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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I kind of regret even mentioning the effects of COVID in my original comment as I figured there would be a reply like yours and you're not wrong! But it wasn't the main point I was trying to make.

My main point is that everyone just seems to have moved on from under 5s. We've adopted a stance of "vaxxed and done" for adults and older children and paid no attention to the vax trials for under 5s taking forever. It's barely even mentioned. So we have parents across the country relying on the generosity of their employer in handling shutdowns, illnesses and so on. I'm lucky, my employer has been flexible and understanding. But I know that's not the case for a lot of people.

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The biggest reason the under 5s vaccine is taking so long is that they don't suffer severe enough symptoms that they can easily test the efficacy of the virus. The same issue was there with the 5-11s but pharma, CDC, & FDA just glossed over that to approve the vaccines.

> that they can easily test the efficacy of the virus

I think you meant to type 'vaccine'

The success we’re talking about was an analytical measurement of the antigen response in the body. It wasn’t lack of symptoms which ruled that phase a failure.

That is incorrect, the decision making numbers used to test vaccine effectiveness having nothing to do with lab antigen numbers, they are based on how much symptomatic illness is avoided. All of the results such as as 95%-96% efficacy for Phizer and Moderna and 66% for J&J are based on the % reduction of symptomatic illness only. Not the reduction in actual illness or based on lab tests of antigen response.

I believe you are incorrect. What you say was true for the initial adult trials but many recommendations for boosters and lower age groups have been based on antibody response, not clinical outcomes.

Correct or incorrect is sort of irrelevant, because it's a problem itself if they aren't including severity of symptoms in the study.

If they are ignoring symptoms to approve a vaccine who's primary remaining benefit is ... reducing severity of symptoms ... then how exactly has the trial proved anything?

Since antibodies are no longer a reliable indicator of immunity or of preventing transmission, then reduced severity is the primary remaining benefit.

Ideally they'd be looking at a cumulative risk/prevention assessment, but I don't see how they do that while excluding observed symptoms.

If they are using antibody levels as a proxy for this when they could just ... directly observe symptoms... then there would be a bigger problem with the study than just a failure to show sufficient efficacy.

Take it up with the FDA. You're preaching to the choir

I get it.

It's just a fine line between arguing what would justify FDA "approval" vs what merits have changed that actually increase the risk-versus-reward assessment.

Put another way, when the biggest excuse for not getting vaccinated was "it's experimental and not approved", it became a straw-man-esque "gotcha-trap" of a battle to achieve "approval", even though that approval process looked nothing like any before it (no matter how many times "full fda approval" is repeated).

When the metric becomes the goal, it's no longer a metric, and all that.

We get bogged down arguing whether criteria of a definition or standard are being met, while the regulators end up just redefining things.

And we're supposed to pretend the teacher applying a curved grading scale actually represents a difference in the students performance.

I've read that the pfizer study compared rates of positive test cases between the two groups.

BUT, the tests were administered based on self-reported symptoms which were then evaluated by a staff member to decide whether a test was warranted. This absolutely blew my mind.

This kind of avoidable subjective decision making should not be happening in a clinical trial. All participants should have been tested at regular intervals.

Equally... that when they repeat it and get different numbers, the failed trial will be ignored in favor of the passing trial, without first invalidating the previous results[0], and without using any increased burden of proof.

Passed+Failed = "Passed!"

[0] There will be a reason given to ignore that first trial, it just likely won't be a good one.

How does one not self-report symptoms? Some will be externally obvious but how does someone know someone else has chest pain, or a sore throat?

>The biggest reason the under 5s vaccine is taking so long is that they don't suffer severe enough symptoms that they can easily test the efficacy of the virus.

How does anyone convince themselves that this is actually a problem?

Especially when the vaccine no longer prevents catching the virus or transmitting it.

What remaining benefit are people so eager to confer upon their toddlers?

Well Virtue with a capital 'V' is one big one! And of course they're an excellent source of revenue for Pfizer et al. You wouldn't want to risk it would you?

-- writing this while my toddler is banished from daycare for 10 days because a single kid there tested positive.

It’s not virtue signaling to be terrified for your children’s health. It might not be rational but it should be perfectly understandable.

Terror is rarely coincident with clear decision making.

Hopefully it's transient, soon followed by calm risk-benefit analysis.

Vaccines still lower disease severity.

Also vaccines reduce risk of some post-acute COVID disorders like MIS-C (which can result even from asymptomatic COVID).

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7102e1.htm

And of course you don't want to infect your child with a disease that has long term consequences which we are still learning about. Diabetes hit the news recently in the US, but it is actually been known for a while in other countries.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7102e2.htm

https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/43/11/e170/35903/N... (UK)

https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/27/archdischild-20... (Finland)

If that wasn't bad enough, diseases that are associated with T1D like celiac disease are on the rise, and show stronger association in COVID patients:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.16173

< https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7102e1.htm

The study you cite specifically excludes those under 5.

