The risk-benefit calculation is strongly age dependent. For old people there's no question about the benefit of the vaccines. For healthy children it's close.

It's very, very, very far from close. The most recent study from Christine Stabell out of Copenhagen showed that even if you're in the age group where the vaccine cuts covid mortality in half, you're overall 7% more likely to die by taking the vaccine. We need to get back to the drawing board on this one.

very common fallacy: absolute vs relative risk. kids have a miniscule risk of dying from covid (0.01%?) therefore reducing this already very very small risk isn't doing much at all. Of course kids do not require an experimental vaccine for a not at all very lethal viral infection.

You're not even guaranteed to get infected (I still haven't been.) So you need to apply that prior as well.

The virus will be around forever so unless you live in a sterile bubble everyone will be occasionally exposed. So infection isn't 100% guaranteed, but it's close.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

How do you know you haven't been infected? Asymptomatic cases are common, and most people aren't getting frequent tests.

She appears to be a crank pushing a "live vaccines are magic" theory.

Covid has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Your claim is not based on reality.

This very much depends on the age groups... For people younger than 40, covid still killed less people than traffic accidents, overdoses, suicides etc. in my country. In the 85yo+ group, the story is a bit different.

Interestingly enough, most of the covid restrictions affected the young the most, while the old were mostly unaffected (tehnically they were all affected the same, but most old people are at home and in beds when curfews started).

> less people than traffic accidents, overdoses, suicides

Unless it's much less that doesn't mean much given that those are usually the largest killers of young people.

Well yeah, but you have to put things in perspective... we took away basic human rights (movement, assembly, relatively even speech), to save less people than if we banned driving for <40yo. Even with the vaccines, and the passive forcing of vaccinations (eg. limiting stuff you can do unless vaccinated or tested daily), most of the services where you needed the vaccine/test were used by the young people (shopping malls, cinemas, etc.), and not old people (who stereotipically just go to normal stores, pharmacy and a doctor).

Just the number of extra suicides due to curfews was probably higher than the death rates in those age groups.

In comparison, in total (so all age groups, including the 85yo+), we had more cigarette related deaths in those two years than of covid, and we still sell cigarettes pretty much everywhere.

No, we did that to save the much higher number of people that would have been affected if we didn't impose restriction at the peaks. How much higher those numbers would have been is of course debatable. But given the exponential nature of spread, one assumes many more people would have been infected. And running out of hospital capacity to treat people would obviously have made deaths much worse.

Cigarettes are very different in that mostly affect the person smoking (in many countries we do indeed ban smoking in enclosed public places).

There is literally no reason or evidence that think that the restrictions had any effect at all let alone a significant one worth the trade offs. If for some reason you are allergic to Sweden you can compare England Winter 2022 with Germany, or Scotland or Wales. Or Germany to Switzerland after Feb, 16th 2022 when they dropped their measures. Or Florida with Cali. It didn't do anything. I am sorry but it's time to learn the truth.

You cannot compare the effects of restrictions on a vaccinated population to the effects on an unvaccinated one.

Restrictions were not introduced to "save" people, in such a way that you could restrict the lockdowns to the more vulnerable elderly population. Such a lockdown would have to be draconian (China-style).

Rather, restrictions were introduced (except for Australia and various countries in Asia which had zero case policy) to curb the growth in the occupation of hospital beds before the hospitals were full. Up until the introduction of vaccines and more contagious variants (Delta/Omicron) there were clear effects on Rt from the introduction and lifting of restrictions. Reduction of the reproduction rate cannot be achieved with a lockdown only of >60 year old people, since (like vaccination) the effect is inversely proportional to the amount of people not being locked down.

I am not doing that at all. Switzerland for example has similar vax rates to Germany and I'd bet that Flordia is similar to Cali. You can even compare before any vaccinations and it's the same picture.

The reasons given for lockdown were ever shifting. Just very recently German Health Minister Karl Lauterach said we have to keep measures because 200 people a day die of Coronavirus and that's just too many.

> Up until the introduction of vaccines and more contagious variants (Delta/Omicron) there were clear effects on Rt from the introduction and lifting of restrictions.

