Covid-19 Cases and Hospitalizations by Vaccination Status and Previous Diagnosis

This doesn't appear to be the case with Omicron. It seems like everyone who has gotten it in the last couple of months has been vaccinated. At least half the people I know (almost all of which are vaccinated) have gotten it in this wave. I only knew 2 people that got it in the 1st wave before vaccines existed. I know it's more contagious now, but most people have had this same experience.

> The vaccine reduces the chance that you catch COVID and spread it to others.

Where does this study show that?

He was infected before he was eligible to be vaccinated. He has natural immunity.

that logic could be justified just about anything

Most governments in the EU allow proof of prior infection as a substitute for vaccination for a green pass. Your assumption that people are so stupid that they would purposely get infected instead of getting vaccinated is speculative, and didn't happen in Europe. You may likely be a highly intelligent person, but that doesn't mean that everyone else is as stupid as you think they are. There is a certain arrogance to that level of paternalistic thinking.

really ? i think you give them too much credit lol

do you have science to back this claim ? It’s not like the vaccine was designed specifically against omicron, the vaccine development started a long time ago ( before omicron)

This is what they do in Europe.

I'm not particularly thrilled with public health authorities using coercion. It would solve my needs, sure, but I just think it's counterproductive in the long term.

The most effective way to guarantee that rednecks will absolutely never do a thing is to tell them they have to do it. This actually doesn't just apply to rural white Americans, but also many other people who are from "honor cultures". Nortenos fall into this category and they are a very high percentage of Latinos in the United States. These are cultures that for historical reasons have absolute hatred of centralized authority. Black Americans in the South and their descendants in many Northern cities also fall into this category. It is truly self-defeating. I can assure you that I know a medical doctor who is fully licensed and runs several clinics and he offered to take me into his office, inject the vaccine syringe into the sink and then write in his records that I was vaccinated and provide me a card. I did not take him up on this because I wanted to make sure that I would feel the pain of the law as an example to my kids. He himself is fully vaccinated but he is completely against the mandate for reasons of principle. How many more are like him? Are we going to do something to prevent doctors like him from doing this? What kind of enforcement will that take? If politicians that most hn readers dislike take over the federal government are they going to be able to use these enforcement mechanisms to outlaw abortion?

Regarding putting the life of your family in danger, I don't think the science supports this, at least not with the current vaccine. It doesn't appear to have markedly diminished transmissibility for Delta and doesn't appear to have any form of reduction for omicron.

However, for the original variant, I think it was completely fair to talk about unvaccinated people being the primary carriers, and therefore putting other people at risk. But it does call into question the fact that a vaccine that requires you to still be afraid of other people who haven't had that vaccine isn't really much of a vaccine is it??

I deeply appreciate your thoughtful response here.

I don't disagree with your points on bad actors either. It should be noted that my positive test in Feb 21 was digitally recorded, reported to the state of Colorado as well as my county health department, and I was then contacted by them. I also have the email from the lab company. My point is that, like the EU, taking people's "word for it" is not a good way to do things, as you said.

I have no doubt my natural immunity will wane. Certainly my free antibodies will, and it's an open question as to how long t-cell memory remains. In fact, there are many countries investigating having people like me be able to go straight to getting booster shots.

One thing that I think is important when it comes to trust, and my family's experience:

My comments from May/June are a lot more hopeful, and optimistic. At the time, I was told my mother-in-law's death was reported to VAERS. I now know it wasn't. I don't think it was deliberate, but I've pulled the flat files for the system twice since August. There is no record of a woman her age in Nebraska with anything remotely like what happened to her. (Sudden cardiac arrest and death aren't hard to spot in that system, and I work with data as a professional all day. I even used Spacy to analyze the dataset to ensure I wasn't going crazy. I was in shock when I realized the hospital forgot to put her in the system.). I investigated this, and it turns out that there is no carrot, and no stick with VAERS. The hospital in Omaha where she died probably was overwhelmed with COVID patients, and they just forgot to put it in. It takes 30 minutes on a shitty website to enter the record in. The end result: I thought somebody was going to investigate what happened to her. I thought we would get some explanation. I WANTED them to tell us that there was an air bubble in the needle, and the vaccine itself wasn't the culprit. I wanted some kind of explanation. Unfortunately, nothing was ever done. No follow up. Nothing. It's been soul crushing for us.

