Because the data shows they don't matter.
This is the same thing as deaths due to covid vs. deaths while positive to covid. Sure some people might have been miscounted as covid deaths but actually died due to cancer/car accident/whatever. Despite this the excess deaths over the past two years is much higher than the number of covid deaths; thus showing that miscounts must be a small minority which, in any case, is absolutely dwarfed by excess deaths not counted as covid deaths. It might even grow a little as testing improves but it still remains mostly irrelevant.
Likewise it may be that some people do not need a vaccination. However, we have a 30/70 split in number of covid hospitalizations, with 30 being vaccinated people, in countries where the split in the normal population is 90/10. This means that despite some unvaccinated people having had prior infection the vaccine reduces hospitalizations by 20x. Given this data the most effective strategy is to just vaccinate everyone without what is effectively a pointless distinction.
As the number of unvaccinated but protected people will grow (through a combination of more infections, more vaccinations and more deaths), the proportion above will revert to 90/10 and unvaccinated people will not be an issue anymore. For now however analyzing the proportion of naturally immune people among the unvaccinated is, again, mostly irrelevant.
Source? Because the CDC says otherwise.
> In the first full week of October, vaccinated New Yorkers with a prior Covid-19 case were 19.8 times less likely to catch the virus than their unvaccinated and uninfected peers, whereas people who were unvaccinated but previously infected were 14.7 times less likely, and vaccinated but uninfected New Yorkers were just 4.5 times less likely.
In other words, natural immunity alone can be up to 5X more protective than the vaccine alone, according to the CDC.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2022/01/19/cdc-prior-c...
That being said, your comment still doesn't make any sense. The people who would be substituting prior infection for a vaxpass would not be the dead ones, because dead people are not known for going to comedy shows, bars, or restaurants.
Ie, the claim is that "conditioned on being infected [and alive], a vaccine is superfluous". The [and alive] that you clarified is about as helpful as "and non-fictional"
Importantly it doesn’t account for the effect of boosters and looks at pre-omicron data.
That noted the best protection seems to be had by a combination of vaccination and prior infection, which is perhaps unsurprising.
Also other CDC studies suggest that natural immunity declines quicker than vaccine induced immunity (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm?s_cid=mm...).
Given these results it would seem like generally a good idea to get vaccinated, even if you have had prior infection.
Don't just read the summary. Look at figure 1:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm#F1_down
There are unvaccinated, uninfected people...and then there is everyone else. Once you have been infected or vaccinated, the difference between is so small as to be academic. And as the authors note, the importance of natural infection increased over time, as the virus escaped the vaccines:
"Importantly, infection-derived protection was higher after the Delta variant became predominant, a time when vaccine-induced immunity for many persons declined because of immune evasion and immunologic waning."
To your other claim:
> other CDC studies suggest that natural immunity declines quicker than vaccine induced immunity
No. That's not what that study said. First, it followed symptomatic infection, not severe illness. As we're seeing now, Omicron pretty handily bypasses vaccine-induced immunity to cause minor illness.
Also, methodologically, the study you're citing was bad. It only gave credit for natural immunity to those people with confirmed infections, which was/is an underestimate, and made vaccines look more effective than they are. A substantial fraction of the "only vaccinated" group almost certainly had undiagnosed covid infection.
This is shifting the goal. The disclaimers I cited come directly from the study and are highly relevant when comparing the effect of natural immunity vs vaccination.
> No. That's not what that study said. First, it followed symptomatic infection, not severe illness.
This doesn’t contradict what I said. The study gives evidence that natural immunity (to symptomatic infection) declines more quickly than vaccine induced immunity.
> Also, methodologically, the study you're citing was bad. It only gave credit for natural immunity to those people with confirmed infections, which was/is an underestimate, and made vaccines look more effective than they are.
One, the same effect would also have been present in the natural immunity group, as people may have been reinfected since their initial confirmed infection.
Two, this is largely irrelevant to the point I was making.
The statistical evidence suggests that even if you have had a previous confirmed infection, you’re still better off getting vaccinated.
Sure. And you'll continue to be better protected every time you get a booster, every 6 months, for the rest of your life. But all of us are going to stop getting boosters at some point. We're going to decide we're "immune enough", and go on with our lives, even though there will be some minute chance of getting Covid, from whichever variant is then around.
Many people with prior infection may feel they are "immune enough", and you can argue over the significance of the remaining risk, but ultimately that's a decision they make for themselves, just as all of us do in every facet of our lives every day.
No, it isn't. It's clarifying that there's a great big forest here, lest we get lost in the details of the spots on the bark beetles in one particular tree. The immunity granted by prior infection is at least on par with that of vaccination.
Moreover, I quoted directly from the study to explain why short-term squiggles in the lines at the bottom of the graph aren't worth dwelling upon: the vaccines are getting worse over time (against symptomatic infection), and the effect of natural immunity is gaining importance. This is exactly as you would expect for a virus that has evolved to partially escape the vaccine.
Regardless, these are minor differences. You can't reasonably argue that vaccination has a definitive advantage over natural infection. We should be counting both.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-cost-of-disparaging-na...
"Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization."
"Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant."
Classic NIH: Say there isn't enough data when challenged on a policy, then deliberately not study it. They did this for DECADES with cannabis.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/omicron-largely-evade... estimates that prior infection offered 85% protection against Delta but only 19% against Omicron.
Definitely not saying vaccines aren't important - they keep you out of hospital! But they don't prevent infection post Delta.
Look at this chart: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...
If you read to the bottom of the previous study I posted they addressed vaccine effectiveness too based on UK data. They work! Just make sure to get your booster.
In other words, it's 70-80% effective, which is pretty poor performance for a vaccine. So, can we please get an update that encodes the Omicron spike instead of trying to boost antibodies for a virus that's now extinct?
It’s a far cry from the apparently very popular myth that the vaccines no longer work at all.
The original target effectiveness was set low because anything to nudge the R value down was better than nothing.
We now know that we can do much better.
Preferably including Omicron data as well.
A) Once in every.. I dunno, 200 times (0.5%) it kicks you so hard that, without protection you're 100% going to die
B) Once every 10 times (10%) it kicks you so hard you're sent to the hospital
C) Just to spitball, let's say 3 out of 10 times it will kick you hard enough that you're out of commission for a couple days but able to recover without hospitalization
D) 3 out of 10 times it will lightly kick you where you hurt a bit but it's just a minor inconvenience
E) The rest of the time it will let you leave without being kicked.
Ok, so you're strapped into this machine. Now, before I turn it on, I offer you a cup (protection). 70%-80% of the time this cup will offer you complete protection against whatever the machine throws at you. But remember that it's still 100% effective when the machine does nothing, so we only need to look at the 70.5% of the time the machine will actually kick you.
So with 70%-80% protection call it 75% effective, we drop our percentages for each scenario:
A) 0.5% -> 0.125% B) 10% -> 2.5% C) 30% -> 7.5% D) 30% -> 7.5%
This is just doing the simple math. The vaccines drastically lower the chance of severe COVID compared to no vaccine at a higher rate than their overall effectiveness.
So again, you going in there wearing the cup or no? Because that's the choice you have when it comes to getting vaccinated.
There is also the "what will happen to the previous batches" question as no one will be willing to get the old vaccine.
There are also interventions other than vaccines, e.g. early treatment, https://c19early.com
Natural immunity as a personal choice should have been possible. But that has not been an option, for someone who wants to be part of society.
Is that because people who have caught it are more likely to take precautions against catching it again?
Those who were vaccinated but previously uninfected may have had a “it can’t happen to me and if it does, I’m vaccinated” attitude.
I’d expect unvaccinated people to be in the bucket with covid deniers and anti-maskers, which would have the highest base rate of COVID.
Anecdotally, my sister is one of those people who “catches everything” so I can’t say I’m surprised, but clearly there is no such thing as absolute sterilizing immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) for this particular coronavirus.
This article explains why it's so hard to make a vaccine for coronaviruses:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-17/coronavirus-va...
