> STOCKHOLM, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Sweden has decided against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11, the Health Agency said on Thursday, arguing that the benefits did not outweigh the risks.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-...
I'm not super well versed in the science but it seems like reasonable parties advise against vaccination in certain scenarios. Also knowing that government bodies are more likely to prioritize group outcomes over individual outcomes it seems reasonable for individuals to be skeptical.
A recent CDC study [0] joins plenty of others from last year in showing that these people were at least as protected from infections and severe outcomes during delta as those who were vaccinated without a prior infection.
Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me.
You've probably spent the last year being told these people are trying to murder your family though, so it also makes sense to me if you don't agree with this.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anything else.
Getting boosted, even after having been infected, is a cheap and easy way to reliably keep your immune response high without unpredictable timing. It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.
I encourage you to read the linked study, particularly the parts about the included cohorts. The recovered cohort didn't have any kind of stipulation that their infection was recent. The text does call out waning efficacy in the vaccines, but it does not mention the same for infection.
> It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.
Does this have something do with what I said?
"The evidence in this report does not change our vaccination recommendations. We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19.”
The reasoning is easy: many more people do not develop as strong a response from infection as they do from vaccination, and vaccination happens on a known schedule. This is especially of interest since the relationship here was reversed with Alpha, and is still unclear with Omicron - the figures I’ve seen have relatively recent infection somewhere between 2 doses and 3 in terms of efficacy, and infected plus vaccinated being the strongest.
Now, if you think from a public health perspective that makes the call very easy: vaccines are cheap and effective, and more reliably produce an immune response. Waiting for people to get infected means that the schedule is unpredictable (overloads happen), and the timing being variable means that you might have people thinking they’re protected but they were part of the group who never mounted a strong response, or who have waned over time. Rather than having people get infected randomly or hoping that they had a strong response, it’s much easier to spend a few seconds vaccinating them so you have a higher confidence that they’re protected.
The study shows a cohort of people who had infections sometime between the advent of testing and march of 2021, and that cohort had better outcomes than the vaccinated but uninfected cohort. How can that be? What does it mean for immunity solely from vaccination to be "stronger" and "more reliable" if the outcomes are worse? What am I missing here?
For the alpha vs delta point, what does it matter if the relationship flipped? They're basically equivalent either way. The important part is that they're both much better than seronaive.
I think you might have lost track of my original response to the question that started this thread (what is a reason to not get vaccinated) where I said:
> Having already had an infection before you were able to get vaccinated.
How are pox parties and "waiting for people to get infected" and "having people get infected randomly" relevant to the scenario that I mentioned, where people don't have the choice of getting vaccinated before they get infected, since its already happened? There's no waiting, there's no parties, there is just dealing with the cards you've been dealt. By now there should be far more of these people than straight up seronaive folks.
Similarly, "We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19", sounds like the same thing: if you need to gain protection from covid, we recommend getting it via vaccine rather than illness. That doesn't apply in this scenario, since protection has (as it seems to me we see empirically here) already been attained.
Apologies if my edit in quotating you is misrepresenting what you're saying, but it's how I read it.
Okay.
If people have already been infected with COVID, is vaccination going to do them any good?
I think so. I'm not a doctor, nurse, anything. But I expect anyone who hasn't seen COVID for a year, it would help. Probably the same benefit as a booster that follows vaccination for people who [think they] have never been infected.
Vaccination has its own risks. I believe there is very slight risk from the injection itself.
But -- I just got booster dose, my third shot, this week. I had to go to a pharmacy a couple of blocks from my house. I walked. I had to cross a street, with the traffic signal, but there were a couple of cars. They didn't hit me. This time. Then I had to go inside the pharmacy talk to some people, wait about ten minutes. Everyone was wearing masks, but honestly it was the most contact I've had with a random mix of people all week...
If I'd needed to drive miles out of my way to get the vaccination, that's also nonzero risk.
And then... well, it seemed to hit me pretty hard, the vaccine, this time. I felt awful for two days. Then I was fine. But it seemed like a bigger reaction than previous doses. I think that's supposed to happen, actually.
Anyhow, I thought about it, and made my choice. I think it was the right way to go for me.
It's given me some things to think about, thanks.
I think thats a reasonable interpretation of what the original quote (which wasn't mine) was saying.
> If people have already been infected with COVID, is vaccination going to do them any good?
