The desire to see this pandemic solely in terms of an individual moral play (on all sides of the debate!) is really strong on this website, and I think it's very unhelpful.
We're all in this together. I got my shots. All my family members of age are vaccinated. All our friends and regular acquaintances are vaccinated.
I still wear my mask where I have to be near people in public, because every little bit helps. My risk is not zero, and if I get sick so might someone else who isn't as protected. I still avoid restaurants. I still work at home. I still limit travel.
We can stop this when the pandemic is controlled. Until then, it remains all of our collective responsibility. And I for one am willing to bear that.
Besides, the virus is not standing still. It is responding to selective pressure by becoming ever more transmissible. The more we try to control the virus by social distancing, the more the virus responds by becoming easier to transmit. We cannot control this pandemic long term via social distancing, even with perfect compliance.
That is a mischaracterization. I mean, it's true, but only in a specious sense that all organisms respond to changes in their environment (including vaccination techniques!). It's absolutely not an argument that pandemic mitigation strategies are universally doomed to failure!
> We cannot control this pandemic long term via social distancing
Again, this is wrong. And in fact it worked to control covid (not perfectly, but well, well under what you'd expect from the early exponential curves in places like Milan and New York) for almost a year before vaccines showed up.
You're making another common mistake here, and imagining that all arguments are about absolutes. In your mind, mask wearing either Works Perfectly or Must Be Abandoned.
In the real world, you wear masks when the pandemic is at a high infection rate and growing, (like now) because marginal improvements are important ("every little bit helps"), and not as much when it's low and shrinking (as it was in June, when I even went to a few restaurants unmasked!).
Would the delta variant have arisen were it not for social distancing? Perhaps, that's unknowable. But we certainly created a lot of selective pressure for it to exist.
That's not to say that social distancing was bad or wrong. It was our only choice at the time. But in a future where social distancing is much less effective and where compliance by vaccinated people will be low, the utility of these interventions is becoming ever smaller. You can of course do whatever you want individually according to your conscience.
Where do we go from here? The world needs to increase vaccine production to billions per month, and decrease response times to new variants so that if there is a new vaccine-resistant variant we can vaccinate the world again quickly.
In fact objectively India's net response to Delta, both in width of infection wave and peak outbreak rate, has been better that the US's, despite near zero net vaccination.
And why is the US so bad at this? Largely because of PEOPLE LIKE YOU who insist on crazy pseudoscience theories like "Masks don't work" or "treat it with dewormer" or (sigh) "Pandemic controls are already doomed to failure" instead of just doing the right thing. Stop it. Stop trying to be smarter than everyone. Just get in line and do the right thing.
The science is settled. Virtually everyone is going to get Delta either sooner or later. There's nothing that can be done to change that fact. All we can do is slow the spread from a few weeks of wildfire to a few months of wildfire.
Good grief, stop. Stop using jargon you don't understand. Stop making medical pronouncements that are clearly wrong. STOP. That statement, if true, would mean that the entire population would be trapped in a cycle of reinfection after reinfection, coming faster and faster, forever. It is clearly not true. No disease works like that. You are using words you don't understand to describe a subject you don't understand but have strong feelings about.
> The science is settled.
Then maybe you could cite some?
It's not about protecting those that are unvaccinated by choice. It's also about protecting those that cannot get vaccines for whatever reason and also to stop breakthrough infections.
Also the majority of UK residents at least are still wearing masks[1] so I think at least that's some evidence that people do share this compassion.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/20/uk-still-weari...
No, we aren't. Obesity is an epidemic. Nearly all of those people made a decision to make themselves more likely to contract covid, more likely to exhibit symptoms longer (thus spread it), and more likely to occupy critical healthcare infrastructure - as well as more likely to die from covid.
There has been almost 0 acknowledgement of this as well as 0 promises to fix this issue. If you're still obese (or not calling for mandatory weight loss) and upset others aren't getting a vaccine you're not fairly applying "every little bit helps".
