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Comment by devit | Hacker News Reader

The alternative is a high chance of becoming ill with COVID, which according to the data available so far is much riskier than the vaccine (1-2% hospitalization risk even for healthy young adults, evidence of long term issues at least in some people).

Unless of course your alternative plan is full isolation for years, in which case not taking the vaccine is the correct choice, but such isolation is only reasonable if you don't care about going outside anyway at all.

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There looks like treatments developing that can reduce the mortality or severity of COVID after contracting it, including possibly reducing long-term scarring from it. These treatments are coming out of better modeling and understanding on how COVID spreads in the body and kills people.

It isn't so binary or black and white -- vaccinate or risk dying. We're starting to get other options.

Some of those options, like monoclonal antibodies, are extremely expensive and hard to produce and distribute at scale, plus they only work early in the course of the disease. I'm not aware of any small-molecule drugs that have hopes of great efficacy on the horizon. You're not going to pump out 150K/day doses of MABs.

It really is vaccinate or risk dying. The other options are too expensive, too timing-dependent or too ineffective.

Why are you more scared of a vaccine than other new covid treatments?

I’m not scared of a vaccine. I am not sure what words I used to give you that impression.

I do see a lot of people fixating on vaccines as if it will make everything better. Vaccines will help, but better if there are other treatments as well. I think that if mortality rates and long-term scarring decreases, then people won’t feel like their survival depends upon other people’s cooperation.

Presumably because any side-effects of new COVID treatments would only affected those who get a serious form of COVID while any side-effects of a vaccine would be applied to the entire population.

The strong asymptomatic spread of this virus, however, makes these decisions more complicated and less individualistic than “what happens to me if I catch it”.

Vaccines are the only way we can end the pandemic though. However great a treatment is, it won't stop anyone catching it or spreading it. If we're to be able to go back to anything resembling normal, we need to stop widespread transmission in the population, and the only way to do that without these restrictions is for an effective sterilising vaccine.

What is the average hospitalization and fatality rate among cases where the patient was taking a high dose vitamin D regimen?

I'm not sure about the combination of covid + vitamin D. But you can also overdose on vitamin D since it's fat soluble.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/vitamin-d-side-effects#...

There's a recent quasi-exprimental study on that, showing that vitamin-d is likely one of the central factors in better outcomes for severe cases of covid-19:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602...

According to this study, vitamin-d gives better outcome than the other treatments, including hospitalization:

"Regarding care dedicated to COVID-19, only the proportion of patients who received a bolus of vitamin D3 during or just before COVID-19 differed between deceased participants and survivors, with a higher prevalence in survivors (respectively 92.2 % versus 66.7 %, P = 0.023). In contrast, there was no between-group difference in the proportion of patients treated with corticosteroids, hydroxychloroquine or dedicated antibiotics, or hospitalized for COVID-19."

And this has to do with Vitamin-D's role with the ACE2 receptor. SARS-CoV-2 has a binding affinity to ACE2, aggressively invading cells with proportionally higher ACE2 receptors (including the lungs).

In fact, someone had tried injecting hrsACE2 into someone as a treatment -- that is, letting the virus bind to hrsACE2 instead of the ACE2 receptors in the cells.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-00374-6

A treatment with hrsACE2 isn't generally-available, and needs a lot more study. The logsitics in producing them at scale would need to be solved, if this is a viable treatment. But this looks promising to me.

Anyone remember hydroxychloroquine?

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