>Vaccines still lower disease severity.

Not for kids under 5. That's why it's not approved.

>And of course you don't want to infect your child with a disease

Breakthrough cases are so common now that the media refuses to use the term anymore. That (lack-of) "preventing-infection" efficacy is baked into the <5 study that showed no benefit.

>that has long term consequences which we are still learning about.

Why is this a valid concern, but potential long-term effects of the vaccines aren't? Especially the known risk of inflammation in still-growing bodies and especially in developing hearts.

>>Vaccines still lower disease severity. >Not for kids under 5. That's why it's not approved.

Wrong. Per the Pfizer press release [0], the immunogenicity analysis of the trial failed in children ages 2 to 4, but succeeded in children ages six months to two years. Given the small dose (3ug) in that study cohort, there was probably not enough rna in the vaccine for the 2-4 age group to show any effect.

>Why is this a valid concern, but potential long-term effects of the vaccines aren't? Especially the known risk of inflammation in still-growing bodies and especially in developing hearts.

The risk of developing myocarditis from the vaccine is about 100-150 in 5 million [1]. The risk of developing myocarditis from COVID-19 is about 150 in 100,000 [2]. I know I'm picking the vaccine for my child.

[0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y [2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm

edited for typos.

The first diagram in the first study you referenced [1] puts the observed rate of myocarditis among patients -without- COVID at 450 per 5 million (9 per 100k). That is much higher than the rate of myocarditis among the entire vaccinated Israeli [2] cohort (125 per 5 million) you mentioned.

The issue is that you're not comparing apples to apples. The Israeli data is looking at the entire population that received the vaccine. The COVID study is only looking at hospitalized patients with/without COVID which is a subset of the entire population restricted entirely to those experiencing the most severe symptoms.

This is not an easy problem to solve. A more apples to apples comparison [3] puts the COVID:vaccine myocarditis ratio at about 6:1, but it also suffers from a bias. In order to measure those rates they relied on the population that tested positive for COVID. This excludes the population of individuals which were infected with COVID but did not received a diagnosis who presumably also had a near 0 rate of myocarditis. This bias [presumably] becomes more pronounced at lower age groups where COVID displays milder symptoms making it less likely to end up diagnosed.

Finally, there is also the consideration that while the vaccines have not yet changed - COVID has. And its likely that the omicron strain will have a different distribution of side effects. It's a difficult problem to solve, and conflicts of interest abound make it all even more challenging.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm [2] - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y [3] - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...

What other respiratory virus in human history has caused chronic long term effects to the young and healthy?

Statistically we should be much more worried about something like RSV or the flu (even after vaccination).

We do have knowledge about long-term effects from other coronaviruses (SARS-CoV-1 and MERS).

Despite its name, SARS-CoV-2 is not strictly a "respiratory virus". While it is spread airborne, it attacks multiple tissues besides the respiratory system, and causes multi-system dysfunction (including but not limited to MIS-C, type 1 diabetes, celiac disease, acute kidney injury, erectile dysfunction, ...). Many of the damages are immune-mediated, which is in line with what we know about T1D and celiac as autoimmune disorders.

> What other respiratory virus in human history has caused chronic long term effects to the young and healthy?

Pneumonia.

And what’s the likelihood of a young child developing myocarditis from COVID? You can’t apply whole population statistics to children blindly. If COVID has shown us anything it’s that diseases can discriminate.

I’m all for getting kids vaccinated when it’s deemed safe and effective (my daughter got vaccinated the first week it was available). But the risk to kids is quite low.

To be legally 2g compliant I need to boost every 4 months. Apparently the risk for inflammation might even get higher with each boost. If I'd catch COVID every 2 years or so how much does my risk rise for every infection?

> Vaccines still lower disease severity.

As does early treatment, https://c19early.com

Vaccine efficacy decays monthly (Delta/2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE

Having your children’s lungs scarred to 20% function and not getting to realize it’s even happened until they start a sport or something doesn’t sound fun to me, perhaps that’s why.

Citation please. What children had this happened to? You can’t throw out fear mongering claims about terrible outcomes with no data.

Also, are you aware that children sometimes die from RSV and even the common cold? The problem COVID vaccines for kids are facing is that the problems from COVID in that age are so infrequent that they are essentially in the noise.

I think the very young child (<18 months) is at higher risk, though.

The entire point is that the vaccine didn't improve the risk profile for kids under 5.

Which means that scenario playing in your head is just as likely to happen (or more likely, not happen) whether your children are vaccinated or not.

