Omicron Makes Vaccine Mandates Obsolete | Hacker News Reader

Omicron Makes Vaccine Mandates Obsolete

wsj.com

37 pointsbadtoro31 comments

In Denmark, 94% of infections are Omicron. Double vaccinated get infected at a higher rate than unvaccinated.(Source: ssi.dk) A booster reduces infection rates to a little less than the unvaccinated. Those are what the data show in Denmark.

Interesting. Maybe the effective lockdown of the unvaccinated is a factor in this? ref: https://dk.usembassy.gov/u-s-citizen-services/security-and-t...

There's no lockdown for unvaccinated in Denmark. If you want access to services you need a valid "coronapas" (health passport) which requires either full vaccination, a negative test or recovery from covid.

I agree that mandates cannot be justified and we were never at a point that they could be justified. Pfizer will sell us their Omicron vaccination next...

https://archive.fo/4pSSU

Fun fact: the article was co-written with Jed Rubenfeld, who is a constitutional scholar and husband to the "tiger mum", Amy Chua.

I can’t read the article, but guessing it puts very little weight on the severity reduction vaccines grant. Or is there new data showing that’s not a thing?

https://archive.fo/2022.01.09-232109/https://www.wsj.com/art...

I don't see anything about severity reduction in the article. The argument it has lies in >As the World Health Organization puts it, “if mandatory vaccination is considered necessary to interrupt transmission chains and prevent harm to others, there should be sufficient evidence that the vaccine is efficacious in preventing serious infection and/or transmission.” For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence.

And

> The little data we have suggest the opposite. One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection.

That's the most relevant quote from the article. The study mentioned is here [0].

Fwiw, one of the authors discovered HIV[1], so they presumably know what they're talking about.

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...

[1] The end of the article mentions "Dr. Montagnier was a winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus."

Edit: For the record, I'm most definitely not anti-vax, just summarizing the article as best I could. Thanks to everyone who dig deeper than I did.

I know too much about the bad ideas of Nobel Prize winners to trust your presumption (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease ), so I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier

] During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier was criticised for using his Nobel prize status to "spread dangerous health messages outside his field of knowledge"[6] for promoting the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created in a laboratory. Such a claim has been refuted by other virologists.[7][8][9][10]

Of course there's no reason to trust Wikipedia. My point is to challenge the idea that because someone got a Nobel Prize on one topic, that makes them a credible source on even related topics.

RationalWiki has a much lower threshold than Wikipedia and at https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease writes of Montagnier support for "[h]omeopathy, water memory, autism quackery, AIDS cured by nutrition and vaccine hysteria", linking to https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/01/14/the-nobel-dise... for support.

It was easy to find L Montagnier et al 2011 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser.306 012007, "DNA waves and water" https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/306/1/0... which, if true, would indeed overthrow science, and deserve another Nobel Prize.

Yet it's almost only cited by homeopaths, and more broadly "alt. medicine" sources. The setup doesn't look complicated, so should be easily reproducible. Almost as if it wasn't correct - just like we would expect.

Thanks for digging deeper. I went in too hard in the "give argument I disagree with a fair perspective", and didn't do the further research I should've.

The last two paragraphs of the medrxiv article is the following:

"Our study contributes to emerging evidence that BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 primary vaccine protection against Omicron decreases quickly over time with booster vaccination offering a significant increase in protection.

In light of the exponential rise in Omicron cases, these findings highlight the need for massive rollout of vaccinations and booster vaccinations."

Compare this to the suggestion of WSJ's word choice of "obsolete"

That’s what I was afraid of. I think it’s quite important to re-evaluate policies now that the virus has changed, and it might be the cases that vaccine mandates are not logical but at the same time of if someone tries to have that debate without bringing up one of the most important goals of the vaccine at which it’s so far been wildly successful, then I don’t think the person is trying to have an honest discussion.

> [1] The end of the article mentions "Dr. Montagnier was a winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus."

This f*** again. That is all I need to know about that article. He popped up at the start of the pandemic claiming it was a bioweapon based on HIV. Because of course he would.

He is also in support of "the memory of water" and "hexagonal water" and other homeopathic related bullshit.

A prime example of someone suffering from Nobelitis. F** this guy. Please do not give this grifter any more attention than he already has. He may have made important discoveries a long time ago, but is completely divorced from reality today.

This is one of the people on a growing list of people with whom any association leads to instant discrediting.

TFA is actually written by him.

This discredits WSJ Oppinon as a valid source of information. If as a journalism agency you do not bother to ban obvious quacks, you do not deserve to be listened to.

The argument for the vaccine mandate is care for others (don’t spread to someone else) which is harmed by vaccinated spreaders.

The argument that forcing people to care for themselves is good would use the severity reduction as a point. But that is not presently the point.

if i were czar of the universe, ad hominem attacks would be punishable by life in prison. i find them that infuriatingly annoying.

why are people more interested in the authors’ biographies than the their substantive arguments?

Apparently the WSJ is against polio vaccination mandates.

> against polio vaccination mandates.

Bad analogies are bad analogies.

IPV does not stop you from getting infected in your gut or transmitting polio. It does stop you from paralysis.

By no less than Luc Montagnier himself. This looks like the nuclear letter by Einstein to Roosevelt. WSJ is one of the very few remaining solid objective outlets in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier was a promoter of the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus, was deliberately created in, and thereafter escaped from a laboratory. Such a claim has been refuted by other virologists.

And other virologists share Montagnier’s assertion that the proverbial pangolins had nothing to do with this fiasco.

>Such a claim has been refuted by other virologists.

You make it sound like there’s a consensus here, but I don’t think that’s actually the case—at least not anymore, if it was true before.

You sure about that?

> other virologists.

You mean the Lancet Hoax?

>Such a claim has been refuted by other virologists.

like Peter Daszak, Shi Zhengli, and Fauci

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...

There's a ring of people here that gang up and downvote posts, waging political wars. Then they seek out and downvote others recent comments by the same user. dang has to look into this.

Just from reading his wikipedia bio, whatever gravitas he may have once had seems to have been traded for conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

This looks like idea laundering.

> wikipedia bio

You should know better than blindly trust wikipedia. It's written by humans, too, who are not devoid of bias.

Nor should one blindly trust a Nobel Prize winner.

cft (who, like us all, is not devoid of bias) linked to Wikipedia as support for the importance of this letter. I think it's only fair to examine that page to check if that support is appropriate.

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