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Comment by rfrey | Hacker News Reader

Many (I suspect most but I only follow a few) epidemiologists are saying there's no stopping Omicron. It's more contagious than measles - if you're in a room with somebody who has it, you're exposed barring a properly fitted N95 mask. All of us will be exposed by mid February.

It's also many times less pathogenic than Delta, and it's a gift that nothing at present can outcompete it. I believe it's the version that will be endemic, if not than something very similar. So as someone who has spent too many months raging against people who refused to look at the facts of Delta - my mom missed essential surgery because the ICUs were crowded with antivax people, to add emotion to the mix - I'm onside that it's the time to start opening up, at least in jurisdictions where Omicron is 95%+ of cases and where hospitalizations have peaked.

The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along. Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days.

edit: In the above I say I believe all of us will be exposed - not necessarily infected though.

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> Many (I suspect most)epidemiologists are saying there's no stopping Omicron.

Which doesn’t mean we all have to get it at the same time.

I’m so tired of these false dichotomies. There’s a lot of middle ground between full lockdown and completely giving up so everyone gets it at the same time. We’re already running out of ICU beds and emergency treatments like monoclonal antibodies where I’m at.

Yet the prevailing logic seems to be that because masks and distancing aren’t perfectly effective that we should just give up and go full-on into infections for everybody.

I don't mean to present a false dichotomy, thank you for alerting me that I may have. Slowing it down is obviously helpful and anything we can do to accomplish that is important. In Canada I'm still doing everything I can because it's not clear that we've peaked - the government is saying we have but they've also cut way down on testing so I'm not sure. In South Africa and increasingly in the UK it looks like a different story.

Once hospitalizations are in decline most of the population will have been exposed.

> Slowing it down is obviously helpful and anything we can do to accomplish that is important.

It's not that simple. It's not a matter of doing something good vs not doing it, that's what an oversimplified black and white thinking is. It's about priorities, and about looking at certain types of damage compared to other types of damage, and choosing the best path that causes the least overall damage.

Some people just have black-white thinking. See also "vaccines are not working" and lots of other nonsense.

I feel like I really started to have more empathy and better understand the world the moment in my life where I realized that black and white don't actually exist, they're unattainable ideals. It's all just shades of gray. It's so rare to find things like math where the answer is either right or wrong.

It really depends on the subject. 1+1=2 according to the rules of arithmetic.

Yes. But also, in current culture, it is politically useful to pretend you have only black and white thinking.

I dont think all or even most of people who use those is truly confused and dont understand. Instead, allowing anything else then "if not 100% miracle it dont work" would force them to admit they are wrong or politicians they root for are wront.

It is much easier to beat the other side in argument if you pretend you are too simple to understand percentages and shades. Because contemporary culture treats nuance as weakness and pretty much accepts that kind of argument.

I kind of resent being lumped in with a politically motivated, black-and-white, feign ignorance kind of crowd. I try to assess the data as it arises, and the data about Omicron is markedly different than previous variants. I don't think I said anything in my comment that deserves this attack.

If anything, attacking anything that hints of "maybe we should reassess given current data" as being the same as the antimask/antivax rhetoric of the last two years is itself exactly what you are criticising.

We need a mechanism to separate academic inquiry from a political tactic that disguises itself as academic inquiry. Unfortunately, the courtesy of extending good faith by default has been heavily exploited, so out of strategic necessity many assume bad faith by default. Naturally, this assumption should be revised once somebody proves that they're actually interested in details rather than fighting. If we had alternative methods of proving "seriousness" (e.g. academic credentials in academic settings), we could sidestep the requirement, but here on the internet it probably has to be this way.

It's a pity, but no, it's not the same as antimask/antivax rhetoric.

I expanded on previous comments. Yours was 3 levels up. I wanted to make the exact point I did - a lot of black and white thinking is in fact manipulative.

Pretending that all those people don't understand does not help anything. Which is why I made that point.

It is repeated patten from the start of pandemic. If something is not 100% perfect, there is not point on doing it and anyone doing it is stupid sheep. No matter how full hospitals are, you are stupid sheep for doing small things that take chances down (like getting vaccine). Pretending that massive powerful media machine broadcasting these are just confused serves no one.

> Some people just have black-white thinking. See also "vaccines are not working" and lots of other nonsense.

The same applies to people who assume that unvaccinated people must be idiots.

Ireland is on the tail of their omicron peak ( based on cases, hospitalizations, and icu beds). Ireland has a very high vax percentage, well over 90+ in the covered groups, with high penetration of boosters as well.

The case peak from omicron was 7x the delta numbers, hospitalization numbers were 2x, and icu was actually down.

I feel like omicron has burned through here, and there’s not a huge risk to opening at this point.

At the point when we have another infectious strain going around, they’re going to have to reevaluate, but that’s later.

> Preaching "floods don't exist!" to the exhausted people who are watching the river subside after slinging sandbags for three days.

