Serology is a thing, as are records of positive test results. Also, in many cases, "proof of vaccination" includes a cell phone photo of the piece of paper they handed out when you got a vaccine, so as it stands, lying is pretty easy.
> Vaccines are safe and available yet we only just approved the use in children under 12.
We don't know they are safe for children under 12. Pediatrics is a profession precisely because "children are not just small adults". Something that is safe for adults isn't automatically safe for children.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/09/teenage-boys-ris...
That's not what the study says. They compared all reports of possible cardiac events in the days following vaccination, including suspected transient myocarditis, to only one risk of COVID: Hospitalization. Notably, they didn't look at post-COVID myocarditis, just post-vaccine myocarditis.
This is the conclusion from the study:
> Post-vaccination CAE rate was highest in young boys aged 12-15 following dose two. For boys 12-17 without medical comorbidities, the likelihood of post vaccination dose two CAE is 162.2 and 94.0/million respectively. This incidence exceeds their expected 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization rate at both moderate (August 21, 2021 rates) and high COVID-19 hospitalization incidence.
Full text: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v... )
They're comparing apples and oranges. It would have made more sense to compare post-vaccine CAEs to post-COVID CAEs, but instead they chose to compare CAEs against COVID hospitalizations, which is a number known to be very low in teenagers.
No, the CAEs in the vaccine study included a lot of transient issues that didn't require hospitalization. Most cases of myocarditis resolve on their own relatively quickly.
Myocarditis is common after COVID infections, too. They're just less likely to be explicitly noted because everything gets chalked up to COVID and the patient is already resting anyway, which is the primary treatment for myocarditis. It's not clear why the authors didn't try to compare against that.
> Meanwhile, the risk of a healthy boy needing hospital treatment owing to Covid-19 in the next 120 days is 26.7 per million. This means the risk they face from heart complications is 6.1 times higher than that of hospitalisation.
It would seem more "apples to apples" to compare rates of hospitalization due to myo/pericarditis to hospitalization due to COVID, or rates of diagnosis of each condition.
The only case of vaccine-associated "heart problems" that I've seen required an NSAID with no further treatment. Unfortunate regardless.
Do we want to see it? I've just found out about the this boy, who died in April:
https://twitter.com/rgvrunner01
How did I find out about it? It's trending on Twitter because the father was on Alex Jones.
I've looked at the VAERS reports of 16-year-old males that died in 2021. There are four cases (one suicide), none match this one. While it's likely that the boy died due to a pre-existing condition, his case should still show up on VAERS (even suicides are included).
The takeaway is that if you hear about something like this, it's not mainstream media. Nobody wants to "harm" the vaccination campaign. Unfortunately, suppressing such cases further erodes trust in media/authorities, which has the opposite of the intended effect. Also, VAERS data appears to be incomplete, rendering risk estimates unreliable.
The background here is that hospitalization from covid increases dramatically with age. Teenagers are at low risk of hospitalization from covid themselves, but I expect that vaccination would still reduce the risk of teenagers transmitting the virus to others.
Link to (as yet not peer-reviewed) study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...
there is a large range of poor outcomes that are not "hospitalized" if they get covid. they are susceptible to getting long covid and also to bring it home and potentially infect their parents unknowingly. just because one risk is higher doesn't mean the sum of the other risks suddenly don't matter.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
As are the vast majority of COVID cases in young boys and girls.
By that logic, my investment strategy of invest in index funds (goes up over time) is inferior to yours of invest in lottery tickets (but we only consider tickets that won.)
True, and the obvious example is that kids don't die of covid, or so little that it is hard to make statistics. For just that reason, vaccines have to be incredibly safe (basically zero risk) for the risk/benefit to be acceptable.
If it wasn't for the risk of transmission to adults there would be no reason for vaccinating kids.
Serology is a thing, sure. But two points:
Getting a serum test rather than getting the vaccine is not going to be cheaper, easier, or better studied. We are not constrained on vaccine supply. So the practical advantage of allowing a totally different pathway is not obvious.
Creating another pathway adds a lot of cognitive load and confusion. The bar bouncer checking vaccination status at the door is not likely to know anything about serology. The same goes for people eager not to get Covid and the people eager not to accidentally kill grandma. Every bit of complexity is met with complaints and confusion; every change in regulation makes it harder for people to know what to do and therefore less likely to do it.
