I'm generally on board with vaccines, and am myself currently fully vaccinated, however, this has just become a condition of my employment at _a very large tech company_. So the possibility that this definition is completely negotiable and shifting like the sands makes me uncomfortable.

you do realize that the public school system in america had had pseudo-mandatory vaccines for a while now right?

In fact, the list of vaccines required has changed over time even!

Somehow we all managed to cope with that for the past 20 or so years….

Required vaccines for school children are for diseases that affect school children. Not to protect old people or people with co-morbidities from a diseases that has little to no impact on young healthy people. Asking children to be a shield is immoral.

That, plus most of those vaccines were tested for 13+ years before becoming mandatory. Polio was an outlier at 6 years. The cost benefit analysis made sense in that case given how destructive polio is for kids.

Speaking of polio vaccines, the field trials for polio involved ~1.83 million children, recorded 518 cases of paralytic polio and demonstrated a 71% reduction in paralytic polio. The mRNA covid vaccine clinical trials involved ~2000 children and recorded no severe covid. Surely polio vaccines and mRNA covid vaccines for kids are just the same thing because people dressed up in white coats were involved in both cases.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/30169...

The polio vaccines had problems and caused it in some people. Improvements in manufacturing removed that danger.

Pseudo is doing a lot of work in your reply, as there as always been a very easy exemptions, religious or otherwise. The recent movement has been too close those exemptions (see maine & the supreme court), and so now this resembles force more than procedural hoops.

What about the idea that your dependency on your health protection could be affected by things like availability, quality issues, etc?

My wife is a diabetic, and I absolutely cringe at the thought that her insulin supply could be limited or tainted.

My wife didn't have a choice about being dependent on her medicine. But you did.

I don't mean to be callous but I'm not sure I'm drawing a direct line here? How does my comment imply I want some interruption in your wife's insulin supply?

> How does my comment imply I want some interruption in your wife's insulin supply?

It doesn't. And I made no such suggestion about wanting interruption in medicines.

I merely questioned the wisdom of voluntarily making oneself dependent on an uninterrupted, untainted supply of medicine.

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021031...

Ah! I see then we agree.

I'm just waiting for natural immunity to be accepted. I don't understand why I have to take a second (albeit small) risk.

In Hungary, natural immunity is accepted. I have a number of friends who are fully immune from natural infection. We traveled a bit this year and they had huge hassles at borders because their immunity cards were only accepted in Hungary. Yet I, with only one J&J shot, had no problems at all, despite very likely having far weaker immunity. It seems a bit silly to force them to get vaccinated when they're already immune. I wish governments would switch tactics from trying to force people to get vaccinated to trying to persuade people to want to voluntarily get immunity in the safest way possible.

This is why I hope the greenpass certs just leak. You cannot as easily withdraw them since that would mean vaccinated people would need to get a new cert.

To be honest, Covid policies are driven by fear. It is a serious disease, but the response is as bad as against the war on terror.

Most of the EU accepts natural immunity, few want one shot of you want to travel without quarantine.

Which is a problem that you need a shot even if you had no symptoms. I won't fly until this craze is over and I am doubly vaccinated. Certainly not getting a pass. They will demand another shot in half a year anyway and I don't even have a crystal ball to look into the future.

The EU demands only one booster shot if you have been previously infected which seems sane. Viral loads vary heavily amongst infected people.

For some the virus apparently had little effects. As variants remain a potential threat then, asking for one shot to ensure some baseline immunity seems reasonable.

As a general rule, it seems sane, yes. But I have a friend who is a nurse, she got bad COVID during the first wave, but fully recovered. Later, she got vaccinated because she was required to for work. The vaccination left her with POTS (racing heart rate and dizziness every time she stands). I'm not saying this is common or likely, but what do we gain by forcing people to get a vaccine who don't need it? Once someone has immunity, it should be their choice if they want an additional vaccine.

> but what do we gain by forcing people to get a vaccine who don't need it?

They need it. Immunity to the variants is far from guaranteed. We can’t afford to let people spread the disease. Nobody wants to end up with the USA death numbers.

This will be just like the Patriot act. If you accept it they will keep pushing all kinds of drugs on you. You must resist, with violence if necessary.

My concern is that the vaccine may be affecting the ability of our immune system to fight off other diseases. See the following:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/26/1046432...

Doesn't mean the vaccines have weakened people's immune system. This is just the backlog of people avoiding medical treatment due to the considerably increased risk it posed.

Dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051078

> I understand the booster is the same formula as the existing shots. Which means the boosters will do as well or worse than the original two shots.

The booster being the same formula does not, in any respect, mean that. There are quite a few vaccines that are given in multiple similar or identical doses and provide stronger and longer lasting protection after the later sides.

