Riemann's posts in 'The Quarantine Zone'

[Riemann]

@DMC has summed up what I was disputing about what @Melbourne wrote, thanks.

@puzzlegal

I, also, think that Reimann was right, although he could have been nicer about correcting Melbourne’s over-simplification of the news.

Just to note that describing it as an “oversimplification” is not appropriate. It’s a very widespread misconception that vaccines prevent disease but do not prevent transmission. And that’s precisely because of this kind of misreporting. Cautious scientists (or in this case the Autralian PM) may correctly say we don’t yet know how effective vaccination is at reducing transmission. That’s often reported incorrectly or ambiguously that we have affirmative knowledge that they do not reduce transmission, and many people have misunderstood this. Here are some examples:

These Vaccines Don't Prevent Transmission of the Virus?

I was pretty bummed out when I read that neither the Pfizer nor the Moderna vaccines necessarily prevented the transmission of SARS CoV 2. I don’t remember where I first heard about this but here’s one cite: neither the Pfizer nor the Moderna vaccine trials tested whether the vaccines prevent people from being infected with the virus. Those trials, instead, focused on whether people were shielded from developing disease symptoms. That means that it’s not clear whether vaccinated people could s…

Vaccine: you'll get COVID but no symptoms?

From a piece by Australian epidemiologist Adrian Enterman claiming the vaccine won’t mean a safe return to international travel: Let’s take the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as an example. They have reported the efficacy of their mRNA vaccine to be 95% in preventing symptomatic Covid-19, having tested it on around half of the 43,000 participants in their phase 3 trial (the other half received a placebo). … However, the study hasn’t officially reported the efficacy of the vaccine against becoming i…

Continuing to keep masking for your own reasons

I thought your vaccine protects you from catching it, but doesn’t keep you from spreading it if you’ve been unknowingly exposed. You don’t manifest symptoms and you don’t get sick, but, without a mask couldn’t YOU be the spreader regardless? So I thought you’d still want to wear your mask to protect the unvaccinated. Am I wrong?

And here’s somebody in another thread misunderstanding what we know about transmission because of the specific post by @Melbourne that’s under discussion here:

Continuing to keep masking for your own reasons

Interesting, because I’ve read that Australia has made national policy based on the affirmative idea that vaccines don’t stop transmission.

The reason we don’t know yet is because it’s much more difficult to directly study transmission to other people from a vaccinated cohort (to unknown other people) than to study the incidence of disease in the cohort itself. But there is a strong expectation (and a growing body of evidence) that any vaccine that is highly effective against disease will also significantly reduce transmission. And it would be shocking and terrible news for the world if this were not the case.

So I’m not just nitpicking, and I think it’s important to correct the error when we see it.

As for @Melbourne - well, my experience of this poster is a tendency to overreact into apoplexy when challenged on even the most minor of points, rather than concede any error. So I can’t say I’m particularly surprised at them taking the overreaction to another level with this ridiculous Pit thread.