> Especially when the vaccine no longer prevents catching the virus or transmitting it.

The unvaccinated get COVID 400% more than the vaccinated, and the unvaccinated die from COVID 1,200% more than the vaccinated[1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

This thread is about children under 5.

It is pointless to quote rates without their context (country, age, virus strain, month, etcetera).

Case in point: fully vaccinated boys without medical comorbidities in the US between ages 12 and 17 from January to June 2021 got myocarditis at 370–610% (ages 12–15) / 210–350% (12–17) higher rates than their risk of COVID-19 hospitalization.

(Edit: forgot the source :P) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...

I have wondered how much of statistics like this are due to the level of observation.

Post vaxx kid: "I don't feel good." Doctor: Let's check you for this myocarditis thing I've read about.

Pre-2020 kid: "I don't feel good." Doctor: You're probably fine.

That still doesn't disprove the fact, that the 'Vaccine' no longer prevents catching the virus or transmitting it.

It doesn't do as good a job as it used to, but we never had a vaccine that was 100% effective at doing either of those things. It's always been a numbers game where vaccines simply increased the odds in your favor. Before delta the vaccines gave a huge boost to your odds of not catching covid at all, but now with omicron vaccines only provide a small boost. Even now it's still better to use vaccines to increase your changes against catching the virus even though the vaccines are most effective at preventing death and hospitalization.

“Weve never had a vaccine that was 100% effective at doing either of those things” is a huge cop out.

It’s true, but we’ve had plenty of vaccinated that were 90%+ effective compared to the Covid vaccines at 30% for infection risk.

I was responding to a comment which said "the fact, that the 'Vaccine' no longer prevents catching the virus or transmitting it."

My problem with that statement is that it wasn't a fact. The vaccines do prevent catching the virus, just no where near as well as they used to and even at their best they never eliminated the risk of catching and transmitting the virus.

It sucks that the new variants are able to overcome so much of the protection we had from vaccines, but we always knew there was a risk that would happen if we allowed the virus to spread uncontrolled. We didn't do enough to keep the number of infections down and evolution did its thing resulting in poorer vaccine performance.

I really hope that adjustments are able to made to existing vaccines to compensate or new vaccines are developed which do a better job, but it's going to be an arms race until people stop passing this virus around by the millions every day giving it more opportunity to mutate and spread again.

Right now, the vaccines are still the best defense we have. 30% is a hard number to hear when we had 90% but 30% of 7.9 billion people is 2,370,000,000 so it can still prevent a whole lot of infections in the world and if we work harder to bring the number of infections down hopefully we can prevent things getting much worse. My biggest fear was that some variant would evade the protections we have entirely and negate the lessons we've learned in treating the sick and we'd be right back to where we were early 2020. That's still a possibility we have to be ready to face.

We still don’t know the long term effects of the vaccine. So this numbers game is equivalent to Russian roulette.

Historically we know the long term side effects of vaccines (hint: there aren't any).

Historically we’ve never used mRNA vaccines.

Even if there were suspected long-term effects, causation != correlation.

If you're concerned about the long term effects of the vaccine, you should be double concerned about the long term effects of the much more complex and much less understood virus.

Except you can avoid the virus by isolating.

Not necessarily, there have been reports of people being infected via central air units in large building (apartments, condos, etc.).

Albeit, I do not believe it is that common, it's still possible. However, if you isolated in a remote location in the woods miles away from humanity, then perhaps you'd be safe, I suppose.

It’s pretty uncommon for multi tenant dwellings to share a common air ducting system, at least in newer buildings. I live in an apartment and my “across the hall” neighbors did get COVID, no issues for me.

I accept that it's entirely possible that 30 years down the line we'll discover some horrific thing we've all done to ourselves by taking the vaccines. What I can say however is that we don't have any evidence that suggests that we will see major problems in the future caused by the vaccines.

What we do have evidence for are future problems caused by these coronavirus infections along with a long list of immediate problems like deaths, severe (sometimes life altering) symptoms which can at times persist for weeks, months, and years, healthcare systems being overwhelmed preventing or delaying access to care and making accessing health services more risky, etc.

If you have to choose between getting a vaccine which appears to be perfectly safe but maybe could cause harm at some point in the future, and not getting it which we know does cause harm now and is very likely to cause harm in the future the choice is pretty clear. We can only deal with the evidence we have today and our best understanding of our current situation.

Especially when the vaccines benefit us not only by keeping us healthier and helping to eliminate the strain on our healthcare systems, but they are also our best bet to help reduce the need for social restrictions and disruptions in education and the economy.

