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Comment by eric_b | Hacker News Reader

At this point I assume it's clear to everyone that all humans will be exposed to COVID. Get your vaccine or don't, but one way or another your immune system will have to sort it out.

The biggest story of COVID that no one is talking about is the absolute failure at all levels (political, medical establishment, etc) to increase hospital capacity.

We are in year 2 of a global pandemic and, at least where I am, there has been a reduction in ICU staff, beds and hospital capacity more generally. Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen.

Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame.

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> Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen.

OR, we've filtered to the people that actually believe in medical science, ones that are willing to do what needs to be done to prevent the spread of contagious disease.

> Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame.

Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Your freedom ends where my nose begins.

Devils advocate: If these are people that work around sick people all the time, couldn't many of them have already contracted and defeated Covid before the vaccines were available? Doesn't that offer a decent level of immunity (something close to what the vaccine offers)? And don't those people already have a good understanding of how Covid affects them individually? It's hard to argue such people need vaccines or else they don't "believe in medical science".

I'm happy that you at least acknowledge that it's about belief.

Its going to affect how people view entering into the medical workforce when they effectively sign up for whatever the fuck medical experiments the government is pissing themselves about at the time.

What medical experiments are you referring to? RNA vaccines didn't happen overnight, billions were spent to accelerate clinical trials, millions have been vaccinated and we don't see much of secondary effects.

mRNA vaccines did basically happen overnight, yeah. As recently as 2017 they couldn't progress beyond animal trials because all mRNA based drugs became toxic after multiple doses. Better hope they nailed that problem, right?

As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain". The trial participants had to report adverse events using an app that had a pre-set list of possible side effects, with no way to enter any others. The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market. The trials didn't measure hospitalization and couldn't show any improvement in mortality. Etc.

Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years.

Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.

> mRNA vaccines did basically happen overnight, yeah. As recently as 2017 they couldn't progress beyond animal trials because all mRNA based drugs became toxic after multiple doses. Better hope they nailed that problem, right?

Please, provide some sources. A quick google search led me to https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/ but this excerpt is in moderna's favor:

> But the Crigler-Najjar treatment has been indefinitely delayed, an Alexion spokeswoman told STAT. It never proved safe enough to test in humans, according to several former Moderna employees and collaborators who worked closely on the project. Unable to press forward with that technology, Moderna has had to focus instead on developing a handful of vaccines, turning to a less lucrative field that might not justify the company’s nearly $5 billion valuation.

> “It’s all vaccines right now, and vaccines are a loss-leader,” said one former Moderna manager. “Moderna right now is a multibillion-dollar vaccines company, and I don’t see how that holds up.”

Considering work on mRNA vaccines started in 1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#Early_research I'd say you are wrong. 2004 and 2008 saw the first use in a humane body of mrna transfer into the cell. Moderna may have hit a roadblock for their cancer therapy in 2017 but that doesn't mean they started working from scratch on mrna vaccines in 2017.

> As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain".

I am surprised antivax aren't running with this story. I read a bit about it and among major outlets only Fox News ran the story. But here's the thing: one case ?

> The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market.

Are you referring to the second dose as a booster ? I seem to remember moderna and pfizer always were 2-doses vaccines. And there were headlines and talk about whether or not it would provide a lifetime protection or regular doses. Against wuhan strains the vaccines held up their 95% protection. So what exactly is false there ?

> Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years.

> Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.

I don't know what track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it you are referring to. Previous vaccination campaign or covid vaccination campaign ?

Anyway, there are other vaccines if you rather go with J&J and Az which are traditional technologies.

That's the right source, but I don't see how you conclude it's in Moderna's favour. The reason they switched to vaccines in 2017 (no evidence they worked on them before) is because after many years of effort they couldn't solve the multi-dose toxicity issues. Their prior drug efforts were all for treatments that required ongoing doses. In contrast the assumption pre 2020 was that vaccines were a one-or-two dose and you're done thing, so the toxicity issue could be dodged.

Well that's great, except now we're up to 3 or 4 doses and the trials for boosters were a joke. Not real trials at all. So, we're flying blind with a tech that was known to be dangerous if you do what our society is now doing.

"I read a bit about it and among major outlets only Fox News ran the story. But here's the thing: one case ?"

No, one case that you know of. But as you just realized, information about such people is systematically suppressed. The media refuses to cover it (outside of Fox), tech companies systematically erase mentions of it and ban people who try to link to it. And the worst is, doctors deny any connection.

