Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesy0ung | Hacker News Reader

Look at the response to COVID-19.

Considering people deny it happened, we might need something more drastic.

OTOH, I’m sure if the Canary Islands blew up and a massive tsunami wiped New York out of the map, there would be people saying NYC was a fictional place that existed only in movies.

That can be read both ways. Please elaborate.

Nations outbid each other to get masks and everything. Confiscated stuff when it was moved past their borders etc. i think the message we can learn from it is clear.

But there was also some international cooperation, as well, e.g. Pfizer-BioNTech.

Where BioNTech had specialist competence in a technology which turned out to somewhat effective against the problem and Pfizer had massive funds, established contact network including decision makers and established ability to quickly run large clinical trials. Neither of all that much use without the other. Taken together, an opportunity to conduct highly profitable business, mitigate a health emergency, and look great doing it. There seems to be lessons about conditions for successful cooperation in the example, but I'm not so sure what they say is particularly encouraging about uniting nations.

The cooperation happened when both parties could only benefit through cooperation, and it required trust. The vaccines were snatched (in the beginning) and the Trump wanted to "take over" BioNTech to guarantee vaccine priority.

COVID-19 showed that everyone is on its own (countries, cities, individuals, etc..)

We created a vaccine in record time and distributed it in peoples arms in even less. I think all in all the Covid pandemic response was an incredible achievement, even if far from perfect.

Far from perfect? Have you seen the latest data?

We now know for example, that the risk of being hospitalised due to vaccine side effects is orders of magnitude more likely than that the vaccines will save you from being hospitalised with COVID.

In randomized control trials of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines here in the UK, we now know the risk of serious adverse effects from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated i.e. a ~1 in 800 change of serious adverse effects:

22-Sep-22 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/

The UK government has now published its estimate of the number of people needed to vaccinate to prevent a COIVD-19 hospitalisation:

25-Jan-2023 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

For example in the 20-29 year no-risk group, the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one hopitalisation is 168,200. To prevent one serious hospitalisation requiring oxygen or ventilation you would need to vaccinate 706,500.

In the UK data, there is litterally no group of people where the likelihood of being hospitalised with side effects is less than the liklihood of being hospitalised with COVID.

It was a disaster that has left us with a plague of "unexplained" excess deaths - a topic that no politician or mainstream journalist wants to touch with a barge pole.

Your first link, straight from the introduction: "Our study was not designed to evaluate the overall harm-benefit of vaccination programs so far. To put our safety results in context, we conducted a simple comparison of harms with benefits to illustrate the need for formal harm-benefit analyses of the vaccines that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. Our analysis is restricted to the randomized trial data, and does not consider data on post-authorization vaccination program impact. It does however show the need for public release of participant level trial datasets."

If it wasn't designed to evaluate the harm benefit of vaccination, why are you portraying it as such?

It doesn't really matter the stated intent of the authors. The fact is that the paper does show a hospitalisation rate of 1 in 800.

Exactly

Not a good example. Large parts of the population were resistant or showed very weak flu-like symptoms. You couldn't show the full hospital wards, the high death rates to all parts of society. You needed to force very invasive measures - closures, quarantines, getting a vaccination - with not much to effectively show what for. Conspiracies and resistance was then of course aloof. With an obvious external threat that would be different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com