Comment by poorjohnmacafee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by poorjohnmacafee | Hacker News Reader

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poorjohnmacafee

Or, devil's advocate, if you believe it's a pretty low risk disease for most of the population, and that a novel mrna vaccine falls outside your risk tolerance. Or maybe you believe if you already have natural immunity from contracting covid you shouldn't need any restrictions at all. Or maybe you believe that mask mandates don't help much since the mask pores are 5k times larger than the size of this airborne (not aerosel) virus. Or maybe you understand that therapeutics exist, eg. how India is beating the virus with ivermectin which has been around forever and widely available.

Or maybe you just think governments have overstepped and are on a slippery slope, as far as goes types of coercion methods, subtle or not, over your personal health choices.

It's not black or white. There's a ton going on in this debate, and I think any healthy skeptic should continue to look at these things closely. I think there was just a Carnegie Melon study the other day saying that those with Phd's are unexpectedly vaccine hesitant vs. general pop. Just saying covid measures - vaccines - quarantines - there is a lot of room for debate right now.

> Or maybe you believe that mask mandates don't help much since the mask pores are 5k times larger than the size of this airborne (not aerosel) virus.

The COVID virus is about 0.1 µm.

The pores in a 3-layer surgical mask are about 50 µm to 500 µm in the first and third layer averaging around 100 µm, and 12 µm to 30 µm in the middle layer averaging around 13 µm.

For a 3-layer N95 mask, it is 50 µm to 200 µm first layer averaging about 75 µm, 40 µm to 120 µm averaging 50 µm for the third layer, and 10 µm to 20 µm averaging 11 µm for the middle layer.

If the only mechanism by which filtering of air worked was to catch particles that were too big to pass through the pores, then the virus would indeed go right through.

However, that is not the only mechanism. Here's a short article from a filter company explaining the different mechanisms [1]. It is quite counterintuitive--as particle size goes down below the pore size efficiency starts to drop as you would intuitively expect but only for a bit and then as particle size continues to go down efficiency rises.

[1] http://donaldsonaerospace-defense.com/library/files/document...

Meta comment: I upvoted this despite disagreeing with a lot of it, because it's an articulate and polite presentation of a view that many HN-ers apparently hold (going by other threads). I adhere to the old norms that downvotes are for non-contributing or impolite comments (like the "you stupid sheeple" form that many others have taken with this), not for disagreement.

No, the vaccine data are black and white. We're approaching 5 billion doses administered with minimal serious adverse effects. Compare the rates to MMR, DPT or anything else given in the billions to the world.

Conversely, some 95% of covid deaths are unvaccinated. It works. Get it and help everyone around you.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/modern...

> No, the vaccine data are black and white.

If you look at some real-world vaccine efficacy data, you will find that it is far from black and white. In the UK, with delta infections, there is no observable risk reduction against death for under 50s.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

> We're approaching 5 billion doses administered with minimal serious adverse effects.

It doesn't matter if the side-effects are minimal, what matters is that the risk/reward benefit pays off. For instance, we still don't know the complete extent to which Pfizer vaccines cause heart issues. There are many cardiac events that aren't clearly linked to the vaccine, because they could have occurred by chance. That doesn't mean they aren't linked though.

Here's some statistically significant numbers out of Israel, showing an increase in lethal cardiac events in certain population groups:

https://twitter.com/RanIsraeli/status/1425002893116166144

If we put this putative risk against the vanishingly small risk of a lethal covid infection in a young person with no risk factors, the vaccine doesn't necessarily come out on top.

In the case of viral-vector vaccines, even the very rare (but often fatal) TTS alone suggests that such vaccination is not indicated for people under 60 in Australia:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X2...

> Conversely, some 95% of covid deaths are unvaccinated.

This is a meaningless number. It depends on how many people are vaccinated and when you started counting. In the UK, roughly half of the recent COVID deaths are in the fully vaccinated, though they are also obviously older. In the under-50 group, there is no difference, like I said.

> Get it and help everyone around you.

This is another fallacy, because the vaccine prevents neither infection nor transmission reliably. If you have reason to believe the vaccine gives you a meaningful reduction in risk, get it to protect yourself. If you want to protect others, adjust your behavior. Get tested and avoid close interactions with lots of people. In either case, don't ask me to take a risk for your or anyone else's benefit.

> In the UK, with delta infections, there is no observable risk reduction against death for under 50s

I am really not sure how you reached this conclusion from the 44 page paper you linked. That paper explicitly says that being vaccinated reduces risk of becoming infected, and only mentions that Ct values (detectable virus) are similar in infected people whether they are vaccinated or not, but similar Ct values does not imply similar disease trajectories or outcomes.

> I am really not sure how you reached this conclusion from the 44 page paper you linked.

The data is on page 18/19. In the vaccinated group 13 out of 25,536 infections resulted in death (0.051%). In the unvaccinated group, it's 48 out of 147,612 (0.032%).

> That paper explicitly says that being vaccinated reduces risk of becoming infected.

Perhaps, but then even if you are infected, your risk of death (under 50) is still effectively the same. It's also not clear how big that risk reduction of infection is. It started out at 95% during the trials, Israel last reported 39%:

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...

> similar Ct values does not imply similar disease trajectories or outcomes

We still use Ct values as a proxy for infectiousness.

Who and why downvotes this?

Better to get the full mRNA load from being infected with Covid, right?

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