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phantomathkg

So you are saying we shouldn’t trust whether others have been vaccinated or not?

Or should we fallback to paper cert?

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I think you should get vaccinated and then trust that vaccine works (if you’re worried about the virus).

That talking point completely ignores the dynamics of infectious disease.

So do the COVID vaccine mandates, frankly. Relatively short lived (~months) protection against infection, which itself comes at the cost of encouraging vaccine escape variants to become the dominant strain.

Furthermore while protection against infection/transmission wanes incredibly quickly compared to natural immunity, the protection against severe disease/hospitalization does much less so. Therefore it is quite silly for a vaccinated person with a functioning immune system to be afraid of catching COVID. (This is usually the point in the discussion where people start saying "what about this one super rare immunocompromised person who the vaccine doesn't work well for"...)

So the whole idea of population-level vaccination to stop the spread is absurd on its face. And the real world data only further underscores that (mass vaccination did not stop the 2021 waves, and if anything it seems like vaccination helped briefly prevent some people from acquiring natural immunity due to briefly protection them against infection, which just made the vaccinated population even better substrate when Delta came roaring).

If someone's concerned about COVID, they need to get vaccinated and stop trying to control everyone around them. It's really quite simple. The collectivist benefit of vaccination is poor at best, and has a lot of theoretical concerns associated with it such as https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou.... Whereas the individual benefit wrt mortality&morbidity is a much stronger argument.

Mass vaccination did not stop the waves in 2021 because vaccination numbers were too low.

Your whole argument is that vaccination wasn't effective on a population level... because the population was not vaccinated enough. With delta we need to reach 90% (https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-herd-immunity-...), but we got nowhere near that thanks to people wanting to treat a collective problem like an individual one.

Reduction of infection/transmission is only one endpoint to consider. We also need to consider the overall effect on the quality of healthcare we can expect to receive in a situation where low vaccination rates causes hospitals to be overrun. This is where the line between personal health decisions on whether to get vaccinated or not and what is fair to society as a whole gets blurry.

People tend to argue "but what about $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit, we don't regulate that!" when someone mentions this, but $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit has been accounted for in terms of resources required to treat people (assuming a working healthcare system), whereas a once-in-a-century-level pandemic hasn't, so it's not a valid comparison.

That's a fine argument, but I've never seen a proper quantitative assessement of the risk of hospital over-run with respect to vaccination rates (or in general, frankly). The vast majority of COVID infections are mild or completely asymptomatic, so something like 90% of the hospitalization burden is being caused by 10% of infections. Mandating that some random 20-something year old get vaccinated does not move the needle (no pun intended) whatsoever.

The at-risk populations can be vaccinated. Let's get them (voluntarily) vaccinated and be done with it. Enough of these mandates which serve more to enrich giant pharmaceutical companies than they do to improve public health.

BTW, while mortality isn't the only outcome of concern, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Pfizer's 6 month RCT - the highest quality data we have of this kind, period - showed no improvement in all-cause mortality in the 20,000+ people they vaccinated compared to the control: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v...

> During the blinded, controlled period, 15 BNT162b2 and 14 placebo recipients died; during the open-label period, 3 BNT162b2 and 2 original placebo recipients who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered related to BNT162b2 by investigators.

So the highest quality evidence indicates that vaccinating a similar population will make no difference in net deaths. (One possible counterargument would be to argue that transmission was unusually low during the study period, but AFAICT that's simply not the case)

Back to your comment:

> People tend to argue "but what about $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit, we don't regulate that!" when someone mentions this, but $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit has been accounted for in terms of resources required to treat people (assuming a working healthcare system), whereas a once-in-a-century-level pandemic hasn't, so it's not a valid comparison.

I won't make that argument, but I did want to mention that - while unrelated to mandates per se - we basically scaled down our healthcare capacity across 2020, at least in the US, due to all the furloughs and the like from the missed medical appointments, as well as (in many places) suspension of "elective" surgeries. And more relevant to the vaccines, a small but real number of healthcare workers have been or are in the process of being fired for non-compliance with the mandate, regardless of their prior infection history etc

Parent was not so much asking about mortality as about health care management. Do you imply all the data that shows unvaccinated are much more likely to require hospitalization, is flawed or fake?

