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Deonandan Profile picture
@deonandan
Mar 27 • 18 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
This thread will trigger a troll feeding frenzy. But I think it's necessary. It's time to summarize a timeline of COVID vaccine statistics and what they say about whether the vaccines reduced transmission or not, and whether "experts" lied or not. Here goes...

(Thread [1/17])
To begin, let's remember that vaccines seek to do 4 things, in descending order of importance and likelihood:
1. prevent death
2. prevent hospitalization
3. prevent symptomatic disease
4. prevent infection & transmission

[2/17]
2020: COVID mRNA vaccines shown in RCTs to be ~95% effective in preventing symptomatic disease caused by original Wuhan variant.


[3/17]nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…
To receive Emergency Use Authorization, vaccine did NOT need to stop transmission (though that would have been nice). Criterion was reduction in symptomatic disease by >50%, which was met and exceeded.
[4/17]
fda.gov/media/139638/d…
Even so, those original COVID vaccine formulations DID reduce transmission, as shown in multiple studies in early 2021.
[5/17]


reuters.com/article/uk-hea…
thelancet.com/journals/lanep…
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
Throughout 2021, evidence was mounting that COVID vaccines were indeed significantly curtailing transmission. Every sign pointed to the pandemic ending early if we could get enough people vaccinated quickly.
[6/17]
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
This was when some countries brought in vaccine passports, which made scientific sense. (You can debate the ethics elsewhere.) By slowing mixing of vaccinated & unvaccinated populations, risk of breakthrough infections was reduced.
[7/17]
cmaj.ca/content/194/16…
The emergence of Delta variant changed the math considerably. Two doses of vaccine were still ~70% effective at preventing Delta infection, which was pretty darned good! We could still tame the pandemic with vaccination if we did it fast enough...
[8/17]
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Then the emergence of Omicron (noticeably in Canada in late 2021) changed everything by curtailing vaccine efficacy. This is when vax passports stopped making sense, as they were disproportionately exposing vaxxed people to the virus, though they had diminished protection.
[9/17]
By 2022, it was clear that vaccination was no longer subduing transmission *significantly*. But 3 doses of gave substantial protection against death for both delta (80%) and omicron (78%), along with 61% protection against admission to hospital.

[10/17]
bmj.com/content/381/bm…
But beware the narrative of the vaccine minimizers. The original vaccine could STILL reduce Omicron transmission somewhat.
[11/17]
gavi.org/vaccineswork/n…
A telling California prison study in 2023 found that *one dose of any COVID vaccine* reduced the probability of an infected inmate transmitting infection to his cellmate by 24%. Again, that's reduced TRANSMISSION.
[12/17]
nature.com/articles/s4159…
The bivalent booster came out in Sep/2022. It was able to prevent actual infection by ~54%, which means it was also significantly slowing transmission. Yet uptake was poor.
[13/17]

jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…
cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…
The newest XBB1.5 booster came out in 2023. It has an efficacy against hospitalization of >70%
[14/17]

news-medical.net/news/20231217/…
Newest XBB1.5 booster also has an efficacy of ~54% against symptomatic infection. This is not as great as the 95% we saw in 2020, but it's pretty damned good! Yet currently only 16% of Canadians have received this vaccine.
[15/17]
cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/7…
A robust meta-study of secondary attack rates throughout the pandemic found that all the vaccines offered some degree of reduction in TRANSMISSION, regardless of the variant:

[16/17]
jamanetwork.com/journals/jaman…
What's the takeaway?
1. COVID mRNA vaccines work.
2. They have always worked.
3. They work best when the vaccine is updated to match the current variant.
4. They have always reduced transmission.
5. They still reduce transmission.
6. Nobody lied to you.

[17/17]
Oops, those last 2 links are broken. Here are the proper ones:

thelancet.com/journals/lanep…
thelancet.com/journals/lance…

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More from @deonandan

Deonandan Profile picture
Mar 6
Some people say they don't care about Measles so long as they're vaccinated. Two doses of MMR vaccine are ~97% effective at preventing Measles infection. (Thread [1/4])
That number also drops as more years pass. That means at least 3 out of every 100 exposed vaccinated people will get Measles. [2/4]
nd as outbreaks driven by non-immune people become more frequent, the probability of exposure increases. Because you don't know if you're one of the 3%, your best chance of avoiding infection is to lower the community levels of Measles. [3/4]
Read 4 tweets
Deonandan Profile picture
Jan 9
There are many cognitive barriers preventing many people from understanding COVID and vaccine science. There are three I want to highlight today.

[Thread 1/4]
1) Inability to Appreciate Exponential growth

By the time you see it, it's already here. The magic of compound interest can make you rich, bury you in debt, or overwhelm your hospitals. Accept that no one has a "feel" for it and instead trust the objective math.

[2/4]
2) Separating Individual from Population risk.

A 1% fatality rate sounds miniscule for the individual. But for a population, it can be crippling. If one million people commuting to work today had a 1% chance of dying, that's 10,000 people suddenly dead. It's a big deal.

[3/4]
Read 4 tweets
Deonandan Profile picture
Jan 6
Bret Weinstein is claiming that the COVID vaccine killed 17 million people. This is based on a non-peer reviewed study by fired former professor Denis Rancourt, famous for his contrarian (eg climate change denial) views. Let's go over why this is all nonsense.

Thread [1/7]
1) Rancourt's analysis is what we call "ecological". He looked at the excess mortality in the population during the time of initial vaccine rollout. Despite his strong claims, you cannot by definition make causal claims based on ecological data.

[2/7]
2) During the period of vaccine rollout, a minority of people in each studied population was vaccinated. And he did not only look at deaths of vaccinated people, but of all people. No way to tell if the deaths weren't actually all or mostly among the unvaccinated.

[3/7]
Read 7 tweets
Deonandan Profile picture
Dec 30, 2023
My online journey these past 3 years has been surprisingly philosophically instructive as I unexpectedly became a little bit publicly recognizable and thus the target of hate mongers. What I learned was that the wisdom of the Stoics is not to be underestimated. [Thread 1/5]
The thoughts of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius taught me much. And if anyone were to ask me (and no one has) I'd recommend that everyone return to such ancient wisdom, whose tenets include:

-Realizing that words are not literal violence. We have the power to ignore words.

[2/5]
-Realizing that life is not what happens to you. Rather, life is how you react to what happens to you. That is always in our power.

-Realizing that you don't have to have an opinion on everything.

[3/5]
Read 5 tweets
Deonandan Profile picture
Nov 25, 2023
This morning my 3-year old wanted to play a game where I write the name of an animal and he draws it. I'm sharing my favourite ones here.

Up first: parrot Image
Next is a snake.... but he decided to instead draw a winding road on which the snake is slithering. Image
For kangaroo, he chose to depict an aerial viewpoint.... from which we can see multiple kangaroos from a distance. Image
Read 8 tweets
Deonandan Profile picture
Aug 22, 2023
As I retreat from public COVID commentary, here's a brief thread summarizing my comments (and things I forgot to say) on CTV this morning: [thread 1/7]
"Is there a new COVID Wave?"
-yes, in USA hospitalizations are up 12.5% this past week, and deaths up 8%
-in Ottawa, hospitalizations and wastewater are both trending up

[2/7] Image
"What's with all the variants?"
-rough lineage:
Omicron -> BA -> XBB -> EG & FL
(heavy oversimplification)

[3/7]
Read 7 tweets

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