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Comment by nulld3v | Hacker News Reader

I am vaccinated but I am upvoting this post because I believe that it is important to investigate these cases to determine how to improve future vaccines. I really don't like how this topic seems to be treated like some fringe conspiracy theory. Maybe it is just a conspiracy, but we won't ever know until sufficient research has been done.

Currently, I still believe that people should vaccinate, even if vaccines cause mortality/harm in some cases. As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

My position depends on us having a good understanding of the vaccine's effects however, and right now I feel like we don't.

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The problem here isn't the study---of course we should study possible vaccine side effects. The problem is the massive leaps of logic being made by people who have (quite wrongly, based on available evidence) become convinced that the vaccines are a greater threat to healthy people than the virus is. As unlikely as it is that an otherwise healthy young person will die from covid, it is even less likely that they'll die from a vaccine side effect. That's just a statistical fact at this point, we have millions of both covid cases and vaccinations to back that up.

This study looked at 25 cases of unexpected death in people aged 46-75 and found 5 cases of myocarditis. Without any control group to compare to, there is literally nothing that can be drawn from this study about the risk presented by the vaccine, and the authors admit as much:

"The nature of our autopsy study necessitates that the data are descriptive in quality and does not allow any epidemiological conclusions in terms of incidence or risk estimation."

Ok, so if you believe your chance of dying of covid is improbably small due to age and overall health, why is it necessary to be vaccinated even if there's only a small chance of side effects? Rare is not zero.

I don't even take OTC pain killers like advil unless I absolutely feel like I have to.

Because a) the risk from covid, while small, is still greater than the risk from the vaccines and b) unvaccinated people are more likely to be infected and become a vector for the virus, infecting other people.

Is there any evidence for (b)? My understanding is that you are just as likely to get vaccinated and "shed" the virus for just as long, but are less likely to be severely sick.

I think you mean "get sick" which is untrue. You are less likely to get sick if vaccinated. You are also less likely to experience severe symptoms if vaccinated. https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/preventive-care/va...

Your understanding is wrong. Vaccinated and unvaccinated people with symptomatic COVID shed at comparable rates, but vaccinated people are less likely to get symptomatic COVID. The difference wanes considerably if your last shot was > 6 months ago, but is still present.

> unvaccinated people are more likely to be infected and become a vector for the virus, infecting other people.

I'd add to this the fact that it was especially true earlier in the pandemic, and at that time COVID was significantly more likely to be fatal. Even if someone rejects the idea of getting a fourth dose of the vaccine (rightly or wrongly), it's possible to think that the first two doses were an entirely reasonable one-time intervention into an ongoing pandemic that saved many thousands of lives.

> unvaccinated people are more likely to be infected and become a vector for the virus

I've read conflicting accounts of whether that's true or false, but even if it is - what difference does it make? We're not going to reach heard immunity here. Everybody's going to get it, several times throughout their lives, no matter what we do at this point.

[deleted, I retract my statement]

Myocarditis literally has it's own page on the CDC covid vaccine website https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...

That first part is a mistaken belief.

There's also a useful metric for the "chance of dying" - it's known as a micromort. Each micromort is a one in a million chance of dying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

A fair bit of statistical work has been done on COVID-19 and it is summarized in the wikipedia article.

    AstraZeneca vaccination against COVID-19 – 2.9 micromorts[31]
    COVID-19 infection at age 10 – 20 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 25 – 100 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 55 – 4,000 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 65 – 14,000 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 75 – 46,000 micromorts
    COVID-19 infection at age 85 – 150,000 micromorts [32]

Yes, many people survived - but those are not numbers I want to be betting against on a daily basis.

NYT - Putting the Risk of Covid-19 in Perspective Is the risk of dying from Covid-19 comparable to driving to work every day, skydiving or being a soldier in a war?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/well/live/putting-the-ris...

> Converting this to micromort language, an individual living in New York City has experienced roughly 50 additional micromorts of risk per day because of Covid-19. That means you were roughly twice as likely to die as you would have been if you were serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 2010, a particularly deadly year.

Rare is not zero - but if you are risk adverse, then avoiding things that are fairly high up on the risk counter would be reasonable. Likewise, if there are two options (driving in a car vs driving in a motor cycle), taking the one that adds the least amount of additional risk is reasonable.

How do those numbers change when you adjust for presence or absence of pre-existing conditions such as obesity and type-2 diabetes?

Please don't. What you are doing is called "P-hacking". Yes, if you keep selecting for subsets of a dataset you'll eventually find one that, just due to random chance, looks like a statistically significant result that proves whatever it is you want to see. That's not the way you do science.

As always, xkcd explains it best: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/882:_Significant

No that's not P-hacking. The majority of US residents have been infected at this point. The sizes of those population groups both with and without serious pre-existing conditions are so huge that there is minimal chance of an incorrect random result.

Your link is not relevant to this issue so I don't know what point you're trying to make.

To be clear I support vaccination. But patients should make their own decisions free of coercion based on informed consent with full knowledge of the risks on both sides. Don't presume to patronize them with spurious, bad faith comments about "P-hacking". Let's see the actual data.

Right, you have a hypothesis. But you don't have data. Trying to tease out evidence for your hypothesis from existing data by slicing the data set up is the very definition of p-hacking. If you refuse to believe existing work on the basis of an unmeasured hypothesis, well, that's a different sort of logical fallacy on top of the bad statistics.

And FWIW, if you want a more complete (but much less amusing) explainer on the subject, wikipedia always comes through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging

This is not at all correct. By your definition looking at anything in greater detail is P hacking.

For example, peanut allergies don't exist because most people don't have reactions to them. You absolutely can ask the question for if peanuts are good or bad for a subpopulation.

The alternative is just sticking your head in the sand.

The difference is in the motivations for asking the question and what's done with the answer (so agenda). People are assuming and agenda of others in this thread, and are crafting responses to head of that perceived agenda without actually answering the question, which is rarely productive, IMO. Better to ask than assume, or if the answer is known, provide it with a caveat that it doesn't actually support the specific cases you're worried it might be used for erroneously.

Wrong, I do not have a hypothesis (or any sort of preconceived notion). I am just curious to see what the data shows about risk stratification across age groups with and without common risk factors. Do you have any references to recent peer reviewed studies on that topic?

I'm not sure why you're trying to derail the discussion by bringing up data dredging. That would only potentially be relevant as a possible criticism of the methodology in a particular study. So what's your point?

I would not call "P-Hacking" wishing to know the stats of the group you're in, especially if there are significant differences between groups.

The global risk of death from childbirth is X.

It isn’t p-hacking for a dude to inquire what the chances are for the male subgroup.

On the scale that micromorts work, that isn't something that it measures well. Micromorts work best for the acute risk "do X and this is your chance of dying." Adding in things that are chronic risks doesn't factor into micromorts well.

Consider "traveling 230 miles by car is 1 micromort"... but that doesn't account for impaired driving or any of the other factors known to influence likelihood or survival of a car crash.

The numbers would likely change if you further specified them, but they are useful for the broad comparisons and risk analysis.

If you've got someone going skydiving every weekend, what does that do to their life insurance rates? Well, skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump. So that's 400 micromorts per year. And that goes into some insurance premium cost calculations.

From Wikipedia:

> Micromorts for future activities can only be rough assessments, as specific circumstances will always have an impact. However, past historical rates of events can be used to provide a ball park, average figure.

Another part of this is a study about risk acceptance.

> An application of micromorts is measuring the value that humans place on risk. For example, a person can consider the amount of money they would be willing to pay to avoid a one-in-a-million chance of death (or conversely, the amount of money they would receive to accept a one-in-a-million chance of death). When offered this situation, people claim a high number. However, when looking at their day-to-day actions (e.g., how much they are willing to pay for safety features on cars), a typical value for a micromort is around $50 (in 2009). This is not to say the $50 valuation should be taken to mean that a human life (1 million micromorts) is valued at $50,000,000. Rather, people are less inclined to spend money after a certain point to increase their safety. This means that analyzing risk using the micromort is more useful when using small risks, not necessarily large ones.

That last sentence is an important one when looking at this.

Would you be willing to be paid $150 to get vaccinated?

These numbers are useless going forward if they are based on the original Covid-19 strains and not the Omicron strains, which now account for virtually every case and are tens of times less lethal.

That's not true. Death rates are now much lower, but that seems to be mostly due to people having (partial) immunity due to vaccination and/or previous infection, and better treatment. Omicron variants are less intrinsically severe than delta, but delta was more intrinsically severe than the earlier variants, so it's not clear omicron's actually any lower than the original strain, alpha, etc.

For example, according to "Challenges in Inferring Intrinsic Severity of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant" (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2119682?query=fea...): "This meaningful but fairly small difference [vs Delta] implies that omicron, alpha, and wild-type SARS-CoV-2 have similar intrinsic severity."

The argument does not hold water. As Omikron replaced Delta, case mortality reduced immediately, despite skyrocketing cases. Population immunity does not explain this. The figure of 75% is only arrived at by correcting for underascertainment, which is an arbitrary estimate.

We have to be extremely cautious when considering any of the death-related statistics for this particular situation.

For example, we know that a dubious methodology was used for counting deaths in Toronto (Canada's most populous city, and the fourth most populous city in North America).

This was publicly admitted to by Toronto Public Health itself, as early as June 2020:

"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."

https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...

I can't see how that significant city's death stats could be considered reliable or usable for analytic purposes, after considering how the counting was done. The provincial and national stats would also be affected to some extent.

This makes me quite doubtful about the stats coming out of other regions, too.

The paper those numbers are based on is Assessing the age specificity of infection fatality rates for COVID-19: systematic review, meta-analysis, and public policy implications https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7721859/

The meta-analysis is looking at that question that you are asking.

It also has all the papers that it cites for analysis and an analysis of its own limitations.

> The systematic review encompassed 113 studies, of which 27 studies (covering 34 geographical locations) satisfied the inclusion criteria and were included in the meta-analysis.

The question nobody else has been able to answer is "What is a satisfactory analysis for these purposes?"

The closest I've seen to an answer is to remove accidental deaths (eg, hit by a car, firearms fatality, etc) but there's a huge range of arguable cases like stroke which is plausibly covid-affected. Second, you have the problem of comparing stats between locations that used different definitions, so it's harder to do post-hoc correlations.

The decisions seems to have been avoiding false-negative mistakes by increasing false positives in the first wave of analysis: "Let's include everything under a simple rule for covid stats so that we at least have some kind of worst-case baseline modelling with similar datasets, and we can figure out afterwards which are real and which aren't"

Anyway, just wanted to see if you actually have a better answer to the problem than the standard that was used.

You have to look at both sides of the equation. There are excess deaths in every region coinciding with Covid spikes. It takes enormous mental gymnastics to say “some deaths were over counted so deaths as a whole must be over counted” and completely discount the probability of missing deaths too.

The recent Paxlovid study supports this. It reduces deaths days 30-90. Deaths that would not be counted as Covid deaths. But they clearly are if paxlovid reduces them.

Yeah, it is just wacky stuff for people to be "COVID-19 NBD" while the hospitals are full and the morgues can't keep up with refrigeration requirements... it is not worth engaging with. The exact count doesn't matter, the spikes demonstrate the truth of the issue.

I think that's a pretty specious argument though. Other statistics are available (especially excess deaths) that can pretty clearly help show what was going on along with the COVID death numbers (i.e. a significant increase in the number of people dying through the pandemic who most likely wouldn't have died during that time otherwise, in proportions generally tracking more or less to the reported COVID deaths). It's not like the reported numbers of COVID deaths exist in a vacuum to be able to be so sceptical of them!

