Boris Johnson has decreed that vaccinated people must not meet indoors because jabs “are not giving 100% protection“. But, according to a new analysis, the risk of catching a symptomatic Covid infection for two people who have been vaccinated is about one in 400,000. For context, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency says that the risk of developing a blood clot from the AstraZeneca vaccine – which the Prime Minister wants all people to continue receiving – is one in 250,000. Others have placed the risk at around one in 100,000. That’s roughly the same chance of correctly guessing the last five digits of someone’s mobile phone number. So why the hesitancy about indoor meet-ups? The Telegraph has the story.
The risk of two vaccinated people catching Covid from meeting up indoors is “tiny”, scientists have calculated, with just a one in 400,000 chance of picking up an infection.
Last week, Boris Johnson warned that people should not be allowing others into their homes, even if they had both had the vaccine.
“The vaccines are not giving 100% protection, that’s why we need to be cautious,” said the Prime Minister.
But Professor Tim Spector, at King’s College London, has calculated that the risk of catching a symptomatic infection is around one in 400,000 for two people who have been vaccinated – which is far less than the risk of developing a blood clot from the AstraZeneca jab.
Professor Spector, who is lead scientist on the ZOE Covid Symptom Study app and professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s, said there was currently just a one in 1,400 risk of “bumping into someone” with symptomatic Covid, and people should feel more “relaxed” if they had been vaccinated.
Professor Spector set out to give the Prime Minister’s claims about the risk of vaccinated people meeting indoors some context.
“It all depends on how much virus is around in the country and currently with rates of one in 1,400 for someone who has been fully vaccinated, according to our data and the trial data, it suggests they are at a 20th of the normal risk, which means their risk is about one in 28,000.
“So if they’re meeting someone with equally low risk the chance of those giving to each other are really absolutely tiny.”
Worth reading in full.
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It’s all just words now.
it is all just words now , since in 93 minutes some pub in England will be irreversibly serving some shivering thirsty customers in frosty beer gardens. I agree, this is all on the point of slowly sinking into the gray mud of our memories.
The world increasingly feels like we are all stuck in a theology class at a convent school.
I loved and learned a lot in my theology class at convent school.
Everything Kim Jong Johnson says is just words.
Words have no reference to reality for him.
Really. Invite your friends round to freeze their tits off! What planet are these people on.
We are grown up people. We don’t need the advice of the nanny state.
cheer up. In quebec, people sit drinking in wooden shed out on frozen lakes, it’s goo fun.
you’ll need some long johns.
Fon:
You are an effin nuisance.
I do wonder how many sheeple are still obeying this idiot. My friends have been calling for a coffee INSIDE for weeks!
We are adults and can make our own decisions!
very daring indeed – coffee INSIDE!
If I’m going to be excluded from society under your vaccine passport apartheid state, I demand to know what my risk of transmitting the virus is compared to someone that’s been vaccinated.
The vaccines DO NOT PREVENT TRANSMISSION, only preventing symptomatic infection. If I’m going to be ill I’m going to be in bed, but a vaccinated person is going to be spreading the virus everywhere without a care in the world.
It is the vaccinated who are a danger to everyone else because they are the asymptomatic spreaders. If anything we should have an un-vaccine passport.
I think your last paragraph is fairy stories – but I’m all in favour of having a bit of fun with that as a wind-up 🙂
Yeah I think I might get an un-vaccine passport app knocked up on Fiverr for shits and giggles.
Actually, there will be a massive market for spoof apps. Can you imagine pub staff having the motivation or time to check them out?
I agree that asymptomatic spread does not exist, but it is the Government and its advisers who have promulgated the idea that it does exist – hence the reason we are living in a surreal world of masks and social distancing for all asymptomatic people. The last para of @Matt Mounsey’s post is exactly what the so-called experts would be telling us if they were to be consistent in their messages.
But they are not telling us that which would suggest that either they know that asymptomatic transmission doesn’t occur in spite of their protestations or they are too ignorant themselves to see the inconsistencies in their own contentions. The bottom line is that they want the official narrative to continue to point an accusing finger at non-vaccinated people at every opportunity. Unfortunately, most of ‘the brainwashed’ can’t see such inconsistencies, not helped by their ignorance about the (extremely) limited benefits of the so-called vaccines, even by the manufacturers own claims.
