You cannot make this virus extinct. These vaccines do not accomplish this goal, the end.
And I say that as someone vaccinated.
> I agree that everybody should get vaccinated. Let's make this virus extinct.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/health/covid-deer-animals/ind...
You going to vaccinate all the animals too?
Or just dogmatically stick to the "unvaccinated people are selfish" because it best fits your political world view - damn the science?
Want to make this virus irrelevant? If Omicron is as mild as the doctors in South Africa are reporting then here is our path to herd immunity. Which is going to happen no matter what governments fuss and fume about. Even New Zealand finally gave up on their ridiculous quarantine strategy.
A) let’s all get a couple of shots to reduce our risk of death, serious illness, and make it less likely that other people get sick, not to mention making it less likely that new variants will emerge by making transmission harder
or
B) let’s have no vaccinations and let the virus sort it out, like we did with, say, the 1918 flu? Or polio, measles, or smallpox?
or
C) let people get vaccinated or not, it’s their business, but putting societal pressure on them is overbearing and eventually pointless
That of those options we should choose either B or C? Because B is how we dealt with illnesses until we had vaccinations to make them harder to get and less deadly. Then we started…vaccinating people. And now measles is still a thing, but no one worries about it, except that cases are going up because people aren’t getting vaccinated. So B seems like a bad plan, because we tried that and it sucked, and then we did A with measles and things got a lot better.
C is certainly a lot more personal liberty-oriented, which I get the appeal of, but society is fundamentally about giving up some amount of individual liberty in exchange for shared and communal benefits. C is actually what is happening in some places with measles vaccinations, where individuals say, “I don’t need to be vaccinated because herd immunity will save me”, which not only means that (despite claiming personal liberty) those people are relying on the vaccinated people to protect them, but that they’re willing to put others at risk (because vaccines aren’t perfect) in exchange for their individual liberty. This seems like C is a pretty raw deal for the liberty and rights of the people who would rather not get infected by, say, measles. Or Covid.
B and C both seem like bad plans. A seems pretty good, but I realize you’re not going to be convinced of that. B is pretty indefensible, I don’t think anyone would argue we should just let Covid run through the world and kill millions and millions more people. Or maybe you do, I don’t know. Seems bad.
But with C, the only way you can argue it’s not selfish to look after your own preferences is if you believe that the outcomes of option A, B, and C are the same. That it doesn’t matter - the same amount of people will die, and the same amount of people will get infected, and the same amount of people will permanently lose their sense of taste or smell, and the same amount of people will end up in the hospital. That fundamentally the outcomes of all three scenarios are identical. But there’s no way that’s the case, right? It just doesn’t make sense.
So if there IS a difference, then A is everyone doing as much as reasonably possible to make things better, B is everyone giving up and accepting whatever happens, and C is valuing your interests above the opportunity to help others. That’s the definition of selfishness.
> ...
> and C is valuing your interests above the opportunity to help others. That’s the definition of selfishness.
This, I think, highlights the fundamental blind spot in reasoning of many who pushes the vax or other measures to 100% "uptake". What do the people think will happen once somebody submits to the pressure? Masked and vaxed and fine and dandy? Quite the opposite, I believe. The resistance in the remaining population is not at the rational level, it is very visceral, primal, fight-or-flight feeling. Even though, I think, it was largely provoked by the initial torrent of equally irrational measures, it is not something that is going to change. Submitting to pressure doesn't mean forgetting or forgiving. The solid foundation is being laid for a very broken society for a generation to come. The internal trust in society is as shaken as never before. Society with 5-10% of people broken, bitter and vengeful is not healthy. The fallout is going to be very bad, in unexpected way. Cruel and unusual.
Sure, you may say it is selfishness. It is not rational selfishness though. As I said, it is a visceral reaction which is very hard to explain, to put into words, therefore all you hear is "we don't want it". It is sort of a mental condition, and pushing through to the end won't cure that condition, only make it worse. Such condition is nothing to be proud of, but punitive correctional measures aren't known to work against diseases, mental included. Even criminals are not prosecuted if suspected to be in acute mental condition.
