If the virus hadn’t mutated from alpha to delta, and then to omega — each of those could have achieved essentially hersd immunity. Unfortunately it mutated before we could tamp it down everywhere. That doesn’t make the people who said vaccines could end the mess wrong, just means we all got unlucky.
Even given (for the sake of argument) that there was cause for hope at some point, that's not an excuse to cling to that hope indefinitely, especially when it demands the violation of other people's bodily autonomy. That hope is dead, and people must let it rest.
More Americans died in the last month from Covid than died in the Vietnam war… to me, that’s an unacceptable toll. I get that people differ in that opinion but it can’t be too surprising that people really aren’t okay with that level of sustained death as the “end game” of this.
It won't keep up like this. It is inevitable that sooner or later everybody will have been infected at least once. Covid-19 will have become just another seasonal respiratory infection that everyone catches for the first time when they're young and the few bad cases will almost all be successfully handled with medicine. Some people may keep getting yearly vaccinations, like so many do with influenza. Most probably won't. Life will largely return to what it was, except for what our experiences during this time has done to our outlook in life.
This is the conclusion I have come to for myself. I got the initial COVID vaccine but the flu vaccine doesn't seem worth it for me and I won't be getting any boosters or further vaccines.
> but the flu vaccine doesn't seem worth it for me
Such a confusing, yet common stance. The flu vaccine is free, risk is essentially nil, and it reduces your chance of death across the board[1]:
> At a median follow‐up duration of 19.5 months, influenza vaccine was associated with a lower risk of all‐cause mortality (RR, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.60–0.93 [P=0.01]), cardiovascular mortality (RR, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.80–0.84 [P<0.001]), and major adverse cardiovascular events (RR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.80–0.94 [P<0.001]) compared with control. The use of the influenza vaccine was not associated with a statistically significant reduction of myocardial infarction (RR, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.49–1.09 [P=0.12]) compared with control.
Let’s just leave it to health insurance providers to raise your premiums, then. If you believe in personal responsibility, that’s how the consequences of your decision will play out should you need hospitalization for your future immune-escaping variant infection.
Consider if your first impulse is to deny the possibility of that last point. You’re probably not an evolutionary virologist, so the truth is you have no idea which mutations are next. Perhaps you think T-cell immunity will save you, but omicron already escapes >50% of T-cell antibody types in 21% of vaccinated or infected people. Will we develop better cross-neutralizing antibodies from omicron or will antigen imprinting doom us to suffering wave after wave of new variants, due to maintaining variant-specific immunity only?
I bet that feeling of self-righteousness is satisfying, isn’t it? Perhaps that’s because blaming other humans subconsciously lets you continue the illusion that humans were ever in control of the pandemic in the first place or that a real risk ever existed for you. Anger is a lot more comfortable than existential anxiety.
But the truth is, it’s not “the man” who’s keeping you down at all — the pandemic limitations you feel right now are the libertarian equivalent to your fist being restrained from meeting your neighbor’s nose.
Due to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), medical insurers aren't legally allowed to set premiums based on vaccination status. But I would still encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated regardless of insurance issues.
>Cellular immunity is highly durable and effective.
The question is not how long the immunity lasts (based on original SARS patients, probably multiple decades to a lifetime), but whether affinity-matured T-cells can sufficiently cover the antigen-space of future ACE2-binding spike proteins.
Somatic hypermutation might still be too complex to model computationally to answer that question outright.
Do you know whether this question is answerable in another way?
It’s just very difficult to make people care about the flu. It’s something they might experience a couple times in their lives and no one really expects to die from it.
It’s impressive annual vaccination rates are as high as they are.
The fact that the group of participants in the study was of a certain age range means that the study says nothing about the result for people outside of that age range.
Much more and better explanation about flu shots here:
That's exactly what I'm saying. The study tells me something about that age range, and nothing about anyone else. So it tells me that it's a good idea to get a flu shot when you reach that age range. What exactly are you trying to say???
> So it tells me that it's a good idea to get a flu shot when you reach that age range.
No, that's not what it tells you. Really, I can't help you if an article that spells this stuff out in great detail results in a response that indicates that you have not understood it, they spent a lot more time on this than I will be able to do in this context.
... The study subjects were in that age range, were they not? I truly don't understand how you could draw conclusions about how a young person should approach flu shots from this study, and I'm not approaching this from a malicious place. If you're not going to converse in good faith, this is probably not the place for you.
Not anti vax, not that it should matter for this argument.
The one part you left out is that there is a genetic component, so the first few ways were a form of selection against people who couldn't handle covid. It seems likely the the remaining population is much less susceptible to dying in future waves.
Flu would have looked like this the first time around, except when it arose, people didn't fly around the world or even really move a few miles from their home most of the time, which acted as a natural way to reduce outbreaks.
What months? Months after omicron appearance? It has been here just about 2 months and boosters are still important because even though omicron is very fairly different from each previous variant we know, vaccine induced immunity still can recognize it after being boosted (it is related to antibody affinity if you want to know more).
Most importantly, vaccine induced immunity still protects against severe disease that requires hospitalization.
More importantly, if the herd immunity is the question - omicron and vaccination might provide very robust immune protection.
Another thing to keep in mind - because omicron was so successful, it may have blocked the appearance of a new variant that is a derivative of it and the next similar variant that might appear that is neither some pre-omicron derivative nor close to omicron.
Vaccination with the original variant is not a bad bet because it is most likely just in the middle of every possible derivation from it.
