The CDC has been horrible on this topic. They’ve been incredibly reluctant to say that vaccinated people can act any differently than non-vaccinated people...
Luckily for the CDC they just recently happened to get data proving that naive vaccinees are 5x better protected than recovered unvaccinated against infection. The study is horrible, with so many issues and conflict of interests... but who cares, the CDC published it, it even has a shiny banner for news media to share around!
I can’t help but see the bias in part of the CDC to undermine natural immunity in favor of vaccination as the only viable path. All their publications completely ignore the abundance of recent studies completely disproving their central thesis, always focusing on a narrow, and often problematic, set.
Edit: and to add insult to injury the the positive cases were from March-May 2020! My dyslexic mind read ‘21 as would be expected, but no!
"our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data."
That's not bad communication it's an outright false statement.
I find this unpersuasive. I don't want to hear anything from the CDC. I don't trust the CDC because (among other reasons) they recently silently redefined "vaccine" to not include the idea that it provides immunity.
If you read it carefully, that CDC study compares vaccinated vs unvaccinated in the population of people that recovered from covid.
It does not compare vaccinated (and not recovered) vs recovered (but not vaccinated), but I have seen many people misinterpret it in this way including journalists.
I think this sort of misdirection is by design with how often I see it happening, the right does not have a monopoly on spreading misinformation.
This study seems worthless. It had no control, it attempted to base its conclusion on a comparison with CDC data, and it didn’t mention whether participants were vaccinated.
Totally unrelated to the question of whether vaccines are efficacious or not.
If I was from Germany or the UK, why would I even care what the CDC said? The study linked at the top of this thread finds this effect across all developed nations.
I didn’t read the article, but isn’t it plausible that whatever they did allegedly did wrong wasn’t significant enough to warrant recommending against taking the vaccine?
It's worth noting that the author of this article, Vinay Prasad, is not someone that would normally be criticizing the CDC. He has consistently advocated for universal vaccination of adults and has criticized those arguing against vaccination. But for anyone paying attention to the science and the policies being implemented in European countries, it's obvious that something is wrong with CDC policies.
The article I posted has a quote and video of the director of the CDC explicitly saying in March of last year that vaccinated people "do not carry the virus" and were 90% protected __against infection__.
That's a direct quote from the head of the CDC, it does not get more official or more of a primary source than that IMHO.
If you have valid, replicatable evidence where vaccines cause harm, I'm all ears.
But if you're going to rely on anecdotal evidence, GTFO. I'm tired of hearing people not vaccinating their children and causing public health issues because they believe they're more informed than the CDC.
> authors made no distinction between unvaccinated and immunologically naive. This is a distinction that every sensible scientific discussion needs to acknowledge.
Ideally, everyone would be tested for antibodies before receiving a vaccine, then we would have data to differentiate naive+vaccine from survivor+vaccine. This would be helpful for both science and public policy.
CDC needs to stop labelling people who are 13 days after their 2nd vaccine dose as "unvaccinated". A more accurate label would be "partly vaccinated".
Evidence is subject to errors in method and interpretation. With luck, those are also corrected with time.
What science does not do is choose some ideologically convenient belief, then selectively cherry-pick and selectively ignore evidence or arguments to buttress that.
At the very top of the article you link is this note:
Since CDC Director Rochelle Walensky made the comments discussed below, scientists have pushed back against the idea that vaccinated people “don’t carry the virus.” We've published a deeper analysis of the debate here.
That is: there is disagreement over the evidence.
The upshot of the announcement, in April of 2021, was this:
[T]he most important part of the recent CDC findings is that vaccinated people are very unlikely to suffer asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. Participants in the study who were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines were 90% less likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. Of infections that did occur, only 10.7 percent were asymptomatic. Taken together, this means vaccinated people are highly unlikely to transmit the virus when they are not suffering symptoms. This also means that as vaccination rates continue to rise, the virus will have fewer and fewer possible hosts.
Again, highlighted at the very top of the article you've selected to link here.
You've chosen to highlight the headline, which was not selected by the CDC and may well not have been selected by the authors either. (Traditional practice is that headlines are written by a headlines editor, more recently, headlines are often selected by A/B testing for impact, clicks, and engagement.)
Moreover, the point made gets to another complaint that's been raised repeatedly by the antiempirical crowd: why should vaccinated people need to wear masks if vaccines protect against transmitting or receiving the virus?
What we've learned since this announcement and piece is that even if vaccinated there remain both transmission and infection risks. Vaccines are not some majickal warding spell, but are simply a technological tool that leverages the body's own immune defences. Sometimes more effectively than others.
And I very strongly suspect that you either know all of this, or have chosen deliberately not to based on your submission and comment history.
The CDC did actually change their definition of vaccination in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. The updated definition is more scientifically accurate, but the timing of the change caused a lot of public confusion and the CDC did a bad job of communicating the reason for the change.
Sorry to sound cross. I believe I explained my point already, but I'll try to re-iterate in a different way.
The CDC measured antibodies and found more variability with natural immunity, then concluded vaccine immunity is more consistent. This is either a huge scientific mistake or just plain dishonest, as antibody level measurement is not shown to be an accurate way to measure immunity. I provided a link to the FDA saying the exact same thing. The CDC then used this erroneous conclusion as part of their big push that everyone has to get vaccinated. To re-emphasize: there is more to your body's defenses than serum antibodies and you can have zero such antibodies and still be protected: https://www.clinicbarcelona.org/en/news/can-you-be-protected....
In contrast, real-world studies like the Cleveland clinic study came out around the same time and showed that natural immunity is working better in practice with no significant variability, but the CDC just ignored those studies entirely even though they were much higher quality than the ones the CDC were citing.
Finally, when a democrat-run administration speaks, or when someone friendly to that administration from the deep state speaks, the corporate media spend about zero effort researching, questioning, or fact-checking it because they are essentially all allies working together. They instead just blindly repeat the message and weaponize it against dissenters. This, combined with the CDC's many mistakes and/or agenda-driven dishonesty, has resulted in great harm and misinformation in American society and possibly the world at large.
If the CDC had not done these things, there may not have been a vaccine mandate from President Biden that had to be shut down at the supreme court level. There may not be as much of the segregation, discrimination, and vitriol that's going on now. These things matter, and the CDC has very clearly acted as an agency with an agenda and not in the best interests of the people: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/02/01/rep_thoma...!
Note that I'm not talking about immunosuppressed people here. I have done zero research on that group but I assume they are a very tiny part of the population that needs to make special considerations for their health, not just for COVID, but for all diseases.
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