> During lockdowns, essential and frontline workers bore the brunt of COVID-19 cases while affluent professionals stayed home, teleworked, and ordered delivery. These workers were once called “heroes.” Now the Zoom class labels the same workers “anti-vaxxers” if they prefer to rely on the natural immunity many of them have already acquired from previous infections.
Also, it is extremely hard to scientifically and politically account for recovery as proof of vaccination. In some European countries, it sort of works, when you have good standards on how exactly to determine and track infection and recovery. Even then there are tradeoffs, because the immunity after vaccination is much better studied and much more predictable.
The politicalization of the vaccine is foolish and unscientific.
The goal isn't to have everyone reach a specific level of immunity. It's to get the highest possible level of immunity that is possible without taking on additional risks.
Any risk is stupid if you already have better immunity than taking the vaccine. Once again, other diseases are handled exactly like this. Vaccine if you haven't had it, and no vaccine if you have. Doctors recognize that adding risk is a bad idea.
I think you're confusing cause and effect here. The politicization of the vaccine is the reason the government is now pushing vaccine mandates and such, not a reaction to it. If Fox News had spent the last year telling its viewers that seat belts make you sterile, the government would be raising fines and ramping up enforcement and generally adopting policies to force people to wear seat belts, right? And some of those policies would inevitably look like overreach, and people would be writing essays like this one complaining about that overreach.
People need to remember the goal is to eliminate the threat, not get everyone vaccinated. These are two different things. Ignoring post-COVID immunity studies just makes officials look unscientific and doesn't contribute to the final goal. Being unscientific puts you at the same level as hucksters. Getting rid of health care workers that risked it all and put a huge strain on their families is just plain dumb and ungrateful. The idea they don't know the whole story is baffling.
For you perhaps, but some people have the terminal goal of avoiding vaccination, even if that increases the threat. That is why the government is doing anything and everything, including FUD, to push vaccines down peoples' throats. Their actions will always seem irrational if you ignore that.
The single simplest summation of the concept of evil is "the end justifies the means".
That's a rather strong way to describe someone who refuses to implement a policy you like.
You might be right, a natural immunity exemption might be sound policy. I personally tend to agree. But you can't make the case for it by pretending that opposition to it is based in ignorance or evil, if the opposition is due to the concern that people who would abuse it and the result would be more deaths.
Vaccine mandates are now down the path of forbidding us to choose what we do with our own bodies.
This is a very, very dangerous path.
Punishing nurses that have aquired immunity via natural infection will hopefully be considered criminal in a not too far away future. Fortunately there are very few places in the world that thinks that doing so is a good idea.
You may not like that CNN endorses vaccination, but you'd be hard pressed to catch them in even a simple incorrect statement, much less an intentional lie, let alone at the same order of magnitude. It is hard not to endorse vaccination if you understand the science.
"If Trump tells us to take it [The Vaccine], I won't" - Kamala Harris
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/2020-vp-debate-kamala-harris-o...
She is clearly referring to the potential scenario back last year when Trump could be pushing for a vaccine to be approved and released that did not satisfy scientific medical standards, just to benefit in the election. That stance doesn't fit in a few seconds of sound bite, of course.
That the left was also guilty of politicizing the vaccine & throwing doubting on its safety when it was politically expedient.
Nor did Kamala Harris throw doubt on an existing and proven vaccine. No vaccine had been approved at that point, whereas Trump was blundering through the pandemic response in search of any way to save his political hide. There was a lot of evidence Trump put pressure on public health officials to downplay the pandemic and put people at more risk than necessary.
Trump had already been known to be conman before he was elected. Everything we learned since only put more details on that fact.
They did exist, were 6+ months and several stages into trials & were given temporary authorization only 2 months latter.
She fomented fear & distrust about the safety of vaccines to score talking points in a debate. Not sure why you think she should get a free pass.
Trump admitted in interviews with Bob Woodward that he was lying about the pandemic. What more proof do you need for him to be completely untrustworthy on the topic?
About what?
> The vaccines weren't approved yet, end of story.
They weren't fully approved until about 6 weeks ago. They had gone through several massive trials and government approvals when she implied the vaccines were unsafe a year ago on national television.
(I will concede that, in implying that Trump would push people to get a vaccine before it was ready, she was wildly wrong.)
Exactly, she (the left) also politicized the vaccine. QED
The fear that Trump might push an unproven, unsatisfactory vaccine, was legitimate. Doing so would have damaged the actual vaccination campaign immensely.
