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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

"The transition to endemic COVID-19 is also a psychological one. When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either. That means unlearning a year of messaging that said COVID-19 was not just a flu. If the confusion around the CDC dropping mask recommendations for the vaccinated earlier this summer is any indication, this transition to endemicity might be psychologically rocky."

Diseases that are endemic today, such as chicken pox, once caused epidemics with massive body counts, notably in North America. No vaccines, no advanced medical care, and no natural immunity meant that some villages just ceased to exist.

Today, thanks to air travel, the world is a village. Wuhan is exposed one week, and the world the next. We, the natives of that village, have vaccines and advanced medical care in finite quantities, plus a better understanding of how to reduce transmission rates. That's gone a long way to soften the blow. The transition from pandemic to endemic usually kills a lot more people in a given area, and the area effected right now is everywhere.

The thing is, COVID-19 is not endemic yet and, even once it is, will likely retain the capability of mutating into a strain that causes a new deadly pandemic. Flu is endemic, but another 1918 could happen at any time. Until we've built up immunity to several different strains of COVID-19, every new strain has the potential to overwhelm our medical systems, and a unusually contagious and deadly mutant will always be a possibility.

It's not as simple as flipping a switch from "life threatening pandemic" to "quotidian endemic". There are shades of grey in between that cause varying strain on hospital ICU's, and the transition isn't one-way.

Our village will be hit far less hard if we behave intelligently about disease prevention. Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.

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“Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.”

It’s truly maddening. My wife (very on the right) refused to get it and instead talked endlessly about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, vitamin D. All of which she got from conservative media. Right now she is lying in bed wracked with COVID. Ate up with fever and a cough that sends jolts of panic through me when i hear it echoing down the stairs. It breaks my heart, man.

God help us and God bless all of you out there with sick loved ones.

Sorry for the sappy post. It’s been a rough few days.

Don't be sorry. I wish you all the best and for her recovery.

Has actually getting Covid changed her mind at all?

She has changed her mind. But she will not get the vaccine after this because she will have natural immunity (her view).

Is your view different? You don't believe natural immunity?

I could be wrong, but I remember reading that a vaccine is more effective than natural immunity

You are correct. A recent study found that un-vaccinated individuals are 2.34 times as likely to be re-infected than vaccinated individuals.

Get vaccinated.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm

Did she take Ivermectin & HCQ? Did she test for Vit D? Or is she unhealthy, and simply contrarian? At least she will be immune once she gets over it. I doubled my Vit D and my doc prescribed Ivermectin lest I risk getting sick. Still no vax for me (philosophical reasons).

You're part of the problem then.

I'd wager the problem with ivermectin and other treatments is that Trump mentioned them. I can't stand the guy, but I also can't stand the Sith attitude that you either take a stand 100% against anything he says or 100% in favour. Unfortunately for those in the first camp, there are peer reviewed studies showing promise for some repurposed medicines. Ivermectin for example has been shown to be helpful both as a prophylactic and as a treatment (which I'll try to explain below).

Here is the highest quality meta-analysis of ivermectin for COVID treatment, fully published in a highly respected journal [1]:

"Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally."

Another paper reports a very lucky event. As COVID swept through French care homes in March 2020, an outbreak of scabies led to an entire care home being prescribed ivermectin. Almost nobody died of COVID. Here's a DeepL translation of the results, shortened for brevity:

"Sixty-nine residents and 52 staff received [ivermectin]: median resident age 90 years (84-94), 78.3% female, 98.6% at least one comorbidity at risk of severe COVID-19. 11 subjects had probable or definite COVID-19 (7/69 residents and 4/52 staff, frequency 10.1%). Among the residents, 90.9% (10/11) had minimal COVID-19, no oxygen or hospitalisation, no deaths. Among the [77 care homes with COVID outbreaks], 45 were included as controls, i.e. 3062 residents (median age 86.2 years, 77.3% women). Among them, 22.6% [95%CI 16.3-28.9] had COVID-19 vs. 1.4% [care home where ivermectin was prescribed] with an attributable mortality of 4.9% [95%CI 3.2-6.5] vs. 0% [care home where ivermectin was prescribed]."

On the balance of probability, ivermectin is effective against COVID-19 both before and during the disease. I've seen anecdotes that it helps with long COVID symptoms in some too, but not read any proper studies, so we might one day add an "after" to "before and during" too. What's more, it's almost as cheap as sugar pills, and among the safest drugs ever invented in terms of side effects (read the quote from the first paper above again). That we're not even trying this in the rich west is the crime of the century. Studies of ivermectin only began in the UK a few months ago, when we already had evidence early last year that it's potentially interesting. You've got to wonder why conversations over repurposed medication are being suppressed.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1097/MJT.0000000000001402

[2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annder.2020.09.231 (in French)

I haven't analysed ivermectin too closely, but a number of national health boards, including the USA, UK, and Brazil, have said that the evidence at this time is insufficient. I trust them more than I trust my ability to identify methodological flaws in medical studies, particularly when my judgement is clouded by wishful thinking. I must therefore politely disagree with you about the balance of probability.

However, you are correct that the second Trump touches anything, it seemingly becomes impossible to have a rational conversation about it. I can't see any reason for you to have been downvoted, for instance.

Thanks, I respect your viewpoint; indeed I can relate to it having held that view for a long time too up until a few months ago when I started to ask trusted colleagues for their thoughts and started to read beyond the headlines. I now differ from you in that I believe governments are a lot less on top of the science than we thought, and seem to misunderstand its purpose, which to me as a scientist is a very upsetting and uncomfortable position to find myself living under. This video [1] makes in my view a good attempt at trying to explain how this all got the way it did, without invoking conspiracy. Worth a watch for anyone with an open mind. Even if you disagree with its conclusions, it's good to understand the arguments of the other side, we're not all loonies.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31X-EzNuOWk

Starts by challenging social distancing & quarantine mandates, because no one had first done a cost benefit analysis. What? Who is this guy?

"Nick Hudson on PANDA:

Panda started off as a conversation, really. A group of four friends, professionals – an economist, a doctor, a lawyer and a little actuary. What we shared was an observation that the data and the facts – the reality – of Coronavirus was far away from what the media and public health institutions were presenting to the world. We saw in that problem the seeds of a great tragedy."

Hard pass.

That was the session opener for the conference, setting the stage. The conference itself (linked from the channel page) has presentations from scientists backing up the claims he makes there.

The first lecture in the session for example is from Dr Clare Craig, an epidemiologist, discussing how the virus actually spreads, and presents evidence for the remark you highlighted about social distancing and quarantine [1].

As I said in other comments here, rejecting arguments based on (lack of) credentials is not constructive. I encourage everyone to open their mind and engage with what people have to say. You can always disagree with them and you're then at least more familiar with the arguments of the other side. I am always trying to find a way to justify the behaviour of governments with regards to COVID-19 - it would sure as heck make my life easier right now to fall in line - and I do this by reading and hearing the arguments in favour of restrictions and mandates from all corners.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=veSfwMZhZRA

I don't know how, but that one was even worse. Total jumble.

Concern trolling the best available science about coronavirus transmission, comparing it to unrelated diseases, cherry picking random data points...

Despicable.

Quickly searching... Holy shit. Dr Craig argues that lockdowns don't reduce transmission, COVID is over reported, that there was no second wave.

https://www.covidfaq.co/Clare-Craig-1f229f215ed640d495bda975...

Ok. We're done.

I won't be reading or responding to any more of your posts.

Well, apparently you won't read this but thanks nonetheless for engaging with the arguments from the supposed "other side" further than most people do. I still respectfully disagree, and hope you find time to reexamine the claims being made here and elsewhere. Rejecting claims out of hand is not the way we get out of this mess.

The trouble with ivermectin is that it doesn't do anything for covid what was indicated in multiple studies.

The trouble with arguments like that are that they rely entirely on faith in the person stating them.

As with all science, it's not the volume of studies one way or the other, it's the quality. Consensus on a topic only comes over time, especially for contentious issues with public interest. The good thing about science is that it more or less always converges on the truth over time, but some are not willing to wait and make snap decisions on policy without stating that it's not backed by scientific consensus.

My statement is backed by recent studies of high quality. Science converges.

It's entirely unconstructive to make comments like yours without sharing your sources. As I said above, there is this toxic attitude exhibited by many where there is an assumption that those who disagree with you are idiots and you need not waste time explaining your arguments. This gets us nowhere. For what it's worth, take a look at the results discussed here [1] which show that those refusing vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 are both the least and most academically qualified. Not everyone on that "side" is an idiot, and you may not have read everything they have (and nor might they have read everything you have).

[1] https://unherd.com/thepost/the-most-vaccine-hesitant-educati...

It seems that those with masters degree are just the most humble and aware of their shortcomings.

Both more and less educated seem to think they "know better" than the specialists in their field, possibly but not necessarily for different reasons.

Btw one source might be this: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-08-11/ivermectin...

Here's another: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389

Also a there seem to be no high quality large studies that show positive effect of ivermectin on covid: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34318930/

All of those are literally one google search away so I don't think providing them inline is all that necessary. People interested in them can find them with no trouble and others won't read them even if provided.

And I'm not calling anyone an idiot.

Thanks for the links, I will take a proper look later. However, I have to repeat my point about scientific convergence because your links, in contrast to what you said earlier, demonstrates it is yet to happen. Popp et al. acknowledges the presence of the meta-analysis I linked above, and that it has a different conclusion to itself. It acknowledges that the approaches were broadly different, and that the criteria for inclusion of various studies in the meta-analyses were different. Future papers are going to have to continue to refine and agree on biases in individual studies that rule them in or out of subsequent meta-analysis.

Or, to put it more succinctly, science has not yet converged.

Yet, COVID is killing people, so we can't wait for science to converge before doing something about it. It therefore makes most sense to use educated guesses and conduct evidence based medicine with appropriate weighing of risks versus rewards. What ivermectin has going for it is that it is an extremely safe drug with a long history of use as an antiviral. Repurposing existing drugs is also far easier (and quicker) to get approval for than new vaccines. Even if the papers you linked are eventually proved right, and ivermectin is not beneficial, the evidence from ivermectin's use over 40 years suggests that it does very little harm - deaths caused by ivermectin intervention are essentially in the noise. What's more, it's out of patent so we're not paying $20-40 a pop like we are with the vaccines. It's got so much going for it that any level headed risk versus reward calculation should include it in the arsenal to fight against COVID.

