You're probably getting flagged because the parent commentator is quoting the lyrics of the song (in quotation marks), as a response to someone asking what was in the video.
Your question should be directed at the creator of the video, not the HN user.
We're posting in a thread discussing why YouTube took down the song. The GP asked for what was objectionable about it. Your comment does not make sense.
The quote is calling the statement "the vaccine will stop the spread of covid" a lie. That statement can be a lie only if the vaccine can not stop the spread. An overly optimistic prediction wouldn't be a lie, so the quote must be calling the vaccine ineffective at best.
Regardless of whether the pandemic is over or not, the statement isn't a lie and therefore the quote is incorrect. The vaccine significantly slows ths spread and from both theory and past experience can fully stop it, given a high enough vaccination rate. At best it hasn't come to fruition yet and at worst it won't not because the statement is a lie but because people actively prevented it from coming true, despite all reason and logic.
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
Too many confounding variables. As vaccines increase immunity, protective measures such as mask wearing and social distancing and travel restrictions are dropped, increasing spread. There’s also the inverse effect where increased spread leads to higher vaccination rates.
Across different countries the testing methodologies are too different to meaningfully compare with.
Finally your last paragraph only applies if the vaccinated person gets infected with delta in the first place (in other words has a breakthrough infection).
95% of COVID-19 deaths are happening among the unvaccinated right now, you’re spreading FUD about what’s basically a miracle.
Thank you for the links. I followed them and came to a different conclusion:
1) "The vaccination rate of a country is not correlated with its covid infection rate".
From the article: "The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated."
You can interpret this as either the vaccine not working (unlikely) or that high-income countries such as Iceland and Portugal test a larger share of their population than low-income countries such as Vietnam and South Africa (very likely), thus confounding the relationship between vaccination levels and reported Covid cases.
2) "And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, people are just as likely to spread the virus as unvaccinated people".
From the article: "The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab [Pfizer] was 42%, but increased to 58% with time."
Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
"Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine."
The word "significantly" has a specific statistical meaning. The paper discussed on the Nature article implies it is not a statistically significant difference between 67% and 58% (likely accounting for covariance and measurement error).
Unless you have a different source showing there is statistical significance between those two results?
> You can interpret this as either the vaccine not working (unlikely) or that high-income countries such as Iceland and Portugal test a larger share of their population than low-income countries such as Vietnam and South Africa (very likely)
You may interpret all you want, but I was just pointing out the lack of solid data supporting the claim: "The vaccine significantly slows the spread"
Almost 3 billion people have been fully vaccinated worldwide and yet there is still no evidence that the vaccines have any effect at all in slowing the spread of the virus. I find this rather remarkable.
This situation could very well push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous strains. Like what happened with Marek's disease among chickens:
> Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
Pfizer buys you a bit more time, but the downward trend in your immunity is unmistakable too:
Italy is at 80% and they still see the need to ban unvaccinated people from places. New Zealand is planning to ban unvaccinated people form places after we reach 90% of over-12-year-olds. So even with a massive 80% vaccinated, the vaccine doesn't stop the spread. Maybe it would at 90%? 95%? Who knows.
In New Zealand, the unvaccinated are largely the indigenous Maori, not stereotypical anti-vaxxers.
I think you'd find that Māori are doing OK. Better than Pacific Islanders.
But yes, there's hard-to-reach people in every ethnicity. What I've enjoyed is the orgs who are vaccinating Māori and Pacific Islanders - always tell the community to come along even if you don't fit in either ethnicity, you'll still get a jab. I just love that. It's the way it should be!
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
The only thing that remains, is some protection against symptomatic disease.
> The only thing that remains, is some protection against symptomatic disease.
And sever disease needing hospitalization and death. And these indeed the things we want to avoid. Both as individuals and as a society. Because if/when hospitals fill up then you have a trouble. This is what people don't get. (They also don't get that they could end up in a hospital or a morgue with some probability, so I don't even mention that.)
One of my friend's father has been waiting for an operation for half a year here (in Hungary). They couldn't do it in the spring because the hospitals were overcrowded with covid patients. Then they couldn't do it because the waiting lists grew during that period. Then somehow he got in about a week ago with the help of a former high ranking official (yeah, gotta love Eastern Europe) just to be sent home the next morning, because there weren't enough free beds in the ICU any more. Yes, anecdotal, but this is the thing we try to avoid.
