Emory Univ. restricts WiFi for students noncompliant with booster requirements
emorywheel.com
emorywheel.com
There is nothing unique or interesting about this, except perhaps that they are being extra lenient and apparently only restricting Internet access instead of blocking course registration as described in their immunization policy.
[0]: https://studenthealth.emory.edu/_includes/documents/policy-8...
Now people demand from us that we got the booster shot - for no rational reason: It doesn't help us, since we're not at risk personally. It doesn't help others, since we'll still be infectious. By getting fully vaccinated and having had the infection, we even have more protection than those who have not been infected.[0]
So some people grow suspicious to the shenanigans of politicians and pharma companies. This doesn't mean that we don't believe the vaccine works - it undoubtedly does (for those who are at risk). But there are other factors at play, and it very much seems weird, in what ways we're being indoctrinated to "trust the science" (most stupid phrase of the century by the way - science isn't about trust, but about verification.)
In the end it just very much seems like this is mostly about some business and political people lining their pockets with our money, and that causes us to reject their BS, because they've continuously been moving the goalposts in trying to manipulate us to consume their products.
I'm not trying to pitch a narrative here, I'm just talking about how people in their 20s have experienced this, and how we've been feeling about this - at least those in my social circle.
[0] https://nitter.net/jo_kuehn/status/1479928423783018506#m
But if a student had COVID last semester, they still must receive a booster shot (against a strain of SARS-CoV2 that no longer exists).
How does that make sense?
Looks like the vaccine creates a broader set of antibody responses than natural infection does. If you want the population to be protected against the next wave of illness, this is the way to go.
> (against a strain of SARS-CoV2 that no longer exists).
That's the funny thing here. Getting boosted with B.1.1.7 doesn't just cause antibodies to develop towards B.1.1.7, but instead for your beta cells that make things against things-kinda-like-B.1.1.7 to mutate until they're creating all kinds of similar antibodies (preferentially drifting towards things that are B.1.1.7-like).
That was the theory, but it is not being borne out by the actual data. See below.
> If you want the population to be protected against the next wave of illness, this is the way to go.
The data coming out of the UK and Israel does not support this claim. Their populations are already vaccinated and boosted at percentages much higher than those in the US, but those vaccinated and boosted people are still getting infected and are still being hospitalized and dying in significant numbers.
I'm not sure where you're pointing "below", but I've read a lot of papers and titrations of neutralization across many variants of different subpopulations.
> The data coming out of the UK and Israel does not support this claim. Their populations are already vaccinated and boosted at percentages much higher than those in the US, but those vaccinated and boosted people are still getting infected and are still being hospitalized and dying in significant numbers.
Israel's had about half the COVID death per capita of the US in 2022, and is probably better at reporting deaths as COVID-related. The UK has about 65%. Boosted subpopulations have fared much better within all of these 3 jurisdictions than the population at large.
Not lately, according to the data the UK has been reporting. The UK has about 90% of its population vaccinated with at least one dose, and about 70% of its population have had boosters. In last week's UK report, nearly 90% of the new COVID hospitalizations were vaccinated people, and over 90% of the COVID deaths. And 87% of the new COVID hospitalizations and 78% of the COVID deaths were boosted people. When the percentages of hospitalizations and deaths of people in a given category are equal to, or greater than, the percentage of people in that category in the population at large, we would not normally say that category of people has "fared better than the population at large".
Of course, as of this week, the UK will stop providing the data that I have just described. So we won't be able to see how these various populations continue to fare. That doesn't look to me like a government that is confident in the benefits of vaccines.
Original research or are you repeating the well-known debunked tripe despite knowing better?
The unadjusted rates in population subgroups are in table 14.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Every single age subgroup has a significantly lower risk of death when vaccinated. The risk of hospitalization is also lower, but less dramatically. This is despite cases being recorded in the vaccinated at a higher rate over this interval (which is probably an artifact of the data rather than being real).
If you look at the raw sum without considering the subgroups, your number is confounded by the fact that the vast majority of the deaths are in people 80+, who are also vaccinated at a higher rate than the general population.
This is about the best known statistical "paradox" that there is-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
Another confound is that we really don't know the number of unvaccinated people. Counting errors get magnified. If you think you have 1M people in a locality, and you know you have vaccinated 930,000 people... you get a huge swing in rates if you actually have 980k vs 1020k people.
No, I'm looking at pp. 42 and 44 of the report you linked to.
