NYC to mandate proof of vaccination for many indoor settings
nypost.com
nypost.com
From what I can tell, you might be opposed to this policy if:
1. You have fears about getting a vaccine, moreso than for coronavirus. If this is you, do you prefer a mask mandate? And if so, how do you enforce this in a restaurant, where anyone eating takes off their mask right away?
2. You have fears about the privacy implications. If so, what are those fears? Perhaps your vaccination status can lead people to make inferences about your health?
3. You are not particularly concerned about the community spread of coronavirus (and the implications of that)
There aren't a lot of choices. You can 1) avoid high-risk areas and escape infection/spreading disease, in which case, this policy doesn't really directly affect you. Or 2) you can take your chances with coronavirus, which you will get sooner or later, and spread it. Or 3) you can "take your chances" with the vaccine which, statistically and biologically, is safer than getting coronavirus and reduces spread.
This policy allows people to choose from 1) and 3) but not 2), which is in all ways the worst decision. Unless, of course, you think that the vaccine is more dangerous than coronavirus. And then I don't really know what to say.
(lightly edited for clarification)
1. No particular vaccine concern, have mine.
2. Yes. I am not telling my name and birth day for random person in public but now this is required for many public venue. No more being anonymous in public.
3. I have lowered concern, most people with vaccine have lesser time of it even with breakthrough infection. Or maybe better to say I am past caring.
4. All prior vaccine requirement (school, other places) have exemption for religios reason, personal objection, or both (varies by state). Compelling medical procedures is not a good thing ever. Saying that we have no compulsion is disingenuous if vaccine are required for restaurant, job, etc.
I am having objections not to vaccine but to compulsion to show government document before any entry to certain places. Public school fine, government worker fine, but government forcing proof before entry to private restaurant very bad from perspective of civil liberties and privacy. Also I have worries over changing requirement: already there are discussion that maybe a booster shot is required. I am fine with taking this booster shot but do not like constant moving goalposts. Maybe later government adds some other requirements for what somebody must do before allowed entry somewhere, the infrastructure for lineing up for getting scanned already will be in place.
The virus is changing (variants) and we have to adapt to the changes. Your options are rolling with the punches or standing firm on a stance that is no longer based in reality. I can understand the pushback/concern to having to identify yourself constantly but potentially needing a booster isn't moving the goalposts, it's reacting to new information.
It doesn't matter if you think the vaccine is more or less dangerous than the coronavirus. It goes back to basic human dignity and human rights. You wouldn't want strangers mandating injections into your body that you don't want. No one would be okay that, unless they are insane.
You might make the argument that anti-vaxxers are endangering others' health by being out in public without a vaccine, but that's only a claim. Lots of people make claims about others infringing their rights all the time, and a nontrivial number of those are baseless. A huge number of assumptions about medical science and constitutional law would need to be tested in court for it to hold any weight, unless you're willing to jettison the entire process of civil society.
I mean, compulsory vaccination is a thing in many countries, and I think it's a net good for the world?
For what it’s worth, I’m vaccinated and wear a mask in every public encounter until I’ve discussed the risks with whoever I am dealing with whether required to or not.
However I strongly disagree with mandatory medical treatment of any kind.
I could imagine a law for emergency vaccinations that I would find acceptable, but it would need to have a lot of safeguards.
First, that's not what the GP said. It's also not what I'm saying.
Second, where I live the vaccine I got [1] went through a well-defined process designed explicitly to safely but swiftly approve medicine for emergency use, eg. during pandemics [2].
[1] - https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/EPAR/comirnaty
[2] - https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/marketing-auth...
You said this, and we are referring to a vaccine that is not FDA approved.
‘Well defined’ doesn’t mean anything. The vaccines have not been approved according to normal medical standards.
Except they have. They've literally been approved using medical standards developed to handle time-critical medicine approval, which is as much of an approval process as the standard non-fast-tracked system. The studies are there, they're just taken from much earlier in the development process of the medicine than usually, and the approval is granted for a shorter period with continuous close monitoring and repeated follow up reviews.
The reason this accelerated approval isn't used for all medicine is not because it's less safe, but because it's more expensive and more effort consuming for all parties involved. Things are less sequential and more parallel, but all the important steps are still there.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/overview/publi...
Compare:
Fast-tracked: https://www.ema.europa.eu/sites/default/files/timeline_-_fas...
Standard: https://www.ema.europa.eu/sites/default/files/timeline_-_sta...
They haven’t.
> The reason this accelerated approval isn't used for all medicine is not because it's less safe
How do you known it isn’t less safe? There are no studies comparing the safety of the methods. Only arguments to that effect.
No? Like, no, this is not a sound argument, and is fallacious to the point where I'm not even going to attempt to argument against it.
> How do you known it isn’t less safe? There are no studies comparing the safety of the methods. Only arguments to that effect.
How do you know the non-fast track process is safer? There are no studies comparing the safety of the methods. Only arguments to that effect.
Considering both processes are established by the same public health organization, and that I'm not a health specialist myself to be able to prove otherwise, I see no reason to trust one but not the other.
We can’t be 100% sure it is.
> There are no studies comparing the safety of the methods. Only arguments to that effect.
Clever try. This is also true, but a fallacy nonetheless.
We have a long history of the safety of the non-fast track process and no history for the fast track process. We therefore have high confidence in then safety of the non-fast track process and low confidence in the fast track process.
> Considering both processes are established by the same public health organization, and that I'm not a health specialist myself to be able to prove otherwise, I see no reason to trust one but not the other.
Ok, so you have just declared that you don’t trust yourself to analyze this for yourself and are going to trust the authorities. That’s fine but it renders your analysis moot.
It also invalidates your argument so far since the authorities you trust have not given approval of the new vaccines only emergency use authorization. The authorities you trust agree with me that we can yet trust the vaccines the way we do those that have undergone full testing.
We were overcautious with the vaccines, it has cost us hundreds of billions in economic damages.
We don’t know the side effects.
I almost consider your talk about side effects fear mongering when the overwhelming evidence is pointing to a safe and effective vaccine. The mRNA vaccines by now have more evidence on their record than most vaccines when the become available. That should count for something. Vaccine hesitancy will cost us dearly.
Like, after the million of administered doses I would offer you a bet that the side effects are less than 1,000th of the effects a corona infection.
Not longitudinal evidence.
I’m not advocating hesitancy. I personally have been vaccinated. The only point I’ve argued for is not mandating vaccination. I strongly oppose mandatory medical treatment of any kind, and that has to include vaccination.
However it is also still true that these vaccines have not received approval, and although widespread use certainly may be better even in terms of lives lost than the economic damage, that is definitely a very bad reason to mandate medical treatment.
> I would offer you a bet that the side effects are less than 1,000th of the effects a corona infection.
For most people, you may be right. I’m happy for that case to he made, openly, with data. What I object to is forcing people on the basis of that data.
One last point: some countries have formally approved the vaccines already. So your focus on an US FDA approval is a little strange. The European union for instance did not use an emergency approval (which would put liability on the governments) but chose a regular approval with conditions, which put the liability on the manufacturer.
For me, it was three or four at least, and until some genuinely inimical people decided vaccines were a good way to get famous at the expense of the body politic, nobody cared.
Did you ever need proof of a polio vaccine to get into Equinox?
Further, I am also asserting that the fearmongering to the contrary is foolish and worth immediate discount. And given that literal disinformation ops are trying to recruit YouTubers to take a ninety degree swerve from tech or whatever they normally do to talk very seriously about the just asking questions about vaccination, I am okay with being pretty damned hard on this.
Thanks for asking!
Using VAERS as proof of anything is a literal demonstration that the person in question has no idea what he's talking about.
In other words, VAERS data should be treated as at most a "this may be worth looking into," and certainly nowhere near a level of "this is a definitive proof something goes wrong." Especially in a time when tens of millions of people are getting vaccinated with the same vaccine at the same time, you're going to get lots of reports of people falling ill with something just by sheer coincidence.
While I can't give you an "actual pathway to a long-term problem" by which I assume you mean a mechanism of action I will note science is hard, scientists can't always predict what will happen, and serendipitous discoveries happen daily. The long term risk is unknown. I think if you're at risk for serious infection you should get vaccinated, if you're not really at risk it's more difficult to weigh the relative risks.
Source: Interview with head of German vaccination recommendation commission.
Also long term side effects have been documented in other mammals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine-associated_sarcoma#:~:....
The side effects that are able to be actually substantiated by credible sources have been generally quite mild and very, very rare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
Given the increased focus on the Covid vaccines, correlations as these would have already been found.
Also, narcolepsy is hard to diagnose?
It thought that narcolepsy much as fatigue is something that is easily missed when showing weakly. Tired kid?
Bullshit and demonstrably false. The first gen rotavirus vaccine was pulled post-marketing because it destroyed the intestines of infants. Was on the market for a year.
lol, no. You know that not a single vaccinated vs unvaccinated population study has ever been conducted, right?
VAERS is designed to detect acute, recent reactions and only acute, recent reactions. If it's not an accute, recent reaction, it probably never makes it into VAERS. That notion that long-term effects could even be reasonably detected today without a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated population study is highly questionable. The CDC refuses to do a vaccinated vs unvaccinated comparison study of overall mortality and disease prevalence. Don't believe me? Go on YouTube and you can find videos of Melinda Wharton making excuses to not do it. Sad, laughable excuses.
Also, you mentioned a German specialist: are you only considering vaccine rollouts in high HDI nations? Because DTP is absolutely associated with increase overall mortality in developing nations. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15082643/
There's also evidence that DTP yields higher mortality in girls: https://academic.oup.com/trstmh/article/110/10/570/2548939
Worth noting that DTP was the reason why the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act was lobbied for and passed in the first place. Vaccines were so "safe", that they couldn't be brought to market for a profit because injuries and lawsuits were so frequent. So, the government indemnified the manufacturers, capped the max injury settlement at $250k, made a special court for vaccine injury where all documents are under seal, and had HHS (taxpayers) make all the payouts. Sounds safe to me!
My spicy hot take: this shit is fantastically complicated. At the very least, I think it has to be acknowledged that accurate medical reporting at scale is apparently a Hard Problem and not at all as solved as we would like to think. I don't know how you're defining sources with a "credible tether to reality," but I'd point to the problem with establishing such things _as itself a problem_. VAERS is a perfect example of such a problem. Despite all the hubris in this thread acting like they've blown the case wide open, VAERS folks are well aware that their data is trash.
When the contrary position is not generally the position of either genuine goddamned loons or the much more unfortunate case of people given historically very valid reasons for hesitancy that in this case no show sign of being true, there might be a reason to re-evaluate that stance.
Right now? I'm good.
mRNA isn't new and we do know how it works. There is no mRNA left after the process. It breaks down and is evicted. If what you describe was going to happen, it would have happened already.
If you can find anyone who has studied mRNA academically (let's draw a line of "has contributed to or reviewed a paper on the topic", I can't think of a better one?) willing to put their credentials on the line to buttress this concern I'd be honestly amazed, because I can't find one and I have looked.
The reason why thalidomide was never stopped before approval is because a fetus is only susceptible during a certain growth phase. And in rats (where the teratogenicity was tested) that period is hours, not weeks like humans.
We know how mRNA works. We know what protein is being coded. We know that it codes that protein correctly. We know that the mRNA flushes when it's done. I'm not asking for a smoking gun. I'm asking you to substantiate even the possibility of it with actual peer-reviewed science and not hyperventilating, middlebrow fearmongering.
Bring something real to the table. For once. Any of you.
And as a good example, please explain why COX-2 inhibitors increase the risk of heart attacks? Oh, you can't? That's because we don't know the mechanism, but have data to prove they are harmful.
Again, would such a mechanism have been possible to show for thalidomide? Can you point to any peer-reviewed science that shows any danger of thalidomide, that's dated before the birth defects actually started happening? If your standard of unsafety couldn't be met for something that we now know for sure is unsafe, it's obviously a bad standard to use.
As someone who works in drug development, the FDA would laugh you out of the room if you said this. Nobody gives a shit what your theories are. Drugs are approved based on hard data, not theories and handwaving about what could or couldn't go wrong. Way too many drugs have been pulled off the market for reasons nobody could predict.
Bextra, a COX-2 inhibitor used for arthritis, was approved in 2001 and wasn't withdrawn until 2005 when it was found to increase the risk of heart attacks. It took 4 years and millions of people dosed before they found that long-term effect.
Now, I'm not saying people shouldn't get vaccinated against. I'm vaccinated. But playing it off like the risk of long-term complications is zero is just foolish.
There have been mRNA vaccines in human clinical trials for around 10 years and they have been studied for around 30 years. There are countless examples of other non-controversial medicines developed and studied for far shorter lengths of time.
I trust you will stop just-asking-questions at that time?
And no approval. In other words, this is a dangerous class of drug that has failed to obtain a single human-use approval in 30 years. Thanks for the info!
Not all the laws are going to be popular. I'm sure not everybody is thrilled about schools requiring all children be vaccinated. People can object to it and express concerns about, and you can even try to change it through legislation. But the majority will prevail.
Regarding your statement: "You might make the argument that anti-vaxxers are endangering others' health by being out in public without a vaccine, but that's only a claim." It's a claim backed by stats. On an individual level, it may be discriminatory to accuse an anti-vaxxer of endangering others without specific proof. But in aggregate, unvaccinated people are more likely to be infected and also spreading disease unknowingly. At least until the Delta variant came along, and now the officials have revised guidelines to ensure everyone wears mask.
Do I think it was premature to let vaccinated people go without mask? Sure. It wasn't my call. But nobody has a crystal balls into the future. So we adapt.
In the long run, operating this fashion has served us well.
Under the NYC "mandate", No one is required to be vaccinated. I'll say that again: no one is being required to be vaccinated.
While I disagree with the DeBlasio administration's new policy (WRT bars, gyms, etc.), both because it will be almost impossible to enforce and because the benefits (via increased vaccinations) will likely be marginal at best, no one is forcing anyone to do anything.
I'd much prefer (as an increasing number of restaurants, theaters and other venues and businesses are doing) that requiring patrons and staff to be vaccinated be a decision taken by the specific business involved.
Those businesses that only allow vaccinated people in their establishments will gain some folks and lose others -- and vice versa.
Regardless, and I'll say it one more time: the "mandate" from the NYC government doesn't force anyone to get vaccinated, nor does it restrict anyone from public spaces.
NYers aren't stupid (or at least not in any greater amount than anywhere else) and most will (and have) take appropriate precautions.
That said, the new requirements won't be all that effective because they're essentially unenforceable unless the business' owners are fully on board -- if they are, then they'll (as many have already done) require their staff and patrons to be vaccinated.
If a business' owners aren't on board with this, they won't require it, whether it's mandated or not.
The whole point of civil society is to solve coordination problems and deliver public goods like sanitation and health. If it can't accomplish something as basic as vaccination then it is blatantly unfit for purpose. Absolutely, jettison it! The truly crazy idea here is that we would retain and bear the costs of a civil society which is so incompetent at its bread and butter job.
We don't leave the water mains to gush into the street, we don't leave the sewers to back up into the toilets, and we don't leave the viruses to circulate in the bars.
Somehow I think there will be a major shifting of goalposts by the anti-vax camp around that time.
> So your hang up is the FDA giving full approval?
Perhaps they will but could you save the strawman arguments for then as well.
I don't think it's the "anti-vax camp" who's behind the major shifting of the goalposts here.
> https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/04/fda-approval-pfizer...
That is not information, explicit or implicit, that is in that article.
Fears of privacy implications: Tracking data/metadata, How data is recorded, How long are records kept. What other data is linked to vaccination checks?
Fears of discrimination: How is vaccination proven? Are special IDs required? What is the cost of identification? What about people who are ineligible to get vaccinated due to age, health status, medical conditions. What percentage of minority groups are vaccinated in comparison to other groups?
Unintended consequences: Will this make unsafe behavior appear safer to vaccinated individuals? What about future variants? Are there future plans to extend the list of businesses/places this applies to like public transport, medical facilities, etc?
Lastly, If you are vaccinated and feel safe doing these activities, why should you care about those who chose not to get vaccinated
I thought that vaccines made you something like 20x less likely to end up in the hospital from coronavirus (widely cited as 95% protective.) And that unvaccinated people spread at 5x the rate of the vaccinated ones. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z
Despite having done some research in virology for my MSc I definitely don't claim to be an expert. The field is really complex, and I'm always open to learning. So feel free to reply and educate me as long as we can keep it cordial.
To answer your last question (presumably non-rhetorical) I worry about unvaccinated people allowing for mutations via community spread, as well as getting sick when they didn't have to, hurting themselves while taking up healthcare resources in the process. Is that unreasonable?
The article you link says the delta is unknown. Delta is rapidly becoming the most common variant in the US. (https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210720/delta-variant-now-a...)
I believe the 40% is coming from the data out of Israel. (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...)
Also data from the CDC on the latest outbreak they studies shows that 74% of the positives were vaccinated. At the time the vaccination rate was about 69% for the state. I can't find anything on the actual town. (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/this-900-person-delt...)
The CDC also has said vaccinated do in fact have high viral loads of the virus and can spread it (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...)
Do you happen to have any actual studies showing unvaccinated people are causing mutations? I have seen it repeated but never seen the study behind it. I do know leaky vaccines cause outbreaks to spread faster. This can be seen in the past. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...)
As for your last part. Lets look at it another way. Heart disease is the leading killer in the US. One of the best way to prevent heart disease is being physically fit and active. By your logic we should be mandating exercise for everyone to prevent it right? Shouldn't we also be forcing people to quite drinking and smoking as well?
Overall its just a slippery slop when you give the government this right. What happens if conservatives get in power and decided abortion should be banned outright as they consider a fetus a person? By the same logic you are using, they would be perfectly reasonable to do that.
As to the hear disease comment those comparisons are disingenuous because you can choose to exercise or not and your choice doesn’t impact others. My 7yo son cannot be vaccinated, he has no choose but to rely on others doing their part
As far as heart disease, in my opinion it does drastically impact other people. Heart disease patients take up hospital beds, they take up medical supplies, they take up doctors time. The CDC says ~1 in 4 deaths is due to heart disease. (https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm) It is a massive drain on our medical system (perhaps the greatest).
1. The data out of Israel on vaccine efficacy with Delta is out of line with other studies on the matter and is generally considered to suffer from some methodological flaws. See https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891 for a study out of Britain showing an efficacy of 88% against symptomatic infection. There is much more data that corroborates only slightly reduced efficacy and the Israel study is the outlier so anchoring to that number is probably a mistake.
2. The Pronvicetown study (where 74% of infected were vaccinated) doesn't tell you anything about vaccine efficacy. The vaccine rate for the town or state are irrelevant since the event in question included a large number of tourists. The town itself only has ~3000 people but there were 60k people there from all over the country at the week-long event.
3. Here is a study showing higher mutational variance in unvaccinated patients: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v.... This is exactly what we should expect. Vaccines drastically reduce the rate of transmission so we should have a strong prior that they would also reduce the rate of mutation.
Until we have answers that are absolutely certain and the long-term risks are known, we are merely experimenting on the whole of the populace, which could lead to disastrous long-term outcomes.
Policy should be based on facts, not guesses.
However, I think your other points are incorrect. Policy making is always about making decisions under uncertainty so we have to make the best decisions we can given the data we have. And the data we have I believe is overwhelmingly clear that any risks associated with vaccination are dramatically smaller than the risks of COVID itself. To date I am unaware of any substantiated risks of vaccination which aren't also risks of COVID infection and where the risk is much higher from infection than from vaccination. It can be tricky at times because mass vaccination will generally affect more people than infection so you have to weigh the relative risks appropriately. However, in the current case where we have a highly infectious respiratory virus we seem destined to end up with an endemic disease which only happens when ~100% of the population has already been either vaccinated or infected. So to first approximation your only two choices are to get the vaccine or (eventually) get infected with COVID. Given that and the very clear data we have now about the relatively insignificant risks of the vaccine relative to infection, getting vaccinated should be the obvious best option. After all, getting infected with a novel virus that is (now) easily preventable is ALSO experimenting with your health.
2. I have to disagree here. The CDC report is dealing with Massachusetts residents infected (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm?s_cid=mm...). It did not include out of state infections. So I would say comparing the state vaccination rate to how many vaccinated state residents got covid is a valid comparison. In fact from what I have seen this study is being used to justify the CDC recommending masks for all again.
3. Thank you very much for this link. I keep seeing a study referenced but was not able to find it. However it has not been peer reviewed yet so we don't really know if its accurate. Any chance you have a study pre-COVID that show this?
This is a ridiculous argument and I'd say mostly FUD. Abortion is pretty well litigated. Conservatives have been in power in state and national govts for years and they've barely managed to get anywhere close to this.
For comparison, that's about twice the US death rate due to flu in 2019, and about 1/40th the US death rate due to COVID before vaccinations were available (and before the delta variant was in the US). That's about 10x better than death rate pre-vaccination in the state that had the lowest death rate (Hawaii).
Then you also should worry about Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE).
"...as well as getting sick when they didn't have to, hurting themselves while taking up healthcare resources in the process."
Like obese people?
This can be downloaded as an image, into apple wallet etc. For those who chose not to, they can stick to carrying around their vaccine card (just as anyone carries around an ID, cash, credit card, cell phone, mask, etc) or just keep a picture of it on their phone
The vaccine is free for everyone, so there's very little discrimination there. In NY there are plenty of sites to go to where you can walk in and be out today in under an hour. Likely half an hour.
As to the privacy, yes, that's a fair concern but its literally no different than having to get a vaccine to travel to certain countries. Data exposed is minimal and not that much more than what would be gathered showing your ID when buying alcohol which contains your name, dob, address, etc. Far more personal information then if I'm vaxxed.
Those who are ineligible for the vaccine (due to age mostly now) I don't think are subject to this. Most people with medical conditions are still able to get vaxxed. If not, they especially should not be going out. Those who are vaxxed and also immunocompromised have far less protection as well compared to their peers who aren't immunocompromised.
Anyone over the minimum age qualifies for the vaccine.
If people at this point are willfully choosing not to get vaccinated tough luck. Its absurd and they shouldn't be allowed to prevent those of us who care about each other and the community from enjoying life again.
Anwhere where unvaxxed people have to take time out because they're sick is time they could have spent working, contributing towards their families or communities, and someone is going to have to take up the work.
So not, at a collective level, unvaccinated people are _very much_ preventing others from enjoying themselves.
> and someone is going to have to take up the work.
There is a lot of unemployment. This is also true for the paid and unpaid leaves btw, should we illegalise these?
If you are consistently taking leave because you puke your guts out every week from eating spoiled food, that wouldn't be much of an excuse for paid leave.
I find the same is true for those who choose not to vaccinate. I do not find that to be a reasonable risk profile to accommodate in a consequence-free manner.
They typically don't put COVID patients in the same vicinity as other patients for obvious reasons. There's usually a dedicated COVID wing.
If we get to pick what we get to shame ICU bed occupancy for, I've got a LOT of other ideas that people probably won't like.
By definition, society is made of up lots of interactions which prevent others from enjoying themselves. I struggle to understand why the line gets drawn at COVID.
In NY it's trivial to get this vaccine. Getting it is certainly easier than getting any other government id (state id, permit, driver's license etc). Certainly ID is needed to purchase alcohol, drive a car, etc. Maybe not at a bar, but often for purchasing alcohol from a liquor or wine store.
> Besides, people who have not had the Covid vaccine are not directly preventing anyone from enjoying life.
Of course they are. They're taking up space in hospitals, endangering public health, and causing unnecessary harm by spreading covid and increasing the risk of a new variant.
The reasoning for restricting behavior based on people's Covid risk (including vaccination status) is exactly the same as in the scenarios above.
People vaccinated against Covid can choose today to live a normal life, confident in the vaccine's protection against their serious illness or hospitalization, without scapegoating those not vaccinated for the entirely predictable seasonal and variant spread of Covid, or forcing struggling small businesses to hire bouncers to check the medical papers of every customer.
government: take these shots or you'll never get your lives back
person who keeps up with the news: how DARE the people who won't take their shots hold us hostage like this!
https://twitter.com/gnocchiwizard/status/1419721365276475394
Put up at least a half honest response to contribute to the discussion
Only available to those who got vaccinated in New York. And given that the NYC border is all of a couple hundred yards from New Jersey and 10 miles from Connecticut, there are tons of people who either live in the city and got vaccinated elsewhere, or else who live elsewhere but are in the city on a daily basis.
But this isn't about other cities and states so this isn't relevant. States, just like countries, are allowed to impose their own laws so long as they don't encroach on rights and laws from the federal government.
Comity is a legal standard that neighboring states can choose to embrace.
So you're saying that since I live in Connecticut, I'm allowed to eat indoors in NYC without showing proof of vaccination? I realize that this is literally what the article says, but surely that must be a mistake, no?
Vaccine card or leave.
If CT wants to work with NY to create a comity law understanding or a common vaccine card (IE accept CT digital vaccine cards) the states can work together.
There is a quite literal, and federally-mandated, difference.
You literally aren't even allowed to ask for someone's ID to cross internal US borders - but you think medical records, which contain just as much (if not more) personally-identifying information would be okay?
"Show me your papers, please."
I understand that this is not inter-state travel, but at the same time you cannot be required to provide your identification by law enforcement or others without cause within them. It is not illegal to walk about without documentation as to who you are.
You aren't even required to show identification to walk into a tobacco or liquor store - only to purchase.
Certain government buildings, bars, clubs, and smoking lounges are the only exceptions I know of to this rule. There is no compelling reason to expand that list, nor the information they are allowed to request.
Of course its okay to walk around without an ID, no one suggests otherwise. But if you go to a restaurant without an ID, and get carded you can't order your drink.
Is the restaurant obligated to serve you then? Absolutely not.
You can enter the state without a vaccine card, you just won't be able to enjoy eating out in all the incredible restaurants in the state.
You can require a driver's license to drive on specified roads in the state, and you can apply that rule to out-of-state residents.
Similarly, you can require proof of vaccination at certain public venues, and apply thar rule to out-of-state residents.
If they want the full NY experience which includes eating at a restaurant they must follow the laws in NY. One of these is paying the NY sales tax, not the sales tax of the state from which they're visiting. They also must comply with NY's vaccine requirements to eat at a restaurant.
If they don't want to, they're welcome to come and enjoy all the other activities that don't require proof of vaccination.
That’s easily faked. To prove vaccination, a picture of a card is not sufficient. If that’s all that’s required as proof then this won’t accomplish anything meaningful.
This is otherwise whataboutism about an issue that isn't an issue.
FWIW, the excelsior pass may be far harder to fake and end up being a solution to this currently non-problem
This is not "real data", it's not even clear what your number refers to. "Life is safe"?
No, its not; its based on transmission being reduced and infections less dangerous among the vaccinated, which mitigates (though does not fully eliminate) the dangers of being fully open, and the policy judgement that the burden of requiring the (freely available) vaccine for such activity is warranted by the public health benefit.
As someone who is vaccinated, I'm frankly tired of wearing masks, and I don't feel I should have to wear one to protect someone else who is refusing a vaccine.
From the FDA[1]:
> Q: Do face masks provide protection from coronavirus?
> A: Masks may help prevent people who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus to others. The CDC has guidance for wearing masks. Wearing a face mask may limit exposure to respiratory droplets and large particles and may help prevent people who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and...
Or someone who has decided that a short life as an alcoholic was preferable to being sober and will need all sorts of medical intervention?
Or someone who participates in extreme sports and now need their back fused because of multiple injuries?
So why is anyone supporting this?
EDIT: please see @_Microft's comment above for an explanation of how HN will "pool" threads before coming to a conclusion :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
(You can also access the second-chance pool via the link labelled "Lists" in the footer of the front page if you do not want to remember it.)
If you really care, you might want to ask dang (email hn@ycombinator.com) but I am confident that my explanation is not that far off.
I replied to this article when it was first published yesterday. It looks like the whole thread got copied over when it was posted a second time.
Unless, of course, you think I am GPT-3. Can't rule it out.
There are vast demographics for which this is actually the case. Children under 18, for example.
If you think these passports will only ever be used to check for Covid vaccination status, or that they'll be rolled back once Covid is no longer killing appreciable numbers of people, you're as gullible as they come and I can only assume have been paying no attention to how these sorts of "temporary," "for the duration of the 'emergency' " measures have progressed over the past 20 years. This is the tip of the spear for implementing permanent a social credit system in the West.
Yeah, let's let the state mandate that you buy an injection every year from private pharmaceutical companies, with extremely dodgy records and motivated entirely by profit, just to participate in normal life. What could go wrong?
It seems pretty weird to ask the indoor business owners to be the ones who are in charge of controlling that the vaccination rate is increasing and to be the one who are punished because the vaccination rate is not high enough.
I got my vaccine early on, and haven't been tested since.
This was based on the fact the same level of virus load was found in both populations that were infected.
These are the key words. But the odds of being infected in the first place are lower if you are vaccinated. So given a choice to spend time with a vaccinated stranger or an unvaccinated one, you should prefer the former if you want to avoid getting sick.
I'd much rather enforce vaccinations than masks.
Well, CDC is saying even vaccinated people should be masking. So it seems we are moving to a public-space mask everywhere all the time.
The CDC does worry about infections due to the risk of escaped mutants.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/cdc-covid-19-only-a...
If you're worried about covid then get the vaccination. For people who want to take a risk, let them do it.
I have the vaccine so why do I care if Im around people that have covid? We believe in science right?
What does the science tell you about the risks to vaccinated individuals when exposed to other vaccinated individuals or to non vaccinated individuals?
The goal is to avoid overloading the hospital system. Vaccinated people spreading the Delta variant amongst each other is not going to do that. Unvaccinated people getting sick will.
This is clearly not the goal -- there have been no additions to hospital capacity since the pandemic started in earnest 17 months ago.
If that's the goal we need to decide what things are ok to go to the hospital for and what aren't. A lot of hospital visits could be prevented if we took the obesity epidemic seriously - I imagine the CFR of covid would be way down if America was not so obese.
And if we're ok with mandating vaccines, we should definitely be ok with mandating a healthy bodyfat %. The health gains from the latter would dwarf that of the former.
That's a lovely multi-generational idea and we should work towards it in the coming decades. Meanwhile, as 400 Americans die of a preventable illness every single day, we should prioritize reducing the hospitalization rate. Florida became the most recent state to halt surgeries at some hospitals... again.
They make themselves more vulnerable to a number of viruses - not just covid. Healthier immune systems reduce transmission.
We have inconclusive data on the protection past infection affords with respect to the Delta variant. We have decent data showing the mRNA vaccines work. We also have inconclusive but pointed data about the Delta variant being more problematic for younger people [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/health/covid-young-adults...
UK just peaked (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/); Does NYC have significantly worse vaccine coverage in vulnerable populations or worse capacity?
My friend, a plastic surgeon, was drafted to tend to an entire floor of folks on ventilators. No other doctors. Occasionally, an exhausted nurse. He spent the last twenty years doing face lifts. I think some patients were in doctor’s offices.
We also halted surgeries and cancer patients’ visits and hosts of other stuff to keep the strained system from going New Delhi.
Yes, because exactly that happened in March and April of 2020, leading to tens of thousands of deaths. Here's your evidence[1][2][3].
[1] https://abc7ny.com/nyc-hospital-queens-coronavirus-news/6070...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/us/brooklyn-hospital-coronavi...
[3] https://www.foxnews.com/health/nyc-hospitals-overwhelmed-by-...
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-trends.pag...
NYC's hospitalizations dipped to ~18 admitted/day citywide in June and are up to ~50 now. But that's a long way from 350 over winter and far away from hitting 1700 in the initial surge.
The UK government realized that even with their high case spike (to winter level) that vaccination ensured that hospitalizations would not come close, so they ended restrictions at what in retrospect was their peak cases. Their admission rate hit maybe a quarter of their winter rate even though case rate peak was similar. (vaccine cut hospitalization rate per case by 75%).
To my point, unless we're substantially different from the UK, it doesn't look like hospitalization capacity should be a concern with this wave.
You are either making a truly extraordinary claim, or are supporting my point. If vaccination significantly reduces viral load in 95% of cases, it's true that it might not reduce it for everyone. But it makes a huge difference, in terms of public health. Both epidemics, and viral infections are a numbers game. Reduce the denominator in an exponent, or a constant multiplier, and you get the difference between life and death.
They sampled people who were getting tested for COVID, and divided the samples into vaccinated-with-breakthrough-cases-who-got-tested and unvaccinated-and-sick-who-got-tested.
This completely fails to account for people who are vaccinated, and don't have breakthrough cases, which is the overwhelming majority of vaccinated individuals.
