

CDC posted:

COVID-19 vaccination significantly lowers your risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and death if you get infected. Compared to people who are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations, unvaccinated people are more likely to get COVID-19, much more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19, and much more likely to die from COVID-19.

Like all vaccines, COVID-19 vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing infection. Some people who are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations will get COVID-19 breakthrough infection. However, staying up to date with your COVID-19 vaccinations means that you are less likely to have a breakthrough infection and, if you do get sick, you are less likely to get severely ill or die. Staying up to date with COVID-19 vaccination also means you are less likely to spread the disease to others and increases your protection against new variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html

Main Paineframe posted:

I don't think it makes sense to talk about "the goal" of the COVID vaccine, because there wasn't just one goal. There were a lot of different organizations and people with a variety of hopes and goals for the COVID vaccine, many of which changed over the year it took to go from "oh poo poo, are we facing a major pandemic" to "we have a working vaccine", and then changed further over the next few months as the actual effectiveness of the vaccine became clear, as did the actual extent of vaccine refusal and the emergence of variants.

Yes, this is true. What is also true is that there was a very clear narrative shift as all those variables you listed changed over time, and the current narrative (“vaccines are meant to reduce hospital burden”) emerged after Omicron as it became clear vaccines did little to prevent against infection. You can see this shift when the CDC invented “Community Levels” and entirely deemphasized case counts and spread.

That is NOT what the primary narrative was in 2021, and the links I provided are just the first I found. There are plenty more.

Gio
Jun 20, 2005


Here’s one more, from the WHO, who you said stated emphasized individual over community protection as a benefit from vaccination in the early days of the vaccine:

quote:

Vaccination has been shown to contribute to reducing deaths and severe illness from COVID-19, and to reduce the transmission of COVID-19. Vaccinating as many people as possible and reducing the spread of disease is important. Vaccination of a significant proportion of the population also protects vulnerable people, including those who cannot receive vaccines, or the small proportion of people who might remain at risk of infection after vaccination. Failure to vaccinate widely also enables continued circulation of the virus and the generation of variants, including some that may pose a greater risk. Widespread vaccination has contributed to fewer people getting sick and being hospitalised, ultimately alleviating the burden of COVID-19 on healthcare systems. It has also helped allow the move back to normal societal functioning and the re-opening of economies.

DominoKitten
Aug 7, 2012

Another thing vaccine mandates do is stretch existing hospital resources further. If you can get the vast majority of the community vaccinated, then everybody as a pool is less likely to need as much hospitalization. Right now the King County vaccination stat dashboard says the risk of hospitalization is a five fold increase for vaccinated vs unvaccinated people...in the past 30 days. Before Omicron it was 30x, during the Omicron surge it was 12x.

Given what the pandemic has done to medical care and staffing, that's...highly valuable on a community wide basis for anybody who needs any medical care.

Charles 2 of Spain
Nov 7, 2017

I don't really think it matters what motivation you give for getting people vaccinated as long as it gets uptake as high as possible. The majority of the population aren't reading government websites to work out the exact benefits.

PT6A
Jan 5, 2006

Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Charles 2 of Spain posted:

I don't really think it matters what motivation you give for getting people vaccinated as long as it gets uptake as high as possible. The majority of the population aren't reading government websites to work out the exact benefits.

The motivation we should give to people on the fence about vaccinations is "if you get it, we shan't ship you to the loving Arctic, because obviously you don't care if you live or die."

"They didn't let me see my dying family member because I didn't have the vaccination!" Yeah, no poo poo! They don't want you spreading a loving plague to people dying of things that couldn't have been prevented. They don't want medical professionals getting even mildly ill! Get hosed!

Charles 2 of Spain
Nov 7, 2017

Eh, when I was volunteering those type of arguments would basically never work for people on the fence.

Tiny Timbs
Sep 6, 2008

"If you don't get vaccinated you will be fired" was pretty effective at my workplace, though I was briefly worried about some of the angrier right-wingers shooting up the place.

Jaxyon
Mar 7, 2016
I’m just saying I would like to see a man beat a woman in a cage. Just to be sure.

Charles 2 of Spain posted:

Eh, when I was volunteering those type of arguments would basically never work for people on the fence.

Yeah convincing people their strongly held and non-factual beliefs are wrong is rarely easy or satisfying. It involves a lot of being gentle and building rapport.

Gio
Jun 20, 2005


Or just force them to get vaccinated. That works best.

Last note on “the vaccine was never meant to reduce transmission” horseshit…

Pfizer and Moderna’s efficacy from their phase III trials (95% and 90%, respectively) that was touted in the media was literally testing the ability of the vaccine to prevent symptomatic infection. In both groups, control and experimental, there were 170 confirmed cases. (Trial participants were not routinely tested; if they were symptomatic they got tested and it was reported back if they were positive.) Of the 170 cases, 162 were in the control group, or 95% of total cases. It was shown (at the time) to be 95% effective at preventing reducing symptomatic infection.

