I still don't particularly like it that much.

None of this should be all that new.

There were plenty of knowledgeable people saying all along that sterilizing nutralizing immunity in the mucosa was unlikely to be achievable for a vaccine against a respiratory virus that most commonly had no viremic phase, particularly as a shot given in the arm.

They were also saying that T-cells were the important thing to prevent disease and death and we shouldn't be focusing on preventing infection.

Some other people who debated or disagreed with that perspective are now suddenly learning novel new things about the immune system. There's a good chunk of experts out there that were saying this all along though (if you were listening to them and not the headlines and blogs and twitter).

You are absolutely right, this has been my experience too. Pointing out what you did about (lack of) sterilising and (importance of) mucosal immunity usually got you downvoted here up until recently. It doesn't matter what your political persuasion is (I am, or at least I was, going into the pandemic, a left liberal), the idea that the vaccines would end the pandemic if only enough people got 1, 2, 3 or more doses was gaslighting from the beginning, probably arising from flippant remarks from politicians when asked for target dates to lift lockdown restrictions - "when X% are vaccinated!". And the idea that this was never what was being said about them this time last year is also gaslighting that's happening right now.

The problem is that this is a very nuanced subject. Everyone thinks they know what's going on, because they've been told it's simple: get vaccinated/boosted, work from home and do as we say and this will all be over. Much of the data being used to justify this was one or more of badly collected, badly analysed or badly interpreted by dishonest politicians, journalists, scientists and members of the public pushing their own (or their bosses') agendas. Instead of opponents' arguments being heard and countered in public ("sunlight is the best disinfectant"), they have been deplatformed under the auspices of "public safety". Scientists have lost their jobs for saying something to counter the narrative - it has become illegal to disagree with the scientists the politicians listen to, under punishment of losing your livelihood. It has been a total shitshow that has exposed how corrupt the whole system is. It has made me quite depressed at how little we've apparently learned since the last century. I thought we were living in the age of science, but what we have right now is far, far from it; maybe we should call it the age of misinformation - driven by humans' psychological maladaptation to their own incredible invention, the internet.

These anointed "experts" still have not told people to chill the fuck out about covid and children. We have two years of publicly available data saying they are at virtually no risk. Yet the CDC and Fauci both act like covid is some kind of grave danger to children.

Dig deep enough into most of the pro-"what we've done"'s arguments and they are nothing more than thinly disguised appeals to authority.

One thought I had recently is how up and downvotes on sites like HN must contribute to tunnel vision in debates. I know I have self-censored in the past knowing that something I would say would get downvoted into oblivion, and I've posted stuff that hasn't been very constructive but that I've known would be a crowd pleaser. This surely creates echo chambres resembling the opinions of the loudest in the community. Old vBulletin-style forums before likes and up/downvotes were a thing, where all you could do was quote-reply (and one-word "+1" and "disagree" replies were brutally deleted by zealous moderators), were perhaps in hindsight the closest to optimal we ever reached in the realm of textual online debates. What a sorry state of affairs.

At the same time I started listening to many interviews with Daniel Schmachtenberger. Mindblowing, but also quite abstract. Rebel Wisdom does some work on the meta-level, i.e. how we can become better at sensemaking. Whether it’s around COVID or the next thing. And that for me is really the main takeaway from this pandemic. We suck at collectively making sense of complex threats and enacting good policies. Even simpler issues like statistical deaths due to air pollution most people don’t quite take for what they are.

I’d be happy to get in contact, I’m trying to figure out what ways there are to connect people and create a community that does high efficiency-collective sensemaking. Something that gives a good and balanced picture of status quo truth quickly. But also something that allows to progressively dig deeper into details. If this resonates with you → [email protected]

Oh, and I totally agree about the message board presentation making a big difference. I posted a crucial comment providing the context to the JRE thing yesterday and it didn’t get any attention. But even on Twitter most people missed the context, so it’s no wonder our sensemaking is so inefficient. Imagine talking for an hour only to later realize the point of contention became 90% mute in the presence of a bit of new information. That’s how I saw this, but multiplied by thousands of people. What a waste of smart people’s time.

my un-educated thinking is

(1) kids catch covid like everyone else, they don't get bad symptoms, but they bring it home and give it to their parents, grandparents, etc. I know 3 families where this happened. Kids got it first, passed it on to everyone else.

(2) lockdowns and/or similar measures, have been needed to keep hospitalization numbers at or below capacity. Some people claim lockdowns are about power but I see zero political upsides to lockdowns so it's hard to see how proposing them is a power grab.

(3) vaccinations, same as above, needed to keep hospitalization numbers at or below capacity

Note: My personal anecdata, my unvacced 79yr old father died from covid 2 weeks ago. His wife has had a harsh case as well but at the moment it looks like she'll pull through.

  t=-1: 70% were vaccinated
  t= 0: 100% were vaccinated
  t=+1: 100% were vaccinated & boostered
  t=+2: 100% were vaccinated & double boostered
  ...

Such a confusing, yet common stance. The flu vaccine is free, risk is essentially nil, and it reduces your chance of death across the board[1]:

> At a median follow‐up duration of 19.5 months, influenza vaccine was associated with a lower risk of all‐cause mortality (RR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.60–0.93 [P=0.01]), cardiovascular mortality (RR, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.80–0.84 [P<0.001]), and major adverse cardiovascular events (RR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80–0.94 [P<0.001]) compared with control. The use of the influenza vaccine was not associated with a statistically significant reduction of myocardial infarction (RR, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.49–1.09 [P=0.12]) compared with control.

It's the biggest no-brainer since seatbelts.

[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.120.019636

Like fuck I’m gonna keep getting boosters but still need to show papers and wear masks. I’m not a sucker.

Consider if your first impulse is to deny the possibility of that last point. You’re probably not an evolutionary virologist, so the truth is you have no idea which mutations are next. Perhaps you think T-cell immunity will save you, but omicron already escapes >50% of T-cell antibody types in 21% of vaccinated or infected people. Will we develop better cross-neutralizing antibodies from omicron or will antigen imprinting doom us to suffering wave after wave of new variants, due to maintaining variant-specific immunity only?

I bet that feeling of self-righteousness is satisfying, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s because blaming other humans subconsciously lets you continue the illusion that humans were ever in control of the pandemic in the first place or that a real risk ever existed for you. Anger is a lot more comfortable than existential anxiety.

But the truth is, it’s not “the man” who’s keeping you down at all — the pandemic limitations you feel right now are the libertarian equivalent to your fist being restrained from meeting your neighbor’s nose.

https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums/

Cellular immunity is highly durable and effective.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

The question is not how long the immunity lasts (based on original SARS patients, probably multiple decades to a lifetime), but whether affinity-matured T-cells can sufficiently cover the antigen-space of future ACE2-binding spike proteins.

Somatic hypermutation might still be too complex to model computationally to answer that question outright.

Do you know whether this question is answerable in another way?

It’s impressive annual vaccination rates are as high as they are.

This tells me, when I'm 65, I should definitely be getting flu shots.

Much more and better explanation about flu shots here:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/flu/in-depth/...

No, that's not what it tells you. Really, I can't help you if an article that spells this stuff out in great detail results in a response that indicates that you have not understood it, they spent a lot more time on this than I will be able to do in this context.

Not anti vax, not that it should matter for this argument.

What if I told you I don't wear a seatbelt?

I remember thinking much the same two decades ago when it was risk of death from terrorists vs bees.

The one part you left out is that there is a genetic component, so the first few ways were a form of selection against people who couldn't handle covid. It seems likely the the remaining population is much less susceptible to dying in future waves.

Flu would have looked like this the first time around, except when it arose, people didn't fly around the world or even really move a few miles from their home most of the time, which acted as a natural way to reduce outbreaks.

Most importantly, vaccine induced immunity still protects against severe disease that requires hospitalization.

More importantly, if the herd immunity is the question - omicron and vaccination might provide very robust immune protection.

Another thing to keep in mind - because omicron was so successful, it may have blocked the appearance of a new variant that is a derivative of it and the next similar variant that might appear that is neither some pre-omicron derivative nor close to omicron.

Vaccination with the original variant is not a bad bet because it is most likely just in the middle of every possible derivation from it.

And I still think the vaccines are substantially accelerating the end. So I'm not even sure what the complaint is. That it isn't the only factor? Sure, but it's a huge one, and one of few that we can control.

For a virus that supposedly just jumped from wild animals to humans, it'd be irresponsible to simultaneously think it couldn't happen again from any of the number of species potentially acting as reservoirs.

But, you need to stop equating ending the pandemic with eliminating the virus.

After the pandemic ends the virus will be with the human race for the rest of our natural lives most likely.

We live with HCoV-229E and HCoV-OC43 and all of us catch that and nobody considers the pandemics that started transmission of those viruses in the human race to still be pandemics.

When the disease burden drops sufficiently then the pandemic is over. Vaccines reduce the disease burden dramatically.

I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths. This avoids all of the problems around classifcations of deaths with/from COVID, vaccination statuses, etc. It's much harder to disguise deaths or lack of deaths. EuroMOMO [1; scroll 60% down to the z-scores] shows excess deaths in Europe basically went back to normal in most countries after the European wave in spring 2020, long before vaccines were available. This was the case despite widely varying levels of lockdown stringency - with at least one country, Sweden, not doing any significant locking down at all. And many countries' peaks at this time were, if you scroll back in time, comparable in magnitude to excess deaths during previous winters. If you draw a line in your mind down the various countries' graphs at early 2021 when significant fractions of the populations of these countries were starting to get vaccinated, you will probably struggle to determine that they've had any real positive effect at all. Once you do that, consider an alternative hypothesis could better describe the data, for example that the virus is highly seasonal and we have very little control over it. Now, a bonus: change the age group from "all ages" to younger cohorts and observe that in many countries excess deaths did not shift from resembling noise during the entirely of the past 2 years. There are even some countries, not known for being paragons of good health such as Scotland, that barely saw any out of the ordinary excess deaths in the young during the whole period. I think people seem to think things are far worse than they actually are in most countries because of the panic created by media and politicians. This is why I am very unconvinced by the argument that vaccines have been helping to end the pandemic, at very least amongst most of those who have been locked down. It seems much more reasonable to me that other factors are at play here.