Hey when you say there have been no high quality large studies perhaps you are unaware of the 63 studies, 42 of which were peer reviewed and 31 were randomized controlled trials. Please look at ivmmeta.com and let me know what you think of these are high quality large studies and if not why.

I'm just merely repeating the conclusion of linked meta-analysis that found 14 RCT studies regarding ivermectin.

As for the studies you linked to. I am no expert at doing meta-analysis but it seems to me that many RCT studies listed there are really small, at least some were done in very remote places. Most of them have single digit number of participants with adverse outcomes. I'm not sure but I think none of them showed no effect which is a bit odd. I suspect that many studies of similar size and quality done globally were exucluded from this list. There might be some general bias against publishing studies that show no effect too.

All the RCTs on this page mentioned together have the same order of magnitude of number of participants as the most recent study that showed no effect that I mentioned. I think one large study done carefully is many times more convincing than tens of very small studies done in highly loaded political climate.

I see that authors of this website have reservations about Together study I linked to: https://c19ivermectin.com/togetherivm.html

This might indicate that studies on this site are to some degree cherry-picked by the authors so it's not so much meta-analysis of all RCT studies of Ivermectin, but rather meta-analysis of the Ivermectin studies someone likes.

Scotty here is the thing I can’t get over maybe you can help. IVM has ‘won the Nobel prize’. It is effective agains ~100 parasites and viruses and all kinds of baddies that plague humans (and as we have learned horses! And other mammals). I didn’t know this until the pandemic but I’ve been giving it to my dog for 10 years!

So it is VERY EFFECTIVE. That is a true statement. Is it effective against CV? I mean why wouldn’t we try it? Why would we assume something that works for so much not be? Why default to not try it? You get what I’m saying? It seems like when the world is melting down we should be trying everything. If there are 60+ studies showing it works why not do another 100? Or a thousand? It’s non toxic, incredibly cheap, easily produced .. it makes NO SENSE to me and stinks of malintent to silence and suppress it. Does that make sense?

> Why default to not try it?

That's because ivermectin is one of tens of thousands of substances we know are VERY EFFECTIVE for something, but we can't give them all to each patient. Even if all of them costed zero and had no side effects ever. They just wouldn't fit in the patients stomach or bloodstream at recommended dosage.

So we need to pick some substances. And it would be ideal if we picked based on something more than pure luck (hunch being correct is still just luck). So we actually need to measure how good any given substance is for covid. But it's not that easy, bacuse we don't have a good system for conducting randomized controlled trials quickly and in organized verifiable manner. So inital studies are just doctors trying something on few of their patients often without any statistical rigor. You can still publish this as a study. You just have to write some stuff down. It doesn't have to be all the stuff. You can take 'out of sight, out of mind approach' with patients that don't fit your hopes. It happenes all the time. And when you get no success there's not much for you as a doctor to publish.

Covid is hard to track because it's very survivable so most patients that you treat will survive regardless of what you are treating them with (if anything at all). So you may very easily fool yourself into thinking that you are helping.

That's why it's better to wait for large randomized medical studies done by medical researchers as impartial as possible. Because every medicine has some side effects at some dosage so the chance of getting any value out of random medicine is nearly zero and chance of inflicting harm when people will safe-medicate based on rumours is significant.

And even if it has zero side effects medicines fashionable in context of covid already have patients that they should be given to. The ones that suffer from all the things that we know those medicines are VERY EFFECTIVE for. So if you don't ramp up the production to give most likely non-effective medicine to people that most likely don't need it, you'll be stealing it from people (and horses!) that do.

You don't need 1000 studies. You need one that is large and good.

Why not take chloroquine? After all it doesn't hurt, right? Or amantidine, highly fashinable in Poland, because one doctor believes in it strongly and advocates for it loudly, although reporters found out his track record with it is not as good as he's saying. But what do they know, right? Or maybe we should inject blood plasma of covid survivors? Sounded reasonable, many doctors used it for treatment. Turned out it doesn't work. Or hydrocortisone, it's just a mild steroid that doctors use to treat severe covid with effect of at least few percent. Or budesonide, another steroid that I personally think they should be using instead because effect looks way stronger. Or why trials of Fluvoxamine are stuck? It was looking so perfect in few initial studies. It's actually my favorite potential covid miracle cure.

The fact that you know of one drug that might be doing something doesn't mean we should be trying it (except for controlled trials) because there are thousands of exactly as promising or more promising substances and we just can't try all of them haphazardly because of the suffering that would cause to patients that don't need the drug, and the patients that actually need it and won't be able to get it.

Why do you say “pure luck”? There are many doctors and studies testifying that it works. How are you reaching that conclusion? I’m not picking a random drug out of the Merck catalog here. We have doctors and patients saying it works at scale - why wouldn’t we do more to test and validate?

Because someone's opinion (and doctor is just someone unless he repeats something that he learned in school or from solid medical research) ... opinion is not knowledge and only knowledge can get us beyond pure luck. Knowledge is acquired through solid research. Which means large randomized studies with control group, blinded or double blinded.

And I'm not saying we shouldn't do more tests. We definitely should do more tests, and design them carefully, write results down diligently, and be ready to accept if they say that there's no effect because that's what most likely to happen with any substance that we test.

Please watch this video. It neatly shows why should you treat small and less rigorous studies with suspicion, even if there are many giving some results:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q

Regarding your source [1], is this the disputed meta-analysis paper that got withdrawn? Or is it another one?

It's difficult to stay on top of things as the scientific process is a poor fit for fast moving things. Pre-prints vs. peer review and so on?

You may be referring to Elgazzar et al. as discussed here [1]. That was not a meta-analysis, it was just a single study; the paper I linked was a meta-analysis of many such studies. The withdrawn paper was included in the paper I linked above, but it's been shown that removing its results from the meta-analysis does not change the conclusion (i.e. that ivermectin is likely an effective treatment and prophylactic against COVID-19). Instead it just changes the efficacy and error bars slightly. See e.g. this interview with evidence based medicine researcher Tess Lawrie [2] - they actually recompute the values during the interview using the software used in the study.

For the record, it's worth pointing out that the reasons for withdrawal are disputed by the authors. I have not looked closely at the arguments for and against so can't comment.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/huge-study-s...

[2] https://odysee.com/@DarkHorsePodcastClips:b/ivermectin-meta-...

Thanks for the clarification.

You are very welcome :-)

When covid becomes endemic, (and it will) will you still feel that way?

I want to reply to this because I want you to know that I hear your views and I understand them. She is very healthy, 40 years old, good Vitamin D levels (she checked them often). She took HCQ for a while, but then stopped.

I also would hug you if I could because I've seen first-hand what's coming your way if you don't get vaccinated. This is so contagious; it's going to get to everyone. You probably won't die, but you are going to be sick in an extreme that is hard to describe. I don't want you to go through this. God bless you my friend.

Thank you for your genuine concern. I am in exceptional health metabolically & hormonally. I don’t think the CCP virus will do much harm to me, and would rather get natural immunity than risk the side effects of the mRNA vaccines. To each their own. I hope your wife gets well soon. I am surprised that the Ivermectin didn’t cut the symptoms dramatically, based on what doctors I follow have been saying.

Does the AZ vaccine not appeal either? It is made from a weakened version of a common cold virus (adenovirus) from chimpanzee which has then been modified to contain genetic material from the coronavirus itself. Thus exposing your immune system to the same viral genetic material it would see if you were infected by COVID naturally, albeit in a much weaker dose.

What people with this mindset need to hear is "even if the vaccine has terrible side effects, we will take care of you as well as we can and as well as you could wish, even if the side effects are exctremely rare".

In my country at least, if you get any of those vaccines and get Capillary leak syndrome as in some cases, a thrombosis that leaves you mentally incapitated as in some cases, a retinal detachment issue that may leave you blind as in some cases, a myocarditis that may leave you dead in some cases --- then you've lost. You will be a pauper for the rest of your life, as you will have to use up all your assets to pay for care cost until social insurance kicks in. The privilege of getting appropriate financial relief for not being able to work in your profession anymore is reserved for civil servants for life. You're finished. In the UK at least they're planning care facilities for those who suffer from long covid -- here it's not even a formally acknowledged disease, you're treated as any other handicapped person or worse, as a patient with a mental problem rather than phyiscal illness.

If you leave people who are afraid of a virus and a vaccine both the choice and tell them taking or not taking the vaccine is their responsibility alone together with the consequences, it's easy to fall into decision fatigue and just do nothing, and ratinalising that behaviour.

> "even if the vaccine has terrible side effects, we will take care of you as well as we can and as well as you could wish, even if the side effects are exctremely rare"

I don’t think this will work, because if it did then people would be taking the vaccine right now.

The issue is multi-faceted of course, but the discussion of “extremely rare events” is a red herring and a wink wink to vaccine skepticism.

It’s like why would we even talk about these extremely rare events and taking care of someone if those events happen, when instead they’re millions of times more likely to suffer from Covid-19? I mean why aren’t you saying “if you drive to the clinic to get a vaccine and get in a car wreck we’ll take care of you” when that is far more likely to occur? Let alone any number of other things like walking outside and getting struck by lightning.

The probabilistic case for the vaccine is well beyond settled and even if there was some long-term unknown boogeyman vaccine issue that for some reason causes this vaccine (even the “natural” JnJ one) to behave unlike any other vaccine you would still get the vaccine because of the known probabilities of contracting and suffering/dying from Covid-19 versus an unknown and unknowable probability of some unknown thing occurring at an unknown future date.

I think the problem is that 1) we don't know the long-term effects 2) There is no FDA approval (although there is now!) and 3) There is no recompense for people hurt by the vaccine - even if that number is 0.

2 & 3 are easily fixable and we should do it now. We don't have hold pharma liable, but we can setup funds for people with side-effects.

1 is an argument from ignorance. There is no long-term data so we can't refute it. It's literally an unfalsifiable premise. I don't know how you fix this one.

> 1) we don't know the long-term effects

Of what? Vaccines?

> 2) There is no FDA approval (although there is now!)

Which is just a matter of bureaucracy. The emergency authorization and deployment is a de-facto approval.

> 3) There is no recompense for people hurt by the vaccine - even if that number is 0.

And? There's also no recompense for many things.

> but we can setup funds for people with side-effects.

The problem is that this makes no sense. Why would you set up funds for people with side-effects? What about funds for people who die in car wrecks on the way to get their vaccines or trip and fall down a flight of stairs?

