39% effective against infection, but the big sticking point is that it "Largely prevents severe illness"...ie keeping people out of the hospital. That is the crucial need right now with the delta spread.
This is the media "grift" I absolutely can't believe. The vaccine IS preventing people from dying and it's largely known that the vaccine doesn't prevent infection or spread. That said, GET THE VACCINE, I do not intend for this to sound like I'm condoning any kind of anti-vax narrative!
Political fluff is expected, but keeping millions of people afraid and irate about information that deeply pertains to both their physical and mental health for what gain?
Obviously! But at what point will educated people (regardless of their political views) realize that playing fast and loose with this kind of media is damaging to everyone and their wellbeing?
The 39% is against getting an infection, and I believe that includes the ability to transmit the infection on. It definitely is crucial that Re (R0 modified by measures like vaccines and masks) be kept below 1 if at all possible.
The preventing severe illness is still holding pretty firm, but not as strong as against other variants. Still a very good chance. And preventing hospitalizations is even stronger.
I haven't seen any good information on transmission. My gut feeling is that less symptoms == less transmissibility, but I have no data to back that up.
One study has put the delta R0 around the same as Measles...which is 3x original COVID, but still less than Chicken Pox.
Sure, but everything also said its spread through the air...no coughing == less droplets. The spread concern would be if people aren't taking the same precautions because they aren't showing symptoms, but if still wearing masks or social distancing then the transmission should be less.
That being said most people aren't taking precautions any more because of this...I've seen people directly exposed for up to 2 days to someone with COVID w/ symptoms who then gets an immediate negative test and goes on with their life and not wearing masks in public/work. No amount of yelling or shaming does any good when people are oblivious to their own self destructive behavior.
It’s important to distinguish between asymptomatic infection and presymptomatic infection. The biggest problem with COVID-19 compared to previous forms of SARS viruses is its ability to spread before the onset of symptoms, which is different from someone displaying no symptoms at all from infection.
I’m not completely sure how infectious an asymptomatic infection is, but i just wanted to note a lot of the concern has actually been about presymptomatic infection.
Thats very possible...I was going off information my significant other mentioned to me yesterday that she heard on the news. Hearsay of hearsay...so my bad...
My understanding is that it's pretty clear that vaccine do not do a good job at preventing infection (i.e. testing positive and/or having cold-like symptoms), Delta or not. I don't think they were ever advertised as such.
The mRNA vaccines were very good at preventing any infection, between 80% and 95% effective depending on variant and study. J&J was between 65 and 80% depending on the variant and study. All of them have been excellent at preventing hospitalization and death.
And they definitely were advertised as helping to prevent the spread. That's the whole "herd immunity" thing. After all, one goal is to prevent the epidemic from hitting the unvaccinated.
Vaccines prevent _diseases_ that can be dangerous, or even deadly. Vaccines greatly reduce the _risk_ of infection by working with the body’s natural defenses to safely develop immunity to disease.
You're speaking nonsense. If you mean the vaccine doesn't prevent a virus particle from going into your body, you are correct. They aid the immune system in fighting the virus once it's inside. "Infection" is usually used when some boundary of viral load is crossed, a boundary almost impossible to reach through any means other than internal incubation. Hence, vaccines prevent infection.
Politicians certainly didn't deliver a great message about it though...when they are the ones that are giving out 99% of the information about the vaccine (since I don't think the drug companies can advertise a non-approved drug). Many vaccines are meant to prevent infection, but this type is meant to mostly reduce the chance of severe infection by training your body to see the virus sooner and know how to attack it with less "training".
That depends on what you mean by "good job". It's certainly better at preventing sever illness than it is at preventing infection altogether, but it's still quite good at that (better than the typical flu vaccine, for instance).
> I don't think they were ever advertised as such.
Correct based on my understanding. But sadly I see people quoting all the time (on social media) that it prevents infection. So there's probably a fair bit of misconception out there
Also, the 39% number is the average for people vaccinated between January and July. For people vaccinated in January, the Pfizer shot is only 16% effective against the delta variant (scroll down to last page):
I am extremely skeptical of this. I think the best summary of why this isn't the story is provided by Zvi[1]. See the section "Delta Variant."
It's not something I can summarize in a couple short sentences, but the base rate of infections we're seeing from the actual data of delta infections doesn't match the 39% intuition at all. Additionally, the Israel Study seems to be thrown around a lot, but the data is suspicious if you look at our actual delta infection data from every other source.
In short, I think there's a lot of panic here that is being done by people who are looking at a single study.
Need to come up with a Nasal Spray version. The mucosal immune system represents the body’s first line of defense and makes up most of the immune system and should be more effective than an intramuscular shot.
Researchers even observed the nasal vaccine to be more effective than if administered into the muscles, Damron said. He explained that a high amount of IgA antibody gets released into the nose and lungs, forging a wall of protection at the site where viruses begin to replicate.
Yes. No intramuscular vaccination for a respiratory virus is going to be effective at preventing infection of the surface, mucosal, tissues in the upper respiratory tract. The IgG antibodies in the body serum do seep into the lower lungs though and prevent serious diseases there and in the body proper.
To provide sterilizing immunity to the upper respiratory mucosa we'll need an intranasal booster after the intramuscular to recruit resident B and T cells to the upper respiratory mucosa. There the B cells will make IgA antibodies for a much longer time than IgG antibodies can seep in at any useful level. Additionally the resident T cells will kill off any cells that do get infected.
