Holloway!

I don’t want to start a medicine war on a hockey blog, so I’ll just point out a couple of things about this thread for those interested.

Can you get Covid and then catch another variant again later? Yes, this is well known. In fact, you can even look up all kinds of stats for % reduction in chance of catching omicron from prior infection vs from vaccine, vs from having both.

Godot says very often here that triple-vax doesn’t protect you from infection, but I don’t think that is true. I haven’t looked at the last 2 weeks or so of data, but initial results showed quite good protection from symptomatic infection if you get that third shot.

RE: masks. Be careful not to conflate the requirements are different for viruses than chemical poisons. You may need a fitted respirator to prevent slowly building up enough chemicals over ten year’s work as a painter. But, you’re unlikely to get sick unless you get over a certain dosage of virus in one short period. This changes the requirements massively, and enough that almost any mask helps a bit, and N95s help rather a lot.
->There’s a chart making the rounds these days trying to sum this stuff up. The chart is far from perfect, but does encapsulate part of what is happening here. It boils down to this: if you sit beside a sick person and you’re both unmasked, on average it takes about 15 min. to build up enough airborne concentration to catch it. If you’re both in surgical masks that fit just OK, it’s more like an hour. If you’re both in N95s that fit roughly (10% leakage), it’s more like 25 hours. A fitted respirator-style N95 with 1% leakage is around 2500 hours. In fact, my wife is an ER doc and they only wear the big rubber-sealed masks when they intubate an really spray out virus. The rest of the time they wear the same paper N95 that I do and the ER docs have mostly made it through months and months in air with much higher viral loads than you or I are likely to see.

-> Obviously these are avg. numbers and depend on fit and air flow and infectivity of the person and variant and yada yada yada. Still though, they show clearly how all masks slow transmission, and that’s all we really need to do. If we can change it so that each sick person infects on average 0.9 people instead of 2, we go from exploding case loads to a gradual fading.

Bottom line is that it does seem counterintuitive to those that use masks for chemical protection, but even somewhat leaky masks work pretty well for viruses.

Yes, the vaccines still help against the severity of the disease, but they basically have no impact on preventing infection or preventing the vaccinated from spreading the virus

Yes, exactly, that is the claim you are making that I said was incorrect. I asked you for proof of this claim last time you said this, in case I missed a newer study, but you haven’t given one yet.

The vaccines are now a “medicine” and not a “vaccine”,.

FYI, the name vaccine doesn’t mean prevention of all symptoms, it just comes from the first disease the treatment was attempted on: variolae vaccinae (cow smallpox). You can’t just invent a new definition for a medical term and then make claims about how a medicine does or doesn’t satisfy your personal definition. It’s incorrect, but more important, dangerous. 

And also FYI, effectiveness of 3 shots is very much in line with most vaccines that we use. For example, see this headline about Polio vaccines:

The misleading narrative that doctors, the government, and the media are maintaining…

I’m just going to let this statement hang here. So it’s either every doctor in the country has made a mistake interpreting the studies or you have. What do you think is more likely?

With Omicron, I, and I believe rightly so, have no confidence that the vaccines, even triply vaxxed, as all of us are, confer any measure of immunity or protection against infection.

You are quite wrong about this, and I’ve sent you the data before, but you prefer to lean on anecdotal evidence because you misunderstand statistics and medicine.

the numbers of homes listed was low, until about a week ago. You know,, ACTUAL EFFING DATA…from the most heavily vaxxed locations.

Ah hah, here it is, you’ve been caught in a logic trap. You feel like you’re right because you’re asking the wrong question.

Vaccine effectiveness is measured as the reduction in chance of infection versus an unvaccinated person under the same conditions. Did you know that NO VACCINE gives you a zero percent chance of infection? In fact, some people study vaccines by administering them to monkeys and then shooting enormous viral loads into their nasal cavities to see exactly how much it takes to make them sick? They do this because no matter the amount or quality of antibodies, it’s possible to induce an infection. No vaccine can protect you from developing a symptomatic case if exposed to too high of a viral load.

As a hypothetical: say an average persons life gives them a 0.28% chance of catching a specific virus on any given day. If they are unvaccinated, 0.28% per day adds up to about 102% over 365 days: they are gonna get sick. If unvaccinated, it’s a 20% chance of getting sick during a year: they are probably not going to get sick.

Right now, we have Omicron which is incredibly transmissible and the community levels are so high that everyone regularly gets exposed to several sick people a week. So, that baseline per diem rate isn’t 0.28%, maybe it’s 2%. If the wave lasts 2 months, that’s adds up to 120% chance of catching it for the unvaccinated and 24% for the vaccinated. One person probably wouldn’t catch it, but across the millions in the country, you’d certainly see lots go breakthrough cases. So you see, the source of breakthrough infections isn’t because the vaccine is poor, it’s because the baseline per diem risk of catching omicron is extremely high right now. Even a 95% effective VE—about the max possible—would still be 6% per person in the above numbers, so you’d still see lots of breakthrough with omicron. 

So, what does this mean for an individual person trying to skip the infection? It means mask and distance to reduce your baseline per diem risk. Why bother with getting the boosted vaccine then? Oh, it doesn’t do much, just drops your risk an ADDITIONAL fivefold!! And, on top of that, it reduces your chance of serious side effects like death by a much larger number!! Mask + distance + 3x shot and you’re almost certain to make it through this wave unaffected. At a community level vaccines are even more important, because their ability to reduce infections and slow the spread can prevent the collapse of our hospital system. 
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This vaccine is a massive MASSIVE success, way better than we had any right to hope it would work for mutated strains, yet you’re out here trying to convince people that it isn’t. That’s very irresponsible. Unfortunately, my wife spent yesterday in the ER caring for an unvaccinated young person that is probably going to die of Covid because the internet and airwaves are filled with misinformation from people who think they can skip a decade of training and still be an expert. 

Yes, exactly. Masks aren’t perfect seals and don’t make anybody superman. Luckily, they still make an incredibly enormous difference to any one person’s chance of catching it, and to the level of community spread.