The problem I see here is that the (I hesitate to call it this) anti-vax "side" has been shifting goalposts since day n-1. If you've ever talked to someone who's shifted goalposts you'll see it's essentially an impossible situation; you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced.
If I'm remembering the timeline correctly, it started with the vaccine being rushed and that we were essentially being experimented on. It's been six months since I – and many others – have had their first dose and we're completely fine. Some claimed to be concerned about the long term effects; do you think they know what the long term effects of a serious covid case is? (hint: it starts with a d and ends with "eath")
Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given.
At some point it was too hard to get- yes, that's true. However, now you can walk into a Target and decide to get the shot in the middle of a shopping trip! I did that with a Flu shot a few weeks ago and it took about five minutes.
In short, you cannot argue in good faith with someone who does not. I don't have a good answer to this – I really wish I did – but that's the reality of the situation.
This is a dangerous message to push. The reality is that there are many lasting consequences of COVID that fall short of death but are, never the less, quite serious. The so called “long COVID” really needs to be part of the vaccine calculus because the health consequences are very much worse than the purported side effects from the vaccine.
I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon first hand when it comes to drugs. As a teenager, there was lots of anti-drug messaging trying to convince us that ecstasy was dangerous. And all of it focused on scaring kids by exaggerating the risk of death. But we could see people taking it regularly and none of them were dying. And so it undercut the message. But decades later, I know a few people who’ve had depressive episodes potentially linked to heavy ecstasy use. And that consequence was never a part of the decision-making process because the authorities discredited themselves by being unnecessarily and obviously hyperbolic.
We need better messaging that provides people with the full range of consequences for their choices. The “you’re going to die!!!” hysteria ends up being counterproductive. Even as deadly as COVID is, the truth is that unvaccinated people probably won’t die from their case…the vast majority survive. But if people understood how many recoveries included long-term health consequences that significantly affected their quality of life, they might be better able to weigh that against the potential side effects of a vaccine.
In 7th or 8th grade, I remember watching a video in health class that included a (presumably fictional) dramatization where a kid died his first time trying marijuana because (unbeknownst to him) it had been laced with crack cocaine. It was difficult to take much of health class seriously after seeing that video.
If your audience doesn't have much background in your subject matter, they're still able to spot lazy arguments. They know they're unable to judge the merits of the rest, but the lazy arguments spoil the whole message. Many times, lazy arguments are less damaging when the audience has the necessary background to evaluate everything being said.
I'm saying maybe there's actually a decent bit of truth in the hokey video. But maybe that's they'd be better off showing DMX than an overdramatized skit.
It does require responsible adults though, but in many countries there were fertile ground for open debate.
Information on vaccine studies? Rushed.
Information on vaccine rollouts from countries that have reached 75-80% of the entire population vaccinated? Faked/not applicable.
Information comparing cases/deaths in US states with neighbouring states having higher vaccination rates? Invalid.
Look, be honest here. There’s more than enough information out there and none of it is being hidden. Hundreds of millions have gotten the shot and the benefits are abundantly clear. For example - “Despite Delta, severe covid-19 is much rarer among vaccinated Britons“ (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/09/18/despite-...).
But this doesn’t make a difference. Despite all this information being available, people will still rely on faulty information like “Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend became impotent after he took the vaccine”. FWIW, the White House treated Minaj like an adult and reached out to have a conversation with her. But she didn’t change her mind.
> treat people like adults
If they were intelligent adults they’d be able to evaluate the data for themselves. Instead they watch YouTube videos telling them to “do their own research” followed by checking out Nicki Minaj’s tweets.
Go ahead. Try having an open debate with Nicki Minaj or Kyrie Irving or any vaccine skeptic with millions of followers. Let me know how that goes.
From the get-go, the messaging should have been: "This is an evolving situation, and we're doing our best to keep up. Right now, our recommendations are X. As we learn, those are going to change."
That's what Japan did. Humility and respect.
It worked.
In the US, it was: "Masks don't work! You're too stupid to even know how to use one properly. Save them for nurses. No, wait, if you don't wear your mask, you're literally killing grandma! We'll arrest your goat-fucking inbred ass if you don't mask up. Trump's vaccine? You'd have to be a colossal moron to take that experimental garbage. Not for me! No, wait, it's Biden's vaccine now? If you don't get the jab, you're Hitler Squared! Don't want it? You're fired!"
How well this worked is left as an exercise for the reader.
Japan's culture is entirely communal. You don't talk on a cellphone on the train because it may inconvenience other passengers. You wear a mask when you're sick so you don't inconvenience others. So much of Japan's culture is rooted in making sure you aren't disrupting the general flow of society.
You can talk about "improper messaging" in the USA, but that rests squarely with President Trump. The entire point of that position is to be the figurehead of America and a unifying presence when things go wrong. He did not, and it caused irreparable damage to the trust and cohesiveness of the public early on in the pandemic.
I can and shall.
> Much of Japan's culture is rooted in making sure you aren't disrupting the general flow of society.
It may surprise you to learn that the US was like this before. And that Japan probably won't be in forty years' time.
You know that movie trope from the 70s and before, where somebody needs a car, gets in one, which is, of course, unlocked, pulls down the visor, and the keys drop into their lap?
That's what it's like where I live.
My town had a home invasion last week. I don't think I've ever heard of that happening here.
> But that rests squarely with President Trump
No.
The establishment burned every ounce of credibility available to burn, succeeded in ousting Trump from office, and is now crying that everything has gone all firey like.
If Trump got a Big Mac on Monday, that was proof he was a Nazi. If he didn't on Tuesday, that was more proof that he was a Nazi.
Biden could nuke Dallas tomorrow and MSNBC would defend him without question. As would probably half the GOP.
The problem with "winning at any cost" is the cost.
Like it or not, that's the state of things in the US.
Those insitiutions could work on earning trust, for example by showing humility and respect, like your parent suggested.
Instead they have chosen to outright lie to the people they have supposed to serve and now its somehow those peoples fault when they trust the institutions even less.
The entire left/right ideas are pretty lame.
Agreed. It's a poor model, and doesn't reflect the current reality.
Moreover, the entire odyssey of you should get this vaccine but only if you're in a very specific age or risk pool and let's punish people and hospitals who violate this set of ever-evolving poorly communicated rules did happen and might be even worse.
After Biden took office, they executed an "about face" so hard that their heads are functional gyroscopes.
Totally agreed on the rest. My stance is simple: get the shot if you're in a high-risk group. Otherwise, your choice, for which you should never be punished.
But in the US, you have people who continue to make arguments about how it's stupid to force them to wear a mask because others are afraid of getting COVID. I saw a really bad meme about that the other day where one person was walking with an umbrella and angrily telling someone else to also use an umbrella so the person with the umbrella wouldn't get wet.
No, and I'm tired of hearing this trope. People are plenty selfish everywhere.
Japan works because Japanese government understands trust. So does China, and for the same reasons.
Along with humility and information, people also need to sense the care.
There is no one clear science, one clear truth to rule them all in this pandemic. This is the only truth I have come to terms with.
I see anti-vaxxers with their straw man arguments as just people who have no trust in the government and the health authorities. Can't blame them though, since the pandemic started almost 2 years ago, there is still a lot we don't know about it's actual origins.
If I die, I cease to exist. So, while from the standpoint of the pre-death me, it is very unfortunate, the post-death me is either a null or an ephemeral entity in a different dimension (depending on which of the belief systems works)
Remaining in the same spatial domain but set back into oblivion by my own choices is about as close to the definition of hell as it can get.
That is where I am right now. My wife is double jabbed and has the worst cough in the world (after a weeks of all of the signs of covid she has tested positive for antibodies) meanwhile I have not even had so much as a sore throat.
I tested positive 15 months ago. Why do I need to be vaccinated?
FWIW I plan on getting the next redesigned booster but for now I see no reason to sign up
You've seen what the virus can do. Why chance it?
I'm sorry to hear about your wife. I hope she gets better.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...
B) you may have missed the last line of my comment
C) trying to understand how this extremely contagious virus managed to not infect me while my wife and I shared bathrooms, beds, and car rides together. My best assumption is that I still carry immunity
Do you think it's impossible that the virus actually did infect you the second time, just asymptomatically?
The moral of this story is that vaxxed or not this virus can still spread, so you can only be safe about yourself. Wear a mask, wash your hands.
Good luck!
There are a lot of things people don't understand, that's why expertise is more valuable than intuition, heuristics, and feels.
> Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a news conference Monday to discuss adverse reactions related to the COVID vaccines — giving individuals who have been “repeatedly ignored” by the medical community a platform to share their stories ... Among them was Maddie de Garay from Ohio who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial when she was 12. On Jan. 20, Maddie received her second dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial for 12- to 15-year-olds and is now in a wheelchair ... “Why is she not back to normal? She was totally fine before this,” said Stephanie de Garay, Maddie’s mother. She volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial “to help everyone else and they’re not helping here. Before Maddie got her final dose of the vaccine she was healthy, got straight As, had lots of friends and had a life.”
> ... Upon receiving the second shot, Maddie immediately felt pain at the injection site and over the next 24-hours developed severe abdominal and chest pain, de Garay said at the press event. Maddie told her mother it felt like her heart was being ripped out through her neck, and she had painful electrical shocks down her neck and spine that forced her to walk hunched over ... She developed gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure, memory loss, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, seizures, verbal and motor tics, menstrual cycle issues, lost feeling from the waist down, lost bowel and bladder control and had an nasogastric tube placed because she lost her ability to eat.
> ... Johnson argued that while most people don’t suffer significant side effects following vaccination, he is concerned about “that small minority that are suffering severe symptoms.”
80-min video of June 2021 news conference: https://rumble.com/vj5xbf-senator-ron-johnson-milwaukee-news...
The more we know about the statistical minority who suffer severe adverse reactions, the better we can screen vaccine recipients to avoid unusual but life-altering injuries.
They are only half curious and the result is a half story.
> Analysis of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database can be used to estimate the number of excess deaths caused by the COVID vaccines. A simple analysis shows that it is likely that over 150,000 Americans have been killed by the current COVID vaccines as of Aug 28, 2021 ... I’m offering a $1M academic grant to anyone who can show the analysis is flawed by a factor of 4 or more in either direction and provide a more accurate analysis to the correct number. We’ll have a panel of 3 judges decide if we disagree. Please send me an InMail on LinkedIn if you think you found I was off by a factor of 4 or more. First one to show the “correct” answer gets the $1M research grant.
2021-09-17 testimony to FDA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFph7-6t34M&t=15617s
Kirsch founded the C-19 Early Treatment Fund, https://www.treatearly.org/
More than 2 billion people have gotten a vaccine worldwide.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. VAERS is self-reported and (as this shows) not reliable data.
Honestly I think you're proving the need for this ban on YouTube. You seem to be trying to get it right, but you've been hoodwinked by the misinformation.
It is indeed hard to get it right, and this is killing people.
He provided a 30 page document referencing the analysis of other doctors, explaining the rationale for those estimates. He has further offered $1,000,000 dollars to anyone who can show that the estimate is off by a factor of 4X, i.e. making the task easier for the person challenging his extraordinary claims.
His claims are so far from anyone's expectations that it should be trivial to disprove, right? There's a bug bounty of $1M dollars available to anyone. Why is no one bothering to claim it?
Because no one who would be interested in disproving it trusts the person offering the bounty to be doing so in good faith.
Credibility? You have to be joking, what does he actually have to lose? According to Wikipedia he had a quarter of a billion dollars 15 years ago! He gets to live by rules you and I don't even know are possible, but suffice it to say that credibility is only ever a problem for the little people. Look at trump, after all.
Sure, Just like Elon and Zuck he'll couch his ego trips as for the people and pursued at great personal cost, but what actual price is failure to him? I'm guessing his true risk is limited to some teasing in the sauna.
I think of that old joke:
>>>>
The young economist looks down and sees a $20 bill on the street and says, "Hey, look a twenty-dollar bill!"
Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, "Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now."
>>>>>
Surely there is not a $1M bill lying on the ground, ripe for the taking. That's why I'm not bothering to claim it.
1) self-reporting systems are subject to memetic effects. Like people calling in every suspicious thing they see to the cops if they hear the cops are investigating a high-profile murder, adverse effect reporting increases if people hear a rumor a vaccine may cause problems, whether or not anything in their day-to-day has actually changed.
2) The push to vaccinate everyone means a lot more people are candidates for reporting than in an average year. Given no side-effects from the vaccine, we would still expect VAERS reports to go up significantly. And since heart disease is a leading killer in the US, and unlike most vaccines, this vaccine is being given to the older population almost exclusively relative to the median age of most vaccine recipients, we're hard-pressed to distinguish "vaccine-caused heart disease" from "greater amounts of reporting from older patients resulting in more instances of heart disease showing up in the VAERS reports."
2) I think that's valid, we would expect reports to go up. But Kirsch limited his search to ages 20-60, I think to alleviate one of your concerns. We're seeing e.g. 3000x normal, 1900x normal occurrences even when filtering like that. Does that not seem alarming?
The people who call in a bunch of unrelated leads during a murder investigation also aren't uneducated; it's perfectly reasonable, expected human behavior that when people are looking for trouble they find it more than if they aren't expecting any connection. Whether or not the connection is actually causal.
2) insufficient data to know if it should be alarming, because outside of a pandemic circumstance, the 20 to 60 demographic doesn't get very many vaccinations. So you're comparing on other years a population with possibly very different behavior to the general population (for example, one explanation could be that there's correlation between people being healthier and people getting vaccinated on years that aren't pandemic years... Possibly because the kind of person who goes out of their way to get vaccinated when it isn't required for school attendance is the kind of person that cares about their health more than average, is more prompt on upkeeping preventative medicine, has access to the kinds of doctors that catch early signs of heart disease before they evolve into full-blown conditions, etc.).
Edit: this has been unjustly flagged.
To give an absolutely terrible, but perhaps useful, analogy... You're an old sea captain on a sailing vessel without modern weather technology. VAERS is the crewman whose knee acts up about half the time before a bad storm. At best, if he tells you his knee's acting funny, you put your weather eye out... You don't turn around and go back to port.
... and that's the problem. The general populace doesn't know how rigorous medical testing works. And when they get their hands on something that sounds serious (but isn't actually at a scale that causation can be confirmed), or someone with an axe to grind decides to push a counter-narrative that doesn't stand up to scrutiny (but who cares whether it does if the general populace doesn't know how "scrutiny" works and is weighing the evidence of the medical community and the CDC vs. one pathologist in Germany as if their words have equal weight), it becomes a general problem for public health.
One that, apparently, Google has decided it doesn't want to be part of.
We are living in the era of sophisticated micro-targeting of groups via advertising profiles and machine learning. Why are our online narratives degenerating into dualistic debates, as if we can only count to two? We have the technology to perform granular, data-driven risk assessment across a wide range of variables.
At a minimum, we can fund forensic investigations of the reports in VAERS, collecting whatever data is needed to trace the root cause of each injury, removing every report that is not credible. Where necessary, we can identify the need for additional data collection, e.g. baseline testing of high-risk individuals before vaccination, for comparison to post-vaccination tests. Standard scientific analysis.
There are also non-public reporting systems (e.g. HMOs) for vaccine adverse events. That additional data is available to CDC.
It would also likely cost far in excess of $1M to investigate these. It is a clever trick though, because it sounds like a big bounty, while being actually a joke amount (he’s proposing spending far less $10 per person to investigate their medical records or autopsy). And seems possibly in bad-faith too, as he seems to be rejecting the population statistical data that already seem to refute his claims.
Advocating for identification of high-risk groups is another good smoke-screen since he’s saying nothing new, but making it sound like he’s smart and aware. Yes, there are people who need to talk to their doctor about risks, but the overwhelming majority of people aren’t in that group, but are made needlessly worried by such rhetorical tricks.
An actual investigation could only be done by CDC, who have access to non-VAERS reports and other health surveillance infrastructure. A handful of independent autopsies have been done, they are expensive.
https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/do-pfizer-vaccines-ki...
Is he referring to being off by 4 or more orders of magnitude?
If I were going to invest effort into a challenge, I would first contact Kirsch and obtain written clarification on terms.
Let us say the vaccine kills one in 100,000, that would be easily dismissed as chance. None of the trials could capture this. Yet, it would make the vaccine worse than the disease for that age group.
Do you see why that sounds implausible?
Secondly, I'm not saying that this has happened, there is no way for me to know. I'm saying that it is possible to identify such cases and still dismiss them. Sudden cardiac death in youth isn't that rare and even hundreds of excess cases could fall under the radar.
I'd also argue that the incentives are such that a dismissal is likely, now that the CDC has recommended the vaccine for children. The CDC used VAERS data in this assessment, which is incomplete to some degree and the window within which a possible side-effect is considered is small (two weeks).
1) the symptoms seem definitely bad, but IMHO not as a life not worth living
2) they usually don't remove the physical ability to commit suicide, so one can "fall back" to the "you are going to die" option (which I would of course, as per point 1, not recommend)
Maybe these stories are put out by the AP? I'm in Lincoln, NE. Omaha is an hour a way. And these exact stories will run in both local papers the exact same day.
Feels... slimy.
Look folks, you can get owned by the libs or you can get owned by the virus. One of them leaves you living to post another day. It's the Trump vaccine, Christ. Remember when the pharma companies delayed announcing the vaccine to not give him the win before the election?
It's perfectly reasonable to have a distaste for this, but I am curious as to if you take issue with this because the person in question is deceased, or if you just take issue with mocking someone under all circumstances.
> the doxxing
I can't say I've seen any of that. Admittedly I only ever see posts from that subreddit when they show up on r/all, so maybe it gets cleaned up on popular posts, but everything I've seen on the subreddit is just directly screenshotted from social media.
> and the general atmosphere of “the vermin are extinguishing themselves and the world is better for it.”
This one is really just a matter of your opinion on trolley problems. For what it's worth I'm pretty sure just about everyone on that subreddit would prefer the individuals in question have a sudden inspiration of critical thought and save their own lives.
