Such shenanigans doesn't build trust. It undermines it. As if gov and science need less trust at this point.
*effectively an untested type of vax technology is somehow miraculously free of any/all possible short and long term side effects? The comparisons to say the Polio vax were embarrassingly naive, at best. I don't get it.
a fast spreading pandemic vs. this or that public health measure.
the damage to the public health community is done not because of things like operation warpspeed, but because of the realpolitik of WHO, China, Trump, etc.
responsible participants have to take the time and effort to communicate with the correct framing: as new data comes in the best course of action can change, the current best is X, based on data D1, D2, ...
of course what ended up happening was random factoids sprinkled all over various media channels linked to local/state/federal/global decisions/recommendations.
government agencies are absolutely not up to the task of doing responsible communication to the public in this day and age.
Well, none delivered as promised. We went from "this will do it..." to "...get your booster boosted...and boosted..."
I get it. It's difficult to say. That's the true nature of science. The problem is, that level of honesty and transparency was completely abandoned. Instead we got "it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated" which was yet another hyperbolic lie. Instead we got Fauci suggesting "wear two masks" instead of coming clean (i.e., those disposable masks didn't have any science to support their effectiveness. That is, they're useless*).
These are not opinions. These are facts. Yet we're in collective mass denial??
*Why didn't we already know this? And why isn't anyone asking why that was?
In a sense it was an already ongoing battle with every argument already deployed and pre-determined, but all of a sudden everybody and their grandma were involved in the conversation against their will. The perma-online people predictably took up the positions they did, while a plethora of other opinions / skepticism emerged but were all summarily heaped in the tinfoil hat. Now it seems to be unwinding, and it feels just as surreal as the last few hours of a rave where everybody is kind of sobering up and looking at a very bothersome way home.
Not being troll-y or snarky. It's a legit question: Why was the self-proclaimed high road given a free pass on taking the low road?
There's been a clear and obvious double standard. Why has that lede been buried?
Right, but according to Reddit, the Australian/New Zealand governments and other places people who didn't want to expose themselves to this stuff where all ignorant selfish assholes.
It's obviously not fully aligned with 'mainstream thought', when the expression of many widely help positions will get individuals and whole subreddits banned
It is standard practice with influenza to update the stains. 0 reason to think that updating the mRNA for COVID vaccines from one strain to another is dangerous. None. Zap. Zero. Zilch.
with lots of money and research going into the technology, I don't understand where folks are coming from.
Vaccines for influenza have been around for decades. The first covid shot was the first ever mRNA technology ever approved for human use.
Now the booster doesn’t simply swap out strains. It moves from a monovalent to a bivalent (original formula plus the Omicron Ba4/Ba5 formula) and we shouldn’t test it? The first ever bivalent mRNA vaccine. Deployed to everyone on the planet. With absolutely no human testing done.
If you’re okay with it, that’s great… that’s your personal choice to trust corrupt health authorities and for-profit vaccine manufacturers. Let me know how it goes.
The FDA instructed Pfizer and moderna to reformulate based on the changing variant landscape as ba.4/5 overtook ba.1
The ba.4/5 bivalent vaccine was an extremely incremental change from the ba.1 booster
A questionable one. Depending on the year, getting the influenza shot has been shown to give you negative efficacy. How nice would that be if we saw a -50% efficacy this year, wouldn't that be problematic for our strapped healthcare systems.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2017/02/studies-...
> In the 2014-15 season (when, as mentioned, the vaccine was unchanged from the year before and a drifted H3N2 strain was circulating), "negative effects of prior vaccination were pronounced and statistically significant," the researchers found. VE in those who received only the 2014-15 vaccine was estimated at 65% (95% CI, 25% to 83%), whereas VE for patients vaccinated two seasons in a row was -33% (95% CI, –78% to 1%).
It's good to ask questions but you should probably ask them of someone who knows what they are talking about instead of spreading conspiracies.
It was always a gamble. I took it, knowing it was a gamble, since COVID was very dangerous. We forced people to gamble. It was criminal.
Too bad it’s just a booster and I’m not eligible to get or because I haven’t gotten the probably essentially useless (for me) original vaccine. As far as I’m aware they didn’t announce the details of this until sometime in August. At this point by the time I got the booster that might provide me some protection the virus will probably have mutated again.
Define immunity, but there is absolutely evidence of long term effectiveness against hospitilization and death if you care to look for it.
"No evidence" doesn't mean we looked for it and it doesn't exist, it means we didn't look for it yet or have chosen not to look into it. In this case you seem to be citing ancient talking points from before it was possible to tell how long lasting the immunity from covid would be, AKA in early 2021 they couldn't state for fact that immunity against severe death would last longer than a year because the disease itself was too new, (although sar-cov1 was known to have long lasting immunity 10 years later, but lets pretend we didn't know that it would work the same). Now we know because the disease has been around long enough to gather those types of statistics.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...
> Virus-specific B cells increased over time. People had more memory B cells six months after symptom onset than at one month afterwards. Although the number of these cells appeared to reach a plateau after a few months, levels didn’t decline over the period studied.
