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Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

fortune.com

191–200 of 259 posts

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#191
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it's still an astonishing result. Most of the non mRNA vaccines have efficacies below 90%, not taking into account the delta variant.

I think efficacy is usually defined as preventing symptoms, a higher bar than preventing hospitalizations. I believe most vaccines were extremely successful at preventing hospitalizations. Edit: Pfizer's primary endpoint was efficacy against lab-confirmed Covid-19 [1]. [1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

This is pure anecdata, but I’m hearing nearly daily from a friend in Indonesia about someone he knows dying of Covid. They’ve all had their sinovac shots.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That cuts both ways. I remember the finger-waggers - for weeks - mocking people who chose to wear a mask in the early days of the pandemic, with the same tone of smug superiority they today reserve for people who choose not to. I'm a lot more worried about those types of people than the type who arrive at what look to me like sillier conclusions but don't seek to impose them on everyone.

I agree on the priority, but the latter types are ultimately still imposing the consequences of their decisions onto others - their extended families when they want to visit, their friendships where they can't help but pushing the nonsense into every conversation, public spaces if they're not actually continuing to wear a mask and social distance, institutions that are going back to business as usual (eg schools), et…

Unfortunately, when places like the world's largest video site censor debates between different medical professionals on the topic, it's hard to be confident how rare those well-reasoned viewpoints actually are.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#193
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next sentence is: From May 2 to June 5, the efficacy rate in preventing hospitalization was 98.2%, compared with 93% from June 6 to July 3 That's a 4x higher chance of hospitalisation.

It's not as easy. Number of cases in that second period are ~10x the number of cases in that first period. Which means you have more propagation, potentially affecting more at-risk chunk of the population. E.g. the very few cases happening in May-June may have beeen predominantly occuring in young people with extensive social contacts, now that the transmission is going up it can spread to more isolated communities (…

Not including that people who are vaccinated's guard is down more, will likely be gathering more with wider social networks, etc; what are the chances an escape mutant variant occurs that spreads wide, has long delay before causing deadly effects, etc?

And when does Ivermectin come into mainstream and every COVID discussion? Based on the evidence it looks like used as a preventative, give it to literally everyone for 2 weeks, and we could close to abolish COVID and variants. The suppression of conversation and scientific debate is the biggest problem out of all of this.

Edit to add: whomever downvoted this, you're part of the problem of suppression - good for you.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#194
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education and intelligence are necessary for achieving autonomy. In general, it's hard to take claims for "autonomy" seriously when so many people's decisions seem to be arrived at by uncritically following social media.

To be quite honest: I'm not comfortable with my current education level regarding the vaccine considering the pretty aggressive censorship everyone has been doing with information on it.

I don't quite understand the "censorship" argument. Of course governments and public health officials are going to push the most effective tools we have to save as many lives as possible.

What is censorship in this case? Not spreading debunked or poorly-supported claims?

True censorship would've been something like keeping hush the rare blood-clotting incidents with J&J. But there are so many studies across so many countries that are freely available to read and be informed by.

Even the claims of twitter/other social media censoring don't hold water for me. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary proof imo

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NZ's strategy (and all lockdown strategies) never made any sense and it was obvious from the get-go. Very early into the pandemic, we learned three crucial facts: 1) Covid is non-transmissible outside. 2) Vitamin D is a potent inhibitor of respiratory illness in general and covid in particular. 3) Obesity is the greatest risk-factor associated with covid. With these taken into account (and all are very well-supported…

1) might not be true with Delta. There are cases of "passing" transmission of 2) is still up in the air with studies going both ways (but get your vitamin D still, it has multiple benefits outside of this) 3) is somewhat true, but there are other big comorbidities as well (Diabetes, Downs Syndrome, etc), it's just that it's one that's highly visible in Western society and hypertension is very common in obese people.

It seems like you're of the mind that every new novel virus that enters the biosphere requires several months worth of randomized control trials to determine best paths forward.