> 1 is an argument from ignorance.

Ain't that the truth. Can you articulate the exact long-term effects that you're worried about or that anybody should be worried about? Why are you (or anybody) concerned about these specific unknown and unknowable long-term effects? What's the likelihood of those effects and how do they compare against the likelihood of contracting and dying from COVID-19?

It's like all of a sudden there's these spooky and mysterious "but what about the long term effects!1!" without any scientific justification. Even if there were potentially long-term effects, those effects are equally likely to be of no-consequence as they are to have us all turned into zombies or something. The search space of "effects" are unknown and have an unknown probability distribution.

The only purpose of talking about "long-term effects" by any pundit or layperson who can't even describe the mechanics of an mRNA vaccine (why not take the JnJ one if you're worried about that anyway?) is to introduce fear, uncertainty, and doubt either out of ignorance or malice.

If you're a virologist, by all means educate us. If not, stop spouting bullshit and hurting people.

> Of what? Vaccines?

You respond as if it they were all the same. No.

> It's like all of a sudden there's these spooky and mysterious "but what about the long term effects!1!" without any scientific justification.

Are you being serious?

Without studies about long term effects of anything, there is no information about long term effects of anything. The scientific justification for looking for long term effects is to look for long term effects, so we know if there are any!

Stop being unreasonable.

I think there's a misunderstanding here about what parts of the study process got fast forwarded, leading to speculation that "long term effects" did not get tested in the way they would normally during vaccine development.

Vaccinations do not get long term effect testing like drugs do because your immune system typically finishes responding within 5 weeks of inoculation. The reason the covid vaccines were approved so quickly is because there was political will to fast forward the funding bureaucracy, none of the clinical investigation takes a long time here.

So when we developed new vaccines over the years you sit on the sidelines, refuse to get them until it's been "long enough"?

C'mon. Nobody was questioning any vaccines for any reason except some fringe leftists until COVID-19 all of a sudden and now that is the vaccine you want to wait for to see if it's ok? How long is long enough? How do you determine it's been long enough? What scientific process are you using?

In exactly what way are these COVID-19 vaccines "different" enough for you to question them versus other routine vaccines that you're getting?

And now compare these made up scary boogeyman "long term effects" versus the actual boogeyman right outside your front door that has killed at least half a million people in the United States alone.

Sorry, I'm going to listen to the entire medical community and the heroes that work at these pharmaceutical companies. Ya know, the people who actually know and understand how these things work and who have also taken them.

Being unreasonable is sitting around from the comfort of your home talking about some nebulous made up "long term effects" bullshit. You weren't worrying about that in October of 2019, why start now without any evidence or reason to?

We have a reasonable idea of the likelihood of dying of covid: the estimated IFR is between 0.14% and 0.2%. That means for every 10000 people that contract it, roughly 16 to 17 of those people will die.

Of those 16 to 17 deaths, the vast majority will be people with comorbidities. People with comorbidities don't have as many years to live as healthy people of the same age, with or without Covid.

On the other hand, we do not know how vaccinated immune systems will interact with an evolving virus. There is a study suggesting that ADE might be a higher risk with the Delta variant ("However, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants may tip the scales in favor of infection enhancement. Our structural and modeling data suggest that it might be indeed the case for Delta variants": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8351274/)

If ADE becomes a significant issue with Delta, or the next variant to emerge we will have a scenario where people vaccinated against the Alpha ("Wuhan") strain will develop more serious illness. Imagine the shit that will hit the fan if that happens XD

It's irritating when people post these studies as though they're somehow evidence of anything.

> In conclusion, ADE may occur in people receiving vaccines based on the original Wuhan strain spike sequence (either mRNA or viral vectors) and then exposed to a Delta variant. Although this potential risk has been cleverly anticipated before the massive use of Covid-19 vaccines6, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies to mediate infection enhancement in vivo has never been formally demonstrated. However, although the results obtained so far have been rather reassuring1, to the best of our knowledge ADE of Delta variants has not been specifically assessed. Since our data indicate that Delta variants are especially well recognized by infection enhancing antibodies targeting the NTD, the possibility of ADE should be further investigated as it may represent a potential risk for mass vaccination during the current Delta variant pandemic. In this respect, second generation vaccines7 with spike protein formulations lacking structurally-conserved ADE-related epitopes should be considered.

This isn't saying anything other than "hey maybe this should be something to look out for though it looks like it was accounted for in the original vaccine development".

Leave the science to the scientists, virologists, and medical professionals. Stop insinuating that there is some sort of scary unknown danger here.

You don't know what you're talking about, there is 0 evidence suggesting that ADE will be an issue, and even the study you cited states "Although this potential risk has been cleverly anticipated before the massive use of Covid-19 vaccines..." which, big surprise, means the pharmaceutical companies creating these vaccines have anticipated this exact thing.

> Of those 16 to 17 deaths, the vast majority will be people with comorbidities. People with comorbidities don't have as many years to live as healthy people of the same age, with or without Covid.

Ok? And? So don't get a vaccine because you found some study that says something that Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and the entire global health community somehow didn't notice or account for and it'll cause some big scary serious illness problem? Die 5 years prematurely because the vaccine has some unknown and unscientific probability of killing you when we know for a fact that the vaccine will reduce the severity of symptoms occurring due to COVID-19 if you even contract the disease?

But let me guess. You're just "asking questions" right?

Stop.

> Leave the science to the scientists, virologists, and medical professionals. Stop insinuating that there is some sort of scary unknown danger here.

Lots of scientists with qualifications relevant to the debate have been critical of the official position.

> But let me guess. You're just "asking questions" right?

Wrong guess. If I was asking questions, I would have put a question mark in there.

My point stands: We do not know how the vaccines will react with new variants.

The alternative of getting a vaccine and getting the new strain isn't not getting the new strain. The alternative is getting the new strain without the vaccine.

And, to use your phrasing, we do not know how _unvaccinated_ people will react to the new strains either. We do, however, know that the vaccines seem to offer a high degree of protection.

> My point stands: We do not know how the vaccines will react with new variants.

We also do not know what reactions may result from new variants + eating chicken, or wearing green shirts, or exercise.

Better play it safe I guess.

Roughly 0.6% of NYC has died from COVID, so it's impossible for its IFR to be 0.2%

It absolutely is possible: If New York has a high proportion of obese and/or elderly people with comorbidities, it will have a higher IFR than places with a lower proportion.

In 2019 almost a quarter of NY's population was over 60 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/911456/new-york-populati...)

In 2019, 34% were overweight and 22% were obese (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/obesity.p...)

Also Cuomo literally sent people infected with coronavirus into care homes.

I’m trying hard to have a positive interpretation of your comments here but it really sounds like you’re saying something to the tune of “who cares they are old or fat” as if their lives don’t matter to prove some statistical point about COVID-19.. And that’s ignoring that the vaccine costs basically nothing, and taking it not only prolongs their own lives but also the lives of others with no meaningful downside. It’s like you’re trying to do some sort of cost-benefit analysis, and thinking the vaccines have some sort of gigantic cost, when they don’t.

> Also Cuomo literally sent people infected with coronavirus into care homes.

Funny the Democrats actually impeached one of their own unethical asshole “leader”. Wonder when the Republicans will catch up and show us those family values.

How much does the vaccine cost globally? How much have the lockdowns cost the economies of developing nations?

There is a very strong correlation between GDP and life expectancy, especially in developing nations.

The money would have been better spent improving countries' health systems, so hospitals wouldn't get swamped.

It's absolutely insane the way the world reacted to this virus. I consider it the first global mass hysteria.

> 3) There is no recompense for people hurt by the vaccine - even if that number is 0.

There are a couple of government funds, but they rarely pay out. They require you to prove your issues are the result of a vaccine, which is extremely difficult to do. Did this person have a thrombosis because of COVID or because of some other genetic or environmental reason? It's really hard to rule out "everything that isn't the vaccine".

> There is no FDA approval

Yet you still have to sign a liability waiver........

Doctors who recommend these medications aren't recommending them in isolation, but in combination. Check out the AAPS Guide to Home-Based COVID Treatment for more info. You have to ask yourself why doctors aren't treating people with covid until they can't breathe.

According to Wikipedia, "the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a conservative non-profit association that promotes medical disinformation, HIV/AIDS denialism, the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, vaccine and autism connections, and homosexuality reducing life expectancy."

>According to Wikipedia

Lol

I mean, the claims on Wikipedia are all cited and line up with what I read in other sources and on its own website.

Wikipedia has a liberal bias, according to its co-founder Larry Sanger. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you do too.

In that context, I strongly suspect, "liberal bias" is just a code word that means "intellectual bias" or at least "non-idiot bias".

As in, "we have a non-idiot bias; please think about not contributing here if you suspect you might be an idiot".

In that context, it does not mean anything like socialist, let alone Marxist-Leninist. However, those who think so might be discouraged, which is a good thing.

By liberal, I mean a smug, entitled elitist who dismisses those who disagree with him as idiots, without engaging in argument, and subscribes to Official Opinions.

You're literally saying that the verifiable, external citations that constitute the rational evidence for the claims of a Wikipedia article should just be dismissed with a "LOL" because the site's co-founder has opined that the site as a whole has a liberal bias.

The user didn't cite any external citations (or verify anything), he cited the first few sentences of the Wikipedia summary. You didn't cite anything either, you just asserted that the article was well sourced, as if you're a god and should be believed automatically. You're "literally" dismissing an association of licensed medical doctors because of a Wikipedia article citation, which is laughable.

I'm not following this. From the top; which claims in the article are you saying are specifically not true? Based on what not being well-cited?

Can you explain why someone should not be able to quote a sentence or two from a Wikipedia article (that anyone can easily find and read in its entirety) or anywhere else without being obliged to duplicate all the citations?

So you can dismiss opinions out of hand because of a "non-idiot bias", and I have to exhaustively dismantle the entire Wikipedia article along with its citations? I'll do that right after you do so with the AAPS, all of its member MDs, and all the research cited in its reports on covid.

All I did was laugh at someone citing Wikipedia as if it carried any weight in itself.

By the way, the section the user referenced doesn't contain a single external citation.

> I have to exhaustively dismantle the entire Wikipedia article

Oh, far from that. Just point out one thing, maybe two, that has struck you as being off or wrong that's all.

> the section the user referenced doesn't contain a single external citation.

