If you know someone who’s been naughty this year, this should make a great stocking stuffer:
Fellow grifter/misinformation spreader Peter Navarro also has one coming out.
Supreme Court has been pretty consistent in upholding the government’s ability to require vaccination. I fear they are going to be less friendly to this too cute by half attempt to coerce employers to do it through OSHA. I thought it was an error at the time and said as much.
I am admittedly biased because I think Biden has been firmly below average on COVID response. Get points for the initial relief package, but after that basically did very little besides prematurely declare victory and the one policy he did implement was always a big underdog to survive court challenge.
Even existing Supreme Court precedent is light on the federal government’s ability to mandate vaccinations. The cases were all states.
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Fair point too, but would have had a better chance than this OSHA end around, which I think even I might strike down as a judge.
I’m not sure I agree. The OSHA thing at least ostensibly stems from the Commerce Clause (ability to regulate large businesses that effect interstate commerce). A blanket vaccine requirement federally… Not so sure. OF course lol this Supreme Court anyway, they’ll strike down vaccine mandates to own the libs either way.
Maybe. Again, I’m admittedly biased by the overall bad job this administration has done combatting COVID, so I may have a blind spot here.
I don’t think anything in here will be surprising, but this is a nice, detailed (with citations) discussion of what exactly it means when someone says that vaccinated people do not spread the virus as much as unvaccinated.
Maybe the most controversial statement is the bolded piece::
The majority of vaccinated people won’t spread the virus if they are exposed. Among breakthrough cases, vaccines ensure less infectious viral particles for a shorter period of time. Fully vaccinated people provide little to no threat to community transmission. Boosters also help. And those with infection-induced immunity may or may not help reduce transmission.
We desperately need pandemic off-ramps. What is our plan to transition into an endemic state? I continue to be surprised and disappointed that we still don’t have guidance on this from public health officials. But, a very safe “off-ramp” is vaccinated people. A room full of vaccinated people, for example at Thanksgiving, with no other precautions poses little to no threat to the larger community.
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no surprise that a biopharm company is being shifty, but this thing that’s likely going to get a nobel at some point is going to get dragged through an ugly court and publicity ringer first and probably screw a bunch of future scientists out of incentives to collaborate.
I’ve seen the claim several times, either hinted at in news headlines or stated as fact by people I know.
And then came Delta. The hyper-contagious variant sent cases skyrocketing and led ICUs to yet again fill up with COVID patients. And it also spurred a full-on freak-out that our understanding of who could spread the virus was all wrong. In early August, the CDC published its findings on a huge cluster of COVID cases in Provincetown, Massachusetts, concluding that 74 percent of cases had occurred in vaccinated people. The supposed implication of that finding was even more ominous: Vaccinated people were just as likely to spread the virus as the unvaccinated. The CDC quickly went back to recommending that vaccinated people wear masks indoors while news outlets ran headlines such as “Vaccinated People With Breakthrough Infections Can Spread the Delta Variant, CDC Says.” The worst-case scenario—that vaccinated people might be going about their lives only to be seeding tons of new coronavirus cases—all of a sudden seemed possible.
I thought my original link was a good, detailed discussion of that particular issue. If you think the article isn’t addressing the question you want it to address, then fine? It wasn’t an implied swipe at you or anyone else here. It wasn’t a direct or implied response to anything you’ve said. If you think the conclusion (that vaccines reduce transmission) is obvious, then I don’t understand the pushback.
Like, there are legitimately people who believe (and then spread) the idea that “vaccines do not reduce transmission” based on headlines like this:
It’s a for real belief that many people have, and I’d like to be able to address that belief if it comes up around me. I’m not ascribing this belief to you.
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When you combine unvaxxed having symtoms that might earn them a covid test with the vaxxed either thinking they no longer need testing or unlikely to show typical symptoms associated with (alpha) covid so not getting offered a test, I wonder whether the difference between 85% and 69% even matters.
It’s a nice blog article if the unvaxxed would ever read it - which they won’t - but could be dangerous for the vaxxed looking for a reason not to mask and forgo future testing e.g if vaccines really are waning, granny’s not going to be too safe in that room full of vaxxed people and neither is the vaxxed, unboostered community when the party breaks and they all go home.
Disclaimer - All my views are my own - I’m not a doc, nor would I wish to be.
I think the point is vaxxed are less likely to contract covid, ergo less likely to spread - but when they do contract, they (some?, date of last sose dependent) still face the initial contagious period and this is before they know they’re postive (if they test to ever know they’re positive)
The study here is based entirely on people who have tested positive for COVID, whether vaccinated or unvaccinated. It’s saying that, conditional on testing positive (which is obviously a much lower likelihood for vaccinated than unvaccinated), the risk of infectious virus shedding is lower for vaccinated individuals than unvaccinated individuals.
If you accept that vaccinations prevent 50-75% of acquiring the disease to begin with, then it seems reasonable to say that the majority won’t spread the virus, because those two things are multiplicative.
Because reducing the degree of infectiousness and reducing the amount of time a person is infectious both lowers the R0 of that person. All evidence seems to point to the R0 of a vaccinated person infected with Covid being less then 1, and that’s all that really matters in the end. That’s what I think you’re not picking up from that study. That’s why that study leads to the conclusion that an unmasked thanksgiving party of all vaccinated people is not a great risk to community spread.
