What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity | Hacker News Reader

What the Omicron wave is revealing about human immunity

nature.com

302 pointsbookofjoe770 comments

This is a really good article on the immune system.

One thing I can't help but notice though is that it only barely skirts the fact that essentially no viral vaccine prevents infection, with the possible exception of the HPV vaccine.

The vast majority of the vaccines we currently use allow infection but give the body the ability to quickly respond to and end the infection before it leads to severe disease (eg paralysis in Polio or B-cell destruction in Measles). For slowly developing viruses you may see no symptoms at all because the body is able to clear the infection but for viruses like flu and Sars-CoV-2 that attack the respiratory system it's much more difficult to prevent symptomatic disease.

Somehow there's this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection or symptomatic disease but that is an incredibly high bar that no respiratory viral vaccine has ever met.

The benefit of the vaccines is that they greatly reduce severe disease, almost eliminate death, and shorten the amount of time the virus has to reproduce so transmission and variant generation are also reduced.

So then no other vaccines have led to or provided herd immunity?

It is just a nuanced semantic distinction. You are immune in the sense that you never notice the virus (in some cases) or have no severe impacts (in others). But you are (never?) immune in the sense that you literally never have the virus replicate in you at all.

I am reminded of the recent twitter thread posted here by Dan Luu about how communicating nuance at scale is impossible.

I thought a big part of the tragedy of the measles vaccine rates dropping is precisely that we’re losing herd immunity.

At 95%+ immunised outbreaks ought not occur because herd immunity, even for the remaining unvaccinated, whereas at the lower levels, outbreaks will likely happen.

Is that not right?

Herd immunity is a function of transmission not individual infection. Faster and stronger immune responses reduce the number of viruses produced inside someone over an infection. That directly means they are less likely to infect other people.

Herd immunity is effectively a function of how infections something is. 1 case leading to 2 cases on average means you need to cut transmission in 50%. 1 case leading to 10 cases and you need to block 90% of new cases.

Critically this means vaccinated people can still be infectious as long as they infect less than 1 person on average you can reach herd immunity.

That is right. It is just immunity as a term in the medical community vs average joe use of the word. Medical community immunity means your immune system fights off the invaders before anything medically interesting happens, not that you have a magical force field that prevents entry. Not sure why people are trying to twist that into some sort of insidious plot.

If you have the measles vaccine and you get exposed to measles, measles will be in your body for a short time in low quantities, but your immune system will quickly destroy it. That means you are unlikely to pass it on or develop symptoms.

Ok makes sense.

But is that different then to vaccines against bacterial diseases? If some bacteria enter my body, surely they don’t magically disappear either, maybe split a few times but eventually die off.

I would say this distinction is often just a semantics argument designed to calm the public. In common usage, it means you won't have a significant infection that becomes contagious. The vast majority of vaccines are successful at preventing that type of infection for a long time. Though there are exceptions.

By defining "infection" so broadly it loses all meaning, some officials are trying lump to the covid vaccines (which are no longer very good at preventing contagious infections) with vaccines that prevent contagious infection for decades. Obviously, the effectiveness of vaccines is nuanced and their effectiveness at preventing contagious spread is a spectrum--not a binary.

Public health officials should just be straight with us. The vaccines aren't as good as some of the vaccines we all get--like measles--but they do provide a great deal of protection. It's still basically a miracle that we got the protection we did in about a year after the virus appeared. It's a huge success.

If it can't replicate as well in you, you significantly reduce the ability for it to spread via you typically. Herd immunity fro that perspective is about reducing spread to the point that outbreaks don't spread from local groups because the R value is low enough, even taking into account the few people who can't be immunized.

Evaluate the statements above with respect to measles or polio, as the parent poster points out. It is clear that measles and polio vaccines can lead to "herd immunity", while preventing severe side effects of these diseases in the majority of cases.

The point is there is a range of infection mechanisms for viruses (respiratory vs other, for starters) and vaccines thus provide benefit at different points in the infection process. This leads to heterogeneity in "infection level" and symptomaticity in the vaccinated population.

>an incredibly high bar that no respiratory viral vaccine has ever met.

An incredibly high bar that no intramuscular (humoral) respiratory viral vaccine has met. Mostly because injecting into the muscle does not lead to tissue resident immune cells in the upper respiratory mucosa because it's a separate immune compartment from the body serum. But there are options like intranasal boosters after intramuscular vaccination that can prevent infection and do significantly reduce shedding and spread.

And it's been driving me crazy the entire pandemic that intranasal spray vaccine boosters are not being heavily funded and persued. It would save the world so many lives, time, and incalculable money.

Any idea (or sources) why they are not being pursued? And why are flu vaccines not commonly given as intranasal spray?

I think there is some concern of intranasally applied substances getting into the brain.

Even plain water infested with certain amoebas can give you a fatal brain disease if you use it for nasal irrigation. It is perfectly safe for drinking, though.

https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/N_R/Nasal-irrigatio...

We do not have that amoeba here, but I still boil the water and cool it down before using it to flush my nose. (Works great against mild common colds.) One of the worst outbreaks in the world actually happened in Czechoslovakia 60 years ago - 16 people died after being infected in a public swimming pool.

There's an approved nasal vaccine in the United States (FluMist). It's use was not encouraged for a while because it didn't vaccinate against H1N1 (recent years have included H1N1). It doesn't look to be particularly more effective than the shot (marketing focuses on no shot, not on it working better; the CDC says the effectiveness is similar).

There's multiple candidate intranasal SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, just none that have concluded trials.

Oh, yeah, I received a nasal vaccine against flu in the early 1990s in Czechoslovakia as well. It wasn't a match for the coming wave, unfortunately, and we all got very nasty flu.

They are being pursued, just not given the same resources as the emergency effort to get the original vaccines approved:

- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.24.477597v1

- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg9857

I think we should thank whatever god that so far it seems we didn't end up with a Marek's disease type situation. I don't know how much of a guarantee there was about this with covid, but if the vaccine would have promoted a much more aggressive virus we could have ended up in a situation where any unvaccinated human will basically die (this happens in chickens, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease).

I sincerely hope the people who devised this vaccine know what they are doing. As far as I know (according to a Katalin Kariko inteview), the Sars-Cov-2 spike protein can't mutate too much without limiting it's effectiveness, so therefore this vaccine should theoretically work in the future.

But that Marek's disease issue is very very scary to me.

Well... that was an unsettling read.

> The evolution of Marek's disease due to vaccination has had a profound effect on the poultry industry. All chickens across the globe are now vaccinated against Marek's disease (birds hatched in private flocks for laying or exhibition are rarely vaccinated). Highly virulent strains have been selected to the point that any chicken that is unvaccinated will die if infected.[14] Other leaky vaccines are commonly used in agriculture. One vaccine in particular is the vaccine for avian influenza. Leaky vaccine use for avian influenza can select for virulent strains.[15]

Wonderful. Like H5N1, which has a 60% mortality in humans.

I remember it was discussed months ago on HN when early on in vaccines roll out, somebody raised this concern but the consensus was the vaccines mostly prevented infection so not a big worry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Marek scenario occurs when a vaccine removes the evolutionary pressure against more virulent strains.

The actual mutation event that creates the more virulent strain occurs randomly. Whether that variant survives and thrives depends on all of the evolutionary pressures in force. If a strain is so virulent that it kills the host, it is selected against, because the dead can't spread. If a vaccine lets the host survive but does nothing to stop transmission, that negative evolutionary pressure is gone. Thus, the potential for a vaccine to drive the propagation of a more virulent strain if all other things are equal.

However, there's good reason to believe that all other things will rarely be equal.

The survival rate of the host is just one selection pressure. Anything can be a selection pressure if it has an impact on reproductive success of a subset of the population. It's possible that increased host survival is a very tiny or even zero pressure - for example, if the virus has a long contagious period, it might have already done all the spreading it's going to do before onset of symptoms and death, rendering survival time irrelevant. Other pressures could dominate - for example, the virus could be susceptible to being killed by sunlight, favoring variants with a light-insensitivity property over variants with a virulence property.

One could even imagine how host symptoms could create positive pressure towards virulence - for example, more coughing and bleeding could help transmission. Such a virus would have its survival chances reduced by a leaky-but-symptom-reducing vaccine, and increased by vaccine-avoidance.

Evolution is spectacularly multi-dimensional. None of these outcomes are inevitable.

That was an especially frustrating period. The vaccine trials never tested for that, and later studies were all like "maybe it does", so the sars-cov-2 vaccines preventing infection was always misinformation and no one was willing to accept that. At least people are aware of it now I guess?

> I sincerely hope the people who devised this vaccine know what they are doing.

I think we all hope this. I can say that I sincerely believe the people who devised the vaccine know a hell of a lot more than just about anyone else on the planet.

I don't trust experts in economics or socio-politics, but I do trust experts in virology. Not to say their information is perfect, but they know so much more than other people in a field where expertise is connected to outcomes.

The people who said vaccines will prevent infection and spreading of Covid?

Nuance matters here. Vaccines do prevent the spread, it's just not 100%. Are you a Bayesian? If so, using the prior of "vaccines are pretty effective at preventing spread" was reasonable until new data came in - this was a brand new technique in a novel virus.

Further, the environment changed due to mutations - the fair question is "how effective was the vaccine at preventing the spread of the origin virus?"

Man, I regret reading this. The cynic in me immediately jumps to a possible world is where a pharmaceutical company is incentivized to bring about a world where every human needs a Medicine-as-a-Service to not die. The world's greatest $ printer.

To be fair they already have this with polio, mumps, rubella and others.

DOesn't the problem with Marek's disease have more do do with the horrendous conditions of poultry handling worldwide (mainly close confines)? I don't think that's generally transferrable situation unless you consider humans to be under similar conditions.

The bar is being set high for these vaccines because they are being pushed and mandated with very exaggerated justification, that they will end the pandemic. Rational people will agree that there are significant benefits to the vaccine, but I don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that these vaccines will get us to an end state where the virus is no longer circulating.

If you want people to go along with a medical intervention, state clearly the expected outcome and don't move the goalposts when the data changes. If the data is strong, you most likely wouldn't need mandates to convince people.

Where I live, the goalposts are exactly the same as they were two years ago: don’t let the health care system get overwhelmed. I have no idea what your politicians have been telling you.

>the goalposts are exactly the same as they were two years ago

Shouldn't the politicians have made progress on this issue over the course of two years? At what point is it incompetence or corruption, if the billions being spent to fight the pandemic make zero discernable impact on the most critical issue?

>Shouldn't the politicians have made progress on this issue over the course of two years?

What do you mean? Should they should magically cause the number of doctors and hospitals to double inside two years?

>if the billions being spent to fight the pandemic make zero discernable impact on the most critical issue?

What leads you to believe that measures such as pushing vaccination haven't been having tremendous impact on that issue?

>What leads you to believe that measures such as pushing vaccination haven't been having tremendous impact on that issue?

Do you believe that health care systems are currently overwhelmed by COVID?

Mainly in areas where many people haven't been vaccinated. Where I'm at, hospitals are fine.

If the definition of "overwhelmed" is "past the point of functioning at all" then no. But if the definition is "at the point of functioning with an appreciably lower quality of care", then definitely yes in many areas (less so now, but more so a month ago).

In the United States, they are currently paying traveling nurses up to $10k per week. That is a 500% increase over normal pay. It's so bad that the Texas legislature and Congress are trying to limit interstate commerce and impose wage caps. These gigs are not hard to come by - anyone qualified can easily get them.

If that doesn't say "understaffed and overwhelmed", I'm not sure what evidence would.

You don't seem to have an "elective surgery" planned and then cancelled and postponed indefinitely, haven't you. Or a biopsy you cannot have for that worrisome mass down there... all because your local facilities are at capacity trying to keep no-vaxxers alive.

Good for you

I'm sorry, I don't understand the relation between me asking if a poster believes hospitals are overwhelmed, and your comment. I assume you believe hospital systems are still overwhelmed after two years, based on your sentiment.

Your comment is likely a rhetorical question. If you disagree to a statement please add some countering facts rather than simply challenging the statements with artifices and shifting the burden.

> Should they should magically cause the number of doctors and hospitals to double inside two years?

It's not even magic. It just needs to be done. Find a way. There is an emergency. You don't just get to whine and complain that it is too hard. Your solution doesn't need to be perfect. Far from it, in fact. It just needs to patch the issue so we don't need to do restrictions of any kind.

Anybody that claims it is impossible to double or even quadruple healthcare capacity specifically for covid just isn't being creative about it enough. It's not magic. You just make it happen. You have almost infinite resources to do it even up to and including relaxing licensing laws or removing any other political or bureaucratic hurdle.

> You just make it happen.

Funny you're light on specifics. We talk about a situation where people die if it doesn't happen. So better propose something solid.

> almost infinite resources

Build hospital tents.

> relaxing licensing laws

Employ untrained people.

> removing any other political or bureaucratic hurdle

Eh that tends to happen, once you're in that triage situation.

Look you can't will medical care. You have to build it. It takes decades.

If we had started training more nurses at the beginning of this pandemic they would have graduated already.

You mean, training at home during lockdown?

Paying them more would also help...

In most of the US life has been back to normal (give or take) for a year or more. A lot of people are still dying, but they are primarily higher risk individuals who have chosen not to get the vaccines that have been free and readily available for about a year.

So in terms of goalposts, what exactly is your goal? I'd like to see international travel normalize - it's maybe one of the few restrictions I still feel is constraining me - but there is little my government can do about that.

There's been plenty of progress on the issue of not overwhelming the healthcare system. In the areas with high vaccination rates. Most hospitalizations are by the unvaccinated. In those cases where unvaccinated overwhelm the system, that's not the politicians' fault except for the ones also spreading anti-vaxer misinformation.

They did make a lot of progress on it: they supported the extremely fast invention and roll out of vaccines that accomplish these goals. People have refused to take those vaccines and have refused to support politicians mandating that people take them. It is thus outside the hands of the politicians at this point, and in the hands of society at large.

Where I live (which may be different from the previous poster), the health system has not been overwhelmed yet. So guess that counts as success?

We didn't have to rig tents to use as hospitals, burn dead bodies on the street, or to pay exorbitant sums for oxygen on the black market, as it has happened in other countries.

And if you ask me, yes, that's worth billions, and a bit of self-discipline.

Where I live health systems are not overwhelmed. They were never overwhelmed even before the vaccines. They are occasionally under some pressure here and there like in a bad flu season. But I have to show a vax card to eat in a restaurant.

Is it possible your area is not overwhelmed because vaccinations are required? Here's a medical system overwhelmed in part because vaccination rate is (was) so low: https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/coronavirus/article25438...

I believe the vaccines are a big part of why they're not overwhelmed now during the Omicron wave. But we achieved the bulk of our vaccination rate before mandates.

I’m struggling to understand your point, since we agree that vaccines are working to prevent hospital overflow. Is the issue the method of enforcement (show a card to eat at a restaurant)? Because I can also agree that it’s a little roundabout.

So...let everyone else get vaccinated and fix it, not me?

What is the burden that would make this a problem? If the typical narrative is to be believed the unvaccinated are in a much worse position, facing the dangers of terrible disease and death!

If there was no burden then the person would get vaccinated. I personally don’t believe there is a burden but they must.

I think they believe it’s up to everyone to decide if there is a burden (and a risk), for themselves.

Is it possible this rock provides effective protection against tigers?

> Where I live health systems are not overwhelmed. They were never overwhelmed even before the vaccines.

This is an interesting statement.

Where I live, one hospital 30 minutes in one direction was never overwhelmed. In fact, they had to fire people because they were so empty due to cancelling all optional procedures.

Another hospital 30 minutes the other direction had to place patients in offices, conference rooms, and tents in the parking lot.

So I guess the health system where I live was overwhelmed. Or it wasn't. Depending upon who you asked and/or the narrative you wanted to convey.

Yes this is an important observation. The bad things all happen, but they’re usually not everywhere at once. One grocery store has empty shelves, another one is better stocked. Makes it easy to look credible saying everything is fine, or everything is terrible.

> don’t let the health care system get overwhelmed

So add more capacity. It's an emergency. Find a way to add it. Why are we into this two years and still have this problem? It's inexcusable at this point.

> So add more capacity. It's an emergency. Find a way to add it.

We did. The government deployed a floating hospital called the USNS Comfort to NYC to massively increase hospital capacity and... it basically just sat there unused for a month and then left after Governor Cuomo said it wasn't needed.

And then rather than celebrate Covid not being nearly as bad as forecast, these same governors doubled down and extended their stay at home orders.

It was that day I realized that none of this has a damn thing to do with science or data.

That’s not the end state anyone who knows anything about this virus is expecting or aiming at at the moment. And it hasn’t been for months and months.

Universal vaccination can make the transition of this virus from pandemic to endemic much more pleasant. In terms of deaths, serious cases (with potential long term effects), but also in terms of smoothing out hospital and infrastructure load.

In that respect the vaccines are an awesomely effective tool that can greatly reduce suffering with minimal or no real downsides.

Side note: an omicron infection is no replacement for the vaccination. Omicron doesn’t confer great immunity against delta and other, “older” virus variants which are still out there, potentially ready to come back next winter.

"Omicron doesn’t confer great immunity against delta"

It is my impression that it actually does, and that is why Delta was outcompeted so fast. If it didn't, both strains would likely co-circulate together.

Does anyone know where I can find graphs that show the % of infections that each variant represents over time?

I used to see them all the time on Reddit in the r/Coronavirus subreddit.

Searching very quickly, I found this from Dec 21, 2021:

https://www.statnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/c7efM-om...

BC, Canada: http://www.bccdc.ca/Health-Info-Site/Documents/VoC/VoC_Weekl...

The CDC publishes weekly data on variant percentages.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...

Outcompeting is an immediate association between the two variants. Conferring x-variant immunity means that once you've recovered from one, you will have lasting immunity to other variants.

There is a possibility that the large majority of the population has been infected with omicron, and recovered. But then delta could come in at that point and produce another wave. At this time, the body would be much more successful at holding off omicron, but maybe not so much with delta.

So purely from the fractions of current infections, you cannot draw conclusions about x-variant immunity.

Why should I care what "anyone who knows anything about this virus" is expecting? The people writing the policies around vaccination are the ones who matter.

There have been mass firings on the basis that this vaccination will end the pandemic and people who don't get vaccinated are actively harming everyone else. The truth of that claim is far too murky to justify the agressive policies that are being used to force people to get vacinated. Policies which, I note, appear to be deploy what are effectively human rights violations. These are not policieis that should be used. The policy response is what is important here.

People who are not vaccinate are definitely behaving in a deeply antisocial way and enforcing vaccines is very much a justified policy in my eyes, even if “only” to smooth over the transition from pandemic to endemic.

To my eyes vaccine mandates are not, in general, human rights violations. They just are not.

Tie them down and forcibly inject them then. Have some courage. Quit pussy footing around with economic threats and shaming.

Why?

Because morally it's the same thing, and it would get done faster and more effectively.

Depends whether you are more concerned about vaccination rates, or with punishing people for being antisocial.

> To my eyes vaccine mandates are not, in general, human rights violations. They just are not.

Are they really though? If vaccines work so damn great why do I still need to wear a mask in a place where everybody is vaccinated? And why did Ontario shut down most of the places that required proof of vaccine during this omicron wave? Shouldn't those places be exempt from shutdowns?

If proof of vaccine still requires masking and shutdowns... maybe it isn't a really an effective policy?

If stop signs and traffic lights work so dann well why am I being forced to wear a seat belt? If I require a seatbelt even after taking a drivers licence exam, maybe following traffic rules isn’t really an effective policy?

One would think that on this forum of all places, people would understand the concept of defence-in-depth. Furrfu…

Vaccines are both the seat belt and the airbags. Masks? Those aren’t even close. They are more like rain dances or amulets.

Besides why does the government get to decide if a vaccinated person has to wear a mask? Makes no sense.

You can add as many layers of defense as you want. Don’t force me to. I’m boosted. I could care less about Covid. If I still have to wear a mask post shot, why the hell did I even bother?

> Masks? Those aren’t even close.

They're to reduce transmission to others. You can call them not good enough but it's a respiratory disease, it's what we've got. The alternative is lockdowns.

> Besides why does the government get to decide if a vaccinated person has to wear a mask?

Why do they get to decide if an unvaccinated person has to wear a mask? You're simultaneously arguing that vaccines are effective and so masks are pointless but also that vaccines are ineffective. Which is it?

> Don’t force me to. I’m boosted. I could care less about Covid.

It's not about you. If the only risk was only to yourself then nobody would care.

> If I still have to wear a mask post shot, why the hell did I even bother?

Because if you get covid you'll have a mild flu instead of being hospitalized or die? You can say it's low chance but 3,000 corpses today I guess were unlucky.

I would have gotten mild Covid. I have no real need to get the vaccine at all. Only reason I got the vaccine was I had no reason not to. I really don’t care about Covid at all. It isn’t a risk I focus on. Never had been. I’m way more concerned about what this hysteria has done to society and our communities.

Others can get a vaccine too if it truly helps them or they just want piece of mind. We all have the choice. Transmission no longer matters. It isn’t a problem each individual needs to worry about. It’s not ethical or moral to keep pushing this as the only concern society can focus on. We need to move on.

And you can use scare words like “3000 corpses a day” but that is propaganda and fearmongering. The more scary the wording, the less the words mean to me. Way more than 3000 people die a day. And people die of many things all the time. Death is one of the only things that will happen to us 100%.

Life is way to short to piss away on this. You are free to continue hunkering down in fear. But kindly stop forcing others to cater to your fear. It is quite selfish to ask that, especially given you can get a freely available, highly effective vaccine.

Get your vaccine and move on. Covid ends for you when you stop being afraid of it. It’s actually that simple.

> And you can use scare words like “3000 corpses a day” but that is propaganda.

You're confusing emotionally charged, high-impact words with propaganda. Having a policy of talking about the dead in a sterile detached way is also a rhetoric choice that affects perception and is just as much "propaganda" by your own standard.

What you're calling "propaganda" is "using words that make something sound more serious than I think it is" or "using words to make something sound less serious than I think it is."

> Only reason I got the vaccine was I had no reason not to.

That's the reason I wear a mask.

> You are free to continue hunkering down in fear. But kindly stop forcing others to cater to your fear.

The only thing that's being asked of anyone is to get vaccinated, wear a mask indoors, and stay home if you're sick. The first two cost you nothing and you should be staying home with any illness anyway.

> Get your vaccine and move on.

I have moved on, except for wearing a mask when in close contact and having to show proof of it for large events, life has literally gone back to normal.

We never had the nation’s top scientist say “if you wear a seatbelt you’ll never get into accident”

> People who are not vaccinate are definitely behaving in a deeply antisocial way

Are chain smokers antisocial ? What about over eating obese ?

I hate risk-adverse fearful societies.

Second-hand smoke strikes me as antisocial if produced in an unavoidable setting.

Obesity ... seems like an entirely personal matter, except perhaps in children where they might be considered victims.

Highly infectious viruses several times more harmful than the usual ones are indeed turning the world upside down. I imagine with time most societies will come to accept such things after they've become endemic for a while.

> Obesity ... seems like an entirely personal matter

Just like vaccination for Covid is personal. Remember that the vaccine does not prevent transmission of omicron. And that if the vaccine works, if an unvaccinated person transmits the virus to a vaccinated one, there should be no risk, right ?

Also, obese and overweight people account for 50% of hospitalizations in ICU for Covid in France.

I disagree with every one of your statements.

> To my eyes vaccine mandates are not, in general, human rights violations. They just are not.

We're talking specifically about the Covid vaccine mandates, not mandates in general. I think there's certainly a serious debate to be had on whether these morally questionable Covid policies are human rights violations.

Please define what you mean by ending the pandemic.

> human rights violations.

Which ones?

I have no idea what ending the pandemic means. It is a stupid wooly phrase with multiple meanings, often conflicting. That is why I'm unhappy about the policies used to achieve it - whatever it is.

> Which ones?

Well, looking at a relevant wiki article [0] I'd say the policies I know best (Australia) are bumping up against the articles dealing with freedom of movement, big chunks of articles 18-21 (underlining peaceful association a few time), I'd argue 22-27 - I forget where 'right to earn a living' is but I'm pretty confident it is in thge UDHR somewhere and that is probably in 22-27.

At some point (and 2 years is past that point) these philosophical issues like human rights start to matter.

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

As with every document of this nature, some of the rights outlined may conflict with each other. You wind up having to reconcile those conflicts.

For example, Article 29:

> Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

> In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

It's pretty easy to see vaccination and other public health measures as one of these scenarios.

“Articles 28–30 establish… the areas in which the rights of the individual cannot be applied, the duty of the individual to society…”

Does that justify how countries like Cuba dealt with HIV? The problem is that public health can reach fairly extreme levels unless it is checked by a strong conception of individual rights. Otherwise you literally get situations like what happened with HIV in Cuba (for those who don't know, HIV positive people were rounded up and sent to institutions as a public health measure to prevent HIV spread). That's why I find it incredibly concerning that people seem to just be happy to suspend individual rights so rapidly. The state of Victoria in Australia recently passed legislation that lets it ignore certain human rights - such as the right to employment - in the face of the pandemic.

> Does that justify how countries like Cuba dealt with HIV?

The declaration says “in a democratic society”. Are we counting Cuba as one?

> That's why I find it incredibly concerning that people seem to just be happy to suspend individual rights so rapidly. The state of Victoria in Australia recently passed legislation that lets it ignore certain human rights - such as the right to employment - in the face of the pandemic.

One might argue they prioritized the Article 3 right to life over that of employment; loss of life being permanent, and employment not, this seems like a justifiable use of Article 29, especially given Australian per capita deaths being massively lower than here in the States. We’ve killed two Tasmanias worth of people over here.

(I have relatives in Ballarat, Melbourne, Sydney, and Hobart, incidentally. I’d trade my pandemic experience here in upstate NY with them in a heartbeat.)

Are you going to try and argue that such a policy would have been on the right side of history as long as it was bought in by a democratic society?

No. Did any democratic society take the concentration camp approach for HIV? Or COVID, for that matter?

Again, the UDHR asserts a variety of rights. You're correct that Article 23 asserts a right to employment, but the apparent desire to read that as the only provision in the document appears to be a motivated one. The document lays out other rights, which naturally may be in conflict with each other at times, a fact that is explicitly acknowledged in Article 29.

I don't object to disagreeing with Victoria's balancing of the various rights, but I do object to the assertion that it's somehow a clear violation of human rights for them to prioritize the rights to life and health over the right to employment.

> The document lays out other rights, which naturally may be in conflict with each other at times

Ok, so we've taken away all these rights from unvaxxed people. What rights do you believe this has that allowed others to exercise?

Because from where I sit:

1. It doesn't reduce the odds of people getting COVID. We just had ... probably between 2-3 million COVID cases between NSW and Victoria, both with highly vaccinated populations. That is only possible if vaccinated people are infecting each other (as most reporting I've read suggests is happening).

2. Doesn't otherwise affect anyone's rights.

Note that there isn't even a right not to get sick from time to time. Although it even if such a right did somehow exist it isn't obvious how an unvaxxed person would be affecting your right to excercise ti since the problem is how much you come into contact with other humans vs anything any other individual is doing. There has been no threat to our hospital systems at any point that justifies what has been done to the unvaxxed. The pressure the hospital system has come under appears to be from the COVID restrictions (and, ironically, probably things like laying off workers for resisting the unreasonable vaccination policies - although if they've got the capacity to start sacking people then they clearly don't see a problem).

So it seems to me that we're doing this just for fun / for the joy of being authoritarian.

And your damn right the reasoning is motivated. Motivated by a desire to let people earn money and make their lives better at will. To be able to go places and visit friens and family without being arrested. To make their own medical decisions. These are reasonable motivations. These rights are the easy ones with practical justifications.

> Ok, so we've taken away all these rights from unvaxxed people. What rights do you believe this has that allowed others to exercise?

The Article 25 right to medical care, which unvaccinated people can put at risk by overwhelming hospitals with ICU cases.

I also consider getting vaccinated to be one of the Article 29 "duties to the community".

There is no risk to the hospital system. There have been 2 years to prepare and we just had 1,000,000 covid cases is NSW and there was barely a blip. There were around 3,000 hospitalisations at peak and it seemed to mostly be vaccinated people although the table over at covidlive.com.au might be misleading me.

This isn't an emergency any more, this is routine.

> I also consider getting vaccinated to be one of the Article 29 "duties to the community".

That is an extreme hand wave. It appears the argument is "We can violate your human rights because you have a duty to do what I tell you". These are serious concerns, you may just handwave things like free travel or ability to see family with "you have a duty, but I don't feel a need to justify it" - but that isn't a respectable position.

What is the real risk to the community of these unvaccinated people? We've pretty much seen the worst case COVID scenario play out in the last 2 months and it doesn't seem like the unvaxxed have been a problem in the slightest. The campaign of bullying should end.

Why would you set up a straw man that you don't even know the definition of yourself?

For me ending the pandemic is a return to regular life and a health care system that is no longer stretched beyond typical capacity. This can be achieved by many outcomes but the most likely one given the state of the world today is getting everyone to take the safe and effective vaccine for as long as necessary.

While we can argue about what are the boundaries for human rights in 1st world countries, it's important to know there have been some very strict and harsh policies regarding Covid in different parts of the world.

In Quebec where I live, the unvaccinated are now barred from entry in large retail stores like Walmart and Costco. If you don't have your vaccine passport with you that shows you're vaccinated in these places, then you can't enter, even for groceries.

There was curfew in place that prevented everyone from being outside during the evenings and nights for the most part of January.

On top of that, the prime minister said publicly in the media that the unvaccinated would start paying an additional tax, even though health care is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone here. The government just backtracked about this the last couple of days.

A lot of these policies are extreme and have shown to be completely incoherent and not backed by science, given what we know about the virus since the last couple of months.

> people who don't get vaccinated are actively harming everyone else.

Aren’t they? Hospitals are overflowing and elective procedures cancelled due entirely to people refusing to get vaccinated.

No they're not.

A) there's more vaccinated in hospital per capita of late. Why aren't we demanding lockdowns again instead of just blaming the "unvaxxed" still

B) the unvaxxed still aren't allowed into many places, yet the virus spreads readily

C) Why, rather than just "argh unvaxxed lepers!" are we not guiding better health and wellbeing instead?

D) a covid case is counted when people are in hospital for any other reason and catch it

E) you are counted as unvaxxed during the two week window after getting vaccinated, which is exactly when your immune system is weaker and succeptible to catching a bad case of covid. Interesting how hard it is to find this data, you'd think it would be strongly monitored

> A) there's more vaccinated in hospital per capita of late. Why aren't we demanding lockdowns again instead of just blaming the "unvaxxed" still

Do you have a source for this. This directly conflicts the data I've been seeing. e.g.: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily — weekly hospitalizations peaking at 92/100k for vaccinated vs. 772/100k for unvaccinated.

