The next sentence is:

From May 2 to June 5, the efficacy rate in preventing hospitalization was 98.2%, compared with 93% from June 6 to July 3

That's a 4x higher chance of hospitalisation.

It could be worse. It could have gone from a 99.9% to 99.1% in preventing hospitalization. That would be an 9x higher chance of hospitalization!

That's the difference between extended lockdown periods and normality in many countries.

I think you're confusing population wide death rates with post infection hospitalization rates. There's about 10x between death and hospitalization and there is about a 3-10x difference between population vs infection (for many countries 10-33% is a reasonable range of infection... except for China/Taiwan/Korea which are in the <1% range).

Here's a similar study for Ontario, breaking down efficacy based on variant:

https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaCoronavirus/comments/oe6ajn/c...

Two observations:

* as the top comment points out, the confidence intervals matter

* the numbers are all over the place

I don't know the data for the Israel study, but I'm not sure we can confidently conclude something as specific as "4x higher chance of hospitalization".

It's not as easy. Number of cases in that second period are ~10x the number of cases in that first period. Which means you have more propagation, potentially affecting more at-risk chunk of the population. E.g. the very few cases happening in May-June may have beeen predominantly occuring in young people with extensive social contacts, now that the transmission is going up it can spread to more isolated communities (e.g. old people with less social contacts, that are more at risk of isolation).

There is not a single number that you can look in isolation that will give you an answer.

Not including that people who are vaccinated's guard is down more, will likely be gathering more with wider social networks, etc; what are the chances an escape mutant variant occurs that spreads wide, has long delay before causing deadly effects, etc?

And when does Ivermectin come into mainstream and every COVID discussion? Based on the evidence it looks like used as a preventative, give it to literally everyone for 2 weeks, and we could close to abolish COVID and variants. The suppression of conversation and scientific debate is the biggest problem out of all of this.

Edit to add: whomever downvoted this, you're part of the problem of suppression - good for you.

It does not look like Ivermectin would provide a substantial benefit:

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

From 61 studies on Ivermectin you cherrypicked one of the 5 with a negative effect:

https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpall

I'll do 99 better for you: https://c19ivermectin.com/ - "Database of all ivermectin COVID-19 studies. 100 studies, 63 peer reviewed, 61 with results comparing treatment and control groups."

COVID, Ivermectin, and the Crime of the Century DarkHorse Podcast with Pierre Kory & Bret Weinstein

https://vimeo.com/557811163 (2.5 hours; deleted by YouTube)

Joe Rogan then recently had Bret Weinstein and Pierre Kory on his podcast to raise awareness of issue

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7uVXKgE6eLJKMXkETwcw0D?si=7... (3 hours - heavily repeat of what was said in link before; Spotify desktop or mobile app lets you watch video)

How to save the world, in three easy [includes inventor of mRNA, if you care about credentials]

https://vimeo.com/562724784 (3.5 hours)

Bret Weinstein (evolutionary biologist) and Geert Vanden Bossche (virologist) explaining in lay how mRNA vaccine skips a step in innate immune response and may cause problem with escape variants:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNyAovuUxro (~2 hours)

Lots of ongoing updates from them:

Dr. Pierre Kory - https://twitter.com/pierreKory/

Dr. Robert Malone - https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD

Dr. Bret Weinstein - https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein

Two other main resources/organizations of doctors posting regular updates of latest data/charts, etc:

https://covid19criticalcare.com/ / http://flccc.net/ (same site)

https://bird-group.org/

I have a hard time taking things like this seriously:

https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1411158326726082565

Are all your links like this? Denying what we clearly can see (that vaccines work) to promote what they think will work (ivermectin)?

EDIT: It gets worse the lower you scroll. In addition to dismissing vaccines and promoting ivermectin, he signal boosts "natural medicine" too.

https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1410028792236679175

I don’t think they’re denying that vaccines do not work at all. Have you watched their interviews or listen to their podcasts? They’re quite long but they are challenging the fact that vaccines aren’t the only way out and we need to consider alternatives and one of that alternatives is ivermectin. If you want to reach herd immunity, you want people to get immunity through different means (like getting vaccines and getting covid but with lesser symptoms. Im not saying go out and get covid but people are already getting covid and we need to lower their chance of hospitalization).

> one of that alternatives is ivermectin.