There's still always that chance that the vaccines will have some negative impact on us later, but anyone in the future looking back and seeing our current situation won't have to wonder "What were they thinking taking their chances with this new vaccine!" It should be very clear to them that because we had no indication that there would be problems with the vaccine and because the vaccines were our best option to keep ourselves and each other healthy in the face of current problems and known future problems caused by the virus it was perfectly reasonable to take the chance on the vaccines and that doing so saved many lives and prevented many problems.

And I hope that should we have to deal with any future consequences from these vaccines that we can once again turn to medical science to find the best available option to treat those problems using the best understanding of them we have at the time. A huge percentage of the global population will be impacted after all so once again we'll be in a position where the entire world has an incentive to work together to find a solution which will hopefully go even smoother next time following the lessons learned here and now.

With more research and time things could change, but until there are indications that the vaccines could cause more harm than the known harms of the virus the vaccines will remain the smartest option we have today, no matter how tragic things turn out decades later.

> I accept that it's entirely possible that 30 years down the line we'll discover some horrific thing we've all done to ourselves by taking the vaccines. What I can say however is that we don't have any evidence that suggests that we will see major problems in the future caused by the vaccines.

This is enough for me to avoid them. I didn’t read the rest because it’s a short essay.

"It doesn't do as good a job as it used to, but we never had a vaccine that was 100% effective at doing either of those things."

Oh please. We have a truckload of vaccines that convey multi-decade/life-long immunity. case: the smallpox vaccine, polio vaccine, etc

We truly never had a real Covid Vaccine - we only have "protective boosters" and for Omicron they are utterly in-effective.

I suspect that these numbers are probably correct for Delta. For Omicron, the active cases are nearly uniformly distributed with respect to vaccination rates. It still helps to reduce hospitalization rates however which is good.

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...

This is interesting. PBS indicated that the vaccine is 30-40% protective against omicron infection and that it jumps above 70% with a booster.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/health/how-effective-are-co...

I wonder if the early data has been proven wrong or if something is wonky about Alberta. At even 30% effectiveness you’d expect to see a big gap between unvaccinated and vaccinated new cases.

Weirdly near the bottom of your link they show nearly 90% effectiveness against all the variants of concern, but omicron isn’t listed. It seems like the vaccines would have to be negatively effective against omicron for all the other data to work out, though.

That certainly used to be the case. In mid December for example (i.e. around the time the PBS article was written) active cases were roughly evenly split between unvaccinated and vaccinated. This is in a highly vaccinated population (85% of 12+, 73% total - out of 4.5M) so prevalence in the unvaccinated group was 3-4X higher than vaccinated at that time.

It seems unlikely that the Alberta population is experiencing a significantly different pandemic than neighbouring regions (demographics and responses are largely the same). I also wouldn't conclude from this data that vaccines are negatively effective as hospitalization rates are lower in the vaccinated group.

> It seems unlikely that the Alberta population is experiencing a significantly different pandemic

I agree. But I don’t understand that data. It doesn’t seem to line up with data from other areas.

e.g. Seattle is seeing 2.5x more infections among the unvaccinated.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/record-covi...

> It seems like the vaccines would have to be negatively effective against omicron for all the other data to work out, though.

If you search hard enough (and quickly enough, they’ll likely be removed soon as they’re anti-narrative) you’ll find articles of people discussing exactly this. That the vaccine actually increases your chance of infection.

> If you search hard enough

You can find anything online if you search hard enough. That doesn’t mean it’s true. It probably means you’re actively seeking out bias-confirming articles.

> (and quickly enough, they’ll likely be removed soon as they’re anti-narrative)

And now it’s full on conspiracy theory. This stuff is nuts. People like Alex Jones loudly put forward blatant lies that are “anti-narrative” and no one shuts them down. Why does every group imagine they are persecuted?

> you’ll find articles of people discussing exactly this. That the vaccine actually increases your chance of infection.

I would be interested in any relevant reputable articles showing this, but I’m pretty certain there are none.

Relevant article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/world/middleeast/israel-v... https://archive.ph/jTdUI

It's not conspiracy theorist BS to suggest Google shapes search results for various reasons, to include politics. They been forced to admit as much. And before you use the confirmation bias argument, I'm pro-vax and all in favor of as many boosters as they offer.

It’s conspiracy theory to suggest without evidence that “anti-narrative” information is being “removed”. Yes, big tech is certainly shaping results, but they’re doing that in both directions. They aren’t simply suppressing data they (or the hypothetical overlords) disagree with. They are feeding the info that people want. (Which is still bad)

The existence of that article in the New York Times would certainly seem to indicate a lack of suppression.

I do appreciate the link, though. That’s interesting and I hadn’t heard that was a concern. I wonder if there is science evidence that or if it’s hypothetical. The article doesn’t indicate one way or the other unless I missed it.

