Was that already the argument?
Those days are gone because of vaccine mandates.
* 70% asymptomatic
* 25% minor symptoms with a 2 week recovery
* 0.5% chance of infecting central nervous system
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/effective...
Yes, maybe. I think that there is no good data that supports that for people under 70 without co-morbidities.
> However, the point has also been made that being vaccinated helps prevent more serious illness[1] which in turn can help prevent hospitals from collapsing under the weight of the severely ill.
Recently I found out that in my country at the peak of the most deadly wave only 5% of patients in hospitals were admitted because of Covid.
It does not prevent transmission, it does not stop hospitals from being overfilled and it does not stop symptomatic disease. What is a good science-based reason for mandatory vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 for everyone?
The fact that you had mild symptoms, or any sort of symptoms for that matter, while vaccinated does not actually imply that you would have been substantially worse off without the vaccine, given the statistical likelihood of mild infection.
This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.
Omicron is 90% less deadly than delta for unvaccinated people and there is a 100% lower risk to need mechanical ventilation, according to this paper:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...
During the delta wave covid survivors had better immunization than people with only vaccination. This contradicts some of the mandates that are currently in place, such as in Germany, were people who previously recovered are still required to get a subsequent shot:
https://news.yahoo.com/natural-immunity-more-potent-vaccines...
> This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.
During the pandemic I looked up information about the public reaction to the Spanish Flu. It was almost exactly the same, including vaccines with unclear efficacy and anti-mask groups. However, the Spanish Flu killed up to 50 million people while the world's population was only 1.6 billion and it only took a couple of months.
Some non-clinical studies suggested a drop in transmission (e.g. CDC study in spring 2021 which examined healthcare workers who got the jab early and were tested weekly), but it's clear now they were just picking up a transient effect, months long but wearing off thereafter.
So the mRNA vaccines are doing exactly what they were trialled to do 1.5 years ago. What your local politicians and public health authorities misunderstood from that is their problem.
AND also my problem.
Did you get this from an official source? I mean, no-one should have stated this because it is simply not true, nor has been for most common vaccins out there. At least in my country none of the official sources nor epidemiologists nor virologists ever said this. They'd only go as close as stating 'can prevent transmission in xx% of cases' or something like that.
Are organizations still making policy decisions based on the specifics of the original application implications? Or from observation that it only notably reduces hospitalizations / symptom severity?
If the former is the case, that would warrant clarity, but I also have no idea what a resubmission process looks like. Is that a one week turnaround? Or is it six months with no vaccines being able to be distributed?
The vaccine helps to prepare your immune system to deal with the virus - in some cases that means it can fight it off entirely, or in other cases it will be able to fight it off quicker and your symptoms will be milder because your body is prepared.
> On November 30, 2020, ModernaTX (the Sponsor, also referred to as Moderna) submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) request to FDA for an investigational COVID-19 vaccine (mRNA-1273) intended to prevent COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
I realize that you don't want to admit having been so wrong about this for so long but the evidence is very clear that the vaccines are safe and effective:
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitali...
Here's a VAERS entry about a patient turning getting abducted by aliens and turning into the Incredible Hulk after the MMR vaccine. https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?IDNUMBER=221...
Reasoning from VAERS without controlled studies is, at best, like cutting the ends off a roast before you bake it because you heard your grandmother did it that way. At worst, it's like irradiating a spider and enticing it to bite you because you read once that somebody got spider powers that way.
Also VAERS is not the only data source we have for vaccine safety, it’s our hypothesis generation system. We have good data from the vaccine safety datalink system that let us actually quantify the risk of different side effects. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.15072
https://labeling.pfizer.com/ShowLabeling.aspx?id=14471&forma...
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 5 years of age and older.
https://www.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/eua-fact-sheet-...
> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINE, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 18 years of age and older.
https://www.fda.gov/media/146305/download
> You are being offered the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2. This Fact Sheet contains information to help you understand the risks and benefits of receiving the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, which you may receive because there is currently a pandemic of COVID-19.
The real question should be, why do you refuse to even just acknowledge basic facts right from the official EUAs? They are for prevention, not for lessening symptoms, and they simply are not preventing COVID-19 with Omicron.
> Note: Confirmed cases were determined by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and at least 1 symptom consistent with COVID-19 (symptoms included: fever; new or increased cough; new or increased shortness of breath; chills; new or increased muscle pain; new loss of taste or smell; sore throat; diarrhea; vomiting)
That’s kind of squishy, but I think it’s a clear distinction.
