> 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.”
Side effects from vaccines are rare, but do occasionally happen. Because of the small risk, there’s a government program to pay money to anybody who suffers a serious side effect from taking a vaccine in exchange for granting legal immunity to vaccine producers ( https://www.hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html ). So, to answer your question, schools don’t literally require legal immunity themselves, but they do benefit from legal immunity that that the government gives vaccine manufacturers: there’s no need to sue a school for requiring vaccines when there’s a special program to pay out benefits.
Last I knew, COVID-19 vaccines weren’t covered, but apparently I missed some news, since it’s the first thing listed on https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp .
>pay money to anybody who suffers a serious side effect from taking a vaccine
Nitpick, but really it is a fund to pay for anyone who suffered a side effect that it cannot be proven wasnt a vaccine. In this case vaccines are guilty until proven innocent.
>approximately 70 percent of its payments are the result of a negotiated settlement “in which HHS has not concluded, based upon review of the evidence, that the alleged vaccine caused the alleged injury.”
1) How do you prove it was the vaccine that caused your side effects? You can't. It's not provable in court because "my legs went numb a day or two after I got the jab" isn't exactly concrete evidence.
2) No company should have their liability removed for any reason, especially by the government. This thinking was partly why the 2008 recession happened. I don't want the government taking on the liability of a multi-billion dollar industry because if the company messes up, we're paying more in taxes - guaranteed - to pay for all the settlements.
3) This mandate by the government violates every part of a right to personal autonomy when it comes to your health - there is a MONUMENTAL difference when the mandate comes from government as opposed to private business. This sets (further) precedence for future governments to give them carte blanche as to peoples' health.
Side note - Just a reminder that government-ran health systems like the NHS makes decisions about your health based on the status of the current system - meaning that people who are too costly to fix/repair/KEEP ALIVE will receive palliative care. That's disgusting to me. (The US healthcare system is a whole other topic entirely, this is just an example of government making bad decisions regarding your health)
how much the vaccine injury program has paid out to claimants in the respective FY [1] -- subsidized by our tax dollars on behalf of big pharma, of-course.
Since 1989, it seems the US govt program has paid out $4,667,496,451 to individuals and attorneys who have sued based on side-effects of vaccines
The MMR vaccine required by school is sterilizing, once and done. Intramuscular Covid vaccines provide blood/serum antibodies that can reduce the risk of severe disease or death, but they are non-sterilizing. They never promised to prevent infection and the CDC has updated their definitions to make that clear.
Why would employers need legal immunity? Their lawyers may want to look closely at the legal immunity protections of the PREP act, which extend to healthcare professionals who recommend "countermeasures".
Because it alters the risk/benefit calculus. A sterilizing vaccine that stops transmission in its tracks, has a clear public health benefit to every part of society, even if there are risks. A non-sterilizing vaccine does not provide that society-wide public health benefit, leaving the employer to bear risks without benefit.
Given that the polio vaccine has >99% efficacy [1] and the fact that US has been polio free since 1979 [2], with the only threat being the occasional traveler to a region with polio, being nonsterlizing doesn't seem to be an issue. Quite different from our current situation.
No, I'm comparing the much higher efficacy of the polio vaccine and low prevalence of the polio disease to the significantly lower efficacy of the Covid vaccines and the high prevalence of Covid at present. That means the fact that the polio vaccine is non-sterilizing isn't very important, while the fact that the Covid vaccines are non-sterilizing is a big deal and undermines some of the public health policy decisions.
actually, the polio vaccine doesn't have much higher efficacy, and the covid vaccines don't have much lower efficacy, they have similar efficacy in reducing severe symptoms
That's not what the referenced links says. It says the polio vaccine has 99 to 100% efficacy. The published numbers for Covid vaccines show the virus vector and mRNA vaccines are around 95% efficacy. That's a large difference.
But the COVID vaccine does provide a society-wide public health benefit. Our best available data indicates that it reduces the risk of transmission, even for Delta [1].
Find the word 'delta' in the text of the actual study. It ain't there. And look at the dates of the study. Most of the data is pre-delta.
