I’m sorry you are a victim of deplorable disinformation. The vaccines actually prime our immune system to fight the infection, and Covid is killing children not just the elderly and body positive

Sorry this is ot, but I can't help but note: replacing "obese" with "body positive" is a wildly Orwellian linguistic move. They aren't remotely synonymous, nor do the groups they actually denote fully overlap (not all obese people are body positive, nor are all body positive people obese).

It's so over the top that it actually registered as cynism with me.

The evidence is all out in the open now - there's really no hiding from it any more.

In randomized control trials of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines here in the UK, we now know the risk of serious adverse effects was 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated i.e. a ~1 in 800 change of serious adverse effects:

22-Sep-22 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/

The UK government has now published its estimate of the number of people needed to vaccinate to prevent a COIVD-19 hospitalisation:

25-Jan-2023 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

For example in the 20-29 year no-risk group, the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one hopitalisation is 168,200. To prevent one serious hospitalisation requiring oxygen or ventilation you would need to vaccinate 706,500.

Even in the at-risk group for 20-29 years, the numbers are 7500 and 59,500 respectively.

In fact there was no group except for 70+ where the risk of hospitalisation (not severe requiring oxygen), came close to the risk associate with vaccine injury.

Look - I'm sorry you were lied to, but at some point you've just go to hold your hands up and admit the truth of the matter.

Here’s your refutation: many of these results confound pre omicron Covid with omicron Covid - the former was 10-100x deadlier, and totally warranted global mandating of the vaccines even with the published SAR rates. After omicron, it is absolutely true that the adverse reaction rate from mRNA vaccines might not be worth the benefit of avoiding the relatively less fatal omicron variant diseases for young individuals.

I will agree that regulatory agencies and many pro vaccine arguments are doing a disservice by not being thorough about such distinctions. That doesn’t mean the choices made pre omicron were invalidated. The mRNA vaccines did a great job and did them in time to protect millions more lives from being lost.

You're comparing apples with oranges.

The majority of the serious adverse effects reported in the original trials the first paper rehashes (15.1 effects per 10000 above a 6.4 effect per 10000 placebo baseline with some people reporting multiple effects, after the authors stripped out SAE's where the placebo group reported worse outcomes...) did not involve hospitalisation, never mind intubation.

And a significant proportion of COVID infections that do not require hospitalisation (i.e not counted in the NNV metric) nevertheless involve serious adverse effects including both those credibly associated with vaccine side effects but more commonly in symptomatic COVID patients (myocarditis) and those not thought to have any association with the vaccine such as long term brain fog. The vaccines were found to have a high efficacy at reducing these types of symptomatic infections though....

More generally and unfortunately for the cranks, its noticeable that excess deaths and hospitalisation peaks follow COVID infection spikes, not the ramp up of vaccinations, and have declined considerably since the vaccination programmes began. It's almost like the professionals know better than someone who thinks influenza is a coronavirus...

1/1000 people are dead in the US. Much more in places like in India. And yet here we are people still underplaying it. It’s amazing seeing rewriting of history right in front of your eyes for sure.

As I say, most of those are in extremely elderly or obese category.

This is a misunderstanding of how statistics work, and part of the lie that Covid is an old people and obese person’s problem. Not that you’re directly making this argument, but for posterity: It’s not just their problem. Unless you feel cardiology and oncology are also old and fat people’s problems, since they die more of cancer and heart disease?

The extremely elderly and obese die of all causes disproportionately. But Covid lowers life expectancy and increases mortality of all age groups starting around age 30 even after all mitigating measures (vaccines, masks, etc) are taken in to account.

The young lower their own life expectancy when they betray an inter-generational commitment to the older generations to take care of them. This won’t be the last pandemic, and the young won’t always be young.

We have no idea what the long term effects of COVID-19 infection will be, however there's no reason to think the long-term impact will be any different from any other coronavirus flu.

And given that the virus is endemic, and the vaccines only provided fleeting protection (they're not even being offered by the NHS here in the UK any more), we'll all get it sooner or later. There's no choice about it. Fortunately for the vast majority of people, COVID-19 is a mild disease that they will recover from quickly.

You have no idea what you’re talking about and are spreading misinformation.

1. SARS-CoV-2 is not influenza.

2. Influenza is not a coronavirus.

3. Influenza usually kills 300,000-500,000 people annually

4. Consensus estimates of excess deaths from COVID-19 are 14 million over the two years of 2020-2021. 2022 isn’t looking great either.

5. All developed countries highly recommend the annual Influenza vaccine even with its variable annual efficacy, as a way of lowering the intensity and spread.

The same will likely continue in many countries for COVID-19, where the recent Bivalent vaccines show reduced but still significant effectiveness against the recent variants of SARS-CoV-2.

6. COVID-19 has raised all cause mortality and lowers life expectancy across all age groups starting before middle age.

7. The UK NHS continues to offer standard two dose and 3rd shot booster COVID-19 vaccines (all mRNA now) for children over aged 5 and adults. This has not stopped.

