Seems like this should have been a requirement before any emergency use authorization, and certainly before any mandates.
The fact that this research is just now being done ought to be enough to immediately revoke the FDA emergency use authorizations and pull the product from the shelves.
The covid vaccines have been a complete and utter disaster at every level. The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
We now have victims of vaccine injury so scared of societal backlash they don't speak out, and doctors so scared of losing their license/job they ignore the evidence in front of them.
As soon as the EUAs were issued, the vaccine manufacturers shut down clinical trial followup and, in many cases, allowed vaccination of the control branch of the trials. Same for Paxlovid, where support for independent trials was refused.
People in the control branch were told they were controls so that they had the option to get the newly-authorized vaccine for real. Standard practice for trials that go well.
It's not specific to EUA, this is commonly done when a Phase 3 trial shows a clear benefit. Essentially, once you're sure a medicine confers a real benefit, it becomes unethical to deny it to the control branch any longer.
Seeing how family who got infected prior to vaccine availability are still suffering brain fog and lack of energy even now, I am too. The long term effects of covid concern me far more than those of the vaccine do.
I'm glad the emergency use authorization allowed people who are interested to get the vaccine. I don't think mandates were ever appropriate, and I think people should also have had a right to NOT get the vaccine.
The emergency use authorization seemed absolutely like the appropriate course of action given the circumstances.
Remember the right comparison regarding apparent long-Covid: What proportion of people would self-report brain fog and lack of energy anyway, with nothing to do with Covid?
This sort of claim has been made after a study was released that took the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies as the source of thruth for whether people had gotten COVID-19.
This sort of claim can’t be made on that basis because a lot of people do not produce antibodies after infection.
Abstract: “Not all persons recovering from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection develop SARS-CoV-2–specific antibodies. We show that nonseroconversion is associated with younger age and higher reverse transcription PCR cycle threshold values and identify SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx as a major correlate of the systemic antibody response.”
Please note that this was already known when the study which is taken to show that people are imagining long COVID was published.
It’s not a good study.
Quite a bit of research has been done since then which further pins down the fact that long COVID is very real and how to diagnose it with biomarkers, which turn out to correspond very well with people saying that a SARS-CoV-2 infection messed them up.
Please also consider how harshly judgemental it appears when someone accuses a large number of people of imagining or making up a severe and disabling condition. You have to be very certain.
Also using steroids like dexamethasone were a later advent in treating covid that helped a lot. (They should have been standard of care right away like they would have been for any other respiratory illness).
These early follies increased the perceived need for a vaccine then and today still; risk : benefit analysis for the vaccines consider worst possible scenarios for covid, which include defunct practices like high PIP ventilator use and forgoing of common first-line treatments
The time frames for the graphs are not the beginnings of covid (EoY 2021). By that time the initial standards of care had improved to the steroid treatments (I can't say specifically which ones, because I do not know, but I do know they were generally the standard of care at that time).
The risk benefit analysis of the vaccine vs the disease is ultimately something that's impossible to do at this point, because it's impossible to be impartial to whatever side you think is riskier. In general, I think a disease is just always going to be riskier than a vaccine. Anything you say about the vaccine could be true of the disease as well until we have complete information about the disease.
Thanks. I wouldn't wish what he went through on my worst enemy. He was in the hospital for three months and spend half of that time on a ventilator. After a month COVID isn't contagious anymore and we were allowed us to visit him in the ICU (really visiting his family). I was at the hospital the night he passed away.
I think for a lot of people COVID isn't "real". They don't know anyone who died. Or if they do they were old, and/or it happened in the hospital far away from whatever their personal reality is.
Believe me when I tell you the risk associated with the vaccine is nothing compared to what he went through. I fully believe had he been vaccinated he'd still be here today.
Sorry for your loss, but there’s no way you could know that. The very same logic you would require you to espouse the belief that any person who received a vaccine and died, died because the vaccine.
He was in mid 30s, young for COVID - but diabetic. There have been actual studies done for the vaccine to show efficacy in preventing death for someone in his risk group. So not the same logic, but accrual proven causation. There's a very very good chance he would've made it had he been vaccinated.
The actual FDA approval letter[0] calls out in the document that all long term testing will not be completed until May 2027. Pointing that out has always gotten one branded as an antivaxx conspiracy nutter, rather than a person who might want to ensure that, well, long term testing data is actually in before injecting something into their bodies.
