Vaccines and our return to office plans
blog.google
blog.google
“their approach to the pandemic is grounded in more scientific rigor, not less.”
https://centipedenation.com/transmissions/mit-study-finds-th...
How about we not label anyone idiots and simply debate the data? Whatever your perspective, maybe there is data you haven't seen.
Vaccines however have bene proven safe and effective over and over and over with virtually no contradictory data. It is settled science (though not all the details obviously).
UPDATE: For those curious about the YouTube link below, it is not true that 25,000 people have died from the vaccines. There have been precisely 3 confirmed deaths directly related to vaccines in the US, all J&J and all for the same reason (which professionals are now aware of and is no longer considered a serious risk).
In case you get curious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du2wm5nhTXY
UPDATE: Whatever you do, don't look for yourself or question the narrative. If you believe the parent update, then it is the safest vaccine ever made and the VAERS data would have to be nearly 100% wrong. What are the statistical odds of that?
https://www.logically.ai/articles/who-is-dr.-robert-malone
You are spreading disinformation.
So yes, he is probably doesn't have a credible opinion.
A bunch of otherwise healthy people have died from the vaccine. You can argue that it's a numbers game, and that getting vaccinated is still less risky, but the decision should not be forced on anyone.
I just don't think anybody should force anyone to get a shot. That should be a personal decision.
Most of them are from elderly people, but there are also a bunch of young people who have likely died from side effects. PEI reports 21 people under 40 who died from thrombosis after Astra Zeneca.
Biontech and Moderna had other side effects (myocarditis for young men), and also a bunch of young deaths.
Johnson is not common enough in Germany to make any reasonable judgements.
Severe side effects (not deaths) are around 0,2 per 1000 shots. (reported side effects, actual number may be higher)
Source (in German): https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/newsroom/dossiers...
I know there's a lot of misinformation about the vaccines going the rounds, but that doesn't mean that all reports of side effects are made up or statistical noise.
The latter has a several orders of magnitude higher death rate than the vaccines. So which option should the employer go for? Mandate everyone to get vaccinated or mandate everyone to mingle with the unvaccinated?
Since the number of deadly outcomes or side effects to the vaccine is so low the breakthrough cases in vaccinated individuals become significant when you compare the risks.
We should be strongly demonstrating that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks, distance, etc so that there are clear benefits to being vaccinated.
If the vaccines reduce the disease to nothing more severe than a cold or mild flu, we should be back to the same daily routines we had when those things were an ordinary risk at the workplace.
Besides, most people have enough life experience to intuitively know that there's no certainty in life. Being honest with people will do more to gain their trust than enhancing the truth for their own well-being.
I work from home but manage small sports club. I would never ask anyone for their vaccination status nor requiring them to be vaccinated to join.
Here's my take on that. Yes, some young, healthy people have died after taking the vaccine. Small numbers of young, healthy people die for no apparent reason all the time, but because vast numbers of people were not all getting the same vaccines at the same time, there was never a plausible common thread to tie them to.
It's not like this is the first time a vaccine is introduced.
The ability to oppose forced medication is a right enshrined in many constitutions. The ability to go as fast as you want on a road is not.
Speed limits and building codes pretty much are "personal preference" in wide swaths of the US. Prior to some federal shenanigans many states had highways with no particular speed limit. Many rural areas do not enforce any building code for noncommercial non-dwelling structures and many exempt dwellings if they are being constructed by the property owner for themselves. And beyond this there are even more areas where laws are on the books but you're free to disregard them and enforcement will ignore you unless you do something so unreasonable they can't justify ignoring you.
Here in New Mexico, where there was no building code until the 1980s, we now have a tasty legacy of houses built not to code that are being sold to 2nd, 3rd and even 4th owners-after-building, and the stories are not great. People calling out contractors to fix this and that to be told that the entire plumbing/electrical system needs replacing to meet code. I own a copy of "The Owner Builder and the Code" and several other books from the heyday of the owner-builder "movement". I want people to be able to construct their own dwellings in ways that liberate their creativity and imagination. Decades on, however, I have to concede that this does have some downsides that need to be addressed.
- You need food.
- Well, not _this_ food and not necessarily at this moment in time.
Whether these particular vaccines are saving any lives is an open question. Given that 1) Given the number of deaths in the two major waves in the U.S. (Spring 2020 and Winter 2020-21) and the timing of most of the vaccinations, it is not clear how much of the improvement is due to vaccination and how much of the effect is due to a wave burning out.
Over the long term, are these going to be as effective as measles vaccines? There is no way to know. However, there is some indication that the time between the first and second injection is particularly risky.
Also, I would love to see a breakdown of how many of the "unvaccinated" are people who had their first shot and waiting for the second, or people who had their second shot, but two weeks have not passed.
It is not unreasonable for people to want to wait and see before diving head first into the "volunteer for experimental treatment" end of the pool.
In no world is this statement justifiable. It is obvious from hospitalization & fatality rates of unvaccinated vs. vaccinated people that the vaccine has already saved many lives and was also probably a strong contributor to that "wave burnout" in the first place, especially looking at a country like Canada
> there is some indication that the time between the first and second injection is particularly risky.
There is no indication that getting one shot puts you in a "particularly risky" position. It is clear the vaccine only achieves partial effectiveness in this time, but that is not "particularly risky", that's slightly reduced risk against the null hypothesis of being unvaccinated. I challenge you to post any literature which shows anything about increased susceptibility of one shot vs no shots.
> It is not unreasonable for people to want to wait
Tell me, what numbers have you set in your head to make it reasonable to "trust" the vaccination? To me, seeing the Phase 3 trials without significant side effects was plenty. Now, we have probably 10+x that data over 2-3x the timespan, and the risk picture has not changed. What tipping point(s) will you consider?
I have an idea. What if we did a randomized control placebo group and compared death rates. That is the gold standard, right? Well they did that, and the placebo group and vaccine group had the same death rate (their next move then was to end the placebo group).
I would be surprised if it turns out the vaccines don't save lives, but I haven't seen any clear cut proof that they are, given that the one experiment that would have proven it conclusively didn't, and then was ended early. So I think it's a perfectly justifiable statement and point of view.
