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Comment by bananapear | Hacker News Reader

Given that the currently available vaccines are all non-sterilising (do not prevent infection and transmission), it is difficult to see this as a measure aimed at controlling transmission.

It is terrifying to me that a government is confining healthy people to their homes for refusing a treatment that they (rightly or wrongly) believe is not in their best interests.

Of course, recorded cases are likely to fall naturally at some point. If the fall is coincident with the introduction of this rule, we can expect the same across the West.

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> not been double-jabbed will only be allowed to leave their homes for work, school, exercise and buying essential supplies

This makes absolutely no sense. The most terrifying is people actually defending and promoting this kind of orwellian and irrational measures.

Please stop spreading misinformation.

Vaccines prevent infection, as evidenced by the drastically lower COVID case numbers in the vaccinated. You can’t spread it if you don’t have it. If you do contract it, you are less infectious.

This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available.

I'll believe that the vaccine prevents spreading COVID as soon as mask mandates stop applying to vaccinated people.

Perhaps the vaccinated won't be required to wear a second mask?

They did here a month or two ago. They now apply only in areas where vaccinated and unvaccinated people mingle and enforcement would be too much bother.

That's not the case here. I've gone to places where everyone has had to show their vaccine card at the door, but we still had to wear masks inside.

I don't think the "Please stop spreading misinformation." boilerplate is necessarily always hostile and provocative.

In situations where the comment is only aimed at correcting a factual mistake, for example, it can be okay, if still bad style.

It always feels as if it prematurely implies evil intention, which is a move that does not belong in any intellectually honest conversation, neither casual nor scientific.

I don't think the boilerplate should be used in comments that then continue with highly questionable, very radical statements. Especially if heterodox opinions are stated as if they were well established positions.

For example: "This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available."

The idea that conditional lockdowns are identical to non-conditional lockdowns from legal, medical or political perspective is not just wrong, but also unnecessarily radical. The radicalism just makes the wrongness trivial to spot.

The position that actually justifies conditional lock-downs (like the new Austrian policy) is one where the discriminatory treatment is acknowledged and justified, not simply denied.

...which should not surprise anyone who somewhat followed the discourse on the issue.

I know that's not as attractive as just denying the existence of differences between two obviously different policies.

Technically, lockdowns before vaccines were available were also lockdowns only for unvaccinated people. There just weren't any vaccinated ones.

Pedantry, I know, but this is HN.

Naming a difference is not an argument in favour of sameness.

The availability of a vaccine is one of the several ways in which the current Austrian policy is different from earlier lockdowns.

This alone already has direct consequences for the political justification of the policy: In the article OP linked they specifically name vaccination nudges as one of the effects they expect from their conditional lockdown. Which is something that would not have made sense in the absence of vaccines.

Pedantry can have it's upside though, so I'm not complaining! :)

> Vaccines prevent infection, as evidenced by the drastically lower COVID case numbers in the vaccinated.

Vaccines suppress symptoms, which may result in infected people being unaware they are infected or transmitting to others. That's why the CDC recommends (as of October 15) that vaccinated people be tested after exposure, since lack of symptoms != lack of infection, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...

> Based on evolving evidence, CDC recommends fully vaccinated people get tested 5-7 days after close contact with a person with suspected or confirmed COVID-19.

From the first sentence of the intro paragraph of your link:

"COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing infection."

Quite, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE

What do you think this video proves?

It's a record of historical claims of effectiveness, posted in response to a claim of effectiveness.

The problem with this “record” is that people may come to incorrect conclusions from the way the information is presented.

Do these headlines represent revisions to the initial effectiveness? Or do they represent the waning effectiveness over time? What is the point of having Fauci in the video?

As with the single sentence to which the video was posted in response, headline interpretation requires further reading.

There’s the problem right there. No conclusions should be drawn from watching that YouTube video, yet it has been created specifically to fool people who will do no further reading. The creator doesn’t care of course. YouTube doesn’t care either.

Covid vaccines cannot 100% prevent infection like polio vaccine. There are papers that talked about vaccinated people with higher load virus for the initial infection. Given vaccinated people tends to display even less symptoms and more asymptomatic, they are able to spread more because more "infectious". If one is severely down with Covid, one will be confine at home or hospital. Hence the OP claims of more infections is correct and it is not spreading misinformation. This is why now healthcare professionals have opt not to use the word "herd immunity" confer by vaccines. Ironically you are actually more inline with spreading misinformation by not clarifying the vaccinated can still be infected and move around way more than severely unvaccinated people. Having say this, I am pro vaccinations. It is still the right and responsibility thing to do.