Your linked ACSH article simply fabricates a conclusion based on no evidence.
The scientific establishment sickens me here. The goal is to get people to vaccinate, which is reasonable enough. The outcome is the opposite, though. The lies are common enough and transparent enough that the whole establishment loses credibility, and a huge swath of the world doesn't believe it about vaccines, climate change, and a slew of other issues.
The argument that vaccines don't prevent delta tranmission are based on headlines, not science.
And unfortunately right now science is playing catch-up.
There simply isn't any evidence on breakthrough transmission with delta testing humans yet because it is recent. The headlines and public health messages are assuming worst case in order to scare vaccinated people into masking up again, while there's actually indications that vaccinated breakthrough infections almost certainly transmit less.
What we know is that while early in the infection viral loads in delta are much higher, but Alpha, delta, and non-VOI/VOC infections feature similar viral trajectories[1], in vaccinated breakthrough infections RNA load declines faster[2] and the ability to culture virus in breakthrough infections is lower[3], we know that vaccines reduced transmission with alpha[4] and apart from scary headlines we still expect that vaccines reduce transmission with delta. While there's documented cases of delta breakthrough infections transmitting to one or two other people, there's not been any studies of how common that is, or how common it is for breakthrough infections to become superspreaders to >10 people, or if that is even possible. Since viral loads are correlated with transmissibility and symptomology/virulence the very high protection against severe disease with vaccination may also protect against severe transmission.
"“The bottom line is, this can happen — it can be true that vaccinated people can spread the virus. But we do not yet know what their relative role in overall community spread is,” says co-author Thomas Friedrich, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison."
Vaccinations may (or may not) reduce the propensity of vaccinated people to spread Delta but it's very clear at this point vaccinated people can spread Delta to some degree.
It is 100% certain that some breakthrough transmissions can transmit onwards.
If I know that, it should be very apparent that wasn't what I meant.
There are people claiming that vaccines do not prevent any forwards transmission and that vaccination is 100% worthless for ending pandemic spread. Arguing that is wrong does not imply arguing for the exact inverse and that vaccines are perfect. I'm pretty sure that hell is the world where everyone argues in absolutes all the time and that I'm unfortunately living in it.
sigh All of this is irrelevant to the central point. The article fabricated facts. If you're a scientist, your conclusion can be 100% and you're still a fraud if you've baked data to get to that conclusion.
As a footnote, we do have data. My best estimate was that the vaccine reduced the transmission of delta by about 50%. That's based on data in the community I live (and this is context-dependent -- for example, vaccines do a lot more for casual interactions than for close/long ones).
I saw that same estimate replicated by two data scientists I trust, using different data from different places, and different methodologies, so it's somewhat robust. On the other hand, all three were susceptible to Simpson's Paradox and demographic bias, so there is one possible source of correlated error (specifically, more at-risk populations have higher vaccination rates). However, even if we assume a best-case there, though, transmission is reduced by <90%.
I'm summarizing him and everyone else with attitudes like his: the vaccine isn't 100% so it is nothing. Maybe I'm a bit extreme, but at this point I am tired seeing the same ensconce.
My own estimate is that the vaccine is about 50% effective for delta. That's cuts R0 in half, which is huge, but not something you can in any way, shape, or form rely on in isolation. It will likely be even lower for future mutations. Aside from the antivaxer movement, another outcome of extreme pro-vaccine stances, to the level of people lying, is that many people take NO precautions once vaccinated. That's a lot of what's driving some (not all) of the current delta outbreaks.
And on the anti-vaxxer side, once scientists get caught fabricating data, they're not going to be trusted even when they're right.
Do you understand that "reduce" is not synonymous with "eliminate"?
Because an acknowledgement that fully vaccinated people can spread Delta is not a refutation to the claim that it reduces the spread.
Even the paragraph you quoted says "However, like prior variants, the amount of viral genetic material may go down faster in fully vaccinated people when compared to unvaccinated people. This means fully vaccinated people will likely spread the virus for less time than unvaccinated people."
> Fully vaccinated people with Delta variant breakthrough infections can spread the virus to others. However, vaccinated people appear to spread the virus for a shorter time
And testing rates are probably even lower now that many people have been vaccinated.
