I fear we may have rushed things for younger age groups. There was little space for debate. It was an uncomfortable time, but I get the sense intellectual debate is returning.
I think we rushed in the sense that this was a very accelerated vaccine program, but whether the rush was optimal (on a per age-group basis) will depend on what the data comes to show.
It's true that most people didn't really want to debate covid then, which is par-for-the-course on political issues. I think though in our post-mortem for covid the my curiosity why we got so left/right political over an illness. I'd love to have that behind us.
There was so little space for debate that the Biden administration attempted to force employers to mandate either the vaccine, or routine testing at the employee's expense, for most working American adults.
If this move hadn't been struck down by the Supreme Court, you can bet some version of this restriction would still be in place and would be defended by many.
Why the hell do we think scientific research needs a so called "debate". Are we trying to become school valedictorians?
What is needed is peer review, not debate. Debate is simply a euphemism for validation seeking for confirmation bias on random social forums.
If there was any problem with the peer review, there is cause for complaints. Are we going to hold a debate on whether the proof of fermat's last theorem is actually correct now?
Nah, it's not the job of science to tell people what to do. We are not going to debate the correctedness of a theorem, but we need debates to justify lockdowns because of the theorem
There's quite a difference between what the numbers actually say vs. what claims were made by public health bureaucrats to justify both vaccine mandates and other NPI-style restrictions.
Open discussion was never acceptable, even here on HN. I was quickly downvoted for saying anything against masking and vaccinations. Not even objecting, mere questions elicited this reaction.
It was pretty ridiculous. Anyone who’s interacted with health policy at the national level knows it’s just a big power game. Anthony Fauci doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking “what can I do for the American people?”—he wakes up thinking “Todd from the VA was an asshole at that budget hearing. What can I do about that?”
How do you distinguish moving goalposts from the more charitable reading of "Hey, this is a novel virus and so our guidelines will have to change as we find out more"
I sure remember when the guidelines were that COVID wasn't transmissible through aerosol, only droplets. Then it was revised to include aerosol. Mask warnings also evolved from "not that effective" to "extremely effective". But isn't all of this explainable charitably without invoking suppression?
I would argue because no charity was given to opinions contrary to what Dr. Fauci and the NIH declaired as truth. Perhaps most infamous is Dr. Collins asking for a takedown of the Great Berington declaration. The fact that so little was certain early on about COVID should have been a reason to allow physicians and scientists to discuss and debate policy without fear of having their careers destroyed. Now that we are further out from the pandemic cooler heads will prevail but I fear the damage to the reputation of the health authorities in the US will take a long time to recover.
Dr. Collins didn't ask for their careers to be destroyed. He asked for a rebuttal (or "take down of it's premises" in his words), which was easy because The Great Barrington Declaration was the most poorly devised policy proposal I had ever seen. I'm not surprised that Dr. Prasad pretends not to understand the difference.
It said that only nursing homes should be quarantined when the vast majority of elderly do not live in nursing homes. It encouraged everyone else to get infected as soon as possible, completely ignoring the fact that vaccines were being developed, which meant that later exposure would be far better than earlier exposure.
“Based on other viruses, we believe masking helps reduce the risk of transmission.”
“Based on initial clinical data we believe vaccination will reduce or possibly eliminate the risk you transmitting the virus to others”
What I’m guessing happened is they thought not being confident in their answer would cause people to not comply.
But the #1 rule of communication (I did some company PR work) is never lie, even by omission. If you lie you’ll eventually get caught and people will never believe you in the future.
There was a messaging lag between countries. You could discern pretty clearly what was doing to happen from whatever happened in Israel as they were roughly half a year ahead and almost simultaneously vaccinated everyone. Based on what happened there with both the initial vaccine and the boosters, you could tell that your local politicians, media and experts where lying and or obfuscating and misrepresenting facts.
> “Hey, this is a novel virus and so our guidelines will have to change as we find out more"
Gee that’s not what I heard at all, what I heard was ‘this is science, and anyone who disagrees or doubts is an idiot and deserves to die and is responsible for killing grandma’
*edit
Oh look here’s the comment where anyone who doubts or disagrees is an idiot:
> I sure remember when the guidelines were that COVID wasn't transmissible through aerosol, only droplets. Then it was revised to include aerosol. Mask warnings also evolved from "not that effective" to "extremely effective".