In some future pandemic might we want to create a two-pathway system? E.g., such that there's a government-issued "safe to mingle" digital passport? Sure. That seems like a great thing to start preparing now so it's ready the next time a disease hops the species barrier. For now, though, I think we should stick with the current plan: vaccination for (almost) everybody.
The cognitive load could be built into the "vaccine card" anyway - I have a driver's license with a couple of extra checkboxes showing that I need corrective lenses and am authorized to drive a motorcycle, but most people need only be concerned that the card itself exists.
FYI: The current legislation requires weekly testing or proof of vaccination, but it doesn't actually impose the vaccine on anyone who doesn't want it.
Fuck off and die somewhere else, seems to be the general sentiment of people I know.
No, this is just not correct. Compulsory vaccination has been a thing for hundreds of years.
We need simple rules that we can apply on a massive scale quickly. The US is a country where more than half of people can't work out if a 1/3 pound burger is bigger or smaller than a 1/4 pound burger.
Single-mindedness is not a rationale for imposing medical treatment on people.
I'll circle back to my driver's license analogy - the bouncer does not need to know that I was docked 3 points from my driving test for failing to signal - he only needs to know that some granting authority, with expertise in the realm being licensed, granted me the license. (or that I'm old enough to enter the bar, etc.)
When 1500 Americans are dying every day of a preventable disease, it is absolutely reasonable to take feasibility of enforcement into account. And enforcement has to be done where the greatest risk of spreading occurs. People might not like getting carded at a restaurant, but there is a point where lots of people are dying and it makes sense, right? We card for alcohol, we card for driving, and those we do every day.
I would think someone who tested positive should be able to get a ca state qr code. It seems the science supports that. Having each validator check that the test is the right test, and the doctor and hospital exist, seems not feasible, but getting a state qr code - then using that at the point of enforcement - seems practical.
But I must remind that, at least in this particular conversation, we're talking about people who've just had the illness in question. We don't know how many of the 1,500/day are people who have previously contracted the illness or else contracted the illness from someone else who previously caught the illness, but in all likelihood the proportion of such cases is likely very low. So referencing the 1,500/day likely has very little relevance to a discussion of natural immunity.
And yes, I agree that next time we do this, we should build it into the card. And better, that card should be digital, so that it can adapt as science discovers more as the pandemic goes on. But what we had was a vaccine, slips of paper, and a lot of questions.
> Cognitive load is the mediating resource. It doesn't on its own justify it, yes. The justification comes from saving lives in a global pandemic
I specifically don't see how your hypothesis works: "if we allow for natural immunity, it will confuse people and some of them will die". Presumably the failure mode is that some of the "bouncers" of society are too dumb to understand "vaccine OR natural immunity" and will thus reject more people than necessary (either the vaccinated or the naturally immune) and thus our risk of spread will be slightly reduced at the expense of our liberties. In any case, I have a hard time imagining large failure rates here, and the risk associated with any given error is very small (a given failure doesn't significantly increase anyone's risk of serious illness or death).
The difference is that the serum test is risk free. If I knew I was already immune, I would not have gotten the vaccine to be completely honest, no matter how small the risk is. For the same reason I don't get other safe and effective treatments for diseases I do not have.
In what way?
Right now there are already at least two pathways. You have a vaccination card or a negative test card within an allowable date range.
The bigger issues are privacy, etc. Not, "Oh no, there are two options! I'm so confused."
Not the specific guy, but... https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/half-people-did-had-no-11063...
https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article253708748.htm... (Unvaccinated fitness guru gets COVID and spends 47 days intubated. ‘I made a mistake’)
Some people love to gamble.
There exist people who are risk averse, risk neutral, or risk loving (in an economic or psychologic sense): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion
If the worst thing a vaccine mandate is doing is preventing you from getting your jollies from being an idiot I see no problem with enforcing a mandate.
I asked and they may have a city agent scanning cards — then you simply stand in line behind someone and see whether or not they are scanning it versus just visually inspecting. If the latter — you are good to go
One critical difference is that there will be legal consequences if you're using a fake proof of vaccination.
Note that it is pretty tricky to define natural immunity in a legal way since there is no good scientific consensus on the correlation between some proxy of natural immunity (e.g. antibody level) and its effectiveness against infection/transmission.
The obvious solution is to use "positive COVID or serological test" as the legal standard.
The vaccine is not important for people under 18.