That's not how the document structure works. That introductory section makes some general remarks like the one that was quoted: "the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a conservative non-profit association that promotes medical disinformation, HIV/AIDS denialism, the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, vaccine and autism connections, and homosexuality reducing life expectancy."

These claims are discussed in other sections below and those have citations.

For instance, let's pick the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis topic. There is a section about that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic...

That has some remarks with citations:

"In the fall 2007 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Patrick Carroll hypothesized that abortion for women who have never previously given birth to a child is a risk factor that most predicts the likelihood of breast cancer. [19][20]"

[19] https://www.aapsonline.org/nod/newsofday471.php (A link into the AAPS website itself!)

[20] https://www.jpands.org/vol12no3/carroll.pdf

The article is just saying that the AAPS person wrote this and that, and here are the links.

A document doesn't have to have citations in its paragraph.

E.g. academic essay:

1. You tell them what you're gonna tell them.

2. Then you tell them (in more detail, with citations).

3. Then you tell them what you've told 'em.

It doesn't make sense to find fault with 1 or 3 for not having citations.

It's all dandy that the AAPS is made of doctors (appeal to authority). Well some doctors are idiots, and they are the ones who get the attention. Now, the article entirely negative; it provides no information about anything good having come from the AAPS or any of its members. It's just a laundry list of the controversies. So there is an obvious bias there; but the laundry list has external citations.

The number of members is large, and the organization has a long history. There is no reason to believe, from that article, that it's entirely defined just by the controversies.

You'd be a fool not to read the article with a critical mind, and just get the information from it, without forming some belief about the AAPS that may be distorted.

Still, it doesn't look good. It looks like they don't care about the controversies; they don't see that as a blemish to clean up.

People will always be sceptical of deviations from the status quo and politicians will always be there to capitalize on those fears for substantial gains of power. We have the most educated populis in human history and we're still seeing these problems. I'm not sure how you could fix vaccines becoming a political issue without major changes to the political structure.

Vaccine refusal has not become a major partisan political issue in any other country. It happened here because of the shameless cynicism of the Republican Party and aligned media apparatus.

The US isn't even the most anti-vaccine country in the developed world, that goes to France.

No, their single dose rate is already 10% higher than the US and increasing at a faster rate.

Do you have a link to the most recent data? I recall The Netherlands having some severe resistance to masks etc, but I haven't seen a breakdown of vaccine uptake by country in recent months.

You can have a strong and vocal anti-vaccine population and yet not have a strong divide on party lines. One factor is that not all countries have such a strong two party system that polarizes every single thing.

Same in France: Macron, the entire government and their health advisors said the following:

- Everyone should go to the opera/cinema to fight Covid (7th March 2020)

- Lockdown for everybody (20th March) (I guess people caught it in the theaters…)

- Masks are useless, absolutely useless for the general public (June 2020),

- Masks are mandatory (September),

- Blocking borders is useless, Covid will be here,

- Borders blocked during Lockdown II and III, if I remember the dates, because it’s useful (so maybe we should have stopped the direct flights between WUHAN and Lyon earlier than September 2020?),

- The idea of Passe Sanitaire (a generalized QR code suspending entrance in public buildings) is a conspiration theory (10th May 2021)

- Passe Sanitaire mandatory on August 1st, live and enforced in all public places except offices, including outdoor restaurants and public transport.

- Trust us this time, the vaccine is the right thing,

- But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines,

- Given they injected 10,000 patients with AIDS in 1989, and took 6 years to admit it, and press wasn’t under État d’Urgence Sanitaire at the time,

(and also, they didn’t know that Benalla had kept and used 6 diplomatic passports after being fired, just to show how they work).

If anything, they have taught us to doubt everything they say: They clearly didn’t know what they were doing, and did governance-by-lying.

Overall I agree, however:

> But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines,

What does that even mean? You're in France, you'll be treated no matter whether someone is responsible or not. I don't think you can be liable of something going wrong if you did everything properly (which is the case).

Everyone, governement and research companies, followed all the laws. Legal responsability exist only if you didn't respect the laws. If they didn't follow the laws, they won't be exempt from lawsuits.

So. What does "But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines," mean?

It means that no one wants to take responsibility for any side effects. And it obviously creates mistrust.

If the state is practically mandating you to be vaccinated for covid they (or the companies that make the vaccine) should be held responsible for anything that happens to you.

You can't have it both ways; either there are no distinctions between vaccinated and unvaccinated people (no measures that only affect unvaccinated people) or someone can be held responsible for any resulting disability or death.

It seems to me that the state can mandate vaccination if they determine that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, full well knowing that there may be (probably will be, in fact) some rare side effects.

How is this different than the state drafting people into the military, knowing that some of them will die?

In both cases, the state is obviously responsible for the outcomes. But that doesn't mean that there is a liability on the behalf of the state, or that you can hold an individual functionary working for the state responsible.

There were many, many protests against many drafts, so yeah, people don't want to be forcefully drafted either.

> It means that no one wants to take responsibility for any side effects. And it obviously creates mistrust.

Ok, but noone ever took responsibility on anything, except what's in the law. I mean, I've never witnessed anything like that.

Did Bush took responsibility when going to Afghanistan? Did Obama took responsibility when enacting ObamaCare? Did Trump took responsibility when embargoing Huawei? Did Raoult took responsibility when recommending Hydroxychloroquine?

I can go on. But really, if you want someone to take responsibility for something beyond laws and contracts (which implies compensation, a contract can't be one-sided. What you suggest would be one-sided), I think you're not in the right universe altogether.

None of these are contradictions, they are reactions to a disease we don't know much about.

- The population is panicking for only a few cases, people are even avoiding Chinese restaurants even when the owners have never been in China. The government wants people to stop panicking, the risks are still extremely low.

- Cases rise exponentially, faster than expected (possibly due to a new variant), hospitals are filling up, now we need to take it seriously

- That one is actually subtle, they told that surgical masks are for the sick and FFP2 (N95) masks are for health professionals, there was a shortage of masks and we didn't have enough for the general public. But they try to say it in a way that would limit fighting over masks, people still fought and stole masks, leaving people who really needed them without protection, I guess saying that masks are vital would have made things worse.

- Masks are back in stock

- Blocking borders is indeed mostly useless when covid is here in large numbers, it is only useful when you have a strict eradication policy and your country is not well connected, not the case of France.

- The point of a lockdown is to limit movement in general, blocking borders is part of it

- In May the situation was improving, vaccination was extremely successful, we were on our way to being mostly covid-free in the summer. There was no reason for such restrictions.

- Delta variant

- Vaccine is the right thing, it has always been the right thing, just look at the data if you don't trust the government. Even a less effective vaccine protects you.

- It is an emergency situation, no time to waste in lawyering, and I am glad they did, delta breakouts in unvaccinated areas are deadly (see DOM/TOM). It doesn't mean safety wasn't taken seriously, all vaccines available in France passed the trials.

- off topic

I am not a fan of Macron, or any political party for that matter, but without the benefit of hindsight everything looks reasonable considering the information available at that time and the specificities of the country. If you think it is bad what would you have done differently? Remember: you have no crystal ball, an unruly population, and a budget.

The budget is as large as the (perceived) danger. And there was no excuse for being ill informed, after China locked down the whole province.

And there's no better way to help the virus than lying to people about the masks. Even the Chinese government didn't lie about masks, while all the western governments did. If masks became a strategic product, then there are enough laws to regulate them (and France did so).

Let me tell you about the situation with masks in France in the early days of the pandemic.

- All mask shaped objects were quickly taken off the shelves. Including snorkeling masks that could be adapted!

- Health professionals received a limited number of masks. For example nurses had 2 FFP2 masks a day, in practice, except for those who worked with covid patients, most had only surgical masks. Pharmacists sometimes didn't have any mask at all (they should have had surgical masks)

- A lot of the masks were in poor condition and of dubious quality, they really tried everything they had. Some came from the stockpile intended for the 2009 flu pandemic.

- Masks regularly "disappeared". As an anecdote from a nurse, she worked in a psychiatric hospital and they didn't have masks (again, a mysteriously lost package). A guy came in, the leader of a big company and was appalled by the situation. He came back with 3 boxes, full of masks and told the personnel "this is for you, these will not got to the director's office, I will come back in a few days and if I don't see the masks, someone is going to have problems!".

- A friend of mine, a pharmacist, was constantly harassed for masks by random people. She had (not enough) masks available for doctors, but she was lucky when he could have one herself. And people had the nerve to ask for her own mask. And on a side note, at one point, they didn't even have enough ethanol for hand sanitizers!

Internationally, China kept most of the masks for themselves, and the ones foe export were sold to the highest bidder on the airport ground. Some countries had local factories, but were lacking in material, especially meltblown fabric, but sometimes even the metal nose strip.

It was bad, really bad. Things started to improve when volunteers started to make fabric masks. Initially, we were dubious about the efficiency of fabric masks, there was a fear that they would make droplets finer and more airborne, we still are, but it seems that they are better than nothing.

I want to think that the deception was a bad thing and that people deserved the whole truth, but I am glad I wasn't part of the government during that time.

It doesn't matter if masks were hard to source at the beginning, every single country found itself in the same situation. Korea is one of the biggest producers of what you call FFP2 masks in the world yet we had a severe domestic shortage here too (the reason for the shortage, after a government investigation, was that suppliers exported most of their production because China was ready to pay x10times the regular price; old dear capitalism at work), forcing the government to nationalize the supply (basically buy all the production) and take over distribution under a strict rationing scheme, until supply stabilized. Nowadays a KF95 (FFP2 equivalent) mask costs less than KRW 500 and supply is plentiful. In early March last year, I had to line up once a week for the chance to buy a maximum of three masks for KRW 2500 each. Sure, the government should have anticipated all of this and establish an export ban early, after all "gouverner c'est prevoir". But what's more important is to be honest with the people who elected you and fix things as soon as possible.

None of what you mention can excuse or justify the blatant lies of the French government. A democratically elected government should not lie to its population, under no circumstances. You don't send a spokesperson on national TV to tell the population that masks are useless, and that the general population wouldn't even know how to use one(!!!).

I suspect the French population will be far more forgiving of a government fuckup followed by an apology and visible and effective efforts to fix the situation, than an outright lie that was only necessary in the first place because of arrogance, complacency and incompetence.

I think the issue of vaccine hesitancy is much more nuanced than this. For example, according to the CDC, the population least vaccinated in the US are black. https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...

Black people have their own idiosyncratic reasons for vaccine skepticism, unrelated to partisan politics. But anyway, Trump support is still a stronger correlation: https://mobile.twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/14207453318...