[1] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

No country was even close to what you could call significantly vaccinated until mid-2021. The winter 20-21 wave is almost entirely unvaccinated populations.

The winter 21-22 is now mostly vaccinated and, surprise, it’s much lower (and unvaccinated are still the majority of deaths).

This argument also works against vaccine efficacy.

The upset from lockdowns and delayed or canceled treatments/surgeries is why. I don't think we have final numbers for 2021 yet, but the numbers from the US in 2020 showed a jump in non-covid deaths about half as big as covid deaths.

Cancer didn't have a big jump that year, but it is one of the things that got postponed diagnoses and treatments, because it doesn't kill immediately so it's not an emergency, so one expectation I've seen is for it to spike in 2021.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234#24...

This outcome was obvious to anybody paying attention in the beginning.

You do not see it? I see a long fat tail there.

There were 131500 excess deaths during weeks 1-8 and 230000 after that. Does it sound normal to you?

And for every age group below 65, 2021 has been worse than 2020 and worse than previous years except 2019 for 0-14 that was even worse than all pandemic years.

Are you intentionally blind to this?

You appear to think that we can somehow take each age group and somehow handle them much differently. Practice has showed that we all are connected.

Why are we getting such runover by omicron - kids in the schools and kindergartens. I do not blame them, it just is like it is.

You are missing the fact that the government and the media has been consistently dishonest and/or wrong at virtually every stage of the pandemic but they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege. People are also tired of the burdensome restrictions that are entirely performative (like masking in general) and harmful (masking in schools, especially among young children. Anyone who has eaten dinner in a packed restaurant with 200 other unmasked people but is then required to put on their mask for the 10 foot walk to the bathroom knows exactly how ridiculous and useless these restrictions are.

You say "they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege". I'm sorry I don't get what you're trying to say here. You can say this about any law. You're saying they act as if laws were important and needed to be unforced.

Finally, of course laws are "dumb", they are binary, you can ridicule any law by pushing it to its limit. Driving on this road at 100 km/h is legal, but suddenly at 100.001 it's illegal?? so yeah, when you're exactly in between a place where you must wear a mask and a place where you don't, it's as ridiculous as... any law really.

I’ve heard engineers complain saying things like “I got the vaccine, how come I haven’t gotten all my freedoms back yet? Why did I bother?” in the middle of an out break. The people whose job it is to look at complex systems fall short. Maximising their chances of getting severely ill is seen as an inconvenience.

Was there any other possible outcome?

Many states didn't regress during delta. They kept calm and carried on with normal. Only some states decided to regress. And the outcomes are almost identical--in the same ballpark at least.

They are dehumanizing.

Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them. We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence. Especially post vaccine.

Maybe people want to move on? Mayne those people have incredibly valid reasons for they wish? Maybe the government should respect that?

It's a piece of cloth worn over your nose and mouth. How fragile is your sense of humanity?

> Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them.

I don't like wearing shoes, but that doesn't make shoe mandates (which are totally a thing, but only private businesses, not by government order) dehumanizing.

> We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence.

Is that straw man dead yet?

> Especially post vaccine.

On this point, I actually agree. Would vaccine mandates be acceptable instead? It would be much more effective than mask mandates (which, while I have no real problem with them in principle, don't actually work that well because so many people don't wear them correctly).

I say this as someone who doesn't mind masks and wears them often.

I guess that's where we differ. I believe we should make our best decisions based on what science predicts. If there's unlikely to be a significant benefit, some are not happy to wear it. You are, but that's a personal choice.

There are lots of sacrifices we could make that would have an immediate and more tangible impact on health outcomes. Outlaw motor vehicles, mandatory vegetables, end alcohol sales. We don't do that because it would piss people off.

That’s an incredibly low bar you’re setting.

What do you think of the suffering of those who’d normally rely on lip reading?

Edit: since we already asked you twice not to do this, and you've continued, I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Just curious, but would you feel comfortable elaborating on how? I haven’t found them all that bad personally, but maybe there’s something I’m not as attuned to.

I resent it.

Masks turned a swath of a particular political party into some seriously sanctimonious assholes.

Sure we do. The word "quarantine" comes from the fact that during large stretches of human history we'd isolate people before entering new cities for the objectively true concern that they're bring in new pests. My grandparents traveled to the Americas from Europe and had the vaccination cards, had thorough medical examinations, and had to quarantine after coming from a ship full of sick people.

The entire history of human civilization is one big narrative of hygiene management. Sewage, water management, waste management, disease control.

I like my civilization more than I care for the whining of people ignorant of the unthinkable amounts of pain that diseases have caused. So, yeah, no problem calling you names, some people need to be reminded of their own ignorance every now and then.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

Yes, compliance and knowing how to wear a mask has been an issue. That's not the same thing as "masks don't work."

This is a random place to put this, but I just want to point out that I think for the most part even mask wearing is not required anymore (unless you are sick, but why are you going anywhere sick?)

Part of the reason I put it here is that I want to make sure it's understood that despite the fact I'm pretty pro-vax, pro-mask and generally supported the lockdowns at the time -- we're past all that for now with Omicron. Things are still a mess, and the facts on the ground could change, but I think it's important that everybody gets on the same page that we're moving on.

The surgeons already know. Since the 1990s, there has been a general movement away from using surgical masks in the OR, due to accumulating evidence that they have no effect. (For example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480558/)

It is a literature review that didn’t find strong evidence for surgical mask effectiveness more because it hasn’t been researched deeply. And it notes that the absence of evidence does not indicate ineffectiveness of surgical masks, and rather a more significant research trial would have to be performed (and there were caveats to the feasibility of doing that as well).

Specific quotes from that article:

“What literature that is available on the subject tends to be dated with poorly explained methodology. There is also uncertainty over whether the results of such studies can be extrapolated to current surgical practice given the advent of new antiseptic techniques since they were completed.”

“It is clear that more studies are required before any absolute conclusions can be drawn regarding the effectiveness or, indeed, ineffectiveness of surgical masks. The published literature does suggest that it may be reasonable to further examine the need for masks in contemporary surgical practice given the interests of comfort, budget constraints and potential ease of communication, although any such study would undoubtedly have to be large and well controlled to prove causality given the low event frequency of surgical site infections.”

“It is important not to construe an absence of evidence for effectiveness with evidence for the absence of effectiveness. While there is a lack of evidence supporting the effectiveness of facemasks, there is similarly a lack of evidence supporting their ineffectiveness. With the information currently available, it would be imprudent to recommend the removal of facemasks from surgery. Instead, in the medical field where common practice can so easily become dogma, it is necessary to recognise the constant need to maintain a healthy scepticism towards established beliefs and to periodically re-evaluate and critically assess their scientific merit.”

At the end, they take the stance that while evidence doesn't support any benefit, it doesn't indicate harm either, so might as well continue using masks.

I don't deny that this is still a matter of controversy, compare Romney (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11289767/) with Belkin (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11886203/).

The most frequent complaint is that most research on the subject is not high quality, but what about those studies that are good? The most thorough clinical study is Tunevall (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1853618/), which clearly supports no benefit. There are apparently no high quality studies that support benefit.

Doesn’t exist.

I dont like being used as a lab rat. I refuse to participate in this uncontrolled experiment these public health experts are conducting.

Regardless of a mandate, people will do what they do even if it's not in their best interests, or in the interests of their loved ones, or the interests of their neighbors. They will smoke in public places, they will goto work sick, they will drive drunk. Frankly put, people can be jerks. So you put a mandate out there, and you do your best.

Masks work. In areas where mask utilization is high, there is good air filtration and people follow distancing rules, the spread is slowed.

Some measures are simply common sense practices and don't need an overwhelming amount of scientific studies to justify them. Particularly when the drawbacks to them are so minor, while the potential advantages are huge.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...

Does it justify mandatory wearing of religious symbols and tattoos? After all, there are almost no drawbacks, and "potential" advantage is even bigger. It was considered "common sense" for millennia.

Before COVID-19, we had extensive analysis of previous pandemics, with the consistent judgment that public mask-wearing had no noticeable effect. For example, the DoD commissioned a study of the 1918-1920 pandemic. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179067)

The latter question sounds insulting and dismissive, but it's actually posed in good faith. It highlights a genuine epistemological problem about the nature, limits, and validity of our knowledge about the pandemic. I can find studies on PubMed and elsewhere that back up virtually any belief, prejudice, policy, or therapy that I like. So can you. Where does that leave us, except with the obvious solution of trusting our local, state, and national health authorities?

From the 1918-1920 Spanish influenza pandemic onward, public health agencies have evaluated the effects of mask mandates and other non-pharmaceutical interventions. The consistent result of these epidemiological studies has been failure to detect a positive effect. A typical review article, which was I think the most quoted up until 2020 is Cowling (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20092668/).

From the discussion:

In conclusion there remains a substantial gap in the scientific literature on the effectiveness of face masks to reduce transmission of influenza virus infection. While there is some experimental evidence that masks should be able to reduce infectiousness under controlled conditions, there is less evidence on whether this translates to effectiveness in natural settings. There is little evidence to support the effectiveness of face masks to reduce the risk of infection.

I see virtually no evidence that suggests masks do anything meaningful to the spread of Covid—especially enough to justify forcing service workers to wear them 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for two years straight. Especially now that anybody can get a vaccine. Why should service workers be required to wear them? To protect fully vaccinated people who are still afraid of Covid? Seems pretty selfish to ask that if people. Especially when service workers get bullied and gaslight by rich tech workers who think “masks are virtually costles” while their only time masking is their 1 hour weekly trip to the grocery store…

These Covid measures are nothing more than forcing the lower class to protect the upper class (or at least pretends to. It’s all theater and we all know it). It is incredibly privileged to support any of the nonsense we’ve mandated the last two years.

