It is so amazing to me how many people don't seem to recognize this.
My (somewhat baseless) speculation on this is that a lot of the people in forums like HN are early adopter types who mostly work from home, and so were able to avoid exposure and got the vaccine relatively early. From this standpoint, I could see it being harder to empathize with folks who were exposed in everyday life (it's just a simple jab, I did it, why can't everyone else? Or maybe even those folks must be bad/lesser people if they didn't stop themselves from being infected).
Combine that with the constant onslaught of media time that pointedly ignores the categories that you breakdown above, and maybe it's no wonder that people have the opinions on this that they do.
Encouraging natural immunity is asking for hospitals to get filled up by people giving themselves covid on purpose. This affects non covid patients too.
This response is actually an example of what I'm talking about.
The comment that I replied to was explaining how the segment of the population that is a candidate for giving themselves covid while being high risk is (and has been) shrinking out of existence.
Meanwhile, there is a much larger (and growing) cohort that continues to be harrased if they (fairly) decide they don't need these vaccines, and the harrasment is justified by claims like yours.
Even the CDC has finally come around and published data along these lines (despite numerous studies suggesting the same starting from early last year). But after bullshitting people for so long, I guess we just have to expect there will be a ton of inertia behind the idea that every human needs these vaccines, no matter what.
Why doesn't someone make the point that 95%+ (or 98%+ etc) of Americans are protected via natural immunity or vaccines and back it up with data?
Once that point is made, the discouraging natural immunity argument can stop because hospitals can't overfill anymore.
However until that point can be made[0] I think the "don't encourage natural immunity" position will prevent the most deaths.
By the way, I also don't condone harassment of unvaccinated people or vaccination as a requirement for employment etc either. Those are separate issues to me.
I attempted to make an argument like that 2 weeks ago.
I was using an estimate of 120m instead of the 146 that you quoted. And I'm just a dummy on the internet, so I'm probably at least a little wrong. But the gist was that if you could jab everyone tomorrow (which you can't), you might get a little bit of a benefit in the stats, but politically you'd be dead
There's no reason hospitals can't still fill up anyway if you have enough volume.
EDIT: I should mention that I really appreciate what you said above:
> By the way, I also don't condone harassment of unvaccinated people or vaccination as a requirement for employment etc either. Those are separate issues to me.
I'm in Canada where the mandates are quite extensive but also change frequently.
I'd like to think the govt is hoping that each time restrictions are loosed, some type of immunity has developed and restrictionz can be loosed more. When things seem to get worse and worse again, the restrictions are added to ensure hospitals can work.
At the end of the day, a large decrease in severity will be the deciding factor. We can try to model when that will happen, but it will have to actually happen regardless of what the models say.
https://covidestim.org/us has estimates on the percentage of people ever infected by state. I looked at MA, NY, and CA, and they all hover around 80% (with error bars). I can't find a cumulative US estimate.
I have no idea how they came up with the estimate, but the site is maintained by reputable institutions, so I am inclined to believe these numbers unless proven otherwise.
Until the people hoarding ICU beds and grinding medical staff into the ground are no longer disproportionately unvaccinated COVID patients, I don't see anyone caring too much about the distinction.
> ... I don't see anyone caring too much about the distinction.
I think you're absolutely right, which is why I'm here banging this drum. People should care about the distinction, because it matters if you want to actually understand the situation.
Certain groups are overrepresented in the prison system in the US. Some people think this means that all members of those groups are bad people. The people who think this are poorly informed, and can only get in the way of solving the actual problems.
And no, I'm not equating the treatment of unvaccinated people to that of minorities in the US. I am equating the structure of the misunderstanding involved (disadvantaged minority + other problems describes a lot of prisoners, but its the other problems that dominate the equation. Just like unvaccinated + seronaive can describe a hospitalized patient, but the seronaive part is what matters).
If the distinction is vaccinated people vs people with natural immunity, I don't think that's a scientifically sound distinction. Do you mean people who recovered 20 months ago from a long gone variant? Or people who recovered with no symptoms last week from Omicron? Do we know what it means if a person has antibodies from a recovery a year ago, given the advent of brand new strains that have spread like wildfire and are only just now being studied in depth?
