Comment by dangerlibrary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangerlibrary | Hacker News Reader

There are two freedoms at issue, right?

1. The freedom to choose what goes into one's own body, in the context of receiving (or not) a vaccine shot.

2. The freedom to choose what goes into one's own body, in the context of an unwitting carrier of an infectious disease breathing SARS-COV-2 into your face.

A lot of the "I shouldn't be forced to receive a vaccine" people seem to be unwilling to make any accommodation for the people most interested in the second kind of freedom. If you don't want to get the vaccine, that's your choice. You should not be forced to do that. But you _also_ don't get to force other people to risk infection with SARS-COV-2 because of your decision.

The same applies to mask mandates, social distancing, etc. You are free to make those choices, but you are not free to stomp all over the liberties of those who are (legitimately) concerned about the potential health consequences of contracting COVID-19 - a disease that has killed over 600,000 Americans in under two years.

Regardless of your level of statistical literacy, it should be abundantly clear that the vaccine kills fewer people than COVID-19. If you consider yourself a "data driven" person, you should probably get the shot.

I would completely agree if it was proven that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus. Unfortunately, recent findings seem to put that assumption in doubt

It doesn't need to be 100% effective at reducing spread to be useful. That's a high and unnecessary bar to ask any disease prevention intervention to clear.

"This code change reduced response latency by only 50%, so we should probably revert and leave things as they are" is not a thing anyone would say.

Most news articles I have read on the topic has been consistently misleading. Let’s say 1/5 vaccinated people can get asymptomatic infection and they spread at the same rate as unvaccinated people, almost all stories and articles fail to make the distinction that it’s 75% less infectious and treat the two as equally bad.

You can see headlines like “vaccinated people spread coronavirus at the same rate as unvaccinated people”

Why does it matter what article writers who do not have healthcare expertise think?

That's what people read and get their information from.

Doing driving the speed limit isn’t 100% safe either, but it’s vastly less dangerous to other people than doing 120 MPH on public streets.

Personally I am fine if someone wants to be mask and vaccine free on a deserted island, but when your directly putting others lives at significant risk it’s not just about personal freedom.

The current statistics around breakthrough cases are not very clear (we have case studies but are lacking broader studies). We do know that vaccinated people can get the virus, can develop an infection, and spread it. We do not yet know exactly how frequently each of those outcomes occur, but the data seem to show that the possibility of each is definitely lower for each of the steps in spreading it. So until more data arrive to dispute this point, to the best of knowledge vaccinated people spread the virus less by virtue of: reduced ability to contract the infection and reduced time of being able to spread if infected. I don't know how much reduction is offered, but the post to which you are replying is not rendered inaccurate by vaccinated people having the capacity to spread the virus.

What if leaky vaccines create an evolutionary pressure on the virus to become more deadly much like Marek's disease?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease

I definitely think that's a very scary prospect, I'm just not sure what an alternative strategy that is viable.

For me, it's hard to justify a mandate if we don't have a reasonable understanding of how much vaccines actually improves the situation. I agree, they likely do improve it in the ways you say, but if it's a cumulative 25% less likely to spread the disease, a mandate seems like overreach.

put the life saving another way: you get the vaccine, you are more likely to stay out of the hospital, and the bed you would otherwise be occupying can now be used to treat the car accident victim, the heart attack patient, the cancer patient, etc.

This has become a mainstream media meme, like the whole "masks don't work" thing from last year.

Yes, masks work. No, they don't grant 100% protection. Yes, vaccines work. No, they don't grant 100% protection.

These things are true at the same time. Learn to think with some nuance.

This is because "work" is a garbage word which is never defined in these discussions. It could mean anything >0%. People have different definitions of work, so they can disagree on if they work even if they believe the % is the same. This is the terrible state of semantics and debate we live in.

>Learn to think with some nuance.

unnecessarily rude

This is incorrect. Researchers have rushed out results on Ct counts with disclaimers on them that they don't know how that affects actual viral loads or transmissibility.

What we now know is that viral culturability is lower in vaccinated individuals at the same Ct count:

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.11.03...

We've also known that Ct counts themselves drop faster in vaccinated individuals:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v...

Nobody has done a study on actual transmissibility and e.g. the household attack rate of Delta in vaccinated individuals. Signs are very clearly pointing to expectations that it would be lower now. It looks like vaccinated individuals with the same amount of symptoms have similar amounts of mRNA loads, but those have less culturable virus and clear faster than unvaccinated infections (which makes like ABSOLUTELY TONS of logical sense since the vaccination allows the immune system to get ahead of the virus and the immune system is dismantling infected cells faster in vaccinated individuals so there's more "dead soldiers" around and the battle is over quicker -- analogy breaks down though because the viral debris stimulates the immune system as well which causes symptoms).

There's statements in the media that "asymptomatic vaccinated individuals might be silently spreading Delta" which have been backed up with no research other than wild extrapolation from the headline Ct values. Meanwhile we know that for a fully asymptomatic course of illness (as opposed to the presymptomatic phase of an illness) that the household attack rate is down by a factor of 10 (although with old-school D614G).

