Unpopular opinion here, I suspect, but I'm happy to see COVID vaccination mandates getting rolled back. They made sense last year when we all thought they would have a meaningful impact on transmission, but Omicron has made it pretty clear that they don't. So if somebody can't or just doesn't want to get the shot, meh, not society's problem anymore, just increase their insurance premiums to reflect the higher risk of being hospitalized if/when they catch it.
And for the record, I'm triple vaxxed myself and continue to strongly support mandatory vaccinations where they do clearly make sense, eg. measles.
Singapore has heavily subsidized healthcare, but they've announced that if you're medically eligible for the vaccine, choose not to get it, and end up in the hospital due to COVID, you'll pay the full unsubsidized rates.
In NL a you have healthcare by mandatory insurance (and they cannot refuse you), so I think there is room for a rule like this in NL; I think that’s not the case in the UK or other places like ES and PT.
It’s not a good plan, but neither did I think the current system in NL is a good plan; I did not vote for the people who got NL healthcare to this point.
You have the same issue with smokers and cancer, obese people and heart attack, drunk/tired/hurried drivers and accidents, drug users and depression, sugar consummers and diabetes, extreme sport hobbyists and traumas, etc.
At some point, half of the population fall under some risk factor that they could avoid, but instead, make society pay for it.
That's the game of universal healthcare.
As a vaccinated French citizen, I'm ok with it. The pros beat the cons.
Interesting point: how can you say "The pros beat the cons"? So far, and more important from the history (one scandal per WHO pandemic declaration, same plot before and ongoing) we have see only evidence of the very contrary: 2021 total mortality was far higher than 2020 one, 2020 with covid, without "vaccines", 2021 with "vaccines".
What evidence you know of the contrary? The À la une of some journal stating that or something more solid?
Long story short: try to compare USA health costs (the highest in the western world) with the lowest mean quality with classic EU PUBLIC and UNIVERSAL health systems the cheapest and the best in mean quality. Than try to draw where the costs came from and more important: from witch pocked money depart to end up in witch other pockets.
In the specific case of smokers, it doesn't actually increase health costs. Smokers die younger and often have a relatively short illness before they die. Compare this to someone who lives 95 and requires care in a care-home it's "cheap". You also save on things like pension costs because you don't pay them to dead folk, and income from taxes.
I'm not entirely sure about the numbers on things like obesity, drug use, etc. off-hand.
I agree with you as a matter of principle, so not that it really matters, but people sometimes say "smokers should pay the cost they inflict on society themselves!" and turns out they're not actually inflicting the huge costs people imagine they do.
You have only shown arguments to revise implementations of universal healthcare - not any reasonable stance to regulate behaviour (which by the way, is not a novel topic - see seatbelts etc. - and not a trivial one with easy answers).
If you start putting more rule, you get healthcare, but not universal.
That's what the universal stands for.
It's for everybody, no matter the person.
If you are not ok with that, they you don't want universal healthcare, you want something else.
I personnally love universal healthcare, and I'm happy to pay for it. I don't want to have to play a game of chess to live my life in the most likely way to be reimbursed by the system.
Correct! Curious to see how long this story remains unflagged, because flagging of any posts showing errors in official COVID claims tend to get killed very quickly here.
Here are even more popular-but-unpopular opinions (facts).
We did not "all" think vaccines would have a meaningful impact on transmission. Sadly they never had any impact on transmission. A whole bunch of studies have measured the SAR split by vaccine status and there's no difference, that's not something specific to Omicron. Although health authorities claimed they would reduce transmission, they had no scientific basis on which to do so because the trials didn't test transmissibility, or even impact on severe illness or death. They only tested reduction in PCR positivity rates (and only symptomatic, iirc).
People who were already checking the claims of public health authorities against the trial data knew this from day one, which is one reason so many people opted out of the vaccination process: if the vaccines are so great, why are they making unsupported claims with 100% confidence? Why lie?
Sadly the answer seemed to be not for medical reasons, but because public health had become obsessed with total vaccination regardless of need. The means had become the end. Telling people the vaccines reduced transmission manipulated huge numbers of people into taking them, even if they weren't in any risk groups and knew it, just out of a sense of obligation to others. And then telling people vaccines reduced transmission enabled them to implement vaccine mandates by claiming the unvaccinated were dangerous to the vaccinated.
You would probably get less downvotes if you provided some cites for these claims.
Also, Occam's Razor to me indicates that people and governments entirely reasonably seized on vaccines as a way out of the mess last year, no grand conspiracies or intentional manipulation needed.
We really don't have much proof that vaccines reduced transmission. It could be to some extent but how meaningful was that?
We also know that some governments but not all governments implemented vaccine mandates. For example, the UK was pretty lax on them but Germany was very strict.
Occam's razor indicates that apparently some governments didn't have scientific basis for mandates. The opposite that they really had all scientific proof but somehow hid that from the public sounds like a conspiration theory and does not cut the mustard.