That's backed up by the praise for people who post there saying they've changed their opinion.
I'm not going to lie and claim the feeling of schadenfreude isn't a factor, but it's more than that. The other reason that subreddit is happy about anti-vaxxers dying is because it means one less person spreading anti-vax sentiments (actually more since their family may stop too).
However, the subreddit isn't calling for anti-vaxxers to be killed. The deaths of anti-vaxxers who die for reasons other than COVID are not celebrated.
If someone is so hell-bent on dying that they'll ignore every single qualified doctor telling them that they're wrong, we can't really do much about that. But at least it usually stops them from getting other people killed with the same stupidity.
People are blinded by the public figures and institutions that they trust - and yes, that includes us.
They were steered wrong because they trusted the wrong people. You can imagine how fast the sentiment around vaccines would change amongst the professional class if suddenly the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, Democratic politicians, etc. uniformly expressed that vaccines couldn’t be trusted.
Agreed. I never said I submitted anything to the sub or founded it or something. I do find it useful to see what is happening to people. A secondary reason I was there is my parents are anti-vax and comorbid and I was hoping to find something that would break their hypnosis, but it's too deep.
That said, as someone that was previous conservative and my parents are conservative, I can say definitively though that conservatism is a suckers game and it should be obvious to anyone that it's a pack of lies by the cruelest and most selfish people in our society with grifters and the super-rich at the top. Liberalism isn't much better (in some ways worse because they have enough credibility with workers to do real damage sometimes without pushback).
> You can imagine how fast the sentiment around vaccines would change amongst the professional class if suddenly the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, Democratic politicians, etc. uniformly expressed that vaccines couldn’t be trusted.
That reality almost happened. At the presidential debates Harris said that she wouldn't take the vaccine if Trump told her to (which was about whether it was the FDA or Trump pressuring the FDA). If they really leaned into that, we'd be in a different world right now. Like everything these days, it's psychic whiplash how fast things change.
Regarding the "sucker's game" comment I can see where you're coming from but wanted to offer my perspective. I'm only a conservative because I'm anti big government, anti identity politics, and pro individuality. However, we live in a two party system so I have to root for the whole team. Those core issues outweigh all other factors. Sometimes after rooting for the same team for many years you just pick up the banner and wave it.
Have you asked your parents what their core beliefs are and why they're on that team? You might find they're one or two issue voters. Not sure if that would help you find some peace with them.
My mother is a Q-anon type person that became deranged and believes in physically impossible conspiracies. She's jewish and hangs out in alternate youtubes that have videos of burning stars of david next to the Q stuff she's interested in. I think she became disoriented by her economic trajectory in life where she initially was working with a masters and then became a housewife that was unable to reenter the economy. She spent over a decade listening to right-wing talk radio and fell into the youtube zone. and At this point I do not know what will reach her.
My father is a lawyer that rubs shoulders with big real estate people. In his youth he supported Nixon. This lived experience of contact with the morally bankrupt rich capitalists has imo morally damaged him. When I asked him if a poor person should die on the street if they can't pay for healthcare, he assented. He doesn't want to be a bad guy, but outside of his specialty his thinking is not clear or imo firmly grounded. He watches Fox and listens to Tucker. He's a Regan type Republican.
> I'm only a conservative because I'm anti big government, anti identity politics, and pro individuality
I'm a communist because over time I realized that we are being divided against each other by the rich and need social solidarity and democracy to have a high-functioning society. I think freedom comes from having security in food, housing, education and from the creative output of individuals and groups and not from what you're able to buy. In other words, a decent society comes from addressing the needs of the people and cooperation, not from making them compete against each other.
Please stop fearmongering people, if you're under 50 and have no comorbidity, you're not at risk.
On the opposite side, the waiter from the coffee shop where I use to sit and read my newspaper on sunday has got a
EDIT: We should absolutely be taking care of people that got sick, but America has no social solidarity whatsoever. It's disgusting.
The negative impact of fear is being completely dismissed by a large cross-section of the population. Reposting what I posted above:
https://twitter.com/PandaTribune/status/1440192783260655618?...
>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"
Some long COVID symptoms are loss of the ability to regulate heart rate reliably. This causes difficulty even standing up because you need to rebalance your blood pressure! It's not every single person that gets these problems, but the population burden is and is going to be enormous.
One cardiac study I read found that the closer they looked, the more heart damage they found, much of it subclinical. That subclinical damage is going to be important as you age even if you don't notice it right away.
Puntmann, V.O., Carerj, M.L., Wieters, I., Fahim, M., Arendt, C., Hoffmann, J., Shchendrygina, A., Escher, F., Vasa-Nicotera, M., Zeiher, A.M., Vehreschild, M., Nagel, E., 2020. Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). JAMA Cardiol 5, 1265. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557
"To our knowledge, this is the first prospective report on a cohort of unselected patients with a recent COVID-19 infec- tion identified from a local testing center who voluntarily un- derwent evaluation for cardiac involvement with CMR. The results of our study provide important insights into the preva- lence of cardiovascular involvement in the early convales- cent stage. Our findings demonstrate that participants with a relative paucity of preexisting cardiovascular condition and with mostly home-based recovery had frequent cardiac in- flammatory involvement, which was similar to the hospital- ized subgroup with regards to severity and extent. Our obser- vations are concordant with early case reports in hospitalized patients showing a frequent presence of LGE,3,25 diffuse in- flammatory involvement,10,26 and significant rise of tropo- nin T levels.4 Unlike these previous studies, our findings re- veal that significant cardiac involvement occurs independently of the severity of original presentation and persists beyond the period of acute presentation, with no significant trend to- ward reduction of imaging or serological findings during the recovery period. Our findings may provide an indication of po- tentially considerable burden of inflammatory disease in large and growing parts of the population and urgently require con- firmation in a larger cohort. "
Earlier studies of this nature, on young adults, were later debunked by larger studies:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/few-pro-...
We don't have enough evidence at this point to be claiming long-COVID exists as a significant problem, and such a situation would contradict the very mild effects that COVID manifests in most cases. The evidence in support of it is not rigorous. If this was the breadth and rigor of the evidence being used support the idea that ivermectin is an effective COVID prophylaxis, no one would give the idea a second look.
This is exactly the kind of false information the YouTube ban is about. You're proving how we need it.
0-50 years old (cumulative): 60
50-59 years old : 215
60-69 years old : 712
70-79 years old : 2125
80+ years old : 7389
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1110092/coronavirus-covi...
As we can see, the risk is clearly minimal if you're young, and we're not even controling for comorbidities.
Young people are at risk of getting long covid, for example. https://www.mattbell.us/delta-and-long-covid/
It's worth noting that with delta and unvaccinated younger cogorts, we can see hiw the relative risk of ending up in ICU increases for younger cohorts.
Sweden has good register web page for this. Choose fates after July 2021 to see how the distribution of cases moves to the left, younger cohorts.
https://portal.icuregswe.org/siri/sv/report/corona.alderkon?...
Yeah, sure, I’ll be fine if I get covid. Will my toddler? Will the person at the store who doesn’t have the luxury of working from home? It’s such a big, selfish risk for something that’s so easy to deal with.
Please stop fearmongering people, if you're under 50 and have no comorbidity, you're not at risk.
On the opposite side, the waiter from the coffee shop where I use to sit and read my newspaper on sunday has got a sight impairment since he got vaccinated: he now sees double. His doctor refuses to believe him. Unfortunately, the pro-vax people won't help him get a new job, nor compensate for his financial loss. Deal with it, plebs.
But FWIW, I find that kind of thing to be too propaganda-ish and to push people away. I'd rather have a more boring discussion about the numbers and why we've seen thousands of people dying per day from Covid and the risks just aren't there from the vaccine. To hear some talk, we should just start randomly dying from it, but that obviously hasn't materialized.
I don't deny that either group exists, but I instead tell people that we have to take a step back because there aren't equivalent numbers of each event. There are orders of magnitude more Covid deaths (and injuries) than vaccine injuries. Yes, there are some of each, but as always, the actual numbers matter here.
I don't really find long Covid to be that useful in arguments. I suppose it has its place vs. the "untested" nature of the vaccine, but it's not really "untested" any more than the average flu shot is, and nobody is randomly dying in droves from those. Also it's in many millions of arms, so if there's something horrible that's going to happen due to it, well... where are all the deaths? We'd need to see millions of them to get anywhere close to the impact of Covid.
I’m looking at these stories, wondering why they’re running a story about a guy in NC when local Nebraskans are dying. Why aren’t they covering the local story?
Why is it cross posted across local news outlets.
Just lazy journalism or a concerted message. Feels gross either way. And not pursuasive. At all.
But since it’s a critical subject, the coordinated messaging feels like a propaganda piece.
This is coming from someone who is vaccinated.
> You might be giving too much credit to adults who can't do basic math.
I agree and perhaps this is where most of the difference lies. I do tend to place an outsize trust on adults whether they can do basic math or not, probably from my upbringing in a rather rural setting where the average person may not be able to handle math beyond 4th grade and yet be very "street smart". I don't see them as any inferior as far as decision making is concerned.
Low energy
Headaches
Upset stomach, including diarrhea, constipation, and nausea
Aches, pains, and tense muscles
Chest pain and rapid heartbeat
Insomnia
Frequent colds and infections
Loss of sexual desire and/or ability
Nervousness and shaking, ringing in the ear, cold or sweaty hands and feet
Dry mouth and difficulty swallowing
Clenched jaw and grinding teeth
Sounds like all of the physical symptoms of so-called long-COVID.
There is no compelling evidence that the correlation between these self-reported symptoms, and having a COVID infection months prior, is due damage caused by the COVID infection, and not due to any number of other confounding factors. There have been no rigorous studies, i.e. large, randomized and controlled studies, showing this.
Notice how extreme rigor is demanded for the ivermectin studies but then really just mere correlation is enough to draw scare mongering conclusions about covid.
Also, the theory simply doesn't make sense, given the vast majority of COVID cases are mild, with no evidence of the kind of acute lung damage that can lead to long-term complications affecting breathing. If lung damage from COVID was really that pervasive, we would know about it, both from the acute symptoms, and from imaging scans.
Here is a typical study purportedly showing evidence for long COVID:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/28/covid-37-of-pe...
Anxiety is the most common symptom of long COVID.. All of the symptoms listed could be psychosomatic, due to fear around COVID.
Not to mention the prescribed two week isolation that is part of the standard of care for even an asymptomatic COVID infecion, which could have a profound negative impact on physical and mental health, given what is known about the health risks of isolation.
Not enough attention is paid to the dangers of over-reacting to COVID:
https://twitter.com/PandaTribune/status/1440192783260655618?...
>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"
With regard to vaccines, my personal opinion is that they will prove to pose an extroardinarily low risk of producing a severe adverse effect, orders of magnitude lower than that posed by COVID.
People worry about vaccines not being tested for long term effects but covid is also not tested for long term effects. We can use common sense to deduce long term effects.
What we do know already is that COVID is not a retrovirus, so it doesn't have a genetic impact on cells that outlives the infection. We also know that the infection lasts a few weeks, then is cleared from the body.
Similarly, none of the vaccines change cell DNA, so will not have a genetic impact that outlives the vaccination's immediate post administration effects.
Therefore we can deduce that the only long-term impact of the COVID vaccines, and COVID, is from the damage done during the few days of immune response to the vaccine antigens, and few weeks when the COVID infection is active, respectively, and thus that the severity of the immediate-vaccine-response/infection can be expected to be proportional to the risk of long-term complications (i.e. long-term effects of vaccines, or long-COVID). So any vaccine that poses an extremely low risk of producing a severe immediate adverse effect, or any demographic which faces an extremely low risk of facing serious symptoms and death from COVID, should also face an accordingly low risk of long-term complications.
With vaccines, there is also the risk of 'antibody-dependent enhancement of virus infection', but so far, that hasn't manifested in any of the COVID vaccines.
The same can be said for a majority of cancer symptoms, autoimmune disorders, etc. Handwaving symptoms away as "that could be imagined" doesn't make it so.
Having seen horrific xrays of the lungs of some COVID survivors, I have trouble believing that symptoms like "chest pain" and "abnormal breathing" are psychosomatic for a majority those reporting them.
It’s hard not to marvel at this virus if it wasn’t trying to fsck you up at every turn
Though I'm not fully convinced for needing vaccine if already gone through symptomatic covid. If I have got the real thing training the immune system, what real benefit a controlled training by vaccine would give over that?
Handwaving away the effects of psychological stress also makes no sense. I didn't say they were imagined. I said they were psychosomatic, which means due to psychological stress.
More generally, when all of the long-COVID symptoms could be due to a host of other confounding factors, it makes no sense to blame COVID and make people even more afraid, and thus potentially exacerbate the very symptoms you are sounding the alarm about.
As Bill Maher noted, people, especially Democrats, are already vastly over-estimating the risk posed by COVID. It's not wise to dismiss the potential unintended adverse effects of this misassessment, and focus exclusively on the risk posed by COVID. A one-dimensional focus on COVID risk is a simplistic and imbalanced way of approaching risk management.
>>I have trouble believing that symptoms like "chest pain" and "abnormal breathing" are psychosomatic for a majority those reporting them.
Both are very common results of anxiety. Given there is no indication of widespread heart or lung damage from the vast majority of COVID cases, attributing these to COVID makes no sense.
Also, loneliness, is extremely deadly:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/loneliness-ha...
We have no idea what two weeks of total isolation, which all of these people who are diagnosed with COVID are subjected to, does to people. Incidentally, anxiety and depression - the most commonly reported "long-COVID" symptoms - are one of the most common effects of loneliness:
https://www.medicinenet.com/what_does_loneliness_do_to_a_per...
So you want to conclude that it's COVID doing this to people despite no evidence of widespread heart/lung damage that could explain these responses, and when there are more plausible explanations emanating from psychological stress?
That is incorrect. [0][1][2][3]
[0] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7588618/
[2] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
My statement is not incorrect. Your links show no such thing.
The vast majority of covid cases have very mild acute symptoms, so the vast majority of the reports of chest pains and "abnormal breathing" months after the infection, that are attributed to "long COVID", could not possibly be due to heart or lung damage from COVID. That kind of pervasive damage would show up in the acute symptoms and in imaging scans and we would know about it.
COVID is not some magical disease. The long term complications emanate from the damage during infection, with severe infections more likely to have long term complications. Mild infections are very unlikely to have long term complications except in so far as the collective hysteria, which is confirmed by polls, and that vastly over-estimates the threat of COVID and leads to extreme over reactions like two week total isolation prescribed for all cases, or all in person classes being cancelled in universities that have a few mild cases, has psychosomatic effects.
I don't think one side has a monopoly on losing trust, behaving badly, or making anti-science decisions.
It is overly generous to speak of "one side" as if there is another equally valid side to compare with. The CDC is not a political institution and they always cite published research in their guidance and public statements about COVID-19. The anti-mask/anti-vax crowd are going around spreading one fantasy after another, coming up with new and ever more outrageous conspiracy theories and excuses for refusing to cooperate; none of their claims have ever been based in reality, and that is why the story changes on a daily basis and why there are so many contradictory claims being made.
To put this in perspective, the high-level direction of the CDC's guidance has, since the very beginning of the pandemic, been to reduce the rate at which COVID spreads; the changes in their guidance have been about the details. The anti-mask/anti-vax crowd has gone from denying that there is a virus to saying that the virus is no worse than the flu to claiming that masks would suffocate them to whining about how mask mandates violate to their freedom and that they would rather die of COVID than comply with a mask mandate. They went from heaping praise on the last President simply because he was in office when the vaccines were first becoming available to complaining that the current President was being given too much credit for the vaccination effort to claiming that the vaccine is made from aborted fetuses, that the vaccine alters DNA, that Bill Gates inserted microchips into the vaccine, that the vaccine causes people to become magnetized, and that vaccine mandates are proof that the vaccine is the "mark of the beast."
Look at the most recent issue of vaccine boosters. The FDA panel of experts (whom we're supposed to trust now, right?) said boosters are not necessary. CDC comes in and says the FDA is wrong, boosters are good jk lol. What a joke.
Can you point me to a well done study on cloth masks and their efficacy? 19 months in and I have yet to see one. But people "feel" that masks must work, so CDC guidance says wear them. Surely at this point we should have so much compelling data about masks if they are effective...
I'm guessing you've hidden away a lot of meaning in the words "well done" but here's one:
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202004.0203/v4
These also: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HLrm0pqBN_5bdyysOeoOBX4p...
If you don't think these are "well done", can you at least clarify what such a study would look like and point us to an example?
If cloth masks are effective (I'm not arguing either way) and those who wear them felt endangered by those who don't, could they simply double their mask? Particulates passing in or out, in either direction, would be subject to the same amount of material as if both were wearing a single mask.
guy with mask + guy with mask = two masks
guy with 2 masks + guy with 0 masks = two masks.
I'm not suggesting that anyone should have to bear the responsibility of another, but the effect should be the same for the wearer if non airborne contaminated surfaces are of low risk. Unless it's a matter of directionality.
Could it be tested to observe a controlled situation where group A) exhales only through cotton while inhaling without, while a seperated group B) does the opposite, exhaling without and inhaling with?
Is this absurd to consider? I'm not feeling well and might actually be absurd right now.
When you exhale, on the other hand, you create positive pressure which violently expels the droplets regardless of what's in the way. This creates droplets with high velocity and turbulent flows within the mask that prevent them from traveling a straight path through the mask and cause most of them to collide with the fabric.
Basically, once it's exhaled it's a hazard to anyone who doesn't have a properly fitted N95/100 mask (which requires specialized equipment, though it's relatively common)
I remember as an OTR driver the truckstop bathrooms I survived each day. The olfactory violence was palpable enough to feel it crawling through the mask and see it grinning as it coursed through what must have been an unusual ratio of gas to air. I'd think to myself in that sometimes surreal environment where photons seemed to sweat and stagger, that even an n95 was pointless, perhaps life itself. If rona be here, every particle is riding a pale horse in a hazmat suit. I'll always consider myself a permanent petri dish for that.