The old, safe antihistamine/anti-serotonin drug Cyproheptadine is promoted by a few lucid doctors as basically an antidote for the serotonin storm that underlies severe cases of COVID-19. @farid__jalali (tweets are now private, maybe he got tired of harassment?) is one of the major advocates for this treatment strategy. He liked my recent comment about "missing the forest for the trees" [0].

> Im not saying go out and get covid but people are already getting covid

A lot of people have already had a case of SARS-CoV-2 (and are therefore already immune), as it was spreading like wildfire well before the tests became available in March 2020 [1]. I had an odd headache in the December 2019/January 2020 period; in June 2020 I met a woman who claimed the symptoms of her eventually-diagnosed COVID-19 started December 7, 2019, "soon after [her] friends came back from their trip to China."

I had a blood draw for the T-Detect test last week. This will determines if my T-Cells recognize SARS-CoV-2. T-cells are a more long-lasting indicator of immunity than antibodies.

> and we need to lower their chance of hospitalization

The problem with hospitalization is that doctors have forgotten that pure oxygen is toxic and causes a cascade of harm to the whole body. I've put some effort into exposing the routine use of oxygen by our medical system as #MedicalHyperventilation [2]. The tragedy of routine hyperventilation is that the antidote is simple, effective, and profoundly therapeutic. While most doctors are aware of #OxygenToxicity, they are not aware of the antidote. :(.

p.s. Welcome to Hacker News, I noticed that your first comment was ~5 days ago. Here's some upvotes. :)

[0] https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1412654755415879690

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27750472

[2] https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat...

Thanks! I’ve been trying to find a place where people debate and discuss with less rage. Hopefully this is the place. Though I think my upvote is gone haha. I’m interested in learning about your test results!

I upvoted two of your comments. I think the upvote on your comment above disappeared when I replied to it.

> I don’t think they’re denying that vaccines do not work at all

That's contrary to the message he signal boosts in the first tweet I linked to.

Is it contrary or is he’s saying that ivermectin can be a good alternative to the vaccine? It still doesn’t mean vaccines don’t work, but why not authorize it (especially in places were the cases are high and hospitals are overwhelmed with a vaccine shortage, why not try?). You can skin the cat multiple ways. You’re going to have people who don’t want to take the vaccine or vaccines effectiveness is starting to drop (https://www.google.ca/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/8003930/israe...) and we need to come up with another plan.

When you look at rare events, then it is easy to get a quadrupling (or more) due to tail effects.

That's the relative risk increase. What's the absolute risk increase?

Varies by age, but for a young person we're talking the risk going from 0.001% to 0.004%.

That's not a one time risk though! So far it seems a person can be infected multiple times.

Say you get Covid once a year, that's 0.004% per year. Also, wether you need hospitalisation or not, doesn't change the fact that some people are having permanent issues like lost their stamina, hair loss, loss of smell. I have a coworker with neurological issues, but he is not in a hospital.

So the big question is: how effective are the vaccines against long Covid?

And we need that number at or below 0.001% or Covid will overtake other diseases in terms of life expectancies and QoL implications. Assuming we would get once every one to two years.

That's just too much rounds of Russian roulette.

You are much less likely to get infected with the same variant once you've recovered from it, and once vaccinations and natural immunity is more widespread worldwide new variants will arise at a slower rate, similar to flu or cold.

Complaining that your glass is 7% empty while mine is 93% full. This is a relatively good result.

I'm not complaining, I'm pointing out that the Delta variant also has a higher chance of hospitalisation, not just getting sick.

Yeah, but it's still an astonishing result. Most of the non mRNA vaccines have efficacies below 90%, not taking into account the delta variant.

I think efficacy is usually defined as preventing symptoms, a higher bar than preventing hospitalizations. I believe most vaccines were extremely successful at preventing hospitalizations.

Edit: Pfizer's primary endpoint was efficacy against lab-confirmed Covid-19 [1].

[1]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

This is pure anecdata, but I’m hearing nearly daily from a friend in Indonesia about someone he knows dying of Covid. They’ve all had their sinovac shots.

How do you conclude that?!

The percent of hospitalization increased from 1.8% to 7%, which is about four times. This is basically lying with statistics

As I understand it that's still better than the non-mRNA vaccines, because it's an increase from a very small rate. What exactly is the lie?

The “lie” (it’s not a lie, it’s just deceiving) is saying that it’s a four times increase. You could also say “6% increase”, but that sounds smaller

Lol, turn out fine. Health condition is not binary. There are way more nuances between healthy, hospitalised and dead. We are only now getting a better picture of the aftermath.

