The vaccines stop people developing the disease - that's what efficacy means [[iVaccine efficacy is the percentage reduction of disease in a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated group[/i]. The clinical trials compared vaccinated with non vaccinated to generate "efficacy" data. "Effectiveness" of a vaccine can only be determined once it's been used in a population for a length of time. The vaccines for Covid 19 being given now clearly stop people from getting the disaese, that what was seen in the clinical trials.
You also have to remember that you can't vaccinate people then expose them to the disease and see what happens - that's not ethical, so vaccine clinical trials take usually much longer and it takes a lot of data collected over a long period of time to characterize how a vaccine affects disease transmission.

Vaccines are, like a many medical treatments, very much affected by the individual you put them in. Personalised medicine (tailoring medical treatments based on a specific individuals reactions) is big business and growing.
You have to be aware that vaccines usually take 5-10 years to develop and characterize (nearer 10 than 5). In that time data is accumulated and a detailed understanding of the effectiveness of the vaccine becomes known. You then carry on collecting data pretty much indefinitely. There are public health programs constantly on-going into other routine vaccinations like MMR for example. Most people probably don't even know they exist.

The simplest thing for one scientist to say to another is "I/We don't know", We all know what that means and it doesn't mean we'll never know or we can't make our mind up or we are lying. But, you say that to the general public, the press (just the general public with an enhanced sense of importance) etc. and you get a very different response.
Simple fact is that we will only really know how effective this vaccine is once we have given it to everyone and watched what happens to the disease.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33306989/

The real beauty of vaccines is that if you give them to enough people they eventually reduce the reservoir of disease in a population to the point where it dies out before it can re-infect. You know, the "R" number? A vaccine doesn't have to give 100% efficacy, non do, the cutoff for vaccine efficacy is 50%. But that's good enough to effectively make that R number so small that the disease basically disappears.

The vaccines stop people developing the disease - that's what efficacy means [[iVaccine efficacy is the percentage reduction of disease in a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated group[/i]. The clinical trials compared vaccinated with non vaccinated to generate "efficacy" data. "Effectiveness" of a vaccine can only be determined once it's been used in a population for a length of time. The vaccines for Covid 19 being given now clearly stop people from getting the disaese, that what was seen in the clinical trials.
You also have to remember that you can't vaccinate people then expose them to the disease and see what happens - that's not ethical, so vaccine clinical trials take usually much longer and it takes a lot of data collected over a long period of time to characterize how a vaccine affects disease transmission.

Vaccines are, like a many medical treatments, very much affected by the individual you put them in. Personalised medicine (tailoring medical treatments based on a specific individuals reactions) is big business and growing.
You have to be aware that vaccines usually take 5-10 years to develop and characterize (nearer 10 than 5). In that time data is accumulated and a detailed understanding of the effectiveness of the vaccine becomes known. You then carry on collecting data pretty much indefinitely. There are public health programs constantly on-going into other routine vaccinations like MMR for example. Most people probably don't even know they exist.

The simplest thing for one scientist to say to another is "I/We don't know", We all know what that means and it doesn't mean we'll never know or we can't make our mind up or we are lying. But, you say that to the general public, the press (just the general public with an enhanced sense of importance) etc. and you get a very different response.
Simple fact is that we will only really know how effective this vaccine is once we have given it to everyone and watched what happens to the disease.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33306989/

The real beauty of vaccines is that if you give them to enough people they eventually reduce the reservoir of disease in a population to the point where it dies out before it can re-infect. You know, the "R" number? A vaccine doesn't have to give 100% efficacy, non do, the cutoff for vaccine efficacy is 50%. But that's good enough to effectively make that R number so small that the disease basically disappears.

Nope.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covi ... #AgeAndSex

Nope.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covi ... #AgeAndSex

These people are not experts. The problem has always been that genuinely smart people who know their subjects also know that there will almost certainly be things that they don't know, and are willing to admit that. This gives enough room for the JHB's, Toby Young's and the Peter Hitchens of this world to insert their own opinions as being valid as real experts or as absolute facts. Young's recent massive c**k up in the Telegraph is an example. And because these people get to a bigger audience they get the most publicity, most mentions and are more memorable.

If you want to know how difficult it is for TV pundits to make generalized statements around death rates and age and who to protect and who not to have a read through this.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8

These people are not experts. The problem has always been that genuinely smart people who know their subjects also know that there will almost certainly be things that they don't know, and are willing to admit that. This gives enough room for the JHB's, Toby Young's and the Peter Hitchens of this world to insert their own opinions as being valid as real experts or as absolute facts. Young's recent massive c**k up in the Telegraph is an example. And because these people get to a bigger audience they get the most publicity, most mentions and are more memorable.

If you want to know how difficult it is for TV pundits to make generalized statements around death rates and age and who to protect and who not to have a read through this.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73777-8

You did mention JHB so I did.

As for Gupta, yes, she's an epidemiologist but maybe you should watch this cringeworthy interview with Andrew Neil from October, where in the first 2 minutes makes a total fool of herself by saying (prompted by the human potato) the 50,000 cases per day projected by the governments advisors was nonsense. Where did we get to? 85,000 on one day in December?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxrG4hW3q2s

Gupta has been on the fringe of the scientific consensus since the beginning of the pandemic and is a strong proponent of herd immunity. Many of her predictions have been proved to be false and she has a poor track record on predictions.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... oronavirus

Herd immunity, the Great Barrington Declaration and the "Libertarians" behind it. Have a read of this.
https://arena.org.au/the-coming-covid-s ... claration/
It's not entirely critical and I think a well balanced review. We should not discount alternatives, that's counter productive - all options on the table.

The problem with Gupta in particular is that she's made grand statements and assumptions that have proved to be very, very inaccurate or just plain wrong. She also seems incapable of re-assessing her own position..

To be honest you can find all this out for yourself, I don't know why I'm doing it for you.


I actually work with some of the guys in the Oxford Zoology department, spoke to one of them today in fact. They are doing interesting work on Covid.

You did mention JHB so I did.

As for Gupta, yes, she's an epidemiologist but maybe you should watch this cringeworthy interview with Andrew Neil from October, where in the first 2 minutes makes a total fool of herself by saying (prompted by the human potato) the 50,000 cases per day projected by the governments advisors was nonsense. Where did we get to? 85,000 on one day in December?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxrG4hW3q2s

Gupta has been on the fringe of the scientific consensus since the beginning of the pandemic and is a strong proponent of herd immunity. Many of her predictions have been proved to be false and she has a poor track record on predictions.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... oronavirus

Herd immunity, the Great Barrington Declaration and the "Libertarians" behind it. Have a read of this.
https://arena.org.au/the-coming-covid-s ... claration/
It's not entirely critical and I think a well balanced review. We should not discount alternatives, that's counter productive - all options on the table.

The problem with Gupta in particular is that she's made grand statements and assumptions that have proved to be very, very inaccurate or just plain wrong. She also seems incapable of re-assessing her own position..

To be honest you can find all this out for yourself, I don't know why I'm doing it for you.


I actually work with some of the guys in the Oxford Zoology department, spoke to one of them today in fact. They are doing interesting work on Covid.