There was data from Denmark, Germany, and a third place a couple of weeks ago where the share of Omikron infections in the vaccinated was 10-15% points greater than the share in the total population (like 70% vacc/total vs 80% vacc/infected). I've checked one of the original sources (country's public health agency) and it confirmed the claim. To be fair, that could be because there are more restrictions for the unvax'd versus the vax'd.

Share of infections is different though. We were talking about the hospitalization rate.

Oops, sorry for the mix-up! I can't speak to the hospitalisation numbers, but I'd be very surprised indeed if the situation there was similar.

Here's one example: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/new-data-on-vaccine-effic...

This is such incredibly disingenuous statistics. Of course there are more vaxxed with COVID than unvaxxed in a sample of 100,000 people. The vast majority of people are vaccinated!

You're comparing two entirely different denominators. This is just sloppy.

Edit: Digging through the source data, I found

> In the last week from 08 January to 14 January 2022, in an age-standardised population, the rate of acute COVID-19 related hospital admissions in individuals that received a booster or third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine was between 2.3 to 3.9 times lower than in individuals who are unvaccinated or have only received one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine

Your own data is saying the opposite of what you purport it to.

You didn't read at all. The stats are adjusted for populations within those cohorts.

It is an appropriate use of statistics regardless. The main thrust of headsoup's argument was that the focus on unvaxxed people isn't helpful because they aren't important in absolute terms.

The rate doesn't matter so much in this instance, because most resources would still be spend on vaccinated people. Much like the fact that when I eventually catch COVID the odds are really good that I'm going to get it off someone who is vaccinated.

If we hypothetically rounded up all the unvaxxed tomorrow most of the strain on the hospital system faces in Scotland would still be there. Vaccination campaigns can't really change that.

A) This is counter to everything I can find online. Going to need citations.

B) This is true. Not sure how it relates to my point though.

C) Aren't we doing both? I've seen both "get vaccinated" and "be healthy" messaging this whole pandemic. Again though, not sure how it relates.

D) True. Again, not sure how this relates.

E) That was a big effect when vaccines just came out, but is a much smaller effect now.

Though I hadn't heard this before, and would be curious to see a study on it if you have one: "when your immune system is weaker and succeptible to catching a bad case of covid."

Edit: Your thing about susceptibility after vaccination is incorrect. It's an Alex Berenson talking point that has been thoroughly debunked.

> Minimal to no real downsides

Yet... Guess we gave up caring about full research and monitoring a couple of years ago.

We're even at the point where we want to vaccinate our small children because 'it's marginally better than nothing' ignoring that side effects are also marginally more than nothing and we have very little good long term data.

> Omicron doesn’t confer great immunity against delta and other, “older” virus variants which are still out there, potentially ready to come back next winter.

Care to share a paper to back this up ? This statement seems hard to prove right now.

> I don't believe there is any evidence to suggest that these vaccines will get us to an end state where the virus is no longer circulating.

Who is saying there is?

President Biden said you can't get COVID if you get the vaccine, implying it would stop the virus from circulating.

>One last thing that’s really important is: We’re not in a position where we think that any virus — including the Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non — unvaccinated people — the vi- — the various shots that people are getting now cover that. They’re — you’re okay. You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...

technically, COVID is the disease and SARS-COV-2 is the virus. So the virus can circulate with only a very small fraction of people getting COVID if the vaccines are highly effective.

I'm not sure what you're technically proving, but the quote said nothing about "small fraction of people", it was categorical.

refuting your statement:

> you can't get COVID if you get the vaccine, implying it would stop the virus from circulating.

It is entirely possibly that vaccination can leave a virus circulating while still preventing disease. Whether it does in this specific case is something you could debate, but you can't draw that implication stand alone.

>It is entirely possibly that vaccination can leave a virus circulating while still preventing disease. Whether it does in this specific case is something you could debate

But breakthrough cases of the COVID disease do occur in this specific case.

What is the relevance of a hypothetical alternative scenario where breakthrough cases don't exist?

So anyway as I understand it we have a pretty technical readership here on HN.

Technically, the virus is called SARS-CoV-2 and the disease is called COVID-19[1].

That does mean, technically, that due to vaccination the virus can indeed circulate but that people are not affected by the disease. Is that what Biden has said? Certainly from the excerpt you posted, that seems to be the case.

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

>That does mean, technically, that due to vaccination the virus can indeed circulate but that people are not affected by the disease.

Are you suggesting that breakthrough cases of COVID don't exist?

I never suggested any such thing

That's cherry picking a slip of the tongue: he was very clear earlier in that post that you can still get infected:

>If you’re vaccinated, even if you do catch the “virus,” quote, unquote — like people talk about it in normal terms — you’re in overwhelm- — not many people do. If you do, you’re not likely to get sick. You’re probably going to be symptomless. You’re not going to be in a position where you — where your life is in danger.

So you can cherry pick and attribute an absurd interpretation while ignoring everything else he said, or go for the reasonable view that he knows infection is still possible based on multiple other points in the conversation. The man isn't a great speaker, but nonetheless it's inappropriate to choose the worst possible interpretation of something when context contradicts that interpretation.

It's one example of many that could have been chosen, and needs no interpretation, his words stand on their own. The fact that there are incoherencies in his various statements is not relevant.

>one example of many

Then show me the many examples where he's said that vaccines are perfect proof against infection. Because now you're moving the goal posts as your point is refuted by context, so you expand to more vague ad hominem attack against him. The burden of evidence is on you to support that, and to do so with more than brief out of context soundbites.

>out of context soundbites

A link to the entire transcript of an event is an "out of context sondbite"? You're clearly not discussing in good faith.

Review your comment. You link to the entire transcript yet use only a single out of context quote. You chose, from a long transcript a single out of context sound bite. My accusation stands. I was the one who pointed out that you ignored the rest of the context that contradicted you.

So there you are-- posting an article, maybe failing to read it or more likely deciding to ignore most of it, and then accuse me of discussing in bad faith? That is quite brazen, accusing me of the exact thing you are doing, A poor, failed attempt at a diversionary tactic to distract from your avoidance of the question.

>out of context quote

It's not out of context, it's completely in context. Biden said you won't get COVID if you take the vaccine, full stop. There's no additional context that changes the meaning of those words.

The fact that he also made other statements about COVID doesn't render the quote out of context.

The entire transcript is the context, and everything else in it contradicts your unreasonable belief that a small slip of the tongue takes precedence over the rest. It's the type of non-argument & deliberate misunderstanding that I expect of the most cynical pundits or political partisans, whereas HN folks usually do a little better than such recycled flame bait.

So, I don't think you and I can have a productive conversation. Perhaps you are capable of doing so when it doesn't involve a political figure, but it seems clear that you have a vendetta in this case and are unable to look past it.

If you'd like to reply for posterity, for anyone else who comes along, go for it, but don't do it on my account, I see no point in revisiting this thread. If we encounter each other in a different conversation then I look forward to the possibility of a reasonable discussion & exchange of ideas, but you don't currently, on this topic, seem interested in that.

https://twitter.com/NickKao13/status/1475641334597832705?t=o...

There you go. From the head of the CDC and a few other quotes from biden too.

Haven’t the older vaccines been mandated for much longer?

There's never been a vaccine that was mandated in order to conduct basic commerce.

Smallpox no? I mean it was criminal to not be vaccinated in many places and upheld by courts. Seems a stronger mandate to me.

If you're referring to Jacobson v. Massachusetts, that case was about whether the state has a right to impose a fine on someone who refused to be vaccinated. A fine is very different than being barred from conducting commerce.

In several states it was a criminal charge that could see you fined and/or imprisoned. Having a criminal record bars you from employment and commerce opportunities no?

I know wearing a mask and taking the bare minimum to try to control a pandemic that has killed millions infringes on YOUR PRECIOUS FREEDOM but it seems a reasonable trade off for the state.

Also what restrictions to basic commerce are you facing? That you can't go get wasted in a bar? Give us a break.

Listen, friend. The vaccine

1) Didn't

2) Can't

3) Will never

Stop Sars-CoV-2. You can vaccinate to 100% and double, triple, quadruple boost everyone. In this Omicron wave, almost everyone I know here in Florida has come down with symptomatic COVID. That includes my wife and kids, the entire families of all my best friends, my coworkers, my boss, my kids' teachers, everyone, and they are ALL VACCINATED to the man. The prior two waves never got within 3 degrees of freedom to me, vaccine or not.

This isn't surprising. COVID doesn't care about our stupid vaccine. It doesn't even know it's there. As far as I know we've never beat a bug like this with a vaccine. Consider that while we sit around and put on the mask and point the finger at the guy next door, the outbreak started in Wuhan, Omicron developed in South Africa, and the next variant is probably starting to incubate in yet another remote location. In fact the entire trajectory of this disaster is basically orthogonal to all of our activities.

The politics of COVID, however, the self-inflicted economic and social damage, are entirely our own doing. I believe this is actually comparable to, if not worse than, the direct effects of the virus itself. And since nothing we have done or can do will prevent the direct damage, I say we should stop inflicting all the secondary damage on ourselves.

> hat includes my wife and kids, the entire families of all my best friends, my coworkers, my boss, my kids' teachers, everyone, and they are ALL VACCINATED to the man. The prior two waves never got within 3 degrees of freedom to me, vaccine or not.

And did they die? Because the vaccines are tremendously effective at reducing symptom severity, hospitalization and deaths.

More likely than not the outcome would have been the same even if they were unvaccinated, because covid-19 just isn't that bad of a virus. If you're under 30 years old, even with Wuhan/Alpha/Delta variants, you were at lower risk than with the yearly flu.

> If you're under 30 years old, even with Wuhan/Alpha/Delta variants, you were at lower risk than with the yearly flu.

This is objectively false; the IFR of all Covid variants is one order of magnitude greater than the flu, with the possible exception of a few years in the century with particularly virulent seasonal flus.

Sure COVID-19 will be endemic, can't put the genie back in the bottle now, but that doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't be trying to end the pandemic: r0 < 1. The vaccines and masks do a great deal to reduce those basic reproduction numbers.

Maybe millions dead, countless others not entirely recovered, isn't helping economies or folks mental health? I agree, that's all our own doing, but not because we "locked down" it's because we never actually did. There was never a lockdown (at least here in the US), middle class folk just stayed home while the lower class brought us our groceries and died.

You're lucky the virus hasn't effected you till now... guess you don't have any friends in the service, hospitality, or health care industries.

Also if you're in Florida, what do you care. Y'all basically YOLOing this and I don't think there's much in the way of government mandates.

Maybe step away from the keyboard, put on your mask, and chill the fuck out friend. People are dying. Stop being selfish.

My, and this goes for everyone, freedom is indeed precious.

That seems like a stretch. Physically taking money from you is almost by definition an imposition on one's ability to conduct commerce.

Many jobs require vaccinations. In my state (and many others) college students are required to have an MMR vaccine to attend school. Students living in residence halls also need a hepatitis vaccine.

Vaccines have long been required in a variety of environments.

Conducting basic commerce is not the same thing as some jobs having specific job requirements.

Many things have been done in the past. Just because something was done in the past, that doesn't automatically make it the right thing to do.

I'm not talking about the past, I'm talking about now. Schools require vaccines, and required them pre-covid, and that has been upheld as constitutional. (In the US) From the perspective of law, it is not wrong. YMMV in other countries.

What are your goalposts here on "basic commerce"? School and many jobs seem like they should be included in that, which refutes your original comment on the topic of vaccine mandates for basic commerce not having precedent.

There's never been mandates that bar you from entering stores to conduct commerce, until now.

That narrows down the scope of your claim a little. It is somewhat incorrect though: During smallpox in the early 1900's, Baltimore would jail people if they refused a vaccine. That's certainly a barrier to entering stores and conducting basic commerce.

England did the same thing.

Going back another 100+ years, Virginia passed a law that could see someone not inoculated via variolation jailed & fined if their failure to inoculate spread the disease. I also consider this jailing a barrier to basic commerce.

The precedents exist.

Slavery also used to be legal in Virginia. What's your take on that?

That's a non sequitur. Your claim was that there has never been a mandate that interfered with "basic commerce". Your interlocutor was disputing that claim. Whether such a mandate is morally equivalent to chattel slavery is an entirely different claim.

My take is that slavery is bad and that you your statement about basic commerce was wrong.

You clearly don't like the restrictions and mandates. If you want to have a productive conversation on the topic with other reasonable people then focus less on precedent and more on why these things are bad regardless of precedent. You'll have to do that with someone else though: your method of discussion up to this point has verged more towards reflexive provocation than productive conversation.

>focus less on precedent

I'll let the reader determine who is furiously trying to list every vaccine mandate precedent. As is often the case, the bad faith argument is one of projection.

furiously trying to list every vaccine mandate precedent

Strange phrasing given that you claimed that there were no precedents and I merely brought up precedents in response. I'm not sure how listing historical legal occurrences would cause you to infer such emotional weight to them as to describe them as "furiously" obtained. It's a discussion, that's all. It's been a bit one-sided discussion, because when you are met with counter evidence you level vague accusations of subtle psychological motivations instead of giving a reasoned response.

I'll give you an example of a more productive & reasonable way to respond to the precedents I listed: The precedents are too old and the current situation too varied from them to have any bearing on current legal decisions on these matters. The United States has had more than 100 years of growth & maturity surrounding decisions on constitutional matters and advancements in constitutional scholarship, and during that time has had occasion to revisit decisions that now seem problematic in light of those advances in legal thinking. Additionally, smallpox was significantly more lethal than COVID. Up to 30% might die of it, raising the stakes far above COVID. As such, even granting that the US constitution would, today, allow for those historic measures, we are not now in a situation comparable enough for them to be required.

There you are. That response would have been a more productive conversation to have, specifically addressing my counterclaims without resorting to ad hominem attacks or avoiding the issue all together. We could then have gone on to discuss that in more depth, even if I partly disagree with what I just wrote, a devil's advocate rebuttal to my own rebuttal of your claim. It's a shame you didn't go down that route. It's pretty pointless to be here unless you're simply looking for rhetorical point scoring instead of discussion. Which bring me to:

>let the reader determine

That would be a major difference between you & I: I don't think about other readers when I post. It simply doesn't occur to me to filter what I write through that lens. Until you mentioned it, what other people reading this might think hasn't crossed my mind. It's simply not what I focus on.

Prior to this pandemic, I've never needed to reveal private medical history to go to a kindergartener's birthday party at a venue. Have you?

(and the kicker was we all still needed masks anyway... "science"!)

I suspect that prior to this pandemic most venues hosting a birthday party for a kindergartener would frown upon any guest attending who is currently infected with a contagious disease or who is not vaccinated against any highly infectious diseases experiencing a local outbreak at that time. This is not "private medical history" in any sense other than that any guest is free to not attend if they don't wish to share this information.

Sure but I’m also free to not go to that business. When the government mandates it, now I have no choice.

Vaccines are like seat belts: they don't prevent car crashes, but they help you survive them.

Good one!

Here’s my version for pre-Covid vaccines:

Vaccines are like seat belts: they prevent car crashes.

No they're more like airbags. The don't stop the accident but they do make it immensely more survivable.

It's amazing how much we've forgotten about how vaccines and immunity work over the last couple of years.

Flu vaccines were always described as a pretty stochastic thing and not a guarantee, though that may have been more for uncertainty of which strain ended up dominant.

Why is why they're colloquially referred to as "flu shots", not "flu vaccines".

> The bar is being set high for these vaccines because they are being pushed and mandated with very exaggerated justification, that they will end the pandemic.

At what point does the justification become 'exaggerated'?

Is "This vaccine would have saved the lives of at least half a million Americans in the past two years" not a good enough justification?

Is "End the pandemic" the only set of goal posts for vaccination that you will accept?

Is not, is there a number of corpses that will be an acceptable justification? How much higher does it have to get? A million? Five? Fifty?

What would it take for you to accept that people should get vaccinated by law? Or do you think it should just not be mandated ever?

We already have these requirements for other infectious diseases as well as health codes that cover clothing and sometimes protective equipment and procedure requirements for workers and customers in public settings.

I liken masks to the requirement to have at least minimal clothing on. Sanitation is the same (wash your hands, here's how to scrub for 30 seconds).

You do not have to get your child vaccinated. If they're going to mandate vaccines, why haven't they done it already? What would have had to change before the pandemic for you to want them to be mandated?

No need to require vaccinations for a flash in the pan event. These things come and go. In the grand scheme of things, human civilization, this will be quickly forgotten.

Vaccines have mostly eradicated other viruses. It's at least possible we could do the same here if we didn't have such a high level of resistance to getting vaccinated.

It was only after (in the US) vaccination rates levelled off and Delta came along that I began hearing people talk about COVID as endemic.

As for evidence, the continued efficacy of some vaccines against variants suggests that, with high levels of adoption, it's at least possible that after a few years of periodic boosters and targeting emerging strains that we could have reached an extremely low level of circulation.

Also why wouldn't you move the goal posts when the data changes? You get new data, you reevaluate prior assumptions and models, and adjust accordingly. Is there a particular instance you're referring to here?

When the primary message to the populace is that the vaccine will stop the spread, then the vaccines do not stop infection, large swathes of the public begin to feel lied to.

Where can I read that message? I don’t follow many news channels. But I visited CDC website and their primary message is that vaccines protect from getting seriously ill.

Part of "serious illness" is being ill for longer. The longer you're infected, the more people you're likely to infect. How could vaccination not reduce the spread?

"So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they're going to transmit it," Fauci said.

Fauci added that vaccinated people essentially become "dead ends" for the virus to spread within their communities.

"When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community," Fauci said. "In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And that's when you get a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community."[1]

This is more or less the messaging I recall seeing around the early stages of the vaccine being available.

[1]https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...

Try visiting archive.org and looking up the CDC site, because we are almost a year removed from the "95% efficacy" propaganda they peddled.

Wait I'm so confused, why were the efficacy studies propaganda?

We have never even come close to eradicating a respiratory virus. There is a huge difference between a disease like smallpox and covid19

A nice summary of human attempts to fully eradicate pathogens - a feat we have accomplished precisely two (2!) times.

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

we have for all intents and purposes eradicated polio in the areas that trust vaccines. it's in basically 2 places now because of a few factors but a large one is that the taliban doesn't trust them and think it's a sterilizing campaign... pakistan, and afganistan.

Don't get it twisted: the CIA disguised its spies as polio vaccine administrators[1]. We could have eradicated the virus had the medical staff not been weaponized.

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/05/20/314231260...

You can both be right. CIA poured fuel onto the fire.

But I do find it is interesting that we almost had polio eradicated until the vaccine was politicized...

There have been both blunt and sharp political forces in play. As far as I know, CIA never operated this way in northern Nigeria, yet that was one of the anti-vax hold-outs where polio was kept alive.

Seems we've forgotten all about how viruses work over the last couple of years.

Without a vaccine, viruses will still evolve to be less virulent and more transmissible, leading to endemic status. Within this a large number of the population gain natural immunity also reducing spread.

Vaccines, done poorly and too frequently, cause vaccine escape where the immune system actually does a worse job fighting infection and you get more virus (aside other immune system issues). Which is exactly what we're seeing now where a lot of places have more hospitalisation and death per capita in the vaccinated...two years into the pandemic

The most ignorant thing to think at the moment is 'just need more jabbing.'

Incorrect.

Smallpox has been around for thousands of years, and it has not evolved to be less virulent.

More transmissible (specifically fitter) but not necessarily, or even usually, less virulent. That is just an urban myth sadly.

Endemic just means 'regularly found', it does not mean mostly harmless!

Vaccine escape refers to a virus evolving to avoid vaccine induced immunity - and can happen with infection induced immunity too. As it happens T cell immunity against severe disease has been holding up just fine - and has saved countless lives. If vaccine uptake was universal, and we took a few sensible precautions, a virus can be completely suppressed, like measles, so wouldn't have a chance for escape mutations.

Your per capita statement is plain wrong.

Now you've been taught a few things about viruses, you can stop spreading misinformation!

For viral diseases, especially coronavirises. Source for the explanation of the myth/urban legend?

Immune system escape can occur, usually in adults, but generally not in children because their immune systems are young and not 'trained' so do a great general response effort.

Vaccines force a targeting of the immune system (e.g. particular spike proteins) that specifically leads to escape, as we're seeing with the vaccines being not only mostly useless, but potentially worse for Omicron.

Per capita not wrong, just not everywhere yet. Example:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/new-data-on-vaccine-effic...

I have to wonder:

If we had protected the vulnerable the best we could, focused on treatments, and let the vaccine rip through the remainder of the population (particularly healthy children) as fast as possible would we have arrived at Omicron levels of deadly much sooner and saved more lives overall?

Not suggesting we should have done that. Just wondering if it might be the case. Guess we'll never know for sure.

You're assuming that Omicron is going to be the last variant.

No guarantees that we can't get another wave of Delta 2.0 in five months.

> Without a vaccine, viruses will still evolve to be less virulent and more transmissible, leading to endemic status. Within this a large number of the population gain natural immunity also reducing spread.

This is a thorough misreading of the evolution of viruses.

> Vaccines have mostly eradicated other viruses

No, vaccines have eliminated exactly one human virus, smallpox.

>It's at least possible we could do the same here if we didn't have such a high level of resistance to getting vaccinated.

why hasn't the flu been eradicated then?

>It was only after (in the US) vaccination rates levelled off and Delta came along that I began hearing people talk about COVID as endemic.

that's because most people have no idea what's going on. experts were saying this was the likely outcome from the begining

> experts were saying this was the likely outcome from the begining

Well only those other experts... the "kooks" and "right wing" ones who "care more about the economy than lives". The ones that got their reputations destroyed.

The mainstream "experts" who are the ones we are only supposed to ever listen to have never really made any of this clear. If they did, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

If they cared about the economy, they'd be screaming at everyone to get vaccinated so that life could go back to business as usual. The economic cost of millions of people requiring life-saving, high-intervention healthcare is crippling.

They don't actually care about the economy, though. They care about two things - fighting a culture war, and bending over backwards for businesses, at the expense of literally anything else. It doesn't matter that millions of people are racking up billions in preventable medical bills, so long as the Mar-o-Lago can stay open as if nothing happened.

They aren't making a 'trade-off' between the economy and human life. They are utterly failing at protecting both. If you want to see a trade-off between the economy and human life, look at how China handled the pandemic. Harsh lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and as a result[1] - strong economic growth through the pandemic.

[1] Also only 4,000 dead, as opposed to 900,000, but who's counting?

There are likely numerous reasons, but the flu vaccine update was generally around 40% for adults in the US[0]. COVID is something like 70% and the OP is saying if we got even higher it might've worked. (I suspect the bigger issue was getting it distributed globally.)

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1920estimates.ht...

The vaccines aren’t effective enough to stop omicron even if everyone in earth took all three shots.

If they stayed 90% effective like they were originally, we could have ended the virus. But vaccine efficiency wanes over time. New omicron+delta vaccines will help somewhat, but their effectiveness will probably wane over time too.

Time to get used to cold, flu, and covid season every winter.

That 94% was against symptoms, not infection. They didn't measure infection, so there was no way to distinguish between stopping infection and still being infected but stopping symptoms (and so still being able to spread it). Turns out, even before Omicron, it was mostly the second case.

CDC said 90% for asymptomatic infection once they did measure infection. https://www.aha.org/news/headline/2021-03-29-cdc-authorized-...

The change is partly that the effectiveness wanes after a few months and partly that its less effectively again new variants like Delta and Omicron. You can create delta+omicron mRNA vaccines to deal the second problem, but the first problem is much harder--and maybe impossible--to deal with.

This is why we had low cases during the summer of 2021. The vaccine mostly worked at stopping the spread. It no longer does.

Hopes are high because if they don’t prevent spread, and breakthrough cases or effects on the unvaccinated/ineligible are bad enough, then there’s no off-ramp for NPIs.

> If the data is strong, you most likely wouldn't need mandates to convince people.

That's an awfully naive and rosy view of "people".

> that they will end the pandemic.

And that they will prevent the appearance of mutated strains.

Or the corollary that the appearance of mutated strains is to be blamed on people being unvaccinated, either because they don’t have vaccines or don’t want them.

Oh no, not this talking point again.

For the last time, you can spawn mutations regardless of vaccination status.

This phenomenon of the unvaccinated being “Petri dishes” for mutations occurs in the vaccinated as well. So let’s not spread misinformation based on a complete misunderstanding on how mutations form in the body.

Disagree? No problem, just show me the data that backs up that claim. Certainly not above having my mind changed.

I should probably have quoted a larger part:

> with very exaggerated justification, that they will end the pandemic

All true, but this was not what was sold to the general public. Had people been informed that the latest vaccines against COVID-19 behaved similarly to rhe seasonal shots people get for regular flue season, a vast majority of the public would have opted out, as they do with the seasonal versions. This was further compounded by the aggressive dismissal and censorship of natural immunity and preventive care (good diet, exercise, vitamins, etc). We are here today because the obvious was politicized.

> the aggressive dismissal and censorship of natural immunity

who agressively dismissed this?

Your friendly neighborhood fact checkers who suppress virtually anything which could justify opposition to vaccine mandates. Including news media.

I angrily dismiss it. It's a nonverifiable bullshit excuse to avoid a needle prick. Tests have some error, it's unclear if you got a sufficient dose, spaced exposures are better, the vaccine has shown better variant resilience, choose your reasons. If you haven't gotten a vaccine, I don't care if you've had COVID or not. Either way you should get a shot.

It might be different if there were any cost to it. But there isn't. So invariably the people bitching about natural immunity are just doing it to make a point, usually political.

I agree people should get the shot. It's so amazingly clear that it's effective at helping your immune system to fight the virus quicker.

But the CDC did announce that since delta people who recovered from an infection have better immune response than those who are only vaccinated. I asked the OP to clarify because there is false information out there that this fact is being suppressed "aggressively" when in fact the CDC announced it!

Of course people who get multiple exposures (vaccines, boosters, cases) have a better immune response. That's separate from whether they have a better experience - sometimes COVID causes damage to organs that is cumulative between cases for instance.

The point isn't that infection carries no immune benefits. It's that vaccines always carry immune benefits so everyone should be forced to get one (very rare cases of immune system maladies aside).

I do actually support vaccine mandates in emergencies such as these. I don't know what I said that makes you think otherwise.

> I do actually support vaccine mandates in emergencies such as these. I don't know what I said that makes you think otherwise.

Sure, happy to explain my reasoning. You said "I agree people should get the shot." Unfortunately, a lot of times that phrase is followed, either explicitly or based on context with the rest of the conversion, by "but it's their choice and I oppose mandates". The use of "should" that people use for "should eat right" not "should wear a seatbelt". It's gotten to the point that if I see such a phrase without specifying something like "everyone should get vaccinated", I assume it's an anti-mandate (and often antivaxer)

I hope our interaction has appropriately updated our priors ;)

So, not only did you not RTFA (which mentions lasting natural immunity up through 450 days so far), you refuse to believe any science that isn't suiting your political agenda. You should not have the power to require anyone to get an unnecessary medical treatment, and neither should the government.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...

It mentions data on 450 days not "hey, you're totally immune for 450 days". And obviously some people who are naturally infected will be immune forever. Some people.

But even if we knew natural infection prevented future infections in all (which it doesn't, people get double or triple infected), it still wouldn't make sense. (For if it leaves you open to reinfection, see spaced exposure, initial viral load, etc.) Because we don't have the records to corroborate everyone's claims they were infected. And, a lot of the people who would claim to have already been infected I have little trust in to be honest, let alone the difficulty of self-diagnosing.

There's no cost to getting the damn shot, so what's the fucking problem with requiring it?

You make an impassioned and personally attacking me case that natural immunity should exempt you, but why not get the vaccine?

Maybe someone just doesn’t feel like getting the vaccine. That’s 100% reason enough, it’s not your decision to make.

> So invariably the people bitching about natural immunity are just doing it to make a point, usually political.

Bodily autonomy is kind of an important topic, is it not? Why should some asshole force me to get an unnecessary medical procedure for a common respiratory virus I already had in order to work or enter many places of business? Why does the government get to force this medical procedure on me?

You can't argue for bodily autonomy and simultaneously support vaccination passports and things like that. I mean you can, but it makes your argument a whole lot weaker.

Every single company and policy maker who is requiring vaccination without considering prior infection.

Rubbish. The CDC advises all policy on this matter in the US and they publicly published that infection and recovery from Delta and subsequent variants gives a stronger immune response than vaccination alone.

It's trivial to find this information.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cdc+natural+immunity&t=brave&iar=n...

First result:

> The CDC is finally recognizing 'natural immunity' — legislators should follow suit

> The Hill on MSN.com|1 day ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/the-cdc-is-finally-...

This just confirms their point, the vaccine passports in the US don't have any allowances for natural immunity - it's vaccine or nothing.

> Had people been informed that the latest vaccines against COVID-19 behaved similarly to rhe seasonal shots people get for regular flue season, a vast majority of the public would have opted out, as they do with the seasonal versions.

We’re people informed differently? I don’t remember ever being under the impression that the COVID vaccine would provide immunity forever, or even longer than a year.

Also, incidentally, like 40-50% of American adults get the flu vaccine. For people aged 65+ it’s like 60-70%. That’s lower than the rates of COVID vaccinations, but not massively lower (especially considering that the choice to get the flu vaccine is not utilized as a signal of political group membership).

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-07-21/ap-...

> BIDEN: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” — town hall.

Personal anecdata(source: had covid-infected roommate, and close contact with someone who tested positive a day later): I got boosted 2 weeks before my roommate got covid, I took no precautions and didn't get sick. The second contact was the beginning of this week and didn't get sick. As far as I'm concerned, vaccines have kept me from getting covid in known-risky environments.

I was under the impression that the vaccine would prevent infection in most people, start to wear off, and that a booster once a year for the next few years would get us to herd immunity.

I recall that being a pretty common expectation.

> All true, but this was not what was sold to the general public.

Fauci was prepping everyone for vaccines with a 50% VE against infection back in late 2020 before the results of the phase 3 trials were produced.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/07/fauci-says-covid-19-vaccine-ma...

> “The chances of it being 98 percent effective is not great,” Fauci, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said at a Q&A with the Brown University School of Public Health in Rhode Island, according to CNBC.

> Instead, Fauci said, scientists are hoping for a vaccine that is 75 percent effective — but even a 50 or 60 percent success rate would be considered a win.

