Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your rewriting of history is though.
My rewriting of History? What rewriting?
95% effective meant 95% less symptomatic cases.
Now everyone is pretending nobody ever promised protection from infection.
Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
221–230 of 272 posts
Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact," Fauci said. "But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity." https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/1... the fraction of people who would need immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (either through vaccination or recovery from prior infection) to extinguish the spread of the…
That might all be true, but it’s all cherry picked out of context. Had we had broad vaccine immunity in the early days of the pandemic, the situation may have turned out differently. Over time, things change.
Officials, Pfizer, and Moderna were loudly celebrating the "94%" or "95%" effectiveness, which was measured in symptomatic cases. Now its 0-20% w/o a booster. The vaccine is clearly less effective than before, which is understandable given the new variant. But it's definitely disappointing--a lot more people will die because the herd immunity clock got reset.
Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
#223If I understand correctly, israel mandates a third shot (to do normal stuff), as do many places in north america, either now or soon. And I can only imagine many people would be happy to mandate a fourth as soon as possible. What I find most frustrating is that politicians are happy to make these mandates live, during an ongoing situation where we actually don't know a lot about how effective things are (and in the c…
In what places or contexts are boosters mandated? As far as I know they aren’t in the US right now.
Some places in Europe, for example Austria.
Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean, I can just dump a bunch of links to studies and details about how boosters are highly effective, even for young people. And I can find dozens more. This isn't baseball cards. The person with the most URLs doesn't win. You have to read the data and understand what it says. You clearly don't, because you're citing pop-science sources such as "The Harvard Gazette", and irrelevant papers about viral loads in br…
Given that a pediatric hospitalization is a hellish and expensive affair and early long COVID may have life-long effects, while a vaccine is cheap and trivially accessible, how is that still _not_ a winning strategy? _Just_ 8000 vaccinations to prevent a hospitalization? How could you even consider that to be bad? Are we in a surplus of hospital beds or guardians or am I the only person that lives in a metro area whe…
8000 vaccinations to prevent one hospitalization sounds like a really bad trade-off when you don’t specify the severity of the hospitalization and you don’t take into account the side-effects and efficacy of the vaccination (other than to prevent hospitalization). Also, did you just add ‘pediatric’ to this stream of words to make it about the kids?
Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
#225If I understand correctly, israel mandates a third shot (to do normal stuff), as do many places in north america, either now or soon. And I can only imagine many people would be happy to mandate a fourth as soon as possible. What I find most frustrating is that politicians are happy to make these mandates live, during an ongoing situation where we actually don't know a lot about how effective things are (and in the c…
In what places or contexts are boosters mandated? As far as I know they aren’t in the US right now.
Unfortunately several European countries consider people with 2 shots unvaccinated by now, and more countries are scheduled to follow that strategy. France, Italy and Austria are the ones I know of.
They consider the original 2nd shot to "expire" after 6 months, so you are forced to take the booster unless you want to live like a hermit.
I strongly dislike this.
Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they are making these strain specific boosters. But it seems “they”* want to keep it quiet until they are ready to release them. My first through on this is that there is over-supply of the OG vaccine and it takes time to switch production and the booster story is designed to give some hope and confidence to the masses (which is good I think). There is also some paperwork involved which takes time, but as we…
> I think they are making these strain specific boosters. But it seems “they” want to keep it quiet until they are ready to release them. There's nothing quiet about it - Moderna has already publicly announced[1] that they're nearly ready to take their Omicron booster to clinical trials. 1. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Oh, maybe it is context specific then. No one I know in Australia is really talking about variant vaccines yet so maybe our media is being a bit quiet about it. Late March is a long time away considering we are dealing with peak COVID now.
Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm sorry but I'm not understanding the logic. The booster was recommended after several rounds of research across multiple countries suggested it was a good idea, with Israel doing some of the first testing and reaching the conclusion that it was worthwhile (and it was, by a substantial margin). You are misinformed. There is a paucity of data supporting boosters, what little exists is for people over 65 (to be fai…
The article was posted in September. Since then all analysis has validated the booster strategy, even in individuals who previously had COVID. The increase in incidence in pediatric COVID patients since the Omicron wave supports the assertion as well. I'm sorry but new meta-analyses are coming up every week. It's been 4 months since that article and the conclusions in said opinion piece have been proven wrong.
> Since then all analysis has validated the booster strategy, even in individuals who previously had COVID.
No, it hasn't. Just a week ago:
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes...
Vaccine efficacy for 3rd dose, out of Ontario, is somewhere in the 30-40% range. In Denmark, secondary attack rate for 3 doses is essentially equivalent to being unvaccinated. This is the latest data we have.