Because of the incredible sampling bias in the study [1], the conclusions that it makes are significantly less extraordinary than your claims.
Just because someone somewhere runs a study that compares 50 dead-in-car-crash people who were wearing seat belts, and 50 dead people who weren't wearing seat belts, you can't conclude that wearing a seatbelt does not reduce your risk of death or injury.
So far the data coming out of the EU has indicated that when passports and certificates were introduced, there was an uptick in vaccination the day the measure was introduced. Estonia, for instance, has seen this happen.
If their businesses are spreading the disease then it seems entirely reasonable.
However, it really sucks that the people who mostly end up trying to enforce the mandate are the staff who already have, in most countries, jobs that most of us would not consider fun. The people most likely to insist on going out to eat and entertain are, generally, the sorts of unpleasant folk that already treat waitstaff poorly.
Just FYI, a vaccinated person, like anyone else, can only transmit the virus if they have a symptomatic breakthrough case.
Edit: Down voters, I would appreciate an explanation for the down votes. Am I missing something simple or is OP mistaken?
If this is the case, I stand by my questioning of OP's statement: "a vaccinated person, like anyone else, can only transmit the virus if they have a symptomatic breakthrough case."
This seems an oversimplification.
This one is great because it really brings to light the issue with deciphering the data...
"Since asymptomatic infections represent a large fraction of the infected population, they contribute substantially to community transmission in the aggregate together with presymptomatic cases, even when they individually transmit at a low per capita rate."
So as best I understand it, the vaccinated are orders of a magnitude less likely to be asymptomatic spreaders, compared to the unvaccinated. As with pretty much everything relating to disease and epidemiology, there are very few absolutes.
As a tangent, I wish we would get rid of this "zero covid spaces" mania, makes having a reasonable discussion between those who want to continue our lives as normal as possible given the circumstances (I am one of them) and those who want to get back to an illusory "pre-covid normal" basically impossible.
One of my grand-mothers died of tuberculosis about 10 years ago. Imo it's as nasty a death as death by covid is. A quick web search tells me 1.4 million people die of TB each year, I suppose an average of 1.4 million (give or take a few hundred-thousands) have died of TB each year for the last half-century at least. Nobody ever talked about us disrupting our daily lives in order to bring TB cases to zero.
Not even remotely the same thing.
Probably covid deaths will trickle down to 500-600 per year in places like the US in a few years, a combination of higher access to vaccines and better health facilities, and the number will remain high in places like India/SE Asia, just like it now happens with TB.
The majority of deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and SE Asia. That leads me to believe that the differentiator is access to medical care, primarily access to life saving drugs.
Actually, COVID has been 1000x more deaths, not 100x.
Well, yes, In the same way an infant may fight Muhammad Ali. Futurama references aside, the vast majority of data shows that vaccinated people are far less likely to spread the virus.
Ill bite and present a good faith argument.
Let's start with the fact COVID-19 is not a very scary disease. The media makes it seem FAR worse than the reality.
Yes, there are risks. It appears to be 2-4x more deadly than influenza, but primarily impacts people with pre-existing conditions. As such, those individuals should protect themselves. If society needs to make some minor accommodations that may make sense. Example, perhaps we allow elderly to shop 6-9am at stores. They're given n95's, etc.
To put it in perspective, in 2020 people in their 80's have a 20% higher chance of death than 2019, so if you have a 5% chance of dying per year, we're talking 6%. That's not dramatic.
> 1. You have fears about getting a vaccine, moreso than for coronavirus. If this is you, do you prefer a mask mandate? And if so, how do you enforce this in a restaurant, where anyone eating takes off their mask right away?
The evidence cloth masks are effective doesn't exist. As such, the policy doesn't make sense. Surgical and N95 masks do have evidence they help, but aren't primarily what people are using.
If you're talking about "fears about getting the vaccine", the vaccine isn't approved and there are treatments for covid-19. Meaning we shouldn't have emergency use authorization at this point AND it's not an FDA approved drug. Even if it becomes approved, I would not expect anyone to take it without discussing with their doctors.
Trials today are not completed. All we have are preliminary reports (phase 1, 2, 3):
https://www.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/providers/clini...
Long term impacts wont be known for 5-10 years. Further, many people can't have the vaccines.
I dont' see an issue with the vaccines, but people should be informed and not coerced.
> 2. You have fears about the privacy implications. If so, what are those fears? Perhaps your vaccination status can lead people to make inferences about your health?
In terms of privacy, the 4th amendment protects against government search and seizures. When government mandates papers being reviewed, they are effectively acting as agents of the state and doing searches.
Further, doctors should be the ones managing care, not bureaucrats. Historically, CDC and FDA issue suggestions and provide evidence. It's dangerous to try and enforce vaccines when we aren't taking into account pre-existing conditions. For instance, there are drugs, ages, pre-existing conditions, all of which impact vaccine effectiveness and risk profile(s).
Coercing people to take a take part in a human experimentation is something we consider a crime against humanity.
> 3. You are not particularly concerned about the community spread of coronavirus (and the implications of that)
The disease is already wide spread and approximately everyone has been exposed. Arguably the vast majority have a partial immunity (had the disease or vaccine). If it's still spreading, there's nothing we can do. Further, the delta variant spreads more easily, but is less deadly. So we shouldn't really worry here.
If you're vaccinated you shouldn't care whether other people in the restaurant are. That's the point of vaccination after all.
And if you're not vaccinated obviously you're not going to be in favor of this new mandate.
The people who support policies like these are vaccin efficacy denialists, petty tyrants, and doomers of various sorts.
And there are good reasons to not want to live in a "papers please" society.
A group of people in a room all vaccinated is safer than a group of people half vaccinated.
The vaccine is not a boolean on off switch, it's a percentage wise improvement over nothing, and it compounds when those around are also vaccinated.
Please provide some citation for this outrageous claim that the point of a vaccine is to NOT provide immunity from infection.
"Vaccines can be prophylactic (to prevent or ameliorate the effects of a future infection by a natural or "wild" pathogen), or therapeutic (to fight a disease that has already occurred, such as cancer)."
That is actually not the point of vaccinations. The point of vaccinations is public health.
I bet dollars to donuts you will be surprised by the answer.
https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/4/7157037/us-voter-id-req...
https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/644648955/for-older-voters-ge...
https://rewirenewsgroup.com/ablc/2014/10/16/well-actually-pr...
https://www.theregreview.org/2019/01/08/shapiro-moran-burden...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/10/heres-h...
https://scholars.org/contribution/high-cost-free-photo-voter...
I'm curious, what solution do you propose to exclude the 23.4 million non-citizen residents, 10.3 million illegal residents and 5.2 million felons from voting? How do you verify that somebody is legally permitted to vote?
Over the last 40-some years, Conservatives and Republicans have been incredibly successful at destroying the idea of government which is effective and serves the public. The result is that oppositional defiance and grievance politics are all we have left.
This is what I mean by "grievance politics". This is not true, but "feels" like it it is. If Congress has done "a great job of passing legislation", what were the legislative achievements of the Trump administration? How did that government reduce its role in our lives? How did the government "shrink" in any way, which is supposed to be the Republican promise?
Republicans/Conservatives don't think the government should provide for society in the same way that Democrats/Liberals do. It's why Republicans politicized wearing a mask and now vaccination, because it's the government doing things. More importantly, telling them to do things. It's why Republicans universally obstruct the progress of the Democrats (see Mitch McConnell not filling a Supreme Court seat) but the reverse isn't generally true. Republicans don't want to pass much of anything, and many Democrats vote for the things they do.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter who is blamed for corruption and incompetence, it still serves to further the idea that government shouldn't do anything. That's not an option when there's a disease ripping though society, which is why the reaction against vaccination and masking is so strong. It's directly challenging the idea that government and society can be effective at solving a problem if we work together. The Jeffersonian ideal of a weak government presiding over a agrarian society is outdated and not a meaningful model for modern society.
Yes it is an option, always. Government always has the option to do nothing and leave people to their own decisions. There is no objective truth that this should ever have been any kind of government issue at all.
If you use an emergency to justify expanding government power, what you get is a perpetual emergency.
Government doing nothing doesn't just leave us to our own decisions, it makes us more vulnerable to the decisions of others. You could even argue that the whole point of a government is to limit the impact that my decisions have on you, and vice versa.
I've had police tell me the rationalization for seatbelt laws is by minimizing ambulance use in crashes, it saves the lives of others and reduces traffic congestion. This is the reasoning put forth for making not wearing a seatbelt a ticketable offense. Last I checked emergency services like ambulances aren't even considered an essential service provided by the government, yet we're being nickel and dimed by the government on their behalf as something so essential we mustn't unnecessarily affect their availability.
Seat belt laws seem mostly about fundraising for local governments from where I'm sitting. When they have a budget shortfall, suddenly traffic stops are tacking on seat belt tickets like gangbusters.
Happens enough to be a problem[1][2][3].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC419765/
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/08/03/unbuckled-bac...
[3] https://www.washington.edu/news/2004/01/20/unbelted-drivers-...
I’m not an antivaxer. The vaccine works and I believe it’s really safe. I’m vaccinated. Nearly anyone who is capable to go to a bar can easily go get vaccinated. If they don’t, I’m not interested in saving them from themselves, honestly.
If the spread or variant breakthrough or some other aspect is so critical that we need to resort to novel privacy violations we should just shut down again instead.
My position is indeed speculative, however it’s not without evidence. We very rarely regain rights or freedoms when they are taken so I think it’s valid to be concerned about the same thing happening here.
Please give examples
Granted, ~20 years is a pretty good run.
Trade & tariff conflicts of the 1930s, which spiraled from a smaller economic conflict into a larger economic conflict and into the great depression. All because the government was given too much leash to run with.
Letting the government (and Fed) bail out Wall Street repeatedly and institutionalize too big to fail as an economic policy.
The US Government specializes in lubricating slopes and speeding down them.
At some point, you just have to look down and notice that the slope of the ground is negative, and everything is greasy.
Other people have covered that in many comments throughout this thread. I personally don't want to live in a world where I am asked to show my papers -- whatever those papers may be -- to participate in daily life.
> Do you think unvaccinated people should be allowed to travel internationally?
I think so, but it's certainly within the rights of any nation to choose the rules by which foreigners may enter their country. I care less about this than I do about having to show a "passport" to get food.
> Isn’t that really dangerous?
In a highly vaccinated population? No. That's the point of vaccines. Once the threat of (involuntary) serious and illness and death has been abrogated, SARS-CoV2 takes its place amongst the pantheon of other respiratory viruses that we have lived with for centuries.
Has that participation ever involved travel to another country? Standard passports exist for very good reasons... otherwise, there wouldn't be 100% of nations who depend on them (are there even any nations that don't ask for one?)
And most western countries are still far to far from being highly vaccinated. If they were, we wouldn't need to ask for their vaccination status.
Yes, long term we either manage to actually erradicate SARS-Cov-2 or at least reduce it to the group of all the other dangerous viruses we can deal with. If the vaccination rate is high enough. Think measels. They didn't ever go away, but for many years, they were not a problem. They are back due to too many people who think they can skip the vaccinations.
And if you ever tried to go onto international, especially intercontinental travel, many countries require proof of vaccination against a variety of diseases.
We're not talking about "most western countries"...we're talking about New York City, where 72% of the adult population has had at least one dose, and about 0.2% get another dose, every day:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.p...
It's all on the same page I linked.
I don't want to be around people who can make me sick. If I go to a restaurant and I'm vaccinated, and everyone else is as well, it's very unlikely I will make others sick or that they'll make me sick. If you go, you may make vaccinated or unvaccinated people sick, and they may make you sick.
You're the one that's intruding on other people's freedoms here.
Well, first...I'm not sure why you think I support those other things? If your argument is that I'm a hypocrite, you might be disappointed to find out that I'm not. If your argument is that because we do those other things, we should do this thing...well, my goodness. That is a slippery slope, isn't it?
But perhaps more importantly, there's an obvious, bright-line difference between drinking alcohol in a bar or flying on a plane, and having to show papers to do 99% of the things I do on a daily basis.
At this point, there is no power conceivable that the Federal government could not claim under the umbrella of "it might affect commerce somewhere".
Most of the powers the Federal government has seized from the states have been rationalized under the ICC. Like making it illegal for a farmer to grow wheat on his own farm to feed his own animals. [1]
> The Court decided that Filburn's wheat-growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for animal feed on the open market, which is traded nationally, is thus interstate, and is therefore within the scope of the Commerce Clause. Although Filburn's relatively small amount of production of more wheat than he was allotted would not affect interstate commerce itself, the cumulative actions of thousands of other farmers like Filburn would become substantial. Therefore the Court decided that the federal government could regulate Filburn's production.
The doctors who gained, then lost, police powers to enforce quarantine during the "Spanish Flu" would like to have a word
Emphasis on the last year and half, too.
It’s too risky to themselves and others for unvaccinated people to drive to a bar to drink alcohol. Ha. Similar to swabbing the injection site for lethal injections to avoid infections.
Covid is a public health crisis -- the single most dangerous existential threat we as a society are currently facing -- and we have great tools to kill it dead. Letting it spread right now is just stupid, because we can end this plague once and for all. While we're working on it, I think it's totally fair to let someone check your vaccination status before you pack yourself into close quarters with them. It's not a matter of the government or the corporate overlords wanting your health information. As the person standing next to you in a crowded bar, I don't want you there if you're not vaccinated. If indoor businesses won't check customers, then I won't go to those indoor businesses, and if enough people think like me, those businesses are gone forever.
Get vaccinated or stay home. You have a choice!
(The real threat during crises like these is things like "we shouldn't have a free press, because nutjobs are spreading misinformation". That is an exceedingly dangerous line of thinking and we should push back against that hard, because the cure is worse than the disease. That's not the case with Covid -- the cure is much better than the disease.)
All that money would be gone towards border control, though.
Will it be gone? As far as I understand, the Delta variant remains contagious even among vaccinated people, so it will likely stay around. Now that there’s vaccines, it’s just less dangerous (to the vaccinated). But any system of health checks you set up now could stay in place for a long time.
> The Mets won't care if you got your flu shot this year
The flu shot is a pretty interesting example. People die all the time because others didn’t get their flu shot. Where I live only half of the healthcare workers get it. The Mets could save lives by requiring that their patrons get it. And yet we don’t get very worked up about these jabs. Maybe covid showed us that we should? I don’t know, but it shows that covid isn’t some unique phenomenon, and that the way we deal with will have repercussions how we deal with other health issues going forward.
Rule #1 in politics: Always set the bar to success at idealistic level, so you can fail and blame it on the scapegoats who didn’t trust the government. “BECAUSE some people didn’t vaccinate, we must lock down everyone again and ruin your economy. Blame it on them!” (Mao revolution failed because there were still some naysayers; Saving women fails because there are still some men opposed to true equality defined by unreachable levels of compliance, etc).
But politicians are talented: When you can’t actually solve a crisis (and Covid can’t be solved because it’s out there, now), you’d better quickly find a scapegoat to concentrate everyone’s blame on.
It will never be completely gone though, like terrorism.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Due to privacy concerns I certainly won't be sharing my health information with random businesses.
Covid will _never_ be gone.
Ever.
Do you pay cash for everything? nnever use a credit card? Don't fly?
BTW I'm opposed to scanning for flying too. No fly lists are an example that came out of this practice. They'll do the same with this new system - no go lists for those with a low enough social credit score.
I hate it. There's no good reason to scan my ID when I'm very obviously of legal age. Some of the bars do this for tracking data and to sell your personal info. Some of the bars are lazy and it's a relatively straightforward way to validate your card.
There's a good reason to validate that I have a vaccine, though, because my presence there affects the life of the staff and other customers. I'm not giving up freedom here, because it's not my freedom to put others at risk, and they shouldn't have the freedom to put mine at risk.
Your slippery slope arguments are also really bad. You can already be (and already are) tracked by your cell phone at all times. We don't need vaccine checks to do it. If the scary government was going to come get you, they have more than enough at their disposal currently to do it.
Don't want to get vaccinated? Fine. Have a valid medical reason, pay a $2500 fee, or leave the city.
>90% of people will just get vaccinated.
So let's make the policy be "you get $500 to get the vaccine or get a doctor's note saying why not. If not you pay a fine". Yeah Bezos gets it (that's why you tax rich people more than poor people, to get the money back later).
Now do you have a problem with this policy?
We shouldn’t applaud the normalization of health status checks outside of a global pandemic.
People see this as a way to go back to the movies again without having to feel guilty about potentially killing someone's grandma. This is an alternative to going back into lockdown.
I'm genuinely curious: what are your privacy concerns here?
I like to think I'm a privacy-minded person, and I can't imagine how the benefits of this policy (keeping things open, preventing hospitalizations, saving lives) wouldn't possibly outweigh the cons (having to bring a vaccine card to a concert).
Basically, I would hope mandates like this are done on the science instead of on the hope that if we're all very good citizens and get our shots we will somehow be rewarded with protection from the big bad virus and an end to the pandemic.
On a related note, I wonder why antibody levels aren't used. I mean, we should want to measure outcomes, not output. If you have comparable levels of antibodies from natural infection vs the vaccine, then you should be well protected. Conversely, if you recieved the vaccine but your immune system does not produce a sufficient level of antibodies, then they shouldn't be considered "safe", right? This question was mostly based on an article I saw about a nurse who was fired because she didn't get the vaccine eventhough she had antibodies. It made me think it was mostly a move by some corporate lawyer limit liability.
"you can "take your chances" with the vaccine which, statistically and biologically, is safer than getting coronavirus."
Can you elaborate on what you mean by biologically safer? Also, I'm looking forward to the data Pfizer will be releasing soon for their regular market approval, because I haven't been able to find good statistics about covid v vaccine serious side effects by risk factor(s).
IMO, people with legitimate medical conditions should just be granted excelsior passes, the same as those who are vaccinated. There's few enough people with these conditions that it shouldn't be a health issue.
Religious exemptions are the tricky one, since NYC especially has e.g. orthodox jews clustered together in their own communities. IMO, they should not got passes. If they don't want a vaccine, fine—they just won't be able to go to the movies.
Yeah, religious exclusions get tricky. Really the whole thing can be tricky because it comes down to philosophical beliefs of what should be mandated and for whom.
Edit: Why so many downvotes without reply?
If they're around lots of people, even vaccinated folks, they'll still catch covid and die
It's all a probability game. Add to this that the sole unvaccinated person is the one most at risk in any given setting, and I'm really fine letting them make their own choices.
As my mother is an Israeli citizen, she was given the "green passport", as my father was only in Israel on a "tourist visa", he was not. this is just an artifact of the current Israeli system where they aren't giving "green passports" to tourists, but demonstrating that one can give them to people that show sufficient antibodies.
That's ridiculous, but hey it's the blankfaces making/enforcing the rules! [0]
1) People that will get resistance via vaccines
2) People that will get resistance via infection
Some 30-40% of the US population decided on #2. Roughly 0.7% of them will die because of that decision, but this is exactly what they are asking for! If you are in cohort #1, you really don't have a lot to worry about from the virus. Why are you denying people the consequences of their decisions?
Yes, the medical system will be briefly overrun, and it would be a terrible time to need hospitalization. That's a good argument for getting it over as quickly as possible! The delta variant is estimated to have an R0 of 8-10. Let it rip and the surge will be over in weeks.
What about the children? Serious negative effects on kids seem to be extraordinarily rare. The kids will be fine.
I am only half joking here. "We live in a society" cuts both ways - we have to respect the general health of everyone, but we also have to respect the explicit wishes of a huge portion of the population - almost a third. The good news is that almost exclusively, they're going to be the ones dying. I can live with that.
I do not want a substantial number of people getting sick and having to use collective resources to heal them at the expense of others because of a collectively bad choice. I do not want to substitute, work overtime, or have reduced productivity due to this.
While vaccinated people are fairly safe, even with us all being vaccinated we are adding to the background risk of hospitalization the equivalent of several hard flu seasons. I've had a really bad flu where I felt I was dying, twice in my life. I do not look forward to having my body bearing that brunt every couple of years for the rest of my life.
Why are you ok with using this argument for covid, but not smoking / obesity / football / etc.? The principle is sound, but the selective application is not.
I am very much in favor of taxing cigarretes and unhealthy foods so that consumers pay for the externalities of their actions.
Mutations can happen anywhere in the world. To reduce the odds of mutations, we need to vaccinate as many people as we can globally. Our efforts would be much better spent getting vaccines in the hands of people in other countries that are very willing to take it.
I'm very much with you, but I think that ship sailed between the lack of international coordination, the lack of vaccination mandates or other measures to improve rates even in the well-supplied-with-vaccine US, and the rush to remove other measures like closures and mask mandates way before it made any sense to.
Instead, we're running an active program to train COVID to overcome the "miracle" vaccine we're so proud of. Should be... interesting.
That ship has sailed? Covid is not going away, ever. It's politically impossible to mandate 100% vaccination, and even if you could, there's still animal reserves. The best case scenario is that covid becomes like the common cold, and you can mostly avoid it with occasional booster shots.
I wish everyone would get vaccinated too, but let's be realistic. How many years do you think you can keep up rules like "must show vaccination card to enter"? At what point does everyone, including vaccinated people, start ignoring them? Personally I think it's going to fail out of the gate, and I'm on team vax.
Why not? We managed to eradicate smallpox. There was political will all over the world to vaccinate almost everyone, and it worked. What's so different about Covid?
The risk of death after contracting the disease was about 30%, with higher rates among babies.[6][12] Often those who survived had extensive scarring of their skin, and some were left blind.
Only 57% have up to one dose.
If it was a vote the vaccine would have lost.
With the scale of vaccinations that we already have, COVID is firmly in the realm of influenza in terms of potential future deathtoll. In fact, for much of this year the UK had higher influenza deaths than COVID deaths:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/22/flu-pneumonia-de...
Why don't we pressure people to get influenza vaccines yearly?
False, the vaccine is more effective than antibodies from a previous infection. It's not a huge difference, but it is absolutely statistically significant.
Source or GTFO
EDIT: Your downvotes are delicious as you provide no source. The notion of vaccine immunity being stronger than natural immunity, especially with mRNA vaccines, is absurd. You are generating response to a single surface protein of the virus. The virus has many surface proteins and a natural infection will tune the immune system to respond to all of them. There is no evidence of vaccine immunity being stronger than natural.
Show me some real-world data of previously infected individuals getting severe reinfections at significantly higher rates than the fully vaccinated. That's the metric needed to make your claim and those data have not been produced. Also, the staying power of the vaccine is already in question BY ITS OWN MANUFACTURER just via the prospect of boosters. They admit implicitly that the immunity their drug produces does not last.
> circulating antibody levels alone are not definitive measures of immune status
This is well established in the literature.
The paper you have cited absolutely does not support the claim that the "vaccine is more effective than antibodies from a previous infection".
Go look for yourself. "Do I need varicella vaccine if I had chickenpox?" The answer is NO.
>Oh, this is a different disease
Okay, then produce a single study indicating that those with prior COVID infection are hospitalized with a reinfection at higher rates than the fully vaccinated. That study doesn't exist. It's all just arbitrary anti-body level response studies, which are useless. If you can't produce a study to show why this infectious disease should be treated differently than all the others, then we'll go with the default position: natural immunity is enough.
YOU are making at least 3 positive claims when advocating vaccination for those with prior COVID infections:
1) COVID natural immunity breaks historical patterns of natural immunity in similar infectious disease 2) People with "only" natural immunity are at significant risk of severe reinfection 3) There is a risk-adjusted, significant benefit for those with "only" natural immunity to get vaccinated
Unless you can cite at least one peer-reviewed primary source, then we must regard your claims as purely uninformed opinion.
And to further counter your claims, here is evidence that naturally acquired immunity is equally as effective as vaccination [1].
Quote from [1]:
- "The cumulative incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection remained almost zero among previously infected unvaccinated subjects, previously infected subjects who were vaccinated, and previously uninfected subjects who were vaccinated"
[1] Necessity of COVID-19 vaccination in previously infected individuals https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...
At least here in the US, we absolutely do.
Now, the consequences of getting to that more optimal virus I'm a lot more hazy about.
The Spanish flu mutated into a more deadly variant, half-way through that pandemic. It went on to kill more people than World War I.
After a year and a half of this nightmare, I'm not really interested in lifting a finger to help people who are both too stupid to help themselves, and who are putting the rest of us in danger by doing so. If you actively refuse to grab at a life preserver that we're tossing you, it's not on the rest of us to jump in the water to help you.
Full FDA approval is coming next month, but I'm sure by the time that happens, the goalposts will once again be moved, and there will be a new crop of excuses for why people aren't getting vaccinated. This has stopped being an argument about facts a very long time ago - it's now an argument about political identity.
Oh, this is not even remotely true. Our medical infrastructure is a limited, contended resources. When the medical system got overrun for several month, the risk is not only passed to those anti-vaxxers but also to those who with serious other medical conditions.
I don't believe this will have much of a net effect on vaccination rate, I believe it will disproportionately negatively impact poor and minority populations in NYC who already have a bad/mistrustful relationship with health care and government, and it is obviously a huge new governmental intrusion into our daily lives. It might well lead to anger and violence (as similar moves have across Europe).
These are my opinions, but I think the strongest arguments against it are facts: if you are fully vaccinated, you are at essentially no risk of serious illness from SARS-CoV2. And literally anyone who wants a vaccine can get one. Those who choose not to get vaccinated are making a risk calculation; they are making a choice.
This policy comes from an almost hysterical fixation on "cases", which are not a metric of any meaning. SARS-CoV2 is not going away. We should be reacting rationally to rates of hospitalization and deaths -- and right now, those are barely changed in NYC, thanks to the very high vaccination rate amongst the vulnerable population:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-trends.pag...
One can certainly argue that there exist small groups of people for whom the vaccine is not perfect protection. This is true, but it's no different than all other viruses, which have threatened immunocompromised people forever. We have never before justified such intrusive government policies based on the risks faced by these individuals. So while I empathize with them, this still seems like over-reach to me.
Literally not true. Kids under 12 are not able to be vaccinated, which puts a limit on the activities they and their families can do. If they're able to know that everyone inside a restaurant is vaccinated they'll be more likely to visit.
> It might well lead to anger and violence (as similar moves have across Europe).
Not really. There were some minor protests and then an untick in vaccination rate. As someone living in NYC right now I really can't see this being met with violence.
If unvax’d people represent such a risk to others in your judgment, you should not be part of putting unvax’d people in your own party into that situation.
(For context, I’m pro-vax, got vax’d literally the first day I was eligible, and have a kid under 12 that I can hardly wait until they’re eligible. I’m against any vax passport scheme that even theoretically allows tracking/correlation of my identity/location if shown to a party intent on tracking me.)
This policy is also hysterical, and not based in science. Kids should not be under any restrictions due to SARS-CoV2.
Please see my comment from yesterday as to why I believe this is true:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28041775
(Aside: I generally feel that the FDA is on the right side of history by being exceptionally careful with approval of the vaccine for children, but arguments like the parent's -- I hear this a lot in different contexts -- do sometimes make me wish that they'd just make an extremely limited approval so that the most fearful 5% of people can force it upon their children and stop holding the rest of the world hostage.)
To be clear, as a parent, it's not because I'm fearful, it's because a positive COVID test from any child in my kid's school means that it shuts down for two weeks, completely messing up our lives, jobs etc. I'm not going to defend that policy for a second as I don't think it's a good idea either, but it's what we're dealing with day in, day out. We're not hysterical fearmongers.
Completely agreed. This is a stupid, hysterical policy, and we should all be against it. I include it with my previous comment that children should face no restrictions from SARS-CoV2. What we've done to kids in the last year is so unethical that it makes me furious.
I don't mean to imply that you specifically, are hysterical, but this stuff is coming from a group of people who are operating based on fear and lack knowledge. And unfortunately, a great many of them are in positions of power.
All the young people have given away a year of their lives to "save grandma"... and now, the government wants them to give up another year, because few grandmas don't want to get vaccinated.
Since the vaccines are available to everyone, and enough time has passed, that everyone has had the chance to get vaccinated, then i have no moral issues if a few people die, because they took the risk, and lost the statistics game.
and before you say "kick the covid patients to the curb," morals aside do you really think that's politically feasible?
This comes full circle on the "show your papers" issue, but at least in this scenario showing papers is directly aligning cause and effect regarding death.
I really think there's a good chance it would be received OK. I think vaccinated people are sick of the shit from the other half or 40% and I think the unvaccaniated think they're immune to everything. I think they're happy taking their chances or w/e
How do you set that restrictions to adults are OK because we want to protect them, but for kids aren't? Those restrictions then kind of become pointless, don't they? Older people also want to see their grandkids desperately, I think that's a simple fact of life.
So unless I am reading it wrong, folks are annoyed because suddenly they have to take care of their kids for 2 weeks. I know I had a rough week+something when I was WFH and caring for our son whose kindergarden got closed due to covid (and he brought it home as we found almost a week later). But fuck, I've managed and it brought me closer to my son, juggling tons of conf calls and so can almost everybody else for few weeks. Its just a work, on all calls in past year there have been kids yelling in the background, sometimes mine too. It is actually properly cool to hear how those voices have their lives running in the background.
Its true that those who physically have to be present at work (like my wife, doctor) had tougher times if kindergardens locked down and no solution in sight. But the amount of couples where both parents were in same situation is properly miniscule, mostly folks that complain don't fall there. Its folks who had their convenient busy lives suddenly messed up a bit and had to fully focus on their closest ones and found out proper parenting 24/7 is hard.
Society doesn't have an easy coping mechanism for this since we don't have robot nannies immune to viruses. That sucks, and will suck. Minor obstacle that builds character and family bonds I'd say.
No, children are almost entirely safe from Covid. Don't exaggerate the risk.
> but then its almost guaranteed parents and everybody else in household will get it.
...and they can get vaccinated, and they will face the approximate risk profile of a cold or flu.
Look, it's like I said: there are people who are going to be at continued risk from this. That's unfortunate, but it's no different than any other virus we've lived with throughout human civilization. At this point, we're proposing extraordinary interventions to head off an ordinary level of risk.
The science behind COVID-19 is evolving, I see new information in the news every day that changes how I see this disease (usually for the worse, though not always). To simply assume children are safe and propose a policy of mass infection is extremely short sighted in my opinion.
I'm still undecided re: mandates as this is correctly viewed as a massive authoritarian extension of government power domestically on top of the 9/11 restrictions that never went away (it is already completely tyrannical abroad). However, for a reasonable society (not ours) I believe COVID-19, especially the Delta strain, presents a level of population risk that the consideration of such measures is warranted.
This society has little respect for the lives of teachers and staff that have to do the job of caring for kids so that parents can have time to work. I hoped that people would come away from the experience with a little bit of growth knowing how difficult it is to do childcare 24/7, but of course the entitlement knows no bounds.
My point is to put pressure on the people in power, not to blindly follow and then just mutter under your breath that you’re mad. They do not give a single crap if people are mad unless their power is threatened. Stand up for yourselves for crying out loud.
This is why I argue with some fellow libertarians on the idea of private company vaccine mandates. There's a place for it, such as this. Restaurants could differentiate this way. Different people have different needs. A government level mandate like this is insane.
For now...
If cases keep rising I don't see any reason why hospitalizations and deaths won't follow. Unless the delta variant is less dangerous or treatments have improved tremendously.
So, the options are 1)Stop indoor dining 2)Accept the public health implications or 3) Require vaccinations for high risk activities. I feel like option 3 imposes the least harm.
Yes, they are. In NYC, 73% of adults over 65 are fully vaccinated, and 77% have had at least one dose:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.p...
You're cherry-picking regions of low vaccination, but ignoring the overall metrics.
The local demographics don't matter unless there's a serious impact on the hospitals. That's why we started down this road, remember? It wasn't to eliminate death.
> I don't dine indoors because the vaccination rate in my neighborhood is 39%.
Are you vaccinated? If you are, you're worrying about something that is irrelevant to you. Avoiding restaurants because other people made a different choice is silly.
> And, while I'm probably not going to the hospital knowing that I might put one of my unvaccinated neighbors in there matters to me.
Ever had a head cold or the flu? You've put an elderly person at risk. Sorry, but it's true.
You can never eliminate this kind of risk. If your standard is "I must never present a risk to anyone else, ever" then you're going to have a really difficult life. You can live that way if you like, but don't force it on me.
They already have. Hospitalization rates have multiplied by a factor of nearly 4x from the 12,000 COVID hospitalizations in early July to the 40,000 COVID hospitalizations today in early August.