The citation for most of the claims is the vaccine trial reports themselves. As for not affecting transmission, I'm on my phone so can't give you links right now but just search Google Scholar and you'll find them. It's obvious anyway isn't it, just look at case numbers.
People chased the vaccines because of the promise of effectiveness. That was reasonable. Going further and making up claims with no basis wasn't.
I think it could be good start. Then extend it to things like extreme and regular sports. Maybe any and all alcohol use. Many poisonings. So many ways to save money by limiting access to health care.
Since actions may imply tradeoffs, you cannot force an action also forcing the tradeoffs - which are to be evaluated subjectively, not by any third party.
To decide that everyone is mandated to eat vegetables, the actor (decisor) should be a perfect, ideal one, knowing much more than we actually know.
> They made sense last year when we all thought they would have a meaningful impact on transmission, but Omicron has made it pretty clear that they don't.
They have a non-zero effect on transmissions, severe symptoms, hospitalizations, and deaths, but don't prevent any of those 100%. Problem is, people hear "they don't work in 100% of cases" but only listen to the "they don't work" part.
To me, "risk of transmission of a deadly disease" should fall under the category of workplace hazards, like falling metal beams and air quality. Employers are allowed to mandate helmets and prohibit smoking, so they should be allowed to mandate other things that reduce the risk of their employees encountering other workplace hazards.
>Unpopular opinion here, I suspect, but I'm happy to see COVID vaccination mandates getting rolled back. They made sense last year when we all thought they would have a meaningful impact on transmission, but Omicron has made it pretty clear that they don't.
I've heard it theorized that vaccination makes Omicron spread faster, because being vaccinated reduces symptoms while not reducing the viral load, making it more likely for someone to unknowingly infect others.
Two polarizing topics in one article: unions and vaccine mandates.*
Whether or not mandating this particular vaccine is a good idea on balance, I don’t think that employers are the right group to be independently determining them. (If society wants to implement them, do it via the government. If that implementation includes a check at school enrollment or by employers as a compliance mechanism, fine, but leaving vaccine mandates to individual employers is about as crazy as leaving them to individual schools.)
* I’d be curious to see a 2x2 grid of pro-union/anti-union and pro-mandate/anti-mandate. I suspect there is a more than 25% of population in each of the pro/pro and anti/anti camps, making me think of that meme with the guy sweating in front of buttons labeled “Right of Workers to Collectively Bargain” and “COVID Vaccine Mandate”
I think they are mostly polarising in US, while in most European countries they have various levels of effectiveness, the majority of the population is with them.
A sovereign nation deciding on the requirements to cross the border into its territory feels different to me than the power of an employer to set health-related mandates. I’m much more willing to accept that a sovereign nation has the right to enforce border policies than an employer has the right to police the healthcare decisions of its employees.
It's not that they're "unable to work", it's just that they can't work on some flights, which makes the scheduling a bit harder for KLM since not every employee can work on every flight.
It's funny you say that within the context of an airline. Where pilot and air staff's health is under extreme scrutiny because they need to be in good condition, otherwise people could die when things go south. They probably enforce vaccines for yellow fever and similar for pilots flying to countries impacted to those diseases, why is it any different for COVID-19?
KLM: “We will track that you have a valid 1st class medical as is required for airline transport operations.”
VNV and everyone: “No problem!”
KLM: “You also need this extra healthcare requirement that KLM is imposing.”
VNV: “No. We’ll see you in court.”
Airlines ensuring their flight crews are complying with federal laws and ICAO standards is great. Airlines setting their own medical standards differently is what I (and the pilots’ union) think is improper.
> Airlines ensuring their flight crews are complying with federal laws
I think you're mistaking the country, KLM is a Dutch airline, and the Netherlands is not a federation. They're under EASA and ICAO regulations, on top of Dutch and (every country they operate in) regulations.
> Airlines setting their own medical standards differently is what I (and the pilots’ union) think is improper.
It's up to them to set those medical standards if they think they're needed. They probably have mental health standards too, considering the worst air disaster in terms of death toll was caused by a pilot of theirs forgetting he's not in a simulator with bad visibility and crashing his 747 into another 747.
As has already been said, many countries require Covid vaccination for entry, including in the EU. Why would an airline not require their air staff to be vaccinated?
The yellow fever vaccine works though. The covid vaccines are all somewhere on the level of very ineffective down to snake-oil. Yellow fever also is actually a serious disease while covid is for the absolute huge majority nothing more than a cold.
Very ineffective at what? Stopping transmission, yes. Preventing heavy cases requiring hospitalisation ? I thought the studies and statistics were pretty much unanimous that the vaccines greatly help at that. Has there been anything new I've missed?
I have not followed the vaccine efficacy as closely as I should. But for the past two years masks have been ‘known’ to reduce transmission rates. Data has finally been released showing that these cloth masks do not help reducing transmission rates.