At the same time though we're still at >90% VE against severe disease and hospitalization through the persistence of T-cell immunity, but that just doesn't protect against initial infection since T-cells take a few days to get going in response to an infection. The vaccines can be largely credited with most of the "milder" Omicron wave keeping the infection-hospitalization-rate much lower.

So who exactly "sold" these ideas about the vaccines to the general public? Because it wasn't the leading public health expert not the pandemic.

How much did the public hear what it wanted to hear from media sources and self-appointed twitter experts?

Here is Fauci claiming the vaccines would result in herd immunity:

> “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci told the Times. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

It sure sounds like he was intentionally feeding us false hope.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/531611-fauci-herd-immu...

That was over a year ago, just before the Delta variant was discovered. Since Delta became prevalent, there has been little talk of herd immunity.

Yeah the Delta variant is the only one that has really mattered at all.

That was something that literally nobody expected, not even epidemiologists or virologists. Goodbye herd immunity argument entirely. Everyone catches SARS-CoV-2 sooner or later.

The quote I posted was contemporaneous with the quote from the parent comment, which claims Fauci prepped us for 50% VE but he later claimed herd immunity was possible which afaik implies far greater than 50% VE.

The parent comment asked "who sold these ideas [that vaccines prevent transmission] to the general public?" From the quote I posted, it certainly seems like Fauci did.

Is there something I'm missing here?

From above: "Instead, Fauci said, scientists are hoping for a vaccine that is 75 percent effective — but even a 50 or 60 percent success rate would be considered a win."

The number 50 was mentioned in passing, but it doesn't sound like he was predicting any specific efficacy number, only that it would not be as high as the rosy 90%+ that was shown by some data. To me, parsing these words is a little nit-picky, since we are talking about a 2 year period during which multiple new and unexpected strains have become dominant, and vast amounts of new clinical data have been published.

The claim that herd immunity is possible seems to imply some base efficacy rate, the actual value of which I agree is not important here. (Although maybe it doesn't. I really don't know.)

And it's true that the quotes come from early on in the pandemic.

However, the claim that it was randos on Twitter and not the experts - at any time - who purveyed the idea that the Covid vaccines would significantly prevent transmission - unlike flu vaccines - is contradicted by the quote from Fauci that I posted in response to the question: "who sold these ideas to the public?"

Also many people fail to seroconvert after natural infection:

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042-f2

And the virus contains immune evasion genes like ORF8 which evade humoral immunity responses by downregulating MHC-I:

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/23/e2024202118

Nobody in their right mind would produce a vaccine with ORF8 in it since it defeats the whole purpose of stimulating T-cell and B-cell recognition.

There's good reasons why natural immunity has been downplayed.

I'm sorry. Can you clarify what you are saying?

> aggressive dismissal and censorship of natural immunity

The 'natural immunity' argument never makes sense if you think about it. You're comparing the chances of a SECOND covid infection of an unvaccinated person to a vaccinated person's first infection. If you compare vaccinated vs unvaccinated people and their chances of their first and second covid infections, the vaccinated person wins in both cases.

Also, the first infection is the riskiest one. So going through the riskiest infection to get immunity for a second, less risky infection doesn't really make sense.

If it's about whether someone who had covid already should count as being vaccinated, maybe. But that also risks incentivizing people catching covid on purpose instead of taking the vaccine.

I would encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, but there were millions of people who got infected before there were any vaccines available. The vast majority of those recovered patients now have durable cellular immunity which will usually protect them against severe symptoms in subsequent reinfections.

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

And if one's natural immunity came from a previous coronavirus infection from 10 year ago?

There is such a thing as cross reactive immunity. Look at the diamond princess cruise ship. They were locked in close quarters sharing a ventilation system for 2 weeks and only 20% of the guests tested positive.

The most fascinating part is how none of this was really unexpected; Too many people forgot how this is already SARS-CoV-*2*

We had over a decade to find vaccines for the original SARS-CoV, and in over that decade we did not manage to find anything long-lasting [0]. A whole lot of problems SARS-CoV vaccines had, seem to also exist for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

[0] https://sci-hub.ru/10.1080/17460441.2019.1581171

> This is a really good article on the immune system.

I still don't particularly like it that much.

None of this should be all that new.

There were plenty of knowledgeable people saying all along that sterilizing nutralizing immunity in the mucosa was unlikely to be achievable for a vaccine against a respiratory virus that most commonly had no viremic phase, particularly as a shot given in the arm.

They were also saying that T-cells were the important thing to prevent disease and death and we shouldn't be focusing on preventing infection.

Some other people who debated or disagreed with that perspective are now suddenly learning novel new things about the immune system. There's a good chunk of experts out there that were saying this all along though (if you were listening to them and not the headlines and blogs and twitter).

It's new to me. Sometimes it's nice to have an article rehash old knowledge and bring it into the current context. If for nothing other than to educate the ignorant like me.

But the way it is written sounds like nobody on Planet Earth could have possibly predicted this and that the way B-cells and T-cells work is completely novel discoveries in 2022.

There were people saying this is roughly would happen in mid-2020.

Tony Fauci was saying he'd be happy if the VE against disease was only 50% in Fall 2020. He was trying to set expectations to about where we are right now.

It gives the wrong impression to people who don't know anything about it and it undermines the vaccine messaging strategy. There's a stronger message that virologists and epidemiologists who were specialists in this kind of thing were grounded mostly in reality all along and THIS WAS THE PLAN AND THE PLAN IS WORKING. By claiming that we're radically learning new things it sounds like the whole thing was a clusterfuck. Getting a vaccine with around 50% efficacy against disease and 90% efficacy against hospitalization was always the winning strategy. We were just supposed to hit 80%-90% vaccination rates at least and the low vaccination rates are meaning that the Omicron wave was more of a burden on hospitals than it ever needed to be.

What went wrong is that the vaccine trials were cut short. People who complain about that usually try to argue we cut short the "long term safety" outcome, which is nonsense because vaccine side effects are autoimmune conditions that either start turning up in a population 3 months after dosing or they don't. What we actually cut short was the _durability_ outcomes of the trials since that was the thing that would have taken 2 years and we didn't have the time. Turns out the headline 90% VE against infection numbers weren't durable but the damage was done once they made the initial headline splash and everyone entirely forgot that Fauci was setting expectations down around 50% beforehand. Then they felt they were lied to. Now they feel like the vaccine program was a failure.

We're now back on track to the original plan, and its viewed as being a failure because the phase III results jacked the expectations up to the mRNA vaccines being magicsauce that would instantly end the whole pandemic. This article is still selling it like this is sort of Plan B in response to information that we could never have anticipated. Instead we're back on what was Plan A all along after the hypecycle got blown away by waning immunity and Delta and Omicron.

Really well said, thank you.

I think the lesson here is that one shouldn't listen either to antivax grifters or to greedy pharma execs who oversell their products because of the enormous incentive to do so, whether it be vaccines or Alzheimers treatments. The best approach is to listen to what real scientists who actually understand the subject say, but that does take patience and a willingness to invest time.

> By claiming that we're radically learning new things it sounds like the whole thing was a clusterfuck

Dr. Fauci and all the other anointed "experts" were constantly saying "there is so much to still learn about this virus". They still do when asked questions they don't want to really answer.

They've been acting like COVID was some mysterious brand new virus that required us to abandon every single thing we knew about epidemiology. They are somewhat responsible for this insanity.

You are quite right, but the media, the government, and many public health agencies have been ignoring this, focusing solely on antibody levels, and trying to keep them constantly high through ever more panicky calls for more and more boosters. For everyone, regardless of prior infection.

Because some times you have to make a call. Some studies are now revealing that booster shots might be less effective in those who recovered (watched a guy present his unpublished data the other day). But it’s not that obvious.

This is for two reasons:

One, measuring antibodies is MUCH easier than measuring T or B cell response. This is especially true early on in the pandemic, if you want to measure representative numbers of people, and you don't know when/whether they will be exposed or catch COVID (due to masking/lockdowns etc).

Two, when your problem is that the hospitals are filling up and you're facing a labor shortage for some essential workers for a a few months... then boosting antibodies for 4-6 months to reduce retransmission rates and minimizing symptomatic cases makes a lot of sense.

That was never a valid reason. They were just making things up without following evidence-based medicine practices.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-19-current-state-omicron/

I don't understand who your "they" is. In my opinion there were valid reasons for both decisions on antibodies and boosters. Since I know one of the people in your linked podcast, I will not comment on it.

No that's simply wrong. Antibodies are relatively unimportant and levels decline quickly. What actually matters far more is cellular immunity. Fortunately the vaccines and recovery from infection have both been shown to produce a significant level of durable cellular immunity in the vast majority of patients.

Who do you personally know in the linked podcast? What are your medical qualifications?

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

Feel like that's a bit of a rude question to ask.

Not really, when you look at where things ended up anyway, aside the issues with pumping up antibodies continuously.

Another case of going for short term efficiency wins over doing things properly, but not so easily.

So it's another case of KPI overfitting? Goodhart's law?

A booster has a solid immunological basis.

The process of hypermutation and affinity maturation takes months to finish. The initial immune response to a pathogen is poor and takes ng/ml of antibodies to neutralize the threat. The immune system essentially has a "budget" for antibodies and the early antibodies are poor and take up too much of that. Affinity maturation produces higher affinity antibodies that are effective at pg/ml but it takes months. But you can now "fit" many more kinds of antibodies into the bloodstream.

Hitting the mature immune response with a booster releases those high potency antibodies from germinal centers.

This is why nearly every single vaccine we give kids comes in a series of 2 or 3 shots spaced out over 6+ months.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/adult.html

Very few of those are one-and-done shots.

The initial mRNA shots were way too close together and were done that way out of expediency since the second shot gave a lot better protection very quickly. It also allowed the trials to complete faster and probably saved 100,000s of lives. It was basically a "wartime" decision to slam shots into arms way too fast.

The increased affinity against Omicron after a booster is also something that shouldn't have been a surprise.

The utility of 4th shot boosters in non-elderly non-immunocompromised and chasing after the idea of reducing spread through infection is on a lot less firm footing. Even the booster-obsessed Israelis are finding in studies that it doesn't do much good. This coronavirus also is currently mutating too rapidly and infection too many people in each wave to be able to logistically update the vaccines for new variants, so it doesn't look very useful to be thinking of it analogously to the yearly influenza shots.

I agree with most all of that, and that it was largely unsurprising. When the mRNA shots were developed there was a tradeoff to be made (and BNT/Mod chose slightly different paths) on both amount of RNA and dosing schedule to minimize side effects while rapidly providing strong immunity (we're also lucky JJ and they all chose a stabilized prefusion Spike unlike ChAdOx etc). Boosters for T and B response in particular are common, but orders of magnitude higher antibodies are quite likely to help minimize Omicron effects (especially for first responders who received early Pfizer doses) and do appear to cause significant reductions in infection/symptomatic cases.[1] I would not have slowed down the testing or EUA, although manufacture was an issue early on. We didn't know when/if a significantly immune evading variant would arrive, and I feel fairly lucky with when Omicron arrived (after many of the most susceptible could be vaccinated). If it had arrived 8 months earlier, it would have been catastrophic.

I also feel that the WHO choices have not been very good. From down playing human transmission early in the pandemic to demanding that there not be boosters in order to speed up the multi-year process of vaccinating 4billion people by 40million doses, when Omicron was already spreading quickly. Honestly, prioritization in the developing world is more important. They seem more political than other sources.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788105

Israel was one of the first place to boost (the first?) and I think the rationale there was not just about antibody levels. There were multiple factors. The emergence of Delta which to some extent bypassed the previous two vaccine doses. The decline in protection against severe disease over time (and specifically against delta). And yes, even temporary control of the community spread (which is maybe the more questionable aspect) to allow the country to remain more or less open while keeping hospital load and deaths under control.

In Israel I also believe there is different policy for people that have been infected. This varies from place to place. Determining whether someone was or wasn't previous infected isn't that simple. You can do it if you have good contract tracing, testing, and more centralized health services like Israel does. Also many places didn't have a large enough portion of the population get infected in the first place so maybe not worth worrying too much about.

I don't see how it is so hard. Every positive PCR gets reported to the local health department which reports it to the state DPH. If the state can use this data to send me a letter asking me to donate convalescent plasma surely they could add this information to their digital covid passport.

I think if the data is available it is perfectly reasonable, and even expected, to consider it. Like they do in Israel. I can't really comment on the US in this regard but I'd agree with you that if they can they should... Right now where I am (Canada) they don't even bother testing you unless you're at risk, so nobody knows...

> There were plenty of knowledgeable people saying all along that sterilizing nutralizing immunity in the mucosa was unlikely to be achievable for a vaccine against a respiratory virus that most commonly had no viremic phase, particularly as a shot given in the arm.

You are absolutely right, this has been my experience too. Pointing out what you did about (lack of) sterilising and (importance of) mucosal immunity usually got you downvoted here up until recently. It doesn't matter what your political persuasion is (I am, or at least I was, going into the pandemic, a left liberal), the idea that the vaccines would end the pandemic if only enough people got 1, 2, 3 or more doses was gaslighting from the beginning, probably arising from flippant remarks from politicians when asked for target dates to lift lockdown restrictions - "when X% are vaccinated!". And the idea that this was never what was being said about them this time last year is also gaslighting that's happening right now.

The problem is that this is a very nuanced subject. Everyone thinks they know what's going on, because they've been told it's simple: get vaccinated/boosted, work from home and do as we say and this will all be over. Much of the data being used to justify this was one or more of badly collected, badly analysed or badly interpreted by dishonest politicians, journalists, scientists and members of the public pushing their own (or their bosses') agendas. Instead of opponents' arguments being heard and countered in public ("sunlight is the best disinfectant"), they have been deplatformed under the auspices of "public safety". Scientists have lost their jobs for saying something to counter the narrative - it has become illegal to disagree with the scientists the politicians listen to, under punishment of losing your livelihood. It has been a total shitshow that has exposed how corrupt the whole system is. It has made me quite depressed at how little we've apparently learned since the last century. I thought we were living in the age of science, but what we have right now is far, far from it; maybe we should call it the age of misinformation - driven by humans' psychological maladaptation to their own incredible invention, the internet.

Couldn't have said it better. When I had multiple smart people I knew in real life yelling what amounts to word salad at me about how I'm so misguided and horrible for asking basic questions about the data... ...that is when I knew this whole thing was gonna last a long time and devolve into a complete shitshow. If people were allowed to express critical opinions and the general public was made aware of the actual numbers regarding covid risk we would have never done any of the things we did over the last two years.

These anointed "experts" still have not told people to chill the fuck out about covid and children. We have two years of publicly available data saying they are at virtually no risk. Yet the CDC and Fauci both act like covid is some kind of grave danger to children.

Dig deep enough into most of the pro-"what we've done"'s arguments and they are nothing more than thinly disguised appeals to authority.

I don’t get it, there was some hope that vaccines could end the pandemic. They didn’t. But they still help, at least by making people much less likely to die. Is there something to be mad at? Hell, even if they ended up not helping much, I wouldn’t be mad at governments for trying. I must be missing something.

Nobodies pissed at the government for making vaccines available, they are pissed that they are having their livelihoods threatened based on false premises.

Doesn't matter if the pandemic ended or not. Society (or at least the politicians) chose to regress. The virus is a virus. It doesn't tell us how to react to it. We do.

Many states didn't regress during delta. They kept calm and carried on with normal. Only some states decided to regress. And the outcomes are almost identical--in the same ballpark at least.

I’m always amused by mask mandates as regressing and “doing nothing for public health” as keeping calm.

Mask mandates say “vaccines dont work” and “stay scared”.

They are dehumanizing.

Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them. We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence. Especially post vaccine.

Maybe people want to move on? Mayne those people have incredibly valid reasons for they wish? Maybe the government should respect that?

> They are dehumanizing.

It's a piece of cloth worn over your nose and mouth. How fragile is your sense of humanity?

> Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them.

I don't like wearing shoes, but that doesn't make shoe mandates (which are totally a thing, but only private businesses, not by government order) dehumanizing.

> We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence.

Is that straw man dead yet?

> Especially post vaccine.

On this point, I actually agree. Would vaccine mandates be acceptable instead? It would be much more effective than mask mandates (which, while I have no real problem with them in principle, don't actually work that well because so many people don't wear them correctly).

What about a mandate against wearing shoes, when many are more comfortable wearing them? I think the argument here is that any mandate beyond the bare minimum is harmful to freedom. Just because you don't mind wearing a mask doesn't mean others can't.

I say this as someone who doesn't mind masks and wears them often.

If not wearing shoes was potentially helping health services to keep being functional, then yes it would make sense to mandate it. Harmful to freedom? What about the freedom of having functional health services? I keep hearing about freedom but freedom isn't about doing whatever we want, we also have to consider the freedom of others not to suffer from our actions. I consider my suffering of wearing a mask laughable compared to the suffering of people unable to get health care when their life depends on it. I'm happy to wear it even if in the future it turns out they weren't helping significantly.

>potentially helping

That’s an incredibly low bar you’re setting.

What do you think of the suffering of those who’d normally rely on lip reading?

> I'm happy to wear it even if in the future it turns out they weren't helping significantly.

I guess that's where we differ. I believe we should make our best decisions based on what science predicts. If there's unlikely to be a significant benefit, some are not happy to wear it. You are, but that's a personal choice.

There are lots of sacrifices we could make that would have an immediate and more tangible impact on health outcomes. Outlaw motor vehicles, mandatory vegetables, end alcohol sales. We don't do that because it would piss people off.

> They are dehumanizing.

Just curious, but would you feel comfortable elaborating on how? I haven’t found them all that bad personally, but maybe there’s something I’m not as attuned to.

I went from living normally to living with a disability the last 2 years. I have a hard time understanding speech if I can’t see peoples lips move.

I resent it.

I’m sorry it’s made things hard.

Not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence? Sure you can consider whatever you want, but hospitals being overrun and barely able to provide not-covid-related health services is the reality some people keep ignoring. Maybe people want to move on? Sure we all do, but... you know... health services can't just "move on"...

Because masks never really made any statistical impact on the virus spread, so requiring them at this point means you’re not following the data you’re following something else. (I was pro-mask for a while before we had data)

Let the surgeons know.

Yes, compliance and knowing how to wear a mask has been an issue. That's not the same thing as "masks don't work."

This is a random place to put this, but I just want to point out that I think for the most part even mask wearing is not required anymore (unless you are sick, but why are you going anywhere sick?)

Part of the reason I put it here is that I want to make sure it's understood that despite the fact I'm pretty pro-vax, pro-mask and generally supported the lockdowns at the time -- we're past all that for now with Omicron. Things are still a mess, and the facts on the ground could change, but I think it's important that everybody gets on the same page that we're moving on.

Sounds like we basically agree even though we are coming at it from different angles.

Not really. I'm saying masks work and mandates are necessary public health policy.

Regardless of a mandate, people will do what they do even if it's not in their best interests, or in the interests of their loved ones, or the interests of their neighbors. They will smoke in public places, they will goto work sick, they will drive drunk. Frankly put, people can be jerks. So you put a mandate out there, and you do your best.

Masks work. In areas where mask utilization is high, there is good air filtration and people follow distancing rules, the spread is slowed.

Masks are still required where I live, yet we have some of the highest infection rates in the country. (Southern California)

> Let the surgeons know.

The surgeons already know. Since the 1990s, there has been a general movement away from using surgical masks in the OR, due to accumulating evidence that they have no effect. (For example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/)

That link doesn’t indicate “accumulating evidence that they have no effect”, and the link explicitly states “it would be imprudent to recommend the removal of facemasks from surgery”.

It is a literature review that didn’t find strong evidence for surgical mask effectiveness more because it hasn’t been researched deeply. And it notes that the absence of evidence does not indicate ineffectiveness of surgical masks, and rather a more significant research trial would have to be performed (and there were caveats to the feasibility of doing that as well).

Specific quotes from that article:

“What literature that is available on the subject tends to be dated with poorly explained methodology. There is also uncertainty over whether the results of such studies can be extrapolated to current surgical practice given the advent of new antiseptic techniques since they were completed.”

“It is clear that more studies are required before any absolute conclusions can be drawn regarding the effectiveness or, indeed, ineffectiveness of surgical masks. The published literature does suggest that it may be reasonable to further examine the need for masks in contemporary surgical practice given the interests of comfort, budget constraints and potential ease of communication, although any such study would undoubtedly have to be large and well controlled to prove causality given the low event frequency of surgical site infections.”

“It is important not to construe an absence of evidence for effectiveness with evidence for the absence of effectiveness. While there is a lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of facemasks, there is similarly a lack of evidence supporting their ineffectiveness. With the information currently available, it would be imprudent to recommend the removal of facemasks from surgery. Instead, in the medical field where common practice can so easily become dogma, it is necessary to recognise the constant need to maintain a healthy scepticism towards established beliefs and to periodically re-evaluate and critically assess their scientific merit.”

Show me any research done before the pandemic demonstrating that cloth masks do anything that justifies their forced use.

Doesn’t exist.

I dont like being used as a lab rat. I refuse to participate in this uncontrolled experiment these public health experts are conducting.

The selected quotes misrepresent the thrust of the article. From the abstract, "...overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination."

At the end, they take the stance that while evidence doesn't support any benefit, it doesn't indicate harm either, so might as well continue using masks.

I don't deny that this is still a matter of controversy, compare Romney (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11289767/) with Belkin (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11886203/).

The most frequent complaint is that most research on the subject is not high quality, but what about those studies that are good? The most thorough clinical study is Tunevall (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1853618/), which clearly supports no benefit. There are apparently no high quality studies that support benefit.

As somebody who works with immuno-compromised patients, where wearing masks was already common before the pandemic; This reminds me a whole lot about original resistance against hand washing [0]

Some measures are simply common sense practices and don't need an overwhelming amount of scientific studies to justify them. Particularly when the drawbacks to them are so minor, while the potential advantages are huge.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...

> Particularly when the drawbacks to them are so minor, while the potential advantages are huge.

Does it justify mandatory wearing of religious symbols and tattoos? After all, there are almost no drawbacks, and "potential" advantage is even bigger. It was considered "common sense" for millennia.

What data do you have that show that masks don't have a statistical impact on spread, mortality, or both? Has this data been corrected for confounding factors and made widely available in replicated, peer-reviewed studies, or did you have to spend a half hour cherry-picking Google results to find it?

The latter question sounds insulting and dismissive, but it's actually posed in good faith. It highlights a genuine epistemological problem about the nature, limits, and validity of our knowledge about the pandemic. I can find studies on PubMed and elsewhere that back up virtually any belief, prejudice, policy, or therapy that I like. So can you. Where does that leave us, except with the obvious solution of trusting our local, state, and national health authorities?

It’s not my job to prove masks don’t work. That isn’t how science works. It’s your job to prove masks are worth their costs to society. It’s your job to prove that I need to be forced to wear one for two years now.

I see virtually no evidence that suggests masks do anything meaningful to the spread of Covid—especially enough to justify forcing service workers to wear them 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for two years straight. Especially now that anybody can get a vaccine. Why should service workers be required to wear them? To protect fully vaccinated people who are still afraid of Covid? Seems pretty selfish to ask that if people. Especially when service workers get bullied and gaslight by rich tech workers who think “masks are virtually costles” while their only time masking is their 1 hour weekly trip to the grocery store…

These Covid measures are nothing more than forcing the lower class to protect the upper class (or at least pretends to. It’s all theater and we all know it). It is incredibly privileged to support any of the nonsense we’ve mandated the last two years.

It’s not my job to prove masks don’t work.

Not my job, either. I'm not a doctor or public health authority. That's where I go for advice; do you have better sources in mind?

I don’t care if they work or not. Public health officials get to communicate health information. They don’t get to force the population to wear masks for 2 years. That isn’t their job even if you or they think it is.

You might love masks but not everybody feels the same way. Leave people the hell alone.

Your perspective is valid, but it exists on a continuum. It's clearly possible for the "I have the right to be the next Typhoid Mary" perspective to be carried too far. That's the whole dilemma in a nutshell... how far is too far? I'm not qualified to say, and it looks like you aren't either, given the lack of actionable guidance you're offering.

"Leave people the hell alone" isn't an option, because you live in a populated, civilized nation rather than on a deserted private island. (I will note, however, that they won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.)

> What data do you have that show that masks don't have a statistical impact on spread, mortality, or both?

From the 1918-1920 Spanish influenza pandemic onward, public health agencies have evaluated the effects of mask mandates and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. The consistent result of these epidemiological studies has been failure to detect a positive effect. A typical review article, which was I think the most quoted up until 2020 is Cowling (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20092668/).

From the discussion:

In conclusion there remains a substantial gap in the scientific literature on the effectiveness of face masks to reduce transmission of influenza virus infection. While there is some experimental evidence that masks should be able to reduce infectiousness under controlled conditions, there is less evidence on whether this translates to effectiveness in natural settings. There is little evidence to support the effectiveness of face masks to reduce the risk of infection.

> I was pro-mask for a while before we had data

Before COVID-19, we had extensive analysis of previous pandemics, with the consistent judgment that public mask-wearing had no noticeable effect. For example, the DoD commissioned a study of the 1918-1920 pandemic. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179067)

At this point there's no valid scientific or medical reason to continue with mask mandates. I recommend listening to UCSF infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi who provides a clear explanation of the current situation.

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

What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic. By that I mean... That is a very reasonable position to hold only 3 months ago.

And I still think the vaccines are substantially accelerating the end. So I'm not even sure what the complaint is. That it isn't the only factor? Sure, but it's a huge one, and one of few that we can control.

> What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic.

I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths. This avoids all of the problems around classifcations of deaths with/from COVID, vaccination statuses, etc. It's much harder to disguise deaths or lack of deaths. EuroMOMO [1; scroll 60% down to the z-scores] shows excess deaths in Europe basically went back to normal in most countries after the European wave in spring 2020, long before vaccines were available. This was the case despite widely varying levels of lockdown stringency - with at least one country, Sweden, not doing any significant locking down at all. And many countries' peaks at this time were, if you scroll back in time, comparable in magnitude to excess deaths during previous winters. If you draw a line in your mind down the various countries' graphs at early 2021 when significant fractions of the populations of these countries were starting to get vaccinated, you will probably struggle to determine that they've had any real positive effect at all. Once you do that, consider an alternative hypothesis could better describe the data, for example that the virus is highly seasonal and we have very little control over it. Now, a bonus: change the age group from "all ages" to younger cohorts and observe that in many countries excess deaths did not shift from resembling noise during the entirely of the past 2 years. There are even some countries, not known for being paragons of good health such as Scotland, that barely saw any out of the ordinary excess deaths in the young during the whole period. I think people seem to think things are far worse than they actually are in most countries because of the panic created by media and politicians. This is why I am very unconvinced by the argument that vaccines have been helping to end the pandemic, at very least amongst most of those who have been locked down. It seems much more reasonable to me that other factors are at play here.

[1] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

After you’ve had a bunch of excess deaths (of the oldest and most vulnerable) wouldn’t you expect it to go below normal after that? Isn’t staying above normal still indicative that lots of excess people are dying?

No country was even close to what you could call significantly vaccinated until mid-2021. The winter 20-21 wave is almost entirely unvaccinated populations.

The winter 21-22 is now mostly vaccinated and, surprise, it’s much lower (and unvaccinated are still the majority of deaths).

> After you’ve had a bunch of excess deaths (of the oldest and most vulnerable) wouldn’t you expect it to go below normal after that?

This argument also works against vaccine efficacy.

when you say "it's seasonal" what do you mean? It certainly is not a "winter" thing given that until omicron, Japan's highest numbers were in the middle of hot and humid summer.

> I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths.

The upset from lockdowns and delayed or canceled treatments/surgeries is why. I don't think we have final numbers for 2021 yet, but the numbers from the US in 2020 showed a jump in non-covid deaths about half as big as covid deaths.

Cancer didn't have a big jump that year, but it is one of the things that got postponed diagnoses and treatments, because it doesn't kill immediately so it's not an emergency, so one expectation I've seen is for it to spike in 2021.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234#24...

And there will be a long tail of death and shortened lives that haunt the entire generation of young people these public health policies fucked over. And the worse part is the spite, hatred, and bullying anybody who expressed any concern got. Especially when the evidence is increasingly showing virtually all of our panicked reactions didn’t really do a god damn bit of good against Covid.

This outcome was obvious to anybody paying attention in the beginning.

> I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths.

You do not see it? I see a long fat tail there.

There were 131500 excess deaths during weeks 1-8 and 230000 after that. Does it sound normal to you?

And for every age group below 65, 2021 has been worse than 2020 and worse than previous years except 2019 for 0-14 that was even worse than all pandemic years.

Are you intentionally blind to this?

You appear to think that we can somehow take each age group and somehow handle them much differently. Practice has showed that we all are connected.

Why are we getting such runover by omicron - kids in the schools and kindergartens. I do not blame them, it just is like it is.

It wasn't a reasonable position since we've known cats and dogs (and everything else) could catch it. (Among other reasons, but this is the most obvious for anyone even slightly familiar with previous vaccination efforts.)

For a virus that supposedly just jumped from wild animals to humans, it'd be irresponsible to simultaneously think it couldn't happen again from any of the number of species potentially acting as reservoirs.

Unless there's been new information in the past few weeks I haven't seen, one of the strongest theories about Omicron is that it's a hop back from rats that had been infected with Alpha.

Vaccines are still going to end the pandemic earlier with an enormous amount of lives saved.

But, you need to stop equating ending the pandemic with eliminating the virus.

After the pandemic ends the virus will be with the human race for the rest of our natural lives most likely.

We live with HCoV-229E and HCoV-OC43 and all of us catch that and nobody considers the pandemics that started transmission of those viruses in the human race to still be pandemics.

When the disease burden drops sufficiently then the pandemic is over. Vaccines reduce the disease burden dramatically.

The problem is the people who still believe vaccines would end the pandemic if only (here comes the timeline, locally we're at t=0).

  t=-1: 70% were vaccinated
  t= 0: 100% were vaccinated
  t=+1: 100% were vaccinated & boostered
  t=+2: 100% were vaccinated & double boostered
  ...

If the virus hadn’t mutated from alpha to delta, and then to omega — each of those could have achieved essentially hersd immunity. Unfortunately it mutated before we could tamp it down everywhere. That doesn’t make the people who said vaccines could end the mess wrong, just means we all got unlucky.

Even given (for the sake of argument) that there was cause for hope at some point, that's not an excuse to cling to that hope indefinitely, especially when it demands the violation of other people's bodily autonomy. That hope is dead, and people must let it rest.

