Yeah, the problem though is that we have a Tragedy of the Commons situation on our hands. There is a non-negligible portion of the population that wants to have its cake and eat it too – reduce the risk that they will suffer health consequences from COVID-19 by letting everyone else get the vaccine, but not getting the vax themselves, therefore putting their risk from vax at zero.
I think part of the thing that makes this more difficult is that some people already have practically no risk of suffering health consequences from COVID-19, and possibly (but also possibly not) do risk suffering health consequences from the vaccination.
It is true; the PDF linked in the GC has to make a number of assumptions and is very obviously made from a point of bias (which does not invalidate its claims but warrants extra scrutiny).
Also it's comparing raw ICU admissions, but there are a number of really nasty adverse reactions that don't throw you in the ICU. The general "second shot syndrome" that something like half of people getting Pfizer/Moderna experience is a great example of that. Yeah it's not bad enough to send them to the ICU, but for many people COVID-19 would be literally asymptomatic or would be minimally symptomatic, whereas the second shot syndrome can be quite brutal.
Why do you believe that? It seems to me that the reputational damage caused by the U of C centre putting out bad slides is going to be stronger than any benefit they might get from being "seen to be a team player" or similar. Skepticism is always good but in this particular case, I do trust that evidence.
> there are a number of really nasty adverse reactions that don't throw you in the ICU
OK, but you can make the same argument for COVID. It seems to me that the slides are at least comparing apples with apples.
> OK, but you can make the same argument for COVID. It seems to me that the slides are at least comparing apples with apples.
If you look at the rates of acute side effects to the vaccines, I forget the exact number but it's at least like 80%. It's insanely high. SARS-2 absolutely does not produce that given the massive proportion of asymptomatic individuals and significant amount of paucisymptomatic individuals
Why do you assume that people who are getting second shot syndrome would be the same people who would have asymptomatic COVID-19? That seems... far-fetched at best.
Second shot syndrome is apparently worse in the young (20's / 30's) due to the stronger immune response. I wasn't assuming that everyone who gets the syndrome would be asymp. but just that many would.
That seems like it'd be easy to fix: the government just needs to say "as soon as you're fully vaccinated, you don't need to social distance or wear a mask in public anymore". Since that isn't their position, there's basically zero incentive for young, healthy people to risk the vaccine side effects.
That is one option. Which is why so many anti-vac people have jumped on the no vaccine passport bandwagon. If there is no way to prove you have been vaccinated, then they can lie about it and take part in non-masked public activity (I'm not sure why they are against the mask).
There are other options. Give everyone who has got the vaccine some money is one I've heard more than once. Maybe someone else has a different idea.
That runs contrary to good public health policy for C19 where even the fully vaccinated should follow many precautions such as masking in public and limiting number of households in close contact.
If you believe good public health policy requires that there be restrictions on gatherings even where everyone is fully vaccinated, then what do you see as the path back to full normality? Or is this just how humanity has to live forever now?
I think the "return to normality" is when the number of new cases reported each day drops to almost nothing and deaths are uncommon. Currently, in the U.S. we're about 70 thousand new cases a day, which is about where we were at the height of the second wave in mid-summer. Deaths are around 750 a day.
I think we'll get to normality eventually, but it may take longer than anyone has patience for, and that will only push it out further as people give up on social distancing and masking.
Time will tell if that's actually enough by itself to get the reproduction number less than 1. If everyone who wants a vaccination has one and yet we still have tens of thousands of new cases per day and hundreds of deaths and no downward trend, then I think continuing with masks and social distancing is going to be necessary.
I'm hoping that as the vaccination numbers go up, we'll eventually start seeing new cases drop off a cliff as the virus runs out of people to infect. (Though I suspect that we'll have problems for awhile with groups of people who hang out together and for whatever reason don't get vaccinated.)
I didn't pick +80% arbitrarily, that's where Israel has been for a bit (age +16 vaxed or recovered) and the stats are impressive. I expect the same in US unless a new more transmissible strain in the face of vaccinations emerges.
