So now the long term plan is for the holdouts to either change their minds and get vaccinated (and many of them have), or for natural herd immunity to take over when there aren't enough people who have neither been infected or vaccinated for the virus to spread to. It seems like the current wave has probably hit a peak. No idea what happens next. New infections could dwindle away to almost nothing, or we might have another big wave. At this point anyone in the U.S. who wants the vaccine can get it. It's sad that over a thousand people a day are still dying of this, but those are the risks that people have for some reason chosen to take.
If we continue to have waves of new infections, I don't know what the long term strategy is. We could drop all restrictions and "let nature run its course". A substantial portion of vaccinated people are probably going to be on board with that as long as we don't have a new variant that the vaccines are ineffective against. We could keep rigid restrictions on masking, social distancing, and large gatherings. That's really disruptive though to schools and churches and a lot of businesses, not to mention taking a long term toll on mental health.
I do wish those in wealthier countries like the U.S. were more invested in getting vaccines to everyone that wants it, anywhere in the world. New variants can come from anywhere.
Was this your plan back in March 2020 or did it become your plan somewhere down the line? What I remember from March 2020 is that the plan was to "flatten the curve" with temporary restrictions. The possibility of a vaccine was theorized to be between 18 months away to possibly never.
Now we have Delta variant which is far more contagious. Looks like we may be over the hump in the current wave (speaking from a U.S. centric point of view). What happens next depends on whether we can achieve a level of immunity that prevents the virus from spreading.
Sir Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group that developed the AZ vaccine, does not think this is possible because vaccinated people can still get and spread the virus.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/herd-immunity-is-mythical-wi...
> “The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population,” he told the U.K.’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on the coronavirus.
> Pollard said that while Covid vaccines might slow the spread of the virus — because fully vaccinated but infected people appeared, in studies, to shed less virus, giving the virus less opportunity to spread — new variants were likely to emerge that would also spread.
> “I suspect that what the virus will throw up next is a variant which is perhaps even better at transmitting among vaccinated populations and so that’s even more of a reason not to be making a vaccine program around herd immunity.”
It is increasingly obvious that we are going to have to find ways to live with this virus. It will be (and basically already is) endemic. Hopefully over time it will become more and more like a cold but until then, aiming for the impossible is only going to make the situation worse because more and more people are seeing that the narrative and claims presented by politicians and technocrats don't add up.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
In the US, adults who want to be vaccinated have been vaccinated. Children aren't at significant risk. So the best approach is to drop all restrictions and accept the risk.
1. Many diseases have been considered endemic but were eradicated. Don't be a doomer.
2. The whole schtick about anyone who wants to get the vaccine can get it, so it should be a personal choice makes this common but very much mistaken assumption that a vaccinated individual is safe from harm. It just isn't so. Your personal risk is not affected only by your acquired immunity, but the acquired immunity of everyone around you. Vaccines fundamentally require a communal, cooperative endeavor to succeed.
Vaccines are highly effective at preventing deaths and I do encourage vaccination, but vaccinated people can still catch and spread the virus. They are probably less contagious on average, but unfortunately that isn't enough to control community spread.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03944-y
Acknowledging reality isn't being a doomer. Don't engage in magical thinking.
You are overstating the extent to which vaccinated individuals are likely to be infectious. But more importantly, you are ignoring the importance of the network effects involved.
For x to get to z through y, x has to infect y, and y has to infect z. If probability of infectious breaktrhough and a contact event is 20%, the probability of it getting to z from x, is .2^3 = 0.008. And yet, a 20% is really high-end estimate of that likelihood. You need to both have a breakthrough infection and be in the vicinity of others for potential transmission.
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html
Your other numbers are just made up and not worth discussing.
2. The measles is way more contagious. It's dreadful for you to simply ignore that when it matters so much to the calculations.
I think this study tries to address this. But haven't had time to read through
https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/reac...
Name two (and also, how long did it take for each one? Is that a reasonable amount of time to wait?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_dise...
> Eradication is the reduction of an infectious disease's prevalence in the global host population to zero.[1]
> Two infectious diseases have successfully been eradicated: smallpox in humans and rinderpest in ruminants.
There is exactly one disease that has been eradicated in humans: smallpox, which took somewhere between 19 years and 27 years depending on when you consider the eradication effort to have started in earnest. We've gotten close with polio (after 40 years) and guinea worm (37 years). There are also a bunch of other diseases on that list where elimination efforts are in progress, but have not yet been completed.
Regardless, "eliminate COVID", should we decide to go down that path, is going to be a multi-decade project at best. It's also likely to be much harder than eradicating smallpox given the asymptomatic transmission and animal reservoirs. It might still be worth doing, in the same way that our eradication effort for measles is worth doing, but it's not worth holding up anything important until the effort completes considering that "until the effort completes" is likely to be a couple generations at the earliest.
The point I was responding to was this idea that we should just settle for covid being endemic. So I'm really not sure why you are going on at about semantics.
My point is it will not be just a few months. It will be decades. Even in the case of measles, it took almost 10 years to get from 250,000 cases / year in the Americas to 100, and we're starting from a lot more than 250,000 cases a year in the Americas this time.
If the alternative is 10 or 20 more years of restrictions, I think "settle for covid being endemic for now, with vaccines available for anyone who wants them, and maybe push eradication at a later date when most everyone has either natural or vaccine immunity and that job is easier" is in fact a better solution.
We have these "rules" to play by: Vaccines don't stop transmission, vaccines majorly help prevent major complications, kids at zero risk, overwhelming majority of adults at zero risk, unvaccinated people are unlikely to convert for whatever reason (political, fear, friends won't, etc), and natural immunity after infection is very helpful.
If given these "rules" - aka reality - what would you do? The dumb people are like, "Durrr, we need more vaccinated people, those evil bastards they are" even though it blatantly ignores reality and will therefore accomplish nothing, besides being an illogical fear since they're protected anyhow. But if you just accept this is how reality is, there's no other logical option but to drop restrictions and move on. It's a relief that at least a couple countries in Scandinavia are normal enough to recognize this. We're too stupid, too broken with fear.
The problem with this plan is that vaccinated people still catch and spread the virus. The available vaccines do not create "herd immunity" in the traditional sense.
I think the best argument for getting a vaccine now is you will be much less likely to get hospitalized (and/or die) if you catch COVID after being vaccinated. But that argument may not apply to people who already caught it, recovered and now have some natural immunity.
Ugh. The antivax stance on HN makes me think wbole of the banned Reddit antivaxx subs moved here.
This makes the huge assumption that the variants stop. The Mu variant, which appears to be vaccine resistant, is here already: https://www.newsweek.com/mu-variant-which-may-vaccine-resist...
My question is, have we ever mass distributed a non-sterilizing vaccine before?
The question then is can we get new infection under control all around the world? Maybe it'll happen naturally due to herd immunity in places where vaccination is rare, but I'd rather we exported more vaccines to those places. We're all in this together.
Interesting thing from that article you link is that just over 99 percent of Covid cases in the U.S. are delta variant.
I'm inclined to be skeptical of claims that any variant is bypassing vaccine protections unless we have pretty solid evidence. It's just the nature of news to speculate about worst-case scenarios.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...
The seasonal influenza vaccine that is mass distributed every year isn't very sterilizing. But it has a good safety profile and some protection is better than nothing.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies....
I think this logic only works if a Delta variant infection provides strong protections against Mu, and a large part of the unvaccinated and vaccinated population first gets exposed to delta variant (assuming it can spread easily...can't find R estimates for some reason, which seems crazy). After all, the same was said about delta before it was prolific, and this whole thing started with one person. "It's not very present, so it won't be present" doesn't make sense, only R numbers do.
> People infected with the Delta variant, including fully vaccinated people with symptomatic breakthrough infections, can transmit the virus to others.
1: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...
Which half?
Democrats: 88%
Republicans: 55%
Republicans who support party more than Trump: 62%
Republicans who support Trump more than party: 46%
Biden voters in 2020 general election: 91%
Trump voters in 2020 general election: 50%
Let's not "both sides" this issue. It should be obvious who is to blame for the US's less than stellar vaccination rates and it isn't well-intentioned but manipulative messaging coming from health officials.
