Decline in effectiveness of all three US Covid-19 vaccines over time | Hacker News Reader

Decline in effectiveness of all three US Covid-19 vaccines over time

latimes.com

85 pointsNews-Dog282 comments

Wonder how this change the benefit vs risk trade-offs. I've personally known two people who had myocarditis and ER visits after the vaccine (which seems unlikely for a X in 100,000 event; given I probably only know maybe fifty people tops who might share their adverse reactions with me), but if vaccines provide lasting protection, rare side effects can be justified.

Now, if annual boosters are required (along with the associated risks for myocarditis and other side effects), for young/healthy/fit people, it could very turn out that the harms outweigh the benefits.

Myocarditis could be caused by wrong application of the vaccines.

From what I understand, people that apply the vaccine should 'aspirate', which basically means:

1) insert vaccine at location where muscle is supposed to be 2) slightly retract to see if blood enters inside the jab 3) if no blood is entering the jab, apply vaccine. Otherwise throw away and retry with new vaccine.

If blood was returned, in that case the vaccine is at a location of an artery and having vaccine applied to arteries seem to have a high correlation to causing myocarditis.

More info in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsACTX0_ihs

In Germany the Vaccine commission recommends against aspiration because it may cause discomfort and there's no benefit to the patient. I don't think anybody does it, it's been like this for years and I'm not aware of any changes during the pandemic.

It was certainly not recommended when I got my shot mid 2021 and I had to explicitly ask for it, because I got AstraZeneca, which causes blood clots in the brain and those in turn were suspected to be correlated with a potential accidental intravenous injection.

Not true, in Taiwan all nurses aspirate with this vaccine.

I meant nobody in Germany, I have no idea how it’s done in other countries :-)

It could be as many people who have complained of long term issues, also mentioned they felt metallic taste immediately 15 seconds after the administration strongly hinting that vaccine hit the bloodstream.

many vaccine administrators refuse to aspirate, they say its no longer necessary.

Ah yes, the highly educated CVS parking lot vaccine administrator.

I called my local doctor asking for the vaccine because I wanted it administered by someone used to delivering vaccines and trained in same. They don’t have them and referred me to CVS and Walgreens.

I cannot help but wonder if the administration is correlated in the high number of adverse events.

>Otherwise throw away and retry with new vaccine.

Could this be in any way related?

> Myocarditis could be caused by wrong application of the vaccines.

Probably if you hit an artery. Also I saw many nurses disinfecting wrongly, you are supposed to wait a few seconds after applying disinfectants.

100% agree, both of my friends who ended up in the ER mentioned the doctor did not aspirate (one works in healthcare so knows this).

Risk of myocarditis from the virus is higher than the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm

And your odds of knowing 2 kids / young adults who both got myocarditis reactions to the vaccine are roughly 1-in-500 if you know 50 people who got the vaccine to the point you would have heard about them getting myocarditis. That isn't winning-the-lottery odds.

It also isn't clear that boosters will be required (the title study is not terribly good and is full of confounding issues), particularly since the older age groups that really need boosters don't overlap with the younger age groups that have the higher rate of myocarditis as a side effect. We also have no data on the side effects of boosters in those younger age groups and if they produce myocarditis at the same rate as the initial dose.

We also don't even have any information on immunological waning of boosters and there's reason to believe that immunity after boosting will be considerably more durable. Some virologists are of the opinion that it always should have been a 3 shot series with a booster after 6 months and then you're done--but we're in the process of discovering the right dosing schedule on the fly.

> And your odds of knowing 2 kids / young adults who both got myocarditis reactions to the vaccine are roughly 1-in-500 if you know 50 people who got the vaccine to the point you would have heard about them getting myocarditis. That isn't winning-the-lottery odds.

That isn't true, if the chance is 1 in 100k and you know 50 then the chance of at least one of them getting it would be about 1 in 2k, this is an overestimate of the chance but it isn't too far off. Similarly for these low probabilities we can just multiply them to get 2, still an overestimate so the probability of 2 of his friends would be less than 1 in 4 millions, which is lottery level.

If it is 10 per 50k, just increase the chance by 100 and you get 1 per 20k, still small.

The chance is 4 in 100k per that article I cited.

With children having a much lower risk profile to start with and the same or similar risk of adverse effects as adults, parents may have some tough choices ahead.

Vaccination side-effects tend toward the immediate, not the long-term. You can bet a close eye is being kept on paediatric adverse reactions — no one is going to look good if children die. It really shouldn’t be a tough choice for very long: no more than several weeks. Meanwhile we know the virus wreaks havoc in a lot of bodies and we have no idea of its long-term effects… like with chickpox => shingles, getting it as a kid may be misery in old age.

The choice actually isn’t tough at all if you listen to your doctor instead of social media.

As a clear example of the level of misinformation that persists among doctors, a 2015 Credit Suisse Foundation report found that 40% of nutritionists and 70% of general practitioners falsely believed eating cholesterol-rich food raises blood levels of cholesterol. This is despite it being proven otherwise over 35 years ago and repeatedly re-proven.

https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...

You shouldn't believe randos on social media, but doctors are not some magically well informed class. Many of them are persistently misinformed and fail to update their priors.

The thing is, doctors may have no idea about what the exact risks of those vaccines are. Suggestions coming from the top for most of them are to obviously just give out the vaccines, except for some very minor edge cases.

Considering how much gaslighting reportedly vaccine injured have experienced from not just their relatives, but also doctors and others in medical communities, I do feel that many doctors may not have a good understanding of risk vs benefits on this one.

Especially in the beginning of summer, there may be more awareness now, but plenty of cases where vaccine injured complain about what happened and doctors don't believe them or simply tell them they can't treat them as there's no official protocol for that.

We're not vaccinating children to protect them. It's to protect adults.

I just scheduled my son's appointment. Yes, his risk is low, but even minor infections have unknown effects on the brain, some referencing as many as 30% of survivors continue to have symptoms.

All of the adults in his life are already vaccinated. I choose to vaccinate him not to protect adults, but because it is a lower risk than covid.

No the risk of the virus to children is also much lower when they're vaccinated than when they're not.

Yeah, there have been couples together getting heart issues.

E.g. Daniel Shep who had it with his partner and then he decided to call around his social circle to urge anyone feeling chest pain after vaccine to go get it checked out and his cousin got this as well.

Given 1 out of 100,000 chance for it, having any couple in the world to have both these side effects would be 10% if there were 1 billion couples.

And according to anecdotal reports, heart issues are only on 3rd spot with frequency, with fatigue and brain fog being before it, which are quite impossible to link back to the vaccine based on anecdotal reports.

> Given 1 out of 100,000 ...

I do wonder how many people can even recognise the warning signs of myocarditis. There are probably a surprising number of young people who don't know exactly where their heart sits. It'd be quite easy to be off by 3-4 inches.

The chance of getting myocarditis from Corona is still higher and more severe. And don't forget the higher risks for blood clots, strokes etc. And we know that some viruses like HPV have long term effects like raising the probability of certain kinds of cancer. It's a risky bet. You can stop getting vaccinated if yearly shot should be necessary but you can't stop being infected once.

The question would seem to be out of the x million people in those (young/healthy/fit) categories, how many have died from the vaccine, compared to how many have died from Covid.

Looking at a breakdown of Covid deaths in the US by age https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... we see 4288 deaths in the 18-29 category, which AFAIK is still a lot higher than the numbers of deaths being reported proximate to vaccination, in that age group. So, at the moment, it seems like (assuming you trust the figures of course) it's still better to get the vaccine.

I really don't understand where this idea of "annual boosters" is coming from. SARS-CoV2 is clearly on the trajectory to become one of the many viruses that are endemic in humans. This means that everyone will occasionally get exposed to it which updates the immune memory. The question is how to get there while minimizing the damage to the population. The mRNA vaccines were originally tested with two doses which appears to provide a strong and relatively long lasting protection against severe disease. Now it turned out that giving a third dose after a few months improves the protection even more, which is particularly relevant for high-risk patients.

> I really don't understand where this idea of "annual boosters" is coming from.

There has beena political firestorm where people are being forced from their jobs for not being vaccinated, ostensibly due to the risk of transmission. Now we discover that vaccinated people become unvaccinated over time (as far as transmissiblity is concerned).

The logical conclusion is to start sacking/ostracising people who do not get regular (likely annual) booster shots.

I think that the vaccine mandates were primarily a reaction to the large increase in hospitalizations and deaths at the time. This was primarily driven by unvaccinated people due to their higher risk of transmitting and contracting the disease and the much higher risk of getting seriously ill. In an endemic situation with widespread immunity this kind of surge should not be a problem.

That sounds like a reasonable line of thinking that I'd be happy to let slide. But there is quite a lot of evidence that the pro-mandate crowd are unreasonable and don't think that way - which is why mandates were a tool being deployed in the first place.

If it was necessary to mandate vaccines in 2020 then it will still be necessary in 2022 and beyond. The changes are all marginal.

I find it infuriating how anyone who dared to question vaccines and their side effects profile were immediately ostracized, censored, hated and gaslighted.

Now it's coming out more and more how there are many adverse effects and much more frequent than what was originally claimed which in addition with how fast they lose their efficacy changes risk rewards profile very much.

In my life I have never seen something that you aren't allowed to question as much as those vaccines. For me, I'm by nature going to feel that something's off and it only makes me dig deeper, increasing distrust.

Because “eradicating covid” apparently is still among some politicians’ and public health authorities’ wish list. Never mind that it’s another pipe dream like “covid zero” policy.

The press. "Israel Is Preparing for Possible Fourth Covid Vaccine Dose".

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-12/israel-pr...

Waning immunity seems to affect only the probability of getting infected. Vaccine effectiveness against serious disease, hospitalization, and death are still very high. So, maybe boosters won't be for everyone

Israel has boosted 2.8 million people as of Sept 2021, a little more than half the vaccinated population. Total vax eligible population is 7 million, but some of them are not vaxed, thus can't take the 3rd booster.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-12/israel-pr...

I'm not downplaying the seriousness of myocarditis, but that's just the swelling of the heart. Swelling happen all the time on all organs of the body, and it can be triggered by a simple flu too, in fact all diseases trigger some form of swelling.

Myocarditis is also a spectrum, some can have it and not even realize it and some will end up at the ER.

That's why I hope the global community shifts the focus from periodic vaccination to finding an efficient and safe cure.

Cures generally don't exist

I don't understand what you mean. While it's true that the traditional approach to virus diseases was "rest and wait until the immune system does its job", these days are long gone and we have many viral diseases well controlled by medicine. Sometimes you diminish the viral load to the level you can function normally, sometimes you prevent the replication so that the virus is no longer detectable etc. Yes, there are many viral diseases we have no cure for, but wouldn't it make sense if we treated it as a challenge - and one of the most urgent for the whole humanity?

Why do you think a cure is even possible (within any reasonable amount of time)? For many years people have been trying to come up with cures for AIDS, various cancers, and even simple colds. While we can manage those better now, we still don't have true cures for them.

I can give you many counter examples, such as hepatitis C, that were previously incurable or hard to cure. For some diseases we have managed to get a sterilizing (=complete) cure, for some others (like HIV) a functional cure (=you live long and healthy even though the virus is still in your body). In part, it is a function of cost allocation.

If you're looking for the graph(s),

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620#F1

Vaccine-as-a-service it is, I guess. What a 'happy accident'.

Why is the "VE-D" number nowhere near the original 95% efficacy number widely reported for the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines when they were originally approved?

Is it different methodology or is it changed nature of the pandemic?

Efficacy depends on strain. Lower for some variants. Vaccines will need to be updated regularly as the virus evolves.