Who is "they" and why did you not source this claim?
Regardless, given the current state where 99% of people hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated, I find it nearly impossible to imagine the idea that "death rates are the same between vaccinated & unvaccinated" wouldn't just immediately fall apart under your proposed experiment.
Long-Term Studies Of COVID-19 Vaccines Hurt By Placebo Recipients Getting Immunized[2]:
> Tens of thousands of people who volunteered to be in studies of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are still participating in follow-up research. But some key questions won't be easily answered, because many people who had been in the placebo group have now opted to take the vaccine.
Pfizer and BioNTech speed up timeline for offering Covid-19 vaccine to placebo volunteers[3]:
> Pfizer and its partner BioNTech plan to offer their Covid-19 vaccine to any clinical trial volunteer who received placebo by March 1, several months earlier than initially planned.
[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2033538
[2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/02/19/9691430...
[3]: https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/01/pfizer-and-biontech-spee...
The documents show that the placebo arms were terminated prematurely and the fact that there is agreement that they are still needed.
Here is Moderna[1]. If you look at Table 19,
Vaccine Placebo
Death* 4/15184 (<0.1) 4/15165 (<0.1)
Vaccine Placebo
Deaths 2/21621 (0.0) 4/21631 (0.0)
It's literally in the FDA reports (https://t.co/tIJN9pkE1B?amp=1).
The relevant line highlighted: https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1348080756921303041/p...
Again, I'd be surprised if it turns out they don't save lives, but I think it's a very reasonable position to be skeptical of that claim.
And you believe this based entirely on wildly outdated data that tracks deaths per cohort without tracking infections per cohort, despite this same literature showing a 0.01% breakthrough infection rate and the disease itself causing a higher death rate for 2020 than any recent year in spite of massive lockdown & social isolation efforts that almost eliminated flu?
I don't really understand this position even if I do concede that there exist a couple line items from 2020 that show two similarly sized groups with similar death rates despite being on opposite ends of the vaccinated or not spectrum.
To summarize: Placebo and treatment arms showed no difference in deaths. However, placebo arms were nixed prematurely and therefore we have no controlled and randomized studies comparing individuals who received the vaccine with individuals who did not receive the vaccine. That was the original claim. When you questioned that claim and you were shown evidence that the original claim was correct, you chose not to say "Thank you."
Instead, the downvote bandwagon is out because apparently facts are too much to bear. sigh
I concede it may be the only data comparing death rates in two randomly selected groups, but I completely contest that I "[was] shown evidence that the original claim was correct". I came into this thread to argue whether "these vaccines had saved lives", and a point we used to as a litmus test for that was if "death rates [due to COVID] differed in proportion between a fully-vaccinated population vs. a partially or unvaccinated population".
Therefore, if you were to show evidence that the original claim was correct, you would prove that litmus test. Instead, two data points were provided: a Moderna study where 4/~15k people died in both a vaccinated and placebo population, and a Pfizer study where 2 vaccinated died and 4 placebo died in a population of 20k. In the Pfizer case, it is especially unclear to me these deaths are related to COVID at all in either population [1];
I certainly have conceded this is a piece of evidence towards your argument, but I continue to believe the onus of "proof" in this case continues to fall to you, as multiple large pieces of evidence point to drastically better outcomes when infected as a fully vaccinated person vs. an unvaccinated, alongside other pieces of evidence showing reduced transmission to and from infected individuals. Therefore given the high infection and relatively significant mortality of the disease we already have these attributes to tell us that as time goes forwards it is virtually guaranteed that "deaths in unvaccinated populations will rise to a level proportionate to IFR and population size", while that outcome seems not true for vaccinated populations. Therefore it seems clear the null hypothesis is that the vaccine saves lives, because it would defy our intuition and known population effects were that to be false. Therefore two data points on small populations in the relatively distant past without associated mechanisms are not enough to prove the original claim correct without significant amounts of further evidence.
I also concede that perhaps in some sense these studies should have continued, and that it may be easy to take this discontinuation as a signal of dubious value of the vaccines; I personally hold that given the other data points at hand they became completely unnecessary and don't show anything statistically significant at all talking about total death counts on the order of 10.
Note:
>> For this surveillance, a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after receipt of all recommended doses of an FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.[1]
Officially, the "unvaccinated" is a mishmash of three groups: a) received no doses; b) received one dose; and c) received two doses but less than two weeks passed since second dose.
Therefore, the comparisons of the "vaccinated" and "unvaccinated" rates are confounded by the fact that the latter group includes substantial numbers of people who have been injected with the vaccine.
Note that the breakthrough infection rate seems to be about 0.01%:
> A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, 2021.
...
> As of April 30, 2021, approximately 101 million persons in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
If memory serves me, the "eager to get the shot" crowd were not very eager to circulate in the population by April 30. I do not know how many break through infections have occurred since then and there isn't much clarity around the question of side-effects.
Also, note that while breakthrough infection in measles-vaccinated individuals result in low viral load[2], the exact opposite seems to be true for the Covid19 vaccines.
It's been so many years since polio and earlier vaccines that people have forgotten the power and importance of collective action. Hope we can turn that around.
Not wanting to do lots of things that contribute to public health or workplace safety that have a small personal cost/risk, and small expected personal benefit is fairly normal.
Refusing to do them, OTOH, is different than not wanting to do them.
If people had refused vaccinations against Polio in this way, we'd still have people living in iron lungs.
Choose to be vaccinated, or choose to stay off campus, so you're not in close proximity to other people for extended periods of time.
I don't make the parent comment claim that "not wanting to be vaccinated is idiotic." It does seem uninformed, unless there's a very clear reason to support that point of view. While the law supports religious exemptions, I'm less sympathetic. And science really seems like it supports vaccinations, not only for personal protection and quality of life, but very importantly, for helping to prevent the continued transmission and mutation of a virus that has taken over 4 million lives.
