once vaccinated, you will still get covid. due to vacciation, symptoms should be less severe and easier to fight off. Yes, you can still transmit if you have it. Should be a fairly obvious question to answer.
The longer answer: contagion is caused by the emission of viral particles, which have been mass-produced by infected cells in your body. The question is if your immune system will suppress the viral infection before there is enough viral matter produced to cause further infection. Whether or not this happen is heavily influenced by specific details of how your immune system has kicked into gear, and immune systems are unfortunately one of the biological systems that varies most from individual to individual.
Shortening is a likely outcome. But in theory it's even possible that the immune response prepared by the vaccine only prevents virus spread to organs where we notice symptoms but does not clear out those places that the virus colonizes during the pre-symptomatic infectivity phase that seems to be the super-power of this particular virus. And that this success prevents another immune response that would otherwise clear out those spreading springboards. Of course this perfect storm of what could be called "vaccine enhanced infectivity" is an extremely unlikely scenario, but at least weak forms of it that cause longer infectivity, but not much longer or even permanent infectivity could remain undetected for years.
The reason for all this uncertainty is simple: testing for infectivity doesn't scale, definitely not enough to continuously observe test groups large enough to experience cases.
But Ithink there is hope: chances are someone is designing a study that recruits a number vaccinated that live together with someone unvaccinated. Then in case their unvaccinated peer falls ill you can observe the vaccinated one, that should be well in the test scaling envelope. We know the attack rate in unvaccinated households and can compare.
If the vaccine is only useful for reducing COVID severity and doesn't help prevent spread, then I see no reason why it should be required for anyone for whom an infection is unlikely to result in hospitalization, i.e. anyone outside the well known high risk groups.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. I think your logic is sound. Typically vaccinations don't work this way though. AFAIK contagion is proportional to viral load which is inversely proportional to immune response (via some complex function over time from initial infection).
I certainly agree that vaccinations typically don't work this way, which is why I find it very odd that there seems to be an effort to quickly handwave away these uncertainties with "well all vaccines are like this."
I would expect once you get your vaccination this to be a non-issue. Like any other viruses that I'm vaccinated against, if I catch it my immune system would destroy it before I become a source myself. I mean isn't that the whole purpose of a vaccine?
Also I do understand that is only 90% efficacy, which means if I am among the unlucky 10% then I'll become infected and become both a spreader and most likely develop the disease.
I'd be very interested in getting vaccinated against the virus once it's been released.
I'd prefer, however, to just get the vaccine so that if I catch it my immune system would destroy it before I become a source myself. I wish they'd make an option (perhaps at a significantly higher cost) so that you can get the vaccine injection without miscellaneous non-vaccine compounds injected in the solution as well.
I'm the opposite of a biology expert, but from what I've read, the "miscellaneous non-vaccine compounds" in the solution are adjuvants which make the vaccine more effective by provoking the immune system into a response. Without those "non-vaccine compounds" the vaccine itself could be no more effective than a shot of sterile saline - which itself is probably another "non-vaccine compound."
Perhaps if you're referring to something else you could spell it out.
Until now the line I have kept hearing is that there is no such thing as herd immunity except that which is realized through universal immunization.
Now that we're not sure the vaccine will actually work in this way, the new line of reasoning is "well it's just supposed to protect you individually from the disease, not stop it from spreading."
> Until now the line I have kept hearing is that there is no such thing as herd immunity except that which is realized through universal immunization.
You were either hearing the wrong information or misunderstanding it. Herd immunity is absolutely real, and can occur if a virus infects enough people (or enough people are vaccinated). When more people are immune, it will be harder for the virus to spread to a new host. When enough are immune, the virus dies out.
But since the death rate of COVID is so high, encouraging people to go outside and get infected in the name of achieving herd immunity (an approach often spread by the right wing) would likely cause millions of deaths, especially because the US has limited hospital capacity. This isn't even mentioning that we don't know the long-term effects of the hundreds of millions of others who would have recovered from COVID.
Herd immunity through vaccination will kill or harm very few people in comparison, given that only 1 in a million suffer side effects from vaccines on average.
