Look, the risks are pretty low for younger people, but from a population level every extra bit of immunity helps to reduce the likelihood of health care system collapse (which has been the goal throughout the pandemic).
Protection from Omikron quickly wanes. At what point does that "extra bit of immunity" justify heart injury? We're talking about roughly 1 in 10000 doses administered causing Myocarditis in a young male. We don't know if the risk increases after each dose, but preliminary data suggests that it may:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v...
The study also shows that there was practically no increase in risk for the third shot (though with a fairly wide CI), so it's possible the risk may just depend on whether someone is immunonaive or not.
The risk is given by the FDA as up to 1:14285 (males aged 12-17) for the second dose:
https://www.fda.gov/media/154869/download
However, a study from Hong Kong found an incidence of up to 1:2700 in the second dose (males aged 12-17):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34849657/
What we don't know is whether a vaccination would actually prevent Myocarditis in a breakthrough infection. These risks may well not be mutually exclusive. In any case, the risks are not directly comparable unless you assume 100% PCR-confirmed infection risk over six months, which is of course unrealistic.
> In any case, the risks are not directly comparable unless you assume 100% PCR-confirmed infection risk over six months, which is of course unrealistic.
I do wonder how unrealistic it is with Omicron, but maybe we'll get lucky and Omicron's less likely to cause myocarditis.
[1]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...
Has America tried addressing COVID that way, increasing the number of doctors?
The amount of education doctors get is harmful. It actually makes them worse at their job. It's effectively a form of hazing by AMA.
There's a combinatorial explosion of effects and side effects in the human body. It's important to learn and memorize, and memorization is undervalued, but not to that extent. It's like memorizing optimal solutions to traveling salesman instances. Other times it's like memorizing a times table of the three-digit numbers. That is a waste of time and will make you a much worse mathematician.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...
And that's after fewer people who are vaccinated catch the virus, and there's more aborted infections and asymptomatic infections after vaccination.
All of those studies use PCR Ct values as proxies for viruses and compare vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals with similar symptom severity, and it turns out that correlates at peak because symptoms are on average due to antigen loading. Those studies aren't very good at showing how effective vaccination is at preventing transmission. They just show that its nonzero.
As I have stated elsewhere in this thread, the rate of vaccine escape has gone up by about 5x, (from 6% to 30%), but that's still much better than one would get from no vaccination.
I can't see how it could spread any faster than it already does through vaccinated people. A few people there being unvaccinated wont make a difference.
This is the big one. Conditional on symptoms the viral load may be similar betwee vax/no vax, but if the vax have much less probability of getting symptoms then all is good.
I honestly don't understand how there wouldn't be protection from the vaccine. It's not a sterilising vaccine, but it does offer protection.
In other words, once infected, there is no reduction. How effective are these boosters against Omikron infection, weeks and months down the line?
With vaccine and booster shots, both require a similar amount of hospital resources.
The current way is simply not sustainable.
I think your concern is based on the heightened risk of myocarditis, right?
My understanding (mostly from [0], made by a UK cardiologist) is that the danger of myocarditis from the vaccine is higher than the danger of myocarditis from COVID only for males under the age of 30 who receive a Moderna shot. For every other case, the vaccine is an improvement (so males under 30 should get Pfizer/BioNTech, which is the government recommendation at the moment in my country).
People should be free to choose booster shots, those who are worried can continue to get booster shots.
In essence the same system we have with the flu is what we should have with Corona.
And then we can focus on some of the bigger problems such as Global Warming.
Funny how that got dropped from the spotlight, I didn’t even notice.
I don't see the point written anywhere so I suppose I did.
In my opinion, people should get the vaccine as long as the harm of not having it is greater than the harm of having it. Adverse reactions are very uncommon and unvaccinated people are at heightened risk of hospitalisation (even under 40s) so the balance tips in favour of the vaccine. The booster seems like a good idea due to Omicron.
> People should be free to choose booster shots, those who are worried can continue to get booster shots.
I do agree that people should have a choice to take it or not.
However just as I believe the right to free speech doesn't mean I'm obliged to listen, I believe the right to choose not to be vaccinated (or receive a booster) doesn't mean I'm obliged to be around you. That is, I think it's fine for participation to be refused to people based on their vaccination status (though I support say testing as an alternative).
This doesn’t make sense either. You are already free not to participate. You can’t demand non-participation. Especially as it is not proven that vaccination prevents transmission.
Too bad the health systems couldn't come up with one tiny sugar pill that would confer 100% protection against all variants for the next 100 years. The are asking us to take 3 shots, the horror!
I mean yes, that's still sort of the point.
There's still probably about 10% of the population which is unvaccinated and unexposed. If they all wind up catching Omicron in the next 2-3 months (due to its ability to reinfect and ignore neutralizing antibodies to travel through the population to find those still-vulnerable hosts) then the fraction of them winding up in the hospital will be sufficient to knock over the hospital system again. We didn't have any excess capacity in our medical system when this started, and we have less now.
The population's tolerance for any sort of behavioral changes is low, and the unvaccinated aren't listening to anyone, so the real only remaining lever to pull is recommending boosters to try to provide some level of protection against disease and transmission over the next couple of months in order to flatten the curve yet again.
The modelling estimates that I've read though are that we're at about 90% of the population being exposed (depends somewhat widely on vaccination status and how hard the area was hit by Delta though), so we're just about done with the pandemic. Omicron should mostly finish the job that Delta started of finding all the holdouts and burning through all the dry wood in the population. In the meantime though that last 10% is enough to put the medical system under too much stress again.
Now we have 1/10th that by your estimate. Why wouldn't we be under significantly less strain?
This UK report[1] does show a corrected Hazard Ratio of 0.76 relative to Delta, but more than half of this group seems to have had a previous infection. Not sure what it would look like if you exclude them.
[1]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...
And Omicron is able to reinfect through the recovered/vaccinated population and we're not taking any precautions at all now so the rate of infections is through the roof.
Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/28/omicron-is-not...
"Omicron is “not the same disease we were seeing a year ago” and high Covid death rates in the UK are “now history”, a leading immunologist has said."