I would hope the nature of the resistance is properly recognised and not vilified. After all, we've complied with all the past vaccine "soft-mandates" for our children and ourselves, but always thought that generous exemption provisions were very good! Letting people make choices without pushing them into the corner is beneficial for society. I always thought the society's capacity for compassion was bigger than my own. Unfortunately, it is not what transpired.
At this moment I'd be ok with increased insurance premiums, testing regime for travel and high-risk settings, tax surcharge or even mandatory community service as alternative to vax. Something we can rationally discuss. "Bodily autonomy" - face masks included - is simply not something I can engage with rationally.
But what is the end game?
The argument that you make is odd, though, which seems to be that people have been so pushed around by these horrible, unreasonable asks that they have a “visceral fight-or-flight” response and hence have a “mental condition” that prevents them from adapting - and not accepting that demonstrates a lack of compassion.
That argument, for what it’s worth, has been trotted out to justify everything from segregation, to fighting gay rights, to objecting to seat belts. Just because people don’t like something they find objectionable doesn’t make them irrational. Saying they are robs them of their agency as humans, and also conveniently obviates them of their responsibility to their community.
“But what is the end game?”
To get to where almost everyone is vaccinated, which is where we are with measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, typhoid, etc. It’s not that complicated.
“ I always thought the society's capacity for compassion was bigger than my own.”
Man, me too. If you had asked me in 2019 if there would be a controversy about adding one more vaccination to the roster of vaccines we give almost everyone (and invest billions in encouraging and distributing), I would have said, “no way - in most of the world, most people see vaccines as something that’s important to help themselves and their community “. In 1947 there was a smallpox outbreak in NYC and millions of people showed up to get vaccinated because it was the right thing to do to protect their community. Their compassion was for others.
To be clear, I don’t think people who don’t want to get vaccinated are monsters or evil. They don’t need to be vilified. No, they’re more in the realm of the person in the community who once in a while has a drink too many and drives home when they shouldnt - probably nothing bad will happen, but it shows a real lack of personal responsibility for their impact on others.
> That argument, for what it’s worth, has been trotted out to justify everything ...
It may be a tired argument, but it doesn't make it false. Sometimes people really do have deep convictions they cannot be rationalized from. Looks like I do, and I'm not happy about it. Only it was never a problem before covid. I was brought up in the spirit of never asking for help or claiming any deficiency until you absolutely, positively, completely unable to handle the situation on your own. Also you must be sure that who you ask is able and willing to provide such help. I thought society progressed enough to tolerate conscientious objection of sorts. Turns out I was wrong. I struggled to keep up and cried for help, first time in my life - and received a good lesson to never ask for compassion again.
> Personal choices have impacts.
They certainly do. I just disagree that it is purely personal. The other side absolves itself from any consequences of the choice pushed upon individual, while being very happy to trump on them if the "natural" impact of "inferior" choice is not bad enough.
> people have been so pushed around by these horrible, unreasonable asks
I haven't said that. Some may very well be reasonable, but it is very hard to see in the pile of punitive-only measures.
Well, at least I have tried to explain how some people, myself included, see and feel in the situation. I'm getting more hints of my inability to communicate this, and nobody in a position to influence the measures gives any consideration to it. This is why I stand with my belief that the side-effect of "where almost everyone is vaccinated" will be not what these people are expecting, in a cruel and unusual way.
Aka unreasonable. Which sort of makes the point. But also - it’s tough for me to be civil when your argument is, “why isn’t anyone taking my feelings into account?”, when that has literally never been the standard for anything related to a common good. I don’t care how you feel about being allowed to drive drunk, because it’s dangerous to others. I don’t care if you don’t want to allow minorities to live in your neighborhood, they have the right to live wherever they want. And I don’t care if you don’t want to get one more vaccination on top of the 5+ we require for work and/or school, it is part of participating in a functional society.
If no one hears you “crying out for help”, think of how the people whose lives have been affected by this disease feel, knowing that there are people who COULD be helping but don’t want to.