> This was publicly admitted to by Toronto Public Health itself, as early as June 2020:

> "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."

I don't know the particulars of Toronto Public Health, but this wasn't uncommon for immediate reporting vs death record reporting. Since, in many places, comprehensive death records can take a few weeks (or longer!) to go through the pipeline before ending up on finalized reports, it's useful to have more immediate death reporting during a pandemic. Such immediate reporting is necessarily going to be a little rougher around the edges, but it generally gets you pretty close to the real numbers.

But, it's absolutely true that this immediate reporting isn't perfect. Still, it's very useful, and usually close enough for near term needs. Taking the Toronto example, the main tradeoffs are that a) you include some deaths where Covid wasn't actually a contributing factor and b) you miss deaths where the person was never tested for Covid (especially applicable to deaths that occurred at home). Often, these two somewhat balanced themselves out, but only in places with fairly high levels of testing.

Then, in the medium to longer term, you can switch over to relying on more comprehensive death records. This helps to filter out non-causal scenarios (e.g. the "hit by bus, tested positive for covid, died" scenarios). It also helps add in cases that were initially missed (had symptoms of covid, never went to hospital, died at home, etc).

Finally, to validate numbers, we can also look at excess deaths. This helps ensure that we're not wildly off base with reported numbers. Excess deaths isn't a perfect metric to compare to, but it's still a great benchmark.

To wrap up this comment, let me respond to this:

> We have to be extremely cautious when considering any of the death-related statistics for this particular situation.

I fully agree, but.. I would suggest that your comment missed a lot of the accuracy refinement that happens in practice over the medium to longer term. Additionally, it's very much worth pointing out that, with additional analysis (from death records, from excess death analysis, etc), we've found that very few places were likely over-reporting Covid deaths, but that a significant number of places were under-reporting Covid deaths. So, yes, take shorter term Covid death stats with a grain of salt, but know that we've generally ended up reporting too low, not too high.

> "Converting this to micromort language, an individual living in New York City has experienced roughly 50 additional micromorts of risk per day because of Covid-19. That means you were roughly twice as likely to die as you would have been if you were serving in the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan throughout 2010, a particularly deadly year."

This is highly misleading. The average individual may be at such risk, just like humans have ~1.9 legs on average, but that doesn't mean that everyone walks around with their 1.9 legs.

So those statistics are based on the risk to the general population and therefore have approximately zero relevance to any single person.

Almost by definition, the disease will claim those most vulnerable first, so questioning whether vaccination is worth it for those less vulnerable is valid.

What're the risks of vaccination vs covid for a healthy 25 year old who works from home?

This exactly. You would want to see the micromort breakdown for the same populations as covid infection. You might also want to dive deeper and see if there's more specific populations and how they compare.

The 50 micromorts per day is from the excess deaths in NYC during spring of 2020 and comparing that mortality to being a soldier in Afghanistan in 2010.

I don't believe that comparing those two is unreasonable.

However, to your last question that is what micomorts can answer.

The risk of death from a vaccination is 2.9 micromorts. The risk of death from contracting Covid-19 for a 25 year old is 100 micromorts. So 30x greater risk.. and those are directly comparable numbers.

The other point to consider - you're not always going to be 25. I'm much closer to the 55 bracket than the 25 bracket, and that represents a 40x increase in risk... so about 1200x greater risk than vaccination.

Assuming you remain a hermit for some number of years (and Covid-19 remains endemic), is there a point where you would change your mind on the value proposition of a vaccination? And if the answer is yes - why not do it now?

Yea, currently you're comparing 2.9 micromorts vs 100 micromorts. At 25, that comparison doesn't have too much to it. 100 micromorts is not something that I think too much about either (comparable to the risk of death while giving birth for the women out there). I've done road trips that racked up 100 micromorts cumulative (more if you add in the hiking and skiing micromorts on that trip).

I'll also note I'm older now than when I was when I did that roadtrip... and there are things that I would do now to further mitigate the risks that I took back then.

It's not wrong for your age, but it is something that should be said "yes, its a risk and it is a lot riskier."

That said, there's a number even beyond that 100 micromorts to consider.

New data shows long Covid is keeping as many as 4 million people out of work - https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid...

> 1.6 million full-time equivalent workers could be out of work due to long Covid. With 10.6 million unfilled jobs at the time, long Covid potentially accounted for 15% of the labor shortage.

That 4M number is not part that I want to be part of. While I have better than average health insurance, the not-dying also has a significant risk to it too. It is harder to quantify as it isn't an accurate cause of mortality - but it is not something that should be ignored.

Many people here enjoy better than average salaries - consider the risk of going on long term disability for the next 40 to 60 years with the corresponding reduction in compensation. And yes, I know people who are no longer able to work on anything that has a deadline or expectations of attendance in meetings; their lifestyle has changed significantly from three years ago.

> The 50 micromorts per day is from the excess deaths in NYC during spring of 2020 and comparing that mortality to being a soldier in Afghanistan in 2010.

So in other words it's pretty inflated.

1) Putting covid-positive patients in nursing homes instead of isolating them

2) Excess use of ventilators set to maximum

3) Omicron

4) I feel like I'm forgetting something...

The NYC numbers are from the spring of 2020. This was before Omicron and before Delta.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e5.htm was a initial report on the excess deaths in NYC in the spring of 2020.

The by age micromorts are based on a paper that was published in December of 2020. Delta was first detected in the US in Feb of 2021 and named in May of 2021 - again, those numbers are before Delta and Omicron (and vaccination).

The numbers may not be current, but they are not inflated. They are an accurate representation of the excess deaths at that time.

> This was before Omicron and before Delta.

> The numbers may not be current, but they are not inflated. They are an accurate representation of the excess deaths at that time.

That is exactly my point for mentioning Omicron: When you introduced them above you were using them for current risk.

Why does vaccine has one micromort where COVID has it broken down by age group? Are you saying vaccine sets the risk to constant regardless of age?

You didn’t stratify vaccination risk by age which immediately calls into question your comparative data. Indeed the myocarditis risk appears to be inversely correlated with age (exactly the opposite of the positive correlation of risk COVID itself has with age).

With all respect, this is terrible logic. You have two probabilities to compare, not one to compare to zero! If and only if the vaccine is more dangerous then your "improbably small chance of dying of covid", you should forego the vaccination.

Is it? No. It is not. Not even for the best protected youngest cohort. Get your shot. You're being misled by politics and tiny, difficult numbers.

Because the risk of e.g. dying of myocarditis from the virus still exceeds the risk of dying of myocarditis from the vaccine.

Particularly with the mRNA vaccines there isn't much in the vaccine that isn't in the virus already.

There has to be a name for this fallacy. It is like we're living in the dark ages where contracting covid is just "God's will" and it doesn't count in risk assessments, while no matter how small the risk is of the vaccine that is all that matters.

Because the risk of e.g. dying of myocarditis from the virus still exceeds the risk of dying of myocarditis from the vaccine.

It's good to point that out, but the first term needs to be multiplied by the chance of getting the virus.

That's likely a number greater than 1 since there is a really good chance of contracting the disease multiple times.

It's definitely not a standard name, but I call kind of reasoning error "active/passive bias": we're generally much more afraid of risks that manifest from action (mauled by a shark while swimming, getting in a car crash) than inaction (dying of obesity, getting hit by a car on the sidewalk).

In the case of COVID-19: you have to actively get the vaccine, meaning that people overweight its risks relative to the risks latent in not getting it.

I think you're right, and an additional factor is that the vaccine is tangible and certain where the virus is invisible and may or may not be present in any given situation (and in unknown quantity).

At its core it may be more that people can't think past binary logic. Either something works or it doesn't work. Either something is perfectly safe or it is too risky. But that doesn't address why they don't apply the same logic to the virus itself (although there are some people on the flip side who still do).

That isn't relevant because there is no evidence that the vaccine reduces your risk of suffering from myocarditis after infection. (It isn't even necessarily true, but that is a separate matter).

> The risk of COVID-19 infection-related myocarditis risk was cut in half among people infected after vaccination (received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine).

https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...

Based on the original strain. Not that I would want to argue. There are several nations that do not recommend vaccination for younger people. They could be wrong of course, but to be so certain about science of a rapidly changing virus and wave away methodological difficulties, like measuring myocarditis without an autopsy, strikes me as scientifically naive, perhaps bordering on religiosity.

> Particularly with the mRNA vaccines there isn't much in the vaccine that isn't in the virus already.

I don’t find this compelling at all. At the very least, the mRNA vaccines have the lipid nanoparticles themselves, and LNPs are quite clearly biologically active.

And the mRNA gets delivered to cells that would not be infected by the actual virus. One might imagine that such cells would be targeted to at some some extent by CD8+ T cells that learn to recognize spike protein. As far as I can tell, there is nothing published examining what actually happens, but you certainly don’t end up with massive death of muscle cells when vaccinated. See, for example, the comments here:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-vaccines-what...

The lipid nanoparticle itself is basically a cell wall and it fuses with your cell wall and deploys its payload. There isn't a lot there. It isn't like the adenovirus capsid that binds to PF-4 and causes the clotting disorders in J&J and ChAdOx1. It would have to be something related to ALC-0315 and/or ALC-0159 and be active in the very tiny quantities which are administered. Those are lipids and it is most likely that they're eventually just disassembled.

> One might imagine that such cells would be targeted to at some some extent by CD8+ T cells that learn to recognize spike protein.

This is exactly what we want to see happen, and you're going to get CD8+ T-cells from the virus as well (and if you don't, then you're going to get very extremely ill).

The tissue distribution is a reasonably good point, but that should be considered in light of the evidence that the virus itself likes to hide out in places like the gut and that liver and gut activation after vaccination may be protective. And if that argument is wrong, that would be an argument to try to produce nasal mRNA vaccines.

And at this point we do have a really massive amount of data on the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines and we're having to sift the data very closely to find effects lower than one in million. Other vaccines perform worse. I think it probably is because we're getting closer and closer to minimalism.

> The lipid nanoparticle itself is basically a cell wall and it fuses with your cell wall and deploys its payload.

The LNPs are most certainly active in the quantities used:

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20221109/Empty-lipid-nanop...

(Also, you don’t have cell walls.)

> This is exactly what we want to see happen, and you're going to get CD8+ T-cells from the virus as well (and if you don't, then you're going to get very extremely ill).

No. What you want to see is protection from the virus, hopefully prevention of infection entirely, hopefully long lasting, hopefully in a form that the virus can’t easily evolve its way out of. And you want this with as little in the way of side effects as practical.

You might think this would happen with an appropriate antibody response or an appropriate CD8+ response or some combination or something else. That’s a hypothesis that may or may not be correct.

But saying that you want your T cells attacking your muscle cells after a vaccine seems absurd. Maybe you can tolerate that (as people apparently can), but I can’t imagine it’s desirable. As far as I can tell, the actual desired means to get CD8+ T cells is for antigen-presenting cells to present pieces of the protein in question attached to MHC1 on their surface, along with the appropriate signals to nearby T cells to encourage them to develop into the right kind of T cell. Your muscle cells are not those antigen presenting cells!

> And at this point we do have a really massive amount of data on the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines … Other vaccines perform worse.