We should stop with the "it's just the Trump supporters" thinking. Yes them, but various other groups including PhDs. A Carnegie Mellon study identified the groups with the most vaccine hesitancy.

"independent hesitancy risk factors included younger age, non-Asian race, having a PhD or ≤high school education, living in a rural county, living in a county with higher 2020 Trump support, lack of worry about COVID-19, working outside the home, never intentionally avoiding contact with others, and no past-year flu vaccine. " https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...

It’s definitely not just Republicans but note that they’re the only one of those groups with bullion-dollar companies pushing a constant stream of messages downplaying they risk of COVID and hyping any plausible concern about vaccination or masks. If Rubert Murdoch gave the word, the amount of energy pushing antivax messages would go down by an order of magnitude overnight.

I'm not sure it's a guarantee that the power is flowing from the top down. It seems more likely that the big players are just going where the money is, i.e. where their voters already are.

It’s both: the big finders definitely will embrace any culture war issue which keeps people voting for the politicians who serve their interests but they also reliably push any issue which goes against certain topics relevant to their business. Even if something isn’t their industry they’ll push it if it cuts against the legitimacy of government regulations or is critical about science (e.g. the tobacco companies’ guys like Steven Milloy were trumping up those “DDT bans mean that millions of Africans die of malaria” stories a decade or so back because they wanted to lower trust in the same public health agencies who were leading anti-smoking campaigns).

> having a PhD or ≤high school education

This is interesting.

Having a PhD seems like a sample size issue

More like a polling one. I routinely astroturf all surveys because I hate surveys. I am both a PhD holder, I am under 21 and I am LGBTQ, A veteran, and everything else at once

Ahh, I bet you really think you're doing something to the system by being so cool.

No lol, you're flagged and omitted. Do you think everybody is as dumb as you?

good. I only do it for required surveys. I dont do other surveys

Being a PhD and researcerh, dont you see surveys as a vital way of collecting data? So why would you intentionally throw off the data many researchers use to reach conclusions?

People wonder why statistics can be so messed up. Some of it is lying with math. But statisticians can't also help when people are being malicious.

A vital way to collect bad data, as evidenced here. Why would you trust what people say anyway?

I'd love to hear the alternative then? How would you gather data on how people feel about policy without a survey (aka just asking them), as an example?

You may be right, however one would think researchers at Carnegie Mello would know how to ensure statistically valid results.

All PhDs are not the same.

more than 93% of the faculty, staff and students at my research institute are vaccinated.

Having a PhD is pretty conflated with both race and political affiliations. Who knows what the effect would be after attempting to control for those things.

Anecdotally, my unvaccinated roommate is Chinese, holds a PhD degree in a very difficult field, and works as a researcher in a FAANG company.

I was very surprised to learn that they were unwilling to get vaccinated. They are actually very worried about infection, and have been very careful with wearing masks, disinfecting things, and avoiding in-person contacts whenever possible. They explained that they were mostly worried about the unknown long-term side-effects of the vaccines. Maybe having a PhD degree is correlated with having this kind of caution.

What's his endgame? Buy time until the the pandemic burns out (if it does)? Or until we have better therapeutics?

> What's his endgame? Buy time until the the pandemic burns out (if it does)?

Yep that's my understanding. Or if enough time has passed since vaccination to convince them that the vaccines are safe.

Please can you explain a non-american what are those idiosyncratic reasons?

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021020...

There is a grim history of poor medical ethics surrounding the treatment of African Americans that has resulted in feelings of distrust from some.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-exp...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/...

Additionally, medical debt is such a massive burden to many lower income households that there’s this additional layer of distrust, a feeling that you should steer clear of any medical establishment otherwise they’ll try to pin something on you and charge you mountains of money (even though the vaccine is free).

We've done some pretty f'd up stuff to folks of color in the past.

One of the most notable examples is that of the Tuskegee study on untreated syphilis, where we denied effective treatment w/o informed consent.

PoC have higher infant mortality rates, and the myth that PoC have more tolerance to pain (and therefore require less anesthesia) is still quite prevalent.

It was bad enough that we had to actually produce a report on what is considered the "bare minimum", but even that has not been totally effective. (https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-repo...)

That's not true. The same thing has happened in France and Brazil. Possibly other places too, I haven't really been keeping up.

It happened in tons of countries

People are not that different

You must be joking? As bad as (some) Republicans are let's not forget Biden, Harris, Schumer, etc saying they wouldn't take the "Trump Vaccine." Not only did that put distrust into the hearts of people on the left, it also gave ammunition for the people on the right. It should have never been a political issue. Unfortunately this is a bipartisan problem (though right now it's more prevalent on the right, I suspect if Trump had won the number on the left would balloon,) a lot of people on the West Coast you'd otherwise call "liberal" are anti-vaxxers and have been for decades. It's a weird coalition of people on the left and right.

Now outside of the US, anti-vaxxers are in every country including Germany, Australia, the UK. It's a global problem. It's actually the "third world" that seems to have less vaccine hesitance. Probably because they've seen the recent benefits of vaccines and they have less access to misinformation.

No, definitely not joking. As https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness... notes, there is essentially zero correlation between any European government's policy at one time or another. They all adjusted to what was happening with COVID, no matter what other political alignments those in power had. (Yes, even Sweden.)

By contrast in the USA, and ONLY in the USA, COVID became a partisan issue so state policies didn't change much.

As far as I can tell Biden and Harris said they distrusted the Trump rollout of the vaccine but not the vaccine itself. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/23/tiktok-pos...

What is that supposed to mean, except don't trust the product being rolled out?

The factcheck word twisting is getting out of control.

But if anything, this distinction is worse, because instead of saying don't trust a controversial product, it's saying don't trust this controversial product because you shouldn't trust the/this government promoting it.

And that's largely what made this, or magnified it, as a political issue: the broader acceptance of saying it's ok to distrust the government depending on what politician is speaking.

Not trusting that it's being distributed in the best way is in no way the same as distrusting the vaccine itself.

That's absolutely not what anyone was implying. And at best is a distinction without a difference.

They were responding to being asked if they would take a vaccine developed/released under the Trump administration.

Not: "What's wrong with how this administrator is handling the vaccine?"

Or, "Do you have a problem with how it's going to distributed?" Which didn't significantly change from one administration to the next, and is an impressive logistical feat in it's own right.

Even if, the same logic stands. Sowing distrust in distribution -or any other aspect- is either implicit distrust in the product or distrust in the government pushing it.

What good is expressing distrust in any part of it, except to discourage people from trusting the quality/safety/efficacy of the product itself?

Here’s a simple metaphor to clarify: they didn’t trust the reliability of ice cream trucks but were excited for cool treats inside.

No, the presumptive question was "If Trump delivered, would you take it?"

Not "Do you trust that Trump will deliver in time?"

Or anything about reliability being affected by "rushing" things, because when it did arrive in the timeframe Trump promised, no one was concerned about the speediness compromising any quality or reliability.

The election was over by that point.

Politifact is so off on this one.

That's a distortion of what Harris et al said.

> let's not forget Biden, Harris, Schumer, etc saying they wouldn't take the "Trump Vaccine."

Could you point me in the direction of a source on this? I have done my own research and pulled up absolutely nothing. Actually that's inaccurate. I pulled up a BUNCH of 2020 articles where Biden talks about inadequate vaccination orders, etc. But I'd be interested in seeing the basis of your claims.

you need to look no further than kamala's vp debate video.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/23/tiktok-pos...

Harris:

"If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it."

Kamala says she would not take a vaccine recommended by Trump, even if recommended by scientists. There is no way in the US for a vaccine to be publicly available without FDA approval so the only interpretation that makes sense is one where even if the FDA approved it, if Trump also approved it she would not take it.

Biden:

"Look at what’s happened. Enormous pressure put on the CDC not to put out the detailed guidelines. The enormous pressure being put on the FDA to say they’re going, that the following protocol will in fact reduce, it will have a giant impact on COVID. All these things turn out not to be true, and when a president continues to mislead and lie, 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’? I’m not being facetious."

Biden says he does not trust the CDC and FDA (at the time) because of political influence.

Hold on. That's much more nuanced than what was originally being implied. (not from the US btw...)

> Kamala says she would not take a vaccine recommended by Trump, even if recommended by scientists.

This is not what she said. She specifically said that if public health professionals and Dr. Fauci recommended it, she would take it. The "if Donald Trump tells us" has an implied 'solely' and that is not hard to figure out given context, where in the same statement she says she'd take it if the public health professionals recommended it.

> Biden says he does not trust the CDC and FDA (at the time) because of political influence.

Not what he said. He was asking for more transparency, and suggesting that that needs to happen for public opinion to sway in the direction of getting the vaccines; in particular, during the Trump administration when the public was repeatedly fed lies about all sorts of things.

Both are more nuanced than you are suggesting, imho.

Again, how would Americans get their hands on a vaccine that Trump "solely" recommends? It isn't possible.

Why does that matter?

Is this sarcasm?

Because it shows that Kamala only said what she said to politicize the vaccine.

How did Nixon get Archibald Cox fired? He fired everyone in the line of succession for the Attorney General until he found someone who would do what he asked. It is not inconceivable that the same thing could have happened with the FDA.

With the history that Trump had for firing people who did follow unreasonable orders (e.g. Rod Rosenstein), it becomes entirely plausible that he would fire any FDA head who did not support a vaccine, regardless of the science behind them. As things turned out, the studies did support the vaccine, but it was not unreasonable to draw a distinction between unbiased experts and experts under threat of firing.

[editing out because someone beat me to it!]

Vaccine refusal is a major partisan political issue on Brazil. Current president didn't want to take proper action and pushed for "herd immunity". And created, shared and supported the craziest conspiracy stories with his alienated supporters. Like Trump but worse.

And still, 95% of the population intends to take the shot anyways. What's happening in the US is really curious and can't be attributed solely to politics. I would love to hear a more comprehensive explanation for why antivax ideas could proliferate to such a large extent in the US.

Vaccine refusal has gotten pretty close in Japan. The LDP has been capitalising on this to justify their incredibly poor COVID response and their "nothing could be done and nothing can be done" mentality.

Honestly, they might be the most realistic about this whole thing. You can’t stop a tsunami.

You don't wait out on the beach if you know a tsunami is coming.

That’s true. But this one had already hit.