I will note it took me some time to find the article (I knew it existed because I'd read it when it came out). Google very nearly refused to do anything but send me links about how important it is to get boosters.

I don't know a ton about the science behind it other than some teams in Israel seem to have pretty strong feelings about it (more pointed than what's in the NYT article), but in my quick search I didn't see them in the search results.

With regards to search shaping, it's pretty easy to see: just Google image search "black inventors" then "white inventors". Also try "black family" then "white family". I'm not claiming any kind of oppression here, just noting that one of the sets of results looks like a Benetton-style diversity ad, while the other just has black people. I find it difficult to believe this was an organic result that wasn't explicitly influenced behind the scenes.

> With regards to search shaping, it's pretty easy to see: just Google image search "black inventors" then "white inventors". Also try "black family" then "white family". I'm not claiming any kind of oppression here, just noting that one of the sets of results looks like a Benetton-style diversity ad, while the other just has black people. I find it difficult to believe this was an organic result that wasn't explicitly influenced behind the scenes.

You could be right. I certainly see that “white family” involves a fair number of pictures of non-white folks. Individually the results all make sense (one from an article called “my white family”, stock photo “interracial black white family”, another about from an article about adopting a white child), but it’s odd that “black family” doesn’t have the same.

At the same time, it’s entirely plausible that this is just surfacing biases in the input. Maybe articles about families that aren’t just white have higher page rank? Maybe it’s something else. It’s interesting, but I’m doubtful it’s intentional (but it could be). If Google wanted to push a bias, it would make a lot more sense to push it on the unqualified “family” or “inventors”.

“White inventors” showing some black inventors makes a lot of sense given popular articles like “The iconic American inventor is still a white male” that specifically discuss non-white inventors.

> Especially when the vaccine no longer prevents catching the virus or transmitting it.

The vaccines never stopped catching or transmission... they lessen the chances of you developing severe symptoms, your immune system still has to work.

Vaccines were more effective at preventing infection, but their effectiveness in that area has declined with newer variants. Lessening the length and severity of symptoms also plays some role in reducing transmission since coughing, sneezing, and runny noses are a great way to spew virus into the world around you.

Although I hope we will see vaccines that do a better job at preventing infection and transmission the benefits we're getting from them right now are enough that everyone who can should be vaccinated and boosted as needed to maintain those benefits.

Do you have a source for this?

> The biggest reason the under 5s vaccine is taking so long is that they don't suffer severe enough symptoms that they can easily test the efficacy of the virus.

Do you have a source on that?

My understanding is the reason it's taking so long is 1) an abundance of caution because the risk/reward calculation is different and 2) young children's immune systems don't work the same as adults').

Covid deaths amongst children was lower in 2020 than from the flu the year before with a severe Covid strain, 400 deaths vs 600 deaths from flu year before, and faced with a tame Omicron variant the FDA decided to skip the science advisory panel for childhood vaccines [1] because they last time denied the request. The way this is handled is unscientific, and has no balance of risk vs reward.

Moreover, the government should be representative and derive it's power from the consent of the governed. Not enforce compliance to administrative state edicts. The slide from a representative republic to a technocracy is worrying.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/dangerous-push-to-give-boosters...

Why are you comparing across years? How many children died of the flu in 2020 during lockdowns and social distancing?

Moreover, the governed don't want the actions of others to kill them. That's why they created a government that prevents others from polluting, driving dangerously, and spreading disease.

> How many children died of the flu in 2020 during lockdowns and social distancing?

400

> Why are you comparing across years?

Many seem to have the misconception that covid is risky for children, while they are at low risk, so I highlight that the child covid death numbers from covid was low and comparable to a normal flu season like the one in 2019.

https://www.khou.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/verify-... says it's 1, not 400. What is your source?

That would make Covid hundreds of times deadlier for children than the flu. If it were a regular flu season without the mitigations that dropped flu deaths to 1, Covid would have killed even more children.

I'm in the same place with my kids and I feel similarly. I feel you on the replies here too. I get it, there are greater risks, but that doesn't mean this isn't stressful along with everything else going on. Anyway, I hope this is the tail end of these worries and hope your family has a healthy 2022.

I don't think "Vaxxed and done" people are saying your kids getting sick shouldn't feel stressful but rather covid poses a risk to children that is similar to or less than numerous other diseases and ailments we already faced. Just as schools weren't closed (or whatever precaution you'd like to put in here) for the flu or pneumonia there is no reason to close them for covid.

Fear is the mind killer.

unfortunately we’re not bene gesserit

Schools regularly either dismiss classes, or all classes altogether, when there are strep, measles or chicken pox outbreaks. The latter is just an itchy rash.

