We can't vaccinate our way out of this virus. Even without the issues of compliance, eradication is likely impossible with a respiratory virus like this.
Even if you have a pan coronavirus nasal vaccine the NAbs will wane and people will get infected again.
It doesn't matter if we use more mRNAs than just spike for more targets or anything else. It'll mutate, NAbs will wane, people won't get vaccinated and the virus will persist.
People are looking for a silver bullet which will confer the naive ideal of "perfect immunity" against this virus which just doesn't exist. The vaccines we have though are great, particularly against severe disease and death. But it won't get much better than this.
The disease burden is currently high compared to common colds because the virus is still novel and our immune system responses aren't 100% fully formed and tested. Once everyone has been exposed to the antigen a half dozen times and the virus is forced to mutate off of its naive optimum then the disease burden will drop even further. Then we just have another human common cold coronavirus.
Nobody is freaking out over HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E or HCoV-OC43.
> Once everyone has been exposed to the antigen a half dozen times and the virus is forced to mutate off of its naive optimum then the disease burden will drop even further. Then we just have another human common cold coronavirus.
This is presented as a fact/certainty, however, I'd like to caution that it is still unclear whether multiple reinfections will add up to lasting damage (unlike the common cold), see e.g. [1].
That said, I agree with you that it'll be hard to eradicate this virus given how quickly it mutates (I'm just not as certain of the consequences).
That study has all kinds of confounding variables.
We don't see other respiratory viruses behaving that way, and its more likely that this one won't either.
Topol isn't a very good source either, he's speaking outside of his area of expertise (he's a cardiologist, not an immunologist/virologist/epidemiologist)
I'm not sure the public - at least in North America - has much of an appetite for any more Covid vaccines. In the US:
- Only about 2% of kids under 5 have had a 1st dose since they were introduced nearly a month ago
- Only 30% of the 5-11 year old population has had 2 doses
- < 50% of people w/2 doses went on to get a booster
So much damage has been done to public trust - "You will not get Covid if you get the vaccine; the vaccine eliminates the spread of the disease; the vaccine is more effective than natural immunity; healthy 18 year old males need a booster to go to school" - that I think it will be a real uphill climb to get more buy-in, even if the actual underlying product is more effective.
Ditto. I’ve had both boosters I’m eligible for. I’ve avoided catching this damn virus until now and I have no intention of doing so. Vaccines are a modern miracle and people scoff at them. It’s shameful.
I had it, before a vaccine was available, and it was a nothing burger, like it was for most 30-somethings. If you already have natural immunity, or 1-2 doses of the vaccine, there’s no point worry about it.
I had the original strain and then delta 9 months later. I was 33-ish, decent BMI and I get more exercise than 99% of people.
Both times I had two full weeks of extremely high fevers and I was the most fatigued I’ve ever been in my life, to the point where it was an incredible challenge to feed myself or go to the bathroom. The first time my around my lungs hurt enough where I could barely take a full breath and I developed a cough so bad I couldn’t really talk for at least a few weeks after the infection waned.
Granted, I have a really crappy immune system and I always get colds when exposed to someone sick and they hit me hard for at least a week with another week or two of symptoms. That said, your experience isn’t everyone’s.
I had it about 2 weeks before I was eligible to get a vaccine, in my 30s. As an active Crossfitter, I am (was?) much healthier than the majority of my peers. Yet it nearly killed me with double pneumonia, and I couldn't taste or smell for 7 months. Even so, I hate masks and haven't gotten any booster shots. I'm just so weary from everything covid related. I'll get an annual shot along with the flu shot, but otherwise I'm done with covid forever.
No, stop staying this foolishness. In dense cities like NY, I would say at least 20% of the city is infected right now. Workers. People on the street. The subway is disgusting, there is at least one infected person per carriage coughing over everyone and refusing to wear a mask. You walk around and hear that infected lung with light mucus cough. It’s everywhere. Unless we get proper proper sterilizing vaccines, the world is going to be in a cycle of getting sick from it every few months. This is serious and infectious like nothing on earth. I am tired of the selfishness of people having an attitude that it’s not a big deal.
At this point the vax we had is for something that doesn’t exist anymore. There is no long lasting natural resistance. We need new tech and widespread adoption. If people are going to go out symptomatic and infected and spread an r=17.5 virus, and there really is nothing we can do to stop them, we need much better tech to save us.
Immunity is likely long term. There was evidence of a bone marrow compartment formation after primary infection in the early days of the pandemic, maybe even as early as 2020. It continues to be supported.
"This work provides further evidence of sustained immune response in children up to 1 year after primary SARS-CoV-2 infection."
More details on the mechanism: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34030176 "Overall, our results indicate that mild infection with SARS-CoV-2 induces robust antigen-specific, long-lived humoral immune memory in humans."
Were you not getting sick before Covid? Lucky you, I got colds a couple times a year, even more often after my kids started attending school. Covid is just another cold for me, why should I care?
No not really. And I am childfree forever so I don’t have to put up with the little pestilence beasts and their Petri dish school crud. Very lucky!
Some occasional subway crud but when you catch COVID over and over again you lose weeks of your life. Also Because colds don’t cause long term damage, blood clots, etc.
This isn’t another cold. It could be mild, or you could wind up with complications from blood clots and inflammation for the next year, more…
That losing your taste? That’s brain damage, buster. Yeah just a cold…
Because the vaccines still slow transmission and more people getting vaccinated would slow transmission even more, lowering one's risk of getting infected as well as the severity of the infection.
Well maybe try moving out of such a densely packed disease trap? Out here in the exurbs I don’t know a single person for whom covid has been any more inconvenient than a cold (since vaccines became widely available).
I’m no anti-vaxxer. I had it, got vaxxed anyway just in case, wore my masks, etc. Like most people, I’m done now. If you want to go live in a bubble be my guest.
That implies we should simply empty the world's cities which I hope you recognize is not a serious or pragmatic alternative to simply vaccinating more.
We could just vaccinate our way until Covid transmission rates fall enough that we don't have to worry about it. Congrats on living in the middle of nowhere, but that's a bubble of a different sort.
> In dense cities like NY, I would say at least 20% of the city is infected right now. Workers. People on the street. The subway is disgusting, there is at least one infected person per carriage coughing over everyone and refusing to wear a mask. You walk around and hear that infected lung with light mucus cough. It’s everywhere.
If you are to insult people's intelligence then don't use your own germophobic anecdotal perception of the world as a credible epidemiological source.
> Unless we get proper proper sterilizing vaccines, the world is going to be in a cycle of getting sick from it every few months.
I get it that you're not familiar with most respiratory viruses.
> I am tired of the selfishness of people having an attitude that it’s not a big deal.
Imposing a medical procedure for your own safety is also a form of selfishness that lead to abuse in the recent past (see Jacobson v. Massachusetts and how it lead to Buck v. Bell)
> There is no long lasting natural resistance. We need new tech and widespread adoption.
Coronaviruses are know to change very quickly and this is why they escape immunity. Tech is not magic and won't change that fact of life. A universal coronavirus vaccine is a pipe dream.
Bob Wachter, who is the chair of medicine at UCSF periodically publishes the UCSF asymptomatic test positive rate. Everyone who is admitted to UCSF takes a Covid test. This rate is the fraction of people who are admitted without Covid symptoms, that test positive. IMO this is a very good number because it's a somewhat randomized population that is being tested in a controlled way, without too much bias.
The latest number he posted, from July 3, was 6.5% [1]. This means roughly 1 in 15 people you come across in San Francisco is positive for Covid. If you're on a crowded bus or train car, there will be multiple Covid positive people on it, and likely one that is contagious. If you regularly take transit and aren't wearing a really excellent mask, it's pretty likely you'll catch it over the course of a month or two.
Back to anecdotes, about 70% of the people I know that fit this description and ride transit in a big city without a mask have gotten symptomatic Covid in the past 3 months. All of them boosted btw.
And that’s asymptomatic! I caught 3 trains today, and in all of them someone was visibility sick and didn’t care. Someone was having a coughing fit on the platform, no mask of course. I went shopping, and several of the staff and shoppers were also visibility sick. One shopper started coughing in front of everyone and they completely ignored it and carried on. At a fast food restaurant (outdoors) there were at least 2 tables with people visibly sick eating their food.
Really, going out in public is quite a risk these days. The sheer number of infected all around you is quite troubling.
Vaccines are not only supposed to benefit the recipient.
Vaccination is a public health program.
If vaccinating under fives reduces the risk to preschool carers and enables us to maintain higher preschool capacity then that's a public benefit that has nothing. to do with whether it affects the individual outcomes of five year olds who contract covid.
