Litmus test on whether this is about "health" and "science" rather than mindless compliance: are people who already had covid exempt from the lockdown and vaccination? And if not, why not?
They are exempt. It's "2g" rules (geimpft, genesen), so you can have had it or be vaccinated. For clubs and similar they're introducing 2g+ which means you also need a PCR test.
This is, sadly, something the US government is too dumb to copy. More than half the country already had the disease and they pretend it's not the case.
Shocking statement that demonstrates more attempt to spin than inform.
Supposing we take the webster dictionary definition of police state: "political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures"
Considering this effects up to 40% of the population according to the article it checks quite a few boxes:
1. Arbitrary: No precedent, first in the world to do so, with no evidence this will solve the problem in total (controlling covid completely).
2. Repressive government control: There's no argument this fits the strictest definition of repressive.
3. Exercise of power by the police: There's no statement they'll use "secret police" but certainly the enforcement will be aggressive and severe to keep 40% of the population locked down. It's not like watching one person's house. That's a lot of people.
For the record, I am not against vaccines. I am however pro bodily autonomy at any cost, for whatever reason, in any condition. The "price to pay in society" isn't to violate your bodily autonomy, and therefore the non-aggression principle, but make a personal decision to avoid or interact with people you disagree with.
It turns out that all it took to test the waters of liberty and free will was deciding what you want to, and what you dont want to, put in your body. You would even think this would be a cut and dry case considering the alleged "libertarian" leanings of HN, but to my surprise it seems many people are willing to sacrifice this fundamental liberty for ephemeral (possibly even negative) gain. We're 2 years into 15 days to flatten the curve. We have all the evidence to show this won't fix anything unless these people are locked down permanently. At that point they may as well be thrown in prisons, or camps, or whatever the dictator says to do. Democracies can't simply hold you down and inject you with chemicals but coercing these people with objectively police state style tactics is the way tyrants dressed as democratic leaders effectively accomplish the same thing.
The ones with a nearly impeccable safety record, that we had many years of long term experience with, the ones that actually provided sterilizing immunity? Those are great!
No vaccine has an "impeccable" safety record, as the original clump of anti-vaxxers will helpfully remind us all. That's a red herring: what matters is that the COVID vaccines are overwhelmingly safe. Hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated worldwide without issues.
You can now get a vaccine that has gone through exactly the same review process as every other vaccine in US history (i.e., one that is not under EUA).
> Hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated worldwide without issues.
Without issues? That's quite a stretch. I would agree that the risk of a severe or even fatal reaction to the vaccine is quite low, but it's still massively higher than for any of the other vaccines.
> You can now get a vaccine that has gone through exactly the same review process as every other vaccine in US history
I can't speak to the validity of this claim, but it's neither here nor there. Approval for vaccines and other medication has been withdrawn before. No vaccine has ever been widely administered or even mandated without several years of safety data.
The current vaccines have an impeccable safety record.
> that we had many years of long term experience with
We had many years surviving just fine with long term exposure to lead, cigarettes and asbestos. Time duration is not relevant, also because we have not had many years of long term experience with Covid itself - which is why the relative risk is what is important. You have an incredibly lower long-term risk when compared with catching Covid, and society has a multiplicatively lower risk when compared with unvaccinated people being allowed to so easily spread the disease.
> the ones that actually provided sterilizing immunity
The current vaccines provide significantly better immunity than the flu shot. This isn't a black and white exercise.
Vaccinated in secret from his parents: new details about the boy who died after the Pfizer injection HanShotFirst↗
Regardless of the merits of any particular one of those articles - this is scare mongering as it completely ignores that around 5 million people have died from COVID worldwide, while around 3 billion people have received the vaccine safely.
The original claim was a qualified 'impeccable' - "the current ones with an impeccable record" - that is the original response was that the current covid vaccines are as safe as the other safe vaccines we have.
The follow up was saying "the covid vaccine doesn't have a perfect safety record therefore it's not really impeccable is it!" while not comparing to other safe vaccines at all.
You can't use a broad definition in the original claim and then try and use a narrow definition when refuting counter claims.
> The original claim was a qualified 'impeccable' - "the current ones with an impeccable record" - that is the original response was that the current covid vaccines are as safe as the other safe vaccines we have.
They absolutely are not "as safe", not by a long shot. The Myocarditis risk is unprecedented, as is the risk for GBS, as is the risk for VITT, which is a disease that didn't even exist before. Those are just the side-effects we acknowledge.
Beyond that, the sheer number of adverse event reports for the COVID vaccines dwarf the reports for all other vaccines combined. You can argue that surely most of those reports must be unrelated to vaccination, but that is true for all reports.
Now, before you move the goal post, I'm not saying that these risks outweigh the benefits. That becomes highly subjective and speculative as we move into the younger age brackets. In its approval papers, the FDA itself calculated scenarios in which the risk of vaccination outweighs the benefit for males under 18, we just choose not to pay attention to that.
Here in Australia we held back from giving certain vaccines (the mRNA vaccines we have available here) to some demographics when the virus was suppressed here, until the risk from a new outbreak meant it was safer to get the vaccine than not. The adenovirus vaccine we have available was not held back in the same way.
The contention in this discussion, I think, is that we haven't established an absolute yardstick for an 'impeccable safety record'.
You rightly point out the adverse effects we're seeing from these new vaccines, and that they appear more frequent than adverse effects from past vaccines, but that doesn't make them significantly less safe.
Suppose we have an old vaccine that has adverse effects 1% of the time (this would be terrible, but still), and a new vaccine that has twice as many adverse effects. The old vaccine would be 99% safe and the new vaccine 98% safe - quite similar (though still terrible)!
When we start talking about the actual rate of excess adverse effects for the covid vaccines it's on the order of 10 per million doses [0]. Even if this is 10 times worse than old vaccines we're talking about vaccines that are 99.9999% safe vs 99.999% safe.
Based on the evidence we have these vaccines are extremely safe, and I would feel comfortable accepting the 'impeccable safety record' label even though I probably wouldn't choose it myself.
It is not ten times worse, it is hundreds of times worse. You would be hard pressed to find a death linked to any of the established vaccines over many years. In Australia, eight people died from VITT alone so far, but how many healthy young people died of COVID? The survival rate for COVID for under 30 without comorbidities is estimated at 99.999%. An impeccably safe infection, by your standard!
> You have an incredibly lower long-term risk when compared with catching Covid...
You can't know that. COVID is a new ilness, coronavirus vaccines are novel and neither MRNA nor adenovectors have long-term safety data. You can reduce your short-term risk from COVID by getting a vaccine, so far so good. You can't know if you then go on to develop an overly specific immune response that will end up hurting you with the next mutation. Perhaps the kind of mutation that is being selected for by a non-sterilizing vaccine administered to a large population? Can we rule that one out? Of course not, it's just too inconvenient to think about.
Too many people act as if this vaccine deal was a no-brainer, that the vaccine hesitant are just stupid. Never mind that the idea of vaccinating people not at risk, especially children, was almost unthinkable when it was the "Trump vaccine". What changed? Is it the science, or is it the population that demands a magic injection to end the pandemic by next Tuesday?
> ...and society has a multiplicatively lower risk when compared with unvaccinated people being allowed to so easily spread the disease.
This doesn't stand scrutiny, as some of the highest vaccinated places also have some of the highest rates of infection.
Isn't that rather the point? When you are a child, adults make decisions for you in your best interest; but when you become an adult, you make your own decisions. This joyful welcome for the infantilisation of an entire population, I find it very disturbing.
There are two points in the comment. I went with the easier one to respond to, because I don't feel like the parent is entitled to asymmetric labor in the form of a detailed rebuttal. The Internet really is an incredible place.
Neither did anyone in society sign anything to put up with you. You're free to live away from society and you're unlikely to be bothered by anyone. Imagine a convict making that argument to a judge 'I didn't sign anything that says I won't murder anyone'.
I'm fully vaccinated thank you, believing as I do that vaccines are a wonder, a victory of human ingenuity over disease. It saddens me that so many people of a similar view also have the nasty authoritarian streak so often evident in these discussions.
Many people have never had a single vaccine in their entire lives till old age... Even went to schools that supposedly were required over the past 60+ years.
The link I provided includes conscientious objections, and makes it abundantly clear that they are extremely limited in scope. In particular, nearly every state requires (1) a statement in writing, (2) confirmation from a healthcare and/or faith practitioner, and (3) evidence that the belief is genuine and not a transient product of merely political beliefs. Additionally, many states will not accept a "genuine" belief if it is not also the belief of the complainant's faith.
A stance becomes no less valid by being driven to the fringe by a population that is increasingly desperate to find a scapegoat for all of its problems.
> The "pro bodily autonomy" message is smoke and mirrors, designed to put a palatable glaze on an increasingly fringe and reactionary position.
There is absolutely nothing fringe about wanting control of your body. This is a modern authoritarian take that is working to undo the last 50 years of increases in bodily freedom for everyone. I obviously won't win against someone espousing left-authoritarian views because neither of us will concede. But I do have some rhetorical things for you:
On "smoke and mirrors" for "an increasingly fringe, reactionary position". Do you think the same about abortion? Or is it, in your mind, okay for that form of bodily autonomy but some forms of bodily autonomy are more okay than others? Do you draw the line where "it harms people"? Who are "people"? It doesn't help you linked the CDC who has a vested interest in talking down the "bodily autonomy" argument as a public policy (public health is typically diametrically opposed to bodily autonomy because public health requires shirking the individual for the "common" good).
Arguing against bodily autonomy is binary. Either you are for bodily autonomy or you are for some level of government control over what people can and can't do with themselves. What I am willing to do to myself is my own business. Why should anyone but me decide?
Bodily autonomy is not smoke and mirrors. "Bodily autonomy" qua "I don't want to get a safe and effective vaccine" is smoke and mirrors.
The rest of the post is built on top of your initial incorrect assumption, and isn't worth a line response. Consider, instead, whether there is any meaningful sense in which getting a free and effective vaccine can be reasonably compared to reproductive rights.
Any useful comparison of outcomes would need to consider deaths instead of case rates as we have a well-known more-transmissible variant in play now compared to the beginning of the pandemic. Most of your sources don't do that.
The linked articles regarding Iceland in fact contradict your assertion. They provide a very clear graph of cases over time vs deaths over time and it is trivial to see that during the recent spike in cases, deaths are much lower in proportion compared to earlier spikes, a clear indicator of the vaccine working well.
It is also logical that most COVID cases in places with high vaccination rates are breakthrough cases, there are simply less unvaccinated hosts for the virus to potentially infect. It does not follow that the outcome would be better with less vaccinated hosts.
Finally, you've posted links to 7 deaths and 28 complications following vaccinations. Regardless of the merits of any particular one of those articles - this is scare mongering as it completely ignores that around 5 million people have died from COVID worldwide, while around 3 billion people have been vaccinated safely. (Source- Google searches for worldwide covid deaths and worldwide covid vaccinations).
It's also important to note that Iceland has a population of 370K and tourists this year will likely peak at about 400-450K (way less than a typical year). Of the 34 deaths attributed to Covid from the beginning of the pandemic in Iceland at least 3 were visiting tourists. All the Icelandic statistics do not differentiate between those living in Iceland and tourists so any calculations based on population will be off.
> an increasingly fringe and reactionary position.
If discussions on HN are any indication, opposition to lockdowns/vaccines is growing and anything but fringe. Risk tolerance is subjective, and the fact that someone's cost benefit analysis aligns against the extreme measures we are seeing does not imply heartlessness. This is not the plague. On the scale of deadly viruses, covid is quite close to a severe flu in terms of mortality/long term effects. It's high time that the moralists started listening to the rapidly growing body of opposition. Clearly this is a curve that we are not going to flatten without extreme measures, if ever given that this is now an endemic virus.
It's not nice to lump me in with anti-vaxxers but I guess that's how modern politics^W^W^W^W^W^W science is.
I don't take the stance that children have complete autonomy only because it leads to some very strange and disturbing consequences. Therefore, if the parents decide the child should not be vaccinated than I think that's a fine decision. I also think deciding your child should be vaccinated is a fine decision.
Where I draw the line is the prevention of attendance at a learning institution. Since you mentioned public school, then this should either have a distanced option (home schooling, etc) or permit the students regardless. Private institutions may do what they please. Yes, this also goes for public grant-receiving universities, community colleges, etc. Forcing people to manufacturer "exemptions" is simply an end-around to the government enforcing it's will upon people and their choices with their body. It's both immoral and unethical.
>We have all the evidence to show this won't fix anything unless these people are locked down permanently
At vaccination rates of 60-70% the vaccinated make 1/3rd of new infections (and giving that the vaccinated have less symptoms, one may suppose that the vaccinated rate of infection is even higher than the official 1/3rd), and thus raising the vaccination rate from 70% to 100% would decrease infection rate just 2 times at best, so even locking down unvaccinated permanently would solve nothing. And that too:
" A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha."
"Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."
Not you specifically but lots of people have tried to conflate restrictions for unvaccinated people to various historical blights including, but not limited to, Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany, South African Apartheid (google the phrase "medical apartheid"), the institution of slavery in the United States and so on.
None of these apply of course for one simple reason: a black person in South Africa can't simply choose not to be black to escape Apartheid. American slaves couldn't simply choose not to be slaves.
So policies that apply to unvaccinated people aren't analogous for the simple reason that you can choose to get vaccinated in almost all cases (side note: the very few people with a valid medical exemption shouldn't be subjected to these kinds of policies IMHO).
So it's not a lack of body autonomy that's going on here. It's just that those choices come with consequences. You don't want to wear a mask? No one is holding you down and putting one on you. But you can't fly on a commercial plane either.