Alternatively, many who were caught in the flood washed up safely on the shores, returned back to town to see people ripping down their houses to build barriers against the flood that they thought was the end of the world.

Because many people they knew didn't wash safely back on the shores.

Is 1% "many"?

Is millions? And what about the millions of others who washed backed up but have become disabled and can’t work?

Millions out of what? Big scary number without context says nothing whatsoever.

Millions out of us.

1 percent of the world population is 78 million people, that is many, even if you try to make it seem small by using percent. Each of those people were a member of a family, a mother, brother, father, son or similar to someone.

But by your reckoning it's not many, and given Hitler killed 6 million Jews, which is a lot less than 78 million, he didn't kill that many either.

As of now, 5.5 million people worldwide died of Covid over the past 2 years (give or take a few million due to bad reporting).

It's an enormous loss of life, but a tiny number for a worldwide pandemic, especially given current travel technologies that would have made ancient plagues orders of magnitude worse than they were.

In comparison, we're talking about the targeted, deliberate, highly organized extermination of two thirds the entire Jewish race in Europe.

The ICUs are full. Millions have died. Millions more have long covid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Enough with this fear mongering bullshit please, what are you trying to achieve, is it fun to spread panic? Show a proper statistically significant excess mortality, or stop talking about people dying.

Three statements of fact were presented.

It is another fact that excess mortality has been shown, clearly and repeatedly.

It is also a fact that there is a theory in psychology that anger stems from fear.

Oh please stop acting like you are some genius for figuring out that 1% can seem small. Would you accept 1% of Jeff Bezos wealth? Or is that too small for you?

I am pointing out a) that some people doing fine is not proof that no one need be concerned, and b) there is separate reason for concern. If the pandemic had not initially been treated as a political problem but as a public health problem a lot of suffering would have been spared. And to call making these points "fear mongering bullshit" is to continue treating it as a political problem.

> It's also many times less pathogenic than Delta

This is a misleading way to say your risk of hospitalization is about half of what it was with Delta.

Vaccination is making it safer to get closer back to normal — which is why Ireland can consider it with their much higher rate of over 92% versus the U.S. 63% — but we still need to be thinking about masks and improved ventilation when it’s spreading, especially since kids are still unable to be vaccinated.

Why on earth would you vaccinate kids? It’s not going to do anything to the spread of the virus, as the grand parent post mentioned it is extremely infectious and neither masks or the vaccines have been shown to make anything else than a dent in the levels of infections. They aren’t at risk of the virus either. The energy would be better spent convincing the few >60yo who haven’t been vaccinated to get the shot. But keeping restrictions until kids are vaccinated? What is the point?

That's correct. At some point we need to look at the real data of deaths. https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ In Europe, there has NEVER been A PANDEMIC for people <45yo.

All care should have focused on the elderly (early treatment, access to doctors even when positive...). No restrictions (mask, mandatory vaccine, lockdowns..) makes sense for those aged under 45yo.

You can be sick without dying. I don't want to get sick.

Everyone gets sick, you can't really stop that. Restricting your life from normal activities from fear of being infected with low risk cold viruses, is the very definition of hypochondria

Vaccinated people suffer much less from a course of infection than unvaccinated, in all age groups.

Not necessarily 'long covid' stuff, just the basic injury that comes from the illness. I sure don't want to lose my sense of smell.

Even in young children, the consequences of infection appear to be worse statistically than the consequences of vaccination. It's of course not all that well understood yet, but for example, compare this syndrome that appears to be associated with Covid infection to the myocarditis due to vaccination:

https://www.cdc.gov/mis/mis-c.html

If you look at what pediatricians and epidemiologists with children are doing, they are being pretty cautious and are eager to vaccinate them.

My point here was death. The fact that there is no life threatening disease for 0-45yo on a statistical level in Europe. Death for this age group is lower than it was in 2017.

> Vaccinated people suffer much less from a course of infection than unvaccinated, in all age groups.

I don't know how you can measure that. And that's not how these vaccines have been sold. They were supposed to have 95% efficacy at lowering risk of getting COVID-19 compared with the control group. We know now that is not the case as it does not help to control the epidemic (most vaxed countries with the highest cases). Transmission and contamination are not reduced with the vaccine.

So now we are told that it was never supposed to stop transmission, but miraculously, it makes your body handle the COVID better.

I don't know what data is used, but if you look for example in scotland (Page 44 https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11223/22-01-19-covid...) There is no obvious difference between the vax or unvaxed in term of hospitalization or covid positivity (p.38) unvaxed even seem to do better.

This is health, people are always going to get sick, not just from COVID. We need to fight all diseases with the best weapons we got. Against Covid, vaccines are 1 weapon, so is anti-viral drugs, antibiotics anti inflammatory and anti coagulant.

But we should let each individual choose with his doctor what treatment he wants. And not guilt young children to take an experimental drug where we don't know the long term efficacy or side effects.

