As someone that complied initially, holed up in an apartment solo for many months while the city descended into chaos, and began testing every 7 days when that became available and staggering interactions between people, I feel like I’ve shown that I’m willing to help mitigation efforts.
Boosters for last year’s virus makes less sense. Boosters at all make less sense, especially for a non vulnerable population, and the fairly predictable solution of stacking them every 6 months should come under much more scrutiny. Especially with the unnecessary myocarditis element.
The same for cloth masks, if they are less effective against the newer prevalent variant.
I’m not sold on this one, and I’ll totally begin bolstering anti-establishment sentiment if they are the only ones willing to disagree.
The antibodies elicited in response to the booster, 6 months later, are different and more diverse in their neutralization capabilities than the ones elicited in response to the first shots.
Although it is likely an omicron-tuned booster would be more effective, time is of the essence and there is both evidence and a reasonable explanation as to why the original booster works. Specifically, the immune system is not static and also changes over time.
Here is a presentation by a virologist on the research his team performed that leads to this conclusion (amongst other lines of research) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIcaSqQFrX0
Effectiveness against severe disease is unknown.
And there’s also https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v... claiming that for males younger than 40, risk of myocarditis from the vaccine and disease is similar.
Under these circumstances, mandating boosters for students is not justified.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
What reality has shown, time and again, is that medical systems across the entire world are incapable of dealing with COVID while providing the same standard of care that people generally expect. (For both non-COVID and COVID cases.)
I personally feel there are reasons to be optimistic over the next few months, but that its too early to say - and claiming otherwise is engaging in very speculative, very wishful magical thinking.
Students live in dorms with other students. If one gets sick they have to isolate away from other students. This is effectively impossible in a traditional dorm so they have to be moved to quarantine. There is likely a limit to quarantine space available. If quarantine is filled the University will have to shut down because they cannot follow CDC guidance.
It is not about the immediate health risk to the students as that is relatively low, but the University being able to continue operations.
When I was at school, we had flu outbreaks. People got sick, their roommates got sick…and no one was tested or quarantined or had to wear masks. Life continued.
What if we just stopped? We could treat Corona outbreaks at schools like cold or flu outbreaks. Would anyone even notice Omicron ripping through the student body if we weren’t obsessively looking? I doubt it.
Whats the rate of hospitalization for COVID among students right now? If you dont have that kind of actual data in hand, you can't make a proper decision.
because of the demographics that number should be close to zero, except for students that have multiple comorbidities.
I anecdotally know people who had a booster and were still subsequently infected. Packing 200 people in a room over 100 days and these rare cases will happen.
This reluctance to accept medications that have proven to minimize the impact of deadly infections doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
if Omicron is as mild as shown by the current data, you won't be able to show any kind of baseline difference between boosted and unboosted.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/malaria...
Dec: "The co-founder of BioNTech SE on Thursday joined the world's 500 richest people after the U.K. this week approved use of a Covid-19 vaccine that the German firm created with Pfizer Inc."
I have the COVID vaccine but that doesn't mean I am not concerned about potential long-term effects that we know nothing about. That, and the possibility of original antigenic sin [0] permanently screwing over our ability to mount an effective immune response to novel strains.
What justification is there for pushing a non-sterilizing vaccine, that doesn't prevent spread, on non-vulnerable populations?
I’m a compliant, conformist Asian, and they’re beginning to lose even me. My nine year old’s private school required everyone to get vaccinated (and we’re in a county where vaccination rates are high) but for some reason she is still wearing masks and eating lunch outside in the winter. My three year old—who is a hyperactive little boy to begin with—suffering developmental delays because he can’t understand instructions from masked teachers. For example, we do a gym class on Saturdays and he can’t tell which of the instructors he should be listening to, against the background noise. I cheat and take off my mask to give him instructions. I’ve noticed—that in a class where I suspect everyone is a democrat (blue state, almost entirely non-white or interracial)—about half the other parents are doing the same thing.
I also understand that Masks prevent people spitting large droplets. But no one seems to be raising concerns that we've starved kids from one of the most evolutionarily significant aspects of humans - facial communication. Would be great if academics/scientists who are far greater qualified in this matter try to understand what impact masks will have on kids - something tells me they are going to face opposition.
[1] I learned about this experiment from the Introduction to Human Brain course at MIT. I watched the entire thing a couple of years ago, it was truly eye opening and I believe the professor had an AMA on HN at time. Check it out: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-1...
The idea of a blanket mandate that these young people must be immediately boosted regardless of how many times and how recently their immune system has fought off SARS-CoV-2 or what their current antibody levels are is totally unsupportable as science or public policy. We're moving from cloth mask theater to potentially screwing up your immune system and endangering yourself with unnecessary-to-harmful booster theater. Enough.
To illustrate the point, a large study out of France found that the only "long covid" symptom that actually correlates with confirmed illness was loss of smell. But there were multiple "long covid" symptoms that correlated with self-reported illness.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
We have to be careful to separate populations by severity of disease, hospitalization, etc., but "long covid" is at least partly psychosomatic.
Good luck driving anything with this garbage paper. Not all published literature is reliable. (Remember the Lancet last year?)
Other than that, when Covid becomes endemic, vaccinations should be offered to those who wants them, as has always been the case with winter flu.
The goal is to keep ICUs available for general emergencies.
Stanford, of course, is just a private institution, but is foreshadowing the predilections of influential policy makers.
I'm not sure what your argument against the booster is beyond the mention of myocarditis (which the CDC addresses here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...) and "it's a lot of work."