It’s confirming data published by UK health authorities coming to the same conclusion.

If you’re 2x vaccinated, hospitalization is highly unlikely for Alpha and Delta variants.

See this report, page 44 bottom:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

What's going on on page 12?

35,251 unvax cases, 34 deaths

4,087 full vax cases, 26 deaths (!?)

I'm guessing the vax population still skews older?

Good catch. I assume the first number includes mostly children since Delta is mostly spreading through schools and children won't get any vaccine.

Interesting. 57% fully vaccinated with phizer in Israel and 55% of new cases are vaccinated. Looks pretty even unlike what this report from the UK shows, hopefully the mortality rate is lower with phizer...

> Looks like a pretty even split unlike what this report from the UK shows

Israel's overall vax rate is higher than UK, so that would be expected to a degree.

There's also page 14 here, where more vaccinated than unvaccinated patients died:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Very odd, especially given the much higher numbers of unvaccinated hospitalizations.

I’m pretty sure this can be explained by the age distributions. Key part is page 44 where they calculate risks.

Ah, interesting, thanks! I was wondering.

Probably older, and then also the vaccinated people that seek medical care likely had less of an immune response to the vaccine.

Isn't this exactly what we would expect? It's more or less similar to what probably happened with the flu in 1920. New flu variants were still popping up, but they weren't like the 1918-1919 type, and the mortality rate was much lower. Plus, I recall being told before the vaccines showed up that they would be better at reducing mortality than at eliminating getting sick at all.

Now, if you thought you were going to just stay in hiding and neither get vaccinated nor get sick, and just wait it out, well that's not going to work (and was never a good strategy). Covid-19 is the new flu, it will always be in circulation, but just get vaccinated and get on with life.

Yes, escape from circulating neutralizing antibodies (so the virus is able to infect you and replicate) is one thing.

Escape from CD4+ T-cells is another thing (the dreaded "reset to 2019" fear).

And the 1918 H1N1 influenza circulated as the only form of seasonal influenza until 1957 (when it was displaced by H2N2 which later became H2N3). From 1957 to 2009 H1N1 mutated in swine. After 50 years of mutating in probably billions of pigs the H1 envelope protein jumped back to humans in 2009. Since old people had pretty universally been exposed to pre-1957 H1N1 they had cross reactive partial immunity from T-cells that still recognized the H1 envelope protein and that pandemic fizzled.

If you can't escape CD4+ T-cells after 50 years of mutating in pigs, I don't think that this coronavirus is going to be able to escape them in a year or two.

Also at some point to achieve escape from neutralizing antibodies this virus is likely going to have to start making "choices" which make it less virulent.

A decline in vaccine efficacy against delta could also indicate that the enhanced transmissibility of delta comes through partial vaccine/immune escape and not through ratcheting up R0/Rt (which would be more consistent with reports that it isn't more lethal / doesn't have higher viral loads, since those switches are all likely to move together).

yep, it may be that these new variants are not attempting any kind of immune escape against vaccines. They might just replicate faster or may be more transmissive and we are seeing the inevitable outcome of a non-sterilizing vaccine: you still get an infection, it just usually isn't a bad one.

Ironically in NZ they have nether vaccine nor any remaining covid. Because they solved it as a community.

Instead we created a global persistent pandemic.

Cool.

Unlike New Zealand, most countries don’t think indefinite draconian restrictions on travel and ever-present risk of being locked down with little notice are an acceptable price to pay for a small increase in life expectancy. I share that viewpoint, and am very happy not to live in New Zealand.

Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose.

Also, as a vaccinated New Zealander who after spending 5 months at home is now traveling again, I can assure you people there are happy and mostly oblivious to what has gone on overseas.

The travel restrictions whilst draconian, aren’t absolute and are being eased when needed. The travel bubble with Australia being a good example of this.

Sounds worse than many places, ie Switzerland which is completely landlocked with diverse neighbors and open borders.

Very few travel restrictions, mostly in spring 2020, just do your part and do the right choices in ie hygiene and travel destinations.

Switzerland has had just under 11,000 people die, NZ 26 (twenty-six).

Not to mention, NZ had complete lockdown for all of two months. The rest of the time peoples daily lives were unchanged. No masks (generally), concerts with 10,000+ people no problem. Summer holidays etc etc.