Are you sure? Available numbers have varied. Are you sure that it is not just a superficial appearance, and that damage could be revealed by a low-level assessment? Some people do not drink or smoke, you know - they want to be optimal, not "it's just a scratch".
Those people who judge the potential damages from covid as negligile but for limited cases would have little reason for reclutance towards vaccination, which would gain the advantage of further reducing those chances.
FDA approval or not was not the statement I made. Even in your link it expressly says they are still being distributed under the EUA not under normal law
Sure, but given that "KLM has not been able to demonstrate that there is an operational necessity" it seems fair to me that the court has decided the KLM cannot mandate vaccination.
That’s a remarkably quick shift from your “clearly no” just minutes ago. We now agree they clearly do help, and I’m not sure if the duration of protection matters.
I think period of protection is extremely important factor when evaluating how effective a vaccine is. Or would you call any of the traditional vaccines effective if we needed to take them multiple times a year? I would not. Clearly such vaccine is not effective on scale.
If the protection only lasts for a number of weeks it is not a vaccine but a prophylaxis, comparable to e.g. Quinine (against Malaria, once upon a time). Vaccines provide protection for a longer period of time, from years (Influenza, TBE) to lifetime (Diphtheria, Whooping cough, Measles, Polio, Pox, etc.).
"They absolutely are effective at reducing the risk of death or serious illness"
Actually, possibly not :( This breaks down into two separate questions:
1. Are they effective at reducing risk of death / serious illness now.
2. Were they so in the past?
To answer these we can't rely on any scientific gold standards despite the importance of the questions, because the trials showed no impact on death or actually the Pfizer trial had more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group (due to extra heart attacks). This was written off as "not statistically significant" (this isn't the right way to use statistical significance as a concept). Then they vaccinated the control group, thus ending the RCT phase of data collection.
The problem was that despite the constant messaging, COVID is virtually never deadly outside of the very elderly or sick, and those people tend not to join drug trials. Thus despite having ~65,000-ish participants there were not enough COVID deaths to detect any impact on this metric. Hospitalization meanwhile and "severe illness" were likewise not trial endpoints. So only noisy observational data is available.
For (1) the data from countries that actually release the raw data shows very mixed results indeed, with deaths being higher amongst the vaccinated cohort for some dosing ranges and age groups, lower for others, and overall there is no clear message from the data that vaccines are reducing deaths.
"It appears that things have got somewhat worse since last week’s report, with the hospitalisation and death rates in the double vaccinated (not boosted) exceeding that seen in the unvaccinated for all aged over 70, and with a higher death rate in those aged over 60 as well. What’s more, there now appears to be practically no benefit of vaccination with two doses of vaccine for those aged under 60, in terms of the remaining protection against hospitalisation and death."
That's for the UK but similar numbers can be found elsewhere in the rare cases where governments actually release the actual data (normally, they hide the actual numbers). Also, what we actually care about is overall mortality because vaccines can and do kill people, and just changing the cause of death isn't very useful. There too the news is disappointing, with small increases in excess death being correlated with booster rollouts but not the winter Omicron wave:
All this is official UK government data so enough reason to at minimum reserve judgement. Data in the past is unfortunately heavily corrupted by mis-allocation of people to the different status buckets. The methodology they use would calculate a big but transient impact on death and sickness from an injection of water.
> virtually never deadly outside of the very elderly or sick
No, I grant you. Some of us have seen it. Although, there is a complication (in the anecdotals I can provide, that suffice to falsify a proposed rule) in determining whether bad treatments may have been the killers.
How do you define that «virtually»? If it is "never (justifiable exceptions aside)", then yes, it is falsifiable by anecdote. '∀x: P(x)' is falsified by '∃x: ¬P(x)'. It's just Popper. I am just telling you it was very possible to die with it middle aged and in good health with the original 2020 variant. Surely you can guess how I know. With the new ones, I do not know, I have no experience.
If that «virtually» means "following some statistics", than those statistics must be judged as quite blurry by our experience: they conceal what we have seen.
I'm sorry to hear that you know people who died of COVID. I don't think anyone I've ever met later died of COVID, and that's true of most of my friends too, as far as I know. It's just very rare, which is why they couldn't get enough deaths in the (large) COVID vaccine trials to meet any threshold for significance.
As for "virtually never", why would you think "never with exceptions" is the definition? "Virtually never" here just means "it happens very rarely relative to the total number of COVID deaths". Isn't that normal use of English? We're not communicating in SAT here.
I agree that the statistics are blurry, but they're mostly blurred in the direction of exaggerating the risks. I'll take your word for it that your acquaintance did indeed die of COVID, but it must be remembered that such classifications were being handed very liberally, especially in the USA where COVID death classifications were being directly incentivized with money.