We’re talking about a vaccine. The risks involved are generally very small, and the benefits of a successful vaccination program
are massive.
On the other hand we occasionally lose an entire classroom of kids to a mass shooting, but a significant part of society tells us that we can’t do anything to restrict gun ownership to reduce that risk because apparently the ‘greater good’ of mass unrestricted gun ownership is more important.
We're talking about interfacing with an incredibly
varied and complicated system in the human body. Just because we have implementations that have worked spledidly in the past, doesnt mean that every new instance of the class "vaccine" should immediately get to ride on the coattails of the others.
Maybe these vaccines are a miracle as a lot of people believe. But this mindset of "it carries the same name as these other products, so it must be fine" is an incredibly vulnerable one to have for future drug products.
Your % for kids under 5 isn't indicative of much. We signed up for a vaccine for my almost-3yo the day they were released and we're scheduled for next week. I know lots of parents who are also scheduled and most are after us.
Just because they were made available a month ago doesn't mean anyone actually had access a month ago.
We - as in parents - literally can't get them. They are intentionally releasing the vaccine for under 5s significantly slower. The comparison doesn't make sense. This has nothing to do with demand.
This has been my experience as well. We go to a large pediatrician practice and they hadn’t even had a meeting yet to start planning to distribute to under 5 kids when it got approved.
They finally just called us to see if we wanted it, but we ended up going to Rite Aid.
>- Only about 2% of kids under 5 have had a 1st dose since they were introduced nearly a month ago
>- Only 30% of the 5-11 year old population has had 2 doses
And yet I bet we all here (in the US; I hear that other countries haven't bothered, seeing no need based on the raw statistics) have seen/heard news stories in which parents are quoted as being pleased that their little ones can finally be vaccinated. Were parents who saw no need quoted? Yeah, I didn't hear any either.
Yet another example of The Narrative(TM) being pushed, regardless of the facts on the ground.
I heard a PSA on the radio that said you should get your 5-13 or whatever age children vaccinated because "many children will suffer major covid complications or even death".
Your extrapolations from the cited metrics make no sense. People are less interested in the currently available vaccines because they don't protect against the current dominant strain (BA.5).
Boosters have been available for nearly a year; vaccines for 5-11's for ~6 months.
I think the booster rate is a reasonable sign that trust in "the science" has been lost - why do you think such a large % of people who initially "followed the science" (and got 2 doses) chose not to "follow the science" and get a booster? (Again, keeping in mind boosters have been widely available since late 2021)
> What I think doesn't matter. From my perspective, about 50% of the United States is on a totally different wavelength, they seem to casually take insane risks WRT covid, and inexplicably focus on hating minorities (which I just don't get, why hate people who haven't done anything to you, when you could just ignore them instead?).
Do you really believe that’s what drives people? You don’t think maybe it’s that these folks have interests that are in conflict with those of these minorities? Or they oppose cultural or political changes that come immigration of different groups with a different culture? Or they worry about what folks coming from troubled parts of the world are bringing with them?
Or maybe it has little to do with minorities themselves, but is downstream of their political opposition to a party that wants to discriminate in provision of government services based on skin color? https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2021/06/12/yet-an....
> Do you really believe that’s what drives people?
I've seen plenty examples of entrenched prejudice in people against others that can't possibly have any negative effect on their own existence.
And in many cases it's very hard not to see it as irrational "hatred" where, as per GP's point, even just pretending the objects of their hatred simply don't exist would surely be a better response.
Presumably hatred for entire classes of people had some evolutionary advantage in the past (perhaps it helped with tribal unity/identification, or conferred success in waging war against other groups who were competing for the same resources) but it's pretty obviously now a dangerous maladaption in the modern highly populated/connected world.
BTW, I'm pretty sure most people (on HN at least) can distinguish between those that object to immigration on racist grounds vs those who have genuine concerns about how to integrate others from different cultures or with difficult backgrounds. For a start even just a single such immigrant is usually one too many for the first group. And the latter spend their time researching/implementing solutions, or personally doing what they can to help newcomers settle in while trying to remain realistic about the rate that can be successfully sustained.
> I've seen plenty examples of entrenched prejudice in people against others that can't possibly have any negative effect on their own existence.
Sure. But OP referred to "50% of the United States ... hating minorities." As a card-carrying minority who lives in a Trump-voting precinct, that's bollocks.
> BTW, I'm pretty sure most people (on HN at least) can distinguish between those that object to immigration on racist grounds vs those who have genuine concerns about how to integrate others from different cultures or with difficult backgrounds.
I think a great many of folks, especially on HN, cannot. I think many highly educated Americans who work in global industries have adopted a radical new ideology that treats multiculturalism as a fundamental pillar of society. I talk to people in that group who think the Japanese are "racist" for not wanting immigration. They don't have the intellectual framework or vocabulary to understand all the other kinds of conflicts--cultural, economic, political--that exist between groups.
I think it's much easier for me as a foreigner to understand how "50% of the United States" is responding to prevailing trends, because I just imagine what your average Bangladeshi person would do in the same situation.
> And the latter spend their time researching/implementing solutions, or personally doing what they can to help newcomers settle in while trying to remain realistic about the rate that can be successfully sustained.
But nothing requires people to support any level of immigration. Even successfully-integrated immigrants change the country. My family, which are landed elites from Bangladesh, has starkly different values from my wife's family, who are pioneers that settled the west coast during the wagon train era. And we vote based on those differences. We are the immigrants who changed Virginia from being more of a southern state to its modern incarnation as a destination for highly educated elites. In my view, nobody whose family is already in America has any obligation to welcome those changes. They're entitled to vote against cultural change, or against reduced political power for their cultural groups. That's just Democracy at work.
Racism (or at least a strong sense of cultural superiority) is almost certainly a key component behind Japanese immigration policies. My Japanese partner would be one of the first to agree.
And no, there's no "obligation" to welcome increased immigration - plenty of environmentally focused political groups demand lower immigration too. Indeed I have some serious concerns over the effect it has on poorer countries when there are so many options for their brightest and most motivated citizens to seek a new life elsewhere. But that's a world away from the dog whistling that goes on when politicians deliberately stir up racist sentiment by singling out entire cultural groups of migrants as being the source of recent crime waves or undeserved recipients of welfare etc.
> Racism (or at least a strong sense of cultural superiority) is almost certainly a key component behind Japanese immigration policies.
That proves my point--you're conflating "racism" with cultural conflict. "Race" is a construct in post-slavery societies, where animosity exists between people who otherwise share history and culture. White southerners and Black southerners are culturally very similar to each other. The animosity of the white southerners toward Black southerners is based on skin color, and that's why it's deemed illegitimate.
The Japanese preference for their own culture is completely different. Unlike skin color, culture makes a huge difference in people's daily lives and there are good reasons for people to prefer their own culture. When I fly back from visits to Tokyo, I land in JFK and am immediately hit in the face with cultural differences. If I were Japanese, and liked Japan the way it is, why would I want New Yorkers coming and changing it?
> But that's a world away from the dog whistling that goes on when politicians deliberately stir up racist sentiment by singling out entire cultural groups of migrants as being the source of recent crime waves or undeserved recipients of welfare etc.
The concept of "dog whistling" is just circular thinking. A study shows that, when you take Trumpian rhetoric about crime and immigration, and omit the reference to Trump himself, the majority of Hispanics and Black people agree with the statements: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
"We began by asking eligible voters how 'convincing' they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned 'illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs' and called for 'fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.' Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos."
Why is Trump's rhetoric "racist" even though the majority of Black and Hispanic people agree with what he says? Because "Trump is a racist." It's circular.
Illegal immigration creates real burdens on communities. One of my wife's cousin's kids goes to a school in the Portland exurbs where 30% of the kids are children of immigrants who not only don't speak English, but mostly don't even speak Spanish (but rather myriad indigenous languages). That creates real problems and burdens for the school. Why are folks in that community morally obligated to be happy about these changes? They're not.
Yes, I'm conflating them because they're the same basic concept - you think the group of people you consider yourself part of (your race, your nationality etc.) to be "better" than others, and anyone who belongs to a different one is assumed to be inferior in some way.
The Blacks and Hispanics that agree with Trump are just as racist as he is, so what?
Vaccine efficacy is measured against symptomatic COVID‑19. It's quite possible that asymptomatic carriers transmit more (e.g., because they do not self isolate, or because they shed the virus for a longer period of time).
You may be right, I'm just saying that it does not follow from the results of vaccine clinical trials.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that covid spreads predominantly from the nasal cavity, where vaccines would have little effect.
