I’d like to learn more about “exponential decay to zero efficacy around 8-12 weeks” and “some signs it descend below zero for a short period thereafter” as well as “Factor in the 3-5 week period of immune suppression post-vax (which the statisticians have tried to obfuscate by recording the recently-vaxed as “unvaccinated”).” Can you share any references I can share with those who are curious/skeptical?
Since we don’t have comorbidity data for these Covid death numbers, it is impossible to discern its accuracy. How many actually died ‘of Covid?’ It’s not a number I would throw around with any confidence. Most people are now aware that the actual number whom died ‘because of Covid’ is far, far less than the number you have posted. However, the WHO has not allowed any Covid death number corrections, as yet. Quite possibly, when pressured, they may indeed refine these numbers so that they accurately reflect reality. Then again, maybe not. It is difficult to tell, especially when the vaccine companies have such influence over that group.
Various governments have since declared their definitions of a “Covid death” were either wrong, lacking comorbidity data, vastly exaggerated, etc. Taiwan’s official Covid death numbers also suffer from similar various flaws.
The problem is the kids then start infecting everyone around them—teachers, parents, grandparents . . . That’s why mass vaccination campaigns for kids is a thing.
Guy
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Right. So how well does covid vaccines prevent transmission from kids? Very hard question to answer but very limited impact from what we have learned.
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except we know vaccination doesn’t stop you getting it or passing it on.
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Well you can’t pass on what you don’t have. So if vaccines slow down infection rates, this can and does help.
Take care everyone. I hope you have a good weekend.
Guy
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do they?
There are two camps.
Camp 1 says they do.
Camp 2 says no, they just prevent serious symptoms.
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In Germany the covid cases among the 5 to 12 years old were up to 7000 per 100 000 kids per week from November to March, while the cases among the elderly were about 200 to 300 at the same time.
5 to 12 years is the mostly not vaccinated population while the elderly are the most vaccinated population. The kids then gave it to their parents and eventually to the grandparents. I speculate the kids were driving the infection rate.
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I’ve seen very little saying Camp 2 (EDIT: Well, except many, many posters here). From what I can tell, the debate is more how much they slow down infection rates, and for how long after receiving the shot. My impression is the general consensus is the vaccines are really important for reducing Omicron severity, but only somewhat useful for reducing Omicron spread. “Somewhat”, however, isn’t nothing.
For example (this is from January, but I can’t immediately find anything clearer that’s more recent; the article’s also a bit unclear for when it’s talking about Omicron versus earlier variants):
Initial studies suggest that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine offer 30 to 40 percent protection against infection and around 70 percent protection against hospitalization.
Early analysis from the United Kingdom has suggested that boosters have moderate to high vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection, offering 70 to 75 percent protection in the initial weeks after the booster.
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All the official statements now give some variant of “Camp 2”. It simply isn’t possible you’ve not read these statements. There are now multiple scientific reviews showing zero or negative efficacy against omicron. National reports on hospitalisations, deaths etc confirm the same thing. Again, if you haven’t seen them it’s because you aren’t looking for them. There’s mountains of stuff since January, including weekly hospitalisation reports.
Slowing down transmission a bit is precisely what you don’t want: “somewhat” is worse than nothing. It creates an evolutionary training ground for immune escape, which is exactly what happened in country after country, with massive infection rates after vaccination campaigns. Those who had any sense (Israel was a good example) belatedly recognised what was going on and backed off.
As for reducing omicron severity: reducing an extremely small number by a small amount leaves you with basically the same small number. And then one has to consider the cost(s) involved in achieving that dubious result, and whether a better result might have been achieved in other ways with less expense and mayhem.
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Any news I can find about Israel “backing off” is related to fourth shots, not the boosters we are discussing. Can you show me a single article in which Israel officials called off their booster (third shot in a series)?
Guy
Yeah, it took them a while to see the light. It is hard, as the saying goes, for a man to believe a thing if his salary depends on his not believing it. But shortly after their more-or-less mandated third dose, I recall a video of one of their top health bigwigs admitting that it wasn’t working. There are very few countries - if any - that are admitting the vaccines were a terrible idea from the start. Best they can do is juggle a tacit acknowledgement that the vaccines have not done what they wanted them to do - because the statistics are undeniable - while publicly mumbling about everyone needing to get repeated injections, for reasons unknown.