And yet the authorities and all the big tech bros were quick to censor anyone who disagreed with the blatant false narratives. Even the WHO took a YEAR to admit to aerosol contamination after the pandemic was everywhere.
Moving goal posts are obvious. They show up with an initial over commit like say, “you don’t need masks” or “the vaccine is sterilizing” that is obviously wrong at the time it occurs, but only on a valid limited data set. This followed by a bunch of backpedaling as that position becomes more and more indefensible as the data becomes overwhelming.
Also, why the hell do we think scientific research needs a so called "debate". Are we trying to become school valedictorians?
What is needed is peer review, not debate. Debate is simply a euphemism for validation seeking for confirmation bias on random social forums.
If there was any problem with the peer review, there is cause for complaints. Are we going to hold a debate on whether the proof of fermat's last theorem is actually correct now?
> Among men under 40, there were an estimated four extra cases of myocarditis associated with the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and 14 extra cases with the first dose of the Moderna vaccine for every 1 million men vaccinated. That risk rose with the second dose for all three vaccines studied and was highest for Moderna's, which had an additional 97 myocarditis cases per 1 million. For unvaccinated men under 40 with COVID-19, there were 16 additional myocarditis cases per million.
which shows that the Moderna second dose is riskier than infection for men under 40? I have to admit I've been really disappointed by the way people have been minimising this. Part of that is being in that group of men < 40 myself (it has always been stratified by age and sex), another part of it is I think we need to be as transparent as possible about all risks in medicine as opposed to giving fuel (and good arguments) that information is being suppressed or charitably ignored because people are panicking.
I had pericarditis (which i initially thought was myocarditis until I had an MRI) shortly after vaccination. People on this forum literally urged me to go get a booster despite my experience.
The overzealous opinions go both ways.
How about people just do whats right for them and stop conforming to groupthink
Your comment shows just why people don't trust anything any more. Anything that you don't agree with is an enemy by the tone of your message, and dismissing any other opinion except the one that you hold by labelling it as "so called debates".
Covid fatality is also age stratified. Besides, you might get it, you might not get it. The vaccines were mandated and people were made to get them to keep their jobs or to live their lives. People have different risk tolerance so it's normal that everyone out there has a different opinion.
Myocarditis is not the only risk when you get covid. You can't conclude that the vaccine is more dangerous than getting covid just based on this one effect; covid has many other dangerous effects on some people, such as destroying your lungs.
The chance of healthy young males dying from Covid is close to zero and not 0.3%. I recently had Covid, less than 6 months after the booster and I don’t think it could have been worse than it was. The third shot measurably impacted my fitness metrics, according do my Apple Watch (sharp decline in VO2max, which took months to recover and even pre Covid it was 3 points off)
> 1. Myocarditis rate is much higher post infection than post vaccination by about 2X
Based on which data since reporting of adverse events after vaccination is constantly suppressed by medical professionals? (and reporting of adverse events is anyway very low in the first place)
> 2. Myocarditis rate post vaccination is 0.02 % . Covid FATALITY rate is 0.3%. Yet we are expected to have "debates" about it
Please explain the excess deaths around the globe right now then, if you believe in such numbers.
Bureaucrats are stupid! First, they rushed to vaccinate the young (up to infants now!), which were not dying, and even after the indications that something's going wrong! Secondly, they removed all measures and let them get reinfected every 2-3 months. What a double whammy! I still wear an N95 mask and have no plans to get covid every 4+ times per year!
> A study ... suggested it may be driven by an inflammatory response associated with SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, which the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines coax the body to produce. The group reported finding certain antibodies in both vaccine-induced myocarditis patients and patients with severe COVID-19, which itself can cause myocarditis.
If those who had this reaction to the vaccine gotten COVID without the vaccine, would it not be likely that they would see the same inflammation response and the same heart damage? If that were the case, receiving the vaccine still seems like a reasonable choice.
My family hasn't yet, and we're far from cave hermits — we just pretty consistently do smart, reasonable things.
Around 25% of children and adolescents who get COVID-19 will get long COVID, the long-term effects of which are not well understood. I have no plans to surrender to "fate" and to stop doing smart, reasonable things.
We're only, what, two years in? Give it a couple more. "Doing smart, reasonable things" only reduces the odds, not put them at zero. Iterate enough times, and the cumulative odds approach 1.