Some of the "Vaxxed and Done" voices that I hear on the WWW sounds like childfree adults telling parents that they should not worry. That is the perfect recipe for confrontation, even if unintentional! As a young adult, I would have happily tried to explain a rational, statistical/data-driven argument to parents. As a parent, I understand and accept a certain amount of irrational protectiveness/risk-aversion. It becomes very easy for us to talk past each other.

It boils down to risk v benefits. The under 5s have been relatively very low risk. If a jab can't out do that then there's no room to move forward with that idea. Omincron appears to be even less powerful, less of a threat. Those odds make the current jabs even less likely to be approved.

Covid was never thought to be risky for children, especially under 5s, even when we didn't have a vaccine. Omicron is much less risky than other kinds of covid.

I saw one paper claiming the reason is that MMR vaccine gives children some protection against "severe" covid due to overlapping T-cells, but didn't check if it reproduced so wouldn't believe too much in that. (And I saw it on twitter from Dr Feigl-Ding who's an alarmist type.)

> Covid was never thought to be risky for children, especially under 5s, even when we didn't have a vaccine.

This is likely correct, but

> Omicron is much less risky than other kinds of covid.

There's some indication (though no solid proof) that the jump in child hospitalizations is due to omicron being _more_ severe in children. The proposed mechanism is that its focus on the upper respiratory system instead of the lungs makes it less severe for us and worse for young children (in line with other childhood diseases that are generally taken somewhat seriously).

Going further, we've moved on from the un-vaccinated in general. My problem is that even though I live in a bubble with 100% vaccination rate among my relatives and friends (most of our kids are older), I can't quite make peace with just letting the un-vax'd kill one another off. And there seems to be no middle ground.

I'm curious where you get this information from.

The unvaxxed won't be killing off each other at a rate much (if any) higher then the vaxed and this is clear as day right now. Numbers.

What is it about this disease that is causing otherwise intelligent people to step into this reality of alternate (and untrue) facts? Even US supreme court justices.

I don't mean this as an attack, it's just I don't get it.

Not that I agree with the parent comment's sentiment, but from the article:

> Preliminary state data suggest that more than 90 percent of today’s deaths are still among unvaccinated people.

Source they provided: https://dshs.texas.gov/immunize/covid19/data/vaccination-sta...

From the numbers, it seems fairly clear that this virus is much more likely to cause death amongst the unvaccinated - unless I'm misinterpreting.

"Killing each other off" indicates mass die off. Are we seeing mass die off?

Given that fully vaxxed places are blowing up in case numbers, the vax obviously isn't stopping transmission much if at all right now.

Many more people are vaxxed then not right now. So if you are unvaxed and infected on a trip to the store who most likely gave it to you? A vaxxed person or an unvaxxed person?

"Unvaxxed killing each other off" is a hysterical take and inaccurate.

I don’t know if an average of 1500 deaths a day counts as “mass die off” or not, but it kind of feels like it does.

"That's not even a 9/11!"

If you had a flock of a million birds and sixty of them died and you wrote a thesis with the term "mass die off" you would be laughed out of the room.

According to NatGeo "mass die off" is 90% of the population. I'd be alarmed at 6% die off in humans and not even be posting on the topic, but we are at less then 1%. For the unvaxxed.

"Killing each other off" just doesn't fit here.

In some countries, there was no major difference in annual All-Cause deaths between 2020 and prior years, which suggested that some deaths (with? of?) Covid were accelerated by a few months, but would have happened even without Covid due to existing ailments/co-morbidities.

Some countries reported more all-cause deaths for 2020.

Some states/countries sent Covid-infected patients into nursing homes, which did not help.

The vast majority of countries (~75%) reported significantly more deaths: https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336

Thanks, very useful article.

You know that precovid about 8000 people died each day in the USA?

Sure. So an increase of 20% every day from a single cause is significant.

The only reason that seems like a big number is because you do t count all the people that died everyday before Covid.

"Given that fully vaxxed places are blowing up in case numbers, the vax obviously isn't stopping transmission much if at all right now."

This is one of those "obvious" things that mathematically isn't obvious at all.

Any slope of a line could be steeper or shallower, so looking at that alone obviously can't tell you if the slope is 1% shallower than it could be, 5%, 10%, 50%... it's not like we hit "100% of the population has had covid now" overnight.

The vaccinated and unvaccinated are not evenly distributed across the country. The distribution seems to bimodal, where there are areas with high concentrations of vaccinated people, and areas with high concentrations of unvaccinated people. I'm in a state with high vaccination rates, but in a county and municipality where vaccination rates are low and where COVID denialism has been law of the land for over a year now.

Do you know what the death rate is today, among either group (vaccinated or unvaccinated)? Your link is pre-omicron, by the way.