The problem for everyone else is that the vaccines aren't 100% effective. Also, we're not vaccinating children yet, and there may be some people who can't get the vaccine for medical reasons.
Another consideration is that if the virus is allowed to continue to spread, there's a real chance that it may mutate into a form that isn't stopped by the vaccine, and then we're right back where we started.
From a public health point of view, I don't see things getting back to ordinary people (and not just the foolhardy) having lunch with coworkers around the same table without masks on unless there isn't any significant amount of community spread going on.
Why does it matter how much of the US is vaccinated? For any given gathering, doesn't it only matter whether the people at that gathering are? Suppose 20,000 people, each from different households, all met at Madison Square Garden, and that they're all vaccinated. Why would that be more dangerous if nobody else in the world was vaccinated vs. if everybody else in the world was?
Look if both households are low risk and everyone has been vaccinated go ahead and meet under one roof without any masks and hug - that's fine under current recommendations. It's even looser than that, like if you unvaccinated low risk children visiting vaccinated grandparents ad so on.
Right now across US being fully vaccinated is only 80% effective against infection. When you have 20k vaxed folks meet when the virus is endemic in the pop, some of those vaxed folks will be infected and some will catch it there.
When more folks are vaxed there will be less of the virus circulating and then that calculation then changes. It's all about how prevalent the virus is in the community to begin with assuming no strains appear that dramatically reduce the effectiveness of the vax.
We've never taken such an attitude for any other endemic respiratory pathogen in existence, and for good reason. It's completely absurd and ignores not only the important health benefits of regular social contact, including direct physical contact, as well as the literal benefits of exchanging pathogens with others.
You and the other commenters arguing your "side" also seem to completely ignore the phenomenom of natural immunity, which I think very obviously has been fallaciously denied by "experts" precisely because they want to convince everyone in the world to get this vaccine. They're already talking about yearly booster shots because most people's mental models are from Flu which has a much greater space of possible genetic configurations, whereas SARS-2 is relatively constrained in how it can evolve and thus should not need a yearly booster if this weren't just about making absurd amounts of money (which it is).
In any case, you should know that there are people like me - very much in the minority - who refuse to submit to such absurdities and will keep fighting. We will continue to be literally as well as metaphorically discriminated against until your "side" stops brainwashing people into a completely disproportionate response to an endemic respiratory virus.
You can stay inside with a mask on while vaccinated all you want. Be my guest. But please stop advocating for and/or supporting mandates and restrictions on the rest of us who have not caught your specific strain of agoraphobia, germaphobia, OCD and misanthropy.
Sure we will get natural immunity, the difference between other diseases respiratory or otherwise is its effectiveness in killing people combined with its transmission. It is in the Goldilocks zone for deadliness and transmission , highly deadly diseases like Nipha or Ebola are easier to keep from being an pandemic precisely because they are so deadly. They still require a strong and immediate response to keep it in control and local.
The annual flu shot is not just for you, it is also to prevent you transmitting what is probably harmless to you but deadly to immuno-compromised like the elderly, they don't have ability to get natural immunity. Pneumonia is significant cause of death amongst senior citizens.
If 600,000 people dying U.S alone in the last year, does not convince you to stay masked and safe and follow some simple instructions for few more months until everyone is vaccinated even if you don't believe in them personally, nothing is going to.
It is more dangerous because people who are vaccinated will take more risks and do less social distancing etc which in turn will harm others.
There is no definitive answer whether vaccine will reduce transmission. Those 20,000 people will definitely meet un-vaccinated people in next 10-12 days, and then may pass the disease to them.
Many people cannot get the vaccine, because it is not open yet to them, or have other conditions. So it is selfish for vaccinated people to behave as though the rest of the population does not exist.
There is also the worry that longer the disease lingers anywhere in the world, there can be mutations which are immune to current vaccines, such an mutation could be disastrous as people will loose trust in the vaccine and a second vaccine even when available will have lesser adoption than now . It could become a vicious cycle where there is third mutation, and this then becomes like the flu shots ( but lot more deadlier)
Young people shouldn't be getting the vaccine period. There is no reason to give every single person who will have children in the future an experimental vaccine for a virus they are at no serious risk from. The long tail risk on that is absolutely insane.