My belief is completely the opposite: Vaccination should NOT be a personal preference: A vaccinated population is a social good. People NOT being vaccinated (against polio, mumps, covid or even influenza) puts the population at risk. If providing the vaccine is cheaper for the government than the having certain amount of population sick, then vaccination should be enforced.
But then again, I live in a country that has a more socialist approach to governance, and I also was educated more towards this ideology.
Historically, we've seen that making arguments like this on the basis of costs, numbers, and science leads to eugenics.
It must be a moral argument, which has gotten harder to make in modern times as commonly-recognized sources of moral truth (religion, mostly) have been on the wane for some time.
If your "freedom" negatively affects the safety and welfare of the other participants of a community then it's the best interest of that society to either coerse you comply, or expel you.
Selfish personal liberty should never detract from the freedoms of the commonwealth. Not getting vaccinated because someone believe biology is a political decision unilaterally detracts the freedoms of others.
A whole lot of people's newfound official freedom to smoke the stinkiest pot and have the smoke travel through the vents to neighboring apartments does negatively affect very young children and elderly in apartment buildings.
Yet, here we are. Clearly, some negative effects on some people's safety and welfare are not considered as important -- oftentimes by the same people who are really adamant about making everyone else comply with their demands.
For example, in my area two years ago, measles made a return because of anti-vaxxer Facebook mommy groups. I needed to bring my days-old infant to the pediatrician for checkups all the while knowing measles lingers in the air for two hours and a pediatrician's office is the most likely place to harbor the virus. Fun times as a parent and a big shout out to all the selfish people endangering newborns with literally no immune system based on junk "science" when the facts are overwhelmingly clear in favor of vaccines.
If I can make my house fireproof (analogy of being vaccinated) then I would not worry about my neighbor house not being fireproof catching fire and spread.
If somebody thinks vaccines just protect themselves, now that's a real idiot, because it is not how they work. They work by preventing you from spreading an illness that could kill other people, specially those that for any given (serious) reason cannot be vaccinated.
You can still be contagious, though less so, since you're having less severe symptoms
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
Not necessarily. You would have the employee represent and warrant to it. If they lie and it causes a problem down the road, they’re clearly liable, that’s fraudulent misrepresentation and the company is in the clear.
Is anybody proposing vaccine requirements for remote-only workers? The announcement this thread is based on literally carves out this exception.
I agree with this. I don't believe every employer has the obligation to support this choice. WFH has been largely normalised--if it's a requirement for someone, they can find their place.
I suppose they have the moral right. But if they get infected, the costs are on them. If they get others infected, their costs are on them. And of course, fraudulent misrepresentation and all that.
Drugs (per drug policy/theory) might affect work performance, and drug tests can be specified as a condition of employment.
Drug tests require information about the contents of your bodily fluids.
Unvaccinated COVID-19 infection is a health threat to on-site employees, and it is in the best interest of every employer to minimize this occurrence by keeping unvaccinated employees away from everyone else.
It's illegal in many countries
So is taking a selfie with the Buddha. This is a bad metric for reasonableness.
Vaccination as a condition of employment probably is (especially with an EUA vaccine); vaccination as a condition of in-office work with continued permission for remote work...seems less likely to be.
But goog isn't going to fire a meaningful number of devs over it.
Morgan Stanley de facto did. Vaccination requires to enter the office. Office work required to keep job.
I’m sure there will be a job market for those who refuse to get vaccinated in low-density population centres.
The majority of the general population is getting vaccinated. I seriously doubt that there are disproportionately large numbers of vaccine holdouts working in positions at Google that are correlated with being highly educated.
It's more likely that these policies will be well-received by Google employees who don't want to be exposed to an extremely risky virus that is known to be highly contagious but easily stopped with a simple vaccine.
"and uncontroversial"
Given the lack of information, no major company should be committing to the end of WFH until the results are clearer. That definitely isn't going to be the case until well after Labor Day.
I don't understand why the major tech companies are so hellbent on re-opening the offices in the fall. It's like they've drawn a line in the sand and they can't even consider reversing course. Which doesn't even make any sense, because for all intents and purposes they've been doing fine. Most tech company's stock price and profits are above their pre-WFH levels. Surely extending WFH until January isn't going to ruin their business.
> At the same time, we recognize that many Googlers are seeing spikes in their communities caused by the Delta variant and are concerned about returning to the office. This extension will allow us time to ramp back into work while providing flexibility for those who need it. We’ll continue watching the data carefully and let you know at least 30 days in advance before transitioning into our full return to office plans.
Contrast this with contractor body shops, small or medium businesses in regular buildings where your day is a screaming hellhole of a tiny cubicle with low walls or an open plan office that also has support with loud headsets next to you, the only lunch option is an overpriced sandwich or salad, the commute is over an hour each way in a cramped, standing room only transit and not a private company shuttle with wifi and clean seats.
If I was working out of MV I would be more inclined to spend a day or two a week voluntarily at the office.
If I was in an open plan cube farm where I give myself mild tinnitus just having noise cancelling headphones cranked up to eleven for the entire duration, then an hour and a half ACE/Caltrain/BART multiple transfers home, fuck that, 100% remote, if I get pushback on the remote part I leave.
There's evidence that, at least, the vaccines (possibly with hypothetical boosters down the line) are effective in keeping those afflicted out of the hospital. I can only speak for myself, but it did do that. It sucked; about as bad as an influenza bout I had a couple years ago. Go down the list of symptoms and I checked all of them. Ten days later (almost to the day, amazingly), it cleared up.
What does the return to "normal" look like? Well, nothing will ever be normal again, if you define Normal to mean "the way things were in 2019". It isn't going away. Delta is no joke; so we wait until it clears up? Until we have another vaccine? And what about the 2022 variants? You want to wait until 2022, and we'll be in the same exact situation then, and you'll want to wait again, because the Omega Variant is no joke. And in 2023, the Zeta Variant will be no joke. No one is joking.
What do you want "normal" to look like? For many people, it may mean more opportunities to work from home. That can't work for a remotely significant portion of the world; tech is privileged in that it can, sometimes work, but that privilege is born on the backs of thousands of workers in healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, services, supermarkets, food processing, etc who don't have that privilege. This isn't "I can work safely, but most can't"; it's "I can work safely because most can't".