Not my job, either. I'm not a doctor or public health authority. That's where I go for advice; do you have better sources in mind?

You might love masks but not everybody feels the same way. Leave people the hell alone.

"Leave people the hell alone" isn't an option, because you live in a populated, civilized nation rather than on a deserted private island. (I will note, however, that they won't shoot you at the border for trying to leave.)

Besides, asking kids to sacrifice their one and only childhood to protect fully vaccinated adults who are still afraid is a horrific public policy. Kids should never be asked to sacrifice for adults. That just isn’t how things work.

All over DFW superintendents are resigning. They see the damage they’ve done and are jumping ship as the chickens come home to roost. I suspect all over the nation school and county health leadership are getting out before the full scope of the damage they’ve caused is realized.

It is that simple.

90% of the people in the hospitals are unvaccinated still.

Cut the unvaccinated fraction of the population down by 1/3 and you cut the hospitalization rate for the next wave by roughly 1/3.

Instead people are doing T-cells/B-cells and affinity maturation the hard slow way.

If we had a 100% vaccination rate we'd be done.

Don't know why everyone so desperately needs to look for counterintuitive ways to approach the very simple problem that when there's a global pandemic you mitigate it with vaccination. Any other result is intellectuals thinking too hard to try to impress themselves and probably missing basic facts in the process.

Even during the height of a COVID surge, the total hospitalizations is maybe 20% higher than normal. Also note that as COVID hospitalizations increase, regular hospitalizations decrease. This is a consequence of the dishonest reporting criteria encouraged by the CDC; people are hospitalized for unrelated reasons but happen to test positive for COVID so are counted as a COVID patients instead of regular patients. See, for instance: https://www.dailywire.com/news/massachusetts-now-differentia....

You can also web search for hospitals being overwhelmed by the flu. In a few minutes I found this happening in two different years: 2018 and 2000. The reality is that hospitals get overwhelmed very easily for a number of reasons. Even if you vaccinated everyone in the U.S., they would still get overwhelmed during surges. In other countries with higher vaccination rates, hospitals still get overwhelmed and primarily with vaccinated people: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...

The reality is that this pandemic is over as soon as we make it over. My family has been living a normal life since October 2020.

Edit: /s because apparently that is necessary.

See https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca/status/1486208081142947840/...

Also, the whole ICU capacity percentage numbers inducing so much fear and panic are very misleading. ICU capacity isn’t static it can be adjusted up and down. So saying ICU is at 98% capacity utilization is meaningless because it could be very well possible that ICU beds can be added and now ICU capacity is 75% utilization.

Vaccines are shown to reduce cases of serious symptoms and hospitalization. Yes, even if everyone is vaccinated is possible for hospitals to still be overwhelmed if infections spread too quickly (hence things like distancing still being important), but even in that case, you’d have less people needing hospital attention that are unable to get it.

The overall goal of our societies, as I see it, is returning to living our lives as normal and killing the fewest people in the process. Reducing hospitalization rates means that more exposure can safely happen before hospitals are at risk. When they come close to being overwhelmed, additional restrictions on gathering will probably need to be reemployed until the risk subsides again.

These risks are also very local (more local than state) and personal. So it’s perfectly reasonable for the pandemic to “be over” for some where the risk is low, yet not for some where the risk remains high.

No, the current status is that we'll be done if and only if we reach acceptance of a situation that is not going to go away anytime soon. The only thing stopping us from being done is in people's heads.

My government has spent hundreds of billions to prevent "the health care system from being overburdened". Not a single cent of that money went into the healthcare system. In fact, the systematic reduction of "healthcare overcapacity" was continued throughout. Our politicians are either remorseless criminals or fantastical dunces. Either way the world would be a better place if they were removed from power, one and all.

Of course. The actual political debate in the US is whether society should accept and normalize daily mass death. If we applied today’s standards, 9/11 would have been a non-issue. It’s only about a days worth of covid deaths, after all.

Their choice has a direct effect on society and causes harm to other people. So no it's not as a simple as.

I guess we could deny the unvaccinated medical care in hospitals. Because they take up ressources that would be spent on people with other medical issues. We have an about 70% vaccination rate and 80-90% of hospitalized covid patients are unvaccinated. Meanwhile I know of people that can't get standard procedures done because of covid patients (this wasn't a problem before the pandemic).

https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/EMT...

* Mandate a minimum # of nurses and pay them fairly. Patient survival depends on nurses being able to do their jobs, but hospitals seem to prefer saving money by cutting staff.

* Improve society’s overall health by reducing inequality. Lives have intrinsic value that transcends any economic or profit-based calculus. We consider mass death unacceptable because we recognize this basic truth.

* Make paid sick days and short-term disability more accessible. It can take weeks to months to properly recover, depending on severity.

* New building regulations in public spaces to lower the viral inoculum (correlated with severity) using tactics such as improved ventilation and 222nm UV lamps.

* Ensure access to the basic necessities: healthy food, housing, healthcare. You can’t survive a covid infection if you’re dying of exposure on the street.

No, this was a discussion about 1. the claim by others that vaccination would be the key to "end" all of this and 2. my complaint that not a single cent of many 100s of billions my government spent on all of this went into health care.

I would very much have liked if we had spent more money on nurses, and into making their work as easy as possible by allowing them to concentrate on their core competencies and offload the easier parts of the jobs onto more nursing assistants, which can be trained relatively quickly. Alas, we didn't, and here we are!

If everyone was vaccinated the healthcare system wouldn't be overburdened without spending a dime on the healthcare system.

Preventative medicine is always the cheapest option.

There's no real argument for continued restrictions beyond hospital capacity (and even that one is a stretch). Why not spend money on that and open up the economy again?

Let's say it's 80%. 80/20. Primary vax status probably hasn't changed too dramatically in 1 month.

p(hospitalized | vaxxed) = p(vaxxed | hospitalized) * p(hospitalized) / p(vaxxed)

= 0.6 * p(hospitalized) / 0.80

= 0.75 * p(hospitalized)

---

p (hospitalized | unvaxxed) = p (unvaxxed | hospitalized) * p(hospitalized) / p(unvaxxed)

= 0.4 * p(hospitalized) / 0.2

= 2 * p(hospitalized)

Vaccination gives a 2.67x reduction in hospitalizations (against omicron which all the anti-vaxxers are saying the vaccines don't do anything against).

With your 90% figure, it becomes 2/3 instead of 3/4 and 4 instead of 2, which is 6x, confirming what the other replier got.

[1] https://www.sortiraparis.com/news/coronavirus/articles/23973...

Page 28 on vaccine efficacy.

https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus...

Same with age and risk-factor cohorts. We could repeat the probability calculation for each cohort if we could collect those data, but it would probably make the vaccine even more effective: Presumably, more higher-risk people are double/triple/quad vaxxed at this point, so whatever rate they show up to the hospital is higher than what the average healthier person could expect.

"Being done" with covid is only a political decision, and no percentage appears to be high enough for them.

They would be a much smaller and manageable number, and on average much older/vulnerable than they are now (vaccination basically lowers your risk to that of someone 20-30 years younger)

More figures from France : the unvaccinated 8% account for 39% of hospitalizations, 54% of intensive care admissions, 46% of Covid deaths.

This is a hugely outsized effect, so there's still enormous potential for drastically improving the situation in hospitals with just a few more percentage points of vaccinated people.

I didn't mean 90%.

If 5% of the population is susceptible that's enough to overload the hospital system during a wave. It really doesn't take much with this virus.

And Delta's transmissibility really destroyed the destroyed the notion of herd immunity. The correct number should be 100% vaccinated.

And its still 90% unvaccinated people filling up the hospitals, even though you're highly vaccinated.

Once you hit the hospital percentages matching the population percentages then the "natural immunity" enthusiasts will have finally all basically caught it sufficiently to gain immunity the hard way and it'll be done.

People with weakened immune systems and other health issues are more likely to be vaccinated. But they're less likely to have a robust immune response to the vaccine.

For a vaccine that doesn’t confer sterilizing immunity and whose effectiveness wanes rather quickly? To say nothing of variants or the fact that this virus has animal reservoirs. Or the impossibility of vaccinating 100% of a population in the first place, nevermind in perpetuity.

“Ending it” was always a pipe dream.

The people are are unvaccinated in some cases have medical reason not to be and therefore be more likely to be hospitalized for anything. You'd need to stratify the numbers by age, vaccine status, and comorbidity status to get the full picture.

Early on when the 99% are unvaccinated line was going around all the data used was usually from before the vaccines were available.

Where is this true?

https://twitter.com/DougHenwood/status/1486807706954567685

Pennsylvania:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/about-90percent-of-...

Kansas City:

https://www.newspressnow.com/news/national_news/coronavirus/...

Missouri:

https://www.newspressnow.com/news/regional_news/central_miss...

Arizona over 80%:

https://ktar.com/story/4856002/banner-health-leader-over-80-...

Boosters 90% effective against hospitalization with Omicron:

https://fox8.com/news/coronavirus/cdc-boosters-90-effective-...

Is it wrong?

There are two main strategies to achieve low death rate:

1) Natural — let weak people die. Cheap.

2) Semi-natural — let weak people to be infected, then try to rescue them. Costly.

3) Supportive — support weak people with vaccines, to help them survive. Costly, but cheaper than (2).

Which one you prefer?

I havnt watched TV since the 2017 elections. Ive missed on everything including bushfires, natural disasters, pandemics, and capitalism.

I can see clearly how the system works. I said i wouldnt watch a single news report (including Covid) until it was a "highlight reel" and man o man has mainstream society lost its glammer. its a machine, where the capitalists and poilticans jockie for your money using the power you can give them against you while smiling into the camera and saying they love you.

FAANG you up the ass at every chance they get. Even the celebs are pawns, reliant on the ad companies for there bread and butter.

ive never been free-er. I had my covid (health issues) 15yrs ago and realised that day that life was precious and u should not take it for granted. I quite everything, travelled the world, and experienced modern society in all its wonder. I met people everyday who wished they could quit and travel like me and i told them, you can.