> You were either hearing the wrong information or misunderstanding it. Herd immunity is absolutely real, and can occur if a virus infects enough people (or enough people are vaccinated).
I was hearing it from people arguing against the Swedish approach of managing the virus without lockdowns. "Encouraging people to go out and get infected" (i.e. actively trying to accelerate the spread and doing nothing to minimize exposure for high risk groups) is not something I see being seriously advocated even by lockdown opponents, though it is often used as a strawman version of their arguments.
Yes, this is an exaggeration, but it's not too far from what some people are suggesting. The fact is, without containment measures, there will likely be hundreds of thousands of needless deaths.
There will be millions of needless deaths. Without containment measures, you no longer have hospitals (either they're full, or the staff are burned out and quit, probably both) for any life-threatening conditions.
The staff thing is the one people seem to completely not get: hospital staff are under absolutely no obligations to keep working overtime shifts. They can in fact simply decide "I'm done" walk off the job and go live in a cabin. Then you get to wait 24 years till we can grow and train some more, minimum.
> Without containment measures, you no longer have hospitals (either they're full, or the staff are burned out and quit, probably both) for any life-threatening conditions.
Doesn't seem to be the case so far in Sweden. In fact Minnesota's per-capita rate of COVID deaths just surpassed Sweden's even though they've done much more in the way of lockdowns. Seem to be some confounding variables at play here besides "are you locked down or not?"
> They can in fact simply decide "I'm done" walk off the job and go live in a cabin.
This is a fantasy scenario. Most nurses are probably in no financial position to do this and leaving to find another job is a dicey prospect right now. I agree that we should not put the hospitals or their staff under undue stress which is why it's such a crime that COVID is being used for cover to furlough staff and impose budget cuts.
> Doesn't seem to be the case so far in Sweden. In fact Minnesota's per-capita rate of COVID deaths just surpassed Sweden's even though they've done much more in the way of lockdowns.
According to Oxford and NYTimes, Minnesota has relatively lax lockdowns compared to other states: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/18/us/covid-stat.... States in the US with more lockdowns also have lower hospitalization and case rates, which suggests that lockdowns are at least correlated with lower infections. To prove causation, you might want more evidence, but to me the mechanism of how lockdowns prevent infections is pretty clear.
This is lazy analysis. Like another responder said, national averages don't matter much when individual cities are being overwhelmed. A tech analogy: You can't say that your service is healthy just because its median latency is 50ms. If the p99 latency is a minute, then your service has performance issues.
Second, because of containment measures, the prevalence of the cold and flu (and other contagious diseases) has also gone down. 2019 is not the correct baseline to make a comparison -- 2019 with lockdowns (and no COVID) would be.
Herd immunity through infection without a vaccine has never been a serious concept. The scientific community only produced any literature on it in response to requests by governments about what would happen if they did absolutely nothing.
During his town hall before the election, Trump even claimed that "over period of time... [developing] a herd mentality" would cause the coronavirus to "go away." From context, a reasonable viewer could assume that Trump meant "herd immunity."
Who is promoting this "new line of reasoning"? I don't hear that at all. OP here was simply stating that the vaccine is not 100% effective, a completely different point than the one you threw out as a response.
I hate to be that person, but I'm personally more worried about the virus mutating under the increased selection pressure. We only defeated polio with a >99% effective vaccine, and the research for this vaccine isn't even available.
Unlike older vaccines (such as polio vaccine) which generally used weakened or killed whole virus particles (and which occasionally produced infectious cases, due to the virus not being as weak or dead as intended), this vaccine contains no whole virus particles and thus cannot result in an infectious case.
It contains RNA that cause the patient's cells to emit proteins normally produced by the viral infection (which can then be recognized by the immune system), but contains none of the genetic material required to produce standalone infectious virus particles.
This is a new thing; these will the first vaccines using this technology to be approved.
The chairman likely isn't worried about the vaccine itself producing infections, but rather does not know whether a vaccinated patient might also develop an active infection before the vaccine takes effect.
The Pfizer chairman is saying he doesn't know whether you can get a spreadable COVID-19 infection after the vaccine has been administered, but before it takes full effect.
That's an entirely different thing from the vaccination CAUSING an infectious case of COVID-19.