I don't want Normal to mean that. Sure that means we need to be smarter in every industry, to make work and gatherings generally safer. Get vaccinated. Wear masks. Quit it with the open offices and everyone two feet away from each other. But at least for me, it also means, I don't want to work remotely. I don't want that to be the norm in our industry. I want to collaborate with coworkers in person. I'm tired of zoom meetings. I'm tired of the PlayStation in my living room looking at me every time I walk to the home office. I'm tired of bringing on new coworkers and never knowing them beyond a line of ASCII text in a Slack direct messages list. Most of all, I'm tired of saying "yeah we're still work from home for employee safety" to my friends in healthcare and manufacturing, who inevitably feel jealousy and derision because not only was that never an option for them, but its only an option for me because it was never an option for them.
There are higher goals than safety; a time for it, certainly, but that time has passed. The world is not going to get safer. The only reasonable option is to adjust our expectations to be alright with a less safe world. You will get sick. I can say with certainty; it sucks, and may actually be the end for some people. This is going to happen, guaranteed, no matter how isolated you remain. You will make a mistake; you will get COVID; and you'll feel like an idiot, having made so many sacrifices to spend 18 months in isolation only to end up in the exact same place as those who didn't care.
Most people don't have COVID. Hard to believe, but its the truth. Most people are perfectly healthy, at least in terms of communicable diseases.
Returning to work does mean that mistakes will happen, and someone presymptomatic or idiotic or whatever will spread it. Its inevitable. You can't control everything. It happened to me, and I don't blame the person who spread it in the slightest. They didn't do it maliciously or deliberately. It just happened.
That's life. Things will happen to you that you can't control. One of these things, at some point, will kill you; its a virtual guarantee. Maybe its COVID, maybe its getting hit by a bus, maybe its cancer. Living your life in an attempt to control everything, safely living in a bubble, is just another way to destroy your life. We've seen mental illness explode during the pandemic; people, overwhelmingly, aren't built for isolation and fear. There's a reason our society was the way it was in 2019, and its mostly human nature.
You cannot say these things with certainty. The evidence so far is overwhelming that a significant percentage of people who become infected with SARS-COV-2 do not become symptomatic. If the numbers in the recent study from UWashington are correct, the percentage of Americans who have been infected but remain asymptomatic has been massively under-estimated. The evidence so far is overwhelming that fully vaccinated people are extremely unlikely to become notably sick (though of course some will).
The influenza virus remains a potent killer of human beings, occasionally (as in 1918) developing a variant that kills millions of us world-wide. SARS-COV-2 (especially Delta) is more transmittable than influenza, and has a higher death rate, but that's really the best model we have for how this plays out. And how is that? Most people do not become sick with influenza each year, most variants of influenza are not particularly worse than the others, there is a vaccine that dramatically reduces the likelihood of severe symptoms (but does not guarantee immunity), and tens of thousands of Americans die from it each year anyway.
That's the likely end-game with SARS-COV-2 based on everything I've read. So not "you will get sick", but "you might get sick, but you're much less likely to do so if you're vaccinated, and either way, next year could be different". The world does indeed get safer sometimes, but then it also gets less safe at other times (and sometimes both at the same time, for different reasons).
Latest official numbers for the UK, Delta variant:
CFR 0.03% for fully vaccinated < 50 years
CFR 0.03% for unvaccinated < 50 years
https://twitter.com/kerpen/status/1418562741246300167
(I checked his numbers with the official source, they are correct in this regard, although rounded from 0.026 and 0.028 respectively)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I'm not sure what's being shared externally, but that Oct 18 date is itself contingent on offices entering a stage which is considered safe. It's the earliest that people can return, not an absolute date. October 18 could come and if an office is located in an area with case counts above a certain threshold (or vaccination rates below a certain level) people will not be expected to come back.
Google was one of the first to send people home. I was home weeks before my kids were definitively sent home from school. We are likely to be one of the last to be asked to come back.
There isn't conclusive data (AFAIK) on the relationship between antibody levels and immunity for this particular virus, but it is not unlikely that people like me have better immunity than the average vaccinated person.
I would've thought an inclusive company like Google would take such basic immunological nuances in to account when stigmatising their own employees?
I'm glad that it didn't kill you, and that you're not suffering from the effects of long covid. That shit is no joke! Did you have rigorous scientific testing done before you caught covid so that you knew it wouldn't affect you?
The awkward truth is that we know very little about how immunity works for covid. We knew enough to build a vaccine and have a year's worth of scientific papers about it and the disease, but the analogy is the difference between knowing enough to build a ship to sail the ocean find the Americas in the 1400s, and Google maps satellite imagery on smartphones.
Ethics review boards know it's amoral to intentionally expose people to virus, even ones we've vaccinated (Even with informed consent society is just too warped for that choice to be made ethically, given the risks.), which means we're not sure, at the edges, how to test for how protective the vaccine is, because, especially with the delta variant becoming more prevalent, we don't know.
This isn't an argument against taking the vaccine. Get the vaccine. The broad empirical data says it's hugely protective. But if it turns out between testing for IgM and IgG, B-cells and T-cells (and the three types of them) that we're using the wrong kind of test to test for protectivity, and that by the same fluke of chance that whatever antibody test you took that you have higher levels of makes you more vulnerable than the rest of the population, Google isn't willing to accept the liability as your hypothetical employer that they knowingly gave you covid and killed you/someone in your family (children in eligible to be vaccinated, or an unvaccinated elder) through gross negligence that could be argued over in a court of law.
I'm not remotely an immunolgist, but I've read enough wikipedia after testing negative for IgM antibodies for covid despite having it, to say that the human immune system is ridiculously complex, and (in part, thanks to our lack of universal healthcare) we lack the scientifically rigorous data to know what we're looking for. The measles vaccine has something like 0.02% of non-responders. That is, a tiny number of people who get the vaccine don't develop antibodies for measles. That's something we know and can account for and deal with and handle. But with covid, we're still not even sure what to test for!
