This is not related to the submitted article, but I am curious and it is related.
> 4. Israel's high vaccination rate isn't high enough.
> Unvaccinated people helped fuel the rapid spread of the virus while the country remained open for business in recent months with few serious restrictions.
> "That will lead to mass infection, which is exactly what we are seeing now," said Segal.
Okay, how does this happen if vaccinated people are much less likely to become infected or symptomatic? They have a high vaccination rate, so why are their numbers are worse than before? How come that small % of vaccinated people are the problem in a population that is almost completely vaccinated?
What is high enough, are we going to keep changing till it is 100%? What happens if the results are still bad after that? At >80% you would expect the numbers to be better, even if just so slightly, not WAY WORSE. Right? How can there be a mass infection if >80% of the population is fully vaccinated?
There are many questions that are not being answered. It is not enough to regurgitate the same things about the vaccine that do not seem to hold true when it comes to countries with high vaccination rate.
In any case, I expected countries with high vaccination rate to do better, not worse than they have done before.
If you expected that, then you probably assumed that other factors remained the same? That isn't the case.
First, countries with high vaccination rates have lightened other restrictions.
Second, countries with high vaccination rates may have many infected people, but few hospitalisations. Where I live, the share of infections that require hospitalisation has dropped by ~80% since the vaccinations started. (The number of infections as a share of population has gone up and down, the share of infections that require hospitalisation has shrunk steadily.)
It’s an interesting thought I haven’t thought about. Does an unvaccinated and vaccinated person spread the same viral load? The evidence suggests so. But is the amount of people “getting” Covid lower in vaccinated lower overall period? Yes as well. It’s a very Bayesian thing with the prior favoring the vaccinated but humans are terrible in terms of Bayesian thinking usually because of cognitive dissonance (not bias).
Curiously, once again, today's update to the page where CDC lists numbers of hospitalizations/deaths from COVID19 among those fully vaccinated against COVID19 has not occurred yet[1].
Maybe it will come, maybe it won't. Back in August, they postponed the update to occur after the approval of Pfizer's vaccine was announced. Today, the head of CDC overruled the advisory panel to recommend boosters[3].
I did teach "Economics of Regulation" for a bunch of semesters, and, this is a textbook example of regulatory capture.
If you are curious, currently, the rate of known cases of hospitalization _from_ COVID19 among the fully vaccinated stands at 5.1/100,000, seemingly headed for the neighborhood of 1/10,000.
Imagine a world in which 1/20,000 people fully vaccinated against measles could expect to be hospitalized with measles or 1/100,000 could expect to die.
In 2018, there were a total of 337 _cases_ (no breakdown of deaths/hospitalizations in the reference source) of measles in among U.S. residents. Only 42 of them were vaccinated.[4,5]
In 2019, there were only 121 measles cases among the vaccinated population.
No deaths from measles as far as I can see. Now, that's a vaccine that protects you and others. Please do not skip MMR.
the CDC says the vaccine is effective at preventing infection
the article’s point seems to be: “ To spread the coronavirus, you have to have the coronavirus. And vaccinated people are far less likely to have the coronavirus—period. “
so i’d be interested to know of a source that says vaccinated people are equally likely to become infected.
I think it would help everyone if we all used specific terms when discussing covid infections.
From what I've gathered, the current generation of covid vaccines (mRNA, J&J, AZ) induce mainly a IgG immune response (as well as other things I know nothing about), but they certainly do not induce an IgA response. IgG is humoral immunity which protects your blood, and lower respiratory track somewhat, IgA is mucosal immunity which protects your upper-respiratory track (nose, mouth, etc) as well as other mucous membranes.
Since covid typically first infects the nose, studies which I cannot find at the moment have shown that vaccinated individuals have only slightly less viral load in the nose than unvaccinated. At the onset of the curve however (first few days), they are the same.
Viral load does not equate directly to infectivity, but from this we can say that vaccinated people can spread covid, whilst being asymptomatically infected.
Saying you "have" covid is too vague, since you can "have" it in your nose, in your blood, etc.
This kind of exchange happens quite often everywhere.
Is it possible that there isn't an well written response to this by people who really knows what they're talking about?
EDIT: I mean: is it really only a failure to understand that if a group 100 people are vaccinated only, say, 10 people will be infected and if a group of 100 people are unvaccinated there will be, say, 70 people infected but those people who are infected in both groups carry a similar viral load?
Is this all there is to this and it's all a big incomprehension ?
Anti vaccine activists don’t tend to be too good at math.
They also tend to be wrapped up a whole bunch of connected conspiracy theories, of which this is just one, and have their root in cultural grievances rather than objective fact, so arguing with them on a factual basis tends to be futile.
This may be very often true, but there must be also people who would be willing to listen were the conversation around it clearer. The toxic information environment has very likely tipped into confusion plenty of otherwise reasonable people. I know for sure of at least one close family member, who if there was no Facebook and real life people banging on doubt and sharing misleading information, they wouldn't be constantly dragged into that direction (yesterday she told me "see, I read on a mainstream local newspaper that one vaccinated person died from covid; those antivaxxers said that the vaccine didn't work, they don't seem to be totally off the mark"; it took 5 minutes to explain that when you say that the vaccine is N% effective it means that in 100-N cases it's not effective, so having some deaths is to be expected... she was easily convinced, once she has been walked through. But it requires constant effort; the asymmetry of this information warfare is so strong; it takes far less energy to seed doubt, you don't have to be factual or even logical; while if you want to debunk stuff you have to be careful otherwise your credibility is gone)
> 4. Israel's high vaccination rate isn't high enough.
> Unvaccinated people helped fuel the rapid spread of the virus while the country remained open for business in recent months with few serious restrictions.
> "That will lead to mass infection, which is exactly what we are seeing now," said Segal.
From https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628....
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Okay, how does this happen if vaccinated people are much less likely to become infected or symptomatic? They have a high vaccination rate, so why are their numbers are worse than before? How come that small % of vaccinated people are the problem in a population that is almost completely vaccinated?
What is high enough, are we going to keep changing till it is 100%? What happens if the results are still bad after that? At >80% you would expect the numbers to be better, even if just so slightly, not WAY WORSE. Right? How can there be a mass infection if >80% of the population is fully vaccinated?
There are many questions that are not being answered. It is not enough to regurgitate the same things about the vaccine that do not seem to hold true when it comes to countries with high vaccination rate.
In any case, I expected countries with high vaccination rate to do better, not worse than they have done before.