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-big-data-study-of-145...

All I see there is poorly-presented correlations that ignore a constantly changing environment. Looks like someone picking and choosing numbers to support the position they want to take, while ignoring all the other data and evidence that disagrees.

Where I live, in California, there has been a months-long-and-holding-steady trend that vaccinated people have much lower cases per capita and much, MUCH lower deaths per capita. Total cases went up when we relaxed restrictions which coincided with when vaccines were widespread. That's not the same as vaccinations causing those higher total case numbers! Now total case numbers are going up again due to seasonal factors + omicron having a lot of mutations; it's too early to say just yet exactly how the vax/unvax per-capita numbers will look for this wave when it's over. As of Dec 26, it was tracking pretty similarly, though[0]... it seems to blow up that dude's case: many fewer vaccination doses are being given now than during the last big waves!

EDIT: here are the money bits that I would need to see really compelling evidence to believe are coincidental/misinterpreted/etc:

* From December 20, 2021 to December 26, 2021, unvaccinated people were 3.9 times more likely to get COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people.

* From December 13, 2021 to December 19, 2021, unvaccinated people were 10.1 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people.

* From December 6, 2021 to December 12, 2021, unvaccinated people were 16.6 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people.

Transmission, severity, and death, all. And that's after the omicron variant reached the state, especially for transmission, though admittedly before it has peaked (it possibly hasn't even peaked yet, still).

[0] https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/#postvax-status

Just mentioning, but 30 october is still pre-omicron in many areas

You're aware that "unvaccinated" includes the vaccinated < 14 days after 2nd shot?

UK numbers show that only 1% of Covid-recovered people are reinfected, which is why the EU pass equated recovery with vaccination (which does not prevent infection or transmission).

It would be more accurate if US hospital data was separated into:

  Fully vax
  Partly vax
  Unvax + Covid-recovered
  Unvax + Covid-naive

> I can't quite make peace with just letting the un-vax'd kill one another off.

Why?

Most of the unvaxxed are in places without access to vaccines and those populations will continue to be a source of new variants. Delta and Omicron both came from places/times that had very limited access to vaccines.

If someone in the US continues to reject vaccination, I don't know what to do about it at this point. But there's big populations that haven't been vaccinated because they haven't had a chance. It's crucial to give them that chance.

People should put more energy/money into getting vaccines to people who want them but don’t have access to them? Why?

Poor people in other countries are still people

People are people.

This tautology doesn’t inform me of anything.

Aside from basic humanitarianism, I'd really like to drop the word "mutations" from the "should my kid see his grandparents" discussion. I only get to do that if we apply public health solutions to public health problems, though.

People who are not you should spent money so your kid can see his grandparents?

Public health care problems (which fundamentally is what COVID19 is, rather than a personal health care problem) require that various human collectives spend money so that people's children can see their grandparents.

Are you this unempathic and selfish in real life?

If asked to pay for children who I don’t know to get meatspace time with their extended gene clan, who I also don’t know, I will decline and recommend they use Zoom.

> Are you this unempathic and selfish in real life?

I do as little as possible for people who do not do for me.

"yes" would have been a shorter answer.

I wanted to be totally clear.

1. Because there is a harmful disease and we have an available protection. It seems obvious that there is moral prerogative to make that protection to those who want and need it.

2. Because the quicker and more widely covid spreads the more chance it has to evolve new variants, and those variants will spread worldwide. So everyone has an interest in slowing it down everywhere in order to protect themselves against potential future variants.

What else would you do with the remaining doses?

Are you at peace with motorcycle riders? They also die at disproportionate rates. Try to think about unvaccinated as motorcycle riders: living and risking death the way they enjoy it.

This is a great analogy, I’m going to use this moving forward.

Do you mean trained, licensed, experienced, and law abiding motorcycle riders, acting on reliable information? It's certainly a good question.

We do place limits on risking death in our society. I don't know if it can be based on objective criteria. We don't let people drive cars without seat belts, or attend school without certain vaccinations. Widespread exposure to a disease of the nature of COVID, under a flood of misinformation, had exactly zero advocates two years ago.

I don't have an answer, and was deliberately being a bit vague about whether I'm at peace with it or not. I'm willing to leave it at being on the fence.

Motorcycles would probably not have been accepted were they invented yesterday. They've been grandfathered into society, like tobacco. I say this as a licensed motorcycle rider.

That’s quite likely, I agree (I am a motorcycle rider too).

I'm a bicyclist, same deal, except no license. There are a lot of people out there who believe that riding a bike on public roads is unacceptably risky.

