CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that Covid-19 vaccines are no longer effective at preventing transmission of the virus.
"...what they can’t do anymore is prevent transmission. So if you're going home to somebody who has not been vaccinated, somebody who can't get vaccinated...
I would suggest you wear a mask in a public indoor setting,"
Claiming that the vaccine prevents spread is misinformation.
'the science' says you are wrong. the vaccines do not prevent spread. that is very very very clear in the data now, so stop spreading that nonsense
that assumption relied on at least 3 things being true:
#1 ) having lower symptoms from the vaccine would not encourage those shedding the virus but not being observably sick to go out and spread the disease (*hint this is probably a pretty bad assumption)
#2 ) the vaccine would reduce viral load
#3 ) a reduction of viral load would prevent you from spreading it to others
It turns out the vaccine does not lower viral load. and even though this has been shown to be medically true, you can see that in places like Isreal and Germany where the virus spreads pretty easily. hell, even in the US, you dont get nearly 1m cases a day without vaccinated people spreading it.
> Do you have a link to a study with adequate controls demonstrating that the Covid vaccines substantially reduce transmission?
It's not our job to educate you. Search for yourself. There are literally dozens of studies from around the world that show that the vaccines reduce transmission[1]. Why should we bother to dig up research when people like you have proved that they don't want to change their mind on the issue? Why don't you provide studies that prove your conclusion?
Also, no one cares primarily about transmission. If an infection were harmless, we wouldn't mind if it spread to 100% of all humans.
The vaccine is intended to reduce illness and death, which it does dramatically.
> It's what we have, according to the designers of the various vaccines. Unless you are suggesting that all things are true unless proven otherwise, in which case I'd ask you to go back and check some books on elementary logic.
That's not a citation. And vaccines are designed with a very general goal of "make the body fight this". That can potentually affect both symptoms and transmission. Don't argue in bad faith and equate that to "anything could be true"
> There is some work after the fact to measure the effect on Covid transmission of the vaccines, but even that isn't very promising.
Huh? Checking if the vaccine does anything at all is after the design is done. The choice of when to test symptoms vs. spreading is more about difficulty of getting the data than anything else.
> It's odd when "stopping people dying" is "a huge downgrade".
Stopping one person from a chance of dying is a downgrade from both stopping that and stopping transmission to more people that have their own chance of dying.
> My comment was about effectiveness in reducing infection and transmission.
This is not the same as
>>> "Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19"
Being vaccinated does not 100% prevent infection and transmission, but it does reduce the likelihood of infection and transmission by about half. The fact is the vaccines are effective in reducing infection and transmission. Your assertion that "the vaccine barely moves the needle on transmission if at all," is gross exaggeration at best and entirely false at worst. The science of immunology and vaccines is sound and well-established. The risk of adverse effects from vaccines is vanishingly small, while the likely benefit of reduced risk of infection, severity of illness, hospitalization and death is huge.
The COVID vaccines are nothing short of a miracle of modern medicine. The only grave problem here is laymen making uninformed medical decisions based solely on political tribalism and failed political ideologies, evangelizing their logically unsound and medically ignorant position, and refusing to cooperate with the interests of public health while needlessly putting themselves and others at significantly increased chances of infection, severe illness and/or death. This is the very definition of anti-social behavior, placing one's ego and whims above the needs of all others, and not caring whether others get sick, suffer and die.
>> > OK. So are you now retracting your previous claim that "vaccines do not prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2"?
> Why should I?
Because it is false.
> It is true, because I was infected after getting vaccinated by someone who was vaccinated as well.
That does not make your statement true. The vaccines never prevented transmission at 100% effectiveness. Never ever. They were not marketed as doing so, and if anyone did claim they prevent transmission at 100% effectiveness, then that person was spreading misinformation. It was never true.
They didn't even prevent severe outcomes at 100% effectiveness, and they were always much better at preventing severe outcomes than they were at preventing infection. (Initially >90% vs. <~ 80% against Alpha).
The whole idea that one case of transmission proves the vaccines are ineffective at preventing transmission is silly.
> Don't twist my words.
I am not twisting your words. You were making a judgement call, which you are obviously not qualified to make.
> Since the vaccination doesn't help against spread, the argument is not true in my opinion.
Can you provide a source for this statement? As far as I know, even though not 100% effective against infections and virus shedding, the vaccines do help against spread so I'd like to know if I'm misinformed.
> Furthermore, the vaccines don't prevent transmission,
They do prevent transmission, since they make people less likely to be infected, and if you're not infected with the virus you won't transmit it. The vaccines are somewhat less effective at preventing people from being infected at all than they are at preventing hospitalization and death, but still significantly effective. [1]
> You can still transmit the virus whilst double vaccinated. They do not slow spread
That's not correct.
I can win the lottery, but I probably won't. Don't think of it as black or white, binary, can/can't. Unless you talk about the probability of getting and transmitting COVID, and how vaccination reduces these, you will come to false conclusions like that.
>>So the virus will happily keep infecting as many people as it can regardless of the vaccines.
This part very specifically and provably isn't true. Vaccines reduce the actual transmission rate by about 90%. What you said about vaccinated people who have managed to get infected still carrying the same viral load is actually true - but your comment makes it sound as if the virus will keep spreading at the same pace regardless of whether you are vaccinated or not - which is simply not true.
> We still don't have any hard evidence that the vaccine stops transmission. It's possible that it keeps you from getting sick while being an asymptomatic spreader.
We absolutely do and such studies exist, and furthermore you can see a rapid decline in new cases in countries that have achieved high vaccine coverage, which would not have occurred if vaccines did not prevent onward transmission.
> I think there is LOTS of evidence about the vaccines effects on transmission which points to them being effective.
Can you point to some canonical sources on this? Preferably things that were published in the last year or so.
My understanding is that effects on infection and transmission were overstated and very short lived anyway. Didn't everybody get covid eventually, multiple times even?
> Looks like you're repeating some politicians' talking point without bothering to check it yourself - the existing vaccines have no noticeable effect on the spread:
If you assume that everyone except you just repeats something some other party has said then I don’t think there’s much to discuss here.
I admit that I haven’t run studies myself, but I have read up what experts in virology and epidemiology have to say and I do have a bit of an understanding about how statics work. The studies you cite show the risk of spreading an infection once a person is infected and that’s the same or at least similar to what for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. There was hope that vaccines would also reduce that risk, but they do not significantly, at least from what we know today. However, this only is one very small piece of the puzzle. To spread, the virus needs to infect a person in the first place - and that risk is significantly reduced, even for the latest variants that partially escape the vaccine. So getting vaccinated significantly reduces both your personal risk and the risk of becoming a spreader.
> And yet, the vaccine doesn't keep you from getting the disease, nor does it keep you from spreading the disease.
Binary yes/no statements like this are basically disinformation. COVID vaccines are _neither_ perfect, not useless.
We know that various COVID vaccines are effective, in the range of 60-90% against getting and spreading and being very ill, which is actually very good compared to many other vaccines.
> All those vaccines were said to prevent getting a symptomatic covid infection and also prevent the spread.
Right, this is nonsense. You claim "lies", but you're parroting lies yourself and spreading dangerous misinformation.
Let's have some sources to back up these extraordinary claims. Show us where medical authorities or the drug companies themselves ever claimed that the vaccines would "prevent getting a symptomatic covid infection" or "prevent the spread".
The original data presented never showed that the vaccines would prevent symptomatic infections or completely prevent transmission.
That is false. Stop spreading dangerous nonsense.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211124-vaccines-redu...
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2294250-how-much-less-l...
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