I too believe strongly in body autonomy, which is one reason why I fully support reproductive rights, including access to abortion. What I find particularly ironic is in the Venn diagram there's a seemingly large intersection between the unvaccinated, those who oppose restrictions on unvaccinated people and those who support restricting access to abortions. Again, not you, specifically.
It's worth adding that this isn't purely a personal choice. If it was, I don't think anyone would be upset about it. There are documented cases of contact tracers who can directly establish links between a given person spreading Covid and the deaths that result from that. What about the people who medically cannot get the vaccine? Or are immunocompromised? If you oppose the vaccine because of the extremely low risks of negative side effects, remember your choice affects other people.
It's riskier to drive in a car than to get the Covid vaccine.
The term "body autonomy" here just doesn't apply. "Consequences to personal choices" is far more accurate.
You are right, one can not simply choose a racial identity. A more appropriate analogy would be the Inquisition, or perhaps Christian persecution in pagan Rome. Those generally left the option for heretics to renounce their beliefs.
>None of these apply of course for one simple reason: a black person in South Africa can't simply choose not to be black to escape Apartheid. American slaves couldn't simply choose not to be slaves.
so the chinese forcing the Uyghurs to abandon their culture is totally fine, because all they have to do is stop practicing it?
You've inferred in the opposite direction of the other poster here. They started with conflations and said they didn't apply for a reason. You are starting with the reason and applying it to a conflation.
Conspicuously missing the persecution of Kulaks and Christians, among others, in the Soviet Union. Side note aside, some of those historical blights hinge on the choice of religion / ideology. You'd think that choosing the correct gods to worship is a fairly easy choice. Freedom of thought, freedom of religion? Pshaw, the State knows better what the population must think. For the common good, social harmony, the luminous future, etc, etc, etc...
There is religious and ideological prosecution which one could argue could be freely chosen, so it is only a counter-argument under certain definitions.
> 1. Arbitrary: No precedent, first in the world to do so, with no evidence this will solve the problem in total (controlling covid completely).
This isn't arbitrary at all, its actually extremely common to restrict the participation in society of unvaccinated people - in countries _much_ more free than the United States.
So you what wish they did it here in the United States as well?
You probably were a fan of FDR locking up US citizens because of their ethnicity too.
Can we stop pretending covid is something that justifies these crazy actions we are taking. Yes it kills people and can spread easily. So what. At this point it is only killing unvaccinated people and vaccinated people can still get and spread it.
So just stop it. Stop with the insanity. Stop pretending that the emperor has clothes. Or at the very least let cities enforce what they want and don’t have a rural place in CA be forced to follow what SF wants, or have Austin do what TX wants.
You’re really uninformed about vaccines. Saying because vaccinated people can spread it despite being over 10x less likely to, is black and white fallacy FUD. I can see you are very hyperbolic your statement:
“Yes it kills people and can spread easily, so what”
Is very callous. I think you could take your own advice about SF vs rural towns and maybe consider applying it to other countries.
There is a growing body of research indicating that VE declines over time. After 6 months the vaccines reduce the risk of getting covid by 2x, VEaI = 50%. Not sure where you picked the 10x number.
1. The probability of a BI is not the same as the relative probability of a vaccinated person infecting another person. I also refer to “vaccinated people“ to mean “a population of vaccinated people”, which is where the big gains are.
2. The day before they get their booster shot (6 months) is not the same as the probability overall, counting the best and moderate days of immunity too
1. Where do you pick your transmission data from? Are there credible studies? VE is the closest proxy for infecting other persons. Beyond that it is difficult to guess transmissibility, in particular because asymptomatic infections and differences in behavior.
2. I expect a vaccine to significantly (VE >90%) reduce infection probability for at least 10 years. These vaccines ain't that. While I'm vaccinated, I have not signed up for an endless stream of "boosters" every 6 months or so. Probably I'll be declared "unvaccinated" with a straight face and excluded from society in the not-so-far future.
> 2. I expect a vaccine to significantly (VE >90%) reduce infection probability for at least 10 years. These vaccines ain't that.
Why do you expect this, and do you think it's a reasonable expectation? Do you shrug off flu vaccines because they're only effective for a year or so? (I understand the difference between reduction in efficacy over time against a single strain vs against new variations)
> While I'm vaccinated, I have not signed up for an endless stream of "boosters" every 6 months or so. Probably I'll be declared "unvaccinated" with a straight face and excluded from society in the not-so-far future.
I don't understand this point of view at all. Do you only take the first pill in a course of antibiotics? Why wouldn't you follow the vaccine schedule that offers the best overall protection, and best reduction in total risk, that we're aware of and is available to you?
"Do you shrug off flu vaccines because they're only effective for a year" Yes, indeed, I don't go out of my way to get a flu vaccine. Flu vaccine effectiveness is underwhelming, 30-40% on average, see https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates....
A third of severe influenza cases develop bacterial pneumonia. Which, left untreated, is deadly. I know, because a few years back I developed pneumonia in the wake of a flu, collapsed a lung and almost died. They saved my life in an ICU with antibiotics. If the only metric of relevance is saving lives via medical intervention, prescribing an antibiotic course to everyone that develops cold symptoms is a no brainer. Statistically, such a public health measure will definitely save lives. Taking it a notch further, why don't we just mandate an antibiotic course twice a year for each person, sick or healthy. We'll never lose another life to bacterial pneumonia.
Yet we are very careful to not overuse antibiotics. Why?
"vaccinated people can spread it despite being over 10x less likely to"
UK data shows vaccinated people are drastically more likely to get it and spread it than the unvaccinated. In other countries VE drops to zero after only about 6-8 months, but the UK programme was ahead of other countries. Raw VE in the UK has kept going down after reaching zero and is currently deeply negative, with it being worse than negative 100% in some age groups. In other words, vaccinated people - for whatever reason - are far more of a problem from an infection control perspective than the unvaccinated.
The public health authorities don't have a good explanation for this and have been reduced to blaming a vague, highly speculative and sometimes unnamed set of confounders, for which they insist everyone make massive adjustments despite not being able to provide any evidence that these confounders are important or even exist at all. And in fact one study in California that did do a lot of these adjustments found they made very little impact (a few percent at most). That's an issue because public health's "adjustments" are now reaching absurd levels, e.g. taking AZ from 4% effectiveness to 73% VE!
It's very unlikely that Austrians are biologically totally different to British people, so we can say with 100% certainty that this latest quasi-Nazi move is going unlikely to have any effect on their case numbers, although we can also say that having taken the leap into such darkness the authorities there will never admit to any type of failure, thus the unvaccinated will continue to be blamed even as the data falls apart around them.
Er, the CDC is a US public health agency. The UK data comes from the UK HSA.
The US figures do indeed diverge strongly from data in other countries. This is very unlikely to be because the USA is somehow biologically special. US statistical quality is unfortunately garbage w.r.t. vaccines, as the CDC stopped tracking data at a national level a long time ago and the states often don't report in comparable ways. The UK data is of a much higher quality as it breaks out the population in the ways needed for this type of analysis.
Article graphing the UK data showing negative efficacy against disease in the raw data, and
discussing the semi-public fighting that's broken out between arms of the civil service over how to disguise or de-emphasise the results:
Essay discussing how although raw UK data shows negative efficacy, it gets adjusted using a test negative case control design to show high efficacy. This contradicts data not only from Norway but also Sweden and Qatar, so is there a flaw in their approach:
Daily Sceptic has been doing a lot of reporting and analysis on the UK data (it's a UK site), usually with very high quality of analysis. A lot of it comes from PhDs and data scientists of various kinds.
* Medical literature shows 50% VE at six months and waning
Sadly, there is no longterm RCT in place to perform this basic, but extremely valuable measure. We have to rely on epi data, and epi data is very easy to mess up. I wonder how much of this is due to different testing regimens. Like CDC telling vaccinated people to not test unless symptoms, or UK school guidance instructing, on contact with known covid case, vaccinated people to do a PCR, but unvaccinated people to self isolate for two weeks. Plus copious doses of Simpson, as different age groups have vastly different covid outcomes and vastly different vaccination rates.
Well the US data is certainly garbage - obviously if you ignore "breakthrough" cases in the vaccinated unless they're very serious, the vaccines will look great. That's just lying though. It's exactly this sort of thing that destroys people's willingness to trust governments or take the vaccines: it's just obvious that public health will do or say anything to get people to take it and couldn't care less about the consequences.
Medical literature appears to be heavily adjusting the raw data and using a methodology that is known to overstate vaccine effectiveness if a vaccine causes "viral interference", without bothering to show that no such interference is taking place.
The entire thing is just a dystopian nightmare of lying and manipulation, really. In the past I've used the term anti-vaxxer as an insult, as I guess many of us have done. Never again. The whole story around vaccines will eventually have to be revisited - you can't witness this stuff up close and not conclude that public health has a blind, near fanatical ideological bias in favour of vaccination to the extent that any bad news is immediately covered up or obfuscated.
Agreed, the situation is a mess. Lest we remember that even particle physics, the canonical example for the success of the scientific method, can be subject to systematic bias due to social pressure.
"Decades ago, physicists including Richard Feynman noticed something worrying. New estimates of basic physical constants were often closer to published values than would be expected given standard errors of measurement. They realized that researchers were more likely to 'confirm' past results than refute them — results that did not conform to their expectation were more often systematically discarded or revised."
I have extensive lung damage from being born premature, I've had pneumonia 13 times, and last April I spontaneously collapsed a lung requiring surgery that cost 80k. My doctor says if I catch covid I'm done, no matter how many vaccines I get. My brother also died from covid last year. I'm tired of walking around feeling like everyone is pointing a gun at my head because they think covid is a joke. Seriously, fuck all you antivaxxers. I wish I could legally endanger your lives just as you've decided to endanger mine over your stupid beliefs.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments and ignoring our request to stop. Not cool.
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I think this isn't enough and wrong way to do things. Only true way would be maximum of 24h old test result. Anything else is putting others including vaccinated people in danger.
If vaccinated people aren't in danger they don't need protection from unvaccinated. If they are they also need protection from vaccinated. On other hand willingly unvaccinated are willing to accept the risks, so it should be up to them.
If we want to truly protect those who can't take vaccines testing and lockdowns for those who have not been tested is only way.
I wholeheartedly approve such measures, but can we do this for more diseases, please? HIV/AIDS, for example. 700 thousand deaths and 1.5 million new cases in 2020. there are so many things we could do to prevent most of those, just think about it.
Sure, take it further, why should you have the right to drive a car? People get killed all the time. We should ban it.
How about all those people who recklessly go swimming and then drown. I mean they are using up valuable resources. Swimming should be banned.
What about candy bars? Think of the savings in health care if we just fed people sawdust.
I agree with all the posters here. We need to put everyone in camps for their own good. Thank god COVID came along and we realized human rights were just a joke.
Cars are relatively safe. What is the issue is that we allow pedestrians on streets. In the winter there is risk of slipping and hitting head. In summers dehydration and death.
We should design our cities better. Lock the people inside and only allow access from behind guardrails to parkin spots. Bikes should be straight out.
Given that the currently available vaccines are all non-sterilising (do not prevent infection and transmission), it is difficult to see this as a measure aimed at controlling transmission.
It is terrifying to me that a government is confining healthy people to their homes for refusing a treatment that they (rightly or wrongly) believe is not in their best interests.
Of course, recorded cases are likely to fall naturally at some point. If the fall is coincident with the introduction of this rule, we can expect the same across the West.
Society forcing people to behave in a certain way is a fundamental aspect of any and all civilizations. At certain points, you rights have to give way for the collective good, especially when people's lives are at stake.
"Social bullying has happened before, so accept it now, as it's for a good cause" is not the best of arguments. Fundamental rights and liberties are fundamental for a reason.
I was pro-lockdown when they first started, but the mandates coming out now don't really make any sense. It seems like politicians are just imposing new restrictions because they need to be seen doing something.
In my (EU) country you need to be vaccinated to go into most shops, restaurants, bars, and beauty services. However you can freely go to your office and not wear a mask. Even the people working in places where as a customer you need to be vaccinated, do not themselves need to be vaccinated.
I'm fully vaccinated, but I have friends who are not. The people who do not want to be vaccinated have their reasons, and I doubt these restrictions which cause mild inconveniences at best (compared to lockdowns like last winter, where some stores were closed for 3 month and you couldn't leave your city) are really going to make them change their mind. If they really want everyone to be vaccinated, they should just come out and say that, then work to get it passed into law.
>you rights have to give way for the collective good, especially when people's lives are at stake
But when discussions over the degree to which measures actually benefit the collective good are suppressed, both top down (tech censorship) and bottom up (downvotes and social shaming), you are moving into the territory of tyranny/oppression.
This isn't about behavior, unless you mean blindly following authority (in which case those civilizations had huge downsides). This is about a medical treatment for a disease that is objectively not a civilization-ending threat, by any measure.
The problem is forcing people to take a specific medical treatment (it's not about immunity from the virus, it's about the specific treatment ONLY), and using fear as a justification to control society.
What you're calling "collective good" is exactly how past atrocities have happened. Anytime there has been genocide or millions of people getting slaughtered, it's because one side decided it was for the collective good. It's a cliche argument that can go both ways and says nothing about the actual reasons for implementing force across a society.
Vaccines prevent infection, as evidenced by the drastically lower COVID case numbers in the vaccinated. You can’t spread it if you don’t have it. If you do contract it, you are less infectious.
This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available.
They did here a month or two ago. They now apply only in areas where vaccinated and unvaccinated people mingle and enforcement would be too much bother.
I don't think the "Please stop spreading misinformation." boilerplate is necessarily always hostile and provocative.