FWIW I predicted that would be the situation in like March 2020. This isn't some new forced narrative, at least for me.
I don't think the rate is that high. I think it's closer to 3%, give or take a few, right now, with an order of magnitude more cases of partial recovery of acute symptoms over time.
Which IMO is still insane, but I don't think it's 1 in 4 level of bad.
There is not, and it pains me to hear people reinforcing that narrative. There are immunocompromised individuals within my family that have significantly higher risks of complications than the next person. For this reason, we take every precaution to avoid exposure and transmission. We have been fortunate to remain COVID-free so far, but please remember that there are lives hanging in the balance.
But… they did. It effectively keeps most of the vaccinated out of the ICU.
> 4 in 5 COVID-19 patients in intensive care are not vaccinated against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The chance that a fully vaccinated person will end up in ICU due to COVID-19 is 33 times lower than for a non-vaccinated person. : https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/4-in-5-covid-19-patients-in-icu-...
> n this cross-sectional study of US adults hospitalized with COVID-19 during January 2022 to April 2022 (during Omicron variant predominance), COVID-19-associated hospitalization rates were 10.5 times higher in unvaccinated persons and 2.5 times higher in vaccinated persons with no booster dose, respectively, compared with those who had received a booster dose. Compared with unvaccinated hospitalized persons, vaccinated hospitalized persons were more likely to be older and have more underlying medical conditions. : https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
And I could link up a dozen similar studies and reports that all say the same thing: the risks from vaccination are low, the risks from Covid are an order of magnitude greater.
You have made this fraudulent claim twice. Along with, it appears, promoting a conspiracy theory that renegade researchers developed it as a bio weapon. You are, in my opinion, a terrible person, worthy of condemnation and dismissal.
>And I could link up a dozen similar studies and reports that all say the same thing: the risks from vaccination are low, the risks from Covid are an order of magnitude greater.
Without absolute numbers, your "analysis" is meaningless. We're talking about seven deaths amongst teens.
>The study noted that about three-fourths of the teenagers in the study had other medical conditions, such as obesity
Not being fat is an excellent way to avoid having a bad time with Covid. Shame that the official advice caused many people to spend the last two years sitting on the couch, eating pizza.
It is undeniable that the vaccine kept the most vulnerable out of the ICU. It is also very true that healthy people under about 45 were at minimal risk from Covid.
It is not my analysis. Every damn research paper shows that the unvaccinated are hospitalized and dying at rates many multiples higher than the vaccinated.
As for the sin of being fat that you find so unforgivable, if the goal is to reduce hospitalization and death, that is going to be infinitely easier to accomplish through vaccination than by trying to convince the country to get fit.
If you're at risk of a bad time with Covid, get vaccinated. Simples.
>As for the sin of being fat that you find so unforgivable
Simple cause and effect. The study you linked said so - if you're obese, you're much more likely to go to the ICU with Covid. It is strange that all of the public messaging designed to "keep us safe" did not include any component to look after our bodies, which would have significant benefits when it comes to fighting disease.
Consider the magnitude of the immune response. In someone with pre-existing immunity the virus may replicate relatively little before being killed. Compare this to getting the vaccine, where your body will be flooded with spike protein whether you have previous immunity or not.
Exactly. And the most plausible explanation for the large variation in number of VAERS reports by lot number is that poor quality control meant some lots were "hot" and led to excessive spike protein production.
I got severe side effects from Pfizer vaccine and so did my spouse. We still didn't fully recover more than year later. We got vaccinated at the same Costco on the same day. I did it because of pressure from work as I had covid before. I didn't expect any health benefits, but I didn't expect year later I still have regrets to fall into trap.
To me the larger issue beyond any comparisons of risk profiles is the ethical question.
If a government through its agencies coerces people to get a medical treatment that harms them in any way they are responsible for that harm. Even if vaccinations are unquestionably a net benefit to everyone, the coercion makes the whole thing a serious breach of medical ethics. "First do no harm".
The "public health" (called "Volksgesundheit" ca. 1935) crowd of course have no such ethics and their goals often have conflicting aims with medicine. They gladly trade a few individuals' well-being for a greater good. Usually the diseases are so bad that this sort of approach is at least understandable (see damage from the first few iterations of polio or smallpox vaccines). But with covid they have completely lost many people. If they had just refrained from coercion (as with flu vaccines) everything would be just fine.