More Americans died in the last month from Covid than died in the Vietnam war… to me, that’s an unacceptable toll. I get that people differ in that opinion but it can’t be too surprising that people really aren’t okay with that level of sustained death as the “end game” of this.

It won't keep up like this. It is inevitable that sooner or later everybody will have been infected at least once. Covid-19 will have become just another seasonal respiratory infection that everyone catches for the first time when they're young and the few bad cases will almost all be successfully handled with medicine. Some people may keep getting yearly vaccinations, like so many do with influenza. Most probably won't. Life will largely return to what it was, except for what our experiences during this time has done to our outlook in life.

This is the conclusion I have come to for myself. I got the initial COVID vaccine but the flu vaccine doesn't seem worth it for me and I won't be getting any boosters or further vaccines.

It's astonishing how bad people's risk assessments are.

It really is amazing, especially from a group that likes to think of themselves as scientific. Full of bias and cherry picking data.

Perhaps I’m getting old and cynical, but… no, wait, I was always cynical.

I remember thinking much the same two decades ago when it was risk of death from terrorists vs bees.

have you worked with medical biologists? Bias and cherry picking there, too.

> but the flu vaccine doesn't seem worth it for me

Such a confusing, yet common stance. The flu vaccine is free, risk is essentially nil, and it reduces your chance of death across the board[1]:

> At a median follow‐up duration of 19.5 months, influenza vaccine was associated with a lower risk of all‐cause mortality (RR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.60–0.93 [P=0.01]), cardiovascular mortality (RR, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.80–0.84 [P<0.001]), and major adverse cardiovascular events (RR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80–0.94 [P<0.001]) compared with control. The use of the influenza vaccine was not associated with a statistically significant reduction of myocardial infarction (RR, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.49–1.09 [P=0.12]) compared with control.

It's the biggest no-brainer since seatbelts.

[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.120.019636

Participants' mean age was 69.2±7.01 years

This tells me, when I'm 65, I should definitely be getting flu shots.

That's very much not what it tells you.

So I shouldn't be getting flu shots when I'm 65? Care to expand?

The fact that the group of participants in the study was of a certain age range means that the study says nothing about the result for people outside of that age range.

Much more and better explanation about flu shots here:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/flu/in-depth/...

That's exactly what I'm saying. The study tells me something about that age range, and nothing about anyone else. So it tells me that it's a good idea to get a flu shot when you reach that age range. What exactly are you trying to say???

> So it tells me that it's a good idea to get a flu shot when you reach that age range.

No, that's not what it tells you. Really, I can't help you if an article that spells this stuff out in great detail results in a response that indicates that you have not understood it, they spent a lot more time on this than I will be able to do in this context.

... The study subjects were in that age range, were they not? I truly don't understand how you could draw conclusions about how a young person should approach flu shots from this study, and I'm not approaching this from a malicious place. If you're not going to converse in good faith, this is probably not the place for you.

Not anti vax, not that it should matter for this argument.

It’s just very difficult to make people care about the flu. It’s something they might experience a couple times in their lives and no one really expects to die from it.

It’s impressive annual vaccination rates are as high as they are.

I won’t be getting any further boosters until all restrictions are permanently removed.

Like fuck I’m gonna keep getting boosters but still need to show papers and wear masks. I’m not a sucker.

Let’s just leave it to health insurance providers to raise your premiums, then. If you believe in personal responsibility, that’s how the consequences of your decision will play out should you need hospitalization for your future immune-escaping variant infection.

Consider if your first impulse is to deny the possibility of that last point. You’re probably not an evolutionary virologist, so the truth is you have no idea which mutations are next. Perhaps you think T-cell immunity will save you, but omicron already escapes >50% of T-cell antibody types in 21% of vaccinated or infected people. Will we develop better cross-neutralizing antibodies from omicron or will antigen imprinting doom us to suffering wave after wave of new variants, due to maintaining variant-specific immunity only?

I bet that feeling of self-righteousness is satisfying, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s because blaming other humans subconsciously lets you continue the illusion that humans were ever in control of the pandemic in the first place or that a real risk ever existed for you. Anger is a lot more comfortable than existential anxiety.

But the truth is, it’s not “the man” who’s keeping you down at all — the pandemic limitations you feel right now are the libertarian equivalent to your fist being restrained from meeting your neighbor’s nose.

Due to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), medical insurers aren't legally allowed to set premiums based on vaccination status. But I would still encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated regardless of insurance issues.

https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/

Cellular immunity is highly durable and effective.

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

>Cellular immunity is highly durable and effective.

The question is not how long the immunity lasts (based on original SARS patients, probably multiple decades to a lifetime), but whether affinity-matured T-cells can sufficiently cover the antigen-space of future ACE2-binding spike proteins.

Somatic hypermutation might still be too complex to model computationally to answer that question outright.

Do you know whether this question is answerable in another way?

> It's the biggest no-brainer since seatbelts.

What if I told you I don't wear a seatbelt?

agree 100%

The one part you left out is that there is a genetic component, so the first few ways were a form of selection against people who couldn't handle covid. It seems likely the the remaining population is much less susceptible to dying in future waves.

Flu would have looked like this the first time around, except when it arose, people didn't fly around the world or even really move a few miles from their home most of the time, which acted as a natural way to reduce outbreaks.

When they’re still saying it months after the condition has changed, yes it means they’re wrong.

What months? Months after omicron appearance? It has been here just about 2 months and boosters are still important because even though omicron is very fairly different from each previous variant we know, vaccine induced immunity still can recognize it after being boosted (it is related to antibody affinity if you want to know more).

Most importantly, vaccine induced immunity still protects against severe disease that requires hospitalization.

More importantly, if the herd immunity is the question - omicron and vaccination might provide very robust immune protection.

Another thing to keep in mind - because omicron was so successful, it may have blocked the appearance of a new variant that is a derivative of it and the next similar variant that might appear that is neither some pre-omicron derivative nor close to omicron.

Vaccination with the original variant is not a bad bet because it is most likely just in the middle of every possible derivation from it.

People in general can’t look at things as systems or have any understanding of probability or nuance. So trying to communicate a clear message to get people to voluntarily perform a pro-social action that doesn’t have 100% certainty turns out to be incredibly difficult. Mix in that most Western countries are highly individualistic, the existence of anti-vaxxers, the spread of things like QAnon and it’s an up hill battle.

I’ve heard engineers complain saying things like “I got the vaccine, how come I haven’t gotten all my freedoms back yet? Why did I bother?” in the middle of an out break. The people whose job it is to look at complex systems fall short. Maximising their chances of getting severely ill is seen as an inconvenience.

Was there any other possible outcome?

>I must be missing something.

You are missing the fact that the government and the media has been consistently dishonest and/or wrong at virtually every stage of the pandemic but they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege. People are also tired of the burdensome restrictions that are entirely performative (like masking in general) and harmful (masking in schools, especially among young children. Anyone who has eaten dinner in a packed restaurant with 200 other unmasked people but is then required to put on their mask for the 10 foot walk to the bathroom knows exactly how ridiculous and useless these restrictions are.

Wrong? of course, it's hard get things right when hit by a new virus, with lot of unknowns. We still don't fully understand how it transmits, why it's so harmful compared to common cold, etc. Dishonest? I'm not so sure.

You say "they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege". I'm sorry I don't get what you're trying to say here. You can say this about any law. You're saying they act as if laws were important and needed to be unforced.

Finally, of course laws are "dumb", they are binary, you can ridicule any law by pushing it to its limit. Driving on this road at 100 km/h is legal, but suddenly at 100.001 it's illegal?? so yeah, when you're exactly in between a place where you must wear a mask and a place where you don't, it's as ridiculous as... any law really.

The comment you think you are agreeing with is one that you are not agreeing with or one that you don't seem to understand.

I find peoples' reactions to this to not be a new phenomenon, but I do have the pandemic to thank for making me far better at identifying such personalities and not letting myself judge the person having them. In my experience it's pretty rare to find someone capable of removing emotion from an argument. Perhaps 5% of people I know are capable of this. The other 95%, given enough debate, put you in their idiot or "basically Hitler" box and cease to listen to or respect anything you say. This makes me very sad, because we've got other huge challenges needing faced as a species and I can see the same crazy nonsense we've seen with COVID happening for all of those too. Before we can begin to fix real issues facing civilisation, we're going to have to fix our ability to tolerate and debate arguments we disagree with.

One thought I had recently is how up and downvotes on sites like HN must contribute to tunnel vision in debates. I know I have self-censored in the past knowing that something I would say would get downvoted into oblivion, and I've posted stuff that hasn't been very constructive but that I've known would be a crowd pleaser. This surely creates echo chambres resembling the opinions of the loudest in the community. Old vBulletin-style forums before likes and up/downvotes were a thing, where all you could do was quote-reply (and one-word "+1" and "disagree" replies were brutally deleted by zealous moderators), were perhaps in hindsight the closest to optimal we ever reached in the realm of textual online debates. What a sorry state of affairs.

I'm glad I found this thread and thank you for not self censoring this time. I've very often done the same. And yes, the vBulletin style forums is something I really miss.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and also how it makes you feel. In Jan 2021 I had become “intellectually lonely”. That was my feeling when I realized there’s almost no one left to have a productive conversation about COVID with. Also I realized how lazy most people are in just putting in even 1 hour of research that could change their situation dramatically (e.g. around supplementing vitamin D).

At the same time I started listening to many interviews with Daniel Schmachtenberger. Mindblowing, but also quite abstract. Rebel Wisdom does some work on the meta-level, i.e. how we can become better at sensemaking. Whether it’s around COVID or the next thing. And that for me is really the main takeaway from this pandemic. We suck at collectively making sense of complex threats and enacting good policies. Even simpler issues like statistical deaths due to air pollution most people don’t quite take for what they are.

I’d be happy to get in contact, I’m trying to figure out what ways there are to connect people and create a community that does high efficiency-collective sensemaking. Something that gives a good and balanced picture of status quo truth quickly. But also something that allows to progressively dig deeper into details. If this resonates with you → gubikmic@gmail.com

Oh, and I totally agree about the message board presentation making a big difference. I posted a crucial comment providing the context to the JRE thing yesterday and it didn’t get any attention. But even on Twitter most people missed the context, so it’s no wonder our sensemaking is so inefficient. Imagine talking for an hour only to later realize the point of contention became 90% mute in the presence of a bit of new information. That’s how I saw this, but multiplied by thousands of people. What a waste of smart people’s time.

I’ve never taken the argument to be that children are at grave risk. I think Fauci even said that the risk is minimal in particular with vaccines. “The with vaccines” will rub some folks the wrong way but the point remains: it’s about potential transmissions, asymptomatic transmissions at that. They so rarely even show symptoms that some are convinced that kids aren’t infectious but that’s the same nonsense we have today where people think they aren’t infectious because they got the vaccine. Add in tight conditions at schools and parents willing to send their kids to school sick, and it’s not ideal.

So what if kids transmit? Everybody age five and up can walk in and get a vaccine. Who are we protecting? Transmission doesn’t matter in a post vaccine world.

Besides, asking kids to sacrifice their one and only childhood to protect fully vaccinated adults who are still afraid is a horrific public policy. Kids should never be asked to sacrifice for adults. That just isn’t how things work.

By wearing a mask? They are sacrificing their childhood?

No, it’s the forced isolation and fear that’s sacrificing childhoods.

All over DFW superintendents are resigning. They see the damage they’ve done and are jumping ship as the chickens come home to roost. I suspect all over the nation school and county health leadership are getting out before the full scope of the damage they’ve caused is realized.

I'm curious what do you think should have been done differently?

my un-educated thinking is

(1) kids catch covid like everyone else, they don't get bad symptoms, but they bring it home and give it to their parents, grandparents, etc. I know 3 families where this happened. Kids got it first, passed it on to everyone else.

(2) lockdowns and/or similar measures, have been needed to keep hospitalization numbers at or below capacity. Some people claim lockdowns are about power but I see zero political upsides to lockdowns so it's hard to see how proposing them is a power grab.

(3) vaccinations, same as above, needed to keep hospitalization numbers at or below capacity

Note: My personal anecdata, my unvacced 79yr old father died from covid 2 weeks ago. His wife has had a harsh case as well but at the moment it looks like she'll pull through.

> they've been told it's simple: get vaccinated/boosted

It is that simple.

90% of the people in the hospitals are unvaccinated still.

Cut the unvaccinated fraction of the population down by 1/3 and you cut the hospitalization rate for the next wave by roughly 1/3.

Instead people are doing T-cells/B-cells and affinity maturation the hard slow way.

If we had a 100% vaccination rate we'd be done.

Don't know why everyone so desperately needs to look for counterintuitive ways to approach the very simple problem that when there's a global pandemic you mitigate it with vaccination. Any other result is intellectuals thinking too hard to try to impress themselves and probably missing basic facts in the process.

> 90% of the people in the hospitals are unvaccinated still.

Where is this true?

New York City:

https://twitter.com/DougHenwood/status/1486807706954567685

Pennsylvania:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/about-90percent-of-...

Kansas City:

https://www.newspressnow.com/news/national_news/coronavirus/...

Missouri:

https://www.newspressnow.com/news/regional_news/central_miss...

Arizona over 80%:

https://ktar.com/story/4856002/banner-health-leader-over-80-...

Boosters 90% effective against hospitalization with Omicron:

https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-boosters-90-effective-...

In France, between January 1st and 16th, vaccinated people accounted for 60% of the new hospitalizations. We, like most of Europe, have 90+% of adult population fully vaccinated, and are nowhere near "being done".

Unless my math is wrong, by your own numbers, unvaccinated French adults are 6x more likely to be hospitalised than unvaccinated adults.

Doh! meant to say "vaccinated adults" at the end. (saw this too late to edit).

Absolutely, but this is in no way related to whether we decide this is "the end" or not.

90% sounded high; I found an article saying as of today 79% of people in France have had both of the initial shots (not sure how they figure single-dose vaccines like J&J and Oxford), and 80% had 1. [1]

Let's say it's 80%. 80/20. Primary vax status probably hasn't changed too dramatically in 1 month.

p(hospitalized | vaxxed) = p(vaxxed | hospitalized) * p(hospitalized) / p(vaxxed)

= 0.6 * p(hospitalized) / 0.80

= 0.75 * p(hospitalized)

---

p (hospitalized | unvaxxed) = p (unvaxxed | hospitalized) * p(hospitalized) / p(unvaxxed)

= 0.4 * p(hospitalized) / 0.2

= 2 * p(hospitalized)

Vaccination gives a 2.67x reduction in hospitalizations (against omicron which all the anti-vaxxers are saying the vaccines don't do anything against).

With your 90% figure, it becomes 2/3 instead of 3/4 and 4 instead of 2, which is 6x, confirming what the other replier got.

[1] https://www.sortiraparis.com/news/coronavirus/articles/23973...

In the most relevant age group 60+ the reduction in hospitalizations is 83% for double vaxxed and 95% for boostered in Germany according to latest figures:

Page 28 on vaccine efficacy.

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

93% of the eligible have had two doses in France, or 78% of the population : https://covidtracker.fr/vaccintracker/

Unless we can get stats for who's eligible or not eligible for the vaccine when they're hospitalized for COVID-19, what can be done with that extra distinction?

Same with age and risk-factor cohorts. We could repeat the probability calculation for each cohort if we could collect those data, but it would probably make the vaccine even more effective: Presumably, more higher-risk people are double/triple/quad vaxxed at this point, so whatever rate they show up to the hospital is higher than what the average healthier person could expect.

We know that for a long time. I'm just saying that despite having 93% of the adult population vaccinated (-18 yo do not need the vaccine pass to go anywhere) , and our ICU beds occupation rate being only 70% at the highest omicron peak, our politicians still refuse to call it an end.

"Being done" with covid is only a political decision, and no percentage appears to be high enough for them.

This is true but slightly misleading : if 100% of the population was vaccinated, 100% of hospitalizations would be amongst vaccinated people.

They would be a much smaller and manageable number, and on average much older/vulnerable than they are now (vaccination basically lowers your risk to that of someone 20-30 years younger)

More figures from France : the unvaccinated 8% account for 39% of hospitalizations, 54% of intensive care admissions, 46% of Covid deaths.

This is a hugely outsized effect, so there's still enormous potential for drastically improving the situation in hospitals with just a few more percentage points of vaccinated people.

Current numbers are already manageable. At the Omicron wave peak, total ICU beds are 70% full. And recent (official) data shown that 30% of all COVID positive hospitalizations were actually unrelated to COVID, that number being as high as 50% for 0-49 age group. Yet our politicians refuse to drop restrictions, they even doubled down by making vaccination mandatory to go anywhere, when a negative test used to be enough.

This sounds like Simpson paradox again. It happened in Israel.

People with weakened immune systems and other health issues are more likely to be vaccinated. But they're less likely to have a robust immune response to the vaccine.

I said "if we had 100% of the population vaccinated we'd be done" and I meant it.

I didn't mean 90%.

If 5% of the population is susceptible that's enough to overload the hospital system during a wave. It really doesn't take much with this virus.

And Delta's transmissibility really destroyed the destroyed the notion of herd immunity. The correct number should be 100% vaccinated.

And its still 90% unvaccinated people filling up the hospitals, even though you're highly vaccinated.

Once you hit the hospital percentages matching the population percentages then the "natural immunity" enthusiasts will have finally all basically caught it sufficiently to gain immunity the hard way and it'll be done.

> If we had a 100% vaccination rate we'd be done.

For a vaccine that doesn’t confer sterilizing immunity and whose effectiveness wanes rather quickly? To say nothing of variants or the fact that this virus has animal reservoirs. Or the impossibility of vaccinating 100% of a population in the first place, nevermind in perpetuity.

“Ending it” was always a pipe dream.

>we'd be done

No, the current status is that we'll be done if and only if we reach acceptance of a situation that is not going to go away anytime soon. The only thing stopping us from being done is in people's heads.

My government has spent hundreds of billions to prevent "the health care system from being overburdened". Not a single cent of that money went into the healthcare system. In fact, the systematic reduction of "healthcare overcapacity" was continued throughout. Our politicians are either remorseless criminals or fantastical dunces. Either way the world would be a better place if they were removed from power, one and all.

>The only thing stopping us from being done is in people's heads.

Of course. The actual political debate in the US is whether society should accept and normalize daily mass death. If we applied today’s standards, 9/11 would have been a non-issue. It’s only about a days worth of covid deaths, after all.

No amount of vaccination will avoid everyone getting infected sooner or later. The vaccinated who die will have died with vaccination mandates or without them. The unvaccinated who die fall into two groups. Those who would also have died vaccinated and those who do so as a consequence of their own choice. That's neither my business nor yours, it's theirs alone. We may argue with them, but we can't force them and claim to be more moral for it, quite the opposite in fact.

> Those who would also have died vaccinated and those who do so as a consequence of their own choice.

Their choice has a direct effect on society and causes harm to other people. So no it's not as a simple as.

I guess we could deny the unvaccinated medical care in hospitals. Because they take up ressources that would be spent on people with other medical issues. We have an about 70% vaccination rate and 80-90% of hospitalized covid patients are unvaccinated. Meanwhile I know of people that can't get standard procedures done because of covid patients (this wasn't a problem before the pandemic).

Due to EMTALA, hospitals are legally required to care for any patient who arrives in unstable condition regardless of vaccination status. But I would encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated as it reduces the risk of hospitalization.

https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/EMT...

An overworked ER Nurse who just can't take it anymore may decide to not update a patient's medical record when a patient is in decline and instead will simply discharge the patient. If the Patient dies at home, the medical records will not indicate a decline, therefore no EMTALA violation. That is how my Mother was basically manslaughtered by West Hills, CA ER back in March of 2018, right in front of my own eyes. I still have PTSD from the incident. After Mom died at home in my arms without ever having been treated for her pre-pnemonia, NOBODY would investigate. How cruel and complicit is that?

Your comment implicitly assumes that vaccination is the only possible way to reduce death, but we have many other interventions that we can choose to prioritize as a society:

* Mandate a minimum # of nurses and pay them fairly. Patient survival depends on nurses being able to do their jobs, but hospitals seem to prefer saving money by cutting staff.

* Improve society’s overall health by reducing inequality. Lives have intrinsic value that transcends any economic or profit-based calculus. We consider mass death unacceptable because we recognize this basic truth.

* Make paid sick days and short-term disability more accessible. It can take weeks to months to properly recover, depending on severity.

* New building regulations in public spaces to lower the viral inoculum (correlated with severity) using tactics such as improved ventilation and 222nm UV lamps.

* Ensure access to the basic necessities: healthy food, housing, healthcare. You can’t survive a covid infection if you’re dying of exposure on the street.

>Your comment implicitly assumes that vaccination is the only possible way to reduce death

No, this was a discussion about 1. the claim by others that vaccination would be the key to "end" all of this and 2. my complaint that not a single cent of many 100s of billions my government spent on all of this went into health care.

I would very much have liked if we had spent more money on nurses, and into making their work as easy as possible by allowing them to concentrate on their core competencies and offload the easier parts of the jobs onto more nursing assistants, which can be trained relatively quickly. Alas, we didn't, and here we are!

> Not a single cent of that money went into the healthcare system.

If everyone was vaccinated the healthcare system wouldn't be overburdened without spending a dime on the healthcare system.

Preventative medicine is always the cheapest option.

If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle.

There's no real argument for continued restrictions beyond hospital capacity (and even that one is a stretch). Why not spend money on that and open up the economy again?

in my country the official figure is that "90% of hospitalized are unvaccinated or vaccinated without a booster". this certainly sounds like a doctored phrase and it dilutes trust to the medical system.

It's simply accurate, and reflects the dramatic difference in vaccine efficacy between 2 and 3 doses (or rather, between a recent or more distant dose)

The problem with that narrative is that it absolves responsibility for further action by pretending that the vaccines are the best we can do about this pandemic. It becomes a show and that's not good

You've been duped by the mostly deceitful narrative about overwhelmed hospitals. Look at this data for your state: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/hospitalization-7-day-trend....

Even during the height of a COVID surge, the total hospitalizations is maybe 20% higher than normal. Also note that as COVID hospitalizations increase, regular hospitalizations decrease. This is a consequence of the dishonest reporting criteria encouraged by the CDC; people are hospitalized for unrelated reasons but happen to test positive for COVID so are counted as a COVID patients instead of regular patients. See, for instance: https://www.dailywire.com/news/massachusetts-now-differentia....

You can also web search for hospitals being overwhelmed by the flu. In a few minutes I found this happening in two different years: 2018 and 2000. The reality is that hospitals get overwhelmed very easily for a number of reasons. Even if you vaccinated everyone in the U.S., they would still get overwhelmed during surges. In other countries with higher vaccination rates, hospitals still get overwhelmed and primarily with vaccinated people: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...

The reality is that this pandemic is over as soon as we make it over. My family has been living a normal life since October 2020.

Thanks, glad to know that the wait times my family has spent with my grandparents this past couple years when they needed to go to the hospital was all in our heads.

Edit: /s because apparently that is necessary.

Is this sarcasm? Because if not, glad you figure it out.

Not to belabor the point, but it seems like you're talking past me, not against me. I said the hospitals would be overwhelmed even if everyone got vaccinated, not that they weren't overwhelmed.

There are some good arguments that current hospitalization metrics are misleading and underestimate the healthcare workload. Delayed treatments or patients who cannot access treatment may be a more useful metric to measure how overwhelmed a healthcare system is.

See https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca/status/1486208081142947840/...

I noticed the hospitalizations graph on my favorite source for Texas (Texas tribune) now reads “Total current patients with COVID-19 in hospitals”. That’s deceitful in my eyes because that includes anyone in the hospital for any reason who tests positive and not people only hospitalized because of Covid-19 which is what you’re expecting.

Also, the whole ICU capacity percentage numbers inducing so much fear and panic are very misleading. ICU capacity isn’t static it can be adjusted up and down. So saying ICU is at 98% capacity utilization is meaningless because it could be very well possible that ICU beds can be added and now ICU capacity is 75% utilization.

Overwhelmed hospitals is not a binary risk.

Vaccines are shown to reduce cases of serious symptoms and hospitalization. Yes, even if everyone is vaccinated is possible for hospitals to still be overwhelmed if infections spread too quickly (hence things like distancing still being important), but even in that case, you’d have less people needing hospital attention that are unable to get it.

The overall goal of our societies, as I see it, is returning to living our lives as normal and killing the fewest people in the process. Reducing hospitalization rates means that more exposure can safely happen before hospitals are at risk. When they come close to being overwhelmed, additional restrictions on gathering will probably need to be reemployed until the risk subsides again.

These risks are also very local (more local than state) and personal. So it’s perfectly reasonable for the pandemic to “be over” for some where the risk is low, yet not for some where the risk remains high.

There are a whole lot of nonsense claims in this post without anything backing it up

Because of the sheer numbers the amount of vaccinated still are the majority in the hospital. You rate of going to the hospitalization is lower, but the raw numbers show more people in the hospital that are vaccinated.

The people are are unvaccinated in some cases have medical reason not to be and therefore be more likely to be hospitalized for anything. You'd need to stratify the numbers by age, vaccine status, and comorbidity status to get the full picture.

Early on when the 99% are unvaccinated line was going around all the data used was usually from before the vaccines were available.

> I am, or at least I was, going into the pandemic, a left liberal

What's that got to do with it?

It certainly undermines the "Check out how rational I am" veneer this person is peddling. I also don't understand the overall argument - is the anger that someone out there thinks they're more protected via vaccine than they are? The message that I think most lay people that are pro-vaccine have in their heads, at least those in my social circle, is merely that they help. They reduce the risk of infection and if you get infected they reduce the chance of hospitalization/death. Those things are true. But the gp commenter seems to want to frame the pro-vaccine as being duped idiots. That's not accurate. Their comments have the energy of "Vaccines work, but not the way you think, so vaccination efforts are unnecessary" without saying it outright.

The immune system is nuanced, the question of whether you should get vaccinated is not. In no way does this article say you shouldn't get vaccinated.

The epidemic will be over when COVID-19 IFR will drop below acceptable level, even when SARS-CoV-2 will continue to circulate. I.e. when covid will be like regular fly, nobody will worry about it anymore.

Is it wrong?

There are two main strategies to achieve low death rate:

1) Natural — let weak people die. Cheap.

2) Semi-natural — let weak people to be infected, then try to rescue them. Costly.

3) Supportive — support weak people with vaccines, to help them survive. Costly, but cheaper than (2).

Which one you prefer?

Amen.

I havnt watched TV since the 2017 elections. Ive missed on everything including bushfires, natural disasters, pandemics, and capitalism.

I can see clearly how the system works. I said i wouldnt watch a single news report (including Covid) until it was a "highlight reel" and man o man has mainstream society lost its glammer. its a machine, where the capitalists and poilticans jockie for your money using the power you can give them against you while smiling into the camera and saying they love you.

FAANG you up the ass at every chance they get. Even the celebs are pawns, reliant on the ad companies for there bread and butter.

ive never been free-er. I had my covid (health issues) 15yrs ago and realised that day that life was precious and u should not take it for granted. I quite everything, travelled the world, and experienced modern society in all its wonder. I met people everyday who wished they could quit and travel like me and i told them, you can.

Unfortunately humans are not capable of infinite growth in a world where nature is being processed into profit in a constant grasp of more and more. Nature imposes its own limits. Virus are part of the moderisation game. They are a cost of buisness. Like our parents generation where the WW1/2 and The depression scared and and shaped them (and created this system), our children will be scared by the unresolved trauma their parents experienced during Covid.

It was just common sense. Flu vaccines have never been much more than 50% effective. The idea that you can just vaccinate against such a hugely virulent virus like COVID, and expect it to stop spreading with such ineffectual vaccines just made no mathematical sense what so ever.

If people didn't understand that it is because they didn't want to.

> If people didn't understand that it is because they didn't want to.

"Listen to the experts". The experts never said any of that. Nor did the media. Critical thinking has been shunned the last two years. I mean you can think critically but lord help you if you say what you think online or in person. It's the in person bullying that is the worst, by the way.

> or in person

Interestingly I think all conversations that I have had in-person, with someone or a group of people I know, have been civil. In fact the only times where I was able to have healthy discussions were in-person.

Healthy online discussions with people I know in the real world? Nope. Healthy online discussions with people I don't know in the real world? Doubly nope.

I’ve been yelled at by almost everybody I know for even asking if what we are doing in reaction to Covid will harm us more than Covid. Literally yelled at.

Yon should consider yourself lucky.

> we shouldn't be focusing on preventing infection.

I'm confused by what you mean. I have read headlines that say mRNA vaccines reduce the risk of infection by 91%, but it seems like you have more nuanced information from knowledgeable people. So, who should I look to to get the "real" information about what to expect from vaccines and public health?

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-ri...

I think these were measured shortly after reaching full vaccination status (>=14 days after second shot). That seems to be a different thing than, say, six months after vaccination.

It would be neat to see the same study ran against Omicron with people who were vaccinated 18 months ago. You know, to mirror actual reality.

Chicken pox vaccine works so well that no one gets a single sore.

This is a rewriting of history. Before we ever had results from the COVID vaccine trials, the FDA declared that the primary goal of the trials was to prevent any symptomatic infection in the first place. From June 2020: https://www.fda.gov/media/139638/download.

Sure, and Viagra was developed to treat hypertension. The fact that efficacy data changes with the completion of new studies or advent of new strains should be viewed as normal, not as a surprise or some kind of bait and switch.

I'm not sure linking to a document with phrases like "As it is possible that a COVID-19 vaccine might be much more effective in preventing severe versus mild COVID-19" really proves that it's "rewriting history" to suggest that preventing all infections or symptomats of a respiratory diseases is an very high bar to set, or that the medical profession hasn't been cognizant of that from the start...

> Somehow there's this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection or symptomatic disease but that is an incredibly high bar that no respiratory viral vaccine has ever met.

So what you're saying that Fauci, Pfizer etc. weren't just wrong about the vaccine ("if you get it you won't get sick" a.k.a. "science has changed as we've learned more facts") but actively lied about it (after all, they of all people should know that no other vaccine succeeded in that for respiratory viruses).

I don't think we can use terms like "lie" with respect to the pandemic yet, because full post-facto analysis is not done yet. That analysis isn't just on people's words, it's on their relationships to other people, entities, etc... You also have to determine what they "know" during a given time. I'm fully supportive of holding government officials accountable, especially if they've enacted their own agenda, but there's a time and place for such things as well as a path to proving them.

If you look back at the actual press releases and research studies that Pfizer and BioNTech published about their Comirnaty vaccine, they never specifically claimed that it would reliably prevent infection. It was the politicians like Fauci who made false claims not backed by reliable science.