In situations where the comment is only aimed at correcting a factual mistake, for example, it can be okay, if still bad style.
It always feels as if it prematurely implies evil intention, which is a move that does not belong in any intellectually honest conversation, neither casual nor scientific.
I don't think the boilerplate should be used in comments that then continue with highly questionable, very radical statements. Especially if heterodox opinions are stated as if they were well established positions.
For example:
"This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available."
The idea that conditional lockdowns are identical to non-conditional lockdowns from legal, medical or political perspective is not just wrong, but also unnecessarily radical. The radicalism just makes the wrongness trivial to spot.
The position that actually justifies conditional lock-downs (like the new Austrian policy) is one where the discriminatory treatment is acknowledged and justified, not simply denied.
...which should not surprise anyone who somewhat followed the discourse on the issue.
I know that's not as attractive as just denying the existence of differences between two obviously different policies.
> The idea that conditional lockdowns are identical to non-conditional lockdowns from legal, medical or political perspective is not just wrong, but also unnecessarily radical.
Not to mention the ethical aspects of this kind of apartheid.
Naming a difference is not an argument in favour of sameness.
The availability of a vaccine is one of the several ways in which the current Austrian policy is different from earlier lockdowns.
This alone already has direct consequences for the political justification of the policy: In the article OP linked they specifically name vaccination nudges as one of the effects they expect from their conditional lockdown. Which is something that would not have made sense in the absence of vaccines.
Pedantry can have it's upside though, so I'm not complaining! :)
> Vaccines prevent infection, as evidenced by the drastically lower COVID case numbers in the vaccinated.
Vaccines suppress symptoms, which may result in infected people being unaware they are infected or transmitting to others. That's why the CDC recommends (as of October 15) that vaccinated people be tested after exposure, since lack of symptoms != lack of infection, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...
> Based on evolving evidence, CDC recommends fully vaccinated people get tested 5-7 days after close contact with a person with suspected or confirmed COVID-19.
The problem with this “record” is that people may come to incorrect conclusions from the way the information is presented.
Do these headlines represent revisions to the initial effectiveness? Or do they represent the waning effectiveness over time? What is the point of having Fauci in the video?
There’s the problem right there. No conclusions should be drawn from watching that YouTube video, yet it has been created specifically to fool people who will do no further reading. The creator doesn’t care of course. YouTube doesn’t care either.
Covid vaccines cannot 100% prevent infection like polio vaccine. There are papers that talked about vaccinated people with higher load virus for the initial infection. Given vaccinated people tends to display even less symptoms and more asymptomatic, they are able to spread more because more "infectious". If one is severely down with Covid, one will be confine at home or hospital. Hence the OP claims of more infections is correct and it is not spreading misinformation. This is why now healthcare professionals have opt not to use the word "herd immunity" confer by vaccines. Ironically you are actually more inline with spreading misinformation by not clarifying the vaccinated can still be infected and move around way more than severely unvaccinated people. Having say this, I am pro vaccinations. It is still the right and responsibility thing to do.
Well no one cares about spread to vaccinated people. No one truly cares about spread except as it affects the health care system. If everyone was vaccinated, all cases would be mild and life could go on as normal. But unvaccinated people are filling hospitals causing disruption to the healthcare system and that effect snowballs.
Then covid medicine would certainly be a more liberal way to go towards; have a remedy available if need be, without being pushed to require vaccines from citizens.
How do you know that? If you are reading that from MS news, and if you are just repeating a statement without actual numbers, you are spreading propaganda of those who are interested in promoting the vaccines (aka Big Pharma and the sponsored media). As shown in this thread , IC hospital occupancy was low in France, and I know it was the same in the Netherlands. The current occupancy numbers of vaccinated vs unvaccinated are conveniently undisclosed by the Dutch government.
Dunno, recent stats from my country (Canada) shows that during our last wave, about 90% of our hospital occupancy was unvaccinated people despite them being about 20% of the population.
Perhaps you mean "90% of covid hospitalizations", which is different than "90% of hospitalizations". I've been checking the jhu pages for various US states, never seen covid hospitalization rates above 10-20% and covid ICU utilization rate above 30%.
Right now, using the Rt map from https://covidestim.org, looks like Indiana & Ohio are in the middle of a wave. Covid hospital bed utilization: IN 10%, OH 15%. Covid ICU utilization: IN 20%, OH 20%.
I think in a few months we experts can look at this winter cases around the globe and compare the differences between the vaccination rates and other measures and find some conclusions.
No, the goal is to reduce load on the healthcare system. It's well known that the Covid vaccines keep people out of hospital. There's no reason that people should interfere with other people receiving urgently needed medical treatment.
How about simply turning away the unvaccinated from hospitals for Covid care? Is that less or more humane than holding them under house arrest?
PS: I think arguments justifying such mandates for avoiding overwhelming of hospitals will further enrage anyone who was already against universal healthcare because it becomes yet another avenue for govt/bureaucratic manipulation of people's lives.
That's a political impossibility. Besides - whom to reprioritize? Pick the sickest person, the latest arrival, or what?
There was a case not too long ago in Alabama where a person suffered a heart attack and died because in three dozen hospitals no intensive care bed could be found, so the concern isn't even theoretical.
In the US, that would result in severe disparate impact on non-Asian minorities, because Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are currently the least-vaccinated groups.
Not really politically viable until these numbers equalize.
It isn't universal healthcare if you exclude anyone for any reason. It still can be public healthcare with alternatives for private insurance schemes. It would be most unwise to kill universal healthcare because of the threat or costs Covid poses.
Like many things in life, absolute universal healthcare is impossible. At limit it implies life without death and youth without aging. The utopian ideal must contend with the reality that resources are finite and accept tradeoffs.
You have set boundaries for the quality of healthcare, but it isn't utopian to not set any conditions for eligibility of health care. That are two different topics.
In that case, why not just say that unvaccinated people at the hospital because they have COVID will be deprioritized, and dispense with all of the other mandates and stuff with the vaccine?
You jump to random conclusions and "knowingly??" do not outline the whole picture.
What is the estimate of the authoritarian rules of increasing mortality? E.g. by a war? By racial cleaning, by collapse of social structures?
You spread half information and consequently fake. The legislation is there for a reason and you throw it away. You just took a decision for the uncaccinated people by eliminating their freedom. They never did it to you.
In France, during the whole year 2020, people were told that the hospital infrastructure was overloaded because of COVID.
Actually, the final report shows that COVID patients represented 2% (!!!) of the total hospitalized... And only 5% (!?!?) of what they call "critical care"...
This report from the ATIH (Official agency) was published in october 2021.
It’s a false dichotomy to claim that they’re non-sterilising. They’re partially sterilising, at to at least 50% effectiveness even after waning. With boosters, it seems that returns to 90%+.
Yeah, the other thing is, sterilising vaccines are possible, they are just harder to research so the initial target for pretty much every vaccine was to reduce hospotalizations and deaths.
I don't know if sterilising vaccins are being researched now though. I heard something about possible nose-spray vaccine that would both improve this and make applications easier. Maybe well see that in near future.
This is not true, at all. The current crop of vaccines are roughly 95% non-sterilizing.
It IS true that they reduce net transmission, but the literature is clear that the reason is almost exclusively due to how they shorten the duration of carrying. The nasal viral load is virtually identical. The primary factor is how long you're carrying that load for (approximately 11 days vs 8 days from what I can tell from pubmed et al).
Does vaccination help the herd? Sure, but it's pretty limited. The reality is that vaccination mostly protects YOU - it keeps the infection in the top layer of the respiratory epithelium, ensures to a great degree that you won't be hospitalized for deeper tissue damage.
Bearing in mind that transmission effectiveness data is only just becoming available from multiple countries, it certainly isn't showing that duration of carrying is the only factor.
Dutch data, for instance, has recently shown substantial reductions in transmission within households, locations where a three day difference in the duration of symptoms is unlikely to have had a major impact. [0]
If the vaccine would protect against transmission in any way, shouldn't I see a less steep flank when a new wave hits and cases are increasing? I have compared graphs with the same axis configuration and it looks like there is no difference at all. The amplitude of that latest wave is even higher in my country than when people were unvaccinated. Cannot control for factors like behavior. Lockdown rules were almost the same, although I think people take current rules far less serious. If you constantly are having an emergency, it isn't an emergency anymore...
So, it's apparently to protect the hospitals. While I've no idea of the situation in Austria, in most Western European countries ICU occupancy is largely unvaccinated people and severely immunosuppressed people.
So once you're close to ICU capacity you have three options:
- Ignore it, likely leading to a lot of deaths.
- Full lockdown
- Targeted lockdown of the most vulnerable population (similar to 'cocooning' of elderly in the early stages)
Obviously, none of these are great options, but they're the choices a number of places are now facing.
ICUs are a scarce bonus, not an entitlement. We are talking denying basic human rights to a large segment of healthy people on the off chance that a tiny percent of them will end up populating the tiny number of ICUs available in the country at some point in the future. What's next: obese people, people engaging in sexual promiscuity, smokers, babies with congenital malformations or simply old people? All of these populations have a higher statistical chance to occupy an ICU bed, so we should just ban them from society? WTaF?
So, in the early stages of the pandemic, a number of countries did exactly that. Which was, arguably, a lot more unfair; over 80s can't take a de-oldening vaccine.
Ultimately, _if_, and only if, the ICU numbers dictate either locking down the whole population or locking down that fraction of the population who have voluntarily decided to be the main contributors to ICU load... well, it's not a _great_ choice to have to make, certainly, but there's something to be said for locking down fewer people, if that is the choice.
Sorry, does not compute. Feel free to do whatever triage you want for the scarce ICU resource. Banning large numbers healthy people form society, of which the vast majority (>99%) will never need an ICU, is something else entirely.
I wish other governments did the same. We could all work together to get rid of this disease, but this will never happen if we let people that refuse medicine to walk freely contaminating others.
what data makes you think vaccine prevents spreading ? I haven't found any compelling case that would go in that direction. Number of cases seem totally unrelated to vaccination coverage..
Vaccines reduce spreading, reduce hospitalizations, and reduce serious illness
Saying "the vaccines don't work at all" is IMO equivalent to saying seatbelts don't work at all, they should be abolished, because someone wrecked and died at 200mph while wearing seatbelts.
Seatbelts do work yet the data on vaccines is - in the very few countries that publish the needed data - by now very clear. Only six months after vaccination the vaccinated are actually much more likely to get COVID than the unvaccinated. Yes this sounds wrong but the data is unambiguous. The UK breaks out cases by age and status. For over 30s case rates are now double or higher. Check my comment history for links.
Of COVID, yes. There are potential problems with these stats too, but the problem I'm trying to tackle here is that people are mis-stating what seems to really be happening with actual infection rates and making invalid comparisons to things like seatbelts.
For the analogy to hold true seatbelts would have to double your chances of actually crashing your car, and also sometimes randomly kill people who hadn't crashed at all (vaccine injuries are a real thing and excess death is now elevated for non-COVID reasons). Clearly the tradeoffs involved here are quite different and statistics need to be used very carefully to assess them.
i've been trying to find precise good data about excessive deaths ( or abnormal increase of peculiar diseases) due to vaccination but so far i haven't. Either the source isn't reliable or the graphs don't really show anything if you're in good faith. And yet there are a large number of people giving personnal testimonies of very bad side effects with relatives (although it could be just people paying more attention)
There are no sources showing an increase in excess death due to vaccination because the medical and media establishment categorically deny that this could possibly be happening. As far as they're concerned more or less nobody ever dies of the COVID vaccine, period, end of story and any claim to the contrary is misinformation. This attitude is sometimes summed up as "Vaccines are amongst the leading causes of coincidences".
The US VAERS database of course tracks peculiar diseases/symptoms/deaths that follow vaccination. At this point it has more records of adverse events for COVID vaccines than all other vaccines combined since the tracking programme began, but the vast majority of problems never make it to VAERS or similar databases, so the absolute numbers aren't that useful. So the best people can do is inference. There appears to be a sharp increase in deaths due to heart attacks and strokes/other clotting disorders this year. The media are occasionally reporting on this but either claiming it's some inexplicable mystery or coming up with some absurd alternative explanation. Examples:
The UK has very good public health data compared to most countries. It breaks out heart related deaths for both with and without COVID. There has been a large rise in non-COVID heart deaths in 2021. Some of this may be/must be due to the (not really admitted) collapse of the UK healthcare system due to lockdown triggered overload. However there is also a correlation with the vaccine rollout (it's graphed):
It's a 12x increase. That's either lockdowns or vaccines but whichever it is, that's not a natural cause, it's caused by government policy.
From a quick bit of Googling there seems to be similar data from Israel but I have not checked this tweet in any depth - the tables seem legit but the summarization of it looks backwards to me:
I have a friend who is investigating this phenomenon in more depth. He found a research paper from the early 2000s that counted news reports about sudden on-field medical emergencies amongst young sports players, then compared that rate to some big lists of news stories in 2021 about it he compiled. He's still working on this project a...
Ah yeah, links to some random blogs... seems legit. A bit like all the "proof" of Democrats stealing 2020, I just don't have time to debunk them all and I'm just going to assume they're fudging the numbers.
Imagine if 100% of a population has been vaccinated. We know breakthrough cases are possible. Everyone that gets Covid after that will be breakthrough! And this graph would have 0 cases of the unvaxxed, and a non-zero bar for the vaxxed, and you're going to interpret that as "The vaccination gives you Covid!". The quoted emails try to explain why this graph is bad and liable to misinterpration, but the Substack author is misleading you by telling you there's dodgy stuff going on.
If the vaccine efficacy drops down after 6 months, then, boosters should be prescribed and even made mandatory. But boohoo, more crying from the other side.