Yeah, it's a mistake to only consider deaths.

And it's a mistake to evaluate the vaccines in terms of what was said about them over time versus the impact they currently have. They currently confer lots of protection to people that have received them.

Like the fact that the officials and manufacturers failed to properly communicate that it's a dynamic, changing situation doesn't actually undermine the very real value that the vaccines still provide.

Mortality rate (p.50) and hospital admissions (p.44) muddy the picture quite considerably. Would love to see similar figures for other countries in Europe.

Looking at those graphs, it does look like it's getting there for 15-44 years too, no?

Yes, we can see that something is different in the last months of 2021. So either Omicron, as we now that it affects younger people as well. Or another cause... Either way, it is close to the 2018 high. It would be bold to qualify that as a pandemic!

I don't know, _all_ points where the graph crosses the "Substantial increase" line were 2020+ or later.

>In Europe, there has NEVER been A PANDEMIC for people <45yo.

What? This is completely, wildly,untrue. See for starters Spanish Flu (killed mostly those aged under 45), smallpox (disproportionately affecting children)

Apologies, I was not clear. There has never been a "deadly COVID19" pandemic for <45yo

1. Vaccination is not a hardship.

2. Reducing R flattens the curve, and pushing it below 1.0 ends the pandemic.

> vaccines have been shown to make anything else than a dent in the levels of infections

Oh?

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2022011...

This applies to all ages, but if I had linked to an ICU with adults I'm sure you would have blamed the pattern on old people.

Vaccines make a big difference, it's just that the vaccine doesn't protect people who don't take it. Even so, it kinda does: herd immunity and R are real. It's hilarious that anti-vaxxers seem to think that anything less than the vaccine somehow managing to protect 100% of people who don't take it is some kind of failure on its part.

Vaccination can be a hardship if it causes adverse events. The long-term negative health effects of COVID infection in children are isolated to the high risk comorbidity group, including COVID induced myocarditis. Healthy kids who contract COVID do not develop myocarditis later. Meanwhile, healthy kids who get the vaccines are at a small risk of developing myocarditis with the risk being far higher than developing it from COVID.

I have two children and they are not getting any COVID vaccine unless a second generation one that is not experimental is developed. I don't want any shot developed during the Trump administration in a rushed federal program injected into my kids and you shouldn't either. They've already both caught the virus and had no symptoms whatsoever. We wouldn't have even known they had it if not for the fact that I had lost my sense of smell and got tested.

Children are at lower risk from COVID-19 than they are from influenza. That is the data and it might not agree with your priors but it doesn't change the fact that that is the data.

It should be noted that the second generation of the COVID vaccine is going to look nothing like the first. They are likely not going to use the same components of the virus that they did with the first generation because the spike protein payload has unintended consequences in some human beings. I acknowledge that this subgroup of human beings is a small minority but it happened to include my mother-in-law who is now dead after suffering cardiac arrest 4 hours after her second shot.

In case you think I am a nutty anti-vaxxer I assure you I am not. I firmly believe that my father is alive today because of the vaccine. He was in a high-risk category and I just don't believe he would have survived COVID infection if he had caught it. It's a great idea for people like him and people in his age group. Hell, it was a good idea for my mother-in-law, but unintended consequences are going to happen when you have a practically untested vaccine administered to a massive population. Both of them are at high risk from the virus. My children are simply not. People seem to be unwilling to admit that a vaccine developed for a rapidly evolving virus in 2020 isn't very effective in 2022. I don't know why this cognitive dissonance is so strong, but it's just the fact. It prevents hospitalization but not spread. That's a good thing, but it's a private health effect, not a public one.

> small risk of developing myocarditis

"small" is doing a lot of work here. As a society, we are generally comfortable with mandates that contain a small amount of risk. This had better be a large value of "small."

> Among more than 2.5 million vaccinated HCO members who were 16 years of age or older, 54 cases met the criteria for myocarditis. The estimated incidence per 100,000 persons who had received at least one dose of vaccine was 2.13 cases (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.56 to 2.70). The highest incidence of myocarditis (10.69 cases per 100,000 persons; 95% CI, 6.93 to 14.46) was reported in male patients between the ages of 16 and 29 years. A total of 76% of cases of myocarditis were described as mild and 22% as intermediate; 1 case was associated with cardiogenic shock.

Oh, it isn't. It's tiny. How many thousands of people do you have to stack on the railroad before you pull the switch on the trolley problem? Not this many. Not a hardship.

If you're going to quote the trolley problem at me, you need to explain to me the benefit of the vaccine for this age group. Risk of the virus for this age group is tiny. The primary rationale for vaccinating children originally was to prevent them from spreading the virus. With the new variants, this rationale has disappeared. It is now a private health decision, not a public health one.

I really dislike these public health studies where they wave their hands at myocarditis and treat it like it's not a big deal. There's no cardiologist that would tell you that. It's very serious and carries with it a dramatically elevated risk of lifelong cardiac problems down the road.