As an unvaccinated suburbanite, my experience has been different. While I stayed home, my very progressive and multiply-vaxxed sister was traveling, visiting our parents during lockdown, going out to restaurants and sporting events. Who exactly was an irresponsible danger to the public health here?
I find it insane that people aren't promoting mandatory testing for all large events. The vaccines are proven not to be effective in stopping the spreading. So testing should be the obvious alternative. But it is never demanded or enacted. Just imagine how much safer it would be if failing to show negative test result from past 24h when entering an event would result in armed gas-masked guard escorting the spreader to safe distance.
I've had three jabs within the last 12 months and while eligible for a 4th, tend to feel it's worth waiting for a shot that's better tailored for protection against current variants, and I'm sure there are others. But it's not people like me that explain how many people haven't even bothered with a 2nd or 3rd jab at all (which have been available here for 9+ months).
Anti-vaxxers aren't new. What we have here is an unhealthy mix of exceptionalism, anti-intellectualism and contrarianism. There is a psychological comfort in believing you' can see through the [Big Lie/Conspiracy].
Prior to Covid it was autism and vaccine. When was the last time you heard about that? Before Covid. Why? Because we've moved on to another vaccine to be skeptical about. The same thing will happen again.
It goes on well before autism too. Polio and smallpox vaccines had their own oppoosition but now we somehow remember those as the "safe" vacines rather than the baselessly "unsafe" mRNA vaccines.
As far as undermining public trust goes, this isn't new either. It has been the platform of the Republican Party for since at least the Reagan era to completely undermine public institutions through chronic underfunding and then use that "failure" as a justification for further funding cuts.
The sad reality is that America in particular has a problem with self-identifying free-thinkers who are the most easily manipulated of all except it's not by the government: it's by church leaders, politicians, grifters (eg Andrew Wakefield in the autism vaccine era, Bob Malone in the Covid era) and self-declared "leaders" because so many lack the capability or interest for critical thinking and simply want to be told what they feel is right.
Look no furhter than your own comment here: no one said the vaccine means you won't get Covid but that's a commonly pushed straw man argument. You'd know that if you remotely looked into it but I very much suspect you don't care. You've decided that's "reality" so that's that.
Well the polio vaccine left people blind iirc. Unfortunately the anti-vax group isnt completely crazy this time. If you haven't seen or heard of adverse reactions click your heels and go kiss your mother: you're one of the lucky ones.
I had to get the vac for int travel and to this day, 6 months later, I still have not recovered my strength. I had covid before that and since then, the first time I barely noticed it, this time it was like a very mild version of what happened with the vaccine. If I could go back I would go nowhere near it. Despite the arrogance most medical professionals display, it seems medicine(atleast this sphere) is the furthest away from true honest science out of all the disciplines.
I know literally not a single person who has had a severe reaction to any of the vaccines.
I find it fascinating that on HN anecdata that conforms with the vaccine being dangerous is totally accepted, but anecdata about people getting very sick from COVID are either considered lies or statistical outliers.
I do know at least a couple that have had severe reactions, especially skin conditions and issues with their eye muscles of all things. Of course there are risks taking vaccines, but they're minor compared to the risks of what covid can do to you. The vaccine reactions are very rarely persistent beyond 6 months or so. I know at least a few people who are still struggling with what covid did to their bodies over 12 months ago with little indication it will improve with time.
I think you're thinking of the Cutter incident in the '50s, where they didn't properly weaken the live polio vaccine and it lead to cases of paralysis. I saw temporary blindness listed as a rare side effect of the DTP combined vaccine, but little else.
fwiw I did not notice any long-term side effects from my three Pfizer shots, nor did anyone I personally know.
As I mentioned in another comment, the President of the United States literally said that if you take the vaccine, you won't get Covid, verbatim.
To your broader point - I think skepticism about the efficacy of the Covid vaccine is a very different (and rapidly evolving) thing than traditional anti-vaxx rhetoric.
If you don't think public trust has declined - why did fewer than 50% of people who got 2 doses go on to get a booster? What changed for them?
People don't get them due to efficacy. People know the makers plan in advance and try to predict the strain that will hit and their prognostication is understandably sub-par.
The pros still vastly outweigh the cons. I hadn't been getting one largely out of laziness and slight needle phobia in previous years. I changed only once it became a requirement for visiting aged care homes, and even though they don't enforce it, have continued getting my annual jabs. Flu vaccines do actually generally provide quite good protection against infection of the most common strains.
The previous president suggested some sort of experimental bleach-based antiviral treatment regime was under development. And you want to ding this one for trying to persuade people to take a vaccine?
‘promoting general public health through sensible preventive medical programs’ is not generally listed among the top evils committed by totalitarian regimes.
Caveat, I plan to get a universal vaccine as soon as I’m able to.
However, I will state I don’t believe the entirety of people not getting vaccines can be on fearmongering and ignorance. It is true that there has been contradictory public statements in a way that eroded trust in future statements, for example I remember there was plenty of positioning early on that vaccines provide immunity to disease in general and not just to severe disease. Of course this was prior to evidence of waning antibodies and virus escaping immunity, but now that those are well documented it makes having trusted the vaccines to provide complete immunity to seem foolish.
You literally ignored all of the parent’s points about wildly changing promises and narratives and inconsistencies to make this for into your story about this just being about an “ unhealthy mix of exceptionalism, anti-intellectualism and contrarianism”.
You focused on the wrong part of the sentence. The key difference is whether someone is against vaccines in general, or against the COVID vaccines in particular.
It’s not the same logic. You’re comparing traditional vaccines deployed for decades before being mandatory to literally the first mRNA vaccine in wide use that was developed just a year ago during a pandemic.
The parent was speaking about the public's trust in institutions. I share the belief that the medical establishment's refusal to speak with nuance about covid and the vaccines did more harm than good.
By laying everything out plainly, I believe more people would have gotten vaccinated.
They're used to trying to distill unbelievably complex issues down to an actionable, one-sentence recommendation for everyone. For most things that's fine, but during a global pandemic people want to know a bit more.
No official body has ever said "you will not get covid if you get the vaccine". Even the earliest trial results said "you will not be hospitalized or die if you get the vaccine", not that you won't get covid.
And at the time, that was true because we were dealing with the original strain.
Nothing else you said is untrue either. The vaccine drastically reduced the spread of the virus. I'm not sure what you're getting at besides spreading more disinformation.
edit: i've replied several times below but everyone needs to keep in mind WHEN things were said. When the CDC said you wouldn't catch the virus in early 2021 - they were basically fully accurate because we were dealing with the original strain. Delta did not exist yet. The original vaccines were INCREDIBLY effective against the original strain - beyond anyone's wildest expectations. 100% effectiveness against death and severe hospitalization. 95% effectiveness against symptoms entirely. These levels of protection were amazing. Yes, things changed when Delta arrived, and even moreso with omicron and future subvariants, but you can't go back with hindsight and discredit what was said _at the time_.
The president of the United States literally said "You're not going to get Covid if you've had these vaccinations" - https://youtu.be/VArXfQU--LA?t=21
It's likely the vaccines reduced the spread of the virus temporarily, but it certainly wasn't very long-lasting. The efficacy waned quickly, even against the original strains/Alpha/Delta - take a look at case rates in Israel (first heavily vaccinated country) through mid-late 2021 (before Omicron).
Remember Delta wasn't even around until late summer. Biden's speech was barely an exaggeration at the time when we were dealing with the original strain. Was it 100% effective at preventing all infection entirely? No. It was 100% effective in preventing severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death, and was 95% effective in preventing symptoms entirely. 95% reduction in infection and 100% reduction in death is close enough to round up for a non-technical speech.
It started to wane slightly after 2 months. It was still nearly 100% effective at that point. It was still highly effective at 6 months (85%+), which is when a booster would return it to full effectiveness.
And as this is the first time any politician has engaged in hyperbole, or been made incorrect by changing information, the American public was rightfully shocked.
Except that created a narrative that the pandemic was above politics, and was only about public health and "the science". But that is clearly not the case.
As was known before Americans took them: 90 - 180 days useful efficacy tops. That’s why the first vax card already had a half dozen lines to record doses.
> "Primary efficacy analysis demonstrates BNT162b2 to be 95% effective against COVID-19 beginning 28 days after the first dose;170 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were evaluated, with 162 observed in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group. Efficacy was consistent across age, gender, race and ethnicity demographics; observed efficacy in adults over 65 years of age was over 94%"
Even with the earlier variants the actual clinical data on the market never achieved 95%. Pure hyperbole and Pfizer has still not shared the actual raw data of the trials.