My point is not that anyone should care how I feel, in particular. I only give it out here, on a semi-anonymous forum, never IRL.
The point is, quite the sizeable proportion of people feel like that, and it is a pain for them which they won't forget or forgive, even if they choose to submit to demands. In fact, many voluntarily vaccinated people feel exactly the same, for them cooperation with any future government initiatives is out of question now. It doesn't invalidate the pain of those catching or dying from the disease, it just another pain in it's own right.
"Common good" cannot be built on pain, history is littered with unsuccessful attempts. Governments all around the world are choosing to ignore this (proving them incompetent) for some reason, and in doing so they may find themselves very unpleasantly surprised. Unless this is the end game they are looking for (proving them evil), but that would be too much of a conspiracy to suggest.
Also smoking is a terrible example - we tax cigarettes highly to discourage smoking because it’s a drag on our medical system. We ban the act of smoking in a wide variety of locations because it has an impact on other peoples health. Some buildings even disallow people to smoke in their private homes, and some cities disallow smoking in offices. We put restrictions on almost every aspect of smoking because it doesn’t only affect the smoker.
Smoking sections in restaurants have all but disappeared, taxes have increased on cigarettes dramatically, warning labels have been placed on boxes/cartons, and so on.
The process has been to try and remove second-hand smoke from those areas where it might affect non-smokers. Traveling abroad to China and Hong Kong a couple years ago it was almost unbearable dealing with people smoking everywhere.
Similar to how as a non-smoker my health risk is non-negligible being exposed to second-hand smoke, so too is my health at risk by unvaccinated individuals running around with higher viral loads increasing the chance and rate of breakthrough infections, and also increased risk of future mutations that could potentially bring about another pandemic.
Very clearly with smoking we've been moving towards a system where you can make whatever health choices you want as long as you aren't impacting the health of others - why should it be any different for vaccines of any kind?
I think we have long established that just me existing is not something people are willing to tolerate. Hell, just my presence impacts the life of others; sometimes even in a negative way. There is even a system to deal with issues like that. It is called civil law.
But why do we stop at smoking? Why aren't we going after farts and methane. After all, did you know that methane gas poisoning can cause death? Surely, if we researched it a little more, we would maybe find out that it causes cancer of something.
No smoking in schools, no smoking in restaurants, no smoking in workplaces, no smoking in public buildings.
Is that not similar to Germany disallowing unvaccinated (and not naturally immune) from non-essential indoor shopping/leisure activities? Or requiring testing for employees who are not vaccinated/naturally immune?
Not if they saturate the health system and you need it for something else.
Also, obesity "epidemic" is slow, therefore easy to manage, compared to the covid epidemic that is governed by power laws.
Finally, there is no vaccine against obesity.
And if many countries can mandate curfews, lockdowns, mandatory quarantenes etc., why not ban sugary foods, sugary drinks, fast food, etc.?
I mean.. I'm against any sort of bans, but generally, more people die from being fat than from covid itself.... if every life matters, why no theirs?
I don’t think any expert nor any public health department is working with the goal of eradication in mind. So we should acknowledge the fact that these vaccines will probably not eradicate COVID. We will have people getting sick from COVID and we will have more COVID variants for the foreseeable future. Even after most people have been thoroughly vaccinated. And given the slow global spread of vaccines we will also probably see more lockdown measures to slow the spread of the virus beyond the current vaccine capabilities.
Now that said, remember that with the vaccines:
> we can make the virus largely irrelevant in terms of its impact on peoples lives. We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals. We can make it harder for new, more dangerous, variants to arise.
I believe I speak for many when I say, "I have no idea what the experts' have in mind" (and that's not a good thing).
So they're trying hard to get everyone vaccinated - a noble goal, perhaps, as our current roster of vaccines diminish symptoms and greatly reduce hospitalization and fatality rates. But..."Stop the spread, get vaccinated"...what? Like the parent said, all of the currently-approved intramuscular Covid-19 vaccines have proven to have a negligible effect on transmission rate.