If the vaccine would protect against transmission in any way, shouldn't I see a less steep flank when a new wave hits and cases are increasing? I have compared graphs with the same axis configuration and it looks like there is no difference at all. The amplitude of that latest wave is even higher in my country than when people were unvaccinated. Cannot control for factors like behavior. Lockdown rules were almost the same, although I think people take current rules far less serious. If you constantly are having an emergency, it isn't an emergency anymore...

No, the goal is to reduce load on the healthcare system. It's well known that the Covid vaccines keep people out of hospital. There's no reason that people should interfere with other people receiving urgently needed medical treatment.

How about simply turning away the unvaccinated from hospitals for Covid care? Is that less or more humane than holding them under house arrest?

PS: I think arguments justifying such mandates for avoiding overwhelming of hospitals will further enrage anyone who was already against universal healthcare because it becomes yet another avenue for govt/bureaucratic manipulation of people's lives.

That's a political impossibility. Besides - whom to reprioritize? Pick the sickest person, the latest arrival, or what?

There was a case not too long ago in Alabama where a person suffered a heart attack and died because in three dozen hospitals no intensive care bed could be found, so the concern isn't even theoretical.

In the US, that would result in severe disparate impact on non-Asian minorities, because Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are currently the least-vaccinated groups.

Not really politically viable until these numbers equalize.

It isn't universal healthcare if you exclude anyone for any reason. It still can be public healthcare with alternatives for private insurance schemes. It would be most unwise to kill universal healthcare because of the threat or costs Covid poses.

Like many things in life, absolute universal healthcare is impossible. At limit it implies life without death and youth without aging. The utopian ideal must contend with the reality that resources are finite and accept tradeoffs.

You have set boundaries for the quality of healthcare, but it isn't utopian to not set any conditions for eligibility of health care. That are two different topics.

In that case, why not just say that unvaccinated people at the hospital because they have COVID will be deprioritized, and dispense with all of the other mandates and stuff with the vaccine?

You jump to random conclusions and "knowingly??" do not outline the whole picture.

What is the estimate of the authoritarian rules of increasing mortality? E.g. by a war? By racial cleaning, by collapse of social structures?

You spread half information and consequently fake. The legislation is there for a reason and you throw it away. You just took a decision for the uncaccinated people by eliminating their freedom. They never did it to you.

In France, during the whole year 2020, people were told that the hospital infrastructure was overloaded because of COVID.

Actually, the final report shows that COVID patients represented 2% (!!!) of the total hospitalized... And only 5% (!?!?) of what they call "critical care"...

This report from the ATIH (Official agency) was published in october 2021.

The report: https://www.atih.sante.fr/sites/default/files/public/content...

From LCP (a kind of French C-SPAN): https://twitter.com/LCP/status/1458163736175386624

Well no one cares about spread to vaccinated people. No one truly cares about spread except as it affects the health care system. If everyone was vaccinated, all cases would be mild and life could go on as normal. But unvaccinated people are filling hospitals causing disruption to the healthcare system and that effect snowballs.

Then covid medicine would certainly be a more liberal way to go towards; have a remedy available if need be, without being pushed to require vaccines from citizens.

And that'll be great when it's widely available.

How do you know that? If you are reading that from MS news, and if you are just repeating a statement without actual numbers, you are spreading propaganda of those who are interested in promoting the vaccines (aka Big Pharma and the sponsored media). As shown in this thread , IC hospital occupancy was low in France, and I know it was the same in the Netherlands. The current occupancy numbers of vaccinated vs unvaccinated are conveniently undisclosed by the Dutch government.

Dunno, recent stats from my country (Canada) shows that during our last wave, about 90% of our hospital occupancy was unvaccinated people despite them being about 20% of the population.

Perhaps you mean "90% of covid hospitalizations", which is different than "90% of hospitalizations". I've been checking the jhu pages for various US states, never seen covid hospitalization rates above 10-20% and covid ICU utilization rate above 30%.

Right now, using the Rt map from https://covidestim.org, looks like Indiana & Ohio are in the middle of a wave. Covid hospital bed utilization: IN 10%, OH 15%. Covid ICU utilization: IN 20%, OH 20%.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/indiana

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/ohio

Yes, 90% of Covid hospitalizations. According to the stats, Covid isn't dangerous at all to the vaccinated if you're < 80 yrs old.

I think in a few months we experts can look at this winter cases around the globe and compare the differences between the vaccination rates and other measures and find some conclusions.

So, it's apparently to protect the hospitals. While I've no idea of the situation in Austria, in most Western European countries ICU occupancy is largely unvaccinated people and severely immunosuppressed people.