I will not allow the paranoia of a bunch of self-righteous cowards to put my kids at risk. Get the shot, move on with your life and leave the rest of us alone. We aren't responsible for soothing your paranoia anymore. The virus is now endemic courtesy of a lab in China funded by self-righteous arrogant scientists in the US. That's a controversial statement but it's the truth. Unfortunately, most of the people complaining about my kids not being vaccinated would rather be angry at me than angry at the people who unleashed this virus on the world.

https://ravarora.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-vaccine-indu...

https://peterattiamd.com/why-im-for-covid-vaccines-but-again...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-vaccines-are...

Vaccines and masks have both been shown to be quite effective prior to Omicron. Kids are the remaining gap and that’s important because they can spread it even if they’re less likely to get sick, and that’s important because they bridge households and come in contact with high risk family members.

The other thing to remember is that kids don’t have a problem with the extremely mild inconvenience of wearing a mask — that’s mostly adults complaining for political reasons. If you ask a teacher, it’s just something they do like wearing shoes, and vaccination is no different than all of the other ones they get (95% rate in the US prior to Republicans choosing to politicize medicine).

This should all be indexed to vaccination and spread rates: relax restrictions on high risk activities like indoor dining as the former climbs and the latter declines, and prioritize keeping schools safe to avoid disruptive closures.

> Why […] would you vaccinate kids?

For the stated and proven reasons, the commonly known basis of vaccination: 1: It is much, much, much more dangerous to get COVID than the vaccine. 2: The immune response from vaccination is much more protective and much more consistent than the immune response from infection, especially with this disease.

This is known.

Also, established scientific knowledge lies counter to the statements you have as premise.

> which is why Ireland can consider it with their much higher rate of over 92% versus the U.S. 63%

Source? I think you are mis aggregating data.

92% [1] of Ireland Adult population has received it-least 1 dose vs 85% [2] of the US Adult population has received it-least 1 dose.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-58522792 [2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/who-are-the-a...

I was looking at the fully vaccinated rates since that seems to be a lot more significant with Omicron and the U.S. has substantial lags but it does look like some of the variation comes from tracking the number of doses total without accounting for the difference between some people having 3 doses. It also looks like some of them are not accounting for the percentage of ineligible kids.

Here's the one I used, which shows full vaccination on 91.7% and partial at 93%:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-trac...

Others have it around 80% so that's probably in error:

https://covid19ireland-geohive.hub.arcgis.com/pages/vaccinat... https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations?country=IRL https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

"The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along"

Well, there has been at least some change. While in the beginning, those people negated the existence of covid alltogether. Only after many of them did in fact suffer from the real virus, I heard those stories less and less and rather now many recommendation of chlordioxid and ivermectin. (Without ever hearing anything about being wrong for once)

In other words, those people rather take something, that is usually used for desinfection and bathroom cleaning - instead of the vaccination. You cannot reason with that.

That being said, I can very much understand, being sceptical of a brand new proprietary genetic technology to be injected in my system.

But I cannot understand completely misstrusting worldwide efforts of so many people - and then rather trust someone on the internet. So, why care, what they think? They can be wrong a million times and you can proof it and they can ignore the facts, a million times more.

I think about just the common cold/flu - I also don't want to get that. If I knew that was ravaging through communities at higher than normal rates, i would take precautions because I just would prefer to not get sick!

Be my guest, but don't force all of society to be your hypochondria buddies.

I'm going to challenge you on a specific point:

If it required a Herculean effort to prevent the health care system collapsing, why didn't Sweden's healthcare system collapse? Why didn't Florida's health care system collapse? There's this certainty that these policies that were more restrictive were absolutely necessary, but nobody wants to acknowledge that locations on the planet that did not have strict policies seem to have done just as well over two years. I welcome you to look at the Swedish data and compare it to the rest of the EU or the United States. Sweden did very well compared to other nations with large global cities. It did not do great compared to Finland, but that's like comparing Colorado to Nebraska. They are neighboring but nothing alike.

I was very pro mask in the beginning until I realized that it was quickly turning into a cultish religion with no regard for actual efficacy. People didn't care that you were wearing a bandana on your mouth that was absolutely not effective, they just wanted you to signal to them that you agreed with their beliefs. My kids being forced to wear masks while playing sports outside on a field was utterly absurd and I have deep resentment towards public health authorities and the cultists who allowed their fear to hijack their brains and their common sense.

Your statement shows a confidence in your own prior beliefs with a muted acceptance of the new reality with omicron. But you just assume that countries that did not have policies as strict as yours had health care system collapses and the data shows they did not.

Your second and third sentences are factually incorrect. Check microcovid.org for an activity-based risk assessment.

Thanks for that site, it's very interesting and a very worthwhile project.

I do note that their Omicron model was last updated on January 4, and they say "we suspect that Omicron also does not affect the hourly multiplier, but do not have data for this". Their suspicion comes from a paper published on December 16 that uses data collected in the last two weeks of November.