A lot of it is statistical fuckery. The set of people hospitalized who are unvaccinated is not the same as the set of unvaccinated people who end up getting hospitalized.

But some of it is certainly true. Vaccination makes a very significant difference in hospitalization among the very at-risk subset of the population. But in the healthier demographics, vaccination status is irrelevant to "net hospitalization" because in those demographics COVID itself is irrelevant to hospitalization when compared to other causes of hospitalization.

Since I didn't mention it explicitly, I mentioned all-cause mortality because that's going to be very correlated to all-cause hospitalization as well (and the fact that mortality itself is something we should care about).

There are so many half truths in your arguments it would take far too long to refute them all. It’s hard to believe you’re not acting in bad faith, either that or completely indulging your confirmation biases.

Wait what? I mean, seriously either 1) you believe the vaccine works: in that case YOU are safe if you're vaccinated, regardless of others. 2) you believe the vaccine doesn't work: it doesn't matter.

So ... what? You don't believe either of those?

The reality is neither of those. The vaccine works, but not perfectly. As such, the protection is the product of the protections of everyone you come in contact with.

Yes there can be a short-lived infection with covid even when you're vaccinated. It's going to be very short lived and not dangerous, and I believe I once read a study that claims humans face some 50 short-lived infections daily. Mostly not covid, not even a virus at all: mostly bacterial ones.

Lots of people die effectively from pneumonia ("natural causes", but pneumonia is the drop that overflows the bucket). And if you turn out to be one of them, you know where the bacteria that's going to kill you currently is? It's on your skin. Right now. Best to take no chances and burn your skin off, because you're sure as hell not going to get it off with any less serious measures.

If you think a simple shot that in the worst case has you feeling kind of off for a few days is comparable to ... taking off your skin, then frankly you are a lunatic.

It's also not as much about my risk if I were to get infected, but me transmitting it to somebody else.

Like say my grandma. She's vaccinated, but she's also 80. In that age group, vaccines might not be enough. Look at Colin Powell. Vaccinated twice, still dead from Covid.

I'm tired of inconsiderate assholes making up elaborate excuses to continue being a risk to everyone cause they don't want the inconvenience of a needle

The biggest thing you can do is get vaccinated and lose like 50 lbs. My grandpa is 85, he got it and it was nothing. He's also not carrying any extra weight and still works and repairs watches. He got Covid at work. I think there's mental aspect and physical aspect. Obviously an anecdote but I think there's few things to take a way.

Almost no vaccines work that way. They’re not magic shields.

In reality protection is slightly variable depending on a host of factors including age & immune response, but on a _population_ level they work to bring the disease under control.

The polio vaccine ended that disease’s existence in most of the world, but it’s not perfect. If you’re vaccinated with the regular schedule and go to a polio-endemic area you may still get it. That’s why people who may be exposed to it in places where it’s endemic or in labs need additional booster shots according to CDC guidelines.

We shouldn’t ask others about their private medical information.

That's not how it works.

Your medical record is private, but if a job has a requirement they can ask for proof of vaccine. It is up to you to provide it, and it is up to them to how to interpret it if you don't provide and how to handle it.

For example even before the pandemic it was a job requirement of you were in a medical field.

That's fine but I didn't have to show my vaccination record to my current employer. I literally sit at home and stare at a computer screen all day. That's different than a nurse at a hospital.

My sister works at Pfizer in clinical trials, her last day is next week. She literally had to submit negative test results every week since around May. She works remotely, doesn't live in the same state as Pfizer headquarters and sits in front of a computer all day. Tell me how that makes sense?

Just get the vaccine and go about life. If you're still worried, you're welcome to stay at home and play video games.

You should not trust even paper certs. At least in Russia, too many of them are bought by anti-vaxxers. I.e., some doctors responsible for vaccination, given some extra money, do everything they need to do, except the actual injection.

P.S. My re-vaccination attempt failed on October 22nd. 270 people in the queue before me, some are sneezing, no social distancing at all, so I decided not to risk. I still have a valid certificate from March 18th.

It's irrelevant whether other people have been vaccinated or not, for a vaccine that works. The claims to the contrary are all extremely weak that look strongly like working backwards from the desired conclusion (collective action) to something that sounds vaguely scientific (the passes).

The system therefore has no legitimacy and opposing it is ethically correct.

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