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Comment by azth | Hacker News Reader

What about those that took the vaccine?

> THIS STUDY WAS DONE BEFORE VACCINATION WAS WIDELY AVAILABLE. IS THERE ANY INDICATION THAT, FOR EXAMPLE, BREAKTHROUGH INFECTIONS WOULD HAVE A DIFFERENT RESULT LONG TERM?

> Yes. We are [studying] this, but I think the jury is still out. We're certainly very interested in addressing that publicly as soon as we can.

> This study was done before vaccination was widely available. Is there any indication that, for example, breakthrough infections would have a different result long term?

> Yes. We are [studying] this, but I think the jury is still out. We're certainly very interested in addressing that publicly as soon as we can.

neat! that first quoted line has css text-transform:uppercase in the article, so firefox copies as original, lowercase text, but chromium copies as all caps!

If you're referring to cases of myocarditis caused by vaccination itself, the cases are negligible: 2.3 per 100,000 [1]. Compare that with the apparent near-certainty of heart damage (and likely brain damage) if you contract COVID while being unvaccinated, and the decision to not get vaccinated is not just selfish but self-destructive.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110737

Heart damage from Covid is nothing like a "near-certainty". The vast majority don't experience it, upwards of 95% depending on the study. Framing this as "near-certainty" or "spares no one" is irresponsible fear-mongering.

The study is not saying that 95% of people who get COVID do not experience heart damage. It is only saying that 95% of people who get COVID did not have a heart-related acute event in the time period examined. That doesn't mean they had no heart damage at all. Their hearts were not directly examined.

The point of this study was to assess whether people who have had COVID are at increased risk for heart-related problems (and the conclusion was that yes, they are), not to assess what percentage of them had actual heart damage.

95% is not a "vast majority"; that's 5% of the population with quantifiable degradation in heart function. I fear for the catastrophe it will cause 20 years down the line in increased disease burden.

Near-certainty is literally the finding of the linked article. You're confusing your numbers. Heart damage != heart attacks.

This claim really requires a citation of some sort. In particular,

> don't experience it

is reckless, given that we know the vast majority of heart disease is undiagnosed until there are symptoms.

It's 1 in 10,000 according to NHS's vaccine factsheet.

> near-certainty of heart damage (and likely brain damage) if you contract COVID while being unvaccinated

This is the first I've seen it presented as a near-certainty. Where is this documented?

I think they are referring to the paper in the OP.

There is no indication that vaccination changes that. You still get it and and if i had to guess, lung antibodies will likely help as much for heart problems as they do for upper respiratory symptoms.

There's no indication either way because the reseach was done before widespread vaccination.

> if i had to guess

Your guesses are worthless (as are mine), unless you have some expertise. The last thing we need is more BS on the Internet about Coronavirus.

Even if it was that way, precautionary principle would still apply. Saying "nobody could have known" in a few years doesnt make your heart damage go away.

Couldn't you apply this logic to excuse doing any random thing? It might help so why not do it since we will potentially regret it in the future if we don't? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you but by that logic we should certainly be giving everyone Ivermectin, it's been proven to be extremely safe and it might help so why not? You would certainly regret not taking it if it turns out it prevented heart damage.

Sorry I cant follow. I was arguing for quite the opposite, just assuming something will help wont make it so. We know there is heart damage as well as long covid even in low and asymptomatic cases. Sure you can bet that the vaccines will help there as well, but how confident are you in that? Because as far as i know nobody promised anything of the sorts. It is a leaky vaccine, you still get sick, you just get lung antibodies so you dont end up on intensive care.

Are you really willing to risk both on the grounds that it might or might not help? I would say if you dont know, you assume that its not a magic shield and adapt your behavior accordingly. Which means so you dont catch it.

Please knock it off with the "selfish" nonsense. Even if everyone got vaccinated, the virus would still get passed around. Then, when the next variant inevitably arises, and everyone's immunity wears off, we're back at square one. The anti-anti-vax crowd is just a walking meme at this point.

You have a valid point, but hospital beds are still a finite resource. So in that sense, yeah, it is selfish to not get vaccinated in the absence of other mitigating factors, since vaccination prevents hospitalization in a large majority of cases.

What's even more selfish is not treating COVID but just telling people to wait until it is bad enough to go into the hospital before doing anything, when we absolutely knew very early on that anyone going on a ventilator was essentially a 50/50 death sentence. Keeping everyone off of ventilators at all costs should have been the number one goal instead of futilely trying to stop the spread of a highly contagious arial virus that is in the same family as the common cold. I know few people who would think you were rational if you prescribed any of the COVID "solutions" to try to prevent cold viruses - yet somehow we were going to be effective with COVID?