1. The problem appears when comparing rates. Your counter-argument is assuming we're comparing absolute numbers which is false.
2. The argument about "data fudging" is the other way around. The raw data shows sharply negative effectiveness against symptomatic disease, and the UK HSA then "fudges" the data into showing the opposite using a statistical technique called TNCC - the validity of which is currently under debate, as it relies on an assumption that doesn't seem to be true.
But these mis-understandings aren't really surprising given that you admit you haven't actually bothered to read the links, and instead decided that you already know the answers because of some unrelated discussion to do with US politics. None of the people I've cited are Americans or in the USA so whatever you think did or did not happen in the 2020 election is quite irrelevant.
not sure who you're quoting. I'm only saying empirical data seem to show that high vaccination rates don't seem to reduce spreading at all. eg: netherlands and cayman islands.
"COVID-19 vaccines are effective at protecting people from COVID-19 and help keep adults and children from getting seriously sick. COVID-19 vaccines can reduce the risk of people spreading the virus that causes COVID-19."
Variants. Delta changed everything. This isn't just one virus globally so you can't compare across countries like that.
Look into what happened with Vietnam. They were able to 'control' the spread multiple times over the first year. They thought they could always control things, so they didn't focus on vaccination.
Once delta took hold, it spread more quickly than they could control things and the govt. has gone crazy on getting everyone vaccinated as quickly as possible.
At this point though, infections are soaring. The govt. has given up trying to control it. A lot of people are going to die. They are figuring that they will push to get as many people vaccinated, but herd immunity will come faster. The plan now is to get the country open again more quickly.
and then you have netherlands with 80%+ of the pop vaccinated hitting record number of cases.
I'm sorry but the narrative "vaccine prevents spread" has been falling apart for the past 6 months and is now completely disproved by real world data. Not a single country has been successful at preventing the spread with vaccination. And it shows at every level : from cities (singapore) to small islands (cayman islands) to states.
The vaccine isn't a superman cape or body condom. It doesn't prevent you from getting covid if you're exposed to it. You're honestly an idiot if you believe it prevents you from getting covid.
The real benefit of the vaccine is that it lessen the effects if you are infected. The benefit of that is that hospitals don't fill up. People who have other issues won't be locked out. Fewer people will die.
The reasoning inside your comment shows the worst kind of obsessive rationalization of truly abnormal, paranoid efforts to mitigate a number that by itself is steadily becoming practically irrelevant. For one thing, COVID will without a doubt become an endemic disease of the human species and is currently impossible to erradícate no matter the forced vaccination programs we throw at it, and secondly, who cares? So long as the virus either mutates into something no worse than seasonal flu and cold viruses, or we adapt to cause us a comparable level of immune protection, its spread and case numbers should be no more relevant than the annual spread of any normal mild flu strain or cold virus was before the absurd 2021 hysteria over raw COVID numbers (not even fatalities or anything that actually has any serious meaning anymore) took hold over millions of people and the politicians who pander to them.
It's sad to see how many otherwise presumably normal people so easily skip away from ideas of basic individual rights for such flimsy reasons now.
You can leave your place also for any physical and mental recreation. Otherwise you can buy everything on the internet so this is mainly bad for the local shops. The gov is rather hysterical because of the recent corruption scandal
Austria also discusses switching to 1G what would mean that only people who count as fully vaccinated would not be locked down but there is still discussion on the definition and limitations of this.
There is also further discussion about requiring PCR-Tests for the non restricted groups.
Austria has a around 60% vaccination rate² and around 12% of the population had an documented infection³.
Herd immunity is a discussion point but scientists are undecided how high the numbers need to be. Estimates from earlier this year did talk about 60% but this number was raised and some experts even say its impossible.
- FFP2 Mask mandated in essential services like pharmacies, grocery store and postal offices for everyone.
- No Mask or distancing mandate for anyone who was vaccinated or recovered.
- Mask mandate and a negative covid test that is not older than 24/48h depending on the testing method for non vaccinated for anything outside of essential services.
Obviously, it would be convenient if the unvaccinated are gathered into some specific locations so the rest of the country can get on with life. After all, they can't just be left sprinkled all over.
They could be called freedom camps or something catchy and people would just telework and live there.
It's great that covid came along so dystopia could be built up in just a few years instead of decades.
Just like how 9/11 transformed the world because Patriot act, secret prisons, secret courts, secret spying.
I for one welcome our new future where we merge with machines and become less human than ever, because think of how safe we will be when we won't even have any contact with eachother anymore!
And the scary part of it is that it doesn't come from some authoritarian tyrant, but rather it's supported by most, or at least a very significant part of the population...
Somewhat unrelated, but FYI - No authoritarian tyrant exists without support of, or at a minimum, indifference from, most of the population. It may not be literally a majority, but it often is.
There is no such thing as a tyrannical dictator. Only tyranny. Ultimately, all tyrants enjoy broad support. The only way to be tyrannical is with broad popular support. Just look at afghanistan
Very mild. Put more effort in it. You should use more of the keys words like PLANdemic, pharma mafia, fascism. Bonus points for bringing in the aliens.
No businesses were shut down, pubs and clubs were open and no masks were ever required to enter a business. They closed a few public buildings for a short time but nobody was ever locked down.
Sweden has already had more cases and more deaths than Austria, both in absolute and per capita numbers, and has a larger vaccination rate than Austria.
Freedom is worthless. Better live your life in lockdown, than stand a 1% chance of dying. Or actually, better for someone else to live their life in lockdown, than to have me stand a 1% chance of dying.
Yes, but there are degrees of heat as well as light. It makes a difference which circle of hell a thread ends up in, so comments that push things further in are a particular problem.
I can’t recall too many threads where I have left inspired rather than despondent, but maybe that is atypical. In general though, are these topical news-focused submissions in the spirit of the guidelines? They don’t satisfy too much intellectual curiosity, and are well-covered by the news, so it seems like “no”
Sweden's early response was really bad, and it still has bad stats. The saving grace has been the high vaccination rate, but the total death toll is still much worse than any of our neighbours.
Sweden is also suggesting that if you're vaccinated you do not need to get tested.
"If you are vaccinated, you do not generally need to get tested when you experience symptoms." [1]
With ~69% [2] of the population fully vaccinated that is definitely going to skew the numbers a bit.
The influence of different testing rates can be avoided by looking at the number of fatalities. Sweden looks much better now than Austria and the overall picture is the same:
France had 14'000 ICU beds in 2020 (down from 24'000 some years ago). They cut it by half after summer 2020 because (quoting the minister of health) : "hospitalized people need to social-distance".
In Switzerland, the two hospitals which were overwhelmed (Geneva fur sure and think but am not sure Aarau), did the same by cutting ICU personnel in two last spring...
One interesting thing about Sweden that seems to fly over everyone's head is that they spend a significant amount of effort promoting health in public schools. So you have generations of people who are taught to focus on their well-being for the rest of their lives. This is likely one of the major reasons why socialized medical system works in Sweden. Soviets did the same thing and even promoted health at work places by instituting Sanatorium breaks for employees. So, with that said, we're probably talking about a sub-group of people with better natural immunity than some other surrounding countries in the area.
According to this source [0], it looks like something like 80% of the population is vaccinated. If they are still implementing lockdowns with an 80% vaccination rate, maybe it's time to acknowledge that the efficacy numbers we've been fed are a little optimistic?
This is hardly unique to australia. UK, Ireland, Israel, and other highly vaccinated nations are experiencing record case numbers. Where is the skepticism? I feel like 80% of the population has gone totally crazy, completely unwilling to question the safety or efficacy of the vaccines, as though they were sacrosanct.
Edit: article is about austria. Still, the accusations of being "antivaxx" are dishonest. Not all vaccines are created equal. And in any case a ≈65% vaccination rate failing to contain the virus still does not bode well for estimates of effectiveness. Something's not right and the discussion needs to be had.
Which source? The Austrian announcement stated that roughly 65% of the population is fully vaccinated against Covid-19, one of the lowest rates in western Europe.
[edit] aahh, you linked Australia instead of Austria - that's pretty much exactly on the opposite side of the globe.
It's amazing to see people still buying into the idea that the vaccine or lock-downs will stop Covid from spreading. It's an endemic coronovirus, it will be around forever. People that want the vaccine (that doesn't prevent covid infection) can get it. Why destroy civilization to achieve less than nothing?
If it supposedly lessens effects if you get infected, why is there such controversy of worrying about those that don't want it?
The people filling the hospitals, which has consistently been overstated in magnitude, are obese/overweight and with other co-morbidities. For vast majority of Covid cases the symptoms are nothing to worry about. The risk of dying from under 50 is like 0.1% or better if not overweight.
This is an extreme modern aversion to any risk that would desire society grind itself to a halt forever and fight pointless mandate battles towards inevitable political chaos instead of just moving on with life.
> For vast majority of Covid cases the symptoms are nothing to worry about. The risk of dying from under 50 is like 0.1% or better if not overweight.
I'm not sure this claim is consistent with the available evidence. Long term cognitive side effects (e.g. "brain fog" and memory loss) and respiratory problems each seem to occur in ~15% of symptomatic COVID cases among working-age, not-particularly-unhealthy people. "Long term" here means 7-9 months after infection. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.18.21253633v...
Okay? That's not inconsistent with what I said, and moreover this is an absurdly vague and nebulous set of supposed symptoms. It is just simply not that credible that this is a significant real world issue to any large degree worthy of the costs of (ineffectively) trying to mitigate them.
But also, everyone is going to get Covid more or less. It is not going away. It is an endemic coronavirus. Even if what you're saying was true, so what? Where does that leave us? It leaves us with those occurrences still happening, AND a perpetually degraded economic, political and social life due to ineffective mandates, shut downs, restrictions and mask drama. None of this stops the spread of Covid!
>The people filling the hospitals, which has consistently been overstated in magnitude, are obese/overweight and with other co-morbidities.
Good thing that only 15-30% of the Western world is obese. I don't follow the situation everywhere but here in Belgium fact is that people have been refused access to the ICU because there was no place because of COVID-19. And that's with postponing non-urgent care (which is happening, again) and all the measures taken.
What you call moving on with life means refusing people access to hospitals.
Hospitals at capacity has been wildly overstated and additionally none of these measures stop the spread of Covid. The cost is not worth the negligible benefit.
>Every time after measures are taken the spread of COVID slows down, every time they are loosened it increases again.
We should probably keep doing this merry go round yes? Expecting different results. This is like arguing we should never pull out of Afghanistan because chaos would ensue. Just lock-down forever yes?
Stopping the spread of a coronavirus is impossible, how do you not understand this?
It's not going to go on forever, we have vaccines, every time more people aquire natural immunity, we get better treatment, etc. But we will do this until we don't have to worry about our hospitals anymore. How do you not understand this?
JFK airport has about 500 takeoffs a day. 0.1% chance of a crash means on average a jumbo plane full of passengers (400 people?) crashes every 2 days. How would you feel about air travel if these were the risks?
Is this number really true? I remember a study from Italy (on Dr. John Campbell's channel) that there were 0 death from Covid* in people under 40 that were healthy.
*Covid was the cause of death, not sepsis and btw he tested positive for Covid.
I would feel great because I have a low body fat, I workout, lift weights, eat healthy and get sun and vitamin D in high amounts.
0.1 was for everyone...without co-morbidities it's even lower and more of a non-issue. People that want to take the vax should do it. Why do they care what young and healthy people do?
Again though, coronvirus's don't go away it will be around forever and likely everyone gets it eventually. So what are we even talking about accomplishing here?
Sure it'll probably be around forever. But a higher vaccination rate will decrease the rate of hospital overflow. Currently in the UK no one else can get sick or end up in the ICU, and ambulances queue for hours. Suddenly we've gone to third world level of healthcare accessibility. Maybe the answer is expand the hospital network, but no one else is doing this either.
Good luck with your health... you'll need it, since you said everyone will get the virus.
50% of the 6 deaths reported in the article were >50 years old.
"Their deaths bring the military’s COVID-19 mortality rate to just over 0.02, much lower than the roughly 2-percent rate nationwide, but 50 times higher than it was during previous surges last year."
Seems like banking on your overall fitness isn't a terrible position to take... Delta variant is probably the main cause of the uptick in fatalities but they remain comparatively low (nevertheless something that led me to get vaccinated....just before they made it mandatory to keep feeding my family anyway).
The efficacy numbers you might be remembering could have been for the wild type, not the more infectious delta variant. A higher infectiousness also requires a far higher fraction of the population to be vaccinated to reduce spread (rule of thumb is that a fraction of 1 - 1/R_0 would be needed for a given value of R_0 iirc).
You also have to keep in mind that the incidences for vaccinated and unvaccinated are vastly different. Several German federal states record these values and the incidence among the unvaccinated is usually ~10x as high as for the vaccinated, so a small fraction of the population can be responsible for a good deal of the infections. I shall provide a link for the latter in a moment.
Example for Saxony, one of the more affected federal states at the moment. Ratio of incidences for unvaccinated:vaccinated is ~19:1, see:
Keep in mind that you would need to weigh that according to the vaccination levels if you want to calculate somethign with them but you should find the current levels on the same pages, I think.
Is germany also using a lower threshold for PCR tests for vaccinated vs unvaccinated, as was the official recommendation by the CDC last year? Because they would significantly skew the numbers.
You're confusing Austria and Australia, but hey, it's par for the course for the dumpster fire level of comments currently on this thread...