I’m a fan of Covid vaccines too, but this feels like drinking the Kool-Aid. The chickenpox vaccine is effective. The measles vaccine is effective. The tetanus vaccine is pretty effective.

The current crop of monovalent Covid mRNA were highly effective from a week or so after the second dose out to quite a few months against variants closely enough related to the original. [0] Otherwise they are, frankly, far from highly effective. The bivalent vaccines, as far as I can tell, look decent in terms of immunogenicity, but haven’t really been studied well for efficacy against actual infection.

So maybe these mRNA vaccines achieve a form of minimalism, and maybe they’re better than other Covid vaccines, but on the scale of vaccines overall, they’re not great.

[0] Compare to the chickenpox vaccine. In actual randomized trials, they were nearly completely effective even in patients exposed to chickenpox a few days before vaccination. The two-dose series appears to protect recipients for life, or at least decades, strongly enough that epidemic chickenpox is gone in the US. And that continues to work despite chickenpox surely being reintroduced by visitors from abroad on a regular basis and from older infectious shingles patients. That is an effective vaccine.

> Because the risk of e.g. dying of myocarditis from the virus still exceeds the risk of dying of myocarditis from the vaccine.

There's several studies that have shown myocarditis from the virus is indistinguishable from previously-measured myocarditis in the population in general - that the virus isn't actually causing any. At least one of them included vaccine-caused myocarditis and showed it's several times higher.

> People who were infected with COVID-19 before receiving any doses of the COVID-19 vaccines were 11 times more at risk for developing myocarditis during days 1-28 after a COVID-19 positive test.

https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...

If we're just going to quote stuff at each other...

> Post COVID-19 infection was not associated with either myocarditis (aHR 1.08; 95% CI 0.45 to 2.56) or pericarditis (aHR 0.53; 95% CI 0.25 to 1.13). We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/

But also your source is kind of bad. It doesn't have an unvaccinated control group, so from that research there's no way to know if what they found was virus or vaccine related. But they did find an age and sex based correlation which lines up with other sources saying the vaccines are bad for young men:

> The risk of COVID-19 vaccine-associated myocarditis was higher in men younger than age 40 after a first dose of an mRNA vaccine or after a second dose of any of the 3 vaccines.

> why is it necessary to be vaccinated even if there's only a small chance of side effects? Rare is not zero.

In my case i vaccinated because i knew i was a transmission node in case of being infected and not noticing, potetially endangering multitude of vulnerable people.

Since the Musk takeover, conspiracy theorists on $8Chan have talked about Grant Wahl dying suddenly because of the "clot shot".

Then we find out he died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.

Then people still refuse to believe it because it doesn't fit their narrative they're pushing. And anyone who dies suddenly must have died because of the vaccine.

https://twitter.com/DiedSuddenly_/status/1603103342481342465

This killed John Ritter, George C. Scott, Lucille Ball and Albert Einstein. But somehow the vaccine is to blame for anyone who dies of it now...

People will believe whatever they want to believe, just let them stew.

This works until it leads to politicians asking for grand juries to investigate anyone associated with the vaccine.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/dec/13/ron-desantis...

Unfortunately, some of them don't stew in silence - and consider anyone who got vaccinated with exactly the same contempt as you do.

Which is all fun and games until you have to, you know, _live_ with them in the real world because they're your family and / or loved ones ?

There is also the "Canadian doctors" story the anti-vax group continue to flog yet it has being proven wrong over and over again.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/11/07/why-wont-a-de...

One of the doctors drowned in a river attempting to save his kids, yet the anti-vax group elect to leverage his tragedy for their narrative.

> One of the doctors drowned in a river attempting to save his kids, yet the anti-vax group elect to leverage his tragedy for their narrative.

One out of how many?

The number of doctors who "died" after getting their fourth dose is a moving target, but the article i posted did a bit of a breakdown:

" The cluster of deaths back in the summer helped kindle what is now a fire — a conspiracy theory that today peddles a list of dozens of doctors online, including the three who died in July, as well as — according to its own descriptions — several who drowned, one who was in the middle of biking 105 kilometres and a doctor who died coming down K2, a mountain deadlier than Everest. "

It started out as "three" doctors, now it is "dozens".

Conflating "died from the vaccine" with "died with the vaccine". Quite ironic!

Are you saying that aneuryms are not a potential adverse event associated with MRNA Covid vaccination [1]?

Furthermore, we know hypertension is also associated with dissections, and there are several documented cases of acute and non-acute hypertension after MRNA covid vaccination [2]

I'm saying that to say there are some possibilities there, but I am also going to say the opposite too.

I don't know that we know enough about the adverse events associated with these vaccinations, and whether or not a vaccine is implicated, or if there was a previous medical condition.

Retrospectively speaking, I don't know that an autopsy would give us any novel answers either, because of the gaps we have around passive medical surveillance vs active medical surveillance.

I am sorry that Mr. Wahl died at such a relatively young age

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35646499/

[2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/epub/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA...

These are at least 4 known causes of aortic aneurysms.

1) Smoking (behavioral)

2) High blood pressure (dietary or genetic)

3) High cholesterol (dietary of genetic)

4) Marfan's syndrome (genetic)

Last I checked, doctors (who know these things) were seriously considering it was #4.

You're a skeptic, right? Why invent new untested possibilities when a there are a series of well known possibilities to be tested first?

Actually, this list is insufficient according to the NIH [1] an article in Circulation [2] and my wife, a boarded surgeon. Where she provided data I have italicized it, all others are from NIH and the other source. Interestingly, Diabetes can also have a protective effective against aneuryms [3]. There is also evidence that viral infection can likewise play a contributing role to local inflammation in aorta, similar to the better-known effects of bacterial infections ...CMV infection can stimulate local inflammation in the aorta but is not a direct cause of most abdominal aortic aneurysms. [4]

Genetic/History

    Ehlers–Danlos syndrome

    Loeys–Dietz syndrome

    Marfan syndrome

    Turner syndrome

    Familial thoracic aortic aneurysms

    Bicuspid aortic valve (BAV), which is an abnormal aortic valve

Birth Defect

Diabetes, particularly uncontrolled diabetes

Lifestyle Habits

    Aneurysms of blood vessels in other parts of your body

    Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

    Cardiovascular conditions, such as atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease, and peripheral artery disease

    Unhealthy blood cholesterol level

    High blood pressure, which is the leading risk factor for thoracic aortic aneurysms but also a risk factor for abdominal aortic aneurysm

    Bacterial infections, which are a risk factor for thoracic aortic aneurysms.

    Kidney conditions, such as renal failure, chronic kidney disease, and polycystic kidney disease

    Obesity

    Pheochromocytoma external link , a rare tumors of the adrenal gland that can lead to high blood pressure

    Vasculitis

[1] https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/aortic-aneurysm/causes

[2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circulationaha.110.0...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6198737/

[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.26901

There is a lot of evidence that the system to report vaccine injuries is largely ignored and people that report issues are ostracized for doing so. It also begs to question how often injuries would go unreported or misreported because of the difficulties of being linked to the actual cause, and many doctors may be unwilling to claim a vaccine caused an injury just due to the stigma around vaccine injuries, especially in regards to COVID-19.

> The problem is the massive leaps of logic being made by people who have (quite wrongly, based on available evidence) become convinced that the vaccines are a greater threat to healthy people than the virus is.

In some cases, it may well be true that the vaccine is a greater risk than the virus. For example, in Australia, the official recommendation is that healthy people under 30 not receive a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine, since Australian health officials believe the risk from vaccine side effects (such as myocarditis) in that age group outweighs the risk of COVID-19 itself. [0] Furthermore, for healthy people in the 30-49 age group, the official Australian position on fourth doses is "permitted but not recommended", since it is unclear if the risk of COVID-19 is greater than that of the vaccine. This is different from the recommendations made by a number of other countries (US, UK, Canada, Singapore), but it appears Australian health authorities weigh the risk of vaccination side effects versus the risk of COVID-19 differently than they do.

[0] https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-you-won-t-get-another-co...

Denmark doesn’t recommend COVID vaccines anymore to anyone under 50 who is not at risk or work in health sector [0].

> People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population.

———

[0]: https://sst.dk/en/English/Corona-eng/Vaccination-against-cov...

While I think it is certainly fair to talk about the policies of other countries, I don't think just because another country has a different policy necessarily dictates that policy is better or worse.

Additionally, I think it's very easy to see something like "Denmark doesn't recommend the vaccines to anybody under 50" and conflate that it means that Denmark doesn't think vaccines were ever beneficial to people under the age of 50 (which is the leap in logic you often see on anti-vax sites). But that isn't the case. What was good health policy in 2021 is different from good health policy now, because we have way more information about the virus, better and more effective drug to treat it, new variants, etc.

Two things can be true at the same time: The vaccines are (on net) incredibly beneficial to people and the population as a whole, and yet at the present time there are certain specific populations of people whose optimal number of doses might be fewer than others.

> While I think it is certainly fair to talk about the policies of other countries, I don't think just because another country has a different policy necessarily dictates that policy is better or worse.

Sure. But if a person is aware that other countries have different policies, that gives them a legitimate reason to question whether the policy of their own country is correct. If a person looks into the matter, and decides not to follow the recommendations of their own government, because they think some other country's government is more likely to have got it right, such a person isn't necessarily being irrational/irresponsible/etc, nor would it necessarily be irrational/irresponsible/etc for them to share their conclusion with others.

> and conflate that it means that Denmark doesn't think vaccines were ever beneficial to people under the age of 50 (which is the leap in logic you often see on anti-vax sites)

Yes, many people do seem to conflate these two claims:

(1) "for healthy children and young people, the safety risk of additional doses of the vaccine currently outweighs the risk of COVID-19"

(2) "for healthy children and young people, the safety risk of any dose of the vaccine has always outweighed the risk of COVID-19"

While claim (1) is disputed, some highly respected medical experts agree with it; the same cannot be said for claim (2).

However, I think this conflation goes in both directions – some people who want to defend (2) do so by conflating it with (1); but conversely, some people attack (1) by conflating it with (2).

Some people can't distinguish reasonable scepticism about vaccinations from unreasonable scepticism.

Yeah, I agree completely.

It also is difficult position for health agencies to be in, because they want to make clear guidelines to prevent confusion, but there are gray areas. For example, it's completely possible that:

(a) The benefits outweigh the risks of a 4th shot for any age group

(b) The risks outweigh the benefits of a 4th shot for some or all age groups [not because the risk are high, but the benefits so low]

AFAIK, there aren't any super high quality studies anywhere in the world that have robust data on the 4th shot in particular for all age groups. So one health agency might guess one way, another health agency might guess another way. Reasonable people can disagree. The CDC got a little bit ahead of the science when they were initially recommending the 3rd shot, but in the long run it was proven to be a good gamble that no doubt saved thousands of lives. But now maybe that same logic is a mistake for the 4th shot.

But regardless of the CDC's recommendations, most people seem to have figured out the cost/benefit for themselves: The vast majority of people in the US have 2 shots, a little under half have the booster, and very few have the 4th shot. Most people probably have made the right choices for themselves given the various risks and benefits for them personally.

I trust that when I drive over a bridge it won't collapse.

But I cannot say I know that the bridge won't collapse.

Knowledge is a true and justified belief. But trust is not a justification - quite the opposite. If you had a justification, you wouldn't need trust.

Trust whomever you want, on whatever basis you want, but that's fundamentally not reason or rationality, it's just an argument from authority [1]. No statement becomes more true just because someone said it, regardless of who they are.