For everyone else, there are vaccines, or if they want, they can risk it without. Give priority to vaccinated patients, and you're done.
And you did not address the threat to our hospital system, which has been the number one concern for a year and a half. Surgeries are already being halted in multiple states... again. You might view it differently if it was your hospital that postponed your surgery because unvaccinated people had filled all their beds because of a preventable illness.
This was the underlying logic for the cdc to require masks once again
You mean the same people this mandate will prevent from participating in society?
You can't kill your neighbor's grandmother by bungee jumping.
https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2009/08/14/bonny-dooners-b...
Let me explain something to you guys, we worked through each "wave" and didn't really care. We were not "forced" to work. It was never a big deal.
The whole "woe is the working class during Covid" was just an excuse for neurotic professional class workers to WFH.
How is this not understood?
Vaccines should only be used for targeted at-risk population. Everyone else should strive for natural immunity.
"Leaky vaccines" result in catastrophic situations like Marek's disease.
Against the original Alpha perhaps. However Delta effectiveness is nowhere near 90%...this is precisely the reason for the push for boosters.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891
[edit] I'm sure with more data that number might change up or down a little, but it seems in line with other findings.
We don't have precise data about the required level of antibodies to stay healthy yet and in quite a few countries the infection rates are currently high enough to pose a real risk for vaccinated patients in the vulnerable group. The safe play is to give booster shots to keep the immune response at its best.
> How is this not understood?
The same way vaccines create selection pressure, so does natural immunity. Letting people get infected instead of vaccinating them actually makes the dice roll much more, as in orders of magnitude more.
Just look how most of the variants of concern, and mainly delta, appeared before any significant vaccine rollout, and further, delta shows high rates of reinfection vs. infection of vaccinated people.
Only vaccinating those at-risk will keep this going and going for God knows how long, and regularly overcrowding hospitals with very corageous freedom fighters.
Just get your shot instead of playing armchair epidemiologist.
I've already had covid in 2020 and recently had another antibody test which still showed a strong response...
> Some monoclonal antibodies, including bamlanivimab, lost their ability to bind to the spike protein and no longer neutralized the Delta variant. We also showed that the Delta variant is less sensitive to sera from naturally immunized individuals.
> In individuals who had not previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2, a single dose of either the Pfizer or the AstraZeneca vaccine induced a barely detectable level of neutralizing antibodies against the Delta variant. About 10% of the sera neutralized this variant. However, a two-dose regimen generated high sero-neutralization levels against the Alpha, Beta and Delta variants in individuals sampled at week 8 to week 16 after vaccination. [0]
Leave the armchair, get your booster shot.
The vaccine doesn’t keep people from spreading delta because it’s not a sterilizing vaccine[1][2]. It’s strange there was that big concern over asymptotic spread and the response was to administer an intervention that greatly increases asymptotic cases.
> instead of playing armchair epidemiologist.
You might want to take your own advice here.
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/02/1017161/covid-va...
You can calculate different (average case) scenarios yourself with % needed to be vaccinated = (1 - 1/R0) for a sterilizing vaccine and add an adjustment factor for the vaccine efficacy. It's not pretty...
Edit: Here's a nice slide deck elaborating[2].
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
[2] http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~denis/epi/edinburgh11/talks/Pellis...
Nobody was assuring anything. It won't get it below R0 by itself, parent comment already told you. It's the combination of seatbelt, airbag, while not speeding, drinking, smoking or talking on the phone what keeps people relatively safe on the road, not any single of those elements.
> R0 can stay >1 with 100% vaccination if the pathogen is contagious enough and the vaccine is leaky enough.
Yes. That's why the epidemiological consensus is for vaccinated people to keep wearing masks, particularly indoors.
> There is a very real chance that we're going to look back on delta fondly if a Marek's disease type scenario unfolds
Excuse me from what I'm going to say, but the Marek comparison is an antivax favourite from the gross misunderstanding that you seem to share with them.
The Marek scenario is the result of imperfect vaccination, plus the massification of the poultry industry, plus the fact that infected chickens can carry and transmit the disease for life, including those vaccinated, which is absolutely not the case with COVID-19.
The disease existed before, but outbreaks were relatively local and self contained.
Now, from the second half of the 20th century it started being a major concern with the industrialization of farming. With a vaccine that keeps chickens from having complications or dying, but not from shedding virions for life, all while living on top of each other 100% of their lives, sure, you reach enough selection pressure to make the disease evolve for the worse.
COVID-19 vaccines may let you be contagious for a few days, then the infection eventually clears, and the density of our dwellings is orders of magnitude lower.
> Then again that's pretty much optimal for big pharma if they have a vaccine that's effective against a hypothetical omega strain that will reliably kill or maim the unvaccinated.
Yeah, this goes deeper into tinfoil hat territory. I'd just like to say that interestingly most of big pharma failed to produce vaccines and have been there largely to give the manufacturing power to the small research groups and small/new biotech companies that actually created them.
Luckily there are dozens of vaccines from all around the world by now, I think competition will do the rest.
There's still no reason to believe that adding mask wearing to a leaky vaccine will reduce R0 below one. We'll probably find out though since we're running a huge, albeit uncontrolled, phase 3 clinical trial right now.
We do know on the other hand that a sterilizing vaccine can guarantee herd immunity on its own with vaccination levels well below 100%.
> Excuse me from what I'm going to say, but the Marek comparison is an antivax favourite from the gross misunderstanding that you seem to share with them.
If I were an anti-vaxxer why would I be advocating a (sterilizing) vaccine? And that kind of passive aggressive insult is a common habit of the kind of midwit who vastly overestimates his own intelligence, but let's not waste time on ad hominems shall we? I simply gave the Marek scenario as conclusive proof that imperfect vaccines can select for increasingly lethal variants. It serves as a kind of limit case where everything is maximally unfavorable. Now the question of concern is can similar viral selection occur when some of the variables, such as infection duration of vaccinated individuals, are different. We cannot conclusively answer in the negative with the data we have, so a tail risk exists.
> Yeah, this goes deeper into tinfoil hat territory.
No, it goes further into considering tail risk scenarios, which is something that most people are reliably bad at.
> Luckily there are dozens of vaccines from all around the world by now, I think competition will do the rest.
I will be greatly reassured when competition creates a sterilizing vaccine that eradicates SARS-CoV-2.
Completely false. There's several groups that might want the vaccine that can't get it. Including: children and the immuno compromised.
32 kids were hospitalized in one week in Alabama last month. A state with half the population of NYC.
https://www.al.com/coronavirus/2021/07/infant-among-children...
Are you referring to the mRNA vaccine? If so, source for this? I see lots of articles that question whether the vaccines are as effective for immuno compromised people, but none that say they shouldn't take the mRNA vaccine. In fact, I see many studies testing the efficacy of mRNA vaccines for immuno-compromised people, which would seem to indicate we think it's safe. I only know one immuno-compromised person, and she got the vaccine.
Like I said, there's practically no data on the mRNA side, particularly with how "immunocompromised" is a very broad term meaning many different underlying issues. Most of the data I've seen is focused on the efficacy rates, rather than safety from complications. IMO it's fair that immunocompromised individuals want to wait a bit when it comes to an entirely new form of vaccine.
The non mRNA vaccines obviously have potential issues for the kinds of people that could die from even a normal flu.
I can't tell you how important it is to keep people who are unvaccinated away from those of us who are vaccinated.
For those that don't know, NYC has very crowded indoors situations because of the cost of real estate. We are all close together.
No sympathy whatsoever for those who refuse to get a vaccine and even offered $100 to get the vaccine.
People never have the right to infect another human being. That is just the way it is.
No "rights" supersede the right to not be infected by non-vaccinated people. None.
Must be one hell of a pandemic if that is a greater incentive than immunity.
That would be false.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/he/hn/immunization.asp
which points to
https://www.shotsforschool.org/child-care/
https://www.shotsforschool.org/7th-grade/
https://www.shotsforschool.org/k-12/
And then there's
https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-8-part-b-chapter-...
Pointing out that children must be vaccinated against viruses that disproportionately harm children in order to participate in public education is true, but irrelevant to the question. Pointing out that we require certain vaccinations of immigrants is true, but irrelevant to the question.
(Not for nothing: we require immigrants to pass a citizenship test and a background check, too. If the standard is "anything that is OK for US immigration is OK for going to Chick-Fil-A", then we're going to have to disagree...)
Indeed, instead there used to be mandatory, involuntary quarantine enforcement, sometimes (typhus, polio) on a per-household basis with the enforcement notice posted prominently on the front door. That restricted not only restaurants and beach visits but all visits of any kind.
It's almost like people are arguing "we did {restrictive policy} once, so any form of restriction is of the same form!"
I mean...hell: we had slavery once. So maybe let's set aside the idea that prior infringements of individual liberty justify future infringements of individual liberty?
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/us-supreme-court-a...
The background was a polio outbreak in MA around 1905, with something like a 30% mortality among all age groups.
We are back to 1905, but now its not 30% that is at the issue, but some decimal to the right of zero.
How would the logistics of forced vaccination go down, anyway? Do you think people wouldn't forge their vaccine papers, bribe doctors or otherwise get them to be sympathetic, or otherwise circumvent/ignore the system/rules in order to avoid the vaccine?
As stated elsewhere in this thread, it is not going to be possible to stop the virus at this point. We will all eventually be exposed and the best we can do is be as safe as we believe we need to be and can.
as soon as authorities announce a potential paper requirement , the literal next day there are touts selling the paper.
I’m not sure why the misconception that freedom is absolute in the US is so widespread.
Further reading:
https://regs.health.ny.gov/volume-title-10/content/section-2...
We should want to be in the same world for COVID. I'm sorry, but I don't see why I should have to risk getting COVID when there is a perfectly safe, free vaccine, that if delivered to enough of the population, will allow us to achieve herd immunity. The risks of long COVID are real. You're either imposing a very safe vaccine on people, or a somewhat dangerous illness on them, it seems very obvious the best option is to impose the vaccine.
It's not very safe; there have been more adverse events reported in VAERS following the covid vaccines than in the past 20 years for all other vaccines. And unlike all those other vaccines, there's absolutely zero long-term safety data, because it's impossible to know the effects 3-5 years in future of a novel treatment that's only existed for one year.
However...
Death 5,191 1.25%
Life Threatening 7,110 1.72%
Permanent Disability 6,103 1.47%
Congenital Anomaly / Birth Defect 232 0.06%
Hospitalized 23,990 5.79%
Existing Hospitalization Prolonged 228 0.06%
Emergency Room 58,335 14.08%
Office Visit 84,704 20.44%
None of the above 274,035 66.14%
Further, there are limitations to the conclusions that you can draw from VAERS:
"VAERS accepts reports of adverse events and reactions that occur following vaccination. Healthcare providers, vaccine manufacturers, and the public can submit reports to VAERS. While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. Most reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind."
If someone gets a vaccination and is then run over by a bus, that can be reported as a "Death". Additionally, given the politicization of COVID vaccines, I think we can expect that there is a strong bias towards reporting events. The COVID vaccines have a number of common side effects (mine were almost as bad as those of my shingles vaccination), which may explain some of the excess.
But fundamentally, the VAERS data simply cannot be used to determine whether or not a vaccine is unsafe.
On the other hand, consider: There have been 349,000,000 doses administered, with about 428,000 events reported, meaning that 0.12% of doses result in an event and 0.04% result in an event involving health care. I ride a motorcycle. I would be overjoyed at those kinds of safety odds.
What alternative do I have for going to the beach - and outdoor space? What alternative does the private gym owner/operator have?
These steps are not the same as your examples.
>>> Your children don't need to go to a public school, or daycare. You can home school if you're so opposed to these things.
"you do not need to use public goods, you can stop using public goods and substitute them with private goods that you provision yourself"
>>> what alternative do I have for going to the beach - and outdoor space?
"how dare you challenge my use of public goods, I have no alternatives and this is an imposition on my rights as a citizen"
For real though, in your self consistent thought framework the obvious obligation you have is to buy your own bit of beach or private park.
Why would we punish the vaccinated, and children, for a minority unvaccinated population? A population that largely (entirely?) puts their own self at risk and no other individual that has taken steps to protect themselves from the virus.
Vaccines (in the US at least) are free to anyone that wants one at this point. It's been that way for months. If someone doesn't have a vaccine, it's because they chose to not get one - and therefore take on the risk of becoming ill or death. That's their problem... not children's problem or vaccinated people's problem.
We're doing all this to protect a population that's actively resisting your protection.
With all that said, let's get back to normal here. People who don't want vaccines aren't going to get them even if you made it the law... be realistic.
I don't like restrictions in general, but I do prioritize these two things in a certain way.
We're trying to protect people that don't want protection. Time to move on and get back to normal.
The fear, paranoia and mistrust around vaccinations against COVID is not normal. "Just let nature take its course" isn't normal, at least not in the modern history of civil societies.
Short of going door-to-door with guys with guns and body armor, forcefully pinning down people and jabbing them with vaccine - nothing you (or anyone) does will convince people to get a vaccine if they've decided at this point they do not want it for whatever their reasons may be.
So... go about your business as usual. Stop trying to protect people that refuse your protection. It's wasted effort, and hurts everyone else that is already vaccinated.
Umm... no. They spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (and COVID) at every opportunity, they consider themselves on a crusade against vaccination and the vaccinated. Society is under no obligation to let dangerous fools remain comfortable in their foolishness.
Except they don't. The people who are vaccinated aren't afraid, uncertain or in any doubt. Nor can they contract COVID from unvaccinated people - otherwise what would be the point of the vaccine anyway?
> they consider themselves on a crusade
Who cares? Why do you care what some other people think? If you're vaccinated, their choices literally have zero impact on you.
> Society is under no obligation to let dangerous fools remain comfortable in their foolishness
Last I checked, we were talking about the US... so ya, they are allowed to be foolish, particularly since the only people they are potentially harming is themselves.
So... what is your plan? Are we storming people's houses with armed men to forcefully vaccinate people that don't want it? Or are we just sitting on some high horse?
I'll tell you who's spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt - it's the very same people making these arguments. Get a vaccine - or else! But you'll still need to wear a mask - or two - and quarantine at home and be careful who you're around because the COVID will get you regardless.
It's complete poppycock. Given those choices, why would someone want to vaccinate if literally nothing about their life improves afterwards?
I think what we have here is an intolerance for other people's choices... and a desire to compel people into submission of what some other people believe is the "right way". Both sides are guilty of willfully ignoring facts when convenient... so who's right? Good thing we're in the US and don't have to care - both can be wrong and go about their business without bothering each other.
It's not now, but it was as i know people who suffered from delayed treatment. As well my aunts a nurse and covid was hell for her, i'd rather she not go through that again because people think they are too good to get the vaccine and turn it into a political issue.
You can deny people entry to various places contingent on vaccination, which is what a lot of places are doing now. You may not be able to convince people to get vaccinated for their own sake or the sake of the health of their neighbors, but way more people will choose being able to go to work, school or the bar over staying unvaccinated.
I chose "getting a student loan" over "not registering for the draft" and I was both terrified of getting drafted and morally opposed to killing, as much as any 18 year old can be.
No guns, no goonsquads, just pile on the headaches and most people will find themselves to get vaccinated regardless of their own doubts, beliefs or prior declarations.
Not to mention turning every business into some sort of citizen police is a very weird concept in the US.
Schools already check vaccination status for other diseases during enrollment.
Workplaces already check immigration status for all employees.
There will always be non-compliance; there are always a few bars that don't check IDs or accept obvious fakes. But most won't risk losing their liquor licenses.
There are a lot of "what if"s in the world, and in public policy in particular. What if no one pays their taxes? What if a state legislature overrides the popular vote of their electorate in a Presidential election? What if the President orders a nuclear first strike and the military doesn't follow the order?
While all of these questions are interesting, for the most part we can get by without having any answers to them. Why borrow trouble worrying about something that may never happen?
What if workplaces mandate vaccines, what if schools, if bars and ballparks and theaters, and we still don't reach the 90-95% thresholds needed to contain the more virulent viruses?
Well, something else will happen. Maybe we give up. Maybe we try other coercions. Maybe the combination of vaccination rates and post-infection immunity will be high enough that the entire question is moot.
Because doing so is a one way road to more extreme, totalitarian measures next time there's a disagreement about public policy (and next time, perhaps you find yourself on the "wrong side").
Because covid won't be a thing forever, and sacrificing core values of your nation for temporary gain is foolhardy.
Because, again, the people you're trying to protect with these extreme, totalitarian measures don't want your protection and statistically will turn out just fine anyway.
Even this would not work (at least in America), because there's a heavy overlap between the unvaccinated and gun owners, and they vastly outnumber whatever police force would be attempting to enforce the vaccination.
Children have a very non-zero infection rate while they do have effectively a zero death rate (no actual information on "complications").
Regardless, the people who do get sick, typically get only midly-so, and rarely (statistically 0) experience serious complications or death.
Therefore, my initial conclusion that the risk for children is near zero stands.
You’ve got this part backwards, if I’m reading this correctly. You must adhere to public health mandates to send a child to public school. If you choose not to abide, then you can opt to send your kid to a private school.
Source: deparment of health
No. No. No. No. No.
Why is this so hard for people to understand? A virus doesn't just enter your body, and quietly go away. In MANY cases, it can have a lasting effect on your underlying health and wellness. This isn't a point of question, it's a known FACT that is all too often left out of the discussion entirely.
I am vaccinated. I have friends who are vaccinated, and have still gotten COVID. One of them still doesn't have their sense of taste and smell back, after nearly 3 weeks post symptoms. They describe being brain fog, and tiredness that they didn't have before, as well as an "itch" in their lungs when exercising that they didn't have before.
There's absolutely no reason to say things like "hysterical fixation on cases". Bringing cases down means LESS LIVES LOST and less HEALTH lost.
I'm all for re-opening businesses and promoting vaccinations. We have to get back to living our lives. I'm just tired of the idea people seem to have that it's entirely about lives.
Sorry if this is a lot of questions, I do think it's valuable to address this with actual models and supporting data.
Yes, probably everyone gets exposed to the virus in the future, but we can decide how quickly. Every month later means we might get vaccines which protect close to perfection, that we find better medication or at least better understand what Covid-19 is all causing and can treat better. Also, with any additional infection the risk of another significant mutation increases. Even with current vaccines, with a high enough vaccination rate any outbreaks should be much smaller and more localized. This does make a difference.
Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2448/
> Why is this so hard for people to understand?
I understand your argument, but I disagree with you, based on a long education in this area, a deep understanding of the data, and personal experience.
> A virus doesn't just enter your body, and quietly go away.
Some do not. This one does.
> In MANY cases, it can have a lasting effect on your underlying health and wellness.
In some, rare cases, we see examples of post-viral syndromes. We have seen these for many different viruses.
> I am vaccinated. I have friends who are vaccinated, and have still gotten COVID. One of them still doesn't have their sense of taste and smell back, after nearly 3 weeks post symptoms.
Again, lingering symptoms following an illness are not unknown. Every time I get a head cold, I typically develop a cough that lasts > 3 weeks. By ~all current evidentiary standards for "long covid", I have had "long cold".
Similarly, my grandmother lost her sense of smell to a head cold when I was a child. She never got it back, entirely. Sad, but not something that we took extraordinary societal interventions to prevent.
> They describe being brain fog, and tiredness that they didn't have before, as well as an "itch" in their lungs when exercising that they didn't have before.
Neither of these are objectively defined. I have an "itch" in my lungs, right now (probably allergies). I have never had Covid. When I don't sleep well (which is often, thanks to the state of our society), I have trouble focusing. Is that "brain fog"?
Point being: some people are going to have after-effects from infection. That's unfortunate, but it's not unknown, and the virus isn't going away. If the choice is to completely up-end our society to prevent people from ever getting sick again, then I'm strongly opposed.
Where's the data? I didn't see a single source listed, just anecdotes from you and your family.
That long Covid is a pernicious result for many people with debilitating effects is well established in the literature, it's not controversial.
That refusing to get the virus under control will lead to further variants potentially worse than Delta that perhaps the vaccines are less able to guard against. Not some crazy conspiracy!
What this is ultimately about is many of our fellow citizens believe "my choice" and "freedom" means the "freedom" to infect other people with a potentially debilitating virus rather than they be mildly inconvenienced.
Citation needed for such an extraordinary claim.
If you don’t mind, could you share data on the UK, a place where nearly all adults aged 30+ have received two doses of the vaccine? It simplifies the discussion because there’s no question about self selection bias. If there’s any negative effects, it should surely have manifested in a large subset of this group of tens of millions of people, across ages and ethnicities.
Not just a handful of cases here or there. I’m talking about 0.01% or more of this population suffering some persistent harm. Not something that disappeared after a day or two.
I'm arguing that most of the science here is bad, and even if these things hold up, the risk of ~10% of the population having anosmia for a few months is not worth the permanent restructuring of our society to fixate on the prevention of a single illness.
I don't think the fear is about 10% ending up with anosmia. The fear is that the 10% of detectable problems might be indicative of much more severe and/or much more prevalent problems going undetected. You're right that the problem is lack of very good data, but the folks who live and breathe this domain appear to be very concerned by the data we do have.
For what it's worth, I don't think many (any?) people are arguing for a permanent restructuring of our society. They're merely asking that we don't consider death to be the only endpoint that's relevant to the conversation.
Even my own taste issues might be something else - the only reason I’m confident they’re there is that it’s intermittent and takes me by surprise. I have two friends that think their sense of taste isn’t quite the same as it was and it’s steadily that way, which to me sounds like it could just be all in their heads (or not).
[1] Imaging data has also physically confirmed lasting damage from COVID which could definitely be affiliated with some of the symptoms we lump under PASC.
In an alternate universe where the media took and ran with the 5G conspiracy theory for over a year, you could survey the population and find the same amount had symptoms from that.
Just a heads-up, that can turn into asthma if you are susceptible. Take care to properly heal every time.
(That'd be 'long cold' I guess. We don't need more of that stuff.)
(It's not hard to guess how I know about the asthma potential. -.-)
I am sure you believe what you are saying, and I am also not doubting that you have some education on the topic, but I have to disagree.
Take for example, this study [1] demonstrating significant loss of grey matter in the brain for COVID patients, both hospitalized and non-hospitalized.
As our understanding of virology evolves it is becoming more and more clear that the notion of ephemeral infections is just flat out incorrect. You likely maintain SOME impact from that infection, its just a question of how severe, or in some cases WHEN (see: chicken pox -> shingles). Viruses wreak havoc, and that is a point which is well documented, and slowly but surely people are starting to pay attention.
My gripe with your comment is that it completely disregards this point and treats the risk of viruses and either death, or no risk at all. The truth is far more nuanced than that, and there's legitimate reasons to want overall CASE COUNT to come down. It's about saving quality of life, including, actual life. Vaccination is the path to do that.
I also don't agree with your comment that "If the choice is to completely up-end our society to prevent people from ever getting sick again, then I'm strongly opposed."
Asking for proof of vaccination is not "completely up-ending" our society. It's quite reasonable to ask for certain personal hygiene requirements (shirts, shoes, etc.) but we can't ask that someone be reasonably protected from a getting and spreading a very dangerous virus? You're somehow OK with being required to wear clothes, which provide almost no protection from anything, but not OK with being asked to show that you're an unlikely COVID carrier/spreader?
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...
Reasonable people can disagree on questions like this. But you came out of the gate insisting that I "didn't understand", which isn't true.
I understand, I just disagree that this is a disproportionate threat to our society that requires disproportionate response.
> Take for example, this study [1] demonstrating significant loss of grey matter in the brain for COVID patients, both hospitalized and non-hospitalized.
FWIW, that study is terrible. It is a statistical fishing expedition, is improperly controlled (i.e. are the changes due to Covid, or something else? You can't tell!), and the whole field of "looking at MRI for reductions in gray matter" is littered with spurious findings. Here's a comment where I go into this in much greater detail:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27927568
> As our understanding of virology evolves it is becoming more and more clear that the notion of ephemeral infections is just flat out incorrect.
It's not "flat out incorrect"...as I said before, we know that post-viral syndromes are real. This is not new information.
Having a cough or shortness of breath (by FAR the most common "long covid" symptoms) after a infection are no more an indication that the virus is lingering in your body, than leg pain after a cast is removed is an indication that you continue to have a broken leg. It takes time to heal.
I see where you're coming from and I don't entirely disagree with your conclusion. The post you linked, makes a strong case for not jumping to conclusions based on grey matter studies, which I think is sound advice.
That said, I maintain that given the option to get COVID or not get COVID, I would greatly prefer the later. You similarly won't find me gaming long hours, and I make sure to get plenty of sleep. In other words, taking precautions that avoid injury is generally a good idea. And FWIW, I don't find the controls in that study to be terrible? I'm not exactly an authority of statistical analysis though, so I'll trust that this is outside my scope of understanding.
Where it sounds like we disagree most is whether or not the risk of COVID causing injury is worth something as small (or large) as asking for proof of vaccination.
It just so happens that I think asking for proof of vaccination is a relatively minor thing given the possibilities of COVID.
And let me be clear, taking a shot that is safe and effective is not an unreasonable ask. Restricting access to leisure to people who are willing to take this precaution isn’t unreasonable. And no, it’s in no way comparable to some of the worst crimes committed by humans.
For the record, I'm fully vaccinated, but if/when bars start demanding vaccine passports in the UK, I stop going to bars.
> they will have to go sit in a park
Seems fine to me. That’s hardly the worst thing that could happen.
If you’re already vaccinated, like nearly everyone aged 30+ in the UK is and refuse to open an app on your phone to show that … I can only hope that you’re in a small minority. I guess most people just want to get on with it, rather than sticking to some principle. Im not even sure what the principle is here. Hardly anyone will be negatively affected by this mandate because nearly everyone is vaccinated.
> i stop going to bars
Cool. Parks are better for your health anyway. Good day.
And refused entry to a bar I wouldn't dream of going to the park, I head home with two bottles of decent white wine.
Good day to you too.
> that principle is a hostility to ID cards and demands from the state to provide them in various circumstances
Can't a bartender legally obligate you to show your id to prove you are old enough to drink? Your argument makes no sense.
Or let me guess, you don’t travel out of England at all so you can avoid the tyranny of passport checkers?
Or do you do the sane thing and show your passport? So then you concede that in certain cases at least the State has a compelling interest in verifying a person’s papers.
Btw, it's beneath you to try an innocent "some eggs". We know exactly what Tesco is going to card someone for, and it's not eggs.
It seems like an inappropriate and needlessly emotive choice.
Both sides are doing it - left considers the entire right-wing populace as 'Fascists'. The right considers the entire left-wing populace as 'Communists' and along with it comes calling out atrocities, historical turning points, etc to further their agenda.
There are more post-vax deaths recorded in VAERS for the covid vaccines over the past 6 months than for all other vaccines over the past 20 years. It's definitely not 100% safe. Sure the risk is low, but the risk of dying of covid is also quite low for a significant subset of the population. There's also absolutely zero long-term safety data on the vaccines, because it's impossible to know what the effects 3-5 years down the line of a new treatment will be when that treatment's only existed for under a year.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
“FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, even if it’s unclear whether the vaccine was the cause. Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem. A review of available clinical information, including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records, has not established a causal link to COVID-19 vaccines.”
Now, think about how broadly the vaccines have been given to hundreds of millions of people. Beyond the obvious conclusion that there is very little chance of a hidden serious complication which hadn’t yet manifested at that scale, think about how compressed that is in timing: if you take 100M people and look at that population for 6 months you’re going to see many deaths with or without vaccination. Now, remember that the elderly and other high risk populations were sensibly prioritized, so those rates will be even higher. Anyone looking at the data has to carefully adjust for things like that – it’s not just a query for the number of deaths but seeing whether it’s unusual for the cohort: are 70 year olds with pre-existing conditions dying at a different rate than they used to, not compared to a global rate covering kids to retirees?
The vaccines are available free to everyone, take minimal time to get, and extremely safe. This is an inconvenience on the level of having to wear pants on a hot day or wash your hands (which takes far more time in aggregate), and it’s only for voluntary activities which nobody needs to do to function.
Apartheid was being shut out of decent schools or jobs, packed into bad housing conditions, and being beaten if you complained about it, all enforced by a brutal prison system.
"The American College of Rheumatology COVID-19 Vaccine Clinical Guidance recommends that people with autoimmune and inflammatory rheumatic disease (which includes lupus) get the vaccine unless they have an allergy to an ingredient in the vaccine."
and
"In general, you should get the vaccine even if you have already had COVID-19."
Let's be clear: the primary reason the messaging has been "previously infected people should still get the vaccine" is primarily because there are a lot of people out there that think they had COVID when they didn't. I had a friend who thought he had it twice, and then finally did get it on the third time. I had another friend think he got it back in February of last year and then actually got it late last year. They're both relatively intelligent (if not ignorant about certain things), and that's just in my little friend group.
I understand why they went down that road, but there's no reason for me to take it.
This is why the CDC started recommending masks again.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-administr...
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm?s_cid=mm...
https://inguyun.medium.com/the-provincetown-outbreak-is-actu...
The new data for the delta variant shows reduced protection for unvaccinated people (e.g. public benefit) from being around vaccinated people, but still shows benefit to vaccinated people.
Edit: note, I’ve seen your other link, and do wonder why that was observed for that community. Here I am referring to current CDC estimates for the country and reports of hospital utilization averages overall.
That's awesome for you, but not what we are discussing here.
What we are discussing here is you mandating that all drivers of cars gets to bed by 10PM and have a good sleep, on the chance that lack of sleep leads to bad driving which leads to higher chances of accidents, including to those who slept well last night, yet were involved in the accident.
>What we are discussing here is you mandating that all drivers of cars gets to bed by 10PM and have a good sleep, on the chance that lack of sleep leads to bad driving which leads to higher chances of accidents, including to those who slept well last night, yet were involved in the accident
Not even close to the reality of the situation, but you wouldn't be the first to take a very hyperbolic approach to it.
We are not disagreeing on the benefits of a practice ( vaccination or taking a nap ).
That has absolutely nothing to do with what was just being discussed. There is hard data which says COVID has a huge range of long term side effects, that’s simply a fact you can personally feel it’s an acceptable risk but nothing about your personal beliefs change the reality of long term impacts of severe viral infections.
I personally feel that the US has given people long enough to get vaccinated it’s time to open the floodgates of infection and open things up. Yes, the unvaccinated and many vaccinated will simply get very sick and die in large large numbers based on their personal choices, but such is life.
I expect most people will disagree with my personal options and that’s fine, but don’t argue about objective facts.
If you can cite this "hard data", it'll be amongst the first I've ever seen.
So far, all I've seen are anecdotes and poorly controlled surveys of self-reported symptoms, the vast majority of which are mild. Reports of "cough" and "fatigue", three weeks after a respiratory illness are not exceptional, they're the expected case.
Just today, this paper was published in a Lancet journal, looking at symptom duration in a large cohort (259k) of children under 17. The most enduring symptoms? Loss of smell, headache, sore throat and fatigue. Virtually everything else fell to background in a week.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...
I bring it up not because it’s a significant risk, but as a demonstration that immune responses themselves are one of the risk factors associated with viral infections. Critically though there are a lot of rare conditions that individually may not be a factor but collectively are.
Hospital-acquired infections for example aren’t directly caused by covid, but start talking about 100’s of thousands of people being hospitalized and it’s a common risk.
As to that study, people under 17 aren’t even close to representative of the larger population when it comes to viral infections. It’s an important consideration but people 35-44 while generally considered low risk are literally at 100 times the risk of death as 4-14 year olds. Youthful immune systems are simply vastly better.
37 cases of "covid-associated" GBS falls in the category of "lighting strike risks" in life. Yeah, it can happen, but it's pretty damned rare. I'm not changing my life for it.
Also, of course...GBS is associated with at least one of the covid vaccines, itself:
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/guillain-barre-syndrome-a...
Next, what about hospital born infections? Clearly people who aren’t in hospitals are at lower risk and clearly people are hospitalized in large numbers from Covid-19. So is that another slightly larger step you’re willing to take?
If not we can talk about tissue damage. Blood vessels for example: https://epi.ufl.edu/articles/covid-19-blood-vessel-damage.ht...
I've never said anything different. I'm not sure what victory you think you've won.
Some people will have long-term symptoms of Covid. Just like pretty much every other virus.
Until I see some serious, well-controlled, high-quality data that shows me that there's an unprecedented risk for a lot of people, I'm not on board with taking unprecedented actions that affect everyone.
You just said so in this thread:
“ > A virus doesn't just enter your body, and quietly go away.
Some do not. This one does.”