So the first link is not a study. There isn't an examination or even a reference of studies that provide evidence to the contrary. Not to say that the article can be dismissed fully but keep in mind it's not painting a full picture.
The second link is about a study that looks at transmission of the Delta variant from a breakthrough infection. It did not look into wether the chances of getting infected after vaccination decreased.
Finally the vaccine dramatically reduced your chances of dying. I'd say that's some pretty good protection from symptomatic disease, not just some protection.
In comparative studies of populations it has been shown to still be substantially effective at preventing infection even after antibodies wane.
You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.
It is a remarkable conclusion to suppose that studying individuals in the same society fewer got infected if they were vaccinated because of comparison between different societies.
It would be as if we proved that people didn't smoke in the USA got lung cancer far less than smokers but you sprung up with a study that showed that rates of smoking between societies wasn't highly correlated with lung cancer ergo smoking didn't cause lung cancer. One would logically suppose that your study didn't prove what you think it proved.
At limit you are supposing that if we got 100% vaccinated somehow we would see as much covid spread despite everyone having antibodies which are known to decrease chance of infection and extent of spread ergo effecting the time one remains infectious and how many virions are available to be spread.
Beware of anyone who doesn't feel the need to disprove that raindrops fall in buckets who nevertheless has proven that storms can't cause floods.
More importantly.
The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.
> In comparative studies of populations it has been shown to still be substantially effective at preventing infection even after antibodies wane.
Source?
> You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective
I linked to an analysis by a Harvard professor. Who uses official government data of the respective countries. So I think I have good reason to take that seriously.
> because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.
Yes there must be many confounding factors. But your phrase: "doesn't show a high enough correlation" is putting it mildly. How about: no correlation at all?
But I would love to see data that shows a population-level effect of mass vaccination on the covid infection rate.
> The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.
This is the sort of percentage that got thrown around a lot at the start of the vaccination campaign. But for protection against infection/transmission. Just one of many examples:
The idea that the vaccinated have become (mostly) asymptomatic spreaders of the viruses, is nothing to celebrate. This is a scenario that can push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous variants:
Killing hosts isn't beneficial to the virus survival, quite the opposite in fact. An infection that super aggressively reproduces but due to antibodies fails to gain a foothold beyond the nasopharynx in vaccinated people doing little damage to the host but spreading effectively to both vaccinated individuals who largely have the above experience and unvaccinated who get miserably sick and sometimes drown in their own mucus could be very fit in evolutionary terms in a mostly vaccinated population.
A mutation which increased its spread slightly among vaccinated individuals by 10% while increasing the mortality of the unvaccinated by 10x would be fitter yet. This isn't fate because the space the virus explores is driven by its actual difficult to predict particulars not hypothetical thought experiments but I wouldn't bet on covid going away, I wouldn't bet on people choosing to be more likely to die and abandoning vaccination, and I wouldn't bet on covid becoming safer for the unvaccinated in the short term.
The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse. So if you choose to stay among the unvaccinated I would expect your prospects in the next several years range from bad to worse. Make your own decisions accordingly.
> Killing hosts isn't beneficial to the virus survival, quite the opposite in fact. An infection that super aggressively reproduces but due to antibodies fails to gain a foothold beyond the nasopharynx in vaccinated people doing little damage to the host but spreading effectively to both vaccinated individuals who largely have the above experience and unvaccinated who get miserably sick and sometimes drown in their own mucus could be very fit in evolutionary terms in a mostly vaccinated population.
> The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse.
If we make it possible for everyone to be vaccinated if they so choose the only tragedy will be the innocent old and immunocompromised who die despite vaccination because they were effectively murdered by someone else's stupidity.
But is the pandemic over? It's clearly not, and that was the point of the lyric. Countries with 90%+ vaccination rates are still having lockdowns because of breakthrough cases.
You're acting as if your interpretation is the only valid one. Since not everyone will interpret "the jab stops the spread" as "the pandemic is over", the best we can do is interpret "the jab stops the spread" as ... wait for it ... "the jab stops the spread".
>The lyrics are just "the jab stops the spread." That is true.
I say this as someone who's vaccinated; that is not true. It can limit the spread by reducing the viral load you give off, but you can still be vaccinated, get the virus, be asymptomatic (or not) and transmit it.
