I am certain that is not the case – simply put like that. It is a story which has caught the press and it just keeps travelling.
IMHO anybody who has a scientific (or better still engineering) education cannot possibly believe that. The data is there for all to see.
Vaccinated people are much less likely to be symptomatic, so are much less likely to be shedding the virus. It’s the same with the common cold, flu, whatever airborne disease. Early on in this crisis, studies were done on how far the droplets travel if you cough or sneeze. It is a huge distance – 10m plus. If you have no symptoms, you won’t be distributing it like that. And if you wear a mask, even a sh1tty one, you will also be distributing it less, on average (I reckon on the packed underground trains you are probably finished unless you wear a spacesuit 
).
And it is a gradual relationship, not “all or nothing”. It was also established early on that the virus load drives the severity of the disease, and a random vaccinated person will give a random recipient a much smaller virus load.
And all these factors add up.
It’s the same as any engineering problem, where multiple factors drive say the failure rate of some product. Most things fail more at elevated temperatures, so if a product is sold into a market which just happens to run the thing cooler, you will see fewer failures. The product might still be crap, but not so many will fail. Engineering is full of this kind of stuff. It’s the “real world”. Things interact…
But anti-vacc people will always have plenty of ammunition, simply because a fair chunk of the population are not vacced, another fair chunk didn’t develop loads of antibodies, and a very large chunk is in poor health anyway (this includes many young people; just walk down the street and look, remembering that those in really poor health aren’t going to be walking down the street anyway) and thus more vulnerable to any given virus loading. So the hospitals will always be fairly busy, though probably not much more than on a regular bad flu season.
Indeed. It doesn’t completely prevent any aspect (catching / spreading / getting ill / dying), it just lowers the chances and extent of each considerably.
So if you’re double-vaxxed and your immune system responded then you’re much less likely to catch it. If you do catch it, you’re less likely to spread it and to get ill. If you do spread it it’ll be to a lesser extent, and if you do get ill it’ll be much less likely to be serious. If it is serious, you’re less likely to die.
Then there’s the efficacy. If 50m people are double-vaxxed at 90% efficacy, that is 5m people for whom it doesn’t work – although a more accurate description is that their immune systems do not respond. Either way, those 5m people are as at-risk as they were before.
Finally, remember the dominant strain is now Delta which is some significant (I forget the number) % more infectious. The vaccine trials, from which efficacy data came, were against the original version (perhaps soon to be rebranded as Classic Covid).
I thought that I’d seen a paper somewhere so had a little look up. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v1 Obviously it’s not peer reviewed so may not be accurate.
That paper looks at viral loads in those who test positive.
It seems to be accepted that a vaccinated person has half the infection risk of an unvaccinated person. I posted a link some weeks back.
So even if the paper is 100% correct vaccinated people are still less likely to spread Covid.
half the infection risk
which is absolutely DRAMATIC!
It means, AIUI, an R number of (say) 1.5 is reduced to 0.75, which is a huge improvement.
~1950 till ~1967 there seems to have been no hostility to the Tuberculosis eradication campaign, in the UK, and probably elsewhere.
Annual chest X-ray, as a condition of employment, for many jobs, with a blood test as an alternative. Until an antibiotic was found, diagnosis mean an isolation ward for life.
I got a very nasty ultimatum letter in my second year in university, due to a clerical error – a check showed I had been X-rayed, and was clear.
Mobile units visited schools, factories, housing estates, etc. But the media and politicians were not stirring up opposition then.
DavidS wrote:
@kwlf Thanks for an excellent example of Simpson’s paradox! Until now I had mostly seen comparisons of baseball players :-)
Thanks! I always saw it explained with cricket, which I understand no better than baseball. I looked up Simpson and it appears he was British and worked at Bletchley park.
Between COVID and gerrymandering we’re spoiled for practical examples of his paradox at the moment!
Peter wrote:
I am certain that is not the case – simply put like that. It is a story which has caught the press and it just keeps travelling.IMHO anybody who has a scientific (or better still engineering) education cannot possibly believe that.
In all fairness to those who (still) believe that vaccination does only protect against severe acute episodes and not against infection: There is a scientific background behind that “rumor”.
In the early days of Covid research, some of the manufacturers of the vaccine actually used “hospitalization” as their clinical endpoint in the trials to license the vaccine. The reasons for that was partly because one believed that this is medically really what the vaccine should reduce and partly because hospitalization is a much easier to control endpoint than infection (simply because you can be infected unnoticed but it’s hard to be hospitalized unnoticed).
Therefore technically what has been proven in the trials has been, that hospitalization is reduced – and these trials did not say anything about infection.
18 months down the road we know more: Vaccination is actually effective against infection (all vaccines and against all known variants just to various degrees).
But what we also know – as shown in the paper off field posted and in many others – it is only indirectly effective against the risk to infect others: Obviously it is because if you do not infect yourself you can also not infect others, but if you got infected yourself despite vaccination, you are as dangerous to others as the people who got infected w/o vaccination.
On a different note:
While we discuss the various testing, mask wearing, etc. regimes in Europe, in the land of the free the market is pretty fast to finally get things done: More and more large employers make vaccination mandatory for their workforce and in US that means that if you can not provide a medical proof that you can not be vaccinated, your work contract will terminate at Nov. 15th (which seems to be the due date for many of the large employers).
Ok, as always in the US religious reasons are treated equal to scientific reasons, you could also opt out due to religious reasons – but as all of the larger churches have already declared there is no dogmatic ban of vaccination, in this case this will only be applicable to very few.
Malibuflyer wrote:
if you got infected yourself despite vaccination, you are as dangerous to others as the people who got infected w/o vaccination.
Is that really true? The immune response the vaccination gives you should reduce the amount of virus in you body, even if you’re infected. After all, that should be the reason you’re less likely to be hospitalised.
