Comment by codefreeordie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codefreeordie | Hacker News Reader

This has been very apparently true for a long time. I'm really curious what changed in the last 6 weeks or so to the narrative plan that saying it went from "disinformation" so dangerous that you got unpersoned to being so obviously true that it appears in mainstream publications.

I mean, I guess it's great that we're allowed to point out the truth now -- though of course you're still not allowed to say that people should consider not getting booster doses.

My local county's public health department has been tracking infection rates by number of vaccine doses for a fairly long time. The unvaccinated have the highest rate of infection (per capita), but among the vaccinated, interestingly, the more doses you've had the higher your risk of infection. It wasn't always that way -- the graph showed that folks with a booster dose did better than folks without for about two months after the boosters came out -- but ever since then, it's been a very clear curve, more doses = more covid (but any doses is better than zero doses)

We've known that efficacy against infection wanes (indeed, this might be expected, as antibodies naturally decline over time - when presented with the same pathogen, memory B cells ramp up antibody production again to prevent severe disease). Nobody was being 'unpersoned' for following this science!

Your county's data is likely co-founded by other factors, assuming it is accurate.

The problem has been those who would try to thwart effective public health response (e.g. by spreading fud about boosters). Largely the motivation is ideological - if the People, represented by the State, could fix Covid with concerted action for the benefit of the whole community, then perhaps they could fix other things, like wealth and racial inequality.

Too much wrong here to know where to start.

I guess we will start with "the people" is not in any way shape or form "the government".

It isn't?

"that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" - Abraham Lincoln.

Certainly that is the principle we've been following in Europe - did something go wrong in the US?

That is a wonderful sentiment. I might even have been true still when Lincoln said that. I've studied enough history to be sure that I can't tell.

But it is certainly not true now.

The government of the present day is primarily an antagonist of the people, extracting the maximum of wealth and power that it can without enduring a revolt.

> the more doses you've had the higher your risk of infection

I wonder if having a recent dose makes people engage in activities that puts them at a higher risk of Covid. I guess it can be tested by randomly distributing placebos among the real vaccines, though that obviously has ethical implications.

That is a possible explanation, or at least partial-explanation. It fits nicely with the fact that the unvaccinated are at highest risk, since they likely take even fewer precautions.

That said, all of the people that I know who still are living under self-imposed lockdown all have the maximum number of doses for which they are eligible. I don't know enough people to be a statistically significant source of info, but you would expect that the group most afraid of covid should be maximally vaccinated.

But also it might be that maximally -vaccinated individuals also test most frequently, and between a false-positive rate and just the fact that these days most infections are nearly or completely asymptomatic, they're just testing positive more often and not actually infected more often.

It's all very hard to disambiguate, other than that it is clear that vaccine doses given not-recently must not have a large beneficial effect on likelihood to be infected.

Likelihood to be hospitalized is potentially different, but that data is a mess too, because we don't collect data on whether the person hospitalized was admitted for covid or was admitted for something else and then tested positive at admission.

During the Omicron surge in the winter, Los Angeles county estimated that about 75-80% of those hospitalized were hospitalized for non-covid-related conditions and just happened to also be positive for covid. But that data isn't available with any data quality.

A cultural shift from "fake news" and "disinformation" to something like "poor evidence", or "conflicting evidence", would be good. Shift public thought towards what constitutes good evidence.

Agree, clearer minds and evidence seem to prevail which is good news.

The only thing that can be said about COVID vaccine, is that the first two doses are the most useful. After that it looks like the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

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