I agree that the effectiveness against symptomatic Covid is lower with omicron, but omicron also evades immunity from prior infection as well.
For Omicron? And even if. It is great if it is a result of my personal decision to get vaccinated. It is awful to force others to get vaccinated, especially if most claims regarding efficacy get weakened a lot over time and people ignore that. Vaccine mandates and mandatory passports everywhere have failed and we should be happy about that.
Who also supports forced vaccinations like in Rwanda?
https://www.dw.com/en/rwanda-forcibly-vaccinating-people-aga...
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/01/21/cdc-studies...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
As for Rwanda, that’s moving the goalposts — there are many things which the Rwandan government has done which most of us do not approve of.
I am only moving the goalpost back to its initial position. Vaccine mandates are draconian - at least when the data is so weak as for SARS-CoV-2.
No, you're conflating two separate things to try to make a weak case appear stronger. Part of living in a society is accepting restrictions on your personal choices which impact those around you. Vaccination mandates are one of the big public health success stories since they reduce spread, load on the medical system, and the cost to society of having to care for people who are no longer as productive. Polio was significant asymptomatic, too — 70% of people had no symptoms and 25% had only mild symptoms, with a fatality rate under 1% — but we almost eradicated it by using public health measures like requiring vaccination to attend schools.
The key difference is that these restrictions are linked to the activities which vaccines make safer: prior to the Republican Party choosing to politicize the issue, ~95% of American school children were vaccinated against common diseases. Someone who objected to that didn't have a paramilitary squad track them down, they just had to homeschool, not travel to many countries, etc. so they bore the cost of their decision rather than everyone else. That's a pretty important difference compared to what allegedly happened in some parts of Rwanda.
Like using Polio for making the case for mandatory SARS-CoV-2 vaccines look stronger?
Smallpox and measles mandates worked.
And which western/first world nations actually had COVID mandates? The US sure didn’t.
(Vaccine mandates) and (mandatory passports everywhere) have failed
> And which western/first world nations actually had COVID mandates? The US sure didn’t.
Germany, Austria, Australia, France, Italy, ...
How's that "wrong" or ignorant?
The t-cell response to infected cells learned from the vaccine, though, is very effective. Which is why vaccinated people still get infected (at a lower rate) but are many times less likely to get very sick, and almost none end up in ICU. The vaccines are effective.
When you do read the lengthy material at https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro... note that the approvals are based on fighting the disease. Reducing transmission — at which the vaccines were clearly highly effective prior to Omicron — is one part of that but an even more important part is preventing severe outcomes. Even with Omicron, the vaccines are highly effective at keeping you out of the hospital and even better at keeping you out of the ICU.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro...
> The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine is authorized to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 18 years of age and older.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211103065325/https://www.fda.g...
> The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and is now marketed as Comirnaty, for the prevention of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in individuals 16 years of age and older.
Again, they were approved for prevention. The applications were for prevention. The FDA is trying to rewrite history, but if you look at the actual applications then you can verify what I'm saying is correct.
SARS-COV-2 is a transmissible virus that causes the disease COVID-19.
In the medical jargon, disease and its causality are separate concepts (and this bifurcation honestly makes sense... There are quite a few diseases where the treatment is to regulate symptoms without any hope of doing anything to modify the underlying active agent other than wait out the immune system to deal with it). It is entirely possible for a therapy to "prevent disease" without reducing the transmission of the underlying virus that causes the symptoms that make up a disease.
It is unfortunate that because of the conflation of these ideas in the layman terms space, people misinterpreted what the vaccine was cleared to do. But blaming doctors or the FDA for that is like blaming computer engineers when users turn off their computer and then don't understand that everything in volatile memory wasn't saved to disk. "Where's my spreadsheet go? It was in the computer's memory, it should be here."
Also, prevention of the disease would mean that people are asymptomatic and/or that they aren't getting COVID. Hospitals in many areas are publishing data showing majority of people there for COVID are vaxxed. So much for prevention of the disease.
If you were paying attention, note the difference between saying it will prevent all retransmission versus reducing it, which is what happened. Also, try to compare what actual medical experts said as opposed to the political entertainers whose talking points you're repeating. The actual medical experts were quite clear on this, and Biden has been pretty clear that breakthrough infections are possible — hence the interest in masks to prevent spread and vaccination to mitigate the damage for the people who we know statistically will catch it.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/...
> Biden said Dec. 14 that people vaccinated for COVID-19 "do not spread the disease to anyone else."
I am pretty happy that the vax-mandaters are being taught a lesson by the virus. They would have pulled through otherwise.