Also, while "natural immunity" may be better in some cases, it is much more unpredictable. We can't even tell for how long that natural immunity is good enough at all.
Why? Germany and many other countries don't differentiate between forms of immunity.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-require-proof-c...
However, given the dysfunction in our system, and given that hybrid immunity seems much better than either vaccine-induced or disease induced[1], the decision to require vaccines for everybody does make sense.
Wouldn't this apply to getting a vaccine, what makes tracking a diagnostic test so much more difficult? People could just have a photo of their positive test, just like they have a photo of their vaccine card...
Looking at my vaccine card, there is nothing special like a ID number or even a signature from a doctor.
The stickers for each shot have the name of the vaccine and a lot #, so that might be the tough part, but the lot numbers are screwy. The first one is a ###A##-#A sequence and the second one is a ###A##A sequence. Not sure if there is a national tracking database on that part. No barcode for easy scanning so it probably isn't checkable.
My Dad's testing cards (The VA was doing a test for every appointment so he got tested three times in two weeks because he was having a non-COVID related issue) had a doctor's signature and the results.
Note: My last Moderna shot was in Feb, and its been radio silence and we passed the six month mark and are about to pass the eight month mark. I would hope they get done with whatever evaluation they are doing soon.
This kind of illogical policy gives fuel to antivaxers.
Also, this article provides some arguments based more on biology. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/prior-infection-vs-v...
There is such a thing as testing for neutralizing antibodies by testing the antibodies against the virus directly. But in general, all of the relevant tests seem to be more expensive and harder to standardize.
Every human body creates its own set of antibodies against the virus (or the vaccine). Starting from different strains of the virus, the potential for uncertainty is too great.
Too great for what? Even with 2 jabs, the immunity is <90% against Delta and research shows post-covid immunity is more effective.
Nor is it clear who actually has a "more effective" or even "sufficiently effective" immunity, given that the infection could be up to a year or more ago, and almost nobody knows exactly what strain they got. And no, you can't tell any of that easily, reliably or cheaply by antibody testing.
Proof of vaccination is the cheapest and most reliable proof of a reasonable chance of immunity.
Not OP, but if arguing against it is anti-vaxx, then I guess you should call me anti-vaxx and I'll call you unreasonable.
Anti-vaxers hate all vaccines. Most of this thread is about following actual science and practices used for other vaccines. If you've had it, then don't get the vaccine, otherwise get the vaccine.
And those who argue the most don't really argue about "they don't need the vaccine", but rather assume the vaccine is much bigger risk or damage than is at all reasonable. And that, yes, puts you very close to the "anti-vaxx" bubble.
Comirnaty had hundreds of millions of doses administered so far, and maybe - maybe - one woman died of myocarditis. This is nothing to potentially hundreds of thousands of prevented fatalities, much less the unpleasant to severe bouts of Covid-19.
Why is it riskier and to whom?
Nor does it actually prove any immunity against disease. You can only assume that these antibodies probe prior contact to the virus and that this prior contact resulted in a robust response. The strength of the immunity cannot be inferred from such titres...
It can have false negatives, making people needlessly take a vaccine, so everyone should take the vaccine in the name of equality?
Vaccine certificates neither prove you actually got the vaccine (though highly likely), nor do they prove any immunity against disease (though fairly likely).
With this level of arguments, I can argue noone should be permitted to take the vaccine.
You probably can't understand (and don't want to) why that is not the case for people who got infected at some unknown random point in the past and with an unknown, random variant of the Virus. And I don't care to explain it to you.
And you probably also don't want to understand why those lab tests aren't designed, regulated or approved as a proof of immunity. To be rigorous enough, probably every single lab would have to do control studies to find out if their tests predict immunity against reinfection.
Otherwise you're just arguing with double standards trying to console insecurity.
Next you are going to tell me you know of a vaccine-related car crash.
Please revisit your priors or who you put trust in, as they might as well lie.
Not sure what else to tell you. The math suggests this is unlikely. But here it is.
Edit: also, nice edit changing it from "next I'll tell you that car accidents are marked as COVID deaths." I didn't say that and have no data on that so I appreciate you changing it.
The odds that 5 people in a row have such serious side effect is 1/10^25. That is equivalent to tossing 83 coins in a row and getting all heads.
Which is more likelier. 1/10^25 or that you have false information regarding this. : )
Edit, here's some corrections:
This isn't 5 people in a row who had issues, it's 5 people within 4 nodes of distance in their social network. 4 nodes of distance is a lot of people, probably around 200,000 - 2,000,000.
The odds of having severe complications from the vaccine are about 1 in 100,000.