Reducing transmission was a primary goal of vaccination (alongside reduction in severity), and it was touted by both the WHO and the CDC.

In other words…

Electric Wrigglies posted:

The vaccine goal was to reduce mortality and incidence of serious sickness, it does this by helping the body respond to an infection effectively, not by preventing any infection in the first place. It was tested to that goal and the efficacy of preventing transmission was only ever going to be a happy happenstance. Wearing masks was about preventing transmission, taking a vaccine was to prevent you becoming gravely sick or dying.

The likes of WHO or whatever I don't think ever had major campaigns hinging on vaccines for others benefit?

This dude’s posts are total revisionism.

Charles 2 of Spain
Nov 7, 2017

The initial trials weren't designed to measure transmission at all.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS
The reaction to this New York Times article of 9 May 2021 was vicious. Here was the paper of record dashing public hopes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/world/virus-herd-endemic.html posted:

The world may need to learn to live with the virus.

While the outbreak in India is capturing the most attention, the pervasive reach of the virus means that the likelihood is growing that it will persist in most parts of the world.

Early in the pandemic, there was hope that the world would one day achieve herd immunity, the point when the coronavirus lacks enough hosts to spread easily. But over a year later, the virus is crushing India with a fearsome second wave and surging in countries from Asia to Latin America.

Experts now say it is changing too quickly, new more contagious variants are spreading too easily and vaccinations are happening too slowly for herd immunity to be within reach anytime soon.

That means if the virus continues to run rampant through much of the world, it is well on its way to becoming endemic, an ever-present threat.

[…]

As more people contract the virus, developing some level of immunity, and the pace of vaccinations accelerates, future outbreaks won’t be on the scale of those devastating India and Brazil, Dr. Heymann said. Smaller outbreaks that are less deadly but a constant threat should be expected, Dr. Heymann said.

Even then they’re like “Oh well we could do it with enough vaccine uptake; the problem is antivaxxers.”

quote:

Still, public health experts say a relatively small number of countries, mostly island nations, have largely kept the virus under control and could continue keeping it at bay after vaccinating enough people.

New Zealand, through stringent lockdowns and border closures, has all but eliminated the virus. Dr. Michael Baker, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago who helped devise the country’s coronavirus response, said New Zealand would likely achieve herd immunity by immunizing its population, but it has a long way to go with only about 4.4 percent of New Zealanders at least partially vaccinated.

“All of the surveys show there is a degree of vaccine hesitancy in New Zealand, but also a lot of people are very enthusiastic,” Dr. Baker said. “So I think we will probably get there in the end.”

I don’t think that they would have published the article even a week later. It was not appropriate for the zeitgeist.

This article from a week earlier gives more background on the shifting public health views.

quote:

Once the novel coronavirus began to spread across the globe in early 2020, it became increasingly clear that the only way out of the pandemic would be for so many people to gain immunity — whether through natural infection or vaccination — that the virus would run out of people to infect. The concept of reaching herd immunity became the implicit goal in many countries, including the United States.

Early on, the target herd immunity threshold was estimated to be about 60 to 70 percent of the population. Most experts, including Dr. Fauci, expected that the United States would be able to reach it once vaccines were available.

quote:

If even more contagious variants develop, or if scientists find that immunized people can still transmit the virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward again.

To be clear, the relevant scientists already knew this on 3 May 2021.

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Oct 13, 2022

Gio
Jun 20, 2005


Charles 2 of Spain posted:

The initial trials weren't designed to measure transmission at all.
They tested the efficacy of the vaccine to prevent symptomatic infection. How the hell is that not a proxy for transmission? The CDC, WHO et al. sure seemed to think it was (see: the CDC and WHO’s exact words, posted above).

Charles 2 of Spain
Nov 7, 2017

It's not a proxy because you would have to also compare any chains of transmission and that's not how the trial was designed. Transmission studies are far more complex and a lot of those were published afterwards. If I remember some of those concluded that vaccinated people were infectious for a shorter period which would actually reduce transmission, but it's not zero. Whether or not the CDC and WHO were wrong in their proclamations is debatable but the purpose of those very first trials had nothing to do with transmission.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
FYI folks the Deer book from my antivaxx bookshelf project is still on the docket- I pushed it back to second in line because frankly, it's very poorly written and it takes a lot of work to synthesize useful information from it. I'll get through it by the end of the year.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS
Here is an interview that Mandivilli gave after writing her piece for the NYT. It came up because I searched for her name to find the NYT article that I had remembered her writing.

quote:

Lizzie: Apoorva, in the early moments and months of the pandemic, we talked about herd immunity as this concept is like the best way to beat the pandemic. How has that changed?