The linked data shows that it did seem to lead to a small improvement for folks during delta. Whether or not that small improvement is worth it is a judgment call.
> Anyhow, I thought about it, and made my choice. I think it was the right way to go for me.
Not that anybody needs this affirmation, but I'm 1000% in support of you making that call.
I consistently see anti-vaccination rhetoric on HN.
This is exactly backwards from reality. The groups you mentioned are at much higher risk from covid and ergo it is much more important to vaccinate. The risk in absolute terms will remain much higher even with vaccination but this is a poor reason not to vaccinate. The reason you vaccinate is the degree of risk mitigated not the expectation of reducing that risk to zero.
They won't exhibit an immune response to COVID spike proteins. From the virus, from a conventional vaccine, or from their own cells' production following an mRNA vaccine.
There are certainly degrees of immune system pathology. If you are receiving medical care for such a situation, by all means please follow your doctors instructions and not mine!
>They won't exhibit an immune response to COVID spike proteins. From the virus, from a conventional vaccine, or from their own cells' production following an mRNA vaccine.
This is absolutely untrue. Most people who are immunocompromised have an immune system that works poorly not none. They are worse off than others as far as mortality and morbidity with the vaccine and without it compared to healthier individuals but they are absolutely able to develop antibodies and benefit from vaccination.
The CDC says they are 65-80% less likely to end up in the ER presenting with covid if vaccinated and boosted.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm...
Immunocompromised people that took your advice would be 3-5x more likely to die if infected with covid and given prevalence will very likely to be infected in the year ahead of us. Please refrain from giving medical advise without first taking the time to understand the topic you are speaking on. It's more important not to spread health misinformation than chat on business and tech.
Vaccines do not stop transmission of Covid nor do they stop you from getting Covid.
They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid.
Thus the decision to vax or not is clearly a personal choice.
They don't stop it, but they do decrease your chances of acquiring it and they do reduce the viral load you shed.
> They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid.
So they prevent you from taking up a hospital bed, exposing the people who have to care for you to COVID and preventing other non-COVID emergencies from being tended to. That seems to impact others to me.
Or are you about to make a bunch of Socio-economic and cultural justifications for obesity that you will not extend to the unvaccinated?
Secondly, and this is the one that people find weird, once you've weighed X pounds, and lost some significant mass, you must eat less calories than simple "calories in is calories out" would suggest, because our physiology reacts as if food is scarce, and will store fat to the detriment of all other functions.
1. Sugar and its substitutes are bad for you, yes thats true (Thank you FDA for recommending 10 servings of grains, and backing the lipid hypothesis which caused low fat (aka High Sugar) products to appear everywhere.
2. Unless the obese somehow violate the law of thermodynamics if you reduce energy in while maintaining energy out mass will decrease.
edit : Also, what's the protocol/norm about posting the same reply in multiple threads? I can see some pros and cons to it being within standard behavior, and don't see a clear answer as to which is larger
I promise you, if losing weight were "easy" then most people would look like Hollywood action heroes.
https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...
... as a co-morbidity of COVID. Clearly the most effective option for people who are obese (and other people at elevated risk) is to get vaccinated.
Or are you about to make a bunch of Socio-economic and cultural justifications for obesity that you will not extend to the unvaccinated?
You might as well be telling people to take antibiotics 'just in case' because a partially resistant strain of something is going around.
That partially resistant strain won't be "partially" resistant for long.
Where have you seen otherwise?
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
[1] https://www.jwatch.org/na54386/2021/12/15/transmission-risk-...
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788485
If you want to retreat to "ok, they probably do actually help a little bit with that, but I think the amount to which they help with that is small enough that [thing] isn't worth it.", then ok, but, like, I think you should probably make it explicit.
(earlier, the topic was about like, health insurance, not employment, and so I'm using [thing] to cover both of those things.)
I can understand immuno-compromised people, an underlying medical condition, for whom a vaccine may not work or may be dangerous. Undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer? Got it: vaccines won't help you (or anyone else) until you can get past the cancer.
I don't agree with an argument from stand-my-ground, my-body-my-choice principles. I could agree with such a line of reasoning, if a personal choice did not present an immediate danger to anyone else.
This is a very infectious disease with severe health consequences. No one has control over the outcome, if they choose to infect another person. Maybe it's no big deal for them. Or maybe it wrecks their life, long after the vaccine objector has left the scene.
What are some other reasons for avoiding vaccination?