Of course, this was written a few weeks before "Project Warp Speed" when everyone and their dog announced that had found a vaccine for this brand new coronavirus.
The effect exists but the data shows it does not matter.
You may have been right at a time where almost nobody had a previous infection. However, estimates by reputable sources https://covidestim.org/us show that a large percentage of people have been infected by covid at least once. The data are by state, I see ~75% for MA, 80% for CA and NY, and you can pick your favorite state.
At this point it is more correct to say that the vaccine does not matter, and immunity by prior infection is the dominant effect. Either that, or the Yale school of public health, the Harvard school of public health, and the Stanford Medicine institutes who run the covidestim.org site are full of shit.
Not age adjusting the vaccinated and unvaccinated cohort is disingenuous. Not breaking out ‘unknown’ vaccine status — which only becomes relevant for the stats after death - is disingenuous.
You are reading propaganda, and reading it uncritically.
Similarly, there is a selection problem for the elderly who choose to remain unvaccinated. You're saying that they think vaccines are ineffective -- and this is definitely a cohort of people! But there is a separate cohort of people, who are more likely to be hospitalized, who know they have severe existing health problems.
I got COVID before there were vaccines and I've received all three shots. While all of my friends caught Omicron, I have not - and I'm the only one among them who got sick beforehand. On the other hand, I have an unvaccinated coworker who has now gotten Delta and Omicron. I know that doesn't prove anything, but it also doesn't make these studies I see any more illuminating either.
As an aside, I'm not even sure I want things to go back to "normal" other than lifted travel restrictions and the anger/frustration/callout culture to go away. Restaurants taking over the streets, working from home, less cars, etc have all been a boon for the way I live my life.
No. This is wrong. As the parent noted, the CDC's own data shows that prior infection provides robust protection against severe disease. Both without vaccination:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm#F1_down
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm
As well as a substantial additional benefit after vaccination:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a4.htm
> Previous COVID-19 illness was associated with reduced odds of severe outcomes (aOR = 0.27; 95% CI = 0.09–0.84).
Moreover, the CDC estimates that over 150M people in the US (out of a country of 330M) have had Covid:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
That's 45% of the US population (before Omicron). There's no rational way to characterize this as insignificant.
> Given this data the most effective strategy is to just vaccinate everyone without what is effectively a pointless distinction
The data clearly shows that protection from natural infection is at least as substantial as from vaccination, and that ~half (if not more) of the US population has had it. This fairly obviously impacts the most effective strategy. Mandating vaccines (and now boosters) in young, healthy people who were already at small risk, including those who have already had the virus, is so absurd that I can't even characterize it as science. It is simply punitive behavior.
Most countries recognize prior infection. We're in a small, small club of scientifically illiterate nations here, and it's rather embarrassing.
> It will be once the proportion of unvaccinated people in hospitals starts to resemble the proportion in the general population.
If the total number of hospitalizations is a manageable number, the percentage that are vaccinated is irrelevant. It's a metric of punishment, not a realistic policy goal. I have no idea what the future will bring with regard to the ratio of unvaccinated hospitalizations, but I know that hospitalizations in general will fall as the population achieves broad immunity -- and natural infection certainly counts toward that goal.
The idea that a vaccine is a punishment is disturbing. I'm glad to have been able to get it.
If you feel more comfortable getting an unnecessary vaccination, nobody is stopping you. Other people should not be coerced into doing the same against their will.
College kids are currently being expelled for refusing boosters. Children are being refused classroom education. Prior infection is not taken into account, and risk/benefit is not a factor. There's no other way to frame this than as coercive behavior.
> There's no other way to frame this than as coercive behavior
We coerce people constantly when they have bad behavior that affects society and others. I don’t know why people keep trotting out mandates as having aspects of coercion/authoritarianism is a mic drop moment explaining why they are bad. How is this worse than all the other health based coercion we’ve had?
For the other-than-COVID vaccines that are required for enrollment, there isn't existing protection in the majority of the population. Nobody has natural, effective, protection against measles.
I think the practical problem/reason is that there's infrastructure set up to track and share vaccination/booster status. There's no infrastructure set up to track, or even test, immunity status, which is the real metric of risk. So, for practical reasons, proof of vaccination status will always be favored and, almost certainly, held above the true, yet difficult to measure, immunity status, to drive policies. This is an easy out, that might cause harm, relative to an "ideal" policies that were based on immunity.
Saying it's happened in the past isn't an argument that it should continue in the future. I doubt your swine flu nasal spray had as intense of negative side effects as the COVID second shot and booster tend to in the young and healthy. Now that we're in booster territory and Delta is being phased out the shots are almost certainly more painful than the disease for some portion of the population.
> How is this worse than all the other health based coercion we’ve had?
I can't recall any other health based requirement for attending an event or restaurant. I also don't understand why people continue to harp on how a personal COVID vaccination decision "affects society and others" at this point. The vaccine only marginally prevents infection at this stage, and the primary benefit of reduced severity should stop everyone who's vaccinated from worrying about what others around them may be doing. I get the flu shot so I don't get the flu, and I'm not sitting around telling others who haven't that they're putting me in danger.
What's really happening here is people who have considered themselves progressive and tolerant their entire lives have decided that they want to impose policies that are tyrannical, but they have to desperately backfill this logic to make it feel okay. They aren't willing to let any form of data disrupt this because if they did, they would have to admit to themselves that they had a tyrannical impulse in the first place.
Notice how when he got the swine flu nasal spray he wasn't demanding that everyone else in every public place he went to also get it. Nothing about this makes sense unless you view it as people trying to psychologically justify tyrannical impulses.
Yeah the tropical diseases are an interesting parallel for me too. In a place where malaria or dengue are prevalent I don’t blame others for being vectors of the disease, I assess my own risk and behave accordingly. And the mere fact that they’re spread via mosquitoes instead of air/surfaces doesn’t change the necessity of congregating people to spread. But these diseases are not universally dangerous, so people should not be universally pressured to take any measure to avoid them.
I’m not sure I fully agree with the tyrannical impulse premise, but I’d subscribe more readily to a tribal “badge of honor” premise, which in this (and indeed most cases) happens to be tyrannical. I think generally the masses don’t intend tyranny, rather they virtue signal to coerce and thus become tyrannical as a result.
And you probably don't remember ever being required to show vaccination status to get into a stadium or restaurant in your lifetime because you hadn't previously lived through a pandemic.
Sure, it’s great that we have the vaccines to do so. We should be focusing on making them available to everyone on earth rather than forcing them down the throats of those who don’t want them to get to the fastest “end.”
> And you probably don't remember ever being required to show vaccination status to get into a stadium or restaurant in your lifetime because you hadn't previously lived through a pandemic.
Fair enough. My reply was in response to a status quo argument, but indeed this pandemic hasn’t been just that. In which case I think you have to assess the dangers to those who have been vaccinated, which is not much. Indeed with omicron the risk isn’t very high for a large portion of the population vaccinated or not. And the vaccines are available to anyone who wants to reduce their risk, thus the mandates make little sense.
Are any number of vaccine shots "good enough"? Or, should we be getting one every month to get as much protection as possible?
There's a line to be drawn somewhere, and I think what's argued here is that natural immunity should count for something, instead of being lumped into the same group as those "unvaccinated and no prior infection".
And more risk. Which is greater?
(This makes your case stronger, of course.)
I suggest you look up seroprevalence surveys. The bulk of COVID infections (barring mandatory and regular testing being extant in a given locality) go undetected, due to the mild symptoms in the vast majority of the population. The seroprevalence surveys have shown this since May 2020.
While not directly comparable, an official report from the UK [1, Figure 3] estimated that effectively 100% of blood donors were either vaccinated, previously infected, or both. This was in September. Blood donors are not a representative sample of the population, but it's not hard to believe that by now effectively everybody (in the UK) has some kind of immunity.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The end result is the same: higher proportion of severe illness among the unvaccinated, which is most easily fixed by vaccinating them.