Where, when, how? Even the very first lockdown in Germany happened when R was already <1. That used to be on the RKIs (our CDC) website.

What I don't understand is that I have to keep coming with facts (and still get censored) and you (the pro-lockdowners) can just keep doing argument by false assertions without showing any data whatsoever.

> The reasons given for lockdown were ever shifting

I agree that communication was awful all over the board and from both sides.

> Where, when, how?

Italy spring 2021. Note that in general I am talking about 2021 data not 2022. I wouldn't even call 2022 restrictions a lockdown, they are really more of a vaccination and mask mandate.

> I agree that communication was awful all over the board

I appreciate the peace offering but you have to understand that, for me, this topic is deeply personal. I am not willing to let it go on "oh let's call it awful and move on". Maybe in the beginning there was an earnest motivation to avoid suffering but the rest of the time, the public was simply deceived if not down right gaslit.

As a general answer: Corona is seasonal depending on latitude and on northern latitude spring is the end of it's season. So no matter what you do, you get a decrease in cases anyway. But if you mean something else, please show me in detail.

The excuse for lack of evidence seems to so often boil down to "that wasn't true lockdown". However, the measures in 2022 followed the same logic as the early lockdowns and were justified with the same grab bag of reasons. For instance, in winter 2021/2022, in Germany, I wasn't allowed to do anything except shopping for essentials because I am not vaccinated. For me, it absolutely was exactly like lockdown: same restrictions, same reasons, same dire predictions what would happen without these measures.

So I want an explanation for why cases didn't "explode" in Switzerland when they dropped their measures 16th of Feb 2022, a full one and a half month ahead of Germany and why are cases now dropping like a rock in Germany three weeks after repealing most measures.

> no matter what you do, you get a decrease in cases anyway. But if you mean something else, please show me in detail.

Not entirely, for example US tended to have waves during the summer that Europe didn't have (more AC and less outdoor activity perhaps?). But yeah it seems to be mostly seasonal and definitely it comes and goes in waves of roughly 2 months.

> why cases didn't "explode" in Switzerland when they dropped their measures 16th of Feb 2022,

Obviously the rate of vaccination had a role in the lack of "explosion" (transmission remains but is lower, and there are more mild and asymptomatic cases that aren't traced). However cases did start to grow around 25th of February, inverting the previous trend[1], and the simplest explanation is that measures had some effect.

In fact the share of positive tests in Switzerland is so ridiculously high (50% around mid March) that the cases probably did explode, but were mostly mild or asymptomatic thanks to the vaccine. So again you cannot compare effects of suspending restrictions in 2022 on what would have happened without lockdowns in 2020.

Furthermore, while deaths among 40-60 year olds are pretty low, that's less true for hospitalizations. The impact of uncontrolled spreading before vaccinations would have been worse than a CFR measured in "ideal" conditions where everybody had access to healthcare.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

In Denmark at least, through all of 2020 we had 0.0% increase in mortality. 2 weeks after we started vaccinating that number climbed to 12.6%, so we might find that the vaccines have killed even more people.

Certainly if you did the deceptive deed of tracking "dead with vaccine" like we do for the disease.

> Certainly if you did the deceptive deed of tracking "dead with vaccine" like we do for the disease.

Where are they not tracking "dead with covid" separately from "dead from covid"? Here in the UK we have very clearly recorded separate numbers for these (the "dead from" number were ~66% the "dead with" numbers until recently with the rise of Omicron meaning that far more people have covid and far few people are dying from it).

In Denmark we have only tracked "dead with" and then mid 2021 we had a large study to figure out the actual number of dead, which turned out to be about 120 people.

Do you have a citation for this? Very interesting and would like to look into this more.

Correlation != causation.

Hundreds of thousands died with a positive PCR test, yes. But then everyone who died had one taken. Certainly, a number of those died because because of this particular infection but the average COVID death was a very old person who had two or more preexisting conditions.

So the real question is: how many have died who would not have died of the flu or RSV or Andenovirus or Beta-coronavirus or any of the other innumerable causes of respiratory infections?

Not to mention, this has nothing to do with people younger than 40 or even younger than 60.

