You’re gonna get a flu shot anyway so you might as well get the COVID booster pack as well.
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I’ve never gotten a flu shot in my life. Not opposed to it for any reason other than convenience and needles, but I’ve never done it. Also, I don’t think I’ve had the flu more than once as an adult and that was when my kids were little.
This makes it even more important to get a flu shot!
Does it much? CN thinks that’s quite exaggerated and I had long lasting moderna anyway.
I’ve probably been asymptomatic. It’s gone through my house a few times and I didn’t notice getting sick.
Sure, think about it. You’re filtering out all the vaccinated people who got exposed but still tested negative because their immune system prevented an infection.
More likely the texas figures are down to a bullshit testing regime where they don’t test asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic people.
If you filter out those cases, the remainder will tend to be the more serious cases, no?
Can you be a little more specific about the words your putting into my mouth here?
Yea I think the consensus is that it’s a nonzero decrease but beyond that there doesn’t seem to be much agreement about what the decrease actually is. Churchill posted some numbers showing enormous decreases but I think that led to a poo-flinging fight so I dropped out of the thread shortly after… still, even if those numbers were outliers or cherry-picked data I think the consensus is that there’s a decrease of some sort
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I guess? Not sure what you’re getting at here.
Well, the argument that they’re throwing vaccines away if you don’t use them is way too simplistic. It’s a large complicated system, but that doesn’t mean there’s no communication between demand, production and distribution. So, for an uncertain minor benefit I’m not sure I should get a booster while people in Haiti haven’t had the opportunity to have one shot. I know that’s not a popular way of thinking around here, but hand-waving away the idea of any connection isn’t very scientific. So, increasing my immunity one quanta isn’t necessarily sufficient. If I’m almost as immunized with my two shots of Moderna, I might still wait.
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Let’s not take the exact numbers in the TX article as exact numbers given a lot of the issues with data as discussed. Take home is that you are helluva lot less likely to get sick and die with the vaccine on board.
The fact that the TX dept of health is putting out this type of info is amazing.
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This CDC report says Pfizer effectiveness against hospitalization is 77% 4 months after vaccination (Table 2):
People are not trying to hear this, but if you were vaccinated with Pfizer and you’re in a vulnerable population, you really, really need to get a booster, because you’re likely a lot more exposed than people expected 6 months ago.
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Of the 15 million vaccinated people in Texas, 2,300 died. I put those numbers in my calculator and it gave me a happy face.
The 5% figure is coming from a subgroup of people who are far more likely to develop serious problems from a COVID infection. Re-read what hokie said:
I think there’s a selection bias here in that many more vaccinated people caught COVID but never tested positive, likely due to mild or nonexistant symptoms. At least, I hope that’s the explanation.
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Yea I think that’s a fair concern shared by many around here. My own calculus was that my impact on the supply chain, though nonzero, is miniscule, and in terms of Sklansky Bucks Lives Saved the best thing I can do is to stay as immunized as possible to protect those around me.
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To expand on this while it’s on my mind, I see it as similar to the climate change issue. My individual decisions like using public transportation, eating meat less frequently, etc, can move things in the right direction, but they’re so drastically overshadowed by the decisions made by politicians and corporations that it really doesn’t do much in the grand scheme of things. Similarly, you can decide to forgo the booster, which is a nonzero move in the right direction, but it’s still the decisions of politicians and corporations that have much more impact on getting those shots in the arms of poorer people around the world. My guess is that a call to our representatives, though nearly useless, would do more to get a vaccine in someone’s arm than individually declining the booster (not aiming this at you, micro, just thinking about the issue in general… though I would still encourage you to consider getting boosted 
)
I do wonder if there’s an argument for delaying a booster now and waiting to see if a more variant-specific (Delta or Delta Plus or whatever the latest up-and-coming bad one is) vaccine emerges, but at this point I assume it’s best to just get boosted now and re-boosted 6 months from now if something like that pops up.
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That’s not what your paper says. It’s 91% 14-120 days, and lists 77% at “>120”.
That’s quite an outlier too. I’ve admitted a grand total of 1 person with a Pfizer vaccine for Covid who tested positive IIRC (I think 3 total, but two were getting admitted for not Covid stuff). Wonder if their matching methods aren’t that effective longer out.
Pfizer group looks sicker at baseline too in their subgroup analysis. Both when compared to the moderna/JJ and especially when compared to the unvaccinated.
I was curious about whether I should get a booster 2 days ago, so I checked the CDC website. I concluded the answer is no.
The problem is one of self selection, to the extent that it’s meaningless (imo) to try to estimate a fatality rate based on the numbers. Here are the by-age number of positive tests and deaths, for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals:
(The numbers don’t quite match the totals in the report, not sure why, but they’re close enough.)
You could look at this data and come to two conclusions:
- As you noted, the case fatality rate for vaccinated individuals is 4.8%, whereas the national CFR has been in the <2% range for quite a long time. So either something is going terribly wrong in Texas, or they have an extremely skewed distribution of residents.
- The vaccine is actually terrible, because unvaccinated individuals have only a 1.9% case fatality rate. It seems to actually increase your risk of dying, conditional on becoming infected!
But (obviously?), I don’t think those would be good conclusions to draw. Across the U.S., I think a reasonable estimate of the case fatality rate (regardless of vaccination status) is somewhere in the range of 1.5%. So I think that the unvaccinated group might be fairly similar to the overall U.S. It’s still about a third higher than the U.S., which suggests (to me) that Texas is testing less aggressively than other states.
But why does the vaccinated group look so different? As others have suggested, the most likely explanation is that the vaccinated group mostly doesn’t get tested unless they develop symptoms. (For example, many companies imposed a requirement of vaccination or regular testing, which would lead to a skew in undetected infection between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.) So if the unvaccinated group of cases includes both unsymptomatic and symptomatic positive tests, but the vaccinated group only includes symptomatic cases, then of course their CFR is going to be biased upwards.
And I think that’s evident in the data. The age-adjusted rate of positive cases is 315.9 per 100,000 in the vaccinated group, compared to 14,196.6 in the unvaccinated group. That’s a 45x difference, implying about a 98% efficacy rate. But we know from actual trials that the efficacy rate is likely much lower than that, which implies that the vaccinated group has a much higher rate of undetected positives than the unvaccinated group.
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Kareem bringing the heat.
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Do we have any Florida covid numbers we can check the Texas numbers against