Unfortunately humans are not capable of infinite growth in a world where nature is being processed into profit in a constant grasp of more and more. Nature imposes its own limits. Virus are part of the moderisation game. They are a cost of buisness. Like our parents generation where the WW1/2 and The depression scared and and shaped them (and created this system), our children will be scared by the unresolved trauma their parents experienced during Covid.

What's that got to do with it?

One, measuring antibodies is MUCH easier than measuring T or B cell response. This is especially true early on in the pandemic, if you want to measure representative numbers of people, and you don't know when/whether they will be exposed or catch COVID (due to masking/lockdowns etc).

Two, when your problem is that the hospitals are filling up and you're facing a labor shortage for some essential workers for a a few months... then boosting antibodies for 4-6 months to reduce retransmission rates and minimizing symptomatic cases makes a lot of sense.

The process of hypermutation and affinity maturation takes months to finish. The initial immune response to a pathogen is poor and takes ng/ml of antibodies to neutralize the threat. The immune system essentially has a "budget" for antibodies and the early antibodies are poor and take up too much of that. Affinity maturation produces higher affinity antibodies that are effective at pg/ml but it takes months. But you can now "fit" many more kinds of antibodies into the bloodstream.

Hitting the mature immune response with a booster releases those high potency antibodies from germinal centers.

This is why nearly every single vaccine we give kids comes in a series of 2 or 3 shots spaced out over 6+ months.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/adult.html

Very few of those are one-and-done shots.

The initial mRNA shots were way too close together and were done that way out of expediency since the second shot gave a lot better protection very quickly. It also allowed the trials to complete faster and probably saved 100,000s of lives. It was basically a "wartime" decision to slam shots into arms way too fast.

The increased affinity against Omicron after a booster is also something that shouldn't have been a surprise.

The utility of 4th shot boosters in non-elderly non-immunocompromised and chasing after the idea of reducing spread through infection is on a lot less firm footing. Even the booster-obsessed Israelis are finding in studies that it doesn't do much good. This coronavirus also is currently mutating too rapidly and infection too many people in each wave to be able to logistically update the vaccines for new variants, so it doesn't look very useful to be thinking of it analogously to the yearly influenza shots.

I also feel that the WHO choices have not been very good. From down playing human transmission early in the pandemic to demanding that there not be boosters in order to speed up the multi-year process of vaccinating 4billion people by 40million doses, when Omicron was already spreading quickly. Honestly, prioritization in the developing world is more important. They seem more political than other sources.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788105

Another case of going for short term efficiency wins over doing things properly, but not so easily.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-19-current-state-omicron/

Who do you personally know in the linked podcast? What are your medical qualifications?

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

In Israel I also believe there is different policy for people that have been infected. This varies from place to place. Determining whether someone was or wasn't previous infected isn't that simple. You can do it if you have good contract tracing, testing, and more centralized health services like Israel does. Also many places didn't have a large enough portion of the population get infected in the first place so maybe not worth worrying too much about.

There were people saying this is roughly would happen in mid-2020.

Tony Fauci was saying he'd be happy if the VE against disease was only 50% in Fall 2020. He was trying to set expectations to about where we are right now.

It gives the wrong impression to people who don't know anything about it and it undermines the vaccine messaging strategy. There's a stronger message that virologists and epidemiologists who were specialists in this kind of thing were grounded mostly in reality all along and THIS WAS THE PLAN AND THE PLAN IS WORKING. By claiming that we're radically learning new things it sounds like the whole thing was a clusterfuck. Getting a vaccine with around 50% efficacy against disease and 90% efficacy against hospitalization was always the winning strategy. We were just supposed to hit 80%-90% vaccination rates at least and the low vaccination rates are meaning that the Omicron wave was more of a burden on hospitals than it ever needed to be.

What went wrong is that the vaccine trials were cut short. People who complain about that usually try to argue we cut short the "long term safety" outcome, which is nonsense because vaccine side effects are autoimmune conditions that either start turning up in a population 3 months after dosing or they don't. What we actually cut short was the _durability_ outcomes of the trials since that was the thing that would have taken 2 years and we didn't have the time. Turns out the headline 90% VE against infection numbers weren't durable but the damage was done once they made the initial headline splash and everyone entirely forgot that Fauci was setting expectations down around 50% beforehand. Then they felt they were lied to. Now they feel like the vaccine program was a failure.

We're now back on track to the original plan, and its viewed as being a failure because the phase III results jacked the expectations up to the mRNA vaccines being magicsauce that would instantly end the whole pandemic. This article is still selling it like this is sort of Plan B in response to information that we could never have anticipated. Instead we're back on what was Plan A all along after the hypecycle got blown away by waning immunity and Delta and Omicron.

I think the lesson here is that one shouldn't listen either to antivax grifters or to greedy pharma execs who oversell their products because of the enormous incentive to do so, whether it be vaccines or Alzheimers treatments. The best approach is to listen to what real scientists who actually understand the subject say, but that does take patience and a willingness to invest time.

Dr. Fauci and all the other anointed "experts" were constantly saying "there is so much to still learn about this virus". They still do when asked questions they don't want to really answer.

They've been acting like COVID was some mysterious brand new virus that required us to abandon every single thing we knew about epidemiology. They are somewhat responsible for this insanity.

I'm confused by what you mean. I have read headlines that say mRNA vaccines reduce the risk of infection by 91%, but it seems like you have more nuanced information from knowledgeable people. So, who should I look to to get the "real" information about what to expect from vaccines and public health?

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0607-mrna-reduce-ri...

If people didn't understand that it is because they didn't want to.

"Listen to the experts". The experts never said any of that. Nor did the media. Critical thinking has been shunned the last two years. I mean you can think critically but lord help you if you say what you think online or in person. It's the in person bullying that is the worst, by the way.

Interestingly I think all conversations that I have had in-person, with someone or a group of people I know, have been civil. In fact the only times where I was able to have healthy discussions were in-person.

Healthy online discussions with people I know in the real world? Nope. Healthy online discussions with people I don't know in the real world? Doubly nope.

Yon should consider yourself lucky.

If you want people to go along with a medical intervention, state clearly the expected outcome and don't move the goalposts when the data changes. If the data is strong, you most likely wouldn't need mandates to convince people.

It was only after (in the US) vaccination rates levelled off and Delta came along that I began hearing people talk about COVID as endemic.

As for evidence, the continued efficacy of some vaccines against variants suggests that, with high levels of adoption, it's at least possible that after a few years of periodic boosters and targeting emerging strains that we could have reached an extremely low level of circulation.

Also why wouldn't you move the goal posts when the data changes? You get new data, you reevaluate prior assumptions and models, and adjust accordingly. Is there a particular instance you're referring to here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_dise...

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/05/20/314231260...

why hasn't the flu been eradicated then?

>It was only after (in the US) vaccination rates levelled off and Delta came along that I began hearing people talk about COVID as endemic.

that's because most people have no idea what's going on. experts were saying this was the likely outcome from the begining

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1920estimates.ht...

Well only those other experts... the "kooks" and "right wing" ones who "care more about the economy than lives". The ones that got their reputations destroyed.

The mainstream "experts" who are the ones we are only supposed to ever listen to have never really made any of this clear. If they did, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

They don't actually care about the economy, though. They care about two things - fighting a culture war, and bending over backwards for businesses, at the expense of literally anything else. It doesn't matter that millions of people are racking up billions in preventable medical bills, so long as the Mar-o-Lago can stay open as if nothing happened.

They aren't making a 'trade-off' between the economy and human life. They are utterly failing at protecting both. If you want to see a trade-off between the economy and human life, look at how China handled the pandemic. Harsh lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and as a result[1] - strong economic growth through the pandemic.

[1] Also only 4,000 dead, as opposed to 900,000, but who's counting?

If they stayed 90% effective like they were originally, we could have ended the virus. But vaccine efficiency wanes over time. New omicron+delta vaccines will help somewhat, but their effectiveness will probably wane over time too.

Time to get used to cold, flu, and covid season every winter.

The change is partly that the effectiveness wanes after a few months and partly that its less effectively again new variants like Delta and Omicron. You can create delta+omicron mRNA vaccines to deal the second problem, but the first problem is much harder--and maybe impossible--to deal with.

This is why we had low cases during the summer of 2021. The vaccine mostly worked at stopping the spread. It no longer does.

No, vaccines have eliminated exactly one human virus, smallpox.

Fauci added that vaccinated people essentially become "dead ends" for the virus to spread within their communities.

"When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community," Fauci said. "In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And that's when you get a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community."[1]

This is more or less the messaging I recall seeing around the early stages of the vaccine being available.

[1]https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...

Without a vaccine, viruses will still evolve to be less virulent and more transmissible, leading to endemic status. Within this a large number of the population gain natural immunity also reducing spread.

Vaccines, done poorly and too frequently, cause vaccine escape where the immune system actually does a worse job fighting infection and you get more virus (aside other immune system issues). Which is exactly what we're seeing now where a lot of places have more hospitalisation and death per capita in the vaccinated...two years into the pandemic

The most ignorant thing to think at the moment is 'just need more jabbing.'

Endemic just means 'regularly found', it does not mean mostly harmless!

Vaccine escape refers to a virus evolving to avoid vaccine induced immunity - and can happen with infection induced immunity too. As it happens T cell immunity against severe disease has been holding up just fine - and has saved countless lives. If vaccine uptake was universal, and we took a few sensible precautions, a virus can be completely suppressed, like measles, so wouldn't have a chance for escape mutations.

Your per capita statement is plain wrong.

Now you've been taught a few things about viruses, you can stop spreading misinformation!

Immune system escape can occur, usually in adults, but generally not in children because their immune systems are young and not 'trained' so do a great general response effort.

Vaccines force a targeting of the immune system (e.g. particular spike proteins) that specifically leads to escape, as we're seeing with the vaccines being not only mostly useless, but potentially worse for Omicron.

Per capita not wrong, just not everywhere yet. Example:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/new-data-on-vaccine-effic...