Therefore, everyone should expect to have 2-20 people within 4 nodes of their social network to have severe complications from the vaccine.
The mistake is not realizing the absolutely massive amount of people within 4 nodes of distance in your social network.
The other massive issue I see here is that there should also be somewhere around 500 covid deaths in the same pool of people that produced these 5 people with vaccine complications. The fact that they are focused on the 5 and not the 500 speaks heavily to their biases.
Keep in mind, all of this also assumes that what they're saying is 100% accurate, and these complications were definitely caused by the vaccine, and were not a coincidence. In truth, for every 1 person that has complications with the vaccine, 10-100x had the unlucky coincidence of something bad occurring that would have happened even if they hadn't gotten the vaccine.
There are around 200 strokes per 100 000 people per year [1].
And number of "heart issues" is even more, only deaths because of heart issues are around ~170 per 100k people per year.
Correlation is not causation.
[1] https://www.world-stroke.org/assets/downloads/WSO_Global_Str...
Same guy as before. I know of two people who temporarily lost taste and I heard of one person who died from COVID, a coworker's uncle.
You can rationalize this however you like, but these are the cases I'm aware of.
Definition of social circle is "A social circle is a group of socially interconnected people". I doubt anyone would complain about having a small social circle if it contained 2M people. :)
> My daughter's bf's friends mom
"My dad's coworker" - 2 steps
"my wife's brothers" - 2 steps
"My daughter's bf's friends mom" - 4 steps
"A friend" - 1 step
He might have a small social circle, but even a small circle is going to explode exponentially when you start hoping outwards. By the 4th jump, you're going to start seeing extreme numbers regardless of how small your personal social circle is.
Thanks.
What you have calculated:
(using 4 deaths at 1e-6 odds, because it's simpler and still gives 10x better odds at 1e-24)
Taking 4 death row inmates, jabbing them with AstraZeneca and expecting all 4 of them to die.
What you have not calculated:
Jabbing 1e9 people, 10k of them developing serious issues (expected prior) and there being a multi-hop connection between 5 of them. Two of them actually being brothers (familial clustering), and some with issues likely more prevalent so not even from the 10k group (1/1e5 cutoff).
The implied qualification of - there exists a HN-er so divide by 1e9 to get odds - is nowhere close to accounting for the additional degrees of freedom from the social graph.
You might not believe in democracy, but this is still a better system than autocracy. Even if you were right (hint: you're not), this is setting a very dangerous precedent than can and will be abused down the line.
Legal requirements are shaped by such "conveniences" all the time. Of course you wouldn't need a driver's license if you could argue with a police officer at a traffic stop that you are qualified to drive, had no DOIs etc. It's a lot easier though to require a driving test and a current license.
Same thing with the vaccination.
> how complicated the testing is or how many health providers and labs there are.
AFAIK, you can actually test blood reactivity to virus protein, proving a positive.
I'm not sure how you would prove that a person actually got vaccinated and it wasn't the case of doctor pouring vaccine down the drain, someone else taking the vaccine instead etc.
And yes, standardizing such testing, as complicated and expensive as it is, across all the relevant labs across the country would be a bureaucratic nightmare.
I'm not going to engage with your bullshit about doctors faking vaccinations.
Fake vaccinations[3], including fake certificates are popular, especially when they are forced. If you want a fake vaccination, I know a guy who knows a guy. Point is - it's not bullshit.
Yes, checking certificates is easier than testing for antibodies. While harder, I still think antibody tests would have less false positives and I most certainly don't think the relative easiness to administer vaccines is a good reason to require everyone to take them, even when they are more immune then those who only got the vaccine.
A friend had an antibody test as he already had covid and didn't want to go for a vaccine. It was no big deal.
[1] https://www.covid.is/sub-categories/travel-to-and-within-ice...
[2] https://www.landlaeknir.is/um-embaettid/greinar/grein/item43...
I don't even know how Iceland's health system is organized. But it would be a good bet that it is light years ahead of the mess of the 52 states plus territories and whatever! Much different story.
Just look at the first paragraph:
> he stated that these measures were necessary to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” But isn’t the vaccine itself supposed to be what protects the vaccinated? Not well enough, apparently. So whose interests are served by mandating a leaky vaccine that prevents neither infection nor transmission of a disease that is chiefly dangerous to people over 75 or with serious preexisting medical conditions?