Early on, experts probably made an educated guess or wish that these vaccines would be sterilizing and started information campaigns on this premise. When this turned out to be not true, their "Stop the spread, get vaccinated" became "You unvaccinated are the problem, you are holding us back, and you will be locked down immediately". Rather than address their mistake, rather than open up transparently, they doubled down on the lie. Not a good way to build trust.
Multiple studies show that vaccinated people have lower transmission than unvaccinated.
> In studies conducted before the emergence of the Delta variant, data from multiple studies in different countries suggested that people vaccinated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines who develop COVID-19 generally have a lower viral load than unvaccinated people.(157, 165-169) This observation may indicate reduced transmissibility, as viral load has been identified as a key driver of transmission.(170) Studies from multiple countries found significantly reduced likelihood of transmission to household contacts from people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were previously vaccinated for COVID-19.(171-176) For the Delta variant, early data indicate vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with Delta have similar levels of viral RNA and culturable virus detected, indicating that some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 may be able to transmit the virus to others.(163, 164, 177-180) However, other studies have shown a more rapid decline in viral RNA and culturable virus in fully vaccinated people (96, 177, 180-182). One study observed that Delta infection in fully vaccinated persons was associated with significantly less transmission to contacts than persons who were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.(181) Together, these studies suggest that vaccinated people who become infected with Delta have potential to be less infectious than infected unvaccinated people.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95565-8
We could all dance the Darth Vader after 20 years of Covid even with vaccination. But we certainly will without.
Er... what now?
Vaccines do help with that, tremendously.
Reminds me of 2 weeks to flatten the curve. Yet here we are. Why all the sudden are we at risk of clogging the healthcare system with some areas hitting 70%+ adult vaccination rates? Germany already has given out 124,401,062 doses of the vaccine. All I ever see is the goalposts being moved with this stuff.
I have taken the vaccine, but I am hesitant about mandates and vaccine passports.
These are estimates. They are sometimes (often!) wrong. Sometimes they're wrong because the problem was underestimated. Sometimes they are wrong for political reasons.
Yes, "flattening the curve" took more than 2 weeks. Big deal. Doing so did absolutely reduce pressure on ICUs and saved many lives. And hell, if everyone had actually followed all the mandates and guidelines at the time, maybe it would have only taken two weeks. But people don't, and it's always hard to gauge how many people will refuse to cooperate, and in what ways, and exactly what effect that will have.
The reason the goalposts are moving is because this isn't a well-defined game with strictly-set rules. The virus doesn't care about our rules or projections. If it mutates, and the new variant does better against our vaccines, then... yes, the goalposts will move. Our utter failure to get high vaccination rates in poorer countries is likely a big cause of the new variants. It's all well and good to be sitting in a highly-vaccinated city in the first world, but all it takes is one person to fly in from somewhere with a new variant, and you're hosed.
If we look at the numbers for Germany they're now getting 60 thousand cases per day, which is three times more than any previous period.
More cases mean more people in hospitals. The situation was bad last winter, it can get worse fast. Now, of course many are vaccinated, so that drops the likelihood of hospitalization, but unfortunately for them 30% of people are still unvaccinated. So I can understand why they're nervous.
The thing about the vaccine also is that the effects drop with time unfortunately, so people need boosters. I've already gotten 3 shots and expect there will be more.
If we aren't to keep the world in lockdown, we need people to be out and about, but vaccinated, so this can truly be treated like a few bad flu years in a row.
Until the virus hopefully mutates towards a less severe thing and we can stop talking about it.
The procedure is benign. Describing it as irreversible is technically true but practically it's scaremongering.
And it's for the sake of the people around you. Your society. So they don't die waiting for their healthcare services to unclog. Edit: And it's also obviously for the sake of the person getting vaccinated, let's not forget that :)
>...fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts. Host–virus interactions early in infection may shape the entire viral trajectory.
Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
>Although vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe disease and deaths from COVID-19, our findings suggest that vaccination is not sufficient to prevent transmission of the delta variant in household settings with prolonged exposures.