I'd be all for mandatory toilet skirts.
That's how we end up with a calculus that determines that impinging individual liberty (requiring masks) has a net benefit (limiting overall community spread).
I guess a similar analogy might be: driving half the speed limit might in a weird sense feel like you're protecting yourself from harm in an accidental if else someone drives too fast, but the better policy would be that both directions of traffic maintain speed at or under the limits. Again, this is an instance where we limit individual freedoms when there is a perceived net benefit to community safety.
this minutephysics video might answer your question
Thank you
wearing two masks instead of one wouldn’t make things worse, though. but better? again, good question.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
Cloth masks don't work at all, and surgical masks only reduce infections by 11%. N95s are probably a lot more effective but this study didn't measure those.
The problem with getting your science news from FB memes is that some nuance tends to get lost.
"Studies show that after getting vaccinated against COVID-19, protection against the virus may decrease over time and be less able to protect against the Delta variant. Although COVID-19 vaccination for adults aged 65 years and older remains effective in preventing severe disease, recent data pdf icon[4.7 MB, 88 pages] suggest vaccination is less effective at preventing infection or milder illness with symptoms. Emerging evidence also shows that among healthcare and other frontline workers, vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19 infections is decreasing over time. This lower effectiveness is likely due to the combination of decreasing protection as time passes since getting vaccinated (e.g., waning immunity) as well as the greater infectiousness of the Delta variant.
"Data from a small clinical trial show that a Pfizer-BioNTech booster shot increased the immune response in trial participants who finished their primary series 6 months earlier. With an increased immune response, people should have improved protection against COVID-19, including the Delta variant." (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/booster-s..., https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
SCIENCE! or whatever agenda the current administration wants to push. This was the same reason all these "leaders" (including Joe and Kamala) were telling everyone to be skeptical of the jab previously, because "you can't trust the orange man's CDC and the vax he pushed through so fast!"
Big tech Co is pushing a bigger agenda and silencing dissent.
They're talking about a different CDC committee that went against the FDA panel, and the CDC director sided with the FDA panel(which meant going against one recommendation of the CDC panel). So yes, you and Greenwald blaming the CDC for siding with the expert FDA panel.
This kind of misinformation spread on the right is insane and permeates every discussion. It's easier to spread misinformation than to fight it, this is such a sad state of affairs.
The Trump-appointed CDC directer Redfield exerted a ton of pressure in CDC to hide or manipulate data, overrode career civil servants’ decisions, fired or marginalized CDC scientists for doing their jobs, publicly spouted nonsense on Trump’s behalf including promoting conspiracy theories about China, etc.
People inside CDC were (for better or worse) not willing to stick their necks out to resist. CDC screwed up a ton in the first 6–12 months of the pandemic; 2020 was pretty much the worst year ever for the CDC. Federal agencies are sadly not fully functional without effective good-faith leadership and support from the top.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-the-fall-of-the-cd...
I'm vaccinated, and in a country with 80% of people on two doses and 90% on one dose. But we still have a lot of cases, and a lot of people stuck on ventilators in hospitals.
For instance if Delta has an R0 of 8, and we're 100% vaccinated, and the vaccine has an efficacy of 85% against infection, the resultant Rt would be 1.2:
8 * (1 - (1 * 0.85))
So that means that some other form of mitigation on top of 100% vaccination would be necessary to stop the spread.
But for mutations with lower R0, or higher vaccine efficacy, herd immunity may still be possible.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
I think that's an overstatement of the links you are sharing.
Several parts of the country have pushed Rt < 1, so there are clearly things we can do to stop the spread, through a combination of vaccination and other mitigation measures.
And the definition of herd immunity is literally what protects people from infection. (Herd immunity includes vaccine immunity.) And even before the HIT, vaccination reduces contagion, reduces the doubling rate, buys time to implement further mitigation to drive down Rt < 1, and saves lives.
Anyway, what the Astra Zeneca guy is saying is just that our vaccines are not effective enough against infection to get Rt < 1 on their own.
mRNA Vaccines do have efficacy against infection, and additional effectiveness against infecting others; it's just that they're still not quite as effective as their effectiveness against hospitalization and death.
Improved vaccines, or the third-shots happening now (which do temporarily improve infection efficacy) improve those stats. Herd immunity isn't yet theoretically impossible even if it's a practical impossibility in our populations.
It probably is true that we can't go back to the way we were pre-covid, no distancing, no masks, and avoid COVID spread. We're not there and may never be since there's a likelihood that some variant of COVID will be endemic.
But there's plenty we can do - vaccination, and mitigation to get Rt < 1 during spikes. Those two practices protect people from infection.
Agreed that everyone able should get vaccinated.
The point is Rt. If Rt is above 1, and the disease has a degree of mortality similar to what it has now, then it means the case count will double at some rate. And ICUs will fill up, and people will start dying from things like broken legs and pneumonia from not being able to get sufficient care. Does that make sense? That's just what Rt > 1 means; case counts are doubling. If Rt is above 1, then if you don't want the disease to eat the world, something needs to happen to get Rt back below 1. If not, it will happen naturally, solely through natural immunity and unnecessary death.
So the goal simply needs to be to keep Rt below 1, or to knock it back below 1 before prevalance becomes dangerous and threatens ICUs.
But that doesn't necessarily mean lockdowns. If there's a spike but already a good level of immunity, it might just mean masks on public transportation for a couple of months, or people naturally choosing to go out to eat three fewer times a month, or whatever.
The measure of required mitigation depends entirely upon the circumstance in the moment. If Rt spikes a little, you don't need to do much. If it spikes a lot, you need to do more. But with enough vaccination, we might not ever need full lockdowns for covid again.
For herd immunity, you also need to take into account that infected people—even symptomatic ones—are less infectious to others, if they're vaccinated.
Last I heard, the CDC gave a 95% CI of the mRNA vaccines being 26% - 84% against infection (from Delta), and there's an additional 40% - 60% protection against infecting others (I've seen that estimate in multiple places but I don't know the source). If that's true, it suggests an overall range of 55.6 - 93.6 effectiveness against infecting others.
Absolutely, I'm just stressing it cause people have used the word 'efficacy' to measure lots of different things!
300 new cases / day, 5500 active cases, and 2 deaths / day, for a country with 10M people. (3 new cases / day, 55 active cases, 0.02 deaths / day, per 100,000.)
Compared with, say, the US: 112,000 new cases / day, 9,800,000 active cases, 2000 deaths / day. (34 new cases / day, 3000 active cases, 0.6 deaths / day, per 100,000.)
I'd say you're in better shape than we are.
I even saw different regions of my country do this. Fast forward 2 months and the situations are reversed and so is the finger pointing.
It’s absurd.
It's an unfortunate circumstance that 90% of people being fully vaccinated might not be enough to stop COVID-19 in its tracks. Even just 1% of people being unvaccinated makes millions of people who could catch, mutate, and transmit the virus. Especially if those people were loosely clustered together, and didn't take precautions against spreading disease, they could possibly keep the virus active (and hospitals busy) for a long time on their own.
I think you're arguing from a fictional frame of reference.
Ideologically I'm somewhere in the right half of the spectrum, and even I'll admit that the state has absolutely taken the right to bodily autonomy, and I don't think it's a universally bad thing.
I have long suspected that the modern 80 year life expectancy was a grand illusion. I wonder if the covid pandemic is Mother Nature's way of signalling that the party is over and it's time to return to 'Gaudeamus igitur, Iuvenes dum sumus'.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
The fact of the matter is that no one is capable of being autonomous in the face of communicable diseases because if you are infected you turn into a factory for the disease that affects everyone else.
Citing a 99.9% survival rate is disingenuous when it’s infecting everyone. That’s blatantly obvious with Covid shooting up to 2-3 place for cause of death and if recall correctly one of those other major causes of death it’s competing with is cancer which is actually a basket of diseases with unrelated causes.
Even with the vaccine “mandate” the US gov has set, you still have the option to get tested frequently and not be vaccinated.
You can’t refuse the vaccine, refuse to get tested and prove you are immune, and want to walk around uninhibited in public when you could be carrying this disease. That’s not bodily autonomy that’s just saying “fuck you I do what I want” to society, so don’t be surprised when claims of “my body, my choice” or clamoring about rights falls on deaf ears to the rest of society
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, it's the smart thing to do. But vaccinated people can still carry and spread the virus. They may be somewhat less contagious but we don't have clear data on that yet.
You are talking about how the vaccinated can spread the virus, which is I agree is true, but ignoring that they can only spread the virus when they get a breakthrough infection. The vaccine massively limits the chance of being infected.
If you cannot recognize the fact that the change of infecting someone else is a function with two variables where x*y where x is a Boolean of isInfected and y is a floating point of chanceOfBeingInfected then I don’t know how we can continue talking as you are in a different reality than I am.
If you get the vaccine your y value in the previous function drops dramatically. If you only look at the x value then of course you won’t see a value in getting vaccinated because you are ignoring the effects of vaccinating
Since exposure is inevitable, the smart move is to get vaccinated yourself. And take other steps to maximize your odds of surviving a breakthrough infection.
What do you mean by common? Do you mean that it happens or that it’s the same rate of infection as being unvaccinated? Your argument only works if the breakthrough infections are as “common” as getting infected without the vaccine.
> Whether we're exposed by a vaccinated or unvaccinated individual is irrelevant
But it is relevant that the chance of a vaccinated individual being contagious is _massively_ lower. You can’t argue that breakthrough infections of vaccinated individuals exist, so therefore coming into contact with a vaccinated person is as risky as coming into contact with an unvaccinated person.
For any single interaction, your risk of virus transmission is probably lower with a vaccinated individual than with an unvaccinated individual (although the magnitude of the difference is unclear). But unless you're living as a hermit you're going to be in contact with thousands of people over the next several years. Some of those people will be infected and contagious. So you will inevitably be exposed multiple times.
If you have two population groups A and B and A has a massively lower infection rate then population group A is not going to have the virus surge through the entire population.
But this is all veering off my original point that you can’t claim bodily autonomy as a reason/right to not take preventative measures like the vaccine if you aren’t actually being autonomous.
You are 100% correct. The vaccinated are barely affected while the unvaccinated are heavily affected.
>It doesn't make sense to apply the same restrictions everywhere, if your odds of catching the virus happen to be slim.
Correct again. We should not limit the vaccinated and prevent the unvaccinated who refuse to take routine tests from affecting the public.
Just so you think I am not allowing for any other option. I am 100% fine with someone who takes a Covid test and gets a negative every single day being allowed the same public privilege's as someone who gets the vaccine. My actual issue is with people who conflate not getting the vaccine with not getting tested as well but still somehow being allowed to walk around in public
Transmission happens where people are crammed together. The Provincetown case from the summer vividly illustrated how this applies in highly vaccinated populations.
I didn’t deliberately miss your point, I’m saying your point is wrong.
You can’t talk about the “how and where the virus spreads” if you are acting as if vaccinated and unvaccinated populations have the same rate of spread. The existence of breakthrough infections does not invalidate the fact that the vaccine lowers transmission rates in the population.
It isn’t some binary field of isUseful where the presence of single transmission of the virus from someone who is vaccinated flips the value to false
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
If you are going to spread misinformation across the internet, please at least run your clips through a thesaurus so they aren't a few seconds of googling away to discover the issue.
[1]https://imgur.com/Dgujf3N [2]
Alas, your link [1] is just a random reddit screenshot and link [2] is accidentally missing.
This is from page 12 of your linked source, the bit with words before the nice graphs you wanted me to focus on.
> These data should be considered in the context of vaccination status of the population groups shown in the rest of this report. The vaccination status of cases, inpatients and deaths is not the most appropriate method to assess vaccine effectiveness and there is a high risk of misinterpretation. Vaccine effectiveness has been formally estimated from a number of different sources and is described earlier in this report. In the context of very high vaccine coverage in the population, even with a highly effective vaccine, it is expected that a large proportion of cases, hospitalisations and deaths would occur in vaccinated individuals, simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective. This is especially true because vaccination has been prioritised in individuals who are more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease. Individuals in risk groups may also be more at risk of hospitalisation or death due to non-COVID-19 causes, and thus may be hospitalised or die with COVID-19 rather than because of COVID-19.
Your own source is saying your interpretation of the data is incorrect and explaining why you’d see higher rates of vaccinated individuals hospitalized. Why are you claiming that the study proves what it says it doesn’t prove?
> simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective.
They are computing case rates. This part of the argument doesn't explain that the case rates are similar in vaccinated vs unvaccinated population.
> This is especially true because vaccination has been prioritized in individuals who are more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease.
The cumulative vaccination uptake rates are 85%+ in >50 ages group, see charts on pages 9-10. While prioritization may have a sizable effect at small vaccination rates, once almost all of the population is vaccinated we have to assume the most of the vaccinated are not 'more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease', otherwise we are simply saying that (almost) everyone is more susceptible. Also, it is 'susceptible of severe disease' not simply 'susceptible of getting infected with covid'. If 10-15% of the population were to have 90% smaller susceptibility to covid infections within the same age group from natural causes, we would have heard about that by now.
For me, the mystery remains.
I could speculate a number of hypotheses, the first one being that there is something about they count 'covid cases' that doesn't match the rest of the literature, but I was unable to find the specific paragraph describing that. Perhaps there is something really dumb that escaped me :(
On the flip side, I also don't have visibility in how 'vaccine effectiveness' rates are computed in the rest of the literature. Perhaps there is something about how other people count 'covid cases' that presents a different picture.
That being said, theirs is a real life measurement of an entire country on natural timeframe, vs. studies that are usually done on population samples on limited timeframes, and then extrapolated to entire countries on natural timeframe. So while this is a single source, it is from a highly credible org with a highly credible setting, making it difficult to dismiss offhand.
https://twitter.com/JamesWard73/status/1436017485262823424?s...
Same bud, not really sure where to take the conversation if you are dismissing offhand your sources interpretation of the data and then still say
> So while this is a single source, it is from a highly credible org with a highly credible setting, making it difficult to dismiss offhand.
Now question for you. Do you have other data sets backing this up, or only the single one that goes against the other data sets?
I actually am taking this into account, but a single set of data or studies that purports one conclusion is not going to make me ignore the hundreds of other studies that disagree
Crescat una veritas.
* Children are required to be vaccinated against several diseases before attending public school
* In Texas (TEXAS!), all university students attending in-person must present proof of a meningitis vaccine
* To travel to many countries you need to present a “yellow card” demonstrating vaccination status against specific diseases.
You don’t catch hiv by walking by someone positive with it, and if you did like you do with Covid and it caused the same level of casualties then yes I would be all for the measures as we are using against covid
When Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission got decided on narrow technical grounds this is the kind of thing my political ideology warned about. We gave far too much power to corporations to decide who they do business with. The laws around that sort of power were decided long before everyone could find out some of the most intimate aspects of your life in a few google searches.
The only reason I am against the anti vaxxers/anti covid measure people trying to take down the faang companies ability to stop their speech right now is because they only want to limit corporate power and private property as it extends to themselves.
Look at the florida law for instance that tried to damage social media companies that blocked people based on their political speech unless they owned a theme park, which was an explicit carve out for Disney.
I can get behind a movement that wants to prevent corporations from having enough power to limit individual rights. I cannot get behind a movement that only wants to prevent corporations from limiting rights on a group of people that I believe are hurting me, but will not limit corporations from limiting rights on everyone else.
Either the logic applies to all, or people are lying about caring about rights and just want to be the people on top.
Where are the camps for people with COVID?
For example, when the covid virus broke out on the scene, some experts developed a vaccine that seems to be pretty darn good at rectifying the situation. Now there seems to be a related but different problem: a fair amount of people who are opposed to taking that vaccine (walking around spreading viruses that affect other’s bodies), so perhaps a similar approach should be taken: find some people with expertise in the problem, and let them do their thing (maybe throw a few ten or hundred million at them to grease the wheels). As it is, the people who have been tasked with this job seem to be not performing up to the expectations of lots of people, so it might be a good idea to start looking for some who can.
I am sorry that you can’t have your hand held every step of the way as you and your group continually shit on everything and put the rest of us at risk.
Sucks to suck for everyone who loses their job cause they want to take a stance. They’ll be remembered as martyrs should they be proven right, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
Would you mind not being cryptic and stating what you actually mean? I don’t expect people to find my beliefs tasteful or agree with them, but I am laying them out on the table to discuss at least.
While you haven't said it directly as you are, in my opinion, a coward. I see how you are implying that society should let the crazy do as they like or they will attack anyone who disagrees.
You should consider how well that went for the Confederate States of America when they decided their gumption could dominate industrial might and innovation.
Good luck sir, Mother Nature has a surprise in store for those who think they can outfeel logistics. Say hi your boog bois too
Weren't those just for public schools? If someone was homeschooled, couldn't they have made it to adulthood without those vaccines, and then never again be asked about them?
Vaccinations save lives - and not only your own. Do it.
If vaccinations encourage new variants is a total different question. It is very possible. Evolutionary pressure is a bitch.
That's not true either. Double vaccination completely prevents infection (even asymptomatic infection) in 50-70% of cases. See e.g. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/227713/coronavirus-infection...
> If vaccinations encourage new variants is a total different question. It is very possible. Evolutionary pressure is a bitch.
Fewer infected people means fewer mutations. As to whether those fewer mutations spread better (thanks to selective pressure)? It's a legitimate question, but thankfully the answer appears to be the no, the opposite, thanks to the neutralising antibody response. See https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/142544990582960128...
I agree, that's an excellent goal! Universal vaccination seems to be an excellent means of achieving it. Besides that, what other thrusts would you like to see?