Only 412 people age 17 or younger in the US have died from covid. [0]
Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19. [1]
[0] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/09/teenage-boys-ris...
Where is the comparison between myocarditis induced by vaccination vs natural infection?
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...
“Myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection occurred at a rate as high as 450 per million in young males. Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine.”
https://twitter.com/ID_ethics/status/1437876328640876544
Better breakdowns by age and gender show a risk of myocarditis after two doses as high as 1 in 3000:
https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1437067899089219589
This number has been steadily increasing, as time passes. Current consensus seems to be that one dose is the optimal tradeoff between risk and reward for young children.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-ant...
> Is it your assumption that all myocarditis cases are as serious as a COVID hospitalization?
Yes. It is not an assumption. Myocarditis is not a mild condition, despite rhetoric to the contrary.
> With or without treatment, the "clinical course appears mild"
> Patients commonly received NSAIDs, steroids, and colchicine for treatment of vaccine-associated myocarditis.
These are.. not comparable to typical COVID hospitalization outcomes, are they?
The (very) few kids who end up hospitalized for Covid have serious co-morbidities that are easy to pre-screen (e.g. severe obesity). For these children, a full vaccination is recommended. Nobody is arguing about that. For healthy kids, it's very different.
It's great that most kids with myocarditis don't end up in the ICU, but being put in the hospital to get hooked up to an IV and an MRI scan is not a good outcome for an otherwise healthy kid who would would have -- at most -- a head cold from SARS-CoV2.
How many avoided death because they had good health care?
One of my pet peeves about this pandemic is how death metrics keep being pushed around, as if it was not a big deal.
If this pandemic had hit before we had modern health care facilities, it would have been comparable to the great pandemics in history.
Besides, what happened to the children that didn't die? What sort of issues this could cause that may affect their development? We don't know, so we should play it safe.
> from the vaccine
There isn't just one vaccine. There are several. If one is potentially causing issues, use another.
Also, what about heart problems from Covid-19, even among those not hospitalized?
I can't read your paywalled article, but I've found another link. The 'heart problems' are myocarditis, which in most cases is mild and _resolves_ by itself.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
If you are going play that game, you also need to ask how many died between March - June 2020 because of panicked doctors intubating everyone left and right with no one around to advocate for the patients.
Not sure what this is implying, or what kind of advocacy would have made a better call. Doctors intubated people (despite a shortage of ventilators and the difficulty of triage) because the patients were struggling to breathe, and given available data the medical profession though it would help those patients recover. They've since learned more about the outcomes from this particular disease and when a ventilator is appropriate. Your comment makes it sound as though any idiot off the street could tell who should be on a ventilator and who should not.
Journalists from the same publication (Rolling Stone) were responsible for the whole fabricated "A Rape On Campus" article as well. I would not give them the respectable journalist moniker anymore except in jest.
Edit: I'm not going to respond to every comment below that points out that it's extremely rare, other than to ask that you compare that chance to the chance of hospitalization due to covid, which according to the link above is less likely.
It’s still considered extremely rare post vaccination.
This is comparing rates of myocarditis vs rates of hospitalization, which is two different things.
We would need to see rates of myocarditis due to vaccination vs rates of myocarditis due to natural infection.
Heart inflammation is not typical in children or adolescents. This is not based on self-reporting.
Are you aware that UK regulators have not approved the vaccine for 12-15 year-olds (or any children younger), based on this risk, specifically?
The vast majority of people who visit a doctor are diagnosed with no hospitalization and the recommended course for most myocarditis cases is not hospitalization. If the recommendation were hospitalization then many more infected young males would be hospitalized based on myocarditis diagnosis.
So there’s a preprint stating that COVID-19 causes myocarditis at a higher rate than via vaccination. So it’s not quite clear to me whether or not, if looking at it from a risk of myocarditis, that not getting vaccinated is the better choice.
And according to the JCVI, it still is marginally beneficial to get vaccinated over not getting vaccinated. So it’s not like they are advising that natural infection is safer than vaccination.
“For otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year old children, their risk of severe COVID-19 disease is small and therefore the potential for benefit from COVID-19 vaccination is also small. The JCVI’s view is that overall, the health benefits from COVID-19 vaccination to healthy children aged 12 to 15 years are marginally greater than the potential harms.” [1]
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-issues-updated-advic...
"The medium- to long-term effects are unknown and long-term follow-up is being conducted.