In the UK, December 28, 2021:
> efficacy of a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine waned significantly at the 10-week mark, leaving boosted individuals at risk of infection with Omicron....In a December 23 U.K. Health Security Agency (HSA) technical briefing, vaccine efficacy against symptomatic infection generally fell to around 40% some 2.5 months after a booster dose.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9641...
Also from the UK (January 6, 2022): vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection, 2-4 weeks after dose 3, is essentially equivalent to effectiveness after dose 2:
https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1481220965539500032
Denmark again, January 5, 2022:
> data just released from Denmark (where 85% of infections are omicron) show no effect of the booster against being infected and no difference between 2 and 3 doses against severe disease except 3 doses better against severe disease for those >70.
https://twitter.com/TracyBethHoeg/status/1478853178699354112
The overall picture is of a vaccine that is temporarily elevating antibody levels, which then decline rapidly. But this isn't unexpected. It's exactly what we thought would happen. Moderna CEO, January 6, 2022:
> Bancel said the efficacy of boosters will probably decline over the course of several months, similar to what happened with the first two doses.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/06/moderna-ceo-says-people-may-...
...but don't worry! Because the good news is that we have really solid data that after only two doses, even high-risk people remain well-protected against severe disease:
> Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four.
Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm sorry but I'm not understanding the logic. The booster was recommended after several rounds of research across multiple countries suggested it was a good idea, with Israel doing some of the first testing and reaching the conclusion that it was worthwhile (and it was, by a substantial margin). You are misinformed. There is a paucity of data supporting boosters, what little exists is for people over 65 (to be fai…
The article was posted in September. Since then all analysis has validated the booster strategy, even in individuals who previously had COVID. The increase in incidence in pediatric COVID patients since the Omicron wave supports the assertion as well. I'm sorry but new meta-analyses are coming up every week. It's been 4 months since that article and the conclusions in said opinion piece have been proven wrong.
Could you explain where you're getting your information because, as timr points out in several different ways, it isn't true.
Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
#229There's no point in fourth boosters until an Omicron-specific vaccine is developed.
Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm sorry but I'm not understanding the logic. The booster was recommended after several rounds of research across multiple countries suggested it was a good idea, with Israel doing some of the first testing and reaching the conclusion that it was worthwhile (and it was, by a substantial margin). You are misinformed. There is a paucity of data supporting boosters, what little exists is for people over 65 (to be fai…
"You are misinformed. There is a paucity of data supporting boosters, " I think the misinformation might be your own here, or rather, at least based on the time frame. In September, there was little data, because very few had their 3rd shot. Now, we have Omicron - a huge, new, material development - and - large numbers of people with their 3rd shots. Here is some fairly definitive data from one source [1] which clear…
Unfortunately it turns out that the way vaccination effectiveness is measured could create this apparent effect even in the case that the vaccination was saline. This sounds absurd and wrong, but, as is sometimes the case with statistics, it's possible.
Prof Norman Fenton has described the issue and also demonstrated it visually in Excel:
https://twitter.com/profnfenton/status/1460339552397275149
https://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-vaccine-ef...
and there's another worked example here:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/bayesian-datacrime-defini...
The problem is obscure but already known since before 2021. It's called Immortal Time Bias:
https://catalogofbias.org/biases/immortal-time-bias/
The cause is the definitional game playing public health engages in, whereby people are labelled as unvaccinated for a period of time even after they've already taken a vaccine. This effectively makes the vaccinated "immortal" for two weeks, because if they'd died within that two week period they'd have been counted as unvaccinated. Thus even if a vaccine did nothing at all it would be given positive effectiveness by the methodology public health researchers are using.
The problem with COVID vaccines is especially serious because there's increasing amounts of evidence that they may have some sort of immunosuppressive effect, and that people are much more likely to catch COVID in the period immediately after taking the vaccine than they were normally. Up until a few days ago this effect could only be seen by observing that many countries experienced a case surge coincident with the start of their vaccination programme. Then it was discovered that somebody in a Canadian public health agency who didn't get the memo had accidentally published proof this was happening:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220108064918/https://www.alber...
(scroll down to the graph labelled "number of days between first immunization and COVID diagnosis").
I have to link to the Wayback Machine because the moment this graph was noticed, it was deleted from the website. Hence why I say someone didn't get the memo. It's extremely likely that other public health agencies have the same data but they consistently refuse to publish data in which "vaccinated" is defined correctly. Public health will not allow the population to see un-distorted data about VE.