I pinned all my hopes for some kind of research on a friend of mine, Adam, who is a pretty prominent coder in the ML space. (I won't say his last name, but he was one of the early founders of a well-known name in the machine learning space). Adam suffered an event very similar to my mother-in-law's, but because of his younger age, survived. Also due to his young age, there was a much bigger interest in researching his incident. A team from the Mayo Clinic began working his case. He was kind enough to get them to start to look at my mother-in-law. We thought we were going to get answers. Unfortunately, in August, the team at the Mayo Clinic "ghosted" (his words, not mine) him. As part of the agreement to collect multiple samples of heart tissue from him, he had required he be included in any pre-prints produced by the team. They stopped replying to any of his communications in August. His exact words to me when we spoke on the phone in September: "They are sweeping this under the rug." It should be noted that the damage to his heart is permanent. He's in his mid-30s. He can't even hike anymore.

Our further conversations have reached a the following conclusion: The funding for the Mayo team, for the MRNA vaccine, all come from the same source. This source is treating it like a friendly-fire incident. In the midst of the most massive public health campaign in history, there is no benefit to learning what happened to him or my MIL. Any answer will only undermine that goal. Like a lung cancer researcher funded by Big Tobacco, or a medical cannabis researcher funded by the Feds, questions that potentially lead to inconvenient answers are crushed before they can yield answers that might conflict with the goals of the funding organization.

That is misinformation. There is no reliable scientific evidence that natural cellular immunity will wear off. You might be confused by antibody levels, which are relatively unimportant.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

The data is super thin on that (we don't know very much about people that are getting sick and not seeking care).

This article discusses an analysis of household transmission in Denmark. It was much higher in households with Omicron cases, but lower (56% lower) among boosted individuals compared to two dose vaccination:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

That's a pretty big reduction.

I guess, but it’s a heterogeneous dataset. They even discuss in this manuscript differences between how CA reports stuff compared with NY. (This is kind of a separate issue where CDC could have lead on data standardization, but not everyone in the US agrees about the Feds playing that role in this case; kind of a separate issue)

The CDC also has covidnet, which doesn’t have the data heterogeneity problem so much, but I’m not sure it has the vaccination status breakdown needed for this study. CDC has famously not done a good job breaking that down… https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covid-n...

Anyway, none of this is to say that they’re definitely not doing a cherry picking exercise, but at least one should read the paper and decide if the choices they make about data sources and analysis are reasonable. Not super productive to just immediately assume bad faith, IMO. Especially since the conclusions are consistent with research from other institutions/countries

False, as is specifically noted in TFA discussing data sources. Those are:

Statewide immunization databases in California are the California Immunization Registry, Regional Immunization Data Exchange, and San Diego Immunization Registry; the laboratory system is the California COVID Reporting System (CCRS). In New York, immunization information systems include Citywide Immunization Registry and the New York State Immunization Information System; the laboratory system is the Electronic Clinical Laboratory Reporting System (ECLRS). California data were matched between the immunization and case registries using a probabilistic algorithm with exact match for zip code and date of birth and fuzzy match on first name and last name. New York data were matched to the ECLRS with the use of a deterministic algorithm based on first name, last name, and date of birth. In California, person-level hospitalization data from CCRS and supplementary hospitalization reports were used to identify COVID-19–associated hospitalizations.

Specifically acknowledged are:

Dana Jaffe, California Department of Public Health; Rebecca Hoen, Meng Wu, New York State Department of Health; Citywide Immunization Registry Program, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

From whom those data were likely in substantial part obtained.