So why are so many vaccinated people getting Covid?

[Goweresque]

Vaccines don't stop you catching diseases, They never have. They enable you to mount a quick, effective immune response when you do catch a disease, often (but not always) before you develop symptoms.

If your immune system deals with a pathogen before you become infectious then you haven't caught the disease. You can't pass it on, you have no symptoms. Only when you get infected and are able to pass that on can you be considered a 'case' of the illness. Just being exposed to a pathogen and your immune system dealing with it is not a 'case' of the disease. Otherwise you could argue that every bacteria that we ingest on a second by second basis is in fact a 'case' of whatever disease or illness they could cause in us, if our immune system didn't deal with them immediately.

There are two types of vaccine - sterilizing ones (where once vaccinated you never become infected to be able to pass it on to anyone else), and non-sterilizing vaccines which give protection against illness severity and death, but don't prevent infection and infecting others. The current mRNA vaccines are the latter, also known as 'leaky' vaccines. They are more akin to a treatment than a true vaccine. Example of the former include the injected polio vaccine (but not the oral one) and the smallpox and measles vaccines.

 

[SteveHants]

If your immune system deals with a pathogen before you become infectious then you haven't caught the disease. You can't pass it on, you have no symptoms. Only when you get infected and are able to pass that on can you be considered a 'case' of the illness. Just being exposed to a pathogen and your immune system dealing with it is not a 'case' of the disease. Otherwise you could argue that every bacteria that we ingest on a second by second basis is in fact a 'case' of whatever disease or illness they could cause in us, if our immune system didn't deal with them immediately.

There are two types of vaccine - sterilizing ones (where once vaccinated you never become infected to be able to pass it on to anyone else), and non-sterilizing vaccines which give protection against illness severity and death, but don't prevent infection and infecting others. The current mRNA vaccines are the latter, also known as 'leaky' vaccines. They are more akin to a treatment than a true vaccine. Example of the former include the injected polio vaccine (but not the oral one) and the smallpox and measles vaccines.

Yes, you have - the pathogen has entered your body and you have mounted an immune response and killed it off. Sometimes, even with vaccination, this response still means you develop mild symptoms and therefore can still transmit it.

For example: a doctor thought Id had measles as a kid (I hadn't as it turned out) so they didn't offer me the vaccine. My younger brother got vaccinated. I caught measles pretty severely. He developed minor symptoms in spite of having been vaccinated and soon got better.

This is not unusual, no vaccines are 100% and some work better in some individuals than others.

 

[Goweresque]

Yes, you have - the pathogen has entered your body and you have mounted an immune response and killed it off. Sometimes, even with vaccination, this response still means you develop mild symptoms and therefore can still transmit it.

For example: a doctor thought Id had measles as a kid (I hadn't as it turned out) so they didn't offer me the vaccine. My younger brother got vaccinated. I caught measles pretty severely. He developed minor symptoms in spite of having been vaccinated and soon got better.

This is not unusual, no vaccines are 100% and some work better in some individuals than others.

Here's a Cambridge University Research Fellow in viral immunology explaining what sterilizing vaccines are:

Coronavirus: few vaccines prevent infection – here’s why that’s not a problem

Sterilising immunity means that the immune system is able to completely prevent a virus from replicating in your body. Not all vaccines provide this.

theconversation.com

I quote:
Some vaccines stop you getting symptomatic disease, but others stop you getting infected too. The latter is known as “sterilising immunity”. With sterilising immunity, the virus can’t even gain a toehold in the body because the immune system stops the virus entering cells and replicating.

 

[SteveHants]

Here's a Cambridge University Research Fellow in viral immunology explaining what sterilizing vaccines are:

Coronavirus: few vaccines prevent infection – here’s why that’s not a problem

Sterilising immunity means that the immune system is able to completely prevent a virus from replicating in your body. Not all vaccines provide this.

theconversation.com

I quote:
Some vaccines stop you getting symptomatic disease, but others stop you getting infected too. The latter is known as “sterilising immunity”. With sterilising immunity, the virus can’t even gain a toehold in the body because the immune system stops the virus entering cells and replicating.

The pathogen has still entered your body in both cases, as I said, its just the rapidity of response that differs.

Your quote is simplified and deals with majority of cases (as was its intent, I think) - if you are immunocompromised, your immune system isn't as effective at mounting that response and therefore even if you'd had a vaccine that was "sterilising" in normal immune systems, it might not be for you.
This is why we vaccinate for diseases that aren't normally life threatening (like measles), because developing herd immunity means that immunocompromised people (in the case of measles, mostly children) are less likely to get symptoms.

Also, there was little chance that we'd get a sterilising vaccine for a rapidly mutating coronavirus (or any virus really).