At this point, those of us who can do the maximum amount possible to avoid catching the virus and/or making sure that we mitigate its effects should do so. The most likely risk at this point isn't death, it's ending up in the hospital for enough time that someone else can't get admitted or has to put off an important procedure.
Hear me out - but, I suggest doing the opposite. Get vaccinated, then deliberately expose yourself to the virus every month. If you do that, you'll never get sick, and your immune response will remain high.
What does this mean? It’s not enough to be against vaccine mandates?
But the wording is exactly the same as used by companies. "Strongly encouraged" is now the preferred wording to express: "You MUST comply with this."
But since everyone who is worried have gotten the vaccine and will continue to get booster shots ad infinitum, there is zero reason to force this on everyone else.
It's time to stop this nonsense.
2 months after the second shot, dead of sudden heart attack.
Countries have always been able to impose vaccine requirements for smallpox polio, yellow fever, meningitis and now covid.
Businesses didn't need to validate that people coming into their stores had these vaccines because the government already would have validated it for them.
Businesses have the right to ensure the health of their employees and customers.
The every six months thing doesn't apply until there's actually a government recommendation to get a 4th shot. I think there is enough chance that there will be, but there's also a pretty good chance that there won't be (because we are actually getting to the point where ~everyone has been infected or vaccinated).
You're announcing confidently to the world that you don't know anything about immunology, and haven't seen the studies that show that boosters produce broad neutralization against Omicron even though they haven't been updated (and you probably lack the ability to theorize as to how that could be possible).
> the fairly predictable solution of stacking them every 6 months
Outside of Israel nobody is suggesting boosters every 6 months. We'll see how that goes for them. Lots of experts are actually very suspicious of the idea that we'll be boosting constantly (outside of the 3% of the vulnerable population that is immunosuppressed).
Why would any other country stop with 1 booster? I think rather that they are just slow rolling their mandates. The data suggests that the immune boost is temporary so I don't see how the situation will be any different for shot 4.
Perhaps the only difference will be increasing fatigue with compliance.
I had the impression that the safety effect for someone in good health under 45 was neglible, although with a significant decrease in risk of catching or passing on the virus. With these effects waning on a time-scale similar to the first two doses.
Particularly curious regarding the risk-benefit ratio for a healthy young adult. How much of a no-brainer is an extra vaccine dose at this point? And do we know something yet about a decrease in the «no sense of smell» long-term complication?
Edit: critical to beneficial
The odds of dying, I took from the CDC, because there are issues with counting deaths in U.K. For anyone up to 40 the odds of dying after catching covid are 1 in 5,000 for those with 2 or more co-morbid diseases, and 1 in 100,000 for those with fewer than 2 co-morbid diseases. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
That makes the chance of dying from covid for a 40 year old or younger = 1 in 83,333,333 for those with 2 co-morbid diseases and 1 in 1,700,000,000 for those with fewer than 2 co-morbid diseases.
Omicron may be different, but as it spreads faster and kills fewer, I doubt it will be any worse in the end.
Now you need to know the chance of dying from a vaccine adverse event but I don't have that to hand.
Food for thought: https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...
Or the actual paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v...
The vaccine seems to result in less symptoms and makes your body clear the virus faster, but the evidence is coming in that peak viral load is not changed.
To me, this is the nightmare scenario of us going forward with emergency use authorizations. The whole theory behind the vaccine was that if your body was primed to handle the spike protein, you'd clear it faster and you'd feel better and critically: that you'd actually spread less virus because your body won't collect as much of it waiting for your immune system to react.
But only the first two parts of that ended up being true, because it appears that peak viral load isn't impacted. So now if you're vaaccinated, you feel fine so you don't test yourself and you don't isolate, but you're still spreading the virus as much as before, and r0 across the entire population is basically unchanged. It would almost be better for others if you weren't vaccinated, because you would have a lower chance of presenting asymptomatically and would be more likely to isolate.
The only silver lining is that it seems to clear faster, so the timespan where you're walking around with a high viral load (ie: superspreader) is smaller. But this isn't what they wanted.
Also, the individual variability in viral load within each group is enormous, such that finding a "significant difference" would probably require many more participants than what the study recruited.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/addendumcorrection-to-dan...
My only criticism of that analysis is that the original study reported all the counts based on the population of over the age of 12. And when he back calculated the expected values he used the full population. The bias I see there is that it's highly likely that all of the under 12s would be unvaccinated which would change the denominator a bit. I re-did his analysis in the most drastic case by saying that all the under 12s were unvaccinated and I get a -59% VE. Not as big negative as he reports, but still negative. So that's a problem.
Long story short, the study observes that there are progressively higher rates of infection in vaccinated cohorts who were vaccinated 4, 5, and 6 months ago. There were 1.7 infections per 1000 people in the cohort vaccinated 4 months ago. There were 2.2 infections per 1000 people in the cohort vaccinated 5 months ago. There were 3.3 infections per 1000 people in the cohort vaccinated 6 months ago.
Obviously, nobody knows how Omicron changes this.
As a result, we don't have a great deal of high-quality data on how short-term dangerous Omicron is yet, other than knowing that it's more contagious than Delta and that vaccinated (and especially boosted) individuals seem to have milder symptoms when infected.
A couple of weeks is "long-term"?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
All this to say there will be fortunes built on the expansion of the market for chronic disease management tools.
"For boys 12-17 without medical comorbidities, the likelihood of post vaccination dose two cardiac adverse event is 162.2 and 94.0/million respectively. This incidence exceeds their expected 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization rate at both moderate and high COVID-19 hospitalization incidence."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf
"myocarditis after vaccination was higher than myocarditis after sars-cov-2 infection for people <40"
There seems to be little relationship between percentage vaccinated and case-counts. Open to being proven wrong on this.