Mandatory vaccination has been in place for a long time, and nobody complained - not least because they understood it was for their own benefit, if not for the greater good.
The question arises, why was Covid vaccination such a problem for a significant vocal minority? You mention 'do no harm', but I really don't think that is the root of it.
Because you can't introduce new technology without testing. Most people just took the vaccine on faith. In fact I'd say the faith in the vaccine was higher than any faith I have seen in my life.
Even religious fundamentalists have a core understanding that they frequently have serious doubts, and that it's okay if it takes time to get back to full faith.
It's not about being deadly, it's about the risk of long COVID and the long-term health risks that spike after infection regardless of symptom severity. It IS bad.
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[ 0.68 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadIt's true that most people didn't really want to debate covid then, which is par-for-the-course on political issues. I think though in our post-mortem for covid the my curiosity why we got so left/right political over an illness. I'd love to have that behind us.
If this move hadn't been struck down by the Supreme Court, you can bet some version of this restriction would still be in place and would be defended by many.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/13/1072165393/supreme-court-bloc...
What is needed is peer review, not debate. Debate is simply a euphemism for validation seeking for confirmation bias on random social forums.
If there was any problem with the peer review, there is cause for complaints. Are we going to hold a debate on whether the proof of fermat's last theorem is actually correct now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
The inconsistency and the blatant suppression of dissenting viewpoints does not help either.
I sure remember when the guidelines were that COVID wasn't transmissible through aerosol, only droplets. Then it was revised to include aerosol. Mask warnings also evolved from "not that effective" to "extremely effective". But isn't all of this explainable charitably without invoking suppression?
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/23/at-a-time-when-the-u-s-n...
It said that only nursing homes should be quarantined when the vast majority of elderly do not live in nursing homes. It encouraged everyone else to get infected as soon as possible, completely ignoring the fact that vaccines were being developed, which meant that later exposure would be far better than earlier exposure.
One of the signatories of The Great Barrington Declaration actually did try to destroy a Caltech professor's career, but Dr. Prasad pretends the reverse happened. https://mobile.twitter.com/lpachter/status/13770484698655580...
The right way to communicate is say:
“Based on other viruses, we believe masking helps reduce the risk of transmission.”
“Based on initial clinical data we believe vaccination will reduce or possibly eliminate the risk you transmitting the virus to others”
What I’m guessing happened is they thought not being confident in their answer would cause people to not comply.
But the #1 rule of communication (I did some company PR work) is never lie, even by omission. If you lie you’ll eventually get caught and people will never believe you in the future.
Gee that’s not what I heard at all, what I heard was ‘this is science, and anyone who disagrees or doubts is an idiot and deserves to die and is responsible for killing grandma’
*edit
Oh look here’s the comment where anyone who doubts or disagrees is an idiot:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258738
I guess we should applaud them for not celebrating the death of anyone who doubts.
And yet the authorities and all the big tech bros were quick to censor anyone who disagreed with the blatant false narratives. Even the WHO took a YEAR to admit to aerosol contamination after the pandemic was everywhere.
1. Myocarditis rate is much higher post infection than post vaccination by about 2X
2. Myocarditis rate post vaccination is 0.02 % . Covid FATALITY rate is 0.3%. Yet we are expected to have "debates" about it
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
Also, why the hell do we think scientific research needs a so called "debate". Are we trying to become school valedictorians? What is needed is peer review, not debate. Debate is simply a euphemism for validation seeking for confirmation bias on random social forums.
If there was any problem with the peer review, there is cause for complaints. Are we going to hold a debate on whether the proof of fermat's last theorem is actually correct now?
> Among men under 40, there were an estimated four extra cases of myocarditis associated with the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine and 14 extra cases with the first dose of the Moderna vaccine for every 1 million men vaccinated. That risk rose with the second dose for all three vaccines studied and was highest for Moderna's, which had an additional 97 myocarditis cases per 1 million. For unvaccinated men under 40 with COVID-19, there were 16 additional myocarditis cases per million.
which shows that the Moderna second dose is riskier than infection for men under 40? I have to admit I've been really disappointed by the way people have been minimising this. Part of that is being in that group of men < 40 myself (it has always been stratified by age and sex), another part of it is I think we need to be as transparent as possible about all risks in medicine as opposed to giving fuel (and good arguments) that information is being suppressed or charitably ignored because people are panicking.