This argument is not going to convince the unvaccinated, who are tired of incoherent "scientific" information that changes every month. The field of virology is apparently in its infancy.
> UK for example, have much higher case numbers this summer than last
but much lower hospitalisation rates [0]. Which is the key point of "flattening the curve" if you remember. We're not going to get out of lockdown measures until the hospitals can cope with the load, and the vaccinations are reducing the load on hospitals. Get vaccinated now.
Anyone expecting the scientific establishment (or in fact anyone) to have a clear, consistent and coherent picture right the way through a pandemic caused by a novel virus is being unrealistic.
The advice changes as we know better what we’re up against and anyone who expects to have all the answers is, frankly a fool. Look at the data, follow the science and do the best you can.
Corona viruses aren't novel, the common cold is one of them.
There were no accurate spread models in 2020, no studies how masks would affect the spread of the common cold.
There was ridiculous advice that the famous droplets would sink to the ground before covering a distance > 1.5 meters,
that masks would not help at all and much more.
Now they admit that the virus is airborne!
Sorry, #FollowTheScience slogans and calling others fools does not help.
> There was ridiculous advice that the famous droplets would sink to the ground before covering a distance > 1.5 meters,
This was based on experience with the original SARS virus.
Take this 2003 paper for example: "Effectiveness of precautions against droplets and contact in prevention of nosocomial transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)" [1]
It was a case control study in a Hong Kong hospital that concluded: "Practice of droplets precaution and contact precaution is adequate in significantly reducing the risk of infection …. The protective role of the mask suggests … infection is transmitted by droplets."
Following the science really, really does help. You just need to do it; fools of course don't.
Ding ding. Not to mention natural immunity is much better (6x to 10x) and longer lasting. I already got Covid (a mild flu for 2 days and tired for 5), there is zero benefit to inject, and the more my arm is twisted, the more I will resist.
> (...) who are tired of incoherent "scientific" information that changes every month.
I don't know where you get your information but I saw absolutely zero change in the info on any of the major vaccines since the very same day they've been announced. From day 1 the message was always that these vaccines trained the immune system to lower the severity of Covid symptoms, but otherwise we could still catch it and spread it.
Then only significant change that popped up since last year was due to the inception of the so called Delta variant, which is an entirely new development and had just enough mutations to lower vaccine effectiveness. However, the mRNA vaccines were, from the very start, described as custom tailored to the existing variants, and we're expected to show a drop in effectiveness if the wrong kind of variant occurred.
Personally, when I received my jabs, in both occasions I received a small flier making it quite clear that the current Covid vaccines only trained the immune system to have a fighting chance against Covid, but we were still vulnerable to catch and spread Covid and thus we should continue to practice basic health and safety precautions.
So I really wonder where you got your info, because none of what you said correlates with reality.
Reducing is not the same as stopping, which is the definition of sterilizing vaccines, which is the common layman perception of "vaccine", including your original example of school-mandated vaccines.
Fortunately, the CDC's Sept. 2021 updated definition makes it clear that non-sterilizing Covid vaccines should not be conflated with the transmission-stopping track record of sterilizing vaccines (e.g. MMR) mandated for school & travel.
Reducing does not have the same scaling effect as stopping, e.g. society must continue to pay an ongoing price for mitigations. Stopping means society can move on after a one-time vaccine cost.
There are intranasal (e.g. inhaler) vaccines under development, which may provide nasal/mucosal antibodies. Until those are available, recovery from natural infection will provide both nasal/mucosal and blood/serum antibodies. This path is available to both the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
Meanwhile here in the UK, with very high vaccination rates, we've been out of lockdown for a while now, are very much getting back to normal life and have low hospitalisation rates. If that's not a 'society wide benefit' I'd like to know what is.
We may need further short tactical lockdowns, and are considering booster shots for the elderly, but the situation here is night and day compared to the US and many other countries thanks to an effective vaccination programme with broad popular support.