New Zealand was exceptionally successful, and other areas which tried that strategy weren't so lucky. Some parts of Australia were shut down for something like 9 of the past 18 months. (Sydney is under lockdown orders today!) And I think it's hard to find fault with the strength of lockdowns in France, Spain, or Italy - their lockdowns just didn't fully eliminate transition, so we put them in the "weak lockdown" bucket, even though as a matter of government policy they were doing the same thing.

> Describing the covid pandemic as simply a small decrease in life expectancy is a little on the nose.

How so? The first result I could find[1] estimates that life expectancy decreased by 1.18 years in the US due to the pandemic, which doesn't strike me as extreme.

1: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/5/e2014746118

Life expectancy is a long term trend. Why would you use it to measure the impact of a pandemic?

Answer: Because you can hide the one bad year with the last 100 good years of data and trending.

Maybe you should use population growth projections from 1970 to 2070 to show that this isn't even a pandemic?

That's 1.18 years despite all the countermeasures the US has implemented.

Are you aware how hard it is to move the needle by any significant percentage when you are dealing with sets of millions? Life expectancy is essentially an average of when people die.

Not to mention life expectancy was going up. So it not only stopped whatever gains we had, but reversed it by a substantial amount.

We were expected to gain 2 years from 2017 to 2030. That's 13 years to go up 2 years.

About 2.8 million people die in the US each year. The current life expectancy is about 80 years. To make that 80 become 78.8 is the equivalent of 1.5% of the people or 42,000 babies dying as soon as they were born.

Anything that can move the needle that much in such a short time is pretty extreme.

Yea, statistics can make a case for anything.

Life expectancy went down, but the average age of a covid death was 82 years old, meaning half were older than 82.

These octogenarians and older are pulling the average life expectancy up every year they continue living.

It would be a way different story to have the average life expectancy go down because a bunch of, say, 20 year olds died.

Yes, old people living longer pulls up the average life expectancy. That's how it works.

And that's been happening every year by a little bit every year (about 0.15 years). Until this year.

When it decreased by 0.1/year for three years in a row, it was a big deal.

Having it drop by 1.2 in just a single year is effectively astronomical. It is a significant event.

It depends on how it drops by 1.2

If all you care about is the numbers, then a drop of 1.2 is a horrible terrible outcome and we should all recoil in horror, no matter how it happens.

To me and almost every other human, having a bunch of 80 year olds die, losing out on say, 1-5 quality-adjusted years of life, is not great, but it is nowhere near a tragedy.

Having a bunch of young healthy people with say 50-70 quality-adjusted years of life left, is an absolute horrific nightmarish cosmic-scale terrible outcome.

But to you, it's 1.2 either way.

> nowhere near a tragedy

It might be useful to tone down any highly idiomatic usage of English here, because this sounds very weird.

edit: sort of has this vibe. me: "I was sad when my grandmother died" hn: "WAAAAYYY off there, buddy."

If half are over 82, what does that make the other half?

I'll wait for you to figure that one out.

1.2 is major, no way to slice it. Because either we've been lucky for decades with all of the slight increases or something major just happened.

Now you're trying to color the discussion by projecting things onto me. I never used the words "horrific" or "nightmarish" or even "terrible".

I used the words significant and astronomical. Because they apply. When we've been slowly gaining by 0.1 years/year, a drop of 1.2 years is a -1.3 change. That's a 1300% decrease compared to previous years. Those sorts of scales of difference are typically found in astronomy.

Why do you have a vested interest in downplaying what happened over the past year?

> if every country simply locked down for 3-4 weeks

This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world.

> But no, muh freedom, and but the economy!

Your mocking tone is out of place. I do in fact think freedom and the economy are both important. Don’t you?

I'll try with a different tone.

The intention of keeping freedom and not harming the economy was IMNSHO not matched by that effect and the discrepancy wasn't really surprising.

The authorities where I live decided to keep more open than I considered wise, and not much later closed a lot of sports, for example. The effective choice was freedom now against freedom later, even if the intention was to choose more freedom rather than less.

Yes, my freedom over the course of almost 1.5 years was adversely affected because we couldn't handle a month without it.

And yes, the economy was adversely affected because most small businesses were shuttered for half a year and swaths of them went out of business since we could not bear closing everything down for a sixth of that time period.

