And you are ignoring one year of data. Check the discussion yesterday, linked above.
The vaccinated world will be at the movies, drinking at a bar, enjoying life and you’ll still be talking about 2020’s pre-vaccine numbers.
I don’t get what you’re trying to argue. The data comparing vaxxed to unvaxxed populations is clear as day light. You even have studies published in publications like Lancet. If you exclude China’s shitty vaccines, cases, hospitalizations and deaths in vaxxed populations drop to close to 0.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2021/covid-rates-unvaccinated-people/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00947-8/fulltext
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I am just on the side of being careful, and I think at this stage optimist is good, being absolutely sure that the vaccine is working (long term) is a recipe for disaster. We haven’t eradicated the virus and we don’t know exactly what will come next, so we should be on our guards.
This is why Moderna is preparing a booster: https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/covid-moderna-ceo-advocates-3rd-vaccine-dose-to-protect-people-at-risk-121052300476_1.html
Sorry, but this is a different argument. The case for being careful has nothing to do with your apparent argument that we can’t be sure the vaccines are working because of numbers from 2020. The studies of unvaxxed vs. vaxxed populations are very clear.
And yeah, the vaccine companies want booster shots. Go figure. The science isn’t clear yet. But even if boosters are needed, that’s another indication that the vaccines work because obviously we wouldn’t continue using vaccines if vaxxed people were still getting sick, hospitalized and dying.
Yes it is, in countries with 2 clear waves we have seen the same pattern before. We also know that virus mutate when under strain. We simply do not know enough at this stage.
We already had this discussion, and this is not the vaccine forum.
Ok well when you publish your study a peer-reviewed journal refuting the other studies that have demonstrated unequivocally that vaxxed populations have seen cases, hospitalizations and deaths drop to close to 0 while in unvaxxed populations in the very same geographical locations, the virus still causes high rates of illness and death, let me know!
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That does not prove that there won’t be a bad mutation and a resurgence is a few months. I never said that vaccines don’t work on the current virus, I said that they are not a definitive protection against future versions of the virus.
Well that’s a different argument. Your previous argument implied that we can’t be sure that the vaccines are the cause in the massive decline in cases, even though we now have incontrovertible evidence that the vaccines work because we can compare vaxxed vs. unvaxxed populations and see the stark differences in cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the same geographic locations. Like I said this data has even been published in publications like Lancet.
So far the best of the vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) are proving very effective against the variants that have emerged. Could always change in the future but I’m not sure what you’re arguing for or against. Given the evidence that the vaccines are currently working amazingly well, are we supposed to remain in lockdown or under heavy restrictions indefinitely? Maybe TW should just skip vaccines altogether and see what happens?
You misunderstood or keep mischaracterizing what I wrote. So again:
I wrote that the vaccine has a part, and even that the rate of descent seems more pronounced this year than last year and that number of deaths came down a bit earlier. However if you look at the curve it also came down last year without vaccine and the number of deaths was near zero in the summer (In UK). Then number of deaths (and cases) went back up in September with a new variant of the virus.
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Why are we having vaccine discussions on a covid board? Should this not be in the vaccine discussion?
And wars on disease are won by vaccines. Polio used to be the horrible disease of the 50s and that was beaten with vaccines. And it wasn’t just a flu either, it crippled you.
And for centuries mankind had been battling with smallpox, the plague, etc. where there was nothing they could do about. Think about how long the plague lasted in Europe.
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Agreed already asked for this to be moved.
True without vaccine it would still be there. But It is never only vaccine, it is vaccine + epidemic prevention measures. Both should go in pair. btw, I am not against vaccines, just warning against early victory lap.
Let’s not mix everything, plague can be treated with antibiotics.
But we need to be clear about the science, which is that this virus mutates relatively slowly compared to influenza and the Western vaccines are proving effective against the variants that have emerged. This is particularly true of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01222-5
The risk that some new variant that can escape the vaccines is real but the way to solve for that is to get as much of the world vaccinated as soon as possible, not for people who have been vaxxed to stay locked up.
On this point, new variants are likely to emerge in places with high numbers of unvaxxed people (India, Africa, heck Taiwan), not in places where large numbers of vaxxed people have gone back to living near normal lives.
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Exactly. I’m not worried about the current outbreak in Taiwan. It will be resolved whether it’s June, October or January is of little significance in the long term. But the virus mutating to the point that everyone needs to be vaccinated again means this will probably become endemic and a great number of people will die.
Good article today in the China Times regarding vaccine effectiveness.
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I really don’t think there’s any reason to believe this. Variants will emerge at random. Whether they thrive or not depends on whether there is a suitable host.
Huh? People who are fully vaxxed are far less likely to be suitable hosts and far less capable spreaders, if they spread at all. Virology and vaccines 101.
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- Less is not zero, and zero is not achievable even in theory. The virus appears to be still spreading quite effectively in the US, despite good vaccine coverage.
- A variant with sufficient evasion capability to achieve R>1 sets you off down a path which will favour further optimisations. Those optimisations might come along with (uncorrelated) features that make the virus more deadly.
Of course there are limits on the potential ‘upgrades’ that the organism can acquire. But nobody has ever done an experiment on this scale before. The results are unknowable.
However the general path in this kind of scenario is that an equilibrium is reached. Disturbing the equilibrium with ‘corrective’ measures tends to cause a transient increase in disease. The nearest equivalent would be pest control in agriculture, where biocides are ubiquitous and continually upgraded to meet the challenges posed by nature.
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That may be the best thing I’ve read so far today. 
I thought: wow, China Times (part of the Want Want group, not always known for its even handed reports) has upped its game. That was really well written!
Then I noticed at the bottom that it was actually a Health Magazine article reprinted on the China Times website—which given the detail and tone of the report makes way more sense. For interested forumosans, here’s the original:
Guy
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Ah can you not just accept that he’s correct.?
The more hosts and the more replication the more likely mutations will pop up , all else being equal
Every now and then an individual is infected by different strains at the same time and /or an individual cannot clear it and it continues to replicate inside them for months without killing them. This can create the condition for a variant with multiple mutations or quite different characteristics to appear. It’s what they think happened with the SA variant.
yes, I know that. However that doesn’t seem to be a big factor in the real world. Consider pesticide resistance. You would expect, wouldn’t you, that if 99.9% of bugs are killed by some pesticide, that mutations simply wouldn’t arise in sufficient numbers, and that pesticide-resistance genes would not be reproduced in sufficient numbers. But they do, I guess because a small fraction of a very large number (ie., the potential population of bugs) is still quite a large number. When resurgence occurs due to a fortuitous mutation, it’s devastating.
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