Which is what we're talking about here, preventing serious cases.
>...fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts. Host–virus interactions early in infection may shape the entire viral trajectory.
Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
That benefit is hardly "at best". That's a fantastic intermediate step. Why is it decried as horrible just because it's not the final solution to the problem?
From listening to nurses and doctors, I get the impression that most people in hospitals with Covid-issues lately are vaccinated; and I trust real people with real experiences over authorities with agendas.
I read some statistics over that the other day. It is correct when looking only at hospital patients.
The explanation is that most who need hospital care come from a risk group. And risk groups are fully vaccinated by over 90% (here). So you end up with high absolute numbers of vaccinated hospital patients.
If you look at a somewhat comparable group of people, chances to need hospital care are manyfold for the unvaccinated. It's true for higher risk groups and for lower risk groups.
Vaccinations are not perfect protection against anything, but they reduce risk by a high factor.
Isn't that the excuse people use to harass anyone who doesn't feel like being experimented on for profit?
The MRNAs are non-sterilizing, as are many vaccines. They may reduce symptoms, reduce infections, and reduce transmission, but they are not considered a sterilizing vaccine.
Secondly, coronaviruses mutate much faster than smallpox, and have other hard to deal with stuff like asymptomatic transmission.
The only diseases we ever eradicated were polio and smallpox. I think we got rid of the guinea worm too. Out of all the many many diseases we have fought over the years.
[0]https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-dev...
The vaccines we have are non-sterilizing - and my understanding is that the reason is mostly because we needed at least something very quickly and sterilizing vaccines for respiratory virus are harder to research. It is not inherent property of the technology as far as I know.
Sterilizing vaccines for COVID seem to be theoretically possible. "Natural" infection generates stronger immune response on mucus membranes as well as deep inside the body and that provides higher protection against infection. There's no reason why that wouldn't be possible to replicate using a vaccine. But nobody succeeded at making one yet, so we'll have to see if it's practical.
Not all viruses are the same, and neither are all vaccines.
If you believe most virologists the only realistic scenario is that the virus becomes endemic, similar to most flu strains or other human corona viruses (which makes vaccination even more important!).
If you get infected with COVID there are far more options than "Sit around with a thumb up your ass until you have to be hospitalized and put on a ventilator".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAHi3lX3oGM
Every person spreading the "horse dewormer" nonsense should be charged with manslaughter. The politicization of this whole thing is beyond a fiasco.
Give everyone 2 months of salary, and 2 months of food. Nationalize food production for a month, give everyone shelf stable terrible food, the same crap that the majority of the anti-vaxxers have been hoarding for decades.
Its like a pretend apocalypse. They should LOVE it.
And large reservoirs of COVID would remain in wild animals, and other countries, and groups (like the elites & their children, or remote communities) that can't practically be forced to comply.
A perfect lockdown would stop a human-only pandemic immediately by stopping all transmission.
Unfortunately, this virus infect other animals as well. Good luck locking them down.
>>> Give everyone 2 months of salary, and 2 months of food. Nationalize food production for a month, give everyone shelf stable terrible food, the same crap that the majority of the anti-vaxxers have been hoarding for decades.
> Utter insanity. Who told you a "real" lockdown would stop the virus? Where did you get this "fact" from?
It stands to reason. An extreme lockdown as described will cause a virus to go extinct provided: 1) animal reservoirs are insignificant, 2) the immune system can clear the virus within the lockdown time, and 3) people actually comply.
Exceptions to 2 & 3 can likely be dealt if the lockdown is paired with and intensive testing and contact tracing program.
All of these things are likely true, because China and other countries have actually been successful at maintaining a Covid-zero policy (at great cost).
Let's just switch to Universal Basic Income and enforce total lockdown to kill COVID and then to save the environment!
Enough of those pesky tourists as well with their polluting jets!
\s because people may, sadly, took it seriously
The only way to reliably stop this from being an ongoing pandemic is measures that reduce the R-value below 1 in a long-term manner, like mass vaccinations.
The mortality under 70 is pretty low.
https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...