Yeah. I used to ride bikes (bicycles) in some super dense urban areas of US for years. Got hurt more on bicycles than on my motorcycles (my 70+ mph interstate crash on motorcycle not nearly as bad as getting whacked on bicycle by a valet going 10mph in downtown Chicago!)

Bicyclist probably get way more injuries per mile than motorcyclists. It's risky!

Cycling isn't risky, sharing poorly designed roads with cars is risky.

Dedicated, fully separated paths with no conflict points have very low fatality rates. Also, even in risky areas there is a net positive effect on mortality.

Yea I was going to say this. I moved to downtown Manhattan and finally mustered up the courage to start road biking after ten years of avoiding it in SF and.... It's amazing and feels almost 100% safe on the routes I take. The only real risks I've seen come from asshole deliverypeople barreling down the bike path the wrong direction, and even those risks have felt pretty capped. They've never been going fast enough that I would've been anything but banged up a bit.

Indeed, and it's very hard to assess individual safety from broad based statistics. How do cycling injuries per mile translate into my personal risk? I've had one cycling injury in 50 years, when I hit a patch of ice on a bike path and cracked a rib. Ouch.

Cyclists have to figure out safety by guesswork. One thing that's reasonably certain is that cars cause the majority of cycling injuries (not counting mountain biking, which I'm not equipped for). I have a rule of thumb, which is that if a car can crash into another car, or into stationary objects such as buildings, then it can crash into a cyclist. So I look at where car crashes occur: Mostly on higher speed, congested roads, and especially at intersections. My first safety rule is route choice, and I avoid routes with a lot of car traffic. I rarely encounter cars on my commute to work.

What about electric unicycles, which were invented "yesterday" and are legal?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pahL4MPPOek

The US tends to have a laissez faire approach to product safety. Rare problems are ignored unless they become newsworthy. More frequent problems are addressed through lawsuits. Regulation is applied (either new regulations or enforcement of existing ones) after the fact if problems reach a certain level of visibility or persistence.

From what I can tell, Europe has more regulations and fewer lawsuits.

Motorcycle riders take out other people on the road, too. Even if you aren't killed by someone on a motorcycle, your family getting PTSD because their mangled corpse flew through your windshield isn't exactly a great outcome, either.

This is of course, true, but what is your point, exactly? Are you arguing that government should ban riding motorcycles just like they are trying to ban refusing to take COVID vaccine?

This is bizarre. You really think the un-vaccinated will “kill one another off”?

Most likely they’ll get the disease, completely recover and move on.

It comes from a disbelief in natural immunity that is more prevalent in the US. I believe it’s due to our policy of not accommodating prior cases of COVID on vaccination records, unlike countries with more sophisticated record-keeping. It may also be due to what I perceive to be a culture preference for premium manufactured solutions in this wealthier, highly industrialized country (c.f. our relationship with health food vs. healthy eating.)

If you believe prior cases of COVID don’t affect your survival rate in subsequent cases, and that there will be an infinite number of similarly deadly successive variants, then you conclude that most unvaccinated people will eventually get the variant that kills them.

> then you conclude that most unvaccinated people will eventually get the variant that kills them.

I think this makes three large assumptions:

  1. That natural infection doesn't result in durable immunity. This appears to be, unquestionably, not true [1].

  2. Those that are unvaccinated will not get a natural infection. This is exceedingly unlikely, assuming they're living normal lives.

  3. Vaccines will be constantly updated. This appears to be true, with a large time delay (see omicron vaccine being worked on now).

1: https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

I appreciate the comment, forgive my late response.

I agree that "kill one another off" was a bit hyperbolic, but it was past the edit window before I noticed that it was being genuinely misunderstood. All I meant was what would seem to be happening: People exposing one another to a communicable disease with a death rate of X. I was arguably using the wrong terminology for the magnitude of X.

Whether a death rate of X is acceptable or not may depend on social acceptance of the cause, the visibility of the cause (plane crashes always make the news, suicides don't) social class, etc. This is evident in the use of analogies within this sub thread, as a way of trying to make sense of the issue.

> with a death rate of X

With natural immunity [1], the death rate will not be constant [2].

1. https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity

How about with a death rate of X(t).

I also like the fact that nobody seems to be concerned with the possible effects this virus could have long-term on the developmental growth of a child under 5… I think I would be much more concerned about that than the symptoms of the initial infection itself.

& for those who want to go “buhh we don’t know how duh vaccine will effect their developmental growth either” - I don’t have much to say to you other than I wish you had an education…

Would those effects be any different than what happens with the seemingly never ending viruses children already contract?

You don't think the accumulation of lipid nanoparticles from what might be annual vaccinations could impact developmental growth in children? We have decades of research on Coronaviridae even if COVID-19 is a bit different, but we have basically nothing on LNP.

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