[1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/nbc-news-pol...
If you use actual vaccination data, there are other patterns[0]:
White: 52%
Black: 43%
Hispanic: 48%
Asian: 68%
When you view all things through a political lens, you'll miss important details.
[0] - https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-... - as of 07 September
This doesn't disprove my initial point. Remember that Black people and Hispanics only make up roughly 30% of the population. They can be vaccinated at much lower rates than whites and still by only a minority of the overall unvaccinated population. Looking at all these numbers together, who someone voted for in the last presidential election is a much stronger indicator of their vaccination status than their race.
"Percent of Total Population that has Received a COVID-19 Vaccine Dose by Race/Ethnicity, Selected States, September 7, 2021"
...and yet Trump himself is vaccinated. American politics is weird.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-demogr...
>These demographic data represent the geographic areas that contributed data and might differ by populations prioritized within each jurisdiction’s vaccination phase. Therefore, these data may not be generalizable to the entire US population.
That page also shows the overall percentage of the population with at least one shot is 75.7% and yet no demographic group reaches that number except those over 50 years old. It seems clear that the CDC data is incomplete enough to not be fully trusted, but even if we do trust it, it doesn't do anything to disprove that the highest contributor to a person's vaccination status (besides potentially age) is their personal politics.
Regardless, if we're nitpicking data quality surely a random nbc news poll doesn't exactly pass muster either.
And like I said, even if we take the CDC numbers as the objective truth, they do not contradict my original point.
Idk if it's supposed to mislead or confuse, or if they're just idiots at the CDC that don't understand statistics.
They shouldn't be comparing percentages of the 3 populations, which is misleading based on different subset sizes.
They should be saying what percentage of each demographic has been vaccinated, which is what they insinuate.
They give 9.9% total and 14.6% last 14 days representative proportions for Black, who are 12.4 % of the US population.
And 61.6% total and 47.9% 14-day for White, who are 61.2% of the US.
These seem fairly even, but really 9.9/12.4 gives only 80% of black proportional makeup.
While White is 61.6/61.2= 101%
And it makes no sense to compare the 14 day subset percentage against either other number.
Science is a process we employ to learn more about the world.
It is not a solution to all the world's ills. Science informs, then people make decisions on that information.
Denying that controversial decisions are being made by people which impact our freedoms and insisting that science prescribes any given policy at all - much less only a single one! - is the type of thinking which terrifies those on the sidelines.
You appear as a zealot.
Are you mentally prepared for the possibility that this is not true? What evidence would convince you that the vaccine won't 'solve' the pandemic?
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/seriously-ill-cov...
Since the Delta variant is so much more infectious than the original covid, you'd have to get to 90% vaccination rates to count as "herd immunity" against this disease.
COVID will become endemic. Everyone knows this. All that's left is for politicians to vilify political opponents for potential votes and try to consolidate more power in the meantime.
Should we follow that science with ourselves? Or maybe is there ethical and philosophical ponderances left there?
That is not really a choice. Does the mugger give me a "choice" when he holds a gun to my head and threatens me with violence if do not do as he desire.
The pandemic is largely over culturally and mentally for pretty much all of the country - I'm in the middle of San Francisco and the only real remaining enforced anti-COVID measures are flashing your vaccine card before going into bars, masks inside of gyms, and masking and demasking when you enter restaurants - although I remember a friend with kids telling me there's still some strangeness at schools.
No one's really locked down anymore outside of a few holdouts in each state.
That's a real understatement. Here in Maryland, my 8 year old is still in a mask at school both inside and outside. She's been a trooper with all the precautions over the last year and a half, but started crying when she heard her school was going to do masking again in the fall, because it means probably another year of social distancing in schools (not being able to play with all your friends, etc). The masks really interfere with her gymnastics class, because of O2 restrictions as well as difficulty hearing/understanding what instructors are saying.
My 3 year old is masked all day in preschool, as well as at his extracurriculars. He does a "toddler crossfit" type class where all the kids and instructors are masked, and it's a disaster. At this age their ability to comprehend instructions is marginal to begin with. Add the muffled speech and inability to see facial expressions and it means the kids have a lot of trouble understanding what's going on. I've done A/B testing helping my kid with the activities. With a mask on, he has a much harder time understanding me, and also mistakes my mood--e.g. he can't see me smiling so he interprets my giving him directions as yelling (it's loud in the gym obviously).
Wearing a mask, as we did for 4-5 hours on a flight recently, weirds out my 2 month old since he can't see my face. We are not going to even try to send him to daycare with masked caregivers. I hate to sound like a nutter--I'm a STEM major, I know how to "science"--but I don't trust that they actually have considered the developmental effects on infants not being able to see faces for 8 hours a day at daycare.
It's a shame that you have to defend not being crazy to say that a child not seeing faces won't have some kind of psychological impact when for all of human history (the biological perspective) we have seen the faces of our elders, peers and parents.
I’m not going to experiment on my youngest to see what happens when an infant spends all day surrounded by masked people at daycare. I’m just not. If things don’t normalize here in Maryland by the time my wife’s done with maternity leave I’m moving to Florida or Texas.
Reading another massive thread on HN about covid and vaccines. We are all drawn to it like a moth to the flame, trying to hash all of these differences out. I hope some good can come out of all of this.
(And I would urge any intellectually curious people who are also laser-focused on empiricism as the only valid way to acquire knowledge, to instead apply rational thought to the question. Why don't we have any scientific evidence on the matter?)
Because it would be too cruel of an experiment to run.
Okay, I'll give that a try: the benefits of wearing masks in public during a pandemic are known, whereas any harm that might be caused by occasionally exposing children to the sight of partially covered human faces is unknown. Therefore, to minimize harm, we should favour masking.
Ignoring it essentially means making a strong assumption that the harm is absolutely insignificant, but is that really the best informed guess specialists can make?
"In summary, though we support mask wearing by the general public, we continue to conclude that cloth masks and face coverings are likely to have limited impact on lowering COVID-19 transmission, because they have minimal ability to prevent the emission of small particles, offer limited personal protection with respect to small particle inhalation, and should not be recommended as a replacement for physical distancing or reducing time in enclosed spaces with many potentially infectious people."
[0] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commenta...
I never quite understood why clear face masks haven't caught on more, especially in these kinds of environments. Some of the air may escape, since it certainly won't be like an N95, but if we can increase ventilation, keep distance a little bit, and wear see-through masks to convey emotions and meaning better, that seems like a pretty reasonable tradeoff.
If there are better masks than N95s for dealing with carcinogens like asbestos, you should use those for that application. Maybe they would work better for Covid too, but providing super high-quality fancy masks to hundreds of millions of people in a pandemic isn't really practical, though. You use the tools you have on hand. Even distributing N95s was challenging.
Controlled tests (with correct fitting) show cloth masks at around 10% efficiency and surgical masks at around 12% efficiency, vs up to 60% for correctly fitted R95/KN95 masks. The difference is huge. The measures that most people are taking with their loosely-fitting cloth masks are having negligible impact on coronavirus transmission.
"A study from the National Academy of Sciences Press establish that most of the COVID-19 particles emitted from those infected are aerosols, or consisting of 0.3 to 0.5 microns. “Droplets” consist of particles much greater in size than aerosols. The science shows however, that most COVID-19 particles are aerosols, not droplets. As such, they are less than 1 micron in size."
See Edwards 2/23/21
And this for a thorough analysis: https://thecivilrightslawyer.com/2021/04/06/masks-do-nothing...
At the risk of adding some global diversity to this conversation:
In a bunch of countries with a significant Muslim population, many women cover their face/head far more than your face is covered by a mask when they go out. Their kids grow up fine.
The kids obviously grow up fine, but IMHO they do see the faces of their peers and parents pretty much always.
My overall point, though, is that it is easy to imagine a horrible, negative effect on a child's psyche, but it is more likely not a problem. Humans, and kids in particular, are fairly robust and adaptable creatures.