You're picking and choosing which issues we should bear "collective responsibility" for. It's some kind of irony we're passing out krispy kremes when you get your vaccination.
Pandemics aren't about personal choice. Period. Pandemics aren't about personal choice. People who do all the right things still suffer. So... how about we try to minimize that instead of making excuses and placing blame?
Post-vaccine, we are not all in this together.
I used to think this too, but the “Covid is a hoax” crowd have made it very clear that we are not
We often overlook those who were previously infected. I believe this is a common mistake that makes for inaccurate groupings, which negatively affect the common good.
Headlines and policy have adopted the narrative that the unvaccinated are driving the most severe cases. Those previously infected are not acknowledged and could significantly overlap with the unvaccinated population.
Those who have previously had an infection with mild to no symptoms should be acknlowedged as a third group in evaluating public health policies (vaccinated, previously infected, and unknown exposure).
Do we know that this is something not currently taken into account? I wouldn't be too surprised if this is already influencing policies. The other thing is if it's being communicated to the public. Also, the data the officials have is most definitely a lower bound since not everyone with COVID was captured by the statistics. Add all that nuance and it may be difficult to send the point across in a way that is understandable to everyone...
What aspect of them are we overlooking, and what is the impact on the common good? I know they have some resistance, though not as much as if they also got vaccinated, so it seems like the original point still stands: Unvaccinated should still be scared of it.
If previously-infected had as much resistance as vaccinated, they should not be more scared than the vaccinated. Even if they would have more resistance if they were also vaccinated.
Did you mean to say that previously-infected have much less resistance than the vaccinated? I would very grateful for a source on that. I tried to find out numbers on that but couldn't find apples-to-apples comparison.
I'm saying that the previously infected w/o a vaccination are more likely to get reinfected that those who were infected and then get vaccinates: about 2.34x as likely. Reinfection rates are low [0]
The risk of reinfection if not vaccinates may also be higher than the risk for an initial infection if vaccinated: Reinfection rates are about 0.31% [1] and as high as 0.7% in some populations [2] while infection rates among vaccinated are about 0.18% [3]
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[2] https://medicine.missouri.edu/news/study-finds-covid-19-rein...
[3] https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9392...
TLDR: The CDC is dishonest and cherry-picks data to meet their narrative. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown natural immunity to work at least as well as vaccine immunity for COVID.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8209951/pdf/RMV...
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-5370(21)0...
I tested positive the last week of December 2020 (exactly three weeks before I was scheduled to get the vaccine, which I did also eventually get). When I spoke to the county health department, they said they had already seen repeat infections. They said immune protection from direct exposure only seems to last 3-6 months, which is backed up by the fact that the virus had only been in my state about 10 months at that point.
Vaccine protection is much more robust.
I'm sorry about your experience. Having Covid sucks. But your anecdotal data here is inaccurate at best, especially since it was from pre-Delta variant (you said December 2020 was your time of this happening) and we do have studies from that time showing how robust immunity was for those who had natural infections:
"Available scientific data suggests that in most people immune responses remain robust and protective against reinfection for at least 6-8 months after infection (the longest follow up with strong scientific evidence is currently approximately 8 months)." [0]
No offense, but these kind of anecdotal reports that "someone said" (even a health official), which sound authoritative because of the context, are how misinformation spreads.
0: https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341241/WHO-...
That's why they still exclusively discuss being fully vaccinated, and discount natural immunity. They believe it's better.
Furthermore, I have seen no-one in the health community that has recommended not getting the vaccine if you've already had the virus. Compare this to, for example, chicken pox, where they only recommend the vaccine if you haven't had it.
In the context of this thread where the comment I was responding to was trying to argue that natural immunity is being short-changed somehow, I think the sentiment I'm expressing is perfectly accurate regardless of how exact timelines have been shifted in the past year. You still need to get fully vaccinated even if you've had the disease. Nothing about that has changed.