No qualifications just absolute dismissal of all long term symptoms.
> Until I see some serious, well-controlled, high-quality data that shows me there’s an unprecedented risk for a lot of people
Sure, because the only evidence you can infer is that which you already agree with. Raising the bar arbitrarily isn’t science it’s a logical fallacy.
However, the exact data you’re asking for is quite simply hospitalization rates. Severe cases of covid include the normal risks of severe viral infections, but it causes severe infections at significantly higher rates thus it also causes those normal complications at much higher rates. Along with it’s own unusual risks from blood clots causing all the things blood clots cause.
What kind of evidence would convince you?
Bear in mind (as I'm sure you know), it's gonna be very difficult to get accurate before and afters while in the midst of a pandemic, and it's likely that this evidence will only exist if enough people don't get one of the vaccines.
Unrelated but important: I think a lot of people miss that this pandemic has infected millions of people, so all of the one in a million events happen with enough frequency to where you will find significant proportions of the population displaying ever symptom you could imagine "due to COVID".
We had a woman who started hemorrhaging a week into her infection. Do you think that was caused by COVID? Probably not, but I'd bet you could find a thousand people where that happened just because of the sheer size of infections.
Those who are unvaccinated because they're immuno-compromised, allergic or under the age of twelve aren't unvaccinated due a "personal choice."
What should be done about those folks? Are you arguing that such people have "made their choice?"
People under 12 with healthy immune systems are at extremely low risks from covid.
I'm sure that's a great comfort to the parents of the ~2000 children that have died COVID related deaths[0] in the US during the pandemic.
And to the parents of the children who will die before we get this scourge under control.
Perhaps you should volunteer to speak at the funerals of such children so you can assure everyone there that it's no big deal?
[0] https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/12/29/covid-2milli...
Kids with compromised immune systems are at risk, and there at increased risk the longer this goes on. Are you willing to talk at the funerals of all those kids?
Also, your link is: At least 172 children had died as of Dec. not 2,000.
I'm not claiming that it's no big deal, nor am I advocating for just letting people die as you are.
Or did I somehow misunderstand your point of view?
Regarding the specific case, to make my position even more nuanced, I don’t have a specific problem with having to prove vaccination or positive test for indoor dining. Here in Berlin that’s the rule they used when reopening last May, and it never went away. This way, nobody has ever really debated it.
So natural immunity should be included then? I hear all these arguments but then people pretend like natural immunity is not a thing. Sure maybe it isn’t as effective as a vaccine (though some argue it is better), but it definitely makes you at least unlikely to spread.
I might believe this isn’t just a huge power grab and people are actually concerned with the health of individuals, if folks would acknowledge “the science” of natural immunity.
Saying it isn’t as good as vaccine means nothing, because we are only trying to eliminate more likely spreaders, not any statistical chance of spreading.
As the events of April-July 2021 proved, the new variant ripped through a population that was supposed to have reached herd immunity. As it stands, 80%+ of people in major Indian cities have had an infection. Does that mean that covid will never bother India again? I’m guessing no.
The trouble is, how do you prove it? There are antibody tests that maybe are positive even months later? I'm not sure, honestly. The tricky part is just the recording of the matter, not the science behind it.
How does someone know that even though I’m vaccinated I’m one of the very very small few who will have a breakthrough infection?
We could probably do things to ensure these as well, but at what point do we just say “yep there is a risk”, and accept that risk as part of living life?
I think there is a part where the principalities and powers that rule, actually want us to get so angry and divided.
That is why things are forced, and mandated, rather than appealed to. One side gets mad that they ask, the other side doesn’t give a chance for the good natured to help voluntarily.
There is no conspiracy of people plotting in a room coming up with how they can gain more power to take over the world (unless they’re two mice trying to do same thing night after night), but nonetheless there is a spirit of division and hatred that is very much present in our country that is tearing us apart.
Totally agree.
> There is no conspiracy of people plotting in a room coming up with how they can gain more power to take over the world (unless they’re two mice trying to do same thing night after night), but nonetheless there is a spirit of division and hatred that is very much present in our country that is tearing us apart.
Yup, there sure is and it's really disheartening to watch it unfold day after day. The country seems more divided than I've ever seen it in my 30ish years, and certainly more divided than rose colored glasses of past decades.
It's a shame but, maybe it's also a sign of healthy country? Maybe united countries are also the ones that go to war and invade others?
I am literally working with vaccination registry APIs right now which have an explicit system for registering and tracking natural immunity.
I will never report someone for violating a vaccine mandate, or a mask mandate. Or if they forge their vaccine card.
If they are knowingly sick, going out with a fever, and a cough in public places and essentially trying to get people sick, I will report them. Even if they’ve been vaccinated but “just” had the Flu.
And that person exists by the way. People who essentially knew they had covid, were feeling symptoms, yet went to a party anyways. But I’m sure there is the person who proudly goes out with their vaccination card showing both doses sick with something else like the flu, judging those who have no symptoms of sickness but aren’t vaccinated also being out.
Why? This is basically you doing something random for absolutely no data supported reason.
So if the requirement is to have be received a full vaccine course for COVID-19 there is no risk to that, just potential waste of doses.
Making up a decision about your natural immunity is you doing exactly that. It's not supported by data.
I imagine it would be pretty easy for someone not used to dealing with gastritis on a regular basis to attribute such a symptom to "COVID".
Cough & Shortness of breath: allergies, asthma, typical recovery process from any cold or flu
Fatigue: depression, anxiety, insomnia, recovery from most illness
Brain fog (whatever that is): depression, anxiety, insomnia, recovery from illness...
It's not that "long covid" isn't real...it's just that the scientific data for it at present are so vague that you can "have" it by being a normal person.
Measles R0 is also something absurd like 15, with spread characteristics of "a person with measles goes in an elevator - the next day a person gets in the same elevator and catches it".
vaccinated people get covid and spread it like unvaccinated[1]. Then what is the point of vaccination mandate? I really don't understand.
Add to that that since May CDC stopped counting breakthrough cases which don't result in hospitalizations.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/30/cdc-study-shows-74percent-of...
"About three-fourths of people infected in a Massachusetts Covid-19 outbreak were fully vaccinated, according to new data published Friday by the CDC.
The new data, published in the U.S. agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, also found that fully vaccinated people who get infected carry as much of the virus in their nose as unvaccinated people. "
[1] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/cdc_date_media_coverage_...
I found that while reading daily news from AllSides[2], as recommended in a recent HN thread. I really like it so far. [2] https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
Whereis if you compare the CNBC link i posted with the official CDC report linked below you'll find no screwed up nor mis-interpretation on the part of CNBC (though CNBC didn't mention the 69% vaccination coverage and obvious correlation with the observed 74% share of infections). And the CDC report is crystal clear:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm
"During July 2021, 469 cases of COVID-19 associated with multiple summer events and large public gatherings in a town in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, were identified among Massachusetts residents; vaccination coverage among eligible Massachusetts residents was 69%. Approximately three quarters (346; 74%) of cases occurred in fully vaccinated persons"
It's an incredibly small sample size, directly after an unusual event after very large indoor public gathering of many people.
This is not how science works.
>nothing anywhere close to this has been shown in any other country.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/07/29/cdc-mask-gu...
"This echoes data seen from studies in other countries, including highly vaccinated Singapore, where 75 percent of new infections reportedly occur in people who are partially and fully vaccinated."
Y'see in SCIENCE we have this generally stated principle that we don't draw empirical conclusions from a dataset of a few hundred observations.
How banal!
"This echoes data seen from studies in other countries, including highly vaccinated Singapore, where 75 percent of new infections reportedly occur in people who are partially and fully vaccinated."
This does absolutely nothing to back up your claim that vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the Delta variant.
But please ask for help next time you move those goalposts, I wouldn't want you hurting yourself.
the statistics would disagree with you on how representative a random draw of several hundred would be in this situation. Anyway, just an example related to the situation - Moderna stage 2 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7871769/):
"Between 29 May and 8 July 2020, 600 participants were randomized, 300 per age cohort. [...]
Conclusions
Vaccination with mRNA-1273 resulted in significant immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 in participants 18 years and older, with an acceptable safety profile, confirming the safety and immunogenicity of 50 and 100 µg mRNA-1273 given as a 2 dose-regimen. "
>This does absolutely nothing to back up your claim that vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the Delta variant.
beside obvious statistical arithmetic clearly showing it (whihc i guess is pointless to discuss giving your statistics statements above), you probably missed the part about nasal viral content in vaccinated people being similar to that of unvaccinated and hint - this infection is airborne. This is why CDC introduced mask mandate for everybody.
And you can read this too https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
"The higher the amount of coronavirus in the nose and throat, the more likely the patient will infect others. In one Wisconsin county, after Delta became predominant, researchers analyzed viral loads on nose-and-throat swab samples obtained when patients were first diagnosed. They found similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients, with levels often high enough to allow shedding of infectious virus. "
The observations in your original citation were NOT NOT NOT a random sample.
Are you really this deeply ignorant of basic statistical methods or are you just being dishonest?
Apparently the answer is that they're a third as likely to have it as the unvaccinated. Which certainly isn't nothing, and it's definitely better than the flu vaccine managed, but it does suggest that there's probably no way we're going to stop the spread of the Delta variant through any level of vaccination no matter what the US media claims. It also means that any hope of avoiding selective pressure for vaccine escape by just vaccinating people quickly enough is likely to prove futile. We also don't really have any special exemptions or privileges for vaccinated people yet outside of laxer requirements for international travel, so that wouldn't explain why the gap is so small.
(Incidentally, the "quick peak and decline in countries with high levels of vaccination" like the UK almost certainly isn't simply a result of vaccines working, despite the CJR article's attempt to spin it that way. All our experts over here seem to be in agreement that not only are the vaccines not effective enough to explain that, it just doesn't make sense to have such a sudden peak and decline as a result of our vaccination program - which has actually been slowing down as it runs out of willing recipients - or from natural immunity in combination with it. They reckon it must be caused in part by people's behaviour, and if we return to normal or autumn hits cases will go up again.)
In the week ending 07/31 MA was getting about 600/day, 200 of them are vaccinated. The number of vaccinated are 4.2M out of 7.1M. Thus according to that data the probability for a vaccinated is just under 40% of unvaccinated.
Giving that Delta is several times more virulent the current situation can be thought that way - the vaccinated facing Delta today is like unvaccinated facing original year ago (year ago totally unvaccinated MA had 400-500/day, and if MA was totally vaccinated today, 7.1M instead of 4.2M, it would as result be 350cases/day instead of the 200). I.e. these numbers also suggest that there is no good way to stop the spread until Delta capable vaccine comes.
That also highlights the propaganda spin of "just 125K breakthroughs out of 160M vaccinated since January", the widely tweeted 0.08% (especially giving that CDC hasn't been counting non-hospitalizations breakthroughs since May, and that number seems definitely incorrect as MA having 2.5% of vaccinated has 7K total breakthroughs - almost 6% of 125K) - the Delta is pretty recent and the total number isn't the point, the point is the current infection rate of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mg6NEp4iKcSR1O8l47bL...
The source for the data is linked in spreadsheet. You can copy/paste the link in google translate.
Imgur links of relevant translated data: https://imgur.com/a/uV2wP5B
This clearly shows a significant portion of the new cases are among the vaccinated.
Anecdotally, those I know who have "breakthrough" cases are having fairly moderate flu-like symptoms. I am quite confident those who are symptomatic are capable of spreading illness even if the vaccinated as a population are less likely to transmit disease.
The point is to greatly reduce your chance going into ICU. Trust me, nobody like the intubation. Physicians don't like it, patients hate it.
They'd might want to look into the I-RECOVER Protocol for treating Long COVID:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-recover...
https://youtu.be/ZCYM2HW2Ayw?t=321
Also there's emerging data suggesting Long COVID symptoms are being triggered by the reactivation of the Epstein Barr Virus.
This kind of attitude turns people away from wanting to engage with you, even if your idea has merit.
> There's absolutely no reason to say things like "hysterical fixation on cases". Bringing cases down means LESS LIVES LOST and less HEALTH lost.
It's naive to think that some people want more lives lost. That's the goal of everyone. In the same way, you're asking people to understand your perspective, try to keep an open mind, and understand the perspective of others. Even if you're correct, the only way to help is to understand the root of why some people are hesitant.
I'm obviously pro vaccines (in general) and are vaccinated for covid, but I'm also pro informed decision making, which from my perspective is very lacking (in some contexts) and very simplistic (summarized into TikTok-style videos and "cute" guitar songs) in others. There is of course valuable information out there but it's very difficult to find and is mostly lost in the ocean of influencer-driven media, turning science into MTV style top 10 countdowns. I happen to very rarely watch TV or news related to Covid from any source other than Sweden's official organizations, and I'm very happy with their information. I also noticed that it's very different in cadence from what I usually read people trying to say anywhere [1] (contrary to generic Swedish media for example, which follows the American example mostly). I believe this is one of the main reasons we have 40% fully vaccinated and ~60% with at least one shot). And there's no noticeable animosity or friction between vaccinated or unvaccinated people. There are also very few masks going around (mostly older people and 1 out of 100 young people I see).
From what I understand, scientists doing the research are working very hard on this, and they are still not 100% clear on all the details. It's naive to dismiss side-effects no matter how rare they are, and even more dangerous to dismiss fears of people. When you say "everyone must get vaccinated whether they understand or not" you're not aiding those people who are hesitant (regardless of why). Just the other day I watched a supercut of different "officials" some saying people can "top-off" with a second jab from another kind of vaccine while others saying that it's extremely wrong to do so. Similar to how the whole mask thing changed over time (and even now again with the new variants). This is all to say that difference of opinion and understanding is not only expected, but it's inevitable. You can't eliminate it, you can only face it and discuss it openly.
1: https://www.1177.se/Stockholm/sjukdomar--besvar/lungor-och-l...
This is demonstrably false if you actually look at hospital admissions.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vaccines-highly-effective...
They have about 75% vaccinated I think (a mix of just about all the vaccines available anywhere) and there is no mask mandate nor proof-of-vaccine mandate as of a few weeks ago. (Airport might be an exception, I haven’t been.). Interestingly it is also against the law to require anyone to NOT wear a mask — and I see about one person in 10 with a mask on the tram, usually none in the shops.
Border controls to neighbor countries are very light so there isn’t really anything preventing the unvaccinated or for that matter infected from entering the country.
I have no idea how this will turn out, I personally expect a big new wave among the unvaxxed in Europe after the summer, but if you’re curious what happens with an implicit policy of leaving the unvaccinated to their fate, keep an eye on Hungary, especially when the cold drives everyone indoors around October.
(And there were a LOT of restrictions before the vaccination rate went up, but unlike Germany nobody was out protesting against them.)
Not being vaccinated put the risk on the kids, which is unconscionable.
Get vaccinated. If you do not for other then a real medical reason you are a terrible person that might just cause the death of a young child. Fuck you.
People who are still opposed to getting vaccinated, versus simply apathetic, are probably never going to be convinced. These measures should encourage the apathetic. For the others, it's cutting losses and hoping it encourages quarantine--whether that be staying home or moving. (Being unvaccinated upstate or in Tennessee is less problematic than being unvaccinated in Manhattan.)
If we take the promise of mRNA platforms at face value, we are heading into an increasingly disease-free future with a strong minority self selecting affliction. I imagine we'll see more debates of this form if e.g. there is a population that is inoculated against Covid, most STDs, the flu, et cetera; and one that is not.
The COVID hospitalization rate in NYC has doubled since the beginning of July, and it has a steep positive rate of change. On its current trajectory, COVID hospitalizations will continue to increase, and sharply.
Terrible first order logic. The threat from the virus is not only immediate risk to the individual, it is also further transmissions increasing the risk of creating new breakthrough variants. Every infected person is a gamble that risks nullifying the effectiveness of vaccines, so the goal must be to bring down infections as strongly as possible.
>We have never before justified such intrusive government policies based on the risks faced by these individuals
we should have. Tolerating disease spread and threats to vulnerable populations when vaccines are available that are practically risk-free (or the risk being magnitudes smaller than the payoff) is ridiculous. Maybe this finally shakes people awake and puts public health and safety to the top of the agenda rather than people throwing tantrums like children about government incursion.
edit: and another point I forgot, with such a significant unvaccinated population we will very likely see surges in admissions in winter again. Public health resources are limited. Unnecessary Covid hospitalizations cause immense opportunity cost in the form of crowding out care and driving costs. Which in many cases other sick people and the public will have to carry.
The idea that “if we all got vaccinated, we could have zero variants” reeks of “zero COVID” thinking
It's really that simple. We want as few active infections as possible globally so that existing vaccinations can work for the variants they were made in mind with. Otherwise we will be at the disadvantage in a perpetual arms race trying to quickly stamp out the global "fires" of new variants.
Unless we could magically get the cases to zero this problem isn’t going away. Mask mandates will slow things, but eventually you’ll need enough people to actually get infected to drop the replication rate.
Given enough time, a virus will tend evolve to become more infectious period.
Somebody else could confirm this, but it seems to me that the current known variants of concern are not responses to vaccination.
Or how the flu hits every single year.
Right from wikipedia.
Epidemiology as a field did not publish papers or study the idea of "natural" herd immunity till last year when politicians started throwing the term around and a whole lot of researcher's scrambled to see whether this insanity had any merit.
Of which the answer is what we already knew just spelled out more specifically: no, this doesn't actually happen in the wild without vaccines, because it's literally just spreading the virus. Viruses burn themselves out after infecting basically everyone, provided immunity is long lasting.
Evolution is incremental. To become vaccine evading, the virus has to have a host it can replicate it, and a host that is a resistant target.
In fact it needs a big pool of them, since once infected develop immunity they no longer produce trial mutations.
So you need a pool of the unvaccinated, coming into frequently, regular contact with the vaccinated in order for any specific vaccine escape to evolve.
This is because, any incremental improvement needs to become a population dominant strain within the unvaccinated population: that you survived in a vaccinated person for a little bit is irrelevant if at the end of the day every virus with that trait dies without spreading.
Even if you successfully do spread from a vaccinated host, you need to either land in another vaccinated host (who then spreads you around: so isolation measures are effective), and while you're doing this you need to develop a better escape system: not guaranteed, because if overall viral loading or time to immunity is shorter, that's less time to generate variants.
But...a good way to optimize this, is to just spread to a pool of unvaccinated people. With luck you retain the vaccine-escape mutations, become dominant within the unvaccinated pool, and then get lots of opportunities to try and infect vaccinated people and get a little further.
This, incidentally, why viral evolution tends to consist of "the virus jumped between species several times" - because crossing a species barrier requires ongoing persistent contact between a host you can replicate it, and one you're trying to cross over into.
Can you please explain more?
Why can't both hosts A and B both be vaccinated folks?
Is'nt there a 3rd category - those who have immunity via past infection? How do it work in that case?
---
If what you say above is correct, then why do we see new strains in flu?
Has'nt pretty much every person on earth been exposed to flu or vaccinated against it?
If 1 vaccinated person infects another say 3, but then those people fail to infect anyone else - then it doesn't actually matter what selective advantages that viral strain had - 100% of the virus has died out.
But if the same chain terminates in the vaccinated people then infecting an unvaccinated person...then the new mutation escapes and potentially becomes dominant within the reservoir (unvaccinated people) and a failure to spread through the vaccinated population doesn't lead to the destruction of the mutant strain.
the next question is what happens to those with acquired immunity, and why are they being forced to be vaccinated?
I see many studies that show that their levels of antibodies seem to be even better than ones from the vaccines.
If that is happening, and the R0 from vaccinated to vaccinated is above 1, aren't we creating immense evolutionary pressure to defeat the current vaccines?
'Zero covid' or near-zero covid anyway does not 'reek' because it is perfectly attainable. The virus could be squashed pretty much completely. The fact that we cannot do it is the result of institutionalized failure, resignation and normalization of dysfunction, not actually a matter of fact.
We have in fact eradicated one highly transmittable, airborne virus through a global vaccination effort already, namely smallpox. And that was almost half a century ago.
Exactly. It was half a century ago when the global population was half what it is today and travel (especially international) was massively lower as well. Also Smallpox had a much lower mutation rate than COVID does, and it's not transmissable until obvious symptoms develop (much different than COVID). Thinking the same strategy would work today is kind of a pipe dream.
In Korea, we tried, succeeded for a couple of weeks, then failed.
People here pretend that if only USA was 100% vaccinated, then there will not be another variant.
There will always be another part of the world where a variant will arise, and eventually make its way here to the US.
OTOH, the USA is unique in the freedom it offers compared to any other country in the world, and a key ingredient in my opinion to its success.
One of the most shocking aspects to me is how the US citizens have changed to so nonchalantly willing to give away their freedoms and those of their neighbours.
I would not have believed if someone told me this 2 years ago.
And in the past years, I had often wondered about the 'good' Germans during the time of the Nazis, and why they did'nt first lift a finger when the atrocities against the Jews started, and later, a good number of them actively participated in elimination of the Jews.
the last year has been quite an eye opener. My hope is that more US citizens, regardless of their political persuasions and belief about the vaccines step back and think about the uniqueness of the freedoms they enjoy, and their willingness to throw it all away.
The mindset of fear that is inculcated that pits one group against another is the similarity that starts it off.
1940s Germany: Germans were convinced that Jews were the outer, not deserving of protection
20th century communism, too many examples - China, Russia, Cambodia, etc : Different classes - writers, teachers, scientists were identified as the outer group, and hate was inculcated
Today's scenario: the 'unvaccinated' are made as the other group.
Choosing not to be vaccinated is not an immutable characteristic. It’s a behavioural choice and a better analogy would be choosing to drink and drive – behaviour that is rightly frowned upon by most of society.
There is no one that argues that 'drinking and driving' is good for anyone at all.
OTOH, regarding vaccines, there are so many different human conditions, side effects and issues seen with vaccines that it is fair to be skeptical.
The other big factor is the time that has elapsed, and different folks have different levels of comfort.
All of this being brushed aside - to identify a group of folks to crush -- is the evil being discussed.
---
that they are immutable or not is quibbling, in my opinion.
Using the Khmer Rouge, the system decapitated the intellectuals not because they are learned, but because they had the ability to think and decide for themselves.
Now, in the US, I argue, that people who chose to think differently are being targeted, with the carrot being provided that they can change...
Is this not coercion? There is a line between persuasion and coercion, and very clearly, it has been crossed.
This is historical evidences that covid viruses in humans evolve to become relatively benign, likely this happens faster if we let it kill more people more quickly, but, well, modern medicine. So what will it take for the current covid variant to reach this state - we'll need it to evolve a benign version that out competes the current covid-delta .
A benign version of a virus that out competes its more lethal cousins is something that we also call a "live vaccine".
So why shouldn't we help it along? if we know it's going to happen naturally why not make it happen faster? past attempts to generate live vaccines have mostly worked but have not always gone well, but they were made with technologies that essentially consisted of whacking them with a mallet and hoping they would stay dead - the mRNA vaccines are much more like engineering. Why not take an existing relatively benign vaccine and fit it out with a protein coat similar enough to C19 and release that?
Obviously this is not something one would do blindly, it would require lots of testing, especially with immunocompromised people. And testing (without releasing it early) would be hard - tested people would need to remain in lockdown.
Of course the crazy anti-vaxxers would scream bloody blue murder - but given that their current propaganda already paints the current vaccines as "live vaccines" and warns people to stay away from the vaccinated that horse would seem to have already bolted
You reply : But the threat is so great that such is justified.
I have heard this dialog before.
> Tolerating disease spread and threats to vulnerable populations when vaccines are available that are practically risk-free (or the risk being magnitudes smaller than the payoff) is ridiculous
Those are very different justifications with very different policy implications, it is best not to conflate the two.
If breakthrough variants was the major concern (and it should have been) vaccine rollout should have been fast in addition to very high percentages, and vaccinated/unvaccinated population mix should have been minimized with policy. Anything less gives the perfect arena for evolutionary algorithm to learn its way around the vaccine immunity.
Second issue is the fading immunity of current vaccines in comparison to natural immunity. Vaccines got disproportionate attention and funding at the expense of covid treatment bets, which would have helped with developing higher natural immunity levels. To what degree conflicts of interests due to EUA play in this, we don’t know. But once booster shots enter the “mandatory” territory, that will cause an additional drop in compliance. How many boosters can we really mandate, for how many years?
We’re not talking about the total vaccination rate; it is a matter of how diffuse or concentrated it had to be for a particular locale to minimize variant training. Obviously it brings up questions of fairness thus was avoided by politicians.
> Vaccination is going as fast as possible, and policy was implemented to minimize all mixing of people, not just Vax/unvax.
It was a lofty aspiration but wasn’t/hasn’t been good enough. We could have had different levels of strictness from the beginning when lifting lockdowns, instead of going a full open and betting on a no variant scenario, instead of now with too late of an attempt, which will anger people and won’t be likely to work well.
It makes the case that previously infected individuals do not need to be prioritised for vaccination, not that natural immunity is better than vaccine driven immunity.
Perhaps you shared the wrong paper?
"Conclusions: Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination, and vaccines can be safely prioritized to those who have not been infected before."
You can prioritize those who have not been infected before BECAUSE those who HAVE been infected are unlikely to see a benefit in vaccinating to begin with.
Like, I'm academically interested in this, and I know how easy it is to share the wrong paper, hence my final comment.
You can certainly go down this path, and dismiss everyone who disagrees with you as "children", but what you value is not the same as what everyone else values.
I am willing to balance the risk of never having a normal life again with an overall risk of illness and death that is on par with every other year I have been alive.
Eventually, I too will become old and frail, and become vulnerable to some virus or another. If I ever become so afraid of death that I demand that other people give up their basic human rights to "keep me safe", then I hope that illness takes me quickly after that. I don't want to live in the world you propose.
With an R0 value of 6, you're statistically likely to infect 6 other people. Why is that acceptable to you?
Because I have been "statistically likely" to infect N other people every time I had a cold, a flu, or any number of other viruses, most of which are fatal to at least some segment of the population.
Moreover, those N other people can get vaccinated if they're worried about this particular risk. It's a great vaccine. It essentially prevents death from SARS-CoV2. If they don't, that's their choice.
Being alive is risky. You can try to eliminate all of that risk, but you will be dead long before anyone puts you in the grave.
The good news is (assuming that they're not immune compromised in a way that would make them vulnerable to a panoply of other viruses) they're at essentially no risk from Covid. The data on this is unassailable:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28041775
The far bigger risk to children, at this point, is panicky parents doing things that negatively impact their psychological well-being.
With your argument standing on the foundation of choice of vaccine+no death vs no vaccine+death, why are you accepting of the fact that lower vaccination rates has a non-trivial chance to strip away the individual choice of life or death of themselves and their loved ones?
I don't know a lot of things.
I don't know that I won't die in my sleep. I don't know if I won't walk out the door tomorrow morning and get hit by a taxi. I don't know that I won't get botulism and die from a bad pickle. I don't that I won't choke on that pickle. I don't know if the next SARS variant isn't festering in some pile of bat poop in a Cave in Kunming right now. I don't know that I won't end 2021 in a hospital, dying from some cancer that hasn't yet been diagnosed.
Life is risky. On the spectrum of "things I don't know but worry about", the third-order effects of someone else's personal decisions is pretty far down the list.
...in fact, this risk is way below the risk that other people seem to be actively trying to take away my freedoms on a daily basis, because they're scared of what "might" happen, and want everyone else to live according to their rules.
But yeah, I'm pretty comfortable with my level of protection from SARS-CoV2.
Just because you're the one smoking, doesn't mean that second hand smoke is harmless.
Well let me at least put your mind at ease here. The high vinegar content means getting botulism from a pickle is extremely unlikely.
Allowing the virus to propagate freely is asking for trouble in the form of mutations as well. If it had been possible to inoculate the majority of the population in India, for example, we probably wouldn't be dealing with the delta variant right now.
Edit: if a single assertion above is wrong, please reply with citations, and we'll all be that much better-informed for it. Downvoting something that's objectively correct just because it disagrees with your political agenda is the weakest of weak sauce.
When it costs us virtually nothing to do the right thing, though, I don't see how the precautionary principle applies. Usually we see that principle come up in arguments over nuclear power, large-scale environmental projects, major technological paradigm shifts, or medical therapies with a real potential for harm. It just doesn't seem to be in play here. Wear a mask in public, exercise reasonable social distancing practices when possible, and get vaccinated with something that has already been used successfully over a billion times. Is that really asking so much?
OK, understood. It's good to see where people are coming from on this subject, even when disagreeing.
If that's true, there's no reason to think that we understand 100% of the long term effects of the novel vaccines for this bug.
https://www.phe.gov/emergency/events/COVID19/COVIDvaccinator...
“Following the money”, it would seem neither the industry nor the Government share your sanguine view on the vaccines. It would be easy enough to revoke the legal immunity now…it’s been nearly a year and a half since COVID was introduced into US, it’s not the emergency it was in the beginning. Yet I think it is still in place.
If the COVID vaccines are so good, why the failure to accept the typical financial liability that comes with every other medical intervention? There’s a difference between being an anti-vaxxer and an anti-inject-stuff-in-my-arm-without-professional-liability-er. Those who “follow the money” in such things would have reason to be skeptical.
Some of their "freedom" is now being stripped away by their vaccinated counterparts, who are growing increasingly impatient and frustrated, and who outnumber them.
This may also be selfish, but at least it's democratic.
Except for the people that are unable to get it due to a medical condition. Or unable to get it because they're too young. Or able to get it but it didn't work for them.
And then the fact that, as it spreads, it has a chance to mutate, so the more it spreads, the more we have to worry about dangerous variants.
Anyone who chooses not to get the vaccine just because "they don't want to" is putting the rest of society at risk... purely because they're selfish. As far as a lot of us are concerned, that's a pretty horrible type of person to be.
Of course, such people are welcome to not interact with the rest of society (nobody, not even other unvaccinated folks, per risk of mutation); live on farm and grow your own resources, etc. At that point, you're not putting anyone else at risk, so it's no longer selfish. However, I very much doubt many of such people, claiming "it's my body, so I can do what I want" are willing to actually follow through what's required to avoid putting _other people's bodies_ at risk.
> Of course, such people are welcome to not interact with the rest of society.
People who's bodies are at risk are free to avoid participating in society. Being sick sucks, but doesn't give you the right to force others to do medical procedures in order to protect you.
Yes, in our world, participating in society is often mandatory, and not a choice that you can make. That equally applies to people who are sick, and to the people who don't want to be forced to have things done to their body against their will.
There are many communicable diseases, and many things healthy people can be forced to do in order to protect the sick. The choice whether or not to force them is a tradeoff - safety for the society versus freedom for the individual.
People who value individual freedom more than they value safety are simply making a different tradeoff than you do. At some point, a society designed to minimize the risk at the expense of human freedoms becomes a nightmare to live in.
For example, we could significantly reduce the risk of rapes and murders (especially of vulnerable people) by forcing everyone to wear a bodycam and an ankle bracelet. We don't do that because we have decided that this is not a tradeoff worth making.
On the other hand, we did decide to reduce the risk of people dying from drunk driving, we have sacrificed our freedom to drink and drive for the sake of the safety of the other people on the road.
My point is, where you draw the line is a question of your values. Neither side is being "dumb" or "selfish". Some people value social prosperity and safety and are willing to sacrifice their (and other people's) freedoms to increase it. Others value individual rights and freedoms, and are willing to accept some risks and sacrifice some safety in order to not have these rights taken away.
Society without freedoms is better able to protect the vulnerable, and also the life in such society is less worth living.
Besides, if we go with your standards, those that can't take the vaccine would not be allowed to participate in a mandatory vaccine society anyway. So either they're forced to avoid participating, or they at least have the option to based on a personal assessment.
1. We all go a little out of our way to help those who need help (the sick, those the vaccine doesn't work for, those who cannot get the vaccine for other reasons), OR
2. Some people are selfish and only care about their own self gratification, so are unwilling to sacrifice a tiny bit to help everyone else.
I'll take the society with more 1 and push back on 2.
You're weighing guaranteed exposure to potentially unknown effects vs a non guaranteed risk of contracting the virus.
Versus a bunch of people that refuse to get the vaccine because ... they feel like they are better able to analyze the facts than those well educated people.
There was literally an interview with a woman on NPR recently who said, "I have grand children, so I'm not getting the vaccine". Like... she thought that having grand children was a reason _not_ to get the vaccine. And she followed it up with "they don't think we're smart enough to make good decisions for our families". Here's the thing; "they" are clearly correct.
I just get so frustrated by this stance of "Science and facts are propaganda; _I_ know better, because I trust my gut. The welfare of society be damned".