This is a thorough misreading of the evolution of viruses.

Smallpox has been around for thousands of years, and it has not evolved to be less virulent.

If we had protected the vulnerable the best we could, focused on treatments, and let the vaccine rip through the remainder of the population (particularly healthy children) as fast as possible would we have arrived at Omicron levels of deadly much sooner and saved more lives overall?

Not suggesting we should have done that. Just wondering if it might be the case. Guess we'll never know for sure.

No guarantees that we can't get another wave of Delta 2.0 in five months.

Universal vaccination can make the transition of this virus from pandemic to endemic much more pleasant. In terms of deaths, serious cases (with potential long term effects), but also in terms of smoothing out hospital and infrastructure load.

In that respect the vaccines are an awesomely effective tool that can greatly reduce suffering with minimal or no real downsides.

Side note: an omicron infection is no replacement for the vaccination. Omicron doesn’t confer great immunity against delta and other, “older” virus variants which are still out there, potentially ready to come back next winter.

There have been mass firings on the basis that this vaccination will end the pandemic and people who don't get vaccinated are actively harming everyone else. The truth of that claim is far too murky to justify the agressive policies that are being used to force people to get vacinated. Policies which, I note, appear to be deploy what are effectively human rights violations. These are not policieis that should be used. The policy response is what is important here.

To my eyes vaccine mandates are not, in general, human rights violations. They just are not.

Are they really though? If vaccines work so damn great why do I still need to wear a mask in a place where everybody is vaccinated? And why did Ontario shut down most of the places that required proof of vaccine during this omicron wave? Shouldn't those places be exempt from shutdowns?

If proof of vaccine still requires masking and shutdowns... maybe it isn't a really an effective policy?

One would think that on this forum of all places, people would understand the concept of defence-in-depth. Furrfu…

Besides why does the government get to decide if a vaccinated person has to wear a mask? Makes no sense.

You can add as many layers of defense as you want. Don’t force me to. I’m boosted. I could care less about Covid. If I still have to wear a mask post shot, why the hell did I even bother?

They're to reduce transmission to others. You can call them not good enough but it's a respiratory disease, it's what we've got. The alternative is lockdowns.

> Besides why does the government get to decide if a vaccinated person has to wear a mask?

Why do they get to decide if an unvaccinated person has to wear a mask? You're simultaneously arguing that vaccines are effective and so masks are pointless but also that vaccines are ineffective. Which is it?

> Don’t force me to. I’m boosted. I could care less about Covid.

It's not about you. If the only risk was only to yourself then nobody would care.

> If I still have to wear a mask post shot, why the hell did I even bother?

Because if you get covid you'll have a mild flu instead of being hospitalized or die? You can say it's low chance but 3,000 corpses today I guess were unlucky.

Others can get a vaccine too if it truly helps them or they just want piece of mind. We all have the choice. Transmission no longer matters. It isn’t a problem each individual needs to worry about. It’s not ethical or moral to keep pushing this as the only concern society can focus on. We need to move on.

And you can use scare words like “3000 corpses a day” but that is propaganda and fearmongering. The more scary the wording, the less the words mean to me. Way more than 3000 people die a day. And people die of many things all the time. Death is one of the only things that will happen to us 100%.

Life is way to short to piss away on this. You are free to continue hunkering down in fear. But kindly stop forcing others to cater to your fear. It is quite selfish to ask that, especially given you can get a freely available, highly effective vaccine.

Get your vaccine and move on. Covid ends for you when you stop being afraid of it. It’s actually that simple.

You're confusing emotionally charged, high-impact words with propaganda. Having a policy of talking about the dead in a sterile detached way is also a rhetoric choice that affects perception and is just as much "propaganda" by your own standard.

What you're calling "propaganda" is "using words that make something sound more serious than I think it is" or "using words to make something sound less serious than I think it is."

> Only reason I got the vaccine was I had no reason not to.

That's the reason I wear a mask.

> You are free to continue hunkering down in fear. But kindly stop forcing others to cater to your fear.

The only thing that's being asked of anyone is to get vaccinated, wear a mask indoors, and stay home if you're sick. The first two cost you nothing and you should be staying home with any illness anyway.

> Get your vaccine and move on.

I have moved on, except for wearing a mask when in close contact and having to show proof of it for large events, life has literally gone back to normal.

> To my eyes vaccine mandates are not, in general, human rights violations. They just are not.

We're talking specifically about the Covid vaccine mandates, not mandates in general. I think there's certainly a serious debate to be had on whether these morally questionable Covid policies are human rights violations.

Are chain smokers antisocial ? What about over eating obese ?

I hate risk-adverse fearful societies.

Obesity ... seems like an entirely personal matter, except perhaps in children where they might be considered victims.

Highly infectious viruses several times more harmful than the usual ones are indeed turning the world upside down. I imagine with time most societies will come to accept such things after they've become endemic for a while.

Just like vaccination for Covid is personal. Remember that the vaccine does not prevent transmission of omicron. And that if the vaccine works, if an unvaccinated person transmits the virus to a vaccinated one, there should be no risk, right ?

Also, obese and overweight people account for 50% of hospitalizations in ICU for Covid in France.

> human rights violations.

Which ones?

> Which ones?

Well, looking at a relevant wiki article [0] I'd say the policies I know best (Australia) are bumping up against the articles dealing with freedom of movement, big chunks of articles 18-21 (underlining peaceful association a few time), I'd argue 22-27 - I forget where 'right to earn a living' is but I'm pretty confident it is in thge UDHR somewhere and that is probably in 22-27.

At some point (and 2 years is past that point) these philosophical issues like human rights start to matter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...

For example, Article 29:

> Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

> In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

It's pretty easy to see vaccination and other public health measures as one of these scenarios.

“Articles 28–30 establish… the areas in which the rights of the individual cannot be applied, the duty of the individual to society…”

The declaration says “in a democratic society”. Are we counting Cuba as one?

> That's why I find it incredibly concerning that people seem to just be happy to suspend individual rights so rapidly. The state of Victoria in Australia recently passed legislation that lets it ignore certain human rights - such as the right to employment - in the face of the pandemic.

One might argue they prioritized the Article 3 right to life over that of employment; loss of life being permanent, and employment not, this seems like a justifiable use of Article 29, especially given Australian per capita deaths being massively lower than here in the States. We’ve killed two Tasmanias worth of people over here.

(I have relatives in Ballarat, Melbourne, Sydney, and Hobart, incidentally. I’d trade my pandemic experience here in upstate NY with them in a heartbeat.)

Again, the UDHR asserts a variety of rights. You're correct that Article 23 asserts a right to employment, but the apparent desire to read that as the only provision in the document appears to be a motivated one. The document lays out other rights, which naturally may be in conflict with each other at times, a fact that is explicitly acknowledged in Article 29.

I don't object to disagreeing with Victoria's balancing of the various rights, but I do object to the assertion that it's somehow a clear violation of human rights for them to prioritize the rights to life and health over the right to employment.

Ok, so we've taken away all these rights from unvaxxed people. What rights do you believe this has that allowed others to exercise?

Because from where I sit:

1. It doesn't reduce the odds of people getting COVID. We just had ... probably between 2-3 million COVID cases between NSW and Victoria, both with highly vaccinated populations. That is only possible if vaccinated people are infecting each other (as most reporting I've read suggests is happening).

2. Doesn't otherwise affect anyone's rights.

Note that there isn't even a right not to get sick from time to time. Although it even if such a right did somehow exist it isn't obvious how an unvaxxed person would be affecting your right to excercise ti since the problem is how much you come into contact with other humans vs anything any other individual is doing. There has been no threat to our hospital systems at any point that justifies what has been done to the unvaxxed. The pressure the hospital system has come under appears to be from the COVID restrictions (and, ironically, probably things like laying off workers for resisting the unreasonable vaccination policies - although if they've got the capacity to start sacking people then they clearly don't see a problem).

So it seems to me that we're doing this just for fun / for the joy of being authoritarian.

And your damn right the reasoning is motivated. Motivated by a desire to let people earn money and make their lives better at will. To be able to go places and visit friens and family without being arrested. To make their own medical decisions. These are reasonable motivations. These rights are the easy ones with practical justifications.

The Article 25 right to medical care, which unvaccinated people can put at risk by overwhelming hospitals with ICU cases.

I also consider getting vaccinated to be one of the Article 29 "duties to the community".

This isn't an emergency any more, this is routine.

> I also consider getting vaccinated to be one of the Article 29 "duties to the community".

That is an extreme hand wave. It appears the argument is "We can violate your human rights because you have a duty to do what I tell you". These are serious concerns, you may just handwave things like free travel or ability to see family with "you have a duty, but I don't feel a need to justify it" - but that isn't a respectable position.

What is the real risk to the community of these unvaccinated people? We've pretty much seen the worst case COVID scenario play out in the last 2 months and it doesn't seem like the unvaxxed have been a problem in the slightest. The campaign of bullying should end.

For me ending the pandemic is a return to regular life and a health care system that is no longer stretched beyond typical capacity. This can be achieved by many outcomes but the most likely one given the state of the world today is getting everyone to take the safe and effective vaccine for as long as necessary.

In Quebec where I live, the unvaccinated are now barred from entry in large retail stores like Walmart and Costco. If you don't have your vaccine passport with you that shows you're vaccinated in these places, then you can't enter, even for groceries.

There was curfew in place that prevented everyone from being outside during the evenings and nights for the most part of January.

On top of that, the prime minister said publicly in the media that the unvaccinated would start paying an additional tax, even though health care is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone here. The government just backtracked about this the last couple of days.

A lot of these policies are extreme and have shown to be completely incoherent and not backed by science, given what we know about the virus since the last couple of months.

Aren’t they? Hospitals are overflowing and elective procedures cancelled due entirely to people refusing to get vaccinated.

A) there's more vaccinated in hospital per capita of late. Why aren't we demanding lockdowns again instead of just blaming the "unvaxxed" still

B) the unvaxxed still aren't allowed into many places, yet the virus spreads readily

C) Why, rather than just "argh unvaxxed lepers!" are we not guiding better health and wellbeing instead?