Not really: it is more a matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals. To attempt giving you the idea, I tried a web search for "Bergamo coffins" - I will not offer a selection, I cannot choose. I picked that because the case of Bergamo got famous, as probably the first one, but more were reported (in Brazil, I remember, etc).
In fact, I was not referring to one acquaintance, but many (very many - though, most of them elderly, and yet as healthy as they get). Let me tell you, from time to time I still get asked by skeptics "yes but what exactly did they die from": well, when they die without their lungs, I hold little doubts. This given, as I wrote, I definitely will not rule out that «bad treatments» may have brought the disease statuses to the collapse. What you saw was "normal, infected, healthy, healthy, healthy, worsening, compromised": it consumed them until sudden collapse, when recovery did not work.
Also: I have seen that many reason as if they were afraid of death and not afraid of damage. Some hold exactly opposite weights. And I have heard often, speaking with my local peers, remarks like "he was an Oak - and now he cannot do three steps without gasping". And this also involved young, sporty people.
So, as I am trying to tell, the risks are there, very real, very possible: it's their framing that is, to the best of my knowledge, still mysterious ("old or sick" goes in the direction but remains gross when applied to experience. It has the statistical ineffectiveness that would have you avoid driving a car and only travel by plane).
With the classifications ("died with" vs "died of") a real mess was made in many countries: but this really confused the image, also concealing, as I am trying to convey, the devastation it did there where it did hit hard.
I could say that the emergency management did not speak SAT.
No, it really is very rare. This isn't some local perspective issue, this is a virus with an IFR of less than 0.1% and by no means everyone caught COVID, many never did. Again - if it were actually not rare, there would have been sufficient deaths from COVID in the pool of 65,000 vaccine trial participants (for Pfizer alone) to have actually seen a difference, but in reality more people died in the vaccine arm than the placebo arm! 65k people is a lot of people. That's more than the population of the town I grew up in, yet COVID deaths were so rare in that group that they may as well not have happened at all.
Bergamo coffins are not a great example to pick because that was an artifact of telling the local undertakers (whom were all quite old) that handling the bodies would be a death sentence, so they refused to do it and as a result coffins piled up.
I'll try to be clearer - though I have myself difficulties in pointing the finger precisely to the point. With «matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals», I meant: sure, you may have an IFR of 0.1% as a raw division, but the questions press on why some have seen an apparent decimation, and many have seen nothing or almost nothing. Is it a perceptive illusion from observing at close distance an Erlang distribution? Or are there factors to be defined that would tell more than "old or sick"? Genetics? Organization? Societal features? Crime rates for Europe tell you very little if the values for the critical parts of Lyon and those of German remote countryside are mixed. I am still wondering what made experiences so different.
But anyway, your (undisputed) post was about the effectiveness of vaccines, and I had you digress after your «virtually never deadly», just wanting to precise that some of us have seen something much less comforting, and would recommend to remain wary of the risks (and some already infected people would say, you may want not to consider death as the risk, but the damages), in case the raw numbers may fascinate into suggestion that one can just relax. It is just a margin note. "Numbers are comforting" // "Yeah well..."
Being against vaccines as a concept is ridiculous, yes. But let me tell you something about corona vaccines in Scandinavia: We started vaccinating our health care employees with J&J and AZ a year+ ago. Quickly, it was discovered that up to 10 nurses had died in all of Scandinavia and likely more, due to extreme strokes completely unexpected at their age and well being. Very quickly the AZ was completely outlawed in Denmark, and J&J put on hold for 4 months before becoming a sign-up only, "wave my rights" vaccine.
This was a decision by DOCTORS. Meanwhile, I read HN and reddit et al. and what do I see? That AZ and J&J vaccines are totally safe and they ban all other comments for "misinformation". What gives?
I am not against vaccinations but I don't like your comment at all.
You also just have an opinion like everyone else.
When you listen to scientists you will understand it's much more complicated than you are saying.
Take a scientist like Geert Vanden Bossche. He really is a very big name in the world of vaccinations. But he has been warning us that vaccinating everyone during an pandemic of a fast mutating virus is a really bad decision.
A huge problem of the 21st century is that everyone feels like they have a right to tell everyone else what they must do. It's fine to listen to scientists and care about others. My goodness. So tired.
How can we know when scientists are compromised? The scientists who pushed the idea that sugar was good for you and a good substitute for fat or that bread is the foundation to a healthy diet was not that long ago.
We can't. At least not always. And they don't even have to be compromised, they could also just be (and often are) wrong. Also, even when they're right it's going to be about about some small part of an impossibly complex whole. I think "what the experts/data say" should play an important, but extremely small role in how we decide to live our lives, with the balance made up by input from our close friends and family and those who are physically/geographically close to us.
Personally, I have lost significant amounts of trust in the ‘peer-reviewed’ articles being pushed today. MSM will use cherry picked articles or doctors to push their agenda.