Not exactly sure what procreation has to do with anything.
Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax. Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.
Total COVID deaths for people aged 0-17 in the USA are 246 so far.
That's not that many. Despite my wife and I getting vaccinated, I'm not completely sure what the correct answer is for our kids.
To put those numbers into perspective, more kids die from the flu in any given year (despite vaccination!). And far more kids die from car related accidents, and cars are a daily fact of life here.
I'm also interested in the other longer term effects of COVID on kids, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there about it.
You talk as if it's a clear cut answer. Given the numbers involved I don't see how it can be.
(Not the one you responded to) I know what an mRNA vaccine is and the only clearcut answer is that "yes, obviously the long-tail risks of mRNA vaccines could outpace the long-tail risk of COVID-19". The statement is also true when you say "...COVID-19 could outpace...mRNA vaccines" as well, if that's not clear.
BTW the "long tail" of COVID-19 in children is totally unproven and the whole "long haulers" phenomenom is likely (a) a small part normal post-viral fatigue which we see with basically any virus, and (b) mostly psychosomatic/psychogenic illness.
That uncertainty is exactly the point. It's possible that the cure could be worse than the disease, but we have every reason to believe that it won't be in the long-term, and that in fact the long-term prospects from COVID-19 are probably much worse than any of the vaccines. And in the short-term the question is decided quite clearly.
So when faced with the choice of vaccine or virus, it should be a foregone conclusion.
> Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.
It absolutely could, and that should be self-evident.
> Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax.
This is just not true. The risk of death in children from COVID-19 is so low you literally should not ever worry about it. If you want to compare numbers in an academic sense go ahead, but the fact that actual adults are wasting valuable cognitive and emotional energy worrying about their kids is a great tragedy.
The recorded COVID-19 deaths in children are, by the way, using the absurd definition of a COVID-19 case/death that most of the western world is using; a definition where having PCR-confirmed SARS-2 infection means that ANY death is classified as a COVID death. This is not how this is supposed to work; there is supposed to be a distinction between the virus and the disease, but we define the disease as merely having the virus! It's completely absurd. Indeed I'm writing an article about this concept (pathological vs physiological) right now
Yes we do? The mRNA vaccines cause your body to produce the coronavirus spike protein. That is the beauty of an mRNA vaccine – the cure literally cannot be worse than the disease, because the cure is just a subset of the disease. Anything these mRNA vaccines do to your gametes would also be done (and worse) by COVID-19 itself, so... definitely get vaxxed with an mRNA vaccine if you're worried about long-tail risk. Also this is the J&J vaccine which is viral vector, not mRNA (Moderna/Pfizer).
We don't know that it has no other effect. We don't know all of the circumstances where reverse transcription can happen in the human body. This kind of epistemic arrogance is dangerous and is how we ended up with thalidomide causing mass birth defects and other such disasters.
This is not, in any way, similar to thalidomide. Thalidomide was an issue because it is enantiomeric and different effects were caused by each enantiomer, only one of which was noticed. That is not an issue here, as we are talking about proteins. The primary difference though is that there was no treatment imperative with thalidomide, but there is with this.
Again, we are talking about introducing something that is guaranteed to be in your body anyway if you contract COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 is viral to the point where, without perpetual lockdowns/mask-wearing/vaccinations, you will get it. So it is still definitely better to get vaccinated, at least with an mRNA vaccine – please stop spreading FUD. Your concerns could be more warranted for vaccines like J&J which use modified viral vectors, but again, exceedingly unlikely that this could be any worse than the virus itself.
You're talking what we learned after the fact about thalidomide. And I'm obviously not saying thalidomide and the mRNA vaccines are similar in their actions in any way. I'm just saying we don't know what injecting a bunch of synthetic spike protein mRNA (a huge percent of which has errors) into your body might do. The same way we didn't know what thalidomide might do, we don't know what this might do. We are not at the level of knowledge about the human body where we can rule out unexpected effects. That is why we have a very stringent drug and vaccine testing regime.
