I agree. What we are witnessing here is the already prevalent breakdown in society’s ability to optimally weigh physical vs psychological risks, and that breakdown fully spreading to local and state government.
The physical risks to vaccinated and previously infected people from BA.2 are low[1]. The deaths of which you speak are a delayed effect from BA.1, which is already declining in terms of infections and primarily affected the unvaccinated.
And given that the US still has many millions of unvaccinated people left, it could take a while before new variants work their way through that entire population (either by immunization or by death).
So the real question is: how long are you willing to endure the current pandemic control measures for the sake of a group of people with oppositional defiant disorder? What are you expecting to happen in the future—do you think the variants will magically all go away or that everyone else will suddenly get vaccinated? Even endemicity is no guarantee of low disease burden — it’s merely a state of predictability.
>sake of a group of people with oppositional defiant disorder?
"a group" -->There are many reasons why people are not getting vaccinated.
"oppositional defiant disorder" -->This seems like a diagnosis, sans any solid source data. Unwise, inadvisable, and not helpful, IMHO.
Reasons I've been given for not getting a vaccine:
>Concern over side effects / complications.
>Unable to trust. This is general, ranging from corruption / financial motives, to media inconsistency, and more.
>Large parts of the world lack vaccine. This is mostly linked to boosters, supply, other concerns.
>Religion -->Don't ask, I don't fully understand either.
>Defiance, as you say, mostly political.
>Desire to seek natural immunity, coupled with lack of desire to catch an infection.
>Waiting it all out. This is a dead end, "maybe I won't catch it and it all goes away" fantasy, maybe your "disorder" in action. I don't know and won't diagnose for shits and giggles either.
Given my, admittedly broad but also anecdotal data collected from various parts of the nation, this "group" is far looser than your statement would align with. There is a fair amount of basic defiance out there. I'm not at all convinced it is a disorder, in the sense of needing treatment, or coercion as we've seen happening in various ways.
Personally, I'm not judging anyone for their choices in this matter. I also very strongly urge anyone I can to get a vaccine. Not anti in the least, however I am anti-conflict, and I've got what I feel is a solid basis for that:
Given we do grant some serious weight to the word "novel", as in we are getting data the hard way right now as much as we are through science, the fact is we just don't know things we would really like to know. And by "know", I mean having high confidence here, not necessarily absolutes, just to be ultra clear.
Given that, many people presenting trust issues, cite inconsistent statements made by officials, the media, and a very strong financial motivation they consider a matter of concern. Fact is, I don't agree with their reasoning, but I would definitely NOT characterize it as some disorder.
Let me re-frame the question:
How long are you willing to endure pandemic control measures?
TL;DR: As long as it takes.
My family just got over a case of Omicron. We caught the O.G. Covid early on in 2020. And that was rough. Details are in my comment history, but let's just say this is not something I would ever want to repeat. We got through it, and some longer term fatigue lasting far beyond the infection running it's course aside, returned to normal some months after. Vaccines were available some time after that, and we got them, except for our youngest who is just now about to turn 6 years old later this year.
We got the mRNA type, Moderna and Pfizer. We then got our boosters basically on schedule, aaaaaaand then?
Yeah, we caught Omicron. Whoop-de-doo!
It's not as rough as O.G. Covid was. We got it from an event where some people sent sick kids and basically infected some 50 families, ours included. Some of those families are unknown to me, a few were not vaccinated, and the remainder were vaccinated. We were one of the few families who had Covid of any kind and were vaccinated.
Our cases were all similar, and I again have longer term fatigue running longer than the course of the infection did. Not happy about that. Our cases were far less severe than O.G. Covid was. Notably, we did not infect anyone else with O.G. Covid, but we did end up infecting someone else and we used the same control measures we did originally. Omicron is said to be far more catchy, and our experiences align with that well enough.
I'm writing this because characterizing people who have not vaccinated as having some disorder isn't helping anyone.
What we are witnessing is government that does not work for the good of the country and its people, but for the good of themselves and the special interests who bankroll them.
The healthcare system is perpetually run on the brink of disaster, but it turns out that it's everybody else's fault and therefore responsibility for preventing its collapse.
All of the U.S. now has no indoor mask mandates and is basically open. All states and cities that still had those removed them on Thursday, February 11, all at once.
"Although BA.2 is considered as an Omicron variant, its genomic sequence is heavily different from BA.1, which suggests that the virological characteristics of BA.2 is different from that of BA.1. Here, we elucidated the virological characteristics of BA.2, such as its higher effective reproduction number, higher fusogenicity, higher pathogenicity when compared to BA.1. Moreover, we demonstrated that BA.2 is resistant to the BA.1-induced humoral immunity. Our data indicate that BA.2 is virologically different from BA.1 and raise a proposal that BA.2 should be given a letter of the Greek alphabet and be distinguished from BA.1, a commonly recognized Omicron variant."
Does it really matter that it's resistant to BA.1 induced humoral immunity?
From the BA.1 variant we learned that cell mediated immunity is more important to end the pandemic.
The media got very loud that the 4th vaccine doesn't help to stop people from getting sick, but it required a month more data to see that it is worth to be injected to decrease the probability of serious illness / death.
Yeah, its not clear if preventing symptomatic infection is as crucial an end-point in contrast to preventing hospitalization, the latter of which is indeed mediated by T-cell immunity rather than antibody titers. The following detail is worth noting though ---
"Vaccine sera were collected from sixteen vaccinees four weeks after the second vaccination with mRNA-1273 (Moderna)"
So it seems like they haven't tested against sera from people who got three doses? Response to BA.1 was better with three doses than two, but I think if the data from Israel was to go by, the impact of the third dose on antibody titers also waned over time (although T-cell mediated immunity stayed the same in terms of % hospitalized).
