[ExI] conspiracy theories, was: RE: Satoshi

[John Clark]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2026 at 3:35 PM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

*> We soon learned that vaccinated people both catch and transmit covid. In
> a sense, the vaccination might have made the transmitter more dangerous, if
> it reduced symptoms enough for the carrier to go back to work.*


*Here we go again. Some may say I'm getting obnoxious about this but I
don't care because you are dispensing medical misinformation that is not
only crappy it is LETHAL, and I think it would be unethical of me to stay
quiet and say nothing about it. So I gave this question to GPT whose
primary source was the New England Journal of Medicine, the most respected
medical journal on the planet :*
*==*

* ME: During the Covid pandemic could vaccinated people still transmit the
disease as easily as unvaccinated people?*

*GPT: "*Yes—but *not quite as easily, and the answer changed substantially
as the virus evolved and as immunity waned*.

This is actually an important qualification to what I said in my previous
answer.
Early in the pandemic, *vaccination reduced transmission quite
substantially*

The first COVID vaccines did two things relevant to transmission:

   1. They made you *less likely to become infected in the first place*.
   2. If you nevertheless became infected, they generally made you *less
   likely to transmit it*.

For the Alpha variant, for example, two doses of Pfizer's vaccine were
associated with about a *68% reduction in onward transmission* from a
vaccinated person who nevertheless became infected, shortly after
vaccination.

There was also direct evidence from household studies that vaccinated
infected people were less likely to infect their household contacts.

So* it would be incorrect to say that vaccinated and unvaccinated people
were equally capable of spreading the virus throughout the entire pandemic*.
But Delta changed the picture considerably

This is where the argument gets more interesting.

With *Delta*, a vaccinated person who experienced a breakthrough infection
could have a *viral load comparable to that of an unvaccinated infected
person*, at least around the time of peak infection. One study found
essentially no meaningful difference in peak viral load between vaccinated
and unvaccinated people infected with Delta.

That produced the phenomenon you probably remember from 2021: *vaccinated
people could absolutely catch and transmit Delta.*

But there was still a difference. *Vaccination tended to make the infection
clear more rapidly, and large contact-tracing studies found that vaccinated
infected people transmitted Delta less often than unvaccinated infected
people*. The effect was roughly *50% less transmission shortly after a
second Pfizer dose*, but it declined substantially with time. By about 12
weeks, much of that advantage had disappeared.

And* vaccination also reduced the probability of getting infected in the
first place*. For example, two Pfizer doses were about *88% effective
against symptomatic Delta infection* in the original 2021 estimates.

So there's an important distinction:

*Among people who were already infected, vaccinated and unvaccinated people
could sometimes be similarly infectious—especially with Delta.*

versus

*In the population as a whole, vaccinated people were considerably less
likely to transmit COVID, because they were less likely to become infected
and, when infected, generally had a shorter infectious period.*

Then Omicron made transmission control even harder

With Omicron, protection against *infection and transmission* declined
substantially, especially months after vaccination. That's one reason the
observation that "vaccinated people were getting and spreading COVID"
became so common.

But this actually strengthens rather than weakens the distinction we've
been discussing:

*The vaccines became relatively poor at stopping transmission while
remaining much better at preventing severe disease and death.*

That's why *the vaccines could simultaneously be*:

   - * disappointing as a tool for preventing infection/transmission,
   particularly with Omicron*;
   - * very valuable as a tool for preventing hospitalization and death*.

And this is also why your friend's argument needs to be handled carefully.
If he says:

"Vaccinated people could still spread COVID."

*Absolutely true.*

If he says:

"Therefore the vaccines didn't work."

*No.* That's conflating two different outcomes.

The strongest evidence is that the vaccines' effect on transmission was *real
but incomplete, variant-dependent, and increasingly short-lived*, while
their protection against severe disease was substantially more durable.

In fact, the Delta data give us a particularly good illustration:
vaccination could leave an infected person with a viral load almost as high
as an unvaccinated person's, *yet vaccination still reduced the probability
of onward transmission and substantially reduced the probability of getting
infected in the first place.*

So if we're trying to settle your original disagreement with your friend,
I'd phrase the conclusion this way:

The COVID vaccines were never a perfect "you can't catch it and can't
spread it" vaccine. They were initially quite good at reducing infection
and transmission, that advantage weakened with Delta and especially
Omicron, but they continued to provide substantial protection against
severe disease and death*.*"

*==*

> *> In Maddow’s defense, I will offer that it was the prevailing belief at
> the time*


*I know you feel you have a moral obligation to defend every utterance of
King Donald The First, but I feel absolutely no obligation to defend
anything Rachel Meadows did or did not say, I'm just not interested in
Rachel Meadows. I will only defend what I said; and I am a fan of logic so
if you can show me I was wrong I will concede the point and make your
viewpoint my own. But I also know that an opinion that was not arrived at
through reason cannot be changed by a reasoned argument.  *

* John K Clark*
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