Peter wrote:
The Indian variant is thought to require about a 90% vacc penetration. The UK has got stuck at ~89% (of adults), …
You have to factor in vaccine efficacy. With delta I think you need 90% immunity, and you will struggle to get that with even 95% vaccine efficacy unless you start vaccinating very young children.
I’m not aware of any officially sourced lies about the vaccines, just a gradual change in language.
As I recall:
We started with controlled trials against the Wuhan variant (R0 = 2.6) and vaccine efficacies (against symptomatic infection) of 70% for AZ and 90% for Pfizer.
Then we had the NHS saying vaccine efficacies “as a whole” were 80%.
Then, as the variants rolled in (R0 = 5-8 for delta?), the vaccines “protected against hospitalisation and death”.
I don’t think any of these statements were lies, just accommodations to new data, intended to be “reassuring”.
Meanwhile the journalistic stuff has become polarised. Eg a few days ago the Guardian newspaper started to lay into somebody for saying that “the vaccines could be dangerous”.
It’s blindingly obvious that the vaccines “could be dangerous”. Side-effects have been recorded. Nobody has been vaccinated for very long. Some age groups have never been vaccinated at all.
The question is what else is dangerous in a Covid epidemic? “Breathing while unvaccinated” must be quite high on the list…
But balanced arguments over pros and cons don’t fit into three word sound bites.
Sadly, there is no ‘herd immunity’ against Covid-19 in the traditional sense, where a disease no longer spreads (such as in Measles or Smallpox). This concept requires that those who are vaccinated or had the disease will, after they come in contact with the virus again, not develop the disease to the stage that they can spread it.
We know now that even vaccinated and recovered can spread it (although a lot less), so what we achieved is that we turned it into a much weaker (and hence less relevant/nuisance) disease, and of course with less spread there will be lower infection numbers, but never as low as we might have thought at the beginning
So yes – ‘herd immunity’ is no longer the objective, as you write.
I wondered for a while how infectious somebody is if they are vaccinated but still get infected.
According to this BMJ article they seem to be as infectious as if they were not vaccinated.
Of course you would still expect the vaccinated to be less prone to infection in the first place, despite the article comparing “a popular weekend getaway spot,” with a whole state.
C210: At the very outset of the pandemic, there was scepticism about whether vaccines would even be possible and whether the effects would be long-lasting or whether we would need repeated boosters. If there was a surprise, it was that the vaccines were more effective than anticipated.
Different types of antibodies are produced in different types of tissues, so the fact that the vaccines may stop severe disease (infection affecting the lungs, heart and other organs) more effectively than they seem to stop carriage/transmission (upper respiratory mucosal infection) isn’t a surprise.
There was always discussion about whether new variants would evade the vaccines. So far, they still seem to prevent severe disease effectively for most people. That may change. If so, we may need to tweak the vaccines. I need a new ‘flu shot every year. If it turns out that all I need is a new COVID vaccine every year in order to keep myself safe, then great! I suppose it’s always possible that a variant turns up that for some reason can’t be vaccinated against, but that seems less likely now.
The obvious big change in understanding was about whether masks were useful and whether COVID was spread primarily by droplets, fomites or aerosol.
So, personally I don’t see a lot of chopping and changing… Just a gradual improvement in our understanding of the disease and its treatment, which is what I would have expected. Medicine is not like engineering. You can’t predict things from first principles with a high degree of confidence. It’s a messy discipline that advances two steps forward, one step back. Even experiments are typically messy and hard to interpret.
If you feel that you were mislead, then perhaps you should try exploring different media sources.
One thing I find somewhat amusing is the total lack of information on how to fool the tests 
I saw one report where some kids found they could get out of school by dipping the lateral flow test swab in vinegar (a positive result)
But how do you get a negative test? What is the control strip looking for? Could it be something in saliva?
I am not into UFO type conspiracies (basically because it would be hard to keep something big like that secret) but to me it looks like there is a bunch of people trawling social media for this stuff and getting it removed fast. Such info would have huge value.
BTW I would bet that the info in the UK passenger locator form which gets looked at is:
Especially they aren’t checking whether you have used one of the exemptions e.g. a “nuclear engineer” etc. because those would require intelligence and a lot of legwork. Very unlikely in such big numbers.
Peter wrote:
But how do you get a negative test? What is the control strip looking for? Could it be something in saliva?
I don’t know, but I have seen a few PCR tests coming back saying that insufficient biological matter was detected on the swab. I forget the exact wording, but clearly some checks are being done.
Just watched this (sorry in french) :
In short :
So it is really a vax that protects you and not others/society/whoever !
So, vax the vulnerable and leave the others alone !
Those vax mandates/quasi mandates (if unvaxed you are a paria) have no scientific basis.
Jujupilote wrote:
So it is really a vax that protects you and not others/society/whoever
I’m not sure that is completely correct. My French isn’t up to it, but around 3.00 the first guy quotes the efficacy of the vaccines “against delta in its moderate form” (?) is 40-80%. Happy to be corrected :-)
40-80% matches this Mayo clinic preprint which has been all over the news recently.
So once infected, a vaccinated person is as contagious as the unvaccinated, but vaccinated people are less likely to get infected, and so their vaccination does still reduce community transmission, as well as protect themselves.
But IMHO this in itself does not justify vax mandates, pass sanitaires, etc. You need to balance this vaccine benefit against broader non-medical issues.
David’s wrote " IMHO this in itself does not justify vax mandates, pass sanitaires, etc. You need to balance this vaccine benefit against broader non-medical issues."
You are right that it does not justify mandatory vaccination. A government could simply say here are the vaccines, you can get them at such and such a place and they are free while stocks last. Then each individual can make their own choice. The problem with that is that 96% of the people in hospital here, with Covid are unvaccinated. In countries like France where it is people’s taxes which are paying for most of the hospital services you can understand why the vaccinated may well come to resent the unvaccinated. Secondly, it seems that many of these unvaccinated people are also health care workers. Do they know something the rest of the population don’t? Or should we remind them of the phrase " physician heal thyself"
I could.quite agree with you about pass sanitaire, but having used mine several times now I do not find them much of an inconvenience and has only taken about 5 seconds to have them checked. The further advantage is that you.know that everyone else I the restaurant or bar or whatever has also either been vaccinated or recently tested negative. I do not feel it curtails my individual liberty but if they did not exist it would no longer bother me after all it would not be bothering the unvaccinated that I might be sitting next to them, blissfully unaware in my vaccinated state, that I am carrying the virus unbeknown to me.
And so we come to the balance with broader, non medical issues. Once again I find myself in agreement with you. There is no doubt there have been problems in the hospitality industry and some still exist. But I also remember pubs and restaurants, in the early days of Covid, when people were fearful of going out, begging Governments to issue orders for them to close so that their insurance companies would have to pay out.The question is now, how many people want to risk entering such places if they are not vaccinated? The pass sanitaire provides IMO a good PR message for these places and at the same time avoids them getting sued by staff, many of whom may also be unvaccinated, if they should suffer a severe Covid 19 which they could allege they contracted at their workplace.