No, among the unvaccinated and uninfected, which, as the data others have been giving shows, is nowhere near even a majority of the unvaccinated any more, let alone enough of a majority to treat it as if it represented all unvaccinated people. So your claim that the unvaccinated but infected are too few to matter and should not affect vaccine recommendations, let alone vaccine mandates, is egregiously wrong.
You are failing to differentiate between the two subgroups of unvaccinated people, the previously infected/unvaccinated, and the purely unvaccinated. Additionally, you are not doing any further subdivision on these two groups by age. The blanket "one size fits all" strategy you are advocating is assuming that all of these groups are at zero risk for adverse events from the vaccine. Young, healthy males have a statistically zero risk of severe COVID complications, and a statistically small but non-zero risk of myocarditis. The risk of myocarditis from the vaccine falls to practically zero as you progress upwards up the age distribution, which is the exact group of people who have the highest benefit from the vaccine. You are talking about a gradient which impacts both the cost and the benefit, with a diminishing cost and an increasing benefit going up in age. Not taking this into account is so illogical, that in my opinion, people who hold this view are clearly blinded by bias.
If I'm going to get smeared as an "anti-vaxxer", I'm going to go ahead and use a label to describe humans who hold the rigid, data-resistant view that you possess:
Immunity deniers
Now imagine having a healthy 7-year old son, and having an excruciatingly difficult conversation with your spouse about why he shouldn’t get vaccinated. Or having to cut off ties with your mother-in-law, preventing your children from seeing their grandmother, because she thinks you are actively harming your own young children by not getting vaccinated despite having natural immunity.
These people are destroying the very bonds of society.
Here's a new editorial from a prof at Johns Hopkins:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-cost-of-disparaging-na...
Might be useful in those conversations on previous infection. And I agree regarding the social fabric being destroyed by these bureaucrats. They are going to slowly try to find a way to ease out of this in a manner that minimizes the damage to their reputations. That's what political elites have always done when their narratives crumble after they have dug in. See the utter absence of contrition or self reflection after the Iraq wmd fiasco for an example. Or Vietnam. They don't care how much damage they do in the process.
The rationale for vaccinating kids was to prevent them from spreading it. The vaccine did that effectively before Delta. With omicron, it's worthless for preventing spread. Kids are the one age group at higher risk from flu than covid.
My two kids (8 and 15) aren't vaxxed. They caught omicron, and now they are in the ICU... Oh wait,no they are fine, had almost zero symptoms, and were playing outside the day they tested positive. Which is, statistically, a virtual certainty. They aren't morbidly obese or immunocompromised, so they shrugged it off.
Nobody is dying on a hill. We're just better at statistics and aren't gullible enough to believe these panicked fools.
Put an experimental product from Big Pharma in your kid for no reason. That's your call. But ask yourself why you suddenly trust the FDA, an organization that labeled oxycontin non addictive, approved Vioxx, approved remdesivir for covid despite it being useless, and that's just the past 15 years. Fear is the mind killer indeed.
We have lots of data on both. Said data shows that 7 year olds are much more likely to have serious affects from COVID than from the vaccine. That's not to say serious outcomes from covid are at all likely. Just that the relative risk is lower with the vaccine.
To reiterate, the absolute risk is tiny, so it's really not a big deal. But if you truly understand statistics, then you will also see that everyone will be exposed to COVID and you are better off with the vaccine than without no matter the age cohort.
And the vaccine reduces transmission (less so than we had hoped, but a reduction, nonetheless), no one ever said it would 100% stop transmission.
I suppose taking an experimental vaccine seems unnecessary if you consider a wild virus to be natural, maybe even artisinal, and you ignore the fact that while the vaccine is quality controlled and the same as what billions of people have now received, and the virus is constantly mutating, well then I guess the virus sounds safer.
Let's not do this. When this mess is over we'll all want to work and break bread together again, and that's much more important than whatever any of us happened to believe or say in the fog of war.
I'm just at a breaking point now, after 2 years of having the most anxiety and risk-averse among us gleefully demonize, censor, and shame those of us with heterodox opinions. When you add to that the enthusiastic endorsement of forcing people like me to get a shot despite already having immunity solely to appease their paranoia, the bitterness has put me over the edge. Considering that it's the same crowd who has spent decades chanting "my body, my choice" and insisting that the government "never come between a person and their doctor", the hypocrisy adds to the outrage. I've been called a conspiracy theorist for pointing out the highly improbable chain of coincidences that made me doubt the narrative around the virus' origins, then had to watch as they all change their minds without an ounce of self-reflection or a single apology. On top of this, the national media has been completely, un-flinchingly on board with all of it, which is a distinguishing characteristic from the harassment and government intrusion upon LGBT folks championed by the political far right until the 2010s. They gave these anxiety driven tyrants full moral authority to violate my rights. I hope you can understand my bitterness.
The last thing I want to do is dehumanize others. For the crime of not wanting to get NEEDLESSLY injected with a rushed, experimental genetic technology whose trials were entirely run by pharmaceutical companies who have a long history of overstating benefits and hiding risks for their products, I've been ostracized, condemned, and coerced by the same people who insist on not eating GMO produce.
Just finished a few trips to Latin America. Kissed the ground when I got back here to Florida, where kids goto school, don't wear masks, and don't have to be vaccinated. Here, we respect individual liberties. We respect the right to go out and earn a living and put food on the table and if we lock everything down, at least uncle sam sends out checks to hold us over for a while.
People are starving and dying in places like Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries in LA. Small business has been devastated by the un-ending lock downs.
Unemployment is rampant. People cannot put food on the table. Its crazy. The lack of empathy that local governments have in LA for a persons right to earn a living is unconscionable. Maybe its because the virus has hit hard the wealthy elite ruling class since they tend to be rich, fat, white, and old. I dunno. But they are all wanting to break in to America and would if they could.
Dividing groups of people up without going deep enough into categorization creates contradictory conclusions.
Roughly speaking this is the difference between your risk of driving with no seat belt and no air bags (unvaccinated), no seat belt and no air bags but with a bicycle helmet (prior infection), seatbelt (vaccinated), and seatbelt and airbags (vaccinated and boosted).
It's absolutely not the same delta there. Not even close. The relative risk and absolute risk are completely different in magnitude, and unvaccinated cohorts are concentrated in younger, healthier populations with a minimal level of risk.
The most distinguishing characteristic of COVID is it's age-risk gradient. There is LITERALLY a 1000X delta in IFR between the youngest and oldest demographics. The fact that the vaccine policies don't take this into account has resulted in the greatest erosion in trust of public health authorities in history. Your analogy doesn't even take this into account, which further demonstrates the shallow aspect of it.
This is the point that I can’t seem to express eloquently enough to overcome the nonstop torrent of poorly calibrated advice from the authorities. I don’t have time to pore over the data, but last time I checked the annualized death totals for children (17 and under) were approximately equal to the 2019 deaths from influenza for that age group. When the marginal benefit of vaccination gets that low, you do have to start asking whether the side effects are worth it—trading a 0.01% risk of myocarditis for a 2% risk of death is clearly worth it, but can you say the same when the risk of death is on the same order of magnitude as the side effects?
(edit: numbers are hand-wavy, not trying to make an authoritative point)
Myocarditis in particular is 8x more likely to occur with COVID vs the vaccine.
So, while an argument could be made that the risk of adverse reaction or death from COVID is too small to matter one way or the other in young people, it is not correct to say that the vaccine is more risky.
There is one exception I have seen in some data that myocarditis risk was roughly equal or slightly higher for young men of a specific age group who received the second dose of the moderna vaccine. But one could of course avoid that particular vaccine and still be better of vaccinated because that of course is only for myocarditis and the absolute risk is very tiny.
https://ravarora.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-vaccine-indu...
Also, if his data is to be believed, then the protection offered by having had COVID in the past has been far overstated.
The WHO definition of a covid death means that they can only be counted as covid deaths if there's a clinical link between cause of death and covid.
Ergo, cancer and car accident victims with covid wouldn't be counted.
