Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

Any vaccine triggers an immune response, so it's not surprising that there's some small risk to people in taking them. But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.

View on HN

Not for young healthy people. And the covid risk for that population, even before omicron, was negligible in the first place. As you said people are really bad at doing the maths, and it is easy to scare people with risks that are of the same order of magnitude than winning the lottery or dying in a plane crash.

Anecdotes often help people defy math.

For example, I know a guy that was a triathlete but a year after Covid still can’t breath well enough to run.

He is 19.

> Not for young healthy people. And the covid risk for that population, even before omicron, was negligible in the first place.

About 20% of young and 40% of adult people in the US are considered obese [1], which has been closely associated with more severe COVID-19 cases [2].

Additionally, even young and completely healthy people have parents and grandparents. While they themselves can be completely fine after a run-in with COVID-19, their family may not be... just look at your workplace and sick leaves. It's usually all the parents that call in sick at the same time because some wave of shit is sweeping through the schools, be it the regular common cold, RSV, flu, norovirus, whatever. The problem is, us humans have adapted somewhat to these viruses, but not against SARS-CoV-2... and now it spreads to the affected generations via the children.

Can you imagine just how horrible a 10 year old feels when he learns that the COVID infection he got at school killed off his grandparents?

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/obesity-a...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/why-covid-19-more-de...

What a pity the vaccine didn't stop infections/eradicate the virus.

You shouldn't use the sarcastic tone. It didn't seem at all clear in 2020 that the virus would quickly mutate to more than double its already dangerously high R0 number. If you're aware of someone credible who said this as more than a wild-ass guess at the time, it'd be interesting to see a link. I'm sure someone somewhere managed to reason that far, but we work based on the facts we have, not how they look in retrospect.

The mRNA vaccines did reduce R below 1 in populations with reasonable vaccine coverage of the initial Wuhan strain, increasing to optimistic (but achieved in many countries) vaccine coverage with the "British" Alpha strain. And then becoming unviable to reduce R below 1 with Delta and later. But even then, vaccination reduced the average reproductive number, which from a public health perspective had great temporary value in buying more time for getting vaccines to all who needed and wanted them.

Europe will probably officially roll back its vaccine passport thingy soon, exactly due to this. Granted, that's a bit late, which is another example of not working based on the facts we have, but then again most countries have practically ignored these rules for more than six months already.

I do have sympathy for the arguments around bodily autonomy/coerced vaccination/violation of fundamental democratic right of travel and so on, but it's a question with a bit of nuance to it.

I think the argument for a mandate is stronger when the prevalence of the vaccine can eliminate the virus from society and I think in that case I would support mandates. But that was never the case for covid.

Instead we have absurd covid policies. France for instance treats double jabbed but not boosted people as unvaccinated. Whatever was the short term effect expected from the booster in Dec last year, it is long gone now, and the omicron wave never translated in a meaningful increase in hospitalisations, booster or no booster. Health authorities are applying moronic policies. My patience with this absence of common sense has evaporated.

> I think the argument for a mandate is stronger when the prevalence of the vaccine can eliminate the virus from society and I think in that case I would support mandates. But that was never the case for covid.

It could have been the case, but it was “all going to blow over” and “not a big deal”.

And hence the US became an infection vector for the whole world.

> France for instance treats double jabbed but not boosted people as unvaccinated.

So?

> the omicron wave never translated in a meaningful increase in hospitalisations, booster or no booster.

Pure disinformation.

“During the Omicron-predominant period, overall weekly adult hospitalization rates peaked at 38.4 per 100,000, exceeding the previous peak on January 9, 2021 (26.1) and the peak rate during the Delta-predominant period (15.5).”

It’s been more than two years. Disinformation such as yours is transparent by now.

Just admit that it’s political - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23405649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22614676 - and save all of us some time.

We are arguing different things, and would probably mostly agree if we sat down to summarize our views.

French authorities are corrupt morons, but there are countries in the world that largely do evidence-based health policy once they get around to it. Norway’s did very good, in general. Including cancelling AstraZeneca, which made everyone get up in arms about how irresponsible they were.

> Can you imagine just how horrible a 10 year old feels when he learns that the COVID infection he got at school killed off his grandparents?

The mRNA vaccines don’t stop the spread of COVID.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.30.21268565v...

That’s not what your pre-print, non-peer-reviewed citation says.

But you know this, right? After 2+ years?

At this point, it’s one side of the aisle cherry-picking pre-print, non-peer-reviewed papers to justify their not getting vaccinated because they bought in 100% to the narrative that it’s not a big deal and will blow over.

> Additionally, even young and completely healthy people have parents and grandparents.

Everyone knows this by now.

The people you’re conversing with simply don’t care if they kill someone.

The study reported 411 events in over 15 million people aged 18-64.

Meanwhile the US has had 6300+ Covid deaths for the ~46 million Americans aged 18-29.

