We Had the Covid-19 Vaccine the Whole Time | Hacker News Reader

We Had the Covid-19 Vaccine the Whole Time

nymag.com

26 pointsrbanffy20 comments

> But in September, we opened bars and restaurants and gyms, inviting pandemic spread even as we knew the seasonality of the disease would make everything much riskier in the fall.

Were people talking about seasonality? I mean, sure, I bet you could find people who mentioned it, but it seemed like popular opinion was on the effectiveness of masks, lockdown, etc.

And when asked for evidence they point to the drop...which oddly enough coincided with the season change.

It's like seasonality is always brought up as a reason to fear the virus (Biden with the "dark winter"), but then casually dismissed when the virus recedes (you never hear "bright summer" - you saw that idiot lawyer with the reaper costume on the beach).

Cuomo was doing a victory lap, selling his bizarre posters claiming NYC figured out how to beat it and get over the hill.

Anyone paying attention can see the curves are seasonal and if any of these interventions worked we wouldn't be facing another rise.

I understand how controversial this may be of a proposal at first glance, but wasn't it be possible to recruit the terminally ill or the euthanasia requestors for the early trials and actually intentionally infect the ~~non-control group~~ both groups with a virus to speed up the process?

I, for one, can imagine that if I was ill but had a way to help the humanity before my inevitable departure, I'd be more than happy to do so, maybe even giving some purpose to all the suffering, after all.

From a moral perspective, I don't see this much of a different problem from the human organ transplantation – except the donation here is of an immune system itself. And while we're at it, wouldn't the organ donors be feasible candidates for such testing, too? I understand that the organ damage or removal could skew the results, but likely not by yielding a false-positive on the vaccine's efficacy?

Similar to how retired/elderly engineers in Japan volunteered to perform on-site remediation work during the Fukushima nuclear crisis?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13598607

Indeed similarly, although they explain in the article that it is unlikely that the retirees would develop cancer by they time they died of natural causes, so the level of sacrifice is different.

Yes, and there was a large group of volunteers pushing for exactly this.

As in to actually sign up to be infected?

Yep - https://www.1daysooner.org/impact

I would have loved to have been infected. Go into deep quarantine for a couple weeks, listen to a ton of podcasts, then have immunity for at least 6 months.

If a terminally-ill patient takes the vaccine, and then subsequently dies, what conclusions should you draw from that?

Well you could determine if they died from anaphylaxis or other acute immunological response. That would be the first step. You can also determine if the patient suddenly develops symptoms (arterial hardening, strange clotting, etc) that are not in line with their current disease.

With all respect, this is glass half-empty mentality and a necessity vs sufficiency bias. The idea at this point is to take the risk and hopefully obtain meaningful results. If the vaccine causes side effects with terminally-ill, then you have proof that it needs further evaluation and the sufficient condition is not met. If the vaccine, however, doesn't cause side effects and is proven efficient, it yeilds a sufficient result thus reducing the trial length, saving millions.

I really hope the pandemic prompts systemic change to the way we handle disease. Imagine if the safety testing for these vaccines were already done in January. Imagine if major transport hubs like airports had generic testing equipment that could check for a wide range of diseases. Imagine if we had a system in place for food distribution so at risk and sick people didn't have to go to the grocery stores. It would be an insult to the memory of everyone lost this year if we didn't gain some 2020 hindsight.

You don't control a thing simpy by measuring it harder. The monitoring is useful, and your suggestions seem sensible.

But they've got to be tied to specific and appropriate interventions and countermeasures matching the characteristics of the disease innquestion.

For COVID-19, characteristics are an extended asyptomatic infectious period, which makes cryptic spread a major factor. Protocols for travel bans and quarantines would have to be tied to detection programmes.

Yes, what I'm saying is we should have the detection programs in place ahead of time so in the future we can more intelligently develop specific and appropriate interventions and countermeasures.

The US didn't identify any cases of covid until weeks after we now know the disease to have been here, and it took months to identify community spread. By the point we realized there was a problem, there was no realistic hope of containing it.

If we had been screening international travelers even with a slow test prone to false positives, like a generic coronavirus test, we would have known earlier that we had a problem, and that information could be given to contact tracers to contain the problem. Rather than scrambling to come up with specific and appropriate interventions and countermeasures as our hospitals were being overrun, we could have taken the time to develop a well thought out system and been ready by the time community spread could not be contained.

Looking at the future, imagine what it would do to every year's flu season if screening for fevers were common. Imagine if you got an alert that someone on your flight was identified by a camera as coughing a lot while standing in line for their TSA check? With minimal inconvenience we could be much better informed about the real-time state of public health, and change our behavior accordingly so we and especially the at-risk get sick less often.

Generally agreed.

Note that there was major pushback against even having such monitoring though, a trend which still persists (the Rebekah Jones/Florida story, despite some additional elements, South Dakota's Kristi Noem https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/19/kristi-noem-...).

Donald Trump has been ridiculed for responding to the bad news on Covid-19 by suggesting that the U.S. is simply conducting too many tests. “Without testing, or weak testing, we would be showing almost no cases,” he complained. Or as he put it at a recent news conference: “When you test, you create cases.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-11/presid...

"I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault."

"Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!"

https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/covid-timeline-...

When within the decisionmaking and executive function there is resistance to and denial of data .... well, needing better monitoring is certainly a problem, but it's not your biggest problem.

Not unique to the US FWIW:

"Coronavirus: Turkey’s new COVID-19 numbers confirm experts’ worst fears'" (29 November 2020) https://english.alarabiya.net/en/coronavirus/2020/11/29/Coro...

> But in September, we opened bars and restaurants and gyms, inviting pandemic spread even as we knew the seasonality of the disease would make everything much riskier in the fall.

In California, things were pretty restricted for the most part, with bars and restaurants limited to take-out or outside service and gyms either closed or drastically limited in capacity.

The current spread doesn't seem to be from businesses, and indeed retail stores are still open.

thank you for tweaking the title. the original, vague title plus the photo from 1957 (wtf) were misleading for me.

The article claims the measles had already been in strong decay before the vaccine. This total bunk right?

The measles where endemic in society and only a sliver of the Population was susceptible at any point. For non measle societies (the americas) first contact is pretty serious with extinction level of deaths. 80 to 95% for all Old world diseases combined. So compared to that you can say it was under control.

That's not what the article talks about though. You're talking about herd immunity because all the children who could die are already dead. Not really "under control" as much as "optimally catastrophic".

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