E.g. given total new cases today, California (30k new cases) has a higher number of cases per capita, vs Texas (15.5k), despite CA having 10% higher vaccination rate. Granted there are other variables at play, but its hard to make the case that vaccination has a large impact on transmission, currently.
I'm not yet aware of any other study that indicates the booster is useful for people in this age group.
I thought that a spike in antibodies might be useful in the short term, but a recent CDC presentation [2] said of an Omicron case study:
> 79% fully vaccinated; 32% with booster dose; Five of the 14 persons received additional dose <14 days before symptom onset
which doesn't give me any confidence.
> security theatre
Since mandates don't exclude people that were previously infected, to me, they seem punitive.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
"Vaccine effectiveness evaluated at least 7 days after receipt of the third dose, compared with receiving only two doses at least 5 months ago".
Literally no control for recency. Newer research (admittedly, not yet peer-reviewed) seems to show that efficacy of the vaccines dwindles over time. As little as 90 days. [1]
The results from the booster may have more to do with having received a vaccine more recently than they do with the overall efficacy of any of the vaccines.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...
Some of them may still catch and spread Omicron, true. But overall far fewer will than without the three doses of vaccination, and those that do catch it will tend to have far briefer and milder symptoms than otherwise. It's still a big help to both the vaccinated/boosted students and all of their close contacts in the dense community that is a university.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/covid-booster-dose-is-crucia...
> The U.K.’s Health Security Agency published a report last Friday, citing initial findings from a real-world study, that said a two-dose course of Covid vaccines were significantly less effective against the omicron variant than the delta strain. However, it found that a “moderate to high vaccine effectiveness of 70 to 75% is seen in the early period after a booster dose.”
> More research emerged from Israel on Saturday, with researchers also finding that a three-shot course of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine provided significant protection against omicron.
So what does forcing people to get a third vaccine really accomplish? In my opinion two things, further erosion of our freedoms, and huge profits for big pharma.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, the slogan of standford is literally "The wind of freedom blows". This policy does absolutely nothing to further anyone's freedom.
Okay, I’ll try CVS/Walgreens/et. al. If you don’t mind waiting until February, I guess that’s an option. Finally I just gave up and scheduled an appointment within the next two weeks at a clinic 90 minutes away. Then we happened to walk into healthcare provider Kaiser that is ten minutes from home: big fucking arrows and signs, “Walk-ins welcome!!!!11” And so we went back the next day and got our booster shots. But here’s my question/complaint: Kaiser is also the clinic that’s 90 minutes away, where we scheduled our original appointment. On the Kaiser site, there is not a single mention of a walk-in option.
My conclusion is that we appear to have to rely on Facebook posts, and rumors from friends to find a booster because the “official” channels are either not useful or just plain abandoned.
Which is what I was resigned to, until I drove by a huge outdoor, drive-through setup that took walk-ins, located in the parking lot near the animal shelter in San Martin. Very professionally run, and I was in and out in 20 minutes. And yet had I not chosen to drive Monterey instead of 101 that day, I would never have heard or seen it, and it is not on a street most people would use.
The backwater of Redmond. CVS, Walgreens (EDIT: Walgreens now shows appointments 2 weeks out), not a one of them showed an appointment less than a month out, if they bothered to show an appointment at all. Which reminds me of another annoyance: why not show ‘next available’ instead of making me click through each day to see if there’s an appointment?
My wife instantly signed up when it was available and got a booster within a couple days. I waited a few days and my appointment was a month out.
We also waited a couple of days for our 6 year old and the appointment was 2 weeks out.
Honestly, I've been able to get both my vaccines (flu and Covid booster) by chance. I came across a vaccine drive run by my town's senior center and went to that for Covid, and then yesterday I happened to walk by the pharmacy in a Target and they were taking walk-ins for flu shots.
Thankfully I live in a state where the leaders really want people to get vaccinated. Yesterday I was driving around an area where there are a lot of illegal immigrants and there were signs all over the place saying "no ID necessary" for a COVID vaccine.
I had the exact same experience as you, but figured I just didn't know where to look. The earliest appointments on my local government website were for weeks out. And, each pharmacy had its own booking website. Surely, there must be someone working on integrating all these fragmented schedules into a single source of truth, and they're just doing a poor job advertising their solution?
[1] I define extremist as the satanism / 5g microchip stuff.
1) I had my booster 2 weeks ago and still am having side effects. I had 2 days of feeling like shit and having my physical output at maybe 20%, slowly recovering but after 2 weeks still around 75% or so. Not sure if it will improve come the new competition season. Same issues were reported with teammates. (I play a sport competitively, 2 days before the vaccine I did a 4.5 hour hard intensive training day, was ok and recovered fine. Just yesterday I had a training match and after 1 hour or so was feeling the lack of strength and difficulty breathing). I am not high risk for covid related issues. Right now, the booster has been quite an issue for me, and if I don't go back to 100% soon, my next year tournaments/ranking is compromised.
2) My kid is at an age they are pushing for vaccine for his age group. His risk based on my country data is pretty much zero (4 severe cases, 3 had co-mobilities that a normal cold would get them in the hospital, and one apparent healthy kid had severe issues but recovered). Risks from the vaccine for this age group are bigger than covid for him. I am against vaccinating him. (mother isn't and he will be)
I am not anti-vaxx (I even got my booster) but if they told me I could be 2+ weeks at reduced physical capacity befora having the booster, I wouldn't have done it.