I mean, there are several posters in this thread who have made that claim, or at least danced around it with weasel words.
Edit: Lol, I swear I made this post before I read Churchill’s, but yeah:
That’s an example of it.
bah, whatever. Blog imo but don’t want to thrash that out.
But if you and your family back home are all vaccinated then all of the activities you discuss are safe for you and your family. In fact it’s the inverse that’s the problem. I’ll still wear masks when my kids are fully vaccinated, but that’ll be purely out of a sense of civic responsibility, not because I am particularly worried that myself or my family could get really sick or die from Covid.
Wife and I got boosted 3.5 hours ago, now we’re watching Utopia (UK), which I guess is fitting.
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You asked me to square the numbers with the conclusion. I did. I’m not insisting that you find it important!
If you want to talk about personal risk and decision-making, I’m happy to. But that wasn’t the discussion I started.
In terms of personal risk and decision-making:
- I continue to wear masks indoors. If I’m in a store, most people are not.
- I recently did the first in-person discretionary shopping (i.e., non food/drink/essentials) that I’ve done in almost two years. I went to a few stores to buy jeans.
- My kid is on the swim team, and obviously doesn’t wear a mask during the actual swimming.
- My kids wear masks at school, but masks are either not mandated in their school (the 2 older ones) or are mandated but allow for exemptions (the younger one)
- We are hosting Thanksgiving. My mom is flying here and my sister and her family is driving. All of the >=12 have been vaccinated and our youngest received his first shot a week ago. There is probably some amount of risk here, not sure how to quantify it, but we will be acting “normally” in that no one will be wearing a mask or avoiding contact.
- I will probably be running a race Thanksgiving morning. Most likely I’ll wear a mask during the corral time before it starts, and then discarding it when I’m out of the mass.
- I’m probably going to make my first work trip in January. It’s going to feel super weird, even if it’s fully masked (which I think it will be). But at this point I recognize that it’s going to take some effort to acclimate to a normal world.
I don’t know how to quantify the risk/benefit of these choices. They’re just the ones that feel right to me. I’m curious about what other people are doing, but that’s largely because I’m legitimately curious about the people in this forum in general. (Like, I want to know when someone’s wife lowers the garage door on an open minivan tailgate, because that’s what my wife did a couple of weeks ago.) But I don’t have anything more than gut feel for my own choices so I’m not sure it’s fruitful to try to pin down exactly what choices do or don’t pass a theoretical cost/benefit test.
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If there are 100 people; 50 vaxxed, 50 non-vaxxed, I believe the non-vaxxed are spreading more than the vaxxed for sure. When you have 90 vaxxed and 10 unvaxxed, the vaxxed might be spreading more. Somewhere inbetween they’ll be spreading the same amount IMO (in raw ‘covid particles in the atmosphere’ terms :) ) But vaxxed to vaxxed transmission is a thing.
If I live in the US where the x of the 50 vaxxed will only be aware of a breakthrough because they had a severe case or ended up in hospital because no twice weekly testing of vaxxed to let them know they had a non-severe breakthrough (say headache and or sneezes) or asymptomatic breakthrough case, then I might severly underestimate breakthroughs (if one wasn’t ITT)
Might be why Biden spending billions on home testing - I doubt the tests will be for the unvaxxed only.
Let’s face it, the vast majority of US’ers will only know they’re a breakthrough case when they get testing for a flight abroad, unless they end up in hospital or bed for a week showing ‘classic’ symptoms or loss of smell - they ain’t driving miles for a test otherwise / probably not driving for a test regardless - and we know it’s at least possible, maybe likely, for an infected vaxxed person to spread - so there will ongoing vaxxed spread without the home testing in place.
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UK considering boosters for under 50’s before any mention of single dose to under 12’s (single dose for 12-16yrs here). Hence our 67% vax to poulation ratio.
Some people in Thailand now on their fourth dose (gotta do as some had Sinopharm for the first two and that not recognised by EU, UK or US for travel)
That’s not the conclusion that you initially asked about? You said this:
And that’s the conclusion I responded to - that the majority of vaccinated individuals won’t spread the virus because:
(decrease in likelihood of contracting the virus)*(decrease in likelihood of spreading the virus conditional on contracting it) appears to result in far less than a 50% chance of an unvaccinated person spreading it. That’s it. No further implications about posing no risk to others.
I don’t think anyone in this thread has suggested that you pose literally no risk to others if you’re vaccinated. The boldest statement made in the story was this one:
A room full of vaccinated people, for example at Thanksgiving, with no other precautions poses little to no threat to the larger community.
Obviously “little to no” threat is very subjective and not quantified and varies according to the conditions of the local community. But that reflects my current belief. That my gathering of vaccinated family, none of whom have had obvious exposures, poses little to no threat to the larger community.
As far as your characterization of the article itself:
I posted it because I thought it was a good discussion, that’s the end. If I wanted to stop taking precautions, I can already do that without posting the article! You’re creating motivations that don’t exist.