Given the very low risk of serious COVID-19 disease in otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year olds, considerations on the potential harms and benefits of vaccination are very finely balanced and a precautionary approach was agreed." [1]
As a concerned parent, this is how I will be approaching vaccination for my sons.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-issues-updated-advic...
EDIT: speling
These are severe enough cases to require medical attention.
In this case experts have pointed out that the analysis is wrong because it doesn't compare mycardius in the control group even through we know covid also causes that. Nor do they consider harm, despite vaccine caused mycardious being mild.
Kill pathogens more quickly, you'll be infectious for less time, and whoever do you infect will have a lower viral load.
https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-case-rates-vaccination-...
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
The usually bandied figure is 80% immunity to stop the pandemic.
Without the teenagers vaccinated, that's never going to get hit.
Wait until winter hits and the cases spike, then it's suddenly going to become "necessary", but if they'd made that hard decision 3 months ago this would already be over.
If you mean something else, you're a victim of fake news.
That was pre-Delta. The higher the R0, the more mitigation we need to do. The question is what gets RE below zero.
At this point, with Delta's R0 and the vaccine's effectiveness, it looks like mere vaccination without masks is going to be insufficient in large groups (e.g. at a giant concert, a big play). But, since all the precautions have a multiplier, that's fine. It means we can keep doing those things as long as we take precautions while we do it and not assume vaccine = ignore COVID.
Good thing children never transmit viruses to adults.
Good thing reservoirs of disease never allow for novel mutations.
Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare projections in one case to actual results in the other.
Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare one rate in the general population to a rate in an already selected group.
Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare self-reported issues to actually verified cases.
Good thing your source[1] didn't make a big deal about the huge multiplier difference between two exceedingly small numbers (0.01622% vs 0.00261%)
Good thing your source[1] didn't falsely imply "hospitalization" and "myocarditis " as equivalently severe, ignoring that the myocarditis responded well and quickly to treatment[2] whereas COVID does not, leading to long hospital stays and/or ventilation and/or death.
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...
Oh, and sorry.
The thing about comments like that is that they polarize the discussion even further, because those who agree with you will become intensified in their agreement while those who disagree with you will react the way people react when someone hammers them repeatedly. This kind of polarization makes curious conversation impossible, because curious conversation has to do with maintaining connection across differences.
That 412 number is "covid involved", not "covid caused".
This could be that the death was not at all due to covid, but the cadaver tested positive. They were in a car accident, for example.
This could be actually caused by covid primarily.
This could be covid tipped someone over the edge who was already very ill.
EDIT: also hospitalizations for children are rare
I did this. This is quite convincing to me that the "COVID involved" deaths are not mis-categorized and they actually are related to COVID unless CDC is straight up fabricating death numbers on a massive scale. The stories about the COVID death categorizations being overstated are pure FUD.
> Data from the first 12 months of the pandemic in England shows 25 under-18s died from Covid.
> Around 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities
> Six had no underlying conditions recorded in the last five years - though researchers caution some illnesses may have been missed
Were the children with complex neuro-disabilities pushed over the edge by covid? Quite possibly. Is that a reason for parents of healthy children to worry? Unlikely.
That's not how "covid involved" is defined, no.
EDIT: please post a url or something.
What use is it to compare two different things? Those heart problems aren't all hospitalizations. Teenage boys who get COVID-19 are more likely to have heart problems than teenage boys who get vaccinated. Teenage boys who get COVID-19 are more likely to be hospitalized than teenage boys who get vaccinated. Many young men have died of COVID-19, and none have died of the vaccine.
> Only 412 people age 17 or younger in the US have died from covid. [0]
More than twice as many died in August as in July or as in August of last year. With Delta and school in session, expect this number to go up for September.
While I have no objection to a vaccine, and I don't question the efficacy of these, the trivial chance of my son's covid19 complications versus forcing him to a doctor's office over his fear of needles, which will cause him a lot of angst, makes me question whether to do it. These decisions aren't always entirely about death percentages.
I think as long as the vaccine is an option for all/most ages then it isn't much of an issue. Although it would be interesting if we allowed kids to get the vaccine at school - possibly without parental permission. (Sort of a tricky area... I think some places provide the HPV vaccine like this since some parents won't let their kids get it.)
Her stories of it radically complicating totally unrelated illnesses and the potential severe long term effects are more than enough reason to take precautions seriously despite what group or demographic you might be in.