What triggered me to wrote this is articles like this one [0] that, in my opinion, don't do anything to convince anybody to get vaccinated. All they do is shame people or groups of people. And what's missing from this article? While it talks about case numbers
> Manitoba's Southern Health region, which encompasses the RM of Stanley, made up roughly half of the province's new COVID-19 cases in recent weeks, but is only home to around 15 per cent of the population.
it completely leaves out what's actually going on in the hospitals in that particular region. Case numbers aren't meaningful. Especially with vaccines that are great at preventing serious symptoms but only good at preventing spread. Don't get me wrong, I'm vaccinated and I believe everybody should be. But the vaccines aren't gonna protect us from ever getting the virus. We all will get it. What matters is to strategically focus on vulnerable groups and difficult geographical areas. But unfortunately we seem to be looking for a one size fits all approach. But maybe people in rural Manitoba need to be taken care of differently than people in urban Toronto.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-covid-19-st...
I mean, sure, but in our toolbox of interventions, vaccination is far and away the best one we have in service of those goals.
Right?
So far the playbook seems to have been:
1) Flatten the curve: Use lockdowns, masks and social distancing measures to maintain a situation where hospitals can still cope. This is not a one-time goal, it's an ongoing effort: As long as there was no vaccine, "no significant transmission right now" does not mean everything is back to normal - because if measures are lifted, transmission can quickly increase and become critical again.
2) Because the situation in 1) seriously sucks for everyone, try to come up with solutions to end the pandemic permanently (or at least make it permanently nonthreatening for the health system so we can leave "pandemic mode" and treat it as an ordinary disease). So far the most obvious strategy for this is vaccination - hence the increasing push to get everyone vaccinated.
3) Evolutionary pressures on the virus might cause the vaccines to become less effective. This unfortunately calls into question whether 2) is really able to bring an end to the pandemic. If this is really the case, then new plans are needed, such as boosters, new vaccines, I don't know. This stuff is currently being figured out.
1) and 2) does not seem like "moving the goalposts" to me. The goals were the same since the beginning of the pandemic, though of course the situation and circumstances were changing (you can only keep up a lockdown for so long, vaccines changed from "vague hope" to "viable strategy", etc)
3) is a new development that was apparently somewhat unexpected (I remember the virus was being talked about as relatively mutation resistant, which evidently wasn't the case.) - but this was simply new knowledge and new developments that might require a change in strategy - the overall goal to get out of this mess (by either eradicating covid or make it nonthreatening) did not change IMO.
Of course if this goal turns out to be permanently unarchievable, the goalpost shifting might start...
Edit: "3) is a new development that was apparently somewhat unexpected". That evolutionary pressures on the virus might^H^H^H will cause the vaccines to become less effective was and is the #1 concern of the critics of mass mRNA vaccination campaigns.
You want to make a randomized, controlled study on entire countries? That's your idea of ethics in science?
> That evolutionary pressures on the virus might^H^H^H will cause the vaccines to become less effective was and is the #1 concern of the critics of mass mRNA vaccination campaigns.
No, it was one argument of whatever seemed convenient at that point to argue against vaccines. Consequently, their only advice how to cope with that problem seems to basically give up and don't do anything.
Honestly, I don't understand what strategy you guys would propose to end the pandemic. Apart from pretending it doesn't exist of course.
* Vaccines are useful in preventing severe disease. Get one, especially if your are not a child. But they are also fragile and it's anybody's guess how they'll interact with a 'likely vaccine evading variant' (quoting Pfizer CEO here).
* It is unclear what effect the vaccines have on the virus evolution. We assume its going to be positive, but have no actual data on it.
* It is unclear what effect the vaccines have on disease spread. The big question is the effect of vaccines on the rate of 'asymptomatic spreaders', which may increase under a regimen of reducing symptom severity.
* Lockdowns have massive costs. Keeping the world running also saves lives, and it's not at all clear that the balance favors hard covid measures.
* Suspended school, masks and social distancing have severe costs in children. I am not sure we thought through the consequences on the next generation.
* The scapegoating shaping online is grotesque. Being a fortunate to be born post WW2 world with its bounty of health, I never understood the story of touching the leper. Until the reaction to the covid pandemic finally illuminated my mind.
The costs of attempts to cure the disease may be worse than the disease. And the disease is horrible.
But I'd like to ask again: You've listed a lot of points on what not to do. But so what should we do to tackle this virus? A virus that will quickly cause enough severe cases to require triage at hospitals.if left unchecked and that will not go away anymore on its own.
Or do you really view this as some sort of slow-motion Armageddon, destinied to bring in the end times - so any resistance is futile on principle?
The hope: Eventually everyone is getting exposed to covid, via vaccines, infection or both. At that point, hopefully, epidemic spikes will become minor, though sadly I don't think there is a path back to pre-pandemic innocence.
* Encourage vaccinations for everyone over 18, and especially over 65 where the bulk of the burden is. I say this with a heavy heart, because there appears to be at least one instance of leaky vaccines selecting for hypervirulent variants in veterinary applications. This is what gives me nightmares. I won't link to it, it's somewhere in my comment history if you are super-curious. Praying for the best. Maybe it's just me being prone to overweigh worst case scenarios. Maybe it's my grandma saying "God's punishment" for instances of lack of humility turning for the worse.
* Lift restrictions for children, especially under 12. I've seen credible data indicating that unvaxxed child covid risk is less than vaxxed parent covid risk. Keep schools open, remove blanket mask mandates, stop pushing vaccines, when it's beyond clear the risk and benefits for them are minuscule, and there are long-term questions around virus evolution trajectory. If I'm not mistaken, something like that happens already in a number of European countries: Swe and Den, possibly UK and NL.
* Exercise regularly, vitamin C & D, zinc, especially in winter season. This is a good time to open the conversation about obesity and diabetes. One side effect of the lockdowns is increased child obesity rates; this metric is trending the wrong way.
* Stay at home if having symptoms. Employer pays no questions asked.
* Probably a system of aid for symptomatic long covid cases. It is unclear how prevalent it is, but, for example, losing lung capacity is an absolute nightmare. Source: I could barely climb a flight of 5 stairs after a bout of pneumonia a few years back. Can't imagine holding a blue collar job in those circumstances.
* Probably skip eating out, partying or sports during an active infection spike, usually about 2 months. See covidestim.org for a very useful resource in estimating whether there is an ongoing spike or not.
* Hospitals are going to get overwhelmed during a spike because they are simply not built for spikes. If that is a concern, we should think on how to quickly scale capacity up and down. Might be very expensive. Perhaps something crazy like a National Health Guard.
* There are going to be victims, mostly old but some young. Please try to keep a bit of decency instead of rushing with every single case on social media for clicks and fear and panic. We are incurring great loss, we are supposed to mourn. It's disturbing.
* Stop scapegoating. The situation is miserable as is, no need to make it even worse through a hellish social landscape.
* Finally, please stop playing God. Recently a grant proposing to essentially design covid at WIH was leaked to the press. The grant was thankfully denied, but the thought that we are 2 inches away from triggering the next pandemic is troubling.
Edit: Come to think of it, this is how the system is supposed to work. People have different stations in life and different concerns. We stand together through hell and high water. We compromise. What we are getting instead is extremes: either hyper drastic measures or, I presume, complete lack of caution.
When we figured out there was asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread. Your advice probably leads to significantly more than 219 million cases worldwide, and 4.5 million dead.
Sure there is: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
> When did 'stay at home if sick, live life otherwise' become obsoleted?
When covid spread while the victims were still asymptomatic.
Re asymptomatic. Vaccinated people also spread the disease asymptomatically. I have seen zero rigorous studies showing how vaccinated asymptomatic spread compares with unvaccinated asymptomatic spread. No, picking 3 studies and linking data between them is not a replacement for a rigorous RCT. This is a particularly salient question as the biggest selling point of vaccines is that they reduce symptom severity.
And why are you linking spread & symptom severity?
Core vaccines observable effect: Reduce manifestation of symptoms in infected persons.
It is possible that the vaccinated population has a larger rate and/or absolute numbers of people with no/low symptoms, aka 'asymptomatic spreaders'. It is also possible the other way around. I don't have hard data, nobody else seems to do.
Given that I don't actually know, I'm happy to refrain from speculation. I wish I could say the same from the 'any measure that may have some conceivable effect of reducing R0 must be mandated yesterday, or else you are personally responsible for the death of 4M people worldwide, and counting' crowd.
>> This is a particularly salient question as the biggest selling point of vaccines is that they reduce symptom severity.
You mean the 'any measure that may have some conceivable effect of reducing symptom severity must be mandated yesterday, or else you are personally responsible for the death of 4M people worldwide, and counting' crowd.
Nor that parachutes work!
This is a tech based forum, surely everyone here has experience with a boss who complains that he’s paying you when the system never breaks, not knowing that it’s not breaking because of active measures being taken to prevent it
Anecdotally, I have never heard anyone make the argument "no one can ever get covid again" nor heard of a school being closed because "a person got near a person with COVID".
https://www.governor.wa.gov/news-media/inslee-extends-school...
I'm imagining YouTube or the government or whoever hiring some informed experts and inviting the vaccine hesitant on for debates. Let them make whatever arguments they want and when they are absurd or move the goalposts point it out. Are medical doctors X, Y, and Z, selected for being informed and skilled orators going to be outdebated by the likes of Alex Jones? Why can't we have some experts who just engage with the conspiracy theory stuff, not sneeringly but just dispassionately.
I don't think this would convince everyone. I don't think convincing everyone should be the goal. I do think it would convince more people than the current approach though and it would be more in keeping with free speech ideals.
The debunking stuff just isn't content interesting these people who are not seeking it out.
And yes, of course there are many websites, free online textbooks and recorded lectures explaining such concepts available to anyone willing to spend some time on it. Even in Czech, so no language barrier.
It doesn't change any minds.
I could not get vaccinated in Germany. Every illegal immigrant could get vaccinated but I as a German citizen, since I was not registered with the police, (some countries have this, for a US citizen this sounds weird) could not.
Ok, caught corona in south America in the Andes mountains and had serious breathing problems but survived.
I have a biotech background and I am sorry to break the news to you. Vaccinations won't make corona go away. I fact it may force it to adapt faster.
So why should I get vaccinated now? I dislike all the government pressure that is put on citizens in this regard.
An the parties in Sao Paulo are back on. No masks. Germany is not considering Brazil even as a high risk country anymore.
So why the force for vaccinations? Freedom won't come back except if the Citizens demand it.
So you're not a virologist or epidemiologist then? Got it.
> and I am sorry to break the news to you. Vaccinations won't make corona go away. I fact it may force it to adapt faster.
The virus spreads more rapidly among and lives for longer inside the unvaccinated, as a result getting much more exposure to human immune systems, and thus giving it more opportunity to evolve.
It has been tribal from the start and still is. We all know this is how things work at this point. It's not as based in science or rational arguments as it is based on motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.
(claimer/disclaimer: I'm a hard-science type (famous university or rather, institute) and got vaccinated as soon as I could; I am from a very healthy family that does not suffer from outlier symptoms (like flu, but eh it's not bad, no allergies, no side effects etc.) so overall I just didn't worry about it, but I didn't worry about Covid before I got vaccinated either.)
but the biggest goalpost that got moved was, we have government regulations and protocols that concern drug approvals to make sure that the general population is not exposed to unnecessary risks. The Covid vaccines were fast tracked and unleashed untested: that's a huge goalpost shifted a huge distance. And nor was the administering of the vaccine accompanied by a notification of the major risks inherent in this approach, like for example, perhaps the viral spike protein was causing all the tissues' damage and the vaccine included the spike protein.
so, in my book the pro vax side has behaved reprehensibly and is doing even deeper damage to the body politic by normalizing censorship.
I'd still urge everybody to get vaccinated.
That's not a goalpost that got shifted. We have standards for both normal approvals and emergency use authorizations. Both were followed for the vaccines (which got EUAs followed by, in some cases/uses, full approval.)
> The Covid vaccines were fast tracked and unleashed untested
No, they weren't, vaccine candidates were developed within a few weeks of sequencing the virus and basically the entire time between then and release was spent in clinical trials.
> accompanied by a notification of the major risks inherent in this approach, like for example, perhaps the viral spike protein was causing all the tissues' damage and the vaccine included the spike protein.
Pretty sure “this vaccine causes all the damaging effects of COVID” side effect would have shown up somewhere in Phase I-III trials.
so, since you are implying that emergency use approval protocols are just as safe as normal protocols, why don't we follow emergency use protocols all the time? they're quicker!
No, I’m saying that EUA protocols exist with defined standards for a reason, and putting things that mert the standards through them is not moving goalposts, since its exactly where the goalposts have been set for quite some time.
> why don't we follow emergency use protocols all the time?
We do, if people apply for an EUA. Of course, very often they don't because the standards that exist for EUAs would rule them out.
It's not like I'm trying to get you to admit something else that's true, that "there are actually benefits to study in in having a portion of the population unvaccinated, since we don't actually know the long term effects of either the virus, natural immunity, or the vaccines"
I am honestly trying to understand your point of view. I really do want to know what specific difference between EUA and approval you're referring to. Not as a gotcha, not as some kind of rhetorical trick--I am taking you seriously. But you seem to be deliberately refusing to return the favor.
If the product cures an itchy rash, then a chance that it kills even one in a million users is a horrible side-effect and we need to know about.
If the product prevents a deadly disease, then we should be taking it even if we know for sure that it kills one in a million (because Covid is killing two in every thousand, and you're 2,000x safer taking the vaccine).
oh, they'll clog up all the hospitals? then are you advocating illegalizing obesity and type 2 diabetes?
I just think the discussion and polity is varied and nuanced, and I don't trust all the people who want to shut down all discussion in favor of a weird monoculture
When people say "clog up the hospitals" they're talking about situations where patients are turned away not only from a local hospital, but every hospital in the state because all beds are occupied by Covid patients. I'm not aware of obesity or type 2 diabetes having this impact on our healthcare system.
If you're very old, you're likely to dies from covid (but also from all sorts of things - this is what old age is about). Not if you're young. So the cost-benefit analysis is different per user, and this is why some people think twice about it.
Yes, but without the vaccine, most people will get infected by real COVID, which introduces the same spike protein (in an uncontrolled quantity, as the virus is replicating) and several other proteins, causing even more damage. Is this a better outcome?
> we have government regulations and protocols that concern drug approvals to make sure that the general population is not exposed to unnecessary risks
These protocols are tuned to be super-safe when there is little at stake. With a raging pandemic, with a nontrivial mortality/long-term effects/economic and societal effects, you are going to change this.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
Yes, it's true that many people who get covid will have a mild case. Broadly speaking, the younger someone is, the better their chances.
And it is just as true that hospital systems in hotspot areas are overwhelmed, causing emergency standards of care, burnout among medical staff, long waits, and the postponement of things like surgery for cancer patients.
Can you name one test that was mandatory for other vaccines, but skipped for the COVID vaccines?
you're doing the reprehensible thing, "nothing to see here, folks, nothing to see". Just be honest in a forthright way.
But the solution shouldn't be to shut down the discussion by banning the other side, because then you just have two sides who fight dirty.
One side refuses to see reason and understand arguments, the other uses shaming, coercion, and censorship in place of the arguments. If the truth is on your side, you shouldn't resort to that.
This hides the fact that there is no actual "side" in the sense of a unified group of people who collectively agree to a set of principles, and goalposts that can even be moved. It's just a bunch of people who have their own brains, and reasons. They aren't all the same, or believe the same things, or make the same claims.
This is trivially obvious, but I see it ignored most of the time. People get accused of things they don't actually believe, and didn't say, or do. That makes them defensive and makes it impossible to have a good-faith discussion, and that's part of the mess we're in.
I think they knew that they had a lot of ways to make a better vaccine, and they will work on that, but I don't think it's going to be done quickly enough. So, I guess we all just have to go along with the booster shots until they "get it right". The government got heavily involved in the process, so it was bound to end up half-assed. There were people that said they would never let the government force them to take Trump's rushed vaccine. They wanted to create a disruption and a huge resistance to his efforts. Biden came along and "changed" it, and now they sing the praises of the vaccine and the unbelievable science behind it endlessly.
You have an enormous pressure to take the vaccine by the behemoth government and the people that write the paychecks. If people use one of the only avenues they have to not get forced into something they have their own reasons for not buying into, I don't really blame them. The people you argued with about the vaccine have nothing to do with ordinary people and their decisions. If I was a lowly worker, I would probably just take it because I guess I would have bigger problems.
There may not be much weight behind the anti-vaccine argument, but there's a lot to be said about better governance that probably would have involved doing things that actually work instead of having to point to things that didn't happen, especially with the angst about not enough people having complied with the emergency measures. Of course, the skeptics believe we mostly did the wrong things in a bout of panic and the need for post-hoc justification grew alongside the mass hysteria. There was the option of focused protection, yet it seems we neglected many people in care homes while the government got busy fighting windmills. We also seriously tampered with natural processes and normal lifestyles. That may have been counterproductive. We are now in a situation where there is no herd immunity, high-risk people are finding it impossible to avoid the infection forever, and we lost a lot of opportunities as the world was on pause that it everyone's life may objectively be worse than should be expected even after all this time.
The Pfizer and especially Moderna vaccines were as close as we could get to an ideal vaccine and had a high efficacy rate - for the Alpha variant. We did get it right. Additionally, the risk of death from the vaccine is effectively zero outside of extremely rare and very specific circumstances that are much less common than death or long term to permanent side effects of COVID-19.
The target is a moving one, especially when a substantial part of the population allows (or can do nothing to stop) the virus to mutate unchecked. The Delta variant has a slightly different spike protein, and we are very lucky the vaccines remain effective at all against it.
If there was a tradeoff between making the vaccine safer or more effective, I guess I would agree to making it safer. That's what it seems like they did by focusing on the spike protein, which was said to not be a defining characteristic of coronaviruses in general. You should understand that the spike protein they did produce may not be nearly close enough to resembling an easily recognizable virus for the immune system to do exactly what we want it to do. This is also one of the reasons that natural immunity seems to be so much stronger than vaccine-acquired immunity. The vaccine might be called good enough by some, but the delta variant overwhelming all our efforts so soon has to be called less than ideal. In fact, the vaccine was supposed to be the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's obviously not. Little has changed, and we aren't doing all that much besides chasing after a magical vaccination or booster shot rate even as Israel is showing us that it's all for naught and mutations are still appearing.