This provides a good reason. Link to the bmj peer reviewed article in the show notes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THv33zWykJc

Also see : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29346565

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29208007

(New target for Covid-19 vaccines identified: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/nov/new-target-covid-19-vacc...)

The major variant around during the original trials was the ancestral one (Alpha may just about have been showing up). In a way we may have been lucky here; there’s some reason to think that Beta is less susceptible to the vaccines than Delta, but Delta outcompeted it.

Delta

Efficacy != efficiency.

Efficacy is just estimation after some tests. It must be at least 50% for vaccine to be accepted. 95% is bigger than 50%.

Thanks for the link. There are also graphs for mortality, that show that vaccines continue to greatly reduce the probability to die of COVID-19: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620#F3

Combined with the reduced probability to get infected, the only thing you have to worry about is infecting the unvaccinated.

A rapidly evolving virus rapidly evolved, to the surprise of no one who paid attention in biology class.

I wonder if covid conspiracy folks also think influenza is a "happy accident" by the pharmaceutical industry.

It's not due to the evolution / delta variant.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-10-04/pfizer-covi...

I don't know where you got the conspiracy idea from? You're making a baseless assumption.

These graphs don't quite tell me enough. It's a complex problem and even with margins of error for varying health condition I'd expect at least a 3d projection to be required to map between age, time (since 'full inoculation') and risks of illness / disease / hospitalization / death.

I have also heard that lifestyles which encourage sitting all day and correlate strongly with lower fitness and higher carried fat are increased risk factors.

I guess I'd appreciate a formula from the FDA and CDC that tells me roughly what time frame they recommend a (regular interval?) booster shot, rather than some oversimplified coarse number.

It's called Product-Market Fit.

Never understood what was the long term plan for non-sterilizing vaccines and trying to get to 100% vaccinated populations. If the vaccines are non-sterilizing limiting them to risk populations seems a much more productive course of action intuitively, but I'm probably missing something.

"sterilizing" is just the "100% non-transmitting" case.

> a growing body of evidence suggests that COVID-19 vaccines also reduce asymptomatic infection and transmission

(https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br..., with more details further down the article) indicates that vaccines have a non-sterilizing, yet reducing effect on transmission.

As such, it still helps reduce at-risk populations' exposure to Covid19 even if it doesn't eliminate it. At-risk people who can't get vaccinated for some reason (e.g. living on immunosuppressants) rely on this.

We're lucky to have Israel as a trailblaser in all this. Extremely high compliance, all vaccinated with the same vaccine, comparable level of medicine in the country, yet the deaths keep spiking from time to time, only marginally below the levels where they were pre-vaccine. Seems like someone, somewhere, might have not been telling the truth about vaccines alone "ending" the pandemic. Even if we vaccinate at the same level (which is unlikely, since the issue is now highly politicized), we're looking at the same thing 6 months from now, with minor variations.

>yet the deaths keep spiking from time to time, only marginally below the levels where they were pre-vaccine

I just checked[0] and it seems like their data for 2021 is way better in terms of deaths than 2020.

>Seems like someone, somewhere, might have not been telling the truth about vaccines alone "ending" the pandemic.

Talking heads will say all sorts of nonsense or exaggerate and shouldn't be your yardstick. The better question is are we better with them than without and the evidence points towards yes.

0. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations (switch to 'cases and deaths' and Israel)

>Extremely high compliance

>[deaths] only marginally below the levels where they were pre-vaccine

Neither of this has any relation to reality. Compliance isn't high (and can't be, since the country is younger than most Western countries, and the vaccine wasn't approved for these ages until very recently), and deaths are significantly lower post-vaccine.

Why do people keep looking at Israel... It's not even near to any meaningful % of vaccination...

We have several countries with higher rates https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Also in Germany for example 90% of the covid people in hospitals are fully unvaccinated people.

What about Singapore? So high vaccination rate, but even with such high rate, cases started to climb:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore

And it will climb even higher:

The city-state’s Ministry of Health reported last month that about 100,000 people aged 60 and above were yet to be vaccinated despite having been in the priority category.

There was a new daily high of 18 deaths in Singapore on Wednesday - as well as a near record 3862 new cases - and the unvaccinated elderly accounted for more than two-thirds of patients who had passed away from the virus or were in the ICU, Health Minister and fellow taskforce co-chair Ong Ye Kung said.

“For the unvaccinated seniors in their 60s, our data shows one in four will require oxygen, ICU care or will succumb,” he said.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/singapore-s-recovery-stall...

> one in four will require oxygen, ICU care or will succumb,

Note how this is deliberately constructed to scare the bejesus out of people. It's like saying "one in four will pick their nose, have explosive diarrhea, or blow their head off with a shotgun". If you don't read carefully enough, which most people don't, you'll be misled into thinking a bunch of people are about to die (rather than ruin their porcelain throne for the day), but they have plausible deniability. "We just didn't phrase it quite right". This does not improve public trust in vaccines _at all_.

Do we need folks 60+ to voluntarily vaccinate? Yes. No doubt about it. But _this is not the way_ to achieve that goal. Transparency and persuasion is how you do it, not verbal tricks like that.

Singapore has about 1650 isolation beds and 200 ICU places. 25000 people older than 60 (1 in 4 figure from the article) can easily overwhelm this capacity.

Even if that math works, we've been dealing with this for nearly 2 years, and it was clear right from the start the disease would end up endemic. Surely that's enough time to build capacity, or at least procure temporary capacity in neighboring countries? It's not like you need a ton of expensive equipment to care for a COVID patient. It's not a tumah.

When a person can no longer survive breathing on their own, the anesthesiologist is called on to intubate them. After that you have the anesthesiologists monitoring all intubated patients. There is no surplus of anesthesiologists anywhere.

In Flanders, 70% of people in hospitals for Covid are vaccinated. What do we make of that contrast ?

Flanders has only 20% unvaccinated people, Germany has 34%, that already 75% more. If you subtract children on both sides, that leaves a lot more unvaccinated Germans to be infected, easily in the 2x to 3x range.

> Also in Germany for example 90% of the covid people in hospitals are fully unvaccinated people.

You'd do well providing some data for this quip. I've spent 10 minutes searching and could not find a confirmation. It's just the generic "hospitals are overwhelmed" BS. At least it's BS in the United States (which has a much higher case load), where you can see whether hospitals are overwhelmed or not (and yes, they are not), right on HHSs own website: https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization

Couldn't find national numbers, just lots of regional queries with hospitals:

https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/panorama/corona-k... (2011-11-05) covers Eastern Germany: 2/3 of covid19 patients not vaccinated at all, 3/4 not fully vaccinated (== 2 shots, or 1 shot in case of J&J)

https://www.hamburg.de/nachrichten-hamburg/15579956/corona-p... (2021-11-06) Hamburg: 205 of 240 (== 85.4%) ICU covid19 patients unvaccinated, 5% not fully vaccinated, 9.6% fully vaccinated

https://klinikum-darmstadt.de/aktuelles-news/ungeimpfte-coro... Darmstadt (2021-09-21): "nearly exclusively unvaccinated" ICU covid19 patients. 50% of ICU capacity is filled with covid19 patients.

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/corona-fast-nur-ungeimp... Munich (2021-10-02): One hospital was at 100% unvaccinated covid19 patients (that's the twitter screenshot from 2021-09-28). They asked the other hospitals: 5 + 1 and 10 + 2 of unvaccinated + "vaccinated but couldn't build resistance for some reason". Further away in the region 100% unvaccinated (ICU and "regular" covid19 treatment)

So I haven't found national numbers but lots of regional ones, and while there are a few counts lower (at 2/3 and 85%), there were also hospitals with entirely unvaccinated covid19 populations, both on ICU and in regular care.

[edit to add:] Found an article about nation wide numbers and it covers the 90%: https://www.rnd.de/gesundheit/corona-intensivpatienten-rund-...

Title: About 90% of covid19 ICU patients not vaccinated.

The bullet points state: In August and September, about 1/10 of covid19 ICU patients were fully vaccinated. Those were often people with an impaired immune system, e.g. due to chemotherapy.

The numbers were (assembled and) released by the federal health office on request of a member of Parliament.

So 90% number is not supported. If primary occupants of the ICU are immunocompromised people, why the fuck are governments not prioritizing _them_ and instead wasting vaccine doses on young people and children who, if healthy, are not at risk at all? Even though Germany has done relatively well compared to other countries, the response still seems to make zero sense there. Blanket mandate is not needed. Raw vaccination rates are utterly meaningless without seeing details wrt age and comorbidities, or figuing out who ends up in the ICU, and targeting those kinds of people for vaccination. Why, 2 years in, such obvious things are so hard for the governments to figure out? Is it because most people in the government are lawyers and not engineers?

> about vaccines alone "ending" the pandemic

The idea that vaccines "end" the pandemic was proposed when there was the hope or expectation that the vaccine campaign leads to a covid19-sterile population.

My post and its parent post are _all_ about discussing what to do when sterilization is off the table (as appears to be the case with the vaccines we have), and I have no idea where your point fits into that.

By the way: The Occam's razor answer to "someone, somewhere, might have not been telling the truth" is that people were expecting a better outcome and were mistaken. "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" and all that.

It's not a matter of not telling the truth but not being able to predict the future. Just like you cant predict when a pandemic will emerge, no one knew it would happen to mutate to the delta variant before vaccines could do what we hoped. The vaccine probably couldn't have been developed any quicker, but maybe people taking better precautions somewhere with masks, handwashing and distancing might have given us enough time to wipe it out without a mutation. Now it looks likely to stick around long term, but at least we've got some more preventatives (vaccines are worse but not useless for delta) and treatments than earlier on.

I don't understand why you're downvoted. Buying time has always been one of the main strategies when dealing with the pandemic. We are much better at handling C19 now. As it seems to have become endemic, we now need efficient strategies to live with it.

Israel only has a 63% fully vaccinated rate. They’ve had a single wave post vaccination. Double check your data, I think.

Does "fully vaccinated" mean third shot or fourth shot at this point?

Second

Only if you received the second shot within the last six months.

That would require the graph on https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... to go down again. It doesn't.

Apparently Israel's government is reluctant to disclose that their entire populace are now involuntary, lifetime Pfizer customers.

The numbers making up that graph don't support or refute your claim because your claim is entirely unrelated.

Since this isn't the only time that you're randomly switching the subject in replies, would you care to explain why?

And Israel did it with a very short interval between first and second dose. It's not unusual for vaccines to require a three dose regimen, with sufficient time between penultimate and last dose for the immune system to abandon high alert status, in order to achieve long term effect.

> Seems like someone, somewhere, might have not been telling the truth about vaccines alone "ending" the pandemic.

Who said that?

I am more inclined to believe authorities are aware covid is now endemic, that masking is the new normal for years and decades and that we likely will need yearly vaccination and that our health infrastructure will have to adapt as well as our face 2 face service industries but they choose not to outright tell because it would be a PR nightmare.

Pretty much the entire US mainstream establishment said that, from what I can tell. There was a huge push to tell people that the pandemic could be over by now if not for the evil Trump-supporting antivaxers, along with pressure on any media outlet that reported the growing evidence the vaccines weren't as effective as expected to shut up about it because it was "dangerous" and "misleading". The UK was different; it seems to be somewhat more widely reported and less controversial here that vaccines aren't going to end the pandemic and the media has been more honest about it, though even here I've noticed the Guardian pushing the narrative our government has "failed" to vaccinate enough and we could have herd immunity if the party they prefer was in power.

Note: I am living across the Channel, in Europe.

> Pretty much the entire US mainstream establishment said that, from what I can tell. There was a huge push to tell people that the pandemic could be over by now if not for the evil Trump-supporting antivaxers,

This is what I have seen on Twitter, reddit and imgur as well. In the forms of memes, with a very polarized and aggressive tones from left leaning people. I am surprised they don't see how their rhetoric and language constructs are the same as "the other side" and it will ultimately leads to the same kind of oversimplification and problems. The blame game is strong.