This reminds me of a bad take that comes up from time to time around war casualties. Some will see that only a thousand soldiers out of a million died in some conflict and think that it wasn't that dangerous, but for every death in war there can be dozens of people who suffer severe mental and physical harm that negatively affects the rest of their life.
Source?
I would also be interested in seeing comparisons to "long <other infectious diseases>".
A request to support a claim about the "long term" effects of a virus/disease discovered less than 2 years ago, in a rapidly changing environment, for which it seems pretty improbable for there to have already been robust, repeated, falsifiable studies done, is different.
I would also suggest that if you want "robust, repeated, falsifiable studies" for "effects of a virus/disease discovered less than 2 years ago" you have set your standard implausibly high. That's not how medicine progresses for urgent things, because it's fantastically negligent. Contrast the rapid global Covid response, which saved millions of lives, with the incredible foot-dragging surrounding AIDS in the 80s. If we had waited for perfect knowledge before taking action, hospitals would have been stacking bodies in the streets.
At this stage you get papers saying things like, "A quarter of children experienced persistent symptoms months after hospitalization with acute covid-19 infection, with almost one in ten experiencing multi-system involvement. [...] Our findings highlight the need for replication and further investigation [...]". [1]
[1] https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2021/06/10/1399300...
Long COVID isn't well-defined in general; some large subset of it is psychosomatic. The main non-psychosomatic problem seems to be fallout from ARDS (Acute Respitory Distress Syndrome), which is directly related to severe bouts of COVID (and generally younger people have less severe COVID, with or without vaccines).
https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/22/we-need-to-start-thinkin...
Asking a source for an imprecise, sensational-sounding claim doesn't deserve this level of hostility.
We have been made to associate the term "long COVID" with debilitating illness lasting many months, talk of people joining online support groups, etc. I'd like a better breakdown of what is common.
Edit: Downvotes why? It isn't reasonable to want to know how many people are having "any symptom at all past 3 weeks" and how many are suffering from debilitating syndromes?
There are probably more symptoms I’m missing, but that is what I experienced for 9 months
My comment covered breakthrough cases. Those occur among the vaccinated.
> IMO it would make a lot more sense to just keep vaccines available for everyone older than 2 including boosters every 6 months (just in case)
That's a terrible idea. Children are not small adults, and you can't use the same medicine for children as for adults. There are Pediatricians who work specifically with children. Giving drugs to children is unlike the scenario where a heavy car takes twice the gasoline a ligher care takes.
"Therefore, the risk of cardiac adverse events following the second dose of the mRNA vaccine could be around 3.7 times more likely than hospitalization due to COVID-19 in healthy 12-15-year-old boys during periods when the pandemic is better under control 2.1 times in 16-17-year-olds. The group found that this trend remains even when SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates are high, with vaccination being riskier than hospitalization from COVID-19. The long-term health effect of the mRNA vaccines on teenage boys is unknown. Few clinical trials have been conducted due to the early observation of adverse events." [1]
[1] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210913/The-rate-of-vacci...
This ignores the existence of antibody tests, and there's no reason that lying about a positive antibody test would be easier to get away with than lying about being vaccinated.
I was covid positive last October and kicked it fine (verified with a test).
I was tested 2 weeks ago for antibodies, my results were a “76” (I assume percentage?).
Why should I get vaccinated?
It does not mean percentage. The fact that we cannot directly relate antibody levels to immunological protection is one of the reasons we can't [yet?] use antibody tests to "count" as immunity.
I did get vaccinated because the vaccine reinforces antibodies which are correlated with fewer complications upon subsequent infection. There are some epitopes on sars-cov-2 which closely resemble parts our own clotting factors and interferons, and the randomized nature of our immune response can lead to some less desirable antibodies being present. So, it seems a vaccine only helps.
One thing about getting vaccinated after recovery from covid, though, is that both the first and second doses knock you on your butt, not just the second.
Exactly! The point of many COVID vaccines is to teach the immune system to destroy a very specific and very important protein, which is the spike protein. Without that the virus can't enter cells. It's not present in our own body.
We have no idea what kind of immune response any given person might get with an actual infection. Reinfections are a thing.
So why not get vaccinated?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
I'm not a doctor. There are numerous reports from people who got a second infection that it was worse.
Is there, like, a rational reason?