I'm still waiting for evidence that vaccinated individuals are even found to cause superspreading events (where a single vaccinated individual infects > 10 other people at an event). My default hypothesis is that the R0 of delta in vaccinated individuals is probably less than 1.0 and I haven't seen any ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE to suggest otherwise. There was one study done in Israel that found that 80% of breakthrough cases passed it on to nobody and with 1-3 cases for the rest of the 20% that puts the R0 below 1.0, but that was done during Alpha so I always lose that argument in favor of fearmongering over uncertainty.

What you say is correct.

Since vaccinated folks can still transmit covid (even if the chance is lower) as well as other diseases, following your logic, everyone should wear masks as much as possible - even when vaccinated. Do you agree?

That’s actually what we’re doing in my state.

That's good! I have been using masks even before the pandemic to some degree before, and to be honest, I'm utterly disappointed by what I see now.

There are the people who are generally against vaccines and who even come up with conspiracy theories - often arguing that their approach is better for health and ignoring covid's long term risks.

Then there are the people who want to make vaccination mandatory - for the same reasons and with the same logical flaws.

Then there's also the government, first saying that masks are useless, then making them mandatory. Also, caring a lot about lives, but at the same time ignoring how many people die from other reasons and not considering the long term damage of lockdowns for many people (especially children).

And I'm pretty sure that when or if this pandemic is over, people will forget about all of it and go back to normal without having learned anything from it. And I'm in the middle, feeling that almost everything has gone crazy and no rational reasoning can help - no matter which of the groups I'm talking to.

My response to this would be dependent upon the current level of transmission in the region, which would inform whether or not such an intervention is worthwhile as a means to prevent loss of life.

If new case rates are very low, the probability of asymptomatic transmission is very low, and universal mask wearing is probably not warranted.

If new case rates are very high, the probability of asymptomatic transmission is correspondingly higher, and universal mask wearing is probably warranted.

Another important input the the equation would be the % of the population with some level of prior immunity to disease.

I'm not in favor or against any given intervention, I'm anti deadly infectious disease transmission.

Masking is good. Ventilation is better. Screening is better still. Until a comprehensive screening program can be put into place or all ventilation systems can be updated, we should continue to require masking indoors until the risk to those who could get infected is lowered by vaccination or until a good treatment is available.

I agree - the downvoters are active today. Upvoted.

My Body My Choice.

You might be the safest driver ever, but you still need to carry auto insurance to take your car onto public roads because youll be interacting with other drivers. FWIW, you're still welcome to drive your car, absent any insurance, around your own private property. We sacrifice some freedoms to join and reap the benefits of joining the group.

> But you _also_ don't get to force other people to risk infection with SARS-COV-2 because of your decision.

No one is forcing them to risk infection. If you don't want to risk infection, stay home!

And now you hit the crux of the issue. Who gets to decide who stays home?

It's a false comparison to say that an unvaccinated person is "forcing" someone to take a risk.

I want to shoot my automatic rifle into the street, you do not.

If you don't want to get shot, stay home or wear body armor! The body armor is 90% effective at reducing severe bodily harm from my bullets.

I don't actually believe in freedoms.

One person's freedom to do what they want with their body conflicts with another person's freedom to live in a drug free society.

This leads to a semantic argument over the word and what freedoms are right or wrong, which is just trying to construct your own axiomatic system, but you can't ever prove the correctness of the axioms that you adopt. Its a pointless endless argument and you can't ever come to any agreement.

The thing to look at is outcomes and unintended consequences.

And really this about the fact that our hospitals and ICUs are going to fill up and we only have a limited supply of people to run them, even if we could have Elon Musk pump out a million ventilators or something. Getting coercive about vaccinations is something that apparently has to happen because not enough people are doing it. And the vast majority of people do actually want an ICU to go to if they get into a bad car accident. That's why freedoms don't actually matter. Our hospitals are turning into fucking warzones and we should be dealing with this like we're on a war footing.

And in this case the enemy is a virus, not human, we should be able to agree as a species that we'd like to defeat its efforts. Instead we have humans with brainworms simping for the virus.

The emphasis on freedoms comes about in the context of a world where powerful entities (governments, private corporations, wealthy individuals) are often oppressive, cruel, and/or corrupt. In that context, it is useful to constrain their power at all times - even when it has negative consequences in the short term.

In the immediate circumstances, I don't disagree with you - but that's a result of the circumstances. We happen to have an extraordinarily safe and effective vaccine available, and COVID-19 is debilitating, deadly, and causing havoc in our healthcare system. It's less obvious that anti-disease measures governments took in the past, or may take in the future, should be seen as uncontroversial.

Taken to an extreme, your argument could be used to prevent the propagation of certain combinations of genes. Similar arguments were also used to justify mass-spraying DDT to eliminate malaria.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...

mass spraying DDT has some large unintended consequences.

probably so does preventing the propagation of certain genes.

when i mentioned unintended consequences i very specifically meant that no policy can be considered in a vacuum without considering externalities, blow back and the response to of human society to those policies.

for example, a world where aborton is illegal and clotheshanger abortions didn't happen isn't one of the possible options. it all needs to get tested against actual reality and not wishful thinking.

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