Being healthy and under 40, and given how quickly these vaccines were rushed out, I merely want to wait until the long-term effects are known. I don't think there's anything extreme about that.
It should be noted that I've had covid (from visiting fully vaccinated and boosted family) and have had the antibody test confirming I should have some degree of resistance now.
However government policy and messaging has all been based on vaccination - not verified natural resistance (which studies show are robust to many variants, unlike vaccination). I can only conclude that the government does not care about health outcomes: It only cares about vaccination status. After being denied entry to restaurants and events and generally punished by society for what I deem to be reasonable caution, it starts to feel very dystopian and gives me all the more reason to pause and wait for long-term studies to be completed.
Incidentally, I'm one of the most vaccinated people on Earth. I've had over 90 vaccines prior to this event, including three just prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. None of them have ever required me to sign a liability waiver. Yet another reason I'm cautious about these vaccines: If the manufacturers are more uncertain of these vaccines than usual then why shouldn't I be?
- My heart hurt as hell from the vaccines. A study from the UK shows more risk for myocarditis from the vaccines than from infection in males under 40. [1]
- Studies say vaccines stop/slow transmission but in reality we see more cases in regions with high vaccination rates than we did last year without vaccines. And more cases than in regions with a lower vaccination rate. Breakthrough infections seem to be the norm, not the exception. I’m not the US.
- Natural immunity is superior. [2]
- Vaccines don’t protect against long covid. [3]
- The people at risk are old or have other problems. Statistically you will be fine when you’re under 60.
So when we add all these things up it’s clear to me we should have only vaccinated older people and the ones with health problem. Because the vaccines only work to protect yourself. And you don’t need artificial protection when you’re young and healthy. Just like the flu.
[1] https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myoca...
[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2
Edit: I source my claims yet people downvote me. If you downvote me just because you heard something else in the media I consider you an irrational person.
mRNA "vaccines" are not as tested as the pharmaceutical companies want you to believe. They've been in development for years and had serious issues. The mainstream media has severe conflicts of interest, financially, with regard to Pfizer. There are smaller conflicts of interest with regard to J&J and Moderna. The Asch conformity experiments are one example of many that show that even experts can be manipulated. If I do happen to have a bad reaction to the shot, I have no recourse to get compensation for my medical bills. I have very, very low risk of complications from the SARS-Cov-2 virus itself.
The risk analysis does not justify the shot, for me.
I think "anti-vax" sounds inherently extremist and conspiracy-theorist, and isn't an accurate representation of the middle ground here. To be fair, it's more like "pro-choice."
Plenty of vaccines are given to children every year and required for them to attend school, and there hasn't really been any negative side-effects of that policy. It's tough to argue that we should not be required to have any vaccine to attend school, and that would break the status quo in the other direction.
The question then becomes: What could make the Covid vaccine different from other vaccines, such that it shouldn't be required?
* If these vaccines were approved earlier and with more early-stage preliminary data than other vaccines?
* If Covid is not as severe as the diseases we currently require a vaccine for? [1]
[1] The current required vaccines for school in New York, for example, are Diphtheria, Hepatitis B, Measles, Polio, and Chickenpox. The mortality rate and permanent damage for some of these diseases are much higher than Covid. With others, I'm not sure of the pre-vaccine mortality rate as it's been around for a long time.
With all that in mind, Covid spreads as much if not more as the diseases we saw fit to require vaccinations against, and the mortality rate for the older population is high. I think a fair argument is whether schoolchildren should have to be vaccinated to protect against infecting the more vulnerable population.
I doubt that you've really never heard any opposition to covid vaccines that aren't deranged things, but okay, I'll bite.
Simply being against forcing people to get covid vaccinated is now defined as "anti-vaccine"... So if, by chance, you also don't think people should be forcefully injected, you're anti-vax too.
Covid vaccines clearly had some positive effects, especially for vulnerable people, but:
* I don't think the balance is right between the risk of catching the virus versus forcing everyone to get vaccinated every few months
* If you think there are no problems with vaccines how do you contend with Astra Zeneca being abandoned in so many places and Moderna being disallowed for under 30s?
* Studies show that kids have more heart issues from the vaccine than from the virus. It's a sick society where we care more about the risk of passing the virus to adults than the risk on the kids.
* If everyone is following the science, why do so many countries have different policies? Especially when it comes to masking and vaccinating kids?
* It's not great to play along with the removal of your rights. How are you ever going to recover them?
But most importantly:
* I shouldn't have to have a reason. We used to think that every man is his own master and he's allowed to make wrong decisions. Do you know how some people have cards saying "do not resuscitate"? Science may decide that the person needs to be alive so he needs to be forcefully resuscitated, but we used to respect people's choices anyway.
Now, because of an infectious disease (as if we've never had one before), we've thrown the individual out the window and worship The Science, even though every government as a different The Science.
I have had covid and I am vaccinated with JnJ but I will not be getting boosters. I would like to see the longer term effects of mRNA vaccinations first. I have all my other vaccinations. Most of my immediate family is not vaccinated for covid (while having all other vaccines) and has a similar position.
Various countries in Europe have balked at or delayed vaccinating under 18s for this reason. Interestingly for people who got the mRNA vaccines there was almost no myocarditis after the first dose, so this was mostly a second dose effect. We may not have enough data right now to say whether a booster dose is even more likely to produce heart damage but it’s possible.
Since myocarditis is also a risk of COVID itself, it’s probably still a better deal for many people in this age group to get vaccinated. In fact public health officials seem to think that it’s a good deal for the average person in this group. However, if you are a healthy man in his early twenties whose absolute risk from COVID is already very low, there’s a decent argument that you should be given a chance for informed consent and not have this mandated.