It was extremely effective against preventing infection (and transmission). The press release you posted said as much. But everything I heard at the time was that it was 100% effective at preventing severe infections (including hospitalizations and death), and that you were much, much less likely to have symptoms at all should you contract it.
The parent is not “spreading more disinformation”, as I see it. The comment just gives the opinion that the public is less than optimistic about vaccines after a challenging and rapidly changing public health campaign. I can tell you as a primary care doctor in a highly blue area of the country, I pretty much agree with the assessment—we are seeing very little interest these days, as much as we are trying to offer.
And this was mostly true from the original strain back in early 2021. The vaccine reduced the ability to contract and spread the virus dramatically. The chances of contracting and spreading the original strain, if you were fully vaccinated, was close enough to zero to say it basically wasn't happening.
Delta obviously changed that, and omicron has changed it much more.
You would think the Centers for Disease Control might predict this coronavirus like all other coronaviruses would rapidly mutate. This is the worst kind of data driven exercise where field knowledgeable people apparently pretend that the history of their field does not exist. Experts are clearly being siloed and gagged. I'd even bet Fauci is being told what to say, against his own judgement, but his position gags him. Any true scientist would be twisted into knots protecting their statements with caveats, but what does the public hear? Confidence!
And now it's more accurate - there's plenty of vaccines out there previously that weren't 100% effective, so there's no reason to have the absolute language out there. The measles vaccine is only 97% effective after 2 doses - so that wouldn't have met the old definition either.
edit: sorry i'm rereading your post and I'm not even sure what your issue is with the current definition
>sorry i'm rereading your post and I'm not even sure what your issue is with the current definition
Really?
So the definition the CDC used for years to describe vaccines had to be changed, since by their own definition the COVID vaccine wasn't actually a vaccine. And the best part is they didn't even announce & explain the change, they just stealthily modified it on their website.
And you don't understand why so many people think secretly redefining a very important word after the fact to change the meaning is shady? Especially considering government mandates put millions of people in a very uncomfortable spot with employment - you don't see why that would lead to mistrust?
OK. I'm not sure we'll be able to square this circle then.
Remember, the gaslighters want you to feel crazy for noticing these things, when in fact it's a very rational reaction to have. Remember, they imply that you are the crazy one for mistrusting government, and all past incidents that show government (and the pharmaceutical industry) are not to be trusted are to be merely handwaved away.
It was, quite frankly, a psyop of the highest order. And they're still pushing it, even in this thread.
Yes - in science, definitions change all the time. We redefined what a planet was and booted Pluto out of the group.
Which part of the new definition do you disagree with as being a valid definition for a modern vaccine? And what difference does it make functionally? The covid vaccines were a product that gave you protection against a disease. Everyone knows that's what a vaccine is. I don't see why it matters what the definition on the site was to begin with.
Where are you seeing that? And clearly the fundamental point of current COVID vaccines is to protect you from disease (they may not help much preventing you from catching it, but they certainly protect you once you have caught it).
If our approach to public health and epidemiology isn't changed by our first encounter with a truly global pandemic in a century, we're doing it wrong.
That's nice, but doesn't at all refute the parent's point that the current global pandemic (which worse than those, if a quick google is anything to go by) can and should cause changes to public health and epidemiology.
> Do you really make suggestions on changes to public heath and epidemiology based on "a quick google"?
This is nonsensical ranting. The idea that "There can and should be changes to public health and epidemiology" is not the same as "making suggestions personally", do not conflate them. For the former, all that you need to know is if others have found areas for improvement, and clearly they have (1), so your statement has no merit whatsoever.
The "a quick google" part only applies to the severity of previous pandemics, do not apply it to the other parts. Or rather, lets hear your expert wisdom on that subject - was the severity the same as COVID-19 then?
If you want fixed goalposts, then the one thing to answer is: do you deny that the current pandemic "can and should cause changes to public health and epidemiology" ?
Thank you for answering the question on the _severity_ of previous pandemics in the 20th century. Your insight and expertise, your attention to detail, and your understanding of what you reply to, has enriched us all.
We could just approve Corbevax in the US. It's a more traditional vaccine and includes more of the virus than spike proteins. It's also unpatented and cheap.
The cynic in me says there is huge interest in having an annual Covid vaccine like the flu one. They'll just change spike proteins every year in a never ending game of cat and mouse. With mRNA that game is easy and profitable.
I hope not, because I don't think we will be given a choice on whether we want to take it or not, and the last booster I had in December wrecked me. Within 20 minutes I was yawning non stop, one yawn after till the point I was gasping for air. eventually my whole body was in pain for about 3 days, my resting heart rate was over 100 (60-65 is normal for me) and my oxygen levels was down to 90. 6 weeks later I caught omicron anyways.
Long story short, I don't want to go through that every 6 months.
If you have reason to believe your body can't tolerate the mRNA vaccines, some alternatives to discuss with a GP might include
* Evushield -- pre exposure prophylaxis if you're at risk and the mainline vaccines don't work
* Paxlovid -- get outcomes comparable to conventionally vaccinated people if you take shortly after infection, beware "rebound" / second course, metallic taste and a lot of poop
* Monoclonal antibodies after confirmed infection -- probably bebtelovimab right? Hard to keep a handle on this with variants.
* Indoor air quality -- try to shop at businesses that have 3+ air changes per hour of MERV13+ filtered or outdoor air (there are healthy building stickers like LEED but they haven't really taken off)
* Rely on others' immunity -- I'm still unsure whether vaccinated people are less contagious? If so even if you're medically unable to participate in vaccination, other people are protecting you in aggregate
* Just accept the possibility of a painful death in the future -- it could happen for any of us right? Who knows? We live with lots of risks.
Wow. Five cases of excessive yawning correlated with vaccine administration. Out of millions of doses administered.
We should totally pause on the rollout of the vaccine, while we do a proper risk assessment on that.
Because on the one hand, we have the risk that unchecked spread of the disease will lead to more dangerous mutations and we could be faced with a complete collapse of healthcare capacity as it is overwhelmed by severe cases.
And on the other, a handful of people might yawn a lot.
In fact that risk balance is too tricky to be left up to the experts. Individuals should do their own personal risk assessment, based on how annoying they find it to yawn, versus how much hospital capacity they assume is available in their region.
Unchecked spread of viruses leads to less dangerous mutations because the more dangerous ones burn through victims too quickly for it to spread very far.
That’s analogous to saying that “vaccination isn’t a great strategy from the perspective of those with adverse reactions.” In another thread, you did not accept that line of reasoning. Why is it valid in this case?
We are forced to in Australia. I was barred from taking exams this semester since I didn’t have the vaccine. Others lose their jobs. There is no freedom of choice there. It’s a gun wrapped in a blanket.
Covid deaths are higher now in the US than this time a year ago and nobody gives a shit. Half the country demonized the other half of the country for reaching the same state of indifference 6-8 months earlier than they did.
> Half the country demonized the other half of the country
And also demonized Australia - "fascist"! "authoritarian"! - for being 6 months behind in COVID and still giving a shit when the USA already didn't. For us in Australia, early 2020 was 6 months of the USA looking like a disaster movie while almost noone had it here.
But did Australia's draconian lockdowns actually even accomplish anything other than delaying the inevitable? Hasn't COVID been going strong there since Christmas, despite everything they put their citizens through?
What is life but delaying the inevitability of death? ;)
It's not an unreasonable question, and with 20/20 hindsight some of the more draconian restrictions possibly wouldn't be justifiable. But we did take it very very seriously and saved ourselves the nightmarish scenes seen in many other countries that put extreme levels of strain on healthcare systems and robbed huge numbers of people's lives prematurely. Of the deaths now, the vast majority are among those 80+, and those who have chosen not to get vaccinated. Hospitalisations are still high, and negatively impacting the health care system's ability to provide quality care, but epidemiologists seem confident it will peak soon even without heavy handed restrictions/ mandates. There's no doubt we could have dealt with it better but I'm still grateful our governments generally listened to the health advice given to them.
Pretty much, ripping through my city now. There isn't a lot of sentiment for liberty/freedoms here, so the authoritarians had a field day. We'll probably do it all again next time too.
It's crazy how Australians have sold out their rights in an attempt at "unity", or whatever the political theme is these days. In the US, with the 2A, no one could force anybody to take dangerous chemicals.
Basically, you’re entitled for compensation if you’re in Australia and was forced to get a COVID-19 vaccine and had moderate to severe vaccine-related adverse events.