[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.13372 -- This study was published this month
Also, Most of the re-infected in Israel were from the vaccinated population, even after you adjust for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated population sizes: https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/7/20/22584134/whats...
On the other hand, with natural immunity, even after your antibody count wanes in your bloodstream, you still have your bone marrow and memory B cells to protect you:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34030176/
It's looking more and more like natural immunity will be more long-lived than vaccine immunity: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9
This is insane. No vaccine works better then natural protection from real stuff - simply because its less stressful to the body and more stress equals better immunity.
I have nothing against vaccines in general but this is nothing but pharma propaganda.
Other research shows that natural immunity is long lasting.
> Overall, our results indicate that mild infection with SARS-CoV-2 induces robust antigen-specific, long-lived humoral immune memory in humans.
As far as the reports from Israel:
> By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.
Gotcha, that was not at all clear from your comment. Thanks for providing a citation for the other claims, I'll take a look at it.
Please stop using atomic anecdotes to percieve the world, or at least stop propogating them.
Almost certainly vaccine immunity is more robust than asymptomatic infections (especially those that rely on the innate immune response rather than adaptive immune response). Asymptomatic infections (especially in the young) are extremely common and possibly in the majority for those under 30.
Those only measured patients who suffered acute symptoms. Those are unlikely to represent even a bare majority of infections although it's quite difficult to get accurate data for asymptomatic infections.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03696-9
"only 10% had been hospitalized"
I look forward to your citation of relevant peer-reviewed longitudinal studies.
Even more interesting from a medical point of view, what mechanism do you propose for developing long term immunity, where the innate immune system rapidly controls infection?
The point I made was that vaccination is not more robust than being infected, or at least dont assume it is without solid evidence to support it.
The whole point is that the adaptive immune system doesn't really ramp up for many days up to weeks, while viral load typically peaks at 3-5 days. That's why the second shot is typically delayed for the MRNA vaccines. A young asymptomatic carrier with a strong innate response who recovers early is unlikely to develop a significant adaptive immune response (e.g. test positive on an antibody serology) thus they are also then very unlikely to develop durable immunity.
"Longitudinal analysis shows durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection with persisting antibody responses and memory B and T cells".
Is that good enough for you?
So unfortunately since I specifically and repeatedly referred to asymptomatic cases, which are relatively common in those under 30, it is not good enough.
If I could edit my original post to <B>BOLD</B> asymptomatic even more, I would, since I highly doubt you're going to find many studies on that group.
The sample size is very small and they list other limitations to their findings, but:
"In conclusion, despite concerns of waning immunity, appropriate immunoassays can detect antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 at 8 months after infection in most asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic persons."
However, from my very first post "vaccine immunity is more robust than asymptomatic infections"... and detectable antibodies is a far cry (orders of magnitude) from neutralizing antibody levels, which are not uncommon even 8 months out in healthy vaccinated youth.
A quick scan says:
* 13% of those with natural immunity "lost detectable IgG titers" after 10 months
* Protection durability from the vaccine is still mostly unknown, but appears to be good for 2-3 years
My anecdote is from 8 months ago, so I'm not surprised the data has been revised. I got my first dose of the vaccine less than a week after I'd recovered, which at the time was the recommendation of the CDC and health department. Less than three weeks after my first dose, they revised that to have people wait six to eight weeks.
https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...
Barring unusual preconditions
Thanks, but I’ll still be thinking about it.
That won’t really make much of a difference in new strains emerging.
https://fortune.com/2021/07/14/covid-vaccine-tracker-update-...
> Given the flu kills more kids than covid
Emphasis mine.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/leaky-vaccines...
Selection pressures and non sterilizing vaccines are what causes more virulent strains to emerge.
At some point life returns to normal.
Come on. Getting vaccinated has more than enough utility for you and for others to make it a good choice on either principle alone.