The thing I find most baffling is that we have very good reason to believe [1] that HEPA air purifiers can keep the air clear of the virus, and yet they are barely talked about.

In the UK we're still waiting on results from trials in schools [2] and we've barely started running trials in care homes [3], and this is 2 years in. In March 2020 our government was trying to comission Dyson to mass produce medical ventilators of questionable use for emergency, and yet we never really tried to get them to mass produce something that is their core competency and put it in classrooms and care homes.

HEPA filters are unobtrusive and can be made quite silent by using larger fans. Its mind boggling enough that we're barely using them, but its even more mind blowing that we have no trial data for them 2 years in.

There is also reason to believe they would work synergically with masks. All masks leak [8], some more than others - portable HEPA devices should take care to limit the (cumulative) effect of leakage to a minimum. Especially in indoor spaces where people spend long amounts of time, and especially in winter as well as in these "modern" business buildings with windows that don't open.

So why does this matter? Mainly because we keep pretending long covid doesn't exist. In the UK, ONS esimates that a 1.3 million (2% of the population) [4] people report long term symptoms, of which 1/2 million (nearly 1% of the entire population) have had them for 1 year or longer, with 247,000 (20%) reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been “limited a lot”.

Information on vaccine protection from long covid has been conflicting [5], with some studies showing they enable return to baseline [6] while others showing almost no effect [7].

Additionally, since Omicron is so new, we don't (and cannot) have any long covid data on it.

It therefore makes sense to continue limiting spread and focus our effort on understanding long covid risk, prevention and treatment better, before completely lifting all restrictions. Especially if it can be done with the help of tools that are almost completely unobtrusive, such as portable HEPA filters.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02669-2

[2]: https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news-health/news/article/4953/can-ai...

[3]: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2021/october/airfilter-study....

[4]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

[5]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2

[6]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v...

[7]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v...

[8]: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/49/e2110117118#:~:text=Medi...

> All of us will be exposed by mid February

This is misinformation.

I don't think it is particularly inevitable. My youngest got it - was picked up on a lateral flow test on Christmas Eve, we had spent the day mucking about and gaming together, wrapping presents etc. None of the rest of the family tested positive to my surprise. Yes, she did isolate in her room over Christmas, poor kid.

I agree that "inevitable" is clearly too strong a statement. Furthermore, the odds of getting it depend on whether any of you are vaccinated and/or have previously had COVID (knowingly or otherwise).

> The only thing I'm dreading is the smugness of the antimask/antivax crowd who will ignore the herculean effort that avoided complete collapse of the health system and just claim they were right all along.

I am pretty happy that the vax-mandaters are being taught a lesson by the virus. They would have pulled through otherwise.

Perhaps I can set you up on a call with my grandparents and aunts and uncles so you can find out what life with measles and smallpox and polio was like. A few still have scars.

Those days are gone because of vaccine mandates.

I just recovered from Omicron and I was vaccinated. I am not sure what your grandparents are going to tell me. That I should get another shot of the vaccine that did not prevent the disease?

That you should be glad that your vaccination made you an order of magnitude less likely to have a severe case? Polio didn’t kill most people either.

> That you should be glad that your vaccination made you an order of magnitude less likely to have a severe case?

For Omicron? And even if. It is great if it is a result of my personal decision to get vaccinated. It is awful to force others to get vaccinated, especially if most claims regarding efficacy get weakened a lot over time and people ignore that. Vaccine mandates and mandatory passports everywhere have failed and we should be happy about that.

Who also supports forced vaccinations like in Rwanda?

https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-aga...

Yes, even for Omicron. Vaccinated people are far less likely to have severe cases at every age group — not being boosted means you’re less likely to avoid a case altogether but the T cell response is quite effective at helping you kick it faster.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/01/21/cdc-studies...

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...

As for Rwanda, that’s moving the goalposts — there are many things which the Rwandan government has done which most of us do not approve of.

> As for Rwanda, that’s moving the goalposts — there are many things which the Rwandan government has done which most of us do not approve of.

I am only moving the goalpost back to its initial position. Vaccine mandates are draconian - at least when the data is so weak as for SARS-CoV-2.

> I am only moving the goalpost back to its initial position. Vaccine mandates are draconian - at least when the data is so weak as for SARS-CoV-2.

No, you're conflating two separate things to try to make a weak case appear stronger. Part of living in a society is accepting restrictions on your personal choices which impact those around you. Vaccination mandates are one of the big public health success stories since they reduce spread, load on the medical system, and the cost to society of having to care for people who are no longer as productive. Polio was significant asymptomatic, too — 70% of people had no symptoms and 25% had only mild symptoms, with a fatality rate under 1% — but we almost eradicated it by using public health measures like requiring vaccination to attend schools.