What's beyond evil is demonizing any treatment other than vaccination - but that's still going on even today, as evidenced by posts like yours.

I got COVID and was (and still am) unvaccinated, yet I did not get anywhere near a hospital; and that is what happened to just about anyone who wasn't in one of the well known and well understood risk groups.

Treating everyone the same instead of focusing on those most at risk was and still is particularly dumb, but here we are with people like you still making completely baseless claims that are certainly not backed by any actual medical science.

Before baselessly judging everyone else as selfish you might want to spend more time looking in a mirror.

What I'm saying is that maybe some people who have been hospitalized due to covid wouldn't be in the hospital if they had gotten vaccinated.

Hospital beds are not an unlimited resource, and there are plenty of other conditions apart from covid that may also require hospitalization.

I genuinely fail to see what is unreasonable, selfish or factually wrong about any of the above statements.

Does that cover risky behavior that could lead to hospitalization as well? Lets be honest, we did collect quite a bit of data over the pandemic years and your risk of hospitalization from COVID is not some random chance but determined by your state of health.

Differently put, i am having a hard time calling healthy teenagers selfish if nobody thinks about calling anyone with a still obese BMI after 2 years the same. Because to be perfectly blunt, looking at the numbers the later is a lot bigger of a problem then the former.

edit: In case anyone is skeptical about the giant impact obesity has, here the CDC numbers from last year https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2021/pdf/21_0123.pdf Figure 1 has leading underlying medical conditions. Hypertension, Lipid metabolism (cholesterol), obesity itself, diabetes and coronary atherosclerosis being the first 5. Table 1 has the numbers of hospitalized. ~95% had two or more on the list.

Counterpoint: dude does not have a valid point.

> The anti-anti-vax crowd is just a walking meme at this point.

Not more than the actual anti-vax crowd.

> Even if everyone got vaccinated, the virus would still get passed around.

That's not necessarily true. The virus needs to spread faster than it dies (look up the R value). Vaccines have eliminated other diseases, such as small pox.

Thats not a realistic option for COVID and the vaccines we have for it. Its a leaky vaccine (meaning you still get sick and spread it just as much) and the reduced likelihood for infection is nowhere near enough to get R0 under 1. Especially with every mutation (delta, omicron ...) having higher R0

> Its a leaky vaccine (meaning you still get sick and spread it just as much)

No vaccine is perfect, but it greatly reduces your chances of becoming infected.

Relative to somebody not vaccinated with the same NPI. Just look at any of those studies, they are almost exclusively done on hospital staff which have among the strictest NPI. Once you drop those the difference doesnt mean much. Especially with the new mutations.

So again, herd immunity is not an option for the current vaccines and variants of covid. This is not a controversial statement.

Can you provide some expertise that says these things? Or are you an expert? Again, we don't need more people on the Internet speculating.

You are correct. We should use the terminology "insanely selfish." If everyone (not immunosuppressed etc) got vaccinated, fewer people would die. This is science, not religion. This is not hard to understand unless you're willfully committed to ignorance. The existing vaccines have so far still been effective against newer strains, just less so.

> The anti-anti-vax crowd is just a walking meme at this point.

This is a semantically null statement.

You cant just apply some general knowledge about vaccinations to COVID with some selfrighteousness sprinkled on top. Unfortunately its not that easy

>If everyone (not immunosuppressed etc) got vaccinated, fewer people would die.

People at risk of a severe case of covid fare better when vaccinated. Thats it. You vaccinating yourself doesnt save an obese elderly person from covid. Its not magic.

To be more precise, there wont be any herd immunity and that has been clear for well over a year. Its a leaky vaccine which means you still get it and spread it just as much as unvaccinated do. You are a bit less likely to catch it, but not to any meaningful degree. Especially not with the R0 of COVID mutations. Your behavior and non pharmaceutical interventions are still the driving factor.

Differently put, you are vaccinating yourself to protect yourself, not others. You have some implicit protection of others through not overloading the hospital system, but not to the degree some people think. Risk groups are a very real thing and if you are not in one, there are a lot of daily risks you take which are quite a lot riskier. Unless we categorize them as selfish too, i am calling hypocritical double standard.

I would also recommend some self reflection into whether you are using the fact that you are vaccinated as an letter of indulgence like far too many do. You do still spread it and covid isnt just solved once everyone is vaccinated. Not being honest with that could be described as willfully ignorant. Having identified a few especially stupid caricatures doesnt mean you are done thinking.

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