Yes, and that's precisely how good analysis and decision making is supposed to work. You're supposed to change your mind when the information you based your decision on changes. That's a _good_ thing.
For any given discussion, given enough people, there will always be a set of people that believe each of the possible things that _can_ be believed. We have people that believe the world is flat. However, the fact that _some_ of those people happened to believe what turned out to be true when the set of input information changed... doesn't make them smarted than everyone else. Unless they were basing their conclusions on a known and defensible set of arguments... it just makes them randomly lucky. You can have a watch to tell time... then ignore it and say it's always 12pm. When it happens to get to 12pm, you'll be right. But you'll still be stupid.
There's nothing stupid about rejecting "expert consensus" when the data backing the experts doesn't exist.
Most people are healthy enough to beat flu, coronaviruses, strep infections, etc. etc. etc. Most people are "good enough" immune-system wise, and are not at all a risk to anybody.
What is effective R with the mRNA vaccines?
What we do know is that vaccinated people seem to be getting COVID Delta and spreading it to close contacts: but that's a self-selecting the sample too - people who are getting vaccinated are also vastly more likely to take adequate precautions if they get infected.
And note that the limit can't be 0. Real life always involves some risk.
Worst possible case regardless of likelihood is not a good metric. I'll bet the average drunk driver, and indeed the average sober driver, causes many more deaths than the average unvaxed unmasked person in a post-vaccination world.
I'll admit something. I happen to love driving twice the speed limit after a few drinks. Feels great. And I indulge that sometimes on country roads when there's no one around. I know I'm a better driver after a few beers than most people are sober. If it were up to me, there would be a test, and a rating on my license that let me drive with a higher BAC than other people. But you know what? My personal pleasure isn't worth the damage of taking someone's life, or of entitling everyone else in society to do the same. So, on the whole, it's obviously better that it's illegal. Even though it infringes on my personal freedom and pursuit of happiness.
In the 2 years of covid we have had 4.25 million deaths with still 90% us and 97% of the rest of the world left to catch it.
You only need a unmasked person to have an R value 1.64 times higher than a vaxed/masked for the proportional deaths to not reach parity even with 90% people vacinated.
That's completely ignoring the fact that driving is actually a productive activity with a goal. Where as most of the reasons people give for not wearing a mask are either easily debunked or work just as well as a retort to someone asking you "why are you continuously punching yourself?".
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
And how many of those were of fully vaccinated people?
Also the dynamics of how far any given infection would spread are very different in a post-vaccination world.
And most antivaxers and the unmasked are welfare cases with nothing to do but look at reddit, and so are a burden on the state and a direct cost to me as a taxpayer even when there isn't a pandemic. Hey, maybe this will work out great in the end.
What do we do now? Do we need to fight a war to decide who gets things their way? There won’t be any real winners in such an event.
Mandating an unapproved novel 'vaccine' while removing all responsibility from the manufacturers for the side effects is extremely reckless toward others.
I can try to understand the other side, but please do the same. Pretty much everyone has been disappointed by humanity this year, and we’re all feeling roughly the same emotions even though we have radically different worldviews.
And to point your point back at you, please re-read my post as someone who is trying to understand them. I honestly have no freaking clue why you think otherwise, other than the fact that I disagree with them. I literally asked them a question so that I can understand them better!
You may have convinced yourself that this is true, but I don’t believe it. Your comment was mostly passive-aggressive rhetorical sniping:
> Okay, so then you die. Nihilism is your choice, so that's cool I guess. But your post is about you, and only you, fullstop. There are other people out there, despite whatever solipsistic beliefs you have.
And the “question” you ask at the end reads like just another attack:
> Why is that acceptable to you?
You gotta understand, friend.. what I think is at stake here are the lives of the people that I love. With that in mind, the seemingly callous disregard of even their own loved ones is... a difficult thing to parse. So again, please try to read my words from the perspective of someone who's desperately frustrated, and at least attempting to figure out why someone is explicitly okay with knowing that their actions will get others killed.
We are nowhere near all people in a population being susceptible to infection with the vaccine rollout (and the people that are susceptible, it's their choice.)
The excess death statistics would like to have a word with you, but more importantly:
> If I ever become so afraid of death that I demand that other people give up their basic human rights
Are basic human rights really what we're talking about here?
If so, they've always had limits when it came to impacts on others. The freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of someone's nose; the freedom to spread certain pathogens might end there as well.
Of course, the article here is talking about vaccination as a condition for participation in venues where density and proximity is a concern. "Basic human rights" may well not quite reach into unqualified access to "indoor dining, in indoor fitness facilities, indoor entertainment facilities." Hell, it's hard to actually make an totally unqualified case for bodily autonomy itself, even though that's a good principle to start from, it isn't the only one.
Basic human rights were not lost from the world by smallpox or other vaccination mandates. They wouldn't be destroyed even if there were going to be a federal mandate for covid vaccination, which doesn't even seem to be on the horizon. They are certainly not going to be destroyed by proof of vaccination being required for entry to restaurants and gymns.
What do excess deaths of vaccinated people look like?
> "Basic human rights" may well not quite reach into unqualified access to "indoor dining, in indoor fitness facilities, indoor entertainment facilities."
This is disingenuous. Freedom of peaceful assembly is widely recognised as a basic right.
VAERS currently reports 11,000 deaths (50% in USA mainland) after Covid vaccines. VAERS only has a subset of data on vaccine adverse events, so the true number when private/HMO databases are included will be some multiple (5x to 100x) of the VAERS total, https://openvaers.com/. A German pathologist has estimated that 30% of post-vaccine deaths were caused by vaccination. We need more autopsies in other countries, along with earlier post-vaccine clinical observation, https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
> pathologists therefore worked with public prosecutors, the police and resident doctors, reports Schirmacher. More than 40 people have already been autopsied who died within two weeks of being vaccinated. Schirmacher estimates that 30 to 40 percent of them died from the vaccination. In his opinion, the frequency of fatal consequences of vaccinations is underestimated
Existing Covid vaccines are non-sterilizing, i.e. they do not prevent infection or transmission. In fact, because a non-sterilizing vaccine suppresses symptoms, an infected vaccinated person doesn't know to isolate (unless they get tested after exposure, as recommended by CDC) and can infect others. A non-vaccinated person would show symptoms and can self-isolate, ending the transmission chain.
Natural immunity is sterilizing, i.e. NYC essential workers who have already recovered from Covid are much better for public health than anyone vaccinated with a non-sterilizing Covid vaccine, https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/558757-the-ill-advise...
> During the pandemic, the professional laptop class protected themselves by working from home while exposing the working class that brought them food and other goods. It is now the height of hypocrisy to recognize immunity from vaccinations but not immunity from those exposed while serving the laptop class.
US Covid deaths peaked in early January, three months before US daily vaccines peaked in mid-April (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/us-daily-covid-vaccine-do...), and VAERS deaths peaked in March-April, https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?GRAPH=ON&GRO...
Otherwise, you risk being lumped in with the multitude of bad takes made by people who misunderstand what VAERS is, and don't understand statistics.
> US Covid deaths peaked in early January, three months before US daily vaccines peaked in mid-April, and VAERS deaths peaked in March-April.
I find an April peak in VAERS deaths entirely unsurprising, since that's exactly when the rate of vaccination was highest.
To put that number into context, you are 944 times more likely to die if you catch covid than if you get a vacine in the US. That's right the anti-vaxer take on the VAERS numbers say getting a vaccine is 1000 times better than not getting a covid vaccine. Even in the country with the lowest reported (0.1% which is not necessarily the actual) death rate per covid case you are 100x better off getting the vaccine.
https://medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?TABLE=ON&GROUP1=...
Big piece of the puzzle you are ommiting there.
In the US, over 300 million doses of covid-19 vaccines have been administered so far. Reported deaths of any cause (regardless of any established connection with the vaccine) among this group was on the order of 6000 people as of the end of July. [0]
US covid-19 cases are around 35 million and 600k deaths. How many of those were "young to not that old"? Well, one count[1] would put us at about 28k under 50, 10k under 40.
Let's be generous to the "vaccines are a threat to the young" position and assume for the sake of argument that ALL of the 6000 VAERS reported deaths were in fact caused by the vaccine and were ALL people under 40. Even making those assumptions, the order-of-magnitude difference in vaccination events vs infection events makes it utterly clear that covid itself is at least 10x more dangerous to people under 40 than receiving a vaccination is.
And if you dig into the adverse vaccine event specifics, my bet is that you find a pretty similar distribution of adverse effects -- sure, some of them are young people, just like some covid deaths are young people, but not most of them.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
People do work with numbers like "Years of Life Lost," and FWIW I think that can inform some conversations even though I don't think it helps much with this one. It is not the end-all-be-all, though. You could, for example, look at the social costs of losing the accumulated experience/wisdom/social capital of people over a certain age, which may be why some societies emphasize respect for the elderly.
Considering that we still don't know the long terms effect of the vaccine, I can understand that someone between 20 and 30 without comorbidities would think that it's reasonable to wait and see, especially if he's less at risk (lives in the countryside for example, remote work, things like that).
> You could, for example, look at the social costs of losing the accumulated experience/wisdom/social capital of people over a certain age, which may be why some societies emphasize respect for the elderly.
That's a good point. You could also add a different value for years depending on the age, as people often value their youth more. 1.5 years lost when you're in college or starting your first job is not the same as when you're in your 70s and retired.
Who's doing this in a movie theater? It's clearly meant to protect public protests.
Eroding liberty by restricting free association would have certainly been considered a violation of rights by the folks that listed them in the Constitution.
In fact, they put it first.
Like when we put barbed wire up in Chinatown, San Francisco in 1900 after allowing all the white people to leave? [1]
Or when we incarcerated 30,000 women in WWI because they may be "unclean" and held them even after their mandatory STD tests came back negative? [1]
Or what we did to immigrant Russian Jews in 1892? [2]
Did you know that up until 2009 we banned HIV positive people from entering the U.S.? [2]
Yes, of course the U.S. has a long history of quarantine. We also have a long history of abusing those powers for racist and political reasons.
The PA Supreme Court, at least, agrees. [3]
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/10/30/3601204...
[2] https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/cure-worse-dise...
[3] https://www.alston.com/en/insights/publications/2020/09/cons...
Independent of the rest of your argument, this one is not a good one to hinge on.
"Excess death" is a pragmatic term, not a normative term. The baseline death statistics doesn't mean those deaths were OK, or natural and acceptable to endure. They include many peer to peer (e.g traffic accidents) or institution to peer (many "lifestyle" diseases') deaths too, which in themselves are also excess deaths in comparison to another baseline (e.g. obesity related deaths in comparison to 1960s).
These feeds back to the arguments of risk tolerance and freedoms; there is a mutually tolerated, implicit risk of peer-to-peer death in driving too. I am not saying this is comparable to the risk of death by covid (it is obviously not), but we can't make principled arguments of absolute safety nor absolute freedom without keeping things proportional to the risks and freedoms we're already been balancing.
> Basic human rights were not lost from the world by smallpox or other vaccination mandates.
If we're being anal about it, it is not entirely true. People have a right to keep the functional and structural integrity of their bodies; and even enhancing immunization would be a change in that, and that has an element of intrusiveness to it. Again, being a transmitter of the virus and harming other people's bodies is also a threat to the functional and structural organization of those bodies, and that is (very) intrusive too, but two things can be true at the same time, and therefore this is not the principle to argue from.
The honest argument would be accepting the need for striking a balance, accepting the sense of anxiety from both sides, and not pushing conclusions into people. We have to have people participate in the rationality of the decision making, from a place of empathy and growth.
I hope this is a moment we can also realize that just like public health is a shared resource and lack thereof is a shared liability, public rationality and sound decision making capability is also a shared resource and lack thereof is a shared liability. We've been turning a blind eye to all sorts of media training people to be more and more polarized, using shaming as a short-term compliance tool that has long-term stupefying consequences. Now we depend on all of us coming to our senses to survive this thing; we need a herd immunity against irrational self-deception just as much.
Fully aware of that. The reason I invoked them is to make the pragmatic point that those statistics alone and the correlated rise with covid should tell an analyst that risks associated with the virus aren't the same as "every other year they've been alive." That's a descriptive observation.
Of course, it also invites a normative judgment...
> If we're being anal about it, it is not entirely true.
It's essentially true, and this is important. There have been genuinely compulsory vaccinations in modern free societies... and these compulsions turned out not to be slippery slopes into totalitarian oppression, but the corner case that you'd expect from societies that, as you say, realize this isn't about "absolute safety nor absolute freedom," that both risks and rights can be qualified (and in fact, for rights to be meaningful at all, they must be qualified, since there are always cases where a right reaches a point of tension with another right).
And NY isn't even talking about genuine compulsory vaccination, it's proposing vaccination as a condition of participating in things that people can opt out of. It's not even as compulsory as a fine or paying your taxes or any number of other carrots/sticks that states regularly use to "push conclusions into people" because if you're going to have a society, you're going to blow past the limits of voluntarism at some point, as lovely as it is to try and maximize it within those limits.
> People have a right to keep the functional and structural integrity of their bodies
Yes, I anticipated that and you can see it in my comment where I refer to bodily autonomy. It's a good place to start, but like every other right it isn't unqualified.
What? I have never heard anything like that at all. Rights are absolute.
That sounds like it is coming from the "Sure free speech is fine, so long as it doesn't offend me," crowd.
it's proposing vaccination as a condition of participating in things that people can opt out of.
People here are generally highly attuned to one of the big surveillance ad corps trying to massage people into accepting some invasion of their personal sovereignty, how is this different? You think if something like this is accepted there won't be pushes to go further?
If this infrastructure is put in place, it will be abused, and it will coopted for other things.
Sure you have. It's embedded in the common phrase (invoked earlier) about the right to swing a fist ending at the edge of people's noses. Or in the oft-invoked expression about yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Or the frequent refrain about rights being paired with responsibilities.
> You think if something like this is accepted there won't be pushes to go further?
We don't have to "think" it, we can point to historic and present examples where like compulsory actions existed without devolving into totalitarianism because we have a society shaped by people who understood it's possible to have both substantial general protections and specific exceptions.
If there are, that should be the exceptions, rather than the norm.
Also, the parent asked if there won't be "pushes". So the implication is that there will be an overwhelming push in that direction, and very weak countering "pull" in the opposite direction.
And it is clear what direction it will ultimately go. So that is the danger in setting a precedent. So that further pushes in a "bad" direction will require much less effort, and only matter of time it is accepted to be the "new normal"..
So the idea that "it is clear what direction it will ultimately go" is... kinda correct, actually. It is clear that general autonomy can remain a valued principle with specific exceptions. It is clear that they are the exceptions rather than the norm. And that the pull in the other direction isn't weak.
Sure. It is the ever increasing number of "specific exceptions" that people should be worried about.
Incorrect.
https://www.theusconstitution.org/news/there-are-no-absolute...
1A text: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." [0]
So is the right to the freedom of speech absolute? Not according to the body authorized to definitively interpret the law, the Supreme Court, which ruled that laws abridging the freedom to defame people through speech or press are constitutional.
Thus the right to the freedom of speech has limits and is not absolute.
"In United States constitutional law, false statements of fact are statements of fact (as opposed to points of law) that are false. Such statements are not always protected by the First Amendment. This is usually due to laws against defamation, that is making statements that harm the reputation of another." [1]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact
As an easy example: how do you reconcile that rights are absolute with the over-used “can’t shout fire in a theatre” case that curtails freedom of speech. Many would argue that rights must be qualified, or exist in relationship with each other. All of these are humanist arguments, mind you. Nobody is trying to throw human rights out with the humans.
Am I missing something? It seems to be clear for well over a year that "this thing" is not some existential threat that threatens our very survival. Why are people talking as if it is, and seeking to craft policy as if it is?
Personally, I believe that the global excess deaths figures will be bigger this year than last, due to all the developing world where vaccines are not available.
What are the odds that anyone is right about everything? We ought to be confident in our reasoned decisions, yes, but then not be surprised that someone else’s reasoned decisions disagree with our own.
I think you're misunderstanding the conversation. The thread is talking about the risk _to vaccinated people_. What excess death statistics are you thinking of that show a categorical increase in risk for those vaccinated?
If so, they've always had limits when it came to impacts on others. The freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of someone's nose
Whoa, you've got that horridly twisted.
It's not a human right to demand that others undergo a medical procedure for your own perceived interest. It's not a human right to demand others undergo a medical procedure, or be injected with something, because you've been told it will benefit you in some way. Every individual has complete choice and autonomy as to the medical procedures they undergo. That is the human right.
>Article 6 – Consent
1. Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.
http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31058&URL_DO=DO_TO...
Because if I put something in my body only because my master tells me to, I am a slave. Through and through. Bodily autonomy is absolute. It's different than the Modern American definition of slavery, which is mostly based on the New World forms of slavery, which are related to but different than the Old World forms of slavery. But they are all slavery. Either you have control of your corpus or you do not.
It is about me. A population is made up of individual people. Those individual people have rights. Given a choice of a population of X size who surrender the rights to govern their body, vs a population of free willed humans of (X - (00.03 * X)), I would gladly take the latter, including as a casualty. Humanity under authoritarianism is never morally acceptable, regardless of how benevolent my dictator appears to be.
From your comment:
> Because if I put something in my body only because my master tells me to, I am a slave.
So don't do it for that reason. Do it because it will save your (and other people's) life.
That's an entirely reasonable position to take.
Concern over long term effects of the spike protein presented by COVID-19, both attached to the virus and free-floating within my body as a result of mRNA therapy.
Concern over long term ability for my cells to accurately recreate the spike protein. From what I've read, this is actually low concern on my scale, the capping seems pretty thorough.
Concern over my body creating an immunoresponse to organs/nearby cells/systems where the spike protein has accumulated
Concern over my immune system being able to form a strong defense in the future over different coronaviruses when it's been trained to work outside it's normal operational parameters.
Concern over the hubris of mankind and the house of cards that is our trust in the peer review system.
Concern over the lack of experiment replication done in the modern medical fields
Concern over the fact that some of these companies have shady history, including knowingly selling me asbestos to keep my testicle dry during the summer heat.
Concern over the lack of transparency in the bridges between pharma lobbyists and government, politicians and media, and media and pharma corps.
Concern over the lack of transparency in more broader sense.
Concern over the obvious astroturfing on social media, of multiple "influencers" posting the same copy and pasted messages, the bot responses, the general fiscal funding behind this debate.
Concern over the future implications of us accepting, as a society, the weaponization of fear, and the saving graces of corporations.
Concern over our willingness to change our lives in drastic manners because of the justification that it may save a life, which I see as an endless justification opportunity for future world leaders.
Concern over turning fear into a virtue.
Your anecdotal evidence from a friend isn't data.
Your link shows what exactly? That yes, the majority of people with Covid currently, and majority of hospitalized (severely ill other words) are fully vaccinated.
You seem to think this is bad or something? As the vaccine rate increases of course more patients will be vaccinated. If the vaccine rate was 100% then 100% of people seen would be vaccinated!
The number of people being hospitalised has decreased hugely though.
> Everyone (each company) that has worked on mRNA vaccines in the last 10 years+ are facing the same ethical dilemma, as all of the compounds have not been approved for human use.
Well this isn't true at all.
> I would stay with Sputnik or the Sino vaccines especially if you have a history of blood clots or genetic predisposition to heart conditions.
I don't know much about the Sino vaccine, but Sputnik is a adenovirus-based vaccine (the same as AstraZeneca). It probably has the same blood clotting issues as AZ, but the places it has been deployed have much less robust post vaccine medical surveillance.
But it's good you'd take it! I'd encourage you to do so ASAP.
The blood clots from AstraZeneca have not been thoroughly investigated - we don't know the pathways involved. By the way, the mRNA vaccines are producing many more blood clot calls into triage lines and offices than AZ (prolly because of slow rollout here).
>I'd encourage you to do so ASAP.
Why would you encourage me to do something my body doesn't need?
The country’s Health Ministry reported last week that the two-dose vaccine is now just 39% effective in Israel where the highly transmissible delta variant is the dominant strain. The shot still works very well in preventing people from getting seriously sick, Israeli officials said, demonstrating 88% effectiveness against hospitalization and 91% effectiveness against severe illness.[1]
So 88% effective against Delta-strain COVID causing hospitalization. That seems pretty good!
I think many people saying "look at Israel" are looking at the decreased effectiveness in stopping any symptoms against Delta-COVID and think that - disappointing - headline figure (39%) is the protection against hospitalisation rate. It's not, fortunately.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/delta-variant-israel-to-give...
It sure is! Once it has had a look at the virus to know to act against it.
That is literally what a vaccine is - a way to give your immune system an early look at a pathogen so it knows to act next time it sees it.
because of the nanoparticle adjuvant that enacpsulates the subunit? yeah that's been on the top of my mind too, but covaxin is a traditional inactivated virus and it confers 70+% efficacy. my question is, if a vaccine that is the same genetic material (maybe a little less, but not heavily modified like mrna or run through the moth/tree approach like novavax) then why are we ignoring those who were actually infected?
food for thought: long covid is H O R R I B L E, and that should be everyones reason to take a vaccine.. but if you don't want to, just be prepared to sit on the sidelines for a year or maybe more. once the pandemic, as defined by the government, ends then you are on your own. there is already less patience for those who need to take extended time from work for a covid positive result
How do you know he wasn't already infected and thus has natural immunity? So how is this saving her or his life?
Why aren't we testing for those who actually need this vaccine or not (because antibody tests don't work very well and no one wants to improve that metric because thats not where the money is)
It's now clear that these injections do not have the efficacy of what has traditionally been termed a "vaccination," but they're definitely being marketed as a preventative, or therapeutic medical intervention.
Weird comment this one...
The obvious good reason is you have one of the many pre-existing conditions that prevent you from getting the vaccine without causing yourself further risk of long term organ damage/failure caused by you previously taking other mandatory vaccines on a regular basis (healthcare workers, vasculitis is one such group of diseases common among the RN population - but what do they know, those front line workers with their anti-vaxx mumbo-jumbo).
The other obvious reason is another simple one - it seems its completely unnecessary for any relatively "healthy" person such as myself to worry about this virus. Our immune systems are designed for this battle, and based on the death rates, it seems despite the US population being very obese and largely unhealthy with a fairly high diabetes rate, we're somehow not dying in droves.
Third reason, vaccinations against every single little virus that comes along is effectively practicing negative selection. I think we all can assume where that leads especially with a leaky vaccine like this one - large scale true extinction event. We're breeding superbugs by vaccinating large scale populations, instead of small targeted vaccine administration.
There is a false equivalence here that freedom to opt-out of a commercial product, is excising one's freedom to "spread diseases".
To make it clear, would you want to pass a law that prevents someone with a genetic defect from marrying and having children? Because they would be "spreading" generic disorders, and by having offspring, they are "exercising their freedom to spread a genetic disorder", right?
You can say that any one that is not breathing through a mask is exercising their freedom to spread diseases, and so everyone should wear a mask all the time..
Basically, the point is there is a line where your right to be safe and the right of the rest of the world to exist in freedom is in balance. And arguments like the one that is being made is pushing that line to reduce the latter, and if we are not careful, the latter will be reasoned out, in the name of increasing the "protection" of the 0.01% of people from 95.02 to 95.03% (Just made up numbers to illustrate the point).
And it is not hard to imagine who benefits from it.
May be we need a "Citizen freedom index" for every country so that we will know when we are draining it.
Because if it is hard to improve what that cannot be measured, its hard to know when you are draining it as well..
Not true. Delta is showing increasingly worse numbers for younger people. Some children's hospitals are full from it. If you have another argument besides that one let's discuss.
"The study does note that “it appears that severe illness due to COVID-19 is uncommon among children.”
"Among the 23 states and New York City reviewed by AAP, children’s hospitalizations made up 1.3 – 3.5 percent of all COVID-19 hospitalizations for the week ending July 29."
"According to the study, children were 0.00 – 0.26 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, and seven states reported zero child deaths among data from 43 states, New York City, Puerto Rico and Guam, with 0.00 – 0.03 percent of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death in those areas."
If you're trying to provide evidence that Covid does not present a serious threat to children, it'd be hard to do a better job.
If you get on that ventilatior you won't be thinking you made the right choice. You'll be wishing you took the vaccine like so many stories we see today. What an idiotic hill to die on.
Even if your young and healthy there's still a non-zero chance something could happen to you.
Why not just get it on the off chance?
> there's still a non-zero chance something somethin could happen to you.
That was true before the pandemic, and it is still true today. If I die, I die. No need to restrict the lives of everyone else just because you are afraid of death.
The problem with you "living however you want" is that it can impact other people...living. Every person the virus infects is a new chance for it to mutate and potentially get worse. We've already seen that happen once with the delta variant. You have an easy way to prevent deaths and you won't because?
Would you let someone "live their life" running around stabbing people? Some people might just get a nick, some could die, what does it matter?
People are largely unvaccinated in New York city (70% unvax), and yet, somehow, we don't see people lying in the streets (at least not from Covid). Hmmmm. Could it be that people's immune systems are functioning despite the human hubris and hysteria?
Where did you see that 70% of NYC is unvaxed? Over 50% of people in NYC are fully vaccinated against COVID and those under 12 are still not eligible.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.p...
I got the 70% unvaxed from a nytimes.com article; apparently it was dated. Looks like only 40% are unvaxed now according to your link. What's the Covid death rate in that highly congested and dense city? In my state, it is .13%, and that's counting many many deaths that have nothing to do with Covid as a "Covid death" (according to my wife [RN] and her friends who work in local ERs and ICUs as well as a head administrator of our largest public state health network).
But guess what? They do save lives. That's why it's against the law to not wear a seat belt or bike helmet in most places or to not drink and drive. The vaccine can save lives too but it works best if as many people as possible to protect those who can't, to prevent breakthrough infections etc.
I'm not "obsessed" with death avoidance. I'm just not such a selfish asshat that I can give an hour of my time to go get vaccinated, reduce spread and maybe save some lives.
It's not like those people with comorbidities were going to die tomorrow without COVID anyways, they were going to live 5, 10, 20 extra years. Time to see children and grandchildren grow up, spend with friends etc.
>The vaccine can save lives too but it works best if as many people as possible to protect those who can't, to prevent breakthrough infections etc.
What works best is for sick people to stay the fuck home until they're not sick anymore. Healthy people's immune systems, won't allow a large viral load to allow for transmission. This is not a magic virus, there is nothing new here.
>I'm just not such a selfish asshat that I can give an hour of my time to go get vaccinated, reduce spread and maybe save some lives.
Homie, if you believe you're saving some lives by getting vaccinated...I don't know what kind of propaganda you've been feeding on along with those cheetos you were complaining about the other day.
The vaccine will not stop you from transmitting the virus to other immunocompromised people. Don't take my word for it, take Pfizer's.
If you believe that the left is pretty much every public health organisation in every country in the world, then yes.
Otherwise, your statement is false.
If Trump had won, and he had encouraged vaccination, would you be blaming the right?
If I run a private public space I shouldn’t (and can’t) discriminate arbitrarily on who can enter.
So if I don't like what your t-shirt says, that's all it takes.
And for instance, Walmart doesn't have to open to the public tomorrow just because they opened to the public today.
You actually can. It might help the discussion for you to tell us where you picked up this idea.
Please explain further what that means.
Also please explain how setting restrictions on use of the space based on conduct, such as being vaccinated or not, is more arbitrary than, say, a dress code.
(There's a stronger argument for refusing a vaccine being an absolute right)
Are you saying that the greater good in overall societal health is less valuable than your individual preferred method of existence? Genuinely curious.
A vaccine that also has a known chance of causing current harm, and an unknown chance of causing future harm.
Nothing is free. How much did pharma companies make from the vaccine? I don’t know the answer.
I see it as on par with indoor smoking bans and seatbelts. You are giving up a relatively small degree of freedom in order to stop a highly contagious, highly mutable virus; and yes, to protect people who aren't you.
It’s not about you. It’s never about you. There are plenty of people who cannot legitimately get vaccinated. Since these people have no choice to get the vaccine, then your rights to choose for yourself are rightly curtailed.
I’m always curious about these arguments. Why do you think your rights are superior to the rights of others?
It's just become "a thing" now thanks to the rightwing using it as another way to aggravate their base, and thanks to "experts" who have an internet connection and think they know more than epidemiologists.
Unless these steps are taken this will never end and the daily hassles will be worse and go on longer for everyone.
We have already decided as a society that individual choice outranks the cost to the health system. See obesity, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, workaholic culture with very limited vacation days, etc
Do you honestly think they will dismantle it one day? Especially if Apple is making it so easy for them.
For the record, no I don't think I should have to present my ID to get a Metrocard or ride a train. I do think that is oppressive. Because by that point they will have intruded into our lives way too much.
NY state has been encroaching for years. They have been fantasizing about a "no ride" list for Amtrak.
And many officials have invited the TSA and ICE to set up surprise mobile checkpoints for commuters at bus terminals.
All under the justification of protecting us from terrorism.
This is just the thin edge of a wedge to expand their control over us. And yes, most of them do want more power and money, and our civil liberties stand in the way of that.
[1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/train-security-is-a-no-ride-lis... [2]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/tsa-swarms-8000...
Except for that time doctors were given police powers to enforce quarantine during the "Spanish Flu" spikes...
This is factually untrue isn’t it? Children are forced to get vaccinated if they want to access the public school system in at least some parts of the US.
Yes, but that choice does not only impact them. Being disallowed the luxury of going to restaurants and bars could be seen as a form of payment for creating that externality.
but above all, some of us have children under 12. we'd like them to be safe. we have relatives who have weakened immune systems, who are in great danger even though they are fully vaccinated. These are the people who have literally no choice between a. hide in fear for years or b. expose themselves to great danger. vaccine mandates allow these people who otherwise have no choice to be more free in the world, by asking those people who totally have a choice to please make that choice by either not entering our public spaces, or getting vaccinated.
Chile saw a big uptick in vaccination when a similar policy was implemented.
Limited evidence suggests that the delta variant may highly contagious among vaccinated populations and that lambda may be resistant to some vaccines.
There are immuno-compromised people who can't get the vaccine for health reasons. By accepting a lack of herd immunity you are throwing those people under the bus. If you are worried about impacts on minority populations then this is something you surely must be considering.
That's the reality. This is endemic and is grouped with the collection of other infections that are going to be around a lot longer than HN (eg latent Tuberculosis infections in around 20% of the global pop).
Those populations are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, and don't need you to do it for them. You have an opinion, don't dress it up in someone else's situation.
The current leading population for vaccination rate in Alabama is the band of majority black districts (and subsequently case numbers have gone down and down and down) there.
You know what those populations are at risk from? Crippling hospital debt from contracting preventable diseases being spread by people pushing antivax nonsense and who do not take preventative measures. And being shot at their jobs when asking those people to wear masks on private property, for some reason.
His point was not speaking for minorities.
… maybe for currently known variants. New ones will appear, and no one can predict if current vaccines will protect us from them. It makes sense to me that a mixed population of vaccinated and unvaccinated people interacting frequently could lead to vaccine-resistant strains. Keep wearing your masks!
This is a good faith explanation with no data to support it. These are the same populations most likely to ignore all sorts of laws, rules, etc. I grew up in a trailer park, and the culture was one of die hard defiance to all forms of authority, no matter the cost, or how trivial the guidance/rules. I saw this same cultural trait at play in the inner city when I lived in DC as well.
The reality is that there are several dysfunctional cultures in the US, across multiple ethnic groups including my moron family, that are pathologically opposed to obeying any form of authority. They tend to also be highly fatalistic, have high teen pregnancy rates, high crime rates, etc. And although they are almost always poor, many other cultural groups in the US that are equally poor don't have these issues. Again, my family, and my relatives fall into this category. And so do the urban unvaccinated. Trailer parks and ghettos have more in common than you think.
I say this because you're hitting on a point that is going to really undermine NYC government:
A group of politicians who assume that unequal outcomes are driven by systemic racism are going to run headlong into a law that is going to disproportionately prevent Black and Latino New Yorkers from accessing businesses and restaurants. They are desperately going to continue with a narrative that absolves them of personal responsibility, and continue making the vaccine easier to access.
It's not going to work, and they will get rid of this as soon as they can, rather than go against their own systemic racism narrative.
In my day job, I interact with many prisons and jails both across the US and in other countries. Minority inmates reject vaccination at a rate well above White inmates, largely due to trust issues. It's a huge problem, one that's not talked about enough due to the moronic social media meme that everyone who doesn't want to get vaccinated must be a MAGA-hat-owner. This is provably incorrect.