(And to be clear, I still recommend that everyone eligible get vaccinated as it's fairly effective at preventing severe symptoms.)

> Somehow there's this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection or symptomatic disease

There's a laundry list of public health officials (including the CDC director, to give a sense of the authority on this list) that said it would prevent infection and transmission. So it really shouldn't surprise anyone that there were expectations that the vaccine would do what public health authorities said it would do.

>And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it's also in real world data.

--Rochelle Walensky, Director CDC

It's kind of funny how fast people forget what was originally talked about when the goalposts moved.

Yep, I find it quite reprehensible how quickly politicians (the ones in public health and elected leaders) pivoted from "the vaccine will end the pandemic" into "this is the un-vaccinated peoples fault".

I guess politically they had to throw the minority group under the buss to keep the attention off of their own failures.

It worked though, I have had people tell me I'm disgusting more than once for not being vaccinated. Nevermind that I've had covid twice, am young and in very good health, have been taking vitamin A/D since 2020 and have high levels of sufficiency of both. It appears I'm the bad guy because I would rather a 75 year old in a poor country have my doses of vaccines than take it just because I'm being pressured into it.

I'm not sure many liberals survived this pandemic, at least not vocally. I feel truly bad for any minorities that really shouldn't take the vaccine for medical conditions. I know for a fact there are doctors who have recommended against taking the vaccine because of preexisting conditions but wouldn't write a doctors note for fear of losing their license.

I'm actually missing out on a vacation in Cali right now with the partners family because I'm afraid I'll get a positive PCR test and ruin it for them (since they require tests or vaccine cards most places, as I understand it)

> "I'm afraid I'll get a positive PCR test and ruin it for them (since they require tests or vaccine cards most places, as I understand it)"

CA is batshit crazy over covid for mediopolitical reasons, but at least here in LA, you can easily flash anything in front of most restaurant/retail workers and they won't even read it if it looks even halfway legit (there's too much variation in vaccine cards and test results for them to be experts anyway). some places, like disneyland, will be a little more diligent though. so while folks still wear masks outdoors like cargo culters, most people don't care enough to do more than go through the motions.

I'm confused. Weren't covid mRNA vaccines very effective at preventing infection, even asymptomatic infection, against delta and earlier variants? Only with omicron has the effectiveness been significantly reduce, but not to zero. And once we come up with a variant-specific vaccine, I would expect the effectiveness to go up again.

The efficiency of vaccines for infection fell by 50% in 4 monts even for delta and other variants. Their effectiveness with omicron infection is very little.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

I've been exposed twice with known-omicron and have not gotten sick yet. YMMV.

50% effectiveness against infection is still pretty significant. And note that OP said "essentially no viral vaccine prevents infection." I think we can agree that is not the case.

No, they were very effective at preventing symptomatic covid. This can mean either preventing infection or not preventing infection but just stopping symptoms. The trials that came up with that 94% efficacy never tested for which of these two outcomes it was, and it turns out it was mostly the second one, which allows for asymptomatic spreading.

No, the vaccines were very effective at preventing any infection, both symptomatic and asymptomatic. There were studies done by giving the participants regular covid tests, usually once a week, so they would catch asympomatic cases as well.

Here are the conclusions from a meta-study from July 2021:

> In fully vaccinated individuals, VE against symptomatic and asymptomatic infections was 80–90% in nearly all studies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8284046/

> Somehow there's this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection or symptomatic disease but that is an incredibly high bar that no respiratory viral vaccine has ever met.

This is only an incredibly high bar if all you ask for is a tool to mitigate personal risk. If you want to make the use of that tool mandatory, then it is a reasonable bar, and there are additional other bars that are also very high.

> Somehow there's this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection

The original announcements from Pfizer et al touted the 90-95% effectiveness of the vaccines against infection (and 95-100% against severe infection). The idea that vaccines prevented most infection was literally part of their testing and marketing from the start. The wild card was Delta & Omicron not complying with those numbers, not that people shared some mass delusion.

I was very enthusiastic about the vaccine and couldn’t wait to get it. I didn’t believe I had any real chance of dying, I just didn’t want to get sick with it and was ecstatic about not having to wear masks.

If the vaccine had come out of the gates as something to just prevent death, I would not have been so enthusiastic or motivated.

None of the phase 3 trials measured protection against infection, and none of the press releases mention infection, see Pfizer’s original results: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201118005595/en/

I think confusion comes from the use of “COVID-19” which is not a virus or infection specifically but a disease caused by sars-ncov2 infection. If you have an asymptomaic infection, you don’t have COVID-19.

The trials would have had to have tested every participant daily to qualify protection against infection. However it was most certainly presumed, and the entire narrative around the vaccine push was achieving herd immunity: when enough people were unlikely to shed viruses in any likely transmissive volume because of achieved immunity (whether via vaccine or previous infection), transmission would trickle to an almost halt and life would return to normal. This wouldn't require 100% coverage, nor a 100% effective vaccine (no vaccine has ever been 100% effective, or so-called "sterilizing") to accomplish.

There is a bit of rewriting now that is happening that is a bit disturbing and seems like gaslighting. A notion that the vaccine never sought to prevent infection (and thus viral transmission). That is obviously and easily proven as completely wrong.

But then protection faded maybe quicker than expected, and variants broke expectations and some protections. It sucks, but it's where we're at. The vaccines still have the enormous benefit of reducing case severity, but they certainly did fail in some of the goals.

Sidenote: If you are infected and thus replicating SARS-CoV-2 viruses, you have COVID-19 even if entirely asymptomatic. As with the prior points, this is trivial to verify. The "COVID-19 is only severe cases" claim is a part of the prior bit of gaslighting where we're redefining everything to somehow make early proclamations (e.g. "prevents covid-19") fit the unfortunate situation today.

Cheers!

> I think confusion comes from the use of “COVID-19” which is not a virus or infection specifically but a disease caused by sars-ncov2 infection.

It's fascinating how two years into this pandemic this is still such a huge communication issue, quite reminiscent of AIDS and HIV.

I wonder how much of that is impacting the reported numbers, in Germany it sure enough did; Hospitals were reporting every patient that tested positive as COVID-19 patient, even when they where in the hospital for a completely different reason and had no disease outbreak.

It's the same in the US, 40% of "covid hospitalizations" were hospitalized for other reasons and then tested positive.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1480679058488836097

Also note at the end he says "asymptomatic covid", which gets right back to the confusion between sars-cov-2 and covid-19.

That is simply false. Here is the original press release from Pfizer when they received an FDA emergency use authorization. They never claimed any specific level of effectiveness against infection. The actual study end points were varying degrees of symptomatic infection. And it certainly does work for that.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577

Unfortunately, some politicians then started making wild claims about infection prevention that weren't backed by actual science.

>Somehow there's this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection or symptomatic disease but that is an incredibly high bar that no respiratory viral vaccine has ever met.

This might have something to do with the fact that "experts" (ei. the CDC, vaccine makers, and politicians in charge of health organisations around the world) explicitly told us in no uncertain terms it would prevent infection. It was one of the main argument for getting it and we were never allowed to question it when a significant amount of vaccinated people started testing positive. We were also told it was dangerous misinformation to question it publicly and it was career suicide for any expert to contradict it. The goalpost has been moving gradually from "complete immunity" to "reducing the risk of severe symptoms".

one of the most interesting thing about covid was to watch people and politician rewrite history. I thought it would be difficult to do in the 2020s but I was so wrong and I wish I had saved screenshots of tweets from health officials and politicians. It's always interesting to watch the face of someone who claim that something is pure misinformation when they realise the CDC themselves were promoting the idea just weeks ago.

There seems to have been no attempt to educate the public on what you should expect from different types of vaccine. When most people think of vaccines, they have in mind the one-shot-and-immune-for-life that you sometimes get with live-attenuated vaccines. Early articles on SARS-CoV-2 being developed clearly explained what to expect. I submitted an article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30162097) but there may be better ones.

> Somehow there's this idea that the Sars-CoV-2 vaccines need to prevent infection or symptomatic disease but that is an incredibly high bar that no respiratory viral vaccine has ever met.

In the U.S., health experts explicitly said the vaccines totally prevent symptoms and infection. The health experts said the vaccines were 100% efficacious, and this fact was repeated in the media and by leadership for months. As recently as seven months ago, they were still saying this.

I tried to google for a list of sterilising and non-sterilising vaccines - but I could not find any. Could you provide sources for your claim that "essentially no viral vaccine prevents infection, with the possible exception of the HPV vaccine"?

So kind of on topic...

I have two boys, one under 5, the other under 10. I am trying to get good data to determine if vaccination is risky or not.

Recently a relative sent me a story about MIS-C, which seems to be new. But trying to get good data on other things like myocarditis risk/rates is like sorting for a needle in a scrapyard.

Does anyone have any good data, preferably raw statistics on this?

Thank you in advance!

The little risk you take by getting the vaccine is more than offset by the far lower risk of getting the disease, which has all kinds of implications.

Since it was approved for children by the FDA I assume they did rigourous testing

Children with no commorbidities have NO reason to get exposed to the risk of taking the vacine. Yes, it's a small risk, but ANY vaccine must be a cost benefit weighted decision. Rabies is a 100% lethal disease, but that is not a valid reason for everyone to get vaccinated for it, the risks of vaccinating everyone in this case outweigh the risk that a randomly selected person would eventually die from rabies. This whole discussion is so stupid, from the beggining everyone could see the stats and see who was at real risk or not from this disease.

Children are still susceptible to long-term complications from getting covid. Like you said, it's a cost benefit decision, but there's real risks associated with children getting covid that seem to be going unacknowledged given that, unlike rabies, millions are going to be infected with covid.

Also at this point EVERYONE is going to be infected by COVID. It's a highly contagious respiratory virus that's not only carried by humans, but animals too. This fantasy that all we have to do is vaccinate everyone and we will be alright really needs to die.

Vaccines are still shown to reduce risk of hospitalization and death even with omicron. So, if everyone is going to get it, wouldn't you rather be more protected when you get it?

The risk of hospitalization for children is virtually zero. The risk of hospitalization for healthy people under 50 is miniscule.

Risk of hospitalization for children aged < 5 years with Omicron is quite a bit higher than previous variants. Take a look at the CDC data, compare age groups this year vs. one year earlier.

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

This trend exists because children are being tested for COVID after being admitted to the hospital for entirely unrelated issues (broken bones, etc). They're in the hospital _with_ COVID, not in the hospital _because_ of COVID.

I hear people say that, but is there research backing it up? I'm a bit dubious because inevitability is a common fall-back position in public affairs, similar to climate change deniers saying that climate change is inevitable so we just have to learn to adjust. They still get what they want, and try to create despair in their opponents.

It's gone endemic, the inevitability is on par with the common cold; you're almost certainly going to get exposed to some variant of it.

Plus AIUI Omicron has demonstrated recombinant replication, which means we're playing a flu-like cat and mouse game with the vaccines. Nobody in their right mind would argue we have any hope of effectively vaccinating everyone against influenza.

Repeating it isn't evidence or even an argument that it's true. Is there evidence? Research?

Pardon me for assuming HN readers are capable of basic keyword searches:

https://virological.org/t/omicron-is-a-multiply-recombinant-...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787944

Would you like me to wipe your ass next as well?

Rabies doesn't spread like covid...

COVID isn't deadly like rabies either. Indeed COVID is turning out to be less deadly than the flu for the vast majority of people, especially the more recent variants. While being far more virulent they are also far less likely to make one seriously ill, let alone kill.

Over 800,000 people have died in the US alone, more than any other event in US history.

2M people die every year in the USA, is that more than any other event in History?

such lunacy

They clearly mean from one specific event. What one event in the USA has lead to 2 million deaths? You're combining all deaths and treating it as if it were the same thing.

>You're combining all deaths and treating it as if it were the same thing.

Couldn't that be applied to deaths from other diseases? Why wouldn't all influenza deaths be considered one event by this standard?

No? Are we in an influenza pandemic or epidemic right now? Again, we're talking about events here.

There have been six of them in the last 140 years with respect to influenza. The Spanish Flu pandemic killed 675k (in the USA, like 50 mil worldwide or something wild like that.)

Any other event in US history.

If you're so sure, name one.

Civil war was less than a million, by the way.

It wasn't. Heart disease and cancer kill far more people on an annual basis and nobody bats an eye. According to the CDC, these were the top 10 causes of death in 2020[1]:

* Heart disease: 696,962

* Cancer: 602,350

* COVID-19: 350,831

* Accidents (unintentional injuries): 200,955

* Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 160,264

* Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 152,657

* Alzheimer’s disease: 134,242

* Diabetes: 102,188

* Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,544

* Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 52,547

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

all are lower than 800,000

The 800,000 figure spans two years. The above figures are for one year (2020).

> Heart disease and cancer kill far more people on an annual basis and nobody bats an eye

I mean there are massive institutes, companies, and laboratories engaged in research on both these topics, tons of fund-raising, campaigns to improve diet and exercise, shockingly expensive treatments and so on. Other than all of that, yes, nobody bats an eye.

it's worth the OP trying to find data on how much risk covid presents to their children and what the risks of the vaccine are. the UK has this risk calculator for COVID in adults: https://qcovid.org/ . I'm not sure if there is anything similar for children. probably, the risk of the vaccine or covid is so low for children it doesn't really matter what you do.

> Since it was approved for children by the FDA I assume they did rigourous testing

Reminder that the two most senior FDA vaccine oversight officials resigned in protest before the age 5-11 EUA was approved.

Reminder that the previous FDA commissioner currently sits on Pfizer's board.

Reminder that regulatory capture of the FCC, SEC, and other govt. agencies is popularly accepted as fact, but somehow the FDA is immune to that criticism.

OK, now do that for the 50 or so other national health agencies that have independently approved these vaccines. Or did you forget that these vaccines have been reviewed and approved by thousands of qualified staff all over the world?

Reminder that many European countries do not suggest the vaccine for children, and some have even banned it in the case of Moderna.

The EU has approved Pfizer for children 5 and over. Moderna is still being reviewed for younger children. Exact guidelines may vary by country.

Overall, Pfizer has been approved in 137 countries and Modern in 85.

One EU country where the guidelines vary is Sweden, who are specifically not recommending COVID vaccines for 5-12 year old children.[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-...

Every western country except the UK (who were criticized) approved it after the US. Many of those deferred to the FDA's judgment and rubber stamped as a formality.

> “I am pleased that Pfizer’s vaccine has undergone a critical phase with FDA approval,” said Health Minister Yuli Edelstein on Friday, just after the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted in support of the agency granting Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), which paved the way for the vaccine’s approval. “This is a huge message for Israeli citizens as well.” He said that he instructed his ministry’s staff to review the approval and submit their recommendations in the coming days so that vaccinations could start before the end of the month.

This was all fast-tracked with countries wanting to get in line for doses, remember?

Thinking-in-reverse, if the FDA flagged/rejected the approval, how many western countries do you think would have approved it within the same timeframe?

> Since it was approved for children by the FDA I assume they did rigorous testing

I wouldn't make this assumption, especially in light of the the conditions under which it was approved (extreme political pressure, rushed/bleeding edge data, etc.) It's probably fine, but my kids aren't going to be first in line because they are in the control group (https://xkcd.com/2576/).

The overwhelming conclusion I've drawn from this pandemic is that it's ultimately about people's level of trust in their own ability to analyze data vs trust in authority figures. There have been so many examples of 'vaccines cause harm!' articles that fundamentally misunderstand basic statistical concepts like selection bias or simpson's paradox (see the covid-datascience.com blog for lots more of these).

Is your prior on 'I will not make a significant analytic error' higher than 'the FDA analyzed the available data correctly'?

And your trust in the government. If your prior on the government is that they aren't to be trusted then it doesn't matter how good of a job the FDB did in analyzing the data -- you aren't going to believe what they release to the public.

I think this is the bigger issue. Most people I know who say, "I'll do my own research" are the same people who asked me what kind of computer to buy. And they know a lot more about technology than medicine. But its they don't trust the government.

Look where big bosses from FDA ended up.

In reality, few people have the time or want to make the effort to comb through and analyze original sources. So most of us rely to varying extent on who we trust and consider to have accurate opinions or assessments.

One huge problem with COVID has been the emergence of essentially propaganda pieces masquerading as detailed, rigorous analysis. These give people a false sense of confidence- "Hey I've done my research!" when in reality you can google for 20 minutes and come up with impressive looking links for whatever view you are already predisposed to believe.

I'm sure these existed before, but COVID has taken things to another level.

> few people have the time or want to make the effort to comb through and analyze original sources

And they lack the expertise regardless, and they can't gain the expertise without schooling and professional experience. We are dependant on others, whether we like it or not.

> the emergence of essentially propaganda pieces masquerading as detailed, rigorous analysis

> I'm sure these existed before, but COVID has taken things to another level.

I don't know that it's another level. The long, incredibly detailed dives into one issue or another have been around for decades.

This is essentially what I expected when the pandemic started. We created a monster of misinformation and disinformation, the 'post-truth' society; the consequences are obviously and completely predictable.

> I'm sure these existed before, but COVID has taken things to another level.

Similar as to the other posted said - this type of fiction writing has existed before COVID. It's just that now you're all reading the same statistical fiction.

Essentially - one genre of statistical fiction got popular. Whereas before everyone was reading different genres.

Impressive looking indeed...

https://hcqmeta.com/

(I really wonder at the effort spent on this...)

> , few people have the time or want to make the effort to comb through and analyze original sources.

I mean, unless it's your profession, you're not. At best, you're reading an article (with summarized data that you hope was aggregated correctly) in a journal. To the best of my knowledge, the raw datasets that those are based on are rarely shared.

I'm triple-vaccinated, but I did it grudgingly, after reviewing as much data as I could.

My prior is "public health is top priority for the powers that be and my individual health is not". Throughout this pandemic this has been demonstrated repeatedly.

Therefore when authorities insist that I do something, I have to try to look up stats for my age group and category and do my best to interpret that correctly as a layman, because authorities might be asking me to do something that is safer for the general public at my expense as an individual.

> I did it grudgingly

For me it was the opposite. Back in Sept/October govt was telling people "no need to get a booster; it's fine" and then "get it after 6 months only" while reading about the Israel experience would have told you that it was safe and prudent to just get it after 5mo

Really tough to tell because there's a lack of data. Parents aren't vaccinating their young children because they have the strongest immune systems and it's unnecessary.

Here are CDC submitted reports of myo/pericarditis seen so far broken out by age:

https://openvaers.com/covid-data/myo-pericarditis

So take from that what you will. And if this is your first time encountering VAERS, the reports actually submitted are estimated to be between 1 and 10% of total adverse effects experienced.

If you're into reading studies, here are some that are largely unknown:

https://www.rwmalonemd.com/heart-blood-clotting

Good luck!

This is somewhat misleading information.

VAERS is an open database, it can be easily submitted to by anyone, it's not a good source of truth and may contain statistical bias.

Parent's ARE vaccinating their children, millions of kids age 5-11 have had the vaccine: https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac... Depending on the state, the total % vaccinated in that age group varies between ~20-50%.

>VAERS is an open database, it can be easily submitted to by anyone, it's not a good source of truth and may contain statistical bias.

This is 100% true, but it leaves out some context.

Prior to covid, it was thought that vaccine side effects were statistically underreported by a significant amount in VAERS. For the signal we are seeing in VAERS to be totally spurious seems highly unlikely, given this fact. It's also worth noting that effects which have a significant time-delay are unlikely to be captured.

All this is to say: yes the data are noisy, but we'd need to erase/explain away the numbers by at least an order of magnitude to erase the spike we are seeing, and that seems like a tall order.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232983/

Other vaccines e.g. the common "childhood" ones are uncontroverisal and given on a rather steady basis as people reach the appropriate ages. The COVID vaccines were pushed to everybody in a time window of months, and with a huge amount of controversy and media attention. Given that, I would expect a spike not only in the raw number of adverse reactions, but also a higher proportion of them actually being reported.

> All this is to say: yes the data are noisy, but we'd need to erase/explain away the numbers by at least an order of magnitude to erase the spike we are seeing, and that seems like a tall order.

That's fairly easy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Interesting comment. It's so funny, whenever anyone posts a VAERS link (literally the only visibility the US public has into adverse events) people come out of the woodwork to mention that anyone can submit a report. Other than VAERS, we have public health authorities which routinely lie to the public simply to get vaccines in arms, regardless of the truth or consequences. Too many examples to list here but Fauci continuously upping the percentage of people that would need to get vaccinated to achieve herd immunity comes to mind. I guess he left out the part that herd immunity isn't even possible with the vaccines.

We're relying on proven liars to get our health information? These are our CHILDREN for God's sake.

I'll go ahead and list the whoppers from the mayo clinic site:

- A COVID-19 vaccine can prevent kids from getting and spreading the COVID-19 virus.

The vaccines in no way, shape or form prevent someone from getting or spreading COVID-19

- COVID-19 vaccines have not been linked to infertility or miscarriage.

Miscarriage data: https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/foia-docs-reveal-pfizer-sh...

- These vaccines were approved quickly because the red tape was cut — not corners.

Please see the story of Pfizer whistle-blower Brook Jackson

- In the U.S., the delta (B.1.617.2) variant is now the most common COVID-19 variant.

Omicron is over 95% of cases. Why would they conceal that? Ahh, because the FAQ question was "Do COVID-19 vaccines protect against the variants?" You'd have to admit the vaccines do next to nothing versus Omicron unless you have had a booster in the last 10 weeks.

Myocarditis risk stratified by gender, age group, vaccine and infection:

https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myoca...

Males under 40 roughly have the highest risk from multiple Moderna doses, followed by infection, followed by two Astra doses, followed by two Pfizer doses. I expect two COVID infections would increase the risk like it seems to do with the vaccines.

This is very interesting to me if true, both because

- I thought the risk from getting an infection would be much higher than any vaccine combination (but here multiple Moderna doses seems to increase the risk even more)

- again, if this is true it still validates the rest of my reasoning: except for multiple doses of Moderna any other combination of mainstream vaccines seems to be safer than actually getting the infection

(I note that there is a lot of uncertainty which is why I use "seems to be" instead of "is".)

The "risk from getting an infection" includes many other side effects besides myocarditis, I would not evaluate the risks from an unvaccinated viral infection (which can cause 100 other things besides myocarditis) vs the risk from vaccination (or vaccination + viral infection, which the most likely long term outcome) on the myocarditis axis alone.

Yes that's fair, but the risk profile from the vaccine is also not just relegated to myocarditis, that's just what's been getting attention. It will probably be years before we have an accurate risk assessment of both infection and vaccines. Given the availability of vaccines, it still makes sense to be choosier if you're in a potentially vulnerable population, which is what the paper suggests.

Myocarditis isn't that dangerous, it's acute and can be managed. Infection is much more risky.

> I expect two COVID infections would increase the risk like it seems to do with the vaccines.

Then the relevant metric should be infection vs vaccine+infection, given that natural immunity is better than vaccine-conferred immunity (which seems very bad with Omicron)

I think you got the order wrong, two Astra doses seems to have zero risk of myocarditis according to the graph in the post.

There are two graphs, the second one is broken out by age and gender and seems to show a higher risk for second dose of ChadOx1 (Astra vaccine).

your kids will be fine either way, but they are far more likely to catch and spread without being vaccinated.

I can't find much besides models for < 16 unfortunately.

However, for 16-40, Patone, et al[1] estimates that myocarditis incidence is around 2/mil for AstraZeneca, 1/mil for Pfizer per does, and 6/mil for Moderna first dose, 10/mil for the second, compared to 40/mil for an active infection.

Singer, el al[2] (pre-print) states that males < 20 are roughly 6x less likely to develop myocarditis from vaccination compared to an infection.

The AMA[3] also has some info on both myocarditis and MIS-C. 95% of those who developed MIS-C were unvaccinated, and up to 40% required some sort of respiratory or cardiovascular life support (compare to 0% of those vaccinated). Also states ages 12-15 appear less likely to develop myocarditis than the 16 - ~40 range.

Everything I've read so far is that myocarditis from vaccination usually resolves fairly quickly.

-----

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf

[2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...

[3]: https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/population-care/unv...

Do these papers differentiate infection with and without vaccination? Meaning, if an unvaxxed person has X myocarditis risk from the vaccine, and Y from infection, what is the myocarditis risk of infection after vaccination?

I haven't seen anything comparing the two yet, but I would be interested in seeing that.

I'll note that in general, I have seen studies indicating that the risk of both MIS-C (linked in GP) and long-covid[1][2] are decreased when comparing vaccinated/unvaccinated post active infection. I've also seen reports that those unvaccinated who experience long-covid sometimes see reduced / cleared symptoms after subsequent vaccination.[3] We also know that antibody titer levels seem to be correlated with a reduction in infection, which is why when those begin to fall off we see more breakthrough infections. And finally we know that building long term T and B cells tends to see a quicker, more effective immune response, both of which should be created post-vaccination.

Given that, I would speculate that vaccination is likely to reduce overall proliferation of cell infection (including directly infecting cardiac tissue via the ACE2 receptors) via having more free-floating antibodies in your system, and is likely to reduce the overall immune-mediated inflammatory response to the virus as it can respond more quickly before the virus has had a chance to proliferate as much. Both of these (reduced inflammation, reduced cell infection) should reduce the risk of myocarditis as a result of infection. And I would speculate that that tracks with other observed reduction of symptoms of infection (MIS-C, long-covid).

Again, speculation on my part; I would definitely want to see studies to confirm or refute that.

-----

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

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

[3]: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/vaccines-long-covid

Myocarditis is extremely serious and potentially life-long. Please don't downplay it. I have a cardiomyopathy.

I'm saying this as someone who lost a family member to a combination of myocarditis and endocarditis resulting from a flu infection: I'm not attempting to downplay it. Myocarditis has the potential to be extremely serious, especially for those with pre-existing heart problems.

However, _in my opinion_ with how infectious omicron is, it is likely inevitable that everyone will eventually be exposed. The literature (linked in my GP) currently seems to indicate that vaccines have a lower risk of myocarditis than an active SARS-CoV-2 infection. Most literature that I've seen (so far) indicates that occurrences of post-vaccination myocarditis tends to be rare, and not life-threatening, and the patients tend to recover quickly.[1]

-----

[1]: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.0...

We read different literature:

https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myoca...

based on this Nature paper

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf

"Yes, sorry to break it to you, vaccines can have risks of myocarditis EXCEEDING risks of myocarditis from infection. Pls stop saying otherwise."

Only for Moderna, which is why a number of places stopped recommending it for "younger" adults. Pfizer has lower results of myocarditis.

I'm not aware of any great data on myopericarditis for very young people, and not as many have been vaccinated, so I extrapolate from older age groups:

Of 3 482 295 individuals vaccinated with BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech), 48 developed myocarditis or myopericarditis within 28 days from the vaccination date compared with unvaccinated individuals (adjusted hazard ratio 1.34 (95% confidence interval 0.90 to 2.00); absolute rate 1.4 per 100 000 vaccinated individuals within 28 days of vaccination (95% confidence interval 1.0 to 1.8)). -https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-068665

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. After a median follow-up of 83 days after the onset of myocarditis, 1 patient had been readmitted to the hospital, and 1 had died of an unknown cause after discharge. -https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110737

So vaccine-related myopericarditis looks rare and mild. Effectively, and possibly literally, no one dies as a result. I actually ended up with a probable case after my second dose, but it was extremely mild (no functional impairment, just periodic discomfort for some months). I suspect most cases are something similar- not fun, but not spooky. I'm not a doctor nor do I have any relevant specialty, but I'm reasonably sure that reducing incidence of MIS-C or other rare severe outcomes of covid is a net win in younger people.

I saw a comment here recently with data that showed the rates for myocarditis for both covid and vaccinations respectively, I recall the chance of developing myocarditis after vaccination being 4x lower than after getting covid.

Assuming that's right (perhaps someone more knowledgeable can provide a source), this seems to imply that vaccination reduces the risk of developing myocarditis by 4x, assuming everyone will eventually be infected.

I'm also curious what effect age has on the risk in both cases, ie. if the same ratio holds for young people.

I believe that is correct. I don't have a great source handy, but here's a preprint which agrees:

Conclusions: Myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection occurred at a rate as high as 450 per million in young males. Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34341797/

Not sure about ratio age dependency. My prior would be that it is similar, since I don't have any reason to suspect otherwise. Still not a doctor or biologist though :P

I was going to wait until all of the first world health bureaucracies cleared it. But now my kids had covid (before they were approved even in the US) and it wasn't a big deal. So I'm not going to get them shots until the natural immunity is proven to fade, which may be never.

Just one more point as food for thought:

One more thing to consider is that the virus is also able to cause myocarditis, especially if you don't rest long enough even if feeling fine. In fact, the virus can potentially cause additional complications even with mild symptoms. There are also things we don't really understand yet with post-viral syndromes which affects many people (disclaimer: Epstein-Barr / Mono messed me up, personally).

This isn't unique to SARS-CoV-2 either, it's a more general viral infection thing and can happen just as well with influenza. With Omicron, it's also very likely that people will get it sooner or later - vaccinated or not.

Granted, most myocarditis goes unnoticed and recovers very well with a bit of rest.

> I am trying to get good data to determine if vaccination is risky or not.

Rather than giving you a list of work that you may suspect of being curated, I will show you how to quickly find what you're looking for.

One of the great things about the National Library of Medicine is that a human looks at each and every paper and assigns standardized semantic tags to it. These are called "MeSH terms" and you can filter the entire library by them.

You mentioned interest in myocarditis, and the following would be an appropriate search query in pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov for this topic:

myocarditis[mh] AND vaccines[majr] AND COVID

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=myocarditis%5Bmh%5D+AN...

The "mh" selects articles that were tagged with that MeSH term. The "majr" selects articles that were tagged with that MeSH term and were mainly about that term. In this case, the structured query drills down from thousands of potential results to 61 results, which is manageable to triage manually.

Edit: Here's how you can figure out wish MeSH terms exist: https://meshb.nlm.nih.gov/search

> In this case, the structured query drills down from thousands of potential results to 61 results, which is manageable to triage manually.

If, of course, you have the domain knowledge required to do so.

You would probably need some basic domain knowledge to interpret medical publications in peer reviewed journals. I'm not saying they are the same expertise, just that "requiring expertise" as a prerequisite is pretty reasonable.

Ask your pediatrician. If you don't trust that they know better, get a new pediatrician. I'm not being glib, this person has made it through a grueling education of their undergrad, med school, and residency. They are well acquainted with hard sciences and research. If you don't trust them on their area of expertise, then that is the problem.

Anecdotally, every doctor I know has gotten their own children vaccinated as soon as it was available (or enrolled them in clinical trials, to get it earlier).