What we do know, thanks to a mountain of unambiguous data, is that people who have had vaccine shots go to the hospital way, way, way less often than those who have not. Which means vaccines prevent other people from suffering bad health outcomes due to lack of healthcare resources. It is a win for everyone.
I'm not aware of any evidence of immunity after recovery waning over time. Omicron seems to infect more people with a previous infection than delta did, but protection from hospitalization is still strong. I'm interested to see otherwise if you have links.
The CDC looked at how people fared with delta with a previous diagnosis by March 2021, so presumably anywhere from when pcr and antigen tests started up until March. There is no breakdown of previous variants in this study, its just if you had a previous infection, you were protected.
I know, this doesn't sound like anything you've heard yet. They still manage to slip in a recommendation that "all eligible persons should be up to date with COVID-19 vaccination", but the data doesn't support that.
> Four cohorts of persons aged ≥18 years were assembled via linkages of records from electronic laboratory reporting databases and state-specific immunization information systems.† Persons were classified based on whether they had had a laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection by March 1, 2021 (i.e., previous COVID-19 diagnosis)§; had received at least the primary COVID-19 vaccination series¶ by May 16, 2021; had a previous COVID-19 diagnosis and were fully vaccinated*; or had neither received a previous COVID-19 diagnosis by March 1 nor received a first COVID-19 vaccine dose by the end of the analysis period.
> By the week beginning October 3, compared with COVID-19 cases rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, case rates among vaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis were 6.2-fold (California) and 4.5-fold (New York) lower; rates were substantially lower among both groups with previous COVID-19 diagnoses, including 29.0-fold (California) and 14.7-fold lower (New York) among unvaccinated persons with a previous diagnosis, and 32.5-fold (California) and 19.8-fold lower (New York) among vaccinated persons with a previous diagnosis of COVID-19. During the same period, compared with hospitalization rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalization rates in California followed a similar pattern. These results demonstrate that vaccination protects against COVID-19 and related hospitalization, and that surviving a previous infection protects against a reinfection and related hospitalization. Importantly, infection-derived protection was higher after the Delta variant became predominant, a time when vaccine-induced immunity for many persons declined because of immune evasion and immunologic waning (2,5,6).
How about we do this. For people that can and “should be” vaccinated but don’t by choice due to their own risk assessment, if they catch Covid and need hospital treatment they don’t get it.
That way they have their freedom and hospital capacity isn’t put at risk. If the people refusing to get vaccinated are willing to shoulder the risk themselves I have no problems with it.
> If the people refusing to get vaccinated are willing to shoulder the risk themselves I have no problems with it.
This is the point: the people who are refusing to be vaccinated that have recovered from a prior infection are not at a higher risk of severe outcomes than the folks who got vaccinated and didn't have a previous infection [0].
So maybe if your definition of "should be vaccinated" is narrow enough, then maybe you can justify some kind of priority order for treatment. That's not a topic I'm going anywhere near though.
There are going to be gray areas. Some individuals should not or cannot get the vaccine. What qualifies for that exactly is a bit muddy as well. So I agree what is "should" isn't very clear.
As an individual, it's really the numbers around the ratio of unvaccinated individuals in hospital / ICU consuming resources unnecessarily and therefore depleting them for the rest of us unnecessarily that's maddening. That plus the regrettable stories about people that are vocally anti-vax that end up dying from covid.
So for me it's like fine, freedom is important and you can choose to go against whatever recommendation you want. But at the same time you have to shoulder the consequences for it too. You can't have it both ways. Have the freedom to do whatever you want but also not bear the consequences of those actions.
> As an individual, it's really the numbers around the ratio of unvaccinated individuals in hospital / ICU consuming resources unnecessarily and therefore depleting them for the rest of us unnecessarily that's maddening.
I think I'm failing to make this clear enough. I'll try again.
The set of unvaccinated people is made up of those with a prior infection (call them R for recovered) and without (call them N for naive). And for simplicity, we'll keep the vaccinated variable to a binary, yes or no. So you have vaccinated with a prior infection (VR) and vaccinated without (VN).
