It's because many more people are vaccinated. Assume 100,000 people are vaccinated and 10,000 aren't. If the infection rate in vaccinated population is 5%, and in the unvaccinated population is 50%, then out of 10,000 infected people, 5,000 will be vaccinated and 5,000 won't.
> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
The CDC's definition has been out of date for years. It turns out that to a large degree sterilising immunity was a myth with only a tiny, tiny fractions of vaccines actually achieving it. [0]
Most just achieve enough reduction in transmission to end or prevent outbreaks by bringing the r0 well below 1.
How convenient that the article, in effect, supports the current agenda of pushing vaccines on everyone. It does this through the angle of sterilizing immunity being unachievable.
It starts off with some Danish guy observing a measels outbreak in Scotland and how the people that had the measels 65 years earlier were not affected by the current outbreak. You can stop reading at that point because it totally ignores that critical part of the story. It then uses this observation as the catalyst for the 'myth' of sterilizing immunity of the measels vaccine. Then it goes into testimony from experts on how we can't prove an infection took place, blah, blah, blah... Right.
So here we go with the wiggle room that eventually justifies the Covid vaccine being given to everyone on earth. Never mind that 65 years later the old people didn't get infected with the measels. Their bodies must have had some seasoned immunity workers who remembered how they handled it last time.
It's never ending. "We don't have proof." "There's not enough evidence." "We can't quantify what defines that." But just to be safe, give this to everyone and punish those that refuse. I can't believe people actually suggest that unvaccinated people not be allowed in the hospital or should just suffer their 'bad decisions.' Really? Is that what it's come to?
‘Convenient’, or unsurprising because it’s just recording the current scientific consensus around vaccines and that’s the same thing driving current policy? Not everything is a conspiracy with malevolent intent.
For all the damage that COVID has wreaked, it’s providing a huge increase in the amount of attention, effort, and investment going into studying the immune system, vaccination, and infectious diseases in general. It’s not surprising that some older ideas and theories are being overturned or modified.
You’re also wrongly treating the vaccines’ effect on transmission as binary, either being fully sterilising or not. In truth they’re all able to reduce transmission somewhat from 20-50%, and that alone might be a good enough benefit to mandate full vaccination across the population.
Yep. That wasn't the goal for the Covid vaccine. It was to keep people from getting severe cases and preventing deaths. It works, but it should be targeted to high-risk individuals and not a blanket strategy that's not needed for the majority of the world's population.
It wasn’t that long ago that the scientists were suggesting 70% was sufficient. Is it that >90% is required when the vaccines don’t effectively impede transmission? Is it possible 100% would not be sufficient?
It's been clear for a long time that even 100% won't make the virus disappear. Yes, back in the early days when we didn't use the greek alphabet yet eradication was a reasonably possible best case outcome (though not really likely, given the transmissibility across species.
Look at how prevalent pre-delta variants are now: no, they have not disappeared because almost everybody had delta, they have disappeared because of vaccine shots combined with moderate (compared to 2020) NPI. A virus strain does not simply disappear because there's a new one in town, it keeps replicating until it runs out of hosts. And virions are certainly not defecting to a newer, more glorious flag (like humans might do)
The 70% number was often mentioned when the original variant was still predominant end of last year. Alpha and Delta are just so much more transmissible. The vaccine was never said to prevent all infections by serious scientists
Does a prior infected person count toward herd immunity? I have Dr. letter of my recovery.
I heard those who had it and recovered have sterilizing immunity. Is that better or worse than the vaccine non-sterilizing immunity for getting us to herd immunity?
Herd immunity counts nothing against delta or omicron. The endemic state, a permanent balance between immunity vaning and reinfection, that's not herd immunity. Natural immunity is just as temporary as vaccine immunity, give or take a few months.
The concluding para from your Nature article says the opposite of what you're claiming, and supports the person you're replying to:
"the persistence of antibody production, whether elicited by vaccination or by infection, does not ensure long-lasting immunity to COVID-19. The ability of some emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants to blunt the protective effects of antibodies means that additional immunizations may be needed to restore levels, says Ellebedy. “My presumption is, we will need a booster.”"
Its a confusing conversation because theres different levels of immunity.
I think the bone marrow cells are indicative of long-term protection from severe illness. They have long ramp up time from the point of latest exposure.
Blood boosted antibodies will be there to thwart an infection and continue to be there to prevent reinfection but the body turns off the pump because it becomes a waste of resource without an active enemy.
So the lifecycle of a (non-boosted) person going through endemic sars-cov2 will be slow activation followed by an afterburner which will tend to get you through a wave. Or you can try to time a booster to get you through a wave without getting triggered by the actual virus.