In my experience, for most fears about X people have, X alone usually is not damaging. However, being surrounded by people who are convinced X is bad will make it more likely that the person will believe it. This tends to cause more issues than X does.
If a kid has parents and other close people around him/her who believe wearing a mask and not seeing people's faces often is bad for the kid - then it will be.
How can a two month old possibly express that he's "weirded out" by a mask. As you said, you were on a plane, which was surely a novel situation for him, so even if he was behaving strangely you can't know that it was because of the mask. I think it's much more likely you're projecting your own fears onto him.
Edit: I've been clear about my reasoning; you have just resorted to ad hominem attacks on my understanding or emotional intelligence. If you don't have any actual counterargument, I'll consider the debate to be over.
On the merits--human babies are hard-wired to recognize faces from birth: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/december/infants-process....
How does a baby express being upset? They can smile on purpose at 2 months: https://www.uofmhealth.org/health-library/ue5463. So the lack of a smile is a detectable sign. After just a few weeks, they have a range of reactions short of crying. They change their facial expressions based on what they're feeling. They make grunting noises to express minor discomfort. You can even tell when they're bored.
It is if, as the other comment did, you just claim I don't know what I'm talking about without providing evidence of that.
But congratulations to you on using sources and arguments. I still think you're projecting. In my experience babies have no trouble recognizing human faces with masks on because they are drawn to eyes. In fact, they even recognize and will respond to a smile behind a mask, again because the muscles around the eyes contract. Probably masks are harder for slightly older children who are learning language, because they can't associate mouth movements with sounds.
Then you know that a mask is the least we can ask of parents.
Children are germ factories. What compounds the problem is they can't be vaccinated.
In CA, we opened the schools.
In two weeks, I have a feeling we will be in trouble.
Kids get virus. Some people show no symptoms, but are little viruse spreaders.
It's a pretty simple equation. Kids spread viruses very easily.
So put a mask on it.
Not for your kids sake, but for grandma's sake, and others.
(Personally, I would have kept the kids out of school for another year. Every kid would be able to stay in school two extra years, if needed. So instead of graduating at 18, some kids would be applying to college, or Amazon, at 20.)
Edit: look no further than the fact that this comment is downvoted for confirmation that some people feel this way.
I've seen it, but this just seems silly. I think the way bars work is you walk in with a mask, take it off, and put it on when you go to the restroom?
From my perspective people who aren’t concerned about contracting and spreading covid are the short term thinkers - they just want to have things back to how they used to be right now without any thought about mitigating the threat.
I agree they should also have more information at various levels so people who want to know more can dig in. But people don't make most choices on anything like a purely rational basis. Asking doctors and public health experts to pretend otherwise when designing their general-audience comms guarantees a higher death toll for no appreciable gain.
As an example, take a look at how we've tackled drunk driving over the last 40 years. Groups like MADD definitely can make rational, data driven appeals. But the reason they were so successful is that they were extremely good at making emotional appeals. Take MADD itself, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The founder, Cindi Lightner lost her 13-year-old daughter to drunk driving. The driver, who drove off and left her body behind, recently had been arrested for DUI. Lightner's personal story, which is heartbreaking, is central to their effectiveness. The result: drunk driving, which was laughed off previously, is now taken very seriously, and deaths are down 40% despite VMT doubling.
I've got family in a small town in the south - the countermeasures they took against COVID basically amounted to Wal-Mart closing for a weekend in March. Most of the people there had made their choice about how they were going to respond to COVID before any lies or omissions by authorities came to light. Unless you're saying these lies and omissions are part of a broader pattern from authorities that extends past COVID, in which case I might agree with you.
Let's be honest, please. The skepticism preceded the lies. The lies, in as much as they actually exist, are just being used as post-hoc rationalization.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/30/white-house-aide-sa...
But again, this is cherry picking. The consensus opinion amongst medical experts is heavily in favor of the vaccine, and they have data to back up their judgement. The contrarian advice from skeptics is decidedly lacking in evidence and relies almost entirely on hearsay and non-scientific anecdotes.
What she wanted is what everyone should want is for the vaccine to be vetted. When it was she took it. She expressed doubt not in medical science, not in the vaccine, but in the claims of Donald Trump.
Once trial results were released, we learned that they're highly effective and that risks of bad reactions are exceedingly rare (especially when compared to the effects of the virus itself).
What's so special about vaccination rates in April? By late August this NBC poll shows a huge gap. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/nbc-news-pol...
Already vaccinated:
- Democrats: 88 percent
- Republicans: 55 percent
- Biden voters in 2020 general election: 91 percent
- Trump voters in 2020 general election: 50 percent
Another analysis from September comparing electoral results and vaccination rates by county shows the same trend. https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covi...
As of April 22, the vaccination rates between the parties was almost identical.
The differential in vaccination rates is largely about people under 65. If you look at over 65 rates red states and blue states are much closer. 88.4% of people over 65 in Kansas are fully vaccinated. That’s higher than California, Illinois, and New York.
For representative comparison deaths in 65-75 age group is 144K and 50-65 age group is 106K, they are a comparable risk group[1]. In my urban county of 2M whites in 50-64 have the lowest vaccination rate in the 60s. Asians have a 95% vaccination rate in the same age group.
The simple fact that Republican dominated counties have their beds and ICUs overflowing[2] after wide vaccine availability while congested New York does not paints a very clear picture that it is not liberal politics that is causing pandemic issues, but conservative politics.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/us/alabama-icu-shortage.h...
I agree. For someone whose threshold of 'did the authorities lie about masks' is one cherry-picked example, there was never any hope. They were absolutely going to find someone to confirm their already-existing beliefs.
- There is no pandemic”
- “Masks don’t work”
- “Border closures are racist”
- “3 weeks to stop the spread”
- “The virus definitely didn’t come from a lab”
- “Antibodies only last 3 months”
- “There will be no vaccine passports”
- “We’re not manipulating COVID data”
- “Vaccines are 100% safe”
- “Lockdowns are for your own safety”
- “Don’t take drugs meant for horses”
- “Measures are guided by science”
- “We’re all in this together”
- “If you get vaccinated you’ll get your freedom back”
When did authorities lie? The position on masks changed over time as data was acquired. Unless you mean when the FDA/CDC was worried about a run on masks, which they were right about.
But I think ascribing a malicious intent to that learning process is disingenuous.
The only people that have made literally malicious claims have been people on the far-right, which unfortunately are some authorities so I guess you're right about Trump and his bootlicks who intentionally lied for personal gain. And continue to do so.
Lying for what you believe to be a good reason is still lying.
As one of the reasons. They also (according to Time) gave the reason that they don't prevent you from getting Covid:
>The science, according to the CDC, says that surgical masks won’t stop the wearer from inhaling small airborne particles, which can cause infection.
>Doctors and health experts keep spreading the word. “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” tweeted Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. Surgeon General, on Feb. 29. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
The CDC states what their rational is, they update their recommendations with new information, and they act in the public interest. Anti-vaxxers do none of those.
I also quoted "but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"
So I don't think I was being dishonest.
Were they? I imagine federal government has the power to expropriate and ration masks, if necessary. This is way better than lying and then making a surprised pikachu face "why don't they trust us?", no?
The fact that they say it was intended to prevent a run on masks proves that it was a lie and they knew it was a lie, which is inherently malicious in my book.
The science on masks is not exactly new or bleeding edge.
You have to be unbelievably naive to accept that "the position changed".
There was a point where it wasn't believed that asymptomatic infection was likely. In that case, wearing masks is less beneficial.
It was manipulative and steering behavior, but in most cases I've seen not lying.
...or have a functioning knowledge of science. Your trail of anti-vax nonsense doesn't really serve you well in this modality.
Your team allegiance is showing.
Which side did you choose? Oh wait, I can smell it from here...
Did your sad little downvote make you feel better? sadflex
Think of all the untrue things that are said every day in order to not induce panic in our financial system, to discourage bank runs, to discourage hoarding/scalping, to generally promote a functional society. This isn't lying, it's results-driven communication.