When you say unvaccinated you are talking about R + N. We have data from the CDC that says R and VN were at roughly equivalent risk of hospitalizatiom during delta, and VR was a little bit better. N was by far the worst, and is who you actually mean when you talk about the people disproportionately filling up the hospitals. Because that's what the CDC is saying, that members of R, VR, and VN were all showing up in the hospitals at a similar much lower rate, and N was in a different universe.
You wouldn't know this unless you specifically asked yourself the question and went looking for the answer, because so far it has gotten very little air time. So it's not surprising that you and lots of other people are not aware. I'm only aware because I happen to be a member of R, and so this is important to me. It sucks living in a world where lots of people think its fine to lump me in with N, and advocate for taking away my livelihood and freedom of movement.
Saying "the unvaccinated are clogging up the hospitals" is like saying "I don't like Mexican food" when really you just don't like spicy peppers. You may avoid some burn that way, but now you're missing out on the rest of the cuisine, and you've failed to equip yourself with the knowledge to avoid the Indian or Thai dishes that will destroy you (because you think it's just the Mexican part that matters, not the spicy ingredients).
I think we're in agreement, and I wasn't being clear enough as well. I do mean the N set. This is what I mean by the "should" being fuzzy.
Unfortunately some of the R set ("some" is also fuzzy, I don't know how much but by this point I'm guessing high proportion), were in the N set and just didn't need to go to the hospital. So the mentality and risk factor prior to move from N to R is the same. There is no deterministic way (except moving to VN first) to mitigate that risk ahead of time.
The big question, of course, is timing — if you had a mild case in 2020, you're unlikely to do as well as someone who got their second dose a couple months ago.
I agree. This is really the critical point: If you are in a low risk group, but get covid you have no way of knowing whether you will consume hospital resources or not. In that case it's best to get vaccinated if you can to protect others who made need the hospital.
Recognizing that naturally acquired immunity exists for tens of millions isn't the same thing as encouraging people to intentionally catch covid to gain natural immunity. Failure to differentiate between the two is just another way the injection maximalists look out of touch or unempathetic.
> Encouraging natural immunity is asking for hospitals to get filled up by people giving themselves covid on purpose. This affects non covid patients too.
So uh, what is that.... 0.01% of the entire population? Less? Yes, some people will cheat the system but people cheat all systems all the time. That's just life.
Most people will do the right thing. We cannot build a society around 0.01% of us who cheat.
That's also why many governments do not accept proof of recovery in lieu of proof of vaccination. Those who do have vaccine-skeptic people catching the virus intentionally and risking death.
So there playing the I am ignoring it or lying about it for your benefit card like Fauci about masks early on?
It was a while ago that the CDC estimated recovered COVID numbers to bre around 146 million. It is more like over 200 million at this point with overlap of vaccinated people.
I am sick of being ignored of having recovered, and people making the excuse that if they let us know how good natural immunity is, or even talk about it, the idiots will go out and get COVID. I don't want a nanny state, or police state for that matter. The WHO and a lot of the world are at odds with the CDC especially on masking and boosting of under 12 year-olds.
Besides boosting one after the other may be weakening the immune system [1]. It makes sense. It raises antibodies, but wanes quickly. Natural immunity lives in B- and T-cell long-term memory of the immune system. SARS-COV1 recovered are still testing strong for immunity for over 18 years now.
I am getting repetitive, but let's address obesity, diabetes, poor lifestyle choices, and their kind before mandating anyone's personal health choices or shaming them for their decisions. If I call out obesity it is fat shaming..., but go ahead and lump the recovered in with the unvaccinated and try and shame and steer the course of our lives with mandates and policing.
No, those are self-inflicted, and you can take action to rid yourself of them or minimize their effects. Self empowerment.
And since I first posted the CDC released a study that shows natural immunity is better than vaccination. Not surprised since vaccination went from 95% efficacy, and you will not catch or transmit COVID (very early on); to well, it's like 78% effective after a few months, and you can catch a mild case of COVID; to it drops below 50% after 3 to 5 months (vaccines cannot be FDA approved if they show less than 50% effectiveness), and you will need a booster, and you can be infected and infect others.
