Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

wwwnc.cdc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 292 posts

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#91

Post by chrisco255 »

pbourke wrote: post #31
kaczordon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, globally we know that re-infection rarely occurs after being infected. This study shows a 60% attack rate for fully vaccinated miners, which is horrendous. The whole point of this study is that vaccination does not stop transmission of the virus. To quote the study: In conclusion, we describe a VOC Gamma COVID-19 outbreak with a strikingly high attack rate among persons fully vaccinated with BNT162b2 vaccine.[……

We also know that confirmed cases are mainly among the unvaccinated and serious outcomes are nearly all (99%) among unvaccinated, despite fully vaccinated and unvaccinated being roughly equal populations in the US at present.

That's not true at all. 50% of new cases in Israel are among the vaccinated.

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/06/nearly-50-of-israel...

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#92

Post by ekianjo »

endisneigh wrote: post #19
standapart wrote: post #18

The main takeaway here, mentioned above, is that this might throw shade on the "public good" idea of vaccination-- that you should still vaccinate those at minimal risk from Covid. If you're at high risk, you should definitely still get vaccinated. Maybe just stop telling twenty-somethings they should get vaccinated too.

I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion. Even if vaccinated people could get COVID (which they can) and could get sick (which they currently do, to some extent) - the question is ultimately whether or not vaccinated people die at the same rate. As long as Rate of Death for Vaccinated < Rate of Death for Unvaccinated + Rate of Death for taking Vaccine; you should be vaccinated, regardless of age.

Except that Rate of Death for taking Vaccine is completely unknown and under-reported by authorities who have a vested interested in getting everyone vaccinated.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#93

Post by Izkata »

criticaltinker wrote: post #84

As other commenters have noted, this case study further supports the widespread observations that COVID-19 vaccines reduce the chance of severe (symptomatic) illness but do not necessarily prevent infection and transmission. The authors of this study conjecture that the unvaccinated asymptomatic “patient 40” may have been the source of the infections seen in the other fully vaccinated patients - however this was a mi…

> One counterpoint that I’ve come across during my own review of the literature, is the idea that imperfect vaccines can cause selective pressure which enhances the fitness of highly virulent pathogens.

This is what happened with "Marek's disease", a virus-caused disease in chickens. The vaccine was "leaky" and ended up selecting for a more deadly form, such that now all chickens worldwide have to be vaccinated for it or they'll die if they get infected - which didn't used to be the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#94

Post by timr »

elcomet wrote: post #85
timr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This one scared me since it was a large, relatively unbiased sample, with before-and-after imaging. It also showed brain damage even in mild cases of COVID19 in >10% of cases. It shows no such thing. It's an analysis of MRIs where the authors infer loss of gray matter in specific regions of the brain. This is in no way "brain damage", and representing it this way is leaping to wild conclusions. Lest you not believe…

> bonus points: can you spot the missing correlate?) Concussions ?

I was thinking of all of the lifestyle factors that might make one susceptible to tooth loss for >10 years prior to the study (this was a selection criteria for the participants): lack of education, nutrition, medical care, etc. The paper never controls for why these people lost their teeth.

(To be fair to the researchers of this paper, they do discuss some of this, but they focus on a causal relationship between tooth loss and the other factors. They never really consider that the relationship between these factors and tooth loss could be reversed.)

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#96

Post by bsdetector »

kadoban wrote: post #49
lugged wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some claim it can still be irradicated. But those people get banned on YouTube for saying bad words so you probably won't believe me.

Do they say how? Doesn't seem like it even makes sense anymore. I'm going to guess based on your youtube wording that their answer is not vaccines?

Bret Weinstein has been citing studies he claims show that ivermectin reduces spread such that even close family members are unlikely to be infected from a person with covid.

edit: curious how hn readers feel they will be able to correct misguided beliefs if they don't even know what those beliefs are.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#97

Post by standapart »

Zpalmtree wrote: post #70
endisneigh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion. Even if vaccinated people could get COVID (which they can) and could get sick (which they currently do, to some extent) - the question is ultimately whether or not vaccinated people die at the same rate. As long as Rate of Death for Vaccinated < Rate of Death for Unvaccinated + Rate of Death for taking Vaccine; you should be vaccinated, regardless of age.

But his point was on that of getting vaccinated as a "public good" - not on the vaccinations impact on your personal risk from covid. Excluding your personal risk, getting the vaccine does not prevent you spreading covid. Probably, it reduces your spread, as you have less symptoms, though.

