Fellow Canadian here - I think the suggestion that restrictions were tied to hospital capacity is a bit off. Restrictions were largely political - driven extensively by polling - and changed frequently with minimal or nonexistent reasoning.
Here in Ontario, the McKinsey-driven "Science Table" frequently referenced hospital capacity in their reports, but their modelling often ended up being off by orders of magnitude.
While I concur that preventable deaths are unfortunate, I don't think there's evidence to suggest that most - all? - of the restrictions put in place had any noticeable impact on preventable deaths from Covid.
If anything, those restrictions very much enabled other deaths - from mental health challenges, isolation, depression, substance abuse, delayed medical screening - that very much were preventable.
While we don't have a full picture yet, it's telling that excess mortality remains heavily elevated even though most of the population has had Covid and been vaccinated.
For individuals, it may not have been. Thousands of people going along to each game all with relatively low individual risk of contracting COVID.
But if after every hockey game 20 hospital beds get used up, that's as risky for the health system as allowing a restaurant to serve uncooked chicken for an evening.
The confounder for this is that there was a 2 week lag between the hockey game and cases showing up in the emergency room and we basically (outside of China) gave up on doing contact tracing, so nobody knows how people were specifically infected.
I’m making up an example. But the gist is that we have an ordered list of things that apply stress to the healthcare system and we basically move the cut-off up or down that list depending on how our healthcare resourcing is working out.
Do we need to call in military hospital ships? Maybe we do stuff that reduces communication of disease, reduces driving to reduce road accidents, etc.
Where I live it was communicated more than once, “avoid doing riskier things this holiday season because the emergency services you expect to be available may not be.”
I enjoyed Invisibilia, but it seemed like every episode ether directly or indirectly just had to touch on - or directly focus on! - how terrible Trump is/was.
I don’t particularly love Trump either, but it would also be nice to be able to listen to an NPR podcast without hearing about him on a regular basis.
Invisibilia took a real down turn after the first couple of seasons, especially after the hosts changed from the original ones. The original season or two of the show were amazing to me, and it fell off quick after that.
Great email from Jack, but I have to wonder about the strike price of any options issued 6-12 months ago - they're likely underwater at this point, and may still be even 3 years from now when the exercise window closes. Not much anything Jack can do (I think?), but I worry there may be individual employees paying out of pocket for equity that is not worth what it was when originally granted.
Family-oriented social conservatism, instinctive obedience to authority and disinterest in political debate mostly. A lot of it actually bottom up rather than top down.
Obviously this clashes quite hard with cyberpunk using the aesthetic of Asia for characters who epitomise American ideas of rebellion, competition and countercultural coolness...
I'm not sure if this is one the parent was thinking of - but there's generally a huge culture of "don't inconvenience others." This can have a lot of knock on effects, like leaving early (really, leaving before others) from work is inconveniencing your peers and your boss.
Also, "filial duty" is pretty strong across a number of Asian cultures. i.e. you should be thinking of your family (parents, grandparents) before yourself.
> This can have a lot of knock on effects, like leaving early (really, leaving before others) from work is inconveniencing your peers and your boss.
Does this go the other way too? Is the boss staying late (with the expectation that others do so as well) considered rude because it inconveniences his workers?
Because if not, this has nothing to do with being polite and everything to do with power and deference to power.
Think conservative values on a social scale minus the personal property part(don't know if the personal property is a general consensus or just authoritarian laws.) Drugs are forbidden, fathers rule the household, children are disciplined when they don't meet satisfaction, you're expected to work hard. You know all the things the conservatives get a bad rap for in the US but everyone thinks that way there and uses it in collectivism
On the flip side, the child didn't consent to being born, and indirectly any suffering a child endures can be traced back to a parent's decision to bring them into the world.
Focusing on the choice of the individual child is a very American way of looking at things. Nobody chooses to be born. So what? The obligation arises out of the relationship between parents, as a category, and children, as a category. Individual choice doesn’t carry nearly as much weight in Asian culture as it does in American culture. Likewise, the notion that obligations can only arise from voluntary and consenting exchange—as if it’s an economic transaction—is one that doesn’t make much sense in Asian culture.
I didn’t say it wasn’t arbitrary—culture often is. My point is that as someone steeped in the asian way of thinking about it, the cultural conflict with the American mode of thinking is really significant.
Under that logic and reasoning any joy or happiness the child experiences can also be traced back to the parents decision to bring them into the world.
My dad mentioned the other day that he had the impression that American parents “don’t really love their kids.” I think what he meant was that the western, particularly Protestant, way of raising children is very hands off. In Asia, parents are expected to subordinate their individual identity to their role as a parent. Sadly that makes Asians raising kids in the US particularly thankless—the parents follow Asian norms in sacrificing for their kids but the kids often grow up westernized and don’t reciprocate.
> the kids often grow up westernized and don’t reciprocate
That should be expected though, and is likely an advantage for those kids. Integration is an important step in adopting a new country. That this will put you at odds with your parents is a common thing too, almost every group of immigrants that I'm aware of has this.
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.
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.