I suppose it depends on how your country defines it and if it follows WHO guidelines
There are popular theories about thousands of such miscounts happening to get more money from the government, but it makes no sense for them to be more than a small minority of mistakes.
Show me profit motive, and I'll show you an audit worth doing. If you've not parsed and checked that data, I'd recommend not passing judgement on it. The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/santa-clara-countys-co...
Is that vaccinated? Fully-vaccinated? Or "up to date" (i.e., whatever round of boosters are being pushed)?
The point is, the narrative has pushed the importance of "the science". Yet so much is actually not consistent with science / scientific method at all. Ffs, they can't even get the definitions and language right.
These aren't occasional lapses. They're non-stop. I hear what you're saying. However, it still doesn't address the negligence. After two yrs it's not incompotence, is it? Still?
". Given this data the most effective strategy is to just vaccinate everyone without what is effectively a pointless distinction."
So...we don't need science. Just everyone bend over and do what the authorities say, when they say, and how they say it? That's it? Kids? New borns? And everyone else on the low side of risk? Just because?
You can't have your science and dismiss it too.
In London this number has been as high as 40%, so it's highly relevant to present accurate numbers.
But the only place science has won is in producing a good vaccine, the rest has been a shit show of crazy decisions and a hunt for those who didn't want to get vaccinated right away.
I sincerely hope sanity returns.
Multiply by tens of thousands, and you can project the effects on hospitalization stats, which aren't necessarily tied to the degree of illness.
It seems like you don't have any actual knowledge of how healthcare works in the real world and are just making things up.
Early data from France suggests omicron patients leave hospital far more quickly - including 43 per cent in less than a day
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
(at Kaiser Permanente Southern California) Among 154 Omicron variant-infected patients who completed hospitalization by January 1, 2022, 129 (83.8%) were discharged in ≤2 days
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...
27% of hospitalizations are not vaccinated.
~50% of ICU cases are not vaccinated.
The conclusion is that people are bad at understanding statistics.
8% are not vaccinated at all.
27% are not vaccinated, partially vaccinated or unknown status
50% of the ICU cases are not vaccinated, partially vaccinated or unknown status.
It is good to understand that 1/2 of the people who come into the ICU are reported as unknown vaccine status by default because they can't speak or fill out paperwork.
I use to produce these reports for this government and the ones before for years . Presenting facts a certain way is what happens and reports get rescoped when the data doesn't agree with the intended outcome.
> I use to produce these reports for this government and the ones before for years . Presenting facts a certain way is what happens and reports get rescoped when the data doesn't agree with the intended outcome.
Are you saying the numbers presented in this report are not accurate or were fudged in some way?
I could go on about hospital visits for non covid reasons being lumped with covid hospital visits.
I have issues with how data is collected in the field. I have issues with the reclassifications that go back and claim covid killed this patients after dying of other reasons.
I have issues with what they decide to collect and what information they ignore.
Probably the most misleading stat of them all.
If somebody comes in the ICU without non-COVID symptoms, they aren't in the statistic, in other words you need to make the probability of "unknown status" conditional on being in the ICU for COVID.
What is the age breakdown of these excess deaths? If the distribution doesn't mirror the age distribution of known COVID deaths, that's an immediate indicator that it's factoring in multiple sources.
Drug overdoses, attempted suicides and actual suicides are way up, for example. Drug abuse is way up. Child abuse is way up.
I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm simply saying that you can't know that you are right without a careful analysis of the data. It should be noted that the "excess deaths are way up" is also used as a tool of people claiming that the vaccines are killing people as well.
Again, I want to emphasize, I don't know the detailed data behind the excess deaths. COVID is certainly one factor, but what percentage does it constitute? I'm not claiming I know, but you are. That's the difference.
You are also ignoring the studies out of Israel (sample size of 2.5 million people), Qatar (sample size of 400K people), the recent CDC study in other replies to your comment, etc. It's a long list of studies that show that prior infection is a superior, more durable form of immunity to Delta than vaccine-only populations.
Additionally, it's rather absurd to use hospitalizations as a metric for the general population. I'm sure you are extremely aware that the bulk of unvaccinated people getting hospitalized are not young or healthy. "Some unvaccinated people" is also a statement ignoring the shocking prevalence of prior infection in seroprevalence studies, which isn't really shocking when considering a respiratory virus that has an R0 that has been at minimum 3 in the beginning with the original variant, and is now 6-7 with omicron.
The data has changed, but many people's opinions have remained fixed. I don't understand what motivates this, but it's become tiresome as it continues to drive policies that are intuitively foolish and violate centuries of immunological knowledge.
I find it a great resource to cross-check the misinformation of the mainstream media. For example, I challenge anybody to look at the 0-14 and 14-44 graphs and tell me when covid actually occurred.
Note that excess is not defined as a deviation from a typical year, but as a deviation from a typical year when no diseases are circulating. The goal of the euromomo website is to detect things like flu outbreaks, so the number of excess deaths is usually greater than 0, capturing the flu, heat waves, and presumably other disasters.
> Note that excess is not defined as a deviation from a typical year, but as a deviation from a typical year when no diseases are circulating.
Data is deseasonalized, which does not mean what you wrote.
You are correct that I oversimplified a complex situation. https://euromomo.eu/how-it-works/methods/ describes their method, especially section "Hypothesis".
Their model includes a sinusoidal seasonal component, as you noted. However, what I said is also true. From the Hypothesis section, third bullet:
"Parts of Spring and Autumn are less likely to be influenced by additional processes leading to excess deaths and the main pattern of mortality can therefore be modelling using only those periods, resulting in a baseline being the number of deaths expected when no particular process increases mortality."
As is clear from the bullet that precedes the text that I quoted, "processes leading to excess deaths" means winter infections and summer heat waves. So my description, while incomplete, is hopefully not too misleading. For completeness, I should mention that they also adjust for population growth. (You can't just do 2020-avg(2015-2019) because the total population is different.)
Stepping back from the details for a minute: this is a 15-year long joint effort of public health authorities in Europe, with the explicit goal "to design a routine public health mortality monitoring system aimed at detecting and measuring, on a real-time basis, excess number of deaths related to influenza and other possible public health threats across participating European Countries." In terms of data analysis, their model is very simple, comprising a constant, a linear trend term for population growth, and a sine-wave term for non-flu seasonality. Do you really think that they would be so incompetent as to use a model that explicitly removes the flu, which is the very effect that they are trying to capture? Give them some credit, they know what they are doing.
Just to be clear, you're saying that the reason we've seen hundreds of thousands of excess deaths last year is because of drugs, suicides, and child abuse.
If people want to explore some "crude" (CDC's word) data by age group. Cherry-picking some data, there were 10-15 times more drug overdoses then covid deaths in 2020 (Q2-3) for 25-34. Similar ratios for 15-24. And I'm sure it'll be the exact opposite for higher age groups or if you focused on people with comorbidities. Yet these demographics are grouped together without any nuance when it comes to mandates. Note this is pre-vaccine and pre-delta so not really representative of current state of things.
In other words, excess death counts would account for overdose deaths because they are expected. They wouldn't be considered "excess" deaths.
The numbers I have seen for excess deaths pretty closely match COVID death numbers as counted from death certificates. So you have two unconnected sources matching up pretty closely. I'd say there is a good chance the near million COVID deaths number we are looking at is pretty close.
At some point the government will probably change the definition of fully vaccinated to three shots and then I'll be in that unvaccinated group I usually make fun of.
Somebody I know lost their job because they wouldn't get vaccinated (but they'd already had confirmed covid). That seems very unfair.
I'm very angry at the dumbasses who haven't been infected and refuse to get vaccinated, including family of mine who died because of that. But no distinction is being made of those who have natural immunity. Which, as you say, is unscientific.
I feel like partly that's because many people think they had it, but didn't, and partly because it's easier for the government to just tell everyone to get vaccinated.
You can't compare studies looking at the population average with someone's specific social circle. Young people have a near-zero chance of getting severe disease anyway.
