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Comment by asimpletune | Hacker News Reader

I thought it reduces the severity of the illness, does it not?

I listen to TWiV, and the prominent virologists there are suggesting that we don't actually know. In some of the latest episodes, they discuss frankly the fact that yearly boosters may or may not actually have any meaningful impact for normal healthy folks. They get into the details of why we know annual influenza boosters are effective, and that we really don't know whether COVID boosters will have the same effect.

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

https://youtu.be/hwPhF7v4G4M?t=1240

https://youtu.be/jbPlhaHytm0?t=2449

This is correct: the current position of the medical establishment is that we simply don't have enough data to make an extremely strong argument for vaccines for healthy people.

To be clear, do you mean no additional benefit for booster vaccines (not the original series)?

I don't know enough about the boosters yet (and nobody does). We'll have a better idea in January after the winter cycle is winding down.

And nobody knows enough about the flu vaccine currently yearly formulation in every year of the last 50+, but it was still recommended and administered to 40+% of US adults. Covid-related antivaxxism is just latent antivaxxers finally coming clean.

Watch the TWiV videos, they go into detail, and I time stamped them

The narrative around the vaccine flip-flopped so often that it is pretty unclear what it is actually doing. Our health minister (Karl Lauterbach/Germany) actually said that it accelerates symptoms, so they stay at home earlier than those without. It's just so versatile it does everything and the opposite at this point.

The narrative of anti-vaxxers has flip-flopped so often that it's pretty unclear what they think vaccines are actually doing.

I am from Germany and I am - like 95% or so of my fellow Germans - vaccinated myself, so what are you talking about?

How can you and 95% of your fellow Germans be vaccinated when the vaccination rate is below 80% in Germany? https://www.google.com/search?q=germany+covid+vaccination+ra...

You said anti-vaxxer which encompasses all vaccinations, but especially in Germany it makes no sense. In Germany most people are vaccinated[1] against something, so they are not oppossed to vaccines necessarily. This illustrates the blind crusade against people that do not want to participate in the mRNA therapy study that is still being conducted.

[1]:https://www.gbe-bund.de/gbe/abrechnung.prc_abr_test_logon?p_... (vaccination rates among child school starters)

The effects are extremely small for variants that arose recently. If there is a new round of vaccines that work on current and future variants, it would make more sense to get vaccinated.

There is a new round of vaccines that work on BA5, the dominant variant as of August in the US.

(yes; this is recent news; everything I'm describing above is about the previous round of viruses. The new vaccines are in only limited availabiltiy right now)

Oh. My bad. I thought you said "There's no value proposition to vaccination at this point."

Even boosters are a bit of a question in my mind. I had forgotten they were already approved recently. There really ahsn't been much discussion at UCSF about it other than "it's available we're still evaluating data before making recommendations".

What I should have said was "nobody should take the pre-bivalent boosters with any expectation of seeing a reduction in infection chances, or severity of disease, based on our current understanding of omicron, while bivalent boosters seem promising, even though we have extremely limited data and won't know for sure until after the winter cycle."

Like the Omicron booster that has limited availability?

I believe those were approved a couple months ago and become available very recently. I was expecting Denmark to resume once that was available (they actually shut down the vaccine problem back in the spring with the plan to restart in the fall with the new booster).

But, as I understand it, does not affect how contagious the person is.

Given that, reducing the severity of the illness is arguably counterproductive, as it reduces the odds that the person will go out and about as opposed to staying at home away from others.

>Given that, reducing the severity of the illness is arguably counterproductive

Sounds like misanthropy to me.

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