I'm not saying it's easy or even possible to do in practice. Science is insanely complex. But let's not confuse trust for rationality, not least of which because it brings to the fore the very real need for institutions that are worthy of our trust.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

> Trust whomever you want, on whatever basis you want, but that's fundamentally not reason or rationality, it's just an argument from authority [1]. No statement becomes more true just because someone said it, regardless of who they are.

A statement can become more likely to be true just because someone said it, depending on the nature of the statement and the person making it. For example, my brother is an oncologist. If I had some health concern about cancer, I would certainly be asking for his opinion. His opinions on that topic are not guaranteed to be correct, but as an oncologist, they are significantly more likely to be correct than that of the average person.

One problem with the frequent popular invocation of claimed "fallacies", such as "argument from authority", is many of them are only strictly speaking fallacious when used as purely deductive arguments, but real world human reasoning isn't purely deductive, it involves a great deal of induction and abduction as well. There is nothing inherently wrong with an "argument from authority" as an inductive or abductive argument.

> Knowledge is a true and justified belief. But trust is not a justification - quite the opposite. If you had a justification, you wouldn't need trust.

One can estimate the conditional probability P(proposition X is true|agent A says that X is true) based on observations of what kinds of things agent A (or other significantly similar agents) has said in the past, and how many of them turned out to be true or false. You can then use that conditional probability estimate to inform your own decision as to how much credence to give to proposition X. That is both trust and justification.

I was not aware of abduction before today, thank you!

I think we may agree in practice if not in theory. I did have the Hume-an problem of induction explicitly on my mind. It would be quite fair to say my epistemology is quite conservative.

> One problem with the frequent popular invocation of claimed "fallacies", such as "argument from authority", is many of them are only strictly speaking fallacious when used as purely deductive arguments,

There's a fallacy for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

You could do some theoretical calculations about bridges yourself, inspect for cracks, and prove from first principles that the bridge is in fact safe; it's not some complicated biological process.

Isn't your citing Wikipedia, in itself, an appeal to authority? Why should we accept Wikipedia as an authority on which arguments are fallacious and which are rational?

(Also, that wiki page mentions that many authors don't see it as a fallacy.)

I'm just citing it for the context of the argument both for and against appeal to authority being fallacious and irrational, not that Wikipedia is the final arbiter of what's rational or not. It's more to say that my position is not novel than anything else. Indeed, to be consistent I would need to say that I don't care how many authors do or don't see it as a fallacy :)

Other countries compared to who? Not everyone here is from the same country as you :)

I don't think anyone is making a value judgment based on where the policy is from.

The change in policy by Denmark very likely comes down to the risk of overloading their ICU's with a naive covid population. When covid first arrived everyone was susceptible to covid and the long tail of poor outcomes was enough to plug up the hospitals (and primarily the ICU's).

Now, much of the population has become either naturally or through vaccination much less susceptible to poor outcomes from a covid infection, and this is especially true of younger people.

So the response to covid was never really about the health of the population as much as it was about the health of the hospitals. The risk to the hospitals is now much lower and therefore the reasonable vaccination effort has now changed.

I’ve been watching the vaccine discussions on HN these years and one can see that too many people are stuck fighting vaccination windmills from days gone by, while downplaying vaccine risks which by now are established and continue to be investigated as this publication shows.

Meanwhile many EU countries have understood that heart problems are a real risk and have adjusted recommendations accordingly. They’ve also stopped obsessing about vaccinating people.

The vaccination crusade’s dead folks, please stand by for the next pandemic.

So you argue that you should increase the risk of death or disability by COVID by not vaccinating. Got it.

It’s the paradox of intelligence: smart people are more prone to fight tooth and nail, and do all kinds of mental gymnastics, rather than to admit that they too have been misled. People of average or below average intelligence tend to accept it much more easily.

I don’t know if there’s already a name for this phenomenon…

Would love to see the incidence of this by IQ. My intuition says it spikes in slightly smarter-than-average folks.

This is the so-called "midwit" meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit

In my experience smart people are also far more likely to create elaborate self-reinforcing systems of belief that are detached from reality.

Any moron can understand the idea of a round Earth and stuff orbiting around it. It takes a genius to comprehend the sublime intricacies of ether vortex theory which explains how a flat Earth can still permit satellites to stay airborne over the plane.

I've met an extremely intelligent person who was convinced we never landed on the Moon and that Stanley Kubrick faked the whole thing and left clues to this in his production of The Shining. I've also met one who thinks the Nazis invented anti-gravity and are hiding the technology to this day in underground bases in Antarctica and South America.

That sounds a lot more like creativity than capacity to reason logically, or a number of other facets of intelligence. That's probably part of the issue, which properties of 'intelligence' we are talking about.

There are also a lot of crazy and intelligent people. I certainly know so many, it almost becomes a correlation.

Actually, the Nazi's hid on the moon wit their anti-gravity tech:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

(which is an entertaining movie if you haven't seen it).

Were they convinced, or are you convinced that they were convinced? The Kubrick thing is an old joke (which usually ends by saying he insisted on filming "on location" for the sake of authenticity)

They were convinced.

I don't either. Personally speaking, after watching the effects of disinformation campaigns over the last 7 or so years -particularly regarding Covid and vaccinations I am pretty much 1,000% unwilling to listen to any "skepticism" simply because I don't trust the source that anyone is getting their information from.

The only reasonable course I can see is to not take any chances and vaccinate early and vaccinate often.

Why would you trust the source on the side that's telling you something new, but not the side that's skeptical of it?

"Misled" is a stupid word for "we constantly learn more and should be adapting our positions."

There is zero evidence for a "haha i told you you were being misled" position. You are performing either foolish or disingenuous logical gymnastics to equate something like "adjusted recommendations accordingly" with "it was intentionally misleading the whole time."

Show me a place where people haven't adjusted their behavior as the virus has evolved, more time has passed creating more data, vaccination rounds have been administered, death rates have evolved, and exposure/infection has happened. It ain't here in liberal California, so is there any such strawman place you're arguing against in the US? Go out on the street and look around and observe that people are being rational and adapting over time instead of keeping up your silly little "haha i'm smarter than you you fell for a hoax" keyboard battle.

> For example, in Australia, the official recommendation is that healthy people under 30 not receive a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine (...)

It should be stressed that this guidance explicitly refers to a fourth dose of a vaccine. I feel it's disingenuous to use this example to try to refute the OP when the problem lies in people taking massive leaps of logic such as going from "it's ok to take 3 doses of a vaccine but the benefits of a fourth might not justify it" to "don't get vaccinated ever because you will die".

> "it's ok to take 3 doses of a vaccine but the benefits of a fourth might not justify it"

That's not what the Australian health authorities are saying. They aren't just saying that "the benefits of a fourth might not justify it", they are saying "(for healthy young people) the health risks of the fourth dose likely outweigh the health benefits"–your rephrasing ignores that safety risk aspect.

In my mind, there are three different positions here:

(1) "Vaccines are perfectly safe, and anyone who even mentions death or serious injury caused by vaccination is just being an alarmist"

(2) "Everyone who took the deadly COVID vax is about to drop dead! Just watch!"

(3) "Vaccines have real safety risks, some people have died from vaccination, and it is certain that more people will die from them in the future. However, sometimes, the risk of death or disability from the disease the vaccine is intended to prevent, is going to be significantly higher than the risk of death or disability from the vaccine. Whether or not that is true in any particular case is going to vary depending on the particular disease, its current prevalence, availability of treatments for it, etc; whether the disease or the vaccine poses the greater health risk will vary across time, place, disease and vaccine; our estimates of those respective risks are always going to be imperfect, evolving, and open to informed disagreement; generally we should trust the public health authorities to make that judgement for us, but they are not infallible, and it can be legitimate to doubt or question their judgement in any particular case"

I see myself as defending (3), whereas what some other people in this conversation are saying seems to me to be closer to (1), and also encouraging the fallacious conflation of (3) with (2).

There is actually a (4) also, which we can see evidence for in a paper such as [1] in the paper Efficacy and effectiveness of covid-19 vaccine - absolute vs. relative risk reduction

Summarized: The Covid vaccines have real safety risks for which there is a body of evidence, that taken in totality, leads one to believe that the temporal and Absolute Risk Reduction of =< 0.85% is not worth the adverse events. Given the suppression of data around the true adverse events, and the time limited protections from the vaccines, it should be used sparingly after the patient is fully informed of the risks, and minimal protections provided. Given the uniqueness of each patient's medical situation though, patients are in the best position to decide if their comorbidities are sufficient to merit the risks of these vaccines. Similarly to the Nordic countries, any younger person without severe comorbidities < 50 should not take the vaccine, but they should be able to make their own decision fully informed of the risks and limited protection, and without any type of coercion.

I don't believe that all Covid vaccines share the same risks since the microgram dosing of the MRNA vaccines vary greatly, and the Novavax vaccine [2] [3] is coming onto the scene, unfortunately with a few of the same adverse events as the MRNA vaccines though

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14760584.2022.2...

[2] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/novavax-covid-vaccine

[3] https://us.novavaxcovidvaccine.com/hcp

> That's not what the Australian health authorities are saying. They aren't just saying that "the benefits of a fourth might not justify it", they are saying "(for healthy young people) the health risks of the fourth dose likely outweigh the health benefits"–your rephrasing ignores that safety risk aspect.

This is a red herring.

It's irrelevant if anyone feels that the 3rd or 4th or 5th dose of Pfiser's increases health risks. The problem is the misrepresentation of these findings. You cannot in good faith jump from "a residual number of people experience health issues when taking the 4th or 5th dose of Pfiser's vaccine" to "do not take any vaccine at all ever or you'll die" specially when they deny that COVID poses a threat and already killed over 6million people.

You're talking about health concerns of taking a vaccine when not taking the vaccine poses a far greater threat, and somehow that's left out of the equation. That's the problem: the disingenuous misrepresentation of the problem.

I think a lot of the resentment comes out of "the experts" changing their narratives a dozen times about the efficacy of the vaccines over the last 3 years while browbeating anyone who voiced any amount of skepticism.

> efficacy of the vaccines over the last 3 years

It's only been 2 years, they were announced at the end of 2020.

No part of this happened. Also, experts are actually experts, so let's lose the quotation marks.

Please cite instances of "browbeating" from Fauci or other prominent public health figures. Please support this wild story in, well, any way at all.

Like the experts who closed beaches in CA and filled in skate parks with sand so children couldn't get exercise and sunlight? Those experts?

They are making these leaps of logic because people have refused to look into it…

Many other people have replied with great information, but I'm going to respectfully disagree with:

I believe the problem is that we were so convinced that our solution to covid was infallible that we removed a basic human right: the ability to make informed choice about your medical care.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I believe that most people involved did this out of a genuine desire to save lives and help people.

The issue is the hubris.

The idea that "I know better than you do what's good for you and for society, so I'm going to force you to do a thing".

This is where we went wrong. The forcing.

If we'd presented vaccination as informed choice, had recommendations but not coercion, I think there would have been a lot less resistance.

We decided that public health was a trump card that allowed us to ignore almost every civil liberty the U.S. was founded on.

We actively limited speech and debate, going to far as to silence and destroy the lives and careers of qualified physicians who dissented.

We restricted freedom of assembly.

We seized property through forced business closing without compensation.

We restricted free movement.

We coerced vaccination in the strongest possible ways shy of physical force.

The list goes on.

We did this out of a hubris that "we know better than you".