Wearing a helmet while driving a car, however, has a pretty good chance of reduxing injuries and fatalities (probably even better than wearing a helmet when riding a bike on a seperated bike path.)
I don't think this is really a question of people analyzing the trade-offs. This how to do with how the risks and the activity are percieved, people are generally really at accurately assessing such risks.
Brushing your teeth doesnt guarantee you will have no cavities.
Radiation doesnt guarantee you will be cancer free.
At no point did the vaccine promise full immunity.
But in my callousness I would simply illegalize treating people that are anti-vaccine.
What about not treating lung cancer in smokers? Or diabetes in morbidly obese?
The immunocompromised will have accelerated shots etc.
More generally, we can't solve for the 0.5%, we have to solve for the 98%.
Either way, you're still less of a risk to your own health and the health of other people if you get vaccinated.
You seem to be trying to make a black & white argument: The vaccine isn't 100% effective, and therefore isn't necessary/people shouldn't feel obligated/it doesn't reduce risk/or something like that. But it doesn't have to be perfect in order for it to be much much much much much much much much much much better than nothing
Both potential short and long-term side effects of the vaccines put aside for a moment and how important things like fertility and reproduction cannot have been adequately tested yet, I think the comment about risking others' health is completely backwards once you think through the logic of it. If my reasoning is in any way illogical, please clarify for me how you think it is wrong.
If the vaccines are reducing symptoms to the point that the vaccinated might not quickly realize that they're Covid carriers and are still going about their days, wouldn't they be more likely to encounter and put at risk more people than the unvaccinated who know that they're sick and far more likely to stay at home and isolate?
(1) is and always has been true for COVID, but (2) remains unresolved at this point.
Unfortunately you can't isolate a world-altering issue like this from its psychological and political context, so for me any respiratory-disease-related risk is secondary to the much bigger threat. "Live free or die" is not an empty slogan. I will be standing with the unvaxxed to the bitter end, although it probably won't go that far.
Note: there are half-way decent arguments against taking the vaccine. Resisting govt oppression is not one of them.
I had my second dose today, but I'm against having to 'prove' (or comment on) that when I decide to go anywhere (within the UK, I don't mean for travel) again.
I just don't want to see it mandated. (Nor disallowed.)
The problem with COVID-19 has never been the risk it poses for you as an individual, but the public health aspects. It is highly infectious; some number of cases require hospitalization; if too many people require that at the same time, the public health implications are substantial, much broader than COVID-19 itself, and potentially lethal.
Ergo, we have a civic responsibility to take steps to reduce the chance of this happening, and the simplest way to do that is vaccination and masks.
True for the US, sure, because of its healthcare capacity and financial resources (rapid development and deployment of potent mRNA vaccines). Peru has likely lost near 1% of its entire population due to Covid (200k deaths, 32m population, guaranteed vast undercount due to local conditions). They'll recover from that no doubt, and the population will ultimately acquire widespread immunity with or without vaccines (which would bring down the rate of deaths), however it's definitely not a tiny percentage of the population to lose so quickly.
It's going to be an incredible rolling challenge to handle the bottom ~3-4 billion people getting Covid vaccinations every year to prevent millions of people from dying annually. And that's assuming the mass propogation of Covid to all humans and a lot of animals isn't going to eventually unleash super deadly strains.
The Guardian had an interview last week or the week before with someone who appeared to know what they were talking about. They made the point that there are dozens of known respiratory viruses already, and that although they constantly mutate and pose new challenges, we have not seen them ever mutate into "super deadly" strains.
I take some comfort from that (even though it is clearly not a sure thing).
Getting vaccinated is not about you only. It is about reducing the risk to all of us.
If so, doesn't that mean your decision affects others?
I hope that you would do the responsible thing and offer to pay your full medical bill in that scenario, in which case, disregard my question.
STDs don't have a vaccine. You can get one entirely unpreventably as well, e.g. because your spouse is cheating.