The key difference is that these restrictions are linked to the activities which vaccines make safer: prior to the Republican Party choosing to politicize the issue, ~95% of American school children were vaccinated against common diseases. Someone who objected to that didn't have a paramilitary squad track them down, they just had to homeschool, not travel to many countries, etc. so they bore the cost of their decision rather than everyone else. That's a pretty important difference compared to what allegedly happened in some parts of Rwanda.

> No, you're conflating two separate things to try to make a weak case appear stronger.

Like using Polio for making the case for mandatory SARS-CoV-2 vaccines look stronger?

No, using it as a reminder that saying a high percentage of people have mild cases isn't a valid argument for saying we should just write off everyone else. Long COVID isn't as bad as Polio but that doesn't mean that it hasn't caused problems for millions of people or that we should be cavalier about assuming no long-term or worse problems will emerge. Getting people vaccinated before we relax restrictions is a cheap, easy, and highly effective way to reduce those risks.

Vaccine mandates … everywhere have failed

Smallpox and measles mandates worked.

And which western/first world nations actually had COVID mandates? The US sure didn’t.

> Smallpox and measles mandates worked.

(Vaccine mandates) and (mandatory passports everywhere) have failed

> And which western/first world nations actually had COVID mandates? The US sure didn’t.

Germany, Austria, Australia, France, Italy, ...

Have you considered that you may have had more mild Omicron due to being vaccinated? It is true that breakthrough infections exist, especially in something as transmissable as Omicron. However, the point has also been made that being vaccinated helps prevent more serious illness[1] which in turn can help prevent hospitals from collapsing under the weight of the severely ill.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/effective...

This is called moving goalposts. The vaccines application states it will prevent transmissions, not lesson the symptoms. If it is simply "lessoning" the symptoms which has not been my experience with Omicron, but not preventing transmission then the authorizations should be pulled until they can be resubmitted.

To some reasonable level, the vaccines do prevent transmission. However, no vaccine is perfect - just look at the flu vaccine - even if the strains picked for the vaccine for the year are right, some people will still get the flu.

The vaccine helps to prepare your immune system to deal with the virus - in some cases that means it can fight it off entirely, or in other cases it will be able to fight it off quicker and your symptoms will be milder because your body is prepared.

The FDA didn't approve the vaccines under emergency use to lessen the symptoms, only to prevent transmission.

That’s not correct, the clinical trials explicitly measured symptomatic disease and not transmission

e.g. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427

The applications specifically said that they are for prevention.

Prevention of the disease, not just spread.

People that are vaxxed are still getting the disease.

At a lower rate and with far less severity, which is exactly what we expected based on the initial data. Omicron's arrival means that more people are getting sick but when they do, it's still considerably less severe — which is good because Omicron is sending more people to the hospital even though it's ~40-50% less likely to do so compared to Delta.

I realize that you don't want to admit having been so wrong about this for so long but the evidence is very clear that the vaccines are safe and effective:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitali...

Again, there you go quoting CDC ignoring the authorization which is for prevention and moving the goal posts quicker than QAnon. Some vaxxed people are in a constant state of Stockholm Syndrome. The evidence you speak of is unattainable at this point and VAERS is one of the only outlets which is significantly backlogged, and according to pro-vaxxers can't be trusted anymore because it doesn't fit their narrative.

Why are you continuing to misrepresent the EUA documents? They don’t support your assertion. (If you point to where in the authorization docs they specify the goal is to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection, I’ll change my mind. I linked the moderna application in another sub thread, and the pfizer one is easy to find)

Also VAERS is not the only data source we have for vaccine safety, it’s our hypothesis generation system. We have good data from the vaccine safety datalink system that let us actually quantify the risk of different side effects. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.15072

They clearly do, it is like the very first sentence:

https://labeling.pfizer.com/ShowLabeling.aspx?id=14471&forma...

> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 5 years of age and older.

https://www.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/eua-fact-sheet-...

> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINE, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 18 years of age and older.

https://www.fda.gov/media/146305/download

> You are being offered the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2. This Fact Sheet contains information to help you understand the risks and benefits of receiving the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, which you may receive because there is currently a pandemic of COVID-19.

The real question should be, why do you refuse to even just acknowledge basic facts right from the official EUAs? They are for prevention, not for lessening symptoms, and they simply are not preventing COVID-19 with Omicron.

COVID-19 isn’t the same as a positive SARS-CoV—2 test. This is what they measured, from the caption of table 10 in the pfizer fact sheet you linked:

> Note: Confirmed cases were determined by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and at least 1 symptom consistent with COVID-19 (symptoms included: fever; new or increased cough; new or increased shortness of breath; chills; new or increased muscle pain; new loss of taste or smell; sore throat; diarrhea; vomiting)

That’s kind of squishy, but I think it’s a clear distinction.

I agree that the effectiveness against symptomatic Covid is lower with omicron, but omicron also evades immunity from prior infection as well.

That being said, the vaccines are not effectively preventing COVID-19 in vaxxed individuals with Omicron.