I think making a comment like yours is exactly how things become politicized or at the very least contributes to it being so. It creates a climate of mutual distrust which in turn can feed paranoia on both sides and create a hostile environment where propagandizing and skepticism fuel a downward spiral in discourse.

We might have one of the most educated populations of all time but it’s still woefully uneducated.

Yeah, the value of "most educated populations of all time" depends on the outcome you value: "everybody has a minimum accreditation"? "Everyone is capable of robust reflection that presumes change over time"?

> politicians will always be there to capitalize on those fears for substantial gains of power.

And there will always be millions of saps and pollyannas who believe their politicians just want to help them.

"The largest decrease in hesitancy between January and May by education group was in those with a high school education or less. Hesitancy held constant in the most educated group (those with a PhD); by May PhD’s were the most hesitant group. "

https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2021/july/cov...

That is pretty hard to interpret still. It could be that people with "some college" respond with oh 100% I'm getting it or 0% I"m not getting it. Where as somebody with a PHD is like yeah. I have concerns so I'm 20% worried, but I'm still planning on getting it. Also I would expect the more educated to 1) be more skeptical, 2) not change their mind when the information hasn't changed much.

Looking at the link that was posted, people who said “probably not” or “definitely not” to taking a vaccine, if offered one today, were considered to be vaccine hesitant.

Since I've had two shots, and it's too early for a third, I would have to answer "definitely not".

:). Now I am sure that people haven't read the article or parts of the survey before commenting.

> Participants were asked if they had received the COVID-19 vaccine, and if not, “If a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 (coronavirus) were offered to you today, would you choose to get vaccinated.” Participants were categorized as vaccine hesitant if they answered that they probably or definitely would not choose to get vaccinated (versus probably or definitely would choose to get vaccinated or were vaccinated). Those who had already received the vaccine were coded as not hesitant in order to reduce bias from differential access to a COVID-19 vaccine among subgroups over the time studied.

PS The author states that Facebook funded the survey, which is an interesting datapoint.

Right the 20% hesitant in that be in the "waiting to see more data how safe it is camp." Or it could be on the "I don't trust the government camp." It would be interesting to see that breakdown.

> We have the most educated populis in human history and we're still seeing these problems

This is not really true. Maybe more educated in some areas but not in all of them. People used to be much better educated to build a garden, better educated to understand the nature. I don't think people think differently than they did hundreds of times ago, I don't feel like we are individually smarter

True! The “Literacy” rate has been increased drastically but that’s not the same thing as education. Something is wrong with the system that despite teaching basic biology and physics in high schools, you still find a significant number of high school graduates who think the vaccine shot suddenly turns you into a big magnet.

I wonder why everyone is so convinced that Republican politicians pull the strings, FoxNews is the mouth of Sauron, and >43% of the population is fooled by their evil puppet leaders.

I think it works in reverse, like evolution. The people are the chaos machine that generate ideas. The ones that stick FoxNews latches onto. If politicians don't get in line, they don't get reelected.

It's like coronavirus for political information. It mutates in the masses, and the ideas that are the fittest survive - becoming political points for the Party as a whole.

The one thing that still bothers me is that we don't yet know how quickly this coronavirus evolves, and from what we know it very likely escaped from a gain-of-function laboratory that specializes in quickly mutating viruses. I didn't see Delta coming. I want to believe that this is the worst of it. But this coronavirus has so far kept us on our toes so it may well have a few more surprises in store

> it very likely escaped

Do you have a source for “very likely”? I’m at “plausibly escaped from” so far and would be interested in evidence that changes that in either direction.

Why isn’t the burden of proof on the lone BSL4 lab in the country doing research on that very class of virus to prove its innocence?

There has been some evidence of how the handlers of that laboratory's research went out of their way to shame anyone who'd suggest it emerged from there in the beginning, followed by mainstream articles noting that we simply can't rule this option out, and that the likeliest scenario is that some workers got accidentally infected and became patient 0

My "very likely", however, doesn't come from there. It's more of a statistical statement. What is the likelihood that a quickly mutating virus will appear next to a laboratory that specializes in quickly mutating viruses and not have originated from there? The world is big. The chances of that happening are very low. Therefore it's very likely that it comes from the lab

Maybe not "very likely", but Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the 13 member team at the WHO investigating the origin of COVID-19, recently said [1], "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human. This is a hypothesis that we consider to be likely."

Further, from the article, "But the WHO scientist pointed out that none of the types of bats suspected to have been the reservoir for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 lives in the wild in the Wuhan region.

"'The only people likely to have approached these types of bats are employees of the city laboratories,' he said."

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/13/who-scientist-puts-...

The WHO is on China's payroll, so I would be very suspicious of conflict of interest.

Peter makes this assertion with zero evidence. They've already made up their mind, and are searching for evidence to prove their global international extortion.

Everything about covid-19 has no evidence behind it. Just like the common cold, any virus is impossible to cure (and therefore the symptoms can be alleviated through natural and allopathic methods), and that is a fact.

Keep going down the rabbit hole, you'll eventually find that the variants are being caused by the vaccines.

> Diseases that are endemic today, such as chicken pox, once caused epidemics with massive body counts, notably in North America. No vaccines, no advanced medical care, and no natural immunity meant that some villages just ceased to exist.

You may be confusing chickenpox and smallpox? Chickenpox is generally considered a pretty mild disease (many countries still don't routinely vaccinate against it), and was so historically as the infectiousness ensured essentially everybody would be infected as a child.

WHO guidelines are actually to only vaccinate if rates can be kept above 80% consistently, otherwise it'll likely hit older populations with much more dire consequences.

Chickenpox is mild in children. More severe in adults. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenpox#Adults

If you get you case in childhood, as most do, then you have immunity through adulthood. If introduced in a new population, the consequences to adults would be much different.

> If introduced in a new population

Ah true, I had not considered that unlike eurasians american populations would obviously not have had it as children.

> If you get you case in childhood, as most do, then you have immunity through adulthood.

Sort of. I got shingles (early 40s) this year. Completely knocked on my ass for a week and maybe 2-3 months to be mostly back to normal. I recommend the shingles vaccine to anyone who will listen.

Did you get shingles shortly after getting a vaccine?

I just got the shingles vaccine this year (two shots about 3 months apart). That vaccine knocked me down from hour 6 to about hour 54 both times. Worse than any other vaccine experience, including Pfizer C19. Still recommend it, but schedule it wisely.

> That vaccine knocked me down from hour 6 to about hour 54 both times

Not sure I understand this. Can you elaborate?

Sorry. I had relatively strong reaction (weakness, soreness, slight fever, and overall malaise) starting about 6 hours after the shot and lasting for two full days.

Get the shots, but if you get them on a Friday, you might be writing off the weekend.

(Missed this earlier)

Ahhh, I had kept reading that as "hour 6" was a maximum starting point of some sort, and that you were going down to "hour 54" ?

It makes obvious sense now. Thanks. :)

You were back to normal. Why recommend vaccination?

so you don't get desperately ill for several days / weeks? why is this so hard for you types to understand?

My type is fine with being ill for days/weeks. The world doesn't end or anything. You just lie in bed and read a book or whatever.

First, it wasn't a couple of days.

Second, I couldn't read a book. I couldn't do anything but sleep (in pain) If you are into being completely knocked out for a week, well ... you'd love this! I have met someone else who got this in their twenties and had to be cared for by their brother for a month!

Third, I'm "close" to being back to normal. It's been four months. That sounds acceptable to you?

Finally, there are other complications. It may have led to an increase in ocular pressure increasing my odds of blindness in one eye. I have a scar from the bumps that formed on my forehead. In some cases it is a lifetime affliction that requires consistent medication with antivirals. In some cases it can cause organ damage.

Your type might want to think about these things.

Yeah, sounds fine to me. Immune system working as intended. I've been bedridden many times in my life, for weeks on occasion, still alive. Never been vaccinated. Every time society goes apeshit over "swine flu" this, "avian flu" that, I get a fever and sweat it out. I expect the pattern to repeat with "bat flu" now.

Salmonella was awful though.

If organ failure, blindness and not feeling 100% for months is you're thing, have at it.

The problem with "the immune system doing its thing" is that against some pathogens it doesn't do a thing at all.

I don't give a shit if you don't want to get vaccinated but you're obviously trying to downplay my very real, very painful and very avoidable issue to support your stance.

Yeah, sorry, I don't think being ill for a bit warrants such dramatic recount. You are absolutely fine. You suffered very little in the grand scheme of things. Stop ballooning it out of proportion. If this is the worst you'll endure, 90% of humanity would swap places with you in an instant.

Maybe you just think you're being cavalier, but honestly, you're just insulting. Worse, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

You don't know me. You don't know my condition, and have demonstrated a pretty tenuous grasp on human pathology in general.

Adios, hope you never get this.

Eh, I was going to apologize, but to be honest I enjoyed bickering with you pointlessly. Hope you don't take it too personally :)

Chickenpox _seems_ like a mild disease, until it develops into shingles, decades later. I sure wished I had gotten the chickenpox vaccine after I nearly lost my eye from shingles.

> Flu is endemic, but another 1918 could happen at any time.

True, though usually viruses mutate into less virulent forms.

There's good reason to suspect that long-term COVID will be on the order of influenza or the common cold -- common and mild for most patients.

> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.

Probably, but even the question of whether vaccines should be a policy issue is in itself a policy issue.

> True, though usually viruses mutate into less virulent forms.

Citation needed. The delta variant is the prime counter-example with higher R0 and slightly higher mortality. SAGE admitted SARS-CoV-2 will very likely mutate to defeat all build-up immunity. Variants of SARS-CoV-2 (SARS and MERS) showed the potential to have very high infection fatality ratios.

There is no reason at all to suspect COVID will suddenly become mild.

> higher R0

Contagiousness can certainly increase. Virulency does not usually increase.

Severe flu seasons are characterized by increased infections, not so much increased fatality rate.

> Citation needed.

"Most viruses become less deadly as they mutate." https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2021/02/27/... (The article is about how COVID might buck the general trend. But in any case, that is the trend.)

Ok, instead of some handwaving from economist, I'd rather have Nature [1] with loads of good references and no paywall.

My point is that we simply do not know. The word 'usual' is deceptive here. Usual for the viruses we studied? Usual for all viruses? Usual for viruses which recently have made the jump to a new species? We do not know. We simply have no idea.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41576-018-0055-5

> usual

> no idea

No virologist or epidemiologist will say it is 'usual' that viruses tend to mutate to become less virulent. Perhaps, and even that is contentious, an expert could make a claim for a specific type of virus.