Take the above snippet for example. From this you could make the statement "we don't have evidence for natural immunity lasting beyond 8 months" But that is explicitly a limit coming from the length of study.
Better get a booster then.
I'm going to demonize the person that thinks they don't need a vaccine.
> I'm going to demonize the person that thinks they don't need a vaccine.
Not sure what that's doing here.
You want the right to breathe virus particles all over me so that you can avoid basic safety measures? Sorry, my sympathy ends where my lungs begin.
- That forcing people to take a drug authorized under EUA with a relatively novel technology is a "basic safety measure"
- That people who didn't comply with this "basic" measure are not breathing virus particles all over you
I'll leave it to you to decide how good these assumptions are.
Are you new to the Internet? Arguments over putting pineapple on pizza cause vitriol.
Jokes aside, the summary admits more studies need to be necessary. From what I understand of it, it made mice stronger against flu, but may have made them weaker to other infections. This is big if true, but it requires more study.
It was aspirational not an expectation. Alas, the downvotes show me that I'm doomed to yet another disappointment :p
> This is big if true, but it requires more study.
That's basically my point. I am saying that I would have (apparently incorrectly) assured people that more study was not required - at all. I and many others probably overcorrected for the skepticism of "the other side". It doesn't change my opinion that the vaccine program was the right call.
And will any of these repercussions be significantly worse than having gotten a mild case of COVID the natural way? We do not know what COVID will do to us in 10+ years even after a mild case. Anything from nothing at all to organ failure to whatever else...
We just don't know, so we make reasonable guesses. Consider the harm we see happening weight then more against the unlimited possibilities of harm we can imagine.
People were by and large happy to have a new vaccine today and risk some unpredictable future risk than die of a disease they saw killing people.
I think some people just can't wrap their heads around balancing these kind of risks.
The very first EUA:
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-take...
> The vaccine was 95% effective in preventing COVID-19 disease among these clinical trial participants with eight COVID-19 cases in the vaccine group and 162 in the placebo group. Of these 170 COVID-19 cases, one in the vaccine group and three in the placebo group were classified as severe. At this time, data are not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.
Fauci, shortly before vaccine approval:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/16/fauci-why-still-need-masks-s...
> “Obviously, with a 90-plus percent effective vaccine, you could feel much more confident” about not getting the virus, Fauci told Tapper. “But I would recommend to people to not abandon all public health measures just because you have been vaccinated.” Those fundamentals include: universal wearing of masks, maintaining physical distance, avoiding large crowds, doing more outdoor activities and washing hands frequently.
> Because “even though, for the general population, it might be 90[%] to 95% effective,” said Fauci, “you don’t necessarily know, for you, how effective it is.” Even at those success rates, about 5% to 10% of people immunized may still get the virus.
People bitched a lot about this at the time.
Almost everyone who’s been vaccinated has ALSO caught COVID. So those of us with the vaccine have to worry about the long-term risks of both the mRNA vaccine, in addition to the long-term risks of the disease. Those who skipped the vaccine only have the theoretical long term risk from COVID to worry about.
What about the ones that died lol?
Not everyone who gets measels gets SSPE. Not everyone who gets EBV gets MS.
We know vaccination made COVID less dangerous. Maybe those with no immunity when they caught it will all die of cancer in 5 years time?
No one knows what will happen in the future. We just have to pick out poison (where we are lucky enough to have a choice).
Part of the reason it was in studies for so long is because it kept failing. But in two weeks (seriously! That's straight from Moderna) they were able to button everything up and make it work for Covid.
"How could ten years of development possibly generate a working product?" is a take, I suppose.
You mean the animal trials in which mRNA based drugs repeatedly failed due to toxicity, for which as recently as 2017 there was no fix?
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
No, mRNA tech wasn't being used before COVID. They were trying to bring it to market and failing. That's why so many people refer to it as experimental.
Yes Covid is a tragedy. I think most people recognize that. That doesn’t mean what we did worked or should have been done.
From the national library of medicine study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7510529/
The pandemic was hard on everyone. Blaming school closures just reveals your personal vendetta.
This conversation is derailed, the original topic was vaccine.
Yup, this seems pretty obvious anecdotally so its good to see it being backed up in the literature.
Was it worth it to save the lives of 100's of 1000's to millions of elderly people? Probably.
Did it negatively impact the younger generation, who had no say at all in the decision? Absolutely.
We made a choice, right or wrong, to sacrifice some of our children to save our elders. Culturally, this is not something we do. I wonder how this will be interpreted as more of these studies come to light and the children start to age and we can see the damage.
No!
We already know we made the right choice because the alternative was 20 million more dead. This "time will tell" bullshit is ridiculous. We swerved the car to avoid crashing it head on into a wall, and yes you might have whiplash but there is no honest room for second guessing the decision not to drive the car into the wall at full speed.
There is an entire branch of study - one which I work in - whose entire job is to run either observational studies or post-hoc studies using real world data to find out if something had an impact, a positive impact, negative impact, and what the likelyhood of your own study being correct is.