> If you look at the raw sum without considering the subgroups, your number is confounded by the fact that the vast majority of the deaths are in people 80+, who are also vaccinated at a higher rate than the general population.
Actually, the figures I gave for percentages of new hospitalizations and deaths were for people 80+. (I had misread the tables thinking that that row was totals.) You are correct that the vaccination percentages for this age group are higher than for the general population, but they're still about the same as the percentages of new hospitalizations and deaths for this population.
I have not tried to check the rates given in table 14 based on the numbers in the previous tables.
> Another confound is that we really don't know the number of unvaccinated people.
The report you linked to seems to be pretty confident in the percentages it gives of vaccinated people. That implies that the UK government believes it has accurate counts of the total population (or at least accurate enough that any uncertainty in the count doesn't significantly affect the rates they are showing).
Well, then you really screwed up, because there's a table in the report that shows for the 80+ subpopulation, the unvaccinated died at a significantly higher rate.
Or, using your table:
(23+175+1112)/1415 deaths in age 80+ had some level of vaccination = 92.57%, vs ~96% of the age 80+ bracket having some level of vaccination. If a group has ~7.4% of the deaths but is ~4% of the population, I'd say they're at excess risk!
> (or at least accurate enough that any uncertainty in the count doesn't significantly affect the rates they are showing).
It makes a massive difference for this number as the vaccination rate nears 100%. If it's 95% of the population that's vaccinated, the risk is ~50% higher. If it's 96%, the risk is ~80% higher. If it's 97%, ~150% higher. In any case, the conclusion holds up for any sane denominator here, but it's hard to have any confidence in the exact odds ratio.
This earlier comment, maybe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30973197
The latter part of my post.
That's not true. It's narrowly targeted at the S-protein, whereas natural infection will result in antibodies to the S and N proteins.
Granted, because that's the immune reaction you want, as targeting the N protein will marshal an immune response but not be neutralizing.
Natural infection does not produce as broad of a neutralizing response to different variants of the S protein.
I also wonder if I’m missing something here because as far as I’m aware the cost of getting a booster is feeling a bit rubbish for 0-2 days. Is it not normal for universities in the US to require (non-covid) vaccinations? I know my university required a bunch when I went up.
Phones barely work in your typical college dorm anyways, depending on building materials.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2201570
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-trial-worlds-first-fin...
I know this information can be very difficult for some to acknowledge.
IMVHO USA People should impose a clear limit in private institution choices, not only for health but also for privacy, dress code etc. Being a society means the society have rules, parts of it can diverge to a certain extent ONLY if that choice do not touch third parties.
As a relative of a not-completely-healthy person working at a German university, who can’t avoid contact to students, I don’t see a problem in requiring students to be vaccinated and boostered.
The risk that someone who is vaccinated and boostered is at any point in time spreading infectious SARS-CoV-2 is lower, than if they are not.
And personally I feel as if the risk that someone who does not want to be vaccinated does not follow the rest of common hygiene standards is high, too.
Want to enjoy civilization? Be a part of civilization.
(Hell, there even seems to be a strong relation between “drives like an idiot” and “can’t be bothered to wear a mask in the bakery”.)
You miss two things: the first is that vaccine by definition immunize, witch means if you are vaccinated you are immune. If that's not the case those vaccines are failed products (and in general we do not have ANY vaccine for viruses exactly because they all failed). So SARS-CoV-2 prove to be failed vaccine and are declared as failure even before experimenting on them. They are just another pandemic scandal, one per declaration of pandemic, bye the WHO, just read the history: H2N2 (1957), H3N2 (1968), SARS-CoV (2003), H5N1 (2004), H1N1 (2009), MERS-CoV (2012) and SARS-CoV2 now, always the same scheme, always the same scandal, enough years in the middle to make people forget the recent past.
Measles vaccine are another proved scandal because they fail to immunize for life, for an illness not dangerous when child but dangerous when adult, exactly when vaccine inducted weak immunity drop.
But vaccines are one of the biggest source of income for Big Pharma so they push them, those who are effective AND those who aren't helping narrative against them by people who believes in chemtrails, flat earth etc to pass those who criticize with scientific reasons as the aforementioned ones.
Accepting that it's not being part of actual civilization but being accomplices in crime against humanity. Learn science and so being able to distinguish science and propaganda is being part of our civilization witch formally is based on science.
Beside that, back in topic, yes some EU countries have some childhood mandatory vaccines, but not new ones, those who are tested in decades, some of proven ineffectiveness, some very useful, some just dangerous, some useful but not mandatory and in Germany few days ago the Parliament reject mandatory covid vaccinations definitively...