As we are literally seeing in many states, obtaining natural immunity en-mass means that ICUs fill, doctors and nurses burn out, and morgues have waiting lists.
That "natural immunity provides decent protection" is itself a lie. Decent protection for whom exactly? It doesn't protect your community to act as a vector for this virus while you are obtaining said immunity. It doesn't even protect you from the risk of long-lasting post-infection disability. It is deliberately malicious and puts its believers at an objectively higher risk.
Are you really sure you want to go down that road? Are you really saying you're fine with someone telling you falsehoods so long as it's in what they believe to be your best interest?
It is not lying to communicate via the channels of public health the strategies that would optimize our utilization of public health resources.
Is the strategy actually working? It sure doesn't seem like it. In fact, it seems to be eroding trust in public institutions on a massive scale with very little other benefit.
It's hard to believe you wrote that with a straight face.
Wow. I believe what you just described is the textbook definition of manipulation. I’m sincerely discouraged right now.
Also known by another name, alternative facts.
That’s pretty much the opposite of results-driven.
Doubleplusgoodful newspeak, comrade.
Let's take OP's statement: "natural immunity is probably just as good as vaccination, we'll accept that as equal for passport purposes". Presumably, the negation of that statement i.e. "natural immunity is probably not just as good as vaccination, we won't accept that as equal to vaccination for passport purposes" would be considered 'lying'. This statement is ridiculously under specified, even if you take out the "probably".
Define natural immunity? Perhaps someone has to take a blood test to show they have the right anti-bodies. Define "just as good". Define "equal to vaccination for passport purposes". Equal how? Why not for other purposes?
All of these questions and lack of clarity are exactly what the parent is talking about. No truth is absolute. There are statements that are less true, but are more effective as communication methods. Politics should prove that to you, and the fact that you don't like it doesn't make it less true.
I'm not condoning lying. I am condoning public policy (including communication to support that policy) that has the end result of saving lives and getting us back to normal. I think a lot of people here are young and rationalists and full of idealism. They have this pure idea that every human being is uniformly spherical and acts 100% rationally, so given all the facts, self-interest will surely steer us into a rationalist utopia, but that's just not the case. Idealists don't account for people working against their own self-interest because of religious fervor. They don't recognize widespread and rapidly spreading ignorance. Rationalists can't explain "doing it for the lulz".
I don't have a lot of love for politicians, but I don't envy their job: They're elected to steer a ship with close to half of the passengers drilling as many holes in the hull as fast as they can. If you have to tell them that drills are dangerous and should be avoided, then that's what you have to do.
I do agree that doing this would likely further slow down vaccination rates, even among unvaccinated people who have not yet gotten COVID. Many will just accept the risk of getting the virus, and then some will end up in the hospital, and some will die.
So while I'm uncomfortable with the lack of acceptance around post-infection immunity when appropriate, I do think it's understandable.
* Stop lying
* Stop threatening
* Stop mocking people when they die
Yeah. That's not going to happen. The sentiment has turned against the unvaccinated dying from a preventable disease in a very big way.
Adding social pressure to vaccinate is useful I think tho. We will see what happens with these new mandates.
In areas where the vaccines are free and widely/immediately available, for someone who has not gotten it already, I can't think of anything that would convince them to get it other than tightened restrictions (employers requiring, etc.) and enforcement. I'd love to hear otherwise from someone who is legitimately on the fence, because I don't think those people really exist.
Despite the anecdote that the first person I know getting vaccinated experienced a life-threatening case of severe anaphylaxis with the first dose, I thought getting the vaccine made some sense. I caught a bug around March/April of 2020 that had very similar symptoms to COVID, kind of like a sore throat with a flu, but I never got tested to see if it was just a bug or Covid that I got. Actually decided I was going to get the J&J vaccine after weighing pros & cons. I know that I am at a very low risk with no comorbidities, but my logic was that despite my low risk, the main benefit would be that it would minimize symptoms if I actually did catch it.
I started talking with the Dr. in the family to decide where/when. This was when the pause on the J&J came out, and I realized continuing my masking, social distancing, and other isolating activities were the best path. That, by delaying, the science would be better known, more vaccines would be used, and information about which vaccines were safest would come out. I felt that some of the politicization issues around what to do seemed to be frankly strange, if not outright authoritarian propaganda on one side, and wacky hodgepodge on the other.
The more I read on it, the more I became concerned because data on spike protein pathogenicity came out [1]. This called into question the big 3 vaccine approaches long term safety in my mind, because if the vaccines cause your body to produce a huge amount of spike protein, well, that on its own is allegedly toxic. Additionally, I have been hoping for the Novavax vaccine to come out, which appears to be safer and more efficacious, but that appears to be a long waiting game.
I continue to isolate, wear an N95, and socially distance.
[1] https://www.salk.edu/news-release/the-novel-coronavirus-spik...
In that case, it doesn't matter what we do. The lies and threats and mocking can continue, and it doesn't matter either way.
So since it doesn't matter, we should just figure out a protocol for a "CDC post-infection immunity card", issue it to people whose antibody levels have been tested and judged to be sufficient, and then bar everyone without a vax or immunity card from any kind of indoor gathering (including for employment)[0].
I'm just sick of all this. For a while I was sympathetic toward the vaccine-hesitant -- some of the reasoning, while misinformed, was understandable -- but my patience is gone. The longer this goes on, the greater the risk of a new variant that the vaccines don't protect us against.
[0] Yes, the usual exceptions apply for people who can't be vaccinated for a legitimate medical reason, but they should be subject to weekly or biweekly testing.
Sure, say you had a parent or close family member die, then someone mocked that. How would you feel about that person? Would you listen to anything they had to say, or just want to punch them in the face?
>Adding social pressure to vaccinate is useful I think tho.
I don't know the answer, but shaming people and mocking them hasn't worked in the last 20 years; in fact it's made us even more partisan, divided and hateful towards each other. Why do you think it would work now?
They're not listening now. We've passed the point where persuadable people in good faith are holding out (for what? The full FDA approval was two weeks ago.) It's time to go the other way and mandate the vaccine -or- frequent testing (I think 1/week is too infrequent) -or- they can preemptively isolate themselves from society.
Bottom line, shitting on people is never effective.
Because you seem to think shaming is about me feeling better at a huge cost: "you get an additional 15% uptake. Let's say you do shame, you only get 5%." I just don't think those numbers are at all accurate. I don't even think that the causation "shaming -> less vaccination" is true.
You don't understand human nature or yourself. Shame on you. Did that make you change your mind? Didn't think so.
I'm sure persuadable people exist, just what percent, I don't know. There are millions unvaccinated in the US and it will change over time. Many people are taking the "wait and see approach." If you don't understand why, see the Tuskegee Experiment. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study) All I know is shaming will have the opposite effect, assuming the intention is to get people to vaccinate. Shaming people is a very selfish and self centered action. The news does it all the time so you get that little hit of dopamine to watch more. Fat shaming is counter productive, lazy shaming counter productive, poor shaming counter productive, homeless shaming counter productive. Drug shaming is counter productive. Why on earth do you think it would it work now?
Or am I wrong? What could possibly persuade the current holdouts?
Even if you choose to ignore that, consider: Vaccinated people have shorter recovery times and are less likely to require hospitalization.
That results in a shorter time window for spreading the virus. Furthermore, if you can recover at home you are less likely to spread it to health care workers or other patients.
Edit: Link to report (pdf warning) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
(this is intended as sarcasm to point out the morality of mocking people who die from a preventable disease)
Everyone got fed up with those people and the gaslighting they've attempted.
History will particularly condemn the lying and the abuse of behavioural psychology I think, even if people think it's justified now because of the pandemic. May the record for future generations be be accurate, because that's the bleak legacy our leaders deserve.
Manipulating populations is what governments do. Subsidizing milk prices, fining people who litter, inspecting the electrical work in new houses, those are all "trying to manipulate populations into a desired behavior".
As for the "lying" part, I don't see it. What I assume that the antivax side wants is some sort of rule like, "If you get a test showing some level of antibodies, you can be exempt from vaccine mandates" policy. That might be sound policy or it might not, I dunno, but "the government isn't implementing my preferred policy" is very different from "the government is lying".