Beyond this, they’ve limited additional boosters to seasonal programs for target populations that are at greater risk. They had one in the Autumn of 2022 and is staring a new one for Spring of 2023 for the immunocompromised and elderly (75+). The UK also signed a deal with Moderna to begin producing mRNA vaccines within the UK by 2025.

The vast majority of the UK population have COVID antibodies and are at far less risk than they were in 2020, but this continues to be monitored and may require broader seasonal vaccination campaigns if immunity wanes.

8. As with any disease vector there always is a choice to use mitigations such as masks in crowded indoor spaces, vaccinations, etc. to lower the spread. This is something other countries learned decades ago.

> You have no idea what you’re talking about and are spreading misinformation.

I actually do know what I'm talking about.

> 1. SARS-CoV-2 is not influenza. > 2. Influenza is not a coronavirus.

I know. It's a flu-like respiratory illness from a class of illnesses that humans face every season.

> 5. All developed countries highly recommend the annual Influenza vaccine even with its variable annual efficacy, as a way of lowering the intensity and spread.

No they don't. The UK does not offer flu vaccine for anyone except member of vulnerable groups, young children or medical workers.

> 6. COVID-19 has raised all cause mortality and lowers life expectancy across all age groups starting before middle age.

The all cause mortality has risen. There's every indication that this is due to the mRNA vaccines.

> Beyond this, they’ve limited additional boosters to seasonal programs for target populations that are at greater risk.

Any why are they doing that?

It's because the likelihood of hospitalisation due to a vaccine injury (1 in 800) [1] is greater than the liklihood of being spared from a hospitalisation due to COVID [2] in every age category except 70+.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/ [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

> The vast majority of the UK population have COVID antibodies and are at far less risk than they were in 2020

The vast majority of the UK population were at minimal risk of COVID to begin with. I myself recovered from it in less than a day.

8. As with any disease vector there always is a choice to use mitigations such as masks in crowded indoor spaces, vaccinations, etc. to lower the spread. This is something other countries learned decades ago.

As the Danish mask study shows, the mask mandates were nothing more than securiy theater. The vaccines only offer fleeting protection of a few weeks, so it's not possible to keep the population on a 3-monthly treadmill of boosters.

> This is something other countries learned decades ago.

No the UK had a policy that explicitly recommended against mask mandates - especially paper and cloth masks.

Hiya, here to help. In reviewing the HN guidelines at the bottom of the page I was reminded that my initial reaction to your performance on this thread here today was uncouth, to be avoided.

Instead I'll take the high road. For an account created ten months ago it seems possible you haven't read the guidelines for commenting. Maybe it will help you understand a bit of why you've been downvoted on this thread today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

My two cents, your mind appears to be made up on this topic. It shows. It also tips your hand as to what media sources you likely consume beyond HN.

Please consider (beyond the emotional reactions associated with this thread on this day) that you could perhaps use some improvement on having constructive discourse in this sort of forum. Chiming in because I like this place and have been here since near the beginning. I'd like to see discourse not devolve into factionalism or whatever more appropriate word could take it's place in this context.

Really not uncouth. Maybe misinformed but mostly just arguing opposing viewpoint that's been getting somewhat more legitimate with all the other "dangerous misinformation" that turned out to be true.

I know the NHS is poor but not even being able to afford flu shots is pretty poor indeed.

> no reason to think the long-term impact will be any different from any other coronavirus flu.

Long covid is real and seems to affect up to 5% of covid patients. We have no clue what the risk will be with repeated infections and 1.05^n is a pretty steep exponential curve when viewed in decades.

> We have no clue what the risk will be with repeated infections and 1.05^n is a pretty steep exponential curve when viewed in decades.

This is fantasy

Head over to /r/covidlonghaulers and read it yourself.

There is zero evidence of the exponential growth you are describing.

Not yet, data collection takes time. On that link above there are stories of people who got long covid on their 3rd or 4th infection. If that could happen with repeated infections, would that lead to mass disability over time (e.g. 25% workforce with ME/CFS unable to do pretty much anything)?

> Not yet, data collection takes time.

There is no evidence except for a few sketchy anecdotes from hyperchondriacs

Life is the best teacher for losing arrogance. Once it happens to somebody you are close to or even to yourself, then you might change your mind. I hope you won't do too much damage by then.

Selection/sampling bias and lizardman's constant are both important to remember.

So you are just going to ignore them?

Do you understand what those two things I mentioned are? Do you know the scale we're dealing with here?

> The young lower their own life expectancy when they betray an inter-generational commitment to the older generations to take care of them

I get what you're trying to say, but this isn't the correct argument for it. Social precedent relies on people not having any excuses that allow special-casing, which obviously doesn't apply here.

The "commitment" is already betrayed wherever eternal pyramid growth bumps up against reality.

Doesn’t the US have a population of 330 million? And I think we’re at a million dead from COVID? So 1 in 330, right?

Of course, taking into account time, population turnover, and tourists, the ratio may actually be closer to yours depending on how we decide to design the metric.

It's kind of the opposite, the majority of deaths from covid were due to cytokine storm, which is your immune system working too well, and producing too many inflammatory cytokines.