There is no such thing as asymptomatic infection. It’s speculation based on a false narrative and there’s no evidence for it. Why buy into their lies?
There is no such thing as asymptomatic infection for unvaccinated people. They’ve had over a year to prove there is and not one study has done so.
But vaccinated people are a different story. They get the virus and will still spread it with a snotty nose and cough, but they won’t get full on symptoms which would put them in bed or hospital.
So I’m not believing their lies. I’m trying to show that the vaccine passport system is an inversion of the truth. Asymptomatic spread did not exist until the government created it with ‘leaky’ vaccines. And so the problem will go on and on for ever after.
The snotty nose and cough would be symptoms, so they’d be mildly symptomatic. Sensible guidance would be for them to self isolate.
The phrase asymptomatic spread should be entirely debunked, and left to rot where it dies.
I don’t want to split hairs nor piss anyone off, but as far as I am concerned a snotty nose and a cough are symptoms. I guess we are then talking about whether the concept of .’viral load’ is valid and if it is then they won’t have enough of it to transmit. If I had a flu jab (never) and it half-worked but I still got the cough/snotty nose I’m not sure I could pass on more than that to another. But that’s my layperson’s logic, I haven’t seen any papers on it.
Technically they are symptoms, but do you think they’ll cause a vaccinated person to self isolate? They won’t even bother reporting or acknowledging it. That was my point. A person who gets Covid, with the loss of taste, smell and the full blown illness isn’t spreading anything because he’s at home crying into his pillow. That’s why vaccinated people will spread this more than unvaccinated.
Is there any evidence that vaccinated people actually show those symptoms as a result of a Covid infection or are you speculating?
There is evidence from all other vaccines against mucosal infections administered by jab. Jabs only prevent full blown symptoms in a proportion of cases. Take the flu jab for example. The mucosal immune system is different from the sterile, systemic immune system. So getting the jab will only prevent the more serious, systemic effects, not the respiratory effects. They know this and they aren’t telling.
Let’s not get too hung up on this idiotic idea 🙂
precisely – it is just a load of words – they can string any collection of words together now as long as the key message is that people cannot mix (because mixing creates the risk that they might actually have some kind of MEANINGFUL conversation and stumble across the truth about what is going on)
I think that your conclusion about vaccinated people is incorrect. You state
“The vaccines DO NOT PREVENT TRANSMISSION, only preventing symptomatic infection.”
However, from the Zoe project, the asymptomatic person is unlikely to be infectious.
Therefore
If the vaccine prevents symptomatic infection then the probability of that person being infectious is low.
The problem is that the government/SAGE position is that an infected asymptomatic person IS infectious.
See above. It’s true that unvaccinated asymptomatic people do not spread. That doesn’t mean that a vaccinated person whose symptoms are artificially suppressed by a leaky vaccine will not spread. They will be shedding virus as if they were ill, but the infection won’t spread past nose and upper respiratory tract to make them sufficiently sick to self isolate. And why would they care if they’re protected?
The reason the unvaccinated asymptomatic person does not transmit is because they have already cleared the virus, but PCR picks up old virus fragments. Their immune system probably killed it and no problem. They never go through the symptomatic viral shedding phase where they can spread.
The difference in the vaccinated is they can go through viral shedding phase but don’t have anything more than mild symptoms.
Sorry, but I disagree. A vaccinated person becomes infected, their innate immune system handles the virus as for the unvaccinated person and both are asymptomatic. The only time that the vaccine will be of use is if the person’s innate immune system and T cell immunity cannot contain the virus and the adaptive immune system is triggered to produce antibodies. If there is an inflammatory response because the virus has gotten past the mucosae then there must be symptoms probably a temperature, if T cells are triggered then there is likely to be swollen lymph nodes as this is where T cells proliferate.
Where is your evidence that vaccinated people shed viruses?
Bear in mind that the influenza vaccine also suppresses symptoms rather than prevent infection, yet this doesn’t appear to be considered an issue for asymptomatic vaccinees.
It’s important to distinguish between different types of asymptomatic people. There isn’t any asymptomatic transmission from people who never get sick. But the AstraZeneca Public Assessment Report clearly showed viral shedding in animals after vaccination and stated that it did not expect transmission to be affected. Moderna’s vaccine is expected to lower the shedding of virus in symptomatic people by 60 percent (Google it), but this is not comparable to unvaccinated people who will have recognised symptoms and be ill.
