Also it's comparing raw ICU admissions, but there are a number of really nasty adverse reactions that don't throw you in the ICU. The general "second shot syndrome" that something like half of people getting Pfizer/Moderna experience is a great example of that. Yeah it's not bad enough to send them to the ICU, but for many people COVID-19 would be literally asymptomatic or would be minimally symptomatic, whereas the second shot syndrome can be quite brutal.
Why do you believe that? It seems to me that the reputational damage caused by the U of C centre putting out bad slides is going to be stronger than any benefit they might get from being "seen to be a team player" or similar. Skepticism is always good but in this particular case, I do trust that evidence.
> there are a number of really nasty adverse reactions that don't throw you in the ICU
OK, but you can make the same argument for COVID. It seems to me that the slides are at least comparing apples with apples.
If you look at the rates of acute side effects to the vaccines, I forget the exact number but it's at least like 80%. It's insanely high. SARS-2 absolutely does not produce that given the massive proportion of asymptomatic individuals and significant amount of paucisymptomatic individuals
There are other options. Give everyone who has got the vaccine some money is one I've heard more than once. Maybe someone else has a different idea.
Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax. Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.
Again, we are talking about introducing something that is guaranteed to be in your body anyway if you contract COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 is viral to the point where, without perpetual lockdowns/mask-wearing/vaccinations, you will get it. So it is still definitely better to get vaccinated, at least with an mRNA vaccine – please stop spreading FUD. Your concerns could be more warranted for vaccines like J&J which use modified viral vectors, but again, exceedingly unlikely that this could be any worse than the virus itself.
Wasn't that the case with J&J also, till they decided to not ignore the clots.
To open up again we need to bring the demand on healthcare services down and we need to do it sustainably, i.e. in a way which prevents another exponential spike. If we can achieve that aim without mass vaccination of healthy young people then great, of course, let's do that. But: if the only way to squash this thing and return everyone to a somewhat normal life turns out to be to keep vaccinating until we get right down to the twenty year olds, shouldn't we do so -- for their sake as much as everyone else's?
How exactly are you so confident about the long-tail risks of contracting COVID-19? Sounds like epistemic arrogance to me.
Continuous mutation of common viruses is the background risk that human beings have evolved over three billion years to withstand as a species. That is different than a completely novel man-made intervention.
In neither case is it possible to know what hidden long-term effects they could have on you. But the virus is known to kill and maim people in the short-term at a much higher rate than the vaccine, which is known to protect you from the virus.
For all we know, mRNA vaccines can alter your gametes. We don't know because this is the first time we ever use them. They aren't like viruses or weakened viruses. They are just a massive injection of genetic material (much of it deformed) that encodes a single foreign protein. No human being has ever had such a thing done to them until very recently. mRNA vaccines are not part of any natural process that modern humans or our ancestors have had to withstand to get to the present day.
I don't know why you have this special concern about the gametes. In any case, if there's a significant bump in miscarriages / infertility from the vaccine, we'll probably know very soon, now that lots of younger people are being vaccinated.
First: does the rate at which the cells are made to artificially produce spike protein follow a different curve than the rate at which SARS-2 would? i.e. could mRNA vaccination cause a much more aggressive "inflammatory cliff", thus the huge percentage of "mild" adverse reactions (mild meaning, you feel like death for a day but end up fine with no detectable long-term issues)? It's possible.
And switching to efficacy, while personally I think resistance to the spike protein alone will be sufficient, because SARS-2 does not have the same ability to mutate/evolve the way Influenza does (for example, I can't imagine SARS-2 evolving away from the spike protein), it's very possible that the diverse epitopes produced by real SARS-2 infection give a much more robust and enduring immunity.
I don't know a single person that has that after flue and cold - and those are with us much longer.
As for viruses mutations etc. do we for sure know that this one is not man made?
> I don't know a single person that has that after flue and cold - and those are with us much longer.
Look into ME/CFS, whose existence is still contested (or rather I should say, whether it's a physical or psychogenic illness is disputed). I know you're just speaking anecdotally but just wanted to mention that post-viral issues (fatigue, memory, etc) absolutely does happen.
> As for viruses mutations etc. do we for sure know that this one is not man made?
At most SARS-2 is the result of extensive gain of function research on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13. I don't know any credible individual that thinks it's fully artificial / manmade (and to be clear, my definition of "credible" is not the "anyone who agrees with the WHO/CDC and nobody else" definition that the establishment relies on).
Personally I think it's more likely that SARS-2 was GoF'd into existence rather than was a purely natural zoonotic leap, whereas I think the probability that it was fully artificial is almost zero.
If we pick the 25-29 year olds and an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.01% [1] it's still 13.5M x 0.01% = 1,350 deaths. It's not a lot by any means, but it's not 'almost nothing' either.
This is the worst case scenario of cause, sibling comment has already mentioned long Covid, where we don't know prevalence precisely.
I'm aware I've picked the 'worse half' of the 20 year olds, 20-24 will fare better obviously.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2
The mRNA in the vaccine lasts a matter hours.
That's not that many. Despite my wife and I getting vaccinated, I'm not completely sure what the correct answer is for our kids.
To put those numbers into perspective, more kids die from the flu in any given year (despite vaccination!). And far more kids die from car related accidents, and cars are a daily fact of life here.
I'm also interested in the other longer term effects of COVID on kids, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there about it.
You talk as if it's a clear cut answer. Given the numbers involved I don't see how it can be.
A college-enrolled 18-24 year old is 3.67x more likely to die of suicide [1][2][3].