I think the point parent is making is slightly different. Let me try to re-phrase it negatively: What we don't know about mRNA vaccines we don't know about SARS-CoV-2 either. Our state of knowledge of the effects of SARS-Cov-2 will soon be eclipsed by our knowledge of the effects of mRNA vaccines. SARS-Cov-2 is only 6 months older than the mRNA vaccines. There will always be unknown unknowns for both mRNA vaccines and SARS-Cov-2.
We’ve given the mRNA vaccines to enough people to be highly confident that your fears are ungrounded. The mRNA doesn’t linger more than a few hours. People received the vaccine a year ago.
The US has administered 250 million shots, of which 7 million were J&J. These numbers, and the fact that the mRNA started trials earlier makes me proportionately less worried about surprise side effects for the mRNA shots.
Probably none, the tricky part is how it affects an embryo because that's an known unknown of a lot of this molecular biology/medicine things. It's already counter-indicated for pregnant women though.
I'm not qualified to comment on whether or not that is a valid concern, but the vaccine we're discussing here (J&J) uses a modified viral vector, as do the AstraZeneca and Gamaleya vaccines.
Correct. I meant the mRNA vaccines. The AZ & J&J vaccines don't have that same concern, but I'd still worry about an untested vaccine. There is really no good reason for the young and healthy to get the vaccine yet or any time soon.
At the moment we're shitting on the younger generation even harder than usual, by denying them the opportunity to go out, meet people and generally enjoy their youth. Doing that for a year was maybe justified, but it is just totally unfair to carry on for an extended period.
To open up again we need to bring the demand on healthcare services down and we need to do it sustainably, i.e. in a way which prevents another exponential spike. If we can achieve that aim without mass vaccination of healthy young people then great, of course, let's do that. But: if the only way to squash this thing and return everyone to a somewhat normal life turns out to be to keep vaccinating until we get right down to the twenty year olds, shouldn't we do so -- for their sake as much as everyone else's?
In my neck of the woods, kids are in school and going to wrestling tournaments and before that hockey tournaments that got to be superspreader events. We're certainly not denying kids sports where I am, or the opportunity to infect their older family members (yay!).
False dichotomy. If the 20 year olds all get covid, almost nothing bad will happen. So just let them catch it. If the at-risk people are all vaccinated, then it's not a big deal.
Almost nothing bad will happen—with the current variants. Uncontrolled spread in a sub population will almost certainly lead to new variants emerging. Given the reduced effectiveness of current vaccines against certain variants, this is reckless.
Very true! But that is no different than flu and cold mutations year to year. The only reason we are worried about covid is the high death rate for some populations. Otherwise, we would not have done any lock downs or mask mandates.
Continuous mutation of common viruses is the background risk that human beings have evolved over three billion years to withstand as a species. That is different than a completely novel man-made intervention.
This sounds like special pleading to me. We have two new possible things that could be introduced to your body - a vaccine or the virus.
In neither case is it possible to know what hidden long-term effects they could have on you. But the virus is known to kill and maim people in the short-term at a much higher rate than the vaccine, which is known to protect you from the virus.
I don't think it's a special pleading. Covid is a nasty coronavirus but it is ultimately an incremental change in a very widespread kind of virus that humans have coexisted with forever. Human beings have evolved to survive this kind of thing as a species. This is the kind of risk that a species has to be equipped to survive to have made it this far. Which is not to say that a virus can't come around and wipe us all out, but it would be a truly extraordinary event.
For all we know, mRNA vaccines can alter your gametes. We don't know because this is the first time we ever use them. They aren't like viruses or weakened viruses. They are just a massive injection of genetic material (much of it deformed) that encodes a single foreign protein. No human being has ever had such a thing done to them until very recently. mRNA vaccines are not part of any natural process that modern humans or our ancestors have had to withstand to get to the present day.
Viruses are like super mRNA vaccines. They commandeer your cells not to just create a single protein, but to create a bunch of proteins in order to form new viruses. And unlike mRNA, they reproduce and can stay in your body for months or years. I don't see the huge new risk.