This is a nuanced issue. We need to be clear that there is a difference between infection of the body organs and infection of the surface mucosal tissues.
ref: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti... page 5, #8. "Whilst we feel that current vaccines are excellent for reducing the risk of hospital admission and disease, we propose that research be focused on vaccines that also induce high and durable levels of mucosal immunity in order to reduce infection of and transmission from vaccinated individuals. This could also reduce the possibility of variant selection in vaccinated individuals."
But won't the mucosa learn to produce the IgA antibodies when you get exposed the next time though? The virus is going to be endemic forever, all who got and will get the vaccine are going to get exposed again and again.
In other words, for the already vaccinated (or post-infected) won't repeated exposure also act as a booster?
Sure. But that means you're spreading the virus, you're taking a small serious health risk, and you're giving the virus tissues in which it can fall back to while simultaneously mutating under IgG antibody pressure in the lower lungs. That keeps the pandemic going.
Studies continue to show vaccines are less effective than we were all lead to believe. It seems like every new study that comes out lowers the bar even further. Pretty soon we'll be hearing "the vaccine doesn't help at all, but at least it didn't give you cancer" (mild sarcasm there, but you get the point).
Each of the big pharma companies were poised to make a boatload of money by being first to produce a vaccine. I'm disappointed, but not surprised.
To me this is the most frustrating and frequent hot take I hear; "continue to show vaccines are less effective than we were all lead to believe"
I was sold a vaccine that limited hospitalization and death and we have three vaccines that all do this, frankly, miraculously.
I wasn't sold a prophylactic sunscreen that prevented infection of coming into my body. I was sold an immune response that made my body more resilient to it. I have not seen any evidence that this is waning over time.
Now, delta is a new variant of the disease that wasn’t the subject of the original vaccine study so why should this now old 2020 vaccine be as effective against this new 2021 variant? It shouldn’t be but considering the vaccines effectiveness at preventing hospitalization and death against the new variation that it wasn’t even built to combat its actually OVERDELIVERING against its goals. Another miracle
So maybe that requires adjustments to the vaccine, perhaps on an annual cadence like the flu vaccine. Frankly I am fine with that.
I am disappointed that the vaccines don’t do more to dampen the spread of the disease but considering how defeatable the worst cases are with now multiple vaccine options I am highly confident that our deservedly well paid scientists and pharma companies can keep the progress flowing here and continue to improve over time.
> I was sold a vaccine that limited hospitalization and death and we have three vaccines that all do this, frankly, miraculously.
Really? What news do you watch? I was sold a vaccine that was 90% effective at preventing COVID infection. [1] Now we're at less than half that.
> I was sold an immune response that made my body more resilient to it. I have not seen any evidence that this is waning over time.
Huh? "Based on our latest assessment, the current protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death could diminish in the months ahead, especially among those who are at higher risk or were vaccinated during the earlier phases of the vaccination rollout." [2]
> Now, delta is a new variant of the disease that wasn’t the subject of the original vaccine study so why should this now old 2020 vaccine be as effective against this new 2021 variant? It shouldn’t be but considering the vaccines effectiveness at preventing hospitalization and death against the new variation that it wasn’t even built to combat its actually OVERDELIVERING against its goals. Another miracle
It's almost as though vaccination of half the population and no kids wasn't enough. Here we are, having lifted mask mandates and lockdowns because the vaccine was "good enough", only to be treated to a Delta surge. If that doesn't scream "we have no clue how good the vaccine is," I don't know what does.
Everybody knew that a mutation in COVID was likely to happen, which only makes those reckless decisions even more disgusting to me.
Let's be clear: I don't fault Pfizer, Moderna, etc. for not creating a super-vaccine that defeated the pandemic single-handedly. I'm irritated because our government's complete ineptitude around addressing the pandemic is leading us into this surge. We gave up our other mitigations FAR too soon. The effectiveness of vaccines keeps declining, both because of Delta and because it just doesn't last very long.
Everybody I know (me included) thought we would get back to life as normal after getting vaccinated. We got bait and switched.
You're acting like this is a surprise result, but everyone expected this. The vaccine was designed to make you resistant to a different virus. We give out new flu shots every year for a reason.
It wasn't a surprise result, you say? Then how could it be that lockdowns were lifted in the US with barely 50% of the population vaccinated AND without approval for children?
Let's acknowledge that at least some of the stuff we're seeing is being driven by politics to the detriment of actual science. Some of that might even include (gasp) information about vaccines.
The fact that politicians act primarily based on political input is hardly a novel idea, and is not in itself evidence that scientists act in that manner when publishing scientific results. You're going to need actual data to back that later bit up, because at present you are just casting aspersions based on conjecture.
variations in the virus are predictable, but which ones really catch on and how are hard to predict.
I don't know how phizer/moderna/etc balance needs to develop different drugs against all possible variants but I expect that once a strong variant emerges they are well incentivized (financially and culturally) to scale up development against it.
The real surprise is how slowly our social and political institutions respond, not our pharma institutions.
Reduced efficacy against asymptomatic and mild illness but still over 90% efficacy against severe illness and hospitalization hardly seems to warrant your level of ire.