Also, here is a previous post from Nov 2020 discussing vaccines being required for employees to. I am sharing hoping others will find the discussions as interesting as I do.
> I'm truly sick of seeing people throwing a fit over vaccines.
Only over certain vaccines in this case. Vaccines which have not undergone the normal testing but which have been pushed into use and mandated without stringent safety checks.
> They're safe
These vaccines are not proven to be as safe as most other vaccines
> effective
These vaccines have not proven to be as effective as promised
> and protect others
These vaccines do not protect against infection - there are indications that those who received the 'booster' dose have a higher rate of infection compared to those from the same cohorts who did not receive 'boosters' - and as such do not protect others.
> People need to stop being such babies over this
There are several laws which mandate bodily integrity, there are whole protest movements which loudly proclaim 'my body, my choice'. Given the above stated facts of these vaccines not being proven safe, not being nearly as effective as claimed and not protecting others it is a very rational choice to forego vaccination.
> Just get the stupid shot
Go ahead
> A huge problem of the 21st century is that everyone feels like they need to have an opinion
That is what you get in a liberal democracy/constitutional republic, people get to make their own choices. There are several movements which want to do away with these institutions to go/return to some more authoritarian form of control. I do not support those movements and I can only assume that you don't support them either. One person, one vote.
> It's fine to listen to scientists
No, it is not. It is wise to read what 'scientists' - between quotes because the term has taken a beating in the last few decades - produce with a critical [1] eye. Academia can produce the most astounding gobbledygook under the guise of 'science' as was proven (again) by the Grievance studies affair [2,3,4]
> and care about others
Why do you connect 'listen[ing] to scientists' with 'and care for others'? These two are not connected at all.
...
[1] as in 'being critical', not as 'through the lens of critical theory'
The poster was (to my reading) not connecting them, it was a pure conjunction of A and B: as in, "be open to trust" [good luck] and also "be open to an act of giving" (the poster must have assumed that those unvaccinated are selfish and did not consider the good effect of their vaccination on the rest of society).
Of course, others have retracted trust on observational basis or have found other ways to avoid damaging others.
The connection is made by mentioning the two concepts - listening to scientists and caring for others - in the same (short) sentence as though there is a relationship between the former and the latter.
I am afraid the intended relation may have been "stubborn and egoist"¹. (The relation would be anterior to the two terms, it would be within that alleged profile.) After all, my friend, the poster is convinced they are babies...
(¹So, logically, as you are reasoning, the poster formulated, in a deontic context, "▫¬S ∧ ▫¬E".)
Edit: of course, when I wrote «was not connecting them», I meant "in a non-syntactic relation (causal etc)".
there is nothing selfish about giving priority to your own health over health of stranger, it's just basic self preservation, and that's assuming these vaccines would slow the spread, which they clearly don't, same as they don't stop you from getting infected, same as they don't stop you from having symptoms, so they can be hardly called vaccines
even if they would slow down spread I'm not going to risk my own health with dangerous vaccine against something which ain't dangerous to me (not drinking, not smoking, exercising, having very healthy weight) to help irresponsible people living irresponsible lifestyle as if it wasn't enough my insurance money being wasted on them
I am sure you will not have misunderstood "interpretation of" with "subscription to".
Anyway, you are inserting weak ideas into your statements, such as that «ain't dangerous to me». Are you sure? The first exception that comes to mind is that # that acted as a superspreader in the first epicenter in Italy in early 2020 during a marathon.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadAnd for the record, I'm triple vaxxed myself and continue to strongly support mandatory vaccinations where they do clearly make sense, eg. measles.
That's usually not possible with universal healthcare.
Then as you accept the principle, you will be mandated to take other vaccines. Your compliance will be verified by a chip.
"Imagine the compliance": https://nitter.net/loffredojeremy/status/1527521228688445442
[0] While technically it's the company who pays VAT to the HMRC, it is the end customer who actually spends that money, so it's just semantics.
At some point, half of the population fall under some risk factor that they could avoid, but instead, make society pay for it.
That's the game of universal healthcare.
As a vaccinated French citizen, I'm ok with it. The pros beat the cons.
What evidence you know of the contrary? The À la une of some journal stating that or something more solid?
Beside that, speaking about France did you read the official report https://www.atih.sante.fr/sites/default/files/public/content... ? Did you read constants articles about medical deserts due to neoliberals reforms ?
Long story short: try to compare USA health costs (the highest in the western world) with the lowest mean quality with classic EU PUBLIC and UNIVERSAL health systems the cheapest and the best in mean quality. Than try to draw where the costs came from and more important: from witch pocked money depart to end up in witch other pockets.
I'm not entirely sure about the numbers on things like obesity, drug use, etc. off-hand.
I agree with you as a matter of principle, so not that it really matters, but people sometimes say "smokers should pay the cost they inflict on society themselves!" and turns out they're not actually inflicting the huge costs people imagine they do.