For natural immunity, reinfection incidence (e.g. two positive PCR tests more than 100 days apart) would suffice? There is robust data on this now.
And yes I realise the Google mandate is not about immunity per-se but the relationship between transmission rates and immunity, but this link applies to both natural and vaccine induced immunity.
https://www.biznews.com/health/2021/06/28/covid-19-vaccine-i...
Honestly, why do you think anyone here would take the advice of some random Wordpress site?
Also, natural immunity is variable whereas a vaccine gives standard coverage without having to measure everyone to see if they meet some sort of baseline natural immunity level. Additionally, vaccines don’t run the risk of killing you compared to an active Covid infection which very much can! The proposition of natural immunity over fast, effective, safe vaccines is preposterous on its face.
First, you're referring to Marc Girardot who, according to his own bio on the PANDA site as having a "MBA from INSEAD, as well as Ms. in Economics and Business" and no expertise or training in immunology in any way shape or form. PANDA, for the record, self describes as "replacing flawed science with good science and for retrieving liberty and prosperity from the clutches of a dystopian 'new normal'". PANDA and it's members are so biased (and at times, under-qualified as in Marc's case), it's absurd that you are on Hacker News telling people otherwise.
But back to the "article" you posted. It begins with an anecdote about a totally real email from a totally real friend regretting taking the vaccine. Shortly after that it features a great table with "data" with no source provided of any kind for the numbers strewn about. Then we see a link to a WSJ opinion column where the authors state that we learn more about the efficacy of medicine as we use it real world scenarios (not against the vaccine, just saying our opinions change over time) and a link to another opinion column published in the BMJ by a group of 27 clinicians, researchers, and consumer advocates who think the FDA should slow down vaccine roll out. Not all that compelling, and definitely not a call to stop vaccination as I'm sure Marc would have liked.
Next we see a graph with "credit: Nature" under it and a few sentences in to the next paragraph is a link to a nature article, but no specifics on where the data came from. Again, I guess specifying sources isn't that important!
I read the rest but I find Marc to be under-qualified by his own admission and the article to favor pushing an opinion over useful, factual science.
Which you didn't the first time you replied as your assumption was this was a debate of not vaccinating vs. just hope your natural immunity will handle it on first encounter.
The thread was about someone who already had covid and that was what the article was addressing.
Michael Levitt as well as Robert Malone also made comment in regards to the article without finding fault.
"I read the rest but I find Marc to be under-qualified by his own admission and the article to favor pushing an opinion over useful, factual science."
This is a truly good reason to never respond or listen to anyone here on this forum. I have no idea why people do it. Everyone here is just referencing information by proxy.
It's very surprising to me how much support there is in general for outsourcing extremely important, previously personal medical decisions to employers. The concept of autonomy of our own bodies as an important right has taken a major step into the background.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5
(For the record, I did get vaccinated, but it seems crazy to me to mandate or compel it.)
Why not? Regular vaccines are already compulsory for public schools.
Interesting how prior to the last year, anti-vaxxers were mainly part of the nutty left, and now they've mostly shifted to the nutty right. The wonders of party allegiance...
It's because it's political suicide for any politician who tries. Look at the protests in France. Employers also have the most vested interest in driving up vaccination rates because, for the most part, a drawn-out pandemic hurts businesses.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rohitarora/2020/06/30/which-com...
I'm extremely confident, because we already have population-scale data on the matter. All evidence points to the vaccines producing marked reductions in infection rates and virtually eliminating severe cases and hospitalizations. It's difficult to even find any cases of vaccinated COVID patients getting severe infections.
Antibody-dependent enhancement of corona viruses was a concern before we had data, but it was taken into account in the risk evaluation process like every other well-known factor in vaccine research.
So I’m not sure what you are talking about.
> Should it occur, ERD caused by human vaccines will first be observed in larger phase II and/or phase III efficacy trials that have sufficient infection events for statistical comparisons between the immunized and placebo control study arms.
All evidence in both the human trials and data from the general public being vaccinated has shown the that vaccines (at least the mainstream western ones) greatly lower both the incidence and the severity of COVID-19. That is, ADE is not a problem here.
I agree, I believe we should have universal government-provided healthcare for all citizens. Employers have far too much control over healthcare in the USA.
The unvaccinated are also continuing to mutate this disease, which increases the possibility of it turning deadly even for those that are vaccinated.
Lastly, everyone retains autonomy: The employee is free to work for an employer that does not require vaccination, and the employer is free to require it from their employees.
“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.”
Richard Feynman. One of the greatest minds to ever exist
Pretty much confident, since a) researchers are well aware of ADE (more than some random person on the internet) b) they take ADE into account when designing and testing the vaccine
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=19410631&cid=61625009
Basically, it seems to have a very minor impact. There is existing precedent for being forced to vaccinate, though I prefer it be used as a very last resort because I think that being forced to do a thing makes more people oppose it and I'd rather see more light and less heat in the vaccine discussions.
There are real risks to vaccines, but according to VAERS data, they're orders of magnitude smaller than those of the virus itself. If one isn't concerned by a 2% mortality from Covid, it seems absurd to me to worry about a ~0.0002% chance of vaccine injury.
If you were playing an RPG and got a magic item that let you roll 1d1000 every time you died and escape death on every roll but a natural 1, you'd think that was OP. This is effectively what the vaccine is, so it makes no sense to avoid vaccination.
1. There are a lot of people that believe they already had Covid, but actually didn't.
2. A "vaccinated or recovered" policy is even harder to enforce, as there are vaccination certificates but no recovery certificates. (Yes, vaccination certificates can be faked, but it seems likely to me that a significant part of the population would be willing to lie but not falsify documents.)
On the contrary, all the big datasets show clearly a long lasting, low risk of reinfection for the recovered. Here, I include an actual dataset (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...) unlike "Virologist Sabra Klein".
What is different about Coronavirus?
I think we’re done playing this game as a society.
Trying to compare these numbers is flat-out misinformation.
A good back of the envelope guess is that if you've recovered from COVID odds are ~99.9% you won't get it again (for at least a year according to the data, more according to what we know about the immune system).