Edit: Please explain to me how swallowing real estate, employee, and supply chain expenses for 30 days would have been more difficult or less preferable to the splintered schedule of mandated closings over a far longer time period.

The importance of freedom and the economy are not in dispute. The point is that both would have suffered less in the long term if "draconian" lockdowns had been implemented in the short term. It's game theory, and NZ chose the winning strategy while much of the world chose the losing one.

>This is an absurd fantasy that couldn’t have been possible in the real world.

China and the countries of Oceania did just this and have largely suppressed COVID without MRNA vaccines. China has a massive, porous land border. They've protected themselves from inbound infection by quarantining all visitors on arrival.

> every single country

The pandemic is estimated to have cost the world >$16 trillion already. Now politicians are telling us we will have to live with it forever.

For that price, we literally could have paid every human on earth $2,000 to shelter in place for 4 weeks.

What others did is not fantasy but possibility. If your leaders cannot deliver that, replace them.

It's a little more complicated than that.

When you live on islands thousands of miles away from anywhere with a fairly homogenous population and diversified economy, it's easier both physically and politically to take isolation action against a pandemic.

I think the crux of the matter is that I speak with the benefit of hindsight whereas governments had no such luxury. I think, perhaps, if we truly knew with certainty that the pandemic was a more prolonged situation than one could hope for (despite being warned of such), that a more organized and simultaneous effort to shutter economies and travel for a temporary short-term would have been an easier position to argue politically.

Perhaps. In the United States, the Federal government lacks the power or manpower to make such a decisions, and given that there are 50 states, you’ll always have exceptions.

Valid point. That's a whole extra tier of cooperation necessary. I suppose in this case it would not be unfair to treat each state similarly to a country on the global level, but it does complicate the path to the success condition.

The very fact you’re suggesting every country locks down for 3-4 weeks” as a solution shows youre ignoring reality.

All it would take is for 1 person to travel for the epidemic to continue. Maybe developed nations could do it but developing nations are still dealing with illegal border crossers even 1 year into the epidemic.

So great theory but it falls flat in reality.

In my scenario travel in both directions would be disallowed for the time period. This also requires neighboring nations to do the same, as well as farther off countries to implement checks at the airport. All this was somewhat done regardless but in a haphazard manner devoid of full international cooperation.

So we suffered the major drawbacks anyway all while reaping a partial reward.

Just because something is disallowed doesn't mean people stop doing it.

The insinuation is that in such a scenario there would be a strong enough disincentive.

And perhaps also the incentive of not having a years long pandemic.

Yeah the farmer in SE Asia whose family is starving because he can’t get to market will certainly not try and break any rules.

Love these solution designed by people who work from home.

Food distribution certainly falls under essential services. Pharmacies, too. But not much else is absolutely necessary.

What is a strong enough disincentive? Would you recommend building physical walls along our borders and using violence against people who attempt to cross without authorization?

No, I wouldn't. Gosh, and if I didn't respond it would almost look like I did support that wouldn't it? Toss out these cheap tactics...

There are obviously many levels on the spectrum of what could be done to sufficiently increase compliance without falling back on martial law and giving the governments more reason to erode our freedoms.

And if we banned all drugs, all drug use would stop too?

That's a strawman for an entirely separate discussion.

But I'll bite. No, it wouldn't. However that's not only why we shouldn't. It is most effectively and altruistically addressed as a medical and humanitarian issue.

They solved it as long as they can live without contact with anyone else.

As much as it shows what could be done with drastic measures, NZ is an island with small population, in the middle of nowhere so it can easily lock its borders compared to say, pretty much any European country.

They certainly handled it better, but I'm not sure that they will actually be ready to live in a COVID world any time toon without a strong and thorough vaccination rollout like everybody else.

Wanting to keep zero case as all cost is going to be increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain: how long will the population accept that they can't travel? Can an economy partially dependent on tourism afford not to be open? Wouldn't NZ be penalized at some point if business people/athletes/students/engineers/scientists can't fly to or from it?

Even if all western countries had been exemplary -ignoring that it would probably be impossible anyway- as long as we don't ensure that even poorer countries are able to stamp out the virus, there will always remain sources of variants that will continue to spread across the world.

Look at Australia. Small population, big country, huge barriers to entrance (even for residents), extreme quarantine measures, and yet, you only need a single infected person to start spreading again.[1] As long as the population won't reach the minimum vaccination level required, they will continue to be barred from travelling and get lockdowns.