I agree. Let's not inject people with experimental vaccines rushed to market under significant political pressure. Let's not pressure strangers' decisions either way.
Far more money in this career path. I've made more some days writing junk code than I ever made in a year in a lab. It's easy to see why some scientists might be incentivised by external factors...
> Let's not inject people with experimental vaccines rushed to market under significant political pressure.
I'm less worried about political pressure, and more worried about the very real pressure being applied by the virus. There have been tests which have been safe thus far, and in my opinion there is less risk in moving forward with testing and distribution of the vaccines then not doing so.
> Let's not pressure strangers' decisions either way.
I'm of mixed feelings on this, and my overall opinion is that it depends on who all is able to take the vaccine.
If there are few restrictions, maybe this would be okay. However, if there are enough restrictions that there will be a sizable number of people who cannot take it, we need to get as many as possible out to try to protect them.
[Edit: This is referring to legal pressure. I am of the opinion that it is not unreasonable to encourage others to take vaccines if they are able.]
> Far more money in this career path. I've made more some days writing junk code than I ever made in a year in a lab. It's easy to see why some scientists might be incentivised by external factors...
First of all, I'd like to apologize for my ad hominem attack earlier. That was uncalled for.
Second, I find it hard to believe that scientists would be pushed to do something actually dangerous on this sort of scale, and like I said earlier, I find the idea of not combating the virus more dangerous then moving forward as quickly with vaccines as can be safely done. However, it's quite possible that I just have too much faith left in humanity.
The risks far outweigh the rewards. We're deliberately injecting ourselves with foreign genetic material that hijacks our cells' machinery to produce viral proteins by design. For my consent, I don't have anywhere near enough faith yet in the people hastily developing such technology, their employers striving to be first to market, or the bureaucrats desperate to give their electorates the impression that they have everything under control.
Maybe if I lived in a large, diverse city, I would be forced to consider it (I would far more likely move my family somewhere safer). But where I am fortunate to live, it makes absolutely no sense.
Pruning gene lines from the gene pool only benefits the surviving individuals if it leaves resources on the table for these survivors to be fruitful and multiply, growing to exploit their new niche.
If there are variants of COVID-19 the vaccine doesn't protect against, is there any reason to think they would have been crowded out by the original variants? Wouldn't their ability to bypass immunity to the original version apply equally well to the immunity gained as a result of sickness as to the immunity gained from a vaccine?
Yeah, but isn't that the vaccine only provoking an immune response that leads to immunity in 90-95% of the people to whom it is administered? Not that the immunity, when gained, is less?
I have no clue, I'm not an expert. I just don't see any discussion on this topic and it concerns me. Historically, I don't see any vaccine which was effective against such a virulent virus, unless it had a much higher rate of immunity. I'd gamble on 5% odds if the reward was high enough, so 95% immunity sounds good but it's only half as strong 97.5% immunity, for example.
I do know that the immunity may only be temporary--1 out of 20 cases of the most virulent strains may then have a larger substrate to mutate within, but I'm not sure if you can get many strains at once, for example. I do know that the flu mutates each year, and I guess I'm basing this whole "increased selection pressure could cause more mutations" on that fact. When there is less available space for the virus to propagate, it's only chance of survival is to be able to infect those who are already immune.
In my opinion, we have an immune system crisis here--we need to focus on eating better and exercising more: we have to fight this virus with every tool we've got, but if we wait a few more months it's possible that we'll get a stronger vaccine. I suspect that's why it ended sooner in certain places--I doubt any measure we can take have had any real effect due to the virulence of COVID--it's in the air and on surfaces and lives there for days, and is transmitted by asymptomatic carriers--so your uber eats driver driving in their car with the AC will infect your food etc.
I certainly intend to stay masked up post-jab(s). I think a month or so after the final dose it will be at the point where any viral load i might be spreading would be pretty much trustable to be at trivial levels, so that's my minimum duration. After that, I'll continue to follow public guidance from local health folks.
I don't mind masking up for flights/travel for a bit, or whatever, either, if it shakes out that way. If i could trade "wear a mask because it works and lots of people died" for "take off your shoes to fly because it's theater, one guy tried it 15 years ago and it didn't work", I'd do it in a heartbeat.