If you haven't had it but gotten the vaccine, odds are [infectionRate]*.6[andRising] that you will get it.
Or to put it another way, more vaccinated people in Israel tested positive for COVID just yesterday than all of the reinfections combined (~2K versus ~700).
I still think the vaccine is a good bet if you are over ~20 and haven't had COVID, but from the data I see natural immunity is going to be the main thing that gets us out of this pandemic, with vaccine the secondary factor.
Israel reported about 2K total positives yesterday. Are you trying to tell me that they were all vaccinated?
That's based on ~70% of hospitalized cases are vaccinated (https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general). I don't read Hebrew and can't tell if they are reporting immunization status of cases as well as hospitalizations and I'm missing that, which is why I'm estimating. You'd expect the % of hospitalized patients to be less vaccinated (assuming vaccines lower serious cases), but also more vaccinated (since the elderly have higher vax rates).
For the ~700 I'm using the ~.1% x ~850K total infections.
First, hospitalized patients are a very different demographic than the population at large - you can't just hand-wave that away by saying that vaccination probably balances that out. A week ago, around 50% of infections were among vaccinated people, although this number has dropped significantly in the past week as the outbreak has reached communities with lower vaccination rates (ultra-orthodox, arab, etc.)
Second, you can't extrapolate reinfection rates studied pre-delta to today. We have seen in other places that delta presents a greater reinfection risk. In the UK, 1.2% of delta infections are among people who had previously recovered. That number is not directly comparable to Israel's 0.1%, because it's measuring a different thing, but it does not suggest a 99.9% protection given the UK's total number of cases (about a tenth of their population over the course of the entire pandemic).
I'm not saying that being previously infected doesn't offer strong protection. It clearly does. But you seem insistent on vastly overestimating the protection it offers while simultaneously underestimating the protection offered by vaccines. I think they're a lot closer than you're making them out to be.
This is very interesting. I hadn't seen that. Can you share a link?
(archive.org link to avoid paywall).
>Comparatively, some 1.2 per cent of the 83,197 delta cases analysed were in people who previously had the virus – one in 83.
If we were to naively calculate an "effectiveness" from this data point (which I absolutely do not think we should do), it'd go like this: First, about 10% of the UK population has been infected. If there were no protection for re-infected people, we'd, of course, expect 10% of cases to be re-infections. Instead it's more like 1%, which suggests that being previously infected makes you 10x less likely to be infected. This gives a 90% back-of-the-envelope "effectiveness" against reinfection.
Now, I don't think it's actually 90% - I think that analysis leaves out a lot of other information we'd need to know. And besides, we'd have to perform a similar conversion for the Israeli 99.9% number to have something to compare to. But we shouldn't make the mistake of saying "99.9% and 99% are in the same ballpark".
Use your heads, this isn't supposed to end.
> Use your heads, this isn't supposed to end.
That's a self-fulfilling prophecy, the lower the vaccination rate the longer the pandemic will last.
The more times you take it, you are increasing your risk of an adverse reaction.
Yes, nothing to worry about here. 2 Weeks to flatten the curve didn't expand into anything else.
We are all playing a game of Simon Says.
There's been talk of a booster shot since the development of the vaccine started.
This is a coronavirus that mutates easily. As many have suggested, it is likely here to stay. Are we going live in fear forever? Wearing masks, social distancing or whatever else they want us to do? In Australia, they are now saying you can't talk to people.
> This is a coronavirus that mutates easily.
I think you have your answer right there for the contradictions. Though I think the CDC should be more open and honest about how they reach their advice.
> Are we going live in fear forever? Wearing masks, social distancing or whatever else they want us to do?
The vaccine has made me significantly less fearful and social distancing is not required when vaccinated. Wearing a mask indoors is only required while transmission levels are high and is only a minor inconvenience. You wouldn't tell me I'm living in fear of the rain for carrying an umbrella during wet season.
Your advice at the end will be seen as rational by some, over caution by others and for some still not enough.
We'll never vaccinate Central Asia and Africa. Even if we could, COVID bifurcates quicker than we can vaccinate the world. Ergo COVID will never go extinct.
We're at a seven day avg. of 300deaths/day right now. Car fatalities are 100deaths/day [2] . Smoking is >1000 death/day [3]. So we're near the geometric mean between smokes and cars.
[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_deathsinlast... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht... [3] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
In other words, it's over when this map is mostly blue and yellow: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_community
I expect that some countries will reach herd immunity and have no major outbreaks anymore while there are still outbreaks across other parts of the world.
"13 hospitals in Mississippi have no ICU beds available due to COVID-19 Delta variant spike"
https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/local/13-hospitals-mississ...
At some point we transition to an endemic virus with a background rate of disease which is similar to influenza or colds, but we aren't there yet when its filling up the ICUs. And if everyone would get vaccinated, then we'd be there today.
Also, I am very curious, who specifically has decided this "isn't supposed to end"?
France has transformed into a full blown police state (Australia, NZ close behind) in just 1.5 years post Covid new normal.
I just don't think any of the signals that would point to an inevitable conclusion look all that strong.
This is the trend in the last couple weeks among many companies and governments. It's just a shame the need for this wasn't realized 2-3 months ago. We could be far ahead of where we are today if more entities had been more aggressive about vaccine mandates. It almost feels like we're feigning collective surprise that a big chunk of Americans decided to take a staunchly anti-science, anti-medicine, anti-rationality stance. In reality, I think most of us saw this coming a mile away.
In the developed world, not many people die from diseases that are preventable by vaccine. Well, until now.
These kind of hyper libertarian arguments always just conveniently ignore everyone except the person making them. We allow smoking because it's your choice but not in public places because that hurts others. We have speed limits because your liberty to drive at 120 ends when it endangers other drivers. We have no restrictions on how much fast food you can eat because it does not impact anyone else.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/07/16/1017012853/97-of-people-enter...
More plausibly, suppose the vaccine is 90% effective against severe disease and 60% of the population is vaccinated. Then you'd have 6/46ths of the hospitalizations (15% roughly) coming from the vaccinated.
