Hacker News Reader

Comment by sennight | Hacker News Reader

> 1.8% case fatality rate

That looks like a scary number until you look at it by age, then it looks very different. If you were at risk of dying from flu before COVID then your odds got worse, everybody else's risk level is largely unchanged. Should employers mandate that healthy employees get experimental vaccines in order to improve the mortality rate among non-employees who were already at risk of being taken out by a cold? Seems pretty obvious to me, but this thing went well beyond reason a long time ago. Unless Google and Facebook have a bunch of 65+ stalking their halls, it is really hard pretending that this isn't either a political move or some weird power trip.

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/dataviz8737/viz/COVID...

View on HN

This reasoning works only if you believe the society isn’t supposed to help the vulnerable.

It’s clear that the older you get, the worse your immunity works. A vaccine isn’t 100% efficient in the first place and will work worse on a 70 yo than on a 30 yo. This means that in order to protect the vulnerable, the society has to achieve herd immunity.

Herd immunity would only occur if the vaccine stopped transmission, right?

Sadly, this is not the case. Vaccinated people achieve high viral loads too.

Except the viral load is decreased if you’re vaccinated https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-crucial-vacci...

...aaand one day later the CDC says the direct opposite in order to justify a new mask mandate, citing unreleased but super scary and definitely trustworthy data.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210729042140/https://www.washi...

Don’t have to listen to CDC then, can trust the data that is already published.

> Don’t have to listen to CDC then...

heh, yeah - that'll work out great I'm sure. "You don't understand, officer! According to the published research..."

That’s just grasping at straws. If you try to get a holistic overview, no single measure is 100% effective. But you can combine masks, vaccinations, social distancing, etc. till pandemic stops to be a problem.

In breakthrough cases in the vaccinated population, their viral load has been found to be just as high as the unvaccinated population. According to Dr. Fauci, this is actually why the CDC changed their masking guidelines for vaccinated people.

> This reasoning works only if you believe the society isn’t supposed to help the vulnerable.

This reasoning is used to justify horrific acts. Is there no limit? Obviously your line in the sand is beyond compelled experimental vaccinations... what about throwing virgins into volcanos? That might actually be more productive, as it could be no less effective in combatting the virus - and it might actually sate the power mad doom cult and show the elderly how devoted young people are to them.

> compelled experimental vaccinations

What exactly seems to be experimental, considering the published clinical trials? You’ve got to have a hypothesis, like “In 5 years mRNA-vaccinated subjects develop chronic explosive diarrhea because of X, Y, and Z.” Then you can go ahead and test the hypothesis, that’s how science works.

> What exactly seems to be experimental...

Gee, I dunno, maybe everything related to the FDA's emergency use authorization?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com