Herd immunity? One of my responders says that's impossible and the only way to be safe is get vaccinated. You are essentially saying "hey just let it happen no vaccination needed".
What is a HN reader to make of these contrasting viewpoints?
How about this given current public health guidelines? Get vaccinated, or stop complaining when us vaccinated want to deny you entry. Wear a mask, or also be denied access. The difference between obesity and a deadly virus is that the deadly virus is directly and immediately affecting me by your choices. I can pay higher health insurance premiums, but I don't want to die.
I neither stated nor implied this. Please don't lie about or distort what other people have posted.
This post is about a study which found most COVID hospitalizations are in people with four specific comorbidities that are major public health issues that are often pooh-poohed when raised.
> Get vaccinated, or stop complaining when us vaccinated want to deny you entry.
Thanks for your preaching. I don't know if you're making demands of me specifically or speaking generally, but as I mentioned, I traveled halfway around the world to get vaccinated.
The vaccines do not provide sterilizing immunity and the science is increasingly clear that the vaccines do not stop transmission to the extent everyone had hoped for. If you are in a high-risk group to begin with, you are still at higher risk of a bad outcome if you get a breakthrough infection.
Finally, once again, your "get vaccinated or else!" comment totally ignores the fact that authorities are trying to compel people who have natural immunity to get vaccinated, even when the science is already fairly clear that their immunity is robust, strong and lasting.
> Wear a mask, or also be denied access
Messaging has been a constant problem throughout the pandemic. A lot of people got vaccinated primarily because they were told vaccines offered the only and quickest path back to normalcy.
As it has become clear that the vaccines don't stop people from catching and transmitting SARS-CoV-2, inconsistent guidance around masking, and flip-flops on masking rules, have only caused people to lose trust in public health authorities.
It doesn't help that the people now telling everyone they need to mask up even when vaccinated are frequently caught breaking their own rules.
> The difference between obesity and a deadly virus is that the deadly virus is directly and immediately affecting me by your choices.
If you are in not in a high-risk group, your odds of dying from COVID are minimal. If you are vaccinated and not in a high-risk group, your odds of dying are miniscule.
Once again, the vaccines do not provide sterilizing immunity and do not prevent you from getting and transmitting the virus.
People with comorbidities frequently associated with poor lifestyle choices affect everyone as they make up the majority of the people being hospitalized. Overwhelmed hospitals have resulted in individuals being unable to access non-emergency healthcare and they are one of the primary reasons we're told we can't just "live with the virus" even in places where vaccination rates are high.
> I can pay higher health insurance premiums, but I don't want to die.
Huh? Under the ACA, individuals cannot be denied coverage or charged higher premiums for being obese, diabetic, etc. And once again, if you're not in a high-risk group, your odds of dying in a car accident are probably higher than your odds of dying from COVID.
Yes, I pay higher premiums because the risk pool is large and includes high risk high cost individuals even though I'm low risk. I can afford it. Me. I can't afford dying (got dependents?), or long covid, which IMO worse than death in severe cases. The messaging for vaccination has been straightforward enough for me: I get it to protect me, you get it to protect me if only for herd immunity. Yes vaccine effectiveness fades over time, but you can get a booster. And, I think in places where the vaccination rate fraction is over 90% (arbitrary high threshold) things will get back to normal.
Good news. There's early evidence that the vaccines don't provide nearly as much protection against long COVID:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v...
> On the other hand, previous vaccination does not appear to be protective against several previously documented outcomes of COVID-19 such as long-COVID features, arrhythmia, joint pain, type 2 diabetes, liver disease, sleep disorders, and mood and anxiety disorders. The narrow confidence intervals (related to the high incidence of these outcomes post-COVID) rules out the possibility that these negative findings are merely a result of lack of statistical power. The inclusion of death in a composite endpoint with these outcomes rules out survivorship bias as an explanation.
With all due respect, your comments suggest that you really don't understand the limitations of the vaccines. It seems you think they provide a lot more protection than they do and your mention of herd immunity is especially ill-informed. Discussion of herd immunity has all but died because the vaccines are non-sterilizing and do not prevent transmission of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is well on its way to becoming an endemic virus.
> And, I think in places where the vaccination rate fraction is over 90% (arbitrary high threshold) things will get back to normal.
You should consider moving then because this certainly isn't going to happen in the US. And every 3-6 months when VE wanes in large numbers of vaccinated cohorts, you'll see spikes in breakthrough infections (where testing is being done to even catch them) and pushes for people to keep getting boosted. Most likely, the number of people willing to boost indefinitely will decrease as time goes on.
Things are going to get back to normal in places where people accept living with the virus.
Getting vaccinated and wearing masks every 6 months and wearing masks indoors in public is living with the virus.
Responses like this are sadly typical. What is your aim? To shoot down a legitimate discussion of risk factors like obesity and poor cardiovascular health, which are disturbingly common in the US?
Calling into question the sanity of firing large numbers of unvaccinated people, many of whom will have natural immunity, is not a proposal to fire fat people. What is your purpose for trying to suggest that it is?
> In seriousness, the whole point of vaccination is public health, which means you're not doing it just for yourself but also for the person who's working next to you.
I recognize the value of vaccines and traveled halfway around the world to get vaccinated thank you very much.
But the COVID vaccines are not sterilizing. The data shows that they can reduce transmission of the virus, which is great, but this effect has very real limits that it is dishonest to overlook given what we know today.
Case in point: a new UK study found that, per the BBC, "individuals who have had two vaccine doses can be just as infectious as those who have not been jabbed"[1]. In the study, a vaccinated index case transmitted the virus to unvaccinated household members 38% of the time to vaccinated household members 25% of the time.
That's a meaningful reduction but not anywhere near enough reduction to pretend that vaccination is a panacea for stopping transmission.
Finally, your comment totally ignores the part of my comment that mentioned natural immunity, which the science increasingly says is robust, strong and lasting[2].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59077036
[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...