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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

Why on Earth are people still not getting vaccinated?

From the fine article:

  > The nearly 14,000 Ohioans who have died this year were
  > almost exclusively — about 95% — unvaccinated individuals.

The key here is the words "this year". Most of the deaths this year occurred earlier in the year when vaccination was not available. I've tried finding the data on the state and CDC website a couple of times throughout the year to no avail. I would like to see the trend right now or at least the past couple months data.

When Ohio released it's "breakthrough" dashboard, I thought it was misleading as well since it included all of 2021 and the vaccine wasn't available to all adults until mid-April or so. Because of that, I started recording the weekly snapshots for a few weeks but lost interest. Since I was capturing weekly, you could just look at the new numbers. Here's what my data showed for Ohio:

Between Sep-15 and Oct-27, there were 2899 COVID deaths. Of those, 2625 were unvaxxed or partially vaxxed and 274 were fully vaxxed. So fully vaxxed deaths were about 9.5% of COVID deaths during that period. I stopped capturing weekly data at that point.

I just went and looked at it again with the most updated numbers and from Oct-27 when I stopped recording weekly data and today, 92% of Ohio COVID deaths are unvaxxed.

Given all that, I don't think starting at 2021 is all that misleading at all. Ohio's fully-vaxxed rate for adults is around 65%. Even assuming it was closer to 60% in the fall, you have 40% of the Ohio's population accounting for 90%+ of its COVID deaths.

Here are Ohio's monthly deaths for 2021 [1]. For December I took the deaths from the first through the 18th and extrapolated linearly.

  Jan  3611
  Feb  1324
  Mar   584
  Apr   558
  May   454
  Jun   227
  Jul   165
  Aug   736
  Sep  2174
  Oct  2341
  Nov  1009
  Dec  1752

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states&...

Because some people have already had COVID, received natural antibodies as a result, and are relying on time-tested science, logic, and intuition in their personal decision to not also get a set of shots + [x] boosters so they can be “safe”. By the way, do me a favor and solve for x in the above equation! And solve again a year from now. And again 5 years from now.

Influenza, tetanus, TBE and polio vaccinations also require repeat shots from time to time - and there are certainly more as these are only the ones that I can remember off the cuff.

In the case of the flu, the jury has always been out in it’s effectiveness due to the seasonal variation (the flu shot (notice how that’s never been called a vaccine, for good reason) is based on previous year’s strain.

Lumping that in with the rest of the diseases on your list where a vaccine can and does provide true immunity is a massive case of apples and oranges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine

I completely agree that having been infected with COVID should excuse one from vaccine mandates, at least within some time frame. However, that isn't why most of the unvaccinated are unvaccinated. Only a few million people had been infected with COVID in the U.S. at the time the vaccine was released, around 1% of the population.

Not everyone goes to the doctor for a scratchy throat (primary symptom of Omicron, by the way), and as a result a huge number of data points are quickly excluded from that “1%” stat.

Right but if you have no diagnosis of Covid then the argument above doesn’t apply since you don’t actually have any evidence of “natural immunity”

We can say with fairly high confidence that the natural immunity rate is fairly low due to the infection rate of the unvaccinated vs. the vaccinated. If any significant portion of the unvaccinated had natural immunity, then the gap between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated would close since natural immunity actually confers more protection.

Of the many people who have told me that they have had COVID already, none have donated blood and received a free antibody test. I donated blood three times between the start of the pandemic and getting the first vaccine. I got three free antibody tests.

Most of the unvaccinated that I talk to who claim to have had COVID but won't give blood say they are scared of needles. So it makes sense they are scared of getting the vaccine.

Wikipedia defines a vaccine as "a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease."

It's not currently possible to be vaccinated, and calling our current treatment a "vaccine" is incorrect.

I don’t understand your point. It’s a vaccine, you get vaccinated, your body produces antibodies, your risk of catching the disease goes down, your risk of ending up in hospital nearly disappears

Anything is possible when you decide to change the definition of what something means. The CDC used to define “vaccinated” as “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” They changed that key word in the definition to “protection”, so sure if you move the goalpost on what something is, you absolutely can call this a “vaccine” and not an MRNA treatment!

Ok sure, it gives 95% resistance, not 100% resistance. So? Do we not mandate seatbelts because they only save your life 95% of the time?

Previous vaccines didn't provide "immunity" in that sense either.

The annual flu vaccine had 60% efficiency. Yet people didn't complain about it being called "vaccine".

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