It doesn't really matter whether this is true or not, it's fundamentally anti-liberal.

It's made worse by the unfortunate fact that in most cases we were wrong.

Asymptomatic spread wasn't a thing. The initial studies that said it was were based on flawed methodology. Even China isn't counting asymptomatic cases anymore.

Pretty much every model that we based policy off of, predicting extreme fatality rates and recommending extraordinary interventions, were dead wrong.

As others have pointed out, mortality counts were wildly off due to many factors, including how death certificates were filled out (died with covid v/s died from covid).

The vulnerable populations were identified fairly early on, but we chose to implement draconian restrictions for everyone, regardless of their individual risk.

This was the problem.

Hubris.

Yep.

Fuck authoritarians!

Never forget.

<IMHO>Pharma could go on with huge gains, just selling immunity boosters, like C, D vits, exposing to solar flares... But boosted with 'media', they were forced to take an "social" experiment. Instead, they even forbid going out, and in my town police chased couples sitting on the park bench!! MAdnESs!! My lungs and 55+ sorts me under vulnerables. Even my doctor argued, freightening me, explaining weak immunity, in spite of mentioned immunity boosters my mamma told me to take :) ! At the end my covid experience is funny - weak flu - good to stay at home - want one again! Divide and Conquer policy, don't you see?</IMHO>

> We coerced vaccination in the strongest possible ways shy of physical force.

Totally.

I couldnt have written that any better. And THIS is why thousands of people showed up in downtown Ottawa and stayed for three weeks. Because we were disgusted and DEEPLY offended by the hubris.

And what was the gov's response? An even greater swing toward authoritarianism - the Canadian government literally locked people out of their own bank accounts, seized property and arrested and charged hundreds.

Incredible. Absolutely incredible. The anger is still palpable. And its going to simmer til our current gov is replaced.

> As others have pointed out, mortality counts were wildly off due to many factors, including how death certificates were filled out (died with covid v/s died from covid).

This has never really been shown to be that accurate considering the excess deaths from the averages every year. You’re ignoring an inconvenient fact.

Which inconvenient fact am I ignoring?

I took screen shots almost daily of all-cause mortality stats through the lockdown.

The entire time it tracked pretty close to the expected linear increase that we see year over year with an aging population, with the exception of a bump in April that was almost exclusively New York City. Given the reported quality of care issues that drove a lot of that, there are still a lot of unanswered questions.

I also saw a sudden jump in these numbers right at the end of the year. Could have been completely legitimate due to delays in reporting, but for some reason the CDC refuses to release anonymized data sets that would allow independent analysis.

Which is highly abnormal.

Additionally, all-cause mortality measures don't do a good job of indicating covid deaths, necessarily. Many deaths were due to delays of care for critical conditions. I experienced this myself, and was fortunate to not have become a statistic. We had deaths of despair, and we have several conflicting studies about those. We also have a significant (maybe majority) number of the deaths attributed to covid being a six to twelve month acceleration of death for those who were at end of life, especially the elderly with comorbidities.

While sad, it's not quite the terrifying tragedy that the numbers without nuance present. It will be interesting to see if 2022 and 2023 see a concomitant dip in expected mortality.

I also spent countless hours hunting down source data (as much as was available) understanding how Covid ID was generated for cross region case tracking, data collection methodology and evaluting transmission studies and models.

I saw massive revisions of numbers post-investigation in several counties, such as Collin county in TX.

If there's one thing we know for sure, it's that the data is a collosal mess. If you spend any time digging into the data collection methods and how reporting was happening you'd see this for yourself.

FWIW, my background is in healthcare logistics, data analysis and technology.

So if you are aware of some facts that I'm ignoring, I'd love to understand them.

The data is easy to find.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-...

I wonder what happened in 2020 and beyond that so many more died? It must just be the weather

When you've spent the time that I have looking into the source and methodology behind that data, rather than just spending 30 seconds googling, please let me know.

But here, I'll save you some time. Those pretty graphs you're linking to use the HMD database as the primary source through Feb 2021.

Take a look at how the HMD database derives it's numbers [1].

Now we can discuss the issue in rational, educated terms.

[1]https://www.mortality.org/File/GetDocument/Public/Docs/Metho...

Ah an attempt to appeal to authority with no proof of any credentials. That’s when you know you lost.

All cause mortality for US source NVSS:

2018 - 2,839,205

2019 - 2,854,838

2020 - 3,383,729

Expected deaths for a given year are based on a combination of factors such as the population age, and function fitting previous trends. It would have been around 2.9 million for 2020.

So the raw excess death count for 2020 is somewhere south of 500k.

Many of these deaths were due to covid directly. The vast majority of which were people already at end of life, very elderly and with significant comorbidities.

We're still doing research on how many of these excess deaths were due to downstream effects of covid interventions, such as lack of access to care, deaths of despair, etc...

Also, when researching all cause mortality in 2020 and 2021 make sure to take into account fentanyl, which has exploded during those years and account for over 100,000 deaths in 2021 alone.

> If we'd presented vaccination as informed choice, had recommendations but not coercion, I think there would have been a lot less resistance.

Honestly, I seriously doubt it. I think the resistance would have been about the same; even the most gentle "recommendation" would have been cast as coercive by those who oppose the vaccine now. All a more "gentle" approach would have done is to dissuade those on the fence.

> even less likely that they'll die from a vaccine side effect

My understanding is that there've always been risks associated with vaccines, and they were always relatively small risks. What I can't find any unbiased information about is how the risks of the Covid vaccine compare with the risks of, say, the mumps or rubella vaccines.

Okay, please explain my leap in logic:

- I was curious

- I went to OECD to get datasets for COVID, excess, and all mortality [1]

- I subtracted COVID deaths from excess deaths to get “likely non-COVID excess deaths”

- then I made a chart [2], showing the ratio of COVID to non-COVID; log-2 scale with a black line at zero (equal COVID and non-COVID)

- I expected mostly COVID excess, like during the delta wave near the 2020/2021 boundary

- chart doesn’t look like that

- I would like the FDA to explain more, including serious studies

What is wrong about that process?

[1] - https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676

[2] - https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/relative-mortality.png

What are the overlapping curves here? Different age groups, different countries, something else?

Each curve is one of the countries from the OECD dataset with partial opacity; the darker regions are overlaps.

Ok, let's see.

Your graph does clearly have a peak at the 2020/2021 boundary, that falls down after the vaccines got widespread, by the middle of 2021 (with most countries going into negative excess deaths). There is another, smaller peak at the end of 2021, that's when omicron got widespread.

What exactly were you expecting to see?

This chart isn’t absolute death: it’s the ratio of two causes of death.

You’re not seeing countries go into negative excess in 2021 and 2022 — you’re seeing non-COVID excess surge.

I was expecting during the omicron wave that we had more than two COVID deaths compared to non-COVID excess deaths — and that more broadly, we’d see more COVID than other excess death

What we see instead is that during the height of omicron, 33% of the excess death was non-COVID — and that for most of 2021 and 2022, 66% of the excess death was non-COVID.

What has been killing as many people as a global pandemic? — and if there’s so many non-COVID excess deaths, did our policies help?

When that ratio turns negative, it literally means that there has been negative excess deaths when compared to the average. You can claim that the average is abnormally high, but that's quite a wild claim.

Negative excess deaths through the pandemics were pretty common and very well explained.

Anyway, such concepts like "non-COVID excess" doesn't even start to make sense. Either you are determining the death causes, or you are doing statistical analysis over unknown causes.

No — it doesn’t.

When that chart turns negative, it means that the ratio of COVID deaths to non-COVID excess is less than one, ie there is more non-COVID excess death than COVID deaths. When there is no non-COVID excess, but still COVID deaths, the chart shoots up; when there’s none of either, it clamps to the black line. This is a log-scale chart of their ratio; that solid black line represents a ratio of 1, ie, equal amounts.

The chart going below the black line represents positive excess death in a ratio that favors non-COVID excess deaths.

Edit: I’ve added a log chart of excess deaths, with the black line at zero, ie, the expected amount.

https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/shaded-excess-mortality.pn...

> concepts like "non-COVID excess" doesn't even start to make sense

Sure they do: excess deaths which exceed the number of registered COVID deaths in the same period. We can detect that by looking at all cause mortality and subtracting identified COVID mortality.

That may be true overall (and it may not btw, only time will tell), but it's certainly not true on a by-indvidual basis. Someone who's, say, 18 with no major health disorders is going to experience a lot more risk of adverse outcome from any of the vaccines than from SARS-CoV-2. That's partially a function of the incredible SARS-CoV-2 outcomes in the "not old" age range but also because vaccination is also a fundamentally different intervention than exposure to the entire SARS-CoV-2 virus. If we're talking about the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer/moderna/etc), those are basically spike protein mRNA suspended in lipid nanoparticles. It makes your cells express the spike protein, not the whole SARS-CoV-2 virus. So metaphorically speaking you're getting pure spike protein antigen, and different peoples' genetic predispositions/etc are going to play out differently in that scenario as opposed to contact with the normal virus.

...Like those of the people in the case report we're looking at.

You literally just made the wild leap of logic the parent comment was talking about.

The mRNA vaccines have a modified spike protein, that is non functional compared to natural infection. On top of that, cells naturally infected with covid also express the spike protein [1], and would do so in far greater amounts than what would be caused by the vaccine.

People's different genetic dispositions will change their immune response, and that might maybe change how they respond to the vaccine as opposed to the virus. But there's no way of knowing which way you will fall, and our current evidence suggests that getting the vaccine is probably always the safer alternative.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8941975/

> we have millions of both covid cases and vaccinations to back that up.

This study looked at 25 cases of unexpected death in

Fair enough, but where is that data? Why a study of only 25 if there are millions?

It's not a conspiracy theory to say such things simply don't add up. The largest drug test in history and no encompassing and definitive follow up? Why?

Not trolling. Serious question (i.e., why).

Without spending much time you could determine why by reading the paper. Most likely it is because they could only find 25 out of millions.

As someone who is also fully vaccinated, I am not sure how you can say it is overall good simply because most people will not react poorly. That is like saying Russian Roulette is a perfectly fine game to play because only one person is going to die, and that's OK.

Shouldn't people decide that for themselves?

Note, I am not saying you are saying it is not that they should decide for themselves, it is more that yours is the same logic used to defend vaccine mandates.

My entire issue actually has nothing to do with health, and everything to do with authoritarianism.

Before the vaccine mandates and coercion I had a seething hatred of corrupt and incompetent little tyrants in positions of power, afterward was nothing new, it just confirmed what I already knew about them. I don't care if I would have a statistically better outcome with the vaccine, I took great pleasure in standing up and defying their bullying and coercion. The wailing and the gnashing of teeth and name calling and crocodile tears from these pathetic clowns about people not getting vaccinated really warmed my heart gave me great pleasure and has mentally helped me tremendously in the past few years. I'm actually starting to feel a bit sad they're slithering back into their holes now, I was hoping for a showdown, but these people are nothing if not cowards like all bullies so this is to be expected.

What surprised me more was how many and how quickly people folded, or never even had any concerns in the first place. Obviously a good portion of the population are a meek and subservient type who want to be ruled and protected. After that a good number are flighty and will panic and run with the heard if something spooks them, sadly a trait that's easily exploited. I really should not have been surprised though, I've seen the same dynamic play out time and time again to start wars, invade privacy, take rights, and take money so irrational optimism that it would be different next time is my failing.