Looks like the only hope we have is to accept it's there and ensure that the impact remains manageable through vaccination and targetted health control measures.

[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/world/sydney-lockdown-cov...

Just to be clear, Australians are barred from leaving the country whilst NZers are free to come and go, provided when they return they do a 14 day quarantine at their own expense.

Getting a spot in the quarantine hotels is difficult but possible on a 3 month time frame.

As for the tourism thing, I’ve heard that it’s actually a net positive for the country(~1.5%). Whilst we have no foreign tourists, we’re also not heading overseas spending money.

Are children free to play team sports?

The lack of that really hurt here.

In NZ? NZ currently has no community covid cases so sports continue. Daily life is largely uninterrupted aside from having less international tourists.

That's what I though. Considerably more freedom than many other countries, IMNSHO, including those whose leaders chose policies with emphasis on maintaining liberty.

NZ already has vaccinations rolling out. They do not plan to have restricted borders forever. Last I heard 1.5m doses had been distributed and govt expects everyone to be vaccinated by end of year.

People can travel but on return would face a quarantine process so most do not bother (except for recent travel bubble destinations). Athletes travel.

Most people have been supportive of the NZ govt as the healthcare infrastructure may not hold up with large numbers of sick COVID patients, hence the vaccine being helpful in reducing those critical cases requiring hospitalisation.

Meanwhile we've spent pathetically small sums on making vaccines and expanding production.

NZ's strategy only makes sense with eventual vaccines. There is no chance that this disease would ever not become endemic. The world is too large, and too many countries don't have the advantages NZ does (comparitavely wealthy, isolated, low population density). They deserve props for keeping their population healthy until this point, but the idea that it can continue indefinitely, or that it was ever feasible for a large proportion of the world to replicate it is pure fantasy.

NZ's strategy (and all lockdown strategies) never made any sense and it was obvious from the get-go.

Very early into the pandemic, we learned three crucial facts:

1) Covid is non-transmissible outside. 2) Vitamin D is a potent inhibitor of respiratory illness in general and covid in particular. 3) Obesity is the greatest risk-factor associated with covid.

With these taken into account (and all are very well-supported by many of those peer-reviewed studies everyone seems to need in order to take any action), the best course of action is to encourage everyone to go outside, hang out with friends, don't wear masks outside (because this discourages going outside), exercise, and soak up lots of sun.

The next "big wave" of covid in the northern hemisphere is going to come in the winter, just as all "seasonal illnesses" do. In fact, there's at least one study out lately that indicate that there's nothing seasonal about illnesses, but that vitamin D deficiency, brought on by staying inside during the cold months lowers group immunity and causes increased illness.

1) might not be true with Delta. There are cases of "passing" transmission of <30s contact. Too soon to tell, but what we learned early in the pandemic pre-delta may not apply now.

2) is still up in the air with studies going both ways (but get your vitamin D still, it has multiple benefits outside of this)

3) is somewhat true, but there are other big comorbidities as well (Diabetes, Downs Syndrome, etc), it's just that it's one that's highly visible in Western society and hypertension is very common in obese people.

It seems like you're of the mind that every new novel virus that enters the biosphere requires several months worth of randomized control trials to determine best paths forward.

The precautionary principle would tell us that it's best to ensure your immune system is as strong and healthy as it can possibly be, which requires going outside, getting fresh air and sunshine, visiting with family and friends, and getting fit.

The way your reply is phrased, it makes it seem like every time a new variant or whatever is announced, we should all default to locking down, staying inside, and slowly killing our immune systems.

That doesn't seem to make sense. We know what makes humans healthy, and we should be constantly reminding people to do the daily things to build their natural immunity, which is an amazing and effective defense against covid and myriad other ailments.

Imagine if we'd spent the past 1.5 years collectively working to lower the BMI of the USA and getting everyone a little more tanned. We'd be far better off along basically every metric and the pandemic would've been far less impactful.

That our Public Health Professionals know all these things work and never ever talk about them and instead seem to always recommend staying inside and spiking cortisol levels, we shouldn't really pay them any mind whatsoever.

Your attempt at reading my internal mindstate was wrong, I'm afraid. I was simply correcting your assertions that have not been backed up by real data, and the fact that you've glossed over the changes in the virus that have been observed in the wild over the last few months.