How about people just do whats right for them and stop conforming to groupthink
Covid fatality is also age stratified. Besides, you might get it, you might not get it. The vaccines were mandated and people were made to get them to keep their jobs or to live their lives. People have different risk tolerance so it's normal that everyone out there has a different opinion.
Based on which data since reporting of adverse events after vaccination is constantly suppressed by medical professionals? (and reporting of adverse events is anyway very low in the first place)
> 2. Myocarditis rate post vaccination is 0.02 % . Covid FATALITY rate is 0.3%. Yet we are expected to have "debates" about it
Please explain the excess deaths around the globe right now then, if you believe in such numbers.
If those who had this reaction to the vaccine gotten COVID without the vaccine, would it not be likely that they would see the same inflammation response and the same heart damage? If that were the case, receiving the vaccine still seems like a reasonable choice.
Around 25% of children and adolescents who get COVID-19 will get long COVID, the long-term effects of which are not well understood. I have no plans to surrender to "fate" and to stop doing smart, reasonable things.
FWIW I predicted that would be the situation in like March 2020. This isn't some new forced narrative, at least for me.
Which IMO is still insane, but I don't think it's 1 in 4 level of bad.
Be infected by SARS-CoV-2, the virus, sure. Get Covid, the disease, no.
> 4 in 5 COVID-19 patients in intensive care are not vaccinated against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The chance that a fully vaccinated person will end up in ICU due to COVID-19 is 33 times lower than for a non-vaccinated person. : https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/4-in-5-covid-19-patients-in-icu-...
> Nearly all teenagers admitted to intensive care units because of COVID-19 were unvaccinated : https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2022011...
> n this cross-sectional study of US adults hospitalized with COVID-19 during January 2022 to April 2022 (during Omicron variant predominance), COVID-19-associated hospitalization rates were 10.5 times higher in unvaccinated persons and 2.5 times higher in vaccinated persons with no booster dose, respectively, compared with those who had received a booster dose. Compared with unvaccinated hospitalized persons, vaccinated hospitalized persons were more likely to be older and have more underlying medical conditions. : https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
And I could link up a dozen similar studies and reports that all say the same thing: the risks from vaccination are low, the risks from Covid are an order of magnitude greater.
You have made this fraudulent claim twice. Along with, it appears, promoting a conspiracy theory that renegade researchers developed it as a bio weapon. You are, in my opinion, a terrible person, worthy of condemnation and dismissal.
Without absolute numbers, your "analysis" is meaningless. We're talking about seven deaths amongst teens.
>The study noted that about three-fourths of the teenagers in the study had other medical conditions, such as obesity
Not being fat is an excellent way to avoid having a bad time with Covid. Shame that the official advice caused many people to spend the last two years sitting on the couch, eating pizza.
It is undeniable that the vaccine kept the most vulnerable out of the ICU. It is also very true that healthy people under about 45 were at minimal risk from Covid.
As for the sin of being fat that you find so unforgivable, if the goal is to reduce hospitalization and death, that is going to be infinitely easier to accomplish through vaccination than by trying to convince the country to get fit.
>As for the sin of being fat that you find so unforgivable
Simple cause and effect. The study you linked said so - if you're obese, you're much more likely to go to the ICU with Covid. It is strange that all of the public messaging designed to "keep us safe" did not include any component to look after our bodies, which would have significant benefits when it comes to fighting disease.
If a government through its agencies coerces people to get a medical treatment that harms them in any way they are responsible for that harm. Even if vaccinations are unquestionably a net benefit to everyone, the coercion makes the whole thing a serious breach of medical ethics. "First do no harm".
The "public health" (called "Volksgesundheit" ca. 1935) crowd of course have no such ethics and their goals often have conflicting aims with medicine. They gladly trade a few individuals' well-being for a greater good. Usually the diseases are so bad that this sort of approach is at least understandable (see damage from the first few iterations of polio or smallpox vaccines). But with covid they have completely lost many people. If they had just refrained from coercion (as with flu vaccines) everything would be just fine.
The question arises, why was Covid vaccination such a problem for a significant vocal minority? You mention 'do no harm', but I really don't think that is the root of it.
Mandatory vaccination for deadly diseases like measles and the mumps. COVID is not deadly for the young.
No matter how right you were to be skeptical, they will never stop calling you names for not doing as they say.