This is even more true if you’ve already had COVID and acquired natural immunity. In many countries proof of infection functions the same as proof of vaccination in terms of accessing services, it arguably should In this case as well.
The sorts of mandates we have had in place for things like MRR are different because we have decades of data on the safety and efficacy of these vaccines, and we know that we can lose herd immunity if we don’t have high compliance. The current COVID vaccines are clearly not providing herd immunity, given that omicron is tearing through highly vaxxed countries like the UK. Many experts are basically acknowledging that nearly everyone will get omicron eventually.
Also, unlike measles which can be kept at bay by mass vaccination, COVID is rampant in massive animal reservoirs like whitetail deer, which means that we aren’t going to make it extinct like we did with polio or smallpox. If the best that can be said about the vaccines is that they reduce hospitalization and death risk for those who take them, then is there justification for a mandate? You can argue that reduced severity is important for protecting the hospitals from being overwhelmed. But does that justify a mandate for boosters amongst college kids whose absolute risk of hospitalization from COVID is already very very small?
Anyway, I’m as fully vaxxed as I can be in my jurisdiction, but I don’t begrudge people making different choices for themselves in a case like this where it’s more about personal risk management than public benefit. Rational decisions are being made and the vaccination rates amongst elderly are much much higher than people in their twenties.
I also think that part of our resiliency as a society is having a range of perspectives. Even if the paranoid personality is annoying or maladaptive, sometimes they help bring things to light.
In the case of mRNA vaccine skeptics like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, they is just consistently very far out on precautionary principle spectrum. Like they don’t think you should learn the sex of your child before birth because it would increase the psychological trauma of a miscarriage. A lot of their concern boils down to overweighing the unknown unknowns (from my perspective). I’m on the other end of the precautionary spectrum, but I have come to value the perspective and role that people like this play in our society, and I think they should be part of the conversation.
My children are very young, my wife and I are young and we workout 6 days a week. We eat healthy and are healthy.
I'm not going to give my children a vaccine against something that has a miniscule mortality rate. And I'm not going to get vaccinated because I'm not morbidly obese or old. Lose weight and stay safe.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...
Either everybody should follow a rule or nobody.
https://www.vumc.org/health-wellness/news-resource-articles/...
I feel pretty good about the safety and efficacy of the current vaccines, but the discourse is poisonous bordering on religious zealotry. What happens when vaccine with genuine safety issues comes along and is mandated?
I totally agree that it's nonsensical. The tendency of many people to conflate the positions of "X is a good thing to do" and "everyone should be forcibly compelled to do X" is routinely frustrating.
Many people do in fact use the term anti-vaxx(er) to refer to people who are against vaccines and also against regulations around them.
It's just coincidental that many in the political arena and media started to label their opponents as anti-vaxxers for questioning mandates.
I wouldn’t be surprised about the opportunistic chances to push an ideology taken by supposedly apolitical orgs. There are examples all over even if you don’t want to see it.
So I was willing to believe that MW made a small addendum to their previous definition of antivaxxer. Despite it being a cheap and dirty abuse of their institution.
But no. They removed it entirely and replaced it with exactly what you said. Wtf.
Opposing a vaccine mandate for completely precedent and objectifiable legal reasons “now makes” you an antivaxxer huh?
Well… I’m new to the club apparently, where do I pick up my Karen haircut and homeopathic treatments?
* They aren't risk free (like we were all told initially)
* They don't prevent transmission (like we were all told initially)
Full disclosure: fully vaxxed, got it the very first day I was allowed to. Wouldn't change the decision. That said: man I really cannot get over the fact that it feels like public health officials are just straight up lying to us all at this point. That is something that I really do not like for several reasons. Not the least of which is that it will prevent people from trusting them in the future, and that will have negative consequences for everyone.
They do prevent transmission to a certain extent.
Has this been quantified? Because I recall Fauci saying it "100%" prevent hospitalizations and it turns out it was far, far less than 100%.
It was sold as preventing transmission:
It's official: Vaccinated people don't transmit COVID-19 https://fortune.com/2021/04/01/its-official-vaccinated-peopl...
> "Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it's also in real-world data," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told Rachel Maddow on Monday, March 29.
No "real" public official I believe ever said this.
> Fauci Predicts U.S. Could See Signs Of Herd Immunity By Late March Or Early April
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/1...
> "I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact," Fauci said. "But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity."
Talking about herd immunity doesn't make sense unless the vaccine prevented transmission.
Then, May 2021:
> Masks off? Fauci confirms ‘extremely low’ risk of transmission, infection for vaccinated
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/dr-fauci-confirms-extreme...
As it's said a bit in that article, it's important to know that the response to anything should be based on a variety of factors and in this case including severity of getting the virus.
From my research, Omicron _is_ similar to getting a common cold. We should be adjusting our response based not only on how transmissible it is but on the consequences of us getting it, but it seems there is a much more black & white approach.
When the chance of death was significantly higher in other variants, holding off seeing ones kids made sense, when long-term covid meant going without taste or smell, that's a significant risk. I still see a lot of "do whatever is necessary to not get Covid" -- but that is now not including the severity of what you're getting. If we removed the name "Covid" and considered each to be a separate virus, would "Omicron" be something you freak out about?
If I were to do a generalized formula it would be something like:
[severity of illness] * [transmissibility] = [strength of response justified]
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Would love additional data that changes this mindset.
* I am vaccinated but not boosted.
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EDIT: Getting downvoted without responses when I'm looking for genuine information to understand more thoroughly is a pretty poor approach to helping fight C19. It dichotomizes and turns people against each other rather than facilitate discussion or learning.
