We as a society didn't stop COVID 3 years ago, so now we're stuck being either guinea pigs for the vaccine or for the disease. So far the vaccine has been a safer bet by far.
There is risk in both the virus and the vaccine. And the vaccine is a statistically safer bet, although I’m sure specific biological/genetic factors can alter this calculation.
Given that the risk of infection is well studied now for average healthy people, where measuring severe outcomes is a matter of how infinitesimally close to 0% it is, I trust my immune system that's the product of millions of years of evolution vs. overly self-confident scientists working alongside pharmaceutical companies maximizing profit and minimizing any knowledge of side-effects and risks associated with their products.
And yet it's not very good against smallpox which had a 30% mortality rate and higher in infants. Not to mention HIV or Ebola.
Smallpox is not covid, it's ridiculous to even compare them.
Measles was controlled by mass vaccination that provides for years of neutralizing antibody response combined with merciless quarantine on outbreaks.
COVID vaccine of today does not achieve that. It's still much better than nothing, but insufficient to control it.
According to what, infectiousness and transmission?
Measles is still a ridiculous comparison. The only comparison is influenza, SARS or something along those lines.
We are slightly lucky the Omicron is not as deadly as Delta... but new variants might be getting there soon.
Even the worst influenza epidemic did not meet the Rt, and it was less deadly than Delta. That 100 years ago, before vaccines, after a huge war with starved people. Flu now has also a half decent vaccine if the predictions work, better at neutralizing it and limiting the spread.
I want to hear a reasoned argument why it should be compared to influenza or SARS, besides "it is an airborne spread". Even MERS is not there.
this is exactly the type of unbounded fearmongering and disinformation that supposed science-advocates love to spread, as though covid will slip into a wave of death at any moment after experts forced everyone to get injected under the promise that it'd all end
> Flu now has also a half decent vaccine if the predictions work, better at neutralizing it and limiting the spread
half decent? that's a really generous framing for hit-or-miss low efficacy.
BA.5 and XBB do lead to more severe disease than BA.1, though still not as many deaths as Delta. There are further even worse developments already getting percentages over BA.5. (BA.4.6 and BQ.7) Again, not much worse, but still an increment. The worst symptom that's new is extreme fatigue.
It is only a few mutations to return to origin and start wrecking lungs again in addition to being spreadable.
Some researchers brought back a chunk of Delta spike into BA.1 and got 80% kill rate in mice. And it is just a few genes. Since XBB shows that variants can, though not easily, crosslink, someone might become this unlucky patient one generating a deadly cross between Delta and Omicron. A variant of Delta that gained some of Omicron features by evolution was also quite deadly, but fortunately it did not catch on and become a variant of concern. We're lucky so far.
Flu vaccine is half decent in that when it works, it gives neutralizing immunity. Keyword is when it works. That is, if the variants in the vaccine match well enough to the current wild ones. It is high efficacy if the guess is right. When the guess is off, having been vaccinated for a similar variant reduces severity and complications a lot, still.
Current COVID vaccine does not in general give neutralizing immunity even when variants match. It means it cannot stop the virus being passed around to immunocompromised, sick or unvaccinated. It reduces the time it's being spread but that is not sufficient. It also reduces chance of people ending up in hospital or dead and severity of symptoms. We do not know how much it reduces chances of Long COVID yet. Because it's not doing much to the spread, people get ill at a similar rate, just milder.
There are developments for mucosal vaccine that can fix this problem.
See Figures 3 and 4.
this is such a utopian and impossible dream, a "real communism has never been tried" escape hatch from reconciling the obvious failures of the so-called expert class & political left who's unleashed authoritarianism upon the world
It became apparent early that it was a respiratory infection, but masks were resisted due to idiocy and politics.
It became apparent early on that there was a week or two incubation period.
Those two facts, had they been taken seriously, would have utterly changed the outcome.
Then again. Maybe you’re crying out against the authoritarianism of facts. It is true they can be a harsh taskmaster. They are utterly unforgiving and totally uncaring. They don’t give a shit what you believe or who’s side you are on. If you love freedom I could understand wanting to be free of facts. Let me know how that works out for ya.
Covid spread out of Wuhun very early. Once it did, all the masking and quarantining post-infection wouldn't stop it.
The few countries that did keep it under control closed their borders to keep it out and tested/traced the few infections they had to preemptively track it down. But countries that already had a nigh number of cases tried those tactics and it failed. The only country with large number of infections who got back down to Covid Zero was china, and they absolutely used authoritarian tactics.
The third world was never going to accomplish that even with authoritarian tactics.
There is no scenario where COVID doesn't become an a global pandemic once it escapes Wuhan. It's just too contagious.