I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS. Same thing about the imaginary widespread side-effects or the mask being useless.
Depressing.
Personally I'm more worried about the people that went full retard about covid alternative views and conspiracies, I've lost a few friends to that. Sometime I wonder if you will be able to integrate into society ever again.
It’s depressing that public institutions mishandled this so badly that a huge segment of the population has lost trust in them.
I can agree that the messaging I got was that the vaccine was meant to prevent serious illness. Regardless, the absurd policies, suppression of information and discussion on vaccine side effects was unforgivable.
People went full retard because the institutions meant to provide them with good information instead treated them like children and suppressed detailed debate. The only alternative was to go online and risk the lunacy that is internet research, so people did so.
Now more people are anti-vaxers than ever before, and not just for mRNA vaccines but old-school shots like measles.
At a minimum many institutions need change of leadership after this fiasco, and maybe complete reform of others.
Yeah, the handling was not great but sadly I'm not really sure if the population was ready for detailed debate, considering that a good chunk of it ended up misunderstanding most of the official notices and falling for the most stupid conspiracy theories.
We need to improve education, by A LOT. And it's everyone responsibility.
the issue is that the conversation is so polarized and religious its literally impossible to discuss any of these issues. the poster you are responding to states some things which are reasonable and others which are complete nonsense. Its like people cant help themselves once picking a side to just wholesale accept every position all the way to "covid isnt real" on one end and "no one should ever leave their house again" on the other end.
The initial batch of vaccines were explicitly marketed as having a 95% effectiveness against transmission for the original strain. This was the entire basis of the herd immunity narrative and it was true for about 3 months until delta happened and the medical community did an egregiously bad job of communicating that.
Cloth masks are objectively useless for personal protection.
> as having a 95% effectiveness against transmission for the original strain.
95% reduction of serious illness. The objective of the mass vaccination was having as much people as possible survive the pandemic. Herd immunity was just noise. There were a lot of noise and nonsense.
> Cloth masks are objectively useless for personal protection.
Proper masks are effective as measured multiple times, tons of statistics on it.
Notice how it switches between SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19? That's because they're very specifically saying it prevents sickness, and not making any claims about infection/transmission. That came months later, per your links, from media and politicians who either didn't understand or were just straight lying. The 95% they're claiming came straight from the press release which was only about sickness, not infection.
It's pretty amazing just how hard this got memory-holed.
Of course it was tested for preventing infection. It was tested for that as well as efficacy against severe disease:
"Efficacy against laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 (with an onset of >= 7 days after receipt of the second dose) and against severe COVID-19.. was assessed among the participants 12 years of age or older."
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2110345
You seem to be conflating the vaccine having efficacy against infection and whether a vaccinated individual who still catches COVID-19 (since protection against infection is obviously not 100%) can transmit it. The efficacy against original COVID-19 strain infection was high (91.3% for the Pfizer vaccine).
Your first link speaks to the situation of a breakthrough infection being further transmitted. Since it wasn't clear HOW MUCH it curbed infection (under non-ideal/trial conditions), quarantines and caution were reasonable.
Here's a chart that showed the original test results across a number of vaccines. The efficacy vs infection dropped quite a bit with variants though the efficacy vs severe disease holds up better:
Do you know why it's "laboratory-confirmed"? Because they didn't test anyone until after symptoms showed.
Your confusion here is exactly what I'm talking about. The press release didn't conflate SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) with COVID-19 (the disease, as defined by a combination of symptoms and the virus). The line you quoted is measuring people who got sick, filtering out those who got sick due to a different virus, it's not measuring people who were infected. They didn't test all participants, so they couldn't make any claims against infection.
Edit:
> and whether a vaccinated individual who still catches COVID-19 (since protection against infection is obviously not 100%) can transmit it.
Getting infected does not mean you caught COVID-19, it means you were infected with SARS-CoV-2. You didn't get COVID-19 if you didn't get sick. Treating the two terms as the same thing is a media conflation people have just accepted, and an annoyance I have to explain every time this comes up because Pfizer was using the correct definitions in that press release.
Yes, you are correct that I should’ve said symptomatic infection (or COVID-19) because they were only trying to power the study for what they needed to clear EUA and not measuring ability to block transmission. The second paper I linked made the same mistake in its table header.
A lot of people were extremely confused during the pandemic and that's why they couldn't differentiate between actual verifiable information being shared and some random newscaster saying, wrongly, that vaccines prevented infection. A few years later they don't even know what is true anymore.