> [severity of illness] * [transmissibility] = [strength of response justified]
I think that's quite a fair metric, but slightly incomplete. The most important factor here is ICU capacity vs. ICU occupancy rate, because this also measures if you die from shit like appendicitis. Winter in general sees more ICU cases, so the strain the system can take is already lower. Switzerland for example is still doing quite well despite incidence rates of more than a thousand due to their extremely advanced healthcare sector. Death is actually secondary in this. If you live after having taken an ICU bed for 6 weeks, you might have killed 2 other people completely unrelated to your case due to your own negligence.
The fact of the matter is that the healthcare sector is getting flooded again, and lots of countries have a serious risk of overstraining their healthcare sector to the point of triage. Booster shots substantially reduce the risk of serious illenss, at least that is what we are believing to see in our hospitals. Unvaccinated are close to 90% of ICU cases, while boostered people make up less than 1%, although it is important to note that doubly-vaccinated still make up more than half of the local population (and roughly 20% unvaccinated).
Of course it takes time to do good studies on the actual impact of booster vaccinations, and I'm super annoyed by the lack of full transparency of research bodies tasked to make recommendations, but you can't just sit on your balls in times of crisis. The risk to ones own health due to boostering also seems to be negligible, it is just a minor annoyance.
Note that it's now talking about effectiveness in transmissibility, rather than what defined effectiveness when they were being tested which was hospitalization and death -- which is still at 90% after 6 months, including against Delta.
I do follow many nurse friends of mine who share daily counts of local ICU case increases, and very much agree that I consider ICU capacity (or hospital in general) to be something that must be monitored. That was a statistic I didn't have -- and thank you spurred some more study digging and I found this:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2115624
This feels pretty relevant, 90% reduction in mortality between those who got a booster and those who did not (for ages 50+), though I'm still looking at people for my age.
Anyway-- thanks, this is useful, going to dig more
That said, what we do know is that the side-effect risks associated with getting boosted are extremely low.
So, I would pose the question: why not?
The health risks associated with getting boosted is vanishingly small compared to other risks you take. For example, as an average 30-40 yo, the risk of death by simply getting out of bed and engaging in normal activities for one day is 1 in 200,000. That risk is far greater than the risk of getting boosted.
My take is that people are making a big deal out of nothing. If there's a chance that getting boosted will help us put an end to this virus sooner, and I'm not taking on any meaningful risk by getting boosted, why not?
If the disease appeared today with its current severity, would the world stop?
We know this, so we downvote.
Their slogan is literally "the wind of freedom blows". Has the wind stopped blowing?
Trusting common sense is the opposite of Science.
Science cannot answer moral questions.
I feel like anyone that doesn’t understand plain and clear logic must be a FauxNews addicted lunatic. What other explanations even are there?
Refusing education for young people because of a booster can only be described as a crime against human rights
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myoca...
Moreover, additional vaccination offers minimal -- if any -- benefit to young, healthy people. As Paul Offit -- a pediatrician, creator of the Rotavirus vaccine, member of the CDC ACIP committee and one of the biggest SARS-CoV2 vaccine advocates -- said in a recent NY Times article:
> Boosters are likely to provide the best protection against infection with Omicron. But for most healthy young people, the original two-shot series — or one dose of Johnson and Johnson — should be sufficient to prevent hospitalization and death, Dr. Offit said. If that’s the purpose of vaccination, then “these vaccines continue to hold up,” Dr. Offit said.
Meanwhile, the WHO continues to beg western countries to stop boosting younger, healthy people. Nobody listens.
> The focus of COVID-19 immunization efforts must remain on decreasing death and severe disease, and the protection of the health care system....In the context of ongoing global vaccine supply constraints and inequities, broad-based administration of booster doses risks exacerbating vaccine access by driving up demand in countries with substantial vaccine coverage and diverting supply while priority populations in some countries, or in subnational settings, have not yet received a primary vaccination series.
https://www.who.int/news/item/22-12-2021-interim-statement-o...
This push for repeated vaccination of the young is based on antibody titers and other "correlates of risk", not on clinical data. But antibody levels decline over time -- particularly in the nasal mucosa. It's basic immunology, and a principal reason that vaccines against respiratory viruses were rare prior to Covid.
We're quite literally conducting a societal experiment based on fear and speculation, while "experts" forget what they learned in biology 101.
Also, while focusing on myocarditis he forgets to count actual deaths from covid19 which is increasing for younger people with the new variants.
https://theconversation.com/younger-adults-can-get-very-sick...
Death rate per million for age 25 is 100.
Yet the author complains about a non statistically significant difference of 1-5 per million of myocarditis for under 40?!
Does the author have an agenda you are aware of?
...and even this miniscule risk is divided by 10 after primary vaccination (a 90% risk reduction in serious illness). So yeah, now you're in the 10-per-million realm, where risk of myocarditis starts to matter.
You're confusing "booster mandates" with "vaccination". Neither the author nor I are questioning vaccination in general. We're questioning mandates for young people -- and in particular, mandates of booster doses that have no proven clinical benefit.
You're the second person here to cite this study and imply that the risk from covid is lower for young men than the risk of the vaccine. But that's...not what the study says.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.7384... suggests the case fatality rate for Covid in 20-39-year-olds is 0.62%. In comparison, the excess risk of myocarditis following a vaccination, per the Nature paper, was 15 per million, or 0.0015%.
Comparing that to CFR is irrelevant. Also, you don't understand the meaning of CFR -- the rate of death amongst confirmed illnesses. It overstates actual risk by at least a factor of 10, and probably more than that. There have been far more cases than ever confirmed by testing.