What data do you want? The all-mortality risk for vaccinated individuals is lower than unvaccinated.

Unless your children have special circumstances, the answer is to vaccinate.

The risk rates for myocarditis 1) extremely low to be caused by the vaccine 2) lower than the risk of P(Myocarditis | COVID)*P(COVID). That is, the risk of catching COVID AND developing Myocarditis is higher than developing it from the vaccine.

This is a great example of misleading statistics!

This comment is saying that vaccinated people are more likely to die than the unvaccinated. Sounds like a lie, but nope! It’s true. Why? The unvaccinated population is much, much younger and healthier than the vaccinated. 95% of the above-80 cohort is vaccinated. Essentially nobody under 5 is. This is called a confounding variable, and is used to spread fake news.

> This comment is saying that vaccinated people are more likely to die than the unvaccinated.

That's definitely not what I was saying. I'm curious which part have you that impression?

Two of my three children are in the vaccination age range (edit the 5-10 range that was the most recent change) and I did a dive in the primary data as I was worried about the risks/benefits of myocarditis vs risk of severe COVID (we had also had COVID in April 2020, but I was the only one tested positive because at that time only healthcare workers could get a test if you weren't hospitalized). I hope this resource helps you, it helped convince me that the benefits outweighed the risks:

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

Do either of your children have any comorbidities? That would be a strong deciding factor for me.

This is the latest advice from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation which summarises and synthesises the evidence:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-update-on-ad...

It's interesting reading about things other than antibody levels now in Nature as well. T-cell immunity was considered borderline conspiracy theory until recently.

I try to avoid conspiracy theories and think this was probably down to the way governments think and are advised, antibody levels mean an instant response in humans to a virus, so keeping them high during a pandemic probably made sense to advisors and politicians. But that ignores so much about the immune system.

I hope this narrative shift leads to some more nuanced decisions being made.

> T-cell immunity was considered borderline conspiracy theory until recently.

It's funny how the pandemic caused people to toss our decades of understandings of viruses out the window because it was politically expedient.

It's always been known that if your immune system allows you to recover from a virus, you will have some level of lasting immunity.

One of the worst things about Donald Trump was that if he or anyone adjacent to him actually said anything good, it immediately became toxic. They did do so every once in a while, but it was so throughly mixed with shit that it became contaminated.

If Trump said the sky was blue, suddenly it would have to be red and if you were a red sky denier you were a racist. We are still dealing with the echoes of this and will be for at least five years.

This is why having a super-polarizing troll in office is inherently bad for society. I think that's true regardless of their stripes. An obnoxious troll from the "left" would be no better in this particular regard.

There's a reason high office leaders need to carry themselves professionally. Class (of the behavioral sort) is not some old fogie cultural superstition. Leaders that carry themselves like Trump actually damage the cognition of the people in their society.

There's truth in the idea that Trump supporting an idea made it toxic even if it was a good idea, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened because the anti-Trump media attacked everything Trump said, whether it was sensible or not. They could have taken a neutral perspective and assessed his speech on its merits, but they did not and they bear some repsonsibility for that.

(To be clear: I'm not a Trump supporter and I think that when he was right it was by accident rather than design. However, many media organizations shamed themselves by embracing partisanship and abandoning even the pretence of neutrality).

This is kind of arguing in circles, though. A big part of the reason media is so hard on Trump is that he is classless and they were embarrassed he was their president. It's not like his public image was any better in 1990 well before he ever openly declared political ambitions and decided he was a Republican. He'd been a sideshow clown for decades. Arguably, the ridiculous level of polarization we already had is the only reason he got to where he is. Even most Republicans were embarrassed of him until he won the nomination and they rallied to the only option left that wasn't a Democrat. But thanks to having way too many candidates in the primary, he didn't need the support of "most" Republicans. He just needed more than Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush.

Are there a lot of examples of this? In general when Trump said the right thing it seems like the media didn't go too far overboard. The most obvious example was about vaccination itself. While people were worried that he would push out a vaccine that wasn't ready, people were on board with vaccination.

That said, I do think that Trump's brand was largely about division on social issues. So to that extent he often put at the forefront of his narratives positions that forced you to take a side. E.g., should Kaepernick be fired or not. Etc...

> In general when Trump said the right thing it seems like the media didn't go too far overboard.

I'd say those aren't the problem so much as the borderline cases where there are true and untrue interpretations of a certain statement, but of course they ran with the most uncharitable possible interpretation because they're convinced Trump is a ruthless dictator in the making.

I think media treatment of him was really weird. Some things were exaggerated, but something like suggesting, during the '16 campaign, in a plainly favorable tone, that his supporters might assassinate his opponent if she won, should have been the only thing anyone wanted to ask him or his proxies about until he was hounded out of public life. Instead it was dropped surprisingly quickly.

I think the media treatment was fair and evenhanded. I think what has changed with the media is that nothing sticks for very long. As you note, what might have been a big story in the past has a really short news cycle now. What was remarkable about Trump was the shear volume of stories -- each lasted for days, but was then followed up immediately (or concurrently) with another. Even Jan 6 is having trouble sticking in the news.

I think this was one of the issues that the Republicans ran into with the election. They thought that certain stories about Biden would stick and last. They missed that none of these stories last any more. You need a huge volume of stories to paint a narrative over a long period of time.

Someone else mentioned the uncharitable interpretations of things he said. That was earned over years of such statements. It wasn't a new isolated incident.

> Someone else mentioned the uncharitable interpretations of things he said. That was earned over years of such statements. It wasn't a new isolated incident.

You're right to such a degree that I distinctly remember my first impression of him being formed by Rush Limbaugh (my dad was a listener) making fun of what a dishonest, sleazy joke of a human being Trump was. Must have been some time in the 90s. His reputation was decades in the making, and at one time that take on him was practically universal. The transformation was fascinating to watch.

(can't edit, but not sure if the DV was over disbelief or for some other reason—if the latter, cool, no problem, I take no issue with whatever your reason was; if the former, it's on YouTube and it's exactly what I've said it is, though on review technically he may merely have been suggesting that the "2nd amendment people" [as he put it] might shoot Supreme Court justices... so, you know, not exactly better. It's not clear which of those—or, maybe both—were what he had in mind when he said it.)

As someone who considers themselves an outside onlooker, I disagree. Trump allowed all of the tribal people to out themselves. It's made it a lot easier to find people who stick to their principles and praised/criticized him where appropriate.

   One of the worst things about Donald Trump was that if he or anyone adjacent to him actually said anything good, it immediately became toxic.

That wasn't the worst thing about trump.... it's the worst thing about the media coverage of him. You're blaming him for how media covered him.

Why not both? Trump behaved in a provocative way for a reason - it's not like he was a poor misunderstood thing and the media picked up on him for no reason.

Preface by saying the I don't agree with Trump on a lot of things.

Lets look at this from a parenting perspective. If i have a child who misbehaves often, is it appropriate for me to punish them when they do something good?

Holding the media to the same accountability, if Trump is saying stupid/outrageous/provocative things, then lambast him when he says those things. But if the media lambasts him when he is saying something reasonable, then that is on the media.

I think most of the annoyance I see in the thread is because there was blame being assigned to Trump or even someone on the same stage as him because they were on that stage with him.

>One of the worst things about Donald Trump was that if he or anyone adjacent to him actually said anything good, it immediately became toxic.

So rather than examining an idea based on the merits, ideas were discarded due to the messenger or the who the messenger associated with.

Yes, I fully agree: criticizing Trump when when he was saying/doing something that makes sense just because it's Trump was very stupid.

What about things said by them directly, their Twitter, etc?

Modified for context, the german adage holds. If you have Trump and 3 people talking at a table, you have 4 Trumpers talking at a table.

You just described one of the many problems with the media and then blamed it on Donald Trump. Why couldn't you have said "One of the problems with the media is..."

70M people would like a word with you.

Don't confuse legacy media propaganda with what regular people think. Especially when you hear newspeak.

And 230M people would like a word with you.

Trumpists seem to forget that neither their movement nor their President have ever had the support of the American majority, much less of all "regular people." Never even the popular vote.

>Trumpists seem to forget that neither their movement nor their President have ever had the support of the American majority, much less of all "regular people." Never even the popular vote.

Neither did Hillary, who won 48% of the popular vote in 2016 to Trump's 46%. Does the fact that not until 2020 did Trump's opponent win a majority of the popular vote invalidate the validity of the opposition until then?

I don't recall that happening. Can you give examples? That sounds like Trump's behavior, not others.

While true, “some level of lasting immunity” is not necessarily all that useful. Norovirus infection and recovery for example, only last 6-24 months. I don’t know what the long term immune system response is for covid, but I do know that planning in general needs to be for the more pessimistic end of what is seems possible, and that quite a lot seemed possible in the early days of the pandemic.

Why the "only" wording? Seems like the covid vaccines don't even last this much, and they are praised.

I'm guessing because they give you protection without actually catching the potentially harmful virus in the first place?

No they used "only" as in "not very long". The question is asking how can you say it's not very long when the covid vaccination lasts less than a year in comparison

6 months is pretty short in both cases, but I think darkcha0s has me right, the cost is much lower in the vaccination case.

For a much most positive example of how that matters:

“How long did he retire for?“ “Only six months“

vs.

“How long did he go on holiday for?“ “Only six months“

Covid vaccines have less side effects than the virus so are still superior option, hence the praise.

What if I had prior infection of Covid before vaccines were available? Why would I need to be forced to be vaccinated? Given that my health care system actually registers this prior infection. While we don't have vaccines for everyone in the world.

We have way more than enough for anyone who wants it.

Given that the poster said norovirus immunity lasts from 6-24 months, having been infected before the vaccine wouldn't guarantee you're safe.

And while sure they could push back your vaccine requirement a few months, that'd require a fair amount of additional overhead and add an additional risk of having gotten a false diagnosis.

Getting Covid should be treated as though you got a vaccine based on the data I have seen, which also means its immunity effects wanes over time and would need to be boosted periodically either by reinfection or vaccine, again the vaccine being the safer approach.

Whether or not you should be "forced" to take it should be based on risk to others in the situation that it is being forced, just like you are "forced" to not speed while driving on a public highway.

I am not sure what the current latest scientific data is but my understanding is that virus and vaccine both reduce the risk of a subsequent infection, spreading the virus if infected and getting severe outcomes requires hospitalization (which reduces hospital capacity). Since this protective effect fades in both circumstances a recent booster would need to be "forced" if not recently having been infected assuming there is no issue with vaccine supply.

> Whether or not you should be "forced" to take it should be based on risk to others in the situation that it is being forced, just like you are "forced" to not speed while driving on a public highway.

I really wish people would stop using this analogy. Driving is a privilege not a right, and you earn that privilege by following the rules.

Living without compulsory medical procedures is a right, not a privilege, so it's the complete opposite case. You need a better analogy.

aren't vaccine mandates for participation in a shared environment - like work?

Mandates are being used in many different ways depending on the country. But even if it were limited to work, the right to work is also recognized as a human right so the analogy to driving still fails.

In the US the mandates allow a choice to either vaccinate or get regular testing. No one is being made to take a vaccine against their will in the US at least, they must however take precautions to protect others from their risky behavior.

You have a right to bear arms here in the US that does not mean you can shoot them in a public place because that endangers others. Typically rights have limits when they impose on others rights.

Working is a privilege was well not a right, you have no right to a job at an employer (at least in the US). So the analogy fits as a privilege but it also works as a right since neither are absolute and are typically limited when they effect others around you negatively.

I agree rights have limits when they conflict with other rights. However the right to work is a right under the UN human rights code. That doesn't mean you have a right to work at any particular place, but it does mean if vaccines are a prerequisite for any kind of work, either by government fiat or by broad corporate consensus, that would be a violation of human rights. Using tests to balance vaccines is one way to address that, but some countries don't even take those considerations and want to blanket mandate vaccines.

If it where a prerequisite to vaccinate with no other choice to find work anywhere (even remote from home jobs) or even say a majority of places I might agree, but that is not even close to the case here in the US.

I think the UN humans rights could also be interpreted as I having the right to a safe work environment and conversely if I where forced to work in a common office space with unvaccinated / untested people that would also violate my rights.

As I said, the US is not the only place that's discussing or implementing mandates, and other places are less flexible in how they're applying them.

Secondly, the very notion that you can have an expectation of not getting infected from someone else is intrinsically untenable. Just try to define what characteristics a pathogen must have before vaccines are mandatory. Why set the bar at COVID's fatality rate, why not the flu? Why not the common cold? Is fatality rate really the right metric? What about number of post infection complications?

Furthermore, what if we say the COVID rate is the cutoff, what if you have comorbidities that increase your chances of death, does that increase the obligation of your workmates to get vaccinated or is that your problem? I think you know which way the rhetoric is going, but these answers are far from obvious.

So which places are you talking about so I know what I can agree or disagree with?

This whole thing seems like continuum fallacy [1]. Just like everything we must all agree on a cutoff because the real world doesn't have neat black and white thresholds, covid is different from the flu that much is obvious and reaches my threshold for requiring vaccination / testing mandates at least in its current form. Do agree that a disease can be deadly enough to require it? If so what is your threshold before the mandate should be allowed?

I am willing to discuss what metrics would help come to consensus as a society, buts its not like requiring vaccines or other preventative measures for certain activities is some foreign concept.

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

> This whole thing seems like continuum fallacy [1]. Just like everything we must all agree on a cutoff because the real world doesn't have neat black and white thresholds

No we don't. This assumes moral obligations are decided by an evaluation of their consequences, aka consequentialism. This is far from the only type of ethics, and permits problematic inferences (see the "Repugnant conclusion").

For instance, a Kantian would reject entirely the notion that such a cutoff is coherent. People who are trying to compel vaccines are merely using other people for their own ends (herd immunity to get back to normal), rather than treating them as ends in themselves. We should strongly encourage and persuade vaccination, but never compel them by coercive means under this ethics. Universalizing "no vaccination" does not result in a paradox, therefore it is not a moral duty under Kantianism.

There are equally compelling formulations of deontology and virtue ethics under which your sort of consequentialist argument also fails, so I'm just not convinced that it's some kind of inevitability.

>We should strongly encourage and persuade vaccination, but never compel them by coercive means under this ethics.

So you don't believe a person should be compelled to be vaccinated or otherwise stay away from other people unless tested for infection no matter how contagious and deadly the disease? That is, forced quarantine should never be allowed under any circumstance regardless of disease?

Why should a person be free to infect others through their unabridged freedom yet one should not have the freedom to drive while drunk? People compelling others to travel sober is also using them as a means to their own ends (not being killed by drunk driver) even though they can take their own precautions (seat belts, air bags, safer cars, avoiding certain areas, they themselves not being drunk). No one is forcing anyone to be sober (in the US) just not to drive on public roads. You are not free to do whatever you want in a society with others there are limits put on your personal freedom so as not to endanger others, there is always a valid debate about what those limits should be, no different here, but there have to be agreed limits or nothing works.

> So you don't believe a person should be compelled to be vaccinated or otherwise stay away from other people unless tested for infection no matter how contagious and deadly the disease?

What I believe is that the truth is far from obvious, and I'm describing how different ethics reach different conclusions for what is true. Thus, it's far from obvious that the choices you describe are the truth or "moral", so much as convenient and expedient. These are not the same thing.

> Why should a person be free to infect others through their unabridged freedom

Freedom is not unabridged, it simply has different limits under different ethics.

> yet one should not have the freedom to drive while drunk?

I already addressed this in my very first reply to you.

> they must however take precautions to protect others from their risky behavior

If the vaccine was so good at protecting others, why the hell do vaccinated people still need to wear a mask? How is it even ethical to force people to vaccinate in order to function in society and yet still require them to wear a mask? Seems kind of bullshit to me.

First, because the vaccines are 80-95% effective in any specific individual (if boosted, potentially much less if not) and that isn’t good enough for society as a whole until the vaccine uptake is higher.

Second, I’ve never really understood why people are all that upset about mask mandates. It’s just clothing. Heck, in winter they are a vast improvement over scarves even without any disease concerns.

(Curiously, last-but-one time I wrote something similar here, someone took so much offence they tried to anonymously wish harm upon me via comments on my blog).

> First, because the vaccines are 80-95% effective in any specific individual (if boosted, potentially much less if not) and that isn’t good enough for society as a whole until the vaccine uptake is higher.

That's a theoretical model. A hypothesis, most likely unattainable. Conveniently so, because it creates the whole lot of scapegoats.

> Second, I’ve never really understood why people are all that upset about mask mandates. It’s just clothing.

It is not. The net is full of accounts of people telling out precisely what is wrong with masks for them. On HN, on reddit, anywhere. If you wanted to understand, you have plenty of material to read. You, most likely, simply couldn't be bothered. That, or we're just different species.

> (Curiously, last-but-one time I wrote something similar here, someone took so much offence they tried to anonymously wish harm upon me via comments on my blog).

I'm sorry to hear that. They shouldn't have done it. However, this comment of yours is very dismissive to the concerns that some people perceive as fight-or-flight matter. Some choose to fight, event in such inappropriate and misdirected way.

> That's a theoretical model. A hypothesis, most likely unattainable.

“Theoretical model” is a tautology.

And it really should be attainable: We’ve successfully eradicated smallpox worldwide, we are close to doing that with polio, and many other illnesses have been eradicated from certain regions via vaccination programs. This is a thing we can do if we try.

> It is not. The net is full of accounts of people telling out precisely what is wrong with masks for them

What I see is always in one of the following categories:

• People asserting that other people (never themselves) with asthma or similar breathing issues can’t wear them, even though literally everyone I know who has asthma or who uses a CPAP machine is actually fine with masks, to the extent that in many cases they get angry with anti-maskers risking giving them covid. Occasionally I also see anti-maskers also asserting that masks make it difficult for children to learn facial expressions in school, which, while superficially plausible, still seems to fail to against reality.

• People who have decided everything about this is a political meme and not real, like this: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/anti-mask-pr...

• People claiming that wearing masks lower blog oxygen levels despite all the evidence from e.g. surgeons, furries (two groups I would not have expected to list together before actually doing so).

It may be that all the above categories have totally overwhelmed real personal anecdotes of people who personally are unable to wear masks. I have no doubt, for example, that there is at least one person with no external nose or ear cartilage for a mask to hold against and who for whatever reason has not had plastic surgery. But this is not what I have ever seen. Always one of the above, on every occasion.

> We’ve successfully eradicated smallpox worldwide, we are close to doing that with polio, and many other illnesses have been eradicated from certain regions via vaccination programs. This is a thing we can do if we try.

Eradicating COVID is not possible because it's in animal reservoirs.

> People asserting that other people (never themselves) with asthma or similar breathing issues can’t wear them

I have had occasions when it became extremely uncomfortable and even triggered an allergic reaction. Universal, effective mask use is not as simple as it's been portrayed.

Furthermore, the evidence that such universal mandates actually work is not as compelling as you think.

> Occasionally I also see anti-maskers also asserting that masks make it difficult for children to learn facial expressions in school, which, while superficially plausible, still seems to fail to against reality.

I don't know what evidence you think proves this claim.

> everyone I know who has asthma or who uses a CPAP machine is actually fine with masks, to the extent that in many cases they get angry with anti-maskers risking giving them covid

Of course they get angry, they're at higher risk and they're scared. They are risking COVID just by going outside. I'm not sure how that translates into an obligation on others to lower their risk. Of course they want others to take those steps, but that doesn't mean those demands are justifiable. If they want to lower their risk, they can take steps to protect themselves, by getting vaccinated, limiting their contact, etc.

> People claiming that wearing masks lower blog oxygen levels despite all the evidence from e.g. surgeons, furries

A properly fitted mask that actually works against COVID absolutely does lower blood oxygen. The whole point is to restrict air flow to prevent aerosolized droplets from passing through. I've measured it myself using a blood oxygen meter while wearing an N95 mask.

Of course poorly fitted masks don't lower blood oxygen, but those also aren't that effective at reducing spread. The comparison to surgeons is disingenuous, they've had years of exposure and training to learn how to operate under such conditions.

> “Theoretical model” is a tautology.

Of course.

> And it really should be attainable: We’ve successfully eradicated smallpox worldwide, we are close to doing that with polio, and many other illnesses have been eradicated from certain regions via vaccination programs. This is a thing we can do if we try.

It is a wonderful thing, a blessing, that we were so lucky with eradication of some terrible diseases. Eradication is really a side effect of a vaccination program hitting a sweet spot within vaccine-pathogen space:

- sufficiently strong vaccine, close to sterilizing

- slowly mutating pathogen

- sufficiently scary illness, to the point that high vax uptake is attainable without coercion

- some evolutionary luck

Of the above properties the current virus-vax duo possesses approximately none, so we could try all we wanted and still remain unsuccessful. Trying hard is a necessary, but by no means sufficient condition.

> What I see is always in one of the following categories

That's impressively selective vision on your part.

> People who have decided everything about this is a political meme and not real

They may be real to an extent AND a political meme at the same time. People make different judgements all the time.

> People claiming that wearing masks lower blog oxygen levels

This looks plausible, however I may agree that some people are merely claiming it. But what it all really is - and you'd figure it out if you were willing to see beyond preconceptions - for many it just a clumsy attempt to speak the "rational" language. Because mask-enthusiasts for some reason are not willing to entertain idea that mask wearing is a huge mental burden. I'll spare you of my personal experience, mainly because I don't want it to be dismissed again. I assure you, there are people who share and understand it, and mask-enthusiasts do not have a monopoly on value judgement.

My question is - what needs to happen for our problems to be recognized? People already are killing themselves, some are still hanging by a thread, but may not be for long. I suspect that the answer would be - it does not matter, our problems do not matter. This is fine, I'm learning to leave with it, learning to see the other side as completely different species, with all that follows. And what follows does not look good.

Calling Covid a "novel" virus was a mistake. Technically it's true but that didn't mean we needed to toss out everything we learned about viruses and start from first principles. Even from way back in March of 2020 even the most basic things we knew about viruses felt controversial. People were seriously thinking you could catch and transmit covid after like 3 months or something--like you'd just constantly get re-infected over and over again. And people flipping out about outdoor transmission... like when has catching a virus outside ever been a real thing? Everything we knew about the subject had to be re-proven.

It was and still is completely crazy.

Many people got Delta and then Omicron even 1 month later. Kai Ryssdal from NPR for example, and one of my friends did too.

So this isn't crazy; it literally happens to many respiratory viruses. Viruses mutate

I always wondered how people claim that. Did they have two pcr tests or something else telling them what variant they had?

I had delta in late October and omicron in early December. I was PCR positive for delta, although I had a mild case. I wasn't allowed to take a PCR test for the December infection, because it was too soon after my delta test and my symptoms were very mild. I did test positive multiple times on LFT, my symptoms matched the 'ultramild' omicron (scratchy throat, slight cough, lower back pain). The day I tested positive for omicron was 4 days after my friends had gathered in a pub, of the 30 of us in attendance 27 tested positive on the same day. The group chat was wild. Some of those that got PCR's were informed they had omicron.

Most PCR tests will discriminate between (B.1) Omicron and things which are not B.1 Omicron, so it's feasible to know this. I mean, strictly speaking all you'd know is that you had B.1 Omicron plus something else, but if you had the non-B.1 Omicron one in October, then in most parts of the world you'd be pretty safe in assuming that was Delta.

Yup. But like you said many respiratory viruses do that. Does that make the flu virus many of us catch every year novel? How about the common cold? Is each specific virus also novel?

Why did we decide to throw out everything we knew about viruses for SARS-CoV-2? It's like society discovered "OMG I could catch a virus and die!". Not realizing that virtually nothing was new about SARS-CoV-2. It's just a respiratory virus like any other we've had passed through millions of generations of living beings. Oddly enough the "broader human species" managed to survive and thrive through all of them.

'novel' is a perfectly cromulent term for covid-19. what's not cromulent is the unreasonable and extraneous reaction to a 'new' cold virus. every new virus will have outsized effect until we settle into steady-state (which depends on the dynamics of the virus).

what leadership needed to do was identify the dynamic threat--mainly to the elderly & immune deficient--and mitigate for them, not run around screaming like discombobulated chickens promoting throw-everything-against-the-wall safetyism. we could have had highly targeted mitigations and minimal disruption to our lives; instead, we got incessant debates over useless masking, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates.

even including the elderly and immune deficient, over 99% of people get covid and recover just fine. this isn't the black plague by any stretch of the imagination.

> every new virus will have outsized effect until we settle into steady-state

No, this one killed more people than anything in US history, more than wars, prior pan-/epidemics, etc. In my lifetime, no 'new virus' has had any sort of similar effect at all, by orders of magnitude.

the flu kills ~36K/year, so if you're ~22+ year old american, then the influenza virus has killed more people in your lifetime than covid.

we don't know yet what steady-state looks like, but note that medical/epidemiological organizations don't generally keep death statistics on colds (caused by rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, etc.) because they're not a significant number. colds can be a contributing factor in death for folks with deficient immune systems, just as it is with covid, but is generally not the sole cause.

again, >99% survive covid just fine. for people with multiple co-morbidities, it's much more serious (whole percentage death rates), but that's because they're teetering on the brink already, and covid (or any number of respiratory diseases, really) can push them over the edge. our mitigations should focus on the aged and unhealthy, not everyone (especially not children).

> >99% survive covid just fine

That's not a good survival rate, though the number sounds big.

> it's much more serious (whole percentage death rates), but that's because they're teetering on the brink already, and covid (or any number of respiratory diseases, really) can push them over the edge. our mitigations should focus on the aged and unhealthy, not everyone (especially not children).

The people at risk are not nearly all "teetering on the brink", nor have they died at this astounding rate from other causes. We could save their lives.

People are dying; and we can save them, and we could have saved many more. Blood is on the hands of the those who stood in the way.

99+% is a big number no matter how you try to slice it. people on the brink should assess and mitigate their own risk, with reliable, honest information and help where needed, not paternalistic overreach. people are dying, full stop, every single day, day in and day out. why weren't you so concerned about the millions who have been dying all along? why weren't you sounding the alarm like this about the flu that has killed more people in your lifetime than covid (which likely always will be the case)? let go of the mediopolitical propaganda and move on.

> Calling Covid a "novel" virus was a mistake.

I don't remember anyone ever doing that. I remember them calling it a novel coronavirus, because it is a new coronavirus, at least to us.

We didn't have to toss out everything we learned about viruses and start from first principles, but certainly people's irritation with COVID restrictions seems to have provoked people to ignore decades of research to the contrary to make bizarre assertions like you can't catch viruses outside or get reinfected (ironically the early scientific and mainstream speculation about if COVID would be different was mostly taking the optimistic tack that COVID might be less likely to cause reinfection than respiratory viruses endemic in the human population like flu...)

Same goes for the T-cell immunity really: it was pretty much a given that the body's normal immune processes still applied to coronavirus, but what was novel was the unscientific community insisting that they couldn't possibly be reinfected and a course of vaccines couldn't possibly give them any benefit to their immune system after they'd been infected (someone should tell all the old people who get flu shots every year!)

> someone should tell all the old people who get flu shots every year

What we call the flu is not a single virus that comes once a year. It's different types of virusses each time, and the flu vaccine targets the most likely candidates of that year. So no, you don't generally get REinfected with the flu, because it's a different virus. Some of the virusses that we consider 'the flu' are actually corona virusses, and perhaps covid19 will join that list as it becomes endemic.

What we call the flu also includes a wide variety of viral illnesses better known as the common cold, which includes some coronaviruses - the flu shots offer no protection against most of these different viruses

What medical practitioners call the flu is a small subset of influenza viruses common in humans, each with a high potential for reinfection, including reinfections within a year (as well as constantly evolving variant strains, just like COVID)

No one who is familiar with viruses considers other human coronaviruses to be "the flu". They aren't even in the same phylum! All influenza viruses are Negarnaviricota whereas all coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-2 are Pisuviricota.

There are four other endemic human coronaviruses which typically cause common cold symptoms. Those symptoms are clinically distinct from the flu in most cases.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262-4079(20)30862-9

Some of the problems with our response is actually based on the opposite issue, our first response impulses were to treat it like a novel flu strain. So we re-ran the H1N1 playbook. The flu was believed to be mostly spread by droplets/surface contact and not airborne, so they assumed covid was too.

The issues you are describing is more the problem that health officials shift the burden of proof depending which assumptions or policies they want to make. Any facts that counter their policies have to be proven by significant evidence. And they often wouldn't look too hard. A fact that supports their conclusion can be assumed until proven otherwise.

Calling Covid a "novel" virus was a mistake

It was called a novel virus to indicate that no person already had (acquired) immunity against it. What inference you make from the word "novel" is on you, not on the rest of the world.

That remains unclear. Some research indicates that exposure to other coronaviruses might have given some people a limited degree of acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2021.07.015

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2022.103831

But did it? I don’t ever remember T-cells being considered anything close to conspiracy theories, nor their importance being downplayed.

Ignored? By whom? I am not a virologist, but actual virologists sure talked about T-cells in public forums. Or moreover, that we have to have some degree of humility about exactly what are the correlates of immunity for this disease.

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/

And this podcast had Fauci on, so it’s not like they weren’t some degree of notable within the immunological academic sphere.

I think it’s time for Hanlon's Razor here. Antibodies were easy to measure. Antibodies probably meant people wouldn’t get sick and wouldn’t spread this. So policy makers, being in a tremendous rush, really glommed onto antibodies, and just got stuck in that mindset, because it’s hard to turn a ship around. I don’t know where there would be a conspiracy—it’s just that this whole thing is complex, and politicians are not virologists.

> it’s just that this whole thing is complex, and politicians are not virologists

What's really really really bad is that the entire narrative has been built on "we are science, follow us, if you don't, you are an idiot, you are endangering others"

Except science is much more nuanced, and hey, it turns out t-cells do things too not just antibodies (of course this was known pre 2020).

Maybe if communication on this issue wasn't turned so black and white, and us vs them, by the media and politicians, we'd be in a better place now. But they didn't do that, they turned this into politics too.

Yes, thank you! Just because I only have a high school degree does not mean my opinion is not as valid as a medical professional's.

Wait. No, that doesn't make sense at all actually... Hm.

I believe it was Asimov that lamented "the problem with democracy is that my ignorance is as valuable as your knowledge".

> "they turned this into politics too."

Politics is the discussion of how we should behave. How could this possibly have not become politics?

When you're lost at sea, you're an idiot if you don't row with everyone else, in the direction that the navigator thinks is right.

This "everything is politics" line really needs to die. It's completely ignoring what people actually mean when they say "turned political" -- that people focus more on scoring points and amplifying divisions instead of the overall welfare of groups and individuals.