Note that the C.O.s also largely distrust big .gov. I was just out at a facility where half of my escorts spontaneously brought up buying guns before Biden bans them (as he has indicated he wants to do — it's not a crazy notion). I've always been a skeptic, but the degree of distrust in authority has never been greater in my lifetime. It is unfortunate that this trend is costing lives.
5) You oppose discrimination. I'm immune but not vaccinated. Where's my immunity certificate?
Do you have any other examples to demonstrate your ability to make absurd analogies?
But state didn't own anyone's body, so the state really have no right to force vaccinations.
Yes, you are.
* while a vaccinated person can spread the virus as well, current understanding is that it does so less than for an unvaccinated person.
* vaccinated people can get sick, even if there's a much lower chance
* vaccinated people can still have children who are not vaccinated
None of this is absolute. It's a matter of percentages, chances and what not.
Your claim is an absolute, and it's absolutely wrong.
They should just vaccinate them then. I don't see why it is fine for the children to be unvaccinated but not for tomp.
The argument that "there haven't been enough clinical trials in order to allow children to take the vaccine" is similar to the whole "there hasn't been FDA approval!!".
Also, just came to my attention that you ignored the "You oppose discrimination. I'm immune but not vaccinated. Where's my immunity certificate?" part of tomp's argument. Why do you want him to take the vaccine despite the fact that he is not endangering others?
As for there not being enough vaccines around the world: I’m taking the US centric view, sorry, because the whole context of this topic is about NYC etc.
We’re drowning in vaccines here, they are expiring while sitting in a fridge, and the logistics are currently just not there to rapidly move cold-store vaccines to another country.
Now that your knowledge level has increased, will you please stop endangering others and take the vaccine?
Thanks!
And I suggest that this should be changed. Chill and try to be less toxic please.
You don't know if I have taken or not the vaccine so please don't assume.
I have no empathy and patience left anymore for those people.
But when the risk of adverse effects of a vaccine is lower than 0.001% and the risk of adverse effects of not having a vaccine is many orders of magnitude higher, the choice is obvious.
It makes total sense to stagger the testing and deployment based on age groups, especially for COVID-19: due to the insane mortality rate a high age, the benefits of vaccine far outweighed the risk of not doing it.
The fact that these elderly automatically functioned as a huge test group for further deployment for others was a very convenient additional benefit.
Likewise, it also makes total sense to be more cautious for kids. The younger they are, the higher the consequences.
Try again.
I agree that limits to freedoms are necessary but this is too extreme.
As for the vaccine being more or less dangerous than the virus, I think for any population over 40 or in poor health, the trade off is clearly in favour of the vaccine. But if you are 20 and in good health, I am not sure it is that obvious.
I am not overly concerned about the vaccine myself, and I got vaccinated even though I had covid (mostly to be able to travel), but I have some sympathy for people who decline to be vaccinated, particularly when all the population at risk had a chance to get vaccinated. At this point this is them managing their own risk. Their life, their decision.
The risks of complications from the virus are many orders of magnitude higher than risks of complications from the vaccine, even for people in their 20s.
The rate of complications from COVID-19 infections among people in their 20s is absolutely not "minuscule".
[1] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/COV...
For those who already had the virus and developed an immune response the risks are different.
There are no actual double blind, controlled, replicable studies that conclusively demonstrate "long covid"
Long covid may be a thing. Right now, its like any anecdata on any virus.
What definition of the word systemic are we using?
A vaccine is not a pathogen, a pathogen is a disease-causing agent, vaccines are not causing disease, they cause an immune response to prevent future disease.
I would be just as against a government mandate that all private establishments must have a no shirt/no shoes policy.
I don't even think a vaccine mandate for private businesses would be constitutional under the first amendment, the courts have recognized multiple times that freedom of association is protected even if it is not explicit in the constitution.
https://www.newsweek.com/chris-cuomo-tony-roman-clash-bizarr...
I'm not a fan of a divided society like this - it is not a good sign for the long term health of a nation.
Do you recognize that SS - when it started - was on the pretext that is was just for retirement? Look as us today. People are even ending up in court...or in debt, because their SS is stolen.
This policy is not just about telling people to take the vaccine. This policy is forcing it and also creating a new system of peeking, stealing, hacking into PHI
According to NYC.gov[1], there have been about 980k cases of COVID in a city with a population of over 8 million. About 12% of the population has had COVID.
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-totals.pag...
Seroprevalence has been measured at 74% for Ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations in the UK.
Its not a surprise that ethnic and religious minorities are anti-vaxx - many of them already had COVID.
I'm anti-mandatory vaccinations for the same reason, as a COVID survivor. All the evidence is showing that this natural immunity is superior to vaccines, but I'm treated like a second-class citizen.
Does it? The evidence I've seen indicates that it's robust, but not necessarily superior to vaccines.
There are biological reasons & theories why naturally acquired immunity may be more robust to variants (immune system learns to target a variety of markers/proteins of the virus, compared to the highly targeted immune response to the spike protein based mRNA vaccines). However to my knowledge there is no conclusive evidence of this yet in the literature on SARS-CoV-2.
[1] SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4.pdf
[2] Necessity of COVID-19 vaccination in previously infected individuals https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
Add that variable into your calculation and reimagine the future with a more accurate understanding of what’s to come and what you think about these new variants.
Getting downvoted by the hive mind so here's some links to a paper and offical news sources-
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/
https://journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/Fulltext/2021/...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.31.21258081v...
https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israeli-scientist-says-...
meta study - https://ivmmeta.com/
https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/indian-ba...
https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/antiviral-efforts...
I'd rather have a mask mandate, like we did earlier. Lacking one is ridiculous because it's trivial to lie and forge a vaccine card. First they said masks wouldn't help, then they said the vaccine was enough. Both steps have been wrong. Societies are being petulant and refusing to just skip to the effective option because they want to party and avoid cooking.
New York State has a digital vaccine tracking system and pass. Naturally, out of state people would find it easier to commit fraud.
4. You view this as the state being paternalistic to protect the unvaccinated when, in fact, if in August of 2021 you have not yet been vaccinated, you are almost certainly making a personal risk management decision and, as such, should be prepared for the consequences to not only yourself, but others like you (unvaccinated).
This view also seems to be predicated on the idea that the vaccinated are largely unaffected by the spread amongst the unvaccinated. To what degree this is true, I don't know. It's hard to keep up with the evolving data and narratives.
So in America after 8 months, most people who want the vaccine have it. Those who have it are incredibly safe, though not completely.
My question is this: when do we admit that in the US, we can go back to normal? At this point, i do see it like the flu or any other moderate respiratory illness. There is a risk, and we mitigated it.
If someone wants to wear a mask, okay. If a business or hospital wants to mandate masks, fine. But at this point, the unvaccinated in this country have chosen to ride without a helmet. So long as the health system doesn't collapse, that is on them, as it has always been.
Because it's highly tyrannical? Odd how cavalier you are about this.
Nevermind that you have a right to privacy when it comes to health matters, this also forces you to carry "ID" pretty much everywhere.
Also, all tyrannies a born to "protect you".
> Makes me sad that we can't have a calm discussion about the merits of the policy.
I don't think that's what you are interested in. You wouldn't have started off your comment that way if you did.
I hope that one day you'll experience an actual tyranny for comparison. Something like Belarus or North Korea.
> this also forces you to carry "ID" pretty much everywhere
Yes, because US car drivers don't already do that? And pretty much anyone in developed countries in the world.
This makes absolutely no sense for anyone not living in the US. You could as well be speaking Klingon.
> not to mention for groceries
This makes even less sense.
Cool. We should submit to any and all amounts of government overreach and abuse of power until our rulers decide to go full Pol-Pot. Then we can say "Hey, wait a minute."
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
It's not illegal to decide to do $XYZ_DANGEROUS_ACTIVITY, why should it be illegal to be exposed to covid?
The only concern in theory is that a vaccine-immune covid variant could develop amongst unvaccinated populations. Is there any evidence for that though?
EDIT: see responses below, there is some good info, thanks folks.
Uncontrolled spread in the unvaccinated puts others that can not produce an immune response at risk.
>Vaccinated people aren't at risk.
This is false, fully vaccinated people in my network have been hospitalized.
>Is there any evidence for that though?
Reproduction and mutation in the infected is the primary mechanism by which variants develop.
Considering that also vacinated people get covid, this doesn't help at all, and since they're mostly asymptomatic, they can even spread it more.
Otherwise, I agree... vaccines are available for everyone, if you want to risk it, it's your risk to take.
And then you have the possiblity of mutations. The longueur the virus is on circulation. The more likely it is to mutate with worse outcome.
Yeah, but mutations are most likely gonna come from the billions that are unvaccinated outside the US. If this is the main concern, we should be doing all we can to make sure people in other countries (many of whom are very willing to take the vaccine) are getting the vaccine.
Imagine trying to get to the hospital and facing lines like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kbNGR7XjrY
The government or the insurance providers are paying for covid care, so it's coming out of your tax money or increasing health insurance premiums for everyone.
You're taking doctors and nurses for granted. Health care providers are burning out faster due to long shifts caused by an overload of covid patients and are quitting. This increases health care costs for everyone and reduces availability.
People having long term health issues decreases productivity, a lot more people might be disabled and file for disability benefits which come out of taxes.
People's quality of life is reduced when their friends and family die.
Lowering population reduces economic opportunity for everyone.
Plenty of risks.
1) You are giving a chance for spreading a vaccine resistant strain. Every time a vaccinated person is exposed to the virus, most likely the immune system would take care of it however there’s a risk that it would contain a vaccine resistant mutation and will spread among vaccinated, creating a vaccine resistant strain.
2) Vaccine protection is not %100, which means people are still at risk, therefore cannot ease measures
3) R0 would be lower in vaccinated groups, meaning a slower spread or complete end of the spread. In mixed groups R0 would be higher which means prolonged or never ending spread.
Regarding 3), Bill Gates wrote that ~70% immunity is all that's needed to eliminate covid. I'm curious for better info regarding that number too. It would imply that as many as 30% of people can remain unvaccinated and covid will still die out.
The herd immunity percentage would depend on the characteristics of the strain. It can be higher or lower, the idea is that you need to have enough immune people so that the spread flames out. I read that for the delta variant the calculations show higher numbers because it’s more capable of spreading than the original one.
Ideally, we will reach that point before a strain undermines our vaccination efforts however that is not guaranteed. We can take measures to increase our chances.
2. Constant infection causes more mutation of the virus and possible escape vaccine capture.
3. Infections overwhelm public health systems causing issues for people with non Covid health emergencies
4. While it’s very unlikely, you still increase the number of vaccinated people hospitalized for Covid
Yet
> The only concern in theory is that a vaccine-immune covid variant could develop amongst unvaccinated populations. Is there any evidence for that though?
Every human with covid is a variant factory. Even the vaccinated are.
And every variant is a new fire which could burst out again - there was a comment that "Everytime we open up, there's a new variant", as if the variant spike was somehow unrelated to the opening up.
This isn't theory.
We should somewhat be thankful that vaccines work with Delta, because if the variant on the uptick was the Gamma variant, the acquired immunity wasn't as effective at preventing a severe disease [1].
If the virus isn't eradicated, then it will keep making comebacks as newly infected people provide more opportunities for more "successful" variants.
Also kids, don't forget kids. Some of them are babies.
[1] - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/10/21-1427_article
You’d think that after a pandemic has killed 600,000 of our fellow citizens we’d be able to come together and simply repeat as adults what we do for most children, but alas we live in a deeply unserious time.
Involuntary experimental medical procedures are what the bad guys do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...
Yes, that's what I was insinuating.
4. You perceive the government as taking more and more power without ever giving any back.
I don't know if this is true, but that is the reason for my instinctual opposition and I haven't overriden it yet.
FDA approval does not confer safety and efficacy. It it there to report empirical safety and efficacy.
FDA regularly revokes approval. That should count for something.
The big problem for me is in making light of the process that, perfect or imperfect, is a extremely important in a for-profit pharma paradigm.
Yeah that's definitely a big part of it. But that's for something for people to factor in on their own, if they so choose. It's not really a fact for the government to base mandates on, unless you only look at public health and ignore all other facets of the issue.
> Whether or not any central authority endorsed it is moot when 100 million doses have been given.
It might be moot from a public health standpoint, but it's not necessarily moot from a public policy or governmental standpoint. Like it or not, rightly or wrongly, it can have significant impact and repercussions if the government starts doing something half the population doesn't like, and then turns around and says, "Ok well, now we all agree the issue is moot, right? so let's force this thing onto everybody. Despite our own experts not having approved it yet."
100%.
We need to continue to be vigilant and to keep public trust. That's currently at stake.
Also agree on everything else you bring up. Especially:
> now we all agree the issue is moot, right?
This is exactly what I was trying to say initially. If the attitude is: what's done is done and therefore we don't do this going forward; then that's a major loss for society. That can't be the outcome.
Not really when these administrations are not followed up in a systematic way. Basically 100 million doses is not a substitute for a clinical trial..
The FDa is keenly aware of the political load in arriving at a decision, but knows getting it wrong means the FDA itself could dissappear. They they have yet to blink on the matter.
Therefore they err on the side of logic and let time do its thing (uncover hidden risks) for which the populace should be grateful
I hope they do
This isn’t what is happening - the scientists are encouraging you to get the vaccine too.
Full approval requires a lengthy amount of time because usually things are being tested outside of a crisis.
I think a lot of comments are missing that this is a public health crisis which has killed nearly 700,000 Americans. A crisis calls for rapid action.
> This isn’t what is happening - the scientists are encouraging you to get the vaccine too.
That is literally what is happening. Their own scientists at the FDA have not approved the vaccine and yet they're trying to mandate people to get vaccinated anyway.
> I think a lot of comments are missing that this is a public health crisis which has killed nearly 700,000 Americans. A crisis calls for rapid action.
I wasn't blaming anybody for rapid action. I'm just saying it's not hard to see why not everyone's interpretation is generous.
To have a different take than other people, I just don't know if this precedent is really one that we want to start, particularly if you are liberal/leftist.
For e.g. let's say we're at the beginning of the HIV epidemic, and the govt mandates a policy requiring you to have a negative HIV test in order to go-to any bar/restaurant etc or there are a bunch of private businesses that say they don't want to risk their patrons from getting HIV, so require a negative HIV test in order to enter, or even that their patrons are just uncomfortable being around people with HIV so they mandate it.
HIV patients aren't a protected class so it could happen and there's nothing anyone can do about it, yet I bet most of the people wanting these vaccine card mandates now would disagree with that policy.
Businesses being able to reject/accept customers can already run into some weird civil rights issues already, and it's strange that so many people who are ostensibly left wing are advocating for libertarian positions on what a business should be able to discriminate on, because it benefits their team this time.
How many people out there argued that a business should have to bake a gay wedding cake, b/c businesses shouldn't discriminate on your sexual preference, but think they should on your personal health decisions? (Which, since vaccines work means that patrons in that business who are vaccinated shouldn't be in any particular extra danger.)*
More frustrating is that if we want more people to be vaxxed there's many more things that we that aren't punitive, but probably don't feel as fair. (aka why did I get nothing for getting vaxed but XYZ got 100-1000$/lottery/free tickets whatever.) Since a large portion of the unvaxed aren't the Trumpian sterotype, but concerned with things like having to take days off of work to deal with side effects. [0]
0: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-co...
* This discounts the generation of new variants outside the business, since this policy is ostensibly targeted at keeping patrons safe, not at being a pseudo-mandate for getting the vaccine.
There is plenty of discrimination among gay men when it comes to the possibility of contracting HIV, i.e. sexually. Many will require their partners to be on PrEP.
4) You recognize this as yet another crisis that the government is using to unconstitutionally increase its powers. 9/11 and the Patriot Act and Iraq/Afghanistan being a recent example.
This stuff happens again and again and yet somehow the default position is “convince me why this is a bad thing.”
History education needs more funding, and fast.
The crazy thing is that the knee-jerk backlash against this vaccine has carried over into ALL vaccines for many people... So expect to see measles, polio, etc. etc. all over again thanks to the polarization involved at this point
I'd still encourage everyone to vaccinate for pro-social reasons, but for the young and the healthy I don't think this is such a ridiculous assertion. I'm virtually 100% confident that vaccines are completely safe and effective. However for a large fraction of people they will make you feel like shit for 2-5 days.
Let's just do a quick QALY based tradeoff for a healthy 25-year old. To make it interesting let's also say that she was already previously infected with Covid. The baseline CFR for this age group is approximately 0.004%. For someone with antibodies this number's at least 50% for subsequent infections.
Assuming 70 years of remaining life expectancy, Covid infection would lead to the loss of 12 hours of life expectancy. In contrast, I'd definitely prefer to be dead than live with the post-vaccine symptoms I experienced. And for me the suffering lasted about 96 hours. And I'm not atypical here. In that sense, vaccines are nearly ten times worse from a QALY perspective than the risk of being unvaccinated.
Again, all that being said, I was vaccinated and would encourage everyone else to do the same. But for the typical healthy 20-something, skipping the vaccine isn't necessarily irrational-- just selfish.
These simple, individualised analyses are about the extent of what public health authorities may do when deciding on the safety or benefits of a treatment. However they exclude other advantages to being a person with a vaccine:
- maybe some of your friends are being very cautious about the virus (for rational or irrational reasons) and being your vaccinated means more meaningful interactions with them
- maybe your employer lets vaccinated people return to the office (and you want to return). Or maybe there are other things that require vaccines (when I went up to university I had to confirm that I’d had a bunch of vaccines, for example)
- maybe you want to be altruistic and reduce the risk you cause to other people
- better ability to travel internationally
- if everyone does it then there is less of an ability for further mutations to develop
I mostly understand why health authorities are limited, and perhaps those simple statistics are the right thing to communicate to the public. But I think in our society as it is, getting the vaccine is still +ve EV for young people.
I'm healthy and 23 years old. I've had Covid. The feeling of being out of breath for 2 weeks straight is horrible. You'd think you would get used to it but you don't. It was a constant struggle that kept me from falling asleep. Feeling like shit for a couple of days, but only the "known" headache and soreness, is strictly preferable. I've been vaccinated with Moderna (the mRNA vaccine with the worse side-effects as far as I can tell) and had a mild case of symptomatic Covid. Getting the vaccine is vastly preferable to the chance of getting symptomatic Covid.
You listed three reasons that people might be opposed to the vaccine itself, not merely the policy. None of these are applicable to my particular group, of which there are many:
4. You are pro-vaccine and anti-covid, but strictly opposed to insane and tyrannical government overreach by the very same people who literally murdered tens of thousands of elderly nursing home patients in 2020 by intentionally exposing them to COVID patients.
It's strange you didn't even consider this option, as if meek, bootlicking obedience to authority - specifically, authority that has already demonstrated that they don't care at all about preventing COVID deaths - is to you as water is to a fish.
> take your chances with coronavirus, which you will get sooner or later, and spread it.
This is patently ridiculous. I am fully vaccinated, but the research is clear - I can carry an infection just as effectively in my nasal cavity as my antivax cousin. Showing my card at the door does PRECISELY NOTHING to prevent spread. The Times, no friend to the antivax crew, grudgingly admitted this a few days ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/health/cdc-masks-vaccinat...
It's quite obvious at this point, that vaccination protects ME, and ME alone. Pretending that vaccination status confers magical sainthood and capital-P Purity amongst its devotees is old hat.
And enacting actual unconstitutional policy predicated on old science is even worse.
I'm still waiting, after a year and a half, for any governments, anywhere, to mandate the ONLY thing that the science is VERY CLEAR will ACTUALLY dramatically reduce COVID fatalities among everyone under 70: mandatory weight loss for the obese.
But something tells me you won't advocate for THAT particular policy position, will you?
> I am fully vaccinated, but the research is clear - I can carry an infection just as effectively in my nasal cavity as my antivax cousin. Showing my card at the door does PRECISELY NOTHING to prevent spread.
I'm pretty sure this is untrue, but not positive. The communication has been very confusing. As I understand it, you can get a high viral load, but it declines much more rapidly in vaccinated people.
> mandatory weight loss for the obese.
This would obviously be far far more invasive than getting two shots. Why support this form of government tyranny, in your words, rather than another?
This is not prima facie evident, at all. For many people, being rationed to 1500kcal per day would be much less invasive than a foreign substance being forcibly injected into your body. Annoying and restrictive, yes, but definitely not invasive.
Further, if we accept the premise (I don't) that governments can mandate any and all measures to ensure public health, why not measures that we know for a fact WILL result in improvements? The effects of COVID on the obese are absolutely DEVASTATING compared to normal weight people. Calorie rationing would have definitely saved lives, just assuredly as if the silly mask mandates around the country specified actually effective masking with N95-P100 filtration instead of accepting virtually useless cloth as good enough.
But that's not what we do, is it? We have the worst of both worlds: we have (1) governments violating our rights in the name of public health with mandates that (2) are pure, useless, ineffective theater.
We shouldn't be mandating anything at the cost of freedom, but if we DO, we should at least make it count with mandates that WORK.
I'm sorry, but the government telling you how much food you're allowed to eat, 3 times a day, essentially for your entire life is so obviously more restrictive than a vaccine mandate. Have you ever actually counted calories, or eaten 1500 a day for months or more on end? I've done both, and it's incredibly disruptive. In studies, people are not very successful at complying with calorie restrictions. How does the government enforce this?
I could understand an argument that both are too invasive (though I'd disagree), but not that controlling what people eat is less invasive. The vaccine is safe, has been studied, costs you nothing financially and very little in time. It does not cause you to upend your entire lifestyle for something you do every single day for as long as you're alive.
> We have the worst of both worlds: we have (1) governments violating our rights in the name of public health with mandates that (2) are pure, useless, ineffective theater.
Is this referring to mask mandates? It looks like masks are reasonably well supported by evidence:
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou...
The point is: if someone is ready to take a risk and contract covid - society should allow it because those people will either die on they own knowledge, or get a better immunity than any vaccine can offer. We know now that vaccination status and even natural immunity is not stopping people from virus transmission, so this argument is off the table.
Better immunity? Almost no one who is fully vaccinated has ever died from COVID-19. It's hard to imagine better immunity than that.
> society should allow it because those people will either die on they own knowledge, or get a better immunity than any vaccine can offer.
Or they will serve as a mutation vector for the next, more transmissible, deadlier variant.
I guess it comes down to whether you favor a rational society based on the rule of law and some degree of fairness, or a free-for-all anarchy where the only rule is natural selection.
The latter is what we had before society was invented some thousands of years ago.
> Or they will serve as a mutation vector for the next, more transmissible, deadlier variant.
Unfortunately, hosts with partial immunity (natural asymptomatic cases or half-vaccinated) are more suitable environment for virus mutation. In tabula rasa host virus just takes over the system by storm, all mutations are in equal conditions. Weak immunity means new mutations are having an advantage and natural selection completes the case.
And now we know that even fully vaccinated people are relatively easily contracting Delta variant. You may draw the conclusion.
We've always known that some percent of those vaccinated will transmit the virus. The vaccine's effectiveness is not 100%. The point, among other reasons, is it reduces transmission.
You could be anti-needle. You could have health issues. You could be in an isolated community. You could have got the vaccine and are not worried about their kid.
You could be anything.
1. This is mandating that vaccine companies make more money, the incentives are suspect. We might reasonably expect people who already had COVID should have better immunity than the vaccinated since the vaccination is basically just a simulation of having COVID. Why not then be suspicious of reasoning motivated by unscrupulous profiteers? People will be getting vaccinated who don't want or need it, which raises an eyebrow. This policy is probably a fig leaf for government handouts to big pharma.
2. The evidence changes. We don't know what the 2 year effects of COVID are yet since the disease hasn't existed for 2 years. Even now week-to-week what everyone knows can change. I do not trust that the scientific basis for this decision will still be sound in 12 months - the data here is raw.
3. What about the argument that people have a right to control their own bodies? There has been a concerted push by reasonable people for that, eg, in the area of abortions. If the NYC government can demand vaccination for the greater good then it is basically the same logic as demanding carriage of babies to term for the greater good. We know a lot of people disagree with that logic.
4. You also haven't distinguished between (1) thinking that the vaccine is a bad idea and (2) thinking that governments feeling empowered to mandate the most experimental vaccines in a generation is unwise. It already appears they don't work as advertised given that having taken the vaccine doesn't acceptably improve their risk profile vs. COVID (in the NY government's opinion). Which I think it does.
5. The far more effective measure would be tight border controls to prevent even worse variants - the biggest risk here as far as I can tell has always been something like a delta variant appearing and breaking through the first generation of vaccines. But defending against that would inconvenience the people making the decisions, so it is unlikely they'll think of that. The decision makers aren't serious about stopping the virus, so their decisions made to allegedly stop the virus are suspect.
But then France recently announced a similar policy and saw a few protests and a lot of people getting the vaccine. They like to protest more in France than America but I think Americans (even in NY) are perhaps more vaccine-hesitant.
I think I would like to see:
- more effort to make vaccines more accessible (wider range of times of day; working with community groups to have pop up vaccination events that include non-vaccine things so people aren’t scared off; maybe trying to let people know where they can get vaccinated and that it’s free; requiring employers to give people paid time off work to get vaccinated; etc)
- other incentives for vaccination (I see examples like being entered into a lottery or getting free donuts, but I mostly prefer just giving people cash to get vaccinated. Say $100 or maybe even $1000)
Another thing would maybe making it easier for businesses to only admit people who are vaccinated or have some suitable exemption but I think the latter is hard for privacy reasons and I think the former is just inviting businesses to decrease their custom which they are not normally wont to do.
His doctor tested him for antibodies, his were undetectable. He was getting a third shot in hopes it would finally give him antibodies.
By being against vaccines or against vaccine requirements, people risk the lives of those like that guy, who's already suffering and already has to be 10x as cautious.
BTW, I'm not implying a stance here as pro- or anti- vaccine requirements - just probing this particular talking point.
Do we know that the activities where vaccines are required are in fact hotspots? If you consider states that did full lockdowns compared to those that didn't but had mask mandates (California and New York vs texas Florida), there wasn't an appreciable difference in cases or deaths suggesting the mechanism of transition lied outside the reach of government. What's to say people still won't congregate elsewhere?
In turn, I'm not convinced this will incentivize people to vaccinate. My mother refuses to get the shot and digs in more against it as penalties show up. Sure this is and data, but I know that many, many people have left New York City due to what they considered draconian lockdowns and I suspect many more people might leave to "freer" pastures.
I'm not convinced this will achieve the intended objective, but instead far more animosity and pushback which is what you see in this thread which is far more tame than what the general population thinks.
Would love to hear a rebuttal.
Thought-terminating cliches are a very effective tool for shutting down discussion. Sadly they've become very common HN in recent years as the site has grown.
That it won’t stop at this. That I’m going to have to entrust my medical information to a shitty app that requires access to my location and contacts to show a QR code that links to a poorly secured database that will get hacked, all because the government doesn’t trust me when I say I got the vaccine.
And yes, she was a real person. Those who ignore the humanities are doomed to repeat humanity's worst mistakes.
Could you explain why you are NOT afraid? Can you please explain what Apple and the City of New York have done to earn the kind of trust you want me to place in them?
Is your starry-eyed trust also extended to police departments as well?
They are building infrastructure to track people everywhere and punish us for non-compliance.
Do you believe that systematic racism exists, and if so, do you think that it is possible that it could creep into the new health surveillance and enforcement infrastructure that they are building? Are there any mechanisms to challenge the abuses that will happen?
I would be more ok with these policies if they pledged to dismantle (or mothball) contact tracing as soon as it is no longer needed, instead of just leaving it up and expanding it forever "just in case", as they certainly will do.
I look forward to the full CDC approval that will validate your presumption about any given vaccine’s efficacy and safety. Right now, the manufacturers have no “skin in the game”…no legal liability. I assume that liability will return with full CDC approval, instead of emergency approval that they have now. (My personal peripheral understanding)
You see, there is a fourth choice, wait on vaccination until those making a vaccine are willing to accept the normal legal responsibility for the products injected into your body. Depending on your personal risk and risk exposure profile and your level of skepticism in an emergency drug, it may be the prudent personal choice. There are even other choices as well. There is more in Heaven and Earth than dreamt in your decision tree.
I don't think that is how "efficacy" works, because to measure "efficacy" both the treatment and population is supposed to have similar exposure to the virus.
You say this because you trust the authorities, the media and the scientists.
You are free to trust them. And someone else should have the freedom NOT to trust them.
And that is the whole point.
Do you have the answer to the following questions?
Why did the mRNA technology remain unapproved for a long time since its inception?
What exactly was relaxed in the approval process that lead to its EUA?
Since the vaccine has been used population wide, will the missed studies or what ever due process eventually be done? Or will they be skipped, citing the real world usage (which was not controlled or followed up in a systematic manner)?
Given recent data which appear to demonstrate even the vaccinated can and will still catch C19, although with milder symptoms and [much] lower risk of needing hospital treatment, isn't the evidence still pointing to us all getting it sooner or later?
"Covid-19 will now join other coronaviruses in being something we contract multiple times throughout our lives "[0]
In many countries so many of the vulnerable and elderly are already vaccinated that maybe encouraging populations to reach some [ever-rising] "herd immunity" vaccination rate has become a political endeavour, not a scientific one.
"Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge estimates that well over 60 per cent of 15-24 year olds [in the UK] have already had Covid anyway"[0]
If so many young people have apparently already had it, is it right to spend so much time, money and political capital worrying about the vaccination rates in healthy young people?
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08/04/offering-vaccine...
It's very easy to give up power to government and very hard to claw it back, and I'm of the opinion that it's not worth giving up norms like this in the long term, even if I agree that in the short term this would be good. I feel similar about e.g. free speech and privacy.
For kindergarten they need more shots: Hep B, Polio, Chickenpox, and Measles, Mumps and Rubella.
Going to middle school? Then you'll need more shots, the TDAP and meningococcal conjugate.
These are all vaccine requirements. Is it an invasion or privacy to demand children's records? Is it the nanny state? We could go down that road, but who wants to live in a world where we lose herd immunity to all of those diseases because 30-40% of people choose to opt their children out?
What’s funnier still to me is men (it always seems to be men) outraged that they might need to prove vaccination in order to send their kids back to school, publicly admitting that they’ve been fobbing that work off on their spouse.
The issue is that this vaccine is not FDA approved. A vaccine that provides for only a year is hardly the same as a booster shot which is good for 10 iirc.
A few quotes I thought were noteworthy:
> For emergency authorization, the FDA required two months of safety data versus six months for full approval, he explains.
> Pfizer submitted its application on May 7 and was granted special priority review status on July 16. In a press release, the company said the decision whether to fully approve the vaccine should come by January 2022. Other reports suggest Pfizer’s approval will likely be sooner, possibly as early as the start of the school year.
> As you might expect, clinical trial data is scrutinized, but the process involves more than just experts reading data. The FDA also inspects manufacturing facilities and meets many times with company executives.
> "I think a lot of us are baffled why the FDA is taking so long.” - Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health
> To that end, the agency has reportedly expedited the process, even deprioritizing other projects in order to accelerate the timeline.
That last sentence struck me strangely, seeming to imply reprioritizing other projects was a big deal. We're still in a global pandemic, people are still dying here in the USA, and the economic realities still actively happening... yeah, I think deprioritizing other things is about the least surprising thing imaginable.
> A vaccine that provides for only a year is hardly the same as a booster shot which is good for 10 iirc.
As compared to the flu shot? The one that I’ve been given for free in every school and workplace I’ve attended in the past twenty years?
Logistically, yearly shots are nbd. Maybe we should make flu shots mandatory for education just like the MMR shot, given the number of kids killed by the flu every year.
Not in terms of long term data, at all
Also, anything being possible is not the same as anything being probable. The vaccine might make me grow a third arm too, after all anything is possible in the long run, but you would laugh if I said that I wasn’t getting a vaccine for the fear of my tailoring bill.
These are serious long-term concerns, which may not manifest overnight, but they are certainly on the radar of many experts in the field.
[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/
[2] SARS-CoV-2 immune evasion by the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant of concern https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/30/scie...
[3] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...
Faking it never crossed my mind, because duh.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=243127
> To be sterilizing a vaccine must prevent infection. Since you never get infected you never replicate the virus and thus do not shed it. If you do not shed it the potential path of the viral life-cycle for that particular infection ends with you and thus you cannot pass on or cause a mutation. You are sterile against that disease; from the point of view of the virus you are a lifeless rock. Among commonly-used sterilizing vaccines are MMR (measles, mumps and rubella), Varicella (chicken pox), OPV (oral polio) and others. The only time that such a vaccine fails is when you do not build immunity (such as due to immune compromise.) This is extremely rare and the protection from such vaccines tends to be either decades-long or lifetime.