“I drove my car off a cliff to really stick it to society”

What’s warmed my heart is most Covid deaths being from the unvaccinated. Clearing out the weak and stupid even sooner than natural causes.

> “I drove my car off a cliff to really stick it to society”

Strawman.

> What’s warmed my heart is most Covid deaths being from the unvaccinated. Clearing out the weak and stupid even sooner than natural causes.

And the wailing and gnashing of teeth continues. You sound like a nasty, sick person xcrunner529. They don't make a jab for that.

EDIT: I will give you the benefit of the doubt though, in the spirit of this website. Perhaps you are not naturally like this, but that you have just been radicalized by hateful rhetoric from violent extremists that I see going around all too often these days. And you're lashing out here because you're being precious about the fact you've been lead to believe incorrect things about the vaccines and virus so many times. If that is the case I wish you the best in your recovery.

The vaccine has stayed just as effective for serious disease as it always was said. I am undeniably safer with the vaccine than without as I have actual family members who like you bought into the “vaccine bad” propaganda and died an early death from…COVID.

There really should be real life DARWIN awards.

The great thing, it’s mostly right wing voters dying. :)

> The vaccine has stayed just as effective for serious disease as it always was said.

It wasn't, this is just how you're coping with your cognitive dissonance.

> There really should be real life DARWIN awards.

There are. They are called the Darwin Awards. They have a website and everything.

> The great thing, it’s mostly right wing voters dying. :)

No I know you don't really mean it, you're just angry and lashing out because you've been wrong and humiliated so many times. You're a good person deep down I think.

And surprise surprise, you're wrong about this too. Vaccination rates correlate highly with age, and so do right wing political beliefs.

Because the vaccine is more beneficial for older people. And people can in fact make reasonable decisions about their health. Incredible isn't it?

The people dying are almost all unvaccinated. In any age group. Period. It’s a fact you can’t change.

You put on a brave front, but I think deep down your beliefs don't really comfort you from knowing that you've been fooled and wrong many times, and continue to be. I think and hope you are strong enough to one day come to terms with it though.

Source?

When you admit to making your decision based purely on "seething hatred," can you really blame people for seeing that decision as irrational?

> When you admit to making your decision based purely on "seething hatred,"

I didn't "admit" any such thing. My post is there for everybody to read.

> can you really blame people for seeing that decision as irrational?

I don't care what people think of my choices, but I never blamed people or complained about what they think of me. On the contrary I was quite explicit that a large segment of the population sees subservience to authority and following the herd as positive things and can simply never comprehend an objection to authoritarianism or see anything wrong with medical coercion "for the greater good, according to our betters". Clearly they will think my decision is irrational.

> I don't care if I would have a statistically better outcome with the vaccine, I took great pleasure in standing up and defying their bullying and coercion.

I don't understand this line of reasoning.

If one is being bullied and coerced into what you and I both consider to be the correct decision, one ought to a) make the correct decision, and then b) deal with the bullies?

I don't think I said I considered it to be correct or incorrect, but yes either way I will never take it now. If I had not been bullied by pissant little tyrants I'd have considered getting the vaccine depending on the situation. I don't get yearly flu vaccines either, but I took them in situations that required it (visiting medically sensitive people/places). Not to compare the diseases, just to compare the situation -- I'm also told a yearly flu vaccine is the "correct decision".

But that's really aside, as I said it's not about the clinical benefit of the treatment. I have principles and I have pride, and it would hurt me mentally to do what they tell me. I believe on balance this choice is better for my health. I know several people who didn't want to get the vaccine but were forced to for their jobs, and are deeply upset by that.

I perfectly realize that there are people who get fearful and panicked and are comforted by subservience to authoritarian leaders, who will never understand my line of reasoning. Just like I will never understand theirs. But I can empathize with them -- it must have been terrifying for them, and I don't blame them for being riled up and angry at people who disagreed with them and with their authorities.

What made me sad was how little empathy there has been from people towards what they don't understand. I guess it goes with the fear mindset, fear of the unknown, the other.

This is how they prey on us, I guess.

why is that logic jump is happening? Mostly because of censorship. If your logic needs censorship to prevent logic jumps, perhaps your logic isn't solid to begin with (or mixed with lies like the vaccine).

For healthy persons in certain age group, COVID risk is almost missing. If they don't want vaccine, regardless of taking 3 doses, I have no right to tell them to take not-thoroughly tested vaccine to help reduce the spread at the potential cost of their own.

The solution is more open studies and acknowledge statistical (in)significance of vax side effects instead of trying to shove it under conspiracy and censorship. Oh, and dont lie about vaccine effectiveness.

This paper doesn't claim that mRNA vaccines are dangerous, it investigates through autopsy 35 people in a region of Germany who died within 20 days of vaccination and only 5 of the deaths are found to show myocarditis of which only 3 somewhat might be attributed to the vaccine.

This is not an expose of big Pharma or anything like that, I don't know why the HN comments are acting as if this is some kind of research supporting the anti vaxxer claims.

If you look into the statistics, it actually might be the case that those 35 deaths were attributed to the vaccine. They found for fact that 10 of those died actually died of something else.

This is also why it takes an expert in a field to evaluate the content and make conclusions. Despite the tone in the HN comments, this actually might suggest that the deaths attributed to the vaccine side effect might be significantly higher than the reality but it would take a research to say of this is the case.

Tell that to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34004500

He is acting like it's support of anti-vaxxer claims. And it is why these articles get shared. Because they contain a very slight, practically negligible affirmation of the smallest portion of their claims. And that, in their eyes, is enough to proclaim victory.

If I'm going to read anti vaxxer content I need to be paid, I'm so done finding misrepresentations and statistical hackery in propaganda articles. They cherry pick data, resort in fallacies and all kinds of trickery. They give you a shocking graph where you can see that young people are dying en masse only to find out that this graph is achieved through visual or statistical BS. Hours spend to dig out lies, completely avoidable by avoiding that content.

I'm a little confused here. I'm not trying to convince you of the anti-vaxxer side.

You said:

> "I don't know why the HN comments are acting as if this is some kind of research supporting the anti vaxxer claims."

To which I posted a link of a guy who is acting as if this is some kind of research supporting the anti-vaxxer claims. The comments were trying to head off the exact thing that happened. Because those users know the pattern. They know why this was posted. It was posted specifically as "vindication" for anti-vaxxers. Those comments to point out that this study does not in any way vindicate anti-vaxxers are needed and the people who made them were right to make those comments.

Oh I wasn't directing my comments to you. My apologies, I just tried to express my reluctance of looking at anti-vaxxer content.

Even if this linked OP is just acting, I still find it very repulsive due to my previous experience. I wasn't referring to that comment anyway.

All good then, I just didn't want you to think I was advocating for the anti-vaxxer position. So if that wasn't your intention, apologies to you as well.

And I understand your reluctance. After the nth time, the eyes sort of glaze over as you get slapped with the same bad faith arguments supported by bad logic and supported by abused statistics.

You're inferring a lot from a someone's brief summary of the paper under discussion.

If you disagree with the summary, maybe address it?

I despise anti-vaxxer lunatics, I still found that comment interesting.

It's not one comment. The guy has a string of them across multiple threads.

And you are going to critique me for "inferring a lot" while ignoring his comment is not only sprinkled with evidence he's a conclusion looking for justification ("lethal jab-associated myocarditis"), but is nothing but inference itself.

It's not interesting, it's just old.

Yeah, I also currently believe that the statistics work out in favor of the vaccine. I am curious though, on how those 3 people died.

My biggest concern is in long-term effects. I understand that it is difficult to study them but that is why I am advocating for continued research.

So basically:

- I understand that in a pandemic situation, you can't wait for research into long-term effects to come out.

- Hence, in a pandemic situation, immediate vaccination should still be recommended.

- Research into long-term effects should continue after the pandemic.

Is there anything make you believe that the research doesn't continue?

I am worried how the discussion around the vaccine has turned political and how there are a lot of strong opinions around it. I worry it might affect funding and also "politically taint" people who publish research about it.

Fair enough but this doesn't mean that the research is finished, just the reporting on it is getting harder. People who actually work with these things instead of pushing their agenda are not really influenced by the politics because what they find is not political. They will not find out that bug Pharma was lying, they will find out how many people actually had myocarditis under what conditions for example.

Fair enough, but everyone was compelled to get the vaccine (regardless of age or risk factors). Given that, the vaccine makers and proponents leave themselves open to such criticisms that would not be valid if the vaccine was not compelled on my 7 year old.

If everyone was compelled how the vaccination rates are so low?

Where do you live that COVID vaccination is compulsory for a seven year old?

In the US, the 5-11 age range has only 38% having had even the first dose. https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...

This has bugged me since the beginning of this mess. It ought to be possible to say "Hey this looks kind of funny, could the vaccines be having weird effects in this .0000001% of the population?" without daggers coming out all around.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me that "The SARS-Cov-2 vaccines occasionally cause health problems" and "Almost everyone should get vaccinated/boosted" are both entirely true statements.

The issue is that there were coercive government mandates.

"Almost everyone should get vaccinated" does not mean the government should coerce everyone into making the correct medical decision by barring them from employment or access to private establishments.

Absent a very compelling reason, people should be free to go against medical advice. People have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies. People have the right to make the wrong choice.

In this case, the reason given for overriding that freedom was a highly specious argument that the unvaccinated were putting other people at significant risk. That argument did not pass the smell test from the very beginning.

You don't get to dismiss an argument by just declaring that it "didn't pass the smell test." That guidance was exactly in line with every counter-pathogen campaign since, Idk, before germ theory?

The worst part is that we have already comprehensively litigated all of this. The spanish flu had people protesting being forced to wear masks and other societal health measures and the Supreme court affirmed the US's right to mandate those kind of large scale health things.

The mask push then was because, for a while (and despite evidence of infectious agent passing through too-small-for-a-bacterium filters) they believed influenza was being caused by a bacterium, not a virus. Even then, they knew that the masks available would not stop airborne viruses. And masking didn't work then either (areas with enforced masking fared no better than areas where masking was optional). You're welcome to dig into accounts of the pandemic and medical journal articles written during and in the immediate aftermath of the influenza pandemic and confirm this for yourself.

Likewise, the initial (honest) advice not to bother with masks for covid was based on the fact that covid, like other coronaviruses and influenza, is aerosol-borne and aerosol particles pass through surgical mask material easily (so wearing a 2nd tight-fitting mask over a surgical mask to get a better fit doesn't matter).

The u-turn on masks for covid wasn't based on science. The justification later given was that the earlier, correct advice not to bother with masks was a noble lie to conserve supplies of masks for healthcare workers. At the time, the reversal was publicly predicated on hand-wavey (and false) claims that covid might be droplet-spread (droplets are larger than aerosol particles and droplet emissions could conceivably be greatly reduced by well-fitted surgical masks with no gaps).

The initial advice on masks was that we don’t know that they help. This is a truthful and different claim than the claim that we do know they don’t help.

The only record you’ll find of a public health official saying we DO know they DON’T help is USSG Jerome Adams.

It’s weird that you’re writing this implying that we now know masks don’t work. That’s not true. We DO know that SOME masks work, others work hardly at all or none at all.

Yes, the binary thinking unfortunately continues. Masks were/are/will never be 0% or 100% effective. Reducing the number of viruses transmitted at once could mean the difference between life and death for covid though.

Closing the beach however, was 100% BS.

