>I have listened to scared people trying to blame people that are not vaccinated for the fact that vaccines are not that effective at preventing infection and that mild breakthrough infections are common.
A. I reject on principle the reasoning that X must undergo unnecessary medical procedure to lower hypothetical odds of Y being afflicted by some negative outcome. STOP SCAPEGOATING.
B. Consider that the 'cases ratio' is tainted because of faulty CDC guidance. If you test more aggressively conditioned on vaccination status, you are going to get biased ratios. At this point anything but sampling studies is pretty much worthless in assessing how prevalent breakthrough infections are. We've got to thank CDC for that.
> Five days earlier, I had gone to a house party in Montgomery County. There were 15 adults there, all of us fully vaccinated. The next day, our host started to feel sick. The day after that, she tested positive for COVID-19. [...] At this point, 11 of the 15 have tested positive for COVID."
If the vaccines reduce breakthrough infections at 1 : 7 rate, an outbreak incident where 11 : 15 get infected has a probability of about 1 : 1,000,000,000. Rather unlikely, perhaps something else is at play:
> The official Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guideline stated that, since I was fully vaccinated, I didn’t need to do anything different unless I started developing symptoms. I’m an epidemiologist at a major medical research university, which has a dedicated COVID exposure hotline for staff. I called it, and workers said I didn’t need to do anything.
> The CDC announced in May that it was only going to collect data on breakthrough infections that led to hospitalization or death, which are fortunately rare. But that means that outbreaks like ours will fly under the radar.
> I reject on principle the reasoning that X must undergo unnecessary medical procedure to lower hypothetical odds of Y being afflicted by some negative outcome.
It sounds like you reject the entire concept of public health. That is going to be a bit of a problem when you are engaging in a debate about public health policy.
Indeed, I do reject scapegoat-driven 'public health'.
The burden of proof is on the health authorities to quantify win/win scenarios. Not fly by the seat of their pants, sometimes based on faulty/incomplete data and guesswork. 'First, do no harm'. If you are unsure, then don't do it.
You want to make an R-based argument? What is the contribution of children in the past 4 weeks? Do you have evidence that children shed more covid compared with vaccinated adults? Do you have evidence that R is a constant, will your calculations hold 6 months from now? Are you accounting for the selection effect of leaky vaccines on virus evolutionary trajectory? What is the cumulative 20 year ADE risk?
For worst case scenario, do you have a 20 year study of leaky mRNA vaccines against infectious disease in some animal population? No, we're experimenting on humans in a world's first. There have been vaccine disasters. Fortunately not in humans. Warning: NSFL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...
Completely ridiculous.
https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/covid-19/data/vaccinatio...
They're not perfect, but arguing they're not that effective is just stupid.