COVID is almost certainly never going away. It will become endemic, joining the other endemic viruses such as the couple hundred cold viruses (including 4 other coronavirus that were once deadly pandemics) and the various flu viruses we reluctantly live with. Something we all get several times over our lifetime, that most of the time just make most of us pretty miserable for up to a week or so.
How many people die during the transition from pandemic to endemic depends greatly on how risky it is to acquire your first immunity, and how strong that first immunity is when it comes to preventing hospitalization and death. The lowest risk way to acquire that first immunity is by vaccination. It's also the way that provides the highest chances of strong immunity--when you acquire it by an actual infection it depends on how severe the first infection was.
So yes, mass vaccination gives us the best chances of returning to normal sooner with less death along the way.
So does an omicron infection compared to delta, even to the unvaccinated. I am not an anti vaxxer, I have two doses of Pfizer in me. The vaccines are simply going to be obsolete in a matter of weeks/months because everyone is going to have gotten and recovered from omnicron at that point. It’s that contagious, it’s futile to try to avoid it. Get vaccinated if you are scared and move on with your life.
The chances of hospitalization if you have omicron are lower than they were if you had another variant, and same with the chances of death, but the factor by which they are lower with omicron is quite a bit lower than the factor by which omicron is more contagious.
The net result is that omicron is greatly increasing the number of hospitalizations way past what they saw with delta, which is overloading hospitals in way too many places in the US.
I'm vaccinated and boosted, but that doesn't help much if I get in a car accident or have a heart attack and I can't get treatment because the hospitals are full of COVID patients.
Want to point out this was your response to the question, "Since the vaccinations are stopping the spread?" in case you wanted to re-read your answer.
1) creating a standard that was never used by the proponents
2) criticizing the made up standard to discredit the proponents
on a medical level, it is clear this wasn't to stop the spread, it was to slow the spread as vaccinated infected have smaller viral load for shorter time period compared to unvaccinated infected, as well as reduce severity and deaths of those that contained a viral load.
On who we call the "proponents" for this topic, I will concede that I've heard many local influencers, radio hosts and others reduce this to "stop the spread" in reference to any viral mitigation measure, such as masks, distancing, quarantine, and vaccination all part of an amorphous overarching program. But its clear that the people that latch on to "stop the spread" as a reference to the vaccine as a technical term advancement would never have looked at the technical supporting data due to either trust issues with the institution or plain ignorance of how it works. The researchers and their research has always been clear about what performance to expect from the vaccines (except duration of effectiveness which is unknown for both the vaccines and natural immunity, compounded by the variants)
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...
A lot of the consternations fall apart, to me, when the aggregate response reaches the same conclusion, something impossible to be done by any guiding hand due to geopolitics.
Does it though? The other countries that went all in on MRNA vaccines obviously don't have an interest in finding more problems with them.
I have yet to see a single good study that determines risk/benefit stratified by age and risk factors. This rather new study shows that risk of Myocarditis is higher with vaccination rather than infection, in males under 40:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.21.21268209v...
Furthermore, the risk appears to increase with each dose. Yet, many countries are now advising all the 12-17 year-olds to get a third dose - to speculatively decrease an already minor risk. This suggests to me that proper precaution is not actually being pursued, neither in the US nor elsewhere.
Decent example but this is a separate issue than the premise I started with or replied to.
I think myocarditis is a good example of remaining objective with data. At risk people know what they need to do and it is no longer selfish for the rest of us to not help that. Nobody can kill as many grandmas as Cuomo’s nursing homes, its impossible now and a booster also assumes additional risk whereas the initial doses did not.
I disagree. The question is, is the the system broken or not? To me, this example suggests that it is indeed broken. Then, did it just break or was it broken all along? Is it possible that we mandated vaccinations to millions of people that were more likely to be harmed than helped by these vaccines? If so, would we know, eventually?
The status quo in the pharma industry is to never do more trials than absolutely necessary, lest you risk discovering something that runs counter to business interest. I suspect a very similar attitude would exist among regulatory bodies that risk discovering that it has been advocating a potentially harmful medical intervention to people that didn't need it.
The only entities that have a vested interest in figuring this out are private health insurances. If these vaccines are worth taking, let them charge a premium for refusal.
No, we were repeatedly told that vaccines prevent both transmission and infection, and anyone trying to cynically rewrite history now is using a strawman argument.
The whole point of the OSHA vaccine mandate was to prevent spread. If it was just a matter of how severe the disease is to you, then there is no rationale for forcing people to take the vaccine or any of these mandates, anymore than there would be a rationale for a mandate to force people to lose weight or exercise more. The AMA said in its amicus brief: "the widespread use of those vaccines is the best way to keep COVID-19 from spreading within workplaces".[3]
Here is Biden: "You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations."[1]
Here is Fauci: Vaccinated people are "dead ends" for virus[2]
CDC director Rochelle Walensky: "Vaccinated people don't transmit the virus"[4]
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/ap-fact-check-biden-inflates-01184362...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...
[3] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21A244/206954/2021...
[4] https://fortune.com/2021/04/01/its-official-vaccinated-peopl...
[at a greater viral load than without the vaccines because all documents from Pzifer, Moderna, J&J, AstraZenaca, SinoPharm, and the people analyzing those documents made the same conclusion]
> on a medical level, it is clear this wasn't to stop the spread, it was to slow the spread as vaccinated infected have smaller viral load for shorter time period compared to unvaccinated infected, as well as reduce severity and deaths of those that contained a viral load.
this was my goal post, it has not moved.
The understanding I've come to (flavored by my media diet) is very similar to yours...It is just really hard to have a conversation with each other about events when we can't even agree on the base facts.
It'd be nice if we could figure out how to reduce that gap, especially because a lot of these things are simply facts, not opinions.
And that is not to say I am free from blind spots! I am not saying my media diet is the "right one" that gets to the truth, I know I have them, but I do try and reduce them as best I can.
They're helpful for preventing severe disease and death, for now -- this effect seems to be significantly offset by reduction in risk avoidance behaviours and government support for said behaviours.
The first gen vaccines do appear help somewhat with reducing infectivity period somewhat.. but once again this benefit is diluted when people are told to burn their source control (masks) and get back to the office.
We need better vaccines deliverable to mucosal membranes for infectious aerosol entry point protection and released under open source licensing. We also need better early treatments with sound scientific basis, and better post-acute-'recovery' sequelae treatments developed with the basis of a growing understanding of endothelial and immune pathology downstream of SARS2 infection.
Second from last but not least, we need efficacious airborne transmission interrupting non-pharmaceutical interventions that don't rely solely on individual behaviour. Finally, it would be nice to have fewer grifters and influencers blocking sound action while spreading nonsense.
People are causing the spread, not the vaccine.