But was the CDC and the president and Fauci and others flat out saying that ?

Anyway, in continental western Europe the media hasn't pushed that narrative and I don't recall the establishment saying "we got the vaccine, covid is over".

edit: I do remember now that that at the beginning of the year, before delta and delta plus they were talk that if the vaccination campaign was fast enough we could get herd immunity (if 70% of the population is vaccinated) but rapidly in april or may I am sure they started to say alpha and delta changed that and we needed 90% and that wouldn't be possible.

But I have heard a lot of antivax saying that "vaccinated people think covid is over but they are wrong, they can still transmit it so they are more dangerous than unvaccinated people". A lot of straw men, a lot of bad faith in framing the situation to fit their worldview.

What I regularly see and frightens me though are headlines like "Finally we can let our masks at home, it's over". Newspapers and the establishment is making a huge fuss over wearing or not wearing masks in public transport or at work. I am of the opinion that the inconvenience is so minor and apparently it does help that I don't see why there's a debate around that, especially now that we are seeing raises in Belgium and Germany.

We don't hear (yet?) about how it's unvaccinated people's fault that there are new variants or restrictions. But I do hear from antivax that these restrictions don't make sense and are solely in place to annoy them and reduce their liberties because vaccinated people are scared of covid and they shouldn't be. This line of thinking is not yet present in our leader's speeches.

What they say though - when covid numbers are low - is that they should be able to lift off restrictions (that is proof of vaccination or negative test results) for their population and not be victims of their neighbour's bad handling of the situation. And that almost always come from right or far right leader, putting people against each other as usual. And they are now creating mini trump all over Europe to carry this message with all the tricks in Trump's book. That is scary.

Trump is the only reason why the US had two working vaccines in less than a year. We'd still be working through "FDA approval" bullshit if it wasn't for the guy, and hundreds of thousands more people would be dead as a result. Possibly millions, because Trump made it politically unpalatable to delay the regulatory approval of vaccines worldwide, same as DeSantis is making hard lockdowns politically unpalatable nationwide.

> Trump is the only reason why the US had two working vaccines in less than a year. We'd still be working through "FDA approval" bullshit if it wasn't for the guy, and hundreds of thousands more people would be dead as a result.

I am not debating that point.

> Who said that?

US government and mainstream media are _still_ saying that to this day.

There probably needs to be some thought about how immunization will affect evolution of the virus and how to get best long term outcomes which may be a significantly different strategy than fighting short term outcomes.

However many people have turned one approach into a morality issue and so any deviation from this (or opposition to this) will be difficult.

Natural non-sterilizing immunization will also cause evolutionary pressure. Not quite as focused on one protein plan (some immune systems might have won their first encounter using a different part as target), but still pressure. Long term the virus will be with us and factor into our life expectancy wether we like it or not (nobody will really care as long as the transition is soft) and wether immune systems are kept trained by infections alone or by infections and the occasional vac shot. I certainly prefer the latter.

I think it is fairly easy to understand why it is desirable to have as much of the population vaccinated as possible.

First, like anything biological, the risk of COVID is not a binary quantity. There is a very strong correlation between the severity of the disease and certain factors such as age. Still, even relatively young people can and do get very sick occasionally. This is why public health agencies make risk/benefit analyses for the vaccinations in different age groups. In many countries they have concluded that the benefits of mRNA vaccines vastly exceed the risk due to observed side effects in all adult age groups. This means that getting as many people vaccinated as possible reduces the disease load in the population, which is a central public health goal.

Second, SARS-CoV2 is a very infectious novel virus with no widespread population immunity. This means that if left unchecked, it can spread extremely rapidly. Even if the "high risk" groups are mostly vaccinated, a very large number of "low risk" people can get seriously ill at the same time. This can easily overwhelm the healthcare system even in wealthy countries. Fully vaccinating the "low risk" population significantly reduces this burden.

You've clearly been having to much to think here.

I don't find that too surprising. I can well remember that it was clear from the beginning that the vaccination would probably have a limited temporal scope. It was just not clear how long the vaccination effect would actually last.

Now we know that very likely after 6 months a significant part of the protective effect has passed.

Does anyone know what this looks like in recovered people who have gone through COVID disease?

I think many governments left their people an impression that those vaccines would end the pandemic and that vaccinated can't get the disease at all pretty much.

>We can kind of almost see the end. We're vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it's also in real world data.

https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-s...

But that's the problem os current politics, while some bluntly lie, others "protect" people from the truth/reality.

I don't see why we couldn't trust people into telling them that vaccines are a great tool, but we will still need to keep using extra measures - like mask wearing - as a means to keep preventing infections.

They chose to create the narrative that the vaccine would be the cure, now it will backlash and create more doubt in people.

Imo the right approach should have been tolerance zero.

Yeah, they probably figured this was needed to motivate more people to vaccinate.

Immunity seems to have a dependence on the intensity of infection. A mild or asymptomatic infection confers less immunity than a serious infection.

This kind of thing will have a few dimensions and a lot of uncertainty to it.

Do you have a published reference that natural immunity depends on infection intensity?

There are multiple studies that point to VE declining over time, to about 50% after 6 months. No further data is available. I do not understand why this vaccine behavior was not observed and documented by the original clinical trials, which were conducted over a period of 4 months (July-Nov 2020). The Pfizer FDA EUA application claimed a blanket 95% vaccine efficacy.

https://www.fda.gov/media/144416/download

(OA) US, veterans, 3 months VEaI = 78%, 6 months VEaI = 50%, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620

US, 5 months VEaI = 47%, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

UK, 3 months VEaI = 75%. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01548-7

Qatar, 3 months VEaI = 70%, 6 months VEaI = 12.8%, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114

(preprint) Sweden, <50yo, 2-4 months VEaI = 83%, 4-6 months VEaI = 50%, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410

The article does apparently only talk about attack rate efficacy/effectiveness. What is much more important in a population with high vaccination rates is the reduction of hospitalization and mortality which is much more long lasting with the vaccines.

Edit: here are the graphs for mortality from the study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620#F3

The article does talk about mortality rates quite extensively, immediately after the first section about infection rates.

Starting sentence for that 2nd section is

> The three vaccines held up better in their ability to prevent COVID-19 deaths..

You will find the changes in two age groups, above and below 65. Modena and Pfizer/BioNTech again much better than J&J, albeit still showing a significant decline in the ability to prevent death.

I get a flu shot every year, getting boosters of these vaccines doesn't bother me at all. There will be other vaccine "implementations" (Novavax, for example) that will get better over time.

The paper in Science that the article is about [1] does not appear to be paywalled, in case anyone wants more details.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620

It’s clear now that the efficacy against infection and protection from death wanes significantly - it’s unclear though how this information should affect our behaviour individually and collectively.

Is anyone changing their behaviour because of this data? In the U.K. at least people behave like COVID is over and most things are back to normal (restaurants, bars and clubs, public transport). I have relaxed my behaviour a lot too, but not too sure if I should be reducing this type of interactions in the light of the new data or not? I don’t belong to a risk group and am double vaccinated 5 months ago with Moderna.

Vaccines are supposed to help you fight the virus, not prevent infection. That was never the promise. Effectiveness is measured through reducing probability of death and hospitalization. Antibodies, T-cells and B-cells all together influence effectiveness.

This is the new speak definition of vaccine. Back when words had meaning, the smallpox and polio vaccines wiped those out because those vaccines created immunity in the individuals.

Now vaccine is akin to airbag in a car ... maybe reduces the individual harm but the individual still gets hit.

> That was never the promise

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...

> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...

> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.

They had a stance, and they walked it back

Anybody actually read the article? “Dramatic decline” yet still 75% effective at preventing death for 65 and older. Isn’t preventing death what counts?

No, because the OSHA vaccination mandate is explicitly about preventing transmission in the workplace. And if covid became so polarizing it is exactly because of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masks, all measures meant to decrease transmission

Linked article has nothing to do with OSHA.

If these injections were like traditional vaccines, I might be more acceptable of the responses in this topic.

But they're not. They're medical treatments designed to only reduce symptoms of Covid by attuning the body's immune system to a specific part of the virus - its spike protein.

I'm 52 with no underlying health conditions. I have already caught Covid-19. I had 3 days of feeling a bit unwell, and a fever. Then it was over. This was in late 2019. It went through the rest of my family that same week/fortnight, and we all had the same symptoms and the same outcome - we all recovered from a "weird flu" as I described it at the time in emails to customers. This was before all the hoo-hah started early 2020.

We have suffered no long term ill effects. None of us had "long covid" (Post-Viral Syndrome).

Our immune systems became attuned to further Covid infection.

In fact the biggest medical problem I had this year was my appendix going BANG! and at hospital I tested negative for Covid. Despite the news that catching it in hospitals was highly likely, that did not happen.

Myself and my 19yo son made the informed choice to not consent to this medical treatment people are calling a "vaccine". My wife decided to consent to the medical treatment, and she had such a bad reaction to it she decided not to have further injections.

Two weeks ago, my son managed to catch Covid again. LFT and PCR confirmed. This was despite him wearing masks and taking all other recommended precautions. So he had to self-isolate for 10 days and didn't go out or to work.

Neither my wife nor I caught it from him - we took Lateral Flow Tests frequently - and we didn't really take any precautions in the house. Meals were done together as usual, no mask wearing etc. My wife had to self-isolate despite negative tests and I work from home anyway.

Same symptoms as we all had in late 2019, he has fully recovered from it - again - with no ill effects, no Post-Viral Syndrome (which some people are calling "long covid"), and is back at work and getting outside.

My main point is this - a lot of the responses in this topic appear to be made on the premise that these injections are a "vaccine" like the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines are for example, but they are only designed to reduce symptoms of the disease rather than get your immune system to recognise and fight the overall virus.

I'm absolutely certain that even though you might have had these injections, your immune system fights the overall virus in parallel with the additional sensitivity to the spike protein (and thus the potential for reduction in symptoms caused by the spike protein).

You're still going to catch Covid no matter how many times you've been injected, and you still have the potential to spread the disease to others, injected or not.

I now await responses calling me and my son idiots, or selfish, or irrational, or irresponsible - this is incorrect. We have direct experience of the illness. I know for a fact my immune system can take effective action against this particular coronavirus, just as it has taken care of other coronviruses in the past. As far as my son and I are concerned, we have just as much immunity to Covid if not better than those who received an injection which only attunes one's immune system to a spike protein.

We are intelligent, rational people who took the time to weigh up the pros, cons and risks of consenting to these injections, and for us, the cons and risks outweighed the pros.

"What about everyone else!?!? Why can't you think of others!?" - my response to that is: What do YOU have to worry about from us if YOU have consented to these medical treatments? Either they work as advertised and you've nothing to worry about because you've been fully "vaccinated" - or they do not work and you're in exactly the same situation as we are. Your "vaccine" does not need my "vaccine" in order to work.

How did you confirm that the 2019 infection was COVID?

I've heard repeated stories from people that had the bad cold that went around that winter and wanted it to be COVID. None of them have been like 'and I confirmed I had antibodies when the tests came out', they've had negative antibody tests or gotten COVID or still don't have any confirmation.

Excellent question, and one which has gone through my head a few times since the start of all the hoo-hah.

Late 2019 practically no one - including myself - had heard of the thing. There were of course no covid tests at the time, so all we have to go on are symptoms.

The symptoms we had - they weren't exactly flu symptoms, they weren't symptoms exactly matching the common cold.

With a common cold, you get a runny nose and a sore throat amongst other symptoms. I don't remember ever having a high fever with a common cold.