It's amazing to me how the political culture of the right has diverged between the US and Europe, and here in the UK particularly. For us responsible behaviour in public and prompt vaccination are conservative touchstones, not exclusively conservative of course but very much seen as not just compatible with conservatism but flowing directly from it's basic principles. What's happened to Republicanism in the US is confusing, and rather horrifying from that perspective.
You might want to read up on Israel before you assume it is because of the high rate of vaccination that you happen to be in a valley of infections again.
Oh we have plenty of infections, tens of thousands of cases per day, but we have much fewer deaths because infected vaccinated people rarely get sick and if they do are extremely unlikely to die.
Early this year we were seeing similar rates of new infections per day, but about a thousand people were dying every day. Nowadays the death rate is about a tenth of that, concentrated among the remaining unvaccinated population.
Israel seems to be having a similar experience, people are catching the virus but those that are vaccinated aren't dying as a result. They're introducing mask mandates and considering tactical lockdowns to try and protect the unvaccinated population. We may need to do the same, nevertheless the best way to protect people who can't be vaccinated is to vaccinate everyone who can be.
I’m from Israel, we were in an excellent condition couple of months ago, but once the vaccination started to lose its potency we see a steep rise in infections and hospitalizations.
Now that we are deep into the booster shot we see the numbers of infections and hospitalizations start to drop again.
> Israel was the first country on Earth to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against COVID-19. Now it has one of the world's highest daily infection rates — an average of nearly 7,500 confirmed cases a day, double what it was two weeks ago. Nearly one in every 150 people in Israel today has the virus.
Not a great advertisement for non-sterilizing vaccines.
Why ignore the GPs argument? Israel has vaccinated 61% of their population. Of course the 39% who aren't vaccinated will continue to spread it like before, even more so if restrictions are lifted.
You see the sibling comment to that one, about how the UK's "very high vaccination rates" means that we've been out of lockdown for a while, are returning to normal life, and have very few hospitalizations for Covid? Well, we've only vaccinated 65% of our population, barely more than Israel - and I think we have demographics which lean more towards age groups at higher risk from Covid than Israel as well. The headline government figures are higher, but they're for over-16s which are the only group eligible for vaccination here.
The 61% is misleading because it includes children ineligible for the vaccine. My undertow that they’ve vaccinated something like 80% of adults (one of the highest on the world).
An unvaccinated child has less chance of severe covid compared to a vaccinated adult. Covid is different between child and adults, reasonable to hypothesize that transmission is also different.
> Evidence from studies primarily done before vaccine approval for those 12 years of age and older suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
"less chance of severe covid compared to a vaccinated adult" is an attempt to move the goalposts to an irrelevant point
if they're vaccinated, they count towards the numerator
if they are a person, and thus have a nonzero chance of getting infected, and a nonzero chance of infecting others if infected, they count towards the denominator
whether or not the "scaling effect" is the same is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
whether or not society must continue to pay an ongoing price for mitigations is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
whether or not society can move on after a one-time vaccine cost is irrelevant to whether or not the vaccine provides a societal benefit, which it does
the goalposts were set at "provides a societal benefit", which it does
Vaccination likely reduces the chance of transmission in any single interaction. However even with a high level of vaccination all of us can expect to be occasionally exposed to the virus no matter what steps we take. The benefits of vaccination are really more about protecting yourself from severe symptoms, and preventing demand spikes on the healthcare system.
When I get the MMR vaccine I don't need to worry about what versions of Measles it is and isn't effective against or how many months later I should start looking at getting another vaccine.
No. It's controversial because too many people believe idiots on social media who never graduated high school spout off theories about 5G microchipping, lizard people, and Ivermectin Horse DeWormer.
> Are we really going to bother digging up the copious video evidence this is a lie?
It seems you're either a bit confused or you didn't bothered to even watch the very same video you posted.
I watched the video and nowhere in it does anyone promise anything about infections magically go away.
In fact, the infection disease specialist in the video says quite clearly that the observed reduction in spread was around 60%, and this statement is repeated in multiple occasions throughout the video.
The video was also posted over 7 months ago, prior to some of the major vaccines having been approved and made available to the public.
Please do not throw baseless accusations of anyone lying when the best proof you can come up with just refutes your accusation entirely.