The reality is, nobody has any idea how many people like that girl are out there.

"Are you referring to the second dose as a booster ? I seem to remember moderna and pfizer always were 2-doses vaccines. And there were headlines and talk about whether or not it would provide a lifetime protection or regular doses. Against wuhan strains the vaccines held up their 95% protection. So what exactly is false there?"

No. I'm using the term in the same way everyone does. They were advertised from the start as needing two doses, but not three or four. And they weren't advertised as "Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 vaccines" but "COVID vaccines" that provided 95% protection against "symptomatic disease". Clearly, they have failed to do that. You can argue that COVID should be defined differently, but it's not.

"Previous vaccination campaign or covid vaccination campaign ?"

This one. Vaccination of children. Or really, people under 55 or so. That seems to be a common threshold at which the cost/benefit ratio goes negative.

"Anyway, there are other vaccines if you rather go with J&J and Az which are traditional technologies."

None of them are all that traditional, and AZ has now been pulled. It isn't available where I live. It's mRNA or else.

> That's the right source, but I don't see how you conclude it's in Moderna's favour. The reason they switched to vaccines in 2017 (no evidence they worked on them before) is because after many years of effort they couldn't solve the multi-dose toxicity issues.

Because it doesn't mean they didn't work on them. RNA platform has been in the making for decades, the fact they used it for vaccines and not for something else doesn't mean it's completely unsafe.

> Well that's great, except now we're up to 3 or 4 doses and the trials for boosters were a joke. Not real trials at all. So, we're flying blind with a tech that was known to be dangerous if you do what our society is now doing.

I disagree, we have big numbers:

> Researchers reviewed data from 728,321 individuals aged 12 or above who had received the third dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine. These individuals were carefully matched 1:1 with 728,321 individuals who had received only two shots of the BNT162b2 vaccine at least five months prior. The matching was based on an extensive set of demographic, geographic and health-related attributes associated with risk of infection, risk of severe disease, health status and health seeking behavior. Individuals were assigned to each group dynamically based on their changing vaccination status (198,476 individuals moved from the unvaccinated cohort into the vaccinated cohort during the study). Multiple analyses were conducted to ensure that the estimated vaccine effectiveness was robust to potential biases. The study included a total of over 12,000,000 person-days of follow-up.

> No. I'm using the term in the same way everyone does. They were advertised from the start as needing two doses, but not three or four. And they weren't advertised as "Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 vaccines" but "COVID vaccines" that provided 95% protection against "symptomatic disease". Clearly, they have failed to do that. You can argue that COVID should be defined differently, but it's not.

That's really unfair. There's no way you could have taken at face value that first generation covid vaccines would protect against any future variants of covid, especially variants with so many changes as omicron. Even so they still hold against severe hospitalizations. Dismissing vaccines entirely on that is like refusing to wear a seat belt because it doesn't always work. There also always were talk about how long would the protection against mild symptoms hold. Now we know.

They never promised magic pills (if you listen to scientists, not politicians, which is another conversation we should also have).

> None of them are all that traditional, and AZ has now been pulled. It isn't available where I live. It's mRNA or else.

Well, that I don't have anything to say. We didn't have much choice in my country (although if you tried to reschedule or chose a specific vaccination center you could increase the odds of getting what you wanted) (I know I did).

Are you implying these workers have done more harm than good? Right after they bore the brunt of the pandemic and were applauded as heros? All its filtered for is compliance and those fearful to lose their jobs.

> Your freedom ends where my nose begins.

I know where your nose is. I don't know where this pandemic ends. Diseases are not free license for governments to do whatever they want for as long as they want.

20 years after 9/11 we still live with the consequences of the "war on terror". Let's make sure that doesn't happen again.

> Diseases are not free license for governments to do whatever they want for as long as they want.

Excuse me, but governments have the power to suspend individual rights during major disasters, like war, insurrection, terrorism, etc... oh wow, look, epidemics too!

Feel fortunate, at least they didn't decree martial law, or better, hefty fines.

I do feel fortunate I don't live in a totalitarian society.

I feel gratitude for those who fought to make it possible.

I hope our descendents get to feel the same way.

It's a public health issue, not the British invading USA. There's zero need to introduce politics into a worldwide health disaster.

If you so love human rights and freedom, you could start by supporting real government overreach like abortion outlawing, inhuman treatment of immigrants, offshore prisons where human rights are ignored, gerrymandering to twist votes towards a single party, insider stock trading from senators, and a long etc.