Most importantly, preventative measures for obesity and STDs are not:
- nearly 100% effective
- totally free
- easily available
- universally recommended by health organizations
The age groups to whom the vaccine is not yet available have no reason to fear Covid in 2021 any more than they did influenza in 2019.
If so, then your position is hard to justify. If not, then I would be interested in your explanation for that belief.
had covid last week, it's preferable to a common cold
Glad it worked out for you, but plenty of other healthy people are dying. Others are passing it on to people who then die.
when covid is so insignificant to people who are healthy.
A truly selfish perspective
If you are so unhealthy that you need the vaccine (remedy) then you have bigger concerns.
Sure, and plenty of people have underlying conditions through no fault of their own, and the unvaccinated are adding to their concerns significantly by gambling with their own health (which is alright, I guess) and by extension the health of everyone around them (which, again, is selfish)
Also what do you mean by remedy? Definitions that I see do not match your use of the term. That word may not mean what you think it means.
> If so, then your position is hard to justify.
Sorry, no. For the record, I'm fully vaccinated, but that argument doesn't work. If we all stopped driving cars, fewer people would die in accidents. That's no belief etc, it's a fact. Yet we obviously don't, because cars are super convenient and relatively few people die. We're perfectly fine accepting some people dying for lots of convenience for everyone.
The same will have to eventually be accepted for Covid. We can't live in a perpetual half-lockdown because the omega-variant will kill 0.1% of seniors otherwise.
Speak for yourself. There are a significant number of people on this site who are pretty vocally opposed to cars precisely due to the safety hazards. There was an article on here just the other day about how drivers of larger trucks and SUVs are twice as likely to kill a pedestrian as drivers of sedans.
I would posit that reasons why these risks are so underappreciated (and why we don't wear helmets in cars) is due to long-term concerted efforts to control how cars are understood and protrayed by those who make money from them.
No, they're not, otherwise they'd be on a farm and live of the land. Living in the city and being able to walk to the grocery store depends on other people with cars doing all the heavy lifting and delivering whatever they need by car to where they pick it up.
> I would posit that reasons why these risks are so underappreciated (and why we don't wear helmets in cars) is due to long-term concerted efforts to control how cars are understood and protrayed by those who make money from them.
I fundamentally disagree. Plenty of people die falling off of a ladder each year. Every time you use a ladder, there's a non-zero chance of dying. But ladders are great! They allow you to reach stuff you couldn't get to otherwise, so of course they're worth the risk. So do cars.
You can go over that for pretty much any topic. Want to live in a house? Construction workers are dying. Want to eat? People die in the process. But they're few, compared to the population of country, and houses and food are great.
If risk minimization is the goal, we'll all run around like the Michelin figure so we don't hurt ourselves. But we don't, because we want to get shit done, and for most things, there's a giant area where the risk is much smaller than the cost associated with avoiding it. The same is true for illnesses. Yes, it sucks, and of course nobody wants to die, but we can't go on like this forever because it could save lives.
Wearing a helmet while driving would increase safety for drivers at not loss of utility. The choice not to do so is indicative of the irrational ways in which we evaluate relative risks.
Balancing risk and utility is absolutely necessary, but we do a horrible job of doing that with cars.
> The same is true for illnesses. Yes, it sucks, and of course nobody wants to die, but we can't go on like this forever because it could save lives.
What are you even going on about here? You think that encouraging healthy people to get vaccinated to help protect other people is stupid because most people are willing to accept the risk of driving? You position makes absolutely no sense to me.
This is likely because you're projecting positions onto the person you're responding to that they never stated, and probably don't hold. If you read their comments again, you will discover they said they themselves are vaccinated, and offered no opinion about encouraging other people to get vaccinated as well. That was plainly not the topic of their comment. They are simply pointing out, correctly in my view, that life is not and never will be totally risk free, and at some point the risks that covid presents to the world at large will have to just be accepted, because the costs of lockdowns as countermeasures are simply too great. We can't continue to prioritize minimizing covid at the expense of all else forever.