> A vaccine that is not sterilizing permits the virus to infect you and replicate and as a result you can infect others. Technically it is not a vaccine at all (which by definition prevents infection); it is a prophylactic therapy. Such a "vaccine" instead acts to reduce or eliminate symptomatic disease. You don't know you're sick and you don't get sick. You don't go to the hospital and you don't die. Unfortunately since you don't know you're sick but are infected and the virus is both replicating in you and shedding you are more-likely to spread the infection to others. All of the current Covid jabs are in this category and so is, for that matter IPV (injected polio vaccine -- the original Salk discovery.)
> During the original vaccine trials in the summer and fall of 2020 they deliberately did not test any of the recipients for asymptomatic infections. Only a person who developed a significant illness was tested. This has continued post roll-out with the CDC specifying that a close contact of a known case who was vaccinated did not need to quarantine or be tested until and unless they became symptomatic. They knew damn well, in other words, that the jabs were not sterilizing but did not want that data up for public debate because then those who have read history would be likely to make the connection to the present day and thus they did their level best to hide it. That has now blown up in their face with it being conclusively known that jabbed people in fact not only get infected but spread the virus to others.
> ... natural infection with Covid-19 is sterilizing. Being infected and recovering conserves the nasal and respiratory mucosal response which is where the virus enters the body.
I agree they didn’t get into the nuances of sterilizing vs. non sterilizing but for the general public that’s deep in the weeds, anyone who followed the details knew this was the case early on.
> “One of this study’s strengths is its design: participants self-collected nasal swabs each week for RT-PCR laboratory testing, regardless of whether they had developed symptoms of illness. Researchers were able to look for evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection irrespective of symptoms. A small number (10.7 percent) of infections in this study were asymptomatic (i.e., did not result in symptoms). However, the majority of infections (58 percent) occurred among people whose infections were identified by testing before they developed symptoms or knew they were infected. The study demonstrates that these two mRNA vaccines can reduce the risk of all SARS-CoV-2 infections, not just symptomatic infections.
This is important because preventing both asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infections among health care workers and other essential workers through vaccination can help prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to those they care for or serve. Findings from this study complement earlier reports that these two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can reduce both asymptomatic and symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections.“
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0329-COVID-19-Vacci...
If they can't get that, how are they going to get vaccinated and maintain those records?
With that being said, this policy doesn't sit well with me. None of the currently available vaccines in the US are FDA approved. Of course, a lot of people have received those vaccines, but I also don't necessarily fault individuals for feeling hesitant (the nuance here is that I think people ought to get the vaccine). mRNA is a new, unknown technology, and the vaccine was rushed faster to public access than any other vaccine before. We have absolutely no idea if there are any long term side effects of these vaccines.
Both candidates Biden and Harris expressed the need for full trials and transparency in regard to the vaccine before they were in office, then changed their tune after (see: https://twitter.com/pbhushan1/status/1416969060890210305). Biden says:
> When we finally do, God willing, get a vaccine, Who’s going to take the shot? Who’s going to take the shot? You going to be the first one to say, “Put me — sign me up, they now say it’s OK”?
If the vaccine is as effective as it seems, then this decision feels positively nanny state to me. It takes away an individual's agency to inform themselves of the risks on both sides and make an informed decision.
If this were mandating that every resident of NYC must be vaccinated, I would agree. But it's not doing that. It's only saying that anyone wanting to dine (or possibly shop, too) indoors, that is, in spaces we know to have higher contamination and spread rate, they need to be vaccinated. People that are hesitant can still go unvaccinated and that's fine, but they have to keep to areas where contamination and spread are less prevalent.
And I think that's fair.
I think we've determined from other issues that "separate but equal" isn't actually equal. That absolutely applies here.
Yes, that's how de Blasio phrases it, but I think there's more to it than how he's talked about it.
The way I see these mandates is an effort to have people maintain a person R-naught of less than 1. How each person achieve that is up to them. They can wear masks, they can get vaccinated, they can avoid places with high transmission rates (such as indoor dining/shopping), or a combination of all these things. And ideally we find more options for people to take so that that everyone can help achieve a personal R-naught in a way that best fits their needs.
Ultimately, the goal is to create a win-win scenario where on a personal level individuals can choose what degree of transmission prevention they want to pursue, and on a social level we're organized so that everyone is (hopefully) not infecting others, or doing so so sparsely that the infection rate is going down.
The goal now is to find a comfortable equilibrium in which society can continue to do its thing without explosive outbreaks of Covid. These sort of mandates help get us there. This is all still very new and we need to find more methods in which we can reach that equilibrium, and we should continue to look for them, but we can't let Covid-19 run rampant until we feel we've all the options we like.
What makes you say this? There is literally no other city in our country doing a lockdown like this. Many places are still opened up and not experiencing a surge. Even in Missouri, cases have dropped in many regions in the last few days without such lockdowns, and hospitals have not been overloaded.
As of 3 weeks ago Missouri had to expand their hospital system explicitly for delta variants? https://apnews.com/article/health-coronavirus-pandemic-micha...
Don't get me wrong, there has been an increase in cases and the R0 needs to be lowered. But draconian measures aren't necessarily required, as Greene County MO's recent infection rates have shown[1]. The R0 sits at below 0 now, and hospital case loads have stabilized.
[1] https://www.covidactnow.org/us/missouri-mo/county/greene_cou...
> “the Constitution requires that every guilty plea waiving the constitutional right to trial by a jury of one’s peers be knowing, intelligent, and voluntary.69 But no one who works in the criminal system thinks that contemporary plea bargaining produces voluntary agreements. The vast majority of plea bargains are accepted by people who are told that they will be imprisoned for longer if they do not give up their right to a jury trial. Many of these people are in jail and are told that pleading guilty is the only immediate way out of jail. In no other cultural context would the word “voluntary” describe this arrangement. Should my coworker ask a person out on a dinner date but tell the person that, if he does not accept, he will be placed in a cage, no one would view the person’s agreement to dine with my coworker as voluntary. That’s not how we understand “voluntary” actions.”
Plea bargains are a totally different world, I'm not trying to compare this decision with plea bargains. What I would like to illustrate, through the author's example, is the process by which modern governments reduce the individual's agency in a de-facto manner, while de-jure asserting that individual's rights are upheld. People have been stuck inside for so, so long, keeping them out of restaurants if they don't get vaccinated is surely just manipulating their decision making toward getting a vaccine they may be uncomfortable getting.
I suppose I don't really get what good this does. If a person decides to not get vaccinated and then decides to dine indoors, who are they harming, other than potentially themselves, by making that decision? I wish they would get the vaccine, but I also do respect their rights to judge the information available for themselves without severely restricting their ability to live their lives.
People’s rights to swing their fists around wildly end at my face
Can you expand on how being required to dine outside instead of dining inside is a severe restriction on someone's ability to live their life?
Do we know if this has more to do with unethical bosses not allowing paid time off to get vaccinated, or more to do with echo chambers about vaccine safety, or something else?
There's definitely overlap between these, of course (an anti-vax boss might create both of these problems in their workplace).
When Covid first broke everything shut down. That is, everything except grocery stores, which were open to all. So yes, I think it's a big stretch to imagine it expanding to grocery stores.
Maybe you think his real purpose is what you described rather than his stated purpose, but if he were hiding the ball I'd expect it in the other direction. It's rather jarring, really. But I suppose authoritarianism and paternalism are becoming more normalized these days.
I don't think de Blasio has a real purpose. I think he's doing what his advisors and experts are recommending he do and he's trying to make it sound purposeful because the political like sounding purposeful.
Do people feel the same way about schools requiring vaccines, or children getting the MMR, Hep B, or Polio vaccines?
Perhaps you have no idea, but the people closest to this science, including the countless government agencies around the world that have given authorization, have a pretty good idea. The design and length of clinical trials is not arbitrary, but your personal idea of "long term" is arbitrary.
I’m not at all saying that’s a risk but just that it’s an example of something we haven’t had time to test.
This leads many people who already mistrust "the system" to tune out future guidance and legitimate information. Black Americans, and Republicans, for example.
Referring to unsettled science as "disinformation" seems premature. Is it not the case that we have some preliminary evidence that this may be the case? I've seen lots of criticism of the study that led to their updated guidance about this. Confounding variables, etc. But these are experts giving us their expert opinion. Surely it should at least be considered a possibility worthy of more study? Does referring to it as "disinformation" create a chilling effect around truth seeking?
Are there other studies, or a "preponderance of evidence", so to speak, that refutes their position? I'm not aware of any. Most often I hear people make "common sense" or "just so" arguments about vaccines in general and how they work. Nothing specific about the covid vaccines. The majority of which, at least in USA, utilize novel tech.
The study: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm
The limitations discussed in the paper seem to have been completely ignored by the media. That isn't surprising at all, but it is a little suspiring that the CDC made a such a quick and resolute policy change based on a study with such obvious (and some might say peculiar) limitations.
So how is it possible to have an honest, open discussion (not to mention conduct proper science) in such a highly censored environment?
(For the record, I'm not antivax and not against these new vaccines, and I think it's also worrying in and of itself that many people like me feel this needs to be said every time in these discussions in order to minimize the chance of name-calling and personal attacks.)
> Over 20 women enrolled in the initial adult Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine trial became pregnant during the study period, and none suffered pregnancy loss or perinatal complications.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninashapiro/2021/03/17/vaccinat...
I understand that some people are not as plugged into the internet, or have various difficulties understanding information, but I doubt that describes you as a hacker news commenter. There is really no excuse for you to be ignorant about things that you can find an answer to in mere seconds.
I've tried. I have not found any hard data from sources I would trust. I've found lots of opinions penned by people I have no reason to trust.
Anyone who doubts the safety of this new immune system programming is obviously either a science denier or a paid [insert foreign country] shill.
Most vaccines take 10-15 years to develop, so that should probably be my target, but I'm willing to take on some extra risk.
Also those policies usually have religious and medical exemptions.
On one hand, I can't wait for the Pfizer vaccine to be fully FDA approved in September. On the other, everybody who uses that argument today will simply forget about it and move goalposts.
For those "waiting for FDA approval", have you ever taken a vitamin supplement? Guess what, you're putting not-FDA-approved chemicals into your body.
At the time we were at the point where it was a real possibility that Trump would push out the vaccine regardless of the status of trials, etc. Trump kept saying dates and deadlines for all sorts of things throughout the pandemic that had no basis in reality, to the point that pushing out the vaccine early was a real possibility, just to make him look better.
THAT is what the Biden/Harris comments are referencing.
Could they have been more clear? Absolutely. But I'm confident that you personally know the difference and that you're just deciding to peddle that bullshit to further whatever right wing agenda you have.
There was a real worry that it would be maliciously rushed under Trump.
Imagine this: Trump guts the FDA leadership and installs fringe scientists. Those scientists then skip steps, ignore trial data, and push out the vaccine.
If you think that was a far out possibility, then you're likely right-wing. The Scott Atlas situation alone should convince you that this was possible, let alone everything else about Trump.
By that logic, we have absolutely no idea if there are any long term side effects of COVID-19, and how they might compare to the unknown of the long term side effects of vaccines.
We do know that many COVID-19 patients have had very bad effects over many months (I'm thinking of long COVID here), not to mention the possibility of death. We don't know what it'll be like 5 years from first getting COVID-19, but we know long term problems happen from the virus.
Compare that to what's known about the vaccine: we haven't seen any indication that the vaccine is causing very bad effects over many months in any significantly large percentage of the population.
This is untrue, researchers have been testing various mRNA therapies on people for 30 years, with it being first done in vitro in 1990 then in vivo in 1992 [1]. Lipid nano particles were first used around the same time.
> the vaccine was rushed faster to public access than any other vaccine before
This is only true if you ignore the development of the mRNA vaccine platform for flu, rabies, and zika that predated the pandemic by years. The novel development here was swapping in new protein encoding. If you look at this as a continuation of that process, then it's only a little faster than normal, and a lot of that was due to the FDA switching sequential steps in the process to be parallel.
> We have absolutely no idea if there are any long term side effects of these vaccines.
This isn't a meaningful claim for 2 key reasons. There has never been a vaccine that had serious side effects that did show up shortly after vaccination[2]. The history of mRNA treatments began as an experiment in gene therapy, but has largely ben abandoned because the effects never lasted long enough. As of 2020 this is an ongoing area of research[3]. No one has figure out how to stabilize mRNA so that it has long lasting effects.
> Both candidates Biden and Harris
They're both craven, ignorant politicians, who cares what they said when the other guy was in power.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7076378/
[edit] All that said, I am no pro mandate but seriously you should all voluntarily go get vaccinated IMHO.
This isn't really what I'm worried about. Right now people are talking long COVID, subtle long term brain damage and it seems like mechanisms are still unknown. So who's to say that immune system reaction triggered by vaccination isn't causing same kind of hard to detect damage. I'd be much more comfortable with the vaccine if the long COVID studies included groups :
- no vaccination/hospitalised
- no vaccination/asymptomatic
- vaccination/not infected
- vaccination/infected
I'm not a risk group and have no problems with social distancing so I'm waiting for stuff like this to come out.
Respectfully, I think what you're really waiting for is this thing to blow over so you don't have to take any personal risk. That's likely to be a fail, as you're just a waiting Petri dish for the live virus to infect.
All kinds of things have risk and the craven merchants of doubt are busy spreading FUD about the vaccine. It's really our only way out of this shit show, because waiting around is just prolonging it.
Or would you like to have a long drawn out conversation about the long term health effects of:
* preservatives
* artificial sweeteners
* high fructose corn syrup
* pesticides
* HPV infection
* influenza/rhinovirus infection
* sunburns
* a night of heavy drinking
Because we can absolutely have a long, drawn out, twisting conversation about all those things.
I don't really mind social distancing measures untill people in the risk groups get vaccinated - all of my high risk contacts have been. So I don't get what we need to get out of, my government is already saying they will eliminate COVID measures after summer, UK style.
I'll get vaccinated at some point if I have to do it for travel or what not - right now I'm not convinced - the social arguments don't make much sense to me (variants will come up anyway, you can get infected and spread the virus even if vaccinated you're just reducing risk)
Well if you're feeling conflicted between these things, you're just being willfully ignorant at this point. The vaccine protects against severe COVID, hands down. Long COVID is highly correlated with severe COVID. The data is absolutely rock solid on both of those. And for these nebulous "unknown long term effects" of the anti-vaxers keep scare-mongering with, the data on that is also pretty damn good. There is no data supporting widespread negative effects from the vaccine after a year. mRNA vaccines have been in use for decades to combat influenza, and there is similarly absolutely no data to support long-term effects from their use. Even a cursory education about how mRNA vaccines actually work, how they create an immune response and don't alter your DNA should be enough to convince most Science-minded, reasonable people. The immune response induced is on the order of any other; there's nothing special about the COVID vaccine immune response! And it doesn't give you an actual viral infection. A vaccine is literally all the benefit with none of the downside. Unlike dummies who think that somehow actually getting COVID is better for immunity. No data supports that conclusion, either.
The vaccine is effective and safe. People who tell you otherwise are just manufacturing doubt and spreading FUD. They are fucking this up for the rest of us. We could have reached herd immunity with the vaccine by now, and variants would no longer be of concern.
> right now I'm not convinced
Well, I'm not inclined to believe that you can be convinced, because you didn't reason yourself into the position you're in now. No one will be reasoning you out of it. We're mostly just combating your further spreading of FUD like your apparent willingness to be a link in the chain in further spreading of the goddamn virus. It's really incredible the selfishness here.
I have 0 problems with people at risk of serious COVID getting vaccinated, in fact I convinced my grandparents to do it. I don't really see what it buys me as a healthy 30 something year-old with no preexisting conditions, other than likely being a day out after the shot.
>We could have reached herd immunity with the vaccine by now, and variants would no longer be of concern.
How does that compute ? I thought nobody actually believed zero COVID is possible ?
Bigfoot is out there, and UFOs. Sorry, I shouldn't mock you. But seriously, epidemiologists, you know--Scientists--without political agendas study this problem very carefully...and do not see any widespread effects from the vaccine after a year. It's not like they forgot to look for it. If you seriously believe they are just being willfully blind to it then you're going to be off a long chain of other rationalizations that are just more hallmarks of the fact that you didn't reason yourself to where you are. But I already suspected that so I am not trying to convince you as much as tag your misinformation for passers by.
> I don't really see what it buys me
This is really the crux of matter. You only think about yourself. One, you are are far higher risk of Bad Things (tm) straight-up getting COVID, especially with Delta and Lambda coming. Again, the data is absolutely clear on that. Two, other people exist. Data shows you are more likely to be infected and more likely to infect others if you are unvaccinated. You help keep this thing festering by offering yourself up as a host. And no, vaccinated people are not doing the same. They are actually taking precautions that protect themselves and others. You're just being selfish and obstinate, and it isn't even principled, you are just worried about vague side-effects that only affect you. Worse, you put vaccinated people at risk too. If you are infected, and also being in contact with vaccinated people, you are just offering evolution more dice rolls to create a more infectious variant that can evade vaccine-induced immunity and infect the people around you. In fact, you tempt evolution to do so, because it's then a selective pressure. It's like giving your crazy neighbor who steals people's bullets and shoots them into the air randomly free ammunition by putting it on the porch with a bow on it instead of locking your shit up in your house. It's infuriatingly irresponsible.
> I thought nobody is actually believed zero COVID is possible?
I said herd immunity, not zero COVID.
herd im·mu·ni·ty, noun: resistance to the spread of an infectious disease within a population that is based on pre-existing immunity of a high proportion of individuals as a result of previous infection or vaccination. "the level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity varies by disease but ranges from 83 to 94 percent"
Zero COVID was a possibility when infections were low. But back then, people were saying it only affected a few people and didn't even want to wear masks. Irresponsible people brought this upon us and keep it going with continued irresponsibility.
I think you're irresponsible and I'm saying it you explicitly.
?? This entire thread is me asking if there's some studies that compare long COVID sideffects with groups based on vaccination. Instead of linking these, since you're already certain (and I would very much be convinced if you can show me) you are saying "believe science" ? And I'm unscientific ?
By all means enlighten me and I'll edit my top post with links to stop spreading misinformation.
There's even data to suggest that getting vaccinated after already having long COVID can improve symptoms.
This study [1] is what got me interested, they claim gray matter loss compares to control group even in asymptomatic cases but they excluded vaccinated people from what I can tell. I want to see this level of data for the groups I mention and then we have a really good insight. And this data should be possible to get.
Your links are articles referencing self-reports and doctors guesses...
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...
Actually, I've seen dozens of articles fly by and they all said pretty much the same thing, because the data is so clear that no one really disputes it. I just googled it because it's stupidly easy to find. Nothing's going to convince you anyway, so there's no point in putting in more effort at this point.
This is pure conjecture base on literally nothing. I don't mean to sound harsh, but it's just baseless. The immune response from the vaccine works like any other type of vaccine immune response. The mRNA vaccines cause you own cells machinery to build virus proteins at which point it works just like any viral subunit vaccine, which have existed since 1970 and include flu vaccines, hep A and B, and few other you may have had already. Billions of people have received those types of vaccines and they don't have long term negative effects, except rarely when someone has an acute reaction right after vaccination. It is true that some people have allergic reactions (a strong an destructive immune response), but they happen within about 4 hours and symptoms usually clear up in a few days.
If the COVID vaccines had some mysterious far off long term effects, it would be the first vaccine ever to do that, and there's no reason to suspect that might be the case. You may find this nature article interesting https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00479-7, it's about general vaccine immunology.
I'm not telling you that you need to get vaccinated, but the particular concern you're raising isn't something you should be worried about.
You are assuming because the mechanism is the same that the effects will be as well - it's like saying "we have this black box service we sort of have an idea of what it does and if we send it X/Y/Z we know what happens, it should work the same with W too - I've been in that scenario often enough to know that's an assumption that I'd rather see the data for.
I already saw that people in my peer group reported short term side effects like headache after getting vaccination, have taken days off from work, family members complained about dizziness the day after.
It's relatively easy to do these studies along with long COVID studies, should be insignificant even compares to money that will be spent on vaccination campaigns - so why skip out on valuable data.
I'm not assuming, the whole field of immunology seems to be on board here. We know pretty well how the immune system work and how immunity develops from exposure to foreign material, it isn't black magic. There's no black box here the immune system has been well studied, and we know the inputs as well.
Vaccines are probably the safest medical intervention we have, the reactions you're describing are typical immune responses that are well studied, well understood, and temporary. No vaccine has every caused some long range reaction in the we you're describing.
> It's relatively easy to do these studies along with long COVID studies
One could, but there's absolutely no reason to bother, because immunology is a well established field and we know what happens after people receive subunit vaccines. The only moderately novel part here is the mRNA which has been tested for 30 years in vitro, in animals, and in people.
There is no mechanism for the vaccine to have some long term effect that wouldn't be apparent within a short time period give the MASSIVE number of people who have received the vaccine. Again, you don't have to take the vaccine, but the thing you are worried about isn't supported by any evidence or research it is amateur conjecture at best.
By the same logic brain effects of long COVID on asymptotic cases is impossible aince these people don't even know they had the infection and shouldn't be studied either.
Saying that the immune system is well studied and we know what happens when we don't even know the mechanism behind the long COVID sideffects is again overreaching.
And I'm not saying my "amateur conjecture" is likely true, I'm saying given the surprising sideffects of COVID on asymptomatic cases it's not really unreasonable to check this kind of things - especially when you're vaccinating a huge % of population in one step (other required immunisations happen generationally)
No, not at all. The virus binds to ACE2 receptors on cells, where are all over you body and in your circulatory system. You could be infected and fight it off without acute symptoms and still have enough systemic damage from the virus and immune response to have lingering effects.
> when we don't even know the mechanism behind the long COVID sideffects
We do, it's cellular damage from the infection. This is well studies with the flu and various other viruses. What we don't know is why it seems to effect some people and not others, the risk factors, and we're still parsing through symptoms to put together a full picture. There's no mystery as to how this happens. When researchers say they don't know why brain fog is a symptom, it doesn't mean they have no clue how it happens.
> I'm saying given the surprising sideffects of COVID on asymptomatic cases it's not really unreasonable to check this kind of things
It isn't surprising though. Plenty of viruses can cause lingering systemic damage without sever acute symptoms. The long covid cases were appearing as early as late April 2020 in the US, and clearly wen't caused by the vaccines that weren't available for a year. This whole what if scenario is just baseless FUD.
If you trust the FDA approval process, why not the FDA’s EUA process as well?
People need to start protesting with their wallets. People need to talk less and act more.
I work in NYC, in an "essential" service. In the beginning myself and other workers were threatened with discipline if we did not show up for work. We were told to go straight home, and stay inside, and do as little as necessary otherwise.
Now, this is easy for me, as I am single with no family, but I continue that policy to this day. I buy the essentials and no more.
You want to threaten me? If I don't do this, I can't travel? Fine, I'll keep my money. I can't go to a restaurant? Fine, I'll keep my money, and cook myself. I can't go to the beach? Well fine, I'll keep my money. I'll find something else to do (some of the parks are empty this time of year as everyone's at the beach!). Can't hurt me by telling me I can't spend.
I do the same when gas prices jump. I travel less. Not because I'm hurt more financially, but as a middle finger to the corporations behind the price increase.
Yeah, it doesn't make a dent in the grand scheme, but at least I don't feel the fool.
Honestly with all of this spending less and the way even essentials are jumping in cost, I haven't been able to save much more, and that's a shame.
There are so many ways Americans could make this work, to send a message, if they didn't spend as the corporate overloads told them they have to do.
Any restriction that prevents me from spending I will gladly follow.
New York has become a pretty miserable place to live. And for the privilege of living in a miserable place you pay an exorbitant amount.
what about building new centers?
See also: Miami, Austin, Seattle housing prices.
You can get around town really without the cost of a car. For a little time and $3 you can go damned near anywhere in the city (and let's admit: with traffic and the wrong time of day, the subway can come in at a shorter ride than a taxi). How many places in the US can you do that?
Remote working may not make that such a big deal, but then you add entertainment and other activities. Fix the two major issues and maybe a good City government, and it could be far from miserable.
> During the pandemic, the professional laptop class protected themselves by working from home while exposing the working class that brought them food and other goods. It is now the height of hypocrisy to recognize immunity from vaccinations but not immunity from those exposed while serving the laptop class.
https://brownstone.org/articles/forced-medicine-the-new-fron...
> Consider this from the Wall Street Journal. “Children under the age of 12, who cannot be vaccinated according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, would likely not be excluded from the program’s outlined indoor activities ... So Broadway shows of children’s plays are permanently banned? Families cannot eat in restaurants? Kids under 12 cannot go to indoor events at all? Is this serious? Media questioned New York officials about all of this, and it truly appeared as if the geniuses running the city had completely forgotten to think about children at all. The question alone seemed to take them by surprise. If they exempt them, there is already a problem. Why include a 12-year-old but exclude an unvaccinated 13-year old?
> Regardless, this is an appalling and unthinkable amount of compulsion to impose for the sake of a vaccine that the willing have long ago accepted and about which the remainders have either grave doubts or hard-core opposition. People figure that it will be challenged in court but that takes time and money, and it is not at all clear how courts will respond. In the end, though lawsuits are fabulous and there should be many more, I don’t see how they stop this tyranny. I’m not sure what precisely does but I know this much: a people and culture that acquiesces to this level of imposition is not well suited for the preservation of liberty or civilization in general. This really does feel like a new chapter in the history of American rights violations.
There are some advocating to expand the scope of the No Fly list, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/unvaccinated-people-belong...
When you occupy a bed in a hospital for a preventable disease (like covid post-vaccine) you are a detriment to society. You are occupying precious resources because you were dumb. Just dumb. No ifs or buts - we need to start calling out stupidity again.
We already handle people occupying hospital resources with self inflicted diseases, like lung cancer or liver trouble, by taxing the shit out of cigarettes and liquor (in countries where universal healthcare is a thing). We can’t put a covid tax on people I guess, so we might as well mandate vaccinations for everything we can.
People who believe vaccines aren’t at least reducing mortality by 10x to 100x can just maintain their stupidity and become pariahs to society. I idgaf anymore. These people are dumb and I won’t waste another breath defending them. It is immediately proven from vaccination campaigns globally that the impact vaccines have is at least 10x reduction in mortality. Vaccines would be worth it even if they killed 1/2 of the numbers of covid, bout they don’t. They are a HUGE reduction.
> From 1999–2000 through 2017 –2018, US obesity prevalence increased from 30.5% to 42.4%. During the same time, the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%.
> Obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer. These are among the leading causes of preventable, premature death.
> The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was $147 billion in 2008. Medical costs for people who had obesity was $1,429 higher than medical costs for people with healthy weight.
Also, if the government really cared about the health of the population, why aren't they mandating exercise or dietary health?
The interesting issue is how to operationalize such type of incentives program. (i.e. Are you COVID19 vaccinated? we will give you a 5% discount in your taxes next year. You get a unique "discount coupon code" after getting your 2nd shot.)
[1] ( https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/new-warning-labels-now-requ...)
This is an grossly exaggerated and absurd comparison.
Exercise nor diet are as easy to do well as getting the vaccine.
Give me a break.
Probably because obesity isn't contagious...
Why are these resources somehow "precious" two years later? Where was the ventilator production? Staffing?
If this were such a serious issue, what have we been doing?
We’re almost done with the restrictions here in Denmark. You know why? Because people got vaccinated and because we required proof of a test or vaccination to keep the spread down while we were building herd immunity.
It’ll be rich when all that effort was wasted because some new strain mutates in western countries that were full of adult babies.
Why are you focusing on weak predictors of expected medical cost like vaccination status instead of strong predictors like diet and obesity?
Vaccination takes minutes while getting someone to lose weight takes months.
Whatever. This whole vaccine vs obesity is a false dillemma and a logical fallacy. And if you’re smart you know this and if you’re not smart it’s not worth the trouble to try and educate you.
In other words, by getting vaccinated you pushed the onus of responsibility onto society.
See how this is a zero-sum game? Either everyone gets vaccinated, and maintains that vaccination forever, or someone is still getting the short end of the stick, and society as a whole loses.
I'm sure you personally feel great for getting a vaccination, but that means literally nothing in the grand scheme of things. But clearly getting everyone vaccinated isn't the focus here, not with this post nor this law. The focus is clearly to feel good about yourself if you are vaccinated and look down upon those who aren't. So I'd say keep ngaf, because as long as lawmakers share opinions like those of yourself, this issue isn't going anywhere.
- Reduces disease incidence by 8x
- Reduces hospitalisation incidence by 25x
- Reduces mortality incidence by 25x
Source, CDC, 29 July 2021: https://context-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/do... (PDF) p. 3.
Whether or not SARS-COV-2 becomes endemic and chronic isn't clear, though that does appear a possibility. It's been detected in 40% of tested wild deer population in 2021 across four US states:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.29.454326v1....
A persistent animal reservoir in North America, and presumably, other continents, in multiple species (deer are simply where we've looked so far), would suggest a substantial risk of chronic Covid, continuously evolving and mutating. My own very nonexpert concern is that COVID-19 will be with us for at least another 2--3 years and quite possibly well beyond that.
Get the jab already.
A fact you seem to be quite pointedly ignoring.
Scale and degree matter.
(That relative rates have to be discussed on HN, a site nominally dedicated to fractions-of-a-percentage conversion-rate optimisations in advertising and sales funnels is ... well, it is.)
But there are selective pressures & second order effects to consider regarding mass vaccination using the current mRNA vaccines which induce an immune response that is highly targeted towards the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein [1][2].
Combined with the evidence that people who have naturally acquired immunity are protected equally as well as vaccinated individuals [3][4], and that combinations of existing medicines have proven effective in reducing hospitalization and death [5] - don't you think that a strategy focused on vaccinating only the most vulnerable populations across the world would be more rational?
[1] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/
[2] SARS-CoV-2 immune evasion by the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant of concern https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/30/scie...
[3] SARS-CoV-2 infection induces long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in humans https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4.pdf
[4] Necessity of COVID-19 vaccination in previously infected individuals https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v...
[5] Multifaceted highly targeted sequential multidrug treatment of early ambulatory high-risk SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
For the past ten years I’ve agreed with the majority on hacker news on almost every issue. Software patents, voting rights, who knows what else. Everyone seemed to just find the right answer and it made sense.
Then all of a sudden I’m in tiny minority because I believe people should be able to choose what they put in their own bodies. It really feels like a twilight zone episode.
There has been a total invasion of commies to HN over the past decade. I don't know if it's the schools to blame or what but something has definitely flipped.
Hackers, as a demographic used to be hard-core libertarian (not necessarily a party member).
If we go down that road, what government injection proffered in the name of public health could ever be refused? It's not as if you won't still be labelled a selfish anti-science anti-vaxxer if you refuse, say, the tenth injection rather than the first one.
So how does that make you a tiny minority on HN?
You still can, with limited exceptions:
* Kids need to be vaccinated against ~9 ailments before they attend school (seems mandatory but homeschool is an option in every state)
* Adults need to be vaccinated against one before they patronize indoor restaurants, entertainment venues and gyms (completely optional activities and only in the densest city in the US, probably some others will follow)
There are also things you are banned from putting in your body, some by age (tobacco & alcohol) and some entirely (e.g. DEA scheduled drugs) and some controlled to the point that are effectively illegal to consume (e.g. meats that aren't allowed to be harvested or imported)
Also, adults that want to attend college classes on campus need to provide schools with proof of vaccination for about a half-dozen diseases. This was the case 20+ years ago, and it's still the case today.
The covid vaccines do not. People are still getting covid after being vaccinated. This is happening a lot.
It's just being selective, because you had to be vaccinated to go to school and/or college.
And ain't nobody alive today that can choose to not ingest microplastics, PFAs, pesticides, many can't avoid lead in their drinking water, and none of us can avoid air pollution.
And COVID for that matter! I would like to choose to not put COVID in my body! It'd be great if I could CHOOSE that. But people are just wandering around spreading the plague like that's their constitutional right. Your unvaccinated fist is right in my face.
Then get vaccinated and your risk goes down to a regular flu season.
All hail the march of greek letters coming our way. It seems Lambda will be next.
This kind of thinking is the root of the problem: so many people nowadays are so completely devoid of values that they have no problem infringing on other people's fundamental rights just to minimise risk to themselves. In decades past Americans were willing to die to protect the freedoms of their fellow countrymen, now they're so spineless they'd rather destroy other people's freedoms just to prevent a risk that's incredibly miniscule considering they're already vaccinated.