So once you're close to ICU capacity you have three options: - Ignore it, likely leading to a lot of deaths. - Full lockdown - Targeted lockdown of the most vulnerable population (similar to 'cocooning' of elderly in the early stages)

Obviously, none of these are great options, but they're the choices a number of places are now facing.

ICUs are a scarce bonus, not an entitlement. We are talking denying basic human rights to a large segment of healthy people on the off chance that a tiny percent of them will end up populating the tiny number of ICUs available in the country at some point in the future. What's next: obese people, people engaging in sexual promiscuity, smokers, babies with congenital malformations or simply old people? All of these populations have a higher statistical chance to occupy an ICU bed, so we should just ban them from society? WTaF?

> or simply old people?

So, in the early stages of the pandemic, a number of countries did exactly that. Which was, arguably, a lot more unfair; over 80s can't take a de-oldening vaccine.

Ultimately, _if_, and only if, the ICU numbers dictate either locking down the whole population or locking down that fraction of the population who have voluntarily decided to be the main contributors to ICU load... well, it's not a _great_ choice to have to make, certainly, but there's something to be said for locking down fewer people, if that is the choice.

Sorry, does not compute. Feel free to do whatever triage you want for the scarce ICU resource. Banning large numbers healthy people form society, of which the vast majority (>99%) will never need an ICU, is something else entirely.

It’s a false dichotomy to claim that they’re non-sterilising. They’re partially sterilising, at to at least 50% effectiveness even after waning. With boosters, it seems that returns to 90%+.

Yeah, the other thing is, sterilising vaccines are possible, they are just harder to research so the initial target for pretty much every vaccine was to reduce hospotalizations and deaths.

I don't know if sterilising vaccins are being researched now though. I heard something about possible nose-spray vaccine that would both improve this and make applications easier. Maybe well see that in near future.

This is not true, at all. The current crop of vaccines are roughly 95% non-sterilizing.

It IS true that they reduce net transmission, but the literature is clear that the reason is almost exclusively due to how they shorten the duration of carrying. The nasal viral load is virtually identical. The primary factor is how long you're carrying that load for (approximately 11 days vs 8 days from what I can tell from pubmed et al).

Does vaccination help the herd? Sure, but it's pretty limited. The reality is that vaccination mostly protects YOU - it keeps the infection in the top layer of the respiratory epithelium, ensures to a great degree that you won't be hospitalized for deeper tissue damage.

Bearing in mind that transmission effectiveness data is only just becoming available from multiple countries, it certainly isn't showing that duration of carrying is the only factor.

Dutch data, for instance, has recently shown substantial reductions in transmission within households, locations where a three day difference in the duration of symptoms is unlikely to have had a major impact. [0]

[0]https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v...

Society forcing people to behave in a certain way is a fundamental aspect of any and all civilizations. At certain points, you rights have to give way for the collective good, especially when people's lives are at stake.

"Social bullying has happened before, so accept it now, as it's for a good cause" is not the best of arguments. Fundamental rights and liberties are fundamental for a reason.

I was pro-lockdown when they first started, but the mandates coming out now don't really make any sense. It seems like politicians are just imposing new restrictions because they need to be seen doing something.

In my (EU) country you need to be vaccinated to go into most shops, restaurants, bars, and beauty services. However you can freely go to your office and not wear a mask. Even the people working in places where as a customer you need to be vaccinated, do not themselves need to be vaccinated.

I'm fully vaccinated, but I have friends who are not. The people who do not want to be vaccinated have their reasons, and I doubt these restrictions which cause mild inconveniences at best (compared to lockdowns like last winter, where some stores were closed for 3 month and you couldn't leave your city) are really going to make them change their mind. If they really want everyone to be vaccinated, they should just come out and say that, then work to get it passed into law.

>you rights have to give way for the collective good, especially when people's lives are at stake

But when discussions over the degree to which measures actually benefit the collective good are suppressed, both top down (tech censorship) and bottom up (downvotes and social shaming), you are moving into the territory of tyranny/oppression.

> people to behave in a certain way

This isn't about behavior, unless you mean blindly following authority (in which case those civilizations had huge downsides). This is about a medical treatment for a disease that is objectively not a civilization-ending threat, by any measure.

The problem is forcing people to take a specific medical treatment (it's not about immunity from the virus, it's about the specific treatment ONLY), and using fear as a justification to control society.

What you're calling "collective good" is exactly how past atrocities have happened. Anytime there has been genocide or millions of people getting slaughtered, it's because one side decided it was for the collective good. It's a cliche argument that can go both ways and says nothing about the actual reasons for implementing force across a society.

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