Teenage boys are at a higher risk of heart complications from the vaccine. If one of them dies from a sudden heart condition, are we supposed to say something that make it seem like getting the jab was the honorable thing to do? Imagine if a parent went through the trouble of proving that their child has already been infected with the virus and has a family history of heart conditions or something. With the current, inflexible thinking about vaccine mandates, the powerful might end up pressuring or forcing them to get vaccinated anyways.
I think you only implied it, but the idea that the unvaccinated were the source of mutations was based largely on estimates that the viral load would be higher when they get infected. That turned out to not be the case when looking at the high viral load of people with breakthrough infections. In fact, as a lockdown skeptic, I think it's becoming clear that locking down indefinitely and losing sight of hospital capacity was a mistake that can explain our current plight. The perfectly healthy and young population normally become our shield from viruses each year. The vulnerable were the ones that needed to avoid infection, and they can't do it forever (and a booster shot may still not even be enough). Then again, we listened to Dr. Neil Ferguson and told Dr. Sunetra Gupta that she didn't know what she was talking about, so I am sure you see it differently.
Teenage boys are at a slightly higher than normal rate for myocarditis after the vaccine, but this is still far lower than the risks associated with COVID-19 itself: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/17/1007447...
It's also worth mentioning that many of these symptoms are caused by immune response and not the compounds of the vaccine itself.
It still sounds like you're over-inflating the risks of vaccines and deflating the risks of COVID-19.
You're still proposing herd immunity (of which we're not there yet) as a solution while ignoring the deaths and suffering that will occur until or if we reach that point. I find the ethics of that proposition questionable at best. It also ignores the higher lethality of COVID-19 compared to the flu: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
The more I hear people respond to or ignore the numbers, the more I'm convinced that most people just don't have a good number sense or sense of risk assessment.
1% chance of death from COVID-19? That fine. ~0.009% of myocarditis after receiving the vaccine which is close to the normal rate of incidence without the vaccine? Unacceptable.
To list a few other things: We don't have reliable numbers for adverse effects, so clinical trials will have to be done. It was just one example, but it was about teenage boys that you have the numbers backwards for if you account for age of an individual. The immune response is cited as a major factor that leads to more serious and fatal cases of COVID, so I am not sure why you are treating that as an important distinction with the vaccine.
When the death count of children reached 300, there was a mainstream MD that questioned why researchers had, thus far, failed to contact the attending physicians to find out the circumstances of these unusual deaths. That should have been pretty important, but it wasn't. England may have dug a bit deeper to verify that 25 children had died from COVID in their country. If teenage boys are the highest risk group for myocarditis as a side effect, and their risk of death is infinitesimal, what kind of math are you offering? Teenage boys and young men generally were not being warned about the relative risk to themselves. That's seems like a problem. I guess heart damage could be considered _no big deal_, but it's substantial and much more visible than often-exaggerated long COVID, at least for the young and healthy. Maybe you prefer to speak about society at large, but there's not an automatic justification for that. If that's what we are actually doing, it should be acknowledged that we are asking children to make sacrifices for adults because I think many people see that as backwards, unethical, and completely unacceptable.
Herd immunity is not how you summarize any strategy, but it's kind of important just like food, money, and a functioning society. Spoiler Alert: We did technically pursue focused protection for the wealthy in wealthy countries. That's one hell of a game plan. If the vaccine worked as advertised, we would be rounding the corner on herd immunity. We are not, and that may be the least of what's gone wrong. Lastly, Bill Maher exposed his fellow liberals for getting the numbers on COVID wildly wrong, and this is consistent in survey data. The liberal media failed to inform when it's much more profitable to fearmonger and create clickbait with junk science. You aren't doing much better in my opinion, and it's probably not your grasp of stats but your bias that is the problem.
I believe that the FDA has only approved one of the vaccines so far. When I got mine, I didn't have a choice.
The only infamous videos I am aware of have been misrepresented, in such the same way you are implying now.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/23/tiktok-pos...
Your source shows just how strongly anti-vax Biden was, making the case that the vaccine can't be trusted because of political influence. Since Biden can't give us any credible assurances that politics aren't involved in FDA approval or CDC recommendations, nor can he address his own concerns about the vaccine's development being politicized, then, by his argument, the American people should not have confidence.
> The following week, Biden restated his concern about politics intervening in vaccine development:
> "Americans have had to endure President Trump’s incompetence and dishonesty, when it comes to testing and personal protective equipment. We can’t afford to repeat those fiascos when it comes to a vaccine. … Let me be clear: I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people can’t either. Last week, Senator Harris and I laid out three questions this administration’s going to have to answer to assure the American people that politics will not play a role whatsoever in the vaccine process. If Donald Trump can’t give answers and the administration can’t give answers to these three questions, the American people should not have confidence."
PolitiFact is one of the most biased outlets I've seen.
Actually, there was a big shift in the numbers about then. People are just divided over whether it was due to shaming people or the certification. I believe Matthew Yglasias posted about that, though he seemed to think it was from shaming people.
It's true that some people moved on to other arguments after that, but if someone has multiple independent reasons for not wanting something, you do kinda have to shoot them all down.
From my experience in trying to explain the benefits of the vaccine to the hesitant, there are more than a few who just won't listen, but there are quite a lot of people who will listen when you calmly explain things. Trying to be forceful will basically always backfire.
Many of them were previously meming about how Covid is not very dangerous, with only a 1-2% mortality rate. So I like to point out that the risk of vaccine injury is several orders of magnitude lower. You need thousands of people dying per day for months to convince anyone that the vaccine is anywhere near as dangerous as the virus, not the odd death of someone the day after they vaccinated here and there.
Once you get people into a direct comparison even if they push back on the numbers being fudged, you can point that every country in the world would have to be in on some conspiracy.
I feel like this is the most effective way to defuse the vastly over-hyped danger of the vaccine. Even if they try to quibble the numbers with the best and worst numbers possible, you don't get to risks that are even the same order of magnitude.
Saying that it's all not in good faith quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, I find that most people are willing to have an honest discussion with someone who respects them and who will listen and address their concerns.
Those conditions are hard, though, because a lot of people seem to quickly throw human empathy out the window and start yelling. That... doesn't work at all.
Anyhow, that's my experience from talking to people. I've gotten several of the hesitant to vaccinate by trying to be as honest as possible about the risks and why worrying about the vaccine but not Covid doesn't make sense. But if you don't listen to or understand where the people arguing are coming from--which is often hard with internet strangers--you probably won't get very far, so I do understand why it's frustrating.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine...
Accusing someone (or worse, groups) of "shifting goalpoasts" is a lame excuse to write of discussion. People can an do have multiple concerns where some of those take a backseat until others are resolved. People can be afraid to state their true concerns, often rightfully so considering how quick they can be grouped with all the other wrongthinkers and summarily condemned and ridiculed. And when it comes to groups - especially such nebolous ones as "the anti-vax side: - the apparent (ie loudest) argument can shift just by the group composition changing.
- just get vaccinated - we need booster shots - we need booster shots every 8 months - we need booster shots every 5 months
And you know there will be something next, it never moves in the other direction.
The idea that we just take two doses and are done is clearly no longer the goalpost.
Also mandating certain vaccines (like MMR) makes sense because they fully inoculate a person and eradicate these diseases.
But when it comes to Covid-19 vaccines I don’t understand the insistence others get the vaccine because it doesn’t fully inoculate against the virus nor does it prevent carrying/spreading the virus.
Perhaps there is an argument that hospitals are overloaded and 100% vaccination would relieve that burden, but I’m not in favor of mandatory vaccines that don’t fully inoculate and eradicate something on the basis it might help our overburdened healthcare system. It becomes a slippery slope, and opens the door to asking why we don’t then mandate diets, supplements and lifestyles that promote healthy immune systems in the name of minimizing chronic conditions that are a financial burden to tax funded Medicare and the healthcare system generally.
I'm not going to get any booster, even tho they are heavy handedly mandating it here, with absolutely zero data. They don't even allow you to confirm a healthy antibody count, strengthening the suspicion that this isn't about "waning antibodies count" at all.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I had my suspicions that this medical tyranny would keep on going on even when the medical data is non-existent, and that most people will not even notice the difference. That suspicion was fully confirmed. I personally apologized to my anti vaccine friend that he was right.
It's going to take a detailed research on why the original Pfizer trial was wrong on the effectiveness, what is the amount of antibodies required to be safe, and then I would see if I meet the criteria, if being recently vaccinated meets the criteria, if they understand the causes of the effects, if the booster actually gives reasonable advantage. And maybe then I'll consider it. If they don't put the side effects and the errors of the phase 3 trials under investigation I might not even vaccinate me or my future kids against other diseases as my trust of this industry was broken by the Pfizer experience.
2) You've got to agree that 6-9 months is a pretty short window of immunity for a traditionnal vaccine. We may maybe rather call it "prophylaxy" then, just like the dewormer you put on your cat every 3 months.
3) Do you have a source? This could be a very interesting pro-vaccine point.
FDA's announcement https://www.fda.gov/media/150386/download
Point to the sentence that says the vaccine got approved.
"Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine"
From FDA's letter (instead of the link):
"I am authorizing the emergency use of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID‑19 Vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19, as described in the Scope of Authorization section of this letter (Section II) and subject to the terms of this authorization. Additionally, as specified in subsection III.BB, I am authorizing use of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID‑19 Vaccine and of COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) under this EUA when used to provide: a two-dose regimen for individuals aged 12 through 15 years; a third dose to individuals 12 years of age or older who have undergone solid organ transplantation or who are diagnosed with conditions that are considered to have an equivalent level of immunocompromise; or a single booster dose at least 6 months after completing the primary series to individuals: 65 years of age and older; 18 through 64 years of age at high risk of severe COVID-19; and 18 through 64 years of age whose frequent institutional or occupational exposure to SARS-CoV-2 puts them at high risk of serious complications of COVID-19 including severe COVID-19."
If I'm interpreting this right:
- the existing vaccine is still available under emergency use authorization.
- a different vaccine called COMIRNATY was approved.
I didn't understand from FDA's letter if COMIRNATY exists.
The inventor of mRNA vaccines, Dr. Robert Malone, claims FDA approved a vaccine that doesn't exist. https://www.bitchute.com/video/DZQFYRGDkB6s/
"Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and will now be marketed as Comirnaty (koe-mir’-na-tee), for the prevention of COVID-19 disease in individuals 16 years of age and older. The vaccine also continues to be available under emergency use authorization (EUA), including for individuals 12 through 15 years of age and for the administration of a third dose in certain immunocompromised individuals."
The existing vaccine was approved, and had a marketing name change. It continues under an EUA for younger people.
Why is this Malone person more trustworthy than the CDC+FDA?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/robert-m...
Then again what does ULA even mean when in my county 84% of 12-15 years olds are already vaccinated.
There are two problems with this type of epistemology. The first is that, like all claims, attributes of the people making the claims are not relevant to the truth value of the claim ("fallacy of irrelevance"). The second is more important and more unique to this particular epistemology: the actions you perceive to be conducted by perceived proponents of some claim will vary heavily based on your own behavior. For instance, how do you know that pro-vaccine people "can't win arguments" and instead "stop them because the other side is too stupid"? Or that there is "massive censorship" favoring the pro-vaccine viewpoint? Surely that is just based on your own "media diet." Surely that perception depends heavily on where you spend your time on Twitter, YouTube, cable news, etc. Would you perceive something differently if it were the case that the vast majority of medical and public health experts who are pro-vaccine in fact have engaged in numerous reasonable arguments with critics and have nonetheless come to the same conclusion? Is there ever a point in which litigation of existing criticisms can end so that we can move on to new criticisms?
Vaccines are widely recommended because they offer enormous benefits. However, they are not without risk or contraindications. People who claim otherwise are spreading misinformation.
People are right to be worried about the COVID-19 vaccines. Without proper studies, their risks and benefits are unknown. We're discovering this information by observing what's happening to the humans who took the vaccines after the fact. This is less than ideal, to put it mildly.
COVID-19 happens to be a potent enough disease that the potential benefit of these vaccines outweighs the risks. We must still be careful though. It's possible that we'll find that the benefits outweigh the risks only for certain age groups, for example.
> COVID-19 happens to be a potent enough disease that the potential benefit of these vaccines outweighs the risks.
I'm saying it's entirely reasonable to be concerned about the safety of these vaccines.
For instance, how do you know that pro-vaccine people "can't win arguments" and instead "stop them because the other side is too stupid"? Or that there is "massive censorship" favoring the pro-vaccine viewpoint?
Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?
Wired was one of the publications that did an interesting article about this: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
I mean seriously, this is how science works and how guidance based on science works. We go wit the best answer we have at the time and continue to search for better answers.
Well that doesn't help much with the trust issue. What else turns out to be bad information? Sometimes the line between lies and (intentional or not) bullshit is quite fine.
One thing I've observed since the start of the pandemic is that information and recommendations are constantly changing, and there's overreaction as well as underreaction. Also late reaction rather than preparedness. Sometimes excessive preparedness (see also overreaction), sometimes too little.
It don't find it surprising in the slightest that people end up not trusting the chaotic system.
It turned out that the virus was transmissible via the air, but it was not airborne, it traveled via much larger respiratory droplets. Ordinary surgical masks were effective at stopping the spread of those droplets.
That's interesting - and must be a hospital issue. My hospital never made such a claim. They were simply upfront with their reason: There was a shortage of masks, and they were being reserved for those who needed to treat COVID-19 patients.
I keep hearing people say this as if saying it enough makes it true (thanks, Stalin), but I don't remember ever hearing it, honestly.
Do you have any footage of this? If it was as widespread as claimed, it should be easy to find.
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200130/Do-masks-protect-...
They were saying not to buy masks in order to preserve them for healthcare workers. There was already a severe shortage of them.
https://news.yahoo.com/cdc-warns-save-respirator-masks-for-h...
The clinical course of COVID-19 is such that by the time most people seek medical attention for hypoxia, their viral load has already tapered off to almost nothing. If someone is about 10 days post-exposure and has already been symptomatic for five days, there is hardly any virus left in their bodies, only cellular damage and derangement that has initiated a hyperinflammatory response. It is from this group that the clinical trials for antivirals have recruited, pretty much exclusively.
In these trials, they give antivirals to severely ill patients who have no virus in their bodies, only a delayed hyperinflammatory response, and then absurdly claim that antivirals have no utility in treating or preventing COVID-19. These clinical trials do not recruit people who are pre-symptomatic. They do not test pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis.
This is like using a defibrillator to shock only flatline, and then absurdly claiming that defibrillators have no medical utility whatsoever when the patients refuse to rise from the dead. The intervention is too late. These trials for antivirals show systematic, egregious selection bias. They are providing a treatment that is futile to the specific cohort they are enrolling.
And here is a study which looks at viral load since days of symptom onset, showing that at the 72 hour mark there is still plenty of Covid-19 in the body: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5
I am not a medical expert, so there may be things to criticize about these studies. All I meant to point out is that people are looking into / have looked at the questions you raise. Doctors and nurses are pretty burnt out; I for one think that they'd be looking for prophylactic treatments.
First, the effects of Ivermectin on viral load were not significant: "The ivermectin group had non-statistically significant lower viral loads at day 4 (p = 0·24 for gene E; p = 0·18 for gene N) and day 7 (p = 0·16 for gene E; p = 0·18 for gene N) post treatment as well as lower IgG titers at day 21 post treatment (p = 0·24)."
Second, Ivermectin did show earlier recovery: "Patients in the ivermectin group recovered earlier from hyposmia/anosmia (76 vs 158 patient-days; p < 0.001)."
From the Washington Post article, a YouTube exec is quoted as saying “We’ll remove claims that vaccines are dangerous or cause a lot of health effects, that vaccines cause autism, cancer, infertility or contain microchips.” This leads me to believe the kind of medical misinformation YouTube is targeting is much more general.
Also, the medical consensus -- via things like Cochrane Review [0] -- is that there isn't enough data on Ivermectin. It's the statistical uncertainty around it that gives the medical establishment pause, and currently makes recommendations of using it misinformation. Should the scientific community discover something different, the definition of misinformation will change.
[0] https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Misinformation. Anti-vaxx groups are sighting India because a tiny state(Goa) with a population of 1.59 Million included Ivermecitin in their home isolation medicine kit along with zinc, doxycycline, homeopathy etc. and also announced that adults in the state would be given Ivermecitin.
A fraction of their population actually received that kit, Of which negligible population actually consumed those if any. Ivermecitin, Zinc, doxycycline were removed from that kit in Goa after federal medical authority asked it to do so and it was even removed from the treatment of COVID-19 patients in the hospitals throughout India.
So, No 'hundreds of millions of people in India' never took Ivermecitin and is no way related to the drop in cases of COVID in India. But Anti-vaxx groups are using this misinformation as an ammunition at unexpected places to further their agenda[1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210924045611/https://github.co...
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/no-fresh-covid-cas...
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/lucknow-news/yogi-adit...
What does the attached URLs has to do with your claim of "hundreds of millions of people in India who have been taking Ivermectin for significant amounts of time." and implying somehow that Ivermectin reduced the COVID case load in India which coincidentally is exactly what Anti-vaxx are peddling?
States which were using non-evidence based medication incl. Ivermecitin have dropped them after Directorate general of health services (DGHS) has issued guidelines to stop using them[1] and recently Indian Council of Medical Research have also dropped them from the list[2].
There's no reason to put India and Ivermecitin again in the same sentence unless it's to promote misinformation.
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/coronavirus-outbreak/story/revised...
[2] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/icmr-drops-ivermec...
The PDF seems to be a controversial article to both sides of viewpoints of the covid19 pandemic treatment by various governments.
One description of the Spartacus letter is "A 41 page document chock full of disinformation about COVID-19 (including claims that the vaccines may be mind control technology)." And now that disinfo is being spread here on HN.