> which extend to healthcare professionals who recommend "countermeasures"
Not quite:
> The term “covered person”, when used with respect to the administration or use of a covered countermeasure, means— (A) the United States; or (B) a person or entity that is— [...] (iv) a qualified person who prescribed, administered, or dispensed such countermeasure;
Prescribing, administering, and dispensing are very different from “recommending”.
It means that for people with an immune system that's functioning within the normal range, the vaccine entirely prevents infection (100% effectiveness). Population-wide effectiveness isn't 100%, but for most individuals it is.
Vaccines work by teaching the immune system how to fight an intruding virus, so it doesn't have to spend days or weeks figuring it out while the virus destroys your body.
That means vaccinated people get viruses as often as unvaccinated, but defeat it much faster, usually before you notice any symptoms.
My confusion is that I would call the time my immune system spends fighting a virus in my body an "infection", but apparently that is not the established use.
Your confusion is warranted. These aren't terms that are 100% agreed upon and the scientific understanding is still evolving as our tools get better. The Atlantic just published an article about this very topic:
If the immune system fights off the invader before it becomes established and starts freely replicating (before any symptoms, before it can be detected, before it can be transmitted) then it's not an infection. It's just some contamination.
Funnily enough, The Atlantic just put out an article describing why the idea of "sterilizing vaccines" itself might be a myth and why that doesn't matter from a practical public health standpoint:
if qualifying companies don't mandate the vaccine, enterprising lawyers will sue the deepest pockets involved in not making sure employees get vaccinated
yep, turns out lawyers will find stuff to sue folks for, no matter what
so, companies might as well do the right thing and be protected by the federal government than do the wrong thing and have to fight those lawyers all on their own
Unless you mean a very literal "at our expense" as in dollars paid for a highly effective vaccine, are you implying that the vaccine has been a net negative?
When it first came out, the data made the vax an obviously net positive. Given what we now know about cases amongst the vaccinated and how they can spread it... It's no longer an obvious positive. The vax has made covid more pervasive because of bad data at the beginning.
I could maybe buy people being lax about masks and social distancing because of the vaccine, but surely you don't think the vaccine itself has made the virus more pervasive?
Well what is the effect and purpose of the vax other than to make people lax about social distancing and masks. The vaccine was correctly developed expressly for the purposes of rendering both unnecessary.
If the vax had worked to sterilize or mostly sterilize the virus as originally it was sold to us as, then this would be okay.
Instead it did not really work, thus spreading covid more.
So in the end, we locked down and destroyed the economy in hopes of a vaccine, but the vaz didn't fully work and now we're going to have to open anyway to avert major economic and social disaster.
It lowers your chance of getting it and thus spreading it significantly and it severely lowers your chance of having a severe reaction in the case of a breakthrough infection.
The only reason it hasn't worked at a societal level is that not enough people have taken it.
It is not obvious to me this is the case. All available data suggest that between the vaccine and natural immunity, we would have reached herd immunity if such a thing were possible. But we have not, indicating the primary benefit of the vaccine is, and will likely always be, some personal protection. Put differently, we will all get COVID eventually, and would have even if everyone was vaccinated, and the question is just one of the severity of individual cases.
If the vaccine actually prevents getting sick enough to notice, then it means a bunch of vaccinated virus carriers are wandering around in public. Whereas if they were unvaccinated, then by the popular theory that unvaccinated people get very sick from this virus, they would know to stay home.
It always surprises me when conservatives use the economic argument wrt vaccine deployment because doing so means they assume an intrinsic value of $0 on human lives.
> Is the federal government going to provide employers with the same legal immunity granted to pharmaceutical vendors via the PREP act
They already did for COVID countermeasures in general. In the first declaration that did that for pharmaceutical companies, public entities managing countermeasure planning and distribution, and others in March of last year.
mRNA vaccines do not directly stimulate the immune system. They cause the immune system itself to create protein structures that stimulate the immune system.
The definition change is simply to more accurately include this vaccine method.
Does this mandate incorporate the Sept 2021 CDC definition of vaccine, https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article25...
> 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.”