Comment by mleonhard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mleonhard | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Vaccines were never expected to stop the pandemic. They were expected to stop people from dying from the pandemic. They are doing that. So far, vaccines have saved 1.1M Americans from dying from covid and saved 10.3M Americans from needing hospital treatment for covid [0].

Preventable Covid-19 cases can lead to higher health and life insurance rates. Firing employees who refuse the vaccine is smart business.

Vaccine mandates save the government a lot of money in several ways:

- US government pays $770B a year for medical care for older people and poor children [1]. Covid cases increase those costs. Fortunately, vaccines prevent most cases and reduce severity of all cases.

- US government has 23M veterans and pays $40B a year for their medical care [2]. Covid cases increase those costs. Fortunately, vaccines prevent most of the cases.

- When a person goes to the hospital and cannot pay, the hospital takes a loss and reduces the tax they pay. Hospitals write off about $40B in uncompensated care every year [3]. Uncompensated covid care makes those numbers bigger and taxes lower. Fortunately, vaccines prevent most serious covid cases.

- Workers can't work when they have covid or their dependents have covid. Covid sickness reduces economic output. Because taxes only apply to profits and most businesses have low margins, small reductions in revenue cause large reductions in taxes. Fortunately, vaccines reduce severity of all cases, so people recover more quickly and workers can get back to work faster.

[0] https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_(United_States)

[2] https://www.va.gov/vetdata/docs/QuickFacts/Expenditures_quic...

[3] https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2020-01-06-fact-sheet-uncomp...

"Vaccines were never expected to stop the pandemic."

That's complete bullshit. You can find many examples of experts, governments and politicians claiming that's exactly what was likely going to happen.

That was the message people were sold.

For good reason, there are many diseases that have been wiped out by vaccination.

Exactly! What was all that talk about using the vaccine to achieve herd immunity and reduce the R0? That was SO the narrative.

Do you have sources? Who said the vaccines were going to stop the pandemic, as opposed to death from covid?

Politicians, media, social media... It was just about everyone except scientists who were saying that from like April through November 2021.

Around November/December people suddenly started treating it as if no one ever said that, as if they suddenly realized they were lied to and didn't want to look like they were fooled.

This was a possibility at some point, but it required a very high number of people to get vaccinated quickly, before more variants. That did not happen, so the newer variants the vaccines had lower efficiency, which required even more people to be vaccinated, which is now seen as impossible, and so instead of hoping to get rid of Covid, now we hope to make it endemic, which is also achieved through more immunity, that which can come from either surviving Covid, or a vaccine. In the endemic state, most everyone has had immunity through a vaccine or recovering from Covid at least once. Covid is still around, since it evolves quickly to bypass immunity and spreads too fast to be eradicated, but as something that people get say yearly, or at a rate more similar to a cold or the flu, you get in this sort of balance where you're always immune enough to survive the next one and evolve your immunity along the way.

The issue is getting to this state with the least casualty, and vaccines are best for that.

I checked for other pandemics to see how they ended, and they all seem to end the same way, by reaching large herd immunity either through vaccination, or just everyone catching it and having the weak die off, and the survivors pass on immunity to the next generation.

>This was a possibility at some point, but it required a very high number of people to get vaccinated quickly, before more variants.

it required vaccines that actually slow the spread of disease

I should not have written "Vaccines were never expected to stop the pandemic." Vaccines were expected to stop the pandemic.

PRC, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other countries had SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 [0]. It kills 9% of people who catch it, even young people. Their governments performed effective contact tracing and forced quarantining. Everyone in those countries was careful not to catch or spread the disease. It nearly became a pandemic, but the people stopped it.

I hoped that Americans would do the same with SARS-CoV-2 (covid).

Instead, we went half the pandemic without a pandemic expert (epidemiologist) on the National Covid Task Force [1]. Our national leader downplayed the pandemic, refused to be careful not to catch or spread the disease, caught the disease, exposed his political opponents to it during debate, recovered, and consistently undermined and contradicted our national pandemic experts (CDC) [2].

Our government contact tracing programs have been underfunded and ineffective. Only schools performed effective contact tracing. Quarantine is not enforced or even checked. There are no fines or prison time for sick people who go to work or to gatherings and spread the disease.

Many Americans refused to take simple precautions to avoid catching or transmitting the disease. Some places even banned such precautions [3]!

About 20% of adult Americans refused the vaccine [4].

Americans refused to cooperate and achieve herd immunity. Do not blame epidemiologists for telling us what was possible. We should blame callous & incompetent politicians for undermining our medical professionals, blame callous & greedy media companies for targeting medical advice with their anti-establishment dogma, and blame callous & gullible Americans for refusing vaccines and carelessly spreading the disease.

Cities with cooperative people did achieve herd immunity. For example, San Francisco did in 2021-06 [5].

Then Delta and Omicron variants arrived. They break through existing immunity. USA now has 700,000 new cases of Omicron per day [6]. So we should reach herd immunity for Omicron in March. Then the pandemic will be over for us, unless another breakthrough variant arises.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House_Coronavirus_Task_F...

[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-the-fall-of-the-cd...

[3] https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-issues-execu...

[4] https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_the_San_F...

[6] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&cumulative=0&...

> Vaccines were never expected to stop the pandemic. They were expected to stop people from dying from the pandemic.

Unless you listened to Joe Biden, the President, who said this in October 2021:

“We know there is no other way to beat the pandemic than to get the vast majority of Americans vaccinated”

https://www.aol.com/news/biden-defends-vaccination-requireme...

Well it’s true without vaccinations we won’t have a chance to beat it. Doesn’t mean we will. It’s just one big part of a public health epidemic, and without we fail.

You're right that they're achieving the goals of the governments, but they're not living up to the public's understanding of "vaccine" -- it's vaporware, or over-promise under-deliver from what we all expected when we were enticed by "vaccine" to take the jab.

in a lot of ways this is a PR issue and undermining of good faith more than a facts/data issue. There may not be any specific conspiracy but for whatever reason they're acting in an untrustworthy manner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com