You have only shown arguments to revise implementations of universal healthcare - not any reasonable stance to regulate behaviour (which by the way, is not a novel topic - see seatbelts etc. - and not a trivial one with easy answers).
That's what the universal stands for.
It's for everybody, no matter the person.
If you are not ok with that, they you don't want universal healthcare, you want something else.
I personnally love universal healthcare, and I'm happy to pay for it. I don't want to have to play a game of chess to live my life in the most likely way to be reimbursed by the system.
Here are even more popular-but-unpopular opinions (facts).
We did not "all" think vaccines would have a meaningful impact on transmission. Sadly they never had any impact on transmission. A whole bunch of studies have measured the SAR split by vaccine status and there's no difference, that's not something specific to Omicron. Although health authorities claimed they would reduce transmission, they had no scientific basis on which to do so because the trials didn't test transmissibility, or even impact on severe illness or death. They only tested reduction in PCR positivity rates (and only symptomatic, iirc).
People who were already checking the claims of public health authorities against the trial data knew this from day one, which is one reason so many people opted out of the vaccination process: if the vaccines are so great, why are they making unsupported claims with 100% confidence? Why lie?
Sadly the answer seemed to be not for medical reasons, but because public health had become obsessed with total vaccination regardless of need. The means had become the end. Telling people the vaccines reduced transmission manipulated huge numbers of people into taking them, even if they weren't in any risk groups and knew it, just out of a sense of obligation to others. And then telling people vaccines reduced transmission enabled them to implement vaccine mandates by claiming the unvaccinated were dangerous to the vaccinated.
Also, Occam's Razor to me indicates that people and governments entirely reasonably seized on vaccines as a way out of the mess last year, no grand conspiracies or intentional manipulation needed.
We really don't have much proof that vaccines reduced transmission. It could be to some extent but how meaningful was that?
We also know that some governments but not all governments implemented vaccine mandates. For example, the UK was pretty lax on them but Germany was very strict.
Occam's razor indicates that apparently some governments didn't have scientific basis for mandates. The opposite that they really had all scientific proof but somehow hid that from the public sounds like a conspiration theory and does not cut the mustard.
People chased the vaccines because of the promise of effectiveness. That was reasonable. Going further and making up claims with no basis wasn't.
(I’m pro-choice here and elsewhere. I have chosen to get three jabs, because I think the vaccine’s benefits to the individual far outweigh the risks.)
To decide that everyone is mandated to eat vegetables, the actor (decisor) should be a perfect, ideal one, knowing much more than we actually know.
They have a non-zero effect on transmissions, severe symptoms, hospitalizations, and deaths, but don't prevent any of those 100%. Problem is, people hear "they don't work in 100% of cases" but only listen to the "they don't work" part.
To me, "risk of transmission of a deadly disease" should fall under the category of workplace hazards, like falling metal beams and air quality. Employers are allowed to mandate helmets and prohibit smoking, so they should be allowed to mandate other things that reduce the risk of their employees encountering other workplace hazards.
I've heard it theorized that vaccination makes Omicron spread faster, because being vaccinated reduces symptoms while not reducing the viral load, making it more likely for someone to unknowingly infect others.
Whether or not mandating this particular vaccine is a good idea on balance, I don’t think that employers are the right group to be independently determining them. (If society wants to implement them, do it via the government. If that implementation includes a check at school enrollment or by employers as a compliance mechanism, fine, but leaving vaccine mandates to individual employers is about as crazy as leaving them to individual schools.)
* I’d be curious to see a 2x2 grid of pro-union/anti-union and pro-mandate/anti-mandate. I suspect there is a more than 25% of population in each of the pro/pro and anti/anti camps, making me think of that meme with the guy sweating in front of buttons labeled “Right of Workers to Collectively Bargain” and “COVID Vaccine Mandate”
Plenty of countries require covid vaccination to enter, that’s an operational problem for an airline deploying staff.
It's funny you say that within the context of an airline. Where pilot and air staff's health is under extreme scrutiny because they need to be in good condition, otherwise people could die when things go south. They probably enforce vaccines for yellow fever and similar for pilots flying to countries impacted to those diseases, why is it any different for COVID-19?
VNV and everyone: “No problem!”
KLM: “You also need this extra healthcare requirement that KLM is imposing.”
VNV: “No. We’ll see you in court.”
Airlines ensuring their flight crews are complying with federal laws and ICAO standards is great. Airlines setting their own medical standards differently is what I (and the pilots’ union) think is improper.
I think you're mistaking the country, KLM is a Dutch airline, and the Netherlands is not a federation. They're under EASA and ICAO regulations, on top of Dutch and (every country they operate in) regulations.
> Airlines setting their own medical standards differently is what I (and the pilots’ union) think is improper.