"substantial protection against severe disease with omicron" is irrelevant when the chance of severe disease is so low.
Do you make no allocation in your mind for the potential that the government is corrupted and the motivations have nothing really to do with public health?
I mean, governments want to ensure their income stream (tax payers) are alive to pay taxes, but that's hardly "corrupt" and is still to do, indirectly, with public health
Yes, it's quite a possibility. Please read into the growing concentration of world power via corporations and un-elected organization like the WEF and WHO. Further, please read into puplic-private partnerships.
Our world is a global one these days and nearly every government is corrupted by a form of corporatism.
I think it's a stretch to suggest all the countries are in on this together as some sort of 'control' method.
Public/Private partnerships are a modern necessity in countries that choose to keep their citizens happy through low-tax policies. There's room for corruption there sure, but that doesn't lend itself to all countries agreeing to go with this wild covid idea as an exercise in exerting greater control over their populaces
So communist Cuba is corrupted by a form of corporatism? Big pharma got to the ayatollahs in Iran? Maduro in Venezuela is goose stepping to the beat of the pharmaceutical conspiracy?
https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/cuba-he...
> Authorities of the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) and the Biotechnological and Pharmaceutical Industries of Cuba (BioCubaFarma) met with representatives of European embassies, Cuban-based partner agencies and PAHO/WHO country office to continue promoting collaboration in the health sector.
https://www.farsnews.ir/en/news/13990121000392/Ayallah-Khame...
> The World Health Organization has considered priorities in combating coronavirus and Islamic Republic of Iran obeys and follows up priorities as defined by WHO.
Admittedly Iran banned US made vaccines, but then just put out their own in cooperation with the WHO, COVAX and Gavi.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/01/12/iran-khameneis-reckless-...
> Iran has said that the country is participating in the COVAX Facility, which is an effort by the World Health Organization, Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance), and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to help low- and middle-income countries get access to vaccines. Iran started the first phase of the human trial for a domestically produced vaccine in December 2020.
See https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/who-funds-world-healt... for who the WHO is funded by. At the point when the US pulled funding, the largest donor was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the third was Gavi. Bill Gates owns a lot of pharma stock. The foundation is a way to garner influence in a tax free and humanitarian looking way.
Who funds Gavi?
It's a rabbit hole, but the world is complicated and conflicts of interest (corruption) abound. Please do follow a few of these research threads and try to be open minded to those suspicious of wealthy people claiming to operate in our interest.
You're not even proposing anything specific. This is Glenn Beck level 'just asking questions'.
The government, for the most part, is not an evil cabal of deep state cultists (in most countries that describe themselves as liberal today). People like you or me can join a party, and then get elected within a year or two.
What I absolutely do believe is that people elected, through what is essentially a harmless popularity contest in peace time, are the worst type of people you want to have taking decisions in a crisis. People worried about their next re-election are _not_ going to make the right decisions, apart from the fact that in peace time the electorate optimizes for populism and extremism, and the candidates are sometimes more like actors than leaders. In short: they are incompetent, heavy handed and not even remotely equipped to deal withe massive leverage attached to the levers they control.
A small town mayor has none of the power a member of congress would.
In democracy the larger the seat, the larger the infrastructure required to get there.
The funding of this infrastructure brings the necessity of corruption.
Assuming the mayor is in an executive mayor system (not a council-manager) system, they often have far more practical power than a member of Congress over any issue, but their power is over smaller issues. Even in a council-manager system, the mayor (who is a primus inter pares council member) is more likely than member of Congress to have decisive power over any issue within their ambit.
(Also, being a small town mayor, or similar local officer, is not an uncommon way to build the infrastructure for becoming, say a state legislator. And that's a way to build the infrastructure for Congress, and that for Senate/Governorship, and that for the Presidency.)
Also what's the end game here. Why would a corrupt government gain by mandating masks and encouraging vaccination. Even the potential motive is lacking.
Can you explain what risks you're referring to here?
That said, the risk of dying unvaccinated from COVID is much greater than the risks of vaccine. And it’s unclear if side effects from the shot are correlated to worse outcomes from COVID (e.g. It’s unknown if these people who were paralyzed definitely would have died when they contracted covid, so paralysis is a potentially better outcome).
[1] https://www.wpxi.com/news/top-stories/every-day-that-i-work-...
[2] https://www.wkrn.com/news/nashville-woman-partially-paralyze...
The math may still work out for your preferred choice, but i wanted to point out that it’s fallacious to dismiss the (rare) risks from reinfection, especially when focusing on the (rare) risks from the vaccine.
You may have said this and I just missed it, but both those risks are small and honestly boils down to a preference IMO. I may just have missed in your comment where you made the right comparison, in which case I’m being a bit pedantic without cause and I apologize.
While the vaccine risks are very small, they're also highest for those who have had the actual infection. There will be little bits of virus lingering in my body for a long time. If I get that vaccine, my immune system is going to go ape attacking them, and maybe do some collateral damage in the process.
To be clear, I still think the risk is small, but so is is the benefit. I don't think it's worth it.
Thanks for writing a detailed comment of your thinking, I think we both are evaluating it the same way, I just wasn't very clear with my initial wording.
The evidence disagrees with your opinion.
right now we know that even the booster provides little ability to stop you from getting omicron. likely by the next mandated booster the variant of the time will also easily surpass the booster.
This is true, but the data is showing that being boosted means that catching Omicron when boosted means you are much, much more likely to have a very minor illness. Refusing future boosters comes at the risk of your own health, as well as the health of the people around you.
And some scientists think that repeated boosters will backfire and lead to waning immunity or at least immunity better centered around the exact strain the vaccine is made (so could be mitigated by different boosters). Plus downsides of repeatedly have to make time to get boosters, taking doses from people who haven't even had the opportunity to get a single dose. Differences in risk between a healthy under 30 and an unhealthy over 65.
It's possible that your statement is correct for some demographics and incorrect for others. But that nuance is not in the current discussion or the current mandates; and that nuance could save lives in less-developed countries.
* citation needed *
> or at least immunity better centered around the exact strain the vaccine is made
Given how mRNA vaccines work, there's nothing stopping the producers from putting as many different "instructions" as they wish in a single dose. But anyways, again * citation needed *
> Plus downsides of repeatedly have to make time to get boosters
Boo frickin' hoo. Even if we have to get quarterly boosters, that's four times a year. You're on Hacker News, you obviously have spare time on your hands.
> taking doses from people who haven't even had the opportunity to get a single dose
At this point, in the developed world, there's no one left who hasn't had "the opportunity to get a single dose." In fact, we have vaccines going bad due to anti-vaxers refusing to get vaccinated. And realize that a vial of vaccine sitting in the WalMart or CVS down the street isn't going to magically get repositioned to Africa due to Americans refusing it.
> Differences in risk between a healthy under 30 and an unhealthy over 65.
You know what drastically lowers the risks of COVID infection, both in terms of getting infected in the first place and the chance of bad outcomes if you do contract it? GETTING VACCINATED.
> throw_nbvc1234 1 hour ago | parent | context | flag | on: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine ...
> Refusing future boosters comes at the risk of your own health, as well as the health of the people around you. And some scientists think that repeated boosters will backfire and lead to waning immunity or at least immunity better centered around the exact strain the vaccine is made (so could be mitigated by different boosters). Plus downsides of repeatedly have to make time to get boosters, taking doses from people who haven't even had the opportunity to get a single dose. Differences in risk between a healthy under 30 and an unhealthy over 65.
It's possible that your statement is correct for some demographics and incorrect for others. But that nuance is not in the current discussion or the current mandates; and that nuance could save lives in less-developed countries.
Based on your comment history, you're American, so you're not helping anyone in "less-developed" countries by refusing a vaccine. You're just exposing yourself and your community to a higher level of risk.