> The 95% they're claiming came straight from the press release which was only about sickness, not infection.
Yep, I repeated this so many times that toward the end I started just insulting people for not knowing.
Actually I was not sure which kind of masks you meant so I pointed out that real masks worked, but yes, obviously cotton/silk/lines/whatever masks without any kind of filter are useless.
Don't post random "he said this, he said that" links please, there has been 0 doubt in my mind that since the release of the vaccines the only effect they had was to reduce the probability of serious illness, as repeated multiple times above.
> or are just gaslighting me as covidians have a tendency to do.
Not exactly sure how you got confused by the term "cloth masks" but ok. I also dont care about what was going on in your mind. Im just providing you evidence that they marketed the vaccines as being effective against transmission and any attempt to claim that was never the case is simply gaslighting.
> I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS.
No. They said vaccines prevent transmission. Over and over.
You may have forgotten what was said at the time, but we won't:
It's the reason I was prevented from entering the US until just a couple of weeks ago. It's the reason why my mother-in-law lost her job as a nurse. People who refused this medical treatment, were treated as dangerous because officials claimed that we presented a transmission hazard.
This was a lie, which you are further compounding with more lies.
I don't forget anything. As I can't forget all the times that I had to explain, since the beginning, that the only statistics available where about reducing to 0 the risk of serious illness. Don't try to change history, please.
And don't link me some random idiot's tweet as proof, we are better than this.
Just stop now and accept reality, it's a good thing that they got rid of your mother in law, I wonder in how much more pseudo science she believes in.
Where I live, people that refused the vaccine were treated as utter idiots but still welcome in hospitals, most of the famous local covid denier died there too.
> And don't link me some random idiot's tweet as proof, we are better than this.
Watch the video clip in the tweet. It shows a montage of officials and talking heads claiming that the COVID vaccines would prevent you from getting COVID and transmitting it.
> Just stop now and accept reality, it's a good thing that they got rid of your mother in law, I wonder in how much more pseudo science she believes in.
No it isn't. The NHS now has chronic shortage of nurses.
If there were a problem with pseudoscience, then they should have fired her for that, not some vague proxy.
You're rather proving my point. So many people are just not ready to have a rational conversation about these narratives. It's all just tribalism and dogma, and we will have to wait years for people like you to calm down to the point where you are able to have reasonably conversations on these topics again.
Why? Because it's not an attractive profession nowadays. Not for the few hundreds of deniers that were fired.
> You're rather proving my point. So many people are just not ready to have a rational conversation about these narratives. It's all just tribalism and dogma, and we will have to wait years for people like you to calm down to the point where you are able to have reasonably conversations on these topics again.
I haven't seen any rational or unique point in everything you have written, only spitting the usual covid deniers nonsense.
You know what my real fear is? The fear that people that have this kind of opinions regarding the pandemic will apply the same reasoning to the next one or to the next crisis. I have a different opinion of preppers now.
If so, please admit that you were wrong when you made this comment:
> I'm hoping that in a decade or so, people will stop using "vaccines never prevented transmission" as an argument since it has been said at least a billion of times since the beginning, VACCINES PREVENTED SERIOUS ILLNESS.
My montage showed you (if you had watched it), many talking heads and officials at the time accusing the unvaccinated of increasing transmission.
The rest of your remarks about "covid deniers" are irrelevant to the point.
So many of you people have become so emotionally invested in the false narratives that you have believed, that you can't cope with any evidence that threatens your narrative even slightly.
At least we can talk about the "lab leak theory" now. This was the original point I made: it will take years for people to climb down these positions they have taken, but at least we are making small steps in the right direction.
Man, you are talking about yourself, you literally started this subthread with the basic set of round of the mill covid contrarians BS that have 0 ground in reality and survive only thanks to the emotional attachment of people like you.
When asked for evidence you post the usual cherrypicked random stuff that aligns with what you believe (the only valid sources).
My recommendation is to just stop with this imaginary fight for the truth, when everyone is moving on and no one even cares anymore about these creative reinterpretations of reality. You lost any credibility with the first message of this chain, too much BS. Free yourself.
Depressing.
Personally I'm more worried about the people that went full retard about covid alternative views and conspiracies, I've lost a few friends to that. Sometime I wonder if you will be able to integrate into society ever again.