Has this kind of vaccine mandate (for everyday life, not for travel) ever been imposed before? I remember the possibility of denying public services (e.g. schooling) to children who weren't vaccinated against measles being discussed but being extremely controversial, and that was for a vaccine that was far more reliable and well-tested.

Which mandate are you talking about?

Requiring restaurants/gyms/etc. to require customers to be vaccinated.

Yep, states have more or less complete authority to mandate things like this.

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...

He asked if it had ever been done before.

It is a basic tragedy of the commons problem. Solving this is basically the reason why we have government.

> a highly specious argument that the unvaccinated were putting other people at significant risk.

The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

Well... the awkward part about this is right now, it is now the opposite problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/environment/covid...

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20221127/more-vaccinated-peo...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinate...

As even that top article points out we'd expect the rate of unvaccinated people to approach the base rate which is 76% of the population having received one dose. And since old people are at more risk and are more vaccinated, we'd expect it to reach even higher eventually. But that happens because eventually the unvaccinated do all pick up natural immunity and the effect we're measuring is that the excess load caused by the unvaccinated is declining. We could have gotten to this point much quicker by having 100% vaccination rates (and 100% of the people still being admitted with COVID would then be vaccinated) but with an order of magnitude less load on the hospital system.

The top article you cite has all this information in it, and even mentions the base rate fallacy. It is criticizing the framing of the pandemic as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" and trying to focus attention on the elderly, but that is orthogonal to the question of if the unvaccinated are disproportionately clogging up the hospital system. Both statistics are true. Everyone should still get vaccinated to reduce the load on the hospital system (although this concern is now fading as antivaxxers actually do pick up immunity the hard way). We should also focus on the elderly more.

As a simple example: if a population begins entirely susceptible and there's a vaccine from day 1 which is available and reduces the risks of hospitalization by 9x and 90% of the people get the vaccine, then the rates of hospitalization will be split 50/50 between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Vaccinating the rest of the population would increase vaccination rates by 10% but would decrease overall hospitalization rates by 44%.

> Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

I wonder how that would apply to obesity and unprotected sex.

Um, obesity is an individual issue (at least at the current levels of hospital load associated with it) so your insurance and bills go up. Unprotected sex has two people involved and can be assault (if not agreed to) and if done by someone who knows they are HIV positive and infects another who dies... manslaughter.

But we've shown that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission, so not getting it is an individual issue ...

So you filling up ICUs where there's no room for people who bothered to help their fellow citizens with heart attacks, car crashes, or cancer treatment is transmission? That is a different definition of transmission than I am aware of.

Can you please provide a dictionary or other reference?

In case you were wondering when ICUs were full of respiratory diseases, that would be last week.

If 100 healthy unvaccinated people in their mid 30s caught delta, how many of them would you expect to end up in the ICU?

Wow, what a cherry picked choice, too bad it's still awful and even an overly generous comparison makes that apparent.

   There are 23k ICU beds in the US.
   The population of the US is 330M. 
   The hospitalization rate for COVID was ~120/100k in 30 year olds.
   Average stay in ICU for COVID was 2-5 weeks.

So if the entire US was made up of unvaxed 30 year olds and 5% of them caught COVID every 2-5 weeks they would require ~3300x120x5%=20k ICU beds for at least an entire year! And since ICUs are normally about 30-50% full with other catastrophic medical events, that means someone else has to die for a self-important exercise of freedumb.

Normally, 30 year olds are healthy and don't present so highly in the hospitals or ICUs so on a percentage basis it's even worse (normal ~2%/decade vs ~20%/decade for 80yrs old). God forbid you're in rural America or your skin color is dark so you don't have access to the beds available in the cities. If you can't be polite to others, you shouldn't expect them to be polite to you.

> The hospitalization rate for COVID was ~120/100k in 30 year olds.

So I think that roughly answers the question, you might expect something like .12 people to be hospitalized (does that include ICU? Do these people have prior exposures? Comorbidities?).

I just ask because I think not everyone is aware yet that covid was (and is) a disease with a wide range of outcomes. I think the number you cited would surprise quite a few people. Many seem to think it was basically like playing russian roulette no matter your situation, and would have guessed a double digit number.

I'm not making any kind of claim that people shouldn't get vaccinated. Just trying to show that some individuals deciding not to get vaccinated isn't exactly as murderous as some might think.

I apologize if this didn't seem like a polite question. Thank you for indulging me.

Sorry, just have immuno-compromised family who are still home bound and couldn't get medical care for more than a year.

I think the other thing that people forget is that covid immune response can give you the same myocarditis (along with clots and heart attacks) as vaccines for much the same reasons, but at higher rates. The fact that the stabilized (Novavax, Pfizer, Moderna) vaccines have 10x lower rates of myocarditis than unmodified spike RNA (ChadOx, Sputnik) indicates that reducing the immune surface variation lowers risk.

> The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

> Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.

My right to choose my own treatment outweighs any right you have to feel safer. That includes you feeling safe that the local hospital system will not be at capacity if you have to be admitted.

It’s no different than having a bunch of chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system. People have the right to make potentially destructive choices that are not directly harmful to those around them.

> chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system.

That's the normal load and it is scaled for it[*].

COVID is like a DDoS.

And there is no elastic cloud scaling for nurses, you can't just turn up more instances from a ready pool.

[*] Well maybe not any more, and lets not get into a discussion of the for-profit health care system.

Interesting way to look at it , a DDoS on healthcare. Makes me think of a Cold War sci-fi story called “Wasp”.

> My right to choose my own treatment outweighs any right you have to feel safer.

No problem. Please sign this document stating that you will not seek treatment for Covid and that hospitals can legally refuse to treat you if you contract Covid.

But, see, that didn't happen. Instead what we wind up with are anti-vaxxers begging for the vaccine after they have been put on ECMO. Yeah, unfortunately it's too late at that point.

And even worse you are now soaking up a hospital bed for 4+ months that should have gone to someone who wasn't stupid.

And even worse that that is the dying person's family giving grief to the hospital staff because someone anti-vax dying of Covid doesn't fit their reality narrative. I could at least have some sympathy for the uneducated following foolish leaders. I have NEGATIVE sympathy for those who then abuse people trying to help them when the consequences come home to roost.

When I can see tears of relief in the eyes of a nurse simply by saying "Don't worry. I'm pro-vax." we have let the idiots have too much leeway.

Fortunately you can't stop the countdown till the moment you realize that the idiot was you.

If contracting a bad case of Covid 19 is enough to get anti-vax people to change their beliefs, perhaps that's pretty good evidence that maybe they haven't thought out the consequences of their position very well, after all.

As the kids say: "Fuck around. Find out." Or, as the olds say: "Play stupid games; win stupid prizes."

> No problem. Please sign this document stating that you will not seek treatment for Covid and that hospitals can legally refuse to treat you if you contract Covid.

Why? Do you expect someone who doesn’t get a measles vaccine to sign a waiver refusing treatment if they get I’ll? Do you expect someone who refuses to wear a condom to refuse treatment if they contract an STD?

> Do you expect someone who doesn’t get a measles vaccine to sign a waiver refusing treatment if they get I’ll?

Perhaps? The advantage that we have with measles is that the vaccine can reach "herd immunity" and the measles vaccine is extremely effective. If enough people started dropping the measles vaccine because "Muh Choices!" that we fell below that and it started clogging the hospitals, yeah, maybe. The enclaves that refuse the measles vaccine find out about every 5-10 years why that's a bad idea.

> It’s no different than having a bunch of chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system.

These aren't comparable. Obesity or alcoholism aren't communicable and don't lead to outbreaks. If they did, we'd be having similar discussions as to Covid.

> The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.

Except that wasn't happening, and so much not happening that hospitals were reducing capacity. The emergency capacity built in early 2020 was dismantled after only a month or so and never brought back.

You can find individual hospitals reaching capacity all the time every year forever, but it was never the problem the news made it out to be. Current headlines include gasp hospitals at 80% capacity! ...Except that's normal. The more empty beds they have, the more money they lose - they try to run at around 80-90% full.

> the government should coerce everyone into making the correct medical decision by barring them from employment or access to private establishments.

But... the government has been doing that for decades and decades, since the very invention of the vaccine! Why is that "The Issue" when there's suddenly a pandemic and it's important, vs. when you needed to show your vaccination records to join the military or go to school in the 90's or whatever?

You see that the concern you're showing seems, to those of us on the other side, maybe a little insincere?

What about my position seems insincere to you?

You see no philosophical difference between the government mandating vaccination records for schools and public institutions like the military vs. them mandating vaccination records for private establishments such as gyms, irrespective of the wishes of the owners of those establishments?

Should the government have the right to mandate vaccination records for entry to a private home, irrespective of the wishes of the homeowner?

The government has the right (and I'd argue, the duty) to quarantine people with diseases that are both contagious and dangerous if that's the best way to keep them from harming others. More details here: https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantin...

AIDS/HIV sufferers would like a word with you.

Speaking of which, Fauci's early statements on AIDS in the initial outbreak were interesting.

Your theory is that the best way to prevent AIDS deaths is quarantining people? That seems extreme.

Regardless, it's not one of the diseases listed on the linked page, and it's very different in nature than the ones there, so that sounds like a red herring to me.

WTH? No. How can you get such a meaning from that. It's the opposite!

You were the only one here suggesting people with HIV were relevant to quarantining. So since neither I nor the CDC thought that was a good idea, then either you did or it was a straw man.

Pandemics are not a private issue. It's similar to a war. It can kill a significant percent of the population and it requires collective action to stop it.

The "vaccine mandates" that have been around since the 90s have been relatively weak or non-existent, via any number of possible exemptions.

Perhaps the military had some say but it's relatively easy to not accidentally enlist.

> ...does not mean the government should coerce everyone...

Here you're presuming that the government's role in a pandemic is to wring their hands and issue PSA's. That might be what some folks want them to do these days, but when the legal foundations of public health policy were laid the government was expected to do quite a bit more.

> People have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies.

This might be your opinion, but the majority of your fellow citizens disagree with you. Try asking them about drug use, abortion, suicide, and other "purely personal" matters.

> People have the right to make the wrong choice.

Many wrong choices come with severe state-imposed consequences. We in the US long ago delegated to our elected representatives the authority to force some choices onto individuals, including in a health emergency. We are of course vigorously debating whether they used that authority wisely this time, but it was theirs to use.

And... They... Just... Keep... On... Using... It.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/us-extends-covid-public-heal...

Yeah, it sure ought to be.

But the same people who believe that evolution and climate change are hoaxes are also convinced that COVID is a hoax. (The disease is a hoax, the vaccine is a hoax, the hoax disease that doesn't need to be cured by the hoax vaccine is an attack by China -- and the coverup is a hoax.)

And those people are ~40% of the US population, with an outsized thumb on the scale of elections due to accidents of geography and history. So instead of talking cogently about tradeoffs, we're barely fending off turning conspiracy theories into policy. And by "barely" I mean "succeeding slightly more often than we fail".

Yeah, we ought to be able to discuss things cogently. That ship sailed a long time ago.

> It ought to be possible to say "Hey this looks kind of funny, could the vaccines be having weird effects in this .0000001% of the population?" without daggers coming out all around.

That's one in a billion. No, it's not possible to reason about a weird effect affecting less than one person in all of EU + US combined.

But we do actually know what happens when there is a legit safety concern with the vaccines affecting a slice of the population, since it has happened. The AZ vaccine turned out to have rare (but not one in a billion rare), serious and even lethal, complications for young women. The public health authorities picked up on this within a month, and acted to stop the use of that vaccine first for that at-risk group and later for everyone.