And while this pre-print [0] establishes that natural immunity is far stronger than vaccine-only immunity, the result is not conclusive for natural immunity + vaccine:
“Individuals who were previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 seem to gain additional protection from a subsequent single-dose vaccine regimen. Though this finding corresponds to previous reports, we could not demonstrate significance in our cohort.”
[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
So, what did we learn? The science seems confident that getting the full regimen of the vaccine is a good idea because it lowers you chance of getting reinfected and the likelihood of side effects are extremely small.
[0]
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
So yes, it IS just as good as the vaccination and should be treated as such. Vaccinating people for the sake of vaccinating them is illogical here.
And don't even get me started on vaccine passports, which are completely unnecessary. If a place of employment absolutely needs proof of vaccination, like the NICU at the hospital or a nursing home or a college dorm, that information can be relayed via existing protocols. We don't need a "papers please" society where paper shufflers and bureaucrats can arbitrarily gate access to society this way.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-08-19-vaccines-still-effectiv...
Pfizer reduced rates by 82% whereas a Covid infection reduced rates by 73%.
>Fourteen days after a second dose of Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech, rates had dropped by 67% and 82% respectively. In comparison, people who had not been vaccinated but had had COVID-19 before had rates which were 73% lower than unvaccinated individuals
If you feel that the tradeoff between liberty and safety here is too high, that makes sense - but do you really think vaccination passports don't reduce the transmission of the virus?
The question is, is the cost worth it?
There's no need for a "sacrifice of individual liberty for safety." That's Orwellian talk for going along with tyranny. By this point, the majority of Americans are going to have antibodies before long from a combination of vaccinations and past covid. Over 100 million already had past covid and I already shared links about how those antibodies are superior to two shots of Pfizer. So how is it necessary for those people to have to subject to a "papers please" tyranny? No thanks.
Implementing these passports will cause something even worse than some covid spread to happen. A two-tiered society where one segment of society is viewed as unhealthy, unclean, even dangerous. History is replete with examples of this being a bad thing.
And philosophy aside, there's also newer evidence showing that for some segments of the population it may be riskier to vaccinate.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...
So why start enforcing passports? To accidentally find out later on, after creating a two-tiered society, that there may be unintended long-term consequences for the teenagers? Nope. Time for YOU, reader, to say no and realize that these passports are just about control. They don't care about your health. It's about power. Think critically about the system being built. It's about the control.
>unhealthy, unclean, even dangerous.
This is probably how I'd describe wilfully unvaccinated people, yeah.
Also curious where you got the 100 million number from - AFAICT there have been 40 million covid infections in the US.
Source for how many people had covid:
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
Anew study published in the journal Nature estimates that 103 million Americans, or 31 percent of the U.S. population, had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 by the end of 2020
The number you mentioned is the number verified, but based on the modeling of infection rates and spread they've come up with the bigger number. It will keep getting bigger.
In any case, "flashing a card" to go into a bar is the precipice of the slippery slope. And yes, it's slippery. It doesn't take much effort to see the writing on the wall and observe the tyranny emerging in other places. If you're not simply ignorant to history and being tricked by the narrative, at least be honest about what you actually want - which is to control others. Don't try to pass it off as being concerned about health though, I wasn't born yesterday.
Then they should get antibody tests, and if their level of antibodies is high enough, we should let them do all the same things that vaccinated people can do.
But that's not what I hear. I just hear people ignorantly claiming they are immune because they got COVID (some even never confirmed, just they "think" they had it), without any idea as to what kind of antibodies they have in their blood. While some of them probably are just as immune as vaccinated people, I expect that a significant number of them (especially those who caught COVID earlier in the pandemic) don't have a level of immunity approaching that of a vaccinated individual. So... go get antibody tests, and lobby health authorities to recognize post-infection immunity as valid, assuming it's been tested by a lab.
Nope. The default position is for people to all be able to do everything the same. I'm okay with mask mandates when case numbers are above N. Since we already have 100 million Americans with superior antibodies from natural immunity, and vaccines freely available, why mandate and build systems around that? To give someone control?
But that's not what I hear. I just hear people ignorantly claiming they are immune because they got COVID (some even never confirmed, just they "think" they had it),
That's not your problem. See about your own vaccination and wear a mask. It's on them to be straight forward with their health. If they work in a NICU or want to dorm in a college that requires vaccinations already, then by all means use existing protocols to expect a report proving they have antibodies. That's fine. But it's not your problem or my problem whether or not smoeone just "thinks" they had it.
Here's an example of how you can see why I have a problem with your approach. You know how we're going to spend federal dollars to make take-home test kits available at-cost at retailers? Are you okay with people getting those test kits and seeing the results entirely privately in their own home, with no one knowing? If not, then the problem is on you. If you are, then what's the need for anyone to gate-keep access to society by demanding proof at the door? If you can't trust your fellow citizens when you're shopping, why trust them to build and run a system of enslavement like one where you have to use a covid passport to go to school or the bar or a theater or the gym or anywhere else?
So... go get antibody tests, and lobby health authorities to recognize post-infection immunity as valid, assuming it's been tested by a lab.
This is progress, but yeah, still a no. Limit the scope of these authorities now before they decide everything for you.
Are you absolutely certain of this? Is it true for all individuals? Even if their infection was 12 months ago? Or 18 months ago?
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9
People who recover from mild COVID-19 have bone-marrow cells that can churn out antibodies for decades, although viral variants could dampen some of the protection they offer.
Note that on this last link from Nature, we now know that past covid is effective at preventing known variants including Delta, per the first two links.
Source for # of Americans who had covid:
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
A new study published in the journal Nature estimates that 103 million Americans, or 31 percent of the U.S. population, had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 by the end of 2020
This would seem to contradict your original claim (and validate my reply), since your statement was predicated on the assumption that someone who was naturally infected in 2020 has as much protection today as someone infected a month ago (or someone who was vaccinated a month ago).
Those 103 million Americans infected last year (well, the survivors anyway) would absolutely benefit from taking a vaccine now if they haven't already.
>If you're not simply ignorant to history and being tricked by the narrative, at least be honest about what you actually want - which is to control others.
I want to keep myself and my loved ones safe - I've got 3 different family members who are both vulnerable to COVID and require in-home care. It's not feasible for them to self-isolate.
https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/101-child-popul...
That's 25 million people in the USA alone, and that's just based on the data we have right now. Virtually no one? And you ignore that the people with antibodies from natural immunity don't need it. See the links in the parent comments I posted.
For those 100m Americans to get that immunity, you had to have a lot of deaths and externalities pushed onto your hospital systems along the way. Healthcare staffing costs are shooting up, health insurance costs will likely rise across the board. Pressure from the delta waves are going to leave a lot of residual costs in the system, and it largely preventable.
Vax passports/documentatio is a whole separate issue, but I'll never understand why Americans are so adamantly against preventative healthcare measures.
We don't formulate public health policy based on 0 cases of flu or cold or covid. Otherwise we'd all be living in temperature-controlled air-corrected 24/7-monitored government housing pods would reduce the transmission to 0. Maybe those pods are the best public health policy? Because they could ship us food contact-free and let us out for exercise at times determined by an efficiency algorithm?
For those 100m Americans to get that immunity, you had to have a lot of deaths and externalities pushed onto your hospital systems along the way.
This is exaggerated. Here is how I know: roughly half of the hospitalizations that have occurred were mild or asymptomatic cases.
Source:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/covid-hos...
Quote from article: "In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease."
So you have fear induced by media relentlessly spamming our brains via feeds and doom-scrolling, and people then see the # of hospitalizations and assume that means a doomsday scenario like the film Contagion. If the reality is that our numbers have been misleading or incomplete, then it is impossible for you to accurately measure those externalities you mention. Therefore some rumored externalities should not be the basis for policy that strips people of their rights and livelihood. And it CERTAINLY should never be the basis for fabricating a false dilemma like vaxed vs unvaxed.