For an analysis of how that particular disinformation spread, see https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1442915635550294016
> Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19
By noting that there are indeed RCTs that show effective treatments for COVID-19 (fluvoxamine and monoclonal antibodies), it renders the entire point false.
The semantic argument about what constitutes an "antiviral" is meaningless as the OP themselves plays fast and loose with this by establishing that HCQ and Ivermectin (primarily used as antiparasitics) as antivirals.
This claim is egregiously false itself. Several RCTs have been done for early exposure to covid or for prophylaxis.
Just out of memory I remember studies for HCQ prophylaxis (doesn’t work), remdesivir prophylaxis (does work), and monoclonal antibody prophylaxis (does work).
The lies created by anti vaccine activists are already spread widely and apparently convinced you these studies which happened didn’t happen.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/22/remdesivir-reduces-covid...
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/08/regen-co...
How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
Trust was destroyed in the first two months of this pandemic.
That... wasn't the claim.
The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.
This was roughly contemporaneous with guidance that most people should eliminate all non-essential contact with people outside their household. Masking for essential interactions was recommended by the same people advising against buying masks more generally.
> ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.
It wasn't a lie, and preserving stocks for frontline workers and their essential interactions was an overtly cited part of the rationale, alongside the lack of additional benefit from superfluous masking.
> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
That didn't happen.
> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
The initial US travel bans, instituted after substantial domestic community spread was known and after substantial spread in lots of other foreign places that were not targeted by the bans was also known were, if not racist per se, more political posturing than public health.
> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
How is that a lie? Whether or not it (or the actual limit on testing, which was more nuanced) was the optimum way of managing limited testing resources may be a valid debate, but it's not a lie.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/8298906...
Sweden may be seen as a bit of an oddball but either way the head of the national public health agency was consistent in saying masks did not provide any benefits for individuals pretty far into the pandemic.
https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/ausland/politik-auslan... (paywall)
https://nyheter24.se/nyheter/944114-tegnell-om-varfor-munsky...
Not mentioned by the GP, but what was up with anything resembling a lab-leak theory getting the "unquestionably fake news" treatment for months?
I have not done any extensive digging into the vaccines myself and can't with good conscience say I'm well-informed. It still seems to me that the risk-trade-off is strongly in favor for getting vaccinated. Even so, I have full understanding for people who now have 0 trust in the public narrative. It's clear that there has been (still ongoing, I assume) a strong propaganda campaign that has at times been using misinformation and censorship (if you count deleting/shadowbanning social media content as censorship), involving governments, traditional news-media and social media. If the narrative around the effectiveness and risks of the vaccine holds, why do this?
Some European countries were so stupid, that they donated hundreds of thousands of masks from their own supplies at the beginning of the pandemic and then ran out of masks for their own medical personnel.
The actions of all those organisation advising against masks were evil and stupid. People saw through their excuses and bought all the quality masks anyway. The rest was bought by the Chinese and sent back home, resulting in an almost completely empty market for quality masks last year.
I hope the likes of the CDC are never able to fix their reputation. Nobody ever apologised, nobody lost their jobs over this.
The motivation may have been to prevent stockpiling, but the messaging was that masks don’t help. I remember it clearly.
That is simply and verifiably false. This is a direct quote from an executive director of the WHO health emergencies program:
> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...
Literally the first google result for "WHO masks don't work". There are plenty more after that. From the WHO's guidance published on April 6, 2020:
> there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting [...] can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19
You can speculate or demonstrate that the motives behind the claim did not match the claim itself. But to say that it wasn't the claim is flatly wrong.
That did appear to be the claim in Fauci's 60 Minutes interview. It was a pretty colossal messaging fuckup and damaged Fauci's credibility and trustworthiness early in the game.
On the other hand, if it's a "colossal messaging fuckup" and damages "credibility and trustworthiness", then you pretty much have to give up on the whole 'science' thing entirely.
They were under the mistaken impression that coronaviruses were spread by large droplets produced by symptomatic individiuals---in which case social distancing and washing your hands would be as effective as masks, and the previous history (and current experience) says that convincing people to use masks correctly and consistently is very difficult. Further, having people stock up on masks like they were stocking up on toilet paper would mean that those who couldn't get along without them would be SOL.
Then it turned out that coronavirus could be transmitted as an aerosol, asymptomatically, meaning that social distancing and handwashing, while useful, were a lot less useful. Hence, masks.
But if you are expecting science to produce a single, correct, consistent TRUTH on demand, you are going to be disappointed. In fact, you're probably better off sticking with The_Donald memes, since they're all of the same quality.
this doesn't even get into the fact that fauci personally approved funding for GoF coronavirus research at the WIV, a fact which he has still not even acknowledged. there are many, many other reasons to distrust the CDC, but these are the ones that i found most personally flagrant.
[1] https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...
To be clear I was fine with saving masks for healthcare workers and maybe there wasn't a better way to do that against the backdrop of people going apeshit in the paper goods aisle, but the point still stands.
> My mother only got vaccinated last month [...] Her main hangup was the lies [...]
Do you have any evidence that this was the reason for the claims?
> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?
What censorship? I heard about it quite early.
> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?
Did the news media label it, or were they reporting on people who were labeling it?
> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.
AFAIK, there were lack of resources to test. Once the resources became available, testing was widespread.
I did a search on youtube to find these sources ("fauci 60 minutes americans dont need to wear masks") I don't vouch for the channels, these are just the first place I found the relevant clips.
original statement (pretty hard to find):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ5oCxP6TUc
his explanation of that statement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2MmX2U2V3c
Here's a timeline summary:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/10/20/is-trum...
This was said by all health officials around January-March 2020. After the stock issue got solved masks suddenly magically became effective for everyone around the summer time. As a "regular person" who took both vaccine shots and is casually observing these developments without reading news or whatever, that single event showed me that governments don't give a shit about telling us the truth in a crisis.
Technically, it was roughly the end of March and April, when evidence of asymptomatic and aerosol transmission began to appear.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/washington-post-live/fa...
Up through roughly April-May 2020, many, if not most, epidemiologists and virologists believed that masks would not help the situation: they thought respiratory viruses were spread through large droplets produced by symptomatic individuals and that physical separation, sanitation, and behavior would work as well as trying to convince people to were useful masks consistently and correctly.
After that time, reports began to appear showing coronavirus could be spread asymptomatically, by normal breathing and speech, in an aerosol form that could stay airborne for long times. Under those situations, masks are the only solution.
The "ensure that enough protective equipment was available for frontline health workers" thing was mostly a response to "but it couldn't hurt" thinking.
"Then there is the infamous mask issue. Epidemiologists have taken a lot of heat on this question in particular. Until well into March 2020, I was skeptical about the benefit of everyone wearing face masks. That skepticism was based on previous scientific research as well as hypotheses about how covid was transmitted that turned out to be wrong. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asia for decades, to protect against air pollution and to prevent transmitting infection to others when sick. Mask-wearing for protection against catching an infection became widespread in Asia following the 2003 SARS outbreak, but scientific evidence on the effectiveness of this strategy was limited.
"Before the coronavirus pandemic, most research on face masks for respiratory diseases came from two types of studies: clinical settings with very sick patients, and community settings during normal flu seasons. In clinical settings, it was clear that well-fitting, high-quality face masks, such as the N95 variety, were important protective equipment for doctors and nurses against viruses that can be transmitted via droplets or smaller aerosol particles. But these studies also suggested careful training was required to ensure that masks didn’t get contaminated when surface transmission was possible, as is the case with SARS. Community-level evidence about mask-wearing was much less compelling. Most studies showed little to no benefit to mask-wearing in the case of the flu, for instance. Studies that have suggested a benefit of mask-wearing were generally those in which people with symptoms wore masks — so that was the advice I embraced for the coronavirus, too.
"I also, like many other epidemiologists, overestimated how readily the novel coronavirus would spread on surfaces — and this affected our view of masks. Early data showed that, like SARS, the coronavirus could persist on surfaces for hours to days, and so I was initially concerned that face masks, especially ill-fitting, homemade or carelessly worn coverings could become contaminated with transmissible virus. In fact, I worried that this might mean wearing face masks could be worse than not wearing them. This was wrong. Surface transmission, it emerged, is not that big a problem for covid, but transmission through air via aerosols is a big source of transmission. And so it turns out that face masks do work in this case.
"I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector). I wish that I and others had caught on sooner — and better testing early on might have caused an earlier revision of views — but there was no bad faith involved."
"I’m an epidemiologist. Here’s what I got wrong about covid."(https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...)
While the former were pragmatic and -very importantly- had enough masks, the latter were actively discouraging people from using any kind of masks and especially the quality masks such as FFP3 (or even FFP2) which are designed to protect among other things against respiratory viruses.
Asian countries had mask stockpiles and could manufacture them, had the experience of SARS and were apparently quite content with the scientific evidence, limited as it was. Naturally, if one can't tell a pandemic from their own ass, doesn't have local mask production capacity and donated a huge chunk of their masks the limitations of the scientific evidence become very critical indeed.
Let's take a moment to remember how US and European politicians and medical professionals were confidently claiming at the beginning of 2020 that the virus would not reach the West and how there's nothing to worry about.
Here, a picture taken 100 years ago, about people wearing masks during the spanish flu. Mind the sign "wear a mask or go to jail!" https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/may/03/the-big...
But that's the point! COVID can be spread by asymptomatic individuals! No coughing! And it's spread by aerosol particles, not large droplets that would be stopped by the gauze masks from 1919. Or if you stay a few feet away from other people and washed your hands before you touched your face.
I've posted links before from pre-2019 about the effectiveness of masks and the difficulties in getting people to wear them consistently and correctly. I've posted links before to papers from May and June, 2020, discussing asymptomatic transmission. This (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/20/epidemiolo...) is an article by an actual, honest-to-gosh epidemiologist saying, "I changed my mind on masks in March 2020, as testing capacity increased and it became clear how common asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic infection were (since aerosols were the likely vector)."
You can doubt anything you want. You can believe Dr. Murray is lying. You can believe I'm lying. You can believe everyone is lying to you. But you are going to have a difficult time convincing rational people with no better evidence than your opinion.
Fauci told the American public that masks don't work. My mom already owned N95 masks and got looked at like a crazy person because she was wearing one when shopping, ect. Then suddenly it became "the science" on the heels of all the research that already existed... Turns out it was a noble lie to protect the supply of masks while production caught up with demand.
It looks like Fauci lied about the lab leak theory for his own reasons, although I'm pretty out of date on that issue. Even if not Fauci we know that scientists with conflicts of interest all signed an open letter saying the theory is bunk and it was uncritically paraded around as "the science."
We were very clearly told "get the vaccine and you'll get your life back" but that hasn't even happened in paces like Israel with extremely high rates.
The vaccine was initially sold to us as something that would prevent infection, but that turned out not to be true. (I'm willing to concede this probably wasn't a lie but just something we learned as time went on, but it does reflect that they may have been overconfident and refrained from discretion because it was a pro-vaccine talking point)
Vaccine passports used to be conspiracies. Same with the idea that we'd have to get booster shots every so often to stay current.
And this is probably the biggest one: So many of the politicians pushing covid restrictions fail to practice what they preach outside of photo ops. The list is a mile long of local, state and federal politicians constantly violating their own restrictions. It lends credibility to the idea that none of them believe any of it.
Thanks for bringing this up, it's something that everyone should be able to agree is unacceptable. I feel naive for asking, but WHY does the public allow politicians to get away with this hypocrisy? (eg. https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-politics/article/London-Bree...)
Then there's whatever percent of vaccinated that would have allowed the fabled reopen, we engaged trough most of these metrics, and we're still far from normalcy.
Heck my vaccine passport has a very clear, very bold expiry date on it, talk of normalcy are nonsense.
Oh and there's that "let's not tell peasants masks are useful as not to cause shortages to professionals." Maybe warranted, given what happened with hoarders and toilet paper, but still definitely a lie.
edit:
jesus christ look at the mess of downvotes this whole thread attracted, replies included, this place is populated by people more toxic than facebook's and more sensitive than twitter's.
and you wonder why the content platform are in full on containment mode. truth is you're bringing your corporate dystopia unto yourself.
In a world without Delta, the vaccines did do an incredible job of actually preventing infection. "Effectiveness [against confirmed infection] remained above 95% regardless of age group, sex, race, or presence of comorbidities."[1] But that study used data up to March 2021, which means mostly non-Delta variants. Against Delta, vaccine effectiveness in preventing infection might be closer to 50%+ (e.g. [2]) -- which is still very effective! It's just not effective as we would like. "Hi, here's a shot that cuts your odds of getting infected in half. Do you want it?" Um, yes please.
You have to change your behavior when the facts in the world change. The messaging had to change with the facts. Of course you can't use the old vaccination thresholds for re-opening if the virus is now infecting 10x (50% vs. 95%) as many vaccinated people as it was 2 months ago, that doesn't make sense.
The virus moved the goalposts. You can be angry about that, but that's reality.
We are so lucky that despite everything, the vaccines are still incredibly effective at keeping you from dying if you get COVID. I'm actually very angry at how the mask messaging was handled (there should absolutely be consequences for that), but it doesn't matter how angry I am, if I don't get vaccinated I am irrationally refusing the single best way to avoid dying in this pandemic.
[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-1577 [2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e4.htm
Evolutionary pressure is exerted by all immune responses, not just ones conditioned by vaccines.
The covid vaccine is just that - limits symptoms but still allows transmission.
> In an unvaccinated population, mutations occur at random producing a wide genetic spread with very few progeny resulting in long lasting lineages (Muller's ratchet), with a selection pressure that favors those variants that can (a) win the competition of replication among its cousins within a host, and (b) not kill the host so that it can thrive in new hosts.
> In a highly vaccinated population, mutations occur at random, but the genetic spread among versions of the virus is narrowed to those that can evade immunity, which has now been made more uniform among the vaccinated population. This further encourages such lineages even when they would not have won out within individual hosts in competition among its cousins. Such evasion increases chances of reinfection. [2]
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.13...
[2] https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/variant-roulette-evo...
Please look up the medical definition of immunity.
Immunity obviously means being immune. Immune has a specific definition and that is not "helps sometimes".
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/immu...
Resistance or, decreased susceptibility, or whatever other term you wish to use, is not the same as immunity.
Otherwise what word do we use for "immunity" now?
The world changed between the beginning of vaccine availability and today. New variants emerged from unvaccinated populations and some of those variants (Delta being the most prominent currently being reported) are able to evade the immune response generated by the vaccine (breakthrough infections). The guidance was updated to reflected newly available information -- would you prefer that the CDC ignore new data and just stick with its initial statements?
The reason we are far from normalcy is that since the beginning of this pandemic people have been refusing to do what they need to do to slow the spread. If people had done what health officials asked, we might have been closer to normalcy. Take your complaints to all those right-wing extremists in the media and the government who politicized a public health crisis and who continue to tell people to ignore the CDC.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.13...
The covid vaccine is just that - limits symptoms but still allows transmission.
> In an unvaccinated population, mutations occur at random producing a wide genetic spread with very few progeny resulting in long lasting lineages (Muller's ratchet), with a selection pressure that favors those variants that can (a) win the competition of replication among its cousins within a host, and (b) not kill the host so that it can thrive in new hosts.
> In a highly vaccinated population, mutations occur at random, but the genetic spread among versions of the virus is narrowed to those that can evade immunity, which has now been made more uniform among the vaccinated population. This further encourages such lineages even when they would not have won out within individual hosts in competition among its cousins. Such evasion increases chances of reinfection. [2]
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.13...
[2] https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/variant-roulette-evo...
The vaccine gives immunity, by the definition of what immunity is. The reduced efficacy was communicated as soon as it was confirmed. There was no lie. This is how science occurs. The best conclusion was given from the data at the time.
Regarding the metrics for vaccination rates that would allow full normalcy: they existed before the Delta variant, and unfortunately this new variant has made herd immunity impossible.
Science got massively oversold. Who did that? Who benefits from that?
> The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call.
I think if you call anyone hesitant to take these shots an anti-vaxxer, you contribute to making the narative so everything extreme. Many that are "c19 vaccine hesitant" are vaccinating their children on the locally standard schedule. It is just that this c19 vaccine is a bit different: did not yet stand the test of time and it is in many cases a whole new therapy (mRNA therapy's debut).
> take the shot or risk death
This sounds so dramatic. This choice is everywhere, just not with so much media attention. Diets, traffic accidents, extreme sports, ...
I think we should use vaccines only to protect those at risk, and/or those who want protection by it. Once they have the shot it's over.
The media is pushing a story that we need to all get vaccinated to protect others. I think, given the research, that this is never going to happen (virus will stay in corners of the world with unvaccinated people, virus will have new variants: virus will stay with us).
At this point, surely the various c19 vaccines are the most highly scrutinised and widely administered vaccines developed in the past 50 years or so. More than 6 billion shots administered, and counting. How much more time do you need?
Based on your wording, it sounds like you have the mistaken impression that the mRNA vaccines are expected to account for and target all future variants. A future variant may have a large enough mutation to the spike protein and render them 0% effective. But they can rollout a new vaccine very quickly with EUA. Sorry if I've misinterpreted.
I don't remember ever seeing #s promising long term effectiveness, but eventually later seeing a chart with projected effectiveness waning over time. What they should do is be careful to present variant specific numbers. There's too much generalizing, like I did as well, lumping Pfizer and Moderna together.
What we don't know (yet) is whether that efficacy will still be as strong 2, 3, or 5 years down the track. But that, IMO, is not a good reason not to get the vaccine today. Trust me, you don't want Covid!
I say so since the beginning (when there was no vaccine): let me get it so I can help in old folks homes.
But what I got was mandates/lockdowns and free mRNA treatments. Not taking the jab means lots of hassle. I see what govts are doing to us. I dont like that. So I resist.
Test of time. How come there's a recall for pregnant women? While a few days ago they were still pushing those pregnant to get jabbed?
