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?
Those clicks!
I'll take that (actually i already have)
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.
One study has put the delta R0 around the same as Measles...which is 3x original COVID, but still less than Chicken Pox.
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.
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27943833 (29 days ago)
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):
https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/vaccine-efficacy-safet...
Protection against severe illness is still above 85% though and declines only slowly. Besides, people vaccinated in January were mostly elderly.
Edit: BTW, regarding the data and methodology, here's a great write-up about why the Israeli top-line numbers can be misleading:
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/israeli-data-how-can-...
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.
[1]: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/08/19/covid-8-19-cracking-...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-sniffing-alternative-...
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.
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://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/397
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."
In other words, for the already vaccinated (or post-infected) won't repeated exposure also act as a booster?
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/29/health/pfizer-and-moderna-cov...
[2]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/covid-19-booster-shot-for-...
Considering the massive drop in deaths as various countries, US states got vaccinated, I'd say they haven't been compensated enough.
This is literally how every vaccine ever made works.
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.
doesn't really hold up when asymptomatic spread (no symptoms at all) has been one of the main concerns for the entire pandemic
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.
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.
I think you swapped Chicken Pox and Measles in your example, as the delta R0 seems similar to Chicken Pox and Chicken Pox has a lower R0 than Measles.
Chicken Pox, which, pre-vaccine, was considered an infection everyone would get.
(Or wikipedia is wrong about R0 values for various diseases, including the delta variant)
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.
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.