VAERS was never trustworthy as a raw data source, only as a source of information on what to investigate. It is the antithesis of medical research... Self-reported, no control for any known bias effects, no scrubbing for obviously erroneous data.

Here's a VAERS entry about a patient turning getting abducted by aliens and turning into the Incredible Hulk after the MMR vaccine. https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?IDNUMBER=221...

Reasoning from VAERS without controlled studies is, at best, like cutting the ends off a roast before you bake it because you heard your grandmother did it that way. At worst, it's like irradiating a spider and enticing it to bite you because you read once that somebody got spider powers that way.

The moderna application clearly distinguishes between Covid-19 (symptomatic disease) and SARS-CoV-2 infection, as the sibling comment says.

> On November 30, 2020, ModernaTX (the Sponsor, also referred to as Moderna) submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) request to FDA for an investigational COVID-19 vaccine (mRNA-1273) intended to prevent COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

https://www.fda.gov/media/144673/download

Which is is not doing. Vaccinated people are still getting COVID-19.

The vaccines application states it will prevent transmissions, not lesson the symptoms

Did you get this from an official source? I mean, no-one should have stated this because it is simply not true, nor has been for most common vaccins out there. At least in my country none of the official sources nor epidemiologists nor virologists ever said this. They'd only go as close as stating 'can prevent transmission in xx% of cases' or something like that.

> If it is simply "lessoning" the symptoms which has not been my experience with Omicron, but not preventing transmission then the authorizations should be pulled until they can be resubmitted.

Are organizations still making policy decisions based on the specifics of the original application implications? Or from observation that it only notably reduces hospitalizations / symptom severity?

If the former is the case, that would warrant clarity, but I also have no idea what a resubmission process looks like. Is that a one week turnaround? Or is it six months with no vaccines being able to be distributed?

The clinical trials for Pfizer and Moderna were testing for severe outcomes, not transmission. The vaccines got emergency use authorization based on that.

Some non-clinical studies suggested a drop in transmission (e.g. CDC study in spring 2021 which examined healthcare workers who got the jab early and were tested weekly), but it's clear now they were just picking up a transient effect, months long but wearing off thereafter.

So the mRNA vaccines are doing exactly what they were trialled to do 1.5 years ago. What your local politicians and public health authorities misunderstood from that is their problem.

> What your local politicians and public health authorities misunderstood from that is their problem.

AND also my problem.

Have you considered that 99%+ of cases are mild or asymptomatic and that this reasoning amounts to confirmation bias? Especially with Omicron? Moreso in healthy people under 50 who are orders of magnitude less likely to suffer severe illness or complications.

The fact that you had mild symptoms, or any sort of symptoms for that matter, while vaccinated does not actually imply that you would have been substantially worse off without the vaccine, given the statistical likelihood of mild infection.

This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.

> Have you considered that 99%+ of cases are mild or asymptomatic and that this reasoning amounts to confirmation bias? Especially with Omicron? Moreso in healthy people under 50 who are orders of magnitude less likely to suffer severe illness or complications.

Omicron is 90% less deadly than delta for unvaccinated people and there is a 100% lower risk to need mechanical ventilation, according to this paper:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...

During the delta wave covid survivors had better immunization than people with only vaccination. This contradicts some of the mandates that are currently in place, such as in Germany, were people who previously recovered are still required to get a subsequent shot:

https://news.yahoo.com/natural-immunity-more-potent-vaccines...

> This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.

During the pandemic I looked up information about the public reaction to the Spanish Flu. It was almost exactly the same, including vaccines with unclear efficacy and anti-mask groups. However, the Spanish Flu killed up to 50 million people while the world's population was only 1.6 billion and it only took a couple of months.

> Have you considered that you may have had more mild Omicron due to being vaccinated?

Yes, maybe. I think that there is no good data that supports that for people under 70 without co-morbidities.

> However, the point has also been made that being vaccinated helps prevent more serious illness[1] which in turn can help prevent hospitals from collapsing under the weight of the severely ill.

Recently I found out that in my country at the peak of the most deadly wave only 5% of patients in hospitals were admitted because of Covid.

It does not prevent transmission, it does not stop hospitals from being overfilled and it does not stop symptomatic disease. What is a good science-based reason for mandatory vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 for everyone?

Gotta topper up once a month. That boosting is all about recharging your battery to fight whatever else is out there lurking around every corner just waiting for you. God this is ridiculous. The vaccines were approved to prevent transmission and they didn't do that, but now Pfizer and the likes will make sure that they get their money's worth and then some.

The vaccines were approved to keep people from dying, with a secondary goal of REDUCING spread. The experts were very clear that vaccinated people would spread it less than the unvaccinated, and all of the data shows that’s correct. Omicron didn’t exist when that data was being assessed, so think about it like someone in 2000 saying RSA 1024 was good encryption — they were hardly in the pocket of big crypto when they updated that to RSA 2048 a few years later after the attacks got better.