Pretty easy to see the numbers favor taking the vaccine.

It really depends. How many of the 6000+ had other major health issues? What are my chances as a healthy 20 something from dying or having a serious complications? VS the unknowns of the vaccine for short term and long term issues? If I had other issues I'd think harder about it. But especially since I already had covid this spring, I'm really see no need in getting the shot.

And on top of what you say, even based on the numbers from the parent we are comparing a 99.986% to a 99.997% chance of being ok. Either way not something worth worrying about, tiny risks.

I am sure you can draw similar differences in risk of boarding a boeing plane vs an airbus plane (because so few events contribute to deaths and boeing had a few crashes recently). The reality is that either is a risk too small to worry about and it would be absurd to insist on one over the other.

Understanding statistics isn’t just about computing things, it is also about looking at the numbers.

I don't really understand this mentality. If the difference is negligible, why wouldn't you want to get vaccinated just to do more to protect other people around you? They can do everything right (get vaccinated etc) and still get sick and die if they're exposed to covid.

1. it doesn't protect people around me, the vaccine does not meaningfully reduce the spread of the virus. It is puzzling that people still make this argument.

2. I had side effects after both injections, including a day in bed with fever. This is not a candy.

How many of the 411 had other major health issues?

But you need to trust the data, and given the politicisation of the issue I get that people don‘t trust that this is properly researched/understood.

>But people are really bad at doing the math when it comes to the risk of serious complications or death from covid vs the risk of serious complications from vaccines. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.

Covid risks are not evenly distributed throughout the population. An extreme majority of serious cases are people older than 65, fat people, or people with other existing health issues.

If you are young, healthy, and active you are at virtually zero risk of Covid. If you are under 25, healthy, and active there is practically no personal health reason to get vaccinated for Covid.

Yep, it's just inflicting suffering also to the healthy in a misguided and desperate attempt to improve a situation by making it more "fair". When in reality the total amount of suffering is just increasing many times, which just makes it much worse. But this is a typical communist/religious idea that you should "share" suffering by punishing yourself.

How is protecting yourself from a disease with a low but real risk of life-altering effects by taking a vaccine with minuscule (but also real) risks a form of self-punishment???

How? Because you are (forced) to take a second dose of a vaccine that's not needed, which makes you sick and gives you heart inflammation. That's how.

Well, taking the vaccine still has a much lower chance of causing heart inflammation than getting the disease while unvaccinated does, even when multiplied with the chance of getting the disease at all.

That is just so flat out wrong… Omicron is less severe now, but there is a clear and real risk even for healthy people

The data is available for everyone. In the United States there have been 7,300 total deaths for people under 30 and 25,000 total deaths for all people under 40. Nearly 80% of all hospitalizations are from obese people. 40% have hypertension, 30% some cardiovascular disease, and so on and so forth.

If you are under 40 and don’t have a known comorbidity you can treat Covid the same way you would treat the flu. If you’re under 30 with the same health status you can treat Covid as if it doesn’t exist.

Kids under 20 are more likely to die from poisoning or an automobile accident.

You cannot look at the blanket outcome because it's affected by vaccinations in the individual, vaccinations on the societal level, and all Covid measures put in place, how they're enforced and to what degree individuals followed them. What you end up with is a skewed picture. You would need data on group A (Vaccinated healthy and young, living under the same rules, following them about in equal measure) and compare it with the outcomes of group B (Unvaccinated healthy and young, everything else the same).

What's more, it's the height of selfishness to think only of your own risk. Setting aside long Covid (which affects the healthy too), vaccinations reduces the severity of symptoms among everyone, reducing pressure on the health care system.

> If you are young, healthy, and active you are at virtually zero risk of Covid.

While you're right that the risk is very small, you are still at much, much more risk from Covid than from the vaccine, though.

You may or may not catch Covid whereas a vaccination is a binary decision.

Everyone will be exposed to Covid.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

Vaccination isn't a simple binary decision. There are choices to make regarding which vaccine and whether to get additional boosters.

Would you say "you may or may not catch the common cold" as well? I'm trying very hard to imagine any 2+ year old person living in a western country who wouldn't have caught the cold. "May not" seems dishonest here.

"Healthy" isn't something that's immediately obvious, and it's entirely possible you're not as healthy as you think. I was running half marathons with undiagnosed stage 4 kidney disease, which by the classification we had in Canada, would have put me at the highest risk for severe outcomes of COVID.

The data is that objectively you are more likely to have serious health issues resulting from Covid than you are the vaccine. And given the spread of Covid, the odds are close to 100% that you will catch it eventually. This is true regardless of health, age or obesite.

It's extremely simple math. If you have a 1/100 chance of something bad happening versus a 1/500 chance, you chose the 1/500 odds. It doesn't mean you throw your hands in the air and choose the higher odds just because they're low enough. You optimize for the best outcome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com