It's up to them to set those medical standards if they think they're needed. They probably have mental health standards too, considering the worst air disaster in terms of death toll was caused by a pilot of theirs forgetting he's not in a simulator with bad visibility and crashing his 747 into another 747.
As has already been said, many countries require Covid vaccination for entry, including in the EU. Why would an airline not require their air staff to be vaccinated?
The court disagreed in the case we’re discussing.
Are you sure? Available numbers have varied. Are you sure that it is not just a superficial appearance, and that damage could be revealed by a low-level assessment? Some people do not drink or smoke, you know - they want to be optimal, not "it's just a scratch".
Those people who judge the potential damages from covid as negligile but for limited cases would have little reason for reclutance towards vaccination, which would gain the advantage of further reducing those chances.
This is a very large legal difference, as under the EUA they have been exempted for any and ALL liability
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
They absolutely are effective at reducing the risk of death or serious illness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE
Actually, possibly not :( This breaks down into two separate questions:
1. Are they effective at reducing risk of death / serious illness now.
2. Were they so in the past?
To answer these we can't rely on any scientific gold standards despite the importance of the questions, because the trials showed no impact on death or actually the Pfizer trial had more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group (due to extra heart attacks). This was written off as "not statistically significant" (this isn't the right way to use statistical significance as a concept). Then they vaccinated the control group, thus ending the RCT phase of data collection.
The problem was that despite the constant messaging, COVID is virtually never deadly outside of the very elderly or sick, and those people tend not to join drug trials. Thus despite having ~65,000-ish participants there were not enough COVID deaths to detect any impact on this metric. Hospitalization meanwhile and "severe illness" were likewise not trial endpoints. So only noisy observational data is available.
For (1) the data from countries that actually release the raw data shows very mixed results indeed, with deaths being higher amongst the vaccinated cohort for some dosing ranges and age groups, lower for others, and overall there is no clear message from the data that vaccines are reducing deaths.
https://bartram.substack.com/p/update-on-the-failure-of-the-...
"It appears that things have got somewhat worse since last week’s report, with the hospitalisation and death rates in the double vaccinated (not boosted) exceeding that seen in the unvaccinated for all aged over 70, and with a higher death rate in those aged over 60 as well. What’s more, there now appears to be practically no benefit of vaccination with two doses of vaccine for those aged under 60, in terms of the remaining protection against hospitalisation and death."
That's for the UK but similar numbers can be found elsewhere in the rare cases where governments actually release the actual data (normally, they hide the actual numbers). Also, what we actually care about is overall mortality because vaccines can and do kill people, and just changing the cause of death isn't very useful. There too the news is disappointing, with small increases in excess death being correlated with booster rollouts but not the winter Omicron wave:
https://bartram.substack.com/p/increased-deaths-in-england-f...
All this is official UK government data so enough reason to at minimum reserve judgement. Data in the past is unfortunately heavily corrupted by mis-allocation of people to the different status buckets. The methodology they use would calculate a big but transient impact on death and sickness from an injection of water.
No, I grant you. Some of us have seen it. Although, there is a complication (in the anecdotals I can provide, that suffice to falsify a proposed rule) in determining whether bad treatments may have been the killers.
If that «virtually» means "following some statistics", than those statistics must be judged as quite blurry by our experience: they conceal what we have seen.
As for "virtually never", why would you think "never with exceptions" is the definition? "Virtually never" here just means "it happens very rarely relative to the total number of COVID deaths". Isn't that normal use of English? We're not communicating in SAT here.
I agree that the statistics are blurry, but they're mostly blurred in the direction of exaggerating the risks. I'll take your word for it that your acquaintance did indeed die of COVID, but it must be remembered that such classifications were being handed very liberally, especially in the USA where COVID death classifications were being directly incentivized with money.
Not really: it is more a matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals. To attempt giving you the idea, I tried a web search for "Bergamo coffins" - I will not offer a selection, I cannot choose. I picked that because the case of Bergamo got famous, as probably the first one, but more were reported (in Brazil, I remember, etc).
In fact, I was not referring to one acquaintance, but many (very many - though, most of them elderly, and yet as healthy as they get). Let me tell you, from time to time I still get asked by skeptics "yes but what exactly did they die from": well, when they die without their lungs, I hold little doubts. This given, as I wrote, I definitely will not rule out that «bad treatments» may have brought the disease statuses to the collapse. What you saw was "normal, infected, healthy, healthy, healthy, worsening, compromised": it consumed them until sudden collapse, when recovery did not work.
Also: I have seen that many reason as if they were afraid of death and not afraid of damage. Some hold exactly opposite weights. And I have heard often, speaking with my local peers, remarks like "he was an Oak - and now he cannot do three steps without gasping". And this also involved young, sporty people.
So, as I am trying to tell, the risks are there, very real, very possible: it's their framing that is, to the best of my knowledge, still mysterious ("old or sick" goes in the direction but remains gross when applied to experience. It has the statistical ineffectiveness that would have you avoid driving a car and only travel by plane).