'the science' says you are wrong. the vaccines do not prevent spread. that is very very very clear in the data now, so stop spreading that nonsense
that assumption relied on at least 3 things being true: #1 ) having lower symptoms from the vaccine would not encourage those shedding the virus but not being observably sick to go out and spread the disease (*hint this is probably a pretty bad assumption) #2 ) the vaccine would reduce viral load #3 ) a reduction of viral load would prevent you from spreading it to others
It turns out the vaccine does not lower viral load. and even though this has been shown to be medically true, you can see that in places like Isreal and Germany where the virus spreads pretty easily. hell, even in the US, you dont get nearly 1m cases a day without vaccinated people spreading it.
I have MS, and I'm not sure that frequently boosting my immune system when I have an autoimmune disease is the best idea. In addition, I'm in a single-income WFH household and we easily isolated when we got omicron. My sister and I literally caught Omicron together and just quarantined for 14 days. We had our mother drop off stuff on the doorstep so we didn't have to go out/expose anyone. It was boring, but I'm damn sure we didn't infect anyone.
Plus to be completely blunt, "not likely to trigger an MS relapse or have any impact on long-term disease progression" isn't language to inspire confidence. To be fair, I think we understand the vaccines pretty damn well, it's MS that I think we might not understand well enough here.
Also, did you end up in the hospital? Did you die?
Because by being vaxxed and boosted you greatly increased your chances of having the chance to post ill-informed comments on Hacker News post-recovery.
No I was not unlucky. get your head out of the sand, omicron breaks through the vaccine easily.
<pajama caste playbook> Because by being vaxxed and boosted you greatly increased your chances of having the chance to post ill-informed comments on Hacker News post-recovery.
hinting at censorship already are you, boy, you just follow the playbook dont you?
<pajama caste playbook> we need to mandate vaccinations and masks to stop the spread of covid
<data> that's not working
<understanding of how the vaccines work> this is not how the vaccines work
<non pajama caste> you are violating my cival rights
<pajama caste playbook> well it prevents severe disease. you need to be censored for misinformation. you need to be prevented from going outside so I can feel safe because vaccination prevents the spread of covid.
<pajama caste playbook> you hate science, science works by censoring those who disagree with the proposed opinion. I worship science so I am the superior caste. I am science, I am good
Listen, if you're hell bent on willfully increasing your risk of death/hospitalization, that's on you. The simple fact is being vaccinated drastically reduces the risk of that.
Does the current vaccine work as well against Omicron as it did against prior variants? No. But does it work better than literally doing nothing? Yes.
And yes, you were unlucky. The vaccines are still 70+% effective at preventing breakthrough infections based on the data we currently have.
The vaccine is not ineffective. And it reduces the severity of the infection even in the case of a breakthrough.
And as far as OP is concerned, there is a high likelihood that their boosted status did protect them from infection.
Every time I have to show my vaccination card to be in public.
> Listen, if you're hell bent on willfully increasing your risk of death/hospitalization, that's on you.
I am vaccinated and boosted. I MAY not want to get boosted AGAIN because it was extremely painful and made me sick for more than a day. I MAY not want to go through that again while taking into account what is happening in the FUTURE with the variants. but I may not have the right to make my own decision due to mandate fanatics
> And yes, you were unlucky. The vaccines are still 70+% effective at preventing breakthrough infections based on the data we currently have.
do you even know what that means? what does it mean to be '70% effective'? How long does this effectiveness last? effective against what (covid19, delta, omicron)? Are you talking about vaccinated 1, 2, or booster? I know personally 20 people who have gotten it. 15 vaccinated 5 Unvaccinated. We have been having more than 600k cases per day since the beginning of January. I'm guessing there is A LOT of break through cases in that.
> And as far as OP is concerned, there is a high likelihood that their boosted status did protect them from infection.
If they were sitting across from me when I was feverish from omi, they would have gotten it. keep in mind, I was infected by someone who was vaccinated.
'the science' says you are wrong. the vaccines do not prevent spread. that is very very very clear in the data now, so stop spreading that nonsense
You thought the vaccines were risk free?
It's the same argument that people use to justify not wearing a seat belt. "There's types of wrecks where being unbelted is actually safer!" Well, sure, but those are an extremely tiny portion of wrecks, and you're vastly safer in the vast, vast majority of wrecks wearing a seat belt.
Get the damned vaccine. If you experience side effects, then that sucks, you lost the lottery. The CDC reports:
* Anaphylaxis happens to 5 people per million vaccinated. (0.0005% rate)
* Thrombosis with TTS after J&J vaccine. 57 confirmed in more than 18 million doses (0.0003% rate)
* GBS after J&J vaccine. 302 cases in more than 18 million doses (0.0017% rate)
* Myocarditis. 1233 reports in total.
* Death. 11,657 deaths among vaccinated. Note that this is death for any reason. A vaccinated person mauled to death by a bear is counted here. (0.0022% rate)
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
* edit for formatting
"Males between 16 and 29 years of age have an increased risk of developing heart problems after receiving a second dose of coronavirus vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNtech or Moderna, according to a large new analysis published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The study, conducted in Israel, estimated that nearly 11 of every 100,000 males in that age group developed myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, a few days after having been fully vaccinated."
Why don't we just quote the part you conveniently left out: "For every million vaccinated boys ages 12 to 17, the shots might cause a maximum of 70 myocarditis cases, but would prevent 5,700 infections, 215 hospitalizations and two deaths, the agency has estimated... One of the new studies looked at data from 2.5 million vaccinated members of Israel’s largest health care network who were aged 16 years or above. The researchers identified 54 cases of myocarditis, and deemed 41 of them to be mild."
So 54 cases out of 2.5 million people vaccinated. And it likely prevented over 10,000 infections, 500 hospitalizations, and 5 deaths. It really, really sucks for those folks. But the benefits VASTLY (orders of magnitude) outweigh the risks.
The risk isn't "underappreciated." The risk is statistically insignificant compared to the protection offered by vaccination.
It's gamble, the next booster might be the one that gets you. And you'll need a booster because it only lasts a few months anyhow.
You use your dead relative as proof for your case in the same breath as calling them a dumbass.
This goes to prove a point. Does it matter if everyone is vaccinated & "safe", at the expense of our dignity and respect as a species?
I know name calling is pretty low, but I stand by it. The data is so good right now, there are so many people who have been vaccinated, so many who've had covid with and without being vaccinated, that yes, you're a dumbass if you think it's smart not to get the vaccine. You've listened to the wrong information and built a bad argument in your mind.
My family member who died was a lovely person, but always bad at critical thinking and always fell for conspiracy theories. Mostly it was harmless. Sometimes it just cost him a lot of money. This time it cost him his life.
Because the booster increases future immunity and decreases the chance that you'll pass future infection to others.
> It's not likely to increase my immunity
Yes it is. I don't know why people are so certain it won't.
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-11-27/protection-... for instance.
I don't think it makes sense to extrapolate this to a hypothetical new shot which is developed for the new virus.
Even by reconciling PCR testing data (which I imagine is incredibly patchy at best), you still would only know historically how many people tested positive (ignoring what is in all likelihood a majority of the cases that never got tested) and be able to reconcile it against numbers of vaccinated, which tells you nothing useful without being able to intersect the two sets (which you can’t do without uniquely identifying every PCR test and matching it to an individual universally).
i.e. the better data you would need doesn’t exist.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2022/01/19/cdc-prior-c...
In the UK, for months now, the rate of infection has been higher among the vaccinated cohort than among the unvaccinated cohort, for most age groups. [1]
The antivaxxers are of course pointing to this data and claiming it's evidence that the vaccines make you more likely to get infected, and therefore the tinfoil hats were right all along.
But what's actually happening is that the unvaccinated cohort contains a lot of people with natural immunity, who are dragging the numbers down, while the vaccinated cohort doesn't have as many people in it who have had a prior infection.
I strongly suspect that if you were you properly separate people by vaccination status and prior infection, you would see that the group of unvaccinated+no prior have a much higher case ratio than any other group. But since we don't have this good data, the antivaxxers are running hog wild with the bad data, drawing the wrong conclusions.
[1] https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/t.coddington/viz/UKRe...
