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Comment by radicaldreamer | Hacker News Reader

The main thing to worry about is if this starts spreading, the combination of 1) lockdowns being politically unfeasible and 2) lack of a mass produced vaccine

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> lockdowns being politically unfeasible

I bet 50% mortality will really focus the mind of the anti-lockdowners.

That is unfortunately unlikely - the best conspiracy theorists view any criticism of their viewpoint as further proof that their assertions are correct and will constantly spin BS to make sure their initial beliefs remain intact.

As I had said at the outbreak of COVID the tough math governments deal with during a pandemic is that there are only so many law enforcement assets and if they are exercised en masse they'll become ineffective due to transmission causing holes in the work force. You really want everyone to remain indoors voluntarily and for law enforcement to have no job to do - that's the ideal scenario since it preserves the strength of government organizations for any other incidents that may arise.

Society functions on using soft power to compel people to act in a way that's viewed as rational by society - anti-lockdowners don't respond to soft power to get them off the street you generally need to actually exercise hard power and isolate them - but a compounding issue is that we've created an environment in the internet where all these conspiracy theorists can attract cult followings and increase the amount of non-compliant folks which exceeds the capacity of law enforcement.

This problem isn't going to go away on a whim.

With a 50% mortality rate, this is quite self correcting. People who refuse to be lockdown will die.

Quite the opposite. 50% of people who refuse to lockdown that contract it will die, the other 50% will function as efficient spreaders. Let's not forget how many of these sociopaths came out of the woodwork during covid.

A whole bunch of anti-vaxxers have died from COVID but their irresponsibility lead to countless others suffering needlessly. While it's my hope that everyone gets to enjoy a long life I'm more concerned about the responsible people being harmed by those folks' irresponsibility.

50% mortality rate is almost certainly way too high and missing subclinical cases in the denominator.

Same thing happened with COVID early where the CFR was reported to be 17% in the initial cases out of China.

But the more people refusing and the longer the wave goes, the more incidental deaths there will be from people with other medical issues that have access to care restricted.

Yes, but there's an astonishing amount of them...

Religious beliefs become stronger in the light of contradicting evidence. There will be a "god of the gaps" approach with conspiracies as well.

The Overton window on the feasibility of lockdowns would get a bit of a shift if it becomes a pandemic with a 60% (or even a substantially lower) fatality rate.

That's if you could get a sizeable chunk of the population to accept the data. Unfortunately, as we've seen with covid there are all sorts of "the guberment is lying to us!" type conspiracy theories out there and it could take a while before the truth sinks in - from seeing friends, family and neighbors experiencing serious illness and/or mortality. But when it gets to that point it's kind of too late.

I think we're in a vulnerable space right now where in some ways the divisions that were exposed and heightened by the covid pandemic leave us less able to deal with another serious pandemic in the near term. Add in pandemic fatigue and it's even worse.

It's not a conspiracy theory when they actually do lie; take Dr. Fauci for example:

"When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85." [0]

Lots of talk of "just so we can flatten the curve" turned into "so noone ever gets infected again". The role of NIH/NIAD in funding gain-of-function research. etc. etc.

There's no denying that plenty of people didn't believe things that the government said were actually true. The problem, of course, is that it is hard to tell which statements are lies and which statements are true.

[0] https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-...

I've come to the conclusion that reducing beliefs like that is not a matter of education. I mean the message is out there loud and clear, it's not that if only people heard it louder and more often that they would change their minds.

No, I think at this point, the best way to reduce the number of people who believe the government lies to them is to reduce the amount of lies that the government tells them.

Covid was a "perfect" conspiracy disease because the symptoms were so different person-to-person.

A 50%+ lethal disease won't leave many survivors to say "it wasn't that bad, everyone overreacted!". The initial wave of conspiracy-minded folks won't have a great time to say the least.

A 5 to 10% lethal disease would be horrific enough.

There is a growing chunk of the population that has now begun beating the drum of "COVID never happened - nobody died and there was no flu." It is extremely easy to underestimate just how ignorant some people can be.

Yea. I’m more interested in the manufacturing capacity of high quality masks, that seems like a low cost high payoff investment from a global health standpoint.

I'm more interested in just shutting down air travel every winter or just period. It's much easier and actually works. Sure we have to go back to a period around 60 years ago but the alternative is going back 100 years in civilization.

> 2) lack of a mass produced vaccine

But this would be a flu vaccine. We've been making flu vaccines for a long time now. Why couldn't they just put H5N1 in next fall's flu vaccine?

Pandemic flu doesn't have to be seasonal and we don't produce enough to actually vaccinate everyone who would want it, and even in a pandemic situation it would be a challenge to ramp up production.

"Should an outbreak of pandemic influenza occur today, the doses available for global populations within this time frame would be well short of the need, given the state of preparedness and the level of existing capacity. Our estimate is that in a “best-case” scenario, only 1.2 billion courses (2.4 billion doses) could be produced from current capacity within six months, and current stockpiles are limited."

https://www.path.org/resources/influenza-vaccine-strategies-...

We've had MERS and swine flu and C19 since that was published (2007), I imagine capacity may have improved since. And ultimately (cynically) that's just a function of the fact that maintaining a stockpile (or the capacity to quickly produce a world's supply) is not a goal of any individual country, anyone living in a country that is 1. Rich or 2. Houses pharma companies or their manufacturing facilities will probably be covered.

This report does say that things have improved since then:

https://api.healthsecuritynet.org/get/file/9789241515634-eng...

It's complicated, first there is not just one H5N1 virus, there is a family of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H5N1_vaccine

The constant evolution of new strains is the norm for seasonal flus though, for which we update vaccines in a matter of months (without any emergency use authorisation to cut through red tape)

If this is indeed human to human transmission, humankind will look very different next fall.

If we look at historic flu trends we're going to be getting to the end of this year's flu season in the northern hemisphere in the next month or so. Usually starts ramping up in November (this last year it was a bit earlier) and goes through February, sometimes into March, but much less in Spring, Summer.

In terms of vaccine I'd be more worried about even poorer uptake than the COVID vaccines among vulnerable populations this time around than I would with supply. The regulatory and manufacturing infrastructure exists to produce a lot of flu vaccines and update the antigens in a matter of months, so I reckon we would be ok on supply within a year. Although the ramp up might depend on who is in office I suppose and how offensive the idea is to their base.

And if people still go to work.

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