With the classifications ("died with" vs "died of") a real mess was made in many countries: but this really confused the image, also concealing, as I am trying to convey, the devastation it did there where it did hit hard.
I could say that the emergency management did not speak SAT.
Bergamo coffins are not a great example to pick because that was an artifact of telling the local undertakers (whom were all quite old) that handling the bodies would be a death sentence, so they refused to do it and as a result coffins piled up.
I'll try to be clearer - though I have myself difficulties in pointing the finger precisely to the point. With «matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals», I meant: sure, you may have an IFR of 0.1% as a raw division, but the questions press on why some have seen an apparent decimation, and many have seen nothing or almost nothing. Is it a perceptive illusion from observing at close distance an Erlang distribution? Or are there factors to be defined that would tell more than "old or sick"? Genetics? Organization? Societal features? Crime rates for Europe tell you very little if the values for the critical parts of Lyon and those of German remote countryside are mixed. I am still wondering what made experiences so different.
But anyway, your (undisputed) post was about the effectiveness of vaccines, and I had you digress after your «virtually never deadly», just wanting to precise that some of us have seen something much less comforting, and would recommend to remain wary of the risks (and some already infected people would say, you may want not to consider death as the risk, but the damages), in case the raw numbers may fascinate into suggestion that one can just relax. It is just a margin note. "Numbers are comforting" // "Yeah well..."
This was a decision by DOCTORS. Meanwhile, I read HN and reddit et al. and what do I see? That AZ and J&J vaccines are totally safe and they ban all other comments for "misinformation". What gives?
The new book from Sedaris is titled "Happy-go-lucky", incidentally.
Babies are the inexperienced individuals, the others are those who have lived a bit. And they should have different ideas about trust.
You also just have an opinion like everyone else.
When you listen to scientists you will understand it's much more complicated than you are saying.
Take a scientist like Geert Vanden Bossche. He really is a very big name in the world of vaccinations. But he has been warning us that vaccinating everyone during an pandemic of a fast mutating virus is a really bad decision.
Also, here is a previous post from Nov 2020 discussing vaccines being required for employees to. I am sharing hoping others will find the discussions as interesting as I do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159579
Only over certain vaccines in this case. Vaccines which have not undergone the normal testing but which have been pushed into use and mandated without stringent safety checks.
> They're safe
These vaccines are not proven to be as safe as most other vaccines
> effective
These vaccines have not proven to be as effective as promised
> and protect others
These vaccines do not protect against infection - there are indications that those who received the 'booster' dose have a higher rate of infection compared to those from the same cohorts who did not receive 'boosters' - and as such do not protect others.
> People need to stop being such babies over this
There are several laws which mandate bodily integrity, there are whole protest movements which loudly proclaim 'my body, my choice'. Given the above stated facts of these vaccines not being proven safe, not being nearly as effective as claimed and not protecting others it is a very rational choice to forego vaccination.
> Just get the stupid shot
Go ahead
> A huge problem of the 21st century is that everyone feels like they need to have an opinion
That is what you get in a liberal democracy/constitutional republic, people get to make their own choices. There are several movements which want to do away with these institutions to go/return to some more authoritarian form of control. I do not support those movements and I can only assume that you don't support them either. One person, one vote.
> It's fine to listen to scientists
No, it is not. It is wise to read what 'scientists' - between quotes because the term has taken a beating in the last few decades - produce with a critical [1] eye. Academia can produce the most astounding gobbledygook under the guise of 'science' as was proven (again) by the Grievance studies affair [2,3,4]
> and care about others
Why do you connect 'listen[ing] to scientists' with 'and care for others'? These two are not connected at all.
...
[1] as in 'being critical', not as 'through the lens of critical theory'
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
[3] https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...
[4] https://quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies-scand...
The poster was (to my reading) not connecting them, it was a pure conjunction of A and B: as in, "be open to trust" [good luck] and also "be open to an act of giving" (the poster must have assumed that those unvaccinated are selfish and did not consider the good effect of their vaccination on the rest of society).
Of course, others have retracted trust on observational basis or have found other ways to avoid damaging others.
(¹So, logically, as you are reasoning, the poster formulated, in a deontic context, "▫¬S ∧ ▫¬E".)
Edit: of course, when I wrote «was not connecting them», I meant "in a non-syntactic relation (causal etc)".
even if they would slow down spread I'm not going to risk my own health with dangerous vaccine against something which ain't dangerous to me (not drinking, not smoking, exercising, having very healthy weight) to help irresponsible people living irresponsible lifestyle as if it wasn't enough my insurance money being wasted on them
Anyway, you are inserting weak ideas into your statements, such as that «ain't dangerous to me». Are you sure? The first exception that comes to mind is that # that acted as a superspreader in the first epicenter in Italy in early 2020 during a marathon.