Apoorva Mandavilli: You're right, Lizzie, we did all talk about herd immunity as the goal, and that's because that's how it's worked for a lot of other infectious diseases. For example, for measles, you vaccinate enough people, you get to a point where enough people are protected from the virus that the virus no longer gets around as easily. What's changed now is that the two big things have happened. One is that around December new variants started to come up of the virus that are more contagious and herd immunity is based on a measure of contagiousness. With more contagious virus, the percent of the population that needs to be protected goes up. It was estimated to be 60% or 70% last year, now the number is 80 or more.

Second thing that happened is that as you know, there is a substantial proportion of the population in the United States that is really hesitant, does not want to get the vaccine, may not get the vaccine. Those two things have led scientists to conclude that herd immunity is extremely unlikely.

Lizzie: Yes. You reported that in The New York Times and it was a story that landed with a splash. Should we interpret that as a sort of disappointing sign or is it just that we should have a different goal?

Apoorva Mandavilli: Yes, I wouldn't interpret this as disappointing, I think it's just a different way of looking at it and really what we need to do has not changed at all. What we still need to do is vaccinate as many people as possible so that we really bring down the number of hospitalizations and deaths, and that has not changed. What has changed is that we probably will not be completely rid of this virus when we get to this herd immunity threshold, which is what we had been hoping for. We will probably see outbreaks of the virus for many years to come. How big those outbreaks are will really depend on how close we get to herd immunity, what percent of the population we can vaccinate.

Lizzie: Yes, I guess I think about this in two ways, the public health messaging part of it, and then how we as a society deal with whatever happens next. I wonder if people are going to receive this message and think, wait a minute, they're moving the goalposts on me again.

Apoorva Mandavilli: There is a real danger of that. When I spoke to Dr. Fauci, he was worried about that as well, because that happened to him a few times now that people accused him of moving the goalposts, but I don't think that's what's happening here. I think the goalposts have moved themselves because of the biological behavior of the virus and because of the behavior of the human beings in this country. It's not the experts, it's this is just what has happened because of those two big factors.

This is itself something of a revisionist history.

Here’s Dr. Birx, in testimony to Congress this June, saying that there was no reason to expect that vaccines would be much more sterilizing than infection acquired immunity, and that they were already seeing reinfections by the time of vaccine rollout.

quote:

We knew early on In January of 2021, in late December of 2020 that reinfection was occurring after natural infection. Once you see that and I want to make it clear to you all and to to anyone that it's listening. This is not measles mumps and rubella. Those vaccines produced long term immunity and can create herd immunity.

quote:

All I know is there was evidence from the global pandemic, that natural reinfection was incurring. And since the vaccine was based on natural immunity, you cannot make the conclusion that the vaccine will do better than natural infection. Although it can often do slightly better. I think that's—

At this point Jim Jordan interrupts her, and it’s painful, but you can listen to the whole exchange if you want.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu1E0pc276I&t=2475s

Jordan’s line of inquiry is disingenuous, and I would not say that Birx is a good person, but I think that her description of the thoughts of her and her colleagues circa turn of year 2021 is essentially accurate.

Platystemon fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Oct 13, 2022

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

Discendo Vox posted:

FYI folks the Deer book from my antivaxx bookshelf project is still on the docket- I pushed it back to second in line because frankly, it's very poorly written and it takes a lot of work to synthesize useful information from it. I'll get through it by the end of the year.

Your earlier recommendation in this thread is a solid read. Thanks for recommending it.

Strep Vote
May 5, 2004

أنا أحب حليب الشوكولاتة

Gio posted:

They tested the efficacy of the vaccine to prevent symptomatic infection. How the hell is that not a proxy for transmission? The CDC, WHO et al. sure seemed to think it was (see: the CDC and WHO’s exact words, posted above).

No, it's not a proxy, they knew the limits of the study, they just loving lied about what the shot does.

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

Gio posted:

They tested the efficacy of the vaccine to prevent symptomatic infection. How the hell is that not a proxy for transmission? The CDC, WHO et al. sure seemed to think it was (see: the CDC and WHO’s exact words, posted above).

Asymptomatic infections can still spread COVID too. That was a large part of why COVID spread so effectively: people who felt totally fine were spreading COVID for a week or more without ever realizing they'd caught it.

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Gio
Jun 20, 2005


e: nvm, that whole shpeel is going to get misinterpeted as well

tinytimmy said, “vaccine passports and mandates were sold on presumption of reduced transmission.” wriggles said, “no that wasnt the point it was only to reduce hospital buden.” he said the same to me when i talked about MDHHS PSAs that had testinmonials from children saying “I got vaccinated to protect gram grams.”

my argument is simply that the vaccines were sold as a means to prevent transmission and it is complete revisionism to say that they werent. i provided evidence from what the CDC, WHO, and others were saying at the time. i dont know if the phase iii trials tested transmission, i guess they didnt, but its irrelevant to my point.

Gio fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 13, 2022

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