Something i read earlier. And as I recall, talking to medical doctors i know. Sorry, I don’t feel looking it up.
Yes. Tom Tom seems like a complete idiot with his conclusion of the interview. Maybe he is so caught up in misinformation that he can only hear some words and not others? Or he has just quadrupled down on his proud anti Vax status that he will try just about anything to support his decision?
I have heard something similar. Not about Delta specifically, but a mechanism by which a vaccine can provide robust protection from serious illness while giving only poor protection against testing positive or even spreading that illness. Apparently the nose is basically an extremity, and its blood flow isn’t robust. So you can have an abundance of antibodies and other immune responses in the blood while leaving the nose only partially protected. This allows a person to become infected and spread the virus, but when the virus tries to move from the nose to the rest of the body, via the lungs, blood vessels, etc., it can still be whomped by the body’s immune response.
I know that there is ongoing research into a nasal vaccine for covid that was launched with the hope that if ordinary injectable vaccines didn’t produce sterilizing immunity, a nasal spray delivered vaccine might.
Well, you said
(bolding added)
If you take that as a neutral logical statement in a logic puzzle, it’s true, according to two of the three studies you pulled up. But in ordinary English, you are claiming that people with breakthru infections are likely to be more infectious (from higher viral load) than people who catch the virus without having been vaccinated. And that’s not true.
First, even with the conditional (they got infected despite being vaccinated) they seem to have the same or possibly lower viral loads.
And second, the whole structure of the claim is designed to imply that vaccinated people are more likely to spread covid, whereas in fact, vaccinated people are less likely to catch it to begin with, and unless they are taking much greater risks than the unvaccinated (perhaps true at the beginning of the pandemic, but at this point, it’s the antivaxxers who are loudest about saying “what? me worry?”) they are far less likely to spread covid than the unvaccinated.
Has this been posted? I don’t see it anywhere.
snips
Side effect rates from a third Covid-19 vaccine dose similar to those after second shot, early data indicate
People who’ve received a third dose of a Covid-19 vaccine are reporting rates of side effects similar to those after the second dose, according to data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The new report, published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, relies on submissions from thousands of people who received third shots of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna after such doses were authorized for people with compromised immune systems. People submitted their reactions to v-safe, the CDC’s smartphone-based surveillance network.
Among more than 12,500 people who completed surveys after each shot, 79.4% of people reported local reactions (including itching, pain, or redness at the injection site), while 74.1% reported systemic reactions (mostly fatigue, muscle aches, and headaches), typically the day after the shot. That compared to 77.6% and 76.5% of the people who reported local or systemic reactions, respectively, after their second shot.
Overall, among more than 22,000 v-safe registrants who’ve received third doses, “no unexpected patterns of adverse reactions were observed,” the report says. As of Sept. 19, some 2.2 million people in the United States had received additional doses of the Covid-19 vaccines.
Text
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -YouTube will block all anti-vaccine content, moving beyond its ban on false information about the COVID vaccines to include content that contains misinformation about other approved vaccines, it said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Examples of content that won’t be allowed on YouTube include claims that the flu vaccine causes infertility and that the MMR shot, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, can cause autism, according to YouTube’s policies.
The online video company owned by Alphabet Inc is also banning channels associated with several prominent anti-vaccine activists including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Joseph Mercola, a YouTube spokesperson said.
A press email for Mercola’s website said in a statement: “We are united across the world, we will not live in fear, we will stand together and restore our freedoms.” Kennedy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The moves come as YouTube and other tech giants like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. have been criticized for not doing enough to stop the spread of false health information on their sites.
But even as YouTube takes a tougher stance on misinformation, it faces backlash around the world. On Tuesday, Russian state-backed broadcaster RT’s German-language channels were deleted from YouTube, as the company said the channels had breached its COVID-19 misinformation policy.
Russia on Wednesday called the move “unprecedented information aggression,” and threatened to block YouTube.
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I guess I wasn’t as clear as I thought that this is not what I am claiming. I don’t claim a direct connection between “viral load” and infectiousness.
Not necessarily true. The studies I posted yesterday were just what I was able to Google to try to see what people who were making the claim (e.g. the person Ms fan was debating) might have been basing it on. I’ve seen some reference a CDC study but I haven’t found that one yet, if it exists. I since came across someone who both made the claim and posted a study to support it. This is what he posted: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v4.full.pdf. This isn’t a tiny study population, but not huge either (n=699, 310 fully vaccinated, 389 unvaccinated, partially vaccinated were excluded) from about 1 month (during delta wave) in Wisconsin, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect this to generalize, but I don’t see any glaring problems with it, so it can possibly help inform our body of knowledge. It uses CT values of PCR tests to estimate “viral load,” which is a common approach (have I mentioned I’m not really a fan of the “viral load” concept? Too many assumptions trying to connect the dots, imo, but this is how people are looking at it, so 
). Here were some of the findings:
Based on this, it looks like the “viral load” (conditional on being infected) is generally similar between unvaccinated & vaccinated individuals, with vaccinated asymptomatic people possibly having higher viral loads than their asymptomatic unvaccinated counterparts, although this is getting into very small sample territory and I wouldn’t really try to infer anything from this. Just pointing out that this has been measured and that’s where the speaking points are coming from. I don’t believe I have misrepresented any of the multiple studies I have posted on this, but I’ll wait to see what Whiskey says about the “study” I “continue to misrepresent”.