Any competent scientist could easily explain that even with an extremely effective vaccine (which Pfizer and Moderna are, at least in relation to virtually any other vaccine, not the "leaky vaccine" he wants to imply), risk will still be high if there is widespread community transmission. This is not a difficult concept to understand, it's simply basic math with any vaccine that has less than 100% effectiveness (i.e. all of them).
Besides, I've always interpreted more of "protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated" is that our ICUs we're very recently filled to capacity overwhelmingly due to unvaccinated people getting sick, and that has serious negative consequences on everyone.
We do know that a vaccination after recovery results in even better immunity than natural immunity alone.
So it's much cheaper to just vaccinate them and KNOW they are immune, rather than indulge in a massive bureaucratic nightmare about test results...
So yes, to me it sounds massively more complicated and expensive than just getting two harmless vaccinations.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
According to oft cited data early on, many people were naturally resistant (perhaps not immune) from similarly packaged (viral envelope) coronaviruses with less dangerous infections, including a 2019-2020 season variant of the common cold.
I don't see those articles anymore. It was also supported by data (and cited by clinicians including at the Mayo Clinic) that folks with current MMR vaccinations and the tuberculosis vaccination given in India tended to test as resistant.
Anyway, just data points from real medical data at a research institute of international reknown not cited...
"Covid Confusion at the CDC"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-breakthrou...
"...The CDC’s failure to report meaningful data has left policy makers flying blind. In the absence of good data to answer the basic questions Americans have been asking, political opinions have filled the vacuum. Strong data might have prevented much of the polarization over Covid.
Sound data from the CDC has been especially lacking on natural immunity from prior Covid infection. On Aug. 25, Israel published the most powerful and scientifically rigorous study on the subject to date. In a sample of more than 700,000 people, natural immunity was 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic infections..."
"...Despite this evidence, U.S. public health officials continue to dismiss natural immunity, insisting that those who have recovered from Covid must still get the vaccine. Policy makers and public health leaders, and the media voices that parrot them, are inexplicably sticking to their original hypothesis that natural immunity is fleeting, even as at least 15 studies show it lasts..."
"...The CDC did put out a study on natural immunity last month, forcefully concluding that vaccinated immunity was 2.3 times better than natural immunity. The CDC used these results to justify telling those with natural immunity to get vaccinated.
But the rate of infection in each group was less than 0.01%, meaning infections were exceedingly rare in the short two-month time period the agency chose to study. This is odd, given there are more than a year of data available. Moreover, despite having data on all 50 states, the CDC only reported data from Kentucky. Was Kentucky the only state that produced the desired result? Why else exclude the same data from the other 49 states?
Some public health officials are afraid to acknowledge natural immunity because they fear some will choose infection over vaccination. But leaders can encourage all Americans who aren’t immune to get vaccinated and be transparent with the data at the same time..."
"Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections"
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
-------------------------
Conclusions:
"This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant."
-------------------------
Author lost me there, I'm afraid.
Although regional numbers vary of course, in my state the death rate by county has averaged between 0.0004 and 0.0032 percent.
Or, in decimal notation, 0.000004-0.000032
These numbers were calculated based on the Covid data repository maintained by the New York Times (https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data) and US Census data (http://www.census.gov/).
0.000004 * 320,000,000 = 1,280 deaths for the entire USA. Your higher estimate yields 10,240 deaths. In reality we’ve had at least 700,000 deaths.
For those who are infected, the naive Case Fatality Rate is about 1-2%. See for example, https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid There are reasons to suspect the real rate is lower in several countries - many places under test cases, so the denominator in deaths/cases is too small.
Additionally, this rate isn’t static - we were seeing upwards of 10% death rates before effective treatments became known and available.
Since 30 to 40 percent of humans experience no illness with this thing the denominator can be quite different depending on what you use for it. Notwithstanding that...
John's Hopkins Website https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda759474...
USA
Total Cases Total Deaths
44,318,179 712,975 1.6%
This is with oxygen support and whatever treatments have been used.
In Mexico where health care seems harder to access
Total Cases Total Deaths
3,720,545 281,958 ~7.6%
So IF you get sick and you don't have modern medicine it's a serious disease.
IF you are one of the lucky 30..40% it's a piece of cake. Flip a coin.
So if we correct by that 40% factor the USA goes to 1% death rate or roughly 10X influenza.
Mexico becomes 4.5%. Not insignificant.
Also not necessarily in the first or second wave...
What stands out is the authors’ favor of natural immunity being better than vaccination.
It may well be, but it has this small caveat that you need to have had the virus to become naturally immune. E.g. you need to take that 1-2% of not surviving entirely, and if too many people take that chance at the same time, even higher.