I'm going to trust the statistics that the vaccines work, and aren't deadly. The numbers seem to speak for themselves, thousands of samples and you can see any region with higher vaccination rates have lower infection and death rates (well, I guess until the efficacy wears down and boosters are needed...). On the topic of long term effects, I'm going to trust this scientist (of course at the end of the day, that's what it ends with isn't it, what statements do each of us trust):
> Unlike many medications, which are taken daily, vaccines are generally one-and-done. "Medicines you take every day can cause side effects" that reveal themselves over time, including long-term problems as levels of the drug build up in the body over months and years, Goepfert said. But "vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body," he said. "This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn't expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine."
>The numbers seem to speak for themselves, thousands of samples and you can see any region with higher vaccination rates have lower infection and death rates (well, I guess until the efficacy wears down and boosters are needed...)
This is inconsistent with record case numbers in highly vaccinated countries across the globe.
>On the topic of long term effects, I'm going to trust this scientist (of course at the end of the day, that's what it ends with isn't it, what statements do each of us trust):
Publishing literature critical of vaccines is social and career suicide. The science is effectively poisoned, one sided because of social shaming. But Pfizer et al. aren't complaining given that they are raking in the cash explicitly free of liability. Not like that's a huge conflict of interest or anything, we should continue to trust their safety and efficacy data unquestionably. Surely big pharma has a spotless ethical and safety record.
> This is inconsistent with record case numbers in highly vaccinated countries across the globe.
Let's see your data then.
> Publishing literature critical of vaccines is social and career suicide.
Ah yeah, of course, when you don't like the statement, the messenger is part of a giant lying conspiracy. Where's the science to prove otherwise? (Hidden by the money and power, I guess?) The studies that Jenny McCarthy and her doctor Andrew Wakefield[1] made up about vaccines = autism have been debunked. But I guess that's all because the powers that be have decided they need to be made pariahs, right? Sigh, I'm glad I live in reality. But hey, maybe I'm the one who's been brainwashed, and you're the clear thinking one, right?
IMO, in the modern world, either the professional institutions of your society are trustworthy or people are screwed. Individual investigation into the sciences cannot be the last refuge of a nation under stress.
Please get vaccinated, if not for your sake for others needing to use emergency services. I waited 4 hours in a good deal of pain in an ER waiting room to be stationed to an overflow bed in the hall because of unvaccinated covid cases filling up the rooms. Being next to the nurses' station I got to hear multiple ambulances and helicopters be redirected to farther away hospitals due to lack of room while doctors and nurses constantly rushed between rooms with confused oxygen deprived patients trying to get out of their beds and take their oxygen masks off while they waited for spots in the ICU to open up.
Talking to the nurses the vast majority of hospitalized cases are unvaccinated and looking it up 40% of the state is unvaccinated but they represented 98% of the covid hospitalizations that were filling up over 1/3 of the beds that night. Exactly 0 beds across the entire state were taken due to being vaccinated.
Thankfully 4 hours of pain is something that is easy to get over and I was able to get treated before it caused life threatening problems, some of the people that were redirected won't be able to say the same.
Did any Western country use "lockdown" as a public health measure before 2020? Many countries spent years developing public health plans for pandemics, based on decades of expert consensus.
Firstly, if you're willing to try to convince me that's true then I'm happy to hear your reasoning. Secondly, assuming your premise I don't see how that would become relevant to justifying a lockdown based on vaccination status. How do you make that logical jump?
There have been countless discussions on HN and elsewhere about the interactions between social media, public opinion and public policy.
If there were flaws in social media which influenced lockdown policy, that calls into question 2020 lockdown precedents, now being used to justify 2021 lockdowns of any kind.
Ah ok I think I see the issue. It sounds like you are making the assumption that the same decision making process for initiating the 2020 lockdowns is now being used to initiate further lockdowns. I think this is a flawed assumption. Before 2020, we had no historical data on the effects of nationwide lockdowns. After 2020 we do. It would seem very unlikely to me that governments are choosing to ignore this new data when deciding to introduce new lockdowns.
Even if you think the reasons for justifying the initial lockdowns were flawed, it doesn't seem relevant to the current situation.
> It would seem very unlikely to me that governments are choosing to ignore this new data when deciding to introduce new lockdowns
Why? As I understand OPs point, they threw out the playbook built for just this purpose. New data which contradicts the original playbook ought to be explained not wholly dismissed and now we are doing something different.
Sorry I don't understand what you are saying. What new data are you referring to? How does it contradict the original playbook? What is the thing we are doing differently?
Bear in mind that people reading this comment thread probably have a very different context from which they understand the current situation than you do. I'm a bit lost with where you are going here.
We use the EU-wide QR system. I don't know how easy is to get a fake certificate that would pass scrutiny, but here in Austria nobody seems to really check them. If you have something with a QR code on it, they let you pass.
Yeah it uses cryptographic signing, but fails at the human level when the checker doesn't use the app to check it and doesn't check the holder's ID.
But there were reports that some Germans were selling the certificates on the "dark web" (i.e. you have to know the WhatsApp number of the seller), and are working with rogue pharmacy employees to issue valid certificates...
FWIW I wasn't checked at any cinema I go to, nor was I checked by my employer, and in fact, I wasn't even checked when I went to the hospital (of course I assume they had it on record, but that's just after you check-in and everything).
As for stores, I don't think they are supposed to check at all. Or at least I hope so. Personally I have never been checked.
Strange, I've shown the CovPass app in the past when either a test or vaccination were required, for eating inside, for example. But I think rules change from city to city. I don't think it's needed anymore, anyways.
It's a digitally signed QR code with your name on it. You can't fake it. Some just reuse some other QR code and hope nobody cross-checks the name with some other ID.
here in Lithuania we already have some cases when people were caught using fake/other people's QR code and got punished for it.
another case was that doctors were bribed to sign a document that person was vaccinated even if that person has not visited vaccination center. so yeah, there are attempts, but at the same time, law enforcement works its job sometimes.
In Greece we had cases of fake certificates which were issued by crooked doctors who had access in the system. So I guess the same must apply all over Europe.
I read some assertions that in Greece there were some doctors who took like 400 euros bribe to make a fake injection, but injected the actual vaccine anyway so that the reality matched the paperwork - from a local perspective, is that true or if so, was it widespread?
Essentially you need to get issued a fake vaccination record by the actual medical system.
My local news had some people admitted to hospital with Covid and despite having the certificate, not having been actually vaccinated (which can be seen in blood tests some time afterwards) which has resulted in identifying some medical personnel who had been issued fake certificates of vaccination without actually vaccinating people; since every certificate "knows" when and where exactly you got the vaccine, which exact batch/vial of vaccine was used, and the institutions' medical records will show who (supposedly) made the injection.
The prosecution for the document forgery is still ongoing, but since some of the affected patients died from severe covid, that's essentially wrongful death through intentional medical malpractice, so the involved doctors/nurses will not only lose their licenses to practice but are quite likely to see jail time, and since a nontrivial ratio of people do get ill as Covid is still spreading, if someone fake-vaccinates a lot of people, they are likely to be identified.
How many Austrians have already recovered from Covid infection and thus have long-lasting nasal/mucosal sterilizing immunity that stops both infection and transmission, unlike vaccines which reduce severity of symptoms and risk of death?
With the side-effect that if one is vaccinated with the Janssen vacin, one cannot enter Austria.
But also, in the Netherlands, booster shots for those people are not available.
So quite a few people are now prohibited from entering Austria just because to get assigned to have the Janssen vacin instead of e.g. Biontech/Pfizer.
It is my understanding that a single dose of the Janssen vaccine is still recognized until 2021-01-02 [0]. After that, you need to have an additional dose of any EMA-approved vaccine.
I assume you would be able to get a booster off-label in the Netherlands.
Corona vaccination in the Netherlands has been pretty strictly “invite only”. I.e. once your age group had its turn, you got an invite to make an appointment to get the injection.
Currently no one in NL has gotten any booster yet. They hope to start 60+ somewhere beginning of December.
So as an example, come 03-01-2022, if you’re 30 and you have a Janssen shot and you want to go to Austria you’re out of luck. It’ll be months before you’re going to get the booster and you cannot “get it off label”.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadLost opportunity for some more confusing naming there, like 2gg or 2g+g or perhaps even 2g².
Shocking statement that demonstrates more attempt to spin than inform.
Supposing we take the webster dictionary definition of police state: "political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures"
Considering this effects up to 40% of the population according to the article it checks quite a few boxes:
1. Arbitrary: No precedent, first in the world to do so, with no evidence this will solve the problem in total (controlling covid completely).
2. Repressive government control: There's no argument this fits the strictest definition of repressive.
3. Exercise of power by the police: There's no statement they'll use "secret police" but certainly the enforcement will be aggressive and severe to keep 40% of the population locked down. It's not like watching one person's house. That's a lot of people.
For the record, I am not against vaccines. I am however pro bodily autonomy at any cost, for whatever reason, in any condition. The "price to pay in society" isn't to violate your bodily autonomy, and therefore the non-aggression principle, but make a personal decision to avoid or interact with people you disagree with.
It turns out that all it took to test the waters of liberty and free will was deciding what you want to, and what you dont want to, put in your body. You would even think this would be a cut and dry case considering the alleged "libertarian" leanings of HN, but to my surprise it seems many people are willing to sacrifice this fundamental liberty for ephemeral (possibly even negative) gain. We're 2 years into 15 days to flatten the curve. We have all the evidence to show this won't fix anything unless these people are locked down permanently. At that point they may as well be thrown in prisons, or camps, or whatever the dictator says to do. Democracies can't simply hold you down and inject you with chemicals but coercing these people with objectively police state style tactics is the way tyrants dressed as democratic leaders effectively accomplish the same thing.
You can now get a vaccine that has gone through exactly the same review process as every other vaccine in US history (i.e., one that is not under EUA).
Without issues? That's quite a stretch. I would agree that the risk of a severe or even fatal reaction to the vaccine is quite low, but it's still massively higher than for any of the other vaccines.
> You can now get a vaccine that has gone through exactly the same review process as every other vaccine in US history
I can't speak to the validity of this claim, but it's neither here nor there. Approval for vaccines and other medication has been withdrawn before. No vaccine has ever been widely administered or even mandated without several years of safety data.
The current vaccines have an impeccable safety record.
> that we had many years of long term experience with
We had many years surviving just fine with long term exposure to lead, cigarettes and asbestos. Time duration is not relevant, also because we have not had many years of long term experience with Covid itself - which is why the relative risk is what is important. You have an incredibly lower long-term risk when compared with catching Covid, and society has a multiplicatively lower risk when compared with unvaccinated people being allowed to so easily spread the disease.
> the ones that actually provided sterilizing immunity
The current vaccines provide significantly better immunity than the flu shot. This isn't a black and white exercise.
"Impeccable" does not appear to be accurate:
Orange County woman's death after 2nd dose of Moderna vaccine spurs concern from family https://abc7.com/moderna-vaccine-covid-side-effects-orange-c...
CDC says 28 blood clot cases, 3 deaths may be linked to J&J Covid vaccine https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/12/cdc-says-28-blood-clot-cases...
Belgium halts J&J COVID vaccine for under 41s after first EU death https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
COVID-19: Vaccine recipient died of heart attack, CECC says https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2021/06/13/...
Woman who died a day after Covid-19 jab had heart attack, wasn't allergic to vaccine: MOH https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/woman-who-died-a-day-...
'I blame myself for vaccinating wife' https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelh...
13-Year-Old Dies in Sleep After Receiving Pfizer COVID Vaccine; CDC Investigating https://www.newsweek.com/13-year-old-dies-sleep-after-receiv...
Two die in Japan after shots from suspended Moderna vaccines - Japan govt https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Young people's deaths after Pfizer vaccines are new worry https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2021/08/24/national/soc...
New Zealand reports first death linked to Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/new-zealand-repor...
Healthy mother-of-two, 35, dies after AstraZeneca vaccine caused blood clots on her brain as relatives say she had jab to 'protect her family' https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9986391/Mother-dies...
Vaccinated in secret from his parents: new details about the boy who died after the Pfizer injection HanShotFirst ↗ Regardless of the merits of any particular one of those articles - this is scare mongering as it completely ignores that around 5 million people have died from COVID worldwide, while around 3 billion people have received the vaccine safely. kyleee ↗ The person you have responded to simply refuted the claim that the vaccines have an "impeccable" record. Cogito ↗ The original claim was a qualified 'impeccable' - "the current ones with an impeccable record" - that is the original response was that the current covid vaccines are as safe as the other safe vaccines we have. incrudible ↗ > The original claim was a qualified 'impeccable' - "the current ones with an impeccable record" - that is the original response was that the current covid vaccines are as safe as the other safe vaccines we have. Cogito ↗ I agree with most of what you say. incrudible ↗ It is not ten times worse, it is hundreds of times worse. You would be hard pressed to find a death linked to any of the established vaccines over many years. In Australia, eight people died from VITT alone so far, but how many healthy young people died of COVID? The survival rate for COVID for under 30 without comorbidities is estimated at 99.999%. An impeccably safe infection, by your standard!
The follow up was saying "the covid vaccine doesn't have a perfect safety record therefore it's not really impeccable is it!" while not comparing to other safe vaccines at all.
You can't use a broad definition in the original claim and then try and use a narrow definition when refuting counter claims.
They absolutely are not "as safe", not by a long shot. The Myocarditis risk is unprecedented, as is the risk for GBS, as is the risk for VITT, which is a disease that didn't even exist before. Those are just the side-effects we acknowledge.
Beyond that, the sheer number of adverse event reports for the COVID vaccines dwarf the reports for all other vaccines combined. You can argue that surely most of those reports must be unrelated to vaccination, but that is true for all reports.