Influenza, you'll get a fever, coughing and sneezing, and you're in for a bad time for more than 3 days. Last flu I had, the symptoms lasted for a week at least, with a recovery time measuring a couple of weeks after.

We each in turn were waylaid in bed for about 3 days, with a persistent cough, a fever, and generally feeling pretty rotten. No runny nose or persistent sneezing. This was no bad cold nor was it influenza - I've had flu before and know what flu feels like. Similarly with a bad cold.

It's why I described it as a "weird flu" in an email to customers at the time - we never encountered such an odd illness like that before.

The Covid-19 pandemic did not just suddenly begin early 2020 as if it just suddenly appeared. It was with us for a while before that, in 2019, and in many countries. Patient Zero will get it and it'll spread exponentially - it only takes 1 person who unwittingly caught it, they fly to another country, someone else there unwittingly gets it, they travel somewhere else, and so on and so forth. It takes time for the various health organisations around the world to begin noticing, start talking to each other, and make recommendations to their governments. By the time governments got to the "we must do something" point, that was early 2020.

I would describe that as "you have not confirmed it".

How snide.

If only I could go back in time with a fucking LFT, eh?

Pretty much. That "you know" it wasn't some other virus is all but meaningless.

You could get an antibody test.

Doesn't work that way.

Antibodies fade away. The immune system doesn't keep antibodies hanging around after it has defeated a virus. What it does do is remember the virus which caused it to produce the antibodies, and will begin producing those antibodies again if the same or similar virus is encountered.

I was infected back in early 2020 (PCR) and still test positive for antibodies. The virus is still out there so it is likely you continue to be exposed (e.g. the hospital, your son, random trip to the grocery store) causing your body to produce more antibodies. Getting the antibody test might be more informative than you think.

> they are only designed to reduce symptoms of the disease

How exactly were the mRNA vaccines designed to do only that?

Perhaps read up on them? I did. Extensively.

They are designed precisely as stated. They are aimed at the spike protein only.

Come back to me after you have confirmed or otherwise and correct me on this point if I'm wrong.

Targeting the spike protein (as part of the overall virus) literally attacks the virus preventing it from infecting cells and thus reduce both the spread of the disease and its symptoms. Not sure why you are saying it only acts on symptoms?!

I asked in good faith. If you have arguments, present them. Otherwise don’t presume to know how much I read or I understand on this subject.

Targetting the spike protein means your immune system creates antibodies which attack the spike protein - it literally does not mean the antibodies produced attack the virus itself - only the spike protein.

The spike protein is what produces a lot of the adverse reactions when people contract the disease - or when people consent to the medical treatments designed only to reduce symptoms.

Seriously, this information is out there, and your understanding of this subject seems rather different from mine.

The spike protein is part of the virus itself, on its outer layer, used to "unlock" and enter cells during the infection process. I don't see how it can be possible to attack the spike without attacking the virus.

This is my current understanding of the subject. I will try to educate myself further, accepting that I may be misinformed, but I seriously doubt it. At this point I rather believe you are the misinformed one, belief sustained by your refusal to provide any links supporting your position.

But then again, I may be very well wrong.

Because these were veterans, the study population comprised six times as many men as women. And they skewed older: about 48% were 65 or older, 29% were between 50 and 64, and 24% were younger than 50.

https://archive.md/5CIsl

Its like making lightbulbs, terrible for business to make them last long.

Yeah. It is probably a worldwide conspiracy by those scientist people just like in that V scifi show.

He does have a point though. Recurrent income is a lot better than 1 sale in any business.

Scientists can have all the good will in the world if they are not allowed to publish by those sponsoring the research or not even given the funds to do the research in the first place.

For example, consider the rather enormous amounts of money the industry spends on developing new statin after statin for blood pressure control. Many newer ones are more or less medically indistinguishable from existing ones on the market, but they are chemically distinct enough to be patentable. Similar story with SSRI antidepressants. Compare with the absolute dearth of research on new antibiotics and vaccines (until recently). We need those far more than we need yet another statin or SSRI, but those you can sell daily for life, and the others are a single dose.

> developing new statin after statin for blood pressure control.

Statins are developed to reduce cholesterol, not blood pressure. While there is some thin evidence that statins might effect BP, there's certainly nobody developing them for that currently.

In this particular instance "not allowed to publish" _definitely_ wasn't the problem, seeing how much crap had been published simply because it has "SARS-Cov-2" in its title.

The research dynamics around Covid19 are very different from those of some run-off-the-mill treatment that was for the most part developed within the private sector (and might or might not have been met with kindness at the top level management which has been approving the POs)

I can easily imagine various pharma companies individually (and without any kind of collusion!) de-emphasizing a cure in favor of a recurring treatment because each follows their self-interest.[1]

In this case, money has been thrown at them with the explicit project description "develop a cure so that public policy can return to normal" (and as is quite normal, policy makers want it done quickly so they look good. I can live with that.)

[1] It only takes one research facility to work on the same issue without such an incentive to make an entire industry scramble towards having the best cure (because otherwise they'd lose the treatment income _and_ leave the cure to somebody else). Identifying candidates where bean counters optimize for treatments even when a cure is possible, and then investing in such areas, might be public money well spent.

Ah.

But this is exactly the argument the lizard people from outer space are making in V. However it turns that the scientists are actually the good guys as their grounded, systematic, critical thinking is key to prevent the free world from being taken over by evil manipulating entities.

People should really rewatch this show.

They've never lied before, and they're not about to start.

The lightbulb reference was actually a thing.

And even that conspiracy didn’t last for long.

While I don't agree with the cynic aspect of your comment, I do think that now, after so much money and effort was spent on vaccines and we more or less know their efficacy in practice, I do wonder if we shouldn't more on a cure now. There are some interesting developments but the discussions everywhere are focused on the vaccines. If vaccination means we should get a shot every 3 months, I do wonder if we are really heading in the right direction.

Prevention generally is better than cure. And it is not like scientists are not researching for alternative treatments, it is just that unless they got some positive result the media will not announce it.

There is no push to do what we KNOW reduces the risk of Covid 19 and that is to get healthy. By now everybody could have lost a bunch of weight and shed their type 2 diabetes and could now be in a much lower risk profile for all causes of death…not just Covid. But almost nowhere do you see the government or anyone else saying one should do that. Probably because there isn’t any money in it and people are lazy.

Yeah, we'll never have a President that is honest enough to give a State of the Union address where he says "Hey you fatasses! Stop eating McDonald's, and do some air squats every day in your home! Then maybe we wouldn't need to pass 4000-page health insurance laws! Bro, do you even lift?"

Actually you don't need to use strong words, you can say the same in a more delicate (and precise) way without offending anyone[0]. It's not like everybody is going to listen, but at least they know they do have some responsibility for their health and they can do much more that just getting two shots (or a shot every quarter as it seems to be the new normal).

[0] Except the people that will get offended no matter what you say, they seem endemic.

There are some health pre-conditions that are impossible to avoid. I have hypertension for example, and except for this I am pretty much healthy. But still have a significant increased change of having of death in case I got COVID.

So yeah, I will take all vaccines I can. If I need a third dose to keep my immunity high against COVID, I will sure take it.

There was anti viral cure which Pfizer just announced trial results of phase 2. Supposedly 90% efficacy when administered 3 days after symptoms to prevent hospitalisations and deaths.

Considering that even people infected by the virus had recurrent cases after a while (and in a much greater proportion than vaccinated people BTW), it is much more likely that this is thanks on how this specific virus works than some conspiracy theory to sell more vaccines.

Also why bother making light bulbs. Just change the definition of candle to lightbulb....

It's almost like the existence of vaccines places evolutionary pressure on a mutating virus.

This whole pandemic has highlighted something that I really prefer not to think about, which is just how irrational, selfish, incapable of assessing risk and prone to confirmation bias too many people are.

The vaccine isn't 100% effective in stopping transmission? Or stopping you catching the disease? Or dying? Each of these becomes some pseudo-gotcha moment that leads some down an invermectin-taking path with Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan as the pied piper.

It's basically equivalent to arguing that people wearing seat belts can die in car accidents therefore seat belts are ineffective. Worse, you can suffer an injury from a seat belt so they're net harmful.

What many non-Americans may not understand is that there are a nontrivial number of Americans who still doggedly and genuinely believe that about seat belts to this day and view laws requiring their use as impinging on their ffeedom.

And we want people to make sacrifices for climate change? Yeah, never gonna happen.

> view laws requiring their use as impinging on their freedom.

They are impinging on our freedom. "You must do something" directly means you're less free, there can be no debate about this. The only debate to be had, is whether someone else (the government, the experts, ...) is allowed to force you to do things "in your best interest". There are ideological and practical (e.g. "power invites abuse" and "experts are stupid" as exemplified by the current pandemic) arguments pro/against.

And we want people to make sacrifices for climate change?

The main problems with most proposed solutions are: (1) they ideological (e.g. "meat harms the environment"), (2) they exacerbate inequality ("no flying except private"), (3) they're ignorant ("no nuclear, let's double down on destabilizing solar").

If instead you proposed solutions that were (1) actually "we're all in this together" (e.g. revenue-neutral carbon tax, or a yearly "carbon budget" so that rich people flying private would pay much more), (2) utilized best technology available (nuclear+solar+batteries+synthesised fuel+...), and (3) respected individual liberty (e.g. some people would rather eat less meat, others would prefer to drive less), you'd see much more public support.

The agreement to be a part of the society is an infringement on personal freedoms by definition - individuals agrees to constrain their behaviors to a set of rules, in return getting the benefit of scale.

A healthy society by definition aims to maximize the sum of benefit minus the inconveniences of constraints.

In the old days of the village life one could forfeit the impacts to their personal freedom, abandon society and go live in the forest on their own.

Unfortunately the modern societies do not give this option. It would be truly helpful to give some perspective to people.

Generally you don’t have a right to drive in any way you want on a public road. There are tons of restrictions on your personal liberty that you agree to when you get behind the wheel, including free expression (try to install a red/blue flashing light on your car and claim first amendment protections). And seatbelts are not required on private roads, or in any case the law would not be enforceable (though if that did happen I’d like to learn about it and be proven wrong).

This, as so many viewpoints that claim to be in favor of freedom, completely obsesses on freedom to, while ignoring freedom from.

Freedom to eat meat completely ignores freedom from dying in a climate apocalypse. Freedom to not get vaccinated completely ignores freedom from dying from a deadly disease.

When two freedoms conflict, the more impactful should be prioritized. In both of these cases it's freedom from.

I just want to point out that your seatbelt analogy isn’t true for all population groups.

Seems some of the vaccines are resulting in heart issues for young, otherwise healthy men.

So would you wear a seatbelt if you had almost zero risk of dying from the crash but an very small chance the seatbelt might choke you while driving and lead to long term harm?

Would you take the risk, solely because the authorities say you must take the risk wearing a potentially unsafe seatbelt to save some old people?

You were saying something about people can’t evaluate risk.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y

As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?

I appreciate you posted a credible link to this.

The article specifically calls out this risk as "very low" and quantifies it as less than 1 in 50,000. The death rates from motor vehicle accidents in the US was ~11 per 100,000 people in 2019 [1].

I assume since you're that risk averse, you no longer drive?

This is a good example of how people are bad at risk assessment and also why people have a phobia about air travel but rarely about driving even though air travel is significantly safer.

So using the argument that there are risks with the vaccine is a selective argument that no one applies to virtually every other aspect of their lives and also misses the point: those risks are quantifiably tiny and need to be weighed up against the risks to themselves of NOT taking the vaccine, including hospitalization, death and long Covid as well as the impact that choice has on others, collectively.

> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?

I actually can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not. The optimist in me is choosing to believe it is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Risk is relative.

