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?
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:
The study you cite specifically excludes those under 5.
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.
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 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...
Statistically we should be much more worried about something like RSV or the flu (even after vaccination).
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.
Pneumonia.
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.
As does early treatment, https://c19early.com
Vaccine efficacy decays monthly (Delta/2021), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE
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
It is pointless to quote rates without their context (country, age, virus strain, month, etcetera).
(Edit: forgot the source :P) https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...
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.
It’s true, but we’ve had plenty of vaccinated that were 90%+ effective compared to the Covid vaccines at 30% for infection risk.
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.
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.
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.
This is enough for me to avoid them. I didn’t read the rest because it’s a short essay.
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.
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The vaccines never stopped catching or transmission... they lessen the chances of you developing severe symptoms, your immune system still has to work.
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.
-- writing this while my toddler is banished from daycare for 10 days because a single kid there tested positive.
Hopefully it's transient, soon followed by calm risk-benefit analysis.
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.
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.