Effectiveness against severe symptoms is what matters the most (and effectiveness against transmission comes second). As long as the maths confirm the effectiveness of the vaccination, having a number of vaccinated people in hospitals is expected. A 90% effectiveness corresponds to having your ICU beds magically multiplied by 10, which is nothing to sneeze about.
1) high cycle PCR tests tend to produce false positives. [0]
2) recently (maybe now?) the CDC was recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals (break through cases). [1]
If unvaccinated individuals are being tested to a different standard, that would seem to muddy the waters, wouldn't it?
[0] https://medicine.yale.edu/labmed/sections/virology/COVID-19%...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210623005911/https://www.cdc.g...
I followed your link [1] and read the entire page multiple times and I can find no content which supports "recommending that the cycle count be lowered for vaccinated individuals".
It says that samples submitted for sequencing should be positive when CT<=28 or are detected as positive by another modality.
Some more discussion on this topic was on HN yesterday [0]
also, from last August:
One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
If the vaccine is available and I choose not to get it and then die... Well, that's my own prerogative.
We are quickly moving into a corporate and government nanny state where citizens and users can't be trusted with their own agency so their agency is removed.
Does this also imply that you will be responsible for the cost of your own choices, and that you will not infect anyone else and not interact with the public?
Honestly, my opinion - if everyone could be vaccinated and the vaccine was always 100% effective 100% of the time without exception, I would not care at all about "individual choice" or "I don't want to take it", I would not care about the extra mutations being created, I would not care about being next to an unvaccinated individual at all.
Do kids even need it? I was under the impression that child covid deaths (or even just severe reactions to the disease) were incredibly rare.
I'll point out that when we talk about how "oh it'll only be bad if you have comorbidities too", I'm pretty sure more than 75% of the US qualifies as having those. I'm not paranoid by any means, and I don't want vaccine apps or centralised databases to exist (anonymously signed timestamped attestations maybe), but the vaccines are not 100%, and my risk model dislikes being stuck next to someone dumping out virions for over 8 hours a day with recirculating air.
[side note: I've also worked retail in the past and that taught me to never trust the general public, and that some idiot parent absolutely will bring a kid in with measles, norovirus, and smallpox in at the same time while lying about how they're healthy so they don't get charged a $10 cancellation fee.]
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-covid-risk-to-...
ETA: not all unvaccinated are by choice. This is not now and never has been purely an issue of choice.
Because they are taking risks with other people's lives, if they spread it. I'm not sure why this is so hard to factor in - if you get Covid, you are more likely to give it to someone else.
If people take the risk, they should also be responsible (collectively, since we apparently can't do tracing very well) for the results. That means they cover the financial costs, and (in my more extreme moments), I think they should face charges of negligence where we can directly attribute to a source.
Sure if you got sick and crawled into a ditch and died then more power to you.
Instead you would end up going to a hospital and wasting a bunch of peoples time, and in the event your dumbass dies from it - some poor man/woman has to hold your hand while you gurgle out your deathrattle.
Being selfish with your own life in a society never just affects you. That's why it's a society. Someone will always have to clean up your shit when you make poor decisions with your life.
That is physically harm you to make sure you die in a safe place, not in my yard
Sounds fair.
("you" of course means "the unvaccinated who use their freedom to hurt others")
There are all kind of possible accidents, DUI is the kind where someone decides that they take the risk of other lives. Similar to the recent accident in Italy where a ski lift was purposely not maintained to avoid stopping it. They knew that they are risking someone's life.
With this said there are two cases:
- the one when someone drives under DUI and I have to kill him to avoid a possible direct accident towards me or my family (by pushing his car from a cliff or something). I would nit hesitate.
- after the accident. I am for a death sentence for specific cases where it is a matter of getting rid of human trash (rapes, murders with premeditation, paedophilia, ...). In that case it is a matter of social hygiene. In the case of DUI I am at the edge, with the possibility of someone to spend years helping the society to try to redeem
What do you mean "anymore"? Collective rule to fight contagious disease is literally as old as civilization. There are rules for it in the Old Testament.
So getting a vaccine does not make the vaccinated isolated from the risks the unvaccinated choose. Your choices affect what I can do and the risks to my health.
Because we're going to run out of room in the hospitals and we all carry the cost of treating the problem. And the doctors and nurses that we have are going to be pushed to the breaking point.
In other words because "we live in a society".
Your right to do whatever the hell you want with your life, no matter how stupid, ends once the health care system starts to fall over (again).
It wasn't "debunked", it was avoided.
And our current status:
"As COVID surge escalates in Louisiana, hospitals shut down elective surgeries"
https://www.nola.com/news/coronavirus/article_bb29717a-ee58-...
"How Louisiana's 4th COVID wave has hospitals 'past burnout': not enough equipment, staff or time"
https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_d53b6fc...
"13 hospitals in Mississippi have no ICU beds available due to COVID-19 Delta variant spike"
https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/local/13-hospitals-mississ...
"Florida Hospital Admissions Break Covid Record Set in January"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-28/florida-h...
Look at places like Sweden (fewest ICU beds in the EU, not overloaded), or Switzerland (one of the best staffed systems, also not overloaded). There are problems when bad management makes problems, as in any enterprise, which newspapers love to find, and sometimes they invent problems that don't really exist (finding a doctor who will say they're tired/burnt out/need money is the easiest thing in the world).
That's why it's better to look at the stats and dig into the system level causes of load issues, as you would with any IT system.
As for avoided: no, none of the measures implemented have had any impact. You can find proof of this in many forms, but the simplest is to look at places like the UK. They just removed a whole boatload of restrictions in the form of "freedom day" and cases fell off a cliff. Experts were left baffled because they had all been predicting a huge surge, although people who were actually looking at the data weren't baffled at all: the fall was predictable given the shape of the same wave in other countries + the assumption that restrictions were having no effect.
Since you're making an argument from statistics, it would be helpful to provide some numbers for your claims and their provenance.
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total
As you can see, it never got above ~80% utilization, even though Switzerland's second wave peaked many weeks before restrictions were re-imposed. The Swiss system is well funded, but it's not an alien planet. If they can do it any developed country can. Also remember that lots of places built emergency hospitals. They were invariably never used.