There is a well known example of a vaccinated asymptomatic superspreader in Halle, Germany.
Plenty of such cases documented at and by Uni Leipzig. (See achgut.com for both).
Various reports from the USA.
3 such cases in my own family in Germany.
Matt is absolutely correct, in theory and, above all, in practice.
Your theory is just that.
It also sounds logical and possible, like some pro masks, but like those pro masks ones, it’s totally wrong in practice and should as such be discarded.
If you have ever watched interviews with German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich who is taking out a case (crimes against humanity, I think) against Christian Drosten who initiated the global use of the PCR test to ‘diagnose’ SARS CoV2 infection, Fuellmich cites the one alleged German ‘superspreader’ case as the foundation of the asymptomatic transmission fraud. Apparently the Chinese woman involved was claimed to be asymptomatic but it transpired that at the time she was alleged to be “asymptomatically” spreading the infection it was discovered that she was dosing herself up on over-the-counter anti-flu medications. When this was pointed out to Drosten he ignored the evidence and continued to claim it was asymptomatic spread. It is also difficult to claim with any certainty that any case is asymptomatic in that it must, by definition, be based on someone having no symptoms at all and be based entirely on a false positive test result, or – if antibodies are detected – these possibly being present from a different coronavirus infection. Also arguably what is truly meant by asymptomatic? For most people, if they barely know they have the infection they might blow their nose or sneeze one day thinking they have an… Read more »
On the subject of asymptomatic spreaders, do some searches on pertussis, aka whooping cough. Despite decades of vaccination, it has never gone away. Asymptomatic transmission. The vaccinated become a danger to newborns and others who are vulnerable.
Yeah, I think the confusion here is between truly asymptomatic transmission, which doesn’t exist (it’s a PCR test picking up a molecule) and diseases which have their symptoms SUPPRESSED by a vaccine. In the latter case many of the diseases don’t go away and are constantly managed by vaccines.
I developed whooping cough after my youngest grandson was vaccinated. This was confirmed by my GP who cheerfully remarked that it was a live vaccine so it could affect non-vaccinated or those who, like me, had never had the illness.
So the unvaccinated are in danger from the vaccinated……..rather than the other way around. My child caught it from school, bit of a mild cold then a slight tickly cough at night. I then caught it and did do the odd bit of whooping which was unpleasant but not too bad. I avoid both doctors and vets so never confirmed. To mitigate the risk to newborns from their toddler siblings and nurseries full of jabbed infants, pregnant women are now “offered” pertussis vaccination, ie the answer to failed vaccines is yet more vaccines!
“Stay outdoors” says the NHS poster.
They can sod off! I’ve been meeting people indoors throughout the winter and guess what? Everyone is still alive and well!
Same here!
Ditto.
Ditto X3
Yeah, it’s called herd immunity.
Yep!
And me!
“Professor Spector, who is lead scientist on the ZOE Covid Symptom Study app and professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s, said there was currently just a one in 1,400 risk of “bumping into someone” with symptomatic Covid, and people should feel more “relaxed” if they had been vaccinated.”
Professor Spector doesn’t understand stats. People who have covid aren’t as likely to be wandering around bumping into people as people who don’t. He should read the replies to his tweets.
I despair at the constant starry-eyed innumeracy of Lockdown Sceptics when it comes to vaccines.
The important question is “What are the current odds of (a) catching Covid/(b) being admitted to an ICU/ (c) dying from it?
The odds start at minute and decline to negligible for even the most vulnerable, and yet we still have the Arsehole in Chief preaching ‘caution’ (i.e. control), with such profundities as :
“The vaccines are not giving 100% protection …”
… as if there was ever any such thing anywhere. The only interest to be gleaned from his incoherent burblings is whether he actually knows that he’s voicing total shite to the crowd of ignoramuses hanging on his every dribble …?
Why are Toby and Co. such ardent followers of the snake oil cult? The unvaxed have exactly the same no-chance of catching bloody Covvie as the vaxed.
And rather less chance, it seems, of getting CJD.
And will fare even better than the vaccinated if they have actually had covid and thus have T cell immunity which is thought to last more than a decade.
I don’t know how Bozo has the nerve to come out with this shite.
“Get vaccinated!”