D) a covid case is counted when people are in hospital for any other reason and catch it

E) you are counted as unvaxxed during the two week window after getting vaccinated, which is exactly when your immune system is weaker and succeptible to catching a bad case of covid. Interesting how hard it is to find this data, you'd think it would be strongly monitored

B) This is true. Not sure how it relates to my point though.

C) Aren't we doing both? I've seen both "get vaccinated" and "be healthy" messaging this whole pandemic. Again though, not sure how it relates.

D) True. Again, not sure how this relates.

E) That was a big effect when vaccines just came out, but is a much smaller effect now.

Though I hadn't heard this before, and would be curious to see a study on it if you have one: "when your immune system is weaker and succeptible to catching a bad case of covid."

Edit: Your thing about susceptibility after vaccination is incorrect. It's an Alex Berenson talking point that has been thoroughly debunked.

Do you have a source for this. This directly conflicts the data I've been seeing. e.g.: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page#daily — weekly hospitalizations peaking at 92/100k for vaccinated vs. 772/100k for unvaccinated.

You're comparing two entirely different denominators. This is just sloppy.

Edit: Digging through the source data, I found

> In the last week from 08 January to 14 January 2022, in an age-standardised population, the rate of acute COVID-19 related hospital admissions in individuals that received a booster or third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine was between 2.3 to 3.9 times lower than in individuals who are unvaccinated or have only received one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine

Your own data is saying the opposite of what you purport it to.

The rate doesn't matter so much in this instance, because most resources would still be spend on vaccinated people. Much like the fact that when I eventually catch COVID the odds are really good that I'm going to get it off someone who is vaccinated.

If we hypothetically rounded up all the unvaxxed tomorrow most of the strain on the hospital system faces in Scotland would still be there. Vaccination campaigns can't really change that.

It is my impression that it actually does, and that is why Delta was outcompeted so fast. If it didn't, both strains would likely co-circulate together.

There is a possibility that the large majority of the population has been infected with omicron, and recovered. But then delta could come in at that point and produce another wave. At this time, the body would be much more successful at holding off omicron, but maybe not so much with delta.

So purely from the fractions of current infections, you cannot draw conclusions about x-variant immunity.

Searching very quickly, I found this from Dec 21, 2021:

https://www.statnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/c7efM-om...

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportion...

Care to share a paper to back this up ? This statement seems hard to prove right now.

Yet... Guess we gave up caring about full research and monitoring a couple of years ago.

We're even at the point where we want to vaccinate our small children because 'it's marginally better than nothing' ignoring that side effects are also marginally more than nothing and we have very little good long term data.

This is an interesting statement.

Where I live, one hospital 30 minutes in one direction was never overwhelmed. In fact, they had to fire people because they were so empty due to cancelling all optional procedures.

Another hospital 30 minutes the other direction had to place patients in offices, conference rooms, and tents in the parking lot.

So I guess the health system where I live was overwhelmed. Or it wasn't. Depending upon who you asked and/or the narrative you wanted to convey.

Shouldn't the politicians have made progress on this issue over the course of two years? At what point is it incompetence or corruption, if the billions being spent to fight the pandemic make zero discernable impact on the most critical issue?

What do you mean? Should they should magically cause the number of doctors and hospitals to double inside two years?

>if the billions being spent to fight the pandemic make zero discernable impact on the most critical issue?

What leads you to believe that measures such as pushing vaccination haven't been having tremendous impact on that issue?

Do you believe that health care systems are currently overwhelmed by COVID?

If that doesn't say "understaffed and overwhelmed", I'm not sure what evidence would.

Good for you

It's not even magic. It just needs to be done. Find a way. There is an emergency. You don't just get to whine and complain that it is too hard. Your solution doesn't need to be perfect. Far from it, in fact. It just needs to patch the issue so we don't need to do restrictions of any kind.

Anybody that claims it is impossible to double or even quadruple healthcare capacity specifically for covid just isn't being creative about it enough. It's not magic. You just make it happen. You have almost infinite resources to do it even up to and including relaxing licensing laws or removing any other political or bureaucratic hurdle.

Funny you're light on specifics. We talk about a situation where people die if it doesn't happen. So better propose something solid.

> almost infinite resources

Build hospital tents.

> relaxing licensing laws

Employ untrained people.

> removing any other political or bureaucratic hurdle

Eh that tends to happen, once you're in that triage situation.

Look you can't will medical care. You have to build it. It takes decades.

So in terms of goalposts, what exactly is your goal? I'd like to see international travel normalize - it's maybe one of the few restrictions I still feel is constraining me - but there is little my government can do about that.

We didn't have to rig tents to use as hospitals, burn dead bodies on the street, or to pay exorbitant sums for oxygen on the black market, as it has happened in other countries.

And if you ask me, yes, that's worth billions, and a bit of self-discipline.

So add more capacity. It's an emergency. Find a way to add it. Why are we into this two years and still have this problem? It's inexcusable at this point.

We did. The government deployed a floating hospital called the USNS Comfort to NYC to massively increase hospital capacity and... it basically just sat there unused for a month and then left after Governor Cuomo said it wasn't needed.

It was that day I realized that none of this has a damn thing to do with science or data.

Here’s my version for pre-Covid vaccines:

Vaccines are like seat belts: they prevent car crashes.

It's amazing how much we've forgotten about how vaccines and immunity work over the last couple of years.

That's an awfully naive and rosy view of "people".

At what point does the justification become 'exaggerated'?

Is "This vaccine would have saved the lives of at least half a million Americans in the past two years" not a good enough justification?

Is "End the pandemic" the only set of goal posts for vaccination that you will accept?

Is not, is there a number of corpses that will be an acceptable justification? How much higher does it have to get? A million? Five? Fifty?

And that they will prevent the appearance of mutated strains.

Or the corollary that the appearance of mutated strains is to be blamed on people being unvaccinated, either because they don’t have vaccines or don’t want them.

Disagree? No problem, just show me the data that backs up that claim. Certainly not above having my mind changed.

> with very exaggerated justification, that they will end the pandemic

For the last time, you can spawn mutations regardless of vaccination status.

Who is saying there is?

>One last thing that’s really important is: We’re not in a position where we think that any virus — including the Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non — unvaccinated people — the vi- — the various shots that people are getting now cover that. They’re — you’re okay. You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...

>If you’re vaccinated, even if you do catch the “virus,” quote, unquote — like people talk about it in normal terms — you’re in overwhelm- — not many people do. If you do, you’re not likely to get sick. You’re probably going to be symptomless. You’re not going to be in a position where you — where your life is in danger.

So you can cherry pick and attribute an absurd interpretation while ignoring everything else he said, or go for the reasonable view that he knows infection is still possible based on multiple other points in the conversation. The man isn't a great speaker, but nonetheless it's inappropriate to choose the worst possible interpretation of something when context contradicts that interpretation.

There you go. From the head of the CDC and a few other quotes from biden too.

Then show me the many examples where he's said that vaccines are perfect proof against infection. Because now you're moving the goal posts as your point is refuted by context, so you expand to more vague ad hominem attack against him. The burden of evidence is on you to support that, and to do so with more than brief out of context soundbites.

A link to the entire transcript of an event is an "out of context sondbite"? You're clearly not discussing in good faith.

So there you are-- posting an article, maybe failing to read it or more likely deciding to ignore most of it, and then accuse me of discussing in bad faith? That is quite brazen, accusing me of the exact thing you are doing, A poor, failed attempt at a diversionary tactic to distract from your avoidance of the question.

It's not out of context, it's completely in context. Biden said you won't get COVID if you take the vaccine, full stop. There's no additional context that changes the meaning of those words.

The fact that he also made other statements about COVID doesn't render the quote out of context.

So, I don't think you and I can have a productive conversation. Perhaps you are capable of doing so when it doesn't involve a political figure, but it seems clear that you have a vendetta in this case and are unable to look past it.

If you'd like to reply for posterity, for anyone else who comes along, go for it, but don't do it on my account, I see no point in revisiting this thread. If we encounter each other in a different conversation then I look forward to the possibility of a reasonable discussion & exchange of ideas, but you don't currently, on this topic, seem interested in that.

Technically, the virus is called SARS-CoV-2 and the disease is called COVID-19[1].

That does mean, technically, that due to vaccination the virus can indeed circulate but that people are not affected by the disease. Is that what Biden has said? Certainly from the excerpt you posted, that seems to be the case.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

Are you suggesting that breakthrough cases of COVID don't exist?

> you can't get COVID if you get the vaccine, implying it would stop the virus from circulating.

It is entirely possibly that vaccination can leave a virus circulating while still preventing disease. Whether it does in this specific case is something you could debate, but you can't draw that implication stand alone.

But breakthrough cases of the COVID disease do occur in this specific case.

What is the relevance of a hypothetical alternative scenario where breakthrough cases don't exist?

Vaccines have long been required in a variety of environments.

Many things have been done in the past. Just because something was done in the past, that doesn't automatically make it the right thing to do.

What are your goalposts here on "basic commerce"? School and many jobs seem like they should be included in that, which refutes your original comment on the topic of vaccine mandates for basic commerce not having precedent.

England did the same thing.

Going back another 100+ years, Virginia passed a law that could see someone not inoculated via variolation jailed & fined if their failure to inoculate spread the disease. I also consider this jailing a barrier to basic commerce.

The precedents exist.

You clearly don't like the restrictions and mandates. If you want to have a productive conversation on the topic with other reasonable people then focus less on precedent and more on why these things are bad regardless of precedent. You'll have to do that with someone else though: your method of discussion up to this point has verged more towards reflexive provocation than productive conversation.

I'll let the reader determine who is furiously trying to list every vaccine mandate precedent. As is often the case, the bad faith argument is one of projection.