How many people got scared about their symptoms and rushed to the hospital because the media caused a panic? Per that source I mentioned, it's entirely possible this happened.
Healthcare staffing costs are shooting up,
Because hospitals are imposing those costs on themselves by firing nurses that are not complying. To the point where some hospitals in NYC are now unable to deliver children.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-hospital-pause...
This is a problem caused by the mandates.
health insurance costs will likely rise across the board.
For years before covid, the common narrative online was always that health insurance companies are bad. It's been known for YEARS that they make record profits and always pass on costs to the customers anyway. In the form of higher premiums, higher deductibles, and shittier services. So why are some on HN now peddling sympathy for them? Those costs are exaggerated and their bottom line is still fat from years of gouging the customers.
Vax passports/documentatio is a whole separate issue, but I'll never understand why Americans are so adamantly against preventative healthcare measures.
Get rid of the mandates tomorrow and say "masking when cases are above N in your area" and I'm sure everyone will be okay with that. No need to impose vaccination mandates anymore - people who want the protection can get the protection voluntarily.
And the small subset of people who cannot, could be taken care of through other creative means like giving them funds to stay at home until the pandemic is officially over. A cost that is a much smaller drop in the bucket compared to this tyranny that is poised to emerge.
I believe record numbers of health care workers are dropping out of the profession from stress & over work, from the pressure of treating those 100m cases. I doubt the number being let go for vaccine refusal is significant in this sense. Nurses in particular already have other vaccine requirements as a part of their job, this shouldn't be a suprise to them.
>For years before covid, the common narrative online was always that health insurance companies are bad. It's been known for YEARS that they make record profits and always pass on costs to the customers anyway. In the form of higher premiums, higher deductibles, and shittier services. So why are some on HN now peddling sympathy for them?
I am not peddling sympathy for insurance companies, I should have written that as premiums will rise - everyone paying for healthcare will shoulder the burden of higher costs.
Are you also against the FDA mandating the fortification of foods with folate and vitamin D as a public health initiative? Is that tyranny against your rights to drink unadulterated milk?
I gave quality sources for everything I said. Whereas what you said is "I believe" and "I doubt" and "Nurses should." That's...not evidence and it's not arguments. It doesn't matter what you believe. Or what you doubt if it's not backed by the evidence. The evidence I provided explicitly says that some hospitals are suspending services due to nurses quitting because of the covid mandate. And here's another source where a union in another state is saying that 30% of their staff may quit over mandates.
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2021/09/01/survey-show...
No doubt some are going to leave because of exhaustion as well, but it's not rocket science to see what's happening because of the mandates themselves.
Regardless of existing vaccine requirements, one would have to bury their head in the sand to not see the difference between what is happening now and what is the norm otherwise. Everyone for the most part is expected to take this vaccine or get fired, regardless of superior natural immunity. Not just nurses. Everyone including the 100+ million people who already had covid and don't technicaly need it. It's a power grab trying to ride the coattails of "nurses already have to get vaccinated."
I am not peddling sympathy for insurance companies, I should have written that as premiums will rise - everyone paying for healthcare will shoulder the burden of higher costs.
Are you also against the FDA mandating the fortification of foods with folate and vitamin D as a public health initiative? Is that tyranny against your rights to drink unadulterated milk?
I don't care about milk. I don't drink milk. What does milk have to do with people being banned from putting food on the table if they don't submit to tyranny? Particularly those 100+ million people who had covid already and thus have better antibodies already? What does milk have to do with people having to live in a "papers please" society in NYC if they want to go to the bar or watch a movie or do anything? You can buy milk fresh from the farm if that's what you want. Make friends with farmers and they'll take care of it. Buy the fortified stuff if that's what you want. You're not mandated one way or the other or threatened with your livelihood if you choose "wrong" on which milk you purchase for yourself, are you?
You seem more interested in a debate. Otherwise why bring up fortified milk as if it's actually a worthwhile comparison? I'm not here to debate, my friend. I'm here to ring the alarm bells because something is wildly wrong and it doesn't take a genius to see it. Go peruse those links in my comments on Australia, and let me know if you think the frog is in the pot yet. Here, I'll paste them for your convenience:
They're going to force people who quarantine at home (rather than a government-mandated quarantine "hotel" with guards) to install and use an app. Facial recognition, GPS tracking in your own home. And it will randomly ping you, and if you don't respond within 15 minutes it'll send the police to your house to conduct an in-person quarantine check. Source:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
They're arresting people for making Facebook posts against lockdowns. Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54007824
Australia presumes to say how many people can visit your home. Source:
https://theconversation.com/vaccine-passports-are-coming-to-...
“NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced freedoms for fully vaccinated people once 70% of the state’s eligible population are double dosed. These include being able to go to hospitality venues, hairdressers and gyms, and have five people to your home.”
They can arbitrarily lock you in your apartment building for up to weeks, no one allowed to leave. Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53316097
So do you think your question about fortified milk is still relevant?
I share legitimate concerns about the Australian federal government's moves in recent years which show a lurch towards the surveillance state and authoritarianism. The points you raise which are related to regulations surrounding the response to COVID are needless fear-mongering however.
Yes, the rights of the individual with respect to movement and to assembly are important. But, so are the rights of citizens to not be infected and be put at risk of hospitalisation and even death.
So, a (temporary) regulation to limit the spread of COVID by reducing the number of people you can have in your home is acceptable in the same way that drivers are forced to drive at 40km/h around schools and playgrounds.
The great majority of Australia's citizenry understands this trade-off, thus supports the (predominantly) state government efforts during this time of COVID. And this support has been shown to provide health dividends; which, astonishingly, even the anti-lockdown Murdoch press seems to be grudgingly accepting:
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/cov...
Being in the middle of an epidemic changes the norms as far as regulations go, in much the same way that such norms are altered during times of war. Citizens know these changes are unpalatable, but also know the alternatives are worse.
EDIT: typo.
Wow. Where to begin. Firstly I'm in Australian Lockdown Hell and I do not support the state government's efforts. Not one bit.
Victoria, day 226 of lockdown. It's 8pm and I need to visit supermarket before it closes due to curfew. Actually, it's too late.
Masks are required outside. Check-ins everywhere. Angry state authorities appear on the screen on my wall blaming and condemning the public for "visiting their families" or "watching the sunset" or other unforgivable immoral acts.
The faces on the screen threaten to restrict freedoms and enforce new rules that go beyond simple contact tracing. Vaccinated or not, I will not support proving I'm vaccinated every day. There's an assumption that everyone is "sick until proven healthy", or "untrustworthy until trusted", or a "dirty virus spreading threat until proven vaccinated which is a sterilizing bullet-proof shield".
The Australian capital ACT, just announced a 4 week lockdown because of 32 reported cases yesterday. The ACT has seen 3 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Three deaths.
Meanwhile, day 226 of lockdown in Victoria, and I can't drive more than 5 km. I could be fined $5,000 for visiting my family. My family can appear on my screen, however, and the conversation is not listened to by the authorities, only logged for now. The warrant-less monitoring comes later, the frequency of which depends on my use of phrases like "I feel like protesting against lockdowns" and so on.
This is Australia, 2021. It matters not that the masses are submissive to coercive control. They're being blackmailed. The "rewards" promised are only the things we already had, now taken away.
> ...acceptable in the same way that drivers are forced to drive at 40km/h around schools and playgrounds
The glaring flaw with analogies involving speeding drivers, is the speeding driver is always speeding by definition. The drunk driver is always drunk by definition. An unvaccinated person is not always infected or spreading the virus. And vaccinated people can still be infected and spread the virus too, which further derails the analogy: A sober driver cannot suddenly become unwillingly intoxicated in the way a vaccinated person can become infected. So please find a better analogy.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
> There's no need for a "sacrifice of individual liberty for safety."
We sacrifice individual liberty for safety every day. People who aren't licensed to drive don't get behind the wheel, and if they do and get caught, the punishments are stiff.
> Implementing these passports will cause something even worse than some covid spread to happen. A two-tiered society where one segment of society is viewed as unhealthy, unclean, even dangerous.