For my age/health group, I view this risk of Covid to be less than the risk of the known issues with the vaccines and the unknown long term risk factors that aren’t yet fully known.

Do you fly on planes with a known safe takeoff statistics but no one has ever landed it before? It’s hard to quantify unknown risk, and I don’t trust people that safe don’t worry about this shot and we aren’t liable if there are side effects!

And yes, I ride a bike and gave up driving!

> For my age/health group, I view this risk of Covid to be less than the risk of the known issues with the vaccines

1. If you extrapolate that out to everyone doing it, we have a ton more people die, many from things unrelated to Covid because hospitals don't have the capacity. That hasn't been factored into your risk assessment;

2. Even with highly-effective vaccines, the death count in the US is at least 700,000. That's likely underreported by a large amount. The absolute worst case for risks of getting the vaccine are orders of magnitude less than that; and

3. Your choices don't affect just you.

(3) is the big one for me. If the net effect of not taking a vaccine was that that person would simply be more likely to die with no consequences to anyone else, I'd just call that evolution in action and move on.

But that's not the case. And the impact on other people is seemingly given absolutely no weight into these anti-vaxx decisions, which is the selfish aspect I was referring to.

Further to that, we get this under control and the vaccinated and unvaccinated both get to share in the benefits of that so it's doubly selfish.

The worst part is this level of selfishness is dressed up as some kind of virtue.

> unknown long term risk factors that aren’t yet fully known

That's just the fudge factor of confirmation bias rearing its ugly head.

100% agree on #3, and also find it odd that it’s frequently missing from the discussion. People complain about how being allowed to do something (or not) impacts themselves, or that another person can or can’t do something impacts that other person. There is less thought spent on how one person’s decisions impact everybody is law though.

How far down the rabbit hole of banning everything because it pisses someone else off do you want to go down?

Do we live in a society where we use authority to enforce the “right choice “ or do we make information and education available for people to decide for themselves how they want to live?

I rather live free, even if some people make bad choices. The risk of central authority eventually turning evil is too high.

It’s a fair question and I think the response is it scales with your proximity to other people. If you live out in the country and your nearest neighbor is a mile away then by all means do whatever you want as most of your choices will not impact others. If you’re living in a dense metropolis in a 500 unit complex then the equation is different as your choices impact more people quicker.

Everyone driving a car puts a health risk on the people walk or biking in the city.

As a cyclist, I demand all ICE cease operations that are killing people and the planet by burning fossil fuels.

Because it’s ok to force people to do things because their actions have external risks on other people.

You ban all ICE cars and I’ll consider vaccinating myself.

Because old people in their SUVs are slowly killing me when I breathe the fumes.

The irony in your post is that you might also be failing to evaluate risk correctly, because you aren't looking at all of the numbers.

To continue your analogy: even as a young and healthy man, the additional risk of you being choked by the seatbelt is still _very slightly smaller_ than the risk reduction from you wearing it. See e.g. tables 1-4 of https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-statement-se..., which give the comparative risks in the 12-15 age group.

It is true that the difference in risk is very marginal, and so you might reasonably choose to "price in" some additional uncertainty around vaccine risks, and reasonably choose not to get it.

You do also mention that you have survived Covid. I don't have the figures, but I would suspect that also changes the risk calculation in your personal case, in favour of you not getting the vaccine.

But please, whatever you do, look at all the numbers before making a decision. Don't just pick and choose those that fit your case.

> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?

A wish to survive future infections? Solidarity?

Would you take a Covid vaccine if it was guaranteed to save your grandparents?

Can you meet the family of the old people you killed, look them in the eye and say ‘It was my right!’

Anyhow, the risk of catching and dying from covid is higher than the chance of heart complications at basically any age, so the fact that it helps other people is just a bonus.

A wish to survive future infections? Natural immunity is more effective than vaccine immunity.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114228

Solidarity? Haha, this is America

My grandparents are all dead, but I don’t think my grandparents who lived through the Great Depression would want me to take the risk of heart inflammation as a young man, so they could potentially live a bit longer. In fact my grandmas would probably take a bullet to spare me health concerns.

Should the young be sacrificed for the old? WTF!?

Given that burning fossil fuels is harmful, I demand that everyone stop burning fossil fuels because it kills some people! https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/vehicle-e...

> Should the young be sacrificed for the old? WTF!?

That’s a misrepresentation. Should the young take a hit of -0.1 disability adjusted life years to give the rest of the population +1.0? Absolutely.

> Given that burning fossil fuels is harmful, I demand that everyone stop burning fossil fuels because it kills some people!

Good news. We’re working on this. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as giving everyone in the country two jabs.

I don’t buy your moral argument that the young should suffer disability for old people to live longer.

Ban ICE engines today, make everyone buy a Tesla. It’s possible, just like you say it’s possible to force everyone to get vaccinated. There are costs to it, not everyone wants to pay those costs! But it can be done!

>Absolutely Even if your numbers (which you've pulled out of your ass) are correct, how are you justifying this?

My grandfather who lost a brother to polio and himself had to live the rest of his life with a weakened heart would absolutely want people to get vaccinated.

And yes, fossil fuels are a health issue. Combined with the massive climate effects, it's good reason to try to stop burning them.

My grandma lived under fascism in Germany and fled the communists.

I am very afraid that we are heading towards an authoritarian state that is the best (worst) aspects of the most terrifying ideological empires (Nazis and communists).

> A wish to survive future infections? Natural immunity is more effective than vaccine immunity.

No, that's not true at all. You got it exactly backwards.

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

I wonder why you cherry-pick obscure sources from other countries while your own CDC quite clearly refutes your claims.

Moreover, you do not need to pick between either getting infected or taking the vaccine, so your whole argument makes no sense from the start.

You're misinterpreting the study; it compares previously infected with previously infected AND vaccinated.

It doesn't say anything about previously infected VS vaccinated but not infected (and there are studies that claim "natural" immunity is more effective; hell even original J&J trial data suggests that!)

That study gets misleadingly cited so many times.

Luckily for the CDC they just recently happened to get data proving that naive vaccinees are 5x better protected than recovered unvaccinated against infection. The study is horrible, with so many issues and conflict of interests... but who cares, the CDC published it, it even has a shiny banner for news media to share around!

> Can you meet the family of the old people you killed, look them in the eye and say ‘It was my right!’

Lazarus Long would have outlived the people who infringed his rights.

Car crashes aren’t contagious. COVID-19 presents a far higher risk for heart inflammation than the vaccine. But you know that when you posit it’s fine to spread COVID-19 because it only kills old people.

The heart complications is a result of dumbass nurses in America not aspirating when giving the shot. If you look at people getting shots in different parts of the world it's night and day.

There's a couple of things that could affect your calculation. First one is that, you can get covid again after having it once, immunity from exposure seems to wane even faster than immunity from Vaccination.

So then you're weighing the risks of vaccination against serious side-effects from the vaccine. According to (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...) 4288 people in the 18-29 category have died from covid so far in the US, so even to young people , the risk is obviously not 0.

Logically unless deaths from vaccination in that age group are higher than that number (which AFAIK they're not) it would seem to make sense to get the vaccine.

> immunity from exposure seems to wane even faster than immunity from Vaccination

Really? Link?

> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?

First of all, because if enough of us don't take the vaccine, we're all at risk from the virus continuing to spread and mutate.

Secondly, surviving Covid once doesn't mean you're immune from catching it (or a variant) again later on. That link you shared states a 1 in 50 000 chance of developing myocarditis from a COVID-19 vaccine. This recent study [0] finds a rate of reinfection among the surveyed population of 121 in 34 500 males and 148 in 31 697 adults aged 18-39. Either of those is more than 2 orders of magnitude higher than the risk of that heart complication. And catching Covid a second time can also leave you with further health complications.

Finally, I just want to point out that the article you linked literally has this citation from the study author: > He says the new studies clearly show that the benefits of vaccination against COVID-19 outweigh the risks of people aged 16 and older developing myocarditis. Previous research co-authored by Balicer found that in this age group, becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 made a person 18 times more likely to develop myocarditis — a much more significant risk than is observed following vaccination.

So if you're evaluating risk for potential heart complications, I'd think you still want to get the vaccine at the end of the day (barring any other, as of yet un-mentioned, health complications). [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8373524/

> because if enough of us don't take the vaccine, we're all at risk from the virus continuing to spread and mutate.

unfortunately, because the vaccine is leaky, it does little to nothing to stop the spread.

"Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States … At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days (Fig. 1). In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7

> First of all, because if enough of us don't take the vaccine, we're all at risk from the virus continuing to spread and mutate.

This is just straightforward fake propaganda.

He said he survived COVID therefore his immunity is very likely stronger (and longer lasting) than that from vaccines.

If you survived Covid without complications, you should not fear a vaccine, because it contains parts of the virus you're already exposed to, so nothing new for your body.

Is this the case even with the mRNA based vaccines?

> As a young man, who survived Covid, why would I risk heart complications to save some old people?

This kind of sociopathy is peak HN.

And suggesting we kill or maim young people is not sociopathic?

The pandemic has also made me more aware of the same thing. I already knew that people were selfish and bad at risk analysis, but the degree to which they are is what astounded me.

I wish there was some good answer to how to deal with the problem. The government can't get too heavy-handed because that will just drive even more distrust and possibly lead to revolution (the distrust has already happened after lockdowns and vaccine mandates, compounded with any distrust that was already there).

There'd have to be a big culture shift if we wanted people to take societal issues seriously. It's pretty clear this is the case when you consider that people are actually losing friends if they decide to get vaccinated. So much for "my body, my choice" (a phrase which has been stolen and twisted by people opposing the vaccines).

> The government can't get too heavy-handed because that will just drive even more distrust and possibly lead to revolution

The pandemic has taught me to be even more cynic about the limits of democracy that I already was.

My country's government, like many others (including the US, I think?), blatantly lied about masks at the beginning, saying that they didn't work or were counterproductive for laypeople which, honestly, was very hard to believe in the face of common sense as well as the know-how from Asian countries that have been using them routinely for years. When mask shortages ended, the messaging changed and suddenly masks began to be useful or even mandatory. The purpose of the lies was clearly to guarantee supply to medical workers.

Later on, a lot of hyperboles were suggested about vaccines, like that they made you "immune", that vaccination would mean that no restrictions would be needed anymore, or that once a threshold of 70% was reached we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would be over. This was clearly not true, but it pushed many hesitant people into vaccination.

The thing is, I'm a person with principles and thus my gut reaction is that a lying government is a bad thing. But if I place myself in the government's shoes and go back to March 2020, I don't think I can really defend that things should have been done differently. If the efficacy of masks had been acknowledged from the beginning, laypeople would have depleted the supplies, shortages in medical settings would be more severe, and more people would have died. If vaccines or herd immunity had been hyped less, vaccination takeup would be smaller (because many people only seem to think in absolutes, they don't care about risk reduction or spread reduction if they don't have a boolean goalpost) and more people would have died.

With this I don't mean that I'm against democracy, of course. In my own country we had an authoritarian leader who was also a bigot and a moron, so I'm fully vaccinated against authoritarianism. But it seems difficult to dismiss the idea that there are some things, like pandemic management, where you can't really count on laypeople to decide anything.

> Later on, a lot of hyperboles were suggested about vaccines, like that they made you "immune", that vaccination would mean that no restrictions would be needed anymore, or that once a threshold of 70% was reached we would have herd immunity and the pandemic would be over. This was clearly not true, but it pushed many hesitant people into vaccination.

It was true then - it was what the math showed before Delta was around. The required size of population for the herd immunity to take over depends on the contagiousness of the disease - it is pretty much inverse of the R number at least in the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered/Removed) model.