But let's talk about this: having an immune system be as strong as possible is not a good thing. Weak immune systems are bad. Overly "strong" immune systems result in auto-immune disease.

"Natural immunity" to COVID is no different ($) than vaccine immunity, and our vaccine-given immunity comes with far less risk. We've been given a miraculous vaccine technology, tested it at scale and found that it's safe. If you want to make some real change, focus on changing the minds of the anti-vaxxers that are extending the pandemic through their lack of action.

Sure, getting everyone fitter would help. Getting people more vitamin D will help with other things (but again, probably not to a great extent with COVID). But that doesn't change the fact that we were grappling with a deadly virus that can quickly overwhelm health care systems and cause long-term "long-COVID" damage that we are still not completely understanding.

($) I don't have the numbers at hand, but the last study I read suggested that getting COVID was slightly better at preventing future COVID than a single Pfizer dose, but worse than two Pfizer doses. Will look for this again.

EDIT: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/past-covid-19-infection-p... is the study.

> "Natural immunity" to COVID is no different ($) than vaccine immunity

You can't find any studies to back this up, can you?

It'll be hard without clarification at first, because it's not clear what you mean--do you mean "natural immunity" as in somebody who, when encountering the virus for the first time, has an immune system which fights off the infection without any symptoms and low/no transmission to other hosts? If that's what you mean, then no, natural immunity, present in basically everyone sub-40 who's not fat, is far superior to vaccines, because it comes with zero long-term risk and from what everyone can tell has a death rate too small to measure: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...

If you're talking about someone who has fought off covid and has naturally-produced antibodies, then you have I presume no citation to say it's "as good as vaccines". Natural immunity in every case it's been studied has been shown to be robust, long-lasting, and superior to vaccines. In fact, the survivors of Sars-Cov-1 from back in 2005 still have robust immunity against sars-cov-2. In fact, some large percentage of the population had t-cell reactivity to sars-cov-2 without ever having contact with the virus: https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3563

It's also super-weird to have people like hold the bar as "vaccine-level immunity". The human body is a genius achievement of evolution, and THAT is the bar.

Zero studies have ever shown any way in which vaccine-based immunity is superior.

And now we have all this talk of boosters. LOL!

Don't need no booster for natural immunity. But there sure are some people who want you to have 'em anyway!

> You can't find any studies to back this up, can you?

The "($)" which you quoted indicates a reference at the bottom of my comment, where I linked a study that explicitly showed that natural immunity from COVID and vaccine immunity are similar (but fully-vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine is best).

I don't believe you're willing to have a conversation in good faith, as you are clearly anti-vaccine. Good day.

Well NZ can enjoy their isolation and constant threat of outbreak while the rest of the world goes back to normal.

Remained how "strong"?

>but you’ll still turn out fine.

Unless you get long covid.

To catch it or to get sick from it?

Either way it would be fine. It basically reduces it to the level of a common cold, ie we can stop worrying about this virus.

The unvaccinated can't (or shouldn't) stop worrying about it. This means they are less likely to be protected by other people being vaccinated.

Those who've already had covid and recovered never have to worry about it either.

Also those under age 40 that aren't fat don't have to worry about it either.

Would that mean there's an increased likelihood I'll be out and about while contagious if I get the vaccine?

It would be hilarious if the same finger-waggers who want everyone vaccinated or quarantined would eventually want to reserve the vaccine for a privileged few.

> the same finger-waggers who want everyone vaccinated or quarantined

Ignoring the name-calling for a moment, what is it that you want for everyone?

To have autonomy over their own medical decisions.

Ah. So I took your use of the word "want" more literally than you seem to have intended it. I "want" everyone to get the vaccine. You seem to be specifically calling out the desire to "compel" which I am much more ambivalent about. (I'd probably be in favour of "incentivising" with a careful eye on unintended blowback).

But the phrase "finger waggers" is just divisive and raises the temperature. I'd strongly suggest you moderate such phrasing on HN.

Fair enough. As I mentioned elsewhere, the same people I'm referring to were trying to shame anyone who wore a mask in the early days of the pandemic, with no gain in self-awareness since. I consider that type of unreflective desire to compel dangerous to democracy and opposing it something of a civic duty, I can get a bit overzealous when speaking against it.

You can have your medical decisions. You just aren't allowed to act irresponsibly and potentially infect people.

Really? It used to be pretty common for people to go to work sick. The flu is serious for many people.