Thanks, yeah. It is completely plausible, I think, that vaccination for any cohort of subjects could reduce their infectivity.

The decision rule, however, is never the existence of a non-zero number. It is always a question of magnitude and whether that magnitude has meaningful impact.

Just to clarify this point: if you experiment with some simple SIR or SIRS models (which are not useful in modern epidemiology, but I digress) you will observe threshold phenomenon. This means that there will be broad ranges where perturbations of parameters (for instance, R0) have little meaningful effect on the progression of the outputs (for instance, the number of infected). Then there will be very small intervals where slight perturbations of parameters have a very meaningful effect on the outputs. For instance, there's not that much difference between R0=5 and R0=6, but there's quite a lot of difference between R0=0.999 and R0=1.001.

This is just to say that: it's plausible that vaccination has little to no impact on actual spread of Covid variants in the global population. I'm not saying this statement is true, I'm just saying that this statement is far from being disproven. There's just not enough evidence to call covid vaccination a "public good" and care about whether the low-risk get it.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#98

Post by sschueller »

Izkata wrote: post #93
criticaltinker wrote: post #84

As other commenters have noted, this case study further supports the widespread observations that COVID-19 vaccines reduce the chance of severe (symptomatic) illness but do not necessarily prevent infection and transmission. The authors of this study conjecture that the unvaccinated asymptomatic “patient 40” may have been the source of the infections seen in the other fully vaccinated patients - however this was a mi…

> One counterpoint that I’ve come across during my own review of the literature, is the idea that imperfect vaccines can cause selective pressure which enhances the fitness of highly virulent pathogens. This is what happened with "Marek's disease", a virus-caused disease in chickens. The vaccine was "leaky" and ended up selecting for a more deadly form, such that now all chickens worldwide have to be vaccinated for i…

So does this mean we made this pandemic worse than the one from 1918 when we didn't have a vaccine?

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#99

Post by mlang23 »

sschueller wrote: post #98
Izkata wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One counterpoint that I’ve come across during my own review of the literature, is the idea that imperfect vaccines can cause selective pressure which enhances the fitness of highly virulent pathogens. This is what happened with "Marek's disease", a virus-caused disease in chickens. The vaccine was "leaky" and ended up selecting for a more deadly form, such that now all chickens worldwide have to be vaccinated for i…

So does this mean we made this pandemic worse than the one from 1918 when we didn't have a vaccine?

This is very likely. And has already been said by various critics already months ago. But these people were silenced or ridiculed, because it apparently was already decided the vaccines need to be sold.

Re: SARS-CoV-2 Gamma variant infected 16 fully Pfizer vaccinated Guiana gold miners

#100

Post by murphyslab »

criticaltinker wrote: post #84

As other commenters have noted, this case study further supports the widespread observations that COVID-19 vaccines reduce the chance of severe (symptomatic) illness but do not necessarily prevent infection and transmission. The authors of this study conjecture that the unvaccinated asymptomatic “patient 40” may have been the source of the infections seen in the other fully vaccinated patients - however this was a mi…

> imperfect vaccines can cause selective pressure which enhances the fitness of highly virulent pathogens

The number of ways in which we undertaking a natural experiment in viral evolution has been top-of-mind for me as well. But the greater issue in my view is not that the vaccines are imperfect. All vaccines are somewhat imperfect. On its own, I the mRNA vaccines were probably entirely adequate.

The problem is that the human population, as a result of policy decisions, will continue to have an immediately-adjacent reservoir of infection [0] with whom we are constantly in contact. I speak, of course, of the large numbers of unvaccinated among us. With vaccinated-to-vaccinated chains of transmission, there's a greater chance that a chain of vaccine-resistant variant will die out because the vaccine both reduces the risk of becoming infected [1] and the risk of transmitting infection [2].

But in a heterogeneous population, with large numbers of unvaccinated individuals, those chains of transmission can go on indefinitely, hopping back-and-forth between the two populations. That's a far greater risk here than the issue of a "leaky" vaccine. A vaccine might "leak" a little bit, yet the probabilities of infection and subsequent infection remain so low that all chains of transmission quickly terminate. Instead, we have a situation where the virus can slip into a separate (reservoir) population where it continues unchecked.

That, in my view, is the real risk to furthering infection.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_reservoir

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-ri...

[2] https://sporevidencealliance.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/T...

Post reply on HN