Now, before you move the goal post, I'm not saying that these risks outweigh the benefits. That becomes highly subjective and speculative as we move into the younger age brackets. In its approval papers, the FDA itself calculated scenarios in which the risk of vaccination outweighs the benefit for males under 18, we just choose not to pay attention to that.
Here in Australia we held back from giving certain vaccines (the mRNA vaccines we have available here) to some demographics when the virus was suppressed here, until the risk from a new outbreak meant it was safer to get the vaccine than not. The adenovirus vaccine we have available was not held back in the same way.
The contention in this discussion, I think, is that we haven't established an absolute yardstick for an 'impeccable safety record'.
You rightly point out the adverse effects we're seeing from these new vaccines, and that they appear more frequent than adverse effects from past vaccines, but that doesn't make them significantly less safe.
Suppose we have an old vaccine that has adverse effects 1% of the time (this would be terrible, but still), and a new vaccine that has twice as many adverse effects. The old vaccine would be 99% safe and the new vaccine 98% safe - quite similar (though still terrible)!
When we start talking about the actual rate of excess adverse effects for the covid vaccines it's on the order of 10 per million doses [0]. Even if this is 10 times worse than old vaccines we're talking about vaccines that are 99.9999% safe vs 99.999% safe.
Based on the evidence we have these vaccines are extremely safe, and I would feel comfortable accepting the 'impeccable safety record' label even though I probably wouldn't choose it myself.
[0] https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2021...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7482102/
You can't know that. COVID is a new ilness, coronavirus vaccines are novel and neither MRNA nor adenovectors have long-term safety data. You can reduce your short-term risk from COVID by getting a vaccine, so far so good. You can't know if you then go on to develop an overly specific immune response that will end up hurting you with the next mutation. Perhaps the kind of mutation that is being selected for by a non-sterilizing vaccine administered to a large population? Can we rule that one out? Of course not, it's just too inconvenient to think about.
Too many people act as if this vaccine deal was a no-brainer, that the vaccine hesitant are just stupid. Never mind that the idea of vaccinating people not at risk, especially children, was almost unthinkable when it was the "Trump vaccine". What changed? Is it the science, or is it the population that demands a magic injection to end the pandemic by next Tuesday?
> ...and society has a multiplicatively lower risk when compared with unvaccinated people being allowed to so easily spread the disease.
This doesn't stand scrutiny, as some of the highest vaccinated places also have some of the highest rates of infection.
Do you also oppose the assorted vaccinations that are often treated as a mandatory condition of public school attendance?
The "pro bodily autonomy" message is smoke and mirrors, designed to put a palatable glaze on an increasingly fringe and reactionary position.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/docs/school-vaccinations.pdf
Why do authorities not want the populace to know about conscientious objections?
It is very odd how this misinformation is _vehemently_ stated as fact.
So many adjectives, so little substance!
There is absolutely nothing fringe about wanting control of your body. This is a modern authoritarian take that is working to undo the last 50 years of increases in bodily freedom for everyone. I obviously won't win against someone espousing left-authoritarian views because neither of us will concede. But I do have some rhetorical things for you:
On "smoke and mirrors" for "an increasingly fringe, reactionary position". Do you think the same about abortion? Or is it, in your mind, okay for that form of bodily autonomy but some forms of bodily autonomy are more okay than others? Do you draw the line where "it harms people"? Who are "people"? It doesn't help you linked the CDC who has a vested interest in talking down the "bodily autonomy" argument as a public policy (public health is typically diametrically opposed to bodily autonomy because public health requires shirking the individual for the "common" good).
Arguing against bodily autonomy is binary. Either you are for bodily autonomy or you are for some level of government control over what people can and can't do with themselves. What I am willing to do to myself is my own business. Why should anyone but me decide?
The rest of the post is built on top of your initial incorrect assumption, and isn't worth a line response. Consider, instead, whether there is any meaningful sense in which getting a free and effective vaccine can be reasonably compared to reproductive rights.
Effective?
Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
Vermont sees the biggest surge in COVID cases despite having the country's highest vaccination rate https://fortune.com/2021/08/12/vermont-covid-cases-vaccinati...
Iceland has been a vaccination success. Why is it seeing a coronavirus surge? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-covid-su...
99.7% of Waterford adults fully vaccinated against Covid-19 https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40704104.html
Waterford Now Has Highest Incidence of Covid in Ireland https://waterford-news.ie/2021/10/11/waterford-now-has-highe...
76% of September Covid-19 deaths are vax breakthroughs https://vermontdailychronicle.com/2021/09/30/76-of-september...
Safe?
Orange County woman's death after 2nd dose of Moderna vaccine spurs concern from family https://abc7.com/moderna-vaccine-covid-side-effects-orange-c...
CDC says 28 blood clot cases, 3 deaths may be linked to J&J Covid vaccine https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/12/cdc-says-28-blood-clot-cases...
Belgium halts J&J COVID vaccine for under 41s after first EU death https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
COVID-19: Vaccine recipient died of heart attack, CECC says https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2021/06/13/...
'I blame myself for vaccinating wife' https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-newdelh...
Two die in Japan after shots from suspended Moderna vaccines - Japan govt https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
The linked articles regarding Iceland in fact contradict your assertion. They provide a very clear graph of cases over time vs deaths over time and it is trivial to see that during the recent spike in cases, deaths are much lower in proportion compared to earlier spikes, a clear indicator of the vaccine working well.
It is also logical that most COVID cases in places with high vaccination rates are breakthrough cases, there are simply less unvaccinated hosts for the virus to potentially infect. It does not follow that the outcome would be better with less vaccinated hosts.
Finally, you've posted links to 7 deaths and 28 complications following vaccinations. Regardless of the merits of any particular one of those articles - this is scare mongering as it completely ignores that around 5 million people have died from COVID worldwide, while around 3 billion people have been vaccinated safely. (Source- Google searches for worldwide covid deaths and worldwide covid vaccinations).
If discussions on HN are any indication, opposition to lockdowns/vaccines is growing and anything but fringe. Risk tolerance is subjective, and the fact that someone's cost benefit analysis aligns against the extreme measures we are seeing does not imply heartlessness. This is not the plague. On the scale of deadly viruses, covid is quite close to a severe flu in terms of mortality/long term effects. It's high time that the moralists started listening to the rapidly growing body of opposition. Clearly this is a curve that we are not going to flatten without extreme measures, if ever given that this is now an endemic virus.
It's not nice to lump me in with anti-vaxxers but I guess that's how modern politics^W^W^W^W^W^W science is.
I don't take the stance that children have complete autonomy only because it leads to some very strange and disturbing consequences. Therefore, if the parents decide the child should not be vaccinated than I think that's a fine decision. I also think deciding your child should be vaccinated is a fine decision.
Where I draw the line is the prevention of attendance at a learning institution. Since you mentioned public school, then this should either have a distanced option (home schooling, etc) or permit the students regardless. Private institutions may do what they please. Yes, this also goes for public grant-receiving universities, community colleges, etc. Forcing people to manufacturer "exemptions" is simply an end-around to the government enforcing it's will upon people and their choices with their body. It's both immoral and unethical.
At vaccination rates of 60-70% the vaccinated make 1/3rd of new infections (and giving that the vaccinated have less symptoms, one may suppose that the vaccinated rate of infection is even higher than the official 1/3rd), and thus raising the vaccination rate from 70% to 100% would decrease infection rate just 2 times at best, so even locking down unvaccinated permanently would solve nothing. And that too:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
" A person who was fully vaccinated and then had a ‘breakthrough’ Delta infection was almost twice as likely to pass on the virus as someone who was infected with Alpha."
"Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus."
Me too! Have you figured out how to keep your COVID to yourself?
None of these apply of course for one simple reason: a black person in South Africa can't simply choose not to be black to escape Apartheid. American slaves couldn't simply choose not to be slaves.
So policies that apply to unvaccinated people aren't analogous for the simple reason that you can choose to get vaccinated in almost all cases (side note: the very few people with a valid medical exemption shouldn't be subjected to these kinds of policies IMHO).
So it's not a lack of body autonomy that's going on here. It's just that those choices come with consequences. You don't want to wear a mask? No one is holding you down and putting one on you. But you can't fly on a commercial plane either.
I too believe strongly in body autonomy, which is one reason why I fully support reproductive rights, including access to abortion. What I find particularly ironic is in the Venn diagram there's a seemingly large intersection between the unvaccinated, those who oppose restrictions on unvaccinated people and those who support restricting access to abortions. Again, not you, specifically.
It's worth adding that this isn't purely a personal choice. If it was, I don't think anyone would be upset about it. There are documented cases of contact tracers who can directly establish links between a given person spreading Covid and the deaths that result from that. What about the people who medically cannot get the vaccine? Or are immunocompromised? If you oppose the vaccine because of the extremely low risks of negative side effects, remember your choice affects other people.
It's riskier to drive in a car than to get the Covid vaccine.
The term "body autonomy" here just doesn't apply. "Consequences to personal choices" is far more accurate.
so the chinese forcing the Uyghurs to abandon their culture is totally fine, because all they have to do is stop practicing it?
This isn't arbitrary at all, its actually extremely common to restrict the participation in society of unvaccinated people - in countries _much_ more free than the United States.
You probably were a fan of FDR locking up US citizens because of their ethnicity too.
Can we stop pretending covid is something that justifies these crazy actions we are taking. Yes it kills people and can spread easily. So what. At this point it is only killing unvaccinated people and vaccinated people can still get and spread it.
So just stop it. Stop with the insanity. Stop pretending that the emperor has clothes. Or at the very least let cities enforce what they want and don’t have a rural place in CA be forced to follow what SF wants, or have Austin do what TX wants.
“Yes it kills people and can spread easily, so what”
Is very callous. I think you could take your own advice about SF vs rural towns and maybe consider applying it to other countries.
(OA) US, veterans, 3 months VEaI = 78%, 6 months VEaI = 50%, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm0620
US, 5 months VEaI = 47%, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
UK, 3 months VEaI = 75%. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01548-7
Qatar, 3 months VEaI = 70%, 6 months VEaI = 12.8%, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114
(preprint) Sweden, <50yo, 2-4 months VEaI = 83%, 4-6 months VEaI = 50%, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410
1. The probability of a BI is not the same as the relative probability of a vaccinated person infecting another person. I also refer to “vaccinated people“ to mean “a population of vaccinated people”, which is where the big gains are.
2. The day before they get their booster shot (6 months) is not the same as the probability overall, counting the best and moderate days of immunity too
2. I expect a vaccine to significantly (VE >90%) reduce infection probability for at least 10 years. These vaccines ain't that. While I'm vaccinated, I have not signed up for an endless stream of "boosters" every 6 months or so. Probably I'll be declared "unvaccinated" with a straight face and excluded from society in the not-so-far future.
Why do you expect this, and do you think it's a reasonable expectation? Do you shrug off flu vaccines because they're only effective for a year or so? (I understand the difference between reduction in efficacy over time against a single strain vs against new variations)
> While I'm vaccinated, I have not signed up for an endless stream of "boosters" every 6 months or so. Probably I'll be declared "unvaccinated" with a straight face and excluded from society in the not-so-far future.
I don't understand this point of view at all. Do you only take the first pill in a course of antibiotics? Why wouldn't you follow the vaccine schedule that offers the best overall protection, and best reduction in total risk, that we're aware of and is available to you?
Is your position the rational position for them to take?
What is the motivation for your position?
Yet we are very careful to not overuse antibiotics. Why?
https://www.pulmonologyadvisor.com/home/topics/pneumonia/bac...
UK data shows vaccinated people are drastically more likely to get it and spread it than the unvaccinated. In other countries VE drops to zero after only about 6-8 months, but the UK programme was ahead of other countries. Raw VE in the UK has kept going down after reaching zero and is currently deeply negative, with it being worse than negative 100% in some age groups. In other words, vaccinated people - for whatever reason - are far more of a problem from an infection control perspective than the unvaccinated.
The public health authorities don't have a good explanation for this and have been reduced to blaming a vague, highly speculative and sometimes unnamed set of confounders, for which they insist everyone make massive adjustments despite not being able to provide any evidence that these confounders are important or even exist at all. And in fact one study in California that did do a lot of these adjustments found they made very little impact (a few percent at most). That's an issue because public health's "adjustments" are now reaching absurd levels, e.g. taking AZ from 4% effectiveness to 73% VE!
It's very unlikely that Austrians are biologically totally different to British people, so we can say with 100% certainty that this latest quasi-Nazi move is going unlikely to have any effect on their case numbers, although we can also say that having taken the leap into such darkness the authorities there will never admit to any type of failure, thus the unvaccinated will continue to be blamed even as the data falls apart around them.
This is not true. Vaccinated people are less likely to get and spread Covid. I’d link you to the CDC but it’s probably redundant.
The US figures do indeed diverge strongly from data in other countries. This is very unlikely to be because the USA is somehow biologically special. US statistical quality is unfortunately garbage w.r.t. vaccines, as the CDC stopped tracking data at a national level a long time ago and the states often don't report in comparable ways. The UK data is of a much higher quality as it breaks out the population in the ways needed for this type of analysis.
Article graphing the UK data showing negative efficacy against disease in the raw data, and discussing the semi-public fighting that's broken out between arms of the civil service over how to disguise or de-emphasise the results:
https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/ukhsa-efficacy-stats-death-...
Norway finds no effectiveness against death (but oddly, some against ICU admittance)
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/14/norway-study-finds-zero-...
Essay discussing how although raw UK data shows negative efficacy, it gets adjusted using a test negative case control design to show high efficacy. This contradicts data not only from Norway but also Sweden and Qatar, so is there a flaw in their approach:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/12/why-are-the-ukhsas-estim...
Another essay showing that the TNCC design requires absence of "viral interference" which may not be the case here:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/11/13/the-flaw-at-the-heart-of...