Er, no, we're not. Certain businesses and government organisations require you to be vaccinated to undertake certain roles. Just as they impose any number of other requirements in order for you to receive the benefits of gainful employment.
Nobody has been so much as threatened with arrest or had any physical force applied in order to ensure they get vaccinated.
Sounds like you made a choice, a poor one. We are also "forced" to wear seatbelts in cars and not drink-drive. For some reason I don't hear those things described as "no freedom of choice" or the ludicrous "gun wrapped in a blanket". Drink-driving is the closer analogy of the two, as the harm extends to other people, as in vaccine refusal. Can you imagine hearing the drink-driving laws described as "a gun wrapped in a blanket"?! It would be ludicrous because the death is on the other side of the equation - deaths are being prevented. How is vaccine refusal different?
This specific vaccine doesn't stop the spread especially of the current dominant variants (still seeing plenty of spread among vaccinated people in ~90% vaccinated populations), so the comparison to drunk driving (putting other people at risk) is poor.
This is specific to the current covid vaccines. It's a valid point for highly effective vaccines like the polio vaccine which should be mandatory.
Because the deaths prevented are debatable, that is why. Should we be forced to get every vaccine? Even vaccines that are not effective? Who decides that?
What if the institutions mandating vaccines have a conflict of interest?
Very few people are actually so selfish or ignorant that they would not get an effective vaccine.
Its absurd to require vaccination but not accept actual infection as such. Surviving an actual infection offers better immunity than the vaccine. The failure to ack this is evidence IMHO of an agenda.
If everyone, including you and your children, started taking the aids antivirals daily, we could probably eradicate aids, or atleast save millions of lives. Are you willing to take them daily to make sure you or your children don't spread aids someday?
If you're unlucky enough to end up among the whole 3% of us that really can't find a job, you aren't going to starve. At any rate it's hardly reasonable to expect you should be able to refuse to comply with your terms of employment and not suffer any negative consequences.
(NB: posting this purely for the benefit of anyone else reading Ekaros's posts and thinking they have any sort point at all).
Depends on your definition of "forced". I was never threatened with legal punishment if I didn't take it, but at Biden's request, my employer told me I'd be fired if I didn't, and a bunch of places I like going made me show them my vaccine card to be allowed in.
Calling their written experience “dangerous vaccine misinformation” is doubling down on your error, given that their comment is merely a statement of what happened to them. Please reread the guidelines.
Denying someone’s experience is extremely rude. Clearly others agree with my reading of your comments.
Excessive yawning could be a symptom of many different things: strange symptoms should be a reason to go to the doctor, not to be dismissed.
Isn't the number of polio cases way, way down since the polio vaccine was introduced, to the point that it's almost eradicated now? How could that have happened if all it did were make infections less severe?
There are two types of polio vaccine. The one used where polio is circulating (oral vaccine) is a live virus and provides more protection against transmission but isn't super effective and (rarely) can cause paralysis. The inactivated vaccine (injection) mostly just protects against severe disease. Here's a paper that says the oral vaccine produces 70-80% protection against transmission and the inactivated vaccine produces 20-30% protection: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2486742/
Not at all. Just one example, flu vaccines have never been 100% effective in preventing disease - more like 40-60%. And flu patients who did receive the vaccine have better outcomes.
I would expect someone to believe this before COVID if they hadn’t done any research of vaccines beyond the dictionary definition. But of course this is absolutely false. Many (perhaps most) vaccines in regular use “only” reduce the spread of infection within the body and reduce the risk of serious symptoms.
Maybe if you mean for gov who pays, but even then, in terms of health care budget, its still quite cheap, to the point that optimizing on price seems like the wrong thing to do right now.
Did that include increased taxation? Including bribes, inefficient bureaucracy and manufactures, their sales organizations and the point-of-care healthcare increasing their profits?
I mean,im in canada, and the non vaccinated take a lot of tax dollars when they end up in hospitals, so in terms of interventions it definitely makes sense from an ecconomic perspective.
The vaccines which nobody is taking and cost under $20 are worth pharma companies engaging in secret underhanded methods to hurt other vaccines (even though all their FDA filings and research are mostly public).
If you want to make claims regulated by the FDA, you have to hire all these FDA consultants, many of whom are former FDA employees. They don’t seem to do much IME. So there’s a serious revolving door problem worth investigating in the case of these vaccines, though I’m not sure that’s secret, underhanded, or necessarily hurting other vaccines.
Yes they have huge contracts but they also have to produce the vaccine! And the vaccine could be waaay more expensive given its value to the people who took it.
Merck stock (no vaccine) had the exact same return as Pfizer over the past 5 years.
Now Moderna is up 800%, so maybe look their way if you are concerned about a conspiracy.
Ever heard of the Freedom of Information Act? The Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency has sued the FDA so that they would release documents related to the review of the vaccines.
Incorrect; according to Wikipedia, Corbevax just includes the receptor binding domain of the spike protein. It doesn't include other parts of the virus - were you confused by the adjuvants?
Anyway, you might be interested in Novavax if you're looking for a nice, classic covid vaccine. It's not any more effective than the mRNA vaccines, but it's FDA-approved.
Novavax UK results on par with mRNA vaccine while trials conducted with variants alpha/beta already circulating. due to unbinding or cross over we cannot really measure long term protection. but several studies show 2373 is better but nobody knows it
> In the US, roughly as many vaccinated people in the US die from COVID every day as there are total deaths across the country in motor vehicle accidents.
It's truly shocking that we're not doing more to reduce car dependency.
So here's what the pandemic should've made patently clear: people weigh up human lives against inconveniencce all the time. What is wearing a mask? it's an inconvenience. It clearly reduces transmission rates and would thus save lives but many don't want to be inconvenienced.
Even taking the vaccine is merely on the level of inconvenience. After billions of dollars, the scaremongering horror stories about "side effects" and "long term effects" have of course never eventuated.
Road deaths? We choose the convenience of driving (sometimes at unsafe high speeds, sometimes drunk) over the deaths that result.
Even guns. The very idea that someone with mental health issues shouldn't be able to just go and buy a semi-automatic assault rifle is an inconvenience deemed too onerous.
Gambling? For a small segment of the population gambling addiction is really devastating. Yet we're OK with casinos.
Same for alcoholism.
But 3,000 Americans die in a terrorist attack and we collectively absolutely lose our mind, launching two wars, directly and indirectly killing hundreds of thousands and spending trillions of dollars in the process.
3,000 people is about the peak of how many were dying to Covid every day during the height of the pandemic.
Yes, suspended, but then resumed once it was determined the risks were very low and suitable techniques were established to handle the adverse reactions.
Moderna remains banned in the Nordics for boys/men under 30. NHS does NOT give AZ boosters, only mRNA. NHS will not give AZ for those under 40, only mRNA.
Neither of those links back up your claims. The pause on administering Moderna was originally set to expire December last year - I can't find any suggestion it was extended after that (wikipedia claims it's still restricted in Finland, but the source is an article from December). At any rate the risk was identified as extremely rare, and I'm yet to see any indication it has caused deaths in anyone under 30 in the many countries it's definitely used.
Use of AZ as a booster I understand to be unadvised due to efficacy concerns.
Ok so one country has chosen, for whatever reason, not to administer Moderna to men under 30, presumably on the basis that they feel other alternatives are safer (with an explicit note that the guideline is a temporary precautionary measure).
That's hardly proof that vaccines are harmful. All medical treatment carries risk. But the risk of refusing it vastly outweighs that.
PS. I still don't see anything on the NHS site indicating there's any concern that AZ is harmful to those under 40.
You apparently simply refuse to follow the science from credible authorities.
>But the risk of refusing it vastly outweighs that.
FALSE. Again, why are you refusing to follow the science?
UK's JCVI which is the official scientific body advising the UK govt, and staffed by internationally renowned immunologists and infectious disease specialists, recommended against universal vaccination to 12-15 year olds.
It was specifically due to the risk-benefit consideration, because the benefit is marginal and risks of infection in that age category are very low. [1]
This is the list of the prominent scientists who made those calls.