For the original variant, the number was about 75 %, with Delta being more contagious, the number is a out 85 %. Worth to mention that this is of total population that can get the virus - you see news like "country X vaccinated 80 % people" but sometimes that is eligible population which is not the same as all susceptible population. When you see antivaxxers claiming vaccines don't help "because of Israel", this is exactly the difference - Israel had almost 80 % eligible population vaccinated, but only about 60 % of total population, which wouldn't be enough for the original variant, much less for Delta.

> It was true then - it was what the math showed before Delta was around.

True, but it was a very rough estimate (COVID R0 confidence intervals were, and to my knowledge still are, very wide) and the potential for change due to new variants appearing was known and discussed very early in the pandemic (the March 2020 variant that ravaged Europe was already an "updated" version of the original virus). And all this didn't prevent our president from confidently appearing on TV and saying that when we reached 70% vaccination rate, we would have herd immunity. He even provided exact dates when that would be achieved, so some people actually expected that he would hold a press conference that day declaring the pandemic over. Of course, the messaging became diluted later on.

While perhaps not an outright lie, at the very least it was a half truth, and unrealistic hyping.

> At the very least, it was a half truth, and unrealistic hyping.

It was what the data showed at that time. Calling if half-truth because people couldn't predict course of a pandemic year in advance seems over the top. Do you know what will happen in a year?

No idea who is your president, so I can't comment on that specific communication.

> My country's government, like many others (including the US, I think?), blatantly lied about masks at the beginning, saying that they didn't work or were counterproductive for laypeople (...)

You should really revisit those claims because it's quite likely you got them all completely wrong.

I'm also living in a country where its government argued against mass adoption of surgical masks and gloves, but the argument was no way close to your claim.

The rationale was that this mass increase in demand for surgical masks and gloves would deplete the current stockpile and production capacity, thus leaving healthcare professionals and other frontline workers without access to basic protective equipment.

We're talking about a spike in demand that directly lead to the death of healthcare and frontline workers[1].

Consequently, we've saw multiple governments and health officials stating that the public should not go on a shopping binge for protective equipment to lower the pressure from the supply-side.

The same problem was also observed in a run for respirators.

In all these cases, once the production capacity was ramped up, governments naturally started providing incentives and even mandating their use.

[1] https://www.medicaldevice-network.com/comment/healthcare-wor...

> You should really revisit those claims because it's quite likely you got them all completely wrong.

> I'm also living in a country where its government argued against mass adoption of surgical masks and gloves, but the argument was no way close to your claim.

I'm not making wrong claims, because I'm not saying all governments did the same thing. In my country the messaging was definitely as I said. The argument was that masks wouldn't work for laypeople because they needed specialized training to be worn right (another clear lie, my wife is a doctor, has always used masks and never got such training beyond a few simple instructions that can be given in 30 seconds. And that did not change with the pandemic) and we would probably make the problem even worse by wearing them incorrectly, touching them with our hands and contracting the virus.

If your goverment was more sincere and still succeeded in preventing people from hoarding masks, I suppose it can be counted as evidence against my claim that lying was actually the best thing to do. But not all societies are equal. In my country I'm quite convinced that if the government had given the same messaging as in yours, people would have hoarded and made the shortage in healthcare worse. Although of course, this is just from my subjective impression of how my countrymen work and not a scientific claim.

> I'm not making wrong claims, because I'm not saying all governments did the same thing. In my country the messaging was definitely as I said. The argument was that masks wouldn't work for laypeople because they needed specialized training to be worn right (another clear lie, my wife is a doctor, has always used masks and never got such training beyond a few simple instructions that can be given in 30 seconds.

Again, I feel you should really revisit the events and review your claim. Even if we accept it at face value, it only makes any sense to raise concerns over "hey didn't work or were counterproductive for laypeople" if they were advising against mass adoption, and advising people to not go out of their way to buy surgical masks and latex gloves only makes sense if the goal is to mitigate spikes in demand to ensure the medical community still has access to them.

Let's put it this way: did you saw any government at all advising against buying toilet paper?

So much for "my body, my choice" (a phrase which has been stolen and twisted by people opposing the vaccines).

Twisted how. It's exactly the same argument, identical in every way, to the one used for years by abortion supporters. It was seen as noble and obvious correct back then by the same people who deem it to be beyond the pale now. It's obvious they have no internal consistency.

Twisted because a contagious virus is not just a personal issue. The virus will continue to mutate and weaken the efficacy of both natural immunity and the vaccine if its spread is not halted.

Abortion isn't a personal issue - it affects the life of the unborn baby. That's why abortion activists have talk about bodily autonomy so heavily.

Meanwhile, vaccines not only don't stop you spreading COVID but they appear to make it worse as UK and Swedish data shows. Thus there could easily be an argument to force you to not take the vaccine, on the grounds that you don't personally need the protection and it makes the epidemic worse. Would you like that?

> Twisted how.

It doesn't apply. It makes the (false) claim that anti-vaxxers don't have body autonomy. They do. No one is holding them down and making them take a vaccine. You've given the choice: get the vaccine or don't. But if you don't there are some negative consequences.

This was already the case prior to Covid. For example: sending unvaccinated children to public school.

When the penalty is having your livelihood destroyed yes, people are being forced to take it. No different to how people are "forced" to pay fines or do anything else the government wants - being physically forced is the very last step and most people never get there because they know what happens next. After all, what do you think happens to businesses that refuse to comply? The police turn up and punish them until they do comply.

Stop engaging in mental gymnastics and admit what you are supporting: mass forced violation of people's bodily autonomy.

"the government" is just people, perhaps selected for even higher levels of selfishness and poor risk analysis skills.

What I believe based on life experience is that the further removed I am from an information source, the more likely it is to be untrue, outdated, inaccurate, distorted.

What I see with my own eyes is LIKELY to be true, although even the process of perception causes distortion.

What someone I personally know tells me has already been distorted THREE TIMES, but is still probably good information, if they are a trustworthy individual.

Friend-of-a-friend? That's FIVE distortions, count them. This type of information is good for compounding, but is not reliable enough by itself.

Any further than that, and I might as well be flipping coins. Add to that various conflicts of interest, and I'd rather avoid hearing it at all.

On your first comment, as far as I know the big contributor seems to be the Delta variant which arose and became prevalent in India at a time when it had very low vaccination rates (and from a different vaccine). In a hypothetical world without vaccines, we'd still have delta and just be worse off. I don't see any reason to attribute this to selective pressure from vaccines.

Sure but Delta is now the dominant strain everywhere. Evolutionary pressure still applies.

Your initial point was "It's almost like the existence of vaccines places evolutionary pressure on a mutating virus". That is implying that the existing observations could be explained by evolutionary pressures, not just that it might be happening in the future.

Delta would have been the dominant strain everywhere without the vaccine as well. Most of the reproductive advantage of Delta did not come from antigenic drift. Blaming vaccines for it like you did is completely, 100% false.

In a world with no vaccines, antigenic drift would happen just the same way, and still gain a reproductive advantage, just from evolving against disease-conferred immunity rather than vaccine-conferred.

Why can I be forced to use seatbelts and vaccine skeptics are not forced to get the shot?

My decision is purely personal, while theirs does increase the risk for everyone around.

Ever rode a motorcycle without a helmet? That's the real deal!

Well, they're both impositions on freedom. But semi-forced medical procedures imposed in an emergency and likely driven by special interests are genuinely concerning. Organising protests over seat-belts - while logically defensible - just makes people look stupid.

So in principle, you shouldn't be fined for either. But the vaccine mandates are a hill worth fighting over.

But unlike seat belt laws, it's not forced. And unlike seat belt laws, it should be, because it affects the health of other people.

Seatbelt laws shouldn't be forced either. But nobody is going to fight seriously over that because it is inconsequential and non-invasive.

They are not a justification for mandatory vaccination, in an emergency, with what is turning out to be an unknown risk and efficacy profile.

> But unlike seat belt laws, it's not forced.

Good. Keep it that way. But speaking from Australia, the truth of that statement is very context-specific. The government will presumably fine me if I attempt to go for a pub lunch without my smartphone, because then there isn't a way to prove to them that I have been vaccinated. This is a bad, indeed a concerning, thing.

right, that's my point!

> But semi-forced medical procedures imposed in an emergency and likely driven by special interests are genuinely concerning. Organising protests over seat-belts - while logically defensible - just makes people look stupid.

I'd say both makes people just look stupid, especially when using phrases like "driven by special interests".

Yep. And one of them is a cause which is worth looking a little stupid for while standing up for freedom, because it is an issue where it is more important to be right than to look like part of the crowd. The other one isn't - being seatbelts.

I argue that the fight needs to start with the most unjustified measures. seat-belts, helmets etc.

As long as you have those in place it's only consequential that more protective measures are in place as well - i.e ones that actually do have an protective impact on society

If your plan is to start with the least consequential issues, you should reconsider the plan. Start with the important stuff, work down to the nice-to-haves. Nobody gets everything that they want.

no, it's not about "least consequential" but about "most unjustified". as long as you have even more unjustified measures in place, you will have a hard time fighting the less unjustified

> Why can I be forced to use seatbelts and vaccine skeptics are not forced to get the shot?

This is a good question.

While I'm 100% for people getting the vaccine, I personally believe that forcibly vaccinating people is a dangerous precedent to set.

Anti-vaxxers like to argue "body autonomy" against vaccine mandates, which is a distortion because you actually do have body autonomy. No one is forcibly vaccinating you. It's just that choice comes with consequences. And for people who are bad at risk analysis, irrational, prone to suggestion, selfish or some combination of the above, they simply don't like there being negative consequences to their actions.

What I find particularly ironic is there seems to be a strong overlap between "body autonomy" anti-vaxxers and those that would deny a 15 year old rape victim from getting an abortion at 7 weeks.

As an "antivaxxer" (not by any reasonable use of the word, but that seems to be the state of the language right now), I would not deny any rape victim from getting an abortion. I don't think I've observed this overlap you mention, other than being referenced in comments like yours.

(I'm sure there are traditional pre-2020 antivaxxers out there, I just never come across them in real life)

On bodily autonomy, I see a lot of this "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you!" kind of argument. Sure, technically nobody is using immediate physical force. By some strict literal interpretation, you are correct. I don't think that's what people have in mind when they say bodily autonomy though.

It's bothersome that people who otherwise make sense equate these two things and totally miss the point about one personal decision having ramifications for society, while the other does not. The elision of that crucial point, or the intentional mixing of all regulations as being equally public necessities, helps prove to vaccine skeptics that rule-thumpers have no respect for individual choices and detracts/distracts from the actual harm that antivaxers do. And it's a position usually put forth by those in favor of public health controls.

If people can't separate emergencies (temporary) from other conditions, or the things that only affect one person from those that affect society, and use the virus and vax campaign as an excuse to reduce individual choice in a permanent way - by of all things, tying it to laws against harmful personal vices or other stupid choices - they will be speaking to their own echo chamber of fellow virtue signalers without accomplishing either of their supposed aims.

the point here is that It seems entiterly arbitrary to enforce seat-belts but not enforce vaccine-shots.

in a constitutional state mandates should not be arbitrarys, that's a defining characteristic actually.

so either you have seatbelt laws and vaccine mandates, or you have no vaccine mandates, but also don't enforce seatbelts.

then if you decide to enforce seatbelts, where do you stop? smokeing, obesity, extreme sports, going outside without a proper reason ... you needed to outlaw all of these "risky-activities" for the good of society then!

One difference is that you can decide to stop wearing your seatbelt if we learn at some point that seat belts are actually more harmful than helpful.

Rather than saying if we mandate one thing, we should mandate everything, we could just evaluate each of them individually. And since that's what we actually do, and these decisions are made by different people at different times (because of elections, appointments, etc), some inconsistency seems inevitable.

How dare you be logical on the internet.