I agree that’s a common structure of the claim and likely the way it was being presented to Ms fan in her facebook debate. I don’t believe I’ve made that claim here. First, I think many people making the connection between these studies showing generally equal viral loads and transmissibility fail to acknowledge the conditional probability. Given infection (less likely in the vaccinated, at least for a few months) {vaccinated + infected} people are probably about equally likely to spread infection as {unvaccinated + infected} people. Second, as I’ve stated many times, I’m not terribly convinced by arguments from “viral loads” measured in a lab at a snapshot point in someone’s illness. There’s a lot more to transmission than just how easily a PCR test can find viral particles in your nose from a swab.
All that said, with Delta, waning protection from the shots, and the number of unvaccinated who have protection from prior infection (“natural immunity”), I’m not entirely sure how confidently we can really say the bolded anymore. Recent data from the UK showed for people over 40 (likely those who got the shots the earliest), during a 4 week period (weeks 33-36) the vaccinated were more likely to have reported cases than the unvaccinated (and not just a base rate fallacy argument - last 2 columns in Table 2):
There are doubtless countless confounders in this observational data, for example I don’t know the relative testing levels of the groups. I’ve heard conflicting hypotheses that (1) the vaccinated are more likely to be concerned about covid & therefore more likely to get themselves tested. (Anecdotally I know some of the “what? me worry?” crowd - both vaccinated & not - who don’t feel testing is necessary for mild symptoms - simply stay home until the illness passes.) On the other hand, (2) many vaccinated people may feel confident in their protection such that they might more likely dismiss mild symptoms as allergies or a cold, and not get tested.
PS. I’m curious what you mean by the parenthetical portion in your post that I italicized about taking more risks at the beginning of the pandemic.
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Good post Marcie. I believe that as time keeps marching on, statistics between vaccinated vs. unvaccinated becomes unreliable.
- The immunity from the vaccine is wearing off
- How are the “vaccinated by recently having Covid” people being counted? What is the “true” immunity/vaccinated level?
- Will there be separate subgroups for those with the 3rd shot?
- If you are not getting tested (regularly), then you do not know that you ever (or when you) had Covid
Being vaccinated, should I go out and catch Delta now before my vaccine immunity wears off? Will this protect me from getting Delta a 2nd time later, when the vaccine efficacy is greatly reduced?
We have to ride this pandemic out for another year, all the while hoping that a new bad variant doesn’t come along. Plus we are relying on the rest of the world to either get vaccinated or catch Covid.
Here’s what i said that you are calling out:
That’s was badly worded. What i meant to say was that as vaccines first rolled out, i would guess that vaccinated people took more risks than they had shortly before being vaccinated, and so, they likely took more risks than their counterparts who were still waiting in line to be vaccinated.
But now that everyone who wants to vaccinated has had a chance to do that, i think it’s unlikely that the vaccinated population is taking more risks than those who chose not to be vaccinated.
Also, while i acknowledge it’s controversial, for the purposes of this discussion i would like to count those who’ve recovered from covid like the partially vaccinated. Which is to say, for most purposes I’d call them vaccinated (or exposed, or potentially immune, or something) and for other purposes I’d exclude them.
I know enough people who have caught covid twice to be pretty certain that immunity from natural infection wanes, just like immunity from vaccination. But also, the evidence shows that most people who recover from covid do have substantial immunity, at least for several months after their recovery.
This is a tangent, but I haven’t found much if any recent information about people catching Covid twice. Even earlier this year, when vaccines were still hard to get in some places, I felt like people were giving me a hard time for getting vaccinated when they couldn’t, since I’d had Covid and was probably immune already.
I’m really not super excited about a booster since I reacted so strongly to the two shots I had so far. But I will do it when/if it’s recommended for Moderna folks.
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Oh, sweet. I just got a very clear and complete email from the people who gave my my initial Pfizer vaccine about who should get a booster and how to do it. They both offered to do it themselves, and also gave me a link to the state’s utility for finding vaccination sites.
I’m not yet 6 months out, but it’s time for me to start thinking about this.
Father D apparently made anti-vaxx a part of his sermon this past Sunday. I’m hearing this through the grapevine.
Your clarification makes more sense & it’s also heartening to know I’m not the only one who doesn’t get it right the first time. 
I have pretty much thrown out the covid case count data since day 1 as unreliable.
The only things we have really known are:
1: how many people died, which has been disputed as over/under reported, but mortality studies have shown that the reported deaths from covid are consistent with expected based on the larger mortality trends.
2: how many people got vaccinated. Which may also be disputed since it was politically charged, but for the most part I believe the vaccine % data that I have seen to be real.
everything about case counts and transmissibility have been totally subjective and effectively unmeasurable (including effectiveness of masks imo). Hospitalization data is also flaky at a high level. Even your pretty good writeup here just says ‘this is an argument some one could try to make’ and is really based on a lot of eh data at best (points to viral load data). I also have complaints about assuming all prior covid cases now have the same level of natural immunity- similarly, it is unlikely that all vaccinated people responded the same. So your personal protection from covid is not a 1-0 but instead some risk in-between, with everyone have a risk >0.
In the end, our data and medical systems are not going to be able to publish a user handbook on how to handle covid for each person. more likely the end result will be similar to flu: “we dont F’kin know, so just get this shot once a year”.
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Wurdz r hard.
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Your move, GoA…
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:ctm:
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Stop making stupid arguments and get vaccinated.
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She’s waiting for the EUA for kids 5-11.
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