Professor Andrew Pollard, Chair (University of Oxford)
Professor Lim Wei Shen, Chair COVID-19 immunisation (Nottingham University Hospitals)
Professor Anthony Harnden, Deputy Chair (University of Oxford)
Dr Kevin Brown (Public Health England)
Dr Rebecca Cordery (Public Health England)
Dr Maggie Wearmouth (East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust)
Professor Matt Keeling (University of Warwick)
Alison Lawrence (lay member)
Professor Robert Read (Southampton General Hospital)
Professor Anthony Scott (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)
Professor Adam Finn (University of Bristol)
Dr Fiona van der Klis (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands)
Professor Maarten Postma (University of Groningen)
Professor Simon Kroll (Imperial College London)
Dr Martin Williams (University Hospitals Bristol)
Professor Jeremy Brown (University College London Hospitals)
>I still don't see anything on the NHS site indicating there's any concern that AZ is harmful to those under 40.
on the NHS website I linked: "if you're pregnant or under 40 you'll usually be offered appointments for the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccines"
Notice how AZ is NOT offered first to those under 40. Did you expect something like: "WARNING. AZ WILL KILL YOU"?
Again, absolutely none of that demonstrates vaccines being harmful, only that certain institutions have taken a particular position out of an abundance of caution. Elsewhere in the world literally billions of people in all age groups have received vaccines of all types. If significant numbers were dying or suffering severe long term side effects from said vaccines, we'd know.
That's why certain vaccines are NOT given to certain populations. That's precisely why JCVI declined to recommend, it was based on RISK vs benefit considerations.
Because we know. In an emergency, in a global pandemic, a recommendation AGAINST universal vaccination isn't taken lightly, and you seem to imply you know better than JCVI?
Where did I say I was recommending universal vaccination?
The benefit-to-risk ratio may well be quite low for particular vaccines with particular age groups. Again, that's not the same as saying particular vaccines are "harmful". By any reasonable definition all the vaccines we have are extremely safe, and for anyone with a typical chance of contracting COVID and having it develop into a serious illness, I can't see why you wouldn't choose any of them.
- you need a license
- you usually need insurance
- there are a large amount of laws dedicated to driving
- there are often dedicated police to enforce those law
- cars themselves have a huge number of mandated safely systems
Etc
It's normal that something causing so much death would have a large amount of regulation
Do they magically appear at your house with no addition driving involved?
(Sorry, that came off snarkier than I intended. Online ordering of food just kind of outsources the driving, doesn’t reduce it. Different maybe for delivery trucks that serve multiple houses per trip.)
The DOT almost certainly tracks "real" delivery drivers (think: semi trucks, etc), but who knows how much gets reported from fly-by-night outfits like Uber and Doordash.
So what's your plan then for groceries to magically appear in someone's house without driving or delivery?
And if you say walk or bike or bus you clearly have very different shopping than I do - let me see you carry 2 cases of 15 bottles of seltzer, and a cart full of groceries on any of those.
I don’t really have a plan, just pointing out how it just moves around who is driving. One option is to buy in bulk vast majority of stuff to make fewer trips and then have delivery trucks do fresh/perishable groceries, like the ol’ milkman. Which, of course, is already a thing but a bit different from the newer grocery delivery model.
Also, while I like the sidewalk robot pod things and flying delivery drones, I legitimately like the idea of delivering stuff with PVC pipes and little electric pods. A little on the small side for groceries, but seems pretty doable without adding congestion or noise (to surface streets or the air). https://i.pipedreamlabs.co/
When a supermarket is only a 10 minute walk away (20 minutes round trip), you just go more often and carry smaller amounts. Even if you suddenly needed 30 bottles of seltzer in the same day, you can just walk there and back twice.
If the supermarket is only 0.5 miles away, it's going to be quite small.
Normal sized supermarkets are in the range of 5 or so miles apart.
I am not interested in living in a place where tiny stores are my only option.
Also, why would I want to waste my time walking 20 minutes multiple times a week, plus time in the store? That sounds dreadful, why would you want that?
That's my point, if you had better transportation system it'd reduce car dependency, but you can't create economically viable public transportation system for suburbs, which were designed to maximize roads. Not be pessimistic, but it'd take efforts along the line of fighting a new world war to fix this. People who live in suburbs suffer with a form of stockholm syndrome and really thing they are living the best life. Yet they end up spending most of their lives isolated and in traffic. Cities should be designed that things you need daily/weekly/monthly are close to you. Let's see what do I need, or have needed in last two weeks: Pharmacy, medical specialists, grocery stores, hardware store, barber shop, food shops, accountant, library, park... and I've walked to all of them. For each one of these I'd have to make potentially a separate trip in a car, if I was living in suburbs.
I'm well aware of that (and have written at length about that on this site in the past). Your comment just seemed like it was saying "you can either reduce car dependency OR have good public transit, not both," which was probably a misreading on my part.
that's hilarious.. but here is a thing lot of people grew up entirely dependent on cars in suburbs, so they think that's the best. They really have no other perspective, only context they have is really bad buses in really bad neighborhoods. And obviously if you are drawing your conclusion based on that limited experience you will conclude that I'd never pick to be in there. Same with suburbs, people who were born there, grew up there and now are living there will come up with bunch of reason why it's SOO GOOD to be there. But they don't know the ease of being in walking distance of doctors, pharmacy, gym, grocery stores, chain food stores, public transportation, parks, school, etc. I who has lived in NYC, had to live in a suburban area due to job for a year. And I finally understood things about USA culture that I couldn't get before..
- Why in movies college is seen as peak of life? Because if you live in a suburb that's the last time you are going to be around new people in general. Rest of your life is going to be in isolated house, isolated car, and some workmates.
- Why car was/is seen as a symbol of freedom? Need to buy milk? drive 10 miles in that direction, need to go to gym? drive 8 miles in that direction.
- Why guns are so valuable? If you live in middle of nowhere cops aren't coming on time..
- Why going to church is so big? Well that's the last place left to socialize after college, that and walmart.
Lol nobody touching this discussion with a however-long-you-can-think-of pole. At least not anymore.
My contribution: I think we have been destroying trust systematically for so long that people are losing their sanity. Finally it is time to rethink our foundations and stop coercing. Currently there are various things that take trust for granted and they will need to become a great deal more persuasive if they want to retain their status moving forward (examples include: governments, currrencies, science, etc. - basically central coordination built on a foundation of coercion, science was the last bastion but the "education system" has become a certification system).
Not op, but I recovered from covid shortly before vaccines were available, and then opted not to get the shots based on available data on reinfections.
That decision has only seemed better supported as time has gone on, yet I still have to desperately avoid the topic in polite conversation if I don't want your average person to make all sorts of incorrect assumptions about me. There was also the risk to my livelihood from employer mandates.
I would have to see them go back and say "hey, that wasn't a deplorable decision, and we're sorry for encouraging everyone to think terrible things about you for making it."
I understand the noble lie argument, it just means that now I can't feel comfortable taking anything that comes out of public health at face value.
Doubling down on failed lockdown policy long after it was known to be ineffective and hurt more people than it helped. Profiteering off of the pandemic crisis. Rampant censorship of people who turned out be correct and were trying to warn us.
If they knew that there was something wrong with the vaccine, I expect them to lie about it, and censor and coerce whistle blowers into silence. They have demonstrated their eagerness to do so over the last two years.
So what good is the word of "the science" about how effective vaccines are? These are the same people that told us that we should trust the Chinese government.
> What did you need to see from those in power that would have maintained or built that trust?
Absolute transparency. Admitting that they made mistakes and committing to avoiding those mistakes in the future with meaningful policy changes. Reparations paid to those who were needlessly harmed by their mistakes.
At the very least, something like the settlements from toxic waste dumping coverups would be a good start.
If you’re in the US, you never experienced a ‘lockdown’ policy.
And nobody has been harmed on the order of the victims of toxic waste dumping.
You seem to be assuming that the vaccination programs that have been given to millions of people globally have had some kind of devastating consequences: mass disabilities, cancers and reproductive harms…
I wasn't even talking specifically about vaccinations at all. There are so many examples of injustices caused by our leaders during the pandemic. An example of a group that was harmed was the Canadian first nation communities. They had their community centers and churches closed indefinitely, while Walmart got the keep all of their stores open.
Not just were people's lives ruined by sloppy and corrupt government pandemic policies, but communities were shattered. The rich got way richer, and working class people were thrown into poverty. And it was so avoidable. Our decision makers at different layers were either corrupt and using the pandemic a cover to profiteer and consolidate power, or they were just incompetent and didn't enact effective policy.
They should be held accountable. They should have to face some kind of justice. Again, look to how corporations that were found to be engaging in illegal pollution were dealt with as a good starting point. Assets should be seized, arrests made. Ideally trusts can be set up to try to repair the damage done to people and communities. People that concealed information about the pandemic should be arrested and tried.
Lots of people I know parrot “safe and effective” whenever testing positive. Turning an FDA-regulated phrase into a joke doesn’t bode well for future trust in government scientists.
Lots of living, nonhospitalized people, who are catching a preventable disease because community vaccine uptake wasn't as high as it needed to be to really stamp out the disease...