Two months later and it’s “whoops sorry chaps the “vaccine” doesn’t work but we have really screwed your immune system. Still, you’ll all feel better with your “freedom” passes.”
FO bozo.
With the current cold weather and Stazi pub nonsense, there’s going to be many meeting up “in their own gardens ” instead.
0 in 7 billion+ for two unvaccinated asymptomatic people.
Hancock had a drink with Cameron. I’d be worried about catching something far worse than covid if I were Hancock.
You mean if you were Cameron.
Swine flu?
If you want your freedom, it’s up to you – not Johnson, or Hancock, or Whitty, or Vallance, or Ferguson… YOU!
We keep on getting this ridiculous advice from Boris Johnson and each time I want to respond with that quote from Monty Pythons Life of Brian …
“He’s making it up as he goes along!”
“…I’m not!”
Tim Spector is quoted as saying “So if they’re meeting someone with equally low risk the chance of those giving to each other are really absolutely tiny.” Actually, Tim, the chances of that are exactly zero. Poor phraseology from a scientist, or was it a misquote?
Shouldn’t the analysis follow through from the chances of catching Covid to the consequences? That is, there’s a 1 in 400,000 chance that one person will get Covid but only a 1 in 20 million chance that the person will be hospitalised and a 1 in 100 million chance that they will die?
I don’t know what these numbers are, the odds I gave were simply for illustration but I suspect aren’t too far off the mark.
In this context of hospitalisations and deaths it is clear that Boris and his statements are not just cowardly, they’re absurd.
It’s good to see someone trying to quantify the risk. That’s something that has been deliberately lacking in government announcements when the actual risks are low. Just the words “you’re at risk” seem to be enough to induce panic. I’m at risk from being killed by the falling grand piano that has been knocked out of the apartment building I’m walking past by a meteorite made of platinum. Sadly, there’s no vaccination for that. So how do Prof Spector’s quoted figures stack up? Do they make sense? Let’s run a “back of the envelope” calculation. There are less than 50,000 symptomatic folk currently in the UK – so let’s run with this figure as an overestimate. Now your chances of bumping into one of them in your local Costa should be close to zero; they should be at home. But let’s suppose 50% of them are muppets who ignore this sensible advice. So you have about a 25,000 chance in 68 million of sitting near to one of these gooey individuals spewing their virus-laden droplets and aerosols. That’s about a 0.037% chance. But we know that the chance of infection from a symptomatic person in long-term close quarter conditions is… Read more »
There is an NHS-backed covid risk calculator that calculates your risk of a. Dying with covid; and b. Being hospitalised with covid:
https://www.qcovid.org/
It doesn’t ask if you’ve been vaccinated or not.
Anyway, according to the risk calculator, my risk of dying with covid is 1 in ~65,000 and being hospitalised with covid is 1 in ~3,500. To put this in perspective, my risk from dying in a car crash is 1 in 20,000 annually, and 1 in 240 in a lifetime.
I have seen that – but it’s not clear to me the exact probability they’re calculating. Is this figure of 1 in 3,500 your overall risk, or your risk of hospitalization GIVEN you’ve been infected? I suggest it’s the latter.
In the above I’m trying to provide an estimate of your chances of ending up in hospital with covid if you’re out and about at the moment. So to end up in hospital you need 3 things to happen
(a) you need to spend time with a symptomatic person AND
(b) that person needs to infect you AND
(c) you need to develop serious symptoms that require hospitalization
ALL those 3 things need to happen
I wish all pub owners would throw Johnson out if he tries to get into their pub just like the Welsh landlords banned Mark Dripford
So, are we now saying that unvaxxed a-symptomatics ARE dangerous?
Yet more modelling FFS.
An investigation using empirical data looking for asymptomatic transmission as a possible explanation for disease spread in a large urban setting (10 million individuals) found that asymptomatic spread was a possible (as in ‘not impossible’) explanation in about 1 in 3000 cases. The 1 in 3000 will be a worst case, the figure for actual transmission may be 1 in 30,000 or less. If it really was 1 in 3, humanity would have died out many millenia ago.
Given we have just tested the entire school children population, and some of those tested positive, why weren’t they then followed up to check whether they had symptoms, and if not check how much virus they were emitting (if any) or if they developed symptoms.
Then we’d have hard data to go on rather than speculation and superstition.