That’s an excellent point about the shoes that I hadn’t put together. I think the vast majority of us think the shoe thing is stupid but we do it cause it’s that or not fly.
If only we could get mandated masks, I think we’d already be out of the woods. Although I regularly see <2 unmasked folks total in the grocery stores around me, it’s a fairly liberal area so I’m just rambling now so have a good safe holiday time.
Oh wow. I don’t see any unmasked people at grocery stores near San Francisco. I saw one woman who had her mask down and the store called police because she didn’t put it back on when asked.
It doesn't. The masks are there only for psychological comfort, they're no more effective in preventing an autoimmune disease like covid than a tin foil hat.
There's a clever little meme floating about showing a perfectly normal, happy, healthy, unmasked family with the caption "conspiracy theorists" and then in the adjacent panel a visibly paranoid person with a mask and face shield captioned "normal person".
Being on the periphery of groups you'd likely describe as "conspiracy theorists", practically all of this is strawmanning.
This has become more of a political issue than a scientific issue. I saw a video of a doctor(?) streaming a video alone in his own home in Germany, when armed police stormed his home and arrested him for objecting to the narrative. That's not science. Anyway, can we really blame the common man for distrusting "science" when so much of it has become a shallow tool for political/social activism in recent years?
Nobody is refusing vaccines without reason. That you think it is without reason is either disingenuous or uninformed. And I'd add that the idea that people should accept an injection simply because they can't present a satisfactory reason for refusal is pernicious. The burden is not on them.
There are some who believe in wide scale fraud without evidence, I suppose, but that's a small minority. Most are simply unsatisfied by the evidence in favour, and sensibly don't take the prospect of a mysterious injection lightly. Regardless, I would argue there are far more people who believe in large scale competent benevolence with no evidence (or even evidence to the contrary).
Amazing to see you get so many downvotes for this post. The modern conception of "conspiracy theory" really is just nothing more than a cudgel, a rhetorical trick to deflect sensible questions posed of official narratives and procedures by putting them in a bucket with off-the-wall absurdities.
> Being on the periphery of groups you'd likely describe as "conspiracy theorists" (...)
There's no need for so many weasel words.
You are talking about a group which insists in spreading theories about how a phenomenon is supposed to be the result of a major conspiracy, and thus insist that the phenomenon does not exist at all.
Back in the day, pre-2020, conspiracy theorists were characterized as tending to avoid human contact and social interactions because they couldn't trust who was in on the conspiracy and happy families were characterized as normal people because there were a lot of them.
The meme highlights the big change in 2020 in which most people have accepted the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic and seek to reduce transmission risk by wearing a mask, avoiding close human contact and socially interactions. People that are not taking these precautions are justifying their actions to not wear masks by claiming that there is a conspiracy and that Covid-19 is all made up. Because they are not socially distancing or wearing masks they look like pre-2020 normal people, at least until they end up in the ICU.
Being vaccinated doesn't mean your body instantly kills any virus it comes in contact with. It can still use your body to replicate and spread until your immune system properly tidies it up.
This is a perfectly reasonable statement that is being blown out of proportion. He is speaking in a scientifically accurate and narrow way - they don't know that yet, those studies have not been completed. That doesn't mean you can, or that it is even likely or probable that you can, just that they don't have results saying you can't yet. That is because those results inherently take longer than studying the effecicacy of the vaccine...because people have to get the vaccine, get exposed, and then the difficult task of tracking any potential infections that they transmit. That science is even harder than what has happened through the vaccine trials. They are studying and will know the answer to it.
The headline is click bait and I'm disappointed in HN here...'we don't know' is a statement that we should laud and appreciate scientists for making, not use as a form of propaganda.
I would say that vaccines work to prepare the immune system to fight a specific threat, but that doesn't mean the virus or the disease disappears. It just mean that the infection's impact is mitigated on the individual and, with time, on the population.
