Comment by linuxftw
2 years ago
We know now that the CDC and the manufacturers (and the media) lied about efficacy regarding preventing transmission/infection. In fact, the trials didn't even attempt to measure transmission or infection, and were not ever authorized for such. The only thing they were authorized for was reducing the severity.
Do not perpetuate the myth that the vaccines slowed the spread.
No, I think I will stand by my position that the vaccines did in fact slow the spread, especially early on. I think there is LOTS of evidence about the vaccines effects on transmission which points to them being effective.
Also think back to before we had good evidence on transmissibility/infection. Myocarditis hit the young, who were the last to be vaccinated, and consequently among the last to be researched. So the evidence of the vaccinations effects on transmissibility/infection led the evidence about myocarditis. Before either of those bits of evidence came out, the vaccines were nevertheless VERY effective at reducing hospitalisations from COVID-19 caused by early strains in those initial trials. I've also only really heard of the Pfizer trial's being severely criticised after the fact.
So there was good cause to get vaccinated the entire time, although the value of vaccination kept dropping as new strains kept cropping up which were seemingly less impaired by vaccination, and after omicron I saw a huge amount of people start to skip vaccination.
> I think there is LOTS of evidence about the vaccines effects on transmission which points to them being effective.
Can you point to some canonical sources on this? Preferably things that were published in the last year or so.
My understanding is that effects on infection and transmission were overstated and very short lived anyway. Didn't everybody get covid eventually, multiple times even?
Everyone getting covid and slowing transmission aren't incompatible. In the no lockdown, no vaccine world, everyone gets covid in ~100 days. With vaccines that period is a lot longer (roughly a year?) even though omicron has roughly twice as high a transmission rate. The simplest proof that vaccines have an effect on transmission is the number of infected people by vaccine status. There have been dozens of studies of this (see https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccine-effectiven...) but this really is one where you can just eyeball the effects https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-brea....
While is was not measured directly, we can still look at other data. People who don't get COVID obviously cannot spread it, and so we know vaccines were effective to slow the spread. They were not good enough to stop it, but they did slow it.
You can go ahead and read the trials yourself. They very much found that the vaccines were excellent at preventing Covid-19 entirely (they did not measure if they also prevented SARS-CoV-2 asymptomatic infection).
It just turns out that they had far too little data and that in real-world conditions they weren't anywhere near the 90+% claimed effectiveness.
Even so, the latest population-level research still suggests that the vaccines were 50-60% effective at preventing Covid-19 entirely, at least for some months.
First, they still haven't released all the trial data. Second, the data the FDA released on their own website for the Pfizer trials proved they didn't even test all of the participants in the trial for COVID, nor did they test all the 'suspected but unverified' cases of COVID.
There simply is no data to prove they ever prevented transmission. The trials were the best place to prove that, and they DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO TRY.