Best estimates of IFR for SARS-CoV2 by age indicate a mortality risk of approximately 0.004% for those under age 34:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1...
Florida seems to have done relatively well for themselves (unless you buy into conspiracy theories about misreporting case loads), but I wonder if vit D and general level of outsideness plays a big role, but it's hard to make apples to apples comparisons between Florida and e.g. New York.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
NY: 300/100k
FL: 289/100k
NY's deaths are also more heavily weighted towards the initial outbreak, when the mortality rate was much higher due to lack of treatment knowledge/options. https://imgur.com/a/fdb1tl7
Still, if they merely kept even with NY, and also managed to have a booming economy, a net influx of population, and very little disruption in primary school education, I’d say that’s pretty good.
The damage that has been done to a generation of disadvantaged kids in states that shut down schools for extended periods is going to have to be reckoned with for years.
[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...
Sources:
http://edr.state.fl.us/content/population-demographics/data/... https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2016/t...
Methodology: Took the Florida 2010 and estimated 2020 numbers and averaged them together to get a "2015" estimate, then compared it to the 2016 NY data.
It was surreal being right next to a student outbreak with 1000+ positives but having almost no transmission to faculty and staff.
Where's the revolution?
Omicron is mild anyway. Heaven forbid that students will experience a "a sore throat, runny nose and a headache":
On top of all of that, vaccines do not stop the spread, but just ease out symptoms. You can be vaccinated and your symptoms can be so mild that you won't even know you are sick. So you'll walk around infecting others.
On top of that, it's not just the vaccinations. Those who get the disease are also helping to slow the spread as they build their own resistance.
There's been enough resistance to the vaccines that it's probably impossible to end this with the best possible result, so we're going for second-best now. And that still involves keeping as many people vaccinated as possible.
>For most, Covid is a mild disease. Some get no symptoms at all. But it can still cause very serious illness in some people, including those who have not been vaccinated.
>[A] massive wave of infections would still mean many people needing hospital care, as well as lots of doctors and nurses being off sick with Covid.
I would like to share this link with you, which explains the effectiveness of vaccines against infection:
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/breakthrough-covid-19-infectio...
“Breakthrough infections are not evidence that vaccines don’t work anymore than the fact that car crashes [that] are still sometimes fatal is evidence that seatbelts don’t work. We use prevention tools because they help reduce our risk of serious disease or death, not because they are guaranteed to 100% always keep us safe,” Murray [, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health] said.
- Pfizer net income for the twelve months ending September 30, 2021 was $19.889B, a 149.36% increase year-over-year.
- Pfizer annual net income for 2020 was $9.616B, a 40.91% decline from 2019.
- Pfizer annual net income for 2019 was $16.273B, a 45.91% increase from 2018.
- Pfizer annual net income for 2018 was $11.153B, a 47.66% decline from 2017.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PFE/pfizer/net-inc...
What many people miss when they advocate for boosters is that antibody count is not the full story. When it comes to protection against severe disease, cell-mediated immunity is key and doesn't go away.
Here's the most relevant science I've found about the effectiveness of the booster.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2115926
If you look at the results table, the booster does benefit everyone. I can't argue with that. However, the absolute counts shown in that table paint a more nuanced picture.
While the 60+ crowd gets significant benefits from being boosted, making it a no-brainer for them, the under 60 crowd has less benefit. The under 60 crowd is already relatively safe from severe disease and death with the original vaccine dose.
Being healthy and under 60, I need to weigh these mild benefits with the cons: 1) normalizing mandated boosters as an ongoing way of life and 2) extending the pandemic by using up booster doses instead of sending them to undervaccinated countries (the ones where new variants are popping up).
Instead of getting in the habit of being boosted with the same vaccine every 3-6 months for mild benefit, I think it makes much more sense to take a holistic view that helps us end this pandemic.
[Edited for clarity]
Hmmm, interesting. I read that paper and thought, wow, I'm glad I got a booster ;).
> What many people miss when they advocate for boosters is that antibody count is not the full story when it comes to protection against severe disease. Cell-mediated immunity is key and doesn't go away.
This appears to be very true (although I am not an immunologist).
> Instead of boosting our antibody counts ever 3-6 months with the same vaccine and normalizing mandated boosters, I think it makes much more sense to send these to undervaccinated locations where variants are evolving.
Sending the boosters to the rest of the world makes far more sense than boosting the general populations in the developed world. We should definitely do both, but if we can only do one then it should be vaccinating as much of the world as possible.
I think your take and mine are both reasonable and based on different interpretations of tradeoffs.
With the original vaccine doses, you and I probably agreed. There was a somewhat objective case to strongly encourage vaccination of everyone. The alternative was to remain in lockdown indefinitely or risk some sort of collapse of the healthcare system.
Now, though, as we consider the booster, I think the choice is less objective or obvious. Our healthcare system is not at risk, and we can largely be free of lockdown with just the vaccine. There are real cons to a booster, including normalizing government mandates and not vaccinating the rest of the world. Some people may choose to have the peace of mind that comes from a booster. Others may choose not to. I'm hoping, though, that we can agree that mandates are not the way.
Outside of that, a private institution is absolutely allowed to make a rule like this.
If you don't want to get a booster shot that's fine - the government should not force you to do so, but that action has consequences. Private - and several public - institutions should impose vaccine requirements as they deem fit. I want to be able to go see a play, or a movie, or to a restaurant without fear that I'm putting myself more at risk because someone at the table next to me got a vaccine 8 months ago and is no longer protected and far more likely to be carrying and spreading covid. I want to be able to see friends and then my family without having to wait days at a time in between to get a covid test result back because places are allowing not fully vaccinated people in.
