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Comment by peteradio | Hacker News Reader

If you would have said 1 year ago, everyone will need this vaccine to reduce R below 1 you would have been laughed out of the room. What kind of shitty vaccine requires literally everyone to get it? Now good thing that wasn't the approach. Instead we said, "these vaccines kick ass" and walked that line back every day to buy compliance one person at a time. Good look. Good luck. Not sure how people can live with the cognitive dissonance of being obviously lied to "for the greater good".

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Changing data and changing virus variants doesn't mean you were "obviously lied to".

A bias towards very positive claims in the presence of little data does, though. All of our expectations around covid would have benefitted from the health agencies being capable of communicating what they know for certain and what they don’t, but unfortunately they decided to make strong claims in the hopes of getting strong compliance.

To a degree, but I've also found that people love to ignore caveats that are presented, or never look at more than the headline version. The amount of times you hear "but risk X is never mentioned" when it actually is clearly addressed in the source statements or "but the data shows Y" but it comes with a list of reasons why it's limited is mindboggling. (and to be fair, lots of media sucks at putting that stuff in context too)

Alternatively, lots of shouting because health authorities are make sooo confusing statements and refuse to give 100% clear cut answers.

Coronaviruses have long been known to have this behavior.

Go on, laugh me out of the room, laugh whoever you want out of the room, the virus doesn't care how much or how little you laugh.

I'm not laughing at all. The politicians who brokered this steaming pile lied about its efficacy to get the foot in the door.

Several of the common diseases require more than 90% vaccine coverage to get herd immunity. Is there any particular reason why this vaccine shouldn't?

I've seen early estimates of less than that, but feh. An estimate from well before the vaccines are in production wasn't going to be accurate.

Gibraltar was 140%+ vaccinated and that wasn't enough to save Christmas there.

https://news.yahoo.com/gibraltar-cancels-official-christmas-...

I thought we already knew that two shots give you 6 months of immunity, assuming people with boosters are the 39.5%, wouldn't the 60.5% be just as susceptible

Gibraltar's economy is tourism- and travel-centric. Just using the population of people who live there full-time doesn't capture anything about the disease spread or vaccinations with temporary visitors (upwards of five million per year).

The argument is that herd immunity for covid cannot be attained via vaccines. Not even 100% vaccination.

The comparison with measles, another contagious airborne disease, is instructive. The threshold for herd immunity is estimated at 94%. This is possible because the vaccine effectiveness against infection is also 93-97%. Unfortunately covid vaccines have waning effectiveness against infection, estimated at about 50% after 6 months, and possibly waning even further.

"Five reasons why COVID herd immunity is probably impossible"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2

"For example, the measles is a highly contagious illness. It's estimated that 94% of the population must be immune to interrupt the chain of transmission."

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

"One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella. Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps."

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html

"Effectiveness against infections declined from 88% (95% CI 86–89) during the first month after full vaccination to 47% (43–51) after 5 months."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

1 year ago, we thought that people would actually get vaccinated at a reasonable rate, instead of dragging their feet long enough for multiple more-infectious variants to appear.

1 year ago, the medical establishment was saying that it's impossible to develop a vaccine for a new virus in just a year, so don't even think about seeing a vaccine anytime soon... leading people with halfway-decent memories scratching their heads about how the heck this vaccine was actually developed and getting really suspicious when it doesn't behave like a vaccine at all in that it doesn't prevent you from getting or spreading the disease. And has rare but serious side effects.

> how the heck this vaccine was actually developed

mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses have been in progress since the 70s. This just happens to be when they finally got to the point of being production-ready. It's a useful coincidence, but without it mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses would have been showing up in the near future anyway (at a slower rate without all the emergency COVID funding).

> doesn't behave like a vaccine at all

Sterilizing immunity isn't an inherent property of vaccines.

> And has rare but serious side effects.

All vaccines do that, and as with all widely-used vaccines the rate of side effects is much, much lower than the rate of side effects from the actual disease.

We were also told if we got the shot we would be done with it. Now we need boosters, potentially indefinitely.

Note how all of the variants which health authorities said just needed a reasonably high vaccine rate are now effectively eradicated. It is only the new 'delta' (and upcoming 'omicron') that remain, and these are known to have much lower vaccine efficacy.

What are you talking about?

The vaccines have shown to slow down infection rates and avoid many many hispitalisations and death.

So yes, getting vaxxed helps the graeter good.

Good luck to you getting a ICU bed now if you have an accident or a stroke or heart issues.

I assume you read the comment I'm responding advocating for 100% vaccine rates to drop transmission rates below R0 1. If politicians (aka "Science Advisors") claimed this was the requirement from the git go it would have been an obvious non-starter.

I'm afraid you may have misunderstood. I stated that R would be <1 if vaccination were at 100%, not that the threshold is between 99% and 100%.

The virus decides how much is needed, we don't.

>Good luck to you getting a ICU bed now if you have an accident or a stroke or heart issues.

They don't put covid patients in the same ward as other ICU beds for obvious reasons.

Where covid patients fill the capacity, there are no "non-covid" wards anymore, because no ICU turns a patient needing it now away to "reserve space" for some potential future patient.

>Where covid patients fill the capacity, there are no "non-covid" wards anymore

Is that happening anywhere now? I mean, got links? I'm generously curious. There's a lot of fear mongering going around.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/09/bogus-okl...

This has been going on for nearly two years and governments were unwilling or unable to increase capacity in any meaningful way? What a total failure of government / medical system if this is true. The Spanish Flu lasted 3 years, it's not like we don't have a fairly recent example of how long this would probably last.

I realized the wording wasn't good, so just to clarify: "fill the capacity" should be read as "fill up the remaining capacity", not "fill the entire capacity" (that's indeed quite unlikely, simply because of non-covid baseload that will be around). Point remains: a covid patient doesn't get turned away just because a potential car crash victim might need the bed later (and vice-versa), as far as I know there's no reserved non-covid spaces, if there's more covid patients more parts of the ICU get run under covid protocols.

Part of the problem with ICU capacity is that is has to be local: for many things, "an hours drive further away than normal" is annoying but solvable, if you need an ICU now it's a problem. Bottom-right here is a district-level map of Germany, showing free capacity: https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansich... (there's some arguing how precise that data actually is, in both directions - for starters its only updated once a day afaik). Plenty places where e.g. transporting a few people from a car crash gets challenging. There's also pretty drastic statements/protests from the emergency departments and people working there, so yes, this currently sadly is an issue in some regions and the threat of it becoming worse is what finally caused some things to happen (after way to long of German politics wanting to deal with anything but this, despite it being long-predicted by the health authorities - it's extremely frustrating because it's been kind of obvious for weeks that something will have to happen at some point, the earlier the better for everyone).

Something that would be interesting data-wise would be deaths during or waiting for transportation - one would expect an increase, but I'm not sure if there even is baseline data available, given rules around who is allowed to pronounce death and how it is recorded.

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