There is data on excess mortality and the answer is, a lot. This is also why the with/from covid debate is pointless. If 100.000 people have died more than they would usually die, then no matter if they died due to covid or their condition was aggravated by it, that's 100.000 more people dying than in a year without covid.

Well except that a lot of countries didn't have any unusual excess mortality in 2020. And anyway how do you separate the deaths caused by the measures from the deaths caused by COVID?

Such as

Discharging hospital patients into care homes:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/28/the-covid-care-home...

"The practice of discharging untested patients from hospitals to care homes remained in force until 15 April 2020."

Killing people with ventilators:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...

"Bergmann’s case illustrates a shift on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, as doctors rethink when and how to use mechanical ventilators to treat severe sufferers of the disease - and in some cases whether to use them at all. While initially doctors packed intensive care units with intubated patients, now many are exploring other options.

> Discharging hospital patients into care homes:

England had 70.000 more deaths than usual in 2020 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...), how many of those were from care homes? The balance was ~30.000 in mid April, were all of them in care homes? And even if so, how do you justify the remaining 40.000 that died later in the year?

> Killing people with ventilators:

Also April 2020, so the question is the same. How do you justify the excess deaths from the second half of 2020 and 2021?

> except that a lot of countries didn't have any unusual excess mortality in 2020

Which? How did death causes compare in 2019 and 2020?

There are studies for this such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35099995/

These are two examples of how measures specifically meant to fight the disease caused a lot of deaths. Care homes also had deaths from loneliness and despair due to banning family visits, another pandemic measure that is still going on today.

https://appgpandemic.org/news/hospital-and-care-home-visitin...

“There are still obstacles in place when trying to visit a loved one in a care home and the impact has been and continues to be devastating. The safeguarding issues I am seeing and hearing about are atrocious. Residents left for hours in dirty, wet incontinence pads leading to dangerous pressure ulcers. Malnutrition. Dehydration. End of life medication given to patients without their or their family’s consent. Psychological trauma, post traumatic stress and suicides have resulted because of this. Multiple systems are failing, including Local Authorities and the CQC. It is a complex situation that needs a bold approach by both empowering families and galvanising government action to hold public bodies to account and stop private equity firms placing profit over people.”

The single largest group of people, between 40% and 60% depending on country, to die from coronavirus were from care homes [1],[2] so it stands to reason that measures applying to care homes had an outsized effect on corona virus mortality.

And indeed, Sweden, after admitting it did wrong by the care home residence in Spring 2020 and taking steps to rectify the situation, got their deaths under control which allowed them to end 2020 at (minus) -2.3% age-adjusted relative mortality.

> There are studies for this such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35099995/

This study uses unadjusted mortality which does not account for an aging population. In particular it doesn't account for Sweden's 2019 negative excess mortality. I look at this report by the UKs Office of National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Table "Table 2: Relative cumulative excess mortality ..." is the most interesting. It shows that more than half of these European countries had absolutely nothing exceptional going on mortality wise between 2020 and June 2021. I'm not sure how the Corona narrative (100000k death / month without lockdowns!!) can account for this data. If it's really only the virus we should've seen mass mortality everywhere especially the places with a more "hands off" approach like Sweden. That's just not what happened.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/half-of-corona...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/05/26/nursin...

> half of these European countries had absolutely nothing exceptional going on mortality wise between 2020 and June 2021

That's not how I read it. First, all except Norway, Finland, Estonia, Denmark had at least +20% in 2020. Second, it's the peak that the graph plots so you cannot use it to take conclusions over the whole year. All the graph can tell you is how hard the country was hit by the spring 2021 wave compared to 2020.

I am talking about this table:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/download/table?format=xlsx&uri=/peopl...

(warning excel)

It shows that of the 32 European countries 17 didn't even exceed an excess of 5% in the whole period from 2020-01 to 2021-06.

The way I read it, almost all countries had extra mortality despite lockdowns, and despite a very mild flu year in 2020 and flu being basically not a thing in 2021.

In fact the only countries with negative mortality are either islands or the northern Europe countries which have long been known to be outliers.

Yeah, but death is not a cardiovascular event you know - these people just suffocated.