> the most highly scrutinised and widely administered vaccines
Where do you get yr data from? Is not polio vaccine administered to more people world wide?
Are we even talking about 1 product? There are many c19 and many polio vaccines. All can have unique problems.
well it's not like you can study long term effect by virtue of having a very large large short term datasets, no matter how much large the current dataset is.
Flu vaccines are only really effective for a single season. Hopefully it’s longer, but even if c19 vaccines give you only 1-2 years protection before requiring a booster, I’d say that’s still pretty good.
There are countries that have had Pfizer rollouts to millions of people over the last 8 months ( 1) . If this were true in the real world, the excess mortality would have shown up in the real-world data by now. It has not. it's rubbish. You tout this false and trivially falsifiable "fact" repeatedly. Quit it.
https://ijhpr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13584-021-...
You honestly should see it coming that would be told that you're talking rubbish - you have trotted out this junk talking point repeatedly, and been told that this is not correct several times now, it was only a matter of time it is said directly.
You're being downvoted but the medical industry in the US honestly has terrible PR. It's not surprising that people misunderstand.
Vaccines do grant immunity, but immunity doesn't mean "you cannot catch the virus" and it never has. It means that your immune system will recognise the virus immediately and fight it.
This is the same thing as "less symptoms".
"A week of feeling like shit" has nothing to do with the virus at all, they're not symptoms of an infection that you are feeling, they are side effects of your immune system learning to fight the virus that the vaccine is teaching it about.
All, or at least most, vaccines require occasional boosters, but if everyone is vaccinated when they should be, the virus will die out before any significant number of further infections can occur, as has now happened with Polio and Smallpox.
So in short: You were not lied to, but you absolutely should have had this explained to you with greater clarity.
You're misunderstanding the precise use of the word "can" here. I can win the lottery. I can win a coin toss. But the odds are drastically different, and so en masse, we should plan and test much more for the "much more likely" case than the other. Now, vaccination against COVID gives better odds of not catching and not spreading COVID. You still _can_, though.
> If vaccines don’t provide immunity
But they do, statistically they provide a high level of immunity. Not 100% though. You know this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699699 So why are you contradicting yourself?
It makes it sufficiently less likely that if everyone was vaccinated, each infected person would, on average, go on to infect less than one other person, and the pandemic would end. The more people who are vaccinate, the lower that average of "people that get infected by each infectious person" goes. That is why vaccinations are important to everyone, not just the individual who is vaccinated.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
We're probably going to get progressively less deadly variants until the end of times.
Vaccines' downsides were definitely overplayed because they were trying to push vaccines.
Talking about the increased risk of blood clots, saying that you would still get symptoms, that you would still infect other people, that you would still have to wear a mask, that you would still have to do a test whenever you travel, that vaccines would lose efficacy and need a booster every 6 month - that's the kind of stuff that would get you branded as an no-vax and banned from youtube.
We paused the use of the J&J vaccine over the blood clot issue that turned out to be a common side effect of many drugs and it was at a rate lower than common birth control pills.
No one has downplayed the side effects or done something nefarious is some nebulous attempt to exert power and disinformation over people.
On the other hand, public policy leading to creation of more dangerous viruses would be a disaster and if that happens, it should be stopped.
Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system. "Immunity" in the context of vaccines does not, and has never meant something like 'diplomatic immunity.' Instead, it means that a vaccinated person's body has the tools to fight off the virus. Which looks like reduced symptoms and drastically reduced likelihood of death from the virus. Mild side effects are expected. [1]
This has been true since vaccines were first discovered /invented, and will continue to be true. Measles, Smallpox, Polio, etc.
Perhaps many people misunderstood what "immunity" meant... But that initial misunderstanding doesn't mean that they were being lied to by doctors and scientists. What it really means is that they were unintentionally lying to themselves about the definition of immunity.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/why-vaccinate/vaccine-d...
Just because it's never been done before does not mean we have no idea what it will or won't do. Biology is uncertain, but it's important to examine the vaccine risks AGAINST COVID RISKS.
Nothing is no-risk, including the vaccine. However, the accurate comparison is getting covid without the vax, versus with the vax. Looking at the vaccine risks in isolation is somewhere between misleading and dishonest.
I can choose to not get the vaccine, but I can't choose to not get COVID. COVID may hurt me either way.
Depending on the values p1, p2, it's better to get the vaccine or not get it. The problem is, most people have no idea about values of p1, p2 and that they are highly dependent on personal details.
Your logic doesn't make sense. You absolutely can choose to not get the serious covid version that hospitalizes you: by getting the vaccine! By socially distancing, and not hanging out with people who don't take very basic precautions. Even your second sentence: "COVID may hurt me either way" doesn't reflect reality - it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated.
And while personal details may vary, we can estimate covid risks pretty well with the population base rate, sliced by a few basic dimensions (age, BMI, smoker status). We also have a pretty good idea of vaccine risks - almost none.
We may not know vaccine side effects long term, but we also don't know the effects of long term covid. We do know that short term, the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.
Look, I'm all for people making their own choice when it comes to the vaccine. Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.
That is not strictly true. Vaccination decreases the chance of bad COVID, but it does not eliminate it. This benefit is working for some people, but it is not for some other people (bad breakthrough cases, people with weak/no immune response to the vaccine who later get COVID).
Limiting contact with strangers via distancing and masks is a sensible strategy for someone afraid to get bad COVID. Except for intoxicating with CO2/H20 and being short on O2, there are little risks to this so I do practice that.
> it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated
Yes but both numbers are too small for me to care enough to risk the vaccine. This isn't the first week of the pandemic - we got more than a year and in this time people around me are still completely fine living their life, the virus has literally no impact where I live. It is different for other people who knew people who died from COVID, so they think COVID is much more scary. But numbers are clear - COVID isn't a plague-level problem and not everybody needs to get vaccinated for their benefit.
> the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.
That is not obviously true. There is a competing opinion that it is not good policy to mass vaccinate with too leaky a vaccine, because there is the dire possibility that it will put pressure on the virus evolution so it gets better at evading this kind of vaccine. I am not saying one or the other is obviously the correct one, but I do not think anybody can say with certainty.
> Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.
Society has a discussion - and there is still no clear consensus on what to do. Different states/countries do different strategies. I think that is a good thing - in case some policy turns out to be quite bad, at least it won't kill everybody.
If you're worried about that, get Sinovac or Covaxin, which are the only traditional, inactivated virus vaccines available (that I'm aware of).
Oh, but for the purposes of mandates, those vaccines aren't accepted.
Yes but a very small part of those are relevant to my personal assessment of risk of bad COVID. The risk depends strongly on age, health status, lifestyle and so on. Absolute numbers of deaths are not that important to personal risk assessment.
"Feelings" have no place in science. These are numbers not subjective anecdotes, which appear to be what you're basing your decision on. Say what you like, the data doesn't lie, only people do.
I would love some citations here, as this seems to be the exact type of misinformation this act is trying to combat. The thought that hundreds of thousands of medical professionals across the world are willingly ignoring potentially fatal consequences for children out of some nefarious political agenda is ludicrous. If this was really happening, it would be trivial to show it, anecdotes are not hard data.
In the same vein, not 1 immunocompromised child should die from COVID when there is an easy and safe way to combat it. Not one. But many have.
When you have nuts sticking spoons to their face, claiming to have been magnetized, and those folks are speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem.
In terms of time, these vaccines very much have not been fully vetted in the same manner as any other vaccine.
> this seems to be an extension of general vaccine hesitancy
In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.
> hesitancy which has absolutely no scientific basis whatsoever
You mean Scientific(TM) basis? Because there are numerous reason to be HESITANT in terms of science (the process of uncovering what is and is not true). E.g. vaccine reactions are not a myth - we should study them more; vaccine mechanism is still sometimes opaque - we should know more about that and how someone's genetic play a part; adjuvants that have side effects are also not a myth - what about finding safer adjuvants?
> nuts ... speaking with equal authority and to as broad of an audience as respected scientists, there's a problem
To be clear, you're saying they should be censored?
Censorship is a Russian Doll problem. It's turtles all the way down. Who makes the censors unbiased? Science should continue to be about questioning what is believed and believed to be true.
There are skeptics on both sides of the bell curve of intelligence. A nut, as you say, and an intelligent scientist may both come to the same conclusion - it doesn't make the nut's reasoning correct, but it also doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.
This is a tired, out-dated argument, all 3 vaccines in distribution in the US have been fully vetted and passed all tests, there is no more "emergency approval". If time is what you want then you're just saying there is absolutely nothing that will convince you to take it.
> In part, yes. However there seems to be roughly an equal amount of people who have never had any objection to vaccines in the past that now do.
Yes, now that is has become a political issue instead of a scientific one (like it should be), many more people have been duped.
> what about finding safer adjuvants?
How about being realistic about the side effects of the vaccine? This is one of the most studied, most widely distributed vaccines in history. If there any data to back up any sort of hesitancy, I believe the amount of people desperately searching for something useful to use in their war on science would find it.
> you're saying they should be censored?
I'm saying viewpoints that obviously have absolutely no basis in reality (Bill Gates microchips, magnetizing face spoons, etc) should not have a place to flourish alongside real scientific discourse. How about we vet an idea before we let the masses with little to no critical thinking skills consume it.
> doesn't make the scientist's conclusion wrong either, just because the nut believes it too.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here, however if a "nut" says something sane, that doesn't make them sane. I think the larger problem is there are a lot of people with a lot of money to make by preaching vaccine hesitancy. If people are maliciously influencing public opinion for personal gain and the detriment of public good, how do you suggest we combat that?
I agree censorship is not the answer but I also don't support giving a platform to people in a society where people will accept absolutely anything in their echo chamber without question or serious discourse. The media has lost the confidence of the people and everyone is so caught up in bipartisanship, it's a literal crime the vaccine hesitancy falls along political lines, if anything that should tell you it is not based in science.
“mRNA vaccines tell our cells to make a piece of the “spike protein” that is found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since only part of the protein is made, it does not harm the vaccine recipient, but it is antigenic and thus stimulates the immune system to make antibodies.”
>VITT is not associated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines.
We're talking 400 cases of VITT from two specific vaccines (AZ and J&J) out of 6.2 billion doses given. Furthermore, COVID itself is associated with getting blood clots. In fact, you have a much higher chance of getting blood clots by staying unvaccinated than getting the vaccine. Even further, blood clots are entirely treatable if caught early.
Of course, as others have said, blood clots aren't a legitimate concern for anyone. This is yet another shifting of the goalposts.
The mask one not being useful is a lie where Fauci was trying to reserve masks for medical staff.
Why not lying again about the current vaccine effectiveness/side effects balance to reserve promising treatments to a certain category of the population?
“In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”
In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.
Hard as it may be to hear, he said, he believes that it may take close to 90 percent immunity to bring the virus to a halt — almost as much as is needed to stop a measles outbreak.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
The lengths people will go to, to defend this type of person, is amazing.
Stop arguing with the guy, I'm not sure what his motives are, but whatever they may be, facts will not change his mind.
It's just reactance if you ask me, but I'm not a psychologist.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/jtm/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jtm...
Dr fauci himself admitted that he was giving bad numbers based on what he wanted the American public to hear.
This is the whole disconnect. The people like Fauci that we are supposed to blindly trust are clearly willing to deceive in order to satisfy their own goals. That's why people distrust him.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
Those calculations of herd immunity threshold percentages were usually over simplified based on the assumption that immunity is a binary condition. But in reality while vaccinated people are less likely to suffer severe symptoms they can still get infected and spread the virus.
I think the most likely explanation is that public health officials believed that citing a 60-70 number would feel more achievable, and thus encourage people to continue masking/distancing until a vaccine was available. If they has said 85% in May 2020, maybe people would have thought it was hopeless and just opened up immediately.
Whether they judged correctly or not, I don't think it was a good idea to bend the truth because it erodes trust in institutions.
Once the situation changed and everyone needed to wear a mask he said that folks should go out and buy masks (and after the supply gap was closed a bit).
Yeah, but it's fair to say he's purposefully lying because he told us he was purposefully lying.
https://www.axios.com/fauci-goalposts-herd-immunity-c83c7500...
Here's the direct quote:
> When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent."
Calling that "purposefully lying" is ridiculous. People who have to present a single number to summarize an entire body of scientific research for the general public always have to make a decision about how conservative of an estimate to give.
You expect those people to make their estimate based on the scientific research, not based on what he thinks the people are "ready to hear".
He literally said that the motivation for saying 80, 85 was the fact that a poll showing how many people had already been convinced to take it.
It's just a fact - he was selling the vaccine. I'm not alleging a conspiracy, or shady financial motives. I'm not saying the vaccine is bad, because I think it's amazing. But Fauci gave numerical estimates that he did not believe to be accurate, for PR reasons.
That's not what I read in the quote.
If he said 70-90%, then people may only hear 90 and think no way we'll get there. Sounds reasonable. If people hear we'll never get herd immunity due to delta and the potential for new variants, will more people get it or will it eliminate a reason for some to get it?
Keep in mind that if your estimate is too low many people will die or have significantly reduced life quality. And if your estimate is too high internet trolls will use that as fodder to discourage people from getting vaccinated.
There we go. He was giving aspirational targets, not scientific evaluations.
Sounds like he had a good reason to stretch the truth, but the fact remains.
It's not a good reason - this kind of manipulation is exactly why people distrust governments and "science".
You have not established any point where he lied or stretched the truth. What you have established is your personal axe to grind against Fauci.
It's good to examine why you feel the need to grind this axe.
We know why Fauci is controversial. He is controversial because the president wanted to let people die because he felt that is the truth about the pandemic came out he would lose power. Fauci told the truth and as a result was villainized by political extremists.
This alone explains, I don't know, like 99.9% of sentiment about Fauci.
So when you spend a lot of effort trying to convince people in the internet that he lied about something, but you're unable to produce any evidence, the perception is that you have some other reason for wanting to believe he lied.
So again I encourage you to think through what the ideal response would have been. Instead of trying to find any tiny reason to criticize him, actually think through what the right thing to do was.
EDIT: To make it even more clear, by the article you quoted, 100% of the numbers he gave were within the confidence interval. That is what it means to give a "scientific evaluation" as you say.
In other words, by your own admission he never told an untruth or a partial truth. He quoted the low end of the confidence interval saying "we likely need at least this many people assuming the vaccines are this effective etc". His gut feeling was that the numbers were higher, but he didn't have the evidence to say that, so the message we "we need at least this many people."
Then as we learned more he revised the estimates up closer to where he thought they should be initially, but which he didn't have evidence for.
Since he was telling the truth 100% of the time, it's difficult to make a case that he was lying or that he is untrustworthy.
They just happen to say pretty much the same thing.
Anyway, this whole hoarding issue can be elegantly side-stepped by not outsourcing mask production and stockpiling. I assume the US government was aware of the possibility of pandemics (likely flu), just like everyone else on the planet was.
> Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) held a news conference Monday to discuss adverse reactions related to the COVID vaccines — giving individuals who have been “repeatedly ignored” by the medical community a platform to share their stories ... “We are all pro-vaccine,” Johnson said at the onset of the news conference. In fact, Johnson has had every flu shot since the Swine flu, is current on all of his vaccines ... he has not had a COVID vaccine because he already had COVID.
> Five people from across the U.S., including a 12-year-old girl who was part of the Pfizer clinical trial, joined the conference at the federal courthouse ... Among them was Maddie de Garay from Ohio who volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial when she was 12. On Jan. 20, Maddie received her second dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine as a participant in the clinical trial for 12- to 15-year-olds and is now in a wheelchair ... “Why is she not back to normal? She was totally fine before this,” said Stephanie de Garay, Maddie’s mother. She volunteered for the Pfizer vaccine trial “to help everyone else and they’re not helping here. Before Maddie got her final dose of the vaccine she was healthy, got straight As, had lots of friends and had a life.”
> ... Upon receiving the second shot, Maddie immediately felt pain at the injection site and over the next 24-hours developed severe abdominal and chest pain, de Garay said at the press event. Maddie told her mother it felt like her heart was being ripped out through her neck, and she had painful electrical shocks down her neck and spine that forced her to walk hunched over ... She developed gastroparesis, nausea and vomiting, erratic blood pressure, memory loss, brain fog, headaches, dizziness, fainting, seizures, verbal and motor tics, menstrual cycle issues, lost feeling from the waist down, lost bowel and bladder control and had an nasogastric tube placed because she lost her ability to eat.
> ... Johnson argued that while most people don’t suffer significant side effects following vaccination, he is concerned about “that small minority that are suffering severe symptoms.”
80-min video of news conference: https://rumble.com/vj5xbf-senator-ron-johnson-milwaukee-news...
The more we know about the statistical minority who suffer severe adverse reactions, the better we can screen vaccine recipients to prevent these injuries.
My Wife, a ICU RN+CCRN spent most of her 2020 on the COVID floor. It was pretty brutal for her.
She has coworkers, of equal status, who experienced pandemic alongside her first hand - who were extremely hesitant to get the vaccine. This includes several months after the initial rollout to staff.
I have medical professionals in my family. Your statement sums it up. In my experience, physical/occupational therapists are the most likely to believe in crazy stuff (from a medical standpoint). RNs come next. I'm sure there are people in between on that spectrum, but I don't interact with them much.
see below:
Covid Fact: - proportion on covid death that are unvaccinated p(not(vaccinated) | covid-death ) = 99% - proportion of population this is unvaccinated P(not(vaccinated)) = 14% - proportion of population this is vaccinated P(vaccinated) = 86% Basic math: - Probability of death from covid if not vacinated P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) = 0.99 * P(covid-death) / 0.14 - Probability of death from covid if vacinated P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 0.01 * P(covid-death) / 0.86 - How many time more likely to die from covid if not vaccinated P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) / P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 608 Fact: if you are not vaccinated, You are 608 times more likely to die from Covid 19 and you are 116 times more likely to be hospitalized.
