[1053r]

This is anti-vaxxer fud.

If you look at places that have high vaccination numbers, oh wait, there aren't any. Israel is leading the world with only about 20% of their population having undergone a full vaccination regimen, and it takes a few weeks after the second dose for immunity to reach its highest level. Given how fast they are vaccinating, a very high proportion of that 20% was given that second shot in the last few days.

In other words, there is no place on Earth where we would expect vaccination to have an impossible to dispute effect on the top-line deaths or hospitalization numbers... yet. Give it 6 weeks.

To your other points about side effects, nearly 100m people globally have gotten at least one shot. The mild side effects which require a day off work are completely worth it, and the severe ones happen extremely rarely, to where a risk adjusted decision even for a very young and healthy person would still be to get the vaccine.

Only one of your points is even mildly valid, that the vaccines haven't been out long enough to know if there are any long term health issues. While we won't know this for generations, because of the definition of "long term," we also have no reason to believe that there would be long term health issues, while we know that SARS-COV-2 infection can DEFINITELY cause long term health issues in a significant minority of people infected.

Lastly, many folks pushing anti-vaxxer propaganda are selling something: usually quack cures. Ignore the parent comment, and focus on the facts.

[loveistheanswer]

>we know that SARS-COV-2 infection can DEFINITELY cause long term health issues in a significant minority of people infected.

Only 10% of positive cases (not including asymptomatic, untested cases) have any symptoms after 3 weeks.[1]

This is not significant compared to say, pneumonia.[2]

>we also have no reason to believe that there would be long term health issues

Medical history is replete with doctors and pharmaceutical companies making this claim for new treatments which ended up having horrible long term effects for many people.

[1]https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-long-term?fbclid=IwAR1R...

[2]https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pneumonia/treatment/

[jhawk28]

Asking whether these covid vaccines work is not anti-vaxxer. The antithesis also holds true, what data shows that they are working? Your example of Israel is the most troubling because they have the highest proportion of vaccinations, but their statistics of cases/deaths are not falling as fast as the rest of the world (or even the Palestinian population that isn't getting vaccinated). Does it mean that the vaccines don't work? Not necessarily. It could be as you suggested, not yet. It could mean that people are changing their behaviors now they are vaccinated. It could mean that at risk people are getting sick on the way to/from getting the vaccine.

[Terretta]

> Your example of Israel is the most troubling because they have the highest proportion of vaccinations, but their statistics of cases/deaths are not falling as fast as the rest of the world (or even the Palestinian population that isn't getting vaccinated). Does it mean that the vaccines don't work? Not necessarily. It could be as you suggested, not yet.

. . .

Early this week, with the country reporting a clear and sustained drop in the number of people age 60 and older who are severely ill, experts became confident they were seeing the effects of the vaccine. People over 60 were prioritized in the initial stages of Israel’s vaccine rollout, so this was where the signal was expected to show up in national COVID-19 statistics.

“We say with caution, the magic has started,” tweeted data scientist Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, on Feb. 1, noting that COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and severe illness were all falling among the over-60s.

What’s more, follow-up studies conducted by one of Israel’s largest HMOs, Maccabi Healthcare Services, suggest that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, which has been used for most of the shots given so far, is working almost as well in the real world as it did in clinical trials, with over 90% efficacy after two doses. This was not a guarantee: Drugs and vaccines may perform slightly differently outside of the controlled bounds of clinical testing.

As the charts above and below show [see article URL], the decline in severe cases began in mid-January, shortly after a steep rise in the number of older Israelis getting their second vaccine shots.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/israel-cor...

. . .

Only 31 out of 163,000 Israelis vaccinated by Maccabi Healthcare Services were diagnosed with COVID-19 in their first 10 days of full-strength protection, its top vaccine statistics analyst, Anat Ekka Zohar, told The Times of Israel on Thursday.

Maccabi found that an equivalent sample of unvaccinated Israelis was 11 times more likely to be diagnosed with the coronavirus, which allowed it to calculate the effectiveness rate.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/vaccine-found-92-effective-in-...

[craftinator]

> Your example of Israel is the most troubling because they have the highest proportion of vaccinations, but their statistics of cases/deaths are not falling as fast as the rest of the world

Care to cite a source? I see the Times of Israel disagrees with you.