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Comment by yadaeno | Hacker News Reader

This article fails to mention the BY FAR most significant benefit of the vaccine which is: achieving herd immunity

We should be as accurate as possible with when talking about vaccine but throwing around statics(or should we say "Vaccine Statistics") like:

> "the death rate among the vaccinated, if infected with COVID, can be 3 to 5.7 times higher than the death rate of the unvaccinated."

is not exactly providing the big picture context needed for a productive social discussion.

The article suggests focusing "real efficacy". Before the vaccine program started there were ~4000 deaths per day in the US, now there are ~100. Clearly it is very effective at reducing death.

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Even the NYT is willing to admit that the drop started in January, before vaccination can really be credited for it.

Herd immunity can be achieved with natural immunity + inoculation + therapeutic/chemo prophylaxis. The only time in history where natural immunity has been considered insufficient for the goal of herd immunity is 2020+. WHO went as far as changing their definition of herd immunity last year to exclude natural immunity (check the way back machine).

Leaky vaccines can also cause mutation pressure on viruses, but the only acceptable public position is that the unvaccinated are causing the more virulent strains.

Propaganda from the top down to sell more (in patent) pharmaceutical products, with force and public shame. Think about this for a moment: someone at WHO identified their herd immunity definition on their website and willingly modified it to exclude natural immunity. Ask yourself how that is in any way scientific or appropriate. It is scientific gaslighting and the only explanation is a desire to sell more vaccines.

If we took your suggestion and let everyone get natural immunity, in the US alone this would cause 2.5 million deaths (not considering new mutations). This is unacceptable to any sane person, and does not require a massive global conspiracy propaganda campaign to convince people of.

https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/verify...

You realize you are posting an article from September 2020 that claims that COVID has a death rate north of 3%, which we now know to be wildly untrue, right?

Christ almighty, the vaccines-are-the-only-solution crowd is statistically illiterate and lazy. Just embarrassing.

Not only are you numbers unsound, but your position is only true if you accept the false dichotomy of “vaccines or nothing”. Prophylaxis options are available, but they’re out of patent, so they’re ignored and torpedoed by your holy CDC and WHO high priests who live in the pockets of big pharma.

>your holy CDC and WHO high priests who live in the pockets of big pharma.

Even you are wrong. Because they are not in the pockets, but they are the big pharma. They are the marketing arms of big pharma that are just a much more convincing version of the person in a lab coat in a toothpaste commercial. They just appear to do enough good stuff to not blow their cover, just like an undercover cop might go along with the baddies just enough to not blow their cover.

So if you think CDC/WHO can be "fixed" by changing the funding, you would be very wrong.

>Before the vaccine program started there were ~4000 deaths per day in the US, now there are ~100. Clearly it is very effective at reducing death.

Changing the way you categorise death can do wonders..

> Q Can you talk about your concerns about deaths being misreported by coronavirus because of either testing or standards for how they’re characterized?

> DR. BIRX: So, I think, in this country, we’ve taken a very liberal approach to mortality, and I think the reporting here has been pretty straightforward over the last five to six weeks. Prior to that, when there wasn’t testing in January and February, that’s a very different situation and unknown. There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem — some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now, we’re still recording it, and we’ll — I mean, the great thing about having forms that come in and a form that has the ability to mark it as COVID-19 infection — the intent is, right now, that those — if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.

Now, imagine if, after vaccine rollout, we counts those deaths as cause by a heart condition. Boom. Drop in covid deaths! Vaccines worked! Hail pharma!

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