And we can debate mask-wearing, but there are no substantive studies on the issue, and if naturally immune and the vaccinated are protected (probably greater than 90% of the population by now), why masks? Not to even drag in having all of our children masked 8 hours/day, while the rest of us are able to limit our mask-wearing even though 12 and under are the least at risk for anything serious from COVID.
Yes, yet another way the government is dishonestly manipulating people into a single course of action even when it is of little benefit to anyone other than those who mistake metrics for what the metrics were designed to manage. There appears to be no bottom to the depths of credibility destruction that the government will plunge in order to put compliance above all else.
> "Omicron is acting like a super booster," Unnasch said. "People who have gotten omicron are going to be really well protected against infection, not just disease moving forward, which is a really good sign."
The best case is never catching COVID again. Even vaccinated people put themselves at risk (albeit less than non-vaccinated people) if they catch COVID intentionally. No one recommends just going out there and catching COVID. But when proof of vaccination systems allow for it, some people do it anyway and some of them die instead.
>Encouraging natural immunity is asking for hospitals to get filled up by people giving themselves covid on purpose.
there's no interest in talking about actual treatments or a $1 early treatment remedy [1], like every other disease. There's nothing that's patentable and profitable, so the focus is on vaccinations, which increasingly show more infections
The US DoD maintains detailed military personnel data to protect national security. Their health care surveillance data shows everything from neurological issues impacting US airforce pilots to 300% increase in miscarriages and cancer. The data is being scrubbed and military whistleblowers are trying to fight to bring it to public attention.
It's like Snowden, but from the healthcare department of the US military. [2]
These days you have to add ‘eligible for booster and chose not to get it’, ‘got booster shot’ and ‘not eligible yet for booster shot’.
In the Netherlands we started the booster campaign on November 18, but we get graphs claiming ‘hardly any people with boosters in hospital!’ with the data including hospitalizations from November 19 onwards.
there are so many different standpoints you could take from the HN population.
- "HN focuses on tech; novel tech tends to be anti-regulation => HN must be anti-mandate."
- "HN focuses on engineering; engineering is often an optimization game that involves balancing tradeoffs => HN must believe COVID response relative to all the other risks we face is an over-reaction."
- and of course the one you presented.
my theory is that opinions within any group are just more divergent than people realize. some groups do a better job than others in (a) understanding that and (b) working with that. it's almost all cultural: do people in your culture publicly voice their non-conforming views, and to what degree do people in your culture update their beliefs when they hear new information?
And myocarditis is caused by the COVID virus. Search for that on the same page.
I would imagine that it's highly likely that people who get myocarditis from the vaccine would have gotten myocarditis from the virus. Certainly more than the general population.
Sure, but there are people who believe they can avoid catching covid-19, and they might be capable of that. Especially if you're living like a hermit or in an otherwise isolated and/or sparse community, you may be well positioned to just ignore this whole mess.
Somewhat orthogonally, I never caught chickenpox, at least nothing symptomatic...
Edit: I think it's also worth noting the history of mRNA vaccines is fraught with toxicity issues [0], and even to this day the stuff I read is pretty damn handwavy surrounding the "modified" pseudouridine toxicity fix which took 7 years to find. One just can't make the argument that the real virus and this synthetic soup of poorly understood nanoparticles are analogous.
> More than 1,300 COVID vaccine-related injury claims are now pending before an obscure government tribunal ... Lawyers tell me the vaccine is so new that there’s virtually no definitive research on injury causation to cite ... In the meantime, people like McFadden face a strict one-year deadline from the date of vaccination to file a claim with the CICP.
Consider for a moment that the "antivaxxers" are correct, that there is enormous bias in our medical, pharmaceutical, and media establishments in favor of vaccine safety. Could you really expect a reliable source on the subject if this were the case? What proportion of people are willing to speak out and risk career and social suicide for being labeled an "antivaxxer"? It is a self reinforcing chilling effect - few people speak out, data does not surface, fewer people look for evidence of adverse events, and over time it becomes riskier and more difficult to convince people that something is amiss.
Meanwhile the internet is awash with anecdote of severe symptoms following vaccination, and particularly concerning are frequent reports of doctors who are dismissive and/or refuse to submit reports on adverse effects. And then there are occasional claims of specialists in various neurological or heart related disciplines who claim to be seeing an unprecedented spike in certain normally rare symptoms among vaccinated patients.