My guess (purely a guess) is that the actual problem with the Pfizer vaccine is that the sides are too close together. The Moderna doses are spaced farther apart and (preliminary, unreviewed) results suggest that it works just fine even six months after the second dose.

I would not be at all surprised if a booster dose of either mRNA vaccine after six months gives essentially lifelong protection. I also would not be surprised if it didn’t.

Bookmarking this so we can have this delightful conversation 6 months down the road when chances are the boosters prove to be just as effective as the original shots.

Early indicators from Israel, which is ahead of the booster curve:

> Israel Is Preparing for Possible Fourth Covid Vaccine Dose

> “We don’t know when it will happen; I hope very much that it won’t be within six months, like this time, and that the third dose will last for longer,” Health Ministry Director General Nachman Ash said in an interview with Radio 103FM.

> Israel, which has mainly used the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE vaccine, has so far inoculated about 2.8 million people with a third dose after beginning a drive to administer booster shots in August. Health officials have said the effects of the initial Covid-19 shots weaken five months after inoculation, making boosters necessary.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-12/israel-pr...

You’re comparing traditional vaccines to mRNA vaccines here. An mRNA “vaccine” is closer to a biologic than to a traditional vaccine. We’re told they’re not “gene therapy”, instead the Moderna CEO has called them “information therapy”.

Anyway, I’m rambling. In a nutshell, they shouldn’t be thought of as the same technology because well, they’re not.

If you read up on the standard CDC vaccine schedule, you will discover many different vaccines with many different technologies. There is no such thing as a “standard” vaccine.

IPV , OPV, the DTaP vaccines, the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, and measles are all different technologies. They’re all biologics, though.

It’s flat out wrong to say vaccines do next to nothing against the delta variant. You can trivially examine this but have chosen not to. My state, Connecticut ,publishes weekly in depth reports that break down cases. Nearly 100% of infections are delta. You’re about 5x safer worth a vaccine than without - for catching COVID, hospitalization, and death. 2/3 of the cases in CT are amongst the less than 30% unvaccinated. CDC dates are similar.

https://data.ct.gov/Health-and-Human-Services/COVID-19-DPH-R...

This is a good report, thanks for sharing. Though would be more informative to also share raw data tables for all the charts.

I dug a bit to double-check the hospitalization rate. The Oct 28 report claims (page 7) "18 Times higher risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19". That's a pretty spectacular number, how did they derive it?

1. The report says "One hundred ninety-one patients are currently hospitalized with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19; of these, 134 (70.2%) are not fully vaccinated.".

2. I found the vaccination rate as 67%, using the dashboard at https://data.ct.gov/stories/s/CoVP-COVID-Vaccine-Distributio....

3. I do a little bit of math.

  pop_rate = pop_cases / pop_count
  pop_cases = pop_case_rate * cases_total
  pop_count = pop_count_rate * pop_total

  risk = unvax_rate / vax_rate 
       = (unvax_rate / unvax_count_rate) / (vax_rate / vax_count_rate)
       = (70.2 / 33) / (29.8 / 67)
       = 4.8x

Your number (5x) is close to what the data indicates compared with what the report claims (18x). Perhaps someone with better fifth grade math skills can riddle me out...

>This puts tremendous evolutionary pressure on the virus to mutate, which has already happened. Now we have the Delta variant which the vaccines do next to nothing against. Why? Because the virus has obviously found a way around our vaccine induced immune response.

Except Delta emerged in India before there was any evolutionary pressure causes by vaccines and the vaccines still work good for Delta.

>Natural immunity looking better every day eh?

Natural immunity is not immune to evolutionary pressure either

Note that natural immunity provides even more pressure to mutate because it's likely to be targeted against more unstable parts of the virus. We are already seeing this in action--while natural immunity provides very good protection against reinfection *with that strain* it doesn't do so well against other strains. The good vaccines (not the killed-virus Chinese garbage) deals with variants better than prior infection.

And the vaccine *does* provide protection against Delta--you're less likely to get it and if you do get it it generally is less serious. Being vaccinated cuts your death rate 10x.

Natural immunity isn't going to happen, we have seen far too many cases of reinfection with different variants. The more we see the more hopeless the death cult approach looks.

>We are already seeing this in action--while natural immunity provides very good protection against reinfection with that strain it doesn't do so well against other strains.

Please post some proof to corroborate any of this. I assume you’re talking about COVID strains here?

>Natural immunity isn’t going to happen, we have seen far too many cases of reinfection with different variants.

Again, source desperately needed here. I’m more than willing to change my take but only with hard data, not sweeping generalizations based on a misunderstanding of how natural immunity works.

I didn't save links, a couple of recent reports:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/delta-variant-what...

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr...

We see a lot of data from Israel because they made a deal with Pfizer early on to trade early access to vaccine for allowing Pfizer access to anonymized health records about vaccination and infection. Thus they have some of the best data around on the effect of the Pfizer shot on a population scale.