You keep raising the possibility you'll be booted for expressing your feelings about the pandemic response, Mantis. I can't see how that would happen as you're just expressing honestly the emotional toll it has taken on you. Even those of us who may disagree with you about the governance issues wouldn't have a problem with that. I'm sure you have everyone's sympathy. Even though everyone would have been detrimentally affected by the pandemic and pandemic response to some extent, the effects and the emotional toll would fall on people unevenly.
An article that goes to the heart of the public benefit of vaccine mandates is: How Easily Can Vaccinated People Spread COVID?, The Atlantic.
It's best to be cautious about the use of preprint studies. Where they relate to a slow-moving scientific field, no one would even bother with them until they've been validated by peer review and/or their results have been reproduced. In a fast-moving, life-and-death pandemic, they are a bit of a necessary evil. But accepting them as evidence runs the risk of accepting fraudulent, faked or biased studies or simply those that have poor methodology. Those risks have been exemplified by the rash of studies touting Ivermectin which have been withdrawn, retracted, or dismissed. But the experts quoted and the preprint studies referenced do at least show that there may well be quantitative and qualitative differences in the way infected vaccinated people spread Covid compared to infected unvaccinated people. And this may well amplify the differences in the likelihood of vaccinated and unvaccinated people contracting Covid, which seems to be established quite clearly by real world evidence.
As the article also shows, just being vaccinated isn't enough. Being vaccinated doesn't mean we're back to 2019. The vaccinated need to be behave cautiously and social distancing and masking inside will continue to be recommended. MBB has on a number occasions slammed the Govt for allowing mass gatherings at big events like the Melbourne Cup with the sole apparent precaution being that they're limited to the double-vaccinated. I also worry about that, but I can see why the Government needs to loosen the reins at this point.
An article that goes to the heart of the public benefit of vaccine mandates is: How Easily Can Vaccinated People Spread COVID?, The Atlantic.
Quote:Vaccinated people spread the virus less overall because they are significantly less likely to get infected in the first place. In early September, the CDC found that six unvaccinated people were testing COVID-positive for every one vaccinated person. But there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic beyond that. Some recent research shows that even once they’ve been infected, the vaccinated are less likely to spread the coronavirus than the unvaccinated. “We’re back in this category of, Yeah, it can happen, but it seems to be a very rare event,” Ross Kedl, an immunology professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me.
He pointed me to two studies, neither of which has been peer-reviewed, to make his point. One shows that although transmission did occur among the vaccinated in Provincetown, those cases represent what Kedl calls a “very limited” proportion out of the total number of infections that occurred as part of that outbreak. In the other study, researchers in the United Kingdom found that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines consistently reduced transmission downstream of breakthrough cases. Much of the original Delta concern was based on something called “viral load”—the amount of virus a person carries while infected. But the researchers concluded that viral load is just one of many factors correlated to transmission reduction. In other words, even if vaccinated and unvaccinated people have the same viral load, it may not necessarily mean they are just as likely to spread the virus.
One reason for this may be that vaccinated people carry less infectious virus particles, as (not-yet-peer-reviewed) research from the Netherlands has recently illustrated. Although it’s widely assumed that virus particles carried by the vaccinated and unvaccinated are the same, basic principles of immunology actually predict otherwise, Kedl told me. Virus particles expelled by a vaccinated person are thought to be coated in antibodies—some of which are produced in the nose and mouth and are considered part of “mucosal” immunity—so “we can expect less of a downstream transmission,” he said.
Other researchers have come to similar conclusions. “The data are very clear that vaccinated individuals are less likely to spread the virus to others than unvaccinated individuals,” Christopher Byron Brooke, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me in an email. A recent paper Brooke co-wrote showed that vaccinated people shed less virus, stop shedding virus sooner than the unvaccinated, and shed particles that are less infectious—supporting the notion that they’re less likely to transmit disease. One study from the Netherlands found a 63 percent reduction in household transmission among the vaccinated. That’s a testament to our vaccines: Homes are a “setting where the deck is heavily stacked towards transmission since members of a household are in extremely close contact for long stretches of time,” Brooke said. (However, another recent study didn’t find a statistically significant difference in household transmission between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.) Ultimately, Brooke said, you can certainly say the transmission risk for vaccinated people is lower, “but I don’t really know how you define ‘low.’”
It's best to be cautious about the use of preprint studies. Where they relate to a slow-moving scientific field, no one would even bother with them until they've been validated by peer review and/or their results have been reproduced. In a fast-moving, life-and-death pandemic, they are a bit of a necessary evil. But accepting them as evidence runs the risk of accepting fraudulent, faked or biased studies or simply those that have poor methodology. Those risks have been exemplified by the rash of studies touting Ivermectin which have been withdrawn, retracted, or dismissed. But the experts quoted and the preprint studies referenced do at least show that there may well be quantitative and qualitative differences in the way infected vaccinated people spread Covid compared to infected unvaccinated people. And this may well amplify the differences in the likelihood of vaccinated and unvaccinated people contracting Covid, which seems to be established quite clearly by real world evidence.
As the article also shows, just being vaccinated isn't enough. Being vaccinated doesn't mean we're back to 2019. The vaccinated need to be behave cautiously and social distancing and masking inside will continue to be recommended. MBB has on a number occasions slammed the Govt for allowing mass gatherings at big events like the Melbourne Cup with the sole apparent precaution being that they're limited to the double-vaccinated. I also worry about that, but I can see why the Government needs to loosen the reins at this point.