As a side note, the fact that you read someone expressing skepticism of some measures of covid containment, and instantly leapt to "they must think encouraging vaccines is stupid" does not reflect well on you, and is a pretty strong indicator that you're spending a lot of time in an ideological echo chamber that's eager to "other" and strawman anyone that disagrees with its positions. Something worth reflecting on, if you're willing.
Ironically, that is precisely what I see you doing. You need to reread this full thread because your comment is entirely off base. The person I was discussing with was expressly arguing against encouraging people to be vacinated to help protect other people. This was justified by referencing how we accept (or in my case don't) the risks of cars in our society. There was no mention of my or anyone supporting indefinite lockdowns.
> We can't continue to prioritize minimizing covid at the expense of all else forever.
Of course not. I support encouraging vaccines and mandating masks precisely because we need to end lockdowns and still need to keep our hospitals running.
That doesn't mean I will sit by while people make ridiculous arguments to against very good reasons for getting vacinated.
I won't respond to the rest of your comment or any follow ups as I don't believe it would be productive.
1) The vaccinated are not getting it anywhere near the rates of the unvaccinated, so they are not spreading it at anywhere close to how much the unvaccinated spread it.
2) If they do spread it to another vaccinated person, that person is highly unlikely to get very sick at all.
3) If they spread it to an unvaccinated person, that person is much more likely to get sick and have a better opportunity to spread it to even more people.
4) People who get sick & end up in the hospital still have lots of time before they get to spread the virus before being hospitalized.
5) Vaccinated people who get COVID are infectious to others for significantly less time than unvaccinated people.
6) Current does not show vaccinated people causing new or more powerful strains. [0]
7) New strains are still significantly less infectious & dangerous for those who are vaccinated.
So I fail to see how your points are relevant from an overall risk-reduction point of view. Available evidence points towards vaccination as a superior risk reduction mechanism than the alternative (which I guess is do nothing? If not, please clarify) that you are proposing.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-vaccine-variants/f...
2) Again to point 1
3) They will most likely spread it back to said vaccinated people who are less likely to get sick
4) Back to point 3
5) Has this been proved anywhere?
6) For the time being. The delta variant only mutated 12 months after the first infection
That would be my guess, since actual evidence shows that vaccinated people are infectious for a significantly shorter period of time:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...
You are trying to condense a very complex scenario into a very simple argument.
"With the BNT162b2 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 93.7% (95% CI, 91.6 to 95.3) among persons with the alpha variant and 88.0% (95% CI, 85.3 to 90.1) among those with the delta variant. With the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 74.5% (95% CI, 68.4 to 79.4) among persons with the alpha variant and 67.0% (95% CI, 61.3 to 71.8) among those with the delta variant." https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891
On the contrary, I'm actually tightening my estimation to "more than 67%" (95% CI @ 61.3%-71.8%). BNT162b2 is Pfizer, ChAdOx1 is AstraZeneca.
> (...) also are less likely to develop symptoms and so will most likely not isolate when you are infected.
Yup, so multiply those likelihoods and let me know what number you arrived at and what assumptions did you take so that we can compare some concrete estimations. Or share some article that tried to estimate this.
> You are trying to condense a very complex scenario into a very simple argument.
I'm willing to be convinced otherwise by some data, so far the only thing you're offering is an opinion.
90% of ICU cases are people that think like you in my county. Almost all new severe cases and deaths are people who believe they are above the risk.
Tell me this, since you are a "healthy" individual do you also forego all cancer screening? Do you simply have such an attunement to your own body that you can feel any rogue cells as they form? Perhaps you rub yourself with quartz because you consider it to be a "good" crystal with healing properties.
And they will have had every opportunity to get vaccinated, so we shouldn't optimize for them.