> DR. ROCHELLE WALENSKY, CDC DIRECTOR
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210402002315/https://www.msnbc...
In April 2021 the original strain was still dominent if I record well, against which the vaccines were much more effective against getting COVID.
Do you have a source for this?
Here's a great retrospective that covers the timeline and the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgrMzvasrm8
TLDR: We knew the mRNA vaccines were effective at preventing serious disease in late 2020. We didn't know for sure (publicly) if the mRNA vaccines reduced transmission rates until mid 2021, as more research concluded. Mid 2021 is when it was demonstrated that mRNA vaccines reduce transmission of the variants of SARS-CoV-2 at the time. As SARS-CoV-2 continues to mutate, more research needs to be done.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Delta_variant
Delta was named at the end of May 2021 and started to become the dominant strain worldwide in the following months. As shown in the chart under ”Prevention” (and described in the linked pages), Delta significantly reduced vaccine effectiveness against infection and symptomatic disease, though not against severe disease.
However, it’s also true that vaccine effectiveness, regardless of variant, significantly declines over the months following the dose - again, much less so for severe disease than for any symptomatic disease.
It was pretty clear that vaccines had been oversold early on. The opposite happened with masks, where the experts pooh-poohed them, then backtracked.
It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten.
(I have had 4 doses by the way, I'm not going to cut my nose to spite my face: knowing that vaccines were oversold is not the same as believing they're useless).
I didn't know that my heart pain was related to the vaccine until I noticed the same pain during the third shot.
The Moderna CEO is at least honest enough to say by now it should be treated the same as a flu vaccine. If you want to you can get your yearly dose and if you don't up to you. Pfizer on the other hand was actively whining about how they created too many doses and how they can't milk it any more.
If it was up to me I wouldn't have gotten the third one, but the fact that they've intermingled it with travel restrictions when it does not in fact prevent spread is quite infuriating.
It seems that people have also forgotten that the antibodies compared to other vaccines(which can be in decades for hepatitis for example) fade rather quickly and that if you got infected quite far out from your last shot, and were only mildly symptomatic it might not actually have been the vaccine that protected you but rather your own immune system and the fact that the whole thing isn't as deadly anymore.
> It was quite eye-opening how fast the mainstream narratives were rewritten.
To be clear, are you saying that this is bad? "mainstream" and "rewritten" are loaded words usually deployed as insult.
But the scientific process is one of learning from reality, and admitting past errors, so isn't an increase in knowledge a good thing?
Exactly what part of the scientific process involves locking people up, stripping them of their jobs, splitting families apart?
Admitting past errors without also acknowledging the current knowledge is just as fallible is nothing but empty words. It's also a very rose tinted interpretation of what has been happening. The messaging has always been "These are this week's truths. They are absolute truths, and we'll enforce these truths at gunpoint, for these truths are infallible, and The Science is settled."
I see that you're not the person that I was replying to, I see that you are attempting to change the subject, speak in extremes, and and to use emotional language, a common tactic to derail logical processing. Writing this doesn't help anyone, not even you.
Fair point.
I fully understand that the science wasn’t settled. It was a new disease, and guidance was going to change.
What I didn’t expect was the overconfidence and then reversals, without missing a beat, and without acknowledging “hey, we were wrong”. The stuff around masks… first ”they don’t work”, “they make it more likely to get infected”, “people won’t know how to use a mask”, “masks are a superstition” then switching to mask mandates, without admitting that those who expressed those views got it wrong.
The reason I used “mainstream” was to show that these were people in positions of trust. News outlets with editorial controls, public health officials, elected politicians. Or doctors. It happened both on traditional, and social media and IRL. The term was not meant to be pejorative, but descriptive.
Vaccines are similar: there are many clips that show pundits, media figures and public health officials overselling vaccines. Instead of later saying “the preliminary data looked good so we assumed they would stop transmission and infection, but it turns out that these vaccines reduce serious illness and death. We were wrong, but it’s a new disease and we are all learning, that’s how science works” we got “we ALWAYS said that vaccines were meant to reduce illness and death and not infection and transmission”.
Maybe I hate being gaslit more than most. My mother, an intelligent woman who I love and respect, in an effort to spare my feelings as a young child, would try to warp reality: “oh you never had the toy that’s missing”. She probably thought I wouldn’t remember, but did. She continued that pattern throughout my childhood. Whatever the reason, I intensely dislike that sort of manipulation, and I think it’s corrosive.
I think that your conception of "we" in "hey, we were wrong" is perhaps too monolithic and simplistic. "show pundits, media figures" are mere conduits, they "get the message out" but they are never subject matter experts, you should not assume that they originate any message, have an authoritative truth or do any scientific study at all.
A lot of doctors jumped on the anti-mask bandwagon. It wasn’t just pundits and media figures.
What kinds of doctors, that you interacted with: Your GP? Those seen on TV who work in media roles? None of those are the researchers.
You are starting to run into No True Scotsman fallacy territory at this point. Everyone from the Surgeon General of the United States to random GPs on Twitter were vilifying masks.
There are a lot of Scotsmen in Scotland, and in my experience they are diverse: I have met socialists and internationalist Europhiles there, and also ethnonationalist racists. Point is, monolithic assertions about "we" or "they" aren't ever completely true.
I'm not in the USA, I got onto masks quite early. But I think that we still lag badly in anti-covid ventilation systems, while still over-emphasising hand-washing.
Some of the best people on the topic (of our evolving understanding of COVID, not of Scotsmen) have in fact been relative outsiders (i.e. neither medical researchers nor crazed conspiracists). I'm thinking particularly of Zeynep Tufekci on Airborne transmission, e.g.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent... https://sils.unc.edu/news/2021/tufekci-lancet
How effective? You realize they never tested the major vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna) for transmission or a reduction in ability to get infected?
You can access the clinical trial protocol by googling it. They never regularly tested patients in the trial, only when they were symptomatic. There is no clinical trial data to prove a reductions in infection or transmission.
There's a very simple reason the vaccines weren't tested for reduction in transmission: that sort of test is much more difficult and takes much longer. When the virus is killing thousands daily just in the U.S., you use the most obvious data to demonstrate effectiveness (or not) and hope that deeper analysis down the road will show other benefits.
But if you mandate vaccines, because "if you're not vaccinated, you'll infect grandma", somehow testing if vaccinated people can transmit it, should be a priority.
If this was some non-mandatory voulountary vaccine.. sure, test one thing, then another,.... If you were put in a position where you were effectively forced to get it (or else you'd eg. lose your job), such things should be tested first.
They are testing whether vaccinated people can transmit. That research is ongoing. Again, if they had started with that, we might just be rolling out the vaccines now, which would have cost additional millions of lives.
Vaccines suffer from their effectiveness. For comparison with covid, measles killed only a few hundred each year (in the US). Vaccination to the level of herd immunity was required to reduce that number; if only half the population were vaccinated, we'd see half those deaths. Covid is still killing roughly the same number of people each day as measles killed in a year, yet people resist getting vaccinated. It's objectively stupid.
To your exact point, your employer should be entitled to set the safety protocols that are necessary to ensure the health of their workforce.
I agree. It wasn't a criticism of the trials, but rather the officials making claims for which there is no data.
There wasn't no data, just not specific statistical data from experimentation with these vaccines. Experts had data on previous vaccines, general knowledge of symptomatology, contagion, etc. It's only reasonable that reasonable experts might differ on the specifics given the level of extrapolation, but that's not "no data".
Kind of ... Suggests ... And it was true at the time, for the strains we had.