Yeah, they could all be lying or this could be the nocebo effect or it's an army of bots spreading antivaxx propaganda...or maybe you can't magically accelerate a 5+ year testing and evaluation schedule for a novel technology merely because the president says he wants a vaccine yesterday? Note that the clinical data from pfizer and moderna is not available to the public - we are essentially relying on the manufacturers good faith with respect to the safety data that lead to approval by the FDA (moderna still isn't approved, by the way).
> Consider for a moment that the "antivaxxers" are correct, that there is enormous bias in our medical, pharmaceutical, and media establishments in favor of vaccine safety. Could you really expect a reliable source on the subject if this were the case?
I'm sorry, but this is just classic conspiracy theory thinking. "The very absence of evidence that I'm right is proof that I'm right."
The point is that it is borderline disingenuous to ask for a source when the allegation is that the sources are deeply biased in favor of their own consistent and pervasive "safe and effective" propaganda. I'm not alleging that this proof of anything.
Antivaxxers rail against all vaccines. Your "less than five years testing" straw man is problematic when they have issues with polio and smallpox vaccines, MMR, etc., some of which have been around nearly half a century.
Being honest, NO amount of testing would be an acceptable amount/duration for a significant portion of that group.
Even if you spell it out for them, something tells me this person will keep calling you names, and finding every excuse not to question how they got to "believing" what they do.
I'm the one who originally asked for a source - there was no name calling, nor should there be.
If someone is going to make a bold claim about something generally considered to be safe, actually causing a significant number of injuries, it's irresponsible not to provide a source.
The name-calling wasn't referring to you. I'm pretty clearly referring to the person who threw out "conspiracy theory thinking" as if that was helping anything.
For what it's worth: Sometimes there isn't a source. It will behoove you to entertain an idea without demanding that someone provide a source that you approve of.
You can check VAERS yourself. Asking for sources on something that is so publicly available is... weird.
Vaccine injuries are reported from official sources just the same as covid-related injuries. There’s not a big media buzz around it because the numbers are so small, and everyone knew going in that there would be a small number of adverse reactions.
Are those more likely to be a) a side effect/risk of the vaccine, or b) a known result of the disease, which is present in people who have had COVID, even unvaccinated?
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, but it certainly seems like you're saying it's newsworthy due to the vaccine.
>Are those more likely to be a) a side effect/risk of the vaccine, or b) a known result of the disease
I have a more pressing question for you:
Do you expect the medical establishment to accurately and honestly attribute the increase in myocarditis and pericarditis as side effects of the vaccine, or purely a result of the disease? I sure as shit don't. I expect the medical establishment to do and say whatever it takes to protect their profits.
The other thing that needs bringing into the discussion is vulnerability.
The average of death with Covid in the US is 80.
If every healthy 30 year old and under in the US declined the vaccine, this would barely move the needle. They personally are not vulnerable and are not likely to end up in hospital.
Reading this discussion, you would think that vaccinated = safe, unvaccinated = certain doom. Age is a much stronger predicter than vaccine status.
Age and also just health status in general, people with diabetes or heart issues are vulnerable; but to your point most of those vulnerable are now vaccinated.
My point was that triple jabbing the worlds healthy 5-30 year olds will not move the needle on hospital demand. They are simply not vulnerable to the disease in a significant way.
So sure, let’s discuss unvaxxed/1 shot/2 shot/boosted splits, but in the relevant population. To focus on 20 year olds is a red herring.
You may even split up (1) into omicron-recovered and other-variants-recovered, since recovering from omicron strain seems to give a stronger resistance against reinfection for both omicron and delta, whereas recovering from delta offers little reinfection resistance to omicron[1].
This, along with a large number of other trends related to COVID (including vaccine effectiveness), can be simply explained by immunity just not being very long lasting (4-6 months?). The Delta wave predates Omicron by around that much time.
I think when all the dust settles around COVID, we're going to learn that both vaccines and "natural immunity" last 3-6 months, and that explains almost all of the noise and confusion about what "works" and what doesn't. And that also suggests that "herd immunity" was never a realistic goal, whether by vaccines or infection. Maybe some future vaccine can be developed which targets a different signal and can last longer.