>Among 95,470 infections analyzed by the national laboratory, 3.6% of those with BA.2 were hospitalized, compared with 3.4% of those with the original strain [BA.1]. Among 3,058 hospitalized patients, 30.5% of those infected with BA.2 developed severe disease compared with 33.5% of those with the original omicron version.
And even if we disregard these real-world results in humans, the hamster experiment found that BA.2 was equivalent in lung pathology and overall fusogenicity to B.1.1/D614G, which is still far less fusogenic than delta. Fusogenicity is linked to lymphopenia[1] and blood clots/stroke[2].
21 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 48.9 ms ] threadgiven that the 7-day avg. death rate is right now higher than at any point safe for January last year that is an understatement
And given that the US still has many millions of unvaccinated people left, it could take a while before new variants work their way through that entire population (either by immunization or by death).
So the real question is: how long are you willing to endure the current pandemic control measures for the sake of a group of people with oppositional defiant disorder? What are you expecting to happen in the future—do you think the variants will magically all go away or that everyone else will suddenly get vaccinated? Even endemicity is no guarantee of low disease burden — it’s merely a state of predictability.
What’s your plan here?
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-16/study-sho...
"a group" -->There are many reasons why people are not getting vaccinated.
"oppositional defiant disorder" -->This seems like a diagnosis, sans any solid source data. Unwise, inadvisable, and not helpful, IMHO.
Reasons I've been given for not getting a vaccine:
>Concern over side effects / complications.
>Unable to trust. This is general, ranging from corruption / financial motives, to media inconsistency, and more.
>Large parts of the world lack vaccine. This is mostly linked to boosters, supply, other concerns.
>Religion -->Don't ask, I don't fully understand either.
>Defiance, as you say, mostly political.
>Desire to seek natural immunity, coupled with lack of desire to catch an infection.
>Waiting it all out. This is a dead end, "maybe I won't catch it and it all goes away" fantasy, maybe your "disorder" in action. I don't know and won't diagnose for shits and giggles either.
Given my, admittedly broad but also anecdotal data collected from various parts of the nation, this "group" is far looser than your statement would align with. There is a fair amount of basic defiance out there. I'm not at all convinced it is a disorder, in the sense of needing treatment, or coercion as we've seen happening in various ways.
Personally, I'm not judging anyone for their choices in this matter. I also very strongly urge anyone I can to get a vaccine. Not anti in the least, however I am anti-conflict, and I've got what I feel is a solid basis for that:
Given we do grant some serious weight to the word "novel", as in we are getting data the hard way right now as much as we are through science, the fact is we just don't know things we would really like to know. And by "know", I mean having high confidence here, not necessarily absolutes, just to be ultra clear.
Given that, many people presenting trust issues, cite inconsistent statements made by officials, the media, and a very strong financial motivation they consider a matter of concern. Fact is, I don't agree with their reasoning, but I would definitely NOT characterize it as some disorder.
Let me re-frame the question:
How long are you willing to endure pandemic control measures?
TL;DR: As long as it takes.
My family just got over a case of Omicron. We caught the O.G. Covid early on in 2020. And that was rough. Details are in my comment history, but let's just say this is not something I would ever want to repeat. We got through it, and some longer term fatigue lasting far beyond the infection running it's course aside, returned to normal some months after. Vaccines were available some time after that, and we got them, except for our youngest who is just now about to turn 6 years old later this year.
We got the mRNA type, Moderna and Pfizer. We then got our boosters basically on schedule, aaaaaaand then?
Yeah, we caught Omicron. Whoop-de-doo!
It's not as rough as O.G. Covid was. We got it from an event where some people sent sick kids and basically infected some 50 families, ours included. Some of those families are unknown to me, a few were not vaccinated, and the remainder were vaccinated. We were one of the few families who had Covid of any kind and were vaccinated.
Our cases were all similar, and I again have longer term fatigue running longer than the course of the infection did. Not happy about that. Our cases were far less severe than O.G. Covid was. Notably, we did not infect anyone else with O.G. Covid, but we did end up infecting someone else and we used the same control measures we did originally. Omicron is said to be far more catchy, and our experiences align with that well enough.
I'm writing this because characterizing people who have not vaccinated as having some disorder isn't helping anyone.
Clearly, one can become in...
What we are witnessing is government that does not work for the good of the country and its people, but for the good of themselves and the special interests who bankroll them.
The healthcare system is perpetually run on the brink of disaster, but it turns out that it's everybody else's fault and therefore responsibility for preventing its collapse.
From the BA.1 variant we learned that cell mediated immunity is more important to end the pandemic.
The media got very loud that the 4th vaccine doesn't help to stop people from getting sick, but it required a month more data to see that it is worth to be injected to decrease the probability of serious illness / death.
"Vaccine sera were collected from sixteen vaccinees four weeks after the second vaccination with mRNA-1273 (Moderna)"
So it seems like they haven't tested against sera from people who got three doses? Response to BA.1 was better with three doses than two, but I think if the data from Israel was to go by, the impact of the third dose on antibody titers also waned over time (although T-cell mediated immunity stayed the same in terms of % hospitalized).
Not under 60, though.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-16/study-sho...
>Among 95,470 infections analyzed by the national laboratory, 3.6% of those with BA.2 were hospitalized, compared with 3.4% of those with the original strain [BA.1]. Among 3,058 hospitalized patients, 30.5% of those infected with BA.2 developed severe disease compared with 33.5% of those with the original omicron version.
And even if we disregard these real-world results in humans, the hamster experiment found that BA.2 was equivalent in lung pathology and overall fusogenicity to B.1.1/D614G, which is still far less fusogenic than delta. Fusogenicity is linked to lymphopenia[1] and blood clots/stroke[2].
1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41418-021-00795-y
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8664391/