Item — HN Reader

Frequently in New Zealand we hear government and journalists suggesting vaccines affect transmission. In truth, masks affect transmission, jabs affect rates of hospitalisation. We had the impression early on that this would be like the measles vaccine, affecting spread. Not really true. There are other studies in Israel and the US showing no meaningful correlation between spread and vaccination rates.

For me the interesting question is: when vaccinated does exposure to COVID bump up our immunity so that we stay safe from serious illness long term, or will we forever be getting these vaccines (making the drug companies richer and richer)

2 comments

Vaccines are supposed to affect transmission, but in a complex way: * reduction of chances of infection; * reduction of time of the being-contagious windows; * expelled virions covered with antibodies, making them less effective. If we add to that * reduction of the viral load, we arrive to a point that some took for granted at the beginning but that has been shaken recently. Good numbers, of course, to give a measure the effects (and of the effects in time, which studies have shown are being paramount in our context), are needed.

I find that, for example, the New Zealand Herald is very keen on dumb-level expression: even yesterday it could be seen following that setting (it made the usual statement of 'safe and effective' in the plainest way, which is childspeak and absurd).

I do wonder though about vaccines lowering symptoms and ‘disguising’ infection, thus potentially promoting spread

NZ Herald: a disgrace to the nation.

By the way: do you have links/references to those studies about the «correlation between spread and vaccination rates»?

> a disgrace to the nation

:) (If we could smile over these phenomena.) Do you have suggestions about good news and commentary sources in your area?

> vaccines lowering symptoms and ‘disguising’ infection, thus potentially promoting spread

I must note: the question about whether the vaccinated could have more asymptomatic cases is a very interesting intellectual proposal. In a way, factored by other effects (such as a reduced infection rate) it could be embedded in a measure of the complexive rates of being infective of the vaccinated. Policy wise though, it could be very relevant if the unvaccinated showed less symptoms.

One is here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/

I looked at that. If you assume that people in different areas behave in the same way with respect to social contact, even if they behave in different ways wrt. vaccination, then it supports your conclusion. The study tries to average that out, but...

There are studies that don't have this weakness. For example, you may look at households, on the assumption that people will have so much social contact with their households that the differences don't matter. Here's one that looks at that. "We estimated vaccine effectiveness against onward transmission by comparing secondary attack rates among household members between vaccinated and unvaccinated index cases, based on source and contact tracing data collected when Delta variant was dominant." https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v... I've seen another study with comparable results (the error bars overlapped).

About news sources: some better than others but all highly deficient

> bump up our immunity so that we stay safe from serious illness long term

Two things (as laymen) could be noted: that rumour about vaccines immunizing from sars-cov-2 being on the way, and that this "historic episode" has boosted the research on coronaviruses themselves (which are normally something "undefeated").