Daily Sceptic has been doing a lot of reporting and analysis on the UK data (it's a UK site), usually with very high quality of analysis. A lot of it comes from PhDs and data scientists of various kinds.
* UK shows negative VE
* US and Germany show 90-95% VE
* Medical literature shows 50% VE at six months and waning
Sadly, there is no longterm RCT in place to perform this basic, but extremely valuable measure. We have to rely on epi data, and epi data is very easy to mess up. I wonder how much of this is due to different testing regimens. Like CDC telling vaccinated people to not test unless symptoms, or UK school guidance instructing, on contact with known covid case, vaccinated people to do a PCR, but unvaccinated people to self isolate for two weeks. Plus copious doses of Simpson, as different age groups have vastly different covid outcomes and vastly different vaccination rates.
Medical literature appears to be heavily adjusting the raw data and using a methodology that is known to overstate vaccine effectiveness if a vaccine causes "viral interference", without bothering to show that no such interference is taking place.
The entire thing is just a dystopian nightmare of lying and manipulation, really. In the past I've used the term anti-vaxxer as an insult, as I guess many of us have done. Never again. The whole story around vaccines will eventually have to be revisited - you can't witness this stuff up close and not conclude that public health has a blind, near fanatical ideological bias in favour of vaccination to the extent that any bad news is immediately covered up or obfuscated.
"Decades ago, physicists including Richard Feynman noticed something worrying. New estimates of basic physical constants were often closer to published values than would be expected given standard errors of measurement. They realized that researchers were more likely to 'confirm' past results than refute them — results that did not conform to their expectation were more often systematically discarded or revised."
https://www.nature.com/articles/526187a
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. In egregious cases you can always send a link to hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
It is ostensibly for their own good and to prevent the collapse of the healthcare system that, coincidently, has reduced capacity over 2020.
[EDIT:] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/world/europe/austria-chan...
If we want to truly protect those who can't take vaccines testing and lockdowns for those who have not been tested is only way.
How about all those people who recklessly go swimming and then drown. I mean they are using up valuable resources. Swimming should be banned.
What about candy bars? Think of the savings in health care if we just fed people sawdust.
I agree with all the posters here. We need to put everyone in camps for their own good. Thank god COVID came along and we realized human rights were just a joke.
We should design our cities better. Lock the people inside and only allow access from behind guardrails to parkin spots. Bikes should be straight out.
It is terrifying to me that a government is confining healthy people to their homes for refusing a treatment that they (rightly or wrongly) believe is not in their best interests.
Of course, recorded cases are likely to fall naturally at some point. If the fall is coincident with the introduction of this rule, we can expect the same across the West.
In my (EU) country you need to be vaccinated to go into most shops, restaurants, bars, and beauty services. However you can freely go to your office and not wear a mask. Even the people working in places where as a customer you need to be vaccinated, do not themselves need to be vaccinated.
I'm fully vaccinated, but I have friends who are not. The people who do not want to be vaccinated have their reasons, and I doubt these restrictions which cause mild inconveniences at best (compared to lockdowns like last winter, where some stores were closed for 3 month and you couldn't leave your city) are really going to make them change their mind. If they really want everyone to be vaccinated, they should just come out and say that, then work to get it passed into law.
But when discussions over the degree to which measures actually benefit the collective good are suppressed, both top down (tech censorship) and bottom up (downvotes and social shaming), you are moving into the territory of tyranny/oppression.
This isn't about behavior, unless you mean blindly following authority (in which case those civilizations had huge downsides). This is about a medical treatment for a disease that is objectively not a civilization-ending threat, by any measure.
The problem is forcing people to take a specific medical treatment (it's not about immunity from the virus, it's about the specific treatment ONLY), and using fear as a justification to control society.
What you're calling "collective good" is exactly how past atrocities have happened. Anytime there has been genocide or millions of people getting slaughtered, it's because one side decided it was for the collective good. It's a cliche argument that can go both ways and says nothing about the actual reasons for implementing force across a society.
Vaccines prevent infection, as evidenced by the drastically lower COVID case numbers in the vaccinated. You can’t spread it if you don’t have it. If you do contract it, you are less infectious.
This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available.
In situations where the comment is only aimed at correcting a factual mistake, for example, it can be okay, if still bad style.
It always feels as if it prematurely implies evil intention, which is a move that does not belong in any intellectually honest conversation, neither casual nor scientific.
I don't think the boilerplate should be used in comments that then continue with highly questionable, very radical statements. Especially if heterodox opinions are stated as if they were well established positions.
For example: "This is no different to instituting lockdowns before vaccines became available."
The idea that conditional lockdowns are identical to non-conditional lockdowns from legal, medical or political perspective is not just wrong, but also unnecessarily radical. The radicalism just makes the wrongness trivial to spot.
The position that actually justifies conditional lock-downs (like the new Austrian policy) is one where the discriminatory treatment is acknowledged and justified, not simply denied.
...which should not surprise anyone who somewhat followed the discourse on the issue.
I know that's not as attractive as just denying the existence of differences between two obviously different policies.
Not to mention the ethical aspects of this kind of apartheid.
Pedantry, I know, but this is HN.
The availability of a vaccine is one of the several ways in which the current Austrian policy is different from earlier lockdowns.
This alone already has direct consequences for the political justification of the policy: In the article OP linked they specifically name vaccination nudges as one of the effects they expect from their conditional lockdown. Which is something that would not have made sense in the absence of vaccines.
Pedantry can have it's upside though, so I'm not complaining! :)
Vaccines suppress symptoms, which may result in infected people being unaware they are infected or transmitting to others. That's why the CDC recommends (as of October 15) that vaccinated people be tested after exposure, since lack of symptoms != lack of infection, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...
> Based on evolving evidence, CDC recommends fully vaccinated people get tested 5-7 days after close contact with a person with suspected or confirmed COVID-19.
"COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing infection."
Do these headlines represent revisions to the initial effectiveness? Or do they represent the waning effectiveness over time? What is the point of having Fauci in the video?
Right now, using the Rt map from https://covidestim.org, looks like Indiana & Ohio are in the middle of a wave. Covid hospital bed utilization: IN 10%, OH 15%. Covid ICU utilization: IN 20%, OH 20%.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/indiana
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/ohio
PS: I think arguments justifying such mandates for avoiding overwhelming of hospitals will further enrage anyone who was already against universal healthcare because it becomes yet another avenue for govt/bureaucratic manipulation of people's lives.
There was a case not too long ago in Alabama where a person suffered a heart attack and died because in three dozen hospitals no intensive care bed could be found, so the concern isn't even theoretical.
Not really politically viable until these numbers equalize.
What is the estimate of the authoritarian rules of increasing mortality? E.g. by a war? By racial cleaning, by collapse of social structures?
You spread half information and consequently fake. The legislation is there for a reason and you throw it away. You just took a decision for the uncaccinated people by eliminating their freedom. They never did it to you.
Actually, the final report shows that COVID patients represented 2% (!!!) of the total hospitalized... And only 5% (!?!?) of what they call "critical care"...
This report from the ATIH (Official agency) was published in october 2021.
The report: https://www.atih.sante.fr/sites/default/files/public/content...
From LCP (a kind of French C-SPAN): https://twitter.com/LCP/status/1458163736175386624
This makes absolutely no sense. The most terrifying is people actually defending and promoting this kind of orwellian and irrational measures.
I don't know if sterilising vaccins are being researched now though. I heard something about possible nose-spray vaccine that would both improve this and make applications easier. Maybe well see that in near future.
Will take years though.
It IS true that they reduce net transmission, but the literature is clear that the reason is almost exclusively due to how they shorten the duration of carrying. The nasal viral load is virtually identical. The primary factor is how long you're carrying that load for (approximately 11 days vs 8 days from what I can tell from pubmed et al).
Does vaccination help the herd? Sure, but it's pretty limited. The reality is that vaccination mostly protects YOU - it keeps the infection in the top layer of the respiratory epithelium, ensures to a great degree that you won't be hospitalized for deeper tissue damage.
Dutch data, for instance, has recently shown substantial reductions in transmission within households, locations where a three day difference in the duration of symptoms is unlikely to have had a major impact. [0]
[0]https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.14.21264959v...
So once you're close to ICU capacity you have three options: - Ignore it, likely leading to a lot of deaths. - Full lockdown - Targeted lockdown of the most vulnerable population (similar to 'cocooning' of elderly in the early stages)
Obviously, none of these are great options, but they're the choices a number of places are now facing.
So, in the early stages of the pandemic, a number of countries did exactly that. Which was, arguably, a lot more unfair; over 80s can't take a de-oldening vaccine.
Ultimately, _if_, and only if, the ICU numbers dictate either locking down the whole population or locking down that fraction of the population who have voluntarily decided to be the main contributors to ICU load... well, it's not a _great_ choice to have to make, certainly, but there's something to be said for locking down fewer people, if that is the choice.
I wish other governments did the same. We could all work together to get rid of this disease, but this will never happen if we let people that refuse medicine to walk freely contaminating others.
Direct link to cited study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...
Saying "the vaccines don't work at all" is IMO equivalent to saying seatbelts don't work at all, they should be abolished, because someone wrecked and died at 200mph while wearing seatbelts.
For the analogy to hold true seatbelts would have to double your chances of actually crashing your car, and also sometimes randomly kill people who hadn't crashed at all (vaccine injuries are a real thing and excess death is now elevated for non-COVID reasons). Clearly the tradeoffs involved here are quite different and statistics need to be used very carefully to assess them.
Do you have any good source ?
There are no sources showing an increase in excess death due to vaccination because the medical and media establishment categorically deny that this could possibly be happening. As far as they're concerned more or less nobody ever dies of the COVID vaccine, period, end of story and any claim to the contrary is misinformation. This attitude is sometimes summed up as "Vaccines are amongst the leading causes of coincidences".
The US VAERS database of course tracks peculiar diseases/symptoms/deaths that follow vaccination. At this point it has more records of adverse events for COVID vaccines than all other vaccines combined since the tracking programme began, but the vast majority of problems never make it to VAERS or similar databases, so the absolute numbers aren't that useful. So the best people can do is inference. There appears to be a sharp increase in deaths due to heart attacks and strokes/other clotting disorders this year. The media are occasionally reporting on this but either claiming it's some inexplicable mystery or coming up with some absurd alternative explanation. Examples:
"Health experts have been left baffled by a big rise [25%] in a common and potentially fatal type of heart attack in the west of Scotland": https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mystery-rise-in-heart-att...
"Why are heart attacks becoming common amongst seemingly fit people?" - their answer is a sudden epidemic of too much exercise: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitnes...
The UK has very good public health data compared to most countries. It breaks out heart related deaths for both with and without COVID. There has been a large rise in non-COVID heart deaths in 2021. Some of this may be/must be due to the (not really admitted) collapse of the UK healthcare system due to lockdown triggered overload. However there is also a correlation with the vaccine rollout (it's graphed):
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/31/why-has-there-been-a-ris...
It's a 12x increase. That's either lockdowns or vaccines but whichever it is, that's not a natural cause, it's caused by government policy.
From a quick bit of Googling there seems to be similar data from Israel but I have not checked this tweet in any depth - the tables seem legit but the summarization of it looks backwards to me:
https://twitter.com/RanIsraeli/status/1425002893116166144
Anecdotally there seem to be a noticeably larger number of athletes having heart attacks whilst playing. Example montages of these stories are here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l34v01crsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZAPxYouf-c
I have a friend who is investigating this phenomenon in more depth. He found a research paper from the early 2000s that counted news reports about sudden on-field medical emergencies amongst young sports players, then compared that rate to some big lists of news stories in 2021 about it he compiled. He's still working on this project a...
But well, I've spotted something: https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/ukhsa-efficacy-stats-death-..., ages 40-49: the vaxxed are getting sick at twice the rate of unvaxxed ones.
But this image https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/7A0B/production/... from https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55274833 says more than 75% of 40-49 have had 1 dosage.
Imagine if 100% of a population has been vaccinated. We know breakthrough cases are possible. Everyone that gets Covid after that will be breakthrough! And this graph would have 0 cases of the unvaxxed, and a non-zero bar for the vaxxed, and you're going to interpret that as "The vaccination gives you Covid!". The quoted emails try to explain why this graph is bad and liable to misinterpration, but the Substack author is misleading you by telling you there's dodgy stuff going on.
If the vaccine efficacy drops down after 6 months, then, boosters should be prescribed and even made mandatory. But boohoo, more crying from the other side.
1. The problem appears when comparing rates. Your counter-argument is assuming we're comparing absolute numbers which is false.
2. The argument about "data fudging" is the other way around. The raw data shows sharply negative effectiveness against symptomatic disease, and the UK HSA then "fudges" the data into showing the opposite using a statistical technique called TNCC - the validity of which is currently under debate, as it relies on an assumption that doesn't seem to be true.
But these mis-understandings aren't really surprising given that you admit you haven't actually bothered to read the links, and instead decided that you already know the answers because of some unrelated discussion to do with US politics. None of the people I've cited are Americans or in the USA so whatever you think did or did not happen in the 2020 election is quite irrelevant.
Maybe because the CDC says so? Or have we lost all faith in them?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/keythings...
"COVID-19 vaccines are effective at protecting people from COVID-19 and help keep adults and children from getting seriously sick. COVID-19 vaccines can reduce the risk of people spreading the virus that causes COVID-19."
Look into what happened with Vietnam. They were able to 'control' the spread multiple times over the first year. They thought they could always control things, so they didn't focus on vaccination.
Once delta took hold, it spread more quickly than they could control things and the govt. has gone crazy on getting everyone vaccinated as quickly as possible.