Fighting vaccines and hygienic measures during a global pandemic won't make you an American hero.

What about my comment was political or partisan?

And while I hate to indulge whataboutism, you should know I do care about and have opinions on all of those things. It remains to be seen whether or not you care about rushing to judgements about others. This is a thread about covid, and the usual internet edicit is to stay on topic, so I'm not going to discuss those things here.

I'm not fighting doctors or medical science.

I'm opposing bad policies made by non experts, and/or experts with conflicts of interest.

You gave me the impression of equating governments enforcing sanitation and health measures with political manipulation. You said that diseases don't give government the right to do as they please, and later mentioned the public fear since the twin towers attack.

I completely understand that governments have eroded their reputation by their own actions, but in this case I'm supportive of vaccination and sanitation. This is not a terrorist attack, this is a very contagious disease that hasn't ceased to evolve because people keep hosting it and giving it chance to mutate. You don't have to trust the government to understand that their actions are reasonable and supported by science in this topic.

There are two views you can take of the world. You can take it at face value, or you can search for deeper meaning.

If we take current events at face value, then yes covid is a real problem, the vaccine really helps, and governments are acting in the interest of the public with health and safety measures.

But if you look behind the curtain, there is so much more going on. It remains to be seen just how much manipulation is involved.

My analogy to the war on terror is meant to have layers.

After the initial attack there was a patriotic fervor and an outcry for retribution. The "war on terror" was a justified response to the demand for national security.

It's not until years later that much of the story we were told at the time had been revealed to contain false truths.

The WMDs never existed. The Saudis were connected to the attackers. Our prolonged engagement in Afghanistan, a means to funnel billions (trillions?) to security contractors. The pentagon. Tower 7. Etc.

There's a enough information to confound the official narrative, and we still don't have all the answers. I doubt we ever will.

The pandemic mirrors this in many ways already. The global outcry, the unprecedented scale of government intervention. "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" parallels today's divide. It wasn't something you could say no to then, and it's not something you can say no to now.

To say these thing simply erode trust is a pittance. This plants a seed in one's mind that there are in fact manipulators at the highest levels of our institutions. There is even more evidence of this in the world today ex. Jeffery epstein and the ongoing maxwell trials.

But maybe none of that applies to the current events. Perhaps my speculation is unwarranted. Sometimes the world simply is what it seems, and you have to take it at face value.

But more often than not I've found the world is a lot like poker, and by the time you have all the information it's already too late.

I don't think it's fair comparing the war on terror with the current pandemic handling. Back then the government attitude was "You killed 3,000 proud Americans, we will avenge them by killing 300,000 Arabs! A eye for a hundred eyes!". It was clear from day one that USA was overreacting, and doing it in a way that was suspiciously profitable.

The WHO is very different than the military industry complex, they're not taking over the world, they making recommendations based on evolving scientific data, and the governments of the world are free to ignore them because not even the UN has enough authority to force them. That so many shitty governments have accepted those recommendations to some degree is a miracle, owed much in part to the effort of their own scientists.

You call it unfair, yet don't give insight into your criteria for fairness.

No analogy is perfect. But the parallels are too strong to ignore. Studying history is about using the past to make sense of the present, and possibly even predict the future.

Saying the USA was obviously overreacting from the start is just hindsight, and not representative of the sentiment at the time. Further I'm sure years from now we'll say the same, that many things we did during this pandemic were overreactions, and that it was obvious at the time.

Comparing the MIC to the WHO is a false dichotomy. The WHO is historically an institution for the USA to project power internationally.

The question of who is "taking over the world" is the territory of speculation. I said originally it remains to be seen how much manipulation is occurring. For example, the lab-leak hypothesis, once the ramblings of a mad man, has gained traction among officials as a likely source for the disease.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17047986/wuhan-lab-leak-most-l...

If this proves to be true, it will have radical implications on the past 2 years.

Quebec offered $1 billion in incentives for their healthcare worker vax mandate -- and it still failed.

Sep 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-plan-nursing-...

> The Quebec government has announced it will provide nurses with financial bonuses of up to $18,000 as part of its emergency plan to fix the staffing crisis in the province's health-care network ... the plan would cost close to $1 billion

Nov 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/8346947/quebec-drops-vaccine-mand...

> Quebec is backtracking on its enforced COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health-care workers, government officials announced Wednesday. After pushing back its deadline multiple times, Health Minister Christian Dubé said the province will abandon the measure altogether, as the health-care network can’t afford to lose the thousands of non-vaccinated employees. The loss of unvaccinated staff would have had a “devastating effect on the system,” according to the health ministry.