It's not arbitrary. There is a clear, bright line between things individuals do that only endanger themselves - or which are wildly unlikely to endanger others - versus those which do endanger others. That's why drunk driving is a felony and not wearing a seatbelt is a minor violation. Even more importantly, it's why drunk driving or not being vaccinated is unethical, while not wearing a seatbelt is merely unlawful.

Seatbelts also affect your passengers (if you are wearing no seatbelt then your body can kill your passengers). So it's not just a personal decision.

it's up to my passengers then - their personal decision - take the risk without me wearing the seatbelt, not riding with me or convince me to put on one.

ah, the flying body scenario. Well it's really your passengers choice then, to get in the car.

Not wearing a seatbelt while driving does actually increase the risk to those around you. If you need to make a sudden swerve to avoid something that suddenly gets in your way such as a deer leaping into the road in front of you, wearing a seatbelt should increase your chances of maintaining control during and after the swerve.

It was really fun in the old days when we didn't have seatbelts and cars often had bench seating in front, so that on a sudden left turn (in the US) the driver could slide could slide far to the right.

I'm pro-vax, but I can see the argument of the anti folks: why actively take action to have something put in your body that (they've read) might harm you? I guess in their minds, if they get Covid at least it would happen passively.

I don't like the analogy. I think seat belt and helmet laws are impositions on your right to kill yourself. Refusing to wear a seat belt doesn't generally endanger anyone else. If antivaxers were only harming themselves, then let em be idiots and die. The problem is, they're not only endangering themselves. Second hand smoke would be a better analogy to vaccine refusal, although it's a pale comparison as it would take a LOT of second hand smoke over many years to achieve the negative health results that a single infected person can inflict on others in the course of a plane flight.

> Refusing to wear a seat belt doesn't generally endanger anyone else.

What if people are in passengers’s seats? Their bodies can be launched with a lot of kinetic force killing people in the front seats. Eventually with enough force, the driver can be launched out of the car and hurt somebody else.

Granted, it is not always happening. The same way someone infected do not always pass the virus to somebody else before getting better or dying.

In my opinion the analogy is quite fitting. People think it is about them, not noticing how it can impact others.

One person with covid will infect on average 3-5 others directly. Multiply that out. One person can only have one car crash, ever, in which their body becomes a projectile capable of killing someone nearby. One is a public health crisis and the other isn't. Conflating the two is an absurdity and a disservice to any attempt at getting antivaxers to understand the seriousness of the situation.

> One is a public health crisis and the other isn't. Conflating the two is an absurdity

Well, it is called an analogy, isn’t it? No one said it is exactly the same.

> One person can only have one car crash, ever, […]

Except not. As people who can be infected, infect others, fall sick again, and so on. People can have multiple accidents with varying degree of charm for themselves and others. Also, you forget that car crashes can also have more than 2 vehicles involved, especially on highways.

> a disservice to any attempt at getting antivaxers to understand the seriousness of the situation.

Well, I took for granted I am not talking to one. I would certainly need to use a different approach then. The issue with antivaxxers is that the reasons for their behavior often seems orthogonal to logical arguments, and aligns more with emotional responses like fear of the unknown and political and/or religious views.

>> No one said it is exactly the same.

Right, but my point is that the degree of risk and probability of harm an individual places on others is the only logical basis by which to determine the degree to which society should restrict or coerce certain behaviors. If we proceed from the idea that individuals should have as much freedom as possible, then on the scale of things society should concern itself with viz the individual's behavior, spreading an airborne virus with a 1.5% mortality rate demands much harsher measures than even speeding or drunk driving. Whereas not wearing a seatbelt or a helmet doesn't even register on the same scale. That's why it does matter that one thing is a public health hazard and the other is a personal one. They are of such different degree that they are materially totally incomparable to one another.

Doesn't make much of a difference but R0 of Covid is probably closer to 2-3

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7751056/

What about seat belts for children who can't make an informed decision to have a greater risk of death or injury in the name of "freedom"?

Realistically the risk is that everything surrounding the vaccine is and was extremely suspicious. I've never had a vaccine before where the nurse urged me to keep moving my arm for the remainder of the day. Realistically the clotting of the vaccines was a real issue due to the poor testing, and I'm not sure if it's still a problem because I haven't heard about it being talked about for a while. In addition, there were potential risks known about the vaccine via research financed by Pfizer for months after it was released that were not present in the media or on any waivers for months after the potential interactions began appearing in lab tests, and the information was not effectively delivered to people who got the vaccine or considered the vaccine. I've seen the heart issues mentioned by people in the comments, what I haven't seen is that Pfizer financed lab research on samples of lung and heart tissue and found a potential for interaction that was never told to anyone until it became a problem.

Then we can talk about how the vaccine companies got immunity from being sued if people had any problems down the road from it.

[1] September 2020: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002432052...

[2] March 2021: https://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/full/10.2217/fca-2020-018...

[3] February 2021: https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1096/fj.20...

[4] January 2021: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7771841/

^ Not all optimal links but they are what I pulled from a quick search on Google Scholar regarding the subject. All date prior to wide discussion on potential issues caused by the vaccination.

No idea what your nurse was on about, but in my country neither me nor anyone I know was recommended to move their arm. And to my knowledge, there were no clotting incidents at all with Pfizer, only with adenovirus-based vaccines J&J and AstraZeneca (and they were extremely rare, although I still was very happy to get an mRNA vaccine because zero risk is better than very low risk, and they have also turned out to be better in almost every respect).

I got the vaccine with knowledge of the risks after researching it. The issue is a lot of people did not have knowledge of the risks since it was not in readily available places which caused widespread distrust in the vaccine.

> Then we can talk about how the vaccine companies got immunity from being sued if people had any problems down the road from it.

I think this makes sense, given governments were forcing their hand to get it on a fast track process. When you pressure someone to rush something I think it's fair to accept the responsibility for the greater risks rushing it caused, I think that's fair. I would absolutely understand the public suing the government if it turned out that rushing it and forcing everyone to get it early caused issues however.

I want to know why they felt the need to redact the contents of the contracts they signed with various governments around the world.

> Realistically the risk is that everything surrounding the vaccine is and was extremely suspicious. I've never had a vaccine before where the nurse urged me to keep moving my arm for the remainder of the day.

This is the very first time I ever saw anyone make this extraordinary claim, or anything close to it. Practically everyone I know is fully vaccinated and there was absolutely no reference to any thing remotely like that. Ever. At all.

Personally, the only out of the ordinary thing I experienced was getting a leaflet with a FAQ on the vaccines. Other than this, I sat down, took the jab, got up, went to the waiting room for a bit, and afterwards went on with my daily life. Boring as hell, and happened on both jabs.

I'm really skeptical regarding your claim, to the point I doubt it ever happened. Do you happen to have any way, other than your word, to back it up?

> Realistically the clotting of the vaccines was a real issue due to the poor testing, and I'm not sure if it's still a problem because I haven't heard about it being talked about for a while.

There is nothing realistic about your claim. Entire countries have taken the vaccine and, even though there are rare cases where patients react poorly to the vaccine, the scenario you've depicted is not factual or grounded on reality.

Do you actually have anything that supports your extraordinary claim, or is this something you believe in in spite of evidence?

Added source links to my post from links I pulled from Google Scholar. Not all are perfectly relevant but in terms of potential known but not discussed impacts I suggest [3] from February 2021 or [4] from January 2021 to have a look at which discusses the potential for heart and lung issues from the vaccine, alongside the need for booster shots, which were noted during the development before the mass deployment.

In terms of my visit, all I can really say is I got the vaccine at the Cleveland Clinic in May 2021, I don't really have any hard evidence of what happened during my visit other than my vaccination card.

Also in terms of the clotting I'm surprised you haven't heard of it? (not Google Scholar links, it's just that it's on many news sources from a quick Google search)

https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/blood-clots-covid

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02291-2

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/coronavirus-vaccine-blood-...

https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2021/07/bloo...

The third link says 28 people had a problem after 9 million doses were administered.

If you hear that and think "the vaccine is risky", you need to adjust your risk tolerance.

I agree with the others about the nurse saying you had to move your arm. There's nothing specific about this vaccine that changes the requirement for mobility. I think you're just overly concerned.

> Added source links to my post from links I pulled from Google Scholar.

Sorry, you dumped a bunch of links but none of them seem to be related to any of your claims.

Can you explain the relationship between any of your links and the points you tried to make? Because dumping a bunch of unrelated links not only does not work as a reference but also feels like something done in bad faith[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Sure thing. The links are summarized research btw, you can get through them all in 2 minutes each.

from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7771841/

"The challenge for modern vaccinology is to be able to provoke all the requisite steps leading to immune system activation in vivo, and to provide a non-virulent, harmless type of a given agent capable of generating a strong and adequate immune response tailored against specific viral attack (Moser and Leo, 2010). Thus, some questions arise regarding the development of the vaccine (see Table 1 for current development state of COVID-19 vaccines) that will be administered to billions of people at risk of COVID-19 infection."

"As mentioned earlier, ACE2 is the route of SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, this receptor plays a vital role in both innate and adaptive immune responses by modulating the antigen present antigen cells that interact with T cells to initiate defense initiatives (Bernstein et al., 2018). This receptor of transmembrane protease acts in the conversion of angiotensin 1-8 (Ang II) to angiotensin 1-7 (Ang 1-7), prompting diuresis/natriuresis, preserving renal function, and attenuating cardiac and vascular reformation (Vickers et al., 2002; Santos et al., 2008; Zhang et al., 2010). ACE2 also has an important role in the nervous system, and disruption of this receptor can trigger neurological disorders (Kabbani and Olds, 2020)."

I read this as: depending on the immune response the vaccine creates, it can cause potential damage to various organ systems

from https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2021/07/bloo...

"In rare cases, antibodies that the body produces as a side effect of the vaccine lead to uncontrolled activation of platelets. This causes both low platelet counts and blood clots to form in unusual areas. VITT is not associated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines. "

I read this as: the vaccines have the potential to cause clots, but this isn't proven for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines

In terms of the tissue tests in lab by Pfizer, I wasn't able to find the paper I that read on that, so I don't have hard proof of that.

Sounds to me like you're not a scientist or doctor and misread the text. Most specifically, I think you're taking exceptially rare events, thinking they're ultra common.

>It's almost like the existence of vaccines places evolutionary pressure on a mutating virus.

All the major variants of concerns came into being in countries with very little vaccination. Delta started in India for example. Most viruses have a very hard time mutating to evade vaccines, since that requires evading the human immune system (with the exception of influenza which is very good at creating new strains which avoid immunity - vaccine or no vaccine).

There are a great, great number of people who believe _both_ that the vaccine works on some level but disagree with the way it's being used in medical apartheid, the lack of exit plans, and changes to daily life, and so on. There are a great number of valid complaints.

But mentioning them and commenting in a more measured way probably wouldn't get you so many upvotes.

> medical apartheid

This is such a baseless and inflammatory mischaracterization. It's like the tamer version of those who have unironically compared mask and vaccine mandates to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.

No one is being forcibly vaccinated so arguments about "body autonomy" are completely irrelevant. It's just that not getting vaccinated has consequences and people don't like there being negative consequences to their (irrational) actions.

You need to have a bunch of vaccines to attend public schools in most places. This is nothing new.

Yet people lose their shit because they're told to wear a mask on a plane when that policy was known before they even bought the ticket.

To characterize any of this "apartheid", just like the comparisons to Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany, belies an ignorance and diminishes the suffering of black South Africans in Apartheid.

The full on assault on the right to work is reminiscent of the worst abuses of the XX century. Technically Stalin didn't mass murder the kulaks, he just decided they had a bad influence on the general population and offered them jobs in Siberia. "Look how many survived, even their poster boy, Solzhenitsyn, came back and had a very successful career." Plenty in the West applauded and downplayed their plight for decades. Some still do.