That was all fairly low drama.

> I am vaccinated but I am upvoting this post because I believe that it is important to investigate these cases to determine how to improve future vaccines.

The fact that people feel the need to say that for any criticism of an intervention says that we have long left the realm of science and entered the realm of religion.

Every intervention has benefits and harms.

Not talking about harms makes it impossible to assess the cost-benefit tradeoffs of the intervention.

I agree with you, there’s a weirdly political zealotry when it comes to such things.

I took the Sinopharm vac as I felt hesitant to take what I considered to be brand new tech in the MRNA vaccines (I ended up taking the MRNA one as well but that was for travel reasons where I live). And people online acted like I was a conspiracy theorist, for preferring the tried and tested tech of the traditional vaccine.

I keep hearing vaccination being promoted, but the last major study I saw showed no statistically significant difference in natural immunity + vaccination versus simple natural immunity. This also seems to be a topic treated as a fringe conspiracy theory instead of an extremely serious health issue worthy of a large amount of resources dedicated to giving us an answer. One certainly could be forgiven for thinking the vaccine has become a larger political issue than health issue for both sides.

that's certainly an age dependent thing, right?

> As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

No.

This is the wrong criteria to judge by. Right now it takes ~30,000 injections to prevent one hospitalization from COVID, according to recent studies.

So the real criteria is, if there are severe side effects in more than 1/30k they should be pulled.

In Pfizer's own RCT more people died in the vaccinated cohort. They had ~4x the amount of cardiac arrest. There was no proven effect on all-cause mortality from the start. Anyone paying attention and not blindly listening to politicians and the sycophantic media knew this long ago.

Wife got shot. Few days later her arm swelled up. 2 years later it still is. Her and I had already had Covid from before the vaccine. Absolutely refused to get it because of that. She now regrets it. She still gets Covid with every outbreak anyway. So doesn’t seem to have helped.

I know a couple of kids that got it and have clots in their brains now. Less sure on timeline on these. But I’ve not seen this before.

Sure it could all be coincidence.

then there’s all the assholes who decided that get the vaccine or become unemployed.

> Few days later her arm swelled up. 2 years later it still is.

I am not a doctor, but that's weird. I almost wonder if it got infected. You had a doctor check it out, right?

Another thing that hasn't gotten enough research is the effectiveness of the latest booster for someone who was vaccinated earlier and got omicron (this is a pretty big cohort). It's genuinely hard to make a recommendation one way or another on it because it's not clear how effective it is after four prior exposure events, and it has to be weighed against the risk of side effects like this.

Same. The impact rate of myocarditis might be extremely small, but if it's caused by the vaccine, it should be investigated, while at the same time, people should get vaccinated. Luckily, the scientific community understands that. Unluckily, the non-scientific community doesn't on both ends. The supporters of the vaccine think you're attacking the vaccine. The detractors think you're suddenly supporting them. No. EVERYONE should be vaccinated. The vaccine has been given to billions, it is exceedingly safe. Can we do better? Yes. Is it marginal? Also yes, but I don't wish miocarditis on anyone.

I agree it is good we keep funding studies to try to better understand and predict the effects of the vaccines. What would it mean to feel like we have a good understanding though? How would we quantify "god"? We have observed that the side-effects have minimal deviation from the normal variations observed in the population for those effects. And we also know it is highly dependent on individual characteristics as to who exhibits the worst side-effects or best antibody response.

> What would it mean to feel like we have a good understanding though? How would we quantify "god"?

That is a hard question and honestly I don't have the knowledge to answer it.

> We have observed that the side-effects have minimal deviation from the normal variations observed in the population for those effects. And we also know it is highly dependent on individual characteristics as to who exhibits the worst side-effects or best antibody response.

Yeah, I get that the vaccine can cause side effects for a very small minority of the population. I think what I want is for vaccine side-effects to be treated more like plane crashes. I get that bad things happen, but if it isn't cost-prohibitive, I would like to know why these things happened, even if they happen extremely rarely.

> As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

That's not how medicine works. What would be your opinion if you were the one that was going to die? Would you still stick by your statement?

The issue is NO ONE told anyone this data. It was "suppressed" to PREVENT "vaccination hesitancy", that's the issue.

I'm pretty sure that's how medicine works. Obviously, if I knew the vaccine would kill me, I would not take it. But it's the same deal with literally any medication.

When I was prescribed Accutane for my acne, I was told that it could cause kidney damage. If I knew it would cause kidney damage to me would I have taken it? Of course not. But I hedged my bets and gambled that it wouldn't.

As far as the suppression of information goes, obviously that is totally unacceptable. That's also partially why I upvoted this post right?

Has there been any plan to compensate victims of the vaccines? either deaths or heart inflammation or other side effects? Any plan to approve and understand vaccine's effects should also come with proper system to compensate and acknowledge the risks.. But I feel that this has been avoided from the start to remove any liability.

Yes, it’s never either or. For one good example of the complexity, see this video [1] where Paul Offit notes the problems with the current bivalve that vaccines.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-v_vXMI91nw

The association between heart problems and mRNA vaccines is a settled matter - outside social media at least.

The Paul Ehrlich institute which is monitoring vaccine side-effects has a nice detailed report on vaccine safety with details on heart problems and all sorts of other things.

Most affected are men and male teens between 12-17 and Moderna’s causing more problems than Biontech. This was the main reason why the German vaccination committee recommended that men under 30 get Biontech.

I missed “settled matter” in the scientific method handbook. The reality is that this experiment is still unfolding and will continue for the rest of my life. It will take decades of research and observations to have real answers.

Settled matter? No.

In that sense nothing is ever a settled matter.

The same kind of technical gotcha like “there’s no evidence masks prevent infection”.

> As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

Assuming the vaccine prevents or lessens the effects of infection, this is logical. A common belief is that the vaccine is virtually useless. If this belief is true or close to true, then taking the vaccine would result in an increase in risk.

Utilitarian ideas like this are the basis of every story of the rogue AI that locks up humanity for its own safety.

> Standardized autopsies were performed on 25 persons who had died unexpectedly and within 20 days after anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. In four patients who received a mRNA vaccination, we identified acute (epi-)myocarditis without detection of another significant disease or health constellation that may have caused an unexpected death.

Myocarditis was found in 4 out of 25 people who had received the vaccine and died within 25 days of it, and none had showed any sign of related disease.

What are the odds of any 4 out 25 people in the age range of the group with no record of any related illness having acute myocarditis?

It is so typical of HN that your vapid comment should rise to the top.

> Currently, I still believe that people should vaccinate, even if vaccines cause mortality/harm in some cases. As long as vaccine side effects cause less deaths and less harm than the virus, vaccination is still the way to go.

Where is the evidence of this, given that many governments have withdrawn the vaccines or even banned for them for young people, a category you probably fall into?

> What are the odds of any 4 out 25 people with no record of any related illness dying of myocarditis.

Note that I'm not saying vaccines do not cause myocarditis, I'm saying that even if vaccines may cause myocarditis but cause fewer myocarditis cases than COVID deaths, then it is still worth vaccinating.

> Where is the evidence of this, given that many governments have withdrawn the vaccines or even banned for them for young people, a category you probably fall into?

Hence my next sentence right?

> My position depends on us having a good understanding of the vaccine's effects however, and right now I feel like we don't.

That said, although I didn't mention it in my comment, my current understanding of the statistics does make me believe that the vaccine causes less cases of myocarditis than COVID deaths.

There is a lot of studies on this topic. Somehow not covered in media. Which makes me even more curious.

Gill J.R. et al: Autopsy Histopathologic Cardiac Findings in 2 Adolescents Following the Second COVID-19 Vaccine Dose, Arch Pathol Lab Med (2022) 146 (8):925-929 https://meridian.allenpress.com/aplm/article/146/8/925/47778...

Risks of myocarditis, pericarditis, and cardiac arrhythmias associated with COVID-19 vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infectionhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0#Aff1

Vaccine-Associated Myo/Pericarditis in Adolescents: A Stratified Risk-Benefit Analysis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13759

Schauer J. et al: Persistent Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Finfings in a Cohort of Adolescents with Post-Coronavirus Disease 2019 mRNA Vaccine Myopericarditis, The Journal of Pediatrics, March 25, 2022 https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(22)00282-7/fulltext

Chua G.T.et al: Epidemiology of Acute Myocarditis/Pericarditis in Hong Kong Adolescents Following Comirnaty Vaccination, Clin Infect Dis 2022, Sep 10. 75(4):673-681 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34849657/

Le Vu S.et al: Age and sex-specific risks of myokarditis and pericarditis following Covid-19 messenger RNA vaccines, Nat Commun, 2022, 13:3633, 25 Jun 2022 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9233673/

Goddard K.et al: Risk of myokarditis and pericarditis following BT162b2 and mRNA-1273 COVID-19 vaccination, Vaccine 2022, Aug 19, 40(35): 5153-5159 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9273527/

https://www.sst.dk/en/english/corona-eng/vaccination-against...

Bardosh K.et al: COVID-19 Vaccine Boosters for Young Adults: A Risk-Benefit Assessment and Five Ethical Arguments against Mandates at Universities, 12 Sep 2022, preprint https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070

Oster M.E. et al: Myocarditis Cases Reported After mRNA-Based COVID-19 Vaccination in the US From December 2020 to August 2021, JAMA 2022,327(4):331-340, 25 Jan 2022 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346

Lai F.T. et al: Carditis After COVID-19 Vaccination With a Messenger RNA Vaccine and an Inactivated Virus Vaccine, Ann Int Med, March 2022 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3700?rfr_da...

Massari M. et al: Postmarketing active surveillance of myokarditis and pericarditis following vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in persons aged 12 to 39 years in Italy: A multi-database, self-controlled case series study, Plos Medicine, July 2022 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34849657/

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination and Myocarditis in a Nordic Cohort Study of 23 Million Residents https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

Age and sex-specific risks of myocarditis and pericarditis following Covid-19 messenger RNA vaccines https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31401-5

What does "not covered in media" mean to you?

While this topic doesn't dominate the news cycle, I've seen plenty of reporting on it.

In commercial mass media?

In Czechia, quite respected medium blame inflation and high prices for energy the reason of higher heart failures. No words about possibly side effect of vaccines.

https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/prvni-priznaky-akutni-infa...

https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/domaci/srdecni-selhani/r~9214c0b4...

But it's not surprise when gonverment bought 20 milion doses for 10 milion nation in spring 2022 for 7,5 bilion CZK when most are done with vaccination for covid. In 2023 they plan buy even more for another 5,5 bilion CZK. Thats how corrupted our gonverment is.

https://www.prolibertate.cz/2022/03/zatimco-sledujeme-valku-...

I had a bad reaction to an mRNA vaccine that I’m still dealing with, and feel exactly the same as you do. This technology is too important to politicise. We need to look at it scientifically, make it better, and continue to deploy it in situations where the risk profile makes sense.

If you're over 80, you should probably get vaccinated.

If you're over 80 you've probably got enough experience to make your own decisions.

>I am vaccinated but

Funny how this sounds like you have some special kind of keycard to be allowed to say what you said.

Because many people fallaciously assume that someone who is not vaccinated must be an idiot and hence should not be listened to.

Well your feeling is wrong. The data gathering to establish the risks is why we don't just update the mRNA monthly based on the latest viral RNA.

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