This needs to stop being sensationalized. Vaccine studies target something simple and easy to measure... whether it prevents Covid symptoms. That’s the hypothesis being tested. It is very likely that it also builds up your immune system to fight the virus such that you don’t spread it. But testing that hypothesis is very hard and not practical. He’s not saying you will spread it, just that strictly speaking, the trials didn’t test for that. We’ll have a better sense of it once the vaccine is widely used though.
I've seen this point made repeatedly, but haven't seen what scientists think is LIKELY -- based on similar vaccines, based on initial data, whatever.
I don't know if scientists GENUINELY have no clue, or if maybe we think it'll likely be good news but can't say it yet because we're worried that people will get a vaccine and then behave irresponsibly.
It sounds like we're going to start giving this vaccine out without certainty on this point, so maybe give a sense of likelihoods for the possibilities. Maybe Pfizer can't because of lawsuits or something, but experts could certainly weigh in for articles like this. It seems like we're afraid of trusting people with the best info we have because we're worried they'll stop wearing masks and throw parties and such. I don't think withholding info is a great way to build trust.
Health experts should feel empowered to say "We think X but only with (let's say) 10% certainty" because there's no study specifically on this topic for COVID. They can always add "without 100% certainty we need to all continue to wear masks because that the stakes are so severe on hospitalizations and death."
Instead, it seems like they hold back info out of concern the public cannot be trusted.
Scientists will never go on record saying what they think is likely without having data which says "60% occurrence rate". Because without data, it's just conjecture and guesswork - and they're very likely to be catastrophically wrong, but have their word taken as gospel (then later used as "see scientists are wrong so <totally unfounded claim with no experience backing it> could be just as right!")
Nobody is asking scientists to say anything without data. What scientists COULD do, for example, is explain what happens with other vaccines, with other viruses.
The less questionable information that circulates, the better. There are already many conspiracy theories about this vaccine. Scientists shouldn't be out there causing more confusion or giving people a kernel of doubt that they can blow up into another conspiracy theory.
Is it your take that public health officials shouldn't have been recommending masks before studies came out specifically on covid?
Or should they have followed scientists from Asian nations that said to wear them because even though we don't have all the info, it looks a lot like other viruses we've seen where masks were helpful?
I'm really sick of seeing the media either pretend to be willfully ignorant of the way science works for the sake of clicks or just be stupid in the first place. Until they have something akin to study data they're going to tell you they don't know. Also, "can transmit" is a pretty tough bar to clear. If the worst off 1% of vaccine recipients can transmit COVID to someone while giving them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation it would technically count as "can transmit".
It doesn't really get reported widely, but scientific studies have indicated that, logically, people who have worse cases of the virus are more contagious. [0] [1] It is highly likely that the vast majority of people given the mRNA vaccines, which are 90+% effective in eliminating symptoms, will be very minimally contagious. Studies are pending, but there's no reason to believe that teaching your immune system to destroy the virus wouldn't also make less virus to be shed to infect other people.
From day 1 it was always very clear that although protective measures such as facemasks do protect the individual from contracting the disease, their primary value is to prevent the mask wearer from spreading it.
We're talking about a disease which is known for having week-long periods where asymptomatic/presymptomatic carriers can unknowingly spread the disease.
Think about it: why do you believe surgeons wear face masks, latex gloves, wash their hands, wear lab coats, protective shoes, and do their surgeon things in sterilized rooms?
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadNow imagine the mud is the virus. Shoes are antibodies (vaccine).
Not an exact comparison, but helps explain.
The longer answer: contagion is caused by the emission of viral particles, which have been mass-produced by infected cells in your body. The question is if your immune system will suppress the viral infection before there is enough viral matter produced to cause further infection. Whether or not this happen is heavily influenced by specific details of how your immune system has kicked into gear, and immune systems are unfortunately one of the biological systems that varies most from individual to individual.
The reason for all this uncertainty is simple: testing for infectivity doesn't scale, definitely not enough to continuously observe test groups large enough to experience cases.
But Ithink there is hope: chances are someone is designing a study that recruits a number vaccinated that live together with someone unvaccinated. Then in case their unvaccinated peer falls ill you can observe the vaccinated one, that should be well in the test scaling envelope. We know the attack rate in unvaccinated households and can compare.