... have somehow reached the conclusion that the vaccine which did them no harm whatsoever, and is responsible for their being likely to have a very mild case of the disease, was not safe or effective?
> because community vaccine uptake wasn't as high as it needed to be to really stamp out the disease...
No, that's never going to happen, and never was going to happen. Even the FDA presenters to VRBPAC (Peter Marks? Can't remember exactly) admit it. That's even without spillover and spillback between humans, deer, cats, etc. This type of virus is absolutely not a candidate for eradication, even the most optimistic predictions from before the pandemic would have required the periodic stamping out of spillover related outbreaks across the world for the foreseeable future.
No significant number of people have died or suffered permanent harm from taking any covid vaccine that I'm aware of. Yes certain countries have at various times suspended distribution - the best explanation was concern that if any of these vaccines did end up killing people, it would destroy public trust to the point vaccination uptake would be massively reduced. But those very same vaccines are still being administered to 100s of millions of people. I think we'd know by now if they really were harmful.
That's why they are either limited or outright banned for certain populations.
Moderna remains banned in the Nordics for boys/men under 30. NHS does NOT give AZ boosters, only mRNA. NHS will not give AZ for those under 40, only mRNA.
Institutions changing advice and reacting with an abundance of caution to protect public health causes you to lower your trust in health regulatory agencies?
I mean, I'm pretty sure that before we had vaccines, we had much higher hospitalization and mortality rates, and now we have partial vaccine coverage, things are quite a lot better.
Is it your position that vaccines shouldn't have been offered?
The pre-media-mangled epidemiology messaging early was never COVID zero, it was flatten curve and slow the spread, while messaging on vax was never bulletproof but reduction in personal outcome risk and lower prevalence.
Politicized media and partisan pundits (both pro and online commenters) reduced nuance of vax research showing both R and outcomes effects to ‘it doesn’t work’ or ‘it makes you impervious’, both of which resulted in people ignoring other simple measures either from lack of faith or too much faith.
From there, inevitable discussions like these threads.
> What, with respect to vaccines, specifically, would you say has undermined trust?
The constant lies about the so-called efficacy of the vaccines, and the fact that they are perfectly safe, when they aren't? And let's not forget the complete propaganda from the CDC/WHO as if they were the only ones allowed to talk about vaccines.
> You're using the fact that you believed a lot of anti-vaccine arguments as support for why you... chose to believe a lot of anti-vaccine arguments.
I dont consider these shots to be "vaccines" (if those are vaccines than aspirin is a vaccine as well, words don't have any meaning anymore), so you can already drop the anti-vaccine etiquette.
well we already have this protein based vaccine Novavax 2373 with cross immune response based on prototype developed 2.5 years ago. because it not only has full representation of spike protein (unlike mRNA taking shortcut to represent S protein) but also cleavage site which is omicron BA5 immune escape from.
However big pharma politics slowed down the approval, purpose delaying US P3 trial, introducing CMC requirement 1 month before formally submitting the application. Novavax 2373 has shown superb efficacy results since Jan 2021 UK trial and follow up study showed long term protection (titers half life 9months compared to mRNA 3months). no myocarditis risk. still FDA only approved it now half year after submission blaming the company's manufacture issue while it has been distributing hundred of millions of doses worldwide
mRNA is not vaccine. it is only genetic therapy
Okay. And what specific number of quality adjusted life years would a vaccination program need to promise to save across the globe before you personally are willing to take it?
Do you feel comfortable acknowledging that this metric in isolation could result in trading years across age demographics? To what degree does it matter if we take 1 year of life from a child and give it to a middle aged person, doing exactly that would be fairly neutral according to QALY.
Taking 1 year of life from person a and moving it to person b is fairly neutral, yes. If, without intervention, both of them were likely to live to 80, now one of them will live to 79 and the other to 81.
That probably doesn’t matter much to either a child or a middle aged person, to be honest, since neither of them has much idea of exactly how many years they have left.
It probably matters quite a lot more to a 78 year old, though.
A vaccine is a public health measure aimed at reducing disease spread through the population.
If you want kids to go to preschools, and not be little disease vectors transmitting infection between households, you should be looking for ways to avoid them acquiring the infection even if the disease has no ill effects on them personally.
Having their parents or grandparents hospitalized are also negative outcomes for a child.
This is the wrong discussion - what's needed is a vaccine that actually lasts for more than 6 months before immunity fades.
I remember reading very early in COVID how experts said finding a vaccine would be very difficult because we've never been able to generate long lasting immunity to corona viruses. And they were hoping COVID would be different.
The conversation around this could benefit from more precise language.
Long lived immunity against severe disease, driven by the T cell response against epitopes that are generally well preserved (>80% for spike protein, ~98% for non spike protein) [1]
≠
Immunity against infection, conferred by circulating neutralizing antibody, which last for a couple of months
Most vaccines blunt or prevent disease but not infection.
What part of the immune system are you referring to? My understanding is that the initial set of antibodies wane over time but will be produced again if memory B cells encounter the same antigen. Similarly, T cells specific for an antigen will amplify in number if re-exposed to that antigen.
The serial interval of the virus is so fast that there's no way the T-cells and B-cells can keep up. Some sort of nasal vaccine could reduce infection for a few months but as far as I can tell it's impossible to make a long lasting (years) coronavirus vaccine that can prevent infection. Serial interval is too fast, antibodies wane too fast, your immune system is too slow. I could see a gene therapy/retrovirus thing that hijacks some cells permanently to produce antigens (or make it smarter and somewhat regulating like an HIV infection, if HIV is forever this could be too) so it's like getting vaccinated every minute of every hour of every day, forever. Alternatively, you could produce genetically engineered B-cells in the lab and inject them into people ('s bone marrow?) to constantly produce a very high dose cocktail of broadly neutralizing antibodies. Completely infeasible, too expensive, won't scale. Might work. None of these ideas would be approved for the general public in at least 25 years.
> The urgency that prevailed in 2020 has evaporated.
I know parents of young children who are extremely disappointed that it took less than a year to trial and approve the first COVID-19 vaccine for adults, and then a full year and a half to trial and approve the first COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5.
What does this have to do with anything? The CDC said we need to take the vaccine. That's all you need to know. If you need to take it then obviously kids need to take it too.
Why did UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) refuse to recommend universal vaccination to 12-15s on risk benefit basis? How did these internationally renowned vaccinologists and immunologists suddenly become antivaxxers overnight?
Professor Andrew Pollard, Chair (University of Oxford)
Professor Lim Wei Shen, Chair COVID-19 immunisation (Nottingham University Hospitals)
Professor Anthony Harnden, Deputy Chair (University of Oxford)
Dr Kevin Brown (Public Health England)
Dr Rebecca Cordery (Public Health England)
Dr Maggie Wearmouth (East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust)
Professor Matt Keeling (University of Warwick)
Alison Lawrence (lay member)
Professor Robert Read (Southampton General Hospital)
Professor Anthony Scott (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)
Professor Adam Finn (University of Bristol)
Dr Fiona van der Klis (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, Netherlands)
Professor Maarten Postma (University of Groningen)
Professor Simon Kroll (Imperial College London)
Dr Martin Williams (University Hospitals Bristol)
Professor Jeremy Brown (University College London Hospitals)
You are seriously calling any criticism of a vaccine "antivaxxer"? In your mind there's no such thing as a vaccine that fails?
Are you for real?
The COVID vaccine does kids doesn't work. Period. And saying that doesn't make someone "anti-science".
And I truly can not even begin to wrap my mind around the idea that you would take someone's kids away because they dare question if a vaccine works! What kind of bizarre religion are you part of that requires you never to question vaccines? Or are you required never to question any authority at all?
And you have had a serious failure of education if you think that what you are doing/advocating for is science. I assure you - it's not. What you are advocating for is some kind of perverted worship of science.
Full disclosure: I have not gotten a COVID vaccine; I am quite unlikely to get a COVID vaccine. If you want to get a COVID vaccine, please feel free to do so, though I would urge informed consent.
Good vaccines are difficult to make, but there's no doubt that a well-tested and approved vaccine saves lives. We don't have polio or smallpox today, thanks to vaccines.
I made the decision not to get the COVID vaccine. I have had COVID twice, confirmed with positive testing. I self-quarantined both times. I was quite tired and slept a lot during both infections. I am definitely on the list of those with co-morbidities. I don't have "long COVID", but my partner definitely does. I don't discount COVID, it's a serious flu, and various flu infections kill a lot of people every year.