Maybe I should have said "tribal" instead of "turned political". Because that's what manipulative politicians do and it's what everyone hates and loves about politics.

I think you are right. It isn't politics, it is mostly tribalism. Us vs. "the others".

I don't think "everything is politics." I think the government needs a response to a global pandemic. Which is politics.

And you said "they turned this into politics," and I think you meant to say, "they turned this partisan." Or "it became politically divisive."

Yes, it's unfortunate that the two parties here in the U.S. did not agree about how to handle the global pandemic.

People from both parties would tell you they were absolutely trying to care for the overall welfare of everyone. And they just disagreed about how to do it.

I'm just personally horrified that we don't even agree about how to measure reality. Really fundamental questions like, "Is Covid more contagious and more deadly than the flu?" "Is the vaccine safe?" "Is your risk of myocarditis greater if you get the vaccine, or if you are infected with Covid?" "Does the vaccine put a chip in your body?" "Does the vaccine turn you magnetic?" "Did 5G cause Covid?" "Is this medication effective at preventing or treating Covid?"

Like, the leaders of our political parties don't apparently agree about how to measure the answers to those questions. Or they're not effectively leading the people in their party to follow that decision.

Basically, we're totally hosed.

I feel like I've missed the context leading to this perspective. Where was the discourse on t-cells shut down?

Exactly. I feel like there are people who see people being shut down, but it hasn't happened in any venue I'm familiar with.

The entire debate about natural immunity was shut down. No, you need the vaccine, was the argument for a long time. It was also ignored in mandates in many countries.

The entire basis of this is that T-cell immunity is ignored, and only sky high antibodies caused by the vaccine offer any protection for future infection.

Can you point me to an article in NEJM or Nature (or another respected publication) that said any of this?

It wasn't in the journals. It was in the media and in discussions with others.

PS: The fact it is hard to talk find sources is because it was all shut down.

You do realize the media can say whatever they want? MSNBC can go one way and Fox News can go the other way. Their audiences don't shut down the other...

> You do realize the media can say whatever they want?

Ultimately all of what these "experts" say is distilled by people in the media and shared through twitter, HN, reddit, FB and more.

During this madness, all the biggest doomsday people in my circle of "real" humans would feed me reams of NYT and Atlantic articles as their "sources". If I fed them some academic article that goes against the media narrative they'd dismiss it as "not peer reviewed" or "publishers were doing a flawed study". Ironic considering almost all of their sources had all the same major flaws as whatever I provided.

Where were the amount of articles that were proportionally talking about it?

Familiar with the term lie of omission?

It's hard to get proportionality w/o spending a lot of time getting data.

But the simplest Google search and you can find Nature articles talking about T-cell response with respect to Covid:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24377-1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00436-4

If you aren't aware of these discussions it's not because of lies of omission, gas lighting, or a vast conspiracy theory. It's because you buried your own head and then said someone is holding your head down.

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2101/rr-0

First, that was simply an editorial piece.

But more importantly they "assert" natural immunity is being ignored by scientific journals, but provide no evidence. Even worse, they then go on to cite studies from prestigious scientific journals that discuss natural immunity! What is it, are they ignoring it or are they publishing well cited papers on it?

Lastly, they conflate science with policy. As they even note, the scientific community has long known that there is some immunity with surviving infection. But policy has to take more than that into account.

It happened. I assure you. Debate, healthy skepticism, questioning... It was all completely shut down. You were not allowed to discuss anything but The Science. I've been yelled at by people I know in real life for discussing T-Cell immunity. Some of the smartest people I know completely lost their minds. They'll never be the same and I'll never have the relationship with them I had pre-pandemic.

The story of the last 2 years is 10% disease mitigation, 20% intellectual error, 30% media fear-mongering and 40% politics & tribalism.

The fact that I can find articles discussing T-cell response all the way through the pandemic with a simple Google search seems to indicate that people were talking about it. Maybe you shouldn't let the people in your social circle dictate what you think is happening in the broader world? And I don't mean that to snarky, but I feel like I see a lot of this type of generalizing.

Would you call the activity around Joe Rogan a discussion or being shut down?

Perhaps your aren't seeing a thing because you aren't looking for it?

Isn't Joe Rogan one of the most popular podcasts in the world and when Neil Young said "him or me", Spotify said him. Is that your definition of "shut down"?

That hasn't completely played out yet. Spotify also lost a lot of share value over this stunt. Organizations certainly are trying to shut him down, which is scary in and of itself, regardless of the outcome. CNN is talking endlessly about this.

If Joe Rogan was a smaller fish, it would have been easier.

If he was a smaller fish, no one would care.

I don't watch Joe Rogan. I've seen one clip where he talks about myocarditis in children and he seems like he is just making things up. And when the data is presented to him, in real time on the show -- its like he doesn't want to believe it. He doesn't seem like a good faith actor. You can probably find the clip.

I haven't seen CNN make any call to have him removed. Although they do call out that he says things that are factually incorrect -- that seems in-scope for a new organization. They did the same thing to Sotomayor when she made false statements about Covid and kids too. Are they trying to cancel her?

>If he was a smaller fish, no one would care.

No one would care about them being shut down, or no one would care what they said? Small people get de-platformed quite often from both political tribes, including shadow bans.

>I don't watch Joe Rogan.

Most people who are criticizing him, calling him racist and all that business don't watch him either I don't think. They just watch curated clips. I watch some of his episodes, some are certainly thought provoking. The general rule of thumb is if a clip cuts off mid-sentence or abruptly, it's probably intentionally misleading.

>I've seen one clip where he talks about myocarditis in children and he seems like he is just making things up.

Is it the one where he was with the Australian journalists where Rogan was saying there is a higher chance of kids getting myocarditis from the vaccine than from Covid? Did you watch the whole thing where the journalist disagreed, then they looked it up and Rogan corrected himself? If not, you watched a specifically curated clip probably designed to push a misinformation narrative.

>They did the same thing to Sotomayor when she made false statements about Covid and kids too. Are they trying to cancel her?

Did they do it for going on a week now? How many anchors covered it? Sotomayor isn't competition for CNN.

If you are interested, I suggest you watch some counter arguments to this whole facade to get a better picture. Right now I think you are just listening to the prosecutor and not the defendant, so to speak. Some interesting things I noticed is when the news would do a segment on a Trump speech and how outlandish it was, then I watched the actual speech, it was pretty obvious the news was being disingenuous. Seems like this happens on all corporate news, not just CNN, MSNBC, etc. It seems like CNN is getting gutted right now, so hopefully it will improve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iccd9KRhXVo

> No one would care about them being shut down, or no one would care what they said? Small people get de-platformed quite often from both political tribes, including shadow bans.

No one would care what they said. There are a lot of smaller fish saying things much worse, and they largely do so with no consequence.

> Is it the one where he was with the Australian journalists where Rogan was saying...

Yes, that one. Rogan never really corrects himself. He starts pushing back on the data source and then they just transition on to something else. I did see that later on Twitter he did seemingly admit to being fact checked. And blames it on it being a long form show where the topics aren't disclosed up front. In those cases why do you submit a thesis, rather than simply stating, "I don't really know the facts here"? That's what reasonable people do all the time. Rather he is counting on you to not know the facts or be able to fact check him in real time. He just steam rolls you.

> Some interesting things I noticed is when the news would do a segment on a Trump speech and how outlandish it was, then I watched the actual speech, it was pretty obvious the news was being disingenuous.

With Trump in particular I felt that the "mainstream" media largely gave him a pass on most of his speeches unless they were nationally televised. Some of his worst comments were stump speeches that never were aired nationally, but could be found on YouTube and other sites. I think he was much worse than most America believes.

>Yes, that one. Rogan never really corrects himself. He starts pushing back on the data source and then they just transition on to something else. I did see that later on Twitter he did seemingly admit to being fact checked. And blames it on it being a long form show where the topics aren't disclosed up front.

Ya that's fair. He does seem surprised when they fact-checked the data during the conversation.

>In those cases why do you submit a thesis, rather than simply stating, "I don't really know the facts here"? That's what reasonable people do all the time. Rather he is counting on you to not know the facts or be able to fact check him in real time. He just steam rolls you.

I don't think that's fair. They fact check real-time constantly. There is a guy in the room who's job it is to fact check real time. They would start a conversation then discuss aspects of it, and the person would look up what they are discussing and show the results. This fact checker was the person who brought up refuting evidence to the myocarditis claim.

His show reminds me of the old Dick Cavett or Phil Donahue type long form shows, except it's 3 hours long. A conversational show like that is different from a show where you have a set agenda with strict talking points you don't deviate from, like a newscast would have.

Also to be fair, he has a lot of people on who are professionals in their relevant fields. One of the guys the media is currently lambasting as a covid "misinformationalist" is an MD that helped create the technology used by the covid vaccine.

>With Trump in particular I felt that the "mainstream" media largely gave him a pass on most of his speeches unless they were nationally televised. Some of his worst comments were stump speeches that never were aired nationally, but could be found on YouTube and other sites. I think he was much worse than most America believes.

It seems to me the news blew things he said out of proportion that they didn't need to. As someone who looked at some of the source material, what the news said he said and what he actually said didn't match up. It definitely hurt their credibility, IMO. Perhaps they ignored the more egregious things you are mentioning in stump speeches, which seems like an odd tactic.

> Where was the discourse on t-cells shut down?

What countries accept a recovered infection on par with a vaccine? That will tell you where the discourse was shut down.

Unfortunately, policy makers communicate to the public with the expectation that they have a seventh grade reading level.

I don't know what you're talking about, I recall learning about T-cell immunity in middle-school biology class like 15 years ago. Just because politics causes you to cloud your judgement and memory does not mean the research and knowledge wasn't already there.

The problem is that to the extent that messaging about immunology was provided by public health authorities to the general public or used to develop policy, it was almost always about antibodies as a correlate of protection, lack of antibodies as evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was novel and not yet endemic (providing justifications for lockdowns/the CARES Act/EUAs and mass vaccinations including children), or about falling antibody titers as a justification for booster shots. There was hardly even any mention of very basic things like Vitamin C, D and Zinc, let alone T cell immunity. T cell studies exist in the literature, of course, but our understanding of T cells and Natural Killer cells seems to have been allowed to contribute very little little to the public health response in many countries in contrast to patented vaccine candidates and antivirals.

Next, we'll start talking about innate immunity. But, maybe it's too early for that for too many people.

I don't get this take but that's because I am not from the US I suppose. Here, politicians and virologists have publically explained immunity in multiple layers.

Antibodies as first line of defense to intercept viruses and keep them from initially docking to cells. Then, at the bottom, there is long-term T-cell immunity which is essential in preventing severe disease. The vaccines train the immune system to recognize and respond quicker to the virus so that it cannot dock to cells and replicate as fast as it could if the immune system had never seen it before. The immune system does not need to catch up first so it gets a running start instead of a cold start if not vaccinated.

Reading this article feels like science experiment on a global scale was run. And that too was a conspiracy theory, once.

> T-cell immunity was considered borderline conspiracy theory until recently.

This surprised me, so I checked my cell biology books. The role of memory T-cells in the adaptive immune response is clearly described in Garland, "Molecular Biology of the Cell", (c) 2002. Not sure in what sense T-cell immunity is a conspiracy theory, unless it's being used as code for something else.

I see more damn arguments on here and EVERYWHERE else that could be mostly avoided (or at least a lot more civil) if people just talked about and agreed what the definition of "Immunity" even means. The problem is that in popular useage, as in not medical, people use it to mean someone is completely and utterly without consequence to whatever thing they are referencing.

Example: The spies were all granted immunity from prosecution.

The problem with this is that the medical definition of Immunity is quite a bit different and this is an important distinction. See example below from Oxford Languages:

"the ability of an organism to resist a particular infection or toxin by the action of specific antibodies or sensitized white blood cells."

If we all just agreed beforehand to actually define what we mean by "Immunity" I swear 75% of these arguments would go very differently.

The CDC literally changed their definition of vaccine after it was pointed out that the COVID vaccines wouldn’t qualify.

Changing the definition that’s been around for decades smells of a con job.

They should have called it a preventative therapeutic like a blood pressure or anti-seizure medication. It fits in that category much better. But if they did that, then it wouldn’t qualify for all the government protections in place for vaccines.

Did you read this article? Based on what I just read, it doesn’t sound like a therapeutic at all.

It gives your body something that allows it to generate an immune response so that it can quickly attack antigens and fight against an infection. Nothing about what the COVID vaccine does is similar to the therapeutics you mention and it functions in the exact same way as any other “traditional” vaccine.

From what I found, the CDC changed the definition from saying something that “generates immunity” to something that “helps produce an immune response”. This is exactly what the parent comment is alluding to. The definition of “immunity” has been vague. Is it sterilization? Because, as the article points out, isn’t really what any vaccines do. They do the same thing as the latest ones. The main difference is that respiratory infections manifest faster than systemic infections. This is covered in the article here.

We need to accept Covid, or it's never going to end.

Because it's never going to end.

There's a nice doctoral dissertation sitting out there for someone to demonstrate that cross-reactive T-cells mostly explain why some people get sick with Covid and others don't. Even better if they can point to a specific virus (most likely spread among children) that elicits that response.

I'm so puzzled by some of the comments here. Is it simply because of how the general public was inadequately educated about how vaccines work? Well, why are you only upset by this now? Because of how much your life has been affected? If not, why not be as vocal about other things that affect the general population much more in the grander scheme of things. e.g. the general public's misunderstanding of simple statistics, or diet, or climate change etc.

I've been vaccinated (double-shot), after I got COVID 1 year ago. I've got Omicron afterwards - a mild cold, but noticeable. I've lost 3 family members to Covid19. My sister still hasn't fully recovered her sense of smell/taste after a year. The hospitals in my country were legitimately overrun for several months (I'm from South Africa). The infection rate was under-reported in some areas due to corruption but the excess deaths are undeniable.

Yes, COVID19 can kill. Yes, there can be some long lasting effects. Yes, some things are over and under-stated, and some governments have under/over-reacted (to the point of being draconian). Yes, many people are asymptomatic and can carry on living as if they were never infected. Yes, some of these asymptomatic people can infect others who don't have the same type of immune response. Yes, vaccines are effective against the variants they were designed for, and less effective against the mutated variants (how is this news?). Yes, even the less effective vaccines help against serious symptoms, death, and the overwhelming of health services. Yes, masks help against Covid and other airborne disease. Yes, washing hands help against bacteria and other some types of viral infection including COVID19.

What am I missing? What is it that people don't understand about the situation? Why are people so upset about this, but not upset about things that are arguably more detrimental to the livelihood of the entire human race?

Just mass hysteria, encouraged by those that feel they can derive by benefit from it, be it increased attention or more political power, anything really. Fairly typical situation actually, maybe even the default state of the human race.

What are the more detrimental things you had in mind?

Because those other things haven't been dealt with via massive overbearing state intrusions.

Climate change is a far far graver threat than coronavirus.

But we're not really doing anything about that. By contrast, it was illegal for people in the UK to visit their friends and family for six months and an enormous propaganda campaign was launched which ensured that even without policing this people were convinced into dismantling society.

That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone.

If we banned fast food it'd be annoying and I'd be pretty pissed off. I don't think we should do it, but it would have a massive impact on obesity rates and add a bunch of quality adjusted life years to the country.

But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating".

I often wonder if people have already forgotten just how hilariously ridiculous 2020 was.

> That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone.

I'm going to be frank - I don't think you care about the bigger stuff that much in comparison. You just care that your life was affected. Just like you don't care that much that some random civilians in another country were killed because of <insert injustice>.

Am I wrong?

EDIT: I'm not saying I'm any different. But I have experienced the effects of COVID19, so to me it's not a "small" thing. I'm still living with the effects every day.

Yes, completely wrong. I'm not sure how you come to the conclusion that I only care because it affected me.

Coronavirus has affected and still does affect me. I know people who have suffered and died from it.

No, I said you don't care that much about bigger things in comparison. Think about it - you cared enough about this "small thing" to make a throwaway account. When last did you do that about anything else?

In any case, I'm not here to preach. I would just like people to have some honesty and perspective in their opinions and arguments.

You're willing to risk the lives of the elderly and people with people with a less-effective immune response if you think the lives of the general population would be "better off"? Just say so. If people feel uncomfortable doing this realise that part of that discomfort is called "cognitive dissonance" (and realise that decision-makers have to do the same thing). Have a serious conversation with yourself before you decide that you need to create anonymous accounts on the internet to air your views.

You've created a strawman of my position.

I don't believe in risking the lives of the elderly and those with a less effective immune response, I have friends and family members in those positions.

What is your point then?

The dichotomy being presented (e.g. "state intrusion" vs "vulnerable people die") is not a genuine representation of the choice we have/have had.

There are far more variables involved than that. The most obvious counterpoint is that after about March 2020 (e.g. zero-covid off the table) there is no realistic situation in which 80 year olds can just go to the pub and not be at high risk.

I think he's upset that we turned civilization upside down for a virus, which in the grand scheme of things is a moderate problem, but not for air pollution or climate change, which are cataclysmic problems.

Yeah, but it's worse than that.

Most of the world's response to coronavirus, in my view, was and is about as sane as if we decided to like, live underground to combat climate change.

Even if it works (why would it) you've lost, because now you live underground.

In 2020 we didn't know exactly what things would look like if we didn't do lockdowns. The situation looked dire, and we reacted the way we did to give ourselves time to protect people while we assessed the situation, and made proper protections available.

The lockdowns weren't permanent (or even that long, to be honest). The protective measures we have in place aren't very stringent (in most of the world). If we hadn't done what we had done, the loss of life would have been considerably worse, and even with the choices we made, it was still quite bad.

I understand that you're unhappy with having a couple years of your life inconvenienced, but you're very much not showing empathy with those who've lost considerably more than you, and aren't really putting much consideration into how much more could have been lost without your inconvenience.

I'm not unhappy about my own personal situation, I'm unhappy because I think that the response was net negative overall.

The relevant variable is not my or your own personal situation but the sum total of all of the experiences of the people in the country.

I disagree that not supporting restrictions is not showing empathy with those who have lost loved ones from coronavirus. I think that this is a false dichotomy.

> You're willing to risk the lives of the elderly and people with people with a less-effective immune response if you think the lives of the general population would be "better off"

And you are willing to risk lives of people living near poverty line in poor countries, because stopping the economy and printing money in 2020 increased the number of people in extreme poverty and caused many more of them to die than would die otherwise.

To that point:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56425115

The QALY tallies are not pretty.

How is it that you know exactly what the thinks?

Your argument is exactly equivalent to me telling you that you don’t really care that much about the rights of the individual.

It’s easy to come to that conclusion from what you wrote.

> But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating".

It sounded like you weren’t thinking how your behavior could result in spreading the virus to people who are more vulnerable.

I'm (unfortunately!) not 20. I'm describing the sum total of all interactions, not just my own personal preference.

I don't believe that "spreading the virus to people who are more vulnerable" is a meaningful concept for coronavirus. If you're immunocompromised (as, for example, my uncle is) then the outside world is now effectively a poison cloud and remains so regardless of what other people do in all realistic cases.

It's theoretically possible of course that if everyone else isolated as well the virus could die out, but post-April 2020 this became a 'frictionless plane' style scenario that couldn't actually exist in the real world.

I come to that conclusion as well. Literally millions of people died of this thing you called ‘minor.’ But those deaths don’t register because they happened out of view, in an overwhelmed hospital or out in the street or at home when capacity ran out. You don’t think about them because you didn’t see them. All you can see is the inconvenience to yourself.

Let’s flip this conversation on its head. why is it that people are surprised that a failure to make a basic decision to protect both oneself and others from a potentially lethal illness is met with sharp criticism and scorn, as it should be?

You're creating a strawman by claiming that people who do not believe in coronavirus restrictions are only interested in the inconvenience to themselves.

It all registers. I could equally say that you're disregarding the other ~99.9% of people whose lives have been affected by lockdowns. I don't think that's true though - I expect that you think their sacrifice was minor in comparison. Is that right?

We don't disagree that people should do basic things to prevent illness - what we disagree on is what a "basic thing" is.

I got rid of my social accounts a while back, including the one I had here. My enjoyment from using this site has risen considerably since doing so. I am someone different than who you are talking with, but I felt compelled to make a single-use account to say this:

This line of commentary, in the context of conversations like these, reminded (really, triggered) a strong feeling of conviction that it was a wise decision to leave. For me personally, receiving comments of this nature from strangers on the Internet just began to feel wrong. It epitomized the general noise of the pandemic that has made it all that much worse. Insinuations and "gotcha's" abound!

Anyways, it just didn't feel emotionally healthy over the long term to regularly subject myself to these modes of discourse.

For what it's worth, in person these types of conversations seem more palatable; perhaps it has something to do with higher bandwidth and trust between friends conversing in person?

Now then, back to lurking. Thanks for listening. :)

I can relate with what you wrote. I felt ilitirit tyring to be mean telling throwaway22032 who they are and what thier motives are without knowing them, probably to make themselves feel superior. It's a very junior high kind of show. And it's always usually wrong to ascribe motivations to someone you don't know.

So the above makes it really easy for me to ignore and discount ilitirit. But still it can hurt and illitirit knows that. That's the game and often I don't want to play either.

First throwaway, not other throwaway that you're responding to.

Personal attacks don't really hurt me. "Someone is wrong on the Internet" hurts me more. That's probably a character flaw I should work on. :)

I'm glad to hear that throwaway22032. throwaway194523 seemed to have more of a problem with it, which I sometimes share but I'm overcoming it. Yes, I have your character flaw too, but there's only so much time in the day!

> But it'd really not be that big a deal compared to stuff like saying "healthy 20 year olds in their prime at near zero risk from this virus are now legally forbidden from dating".

This idea that young people are at near zero risk is not true. Pro athletes in their prime have gotten covid and suffered terrible side effects. Jayson Tatum is 23 and needed an inhaler after getting covid because he couldn't keep his wind. Tom Sweeney got myocarditis and had to end his football season early. Several young MMA fighters and pro wrestlers have nearly died. These are all people in their fitness prime.

Near zero is not zero, I agree.

More young people die or are horribly injured in the years of "normal" living than would have died or suffered long term consequences from covid. Indeed the typical death spike in young people from normal risk taking was essentially removed by keeping them locked away.

Covid can and does have consequences for everyone. Look at the charts for actual rates and tell me with a straight face any healthy 20 year old needed to have their freedoms removed for that level of risk.

Given that we all live together and can be carriers and spreaders even if we are not ourselves individually impacted, it should be acceptable that regardless of age a person/family stay isolated or take measures to distance themselves and reduce the chances of inhaling or exhaling a virus. Jointly taking such measures for the greater good - ending the spread of a virus - is not a "taking away of freedom".

> Jointly taking such measures for the greater good - ending the spread of a virus - is not a "taking away of freedom".

It absolutely is taking away freedom. It is also taking away opportunity, damaging mental health, and stunting progression.

The trade off being made is that young people suffered so the old would die slightly later. I was fine, I had it easy, I am not young. The pretence that we are all doing this for the "greater good" is wild. The Quality Adjusted Life Year outcome from most lockdowns was negative imo. It is just coincidence that the active voting population was the segment of society being prioritised eh?

Ah, I should have pointed out that I’m neither a US citizen nor a current resident. In many other parts of the world, we tend to have a different view of collaboration.

I am also not from the US, my views are not merely a representation of a weird pocket of the world you can just dismiss with a smug self satisfaction...

Well, in many parts of the world, we have followed safe distancing and other protocols without complaints about freedoms being taken away.

> That's why I'm upset, anyway, because my life was turned completely upside down for something that's actually quite minor in the grand scheme of things, whilst we're leaving the big stuff alone.

How is Covid-19 minor?

"In the grand scheme of things" contains things like 3C above pre-industrial if we keep burning shit.

I wouldn’t call losing close to 1% of the population (or more if fully unchecked and without health care capacity) minor. That’s pretty damn major.

Multiple things can be bad all at the same time and at different scales without making one of them minor.

So far we've lost about 0.3% of the US population. That's a major public health crisis but nowhere near 1%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Nice link. I appreciate that page, actually. Hadn't seen it.

However, this is with all of the interventions, plus vaccines in. It's with the curve flattened as much as all of the interventions allowed.

What you don't have is the counterfactual of what would have happened with no intervention of a highly contagious air-borne virus, and a matching health care collapse. In the beginning we were closer to 1% and higher in some places. This is US stats, where people have access to higher quality healthcare than much of the world (and vaccines), plus mixed interventions (since local/state dictated much of that).

We were never higher than a 1% fatality rate in any place. The high rates that some people estimated early in the pandemic were due to garbage data from very limited testing of asymptomatic cases. The CDC did a more thorough analysis and estimated a 0.6% infection fatality rate back when no one was vaccinated.

Wasn’t that before Delta and Onicron?

Also before vaccination and prior infection. Either or both of those mean that the risk involved with catching Delta or Omicron is generally far lower than it would have been had they just "appeared" in March 2020.

If it were 1% (it's 0.3% in the UK and US) then it's about a normal year, again.

So over two years we go from losing 2% of the population to losing 3%. Assuming you're talking excess deaths.

Yeah, it's pretty bad.

I don't think it's "make it illegal to visit your mum, ban all social events, close the schools, bars, pubs, stop flights, wear things on your face, stop going to work normally, ..." bad.

But that's just a value judgement thing. Without those things there is no life to save. YMMV.

Here in my region of Spain overall deaths were lower than in a normal year. Media attention is so skewed towards covid it's almost impossible to even think of anything else. Heck, even googling 'list of cases of deaths globally' directly redirects to covid-related hits. On the first two pages there isn't anything that's not covid. I think this has to stop.

Please tell me the way in which a virus that swept the globe and killed nearly 6 million people (and those are just the deaths we counted) in 2 years is ‘minor in the scheme of things.’

<0.1% of the population in 2 years is quite minor in the context of the response in my view.

It justifies things like washing your hands and getting vaccinated.

It doesn't justify lockdowns and things like making it illegal for family members to visit each other. That's a net loss on all of society.

So what's the line?? Is it 10 million? 1% of the human population? If so, why should it be 1% and not 0.1%? Because it seems more significant?

Depends on the situation.

If we're faced with a situation in which we can collectively give up 1% of our lives to save 5%, I'd say that's worth mandating.

1% for 2%, I'd grit my teeth and say we need pretty solid data on that 2%.

1% for 1%, nah.

I don't think coronavirus was even close to that, if you just look at the full lockdown and the reduced ones (e.in the UK and ignore all of the associated mitigations, that was ~1% of our collective lifespan given up. Did it save 1% of people?

I don't think it was even close. And that's not even taking into account opportunity cost. Most of the 'savings' here comes from the fact that by locking down you're also barricading the vulnerable away.

On the outset I think the ability for it to spread and cause general mayhem in the population was good enough reason to shut things down. The main cause for concern was overwhelming emergency systems. We need to remember that death is only one statistic. You would still visit the hospital as an alive, infected individual and put a strain on that system even when you fully recover and go home.

Or to put it another way, even if the virus was not deadly at all, but it could take people out for a few weeks at a time, that would be reason enough to impose mask mandates, get a vaccine rolled out, tell people to work from home for awhile. Especially if people needed hospital services.

One of those things is not like the others.

Offering people a vaccine is an obvious win. The only way in which it could not be is if the virus were so mild that the R&D and distribution cost weren't worth it. That's obviously not the case for coronavirus.

The other things are just authoritarian desires that you're not able to even quantify.

The fact that you'd delete my career and social bonds for the sake of a theoretical virus that might just put people in bed for a while means this discussion is over, I don't engage with terrorists, good luck.

Overreaction there for sure

This is the main issue I have had with the response to the pandemic. Covid is not the first time in modern history we have had a contagious virus that kills people regularly (see: flu). So pre-Covid, everyone was gambling that their non-social distancing behaviors would kill someone through spreading a contagious disease. The risk was very small but clearly non-zero, and members of the public clearly decided en masse that going about their normal lives was more valuable than that increased risk of killing someone with the flu.

Now comes covid and people who happily accepted the risk of flu exposure/spread pretend that value judgement has never been made before and it is gauche to even talk about it. At some point it is a reasonable possibility that the threat of covid in terms of death and disease will be equal to or less than the threat of flu. It's difficult to predict exactly what that number is but it is at least theoretically quantifiable number. What's the point of maintaining restrictions at that point when the known value system of the public accepts that level of risk?

That number should be talked about, and people should stop pretending that weighting convenience and other factors against numbers of deaths is a sociopathic thing to do. Everyone has been doing it long before covid.

It goes beyond that.

We are constantly gambling all of the time that we might have some external effect on the world, it's the human condition.

Generally we distinguish between overtly dangerous behaviours that could have easily been mitigated (e.g. drinking ten pints and going out for a drive), and behaviours that happen to be kind of a little bit dangerous but aren't explicitly malicious (e.g. just driving under normal circumstances).

The difference here with coronavirus is that for whatever reason, some people decided to apply a completely unreasonable standard of assuming that anything anyone did ever was a malicious act, which is completely incompatible with civilization. If we didn't have all of the exceptions for the proles (sorry, "essential workers"), society would have completely fallen apart.

The arbitrary exceptions are pretty nice. In an industry I am aware of, people absolutely have to be onsite and also need to eat lunch. When lunch is being eaten in the cafeteria, you got a bunch of maskless people in the same room spread out at least six feet. It's been long established that the virus, particularly the omicron variant, easily spreads at distance.

But those six feet, when blessed by corporate, make all the difference.

ETA

I do take the virus seriously, am vaxxed, and actually do a good job of social distancing, unlike many of my peers who preach the seriousness of the disease and yet engage in behaviors that are high risk in terms of transmission. Level of concern about the virus and belief in public health authority narrative are orthogonal dimensions.

If you're sitting down you can't get coronavirus though. It only travels above 4ft.

Unless you're on a plane. Something to do with the low ceilings I guess.

Personally I'm warming up to where we assume COVID is endemic and we resume most of our older tendencies. Face masks probably become more normal on public transit. But I do agree there's a number where the virus remains but we're comfortable with it.

The whole idea originally was that the virus could be more or less deadly than we knew and would lock up hospital services. Even with this less deadly variant, the hospital bed shortage is a reality for many communities, which has downstream effects.

Re: prepping for known unknowns.

That valuation framework has also existed historically in terms of the periodic low-key freakouts about bird flu, swine flu, etc. Also the periodic filling of hospitals during flu season (though, it has been stated here and elsewhere that hospitals filling up is frequently just a feature of how the healthcare system is run).

