This post will trigger a troll feeding frenzy on Xitter. But I think it's necessary, and maybe people are saner here on Mastodon.
It's time to summarize a timeline of COVID vaccine statistics and what they say about whether the vaccines reduced transmission or not, and whether "experts" lied or not. Here goes...
[1]
To begin, let's remember that vaccines seek to do 4 things, in descending order of importance and likelihood:
[3]
To receive Emergency Use Authorization, vaccine did NOT need to stop transmission (though that would have been nice). Criterion was reduction in symptomatic disease by >50%, which was met and exceeded. https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download
[5]
Throughout 2021, evidence was mounting that COVID vaccines were indeed significantly curtailing transmission. Every sign pointed to the pandemic ending early if we could get enough people vaccinated quickly. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4292
[6]
This was when some countries brought in vaccine passports, which made scientific sense. (You can debate the ethics elsewhere.) By slowing mixing of vaccinated & unvaccinated populations, risk of breakthrough infections was reduced. https://www.cmaj.ca/content/194/16/e573
[7]
The emergence of Delta variant changed the math considerably. Two doses of vaccine were still ~70% effective at preventing Delta infection, which was pretty darned good! We could still tame the pandemic with vaccination if we did it fast enough... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10169571
[8]
Then the emergence of Omicron (noticeably in Canada in late 2021) changed everything by curtailing vaccine efficacy. This is when vax passports stopped making sense, as they were disproportionately exposing vaxxed people to the virus, though they had diminished protection.
[9]
By 2022, it was clear that vaccination was no longer able to subdue transmission significantly. But three doses of an mRNA vaccine gave substantial protection against death for both delta (80%) and omicron (78%), along with 61% protection against admission to hospital. https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj.p1111
[11]
A telling California prison study in 2023 found that one dose of any COVID vaccine reduced the probability of an infected inmate transmitting infection to his cellmate by 24%. Again, that's reduced TRANSMISSION. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02138-x
[13]
The newest XBB1.5 booster came out in 2023. It has an efficacy against hospitalization of >70%. It also has an efficacy of ~54% against symptomatic infection. This is not as great as the 95% we saw in 2020, but it's pretty damned good! Yet currently only 16% of Canadians have received this vaccine. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7304a2.htm
@Shanmonster "best" is a personal choice. All three major manufacturers (Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax) have an XBB1.5-tuned booster out. That's what you need. Historically, Moderna tends to make a more efficacious product with more side effects. Novavax tends to have least side effects.
Before you get too excited, JP, note two things: (1) the authors are an epi student and two "independent researchers" with no expressed training, which leads to (2) they used VAERS to calculate risk. And almost by definition, VAERS cannot be used to calculate risk. BS study.
Why? Because VAERS is not a surveillance database. It's an open registry where anyone can write anything. Increase in VAERS reports probably just means nutters are spamming the registry with more unverified "vaccine adverse event" reports. Proper researchers would know this.
Now that my research is focused on AI technologies, I begin every presentation by telling the story of when someone used ChatGPT to (incorrectly) conclude that I'm actually the public health vampire "Nosferatu" on Twitter. I love this so much.
Peeps, I'll be on CTV Morning Live (Ottawa edition) tomorrow at 8:30AM. Doing it remotely from home, so high probability the dog will be barking at phantom rabbits during the broadcast. Also... pants or no pants?
Another fun underrated sci-fi series I recently watched: "The Last Ship." Once you get past its love affair with the US military, it's a fun little adventure into a post-pandemic world. (Done before COVID, wildly.)
Not a day goes by when I don't see someone online complaining about shows/movies "forcing diversity" into their casting. Yet my (brown) friend's 6 year old daughter just asked her, "'Mama, all the shows we watch, all the actors, why are they all white?'" Just sayin'.
@the5thColumnist I knew someone was going to make this point. Bollywood movies are all Indian actors, too. But those societies are racially monolithic (as least visibly; clearly not true when you parse ethnicities). USA and Canada are colonial constructs with multi-ethnic, multi-racial populations. I don't think it's unfair to expect our cultural products, that purport to represent us (like TV shows set in real cities) to truly represent us.
It saddens me that we have failed enough young men for so long that they now turn to simplistic (and idiotic) social media influencers (an grifters) as role models for masculinity. This will take generations to remedy.
My first keynote address as part of my new Research Chair on AI uses in university teaching will be in 2 weeks. Question is... should I use ChatGPT to write the lecture for me? Wouldn't that be appropriately ironic?