> and it still failed

Maybe because they set up the incentives poorly?

> One nurse, who CBC agreed not to name because she is not authorized to speak to media, said the announcement will do nothing for her.

The woman works part-time as an emergency room nurse on the night shift, but says she cannot afford to take on full-time work overnight because she is a single mother.

"I'm penalized either way," she said, explaining that part-time nurses expect that they will still be forced to work overtime.

Incentives failed to create a replacement workforce and enough workers refused the vax that they could not be replaced.

There are a lot of things involved in increasing hospital capacity. One would be increasing the number of workers.

With things like masks we were able to free up supply by allowing N95 construction masks to be used until other production can get up to speed. We don't exactly have a hidden cache of nurses and doctors that can be rallied upon a moment's notice.

Now getting rid of the ones that can, and probably contracted COVID already does make zero sense.

> Get your vaccine or don't, but one way or another your immune system will have to sort it out.

Immunity from exposure and s highly variable, it could be 3 months, it could be 3 weeks. Immunity from vaccine is more deterministic, but still limited. We will probably need at a yearly booster.

COVID is burning out workers everywhere, especially in the medical field. A lot of the quitting isn’t related to vax status, people are just tired and they don’t feel they get paid enough for the job they are doing.

Hospital capacity will take years to increase. At least 4 to raise nurse/doctor class sizes, probably longer since you need to expand the training programs as well. We also already spend 18 percent of our GDP on healthcare, going to 30 percent is going to hurt, but if people don’t want to get vaccinated, maybe we can just charge them higher insurance premiums to make up for it?

> Hospital capacity will take years to increase

No, not really. With trillions of dollars and 2 years there was absolutely plenty of time and resources to train more people and find new COVID-specific spaces. Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster.

The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.

Why would have that worked when half of the US politicians still think it's a cold ?

Train the other half.

> Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster.

Nursing programs were already at capacity before COVID started, and doing a 2 year program is preconditioned on previous education (a 2 year AS degree in my state).

> The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.

Said by every arm chair general ever.

Arm chair generals? Well yeah - military generals have a track record of being able to rapidly train and deploy people during a crisis.

Do you think in World War 2 the generals sat around saying "there's no possible way we can increase the size of our air force, it takes years to train pilots and engineers". No, they didn't. They found ways to make it work, because it was a crisis. The absolute refusal by the health sector to do this in any way speaks volumes.

I don’t think you understand what the word “arm chair general” actually means. It’s just a term that means “someone who has no experience with the field thinking the answers are easy and that the experts doing the work are just idiots for not seeing how easy the answers are.”

I know exactly what it means. Nonetheless the term isn't really apt here, given the connotations and obvious parallels with real world military operations.

3 months or 3 weeks? Or >13 months according to the latest research which can only report as long as the study window is open.

Natural immunity is better than current vaccines for effectiveness and longevity.

Vaccines are for the vulnerable.

seanmcdirmid says >"Immunity from exposure and s highly variable, it could be 3 months, it could be 3 weeks. Immunity from vaccine is more deterministic, but still limited. We will probably need at a yearly booster."

We are likely now constantly being exposed to the virus. Although we are "immune" (thanks to boosters, immunizations, getting ill, natural immunity or blood transfusion), any subsequent exposure to covid will garner a response from our immune system. So we'll effectively be "re-inoculated" against whatever variant we are exposed to.

So long-term the need for a booster may wane, the exception being for highly-infectious variants that pose a threat to an already-immunized and exposed population.

> So we'll effectively be "re-inoculated" against whatever variant we are exposed to.

You'll be re-inoculated if you have an immune reaction, which has a chance of getting sick...and it isn't a given that you'll live to take advantage of the inoculation.

> So long-term the need for a booster may wane, the exception being for highly-infectious variants that pose a threat to an already-immunized and exposed population.

It is just like the flu, but a bit worse. Yes, you might be able to survive getting it every year until you get old or develop co-morbidities. But getting a yearly booster is probably a smarter choice (for the flu and COVID).

> Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen.

Bzzzt. Thank you for playing. Also, you fail to understand that capacity is down because of burnout, so advocating against vaccination, especially for health care workers, is hypocritical in the most cynical way. You are advocating for the onset of chaos.

> capacity is down because of burnout

...and mandates. The stories in the media only capture the firings, but a ton more left before getting fired, simply because they had no desire to be fired.

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