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.

(https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus)

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.

(https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations)

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...