If you are right, most of them have natural immunity and the data proves that this is already better than the vaccine, so what's the point? They are already doing ok, and vaccination would then move them to the vaccinated column and count their immunity as a success for the vaccine, which is unscientific and dishonest.
Many places around the world have vaccine passes that don't care about natural immunity, which is incredibly unscientific and dishonest. If the case rate is higher among the vaccinated, you're statistically less protected at a venue that checks the vaccine pass. It's counterproductive and ought to be abolished immediately.
Vaccine mandates that ignore natural immunity are equally wrong. Many hospitals in the US fired un-vaccinated healthcare personnel without regarding natural immunity, which led to staff shortages, which combined with this Omicron surge means hospitals are so desperate for staff, that many are allowing people to work with an active corona infection, as long as they are vaccinated. We're preferring actually infected people over un-infected, but un-vaccinated people. In a healthcare setting.
And the people responsible for this is claiming to "follow science".
It's absurd.
The only measurement that should matter is your immunity level, regardless of how you acquired it.
Not sure what you mean. Science detached from outcomes is bad science. Science is trying to suss out cause and effect, not to avoid reality.
> This bad science fuels the anti-vaxx movement even more, and honestly, it is hard blame them.
Ah. There it is. Nope. It's still easy to blame them. It's not a sufficient criticism to cede moral superiority. "You didn't adjust your tone to distinguish 'unvaccinated' from 'immune-because-infected' from 'vaccinated'." does not suggest that antivaxxers are any less morally bankrupt for promoting the course of action which results in serious illness and death.
I don’t understand why it’s so controversial. The upside is huge and there is literally no downside.
And there are zero mandatory vaccines that require 6-month boosters for life.
And zero mandatory vaccines that have efficacy rates under 90+% (probably more like 99%).
I think it's ok to acknowledge we're in totally novel territory with covid.
A woman has a right to say my body my choice. You think removing that choice is without controversy?
Choosing to terminate a pregnancy is not comparable to choosing to spread a highly contagious disease.
Let's say America's birthrate is too low because of the vaccine, the government could use that reasoning to suspend the right to choose.
Adverse reactions to vaccinations exist. Some are severe / fatal.
Ignoring this feeds into vaccine skepticism.
Developing antibodies the old fashioned way is great! Doing it with vaccines saves other people's lives. That is the problem with people who refuse the vaccine and why they deserve to be vilified.
Unless they went to the hospital or had a positive test, then they just think they had it right?
We get data like this:
All we know are things like:
Unvaccinated 12-34 year-olds in Washington are
• 2 times more likely to get COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 12-34 year-olds.
• 5 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 12-34 yearolds.
Unvaccinated 35-64 year-olds are
• 3 times more likely to get COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 35-64 year-olds.
• 7 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 35-64 yearolds.
Unvaccinated 65+ year-olds are
• 4 times more likely to get COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 65+ year-olds.
• 7 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 65+ year-olds.
• 11 times more likely to die of COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 65+ year-olds.
But it unfortunately doesn't break down things like "had a confirmed prior infection" or "thought they might have had a prior infection". It would be interesting to see how the data works, but right now unvaccinated people are on average in a very bad spot. For all we know, the unvaccinated are just more likely to have comorbidities (e.g. obesity) that lead to their higher fatality rates. But for now, getting vaccinated is so easy, I wouldn't take the risk.
I got COVID back in March of 2020. I got two vaccines and a booster, and then in late December I caught COVID again (probably Omicron based upon symptoms and the prevalence).
I think what you're trying to say is that you believe there is an adequate enough case for people who had prior infection to avoid what they believe is an unnecessary medical procedure which may have some risk. And, scientifically, you believe it's absolutely certain that in this specific situation, prior infection immunity provides very good protection, enough to override any benefits we might see that happen at very high vaccination rates.
Hope that's a good summary....
Are you a scientist?
You made a number of statements about what is good and bad science, but some of the reasoning you make doesn't completely add up. In science nobody has epistemic certainty, but scientists and public health people act as if they do. In reality public health decisions are made using imperfect information and balance utilitarian and emotional concerns, as well as prior knowledge of patient compliance. Sometimes it may be necessary to not change a message, even if it's somewhat wrong, too quickly.
The calculus is very simple at this point. I believe CDC and others are saying that the additional risk from taking the vaccine is very very small, and the marginal benefit of having even people with prior infection get vaccinated presents a greater (overall) health outcome (presumably in the form of people who had infection immunity but still were re-infected, and then infected others).
Beyond that I don't think anybody has enough scientific data that is certain enough to say that you're right in your statements, and I think it's pretty poor taste to just keep attacking people who disagree with you as doing "bad science". Science is a subtle art, and anyway, public health is an entirely different field that has to concern itself with effective communication and people-emotions and ethics, so sometimes what CDC announcements may not be identical to what the state of the art of science is saying.
I think making a simpler and weaker point would work better. I'd criticize the media for unnecessarily creating additional fear, uncertainty, and doubt, around COVID (there was a lot of early reporting about how omicron was going to destroy the world, that was entirely baseless speculation). And too many people, both media and generally, are quick to criticize people who don't "follow the CDC to the letter", especially around vaccines. I think that kind of cropped up politically in the US after the unnecessary autism/vaccine scare and ended up representing a dividing line.
BTW, I'm an ex-scientist, worked in medical biology for decades, and I don't think many vaccines (flu, covid) are nearly as effective as the medical establishment suggests (look at the numbers of people who died of flu even in years with very high vaccination rates). And people do have significant side effects from getting vaccinated, but very rarely are the side effects more dangerous than the value of being vaccinated (in cases of flu and covid), which is why I support them. Finally, I think that herd immunity doesn't actually work in diseases like flu or covid. So I have some sympathy to your message but ultimately, just get vaccinated and boosted unless you can truly articulate some huge risk to your personal biology.
The best protection based on my knowledge of biochemistry would be natural immunity to the current variant in circulation.
The clear public health trend seems to be that we're going to see 2-3 revs of the vaccine booster per year, not that we're going to depend on natural immunity. I think it is almost certain that most COVID deaths were front-loaded and this will look almost exactly like flu vaccines in 3 years.
I also think you've set up a straw man to knockdown when you equate being skeptical to "question[ing] the medical establishment without data". There's no shortage of data out there on and around this topic. You can search on PubMed and literally read for weeks.
As to searching on pubmed and reading for weeks: that's the problem! The vast majority of people are not qualified to read the scientific literature. You need extensive training to learn how to read literature and evaluate it properly. This is especially true for medical/biology research. Learning to be proficient in that world (medical biology/public health literature) is the price of entry for being effective at changing policies. The Skeptics don't always win.
Agree to disagree but I’m all for people reading and researching on their own. Nobody understands the literature the first go, that happens with time.
I suppose it's a loaded term has a wide range of connotations, perhaps the point about not giving more fuel to "anti-science" groups like flat-earthers and hard line antivaxxers is justified.
But then I couldn't shake the feeling that the criticism of "bad science" is justified -- what you described is basically scientists making political and policy decisions, and dispensing not-exactly-true statements to the public. That may not be "bad science" for the reason that it's not science at all -- the scientist is tasked with being a politician, and we all know what politicians do.
The problem is that to outsiders (like me), there's really no way we can tell which hat the "Scientist" is wearing. I personally think that scientists trying to pretend to be politicians is going to backfire badly in the long run, no amount of policing against non-scientists bad mouthing "science" is going to fix that.
The fundamental problem is, without a full-blown censorship system to silence skeptics (whether justified or not), there's really no a good way to prop up the authority of the scientific establishment unless they stop telling white lies and establish authority based on a track record of speaking objective truths.
Adding on, immunity declines over time, so to maintain it would either mean reinfection or booster…
It was worth reading.
[edited to remove antagonistic comment] - I think your comment about science being dead is less-than-useful hyperbole.