I think there would be a lot more useful debate if 1) people admitted that there is nothing truly unique in kind about the current situation (just degree) and 2) the "return to normal number," however that number is defined, is a real thing. The folks more concerned about the virus could advocate for more stringent constraints on reopening and vice versa. But people would at least be using a common framework that's grounded in the reality that people are willing to live with a certain amount of risk without doing much about it.

I think we'd have a lot more rationality in politics if we didn't have this "fear" that basically some people just want to see the world change forever.

I'm forced to push harder than I actually want to in order to counteract the contingent of oddball "but 2019 was bad, I had to go outside, never go back pls" people.

no idea what you're even talking about anymore

I have heard this argument so many times now. It’s so easy for someone to say stuff like this in hindsight.

But on day zero, no one knew what this “flu” really was and what it was capable of. What we knew at the time was the infection rate was accelerating globally.

You didn’t have any evidence to weight until now. The response that we took was right given limited information.

Not downplaying covid, but diarrhea kills 10M+ people globally. I also find turning a blind eye to other important topics and media laser-focus on covid a bit upsetting. But also understanding how media is profiting from it. Further on that, big pharma lobby is huge on boosters for young people. There is very little benefits for boosters for under 40's. You are talking a 0.1% decrease of hospitalization (from 0.2%). Countries like Spain didn't even roll them out until very recently for this reason (although last October they said they will not roll it out at all for under 30s).

I figure it's a loss aversion thing.

Coronavirus is new and therefore feels like a loss we can revert, whereas solving diarrhea or other issues would feel like a gain.

It's irrational but then, we be meat bags innit.

>Yes, even the less effective vaccines help against serious symptoms, death, and the overwhelming of health services

This is where you overstep. Israel, Portugal and Australia all with 90%+ vaccination rates have their health care systems collapse, this simple fact is hidden by the fact that all 'optional' procedures, like say hip surgery, have been postponed for two years (and getting longer every day).

I’d suggest you’ve also overstepped re “health care systems have collapsed”, especially as it pertains to the pandemic.

Health care systems run close to capacity with wait times under even normal conditions. Western Australia has had almost negligible covid-related illness and yet it’s healthcare system is still in a precarious state re load. Victoria only announced a code brown and cancelling/rescheduling of elective surgeries a month ago. Meanwhile over the larger two year time horizon our system has apparently collapsed I’ve had a shoulder reconstruction and my wife has two separate surgeries on each of her hands.

Our healthcare system is just a mess with unfortunate incentives around what is given priority. The pandemic is just a convenient cover for what is an extended period of under investment and a lack of resources. The same stories about delays in elective surgeries and people waiting years for hip replacements have themselves been central to the narrative even before the pandemic.

> Health care systems run close to capacity with wait times under even normal conditions.

You make that sound like a good idea. Shouldn't there be a buffer in the first place? How can a healthcare system cope with other cases of sudden influx of patients when there was no way to vaccinate against that, such as natural disasters?

US has 2.6 doctors per 1,000 people. Cuba has almost 6 doctors per 1,000 people (more than almost any 1st world country).

These doctors are completely strapped for advanced medical equipment, but they have sufficient resources for preventative care. If Cuba's doctors saw 12 patients per day, they would see every person in the country every 2 weeks.

This (plus reducing obesity) goes a long way toward solving the problem. Cuba has problems where advanced treatment is needed, but succeeds at catching disease early and encouraging people to solve lifestyle problems before they cause damage.

The US needs to DOUBLE its medical doctor graduation rates just to keep up with countries like Austria.

How does this happen? In the 50's, your doctor spent 1-2 years doing prerequisites then 4 years in medical school and 1 year of internship before setting up a general practice. Today, they need 4-5 years for their BS degree then 4 years of med school, then 1 year of internship, then 3 more years of family medicine residency.

It takes 13 years just to be able to diagnose the sniffles or send you on to a specialist. Even a nurse practitioner takes 4-5 years for their BSN then another 3-4 years for their MSN which is still longer than the doctors people saw in times past. Despite this, patient outcome is virtually unchanged.

This credential inflation costs valuable years that could be spent treating patients and accrues debt that is then passed along to patients as higher costs. Because insurance companies profit on a percentage of income, the magnify those costs even more.

What happens if you change this back to how it was?

Loads of doctors get mad because all their schooling becomes pointless. When supply doubles, their wages go down too. What do you do with all the nurse practitioners who have more education and experience than the doctors?

The rest of the country would benefit, but the people most involved have more to lose and a much stronger reason to push for the status quo (not to mention much more money to spend in lobbying).

Israel does not have anywhere close to 90%+ vaccination rate. They have a large subpopulation of refuseniks.

If by that you mean that 24% of their population is under 12 and then redefined vaccination rate to include those who can't be vaccinated.

Otherwise you are spreading misinformation. I'll hold my breath for someone to flag out right lies on here.

No, I mean that even in the above 60 cohort, Israel is not above 90% vaccinated. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-omicron-in-isra...

Just over 58% of those eligible to be vaccinated in Israel are fully vaccinated by the Israeli definition, and 67% of those eligible to be vaccinated have received at least two doses. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/once-a-world-leader-isra...

> I'll hold my breath for someone to flag out right lies on here.

Feel free to flag your own comment if that's what you really want.

>Just over 58% of those eligible to be vaccinated in Israel are fully vaccinated by the Israeli definition, and 67% of those eligible to be vaccinated have received at least two doses. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/once-a-world-leader-isra...

Which was changed to mean double boosted two weeks ago.

The meaning of "two doses" hasn't changed.

Israel is only about 60% fully vaccinated.

This is misinformation.

Of the population that's eligible for vaccination 95% have had two shots.

no, it's a fact, and what you said is misleading. 2 shots is not considered fully vaccinated anymore, especially with a country who had the booster before anyone.

That's hardly a contradiction. The vaccine may help prevent overwhelming health services (prolong the time until collapse, decrease the overall intensity of the collapse) but not be successful at it. Whether any given health care system collapses depends on the quality of the system itself, your definition of collapse, the vaccination rate, the makeup of the population, non pharmaceutical interventions in place, the season, and so on and and so on.

GP never said vaccines prevent the collapse, they said they help, i.e. reduce deaths and the pressure on the health care system. Unfortunately they can't reduce it enough to prevent an overload.

Yes, elective (i.e. 'optional') procedures have been postponed all around the world. Due to COVID putting an extra burden on the health care system. That's what you can decrease with vaccines... And if you want to figure out (i.e. measure) if vaccines help with this, or work in general, then it's not enough to look at just a binary endpoint: "did it collapse or not". But we have very detailed and very good quality data. We do know how much vaccines reduce the hospitalization rates. There's no need and no point arguing against it. Especially not in superficial comments. (Of course, everybody is welcome to publish their own data analysis if they think they can disprove what has been published before, but whoever doesn't do the said analysis should just stick with what has been published and listen to those who actually read those publications.)

> Yes, washing hands help against bacteria and other some types of viral infection including COVID19.

This is pure conjecture, at least when you try to apply it to covid. There is no evidence that has linked hand-washing to a lesser incidence of sars-cov-2 infection. There isn't even a single case definitvely linked to a fomite even 2 years later, afaik. From day one, this was a respiratory disease that spreads through respiratory droplets which travel through the air.

In the context of covid, hand washing is just a ritual that lowers your anxiety and gives you a sense of control over the randomness of the world, much like rain dances or haruspicy were for ancient people.

> From day one, this was a respiratory disease that spreads through respiratory droplets which travel through the air.

SARS is airborne, not just droplet-borne. https://www.epa.gov/coronavirus/indoor-air-and-coronavirus-c...

Are you really puzzled why acute changes to people's lives get attention and response, in some cases more than arguably deeper problems that they've lived with for much longer and are harder to notice the impact of?

I see this kind of alleged puzzlement a lot here and on the internet in general. I'm not puzzled by it though, I think it's usually insincere and simply used as a cheap rhetorical device to dismiss people's feelings and reactions without actually making an argument.

For the very few people who genuinely don't understand: this is part of the human condition. People aren't "rational" according to a text book. People's happiness and feelings depend hugely on contrasting situations. Whether it is your situation now compared to your situation before, or your situation compared to your neighbor's situation. In many cases this has a bigger impact than the "absolute" situation. And the misunderstanding or disregarding of other people's feelings does not invalidate them.

I agree with this.

I think we also need to examine the notion of what is "rational".

Even if we were truly rational beings (in the sense of being something like utilitarian happiness maximisers with an omniscient view and amazing central planning), we have value functions that don't solely revolve around "be alive and make more life".

My grandmother's response to coronavirus was to continue and crack on with her life as usual. Some of her friends did the same and died. Was this irrational? Her reasoning: we weren't put on this earth to sit indoors staring at the TV.

She's still out there rolling the dice every day, it's not like this is a one-and-done. What is the value of a few months of freedom to an 80-year-old?

If you are 80 years old and vaccinated against COVID, there are a lot of other things that are more likely to kill you. So she should be out living her life.

At the outset of the pandemic it sounds like irrational behavior, knowing what I did at the time. After vaccination though and assuming she's wearing a mask in crowded areas its a pretty calculated risk and one she should be comfortable with.

Yeah, this is a kind of trolling/flamebaiting behavior. Even if we assume good faith, ilitirit is at best bragging that they are so galaxy-brained that they can't understand why everyone isn't making a bigger deal about Real Issues. It's not cute and it's not interesting.

It's more than that I think. It's boasting about selfishness and a lack of empathy in a way.

I also have a "side" in the general covid individualism vs collectivism debate, but I can absolutely see the issues people on the other side have. Even the ones I don't think are all that reasonable or valid, I can empathize with how others feel and understand how they could feel that way without being "bad people".

Unfortunately I see a lot of this selfish rhetoric from both sides but particularly from the collectivist side, the ones who have said we're all in this together and have asked others to make sacrifices, to summarily dismiss the concerns of others, remain totally closed to any of their opinions or concerns, and even outright making fun of them and bullying them ("poor baby"). It's really quite an astounding about face and I can't quite fathom the blatant hypocrisy and hatefulness of it.

I'd offer that many in the more collectivist mindset were shocked by the response to: incoming scientific data and recommendations, vaccinations, and vilification of certain leaders in science. So you have an escalation of rhetoric to balance that, to the point where it starts to drown out real, debatable concerns from the other side.

I know there's a bit of a chicken/egg problem here in who to point fingers at on who started what rhetoric, but I do feel strongly that the individualist response that came out of the gate was very naive and often continues to be. If people are still bringing up the initial guidance on mask wearing from early 2020, it tells me they had zero empathy or understanding of what the situation was at the time.

Sure, and the other mindset was shocked by the response to the incoming scientific data as well. Can you not empathize with that or understand it? You don't have to agree with it, but if you believe they must be "bad people" or have zero empathy to hold those views, then it may not be them who have the empathy deficiency.

The policies and government responses to the pandemic is not "science". They say it's science or evidence based, which is fine it takes that into account. But the actual policies and tradeoffs themselves are not. You could say that some restrictions and medical coercion placed on people would prevent 10,000 deaths. But even if that was true, the tradeoff is not "science". Somebody else could call you a hateful grandma killing science denier for your preference and say they would rather forcefully isolate every person and prevent all movement or travel and save 20,000 because health systems are still collapsing under your scheme.

> I see this kind of alleged puzzlement a lot here and on the internet in general.

Same. Easiest way to fish for upvotes.

I'm not doubting this statement, but just am curious about the physiological machinations of it, how does a vaccine (especially one designed for a different mutation) help prevent the severe symptoms of the disease? Like whats going on in the body to make that happen?

Vaccine strengthens your immune response.

You get infected.

Your body is better able to slow the rapid multiplication of the virus in your body.

You have less virus fucking up your insides and thus are less sick.

Quick answer is the last 3 paragraphs.

When your body responds to a virus, it creates many kinds of antibodies against its many constituent components. This is why new CDC studies show that natural immunity is far better than the vaccine which creates ONE antibody against one part of the virus (the spike protein).

A virus can mutate in a lot of ways, but usually not at the same time. If your body has 50 different antibodies against different parts of Delta, when Omicron comes along with a bunch of changes, you'll get sick while your body develops additional antibodies, but your body will still keep the disease from multiplying too quickly with the antibodies that still work (or partially work).

The vaccines force the creation of a specific spike protein either through messenger RNA (pfizer/moderna) or through infection with a different virus (Johnson & Johnson -- for the record, the only two other vaccines like this were emergency vaccines approved for ebola in 2016 and 2019) or a more recent one that delivers attenuated virus (but was denied by the FDA because they "had enough vaccines").

Your body sees a massive jump in these spike proteins and marshals a big immune response that floods your system with antibodies against this protein (myocarditis and some other symptoms are believed to be caused by these antibodies attacking your body's very similar ACE2 receptors). When you catch the disease with all these antibodies flooding your system, they can slow the disease down while your body creates the rest of the antibodies to finish the disease off.

Delta had a moderately different spike protein, but the antibodies against the original spike still seem to work at reduced effectiveness which is why so many vaccinated people caught delta. Omicron has an even more different protein that almost completely evades the antibodies which is why everyone is catching it.

So why does the vaccine reduce death?

I'll say that "with covid" and "from covid" are a real thing (even the great Dr. Fauci has said this on national TV). Not being boosted is also sufficient to get you on the unvaxxed list (among other things). Politics and political pressure on places like the CDC further muddy the waters.

That aside, exponential growth is important here. If you are unvaccinated (and aren't one of the 10-15% of people who somehow already have partial immunity), the virus enters your body and begins multiplying. If you have 1,000 viruses in the droplet, they invade cells and become (for example), 10,000 and then 100,000 and then 1M within just three doublings.

Now, let's say that the antibodies are just 20% effective. Only 800 viruses can invade creating 8,000 copies. Of those, only 6,400 survive creating 64,000 viruses. On our third round, only 51,200 are left creating 512,000 viruses.

After 3 rounds, the vaccinated person has HALF the viruses in their system. They'll still have symptoms, but they will be nowhere as severe. This gives your body a lot more time to create the rest of the necessary antibodies and fight off the disease and prevent severe reactions or death.

For some reason this has become a political issue rather than a health issue. At the moment Americans are living in an extremely toxic environment where everything is either right or left. Not right or wrong.

> What am I missing? What is it that people don't understand about the situation? Why are people so upset about this, but not upset about things that are arguably more detrimental to the livelihood of the entire human race?

Even though the facts are mostly true and "known", most people are not fully aware of them. As of today, people are still trying to push mandates (and passports), even though it is clear that vaccines will not end the pandemic. The media and politicians have done A LOT to ideologize the vaccines, instead of decribing them as what they are: a tool for mitigating personal risk. The virus itself never had any ideology at all.

Inaccurate preconceptions stick in people's minds and it will take a while until public opinion will reasonably will be in line with science again. They need to peel off all that ideology first.

Just wait until the general public finds out about the evolutionary/ selective pressures caused by a severity-reducing but non-sterilizing vaccine.

The general public won't "trust the science" ever again.

> The general public won't "trust the science" ever again.

What does "trust the science" even mean? For many people it seems to mean, trusting what one selected scientist says. For others what the news have to say about science and for others it means analyzing the data themselves.

I think that science generally benefits from critical thinking. Suppressing critical thinking seemed to be a recurring scheme of this pandemic.

If critical thinking here is a euphemism for loudly objecting to published scientific findings, which I suspect it is, then I disagree.

What about lougly objecting to a biased interpretation of published scientific findings? Of course that requires critical thinking.

What about when the CDC publishes an article with a title like this? https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

Critical thinking would mean asking how could a vaccine that simulates part of the virus provide better immunity than recovering from the real thing?

Turns out, it doesn't. But the latest release doesn't have a catchy sound bite for a title. The results are buried in the summary: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...

The same goes with masks back in 2020. While officials were announcing that masks may actually be detrimental for the average person, hospitals were screaming for more PPE. Clearly, something wasn't adding up. As it turns out, that was a lie.

I'm vaccinated, I was a big supporter of lockdowns at the beginning of all of this, but "trust the science" is, ironically, becoming its own religion to some people and I find it repulsive. Especially when it has been shown time and again that science can be wrong and that scientists have no problems with telling noble lies.

Trusting the science just means trusting the government's and Big Pharma's accepted interpretation.

So… there was hope vaccines could stop the pandemic, but they only help a lot to reduce number of hospitalizations and deaths, so now you’re anti vaccines. And people won’t trust science ever again?

I’m sorry but that doesn’t make any sense. All I’m hearing is some people trying to argue their ways into being irresponsible and selfish. Should governments let hospitals get overrun without even trying to take any measures? Ok we get it, your freedom is more important than other people’s health. But freedom isn’t about doing whatever you want. If your "freedom" threatens the lives of other people, I’d say it’s egoistic behaviors disguised as freedom.

> If your "freedom" threatens the lives of other people, I’d say it’s egoistic behaviors disguised as freedom.

This has been debunked a long time ago. As I said: SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are a tool for mitigating personal risk, but not against the spread of the virus in the society. This is clearly shown by the Covid-rates in tripple-vaccinated people. Not taking the vaccine isn't any more egoistic than smoking, being obese, driving a motorbike, eating unhealthy, not supplementing vitamin D or anything else that increases your risk of illness. Not taking the vaccine also does not automatically translate into becoming hospitalized with severe Covid. A healhy young person with a functioning immune system has a very low risk of getting hospitalized because of Covid.

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine mandates are intellectually and morally dead. This is also evidenced by my own and my wife's case: Two doses of pfizer, then infected by a person who was tripple-vaccinated and we both had symptomatic Covid that wasn't mild by any means.

"Not taking the vaccine isn't any more egoistic than smoking, being obese, driving a motorbike, eating unhealthy, not supplementing vitamin D or anything else that increases your risk of illness"

I'm sorry but once again, hospitals aren't currently overrun by illnesses due to smokers, obese, etc. They are overrun by people with severe Covid cases, with significantly more unvaccinated people than vaccinated people.

"Not taking the vaccine also does not automatically translate into becoming hospitalized with severe Covid" Of course, it just tends to reduce the severity of covid cases. Which is the point, because, you remember, it reduces hospitalizations so that health services can remain functional?

"This is also evidenced by my own and my wife's case: Two doses of pfizer, then infected by a person who was tripple-vaccinated and we both had symptomatic Covid that wasn't mild by any means." Why aren't you considering the possibility that your not-mild covid could have been worse if you weren't vaccinated? I don't see your case as an evidence for anything, really. [Edit: Apart from the fact that covid vaccines don't make one immune, especially with variants. The point was that they still help significantly with case severity]

78% of people dying from COVID have at least 4 pre-existing conditions and one of those is almost always obesity.

The people supposedly being blocked by COVID patients are largely people who have pre-existing conditions from smoking, eating unhealthily, not exercising, being obese, taking stupid risks, etc

At best you have one stupid group blocking another stupid group.

Passing new laws to forbid smoking, eating too much, not doing enough exercised, etc. would be so much more restrictive, compared to taking few vaccine shots and wearing a mask in some places. Vaccines help reducing hospitalizations for all these groups at once, right?

So a vaccinated, fat, smoking and drinking motorcyclist does more for the health sector than a slim yoga practitioner and health food enthusiast who decides against vaccination? What could go wrong?

So... I don't understand if you think there are too much restrictions due to covid, or not enough?

what are you suggesting? Restrict eating, smoking, drinking, motorcycling, force people to exercise?

Or are you suggesting that since we can't restrict all these things, we should restrict nothing?

I still fail to see how 2 vaccine shots a year compares to restricting what you're allowed to eat, smoke, drink, drive, and force exercise.

Depends. If you want a social-credit-score-like system like in China, then more restrictions are great, because obviously once you implement restrictions, you also need to document them and make sure that everyone complies. If such a dystopia does not sound good, keep them to an absolute minimum.

If a person chooses not to be vaccinated, they have a tiny chance to go to the hospital (polls show that almost HALF of democrats believe 50% of covid patients are hospitalized when it's actually 1-5%). If a person is fat, there's a 100% guarantee that it will land them at the doctor for any number of complications.

Furthermore, once COVID is dealt with, that person isn't going back to the hospital while the fat person will be going back over and over again. The tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars this costs are all foisted onto healthy people. Why should healthy people who worked hard to keep healthy be forced to pay for unhealthy people who lived a life of gluttony and sloth?

Perhaps more directly to the point, all the food driving fatness could be going to kids dying of malnutrition in other parts of the world. I don't know about you, but I'd rather spend those hundreds of thousands of dollars to send that food overseas to keep kids from starving rather than paying for someone's eating addiction.

I don't know how to solve obesity, I'm not trying to. But back to the current situation, vaccines are a practical way to help keeping health services functional. It doesn't solve other health issues, and is much less restrictive that going after smoking, eating, alcohol, under-exercised people, etc.

I'm not sure what are you suggesting. Applying all those restrictions? People are already barely accepting current restrictions. Or do you mean since we can't have all those restrictions, we must have none?

Attempts to solve obesity are met with the same objections around freedom of choice. And honestly any attempt to do anything about it would be so much more complicated than saying "get this shot", which is already fairly complicated to begin with.

> I'm sorry but once again, hospitals aren't currently overrun by illnesses due to smokers, obese, etc. They are overrun by people with severe Covid cases, with significantly more unvaccinated people than vaccinated people.

In my country, Germany, the hospitals are not overrun because of Covid. The Covid share of patients at the top of the most deadly wave was 5%. What actually happens in the health care sector is massive mismanagement. Not a good reason to mandate vaccines, I think. Instead invest in the healthcare sector and pay the workers appropriately.

> Why aren't you considering the possibility that your not-mild covid could have been worse if you weren't vaccinated?

Why aren't you considering that I did consider that and came to the conclusion that there is no way in the world to tell if that is true. Omicron was said to be generally milder after all.

What did intensely lower the severity of the disease without the slightest doubt from my side was a massive vitamin and minerals booster package that we started a few days in. I know, n=2, so nobody will believe me, but for those who are interested and are in a similar situation:

Vit B(complex), C, D, K2, magnesium, zink, potassium, also melatonine for sleeping and R-alpha-lipoic acid and Q10 against brain fog and neurologic symptoms, as well as probiotics for general vitality and against the Omicron constipation.

"What did intensely lower the severity of the disease without the slightest doubt from my side". Hmmm I don't see how you can be so sure that something you took is the cause for getting better. You can get better for a lot of reasons, one being your immune system winning the battle on its own. It's a common misconception that getting better after taking some medicine proves it works. To prove a medicine works, we have to go through those double-blind clinical trials.

Anyway, you're suggesting that instead of vaccines, omicron could be dealt with with Vit B(complex), C, D, K2, magnesium, zink, potassium, melatonine, R-alpha-lipoic acid, Q10, and probiotics. That sounds a lot of things compared to 1 or 2 vaccine shots per years. So you say you prefer a combination of lots of medicines with potential side effects, plus it's hard to know how they could interfere. Sounds weird if your reason for not wanting vaccine is the side effects, as there is a lot of data for the vaccine thanks to clinical trials, as opposed to custom combinations of vitamines, minerals, probiotics, and Q10? what's that?

Sounds like you see anything coming "from the elites" as dangerous and dishonest, whereas anything coming from "the people", the "common sense" is reliable and safe. I guess these discussions are deeply about "trusting official institutions" vs "trusting random people claims". There's no convincing anyone if the premises are that the goal of official institutions is to conspire against the people for the benefit of the powerful. And even if it was true, 1) I'm not sure how getting people vaccinated benefits the powerful vs other medicines, 2) it doesn't mean random people claims are correct. It seems you'd believe anything as long as it's opposed to official claims about vaccines. It's a binary view: either one trusts official institutions and everything he say is wrong, either one is against official institutions claims and everything he say is right.

I tend to trust official institutions more than random people, as it's easier to lie/be wrong when you're not accountable for anything.

> Anyway, you're suggesting that instead of vaccines, omicron could be dealt with with Vit B(complex), C, D, K2, magnesium, zink, potassium, melatonine, R-alpha-lipoic acid, Q10, and probiotics. That sounds a lot of things compared to 1 or 2 vaccine shots per years.

This is a false dichotomy, because you can be vaccinated and still get symptomatic or even severe Covid. Didn't I mention that I was vaccinated? Get vaccinated, I recommend it. Just don't force anyone else to get vaccinated.

What I am suggesting is that you can be vaccinated and still need something else on top of that in order to recover. Pfizer has a new pill, maybe you'd prefer that.

I also would not call my assortment random or "medicine". I am not advising you to take it against Covid, but I am sharing my experience with it. All substances that I mention are part of a healthy human body and there is a ton of science that backs up their critical roles in bodily functions and the immune system. There just haven't been huge clinical trials that prove that they can cUrE COvId.

I don't think any clinical trials claimed they would "cUrE COvId" for sure. IIRC they showed more than 70+% efficiency in preventing infections, so it seemed like our best weapon against covid. People then hoped it could end the pandemic, and exaggerated claims have been made by a lot of people, I guess, and maybe some governments. The clinical trials didn't claimed that.

While the scientific data has been clear (absolute risk reduction of vaccines about 1% for the early strains of the virus) the public discourse seems totally detached from the science. People are still saying things like "I'd rather get the jab instead of Covid.", which shows that they are not aware of the possibility that they can still get Covid. I think this is the result of a massive bias in the media that did not allow even mentioning the slightest fact that makes the vaccines seem not so awesome.

And we haven't even started to talk about the myocarditis risk for young males.

Why do seat belt laws exist?

Seat belts != vaccines.

Seat belts can be taken off after use.

Vaccines cannot be scraped out of the body again.

Masks vs. seat belts is a better comparison.

Why would you make someone do something that doesn't impact others?

I don't think it's about education specifically on vaccines on the immune system. I've never been interested in biology. Nor in elementary neither in high school. Actually I pretty much disliked the topic. It was boring, so the information didn't stick and I never liked the process of learning. (Nor did I have to learn anything I was really interested in before going to university. Maybe except for history.)

However, since I did learn how science and discovery worked and I always loved systems and understanding how they work, once it became an important topic, I couldn't stop reading up on it and had a lot of a-ha! moments. (Partly because of not learning this in high school, I have to admit.)

So not knowing is not the problem. Actually no person on Earth knows everything. Not even the basics. And sometimes, when you listen to people who are in denial, some of them actually do know the basics. (Just think of the antivaxxer doctors...) It's more about not willing to admit the situation. It's also about not knowing what they don't know. Now that's one heck of an important lesson I was taught by my excellent physics teacher in high school. He had this saying "knowledge begins with knowing what you don't know" (or knowing/being aware of your lack of knowledge). Which is likely a way of paraphrasing Socrates.

And I see a lot of people are just unaware of this. (Yes, Dunning-Kruger.) More educated and more intelligent people fall for this less often probably, but still some of them do, big time. They'll think that they cannot be wrong exactly because they are smart and are usually right. Or, at least this is how they seem to explain it to themselves. But it's simply a lack of self-reflection and humility and a willingness to accept inconvenient consequences.

People get up in ARMS about banning peanuts. This is the world.

What's so striking is how fast the omicron variant spread. Worldwide in weeks, not months. That's very unusual. Omicron may be the most contagious virus known, although some argue measles is higher.

Even though omicron vaccines are already in clinical testing, this spread too fast for vaccine deployment to keep up. Pfizer already has an omicron vaccine in volume production, and it's being held back until clinical tests indicate it is safe.

More general vaccines are in development. They may or may not work, but there are multiple projects underway. We're probably going to need them.

How would Pfizer practically measure this test if most of the test population may have been exposed before vaccination?

Antibody tests. It's possible to tell if you've been exposed, and to which viruses and vaccines.

It might be the most contagious virus that has a ~nonzero damage potential.

It's fairly normal for people to e.g. contract the common cold three or four times a year. Or at least, it was before hiding away became more normalized.

I suppose those could be different strains. I think it'd probably be fairer to say that it's the most contagious virus which we're actually tracking.

Omicron will be over before the vaccines are ready. What do they do then? Seems like a waste of effort to develop a vaccine for a variant that burns out so quickly.

It's not clear how long immunity from having the disease will last.[1] Some people do get it more than once. The UK counts re-infections, and they're at 4% and climbing. If new variants appear, they will be mutations of the omicron variant, because it's so dominant. Large numbers of people getting sick every year or so is possible.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-60174478

> The immune response after vaccination more or less mimics what happens after infection, with one major difference. In a SARS-CoV-2 infection, the immune system sees the whole virus. The most effective vaccines, however, are using just one viral protein to elicit a response: spike. And whether antibody levels will also plateau after vaccination isn’t yet clear. Wherry and his colleagues analysed immune responses in 61 people for 6 months after their first shot, finding that antibody levels peaked about a week after the second shot and then fell quickly for a couple of months. After that, they declined more slowly.

Clearly this article's author is a conspiracy theorist and should be censored for spreading misinformation.

how so?

What? This has been well established in the scientific community for a while. No conspiracy at all here.

It's called sarcasm. Any acknowledgement of natural immunity has been deemed unscientific conspiracy theory in the mainstream in the US for the past year, only accepting vaccination as a solution.

I remember I read Randall Munroe's What If to my daughter a few years ago and there was a chapter about the common cold. The conclusion was was that eliminating it was impractical for economic reasons - we couldn't have survived a global lockdown, and the virus mutates too fast to create an efficient vaccine. It felt a bit surreal seeing testing the scenarios described by Munroe in practice.

That doesn't make sense. A major discussion in the public since Covid caught on was about herd immunity -- and that infection would drive some of this. Maybe the concern is that we aren't inclusive of natural immunity in our policies. But that is purely an issue of bureaucratic process (for example, there should be no false positives in administering a vaccine) and incentives (we don't want people to try to get infected since infected people can transmit the virus), not any statement about the science related to natural immunity.

To be fair, the herd immunity idea was floated around quite early in beginning of the pandemic. But it was quickly thrown out when governments saw the infection rates and deaths spike up. Ever since, vaccination has been the dominant (hammer) solution for the virus. (Vaccination) Has been the background track for this pandemic and still is to date. Natural immunity is only coming back because Omicron is not as deadly as the previous strains. It was never an option before.

Exactly. The incentives didn't line up for natural immunity as a course for herd immunity. It wasn't about the science, but policy. And it was never an argument about the science (besides science trying to understand the delta between different types of immunity, including different types of vaccines and natural immunity). That's why I'm perplexed about the "conspiracy" talk. No more than there's a conspiracy about wine consumption in the US.

It doesn't make sense if you are actually following the science and not The Science like politicians are. Over 2021, natural immunity was dropped so hard in the US that the vaccine passports/requirements popping up here make no allowances for recovery from covid - it's vaccination or nothing.

I think OP was being sarcastic.

Please don't post this sort of flamewar comment to HN, regardless of what your views are or how right you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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