Have you read the EUA?

Have you? You’re just regurgitating right-wing talking points, conspicuously short on sources or demonstrated understanding.

When you do read the lengthy material at https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro... note that the approvals are based on fighting the disease. Reducing transmission — at which the vaccines were clearly highly effective prior to Omicron — is one part of that but an even more important part is preventing severe outcomes. Even with Omicron, the vaccines are highly effective at keeping you out of the hospital and even better at keeping you out of the ICU.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...

Well, for one you are quoting the CDC which is not who approves vaccines.

https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro...

> The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine is authorized to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 18 years of age and older.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211103065325/https://www.fda.g...

> The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and is now marketed as Comirnaty, for the prevention of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older.

Again, they were approved for prevention. The applications were for prevention. The FDA is trying to rewrite history, but if you look at the actual applications then you can verify what I'm saying is correct.

I linked to the FDA, too, since I knew you either hadn’t read or understood the documents someone else summarized for you. The part you quoted confirms that: note the distinction between the disease and the virus which causes it. Everyone knew that vaccinated people could still spread, but it takes longer to get data quantifying exactly how much and since the data showed very high efficacy against serious cases there was no ethical reason to delay protecting people waiting on that.

Everyone knew? I mean I can send videos if you'd like of Biden and left-wing politicians saying the vaccine would prevent you from getting it.

Also, prevention of the disease would mean that people are asymptomatic and/or that they aren't getting COVID. Hospitals in many areas are publishing data showing majority of people there for COVID are vaxxed. So much for prevention of the disease.

> Everyone knew? I mean I can send videos if you'd like of Biden and left-wing politicians saying the vaccine would prevent you from getting it.

If you were paying attention, note the difference between saying it will prevent all retransmission versus reducing it, which is what happened. Also, try to compare what actual medical experts said as opposed to the political entertainers whose talking points you're repeating. The actual medical experts were quite clear on this, and Biden has been pretty clear that breakthrough infections are possible — hence the interest in masks to prevent spread and vaccination to mitigate the damage for the people who we know statistically will catch it.

Oh look, you're wrong again:

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/...

> Biden said Dec. 14 that people vaccinated for COVID-19 "do not spread the disease to anyone else."

Biden is not a medical expert — as you might note, I tried to get you to focus on what they were saying — and that statement is clearly imprecise, which is why it was rejected by medical experts. He had at other times expressed this concept more accurately as improving the odds so this seems more like overstatement (“anyone” versus “as many”) as part of a broader point which has been quite accurate: getting vaccinated is the best way to end the pandemic.

Covid-19, the disease, is a family of symptoms up to and including death.

SARS-COV-2 is a transmissible virus that causes the disease COVID-19.

In the medical jargon, disease and its causality are separate concepts (and this bifurcation honestly makes sense... There are quite a few diseases where the treatment is to regulate symptoms without any hope of doing anything to modify the underlying active agent other than wait out the immune system to deal with it). It is entirely possible for a therapy to "prevent disease" without reducing the transmission of the underlying virus that causes the symptoms that make up a disease.

It is unfortunate that because of the conflation of these ideas in the layman terms space, people misinterpreted what the vaccine was cleared to do. But blaming doctors or the FDA for that is like blaming computer engineers when users turn off their computer and then don't understand that everything in volatile memory wasn't saved to disk. "Where's my spreadsheet go? It was in the computer's memory, it should be here."

Omicron is very resistant to the antibody response of the vaccines - the antibodies are supposed to cover the protein spikes which latch onto and enable infection of cells.

The t-cell response to infected cells learned from the vaccine, though, is very effective. Which is why vaccinated people still get infected (at a lower rate) but are many times less likely to get very sick, and almost none end up in ICU. The vaccines are effective.

It ok to be ignorant, but you should think twice about that smugness. You are wrong, and you have very little excuse for being this wrong after two years of living in a pandemic.

The comment you replied to is somewhat common factual description of events of someone who was fully vaccinated and still caught covid, which lead them to decide not to get booster shots in the future.

How's that "wrong" or ignorant?

There’s a massive difference between COVID and those diseases, though, in terms of impact (death, crippling, etc) on the young and healthy. COVID isn’t all peaches and cream, but it’s not smallpox. The response to smallpox warrants a different level of severity than COVID.

Just looking at the Wikipedia page suggests that Polio outcomes are quite similar to COVID:

* 70% asymptomatic

* 25% minor symptoms with a 2 week recovery

* 0.5% chance of infecting central nervous system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio

LOL, just what lesson do you think that would be? I'm happy that Omicron is getting some immunity into the selfish idiots of the anti-vax crowd.

I was vaccinated. Almost everyone will catch Omicron.

Do you think that's a counterargument?

Do you have a science-based argument for mandatory vaccines against SARS-CoV-2?

Yes.

> Yes.

Was that already the argument?

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