Strange phrasing given that you claimed that there were no precedents and I merely brought up precedents in response. I'm not sure how listing historical legal occurrences would cause you to infer such emotional weight to them as to describe them as "furiously" obtained. It's a discussion, that's all. It's been a bit one-sided discussion, because when you are met with counter evidence you level vague accusations of subtle psychological motivations instead of giving a reasoned response.

I'll give you an example of a more productive & reasonable way to respond to the precedents I listed: The precedents are too old and the current situation too varied from them to have any bearing on current legal decisions on these matters. The United States has had more than 100 years of growth & maturity surrounding decisions on constitutional matters and advancements in constitutional scholarship, and during that time has had occasion to revisit decisions that now seem problematic in light of those advances in legal thinking. Additionally, smallpox was significantly more lethal than COVID. Up to 30% might die of it, raising the stakes far above COVID. As such, even granting that the US constitution would, today, allow for those historic measures, we are not now in a situation comparable enough for them to be required.

There you are. That response would have been a more productive conversation to have, specifically addressing my counterclaims without resorting to ad hominem attacks or avoiding the issue all together. We could then have gone on to discuss that in more depth, even if I partly disagree with what I just wrote, a devil's advocate rebuttal to my own rebuttal of your claim. It's a shame you didn't go down that route. It's pretty pointless to be here unless you're simply looking for rhetorical point scoring instead of discussion. Which bring me to:

>let the reader determine

That would be a major difference between you & I: I don't think about other readers when I post. It simply doesn't occur to me to filter what I write through that lens. Until you mentioned it, what other people reading this might think hasn't crossed my mind. It's simply not what I focus on.

I know wearing a mask and taking the bare minimum to try to control a pandemic that has killed millions infringes on YOUR PRECIOUS FREEDOM but it seems a reasonable trade off for the state.

Also what restrictions to basic commerce are you facing? That you can't go get wasted in a bar? Give us a break.

1) Didn't

2) Can't

3) Will never

Stop Sars-CoV-2. You can vaccinate to 100% and double, triple, quadruple boost everyone. In this Omicron wave, almost everyone I know here in Florida has come down with symptomatic COVID. That includes my wife and kids, the entire families of all my best friends, my coworkers, my boss, my kids' teachers, everyone, and they are ALL VACCINATED to the man. The prior two waves never got within 3 degrees of freedom to me, vaccine or not.

This isn't surprising. COVID doesn't care about our stupid vaccine. It doesn't even know it's there. As far as I know we've never beat a bug like this with a vaccine. Consider that while we sit around and put on the mask and point the finger at the guy next door, the outbreak started in Wuhan, Omicron developed in South Africa, and the next variant is probably starting to incubate in yet another remote location. In fact the entire trajectory of this disaster is basically orthogonal to all of our activities.

The politics of COVID, however, the self-inflicted economic and social damage, are entirely our own doing. I believe this is actually comparable to, if not worse than, the direct effects of the virus itself. And since nothing we have done or can do will prevent the direct damage, I say we should stop inflicting all the secondary damage on ourselves.

Maybe millions dead, countless others not entirely recovered, isn't helping economies or folks mental health? I agree, that's all our own doing, but not because we "locked down" it's because we never actually did. There was never a lockdown (at least here in the US), middle class folk just stayed home while the lower class brought us our groceries and died.

You're lucky the virus hasn't effected you till now... guess you don't have any friends in the service, hospitality, or health care industries.

Also if you're in Florida, what do you care. Y'all basically YOLOing this and I don't think there's much in the way of government mandates.

Maybe step away from the keyboard, put on your mask, and chill the fuck out friend. People are dying. Stop being selfish.

And did they die? Because the vaccines are tremendously effective at reducing symptom severity, hospitalization and deaths.

This is objectively false; the IFR of all Covid variants is one order of magnitude greater than the flu, with the possible exception of a few years in the century with particularly virulent seasonal flus.

(and the kicker was we all still needed masks anyway... "science"!)

I liken masks to the requirement to have at least minimal clothing on. Sanitation is the same (wash your hands, here's how to scrub for 30 seconds).

I sincerely hope the people who devised this vaccine know what they are doing. As far as I know (according to a Katalin Kariko inteview), the Sars-Cov-2 spike protein can't mutate too much without limiting it's effectiveness, so therefore this vaccine should theoretically work in the future.

But that Marek's disease issue is very very scary to me.

> The evolution of Marek's disease due to vaccination has had a profound effect on the poultry industry. All chickens across the globe are now vaccinated against Marek's disease (birds hatched in private flocks for laying or exhibition are rarely vaccinated). Highly virulent strains have been selected to the point that any chicken that is unvaccinated will die if infected.[14] Other leaky vaccines are commonly used in agriculture. One vaccine in particular is the vaccine for avian influenza. Leaky vaccine use for avian influenza can select for virulent strains.[15]

Wonderful. Like H5N1, which has a 60% mortality in humans.

The actual mutation event that creates the more virulent strain occurs randomly. Whether that variant survives and thrives depends on all of the evolutionary pressures in force. If a strain is so virulent that it kills the host, it is selected against, because the dead can't spread. If a vaccine lets the host survive but does nothing to stop transmission, that negative evolutionary pressure is gone. Thus, the potential for a vaccine to drive the propagation of a more virulent strain if all other things are equal.

However, there's good reason to believe that all other things will rarely be equal.

The survival rate of the host is just one selection pressure. Anything can be a selection pressure if it has an impact on reproductive success of a subset of the population. It's possible that increased host survival is a very tiny or even zero pressure - for example, if the virus has a long contagious period, it might have already done all the spreading it's going to do before onset of symptoms and death, rendering survival time irrelevant. Other pressures could dominate - for example, the virus could be susceptible to being killed by sunlight, favoring variants with a light-insensitivity property over variants with a virulence property.

One could even imagine how host symptoms could create positive pressure towards virulence - for example, more coughing and bleeding could help transmission. Such a virus would have its survival chances reduced by a leaky-but-symptom-reducing vaccine, and increased by vaccine-avoidance.

Evolution is spectacularly multi-dimensional. None of these outcomes are inevitable.

I think we all hope this. I can say that I sincerely believe the people who devised the vaccine know a hell of a lot more than just about anyone else on the planet.

I don't trust experts in economics or socio-politics, but I do trust experts in virology. Not to say their information is perfect, but they know so much more than other people in a field where expertise is connected to outcomes.

Further, the environment changed due to mutations - the fair question is "how effective was the vaccine at preventing the spread of the origin virus?"

There's a laundry list of public health officials (including the CDC director, to give a sense of the authority on this list) that said it would prevent infection and transmission. So it really shouldn't surprise anyone that there were expectations that the vaccine would do what public health authorities said it would do.

--Rochelle Walensky, Director CDC

I guess politically they had to throw the minority group under the buss to keep the attention off of their own failures.

It worked though, I have had people tell me I'm disgusting more than once for not being vaccinated. Nevermind that I've had covid twice, am young and in very good health, have been taking vitamin A/D since 2020 and have high levels of sufficiency of both. It appears I'm the bad guy because I would rather a 75 year old in a poor country have my doses of vaccines than take it just because I'm being pressured into it.

I'm not sure many liberals survived this pandemic, at least not vocally. I feel truly bad for any minorities that really shouldn't take the vaccine for medical conditions. I know for a fact there are doctors who have recommended against taking the vaccine because of preexisting conditions but wouldn't write a doctors note for fear of losing their license.

I'm actually missing out on a vacation in Cali right now with the partners family because I'm afraid I'll get a positive PCR test and ruin it for them (since they require tests or vaccine cards most places, as I understand it)

CA is batshit crazy over covid for mediopolitical reasons, but at least here in LA, you can easily flash anything in front of most restaurant/retail workers and they won't even read it if it looks even halfway legit (there's too much variation in vaccine cards and test results for them to be experts anyway). some places, like disneyland, will be a little more diligent though. so while folks still wear masks outdoors like cargo culters, most people don't care enough to do more than go through the motions.

Fauci was prepping everyone for vaccines with a 50% VE against infection back in late 2020 before the results of the phase 3 trials were produced.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/07/fauci-says-covid-19-vaccine-ma...

> “The chances of it being 98 percent effective is not great,” Fauci, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said at a Q&A with the Brown University School of Public Health in Rhode Island, according to CNBC.

> Instead, Fauci said, scientists are hoping for a vaccine that is 75 percent effective — but even a 50 or 60 percent success rate would be considered a win.

At the same time though we're still at >90% VE against severe disease and hospitalization through the persistence of T-cell immunity, but that just doesn't protect against initial infection since T-cells take a few days to get going in response to an infection. The vaccines can be largely credited with most of the "milder" Omicron wave keeping the infection-hospitalization-rate much lower.

So who exactly "sold" these ideas about the vaccines to the general public? Because it wasn't the leading public health expert not the pandemic.

How much did the public hear what it wanted to hear from media sources and self-appointed twitter experts?

> “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci told the Times. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

It sure sounds like he was intentionally feeding us false hope.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/531611-fauci-herd-immu...

The parent comment asked "who sold these ideas [that vaccines prevent transmission] to the general public?" From the quote I posted, it certainly seems like Fauci did.

Is there something I'm missing here?

The number 50 was mentioned in passing, but it doesn't sound like he was predicting any specific efficacy number, only that it would not be as high as the rosy 90%+ that was shown by some data. To me, parsing these words is a little nit-picky, since we are talking about a 2 year period during which multiple new and unexpected strains have become dominant, and vast amounts of new clinical data have been published.

And it's true that the quotes come from early on in the pandemic.

However, the claim that it was randos on Twitter and not the experts - at any time - who purveyed the idea that the Covid vaccines would significantly prevent transmission - unlike flu vaccines - is contradicted by the quote from Fauci that I posted in response to the question: "who sold these ideas to the public?"

That was something that literally nobody expected, not even epidemiologists or virologists. Goodbye herd immunity argument entirely. Everyone catches SARS-CoV-2 sooner or later.

We’re people informed differently? I don’t remember ever being under the impression that the COVID vaccine would provide immunity forever, or even longer than a year.

