> Even during the pandemic response it was eventually acknowledged that early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
To the very best of my knowledge this is just misinformation. If you have a citation here, please provide it.
The paper I shared actually doesn't support the claim of preventing infection.
The trials showed a minimal risk of adverse responses to the injection itself and what appeared to be a reduced rate of symptoms. The trials didn't cover impact on infection rates at all, that would have required proactively testing every participant for infection which wasn't done. The trials only followed self reported symptoms, meaning all the study can indicate is a correlation with reduced symptomatic infection.
The paper linked shows a reduced rate of COVID in the pool of people that received a vaccine candidate compared to the pool that received a placebo:
A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections:
21,720 with BNT162b2 and
21,728 with placebo.
There were 8 cases of Covid-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose among participants assigned to receive BNT162b2 and 162 cases among those assigned to placebo;
BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19
Again, no vaccine ever really 100% prevents infection - what they do is reduce the number and severity of cases. Vaccines are literally created to increase the human bodies ability to fight off infection - efficacy varies by age and many other factors.
I think we are saying the same thing in slightly different ways.
Agreed, they found fewer cases of Covid, the disease not the infection, based on self report data from the two test populations. They did not test the entire population for CoV-2 infection, if they did a difference in 8 cases may not have been considered statistically significant depending on what they intended to show.
My claims here have nothing to do with whether vaccines prevent infection or that 100% is a realistic expectation. I'm simply pointing out that what was actually tested and reported in the trials can't be used to support claims of reducing infection or transmissibility. If that's what the OP paper here is doing I call BS.
Is your concern with what the studies tested or whether it was acknowledged?
I can find you links, though it will be directly to the original studies done for the covid vaccines. The studies were well written and clearly called out their methodology. The problem was with how the studies were interpreted and explained to the public, not with the studies themselves.
early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
Who made such stupid claims and __why__? My own recollection, from Australia watching the US, was the the US political administration of the time turned any scientific based discussion into a complete shit show - many images of cowered CDC employees sucking their faces in while Trump v1.0 babbled on about bleach and sunlight.
From my first free of politics encounters with world class epidemiologists in 1980 or so I've not heard one claim that any vaccine had a 100% efficacy rate for both disease prevention and for eliminating spread - it has _always_ been a numbers game, like seat belts, of statistical reduction.
Your own link agrees:
Conclusions: A two-dose regimen of BNT162b2 conferred 95% protection against Covid-19 in persons 16 years of age or older.
95% protection is pretty good, but for all manner of reasons it's unusual to expect any vaccine to prevent 100% of all infections across millions of people or animals.
Typically, in educated countries, phrases such as "prevent infection and spread*" are understood to mean that in the same manner as "seat belts prevent death and injury*"
Okay got it, I didn't expect that was what you were taking issue with. At least in the US, we were constantly being told by our government leadership that we all needed to take the vaccine to stop the spread.
Fauci, for example, claimed very early on that we needed herd immunity and would get thee with around a 60% vaccination rate. He both knew that number was too low for the hypothesis of herd immunity, raising it as time went on, and that herd immunity requires a treatment to prevent transmission, implying the vaccines were known to do that (they weren't).
More egregiously there was a political push, picked up by the media as well, that basically boiled down to an argument that anyone refusing the vaccine is actively killing old people and children. They would go so far as to say unvaccinated people shouldn't be allowed into hospitals for care for unrelated health conditions.
All that to say, my point was simply that this review paper seems to be making claims that would require research I never saw happen. Sadly the pay wall means I can't read their full claims, but even the overview of their results seem dubious.
> They would go so far as to say unvaccinated people shouldn't be allowed into hospitals for care for unrelated health conditions.
Do you believe that someone with unmanaged ebola or measles should be allowed to go into a hospital for a broken toe?
Obviously there are possible pathogens for which this is a totally sensible position, and under uncertainty and strained resources the bar to get there gets much much lower.
You're raising drastically different scenarios in what I'm pretty sure would be a strawman argument, though yes people with Ebola do still get medical treatment. They are generally isolated and/or treated at a temporary unit setup during an Ebola outbreak, they aren't told no at the door because they're sick.
At the time people were talking about restricting COVID visitors, we really didn't know if we were dealing with something most similar to a seasonal cold, a serious flu, or the Spanish flu.
> They are generally isolated and/or treated at a temporary unit setup during an Ebola outbreak, they aren't told no at the door because they're sick.
Obviously this would be the result of not allowing unvaccinated people into hospitals. It is literally illegal in this country for us to simply "tell them no at the door."
People weren't calling for temporary hospitals being stood up or wings allocated just for unvaccinated people, they were calling for people to be denied care.
Your Ebola example still doesn't hold, the death rate and transmissibility is drastically different between the various colds/flus and Ebola. Not to mention you're justifying blocking individuals from care because we didn't know what we were worrying about yet and because they chose not to take an experimental vaccine using a new technology that was rushed through testing (and reasonably so, I get why they rushed to EUA but that does make it more effective or better understood).
I assume you don't agree with the ACA, medicare for all, or healthcare as a right. All of those ideas are based on ensuring everyone has access to healthcare, and that preexisting conditions can't be considered.
As we all know, when people on the Internet are calling for things, a reasonable expectation is for them to fully specify the end-to-end implementation plan. And if they don't provide, then you can definitely just presume the absolute worst case scenario!