Also I do understand that is only 90% efficacy, which means if I am among the unlucky 10% then I'll become infected and become both a spreader and most likely develop the disease.
I'd prefer, however, to just get the vaccine so that if I catch it my immune system would destroy it before I become a source myself. I wish they'd make an option (perhaps at a significantly higher cost) so that you can get the vaccine injection without miscellaneous non-vaccine compounds injected in the solution as well.
Perhaps if you're referring to something else you could spell it out.
Now that we're not sure the vaccine will actually work in this way, the new line of reasoning is "well it's just supposed to protect you individually from the disease, not stop it from spreading."
You were either hearing the wrong information or misunderstanding it. Herd immunity is absolutely real, and can occur if a virus infects enough people (or enough people are vaccinated). When more people are immune, it will be harder for the virus to spread to a new host. When enough are immune, the virus dies out.
But since the death rate of COVID is so high, encouraging people to go outside and get infected in the name of achieving herd immunity (an approach often spread by the right wing) would likely cause millions of deaths, especially because the US has limited hospital capacity. This isn't even mentioning that we don't know the long-term effects of the hundreds of millions of others who would have recovered from COVID.
Herd immunity through vaccination will kill or harm very few people in comparison, given that only 1 in a million suffer side effects from vaccines on average.
I was hearing it from people arguing against the Swedish approach of managing the virus without lockdowns. "Encouraging people to go out and get infected" (i.e. actively trying to accelerate the spread and doing nothing to minimize exposure for high risk groups) is not something I see being seriously advocated even by lockdown opponents, though it is often used as a strawman version of their arguments.
Yes, this is an exaggeration, but it's not too far from what some people are suggesting. The fact is, without containment measures, there will likely be hundreds of thousands of needless deaths.
There will be millions of needless deaths. Without containment measures, you no longer have hospitals (either they're full, or the staff are burned out and quit, probably both) for any life-threatening conditions.
The staff thing is the one people seem to completely not get: hospital staff are under absolutely no obligations to keep working overtime shifts. They can in fact simply decide "I'm done" walk off the job and go live in a cabin. Then you get to wait 24 years till we can grow and train some more, minimum.
Doesn't seem to be the case so far in Sweden. In fact Minnesota's per-capita rate of COVID deaths just surpassed Sweden's even though they've done much more in the way of lockdowns. Seem to be some confounding variables at play here besides "are you locked down or not?"
> They can in fact simply decide "I'm done" walk off the job and go live in a cabin.
This is a fantasy scenario. Most nurses are probably in no financial position to do this and leaving to find another job is a dicey prospect right now. I agree that we should not put the hospitals or their staff under undue stress which is why it's such a crime that COVID is being used for cover to furlough staff and impose budget cuts.
The degree of hospital overcrowding seems overstated at the moment: https://twitter.com/tlowdon/status/1334565211148152832
According to Oxford and NYTimes, Minnesota has relatively lax lockdowns compared to other states: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/18/us/covid-stat.... States in the US with more lockdowns also have lower hospitalization and case rates, which suggests that lockdowns are at least correlated with lower infections. To prove causation, you might want more evidence, but to me the mechanism of how lockdowns prevent infections is pretty clear.
> The degree of hospital overcrowding seems overstated at the moment: https://twitter.com/tlowdon/status/1334565211148152832
This is lazy analysis. Like another responder said, national averages don't matter much when individual cities are being overwhelmed. A tech analogy: You can't say that your service is healthy just because its median latency is 50ms. If the p99 latency is a minute, then your service has performance issues.
Second, because of containment measures, the prevalence of the cold and flu (and other contagious diseases) has also gone down. 2019 is not the correct baseline to make a comparison -- 2019 with lockdowns (and no COVID) would be.
However, that has not stopped Trump from alluding to a herd immunity approach: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/29/trumps-be...
During his town hall before the election, Trump even claimed that "over period of time... [developing] a herd mentality" would cause the coronavirus to "go away." From context, a reasonable viewer could assume that Trump meant "herd immunity."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/09/16/trump-says-...
It contains RNA that cause the patient's cells to emit proteins normally produced by the viral infection (which can then be recognized by the immune system), but contains none of the genetic material required to produce standalone infectious virus particles.