My personal belief is that fully vaccinated should, today, equate to the initial vaccine plus the booster. I expect it might even further change to include a second booster.
I have a difficult time understanding why compliance with a life saving decision that is in the best interest of the individual as well as society is so hard. Reasonable exceptions should continue to exist.
If you choose not to get a booster then I don't want you to be able to continuously put me at risk.
I fully support mandates by private and public entities. This does not mean I will always do so - I'm not playing the slippery slope argument fallacy game. For covid booster shots I would be in full support of a government mandate.
Why do you believe that you're any more at risk in this situation if you're boosted?
> ... and is no longer protected and far more likely to be carrying and spreading covid
Antibody levels are not the full story. Cell-based immunity remains intact without boosters and is key to preventing hospitalization/death.
Covid spreads far more easily indoors. Breakthrough cases are becoming more common. Group immunity through boosters (or exposure) is more effective at preventing the spread of covid and reduces the chance that any one individual will catch COVID (and continue to spread it).
> Cell-based immunity remains intact without boosters and is key to preventing hospitalization/death.
Source? And further, preventing hospitalization and death is great - but we should aim to do better, preventing sickness, stopping the spread, reducing the chance of mutation etc which is what the vaccines (initial and boosters) enable.
ETA: in another of your comments you cited an article with this conclusion:
"Across the age groups studied, rates of confirmed Covid-19 and severe illness were substantially lower among participants who received a booster dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine than among those who did not."
and still somehow came to the conclusion that not getting boosted is better for society.
I'm soooo sick of these Covid threads. They basically never lead anywhere in the comments, it's the same shit over and over, folks presenting their take as unassailable fact. I'm not saying this article is deserving of being flagged, but over the past two years I greatly wish I at least had the capability to just look at "tech articles" vs. everything else.
Also, I get it, it's easy to say "just don't look", I'm just asking if anyone else things an easy way to filter out some threads like this would be useful. This sentiment is basically a follow-on to a submission I posted recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29532676 , where the best consensus seemed to be that it's really not possible to have insightful, thoughtful debate on these sensitive topics, or at least it's the case that the HN threads really aren't that much higher quality on these topics than on other sites, and that's not true for lots of other categories of topics.
>Classes at Stanford will be online for the first two weeks of the winter quarter. The quarter will still begin Jan. 3 for most students, as scheduled. We will resume in-person instruction Tuesday, Jan. 18, after the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday. We continue to expect students and instructors to be on campus for the winter quarter.
>If you are healthy, you are encouraged to come back to campus on-time and get settled. You can return to campus later if you choose to, but we advise against waiting until in-person classes are about to begin. This is because if you return on-schedule, test positive upon arrival and need to isolate for at least 10 days, you will be able to continue your coursework during the online instruction period. Once in-person instruction begins, any accommodations for those in isolation will need to be arranged with individual instructors at their discretion.
The reader with an understanding of university finances is encouraged to arrive at his own conclusions.
They're being so careful that they force another booster shot, but if you get covid, you might fail a course? What a great way to artificially lower future covid numbers by having people refuse to self report.
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/life-is-too-shor...
I think your statement applies equally well to many other things. Computer Security popped into my head when I read it.
Why?
Can't we all just take a breath?
Reddit abortion debates are higher quality than this. Come on.
https://www.reveddit.com/v/COVID19/comments/rofrig/risk_of_m...
Really interesting paper from authors with major roles on advisory committees and public health. This is an important and comprehensive dataset that will absolutely be used to further inform public policy in the UK and abroad.
The main take home:
"the risk following COVID-19 vaccination was largely restricted to younger males aged less than 40 years, where the risks of myocarditis following vaccination and infection were similar. However, the notable exception was that in younger males receiving a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine, the risk of myocarditis was higher following vaccination than infection, with an additional 101 events estimated following a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine compared to 7 events following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.
i.e The second dose of "full strength" Moderna in males 13-40 gives a spike in myocarditis that is markedly higher than the risk of myocarditis from covid infection.
There weren't enough cases of myocarditis from this very comprehensive dataset to properly assess myocarditis in children aged 13-17, so as the authors state, this now needs to be pursued by pooling international datasets, and I expect they are already pursuing that.
Very interesting data, thanks for posting.
As I stated elsewhere, this is one piece of the public health puzzle. There are obviously a number of risks and benefits that all feed into the recommendations made. But all else being equal, this data could certainly affect recommendations for Moderna vs other vaccine options in males under 40. Watching with interest, thanks for posting OP!
permalinkhide replies (2)author-focusas-ofpreserve [–]a_teletubby113 points4 days, 20 hours ago* (edited 3 hours, 2 minutes after) It's not just a Moderna problem though. Even for Pfizer, we see a weaker but clear signal:
Infection: 2.02 (1.13 - 3.61)
Dose 1: 1.66 (1.14 - 3.41)
Dose 2: 3.41 (2.44 - 4.78)
Dose 3: 7.60 (1.92 - 30.15)
This is a "bombshell" for the lack of better words. I really wish someone could show this to college administrators who are mandating 3d dose for college students after just 6 months, with no regard for recent breakthrough infections.
Edit:
I know the CIs overlap, but the fact that the point estimate of infection (2.02) is clearly outside of Dose 2's CI (2.44 - 4.78) is already concerning. I'm merely advocating for caution for healthy young males for whom Covid is a miniscule threat.
I wonder if we'll get to the point where they require a booster shot every month or every week and how many people would still comply at that point.