This type of reasoning is based on an assumption that a pathogen limits its reproductive number by increasing its virulence. It is reasonable to test this hypothesis, but unfortunately we do not have enough data points to make any conclusive statements.

Nature paywall is on scihub. Just copy the doi.org url.

Lots of misinformation in the parent comment as well as yours. I’m not going to correct it - I think discussion on HN has been on a large spectrum - interesting policy discussions, technical debates to insane upvoted misinformation and scaremongering.

We need to pay attention to virologists, not HN armchair experts.

virologists sponsored by which party?

> There's good reason to suspect that long-term COVID will be on the order of influenza or the common cold -- common and mild for most patients.

In slovenia, by some estimates of our expert group, half the country got infected by covid (~1mio), 4450 died, almost half of them in old age/nursing homes, and out of all that, only 4 were under 35yo, only one (out of those 5) under 25, and we count every death within 28days of infection as a covid death (even suicide or a car crash).

For a large percentage of the population, it already is common and mild.

This is why I'm unvaccinated... low risk

This seems like first order thinking. What about the repercussions of the infection? Mutations? And what is the tradeoff with the vaccine? Is the vaccine "higher risk" with all of the other second order questions taken into account?

The antibodies stay in your bone marrow forever. See jack kruse's Instagram posts.

Memory B-cells, not antibodies.

> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.

Something tells me that this is just history repeating. The difference here is the same as your metaphor; the world is a village and now its much easier to see that one conspiracy nut every village has that gets outcasted.

The problem of course is that now those nuts can band together in the thousands thanks to worldwide communication and argue against the (still vast majority) of the village now.

The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue" not because of the "conspiracy nut in every village", but because the scientific literacy of the general public is astonishingly low, and the second and third order consequences of public health policy are tremendously complex.

We must encourage discussions that move beyond overly-simplistic dualistic framing such as "vax versus anti-vax", "individual choice versus public health", etc.

Looking back through human history we can find numerous examples where scientific consensus was wrong, or where we created powerful new tools that backfired in unexpected ways. Diversity in opinion and choice is natures way of arriving at optimal decisions. Although it feels like friction and divisive arguments to us now, these are critical discussions that help expand everyone's knowledge and awareness.

At one level it appears to be chaos, but at a higher level it appears as harmony. We are now living in the age of the super-organism. The age where we all must become acutely aware that the separation between you and I - the separation between self and other - must be dissolved and reformulated, for the survival of our species and our planet.

> The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue"

They are a political wedge issue because some want them to be policy.

Anything that is policy -- taxes, marriage, controlled substances, international trade -- is political.

And always someone says "why is policy X political?" without realizing what "politics" is. Usually, they mean to say "why doesn't everyone agree with me?"

> "The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue" not because of the "conspiracy nut in every village", but because the scientific literacy of the general public is astonishingly low, and the second and third order consequences of public health policy are tremendously complex."

This. Feels like the future depends on identifying the root cause of these issues and working to overcome them.

Also, the question of should a government force its citizens to have a medical procedure. Or de-facto forcing by requiring proof for common daily activities.

This issue was then weaponized for political purposes, and people got militant about it.

But governments have consistently lied/been wrong about this virus, so there is no trust either in their messaging about this crisis.

> Also, the question of should a government force its citizens to have a medical procedure.

There’s a Supreme Court decision[0] about whether states can mandate a vaccine (they can).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts

> can

> should

> The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a "political wedge issue" not because of the "conspiracy nut in every village", but because the scientific literacy of the general public is astonishingly low, and the second and third order consequences of public health policy are tremendously complex.

This seems disingenuous. We eradicated smallpox and scientific literacy just as low then. Why is it different this time?

Because public trust in institutions has been destroyed. It's also a main reason why Trump was elected. The people in charge of these institutions destroyed this trust over decades, and they have continued to do so throughout the pandemic.

Yes, calling people nuts is a sure fire way to solve this problem.

The “nuts” were also saying covid was coming and was dangerous and were called crazy xenophobes.

I’m vehemently pro-vax but there are as many idiots on both sides of this issue as there are non-idiots. Note that I need to disclose that, since the scarlet letter being handed out now has the power to prevent you from being on YouTube and in some places soon will probably bar you from your local grocery store (now that that is normalized.)

I don't disagree about name-calling, but the responsible thing to do is to adapt your opinions as new knowledge is revealed, not everyone is doing that.

You can never convince someone by calling them stupid, selfish, irresponsible or in general blaming them. All you will do is create hatred toward yourself as well as your viewpoint and further the disagreement.

Best way to convince someone is to make them think it was their idea all along.

At this point, I figure much of the anti vax crowd may be actively hoping something would go wrong here, due to the hate they are receiving.

Why does anti vax crowd look at things like Ivermectin etc which hasn't been tested at all compared to vaccines and could potentially have more unknown risks? Because it wasn't shoved down their throat and they were able to find it by themselves.

Even those who are in the middle, vaccine hesitant for example may be feeling the hate that is coming towards them, making them avoid vaccines altogether out of anger towards the other vaccinated side.

> You can never convince someone by calling them stupid, selfish, irresponsible or in general blaming them. All you will do is create hatred toward yourself as well as your viewpoint and further the disagreement.

Who's calling them stupid? I don't recall any politicians or government health officials calling anyone stupid. Sure, there are people on Facebook/Twitter/etc... name-calling, but that's always been the case, and there's plenty of it on both sides.

If someone is telling you to do something, but demonstrates clearly they are not able to repeat your own argument back to you convincingly, they're calling you stupid, because they've demonstrated they don't think you have an argument.

> The “nuts” were also saying covid was coming and was dangerous and were called crazy xenophobes.

I only ever saw people saying that calling it things like "Wuhan Flu" was xenophobic.

Earlier than that, it was about only closing travel to China but not Europe, which was having a completely uncontrolled outbreak.

Lol. I didn't realize there was a race of people known as wuhanis.

>calling people nuts is a sure fire way to solve this problem

I tried to emphasize that this is a very small slice of the population. They get kicked out of the village because there's no other way to solve the problem. Or at the very least, the village lacks the resources and talent to solve it. Human psychology is still a huge mystery. Ideally, everyone gets free, assessible mental health care, but ideally people would also wear a mask so they don't die/have others die. We're far from Paradise.

>I’m vehemently pro-vax but there are as many idiots on both sides of this issue as there are non-idiots.

I fully agree with this, and I much too often see people trying to cast this as a "all conservatives are antivaxx" issue, which is such a broad stroke that you may as well just say "anyone who doesn't agree with all my world views".

That is not who I mean when I say "nuts". Not the people genuinely misinformed (often by nuts), not the people who may have reasonable hesitations or doubts about certification of a new medical product. And certainly not "people who aren't my political party" (yes, everything is Red's fault. How productive). To be honest, not even the people high up who KNOW they are spouting BS or citizens who know the dangers but "want freedom" (they aren't crazy, that's just malicious and greedy at that point. different topic altogether).

But there are just some few people who genuinely seem unhinged and just want to latch onto something that feels relatable, even at the own health's expense. Those are the nuts gathering together. And this is far from the first time. Just the most potentially impactful.

Us "nuts" are merely the most well-read, intellectual individuals in society:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

It is a political wedge issue because it generates fear. Anything that causes people to be fearful is going to be exploited, and amplified, by political parties in whatever way they feel would benefit them.

It's a handle they can pull, so they pull it. It can be xenophobia, it can be "look at what they're doing in country X, what if they did that here?" It can be fear of loosing jobs, fear of wildfires, sea-level change, and it can be fear of getting sick.

The problem is, that the media is creating the wedge. Instead of a huge spectrum of pro- and anti- people, they combine them into two groups.

I'm vaccinated, and I don't care if others don't get the vaccine. Forcing people to get vaccinted is imho stupid. And we've already taken away a year from young people to "save grandma", and now grandma can get vaccinated (or possibly die, if she doesn't want to), and we're again locking down the kids, creating long-lasting problems, especially mental ones.

Conspiracy theorists said the virus came from Wuhan, then they said it had a low fatality rate, then they said COVID would be here to stay like the flu. Now the village is slowly accepting and even promoting all those “conspiracies”

I like your comment, but not this part:

> The thing is, COVID-19 is not endemic yet and, even once it is, will likely retain the capability of mutating into a strain that causes a new deadly pandemic.

I don't think that's possible, since I am not aware of a precedent. Meaning: the other 4 endemic coronaviruses which also started as pandemic and now are harmless cold viruses never caused a new deathly pandemic in a mutated form.

Documents from scientists in the UK government articulate in great detail that it is a "realistic" possibility that the virus mutates to be deadlier and/or more transmissive [1].

One key difference between this coronavirus and the other endemic 4 is that mass vaccination strategies were never used. Analogous to antibiotic resistance, vaccine resistance is a realistic consequence if vaccines are used indiscriminately [2][3][4][5]. So that is one way we may be setting a new precedent here. If you take a look at what happened with Marek's disease virus in chickens, it's not pretty - none of us wants a world where it is literally impossible to survive without vaccination, because multiple generations of vaccines were undermined by viral evolution.

[1] Can we predict the limits of SARS-CoV-2 variants and their phenotypic consequences? https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti...

[2] Risk of rapid evolutionary escape from biomedical interventions targeting SARS-CoV-2 spike protein https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33909660/

[3] Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2016...

[4] The adaptive evolution of virulence: a review of theoretical predictions and empirical tests https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302775/

[5] Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

Then why did the "worst" variant so far come from a place (India) with extremely low vaccination rates at the time?

It's a numbers game. With chickens there are billions of chickens created and destroyed annually, and almost all of them are vaccinated in utero, so it makes sense that we'd see the disease get selectively deadlier. With Covid if you knock down the disease rate to something that's basically a few cases per month via vaccinations, you won't have enough chances for mutations to occur.

None of the others were an engineered chimera virus, which this may have been. What you say is reassuring to me, but this could be different.

Any time you use the government to force people to do something against their will, you have made the issue political. Politics is the business of force.

> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.

This is just history repeating itself, unfortunately. The Spanish flu had people protesting the counter-measures put in place to reduce transmission, as well.

It just boggles my mind that with modern understanding of how these things work (and we have a MUCH more complete understanding than they had during the early 1900's), we repeat this ignorant mistake.