The Delta variant replicates really quickly, that is its evolutionary advantage over other strains, it's not that your immune system is weaker to it. What happens is that at first it ramps up a lot faster than your immune response, and during this period, it produce a lot more virions, and your immune system has a bigger fight on its hands.
There are many immunologists working on identifying the nature of the immune response to sars-cov-2, and so far, something on the order of 80 unique antibodies have been identified which are induced by vaccination, and about 200 unique antibodies which are induced by actual infection. The convalescent antibodies target the nucleocapsid (the ball) more than the spike protein.
It appears that the delta variant escapes approximately 1/8 of the antibodies in both cases, so you still have a very strong immune response, just one which doesn't ramp up as fast as the virus.
Now, as for the mRNA sequences, we can create them in a DNA printer (then transcribe to RNA), however, this triggers new safety and efficacy trials at the FDA.
Give this a read, Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes To Die. (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-...)
Are you willing to bet that the tweaked Moderna vaccine (the trials of it was announced, right?) shows worse efficacy than the original? Odds 51:49 in your favor, null hypothesis of the same efficacy is a tie. That's generous I think, if nobody knows.
If not - why not?
Not all proteins are safe to have in the body.
Most proteins are safe, of course, and the odds that any particular new mRNA target is safe is pretty good. But it's not trivial to predict with computational models, and so it requires testing.
Nobody knows what any particular antibody count means with respect to risk to your health from a future COVID infection. Instead, we need to be looking at the hard statistics about who's getting admitted into hospitals and who's dying.
[0] https://ehrn.org/articles/covid-19-testing-and-possible-rein...
It is a free vaccine that could save your life, has been safely administered to billions of people and greatly reduces the odds of you getting infected, transmitting to others or ending up in hospital.
What is the downside? or are you just apathetic to getting it.
It's been widely reported by authorities on the subject that vaccination after infection with Alpha confers immunity to all currently known variants.
The same is not true for natural immunity from just an Alpha infection AIUI.
Why would you not get vaccinated?
Your post is using scary anecdotes to try and persuade. That does not come off as trustworthy.
From what I understand, different ages of people tend to have different sorts of immune responses. While vaccines are safe and effective, it takes some time to get the dosages right for children because of the way their immune system responds to things - at least, with a new vaccine. I'm not an expert, though, and I got this information while looking up variances in side effects (older folks get less than younger folks, and folks with two x chromosomes - mostly females - tend to get more as well).
The main issue here is that covid is less of a problem for people who are younger.
That means rarer issues can start to outweigh benefits. It's easily possible for vaccines to be beneficial over a certain age and detrimental under.
Also - while the vaccines lower transmission they do not stop it entirely so again it comes to weighing benefits.
The other issue is about testing how well the vaccines work in different groups. Just because it works well in a 65y grandfather doesn't mean it'll work well in a 2mo baby, or help with dosing decisions.
Maybe because there's concerns.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...
> "for boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day Covid-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly Covid-19 hospitalization,"
There is a difference. Covid is 10 times more lethal than the average flu. It's not always that they can't either, it's also that their body won't develop enough antibodies.
Main reason for lockdown is so that your hospitals can keep functioning, or in the case of New Zealand, so that you can go back to complete normal life except for travel outside the country.
Can you share some of those any metrics? Legitimately asking.
Still I don't understand the current approach to COVID in the US. Vaccines are safe and available yet we only just approved the use in children under 12. I have heard second hand many doctors are downplaying the importance of the vaccine for people under 18.
On the other hand places with good vaccination rates are reimposing lockdowns and mask mandates. Quite a few public events are getting canceled or rescheduled.
By any metric the COVID response of lockdowns, etc. was at best breakeven in terms of cost effectiveness. Since the risk of COVID is lower now both due to the vaccine and also just our knowledge of treatment, any lockdown/mandate response will have a lower cost effectiveness.
IMO it would make a lot more sense to just keep vaccines available for everyone older than 2 including boosters every 6 months (just in case) and end all other restrictions. Sure there is a small population that would get vaccinated but genuinely can not due to a medical issue but that scenario is no different than the seasonal flu and other viruses.
It would be better to just do a vaccine/verified immunity passport like program but that is practically impossible in the US. Too many people won't like/use the governments app including both the normal conspiracy nuts but also the privacy-minded HN crowd. It also does not help that there are half a dozen passport like apps from insurance companies and various government agencies.