I don't know why you have this special concern about the gametes. In any case, if there's a significant bump in miscarriages / infertility from the vaccine, we'll probably know very soon, now that lots of younger people are being vaccinated.
The fact that the vaccines create just a single spike protein and the real virus creates much more is actually one of the issues.
First: does the rate at which the cells are made to artificially produce spike protein follow a different curve than the rate at which SARS-2 would? i.e. could mRNA vaccination cause a much more aggressive "inflammatory cliff", thus the huge percentage of "mild" adverse reactions (mild meaning, you feel like death for a day but end up fine with no detectable long-term issues)? It's possible.
And switching to efficacy, while personally I think resistance to the spike protein alone will be sufficient, because SARS-2 does not have the same ability to mutate/evolve the way Influenza does (for example, I can't imagine SARS-2 evolving away from the spike protein), it's very possible that the diverse epitopes produced by real SARS-2 infection give a much more robust and enduring immunity.
Your point about efficacy is not currently born out by the data, AFAIK. Seems like re-infection after COVID is much higher than infection after vaccine.
I have special concern about gametes because it’s one thing to risk the health of currently living people, but it’s another to risk the gene pool going forward into eternity.
> Difference is that I know person that got COVID in November and now has issues with memory.
> I don't know a single person that has that after flue and cold - and those are with us much longer.
Look into ME/CFS, whose existence is still contested (or rather I should say, whether it's a physical or psychogenic illness is disputed). I know you're just speaking anecdotally but just wanted to mention that post-viral issues (fatigue, memory, etc) absolutely does happen.
> As for viruses mutations etc. do we for sure know that this one is not man made?
At most SARS-2 is the result of extensive gain of function research on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13. I don't know any credible individual that thinks it's fully artificial / manmade (and to be clear, my definition of "credible" is not the "anyone who agrees with the WHO/CDC and nobody else" definition that the establishment relies on).
Personally I think it's more likely that SARS-2 was GoF'd into existence rather than was a purely natural zoonotic leap, whereas I think the probability that it was fully artificial is almost zero.
If we pick the 25-29 year olds and an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.01% [1] it's still 13.5M x 0.01% = 1,350 deaths. It's not a lot by any means, but it's not 'almost nothing' either.
This is the worst case scenario of cause, sibling comment has already mentioned long Covid, where we don't know prevalence precisely.
I'm aware I've picked the 'worse half' of the 20 year olds, 20-24 will fare better obviously.
No, and no one had any reason to think that thalidomide would cause mass birth defects. This is why we have such long testing periods for vaccines and drugs in general. We also go through extra testing before approving things for pregnant women. We don't know what we don't know. Modern medicine is impressive, but we must maintain epistemic humility.
(A) vaccination means less social distancing sooner. Lots of people are interested that.
(B) covid-19 might very well become endemic. Like how the common cold is always around. It's not so bad if we're vaccinated. But for those that don't get vaccinated hurd immunity might not cover them.
In practice: I think we just need to be honest about the risk of vaccines. And say that taking it is the patriotic thing to do :)
> vaccination means less social distancing sooner.
i guess you can put it like that.
from my understanding the vaccines do reduce the transmissibility of the virus, but they do not lower it to zero [0]. you can still get the virus, but with the vaccine your chances of needing hospitalisation drop to zero [1].
i guess this is why you still need to wear a mask, and still need to socially distance even if you are vaccinated [2].
> from my understanding the vaccines do reduce the transmissibility of the virus
Yeah, but once vaccinated you can start to worry less. And surely we'll see things open up to those who are vaccinated.
The fact that it's possibly still transmissible by vaccinated people is probably the reason why we all need to get vaccinated, and there is no hurd immunity to be gained :/
No vaccine ever reduces transmissibility to zero. Vaccines prime your immune system to fight off the invader as quickly as possible, but they are not a magic shield that prevents the invader from ever entering your system. And if it is in your system, it is of course possible to transmit it.