If it is important to you, you can find ways to avoid those. It is just not a priority for many people, because their own health is secondary to something else.
Also, it's like the vaccine debate has turned into the same arguments as the pro-life/pro-choice debates.
You do have a right to choose. This isn’t a vaccine mandate. It’s the vaccinated asking to be separated from unvaccinated individuals in high risk places of recreation (restaurants, movie theaters, gyms, and large venues). Meanwhile, mask mandates will likely stay in place for places where it isn’t possible or important to separate the vaccinated and unvaccinated (grocery stores, MTA, healthcare settings, the great outdoors). To avoid antagonizing the unvaccinated and reducing spread for high risk individuals that don’t have a choice, grocery stores are requiring masks for everyone still.
So what are people so in arms about? Overreaching? This isn't (legal, ethical) overreaching, this is using data to drive the economy forward without killing people in ways that have been supported by the courts for almost a century. The more we reduce cases, the less likely we get a variant that’s worse than Delta.
While we’re discussing gripes, the states that were in staunch opposition to mandatory vaccines (*and masks*) are the ones that reopened the earliest and with the highest cases. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Read stories from people who are on their death bed from COVID, some ask for the vaccine (it’s too late), others still deny that it could have saved their lives.
If you're scared to do things around others even if you're vaccinated, then that's fine. We cannot accept a societal change towards mandating choices for people. It will be very, very hard for us to walk that back.
Making epidemiological decisions isn't something that most people are qualified to do. I have seen the takes from random people and 99% of them are abject garbage.
What makes anyone qualified to make decisions over someone else's choice of what they should put in their body? If the vaccines are effective, then you can make the choice if you feel comfortable getting them and then being around other people.
I don't even think people realize what they're saying when they say "most people aren't qualified to make decisions". I mean, seriously?
The death rate of covid for healthy individuals is still very low. Even lower if you're vaccinated. We should _not_ sacrifice personal choice in the name of public safety.
Give people the data and let them make their own choices.
Science _is_ fluid by its very nature because it's a process, not an outcome.
But processes can be well-executed or not. Scientists, with all their human and institutional flaws, are still just so, so much more qualified than the lay public to make informed opinions that it's not even funny.
It's the same as with doctors: a medical second opinions is obtained from another doctor, not by yourself, because ultimately expert opinions may be challenged by others who have at least a similar amount of training and expertise.
Lay opinions have gigantic, brutal knowledge gaps. The gaps are so huge as to make lay opinions essentially useless.
I have spent an hour a day, every day, since the beginning of the pandemic, reading up on the scientific literature of COVID. I am overeducated geek with a computer science degree. Do you know how many reasonable assertions I can make about the pandemic? About as much as validating that the calculations behind the p-values of studies are correct, and nothing more. I can, at most, summarize and explain the high-level reasoning behind most epidemiologists' and governments's decisions, with the pros and cons that they themselves have suggested.
We are talking about over 600 hours of research as an educated layman and still no novel conclusions. To think that people who have spent at most a fraction of that time, with no university-level knowledge of statistics or basics of germ theory, can make reasonable assumptions, has no relation to reality.
The science-denying objections to the science has been ... remarkably consistent in shrillness, interneal inconsistency, and studied refusal to accept facts and demonstrated evidence.
So there's that.
Exactly. Governments need to figure out why people aren't getting vaccinated and fix those issues.
So yeah, multiple levels, very little trust in the "system" to take care of me and my family.
and done: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
> then let people make their own decisions about what to do
As we see, they go to crowded places, unvaccinated, and spread the virus. I think that's irresponsible. Is that "ludicrous moralization and judgement?"
Vaccine effectiveness is changing every day. In Israel they're seeing 16% efficacy 6 months after the 2nd Pfizer dose.
Also, benefits are only one half of the cost:benefit analysis. Where is the public data on side effects? It doesn't exist because all we have is completely unverified VAERS claims.
You can't make an informed decision when you only know half the equation.
It's in the name of not spreading a deadly virus, not security with scare quotes.
It is as if some subset of humanity decided to start driving their cars blindfolded and the internet commentariat proclaimed, "their car, their choice! Spare us your ludicrous moralization and judgement!"
We mandate many choices for people already, including, specifically, about taking vaccines.
This has been a societal change in the making for quite some time. It used to be that if one were uncomfortable they were free to not participate, one's requirements were not an onus on others. Now people feel free to create onus on others.
Today people feel free to demand that others comply to their requirements to feel safe rather than relying on/increasing their own self protection and isolation standard.
To date, I haven't seen their concerns mentioned - mentioned - in any of these pronouncements.
I get that there are enough people willing to go along with this that they'll likely stick around for a bit - but another thing I haven't seen is an end game.
Corona is in the deer, it's in pets. Are they all going to get vaccinated too? Are people going to willingly get shot up with Pfizer and Moderna every six months for the rest of their lives; living in a three-tier society?
Yeah, I'm all for pushing willfully ignorant discussion out of the public eye.
What communities are being targeted? Everyone who leaves their house is affected.
> strongly discouraging open debate
We're debating it here just fine.
> dissenters [..] physically remove themselves
Voluntarily unvaccinated walking COVID vectors? Yes, that's exactly the point.
Maybe we can eradicate it, maybe not. Literally no one knows what the future holds here.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/14/covid-outbreak-a...
The good news is that viruses tend to get less dangerous over time. Death of the host provides selective pressure against those variants. Syphilis used to be extremely dangerous and rapidly fatal, but it has been around for so long that it has changed. But that process takes years typically.
One notable exception was Marek's disease in chickens, where the widespread administration of leaky vaccines (which suppressed symptoms and complications but not transmission) led to the breeding of hotter and hotter strains in the vaccinated flocks, which became more lethal to unvaccinated chickens.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
What it showed is that when you take a group of chickens, infect them with multiple strains of different virulence at the same time, and partially protect all of them with a vaccine, the ones with the most severe infection live longer, which allows them to spread more of the most severe virus than they would otherwise.
Said differently: if you don't let the "bad" virus kill the hosts, it can spread more.
Well, sure.
'People suspected the vaccine, but the problem was that it was never shown before experimentally,' said virologist Klaus Osterrieder of the Free University of Berlin, who wasn’t involved in the study. 'The field has talked about these types of experiments for a very long time, and I’m really glad to see the work finally done.' "
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...
Not trying to raise alarm here or say that this necessarily will happen with SARS-CoV-2, there are tons of big differences. In general, we should expect it to become less lethal over time, but the vaccines may have introduced a confounding factor to the usual selection for milder disease.
Sigh. Could the author choose more inflammatory language?
This is half of the problem with Covid-related reporting today: hack journalists who simply cannot resist using horror-movie language to describe illness.
> Not trying to raise alarm here or say that this necessarily will happen with SARS-CoV-2, there are tons of big differences. In general, we should expect it to become less lethal over time, but the vaccines may have introduced a confounding factor to the usual selection for milder disease.
As I said, I think that's an over-statement, having read the original paper. But sure, theoretically, if you have a vaccine that only partially protects against some really severe strain, that strain could escape and go on to become more severe over time.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with this information. Not vaccinate? Stay inside forever and suck our thumbs?
In chickens, we probably don't care enough to invest a ton of money into in creating a new vaccine every year. In humans, that's not a problem. If a more virulent form of SARS comes along that escapes the vaccines, we'll make a new vaccine. We're getting pretty good at it now!
(I realize you're not on this side of the argument. I'm just reacting generally.)
If the actual progression of Covid shows something like it is happening I would say that would be called for for everyone except the high-risk groups, yes.
Switch from vaccinating everyone to vaccinating the most vulnerable and using antivirals to treat the illness when it's severe.
> If a more virulent form of SARS comes along that escapes the vaccines, we'll make a new vaccine. We're getting pretty good at it now!
And what if we can't one year --- for any reason? Then billions of people have their brains turn to mush. I don't want human survival to depend on an annual drug refresh.
Indications though seems to be for only needing 2 or 3 doses or needing boosters multiple years apart.
People have lost their minds over covid and act in ways that they would have said were insane probably five years ago.
A bunch of younger people at very little risk of getting horribly sick, are demanding that everyone get vaccinated wear masks and want life to be miserable even though it is older people who are saying I’d rather just live my life and if I die I die.
I might get one dose of the vaccine, just so I can not be part of either side of this crazy debate.
So no I will not get two doses because it is pointless. I might get one, and I’ll be more “safe” than all the others, yet I will purposefully not get two so I don’t get tempted to thinking those who didn’t should be shunned and isolated.
Let me ask you this, if I was a coworker and you found out I wasn’t vaccinated, yet wasn’t following the mandates, would you just say whatever, or would you notify the hotline to report violators? Could you do that with a good conscience?
What a silly way to make health decisions.
Edit: looks like it wasn’t sarcasm at all.
There’s a reason why I decided you weren’t making serious arguments worth debating. This is performative nonsense.
You can make a straw man of my argument but don’t try to act like you are some high and mighty smart guy who knows better than those dumb dumbs down there.
I know your type, you try to pretend that you’ve arrived at all your conclusions through thorough scientific processes coupled with your supreme intellect.
Yet you prove to be more ignorant than most.
Let me guess now you’ll say look at my degrees I am smart.
There may come a time where you will have to choose to hide a non-vaxxer in your basement, or rat out the dangerously healthy individual to the authorities. I’d choose hiding them in my basement with my conscience wondering if I should, and you can choose ratting out your neighbor with the approval of your conscience.
I’m only slightly joking about getting one dose. Although natural immunity makes me statistically unlikely to get or spread covid, there is thoughts that the vaccine might do better against the variants (and some thoughts it might do worse).
They say it wouldn’t hurt to get a vaccine if you already had it, but probably just one as a booster.
I want to get one dose, to not be on the side who thinks these vaccine have chips in them and will make you infertile, and to not be on the side that is crazy and thinks we should have zero risk in life that we get sick and die, and would literally advocate for not allowing healthy people to be out of unvaccinated, because with natural immunity and a booster and I’d be even lower risk than double vaccinated yet would still not be allowed to do things only vaccinated people would do, pointing out the absurdity.
Like people are insane. I’ve had covid, and yet some would still recommend I avoid hanging out indoors with others who have also have covid if none of us have been vaccinated.
The vaccines are super duper effective, but because a possibility exist you could still get sick and the virus could mutate again we should go on living like crazy hermits and not be the social beings we are.
It is insane.
We use the court system as a way of resolving conflicts where there are competing interests and arguments to be made. The Supreme Court had a similar situation happen 116 years ago, and they found that the public health interests outweighed the competing arguments.
What's the alternative method for making decisions when there are competing legal arguments?
You are now failing to accept the point made, and changing the argument.
Requiring vaccination is not new. As a matter of law in the US the issue was settled by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachussetts in 1905 [2]. Mandatory vaccination has been used to effectively eliminate smallpox and polio, in particular.
We've now administered billions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines. The idea that we're somehow missing side effects is quite frankly ridiculous at this point.
That idea also shows a basic misunderstanding of what's going on here. Immune system responses to something like a vaccine are actually extremely quick. This is not the same as, say, other drugs or compounds that live in the body for a long time. The body's response is known very quickly, which is why the very slight possibility of a clotting issue with AstraZeneca, for example, was identified extremely quickly.
Vaccines just aren't a personal choice. If it was, nobody would care what individuals did. The idea that someone's baseless opinions should trump public good as a matter of principle is sad, false as a matter of law and baseless as a matter of principle.
Contrary to the opinion of many (sadly) absolute selfishness isn't a virtue, it's just selfishness. And it's the latest iteration of the underlying anti-intellectualisms in the US.
What's especially disappointing, even worrying, is just how much traction these baseless ideas get from those who allegedly have a science education.
With NYC's mandate (which I support), it still doesn't mean you have to get vaccinated. It just means there are consequences if you don't. We already have this with schools. While we're at it, it's time to stop this nonsense of vaccines being against one's "personal beliefs" to get an exemption.
If you want to live in a society that benefits from mass vaccination you should be prepared to do your part, particularly when that part just means getting an extremely safe needle. If you want to opt out of that, you also opt out of the benefits of that.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_resurgence_in_the_Unit...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
According to the CDC, Measles is brought into the US by international travel:
Measles cases in the U.S. originate from international travel. Make sure you and your loved ones are protected against measles before international travel. [0]
I personally went to the ER with heart attack like symptoms (chest pain) and it was Pericarditis . No one warned me of this risk. Now I'm footing the $15k bill for the good of the public. Additionally no doctor suggested reporting it to VAERS. Why? i suspect because it's become taboo to speak ill of the vaccine in any way. (watch to see if this comment gets downvoted to oblivion, proving the point)
"Free" turned out to be not so free for me.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...
I truly hope that we're right on this one.
The one-year chances of dying in a car crash are ~20 in a million [1]. I assume then that if the vaccine "risk" concerns you, you've clearly given up driving, right?
A quick search suggest that US has had ~35M cases of Covid-19 and ~615K deaths. Deaths in particular is likely underreported but we'll go with the official figures.
That puts the odds of dying from Covid-19 at ~2%, which is of course 20,000 in a million. The vaccine isn't perfect but recent data shows that almost all severe cases (including death) occur in the unvaccinated population, even when there's a breakthrough infection of someone vaccinated.
This is the problem many including myself have when anyone raises the specter of "risks" because even if you assume the worst case scenario of getting the vaccine, not getting it is literally thousands of times more likely to kill you.
And that would be fine I guess if that only applied to you but it doesn't. The unvaccinated pose a health risk to everyone around them.
The anti-vaxxer position just completely defies logic. Worse, defying logic seems to be a badge of honor for some.
[1]: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...
If the city wants to impose this rule, then at the very least they should handle the enforcement. Outsourcing the mandate without compensation is absurd.
also, this case was not about the whether it was a breach of the civil rights act which is what i contend this law violates. in fact, the civil rights act was established after this case so it couldn't possibly have factored into the decision.
The Supreme Court found, 7-2, that it was not a 14th Amendment civil rights violation to have compulsory vaccination and that police powers extended to protecting public health.
They knew arresting them wouldn't work, so instead they went with what they thought was more of legal grey area, just shut off their access to water. They're not forcing you to get vaccinated you see, you could obviously just buy bottled water!
Considering that people of color have been the targets of medical experimentation under the guise of public health by both our government and the same drug makers peddling the vaccines (usually in other countries), this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
Unless you are a pregnant woman you mean!
When enforcement comes knocking, are we going to give them a pass? How does one reconcile requiring it for clients who spend and an hour or two, but not for workers spending 15 hours on premises?
1. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-vaccine-eligibi...
1. Asymptomatic transmission is the primary vector and just as dangerous as being in proximity to a sick individual - has this been confirmed or refuted? Obviously-sick people aren't going to be in restaurants and bars so they can be taken out of the equation entirely. The virus has a normal lifecycle like all others: incubation, infestation and recovery, and during the 2nd phase people should be showing symptoms that our human instincts would urge us to isolate from and ostracize against.
2. The human body cannot become immune to a strain of this virus by recovering from it naturally - most people have had the virus by now, and if the virus is omnipresent, the non-vaccinated should keep becoming re-infected and in a perpetual state of illness - greatly multiplying their chances of death. I don't see the fatality data supporting this hypothesis, so natural recovery immunity is probably serving some protective function.
I think this is neither obvious nor true. There are an unfortunate number of people in this country who choose to go out and socialize when they have active symptoms.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/boston-mayor-janey-compares-vac...
Note that I'm not making the comparison with slavery myself, I'm just passing on the statement from another big city mayor with a different perspective.
1. As others have mentioned, this is being done before the vaccine being available to children under 12 and before the vaccine has been officially approved by the FDA.
2. This policy isn't simply being announced as a way to temporarily bring down cases, it's being instituted indefinitely, with no pre-determined expiration date.
3. There has been no attempt to justify the policy. And the burden of proof should be on those instituting the policy.
4. This announcement is nearly triumphant rather than displaying any kind of humility. They barely conceal their glee at having the political capital to spend on this policy.
But they're kind of weak as implemented here. Considering that a photo of a vaccine card is considered valid proof (and the guy checking cards at the bar or whatever is only going to spend two seconds looking at it), some enterprising scumbag could probably whip up a site that automatically creates fake vaccine pass photos over a weekend or two.
*Even with delta, the vaccines are pretty damn effective at preventing infections. A lot of media coverage on this is misleading and is based on not understanding base rates - when a high proportion of people at risk of hospitalization are vaccinated, you're going to see vaccination rates among hospitalized people that are higher than the actual efficacy rate would suggest.
These cards have zero security features.
Fear about the vaccine, privacy, or how “minorities are going to suffer”? BS
Also, yes, why not? Same as polio
Right now, without masks, every time you go outside is like having unprotected sex with drug addicts in the 90s. Worse in fact, because you are putting your life and the lives of others at risk knowingly.
- what will this do to the long term economy of the localities that choose to mandate this, if later the rest of the country does not go along? Will this see a rise of restaurant soeakeasies?
- do people not wonder about the timing of it all, when the powerful opposition to the mayor of nyc (cuomo) is politically weakened by a sex scandal, and absorbs all the front page news in the process, effectively innoculating a mayor that is hated, among all demographic groups in nyc?
Of course we can both be right. I mean, if you can’t achieve herd immunity for some reason, then you can never really stop the requirement for proof either. But then, if a country has so many adult babies that it can’t achieve hers immunity through vaccination during a pandemic, maybe it needs to be run like a kindergarten (which you coincidentally can’t attend unless you’re vaccinated).
Just checked this "NYC COVID Safe" app[1] which is claimed to be "Key to NYC". All it does is taking and storing a photo on the phone. It obviously meant to be CDC paper card, but there seems no validation, client side or server side. (update it does phone home for some apparently analytics event like onboard, added card, etc)
In contrast the NYS Excelsior Pass app [2] at least did some check on server side on personal information like name/DOB and place/date of vax before generate a QR code. Also there's another app for business side to verify the consumers' generated QR. It may not be 100% perfect but at least did some diligence.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nyc-covid-safe/id1565213506
“A strong stance needs to be taken,” the lawmaker added. “It will be controversial, but your stance — when we look back in history on this one, this will be a defining moment in your government.”
They act like they know what's best, when in fact we have no idea how COVID-19 will evolve in the future or what the efficacy of the current vaccines will be with future variants. Also, we have studies coming out that show natural immunity is stronger than vaccine immunity against future COVID-19 infections. Simply put, this virus is going under evolutionary pressures that nobody can predict.
Having the NYC mayor saying things like, "it’s the only way to protect our people"? Um, you could do lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing, or IVM. He is trying to incite hatred and war, with words like "We could not have been more kind... The voluntary phase is over". Pretty shameful in my opinion.
Which... studies? As far as I've seen the opposite is true.
T cell responses are important for viral infections. However, we see that T-cell responses are significantly decreased in vaccine group, compared to natural immunity.
This argument, of course, is made by innumerate people who do not realize that the number of US holdouts is utterly dwarfed by the number of people who want a vaccine but can't get it no matter what. If we are worried about a new scary variant slowly burbling away in the lungs of the unvaccinated, preparing to jump out and get us good vaccinated folk, should we not be focusing our energy on... I donno, actually trying to help people who want it get vaccinated instead of forcing people who are reluctant? My $0.02 from a fully vaccinated person who still thinks people should be able to make their own decisions about their bodily autonomy.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/world/vaccine-coronavirus...
My neighbor has been told by his doctor to not get any vaccine because of his medical history. Are those people just SOL, or am I missing something?
THX
1) You could say the same for the vaccine. We dont know.
2) Almost certainly no shorter than getting the vaccine. Both trigger roughly the same immune response and building of antibodies.
Can you point to anything that backs up that claim?
California has
https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov/
and I can't get that to recognize that I've been vaccinated. I was vaccinated at Stanford, and their health record system, which I can access online, shows that. But the data didn't make it to the state system. Stanford customer support blames the state. State customer support says "contact your health care provider".
https://www.thetrafalgargroup.org/news/nat-issues-vaccines-0...
If we believe these results, vaccine mandates are about as unpopular as TARP was back in 2008 (opposition to which was largely responsible for the "Tea Party" movement). You can expect even stronger opposition to vaccine mandates - because this issue is far more personal.
Bring on the downvotes.
Especially considering polling in 2020 was way off across the board.
How much do you think the actuaries would increase insurance cost for numbers like that?
Doesn't seem like that's a huge risk increase.
And 90% of those are in the above 75 years old age group with the highest maximum risk calculated in already.
I bet there's not a single actuary that is worried about Covid.
https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/average-cost-hosp... (Nov 2020)
Vaccination reduces the risk of hospitalisation by 25x. (CDC data, 29 July 2021, leaked report).
I don't have good data on hospitalisations, though for quite some time early in the pandemic it was about 15% of all detected cases. I strongly suspect it's lower than that now (nonsymptomatic / low-severity cases are now detected), but it's still substantial.
Just on a per-person basis, that's about 50-65 large you're looking at in excess claims for shunning the vaccine. The actuarial risk is probably on the order of 10% of that, though you'd need to add in other costs and long-term health consequences. Severe cases can of course run far higher --- some patients have had double-lung transplants.
They should. But, how could this be enforced without even-more-draconian measures?
If the goal is still seemingly to cut down spread this law does absolutely nothing but increase hubris and cause more cases as more people walk around without a mask. Walked into a CVS the other day and both the clerk and some customers had no mask on simply because they got the vaccine. So I'll stick with my mask for now.
It could be a good advertising campaign: Come on in, we trust you.
I guess this pandemic will go on forever.
What I am seeing are a lot of people that conflate wearing a mask to being protected from the virus' side effects, or that getting the vaccine makes it impossible for them to transmit, and that they are morally/ethically superior to those who take neither of these decisions.
... which resulted in riots
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20210731-france-sees-thir...
It is an endearing habit; but to be fair, some of those protests can look a bit "riotey", what with the smoke bombs, water cannon, paramilitary cops with batons etc ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfxVY8ltyso
... to us in la perfide Albion at least, to Americans this probably all looks a bit tame.
Americans talk a good game when it comes to riots but if they took their rhetoric about "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" seriously every election would wind up with the Capitol looking like it did on January 6th.
It appears to have the same effectiveness in terms of hospitalization benefits, and appears to be a traditional vaccine.
This is ID to eat food.
In that book there's this concept called the advantages of backwardness and it's this thing that crops up often after a crisis where the previous major player, having collapsed as a result of whatever forces brought them down, surrender some of their former glory to previously more backward regions whose backwards methods, in the new climate or situation, set them up for success.
Here's a quote from Ian Morris the book's author discussing the advantages of backwardness in an interview:
"And as cities, states, and industry spread, they entered new geographical niches where the old ways of doing things didn’t always work. People on these frontiers were forced to tinker, to make old techniques work in new—and eventually better—ways.
The best example might be in the origins of agriculture: Seven-thousand years ago, farming first developed in the hilly lands around the edges of what we now call Iraq. When farmers moved down to the plains of modern Iraq, they found that to make farming work, they had to develop irrigation agriculture.
We saw the same thing happen again with the spread of industry in the 19th century. Industry was invented in the British Isles, but as it spread outward into Germany and North America, people in these places had to create new ways of making industry work successfully. As they did so, Germany and the United States began to replace the British Isles as the center of industry. And we see the same process continuing to work in our own day. In the last 20 years, we’ve seen the meteoric rise of China. We should expect the “advantages of backwardness” to continue being one of the major motors in world history."
The connection with the present topic I think is the following. In a sense we've denied our immune systems the advantages of backwardness by the very same advanced technology we designed to augment and protect them. In other words by rushing to create and deploy a vaccine we've prevented our collective human immune system from cultivating defenses to this virus. In that sense I think the policy from a high-level strategic point of view is a weakness and possibly fundamentally flawed, because it opens the possibility the we've made our immune system dependent on vaccinations to deal with further and related infections in future. The other side of the coin is the advantages of backwardness for the virus: we have applied such a strong selective pressure so universally and quickly that in order for the virus to survive it is forced to evolve to become more transmissible, and possibly more dangerous. The more dangerous point is contentious but I argue it as follows because the more dangerous a variant is is correlated with the strength of our measures against it we are selecting for more dangerous variance to evolve more transmissibility. In effect this could be one of the first times in human history that our advanced technology has seriously thrown a natural system previously in equilibrium, in other words the equilibrium between our collective immune system and the collective microbiome of bacterial viruses on Earth, out of balance. nearly many natural examples of how we've done this but they're localized to particular regions like oil spills or Forest clearing we're throwing ecosystems out of balance left right and center but this might be the first time we've done it on a global scale. (And if we release the prophesized mosquito nuclear bomb that's going to wipe out mosquitoes around the world that will be another example of throwing a global ecosystem out of balance). In this pandemic topic, as we keep throwing more fuel at that fire thinking we're solving the problem we may end up simply be providing fuel for future conflagrations that could lead to our collective demise.
I don't want to be too dramatic here and I admit the choice of words has a little bit of that effect but we are talking about a massive global scale thing which we are right to take it seriously and while there may be many motivations for getting a large proportion of the world vaccinated, this line of thinking is not one I've seen elaborated very much so I wanted to add it here.
"It’s time for people to see vaccination as necessary to living a good and full and healthy life,” de Blasio said during his daily press briefing."
That's what people were saying was going to happen more than a year ago and they were attacked for being conspiracy theorists...
Whatever happened to needing 60 or 70% of the people vaccinated to gain herd immunity and stop this pandemic?
So 100% vaccination, even for those who had covid and you must carry documentation/id at all times? Why now? Why for this disease? Especially considering the mortality rate is far lower than what was originally projected.
When the projections were 5%+, I can understand erring on the side of caution, but the mortality rate is lower than 1% last I checked. So odd.
> Everyone has to be vaccinated and we must all prove it to exist in society ( even people who had covid )? So, it isn't about herd immunity anymore? It isn't about stopping covid, but getting everyone the vaccine and forcing them to carry identification everywhere?
No, it's very obviously about stopping covid. Don't be obtuse.
How much higher? 100%?
> No, it's very obviously about stopping covid.
Then why are those who already got covid told to get the vaccines? Doesn't make much sense does it?
> Don't be obtuse.
Are you part of the team downvoting anyone who is simple asking basic questions? The covid brigading is rather obvious and hilarious.
30 year resident and heartbroken.
No one should be under the impression that the next booster won't be mandated. You give these people an inch and they take a mile.
And it's also not a government thing. I would think that the White House is upset with New York's decision because they preferred private business restrict access to the unvaccinated, New York might have jumped the gun, revealed the play etc.
If the vaccines work, why are we talking about vaccine passports and domestic travel bans? If the vaccines don't work, why are we talking about vaccine passports and domestic travel bans?
Also worth noting, this is de facto racial segregation, because blacks and Hispanics are by far the highest population of unvaccinated in NYC. Funny how a lifetime of having your health and well-being actively ignored and sabotaged by public officials raises doubts when they suddenly show up with shiny new injections and start pushing them with lotteries, free ice cream and donuts, and all the rest.
[1] https://swprs.org/covid-vaccines-the-good-the-bad-the-ugly/
https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/
> E) The facemask aerosol issue
> In the following video, Dr. Theodore Noel explains the facemask aerosol issue.
https://factcheck.afp.com/doctor-expired-license-falsely-cla...
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/08/facebook-p...
the fact that we have accounts on here with large amounts of reputation reposting facebook-based misinformation does not give me faith that leaving these choices up to allegedly informed individuals is a good idea. as others have pointed out, 99.99% of people are in no way qualified to make such determinations.
Because that's working out well (also in Australia). I suppose de Blasio doesn't mind swarms of people protesting in front of Gracie Mansion, none of which will be wearing masks, mind you. And then you'll hear the same spiel about how the unvaxxed are to blame again for the Zeta variant as the local pride parade marches by in the background.
"Additionally, the mayor said the city is examining expanding the vaccine proof requirement to other indoor activities, such as shopping."
Of course they are. This is the thin end of the wedge. It always is.
"“If we do not take a strong stand and say ‘you have the right to your body, of course; but you do not have to kill other people.”"
Will they give it a rest? You have no right to force someone to take an experimental vaccine large segments of the population don't even need. And those living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Even IF I grant you that you can become a transmitter of the disease to someone vulnerable (a possibility that is always with us for any disease), it is not intentional whereas what he has in mind (abortion) is.
"“We’ve got to shake people at this point and say, ‘Come on now.’ We tried voluntary. We could not have been more kind and compassionate. Free testing, everywhere you turn, incentives, friendly, warm embrace. The voluntary phase is over,” de Blasio said on MSNBC last week."
What an absurd statement. That's like saying "I've tried consent, but since you didn't agree to my request, I'm going to eschew consent and coerce you." Then it wasn't consensual to begin with!
"“Given everything we’re learning, all options are on the table,” he said Friday. “I keep saying we’re climbing the ladder in terms of more and more mandates.”
"And on Monday, the mayor hinted at the Big Apple moving toward a “reality” in which those who do not get vaccinated are barred from certain settings.
"“More and more, there’s going to be a reality where, if you’re vaccinated, a world of opportunity opens up to you. If you’re not vaccinated, there’s going to be more and more things you can’t do,” de Blasio said during his virtual press briefing, when he announced that the city will only hire vaccinated workers and advised all New Yorkers to wear masks in indoor, public settings.
"“I say that to say, go get vaccinated, so you can fully participate in the life of this city, because that’s where things are going.”
How gracious of him. Again, thin end of the wedge. Why are some people being so credulous?
It's all quite simple:
1. The vaccine is not FDA approved.
2. It is an experimental vaccine.
3. COVID is not dangerous for the vast majority of the population, especially those under the age of 30.
4. There is mixed evidence about the safety and efficacy of he vaccine as well as its relation to new variants.
5. The suppression of expert debate is, at the least, suspicious as all hell.
Taking all factors into consideration, there is NO REASON to force anyone to take it. None. Especially not those in the cohorts that aren't affected. If you're at risk (e.g., the obese), then it is up to you to make the calculation for yourself.
(Also, since this mandate will disproportionately affect black and Latino New Yorkers, wouldn't this make it systemically racist according to the standards of today? Wouldn't you be punishing them for refusing to be vaccinated? Yes, reason has long exited the scene.)
Yes, 88% of blacks would be excluded from restaurants by this policy while 80% of whites will walk right in.
https://covid19vaccine.health.ny.gov/vaccine-demographic-dat...
I'm curious how this hasn't made the news...
Many countries have/had lockdown policies far more strict than the strictest locale in the US.
I do not like the government placing the burden of enforcement on businesses. It will lead to a backlash from the anti-vax crowd, waste of employee resources, and lax oversight will give a false sense of security.
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...
What are people up in arms about then? Its like another take on the mask mandate outrage, where people conflated selfishness with freedom, except this time you can still do everything you need to while being non-compliant.
What happened in the last few decades? Increased mistrust of government? Shift in the views of individualism? Or is my assessment wrong and if something like smallpox popped up today we'd be able to work together to eradicate it?
The vaccines will protect against severe symptoms only for a time, and Corona is always changing. Slowing the spread will prove counter-productive particularly to those who have sought the protection of vaccines.
Your best hope of continued immunity is infection while your vaccine still protects against severe symptoms. The best hope that children have of mild infection in adulthood, is low-risk infection now, while they are at no risk. There is no more point in slowing the spread.
That will only make us immunologically naive to this virus for a longer period of time. Many, many viruses infect and reinfect billions of humans throughout their lives, with barely any notice. It is time we made Corona one of these viruses.” End.
[0] https://twitter.com/eugyppius1/status/1422789917873262595
If you doubt this: consider that Israel is nearly fully vaccinated, yet they are, right now, making plans for lockdown in September.
And calling it a "vaccination" is being generous, considering that after 6 months efficacy is down significantly, like 20% of original levels. Its more like a therapeutic. This too is similar to a flu vaccination. How many shots per year do you want to take? For how many years? Don't forget that every time you increase the risk of an auto-immune reaction. Also keep in mind that vaccination doesn't even seem to protect other people by decreased virus shedding.
You are comparing an experimental "vaccine", not approved by the FDA, with no long-term studies, where the companies that make them have immunity from unforeseen consequences, that rapidly declines in usefulness over mere months and which is "preventing" a disease that leaves the vast majority of people unaffected anyway to eg Polio, that can leave people paralyzed for life and where we have an effective vaccine that reliably works for decades and for which we have long-term experience.
How are you people thinking you're making a clever & well-informed point. Your reasoning amounts to "infection bad, why you want infection".