Or look at Swedish data.
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/4b4dd8c7e1...
Sweden started the pandemic with the lowest ICU capacity in the EU yet their age adjusted mortality only reached the same level as in 2012 - not even a "once in a decade" level problem.
https://softwaredevelopmentperestroika.wordpress.com/2021/01...
That isn't factual.
Half of COVID hospitalizations were diagnosed with COVID after admission.
The shitty newspaper article then spread the impression that people were going into the hospital for a broken leg and contracting COVID and counted as COVID hospitalizations with exactly zero proof.
The alternative explanation is that people show up at the hospital with strokes and heart attacks and are tested and show COVID positive and probably really are COVID hospital admissions due to COVID-caused thrombosis Particularly since thrombosis affects more younger people who are now making up the majority of unvaccinated hospital admissions. 40 year olds who get the sniffles and think its just a cold, then throw a clot and get admitted or just die has been happening from the very start of this.
Not even going to waste my time on your WhatAboutTheSwissHospitalDataism, I have work to do and don't have hours to spend today to figure out why you're wrong.
Regardless, I can see you already have your conclusion and will stick to it. So be it.
If you do it at home sure, but if you all get together and clog up hospitals, now it's my problem.
This is basic social contract stuff. It's disappointing to see so many people unwilling to undergo minimal sacrifices to help safeguard the health and welfare of others.
"unvaccinated" includes people who have had one dose or people who had the second dose less than two weeks ago[1]:
>> a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after receipt of all recommended doses of an FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.[1]
>> ... A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, 2021. Among these cases, 6,446 (63%) occurred in females, and the median patient age was 58 years (interquartile range = 40–74 years). Based on preliminary data, 2,725 (27%) vaccine breakthrough infections were asymptomatic, 995 (10%) patients were known to be hospitalized, and 160 (2%) patients died.[1]
>> ... As of April 30, 2021, approximately 101 million persons in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. [1]
Now, let's look at a more recent report[2]:
>>> As of July 19, 2021, more than 161 million people in the United States had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
>>> Hospitalizations* 5,601 (95%)
>>> Deaths† 1,141 (19%)
So, "fully vaccinated" increased by 60% over that period, but deaths among the fully vaccinated increased by 613%.
That's curious.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e3.htm
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/bre...
> Beginning May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections to investigating only those among patients who are hospitalized or die, thereby focusing on the cases of highest clinical and public health significance.
This is just to keep in mind the % of cases that result in death will be higher based on the different focus of the monitoring.
> 292 (26%) of 1,141 fatal cases reported as asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19.
So you're saying 1,141 - 292 = 849 or 430% increase over 160 deaths recorded before.
Still significant. This is at the same time that Delta is increasingly dominant[0][1]. So it does seem like this Delta variant may be more deadly, even to the vaccinated, though still massively less deadly when compared directly to the unvaccinated. From April 30th through about yesterday, there were about 35,000 total deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19[2]. That number dwarfs the total 850 or so that have died while vaccinated since the beginning of vaccination availability.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/17/us/delta-vari...
[1] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/07/15/us/delta-variant-...
> So you're saying 1,141 - 292 = 849 or 430% increase over 160 deaths recorded before.
No, I was comparing apples to apples. If you want to do it this way, you need to also note:
> 28 (18%) decedents were asymptomatic or died from a cause unrelated to COVID-19.[1]
Therefore, (1,141 - 292)/(160 - 28) corresponding to 543% increase.
Either way, the baseline went from 100 million fully vaccinated to 160 million fully vaccinated meaning a 60% increase in the population in question resulted in either 543% or 713% more deaths after breakthrough infections.
Further,
>> Beginning May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections
this is only relevant insofar as we now have no measure of how many fully vaccinated individuals get infected, don't feel sick, and walk around with high viral loads.
Right - the only logical variable to account for the increase would be Delta. Unless you're implying some other cause for the increase?
I am not particularly interested in the cause ... but, the Bayesian in me combines the fact that CDC stopped reporting number of breakthrough infections combined with the facts that chances of dying from Covid19 are low to being with and supposedly lowered by the vaccine gives me the gut feeling that breakthrough infection rates are now probably around 2-3% which means there are a whole lot of typhoid Marys walking around with high viral loads.
> Among 1497 fully vaccinated health care workers for whom RT-PCR data were available, 39 SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections were documented. Neutralizing antibody titers in case patients during the peri-infection period were lower than those in matched uninfected controls ...
For the record, that's 2.6% breakthrough infection among fully vaccinated people who are healthier and more careful than the general population.
At the beginning of the vaccination campaigns it was natural for people to be skeptic of vaccines that had been developed so quickly, but you'd really expect these feelings to go away after so many millions have been vaccinated without problems. What's strange about it is that some colleagues of my girlfriend apparently continue to peddle vaccination conspiracies after they've got their second Pfizer shot. What's going on?
It was very naive to think that 100% of the population would enthusiastically be on board with getting this vaccine. That never happens. I am too young to remember but I would guess there were holdouts on the first polio vaccines as well (though maybe not as many, as it affected mostly children and the diesease had much worse outcomes).
This is the natural result of 40+ years of sustained attack on the idea of government, on the effectiveness of public institutions, on the concepts of authority and expertise:
>Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge"
In the spring there were fewer doses than people who wanted them - people were flying to other states to get vaccines. Mandating vaccination wouldn't have sped it up much, while making workers' lives even harder.
Religion is, ultimately, about the individual's relationship with the higher. To dismiss someone's religious complaint because of a supposed leader is to destroy freedom of conscience.
If you had said "Pope" instead of "Islamic leader" it would have been classic WASP anti-Catholic bigotry that JFK faced in when running for president.
[EDIT] changed post to reflect that I don't have any problems against muslims' opinions (half my family is muslim in fact), just their leaders.
Oh, that's a clear indication that you do not understand Islam. Fatwas are only binding on the person who issues them. Same for lesser opinions.
Islam is different. While there are currently a lot of Islamic dictatorships, Islam is the genuine religion of personal choice and freedom.