Is r/lockdownskepticism also skeptical of vaccination?
And do you think covid is worse than or same as the flu?
And do you think covid is worse than or same as the flu?
Not that you asked me- I would classify it as "different" than the flu, that it affects different individuals differently, and that the original variant was definitely something more scary than the flu. Especially due to the novelty of the spike protein. Now- I view omicron as about as dangerous as the flu for a much smaller subset of people than the flu is dangerous for. Especially when you account for age and comorbidities. The flu kills children, while covid generally does not.
It's a very heterogenous sub, but I don't think you'll find the kind of anti-vax thinking that suggests that, eg, childhood vaccination is unhelpful to a society, if that's what you're asking. If you are asking more strictly about sentiment toward the currently available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, I think that by and large we think they're a marvel of engineering, but have an array of assessments and opinions regarding pandemic-timeline vaccination, what it's meant to accomplish, and whether genuine public health decisions in such a context can ever be made independently of profit motivations of vaccine makers. As for the mod team, I think I can confidently say that we view the vaccines as very useful tools and owe the engineering teams (both who have worked these decades to make mRNA platforms a reality and those who lost sleep to crank these vaccines out) a debt of gratitude.
> And do you think covid is worse than or same as the flu?
By "the flu", I presume you mean the H3N2 influenza which began as the 1968 pandemic and has since been endemic, causing seasonal outbreaks most years, rather than epidemic influenza which of course happens from time to time (eg, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic).
I don't think there's any remaining need to speculate: the wealth of evidence clearly demonstrates that COVID-19 is far more likely than seasonal influenza to result in hospitalization and death for the elderly with comorbidities, less likely than influenza to do so in young and middle-aged healthy people, and similarly likely as influenza for people in the middle.
This has been evident, and has held true, since last summer, when John Ioannidis published this paper on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512...
I want to point out that opposition to lockdowns, almost without exception, does not turn on the population mortality rate of the pathogen in question. In fact, if the pathogen were even more dangerous, we suggest that lockdowns are likely to be an even worse idea.
Lockdowns necessarily cause stratification by socioeconomic status rather than by risk. Even in an 'effective' lockdown, we still see spread among the "essential workers" who keep society going, and in their households, which are disproportionately likely to be multigen.
To the degree that lockdowns actually slow spread, this means that people in the high-risk tier (in this case, mostly elderly people) have to isolate _longer_ to wait for the spread to complete among the lower risk tiers. This may be acceptable for affluent households with remote jobs and the ability to have all of their needs met via delivery, but is obviously untenable for our marginalized neighbors who cannot afford periods of extended isolation.
The latter is not mere fatalism, by the way. It's simply acceptance that at this time, with our current level of understanding and abilities, we cannot stop respiratory illnesses from spreading and frankly, even claims about stopping "severe illness" are all horribly confounded by massive conflicts of interest and a culture of dishonesty in public health. As this paper is now showing, in fact, Moderna was advertised as perfectly safe and an obvious no-brainer tradeoff free improvement. In fact it's not, it's taken a very long time to realize this, and in fact there's certainly a lot of cases that the medical system isn't aware of. As such we cannot actually say whether the vaccines are helping or harming over-all because the damages inflicting aren't being measured properly, or at all. And indeed in many parts of the world excess death is actually positive in 2021, instead of negative as it should be given an effective vaccine (overhang from 2020 pushing it down + effective vaccines reducing COVID excess to zero).
How do you explain countries like Vietnam, China, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, where Covid was eliminated from their societies via lockdown (and border control to prevent re-introduction) before the Delta variant spread? It's true that only China and Taiwan have retained Covid-Zero status in the face of Delta, but it seems like the success of lockdowns turns upon characteristics of the pathogen including its population mortality (the more deadly the virus, the more likely the population will support and assist in extreme measures to control and eliminate it within national borders).
China now has local transmission in Xian, known for the terracotta warriors. It's arguable they never stopped local transmission and simply stopped reporting cases and deaths accurately once covid took off outside China. They stopped recording deaths at around 4,000 in March 2020.
As for other places, for some reason COVID seems less severe in east Asia in general. You left out Japan where COVID has not been particularly serious and which also used quite light measures, especially in the early days.
Really, this has been done to death by now. Lockdowns don't have any effect. Some people thought they did because the natural wave pattern happened to overlap with when lockdowns were brought in and epidemiologists - perhaps the most useless form of expertise in the world - were united in believing that COVID wasn't going to be seasonal, for no obvious reason. So they just ascribed the fall in cases to their brilliant policies instead of the true cause. Once COVID came back at different times in different countries much more data became available and it started to show the truth: NPIs like lockdowns, masks, contact tracing etc were all useless. Only very early and very harsh border controls seemed to have much effect, and even then only temporarily.