This is a new thing; these will the first vaccines using this technology to be approved.
The chairman likely isn't worried about the vaccine itself producing infections, but rather does not know whether a vaccinated patient might also develop an active infection before the vaccine takes effect.
The Pfizer chairman is saying he doesn't know whether you can get a spreadable COVID-19 infection after the vaccine has been administered, but before it takes full effect.
That's an entirely different thing from the vaccination CAUSING an infectious case of COVID-19.
If you read carefully, you'd see that's not the concern.
Over my dead body (one way or another).
I hope any children you may have are 18.
> And I was a biomedical scientist formerly.
Well we can see why it was formerly.
> Over my dead body (one way or another).
Could we maybe avoid putting others at risk?
I agree. Let's not inject people with experimental vaccines rushed to market under significant political pressure. Let's not pressure strangers' decisions either way.
Far more money in this career path. I've made more some days writing junk code than I ever made in a year in a lab. It's easy to see why some scientists might be incentivised by external factors...
I'm less worried about political pressure, and more worried about the very real pressure being applied by the virus. There have been tests which have been safe thus far, and in my opinion there is less risk in moving forward with testing and distribution of the vaccines then not doing so.
> Let's not pressure strangers' decisions either way.
I'm of mixed feelings on this, and my overall opinion is that it depends on who all is able to take the vaccine.
If there are few restrictions, maybe this would be okay. However, if there are enough restrictions that there will be a sizable number of people who cannot take it, we need to get as many as possible out to try to protect them.
[Edit: This is referring to legal pressure. I am of the opinion that it is not unreasonable to encourage others to take vaccines if they are able.]
> Far more money in this career path. I've made more some days writing junk code than I ever made in a year in a lab. It's easy to see why some scientists might be incentivised by external factors...
First of all, I'd like to apologize for my ad hominem attack earlier. That was uncalled for.
Second, I find it hard to believe that scientists would be pushed to do something actually dangerous on this sort of scale, and like I said earlier, I find the idea of not combating the virus more dangerous then moving forward as quickly with vaccines as can be safely done. However, it's quite possible that I just have too much faith left in humanity.
Maybe if I lived in a large, diverse city, I would be forced to consider it (I would far more likely move my family somewhere safer). But where I am fortunate to live, it makes absolutely no sense.
Pruning gene lines from the gene pool only benefits the surviving individuals if it leaves resources on the table for these survivors to be fruitful and multiply, growing to exploit their new niche.
If there are variants of COVID-19 the vaccine doesn't protect against, is there any reason to think they would have been crowded out by the original variants? Wouldn't their ability to bypass immunity to the original version apply equally well to the immunity gained as a result of sickness as to the immunity gained from a vaccine?
99% effectiveness from natural immunity vs 90-95% for vaccine
I do know that the immunity may only be temporary--1 out of 20 cases of the most virulent strains may then have a larger substrate to mutate within, but I'm not sure if you can get many strains at once, for example. I do know that the flu mutates each year, and I guess I'm basing this whole "increased selection pressure could cause more mutations" on that fact. When there is less available space for the virus to propagate, it's only chance of survival is to be able to infect those who are already immune.
In my opinion, we have an immune system crisis here--we need to focus on eating better and exercising more: we have to fight this virus with every tool we've got, but if we wait a few more months it's possible that we'll get a stronger vaccine. I suspect that's why it ended sooner in certain places--I doubt any measure we can take have had any real effect due to the virulence of COVID--it's in the air and on surfaces and lives there for days, and is transmitted by asymptomatic carriers--so your uber eats driver driving in their car with the AC will infect your food etc.
> The estimated risk of infection from touching a contaminated surface was low (less than 5 in 10,000)
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.27.20220905v...
I don't mind masking up for flights/travel for a bit, or whatever, either, if it shakes out that way. If i could trade "wear a mask because it works and lots of people died" for "take off your shoes to fly because it's theater, one guy tried it 15 years ago and it didn't work", I'd do it in a heartbeat.
If only we could get mandated masks, I think we’d already be out of the woods. Although I regularly see <2 unmasked folks total in the grocery stores around me, it’s a fairly liberal area so I’m just rambling now so have a good safe holiday time.