The problem with the vaccines (and lockdowns etc) is that these are new obligations, so making people realise how little control over their lives they actually have (in spite of the 'freedom' retoric so popular in the US).
1) People ARE too "stupid". "Stupid" here is a placeholder for a larger discussion on biological, antropological, social and psychological evidence. Which all could be summed up as: We are meant to be just smart enough to survive, then some more. Average human capability for evidence evaluation and independent reasoning is quite low.
2) Effort for winning in an unbounded argument space is practically infinite. Debunking bullshit takes several orders of magnitude more resources than coming up with more bullshit.
There needs to be a point at which you should disqualify an arguing party as not worthy of further evaluation. That's another way for the other party to "win the argument". In this specific case, pro-vaccine people has long won the argument, and by a mile.
Since covid is so deadly if you get it, and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore, vaccination is also almost guaranteed to protect you from serious cases, why wouldn't you get it? Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?
* which as an aside does cause myocarditis and pericardits in particular for young males. This is important because for example in Germany the incidence was 1 case from 17.271 doses for males in the 12-17 age range and in most cases the symptoms appeared after the second dose, which may mean that a booster could also trigger it.
People think they had COVID in the early pre-testing days, but it was just the flu or a bad cold. (My son was in this realm; severe pneumonia in early 2020, but later testing showed no antibodies.) You'd have restaurants swamped with angry "but I've already had it!" people.
Verification is hard; you can't just take word for it, so that means an antibody test, and at that point you might as well have just vaccinated them anyways while they were in.
Verification isn't hard if you don't completely fuck up. There are countries in Europe which don't have the medical capabilities of the US and they were able to get this right.
Obesity and COVID hospitalizations: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm
Waning VE of vaccines (many more studies available from the CDC and others too): https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Pfizer medicine and unethical trial on Nigerian children in 1996: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/11/pfizer-nigeria...
I particularly think the Wikileaks that shows more unethical, illegal attempts to get out of it are even more interesting: "But last year a US diplomatic cable uncovered by WikiLeaks revealed that Pfizer hired investigators to look for evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in an effort to persuade him to drop the legal action."
Your son or you "thought" he had it. I had it. A positive COVID test, and antibody tests 8 and 9 months later. Not my imagination.
I recommend the vaccine for friends who have not had COVID, but that is their choice not mine. If I were in my twenties, healthy, and no comorbidities, I wouldn't personally get it. You only need to look at the chart of COVID deaths and hospitalizations by age bracket, and you can see that the risk is very low. Let's see if there are any issues 3 to 5 years from now. Unfortunately, Pfizer vaccinated their control group, so long-term safety studies will have to be restarted or done by others.
People with prior infection should be angry about not being allowed to have the same access as vaccinated people. The US State department accepts it for entry into the US, but a pizzeria owner needs to turn away natural immunity folk? You wonder why there's anger? Japan, Singapore, Norway, the UK, and Ireland are doing away with COVID restrictions, and for the most part, vaccine passports. The US is completely ignoring natural immunity outside of entry to the US. Weird.
I don't know why you assume Fox is anti-vax, Trump took the vaccine and promotes it on Fox News interviews himself.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-urges-all-americans-to-g...
I dont understand why everyone thinks they are fascists.
I don't know if that's correct or not but it has nothing to do with my point that pro-vaccine content does exist on Fox News.
Fox and CNN are two sides of the same coin.
This policy on YouTube just started, and, last I heard anyway, there are other sources of information other than YouTube.
There have obviously been many many sources of information on the internet that allow anti-vaccine information. And, if that information was actually credible, it would have also been available to, for instance, those at YouTube who made this policy. What do you figure their agenda is for covering it up?
--- start quote #1 ---
Thanks to your ongoing efforts, my 40+ year old sibling finally got vaccinated about three weeks before getting infected by her kids. She still had it pretty bad, so I think it’s likely you saved her a trip to the hospital or worse.
She was on the brink of getting vaccinated weeks earlier, but “That Guy” had cast enough doubt that a family member talked her out of it. So I’m glad you specifically mentioned him back then. Thanks to our civilization’s shiny new censorship machine it was maddeningly difficult to actually find good counter arguments to his claims, since we’re all supposed to just pretend bad claims don’t exist. So mostly I had to just point to the favorable evidence rather than being able to give a point by point rebuttal.
[...]
And her family is fox news conservative, so all the tribal hate made it especially hard for her to take their claims seriously. She stayed up all night making her decision, and had 250 browser tabs open by the end. So people do try, and do pay attention.
--- end quote #1 ---
and later, in response
--- start quote #2 ---
I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.
--- end quote #2 ---
This is a really frustrating perspective to hear.
> I heard this bogus claim about something I don't understand and wanted to know if it was true
> All I could find was doctors saying it was nonsense
> How could I know what the truth was?
I suspect it's a common form of reasoning. It's committing so many mistakes all at once.
* Refusal to acknowledge that you might be considering nonsense and thus perceiving anyone saying it's nonsense as malicious
* Complete refusal or certainty in your inability to do basic research on things that are well documented by many organizations and easy to find BUT STILL SAYING ITS HARD TO FIND
* Not just lack of trust, but certainty of distrust for authority figures. Anything they say has negative value.
It's far more upsetting to me than hearing people with malicious political agendas being assholes.
Every day we hear the mantra, "follow the science!". Here are people striving to do exactly that, and they're being criticized for it. Saying that they're not trying hard enough if they're not finding the answers they seek when it's framed the way you say it must be presented is not a recipe for helping such people overcome their objections.
Others simply say "No it does not alter your dna" because that concept is irrelevant and made up. There's no basis for it.
You don't get to say you're unable to get an explanation if you're not getting it because you either refuse to do the most basic search, or do the search and refuse to acknowledge it.
You cannot lead an effective society in which people embrace the doublethink of simultaneously refusing to acknowledge experts, refusing to even attempt to understand something themselves, and still demanding an understanding of something.
They are striving to find evidence that supports their confirmation bias.
It's like you said: they're not finding the answers they seek (because they are seeking for specific answers).
These two people were complaining not that they couldn't find anti-vax information. They were complaining that they couldn't find anybody directly refuting anti-vax claims, because those anti-vax claims had (assumedly) been censored.
But let's assume that you're correct. Wouldn't it be better to let the skeptic find some posting from a person who wrongly believed that, say, the vaccine causes sterility; and when they go read that (maybe just to bolster their own beliefs) they also see the reply from someone who addresses the skeptic's incorrect beliefs? If we prevent our hypothetical skeptic from finding that page that made him feel safe, he wouldn't have gotten to the counter-argument at all.
No, because...
"The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." ~ Albert Einstein
Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? ... Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?
Since covid is so deadly if you get it
and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore
Is there credible, non-censorious evidence that the vaccine reduces these particular risks? This is the same argument that we keep seeing: you have to take this vaccine because ${thing that vaccines normally do but this one hasn't been shown to do}. The most egregious example is "provide immunity"/"improve outcomes for anyone around you". I just don't believe a word of it until I see the science.
https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021HLTH0058-001843
Over the past two weeks:
> After factoring for age, people not vaccinated are 25.8 times more likely to be hospitalized than those fully vaccinated.
(The age correction reflects the fact that vaccines aren’t distributed evenly by age).
I recognize that it's ridiculous to be in a situation where I'm rejecting facts; that's a great way to be led completely astray. But that's the world that censorship has created.
Sounds to me like you're blaming everyone else for something that's completely under your control.
> I think that actual scientific study is needed to explain these numbers.
Science is not done in the media. I'm tired of being told that I have to believe the science that's on TV when every single time I investigate it turns out the science says the exact opposite. The non-scientific "facts" in the media are even worse; take those overwhelmed hospitals in Oklahoma and the nationwide overwhelmed poison control centers, which were both bold-faced lies. (In case you've missed the non-retractions, Oklahoma hospitals denied having ivermectin patients and only 2% of calls to poison control had anything to do with covid.)
You were linked a government study, then said "science is not done in the media"
http://news.gov.bc.ca/files/8-31_PHO_modelling.pdf
And here:
http://www.bccdc.ca/health-info/diseases-conditions/covid-19...
You still didn't answer the question of what would you actually believe. It seems like you might just call anything you don't like "the media". Let's see where you get your information.
Give me a good explanation of how a 25x effect size can be hand waved away. Even if you consider “leaving their homes more”, I have a tough time believing that you’ll be able to come up with an effect size that large on that basis alone.
As an addendum to this, I’ll point out that several jurisdictions dealing with very severe case loads, including Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, have cancelled many elective procedures in favour of putting more COVID patients in their wards. Doesn’t sound like these are “concerns other than COVID symptoms” to me.
All you "young" people not taking the shot, there are lots of otherwise relatively young people dying every day. Don't die needlessly. Search for stories of people who regretted not taking it on your deathbed. Do you want your mom or dad to live without you?
Social media platforms broadcasting your views around the world and moderating some of them was not censorship.
Private companies that allow you to reach millions of people are offering you the ability to use their service. It's not censorship when they don't allow you to use their service (and until today, they haven't stopped much), it's terms of service.
If I invite you to my house and you eat my dog's food, I have the right to tell you to leave. The movement wouldn't be what it is today without YT, so this censorship stuff is too much.
There are several problems with this, outlined in Clarence Thomas's recent concurring opinion in Biden v. Knight. Dominant communications platforms are essentially part of the public square, and two well-established legal principles could come into play to restrict their actions: public accommodations and common carriers.
There's the additional problem that government is influencing how social media companies police content, not only indirectly through fear of retribution, but even directly. One instance that recently got media attention:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/07/15/psaki_wer...
I've long seen it used to refer to, for instance, TV network censors. And every online dictionary I can find allows for entities other than government to be referred to as censoring.
They run a platform that practices censorship. It is legal. Trying to say it is okay because they are a private entity doesn't wash and they should be called out. We could even band together and censor them.
Censorship is NOT just government action.
The unfortunate reality is - that is the actual crux of the problem. Maybe say "incapable of making" instead of "too stupid to make", since that makes the scope wider. But that is the long and short of it.
It's easy to call someone stupid while ignoring what they are saying. It's hard to charitably hear someone's argument. I'm certainly at fault there.
Either way I categorically reject the worldview where a "benign" paternalism protects us from ourselves.
That's nice. unfortunately the world as it is is categorically providing practical counterexamples to this.
It's so obvious to me how counter-productive these measures are. However I don't suppose increasing vaccination rates are part of the goal of these measures, but just protecting YouTube from having to do moderation or take responsibility for the content on their platform.
My mom for example, after many conversations and a great deal of effort on my part to present data and evidence that was free from shaming and judgement, has made two appointments to get vaccinated, and subsequently cancelled them. The second cancellation came after Biden's recent speech blaming unvaccinated people being directly responsible for killing the vaccinated, a nonsensical supposition.
This is scary stuff. The moral absolutism that the platforms endorse is creeping into more and more subjective areas, and essentially obliterating any hope of nuance or increased understanding about changing strategies and data.
a) could harm me, and is more likely to given my family history, and b) there's conflicting evidence that it gives me any advantage over the immunity I already have.
If you'd like to change my mind, you can start by not threatening my livelihood, not calling me a murderer, and not treating me like I'm subhuman. Yes, I'm a little angry. Wouldn't you?
My ex girlfriend is the exact same as you. I called her out on it, she didn’t like that. Do what you like, but IMO what you are doing is dishonest.
She did eventually get it, though, for no other reason than: it’s harmless, and it’s easier and cheaper than doing a test before every concert she wanted to go to. She eventually apologized and said she was just being stubborn for the hell of it.
Ah well, people change.
Can you explain how this is nonsensical? There is quite a bit of data showing that those who are unvaccinated are much more likely to spread the disease.
According to the most recent data from the CDC (https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html), 960 out of every 160,000 Americans has been hospitalized due to covid (this is across all people regardless of vaccination status).
So there is _at least_ a 99% reduction in the rate of hospitalizations for the fully vaccinated, according to the figures he cited.
The message he's sending is that even if you are vaccinated, _you're not safe_. Why is this an effective message for persuading those who might still be convinced?
Is the overall outcome better than if our political leadership continued to transparently emphasize vaccine safety and outcomes, rather than scoring points with their political base? You convince more people to become vaccinated by being convincing. When you get more people vaccinated, you save more lives.
If someone's position is, that it doesn't matter if the overall outcome is worse, because the bad outcomes are more concentrated in selfish/stupid/red-state people, then I simply disagree with that.
From what I have read the those who are vaccinated are about 17 times less likely to be hospitalized. Here is a link to an example article showing that statistic:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-coronavirus-vaccin...
There is very worrisome data coming out of Israel that shows that the risk of breakthrough infections is likely to rise, as delta becomes more predominant and the efficacy of the vaccines wane.
https://www.science.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-vac...
Simply put, I don't think the assertion that the unvaccinated are killing the vaccinated is untrue. There is a lot of data that shows that being unvaccinated greatly increases your chance of spreading the virus. The virus is a much bigger part of our lives due to the unvaccinated.
Data is increasingly showing that being vaccinated is not a guarantee that you won't wind up in the hospital, have long term symptoms, or die from the virus, especially if you are in an at risk group.
> There is very worrisome data coming out of Israel that shows that the risk of breakthrough infections is likely to rise, as delta becomes more predominant and the efficacy of the vaccines wane.
There has been very worrisome data every week since this pandemic began. The best data we have is that vaccines are safe and effective, and they're important as part of our collective efforts to minimize harm.
To me, that's the harm done by the coronavirus, not the harm caused by the unvaccinated to the vaccinated.
> Data is increasingly showing that being vaccinated is not a guarantee that you won't wind up in the hospital, have long term symptoms, or die from the virus, especially if you are in an at risk group.
I've heard this same thing from the people I know who don't want to get vaccinated. Doesn't change my mind that a) the best data we have suggests it will decrease their overall risk factor and b) calling people stupid and evil or policing what they listen to isn't a good way to win that argument.
94% and growing is not true, it is quite the opposite that the data is showing that vaccine efficacy is growing. Lots of good data shows that the efficacy of the vaccine is lower with delta and as we get further from when the vaccine was administered the efficacy drops significantly. This is the reason we need boosters, but their effectiveness will also wane over time.
Even if the vaccine were 99% effective, if 5,000 vaccinated people were to die from Covid every year, the data suggests that the vast majority of them (if not all) are a result of those who are choosing not to be vaccinated. So it is not a stretch at all to say that the unvaccinated are killing the vaccinated.
I don't think that overstating the positive effect of the vaccine is a good strategy. Yes they are effective, yes everyone who can should get one, but that doesn't mean that the unvaccinated are't responsible when someone who is vaccinated gets sick.
Pointing out that the unvaccinated are responsible for getting the vaccinated sick, in addition to all of the strains they are putting on our society (economy, public health, etc), is a good argument in favor of mandates. I for one am glad Biden and other leaders pushing mandates are making this argument.
That's what they mean by "the unvaccinated are killing the vaccinated". People who could have lived if they got ICU care are dying because the ICUs are already full.
It isn't like refusing a cancer treatment on an easily treatable cancer, after all, but rather an infectious disease.
I stop tolerating your idiocy once it's consequences begin to affect me.
What throws a wrench into all of that planning, and ability to predict and respond to healthcare demand, is a novel pandemic that sends massive amounts of people to the ICU, which the healthcare system was never built to handle.
but of course you already knew that.
what fills up icu beds? obesity? not acutely, that will take years to infect another person.
the vaccines are not great at stopping the spread of delta but they are great at preventing people who get it from going to the hospital.
that's not an accurate take on how the vaccines work against delta.
the vaccine makes it so you are much less likely to get the virus in the first place. it also shortens the time you are infectious to other people if you do get a breakthrough case since your bodies immune system response goes into effect immediately and not after a while. an extremely simplified view is: antibodies neutralize free floating viral particles(antigens). B cells create antibodies. T cells tell B cells to go make antibodies and also kill infected cells with cytotoxins.
when you are vaccinated your T cells and B cells already know what to do if they see viruses so they can mount a defense immediately and it shortens the infectious period. in addition you will still have antibodies left over(i am unsure if you still make more for a period of time after the vaccine without any antigens) from when you got the vaccine so you will have a lower likelihood of getting sick in the first place since the antibodies can neutralize the antigens before they have a chance to infect too many cells and create more antigens.
by the nature of not getting sick in the first place and by not being infectious for as long the spread of delta is slowed
you're fighting a point that has not been made.
In whole world, they all do, and I am not sure it is always the right way things should work. We should have enough beds and staff to care for all people in need. Even those not in preferred societal classes or not with the right political views or even those who did some bad medical decisions.
If you catch covid, there is a good chance you'll pass it onto others, unlike the previous maladies. And that is a real problem: Some of those people will die, most will pass on the virus to others, and a good number of folks wind up in the hospital.
And that's happening so much that folks are dying from non-covid things as well.
Pretty much, if you choose to die from Covid, you are going to take others down with you.
Your tone is both unwelcome and doesn't add to the discussion. And "2/3" isn't even close to being right[0].
Which makes me stretch hard to find good faith in your musings.
[0] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.p...
Our World In Data is a great source for this and other covid-related data for the world and individual countries.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
I'm actually excited about the new mRNA tech and the massive boost it got from the money during C19. I think lockdown is toxic to society and risks can be taken on vaccines to open things up.
I'm optimistic for humanity and thankful we had a mild-ish pandemic that was fatal for a relatively small percentage, but allowed us to improve our biotech so much in such a short time. This will surely help us next time.
This article for example:
https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2021/03/23/no...
The various commercial tattoo inks haven't, though. They're classified as cosmetics and aren't tested or approved by the FDA at all: https://daily.jstor.org/why-doesnt-the-fda-regulate-tattoo-i...
Not crossing it, staying home all day until you starve or go insane from isolation is more deadly.
So we choose to cross the street.
My mother only got vaccinated last month. She and my father are both medical professionals (she's retired and my dad got it early on since he's super high risk). Her main hangup was the lies and coercion. She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions. I'm confident there was also some element of "if I get it now I'm telling them their tactics worked."