Justified? Up to you, but I think your hypothesis is either stupid or unempathetic.
For personal reasons, I got mine right away in an area where it was scarce, and had to monitor availability and at a moment's notice drive and line up for hours somewhere to get it. You are to apathetic to even bother remembering, but think that it's ok for a university to exercise it's power over others to force them to get vaccinated.
The only hard deadline I had for myself was to get it before I had to actually interact with groups of people again, which I did meet, but only just. I also know people who didn't bother getting theirs at all.
So yeah, I don't really have any huge issues with the policy.
Equally I wouldn't care if they just bribed the students with something.
This seems like they are acknowledging the addictive potential of certain web services and are using it to force compliance among their students. I think that is despicable, if that is what is going on.
PS: I'm fully vaccinated. Sadly it seems necessary to make such a disclaimer, lest the hatemob will destroy you and not even consider your argument.
edit: Always interesting to have a controversial comment. I counted -11 +9 so far. I'm seeing very little engagement for that. I don't think my comment was particularly inflammatory, merely poking a little fun at the authoritarian political plays we've seen during this pandemic. So I'm wondering why people are so motivated to vote on my post.
Quebec Canada made it so you had to show proof of vaccination to go to the liquor store (your comment about exploiting addiction made me think of that). Any pretext of actual public health benefit has been abandoned long ago (I disagree with but understand the argument why you'd want a bunch of people without masks in close proximity to have taken a vaccine that actually prevents transmission). Some people seem to think it's acceptable for institutions to just be able to pick on people without an acute reason to require them to be vaccinated, in order to "nudge" them toward a perceived greater good. I dont
(I also have all my vaccines and got each the first day I was eligible. Opposing this nonsense has nothing to do with opposing vaccines - as a concept, or the covid ones.)
And I'm not trying to be ideological here - if I've made a factual or logical mistake, I'm happy to be corrected and will own it
I'm looking forward to when this asinine paternal nonsense backfires.
> The restrictions caused students’ Wi-Fi to slow down and blocked access to nonacademic sites such as social media and video games.
"Hey, so-and-so's phone just connected to campus Wi-Fi again," "Damnit, we told him he can't be back until he gets jabbed, go call security."
No tracking means no non-compliance. What a backwards way of thinking.
You also can choose to no longer attend. But the faux outrage over this — “they shouldn’t be allowed to do that!” — reads very hypocritical to me, like private entities are allowed to do what they want without interference until they do something that is personally disagreeable.
How does that work if you don’t want to bake a cake?
I’m all for individual rights, but this statement is so hypocritical that I find it hard to not comment on it.
The university would probably say they are trying to keep the school safe for vulnerable students. One of my kids would likely be in the vulnerable category, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to that argument.
Yes, but the people who think that decision was wrong and should be reversed are basically the same people who are supporting what Emory is doing.
Of course not, the idea is completely bonkers. The point is that protections are not extended solely on the basis of "immutable" or inborn characteristics.
It’s a weird legal meme that immutable characteristics should somehow be treated differently for the purposes of moral blameworthiness. I am not really sure where it comes from and why people seem so eager to parrot it, but it looks completely baseless.
So sexuality is immutable?
This will be a better argument when vaccine choices are added to the list of protected classes. That does not seem too likely, however, given that it is a choice rather than an immutable characteristic.
List of protected classes is just a list that can be amended, changed or entirely removed. I am not really sure how it’s an argument for anything unless you are a hardcore ultra-legalist who believes that a law, a completely artificial human construct, has some sort of divine importance over everything else.
> That does not seem too likely, however, given that it is a choice rather than an immutable characteristic.
It’s a weird legal meme that immutable characteristics should somehow be treated differently for the purposes of moral blameworthiness. Again, I am not really sure where it comes from and why people seem so eager to parrot it, but it looks completely baseless.
>> List of protected classes is just a list that can be amended, changed or entirely removed. I am not really sure how it’s an argument for anything unless you are a hardcore ultra-legalist who believes that a law, a completely artificial human construct, has some sort of divine importance over everything else.
I think that you may need to spend some time thinking about what you just said. Perhaps you need to look at your own actions
that said, there are at least two ways to look at this.
the first is that this is a silly policy that seems to have nothing to do with an infectious disease, which for me, brings up memories of all sorts of ridiculous rules that institutions tend to have.
the other way of looking at it is that this policy is really quite mild compared to other measures the school could take to encourage students to get boosters.