At this point though, infections are soaring. The govt. has given up trying to control it. A lot of people are going to die. They are figuring that they will push to get as many people vaccinated, but herd immunity will come faster. The plan now is to get the country open again more quickly.
I'm sorry but the narrative "vaccine prevents spread" has been falling apart for the past 6 months and is now completely disproved by real world data. Not a single country has been successful at preventing the spread with vaccination. And it shows at every level : from cities (singapore) to small islands (cayman islands) to states.
The real benefit of the vaccine is that it lessen the effects if you are infected. The benefit of that is that hospitals don't fill up. People who have other issues won't be locked out. Fewer people will die.
Get vaccinated.
It's sad to see how many otherwise presumably normal people so easily skip away from ideas of basic individual rights for such flimsy reasons now.
There is also further discussion about requiring PCR-Tests for the non restricted groups.
Austria has a around 60% vaccination rate² and around 12% of the population had an documented infection³.
Herd immunity is a discussion point but scientists are undecided how high the numbers need to be. Estimates from earlier this year did talk about 60% but this number was raised and some experts even say its impossible.
2: https://orf.at/corona/daten/impfung
3: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...
The implementation was the following:
- FFP2 Mask mandated in essential services like pharmacies, grocery store and postal offices for everyone.
- No Mask or distancing mandate for anyone who was vaccinated or recovered.
- Mask mandate and a negative covid test that is not older than 24/48h depending on the testing method for non vaccinated for anything outside of essential services.
The minimum time between 2 vaccinations is 2 weeks but it might be better to have a longer interval according to research².
Recovered need to wait for a minimum of 21 days before getting a vaccination.
Vaccination need to be refreshed after 270 days.
2:https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1875
They could be called freedom camps or something catchy and people would just telework and live there.
Just like how 9/11 transformed the world because Patriot act, secret prisons, secret courts, secret spying.
I for one welcome our new future where we merge with machines and become less human than ever, because think of how safe we will be when we won't even have any contact with eachother anymore!
Perhaps Sweden did the right thing? Unthinkable, let's repeat failed policies ad infinitum!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: Austria currently has more absolute excess deaths and lower population than Sweden according to Financial Times.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
Total deaths per million in Sweden so far: 1466 Total deaths per million in Denmark so far: 471
With ~69% [2] of the population fully vaccinated that is definitely going to skew the numbers a bit.
1. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Looking at this, I also do not understand why Austria's ICUs are overloaded now but not in November 2020.
France had 14'000 ICU beds in 2020 (down from 24'000 some years ago). They cut it by half after summer 2020 because (quoting the minister of health) : "hospitalized people need to social-distance".
In Switzerland, the two hospitals which were overwhelmed (Geneva fur sure and think but am not sure Aarau), did the same by cutting ICU personnel in two last spring...
This is hardly unique to australia. UK, Ireland, Israel, and other highly vaccinated nations are experiencing record case numbers. Where is the skepticism? I feel like 80% of the population has gone totally crazy, completely unwilling to question the safety or efficacy of the vaccines, as though they were sacrosanct.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/datablog/ng-inter...
Edit: article is about austria. Still, the accusations of being "antivaxx" are dishonest. Not all vaccines are created equal. And in any case a ≈65% vaccination rate failing to contain the virus still does not bode well for estimates of effectiveness. Something's not right and the discussion needs to be had.
[edit] aahh, you linked Australia instead of Austria - that's pretty much exactly on the opposite side of the globe.
The people filling the hospitals are unvaccinated.
The vaccine doesn't prevent new cases. It isn't a super man cape. It lessens the effects, if you do get infected.
If it supposedly lessens effects if you get infected, why is there such controversy of worrying about those that don't want it?
The people filling the hospitals, which has consistently been overstated in magnitude, are obese/overweight and with other co-morbidities. For vast majority of Covid cases the symptoms are nothing to worry about. The risk of dying from under 50 is like 0.1% or better if not overweight.
This is an extreme modern aversion to any risk that would desire society grind itself to a halt forever and fight pointless mandate battles towards inevitable political chaos instead of just moving on with life.
I'm not sure this claim is consistent with the available evidence. Long term cognitive side effects (e.g. "brain fog" and memory loss) and respiratory problems each seem to occur in ~15% of symptomatic COVID cases among working-age, not-particularly-unhealthy people. "Long term" here means 7-9 months after infection. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.18.21253633v...
Okay? That's not inconsistent with what I said, and moreover this is an absurdly vague and nebulous set of supposed symptoms. It is just simply not that credible that this is a significant real world issue to any large degree worthy of the costs of (ineffectively) trying to mitigate them.
But also, everyone is going to get Covid more or less. It is not going away. It is an endemic coronavirus. Even if what you're saying was true, so what? Where does that leave us? It leaves us with those occurrences still happening, AND a perpetually degraded economic, political and social life due to ineffective mandates, shut downs, restrictions and mask drama. None of this stops the spread of Covid!
Good thing that only 15-30% of the Western world is obese. I don't follow the situation everywhere but here in Belgium fact is that people have been refused access to the ICU because there was no place because of COVID-19. And that's with postponing non-urgent care (which is happening, again) and all the measures taken.
What you call moving on with life means refusing people access to hospitals.
Hospitals at capacity has been wildly overstated and additionally none of these measures stop the spread of Covid. The cost is not worth the negligible benefit.
Every time after measures are taken the spread of COVID slows down, every time they are loosened it increases again.
We should probably keep doing this merry go round yes? Expecting different results. This is like arguing we should never pull out of Afghanistan because chaos would ensue. Just lock-down forever yes?
Stopping the spread of a coronavirus is impossible, how do you not understand this?
It's not going to go on forever, we have vaccines, every time more people aquire natural immunity, we get better treatment, etc. But we will do this until we don't have to worry about our hospitals anymore. How do you not understand this?
JFK airport has about 500 takeoffs a day. 0.1% chance of a crash means on average a jumbo plane full of passengers (400 people?) crashes every 2 days. How would you feel about air travel if these were the risks?
*Covid was the cause of death, not sepsis and btw he tested positive for Covid.
0.1 was for everyone...without co-morbidities it's even lower and more of a non-issue. People that want to take the vax should do it. Why do they care what young and healthy people do?
Again though, coronvirus's don't go away it will be around forever and likely everyone gets it eventually. So what are we even talking about accomplishing here?
Maybe you should read this (and feel free to conclude it's lying media): https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/30/fact...
A strong immune system might even be better for the virus: https://magazine.ucsf.edu/your-immune-system-could-turn-covi...
Sure it'll probably be around forever. But a higher vaccination rate will decrease the rate of hospital overflow. Currently in the UK no one else can get sick or end up in the ICU, and ambulances queue for hours. Suddenly we've gone to third world level of healthcare accessibility. Maybe the answer is expand the hospital network, but no one else is doing this either.
Good luck with your health... you'll need it, since you said everyone will get the virus.
Well, for context, the US military is overwhelmingly physically-fit and healthy compared to the general population.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/09...
50% of the 6 deaths reported in the article were >50 years old.
"Their deaths bring the military’s COVID-19 mortality rate to just over 0.02, much lower than the roughly 2-percent rate nationwide, but 50 times higher than it was during previous surges last year."
Seems like banking on your overall fitness isn't a terrible position to take... Delta variant is probably the main cause of the uptick in fatalities but they remain comparatively low (nevertheless something that led me to get vaccinated....just before they made it mandatory to keep feeding my family anyway).
Nobody is saying "stop" the spread, it is obvious it isn't going to just stop. "slow" it is a more admirable goal.
You also have to keep in mind that the incidences for vaccinated and unvaccinated are vastly different. Several German federal states record these values and the incidence among the unvaccinated is usually ~10x as high as for the vaccinated, so a small fraction of the population can be responsible for a good deal of the infections. I shall provide a link for the latter in a moment.
Example for Saxony, one of the more affected federal states at the moment. Ratio of incidences for unvaccinated:vaccinated is ~19:1, see:
https://www.coronavirus.sachsen.de/infektionsfaelle-in-sachs...
Example for Bavaria, also heavily affected. Ratio of incidences for unvaccinated:vaccinated is ~9.7:1. Source:
https://www.lgl.bayern.de/gesundheit/infektionsschutz/infekt...
Baden-Württemberg, taken from an article as I couldn't find the original source. Ratio of incidences unvaccinated:vaccinated is ~18.4:1 there:
https://www.swp.de/panorama/intensivstation-geimpfte-corona-...
Keep in mind that you would need to weigh that according to the vaccination levels if you want to calculate somethign with them but you should find the current levels on the same pages, I think.
I'm going to trust the statistics that the vaccines work, and aren't deadly. The numbers seem to speak for themselves, thousands of samples and you can see any region with higher vaccination rates have lower infection and death rates (well, I guess until the efficacy wears down and boosters are needed...). On the topic of long term effects, I'm going to trust this scientist (of course at the end of the day, that's what it ends with isn't it, what statements do each of us trust):
https://www.uab.edu/reporter/resources/be-healthy/item/9544-...
> Unlike many medications, which are taken daily, vaccines are generally one-and-done. "Medicines you take every day can cause side effects" that reveal themselves over time, including long-term problems as levels of the drug build up in the body over months and years, Goepfert said. But "vaccines are just designed to deliver a payload and then are quickly eliminated by the body," he said. "This is particularly true of the mRNA vaccines. mRNA degrades incredibly rapidly. You wouldn't expect any of these vaccines to have any long-term side effects. And in fact, this has never occurred with any vaccine."
This is inconsistent with record case numbers in highly vaccinated countries across the globe.
>On the topic of long term effects, I'm going to trust this scientist (of course at the end of the day, that's what it ends with isn't it, what statements do each of us trust):
Publishing literature critical of vaccines is social and career suicide. The science is effectively poisoned, one sided because of social shaming. But Pfizer et al. aren't complaining given that they are raking in the cash explicitly free of liability. Not like that's a huge conflict of interest or anything, we should continue to trust their safety and efficacy data unquestionably. Surely big pharma has a spotless ethical and safety record.
Let's see your data then.
> Publishing literature critical of vaccines is social and career suicide.
Ah yeah, of course, when you don't like the statement, the messenger is part of a giant lying conspiracy. Where's the science to prove otherwise? (Hidden by the money and power, I guess?) The studies that Jenny McCarthy and her doctor Andrew Wakefield[1] made up about vaccines = autism have been debunked. But I guess that's all because the powers that be have decided they need to be made pariahs, right? Sigh, I'm glad I live in reality. But hey, maybe I'm the one who's been brainwashed, and you're the clear thinking one, right?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/
Talking to the nurses the vast majority of hospitalized cases are unvaccinated and looking it up 40% of the state is unvaccinated but they represented 98% of the covid hospitalizations that were filling up over 1/3 of the beds that night. Exactly 0 beds across the entire state were taken due to being vaccinated.
Thankfully 4 hours of pain is something that is easy to get over and I was able to get treated before it caused life threatening problems, some of the people that were redirected won't be able to say the same.
> In one notorious clip, the spontaneously dying man throws his arms out to catch himself
If there were flaws in social media which influenced lockdown policy, that calls into question 2020 lockdown precedents, now being used to justify 2021 lockdowns of any kind.
Even if you think the reasons for justifying the initial lockdowns were flawed, it doesn't seem relevant to the current situation.
Why? As I understand OPs point, they threw out the playbook built for just this purpose. New data which contradicts the original playbook ought to be explained not wholly dismissed and now we are doing something different.
(2008) US ACLU, Pandemic Preparedness, the Need for a Public Health Not a Law Enforcement / National Security - Approach (41 pages), https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/privacy/pemic_...
(2011) UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy (70 pages), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
(2017) US HHS Pandemic Influenza Plan (52 pages), https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/pan-flu-repor...
Bear in mind that people reading this comment thread probably have a very different context from which they understand the current situation than you do. I'm a bit lost with where you are going here.
It seems anti-vaxers have invaded HN today. =(
But there were reports that some Germans were selling the certificates on the "dark web" (i.e. you have to know the WhatsApp number of the seller), and are working with rogue pharmacy employees to issue valid certificates...
As for stores, I don't think they are supposed to check at all. Or at least I hope so. Personally I have never been checked.
another case was that doctors were bribed to sign a document that person was vaccinated even if that person has not visited vaccination center. so yeah, there are attempts, but at the same time, law enforcement works its job sometimes.
My local news had some people admitted to hospital with Covid and despite having the certificate, not having been actually vaccinated (which can be seen in blood tests some time afterwards) which has resulted in identifying some medical personnel who had been issued fake certificates of vaccination without actually vaccinating people; since every certificate "knows" when and where exactly you got the vaccine, which exact batch/vial of vaccine was used, and the institutions' medical records will show who (supposedly) made the injection.
The prosecution for the document forgery is still ongoing, but since some of the affected patients died from severe covid, that's essentially wrongful death through intentional medical malpractice, so the involved doctors/nurses will not only lose their licenses to practice but are quite likely to see jail time, and since a nontrivial ratio of people do get ill as Covid is still spreading, if someone fake-vaccinates a lot of people, they are likely to be identified.
CDC estimates 146 million Americans have already been infected, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
I assume you would be able to get a booster off-label in the Netherlands.
[0] https://gruenerpass.gv.at/geimpft/ "03. Jänner 2022 ist das Impfzertifikat einer einmaligen Janssen Impfung nicht mehr gültig."
Currently no one in NL has gotten any booster yet. They hope to start 60+ somewhere beginning of December.
So as an example, come 03-01-2022, if you’re 30 and you have a Janssen shot and you want to go to Austria you’re out of luck. It’ll be months before you’re going to get the booster and you cannot “get it off label”.