Also, incidentally, like 40-50% of American adults get the flu vaccine. For people aged 65+ it’s like 60-70%. That’s lower than the rates of COVID vaccinations, but not massively lower (especially considering that the choice to get the flu vaccine is not utilized as a signal of political group membership).

> BIDEN: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” — town hall.

I recall that being a pretty common expectation.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042-f2

And the virus contains immune evasion genes like ORF8 which evade humoral immunity responses by downregulating MHC-I:

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/23/e2024202118

Nobody in their right mind would produce a vaccine with ORF8 in it since it defeats the whole purpose of stimulating T-cell and B-cell recognition.

There's good reasons why natural immunity has been downplayed.

The 'natural immunity' argument never makes sense if you think about it. You're comparing the chances of a SECOND covid infection of an unvaccinated person to a vaccinated person's first infection. If you compare vaccinated vs unvaccinated people and their chances of their first and second covid infections, the vaccinated person wins in both cases.

Also, the first infection is the riskiest one. So going through the riskiest infection to get immunity for a second, less risky infection doesn't really make sense.

If it's about whether someone who had covid already should count as being vaccinated, maybe. But that also risks incentivizing people catching covid on purpose instead of taking the vaccine.

There is such a thing as cross reactive immunity. Look at the diamond princess cruise ship. They were locked in close quarters sharing a ventilation system for 2 weeks and only 20% of the guests tested positive.

https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

We had over a decade to find vaccines for the original SARS-CoV, and in over that decade we did not manage to find anything long-lasting [0]. A whole lot of problems SARS-CoV vaccines had, seem to also exist for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines.

[0] https://sci-hub.ru/10.1080/17460441.2019.1581171

who agressively dismissed this?

It might be different if there were any cost to it. But there isn't. So invariably the people bitching about natural immunity are just doing it to make a point, usually political.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...

But even if we knew natural infection prevented future infections in all (which it doesn't, people get double or triple infected), it still wouldn't make sense. (For if it leaves you open to reinfection, see spaced exposure, initial viral load, etc.) Because we don't have the records to corroborate everyone's claims they were infected. And, a lot of the people who would claim to have already been infected I have little trust in to be honest, let alone the difficulty of self-diagnosing.

There's no cost to getting the damn shot, so what's the fucking problem with requiring it?

You make an impassioned and personally attacking me case that natural immunity should exempt you, but why not get the vaccine?

Bodily autonomy is kind of an important topic, is it not? Why should some asshole force me to get an unnecessary medical procedure for a common respiratory virus I already had in order to work or enter many places of business? Why does the government get to force this medical procedure on me?

You can't argue for bodily autonomy and simultaneously support vaccination passports and things like that. I mean you can, but it makes your argument a whole lot weaker.

But the CDC did announce that since delta people who recovered from an infection have better immune response than those who are only vaccinated. I asked the OP to clarify because there is false information out there that this fact is being suppressed "aggressively" when in fact the CDC announced it!

The point isn't that infection carries no immune benefits. It's that vaccines always carry immune benefits so everyone should be forced to get one (very rare cases of immune system maladies aside).

Sure, happy to explain my reasoning. You said "I agree people should get the shot." Unfortunately, a lot of times that phrase is followed, either explicitly or based on context with the rest of the conversion, by "but it's their choice and I oppose mandates". The use of "should" that people use for "should eat right" not "should wear a seatbelt". It's gotten to the point that if I see such a phrase without specifying something like "everyone should get vaccinated", I assume it's an anti-mandate (and often antivaxer)

It's trivial to find this information.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cdc+natural+immunity&t=brave&iar=n...

> The CDC is finally recognizing 'natural immunity' — legislators should follow suit

> The Hill on MSN.com|1 day ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/the-cdc-is-finally-...

This just confirms their point, the vaccine passports in the US don't have any allowances for natural immunity - it's vaccine or nothing.

The original announcements from Pfizer et al touted the 90-95% effectiveness of the vaccines against infection (and 95-100% against severe infection). The idea that vaccines prevented most infection was literally part of their testing and marketing from the start. The wild card was Delta & Omicron not complying with those numbers, not that people shared some mass delusion.

I think confusion comes from the use of “COVID-19” which is not a virus or infection specifically but a disease caused by sars-ncov2 infection. If you have an asymptomaic infection, you don’t have COVID-19.

There is a bit of rewriting now that is happening that is a bit disturbing and seems like gaslighting. A notion that the vaccine never sought to prevent infection (and thus viral transmission). That is obviously and easily proven as completely wrong.

But then protection faded maybe quicker than expected, and variants broke expectations and some protections. It sucks, but it's where we're at. The vaccines still have the enormous benefit of reducing case severity, but they certainly did fail in some of the goals.

Sidenote: If you are infected and thus replicating SARS-CoV-2 viruses, you have COVID-19 even if entirely asymptomatic. As with the prior points, this is trivial to verify. The "COVID-19 is only severe cases" claim is a part of the prior bit of gaslighting where we're redefining everything to somehow make early proclamations (e.g. "prevents covid-19") fit the unfortunate situation today.

Cheers!

It's fascinating how two years into this pandemic this is still such a huge communication issue, quite reminiscent of AIDS and HIV.

I wonder how much of that is impacting the reported numbers, in Germany it sure enough did; Hospitals were reporting every patient that tested positive as COVID-19 patient, even when they where in the hospital for a completely different reason and had no disease outbreak.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1480679058488836097

Also note at the end he says "asymptomatic covid", which gets right back to the confusion between sars-cov-2 and covid-19.

If the vaccine had come out of the gates as something to just prevent death, I would not have been so enthusiastic or motivated.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577

Unfortunately, some politicians then started making wild claims about infection prevention that weren't backed by actual science.

An incredibly high bar that no intramuscular (humoral) respiratory viral vaccine has met. Mostly because injecting into the muscle does not lead to tissue resident immune cells in the upper respiratory mucosa because it's a separate immune compartment from the body serum. But there are options like intranasal boosters after intramuscular vaccination that can prevent infection and do significantly reduce shedding and spread.

And it's been driving me crazy the entire pandemic that intranasal spray vaccine boosters are not being heavily funded and persued. It would save the world so many lives, time, and incalculable money.

Even plain water infested with certain amoebas can give you a fatal brain disease if you use it for nasal irrigation. It is perfectly safe for drinking, though.

https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/N_R/Nasal-irrigatio...

We do not have that amoeba here, but I still boil the water and cool it down before using it to flush my nose. (Works great against mild common colds.) One of the worst outbreaks in the world actually happened in Czechoslovakia 60 years ago - 16 people died after being infected in a public swimming pool.

There's multiple candidate intranasal SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, just none that have concluded trials.

- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.24.477597v1

- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg9857

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Here are the conclusions from a meta-study from July 2021:

> In fully vaccinated individuals, VE against symptomatic and asymptomatic infections was 80–90% in nearly all studies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8284046/

This is only an incredibly high bar if all you ask for is a tool to mitigate personal risk. If you want to make the use of that tool mandatory, then it is a reasonable bar, and there are additional other bars that are also very high.

In the U.S., health experts explicitly said the vaccines totally prevent symptoms and infection. The health experts said the vaccines were 100% efficacious, and this fact was repeated in the media and by leadership for months. As recently as seven months ago, they were still saying this.

This might have something to do with the fact that "experts" (ei. the CDC, vaccine makers, and politicians in charge of health organisations around the world) explicitly told us in no uncertain terms it would prevent infection. It was one of the main argument for getting it and we were never allowed to question it when a significant amount of vaccinated people started testing positive. We were also told it was dangerous misinformation to question it publicly and it was career suicide for any expert to contradict it. The goalpost has been moving gradually from "complete immunity" to "reducing the risk of severe symptoms".

one of the most interesting thing about covid was to watch people and politician rewrite history. I thought it would be difficult to do in the 2020s but I was so wrong and I wish I had saved screenshots of tweets from health officials and politicians. It's always interesting to watch the face of someone who claim that something is pure misinformation when they realise the CDC themselves were promoting the idea just weeks ago.

I am reminded of the recent twitter thread posted here by Dan Luu about how communicating nuance at scale is impossible.

By defining "infection" so broadly it loses all meaning, some officials are trying lump to the covid vaccines (which are no longer very good at preventing contagious infections) with vaccines that prevent contagious infection for decades. Obviously, the effectiveness of vaccines is nuanced and their effectiveness at preventing contagious spread is a spectrum--not a binary.

Public health officials should just be straight with us. The vaccines aren't as good as some of the vaccines we all get--like measles--but they do provide a great deal of protection. It's still basically a miracle that we got the protection we did in about a year after the virus appeared. It's a huge success.

At 95%+ immunised outbreaks ought not occur because herd immunity, even for the remaining unvaccinated, whereas at the lower levels, outbreaks will likely happen.

Is that not right?

If you have the measles vaccine and you get exposed to measles, measles will be in your body for a short time in low quantities, but your immune system will quickly destroy it. That means you are unlikely to pass it on or develop symptoms.

But is that different then to vaccines against bacterial diseases? If some bacteria enter my body, surely they don’t magically disappear either, maybe split a few times but eventually die off.

Herd immunity is effectively a function of how infections something is. 1 case leading to 2 cases on average means you need to cut transmission in 50%. 1 case leading to 10 cases and you need to block 90% of new cases.

Critically this means vaccinated people can still be infectious as long as they infect less than 1 person on average you can reach herd immunity.

The point is there is a range of infection mechanisms for viruses (respiratory vs other, for starters) and vaccines thus provide benefit at different points in the infection process. This leads to heterogeneity in "infection level" and symptomaticity in the vaccinated population.

So what you're saying that Fauci, Pfizer etc. weren't just wrong about the vaccine ("if you get it you won't get sick" a.k.a. "science has changed as we've learned more facts") but actively lied about it (after all, they of all people should know that no other vaccine succeeded in that for respiratory viruses).

(And to be clear, I still recommend that everyone eligible get vaccinated as it's fairly effective at preventing severe symptoms.)