 

[essex man]

The pathogen has still entered your body in both cases, as I said, its just the rapidity of response that differs.

Your quote is simplified and deals with majority of cases (as was its intent, I think) - if you are immunocompromised, your immune system isn't as effective at mounting that response and therefore even if you'd had a vaccine that was "sterilising" in normal immune systems, it might not be for you.
This is why we vaccinate for diseases that aren't normally life threatening (like measles), because developing herd immunity means that immunocompromised people (in the case of measles, mostly children) are less likely to get symptoms.

Also, there was little chance that we'd get a sterilising vaccine for a rapidly mutating coronavirus (or any virus really).

Measles is a truly deadly disease...kills between 1-3 children per thousand, i.e. far far worse than covid..closer to one in million

 

[SteveHants]

Measles is a truly deadly disease...kills between 1-3 children per thousand, i.e. far far worse than covid..closer to one in million

95% is not one in a million - its 5 in 100, ie 1 in 20.....

 

[essex man]

Measles is a truly deadly disease...kills between 1-3 children per thousand, i.e. far far worse than covid..closer to one in million

Also the vaccine for measles is a traditional vaccine not an experimental type of gene therapy drug

 

[essex man]

95% is not one in a million - its 5 in 100, ie 1 in 20.....

95%?

 

[SteveHants]

95%?

COVID has a 95% survivability in the unvaccinated - see my earlier post from the BMJ.

5% die, that's 1 in 20.

 

[essex man]

COVID has a 95% survivability in the unvaccinated - see my earlier post from the BMJ.

5% die, that's 1 in 20.

No they don't, 20 million caught it in UK before vaccines!

 

[essex man]

No they don't, 20 million caught it in UK before vaccines!

The survival rate deps on population mix but well above 99%

 

[SteveHants]

No they don't, 20 million caught it in UK before vaccines!

See the paper from the BMJ - its more recent. With delta variant, the unvaccinated now have 95% survival rate.

 

[essex man]

See the paper from the BMJ - its more recent. With delta variant, the unvaccinated now have 95% survival rate.

Sorry, it's not, was talking about children in any case...3 in a thousand for measles, less than one in a million for covid

 

[essex man]

See the paper from the BMJ - its more recent. With delta variant, the unvaccinated now have 95% survival rate.

I will look at paper if you have posted

 

[essex man]

See the paper from the BMJ - its more recent. With delta variant, the unvaccinated now have 95% survival rate.

It doesn't say that

 

[Goweresque]

COVID has a 95% survivability in the unvaccinated - see my earlier post from the BMJ.

5% die, that's 1 in 20.

I looked at your link, I could see nothing in it that says the stat you're quoting.
It also doesn't pass the smell test - if it were true then in 2020 (when no-one was vaccinated) 5% of all infected people should have been dying. Which they were not. For example this report from Imperial College last December (so when vaccines had not yet been rolled out) says they calculate the IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) to be just under 1% in England for 2020 as a whole, and dropping as the year progressed due to improved clinical outcomes.

COVID-19 in England - analysis of the first two waves | Imperial News | Imperial College London

The latest report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team presents an overview of SARS-CoV-2 transmission during the first two waves.

www.imperial.ac.uk

 

[SteveHants]

I looked at your link, I could see nothing in it that says the stat you're quoting.
It also doesn't pass the smell test - if it were true then in 2020 (when no-one was vaccinated) 5% of all infected people should have been dying. Which they were not. For example this report from Imperial College last December (so when vaccines had not yet been rolled out) says they calculate the IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) to be just under 1% in England for 2020 as a whole, and dropping as the year progressed due to improved clinical outcomes.

COVID-19 in England - analysis of the first two waves | Imperial News | Imperial College London

The latest report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team presents an overview of SARS-CoV-2 transmission during the first two waves.

www.imperial.ac.uk

There wasn't a delta variant in 2020.

 

[essex man]

There wasn't a delta variant in 2020.

It simply doesn't say the 95% rate in the article.
You understand there is no evidence that delta is more deadly than previous, extra transmission (likely less deadly)would make sense but also unproven.
It's just the predominant strain, not very different from any other

 

[ollie989898]

Covid doesn't kill anything like 5% of those infected. Covid is pretty infectious but it isn't that lethal.

The fact is the median age of those who have died of the virus is something like 85. We also know the way the government is counting covid deaths is ridiculous. We will likely never know how many people have died from it but it certainly isn't the number the government are claiming it is.

 

[Goweresque]

There wasn't a delta variant in 2020.

Please quote from the article you linked where it says the current IFR for unvaccinated people is 5%, because I can't see it. Seriously if the IFR was 5% for the unvaccinated there would be bodies across all over the streets world wide, thats a seriously high infection fatality rate, its on a par with the original SARS virus.