It doesn't. The masks are there only for psychological comfort, they're no more effective in preventing an autoimmune disease like covid than a tin foil hat.
Cheap, but clever.
Now, that's "normal people", while "conspiracy theorists" are those carrying on unfazed.
Conspiracy theorists are the ones who deny science.
Conspiracy theorists are the ones who refuse vaccines without reason.
Conspiracy theorists are the ones who believe in large scale fraud with no evidence.
Conspiracy theorists are the ones who think "This virus is a hoax".
I guess any of the above could also qualify for straight up stupidity, not just conspiracy theories.
Normal, sane, people follow science and act with compassion for their fellow man.
Wear a mask. It's not hard, I do it 8 hours a day.
I apologize for the rant.
This has become more of a political issue than a scientific issue. I saw a video of a doctor(?) streaming a video alone in his own home in Germany, when armed police stormed his home and arrested him for objecting to the narrative. That's not science. Anyway, can we really blame the common man for distrusting "science" when so much of it has become a shallow tool for political/social activism in recent years?
Nobody is refusing vaccines without reason. That you think it is without reason is either disingenuous or uninformed. And I'd add that the idea that people should accept an injection simply because they can't present a satisfactory reason for refusal is pernicious. The burden is not on them.
There are some who believe in wide scale fraud without evidence, I suppose, but that's a small minority. Most are simply unsatisfied by the evidence in favour, and sensibly don't take the prospect of a mysterious injection lightly. Regardless, I would argue there are far more people who believe in large scale competent benevolence with no evidence (or even evidence to the contrary).
There's no need for so many weasel words.
You are talking about a group which insists in spreading theories about how a phenomenon is supposed to be the result of a major conspiracy, and thus insist that the phenomenon does not exist at all.
The meme highlights the big change in 2020 in which most people have accepted the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic and seek to reduce transmission risk by wearing a mask, avoiding close human contact and socially interactions. People that are not taking these precautions are justifying their actions to not wear masks by claiming that there is a conspiracy and that Covid-19 is all made up. Because they are not socially distancing or wearing masks they look like pre-2020 normal people, at least until they end up in the ICU.
The headline is click bait and I'm disappointed in HN here...'we don't know' is a statement that we should laud and appreciate scientists for making, not use as a form of propaganda.
I don't know if scientists GENUINELY have no clue, or if maybe we think it'll likely be good news but can't say it yet because we're worried that people will get a vaccine and then behave irresponsibly.
It sounds like we're going to start giving this vaccine out without certainty on this point, so maybe give a sense of likelihoods for the possibilities. Maybe Pfizer can't because of lawsuits or something, but experts could certainly weigh in for articles like this. It seems like we're afraid of trusting people with the best info we have because we're worried they'll stop wearing masks and throw parties and such. I don't think withholding info is a great way to build trust.
Health experts should feel empowered to say "We think X but only with (let's say) 10% certainty" because there's no study specifically on this topic for COVID. They can always add "without 100% certainty we need to all continue to wear masks because that the stakes are so severe on hospitalizations and death."
Instead, it seems like they hold back info out of concern the public cannot be trusted.
Or should they have followed scientists from Asian nations that said to wear them because even though we don't have all the info, it looks a lot like other viruses we've seen where masks were helpful?
It doesn't really get reported widely, but scientific studies have indicated that, logically, people who have worse cases of the virus are more contagious. [0] [1] It is highly likely that the vast majority of people given the mRNA vaccines, which are 90+% effective in eliminating symptoms, will be very minimally contagious. Studies are pending, but there's no reason to believe that teaching your immune system to destroy the virus wouldn't also make less virus to be shed to infect other people.
[0] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2671
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19057-5
From day 1 it was always very clear that although protective measures such as facemasks do protect the individual from contracting the disease, their primary value is to prevent the mask wearer from spreading it.
We're talking about a disease which is known for having week-long periods where asymptomatic/presymptomatic carriers can unknowingly spread the disease.
Think about it: why do you believe surgeons wear face masks, latex gloves, wash their hands, wear lab coats, protective shoes, and do their surgeon things in sterilized rooms?