If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world.
So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be.
Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
> Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.
Wrong on both counts. First of all viral epidemics follow a natural progression. Saying that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it.
This same mistake has been made in associative studies looking at mask mandates, where many shoddy papers were released that showed a drop in mask-mandate counties while neglecting to account for the fact that cases were dropping everywhere. Monica Gandhi (an HIV researcher whose pro-masking papers have been of consistently poor quality yet are fairly widely cited because they produce the “correct” result) published a study to this effect that she and her team had to later retract because cases later went up. They were just measuring the normal viral epidemic curve and convincing themselves, without real evidence, that it must have been the masks.
As to the other point, the efficacy of the vaccines is real but quite limited. The recent data coming out of Israel especially was something like 33% case reduction, but a much better reduction in hospitalization/death (80-90%). That to me demonstrates that the party line position of “the vaccines are amazingly effective” is simply not true. They’re great for reducing personal risk - although I’d note the Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis, and strokes are pretty concerning - but they don’t do much for slowing the spread. Now frankly we never should have been trying to slow the spread of SARS-2 in the general population - it was always destined to be an endemic respiratory virus, and a mild one at that for most healthy people - but I’m just making the point because the whole narrative has been that we had to lock down “until the vaccine” to save people from getting infected when increasingly it’s looking like everyone has to face the virus one way or another.
So go out and get vaccinated if you want better odds against SARS-2 while taking on some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days, but don’t kid yourself into thinking that any concerns about either the safety or efficacy of the vaccines is baseless.
How do you explain that, even though significant proportion of populations is already vaccinated, new hospitalizations are almost exclusively people who were not vaccinated?
If vaccines were not effective wouldn't it be true that we should see both vaccinated and unvaccinated in hospitals?
While vaccinated people still can get Covid, they have much lower chance of passing it further. In a vaccinated people the virus cannot multiply as much and with lower and shorter presence of the virus in the organism and much less chance of symptoms that aid spreading the virus (like caughing) there is much less chance you infect other people.
The reality is that Covid is now mostly spreading in circles of unvaccinated people and vaccines are effective at stopping spread of the virus.
The vaccines prevent the disease from becoming bad enough to need hospitalization. That's about it. This answers your question about why hospitalizations are mostly unvaccinated people without negating any of the GP's points, which are well stated.
The idea that the vaccine prevents hospitalizations is in fact directly contradictory to the GGPs central argument, which was "that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it."
It's also worth pointing out that "some risk from possible side effects of making your cells express a bunch of artificial spike protein throughout your body for a few days" is strictly less than that of the virus, because the virus also puts those spike proteins in your body.
And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
Further, GGPs 33% number is actually 39%, and applies specifically to the delta variant. Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
> The idea that the vaccine prevents hospitalizations is in fact directly contradictory to the GGPs central argument, which was "that a drop in [COVID] death rates following vaccine rollout proves their efficacy/safety is like saying that a week of heavy rains after doing a rain dance proves the rain dance did it."
That doesn't follow. My point was simply that making an association does not prove causation. Which is true. Observing that giving someone a vaccine reduces their hospitalization is a separate matter, and one I literally stated in my comment (that they reduce COVID hosps by 80-90%)
> And the MRNA vaccines don't have stroke or guillain-barre as side effects. That only applies to the J&J (Janssen) vaccine.
You're wrong about the guillain-barre. Unfortunately I can't find the study I'm looking for. There is a paper that looked at the rates of Guillain Barre in the mRNA vaccines and found them 4-5x higher than normal ("normal" is a low base rate obviously), and specifically criticized the misleading math/wording coming from Pfizer and the like where they falsely claimed that the Guillain-Barre was not more common.
> Against the version of the virus that the vaccines were developed against, it had a far higher rate of infection reduction, which is why people are (reasonably) somewhat concerned about delta, and why vaccination is even more important: because herd immunity is now even harder to achieve.
This is why getting naturally infected is so important! You get near 100% infection reduction for a couple years and then immunological memory for the rest of your life. You can't beat those numbers with the vaccines, not even close.
If you look at the 6 month Pfizer trial, the vaccines made no difference in all-cause mortality. In fact there was one more death in the vaccine group. (My interpretation is that the vaccines spared some COVID deaths - a small but real amount - but caused more deaths from the side effects of being injected with a massive bolus of spike protein mRNA (acute clotting disorders, stroke, myocarditis, that kind of stuff))
If you remember, vaccines were developed under enormous pressure and every day of delay meant literally tens of thousands of people dying across the world.
So the uncertainties about these vaccines must be weighted against the situation in which they came to be.
Fortunately, the doubt against vaccines seems to be largely unfounded and it is easily evidenced by drops in death rates in all countries that implemented vaccinations.