If you think this is 'done' and we shouldn't revisit this to see what we did well / did poorly then that is as anti-science as they come.
You are lumping every response to the pandemic together and appear to be saying "you can't judge this, would you rather millions have died??" - well no, but thats not the question either. Instead "We did things to respond to the pandemic, some good some bad. What was good and what was bad."
This will happen. Saying "NO NO NO" is not going to stop that or help it.
Maybe rich tech workers had it easier or are living in denial but the fact is what we did to the young is completely disgusting and it is shameful how quick some people are to dismiss it. What we did to kids was state sponsored child abuse. We absolutely fucked over their one and only childhood for a disease whose median age of death is higher than the average life expectancy for a normal person. The number of young ones who got seriously ill from Covid is a drop in the bucket.
Complete bollocks.
Yes it’s more concerning that poor little Timmy couldn’t have his first kiss than granny actually ending up dead.
If you haven’t prepared your children to handle a little inconvenience like not going to a prom, he’s certainly not going to be prepared for real life.
'Millions of dead' vs 'no prom'. As if prom means anything. As if it's some essential thing that was always a critical part of human life and children are considered "sacrificed" if they have to go without. Ridiculous. Talk about privilege!
Sadly, things during the deadly global pandemic have been less than ideal. Nobody asked for the pandemic and nothing we did or could have done differently would have changed the fact that it was going to have an impact on children just as it has had an impact on all of us. You just can't have a deadly global pandemic and not disrupt people's lives somewhat.
Ask any kid who lost a parent to covid if they'd rather have prom, a 'first days of school' immediately instead of later, or their loved one back. Imagine how many more parents (and children) would have been killed or suffer long term problems due to the virus if we'd done absolutely nothing like many seem to have wanted.
I wonder which kids are going to grow up and think back to this time and feel more abused, the ones whose parents did everything they could to protect them in the middle of a pandemic or the ones whose parents told them not to wear a mask and wouldn't get them vaccinated and wanted to shove them back into schools no matter how many children and adults got sick.
Even if all that crap we subjected them to worked, that still doesn’t make what we did to them okay. We stole significant chunks of their one and only childhood away from them for a disease that they aren’t even close to being at risk from.
We absolutely fucked our kids and it is perhaps one of the saddest most shameful outcomes of societies myopic fixation on Covid.
Frame your argument in terms of quality adjusted life years and the whole thing falls apart. The median age of somebody dying of Covid was higher than the average human lifespan. What kind of sick demented society steals two or more years of little kids childhood for that?
Most older adults are not living in nursing homes.
You can't and couldn't possibly know that. Nobody could. What we do know today is that the un-vaccinated aren't dying like was originally claimed they would, in fact they seem to be faring better for those under 60 or so.
Not with that attitude... Yes you can, there are plenty of ways of comparing regions or countries with high and low vaccination rates, or vaccination uptake. (Of course only while demographically adjusting, but the people who do these studies surprisingly often do think about the basic gotchas.)
The incident of death does increase substantially past 55, however people died at all ages during covid, so we know more infections = more deaths across the board.
Given that the vaccine available at the time resulted in around a 85% reduction in likelyhood of infection, we can for sure declare it saved many more lives than without, unless it directly killed more people than it helped...
Oh man what a gotcha! If only there was some sort of change in circumstances that could impact how many people will die from a new disease, like I don't know, new less damaging variants and significantly better care in facilities that are no longer buckling under the burden of thousands of cases a week.
Haven't heard that before!. Do you have a source to read more about it?
there's no point to wearing masks if you go to places where you take it off. people did exactly that and everyone was pikachu surprised that the pandemic was still alive and well.
But then they were the same mask for a week and play with it/adjust it 100 times a day.
Thank you for helping making my point
as far as I know the numbers are here and show otherwise
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/in-the-era-of-omicron...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/briefing/masks-mandates-u...
of course for personal health choices it's best to go for a P100 respirator and getting the vaccine
1. People don’t obey them
2. People use garbage cloth or surgical masks that have poor efficacy. Those masks at best are only effective in partially protecting others if you’re sick, but not vice versa.
3. For the reasons stated above, these studies don’t disprove the efficacy of n95 or higher rated masks
Unlike cloth masks, n95s and higher rated masks have much better efficacy and I have yet to see a study that either focuses on them or differentiates them from near useless masks. A better study would focus on hospitals and their workers’ use of different types of masks. The current studies just help prove my point. Hating masks is something people on both sides of the political spectrum can agree on in the West
And still, as long as we don't magically come up with a way to educate millions of people effectively about masks, mask mandates are a wash. (Their best benefit is that anyone who gives a shit does not look like an outlier.)
I’m just saying that n95 masks are highly effective at preventing the transmission of airborne illnesses such as COVID regardless of whether anyone else wears a mask, along with my observation that the West detests masks ie. I’m not recommending a solution. I’m lamenting the stupid and illogical behavior of people, even educated ones