So in a sense, there is evidence long term "slow" immunity which is less effective at preventing transmissions and so allows for waves which indicates a certain lack of immunity by another defintion. I think that leads to conflict because of fuzzy definition on either side of the conversation.
Anyway that's my mental model of this whole thing. Any glaring holes?
There is plenty of evidence of natural immunity decaying. It will likely never (not in a lifetime) fall to a level equal to an entirely unprepared immune system, but the same holds for vaccine effect: immune system responses are a log decay, with various nonlinear effects applied (thresholds, saturation, the occasional rare ADE and so on) to different aspects that are of different importance for different viruses so that the observed curves look a bit different in each case. Yes, for some viruses, even what's left after a century is enough.
But those details are completely besides the point for endemic state, endemic state is endemic state wether reinfection, on average happens every quarter or wether it happens every five years. The only difference is that anything larger than a few months will lead to massive seasonality, and longer cycles will lead to a larger severity spread. This severity spread will be the decisive factor in the question of revaccination thresholds (maybe higher than current flu shot habits, maybe lower, maybe about the same), but there are far too many uncertainties to bother with concrete predictions.
What we do know: a year or two from now there won't be any vaccine-only immunities left, everybody will either be vacc+infection or infection only.
For that to be meaningful you need to compare the per capita rate of vaccinated and prior covid infected. That’ll show you very roughly how much protection each provides in a way that’s comparable.
With hardly more than 10% recovered, total, vs almost everybody vaccinated that's not much of a difference. Very well within the range of methodical difference like in which group those recovered and vaccinated are counted and so on.
Anecdotal, but I got my first bought of covid in Feb. 2020, and it was very flu-like for me. I've had 2 more infections after that (one, didn't even know, and the next was like a mild cold). In South Florida, we barely had a lockdown.
It's not a sustainable business, once polio was eradicated from territory, you lost all sales. New vaccines are more of what we'd call a subscription model.
Yes, exactly. The license clause can only be enforced because of copyright law, and fair use is allowed for by the copyright law. The rights given to you by the law supersede anything a license says, because without that law, the license would be completely meaningless.
(In theory, the reason EULAs work is because when you run the program, you are copying it from disk to RAM. This is why they are believed to be very shaky, as copyright law does not specifically consider copying from disk to RAM inside a black box to be "copying".
The GPL is on firmer ground, because it covers copying for distribution to other people. That is a situation that copyright law is specific about.)
This is exactly why people like me get confused about such things. From the little reading I've done I tend toward the "copyrights sound like the solution, and everything else is a twisted interpretation of that" point of view, but I'm only well read enough to know that I'm not well read enough to have an actual opinion.
Whats better is that the Wikipedia explanation goes into a whole section of "Parody vs. Satire" where Webster defines parody as a subset of satire. Makes my head hurt.
Scintilla-based editors, GTKsourceview-based editors (I just tried with Scite and Gedit) and Emacs all correctly position the cursor when using the arrow keys and proportional fonts.
As for lining up similar constructs, I mostly code in Python, and the PEP 8 style guidelines explicitly forbid that.
I tried it in Emacs. Your definition of correct does not agree with mine.
If you draw a line parallel to the left-hand edge of your monitor down from the character that the cursor is currently over, it should touch the character that "next-line" will move to. That is not what happens when you use a proportional font in Emacs. (If you are on the 10th character of the line, you will move to the 10th character of the next line.)
What happens makes mathematical sense, but Emacs is a visual editor. Programmed text editing is nice, but sometimes you notice a visual property of the source code, and would like to exploit that instead of some lexical property. Visual editing lets you do this, but proportional fonts destroy this ability.
Anyway, sorry to hear about the Python style guidelines. If I did Python, I would ignore that one. (Haskell is whitespace-sensitive and allows you to align similar constructs. So this is just a Python thing.)
> I tried it in Emacs. Your definition of correct does not agree with mine.
Yes it does. In Emacs, with a proportional font, if I'm on the 10th character of a line and press "up", I do not necessarily move to the 10th character of the previous line. I move to the character visually above the current one.
Sorry it doesn't work for you - we must have differing Emacs setups. I'm using Emacs 23 in GUI mode.
Also, I'm a big fan of Haskell in general, but sometimes when I'm coding I think its whitespace is a bit too significant.
When I hit "Return", it duplicates the current line's leading whitespace on the next line. That will still work perfectly with a proportional font. When I hit "cursor-down", most text editors that allow proportional fonts know how to put the cursor where it visually belongs.