"Masks aren't effective"

"Masks are effective"

"Vaccinated don't have to wear masks"

"Vaccinated should wear masks"

"COVID is not airborne"

"COVID is airborne"

"COVID came from a wet market"

"COVID came from a lab"

"If you caught it, you have immunity"

"If you caught it, you might not have immunity"

It's not difficult to understand why there is so much confusion. Our government was and has been quite inept at its messaging in both Trump's and Biden's administrations. The sad thing is many people still hold up the government / bureaucrats / politicians as omnipotent. It's called the novel corona virus because it's new. What we think today may not be true next month or next year.

I think one of the big problems of course is the government / bureaucrats / politicians are afraid to be straight with us. They think we'll freak out set everything on fire or something at the first hint of bad news. I feel their elusiveness is much, much worse; now trust is pretty low which makes the already ineffective government / bureaucrats / politicians' messaging even more ineffective. The government / bureaucrats / politicians found a hole and made it much bigger.

Honestly at this point in the game I have no clue what is factual and isn't. I don't know who the hell to trust anymore.

> The sad thing is many people still hold up the government / bureaucrats / politicians as omnipotent

And so-called "experts"... by which I mean only the ones that say this is the worst thing ever. Any expert in the field with any objections or criticisms to what we've done immediately gets the online equivalent of being letter bombed.

The public health messaging for this whole thing has been absolutely horrific and has only been getting worse. They've managed to cast so much fear, uncertainty and doubt on what are in fact remarkable vaccines... I don't know how they will ever repair their trust or credibility.

> They think we'll freak out set everything on fire or something at the first hint of bad news.

Could it be that they've used this tactic so often just to get this effect when they so desire it, that now they fear that it will be our only reaction?

Almost all of the statements were true. They just needed more context with them.

> "Masks aren't effective"

The point of the (non n-95) masks is not to protect the wearer. They didn't want everybody to cause a run on the n-95 masks for healthcare workers. The cloth masks may not very effective at protecting the wearer.

> "Masks are effective"

Masks are very effective when the infected wear them. Everybody should wear them because they don't know if they're infected or not.

> "Vaccinated don't have to wear masks"

Currently we don't believe vaccinated people. If you get vaccine you don't have to wear a mask.

> "Vaccinated should wear masks"

Unvaccinated people were the first to go everywhere with out masks. That carrot didn't work.. Everybody put them back on.

> "COVID is not airborne"

This could be true!

> "COVID is airborne"

But it catches a ride on water droplets!

> "COVID came from a wet market"

I haven't seen this as part of government messaging

> "COVID came from a lab"

I haven't seen this as part of government messaging

> "If you caught it, you have immunity"

For some amount of time, yes

> "If you caught it, you might not have immunity"

Yep we've got new variants that yo _might_ not be immune to.

> Almost all of the statements were true. They just needed more context with them.

You nailed the issue in the first 2 sentences. All of those things listed are technically true, as long as the context is provided and understood. But when you have the whole situation turn into a bipartisan shitshow, context goes immediately out of the window (both intentionally and unintentionally, just like nuance being lost in twitter discussions). It is you vs. them for everyone emotionally invested into this.

"CDC said COVID is airborne, and if you disagree, you are a science denier and probably a nazi too. No, I am not gonna listen to your 'context'".

"CDC said there is no evidence that COVID came from the wet markets, which means that you claiming that it is possible is a conspiracy theory".

"CDC said that people don't have to wear masks, but now they say people have to wear masks, they don't know what they are doing and are just trying to pacify the population. I don't need context, I am just reciting what CDC said."

Actually looking into the context of the official statements on COVID, there isn't really a contradiction, and their recommendations make sense. But then if you actually absorb the context, then there is no team sports fight to be had, there is no side to cheer and root for, and there are no opponents to defeat who are dumb and wrong (unlike you and your team). The intensity and excitement of the "battle" is positively correlated with willingness to omit context and refusal to consider it.

If it ain't in the headline it's "SO CONFUSING"

Your reply is a perfect illustration of what I was talking about in my original comment. I couldn't have come up with a better example even if I tried.

You conjured up a greatly simplified version of what I said, threw away all the context that actually matters, and built it into something that's easy to rally against for someone who is "on your team".

Yes I thought the irony was beautiful

Except policies don't follow the context. Science says the old are vastly more likely to get severe reactions to Covid but we lock everyone down and still send Covid patients back to nursing homes.

> Except policies don't follow the context. Science says the old are vastly more likely to get severe reactions to Covid but we lock everyone down and still send Covid patients back to nursing homes.

Agreed, this is an issue. But I don't think that "policies tend to disregard context, which leads to poor outcomes, so we should disregard context when arguing about policies too" is a sound approach.

Is this really so confusing to most people? I feel like it was pretty clear throughout that the first statement in most cases was: "We expect X is [not] effective based on history, but we aren't certain because this is so new" and the second statement was "Our initial research shows that we were [right / wrong]" followed sometimes by a third statement which is "As more information arrives we were right about Y and wrong about Z".

I agree with you that politicians are afraid to give it to us straight, but I attribute their hesitance not to how they expect the people to respond but how they expect media to respond. You get in a little trouble for being wishy-washy, but you get big trouble for giving a straight, honest well-informed sounding (described this way because its not like the announcers are the ones actually doing the research) detailed response and then finding out some of your details are wrong.

I have been thinking about this a lot, we all hate the way politicians speak (me included) but we made them speak this way because while they may not impress anyone they don't give definitive sound bites that will then be repeated over and over on the news when they happen to be wrong.

The smug confidence when the outlets assert these things is one of the most galling parts:

> Babies and young children study faces, so you may worry that having masked caregivers would harm children’s language development. There are no studies to support this concern.

https://twitter.com/AmerAcadPeds/status/1425857041457942542

There are "no studies" because you can't do studies like that on humans! I guess absence of evidence = evidence of absence now. What about on monkeys?

> The face-deprived monkeys and control monkeys were scanned by fMRI when they were six months old to measure their neural responses to faces and other visual stimuli.

> Control monkeys had face patches by the time they were six months old; the face-deprived monkeys did not. Patches for other visual categories that both sets of monkeys saw equally, such as hands and bodies, were roughly equivalent between the two groups.

https://massivesci.com/articles/facial-recognition-patches-b...

It's not just that the CDC/Fauci and the Government have been a major contributor to the disinformation out there, it's that there is a political force running at full power pushing vaccines as the one and only possible solution to COVID-19. Before Trump left the White House, the Democratic party leadership came out against the vaccine. NOw that they're in power again, every signal and message they send is Pro Vaccine and Anti Everything else, and it seems all of SV is ready to help by any means necessary, including a lot of people on HN calling anyone and everyone who even questions the safety or necessity of these vaccines as Anti-Vaxxers. We're rocketing towards a new civil war if you ask me.

> We're rocketing towards a new civil war if you ask me.

The culture war was fabricated by billionaires. Stop listening to their stooges.

How is this "history repeating itself"? A few people objected during the Spanish flu so if we have even a single person that objects nowadays it's "history repeating itself"? What if we discriminate against a minority based on their belief (e.g. refusing a medical intervention) and don't allow them to live a normal life. Is that also history repeating itself? I can think of a few instances in history where groups were prosecuted for their convictions. Are we currently repeating that part of history?

> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.

You ain't seen nothing yet. How about firing nurses, firefighters, police, etc.?

> and a unusually contagious and deadly mutant will always be a possibility.

Is this not the case with other existing virus' like the flu? Yet people choose to go on with daily activities, even bringing it to the office just to feel (self?) important ...

Possibly, though how often has a routine flu strain become a pandemic that overwhelms hospitals?

agreed in the early days, and i'm not scientician, but my understand was that once you've had it you become increasingly immune (or unlikely to require hospitalization).

I was more thinking about the future, than the immediate response.

Seems like someday Corona virus will be something we just get like a cold or chicken pox?

And also just like the other four common coronavirus types that we already live with.

There is a chicken pox vaccine. It reduces risk of shingles later in life compared with natural infection. My parents intentionally infected me early. I still got the pox a second time as an adolescent. Both times were painful.

Please get your kids vaccinated.

This informed post is optimistic about covid after it's endemic: https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/why-covid-19-is-her...

are you kidding? this is basically a blog for a group of politial scientists

“ When everyone has some immunity, a COVID-19 diagnosis becomes as routine as diagnosis of strep or flu—not good news, but not a reason for particular fear or worry or embarrassment either.”

There is no reason to believe this. Many top experts, like Yaneer Bar-Yam, believe there is a real chance it continues to mutate to be worse.

> Turning vaccines into a political wedge issue is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life.

Sadly, there is one thing worse: health "authorities" and "experts" completely disregarding therapeutics, e.g., Ivermectin, which is as safe and as cheap as Aspirin, and which reduces the risk of serious illness and death by up to 86% [1] (which brings the death risk to about 1/4 of the flu... aka a low enough level to not even warrant a news story), all because a politician said it works.

I recommend listening to episode #1671 of the Joe Rogan podcast, in which he interviews Pierre Kory and Bret Weinstein. Once you listen to this, if you are not absolutely astounded by what you learn, please let me know (unless the reason is because you already knew this stuff).

Edit: imagine being so ignorant and deranged as to down vote these well studied and cited (see below) facts.

1. https://c19ivermectin.com

This all sounds well and dandy, except the best data we have for covid-19 shows a .2% - .3% infection fatality rate, about 2x or 3x worse than the seasonal flu, which is still -- as we learned in May 2020 -- highly gated to people with severe age- and weight- related comorbidities.

In short, comparing this to chicken pox or other epidemics with "massive body counts" is flatly asinine. It's a slightly worse version of the regular flu; always has been, seemingly always will be.

Fwiw, I've been saying the same thing for 1.5 years now, which is what the original data reflects, which hasn't changed since then. Whenever we get new data that changes our understanding, we should reevaluate at that point.

5% more deadly would be "slightly". 2-3x more deadly and much more infectious isn't "slightly".

You could perhaps say "like a deadlier flu".

> Today, thanks to air travel, the world is a village. Wuhan is exposed one week, and the world the next.

I'm really hoping we can reduce the intermixing by some degree by banning lineups at airports security screen and customs/immigration lines, but I'm not holding my breath.

Except 15 minutes before/after those lineups everyone was/is crammed together in the legally allowed minimum space on board the plane?

The people on the same plane are going to/coming from the same place and at least direction. Not so in the completely mixed lineups.

But how long would you have us wear masks for?

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