If you are choosing not to get vaccinated[0], then you are dangerous. You are literally a hazard to public health. You are easy incubation grounds for new virus variants that can evade the protection of the vaccines we have now. You are selfishly pushing the consequences of a possible infection on your family and friends, and on the doctors and nurses who may have to treat you. All because you've decided to politicize a vaccine. A vaccine, for crying out loud! It's absurd.
> Time for YOU, reader, to say no and realize that these passports are just about control. They don't care about your health. It's about power. Think critically about the system being built. It's about the control.
I mean, sure, there are a lot of things in this world that are more about control than their stated purpose. Public school curricula, airport security, organized religion. The list goes on. And sure, I bet some people get their rocks off telling people they can or can't go to their favorite bar or restaurant because of their health care choices. But the bottom line is that we're not getting out of this pandemic without mass vaccination or natural immunity. And the time it'll take us to get to natural immunity will involve years of orders of magnitude more deaths, the constant overloading of our heath care system, and doctors and nurses quitting en masse as they cease to be able to deal with it all anymore.
Even if we accept for a moment that no one in power cares about public health, I think it's safe to accept that they do care about the economy, because that's how they continue to line their pockets. The economy doesn't look so good in places where people don't care about trying to beat back the pandemic.
[0] Even though this isn't a thing, I absolutely support the idea of a "post-infection immunity card". We should define what level of antibodies conveys enough immunity, and give people antibody tests and issue them cards if their antibody counts qualify. Those cards should be accepted wherever proof of vaccination is accepted.
The comparison is the only way to shake awake some people who are too afraid to speak up. Because that's effectively where we're headed. Just look at Australia's new app that they're going to demand people use for self quaranting. Facial recognition and GPS tracking in your own home, and random pings that send the police officers to your house if you don't respond in 15 minutes. See my comment history for links if you're interested in that.
We sacrifice individual liberty for safety every day. People who aren't licensed to drive don't get behind the wheel, and if they do and get caught, the punishments are stiff.
That's not the same as false dilemmas around vaxed vs unvaxed that conveniently ignore the 100+ million who have superior antibodies from natural immunity. That's not the same as being fired from employment because you don't need the vaccine but your HR department wants to exercise ownership over your body. It's not a sacrifice of personal liberty to get in trouble if you drive before you're old enough or before you pass a road test, because you're driving two tons of steel that could hurt someone else.
Whereas here, it's only under the false dilemma of vax vs unvax where one could construe an illusory situation where vaccination is a function of responsibility. Because once we see that the vaccinated spread the virus, and those with past covid have superior antibodies...the entire analogy collapses.
And sure, I bet some people get their rocks off telling people they can or can't go to their favorite bar or restaurant because of their health care choices
And those people are more powerful than you think, and they will take a mile if you give them an inch.
But the bottom line is that we're not getting out of this pandemic without mass vaccination or natural immunity. And the time it'll take us to get to natural immunity will involve years of orders of magnitude more deaths
We already have a third of Americans with natural immunity.
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
So it's already the case that we do not need to keep framing the conversation in terms of vax vs unvax.
the constant overloading of our heath care system, and doctors and nurses quitting en masse as they cease to be able to deal with it all anymore.
You mean like how the numerous nurses and doctors who say they don't want the vaccine, end up getting fired or quitting to avoid it? And consequently some services like child-delivery in NYC are being suspended?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-hospital-pause...
This is entirely a manufactured problem. Manufactured by the people who supposedly care about public health, who love those mandates and the power they feel when they sign those papers.
Even though this isn't a thing, I absolutely support the idea of a "post-infection immunity card". We should define what level of antibodies conveys enough immunity, and give people antibody tests and issue them cards if their antibody counts qualify. Those cards should be accepted wherever proof of vaccination is accepted.
Yes, except no to "proof of vaccination." That's not necessary. If someone feels at risk, the vaccination is available if they don't have antibodies. Wear masks if you have to. Implement mask wearing when case #s go above N. Anyone still demanding passports is naive. Why on earth would you expect 100+ million Americans with superior natural immunity to live in a "papers please" society?
Incidentally boys have an outsized share of the risk of complications but still less than the risk of covid. The correct thing to do is take the minimum effort to protect yourself and others and stop complaining.
You're right, it's an intentional effort by Democrats in power to create divisions in the United States when the reality is not vax vs unvax at all. Natural immunity is relevant to over 100 million Americans by now yet that's not making it into the narrative.
won't protect their fellows and it's unlikely to be limited to the present crisis. When this crisis is gone someday there will be another and we will want to be prepared to handle it better than we have this one.
The extent of this crisis is overblown. The best way to protect each other is to wear a mask when case numbers go above N, and to offer free vaccines as an option for anyone who doesn't have natural immunity. This is not the approach being taken. Why not? It can't be said to be about protecting people if we're ignoring the 100 million+ who have antibodies from past covid. Those antibodies are superior to two shots of Pfizer.
Incidentally boys have an outsized share of the risk of complications but still less than the risk of covid
Incorrect. The guidance mentioned in the link above is that they are at lower risk if they just get covid, versus getting vaccination.
The correct thing to do is take the minimum effort to protect yourself and others and stop complaining.
And the minimum effort is masking when cases numbers are above N. And stop complaining? I'll shout it from the rooftops until people wake up to the tyrannical systems being built.
Just because someone suffered an infection, it doesn't mean they're now naturally immune. That immunity might have worn off, or their illness may not have been severe enough to provoke an immune response that confers as much protection as one of the vaccines do.
I would love to read a study that shows natural, extended immunity in everyone (or even just many or most people) who has been previously infected, but I don't think that study exists, and it's telling that you haven't linked to one.
Yes I did, you must have missed it in the parent comments.
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
From article: "A new study published in the journal Nature estimates that 103 million Americans, or 31 percent of the U.S. population, had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 by the end of 2020"
Over 100 million! Past covid and therefore natural immunity.
Just because someone suffered an infection, it doesn't mean they're now naturally immune. That immunity might have worn off, or their illness may not have been severe enough to provoke an immune response that confers as much protection as one of the vaccines do.
I would love to read a study that shows natural, extended immunity in everyone (or even just many or most people) who has been previously infected, but I don't think that study exists, and it's telling that you haven't linked to one.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-27/previous-...
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
From science.org article: "The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label."
Also, the evidence says that the antibodies are slated to last a lifetime.
We accept this sort of risk management in many other domains, where your individual choices impose may introduce external damages(Pet bonds for renters?) but Americans don't seem to think it fair in this situation for some reason.
The "community" is not entitled to set rules to "minimize those costs." That's some Orwellian dictatorial nonsense. It would justify all kinds of evil. And it has justified all kinds of evil throughout history when sides were drawn this way and one side dehumanized the other.
We don't think this way in America because we remember history, our own and the rest of the world's. We have experience. And there are those of us who are still old enough to remember.
Edit for sources higher up the conv tree:
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-27/previous-...
So far you've made the "superior antibodies" claim no less than 9 times(!) in various comments and cited exactly 0 supporting evidence.
Example:
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-27/previous-...
# of Americans who had covid:
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
A new study published in the journal Nature estimates that 103 million Americans, or 31 percent of the U.S. population, had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 by the end of 2020.
It's impossible for you to have counted the # of times I made this claim in my comment history without noticing the links. Please be sure you're trying to see the sources when I provide them in parent comments.
In fact, the very article we are commenting on has quotes from medical experts which contradict its findings.
I think it would be more honest to add a qualifier to your repeated claims. As in, "it hasn't been collaborated yet, but there is a promising study suggesting that....."
Stating it as fact, so vehemently, so frequently, is very misleading. What if that one study is found to be faulty?
>It's impossible for you to have counted the # of times I made this claim in my comment history without noticing the links.
I searched the (first page) comments for this story using the phrase "superior immunity". You mentioned this "fact" 7 times without providing the source (or any sort of qualifier as mentioned above). I do see now (after searching your name) that you have indeed provided a link to the source numerous times under other comments so it seems obvious that this wasn't intentional or malicious. Apologies for that.