There are numerous other instances of near willful infection of others.

So by that logic, if the vaccine makes me more likely to have a 'walking case' of the virus, I shouldn't be allowed to get it unless I'm high-risk, right?

The vaccine doesn't make you more likely to have a walking case, it still provides substantial protection. It doesn't provide as much protection as hoped against that variant.

It is a good argument for the vaccinated to continue to wear masks when mixing with the unvaccinated.

Education and intelligence are necessary for achieving autonomy. In general, it's hard to take claims for "autonomy" seriously when so many people's decisions seem to be arrived at by uncritically following social media.

That cuts both ways. I remember the finger-waggers - for weeks - mocking people who chose to wear a mask in the early days of the pandemic, with the same tone of smug superiority they today reserve for people who choose not to. I'm a lot more worried about those types of people than the type who arrive at what look to me like sillier conclusions but don't seek to impose them on everyone.

I agree on the priority, but the latter types are ultimately still imposing the consequences of their decisions onto others - their extended families when they want to visit, their friendships where they can't help but pushing the nonsense into every conversation, public spaces if they're not actually continuing to wear a mask and social distance, institutions that are going back to business as usual (eg schools), etc.

I'm all for making one's own decisions and going against the grain (eg wearing a mask at the start of the respiratory pandemic). I'm just saying that the dissent seems to consist of very few well-reasoned viewpoints, and a whole lot of herd following and outright nonsense.

Unfortunately, when places like the world's largest video site censor debates between different medical professionals on the topic, it's hard to be confident how rare those well-reasoned viewpoints actually are.

Even without the censorship, the non well-reasoned narratives would still drown out the well-reasoned ones. The social media hypothesis that many opinions could be distilled down into useful information has been a failure.

So I'm speaking locally based on the people that I know personally who have bought into the "skepticism", and they don't seem well-reasoned at all. For example, one sent me a video saying that Covid is caused by 5G and asked my opinion (thank goodness for small things). I responded with corrections of specific technical claims in the video, only to have them fall back to relativism because "nobody can know". Ultimately the manipulation and conviction in the video won out over scientific facts. It's like the new dark ages.

Also, there are also Internet forums with a higher signal to noise ratio than effortless-publishing mass-media, and I do believe that if there were anything worthwhile it would gain momentum.

To be quite honest: I'm not comfortable with my current education level regarding the vaccine considering the pretty aggressive censorship everyone has been doing with information on it.

I don't quite understand the "censorship" argument. Of course governments and public health officials are going to push the most effective tools we have to save as many lives as possible.

What is censorship in this case? Not spreading debunked or poorly-supported claims?

True censorship would've been something like keeping hush the rare blood-clotting incidents with J&J. But there are so many studies across so many countries that are freely available to read and be informed by.

Even the claims of twitter/other social media censoring don't hold water for me. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary proof imo

I agree, which is why I don't feel terribly autonomous with respect to my decision to get vaccinated. The best I could do was wait several months to see if anything major shook out as they scaled up.

But the autonomy applies to the decision process, and not the specific choice. Choosing the contrary conclusion is just as non-autonomous.

> I.e., Delta is more likely to get you sick, but you’ll still turn out fine.

Except for possible brain damage:

> In a June paper[5], he and his team analysed clinical details for 125 people in the United Kingdom with COVID-19 who had neurological or psychiatric effects. Of these, 62% had experienced damage to the brain’s blood supply, such as strokes and haemorrhages, and 31% had altered mental states, such as confusion or prolonged unconsciousness — sometimes accompanied by encephalitis, the swelling of brain tissue. Ten people who had altered mental states developed psychosis.

> Not all people with neurological symptoms have been seriously ill in intensive-care units, either. “We’ve seen this group of younger people without conventional risk factors who are having strokes, and patients having acute changes in mental status that are not otherwise explained,” says Michael.

* https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02599-5

* https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/11/small-study-r...

* https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/the-hidden-long-term-cog...

Even if you're (fully) vaccinated, it may be prudent to wear a mask.

As someone who was a hypochondriac before it went mainstream: I would not worry about it.

Note that the vaccines can also cause strokes via blood clotting, disability and death. It is not a huge surprise because the mechanism of action for the mRNA vaccines is quite similar to that of the virus itself. The primary difference is in the controlled dosage, as the mRNA does not self-replicate (at least not yet - some researchers are working on "self amplifying mRNA vaccines").