Good breakdown. I'd propose further breaking out of each category based on whether the person is immunosuppressed (for example from medication given to organ transplant recipients) or otherwise immunocompromised.
“In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.”
I feel that you need to include the people for masks and those against it. Unlike vaccines, masks do not lose efficacy over time or due to new variants. Both anti-vax and pro-vaccine supporters can fall into the anti-mask category. I don’t understand why people in the West are so anti-mask. It's been two years since I've gotten sick with anything.
1. Covid-recovered and Vaccinated + pro-mask
2. Covid-recovered and Partly-vaccinated + pro-mask
3. Covid-recovered + pro-mask
4. Vaccinated + pro-mask
5. Partly-vaccinated (< 14 days after 2nd shot) + pro-mask
6. Covid-recovered and Vaccinated + anti-mask
7. Covid-recovered and Partly-vaccinated + anti-mask
8. Covid-recovered + anti-mask
9. Vaccinated + anti-mask
10. Partly-vaccinated (< 14 days after 2nd shot) + anti-mask
> I don’t understand why people in the West are so anti-mask.
"anti-mask" has an implicit spin where it sounds like you're claiming a person is against the idea of anyone wearing a mask, but then often apply the label to a person who is perfectly fine with masks so long as the person wearing the mask is doing so of their own volition.
so i say split that category, and then the major categories might be more like "pro-universal-masking", "anti-universal-masking" (i.e. "individual choice"), and "anti-mask-wearing-in-public" (not only doesn't want to wear a mask, but doesn't want the people around them to be wearing a mask).
> in the West are so anti-mask. It's been two years since I've gotten sick with anything.
For one data point, I'm vaccinated, had Omicron, and am now "anti-mask", as in, I think they are more harmful to me than not wearing a mask. The vaccines/boosters only target one protein, of 28. I want periodic exposure to all the proteins, to keep my immunity up and minimize my risk for now and future variants.
Of course, I wear a mask as a courtesy for others. But, if nobody around me has a mask, I will remove mine.
> I want periodic exposure to all the proteins, to keep my immunity up and minimize my risk for now and future variants.
I think this makes sense to say now that the new variants are becoming less and less lethal. At the same time, this sounds similar to anti-vaccine arguments.
> At the same time, this sounds similar to anti-vaccine arguments.
I don't see how, since I didn't mention vaccination. Vaccination for initial immunity reduces the risk incredibly, with boosters reducing it even more. Also, it would be very unlikely that all all anti-vaccine arguments are wrong, since that would require the vaccines to be risk free and perfect. We know they aren't, since people have died directly from vaccination, and it's failing in trials for young children. But, the relative risk is mostly negligible compared to the the actual disease, for almost all.
There's also a further separation that is veeery relevant: age groups. There are sometimes graphs that split them out if you go digging far enough, but the graphs that make headlines are usually along the lines of "death rate, fully vaccinated versus unvaccinated" (which as you point out has its own issues). Not splitting it out into age groups gives casual readers the impression that mortality is evenly distributed along all age groups, which it most definitely is not.
To the contrary, #3 includes everyone receiving a booster, because immune system suppression/DoS immediately after a vaccine makes it the period of highest risk for both infection (from Covid or anything else) and vaccine injury. If we don't have separate reporting for #3, those negative effects will be attributed to #4. How many people know they should minimize physical exertion and crowds for 14 days post-vax?
> it’s still a very small proportion of the population
At present yes, but this was 100% of the now-vax population at a prior point in time (everyone passes through #3 to enter #2), so it should be separated in the historical record.
If you're comparing the duration of an injection with the medically and legally mandated 14-day period of exclusion, look into the scientific reasons for the 14-day period.
> The government of Singapore has become the first to recommend that people who've received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine should avoid strenuous physical activity after getting their shots, something of urgent importance to gym operators as vaccine programmes continue to roll out around the world.
#1 was already a high percentage in 2021 and is now higher due to Omicron.
Edit: CDC estimated pre-Omicron #1 as 146 million people (as of Oct 2021), https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...