FWIW, I do hope this study ends up being proven correct. But in the mean time, I highly encourage you to be more honest in how you cite it.
But mandating it across the board and taking away people's opportunity to put bread on the table if they don't comply? That's not a sacrifice of some marginal amout of individual liberty - that is a declaration of war on liberty itself. The reason I say this is because it's not hard to think logically about where systems around vaccine passports will take us. A two-tiered society in which one side of tens of millions is forced out of society, ostracized, and dehumanized.
For no reason, considering we're already looking at the majority of Americans having antibodies one way or another soon. The 100 million who had past covid have superior antibodies already. Time for us to stop allowing this converastion to be framed around someone getting or not getting the vaccination.
“COVID parties” are also a worst case scenario - I think the vast majority of people would just opt to not get vaccinated and live their lives as usual - which would lead to more outbreaks, deaths, mutations, etc.
Another post on the HN frontpage is relevant to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28526966
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations#attitudes-to-c...
The US has more skeptics than Germany and France, but it's a pretty slim difference
[0] https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/184786/la-boum-calls-f...
By the way, I have been vaccinated for months, but I can understand that others may not want to for reasons other than those I would describe as “selfish”.
I got the vaccine. Still, I can easily come up with like a dozen good faith, non-selfish reasons to avoid getting it. Are you unwilling to brainstorm a little, or are you just being disingenuous?
Oh, let's please not delve too deeply into "German culture".
Update/PS: Maybe the downvoters can explain how the unselfish German culture works when it comes to things like considering Turks to be equally valuable human beings.
‘For Memoli, this reflects a bygone paternalism. “I always think it’s much better to be very clear and honest about what we do and don’t know, what the risks and benefits are, and allow people to make decisions for themselves.”’
At this point I’m not even sure it matters. The states with the lowest vaccination rates are never going to have vaccine passports anyways. Mentally and culturally the pandemic is over for most people, vaccinated or not.
Right. It provided proof that the authorities were willing to lie “for the greater good”. So at that point their statements cannot be seen as truthful but only “possibly good for us to believe” (they think).
And as soon as people accepted that possibility, combine that with their personal estimate of how often “greater good” might conflict with what they personally would consider the actual good of the country or themselves, and you have a situation where many people don’t comply with the recommendations.
Lying to the public is a bad long term strategy for achieving cooperation.
But a lot of these people (perhaps justifiably) already viewed media and public officials as perfectly willing to lie to them or ignore their concerns - this extends beyond the pandemic itself and is part of a broader trend of mutual distrust.
Awfully convenient, isn’t that?
This made sense as a fear before vaccines were available. If immunity passports existed, and the only way to get one was to be infected - sure some people would do they.
Howver now it would be much easier to get vaccinated than finding an infection and get it registered. The policy would save a bunch of people from a couple of vaccine induced sick days without any reasonable downsides. Seems like an easy decision to make.
Authorities aren’t trying to “trick people”, they are manage an epidemic with more of a sure thing (vaccines) rather than something that is much less reliable.
We can reach herd immunity with a combination of vaccines and natural immunity. You will not be able to vaccinate everyone.
I am talking specifically about people who already have been infected with the virus and have survived.
Ok, though, let's talk about people who already had COVID. Did they actually have COVID, as in, did they test positive, or did they just feel really sick and think they had it? Have they had recent antibody tests? Did those tests show that they have antibody levels that would give them protection (including against delta) comparable to a vaccine? Have they consulted a medical professional about this? If it's "yes" to those questions, great, probably no need to get vaccinated. I have no problem with that. But the "I got sick so I'm immmune" stuff I hear constantly sounds more like a hope than something the people who say it have actually researched and been tested for.
Only 3,000 people between the ages of 19-29 have died from Covid-19 in USA, which is the age group I happen to be in.
"7,653 reports of death" is the string to ctrl-f for
"FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS, even if it’s unclear whether the vaccine was the cause. Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem."
This is essentially an unrestricted database containing raw reports. Nothing is done to eliminate or control for the entries where the cause of death is unrelated to the vaccine, and the data isn't a replacement for a controlled study.
Deaths that can actually be attributed to reactions to the vaccine are so far much lower than that figure (and even if they weren't, millions of people have been vaccinated; COVID-19 is significantly more likely to kill you or leave you with long-term health problems).
Notice I originally said 4,000 deaths and not 7,000, since I was assuming a certain number of them were not directly vaccine related.
Could you explain to me your opinion on all of the children who are going to the emergency room with heart conditions a few days after vaccination?
Worse, it leads to
1. new COVID variants, some of which will be worse than what we have,
2. more deaths from people who had some other health emergency while unvaccinated idiots are slowly dying in the hospitals taking valuable beds, and
3. to more burned out, dead and PTSD suffering healthcare personal.
I would recommend everyone to browse [1] and [2]. Not being vaccinated if you can, is truly disgusting, selfish and stupid choice.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/ [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/nursing/
Mass vaccinating the entire population for a respiratory virus that mutates so easily creates a whole host of other problems and a never ending pandemic of variants that may actually get more severe.
It's false that people without risk factors don't die of covid and monoclonal antibodies often don't work. You aren't safe if you aren't vaccinated or otherwise immune.
With leaky vaccines applied to an entire population the tendency is for more severe variants to prevail. How many times does the flu vax miss the target? Flu has is also leaky but we don't get more than 40% coverage so not likely to see more harmful strains selected. And then we whore ourselves out to big pharma hoping they stay ahead of it all.
See the devastating effects of this in the poultry industry: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...
And the backing study: Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens
"Our data show that anti-disease vaccines that do not prevent transmission can create conditions that promote the emergence of pathogen strains that cause more severe disease in unvaccinated hosts."
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.13...
But there's a chance of you spreading the infection to someone who's vulnerable in the process of recovering from it. Or someone else who ends up spreading it to someone who's vulnerable. Could just be that you pass by someone in your apartment building on the way to pick up your antibodies. Or exhausting medical care supplies if you do end up needing treatment.
I'm not equipped to tell whether your claim about mass vaccinations are true, but if that's correct are yearly flu shots also a bad idea?
Yearly flu shots if they went out to the entire population would most likely create a similar problem. But with only 40% of the uptake and usually to the more vulnerable they haven't had this effect.
Mass vaccinations to a virus like polio make perfect sense because this virus is not able to mutate and still successfully infect the host. You can confer long lasting immunity with vacinations on this. The spike protein on Sars can mutate many ways to Sunday and still break through the cell wall. So your constantly reformulating and boosting and trying to keep ahead of a changing target that if left to its own devices would just peter out due to it becoming less and less severe (too severe and it dies due to less transmission, less severe get more transmission and win and the virus becomes more benign over time).
With a leaky vacccine you can be a happy chicken with a severe variant and be totally fine until your immunity wanes and the next designed booster is off the mark. See this: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...
If we vaccinate the vulnerable but ease off the rest of the population we'll be better off longer term with less harmful variants.
This is something like saying do seat belts really work?
Furthermore Covid is believed to mutate substantially slower than the flu
> Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Alphainfluenzavirus are RNA viruses that cause coronavirus disease-19 and influenza, respectively. Both viruses infect the respiratory tract, show similar symptoms, and use surface proteins to infect the host. Influenza requires hemagglutinin and neuraminidase to infect, whereas SARS-CoV-2 uses protein S. Both viruses depend on a viral RNA polymerase to express their proteins, but only SARS-CoV-2 has a proofreading mechanism, which results in a low mutation rate compared to influenza.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33064680/
On the topic of mutations letting it spread through those who aren't AS vulnerable would give it billions of new patients and trillions of new chances to mutate while killing millions of people whose lives could have been saved by a vaccine that is safer than many people's weekly commute to work.
In a perfect world, everyone would understand that getting the vaccine is the appropriate choice of action and we could accept natural immunity from people who were infected before vaccines were available - but unfortunately we're forced into playing these weird games where authorities have to try to incentivize people who aren't behaving rationally - which in turn leads to further distrust from people on the fence.