The precautionary principle would tell us that it's best to ensure your immune system is as strong and healthy as it can possibly be, which requires going outside, getting fresh air and sunshine, visiting with family and friends, and getting fit.

The way your reply is phrased, it makes it seem like every time a new variant or whatever is announced, we should all default to locking down, staying inside, and slowly killing our immune systems.

That doesn't seem to make sense. We know what makes humans healthy, and we should be constantly reminding people to do the daily things to build their natural immunity, which is an amazing and effective defense against covid and myriad other ailments.

Imagine if we'd spent the past 1.5 years collectively working to lower the BMI of the USA and getting everyone a little more tanned. We'd be far better off along basically every metric and the pandemic would've been far less impactful.

That our Public Health Professionals know all these things work and never ever talk about them and instead seem to always recommend staying inside and spiking cortisol levels, we shouldn't really pay them any mind whatsoever.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#196
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had mildly symptomatic covid while my wife had acutely symptomatic covid. Then I had a year+ of long covid symptoms. Then I got a vaccine dose and was very sick for 4 days and had painful systemic inflammation for 6 weeks, during which time my covid toes and tongue and cough disappeared. My second dose only gave me stomach pain for a week.

Did you have symptoms for 9 weeks (your previous comment) or >1 year (this comment)?

Not the original commenter, but it seems clear that they had symptoms of long covid for >1 year after first catching covid, and those symptoms stopped <9 weeks after getting the first dose of the vaccine.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if every country simply locked down for 3-4 weeks This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world. > But no, muh freedom, and but the economy! Your mocking tone is out of place. I do in fact think freedom and the economy are both important. Don’t you?

>This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world. China and the countries of Oceania did just this and have largely suppressed COVID without MRNA vaccines. China has a massive, porous land border. They've protected themselves from inbound infection by quarantining all visitors on arrival.

> every single country

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#198
post #2

I'm so exhausted and demoralised by this endless cascade of things-getting-worse. It's taking a really big toll on my mental health and there's no resources available in my country to offer support (and there's nothing to be done except try to learn to live with it, anyways). The future looks bleak.

The very best thing you can do to help yourself AND help combat coronavirus is go outside, enjoy the sun, get some exercise, and do all of that with a big gaggle of family and friends.

Try it. You'll be improving your own immune system, you'll be happier, and you can forget all this fearmongering garbage.

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#199
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as easy. Number of cases in that second period are ~10x the number of cases in that first period. Which means you have more propagation, potentially affecting more at-risk chunk of the population. E.g. the very few cases happening in May-June may have beeen predominantly occuring in young people with extensive social contacts, now that the transmission is going up it can spread to more isolated communities (…

Not including that people who are vaccinated's guard is down more, will likely be gathering more with wider social networks, etc; what are the chances an escape mutant variant occurs that spreads wide, has long delay before causing deadly effects, etc? And when does Ivermectin come into mainstream and every COVID discussion? Based on the evidence it looks like used as a preventative, give it to literally everyone for…

It does not look like Ivermectin would provide a substantial benefit:

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

Re: Israel data reportedly shows efficacy drop of Pfizer-BioNTech for delta variant

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This new mRNA tech might completely change some degenerative diseases. My kid may benefit, although given the rarity of the condition and time to approval I'm less hopeful. Hopefully we stop trusting politicians, physicians, and scientists and start trusting Science and statistics.

>This new mRNA tech might completely change some degenerative diseases. For those who can afford it. Just another example of the rapidly growing chasm between the wealthy and the poor.

It’s funny how we came up with this amazing new tech, where the owner can access basically all the information in the world in his hands, can listen to music, watch films, basically do anything. I mean Elon basically says it turns humans into cyborgs.

And this tech was obviously very expensive, and the rich had huge advantages in keeping it to themselves, I mean why give the poor access to all information in the world right?

So the rich just kept smartphones to themselves to get richer and more powerful.

Oh wait… what did I get wrong in this story?

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