**
In the early 90's, in the run-up to the first Gulf war, military personnel were widely asked to volunteer for an experimental vaccine. We were told this was an anti-anthrax vaccine, necessary because it was believed (or so we were told) that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of anthrax-based biological weaponry. Those who were deployed weren't given the option, but those who did not deploy were asked to volunteer.
I did not volunteer. Some weeks after the call for volunteers went out, my Navy section non-commissioned officer (LPO) told me that I was required to volunteer. I disagreed, saying that was an order not voluntary. I was then told that I was ordered to volunteer, and that I'd be court-martialed if I did not volunteer. Now this is shitty, but when you sign up for the military, you sign up for stuff like this whether you like it or not. I don't know if I could have successfully fought this, but it seemed like a bad idea, so I agreed that I would "volunteer". I was then ordered to sign a paper stating that I had "volunteered" for the shot of my own free will. I refused this initially, but I got called out again by my leadership and threatened with court-martial if I refused an order to sign the paper. I was a scared 19-year-old, and didn't know if I had legal grounds or not, so in the end, I agreed to sign.
I wish I had never signed that paper. I wish I'd had the courage to tell my leadership to take me to court-martial. After I got the shot, I got sick. Constantly. I got sick again and again, taking weeks to get better between each bout. Fever, chills, headache, it was like a flu that went on for months. It was so bad at one point that my chief petty officer sent me to bed for a week, even when Navy medical refused me any treatment beyond Ibuprofen. This condition affected me on-and-off for well over a year.
Many years later, I read about "Gulf War Syndrome." I read of government claims of exposure to chemical agents while deployed - except that I never deployed to Iraq, and neither did thousands of others with symptoms. I truly believe that Gulf War Syndrome was caused by a chemical agent our own government deployed, in the form of a vaccine that I "volunteered" for, and thus have no recourse against my own government.
When I see my own government telling me that I "have" to get another experimental vaccine, a vaccine that cannot prevent transmission or infection from COVID, a vaccine that no one can be held liable for problems, and that same government threatening me with loss of public access, threatening me with "vaccine passes", pushing companies to exclude me from the job market unless I comply, I have this to say:
GO F** YOURSELVES
I won't ever "volunteer" again.
EDIT: I would also like to state that other than this one blot on the record, I greatly enjoyed my time in the military. I got to visit places I'm unlikely to see ever again, was given enormous responsibility, and had a job I truly enjoyed (most of the time). I met great people, and felt good about my contributions.
The military is a bit different - when you enlist, you're basically giving your body to the U.S. government for a period of time. It's one of the only situations where you can be legally required to throw your body into harm's way. Whether that's running into a room where there are guys with guns drawn, or taking an experimental vaccine, the laws on this are long-settled.
Of course, the people who were forced to do all these unfortunate things should have godtier medical care for life, and the V.A.'s performance has been an absolute disgrace.
Wow, that's quite a story. I've found myself in "owned" ethical situations but not at such a young age or in as much of an "owned" position, but boy does the memory burn anyway. I wonder would you be described as a "rugged individualist"? Have you considered stoicism to cure you lol?
There are studies comparing the protection offered by vaccination vs natural infection, so there's no need to draw conclusions from a single anecdote. Obviously when you're just looking at a single case the results will be dominated by behaviour and luck around exposure, not the degree of immunity.
I would have added some data points to your original comment, but then mods deleted your comment while I typed. Seems they've got to suppress single anecdotes so no one has the bravery to add a second.
> , so there's no need to draw conclusions from a single anecdote
In the meantime we are still waiting for the raw data to be made public about Pfizer's vaccine trials. Strange that we can inject billions on people on Earth yet nobody apart from a selected few were allowed to see that.
Didn't the FDA release like 60k pages of those documents a couple months ago? I know Pfizer didn't want that, but people are forgetting before COVID mRNA medicine was a holy grail. So much so a lot of groups didn't pursue it since they saw it as a pipe dream. COVID's greatest gift was causing massive influxes of research dollars into them and most likely fast tracking these new drugs 15 years. mRna will literally be part of the new wave of medicine starting that will cure cancer. And it's odd to you that Pfizer doesn't want to post all their research data online? With the FDA or CDC they can be assured of data containment.
And let's be honest....an mRNA vaccine has some fats, sugars, and salts in it. The magic is in the programming to work with your body and it's immune system. I've heard some insane personalized interpretations of basic organic chemistry on the vaccine topic before (please know not saying you, referencing past discussions with others) about how vaccines loaded with poisons and caused all kinds of issues. And with an mRNA vaccine's ingredient list reading like an organic snack know what all those people said instead? An mRNA vaccine will alter your DNA because youtube told them so.
These are also the people that said they understood Particle Physics better then myself or any source I cited, because I was too full of myself to acknowledge that when I said non-ionizing radiation I was ignoring the radiation part...which is how 5G was the true cause of COVID19. Then they told me I was a poster boy for what education does to someone....because I lacked the common sense to recognize the dangers of the radiation part in non-ionizing radiation. Never mind he was arguing with me surrounded by technology saturating him with that very same harmless radiation.
I told those examples to make a point...releasing all of that data won't change the first person's mind. They'll simply shift their position or do like they did with the whole autism debate and say they're right and anything saying differently is obviously part of a larger conspiracy of people who don't care about patient health. Over 20,000 people are hospitalized and 3,000 dead every year from aspirin due to anaphylaxis or bleeds. That's not really reported because anyone who expects every single human on the planet to have zero negative reaction to a drug every time is setting unrealistic expectations as a cheap way to try to prove their right. We've had roughly (last time I checked several months ago) a couple of dozen verified deaths relating to the vaccine since roll out and all those had genetic conditions that caused it.
Point is, every scrap of that data can hit the net tonight and the only thing that would change is we'd wake up to the new laughable "they are using it to track you" or "It's going to force gender change in men!" rumors tomorrow. Meaning, 99% of the people who'd (skim) read that data are the kind of people who'd tell me I was a moron because I wasn't getting that non-ionizing radiation is still radiation and is nuking us all.
Even people not in vulnerable groups still die or suffer long term effects at a higher rate from covid if unvaccinated than they do from the vaccine. Both rates are very low, but why pick the worse one?
Right, of course. I guess I mean for a given individual (who can’t change their immune system), the poster seemed to imply that the choice to be vaccinated was neutral or negative.
For a person with a healthy immune system the choice to be vaccinated is neutral or negative. This includes non-immunocompromised people under the age of 65.
things were bad before. now most people have antibodies, and now covid isn't causing much pneumonia, but don't you remember how bad it was? healthy middle-aged people were dying, hospitals were overloaded, people were on ventilators and getting lung transplants. case fatality rate was 2%.
it's better now, but the virus was horrible in 2020.
VAERS is raw data - anything and everything that happens a couple days after getting the shot. it's dimensionless without knowing background prevalence of disorders, as well as incidence per 100k doses.
I'm not totally sure about your article, either. for instance, they quote someone saying Bell's palsy is one of the top three side effects from mRNA vaccines, but this Lancet article [1] shows that risk of Bell's palsy is only increased by the Chinese CoronaVac vaccine, not Pfizer.
anyway, hopefully this universal coronavirus vaccine works. I just want to be protected - I don't care what you do.
no they can't, for instance in Czechia your have to report it to your doctor, who can then report it to VAERS and it's up to him whether it's gonna be reported
real vaccines stop you from getting infected, spreading the disease or having symptoms, what's again efficacy of these vaccines at least against asymptomatic COVID? since we abandoned the idea that vaccines slow spread in any way...
Why would you get vaxxed if you are healthy person and your vaccination doesn't help anyone but you?
For the record in 11M Czechia 40K people died WITH COVID (that includes car accident victims, terminally ill patients it anyone enlisted in hospital who had to get tested) in more than 2 years, less than 1% of them were under 44. [1]
Even if you have a pan coronavirus nasal vaccine the NAbs will wane and people will get infected again.
It doesn't matter if we use more mRNAs than just spike for more targets or anything else. It'll mutate, NAbs will wane, people won't get vaccinated and the virus will persist.
People are looking for a silver bullet which will confer the naive ideal of "perfect immunity" against this virus which just doesn't exist. The vaccines we have though are great, particularly against severe disease and death. But it won't get much better than this.
The disease burden is currently high compared to common colds because the virus is still novel and our immune system responses aren't 100% fully formed and tested. Once everyone has been exposed to the antigen a half dozen times and the virus is forced to mutate off of its naive optimum then the disease burden will drop even further. Then we just have another human common cold coronavirus.
Nobody is freaking out over HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E or HCoV-OC43.