> it's being used in medical apartheid

Can you please offer a description of exactly what you feel warrants an association with racial discrimination and persecution?

How are the unvaccinated supposed to put food on their table when they are being kicked out of the military, fired from their place of employment, or told that they must comply even if operating a self-owned-work-from-home business?

These people are being forced out of regular society into an underclass that will have to operate in a grey economy to survive.

Again this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the origin, meaning and reality of "apartheid".

Black South Africans didn't choose to be black. They couldn't choose to be white to escape the segregation, loss of rights and brutality.

No one is being held down and forcibly vaccinated. Even in the military, which is pretty strict about this, your choices are to comply or to face disciplinary procedures, possibly including being discharged from the military.

That's a choice.

Side note: military service members already have to comply with all sorts of medical requirements including shots. Why Covid is being singled out now is the only interesting part to this.

>>>Again this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the origin, meaning and reality of "apartheid".

The etymology of the world is separateness or "apart-hood". We can debate whether the concept requires immutable physical/racial characteristics, but in most Western minds the word "apartheid" is more common to communicate concepts of enforced second-class-citizen status than others, such as in India's caste system, or burakumin here in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin

>>>No one is being held down and forcibly vaccinated.

They are simply being forced into unemployment, and whether they eventually starve due to their lack of income, well, that's not YOUR fault, right? It's the most cowardly, passive-aggressive way to eliminate undesirables.

This is like Israel saying they aren't actively murdering Palestinians, so what's the problem? Meanwhile they maintain a blockade that prevents import of basic stuff that has at times included wheelchairs, tin cans, livestock, and construction materials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip#Lim...

>>>Side note: military service members already have to comply with all sorts of medical requirements including shots. Why Covid is being singled out now is the only interesting part to this.

Because the tons of other shots that we get (including that stupid, painful anthrax booster) don't have anywhere near the rate/risk of side effects that come with COVID vaccination!

And when we're exposed to stuff that DOES negatively impact our health, it has often led to the government getting sued for compensation afterwards. Examples: Agent Orange, Iraq "burn pits", USS Ronald Reagan and Fukushima radiation, etc...

Upon further research, you can get VA Benefits for side-effects linked to older, bad batches of anthrax shots: https://ptsdlawyers.com/anthrax-vaccine-presents-long-term-e... So the government recognizes that it screwed up giving us dangerous vaccinations in the 90s and is compensating veterans, and that's for something with a LOWER risk profile than COVID vaccination. But for COVID, the entire adult population of the country is being told to either comply or join the breadlines.

>>>That's a choice.

Yes, and sooner or later, as people feel increasingly suppressed by the government, they will simply stop debating and "make the choice" to resort to violence. En masse. And I don't think the bulk of the people who are oh-so-smug-and-confident about the need/importance for this current trend of government authoritarianism fully appreciate what that means.

> How are the unvaccinated supposed to put food on their table

Get vaccinated?

Unlike minorities, they can actually do that, you know.

Ah yes, the classic position of all authoritarians: "My Way or the Highway!"

And what do you tell the minorities who view vaccination mandates as yet another example of government oppression, under which they've already suffered?

I think it's quite brilliant! Unvaccinated people hurt others by spreading the disease to the vulnerable and clogging the hospitals (at much higher rate than vaccinated). Turning this around and making it so that their unvaccinated status is hurting them too, seem like a great balancing act.

And talk is cheap. I remember article about how police unions in whatever US city claimed that 10 000 police officers will quit if they have to get vaccinated. The mandate went through and the number who quit was 36 or so.

If less than 1 % of antivaxxers really mean it, when push comes to shove, that means we can still save the world.

But I also have no patience anymore, so I'm not the best role model of a delicate approach to those things.

>>>And talk is cheap. I remember article about how police unions in whatever US city claimed that 10 000 police officers will quit if they have to get vaccinated. The mandate went through and the number who quit was 36 or so.

I wonder what city this would be? Maybe LA? Chicago had to pause the mandate for law enforcement due to the union backlash.[1] New York lost ~9,000 public workers (not all police though) due to their mandate.[2]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/02/police-vacci...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/01/new-york-cit...

>>>when push comes to shove, that means we can still save the world.

Except that the vaccine efficacy falls off of a cliff over time, so unless all 7 billion of us are gonna get boosters every 3 months, what is the real plan to "save the world"? If COVID is here to stay, at some point we need to add "COVID patients" to our baseline stats that drive our understanding of ICU bed requirements, and then just return to normal. At the very least "Asia normal" where people just understand to wear masks most of the day in crowded places.

The reason only 36 were fired is because they had thousands apply for "religious exemption". In the end they either accept them as exempt making the mandate moot or they will end up having to terminate them.

> * Ah yes, the classic position of all authoritarians: "My Way or the Highway!"*

Isn't that the core tenet of anti-vax militants? That not only are they entitled to refuse to follow the most basic health and safety precautions but also that they, somehow, are entitled to put at risk everyone around them because they feel like it?

And their sense of entitlement runs so deep that anyone around them not playing along with their sense of entitlement warrants personal attacks such as the one you've just mounted?

Pray tell, if you honestly placed any value on personal freedom how come you place a higher value on your personal whims than the health and safety of everyone around you?

>>>Isn't that the core tenet of anti-vax militants?

No their core tenant is "My Body My Choice."

>>>That not only are they entitled to refuse to follow the most basic health and safety precautions but also that they, somehow, are entitled to put at risk everyone around them because they feel like it?

There is a baseline level of risk that society tolerates, consequences be damned. That's why we un-banned alcohol, and why motorcycles are (thankfully) still legal.

>>>personal attacks such as the one you've just mounted?

Actions have consequences, right? Take an authoritarian position, get called out for being an authoritarian. If being identified as an authoritarian feels like a personal attack to you, you can always chose to not espouse authoritarian policy implementations.

>>>Pray tell, if you honestly placed any value on personal freedom how come you place a higher value on your personal whims than the health and safety of everyone around you?

"you you you you"....You seem to be assuming that I'm unvaccinated. I'm not. Nor do I have a COVID-risky lifestyle. I couldn't care less about lockdowns ending since I don't go out anymore anyway. I go to work (largely with vaccinated coworkers), I go to the supermarket/gas station/convenience store, I go home. I wear masks in public at all times. The only things I miss are Friday Night Magic and easy international travel. COVID has been "business as usual" for the lifestyle of many introverts.

I'm anti-mandate. And yes, my value equation places higher utility on personal freedom than health & safety. I assess that kowtowing to overbearing government intervention will calcify over time as it so often does, and trend towards misuses of power that will be a net loss for all of us. As it so often does.

"You can vote your way into Communism or fascism, but you have to SHOOT your way out of them."

Here's a better compromise in the interim: if hospital ICU capacity falls below 10%, the hospital has the right to refuse unvaccinated patients seeking admission for COVID treatment, in order to retain capacity for non-COVID-related conditions (both vaxxed and unvaxxed patients). BUT....I want to see this policy extended to the obese as well. If your BMI is over 30 and you have a heart attack...you get told "No Vacancy".

>It's basically equivalent to arguing that people wearing seat belts can die in car accidents therefore seat belts are ineffective. Worse, you can suffer an injury from a seat belt so they're net harmful.

For what is worth, I remember when seatbelts were about to become mandatory in my country as a kid and people argued exactly that. They weren't feeling unsafe in the first place to want to go through the inconvenience. It took a lot of traffic cop posts and fines until people got the habit rather than a rational argument about small chances which people are bad at reasoning about.

Though in all fairness that's the same country that is at the bottom of the vaccination charts and top of the deaths charts in Europe and due to corrupt government there's an abnormal distrust in authority there.

Those laws only exist to generate revenue for the police. Dying in car crashes is not an infectious condition, and never constituted a public health emergency. Put another way, it's no harm to society if you go through a windshield, but you can be fined for not wearing a seatbelt... while it's measurably harmful and morally questionable to refuse a vaccine, and no one will ever fine you for it.

Car crashes do economic damage, raise health and car insurance premiums etc. It's not a health emergency but there is harm to society.

Is it possible to find anything that can exist or occur that is immune from being calculated a 'harm to society'?

But unlike speeding or drunk driving, not wearing a seatbelt doesn't cause car crashes.

> It's almost like the existence of vaccines places evolutionary pressure on a mutating virus.

This is true, however, in this case, the vaccines are losing effectiveness against the same strains over time. Which is unsurprising, actually, early reports from China on natural immunity showed that it doesn't last as long as usual. It was hoped that a vaccine would be more targeted but it seems effectiveness fades there also.

> It's almost like the existence of vaccines places evolutionary pressure on a mutating virus.

That has nothing to do with it.

Delta isn't selecting for immune escape, it is just selecting for higher transmissibility. It has outcompeted other immune escape variants.

We aren't into the phase of the pandemic where immune escape becomes important yet.

are you unconcerned by the trend? whats to say the vaccine efficacy won't decline further?

people are going about their normal routines assuming they're safe now, when in reality almost 2 years later there's still no clear path to universal lasting immunity.

It seems HN is quite eager to upvote vaccine skepticism of all kinds. It could provide quite the distorted view of reality if I were to trust HN karma over the near-universal medical scientific consensus (FDA approving vaccines for 5-11 year olds with a universal vote). I wouldn’t be surprised if HN starts advocating for ivermectin soon.

Approving vaccines for children is nowhere near being a near-universal medical scientific consensus. Far from it. Lots of people in medicine think that's clearly insane. See the testimony of Peter Doshi to the Senate recently for an example.

> Lots of people in medicine think that's clearly insane.

But not the people who matter. The FDA panel was unanimous. Stop listening to fringe voices in fields you aren’t an expert in. Peter Doshi was invited by Republicans to sow FUD. He doesn’t think the vaccines are saving lives.

The people who matter are there because they purged any rational people a long time ago. The UK JVCI has gone through multiple rounds of purges by now. Government health agencies have no credibility as neutral bodies by now, that's long shot.

Peter Doshi is a doctor and editor of a prestigious medical journal - the fact you consider him a "fringe voice" shows just how far off the reservation, and just how dangerous, views like yours have become.

well, there's always reddit if enjoy the company of intellectual majority.

Ok.

> The vaccine isn't 100% effective in stopping transmission? Or stopping you catching the disease? Or dying? Each of these becomes some pseudo-gotcha moment that leads some down an invermectin-taking path with Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan as the pied piper.

What saddens me the most is that when I got my first jab (european country) I was given a leaflet clearly stating that a) the vaccine works by giving your immune system a workout to get it better prepared to fight the infection, b) the vaccine is not a silver bullet in stopping you from contracting and spreading the disease, c) even with the vaccine we need to continue respecting basic health and safety precautions like wearing masks and social distancing.

The message was clear: the vaccine significantly mitigated the impact of the pandemic, such as the need for lockouts, but the problem doesn't go away.

Consequently, where I am we're seeing vaccination rates close to 80% and pretty much everything went to normal. The infection rates are increasing slightly right now, but it's a far cry from the shitshow that we've endured around the spring of 2020.

This is really concerning be because it seems the world already forgot that this first batch of vaccines were nothing more than an emergency stopgap solution to buy the world some time until it figures out how to put a stop to it. Even though we're no longer seeing emergency response teams piling up dead bodies in makeshift tents, the root problem is still there, completely unaddressed.

> it seems the world already forgot that this first batch of vaccines were nothing more than an emergency stopgap solution to buy the world some time until it figures out how to put a stop to it

The world gave up. Didn’t you? In many countries vaccines have been fully available for 6+ months and a significant portion of the population still won’t take them. COVID will never be solved because of people who believe Bill Gates put microchips in their medicine.

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