I have no idea why you’re drawing a distinction between “boosters” and “fourth doses”, or indeed why you’re trying to constrain the conversation into your preferred cul-de-sac (again). The vaccines have done nothing useful for anybody - boosted, unboosted, or whatever - and there’s no reason to expect that Taiwan would have a radically different experience (unless you buy the theory that Taiwan was COVID-free during the vax campaign - that might well result in a different outcome). Incidentally, what happened to Chen’s pronouncement that we’d be given our freedoms back when the country was 50% boosted? I believe that milestone was passed, and quietly ignored, a few weeks ago.
Even in the hypothetical scenario where vaccines did slow infection rates without any downsides, there’s no obvious reason why that would have “saved lives”. As someone put it elsewhere, that would have simply resulted in “the vulnerable” getting infected on Thursday instead of Tuesday.
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Just for you to see the statistics in Germany till now
About 95 thousand people have died during this time where most people were unvaxed.
Those are the numbers we allow now with mostly unvaxed people dying.
About 40 thousand during this time.
You do the math!
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I’ve noticed everyone cheerleading for vaccines supports their point with a couple of graphs, completely ignoring the more sophisticated analyses that looked at multiple countries, confounding factors, overall mortality, etc etc etc.
I have done the math. So have lots of other people much smarter than me (go and look at Norman Fenton’s analyses of NHS data). The primary conclusion is that those charts don’t show what you think they show.
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They should send you to an ICU in Germany or elsewhere proclaiming your position.
Maybe they will listen to you and take a break from work, go home and never come back.
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Have you been to an ICU in Germany? Have you even bothered to look at the statistics released by the health service there? My niece is a doctor. She worked in a busy London hospital throughout the pandemic. To the extent that there were any problems at all, they were entirely due to the dysfunction of NHS management (understaffing, mostly) and nothing to do with people dying of COVID. She resigned in disgust a few months ago. Humbuggery runs in my family, I guess.
ICUs today are full of the same people they always were. Smokers. Junk food addicts. Road traffic accidents. Post-surgery monitoring. Even at the height of the pandemic there were maybe two or three COVID patients in any given ICU, and they were there because they had “three or more comorbidities”, not because they had COVID per se.
90%+ of the people dying “of or with” COVID today are vaccinated, in multiple countries. That’s partly because people being marked down as COVID deaths are in the heavily-vaccinated demographic, partly because they’re not dying of COVID but with COVID, and partly because the vaccines just don’t work. The bottom line, though, is that absolute numbers are very small indeed. And as I said above, even if the vaccines actually worked, a small number reduced by a small amount is still a small number. We could have achieved a much better result by offering vulnerable people best-practice treatment, but that was politically untenable. And in that regard, it’s worth pointing out that Taiwan is still putting people on vents and remdesivir - which was shown early on to result in a high death rate. Even the Americans stopped doing that eventually because it was getting too obvious.
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Because we are in the Taiwan thread, and the topic at hand is boosters as third dose. It’s not a “cul-de-sac,” it’s the topic we were discussing before you arrived and waved it away. 
Guy
You appear to be having a discussion with yourself. I scrolled way back to yesterday and can’t see anything about boosters/third doses. I was responding to @lostinasia’s assertion - based on some data collected way back at the start of the omicron wave - that a vaccine designed for a long-extinct variant of COVID is even theoretically likely to be of any use against a dramatically different variant, regardless of how many doses you hand out. It was also a response to your assertion that vaccines “can and do slow down infection rates”, which is patently not true and would be clinically meaningless even if they did.
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A new large scale community study is investigating the effectiveness of the vaccine in communities by examining 30 million people in widely different settings.
This study was based on 30 million cases of covid-19 and over 400,000 deaths linked to covid-19 across 2558 counties.
What this study adds
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Higher vaccination coverage was associated with lower rates of population level incidence of covid-19 and mortality related to covid-19
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This community level benefit complements the large body of evidence indicating individual level benefits of covid-19 vaccination
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Question Is SARS-CoV-2 messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination associated with risk of myocarditis?
Conclusions and Relevance Results of this large cohort study indicated that both first and second doses of mRNA vaccines were associated with increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. For individuals receiving 2 doses of the same vaccine, risk of myocarditis was highest among young males (aged 16-24 years) after the second dose."
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