Why focus on the "get vaccinated" message? Because the vaccine is free. It's widely available. There is absolutely low, low risk to taking it - less risk by far than getting COVID or long COVID. Because prior to Omicron, the goal wasn't "let everyone get sick and be done with it", it was "prevent anyone from getting sick". I just thought of one as I type this: To say "we accept natural immunity as a viable strategy" could have encouraged thousands upon thousands of ignorant or otherwise actively anti-authority citizens to get sick on purpose to stick it to the man, then end up in the hospital.
I don't want lies to win, and I don't want to ignore the science. Natural immunity should be acknowledged for its benefits. I think a government could do that, and still say "tough shit, get vaxxed" just to make sure people don't commit bio-warfare on communities by trying to get ill.
https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1484930583214100481?t=UDTW...
It's so ridiculous now they're requiring vaccination for the vaccinated too.
It is things with not wide but tall PDFs that cause problems with hospital capacity because it generally takes a fairly long time to increase hospital capacity.
Things with very wide but not tall PDFs are much easier to deal with because you've got years to build up capacity for them and that increased capacity will be needed for decades. The latter is important because it means a young person can look at that increased long term need and choose a career in healthcare knowing that the demand will still be there 10-14 years later when they've finished school and residency and will still be their long enough to see them through their entire career.
Second, it does prove my point in that the poster referred to the "unvaccinated" as a single group, a position that I'm suggesting results in a very inaccurate set of conclusions (which other responders have commented on) because of skewed cohorts.
Third, I most definitely do NOT have it all figured out - I'm as confused as anybody else on most of this stuff, which is why my post was on a single focused point, and not on issues where I have an opinion, but much less research and data supporting my position.
Lastly, I've read all the replies and thought it was good discussion. I didn't see anything to suggest I hadn't thought it through or disprove my position, just disagreements on how useful it would or wouldn't be, which is fair.
And to make it concrete: where I live we're into emergency (as in, stretching the system past its limits) ICU capacity and elective procedures (which, please note, does not mean optional) have been cancelled or delayed en masse for a couple months now as we've been going through our 4th and 5th waves.
People are absolutely regularly having diminished quality of health care due to unvaccinated people catching, as well as spreading, covid.
Severe outcomes stretch the system more, and unvaccinated people have more severe outcomes.
At any rate, if those nurses weren't vaccinated it's likely more than 30% would be out and a significant portion of them would be dead, so if you want to go down the "vaccines make people sick/more likely to be sick" path then you've just fallen off the rails. The path you have in mind would be a mass death event our medical systems are completely unequipped to handle.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-20/hospital...
Of course, the general problem here is one of measurability and working in an adverse environment. So in a medical sense, prior infection determines response. But in a public health sense, if you believe that prior infection claims are easier to fake than vaccine records, and if you believe the spread risk is worse, then it makes sense to proxy spread risk with vaccine records. Personally, I get what you mean, and perhaps I'm not fighting too hard for the truth here because I don't really care that much.
But I just wanted to say I'm with you on the facts since every other response is operating (in my opinion) in the fallacious "there's a paper that says" mode. It's just not Bayesian.
So if anything, breaking that out just makes not getting vaccinated for those without prior infection look even stupider.
I'd have no problem with treating proof of immune response as similar to vaccinated, but I also haven't seen most of the outraged argue for that - versus just arguing for "freedom" - so... don't wait for me to make that case for them.
And then immunity is not a binary or linear response. Vaccination can still boost immunity in the case that someone has recovered from infection.
I know someone who could not get vaccinated for medical reasons (legitimately), and caught it, and died.
It just really sucks to know that the person I know would more likely be alive if not for the choices of others.
Which of these two people are more likely to spread COVID:
1. An unvaccinated person who rarely leaves their house and avoids contact with people as much as possible.
2. A vaccinated individual with an asymptomatic infection who regularly engages in social activity, confident that their triple-boosted immunity will protect them from serious illness.
So yes, the choices of others have an impact, but I don't think it's clear that getting a vaccine is the thing that universally improves the outcome for others. It's individual behaviors more than vaccination status that impact the health of others. The choice to get vaccinated (or not) has little impact on one's chance of shedding the virus. But the change in behavior thanks to vaccine-induced confidence leading to more risky behavior could actually have a negative impact on the health of others.
> Vaccination does not prevent one from being contagious.
I never said it did, that's not even a counterpoint. Seat belts do not prevent car accident injuries, helmets do not prevent concussions. But they all are effective in reducing the probability.
> On the contrary,
Note the common form of the straw man.
> Vaccination could lead to more risky behavior.
"could", an imagining of some sort of scenario that works for whatever reality you're trying to believe in
> Which of these two people are more likely to spread COVID:
Apparently you think those two options are exhaustive?? Eliding right past the public behavior of the non-immunocompromised unvaccinated? Ignoring the point that if more unvaccinated people were vaccinated and boosted, it would be less likely that vaccinated people engaged in social activity would spread COVID? So, no thank you, I will not ignore a reality that hit me viscerally in favor of your theories of what "could" be true.
Intramuscular/serum vaccines cannot stop respiratory infections, by definition. They are non-sterilizing. Only a nasal/mucosal vaccine or nasal infection can provide sterilizing immunity against a respiratory virus.
This is the technological limits of what vaccines are capable of. Vaccination limits the damage, ensuring a much lower likelihood of catching a 1 to 3 day cold affecting only my upper respiratory tracts rather than risking the lungs and the rest of my body on a potentially multi-week infection.
The longer the infection, the more likely pneumonia or another co-infection will injure or kill you.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/flushot.htm
So does the Mayo Clinic:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/flushot.htm
I won't go on, but by definition, a medicine that you take that's intended to build up your immune response to a disease is a vaccine. I saw someone upstream write "Intramuscular/serum vaccines cannot stop respiratory infections, by definition," and as far as I can tell this is just point-blank wrong. Whooping Cough -- pertussis -- is a respiratory bacterial infection we've been vaccinating against with intramuscular shots since the 1940s.
Does measles count as a respiratory infection? It causes coughing, is airborne, and infection happens via nasal passages. The intramuscular measles vaccine seems to work pretty well.
Is it super important that they are technically wrong on something, anyway? Like, do you think Fauci is going to be cancelled because he said something wrong? I doubt that's going to occur based on his prior messaging.
"If you're vaccinated, you won't get COVID" - Joe Biden
From the beginning, there has not been a COVID-19 vaccine that purported to be 100% effective. There are vanishingly few vaccines that provide 100% immunity, if for no other reason than the immune system is not perfect.
In human history, we have only completely removed 1 virus from humanity: smallpox. That is literally the only 100% effective vaccine ever produced. And even then, it is only 100% effective after the fact.
The mRNA vaccines give a broader immunization that covers more. That's not even up for debate, you're only pretending it is.
I hope your comment is sarcasm.
Either way I find it weird that the study clearly shows vaccination + infection provides the best protection yet people are using this to argue that they don't need a vaccination at all.
The way in which the media has gotten everyone to say "the unvaccinated" is a 'disease' against basic science (not even getting into the divisive nature of this). I would go as far as saying if you read any paper, study, or other that refers to the "unvaccinated" as a single cohort, you are reading vaccine propaganda, not science, or certainly not good science.
This must stop. Prior infection immunity is basic science that we've known for eons, and ignoring it is so blatantly glaring an omission, it should make the most staunch pro-vaccine person pause and say: "why are they so adamant to vaccinate those with prior infection?". One would expect prior infection to be robust, and multiple studies, including even the CDC's most recent shows it to be easily as good if not better and longer lasting than the vaccine. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.
If you think any of the above is "anti-vax" then I would suggest the media has won and science is dead. I'm not suggesting the vaccine doesn't work. I'm not suggesting it doesn't provide protection against severe disease and death. I'm not suggesting anyone go out and intentionally try to get COVID, but a HUGE # of people have already had it and ignoring them is downright unscientific. If you are a rational person who wants to see good science and are unemotional and detached from outcomes, then you will want to see proper study cohorts, and combining prior infection in with the "unvaccinated" cohort, is just bad science. This bad science fuels the anti-vaxx movement even more, and honestly, it is hard blame them.