A college-enrolled 18-24 year old is 6.08x more likely to die of alcohol [3][4].
A child (0-14 years) is 6.75x more likely to die by motor vehicles [5].
A child (0-14 years) is 3.93x more likely to die of drowning in a pool [6].
All fatalities are compared to present CDC numbers [7].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809451/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enroll...
[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_302.60.a...
[4] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...
[5] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
[6] https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/w...
[7] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...
BTW the "long tail" of COVID-19 in children is totally unproven and the whole "long haulers" phenomenom is likely (a) a small part normal post-viral fatigue which we see with basically any virus, and (b) mostly psychosomatic/psychogenic illness.
So when faced with the choice of vaccine or virus, it should be a foregone conclusion.
It absolutely could, and that should be self-evident.
> Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax.
This is just not true. The risk of death in children from COVID-19 is so low you literally should not ever worry about it. If you want to compare numbers in an academic sense go ahead, but the fact that actual adults are wasting valuable cognitive and emotional energy worrying about their kids is a great tragedy.
The recorded COVID-19 deaths in children are, by the way, using the absurd definition of a COVID-19 case/death that most of the western world is using; a definition where having PCR-confirmed SARS-2 infection means that ANY death is classified as a COVID death. This is not how this is supposed to work; there is supposed to be a distinction between the virus and the disease, but we define the disease as merely having the virus! It's completely absurd. Indeed I'm writing an article about this concept (pathological vs physiological) right now
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations
When that reaches +80% the recommendations will ease more but as of now:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...
Right now across US being fully vaccinated is only 80% effective against infection. When you have 20k vaxed folks meet when the virus is endemic in the pop, some of those vaxed folks will be infected and some will catch it there.
When more folks are vaxed there will be less of the virus circulating and then that calculation then changes. It's all about how prevalent the virus is in the community to begin with assuming no strains appear that dramatically reduce the effectiveness of the vax.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/04/13/9864114...
You and the other commenters arguing your "side" also seem to completely ignore the phenomenom of natural immunity, which I think very obviously has been fallaciously denied by "experts" precisely because they want to convince everyone in the world to get this vaccine. They're already talking about yearly booster shots because most people's mental models are from Flu which has a much greater space of possible genetic configurations, whereas SARS-2 is relatively constrained in how it can evolve and thus should not need a yearly booster if this weren't just about making absurd amounts of money (which it is).
In any case, you should know that there are people like me - very much in the minority - who refuse to submit to such absurdities and will keep fighting. We will continue to be literally as well as metaphorically discriminated against until your "side" stops brainwashing people into a completely disproportionate response to an endemic respiratory virus.
You can stay inside with a mask on while vaccinated all you want. Be my guest. But please stop advocating for and/or supporting mandates and restrictions on the rest of us who have not caught your specific strain of agoraphobia, germaphobia, OCD and misanthropy.
The annual flu shot is not just for you, it is also to prevent you transmitting what is probably harmless to you but deadly to immuno-compromised like the elderly, they don't have ability to get natural immunity. Pneumonia is significant cause of death amongst senior citizens.
If 600,000 people dying U.S alone in the last year, does not convince you to stay masked and safe and follow some simple instructions for few more months until everyone is vaccinated even if you don't believe in them personally, nothing is going to.
There is no definitive answer whether vaccine will reduce transmission. Those 20,000 people will definitely meet un-vaccinated people in next 10-12 days, and then may pass the disease to them.
Many people cannot get the vaccine, because it is not open yet to them, or have other conditions. So it is selfish for vaccinated people to behave as though the rest of the population does not exist.
There is also the worry that longer the disease lingers anywhere in the world, there can be mutations which are immune to current vaccines, such an mutation could be disastrous as people will loose trust in the vaccine and a second vaccine even when available will have lesser adoption than now . It could become a vicious cycle where there is third mutation, and this then becomes like the flu shots ( but lot more deadlier)
I think we'll get to normality eventually, but it may take longer than anyone has patience for, and that will only push it out further as people give up on social distancing and masking.
I'm hoping that as the vaccination numbers go up, we'll eventually start seeing new cases drop off a cliff as the virus runs out of people to infect. (Though I suspect that we'll have problems for awhile with groups of people who hang out together and for whatever reason don't get vaccinated.)
Another consideration is that if the virus is allowed to continue to spread, there's a real chance that it may mutate into a form that isn't stopped by the vaccine, and then we're right back where we started.
From a public health point of view, I don't see things getting back to ordinary people (and not just the foolhardy) having lunch with coworkers around the same table without masks on unless there isn't any significant amount of community spread going on.
(B) covid-19 might very well become endemic. Like how the common cold is always around. It's not so bad if we're vaccinated. But for those that don't get vaccinated hurd immunity might not cover them.
In practice: I think we just need to be honest about the risk of vaccines. And say that taking it is the patriotic thing to do :)
i guess you can put it like that.
from my understanding the vaccines do reduce the transmissibility of the virus, but they do not lower it to zero [0]. you can still get the virus, but with the vaccine your chances of needing hospitalisation drop to zero [1].
i guess this is why you still need to wear a mask, and still need to socially distance even if you are vaccinated [2].
[0] https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2021/covid-19-vaccin...
[1] https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press-releases/2021...!
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html
Yeah, but once vaccinated you can start to worry less. And surely we'll see things open up to those who are vaccinated.
The fact that it's possibly still transmissible by vaccinated people is probably the reason why we all need to get vaccinated, and there is no hurd immunity to be gained :/