> long term testing data is actually in before injecting something into their bodies.
You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
There may be concerning long term effects, but keep persepcive, the worst possible case is still better than the known case of COVID. And of course long term studies on COVID are also still in progress with all signs pointing to even more bad effects of COVID coming out in the coming years.
You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
That is actually yet to be determined, which is the point.
And I only mean that as it relates to specific demographic cohorts, not overall. If I were elderly, diabetic, immunocompromised etc. I don't think I'd hesitate. But the data I've seen on my demographic cohort is a toss-up at best, or even shows the vaccine to be riskier.
>There may be concerning long term effects, but keep persepcive, the worst possible case is still better than the known case of COVID.
The most common outcome of Covid is feeling bad for a couple of days (up to a week), and then moving on with life across all age groups. This has always been the case.
That really depends on the age group. The chances of someone under 30 having any real negative effects to Covid is virtually 0, while there is some evidence pointing to males under the age of 30 having issues with the vaccine.
For young people the risk of death goes from something like 0.1% to 0.01% with the vaccine (just aiming for order of magnitude risks), which isn't a big deal for an individual.
However, when you are talking about populations of 10s of millions in low risk age ranges, it's 10,000's of preventable deaths!
Even if you don't care about the deaths (it's their choice to die; whatever), note that for every death, there are 10-100 long covid cases that are pulling resources from the health care system indefinitely.
The vaccine seems to cut those by about 90% too. Why should we waste tax dollars on medicare and welfare for anti-vaxxers?
Not in young age groups its not. Those 10k at risk of Covid death are at significantly higher risk of death from other causes too. If we stratified by more than age you'd see significantly reduced IFR among all age groups in the group without comorbidities. Quit lumping all people together, this is the age of big data and we should be using it to enhance lives not subjugate with blithe renderings.
> You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
You seem certain of this, but the vaccines are new enough that we can't possibly have long term data to even evaluate.
Bodies are complicated, even more than software systems. I've been in enough SEV reviews where the root cause was seemingly innocuous to know that I can't anticipate with much confidence that any particular change won't result in some cascading failure scenario. This is why we have test environments. Luckily in software it's extremely rare for a change to take years to manifest bad behavior, but not so in medicine.
I'm no biologist, but an obvious question to ask is if the spike protein by itself, which the vaccine will produce, has different impacts than the spike protein coupled to the virus envelope. It's certainly smaller, will it be able to pass through areas where the whole virus package wouldn't? What about the end of the spike that would otherwise be attached to the envelope, will it have an effect?
You can't naively draw a Venn diagram of virus and vaccine impacts where the vaccine impacts are fully a subset of the virus impacts.
> Seems like this should have been a requirement before any emergency use authorization
Well... if you think that there's a case for an emergency use authorization, then you kind of can't wait to determine long-term risks. If there's a Covid epidemic threatening to kill millions of people in 2019, you can't wait for a study of long-term consequences that terminates in 2027. You have to decide with the information you have in 2019.
Was there a case for an emergency use authorization? Covid did in fact kill millions of people, so arguably yes.
> The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
Source needed. Reading these comments, one would think nobody ever died of COVID. One would think we didn't have hospitals crammed to the gills with them.
Covid has killed millions. How many have died of myocarditis? While I agree with your sentiment, it's hyperbolic to claim the vaccine has done "exponentially more damage than the virus".
Chemo Therapy is literally poisoning you just enough to kill the cancer.
The anti-arthritis medications I take cause terrible side effects.
These options are still better than the underlying problems. Throwing out pithy feel good quotes doesn't capture the nuance of the line that doctors walk when trying to treat illnesses. "Do no harm" is the ideal. In reality it's to do less harm than the disease.
> Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?
It reminds me of how Japanese honeybees kill hornets - they overheat it by swarming it and flapping their wings vigorously to transfer body heat and cook it alive.
They fortunately can tolerate a few degrees higher core temperature than the hornet - it can't be good for the bees but if your lifespan is 60 days.
This is not a good rule if taken to the extreme. Almost all medical procedures have an associated risk, some higher. The key question is whether the risk outweighs the benefits.
This is more people than COVID kills in the same time period, but strangely there's no panic about that. No mandates. No significant steps from any authorities to do anything about it. Perhaps because there's no money in that, unlike pushing a remedy for something that's not as significant as people feel.
edit: Since HN is ratelimiting me and not letting me reply to the below, here's the reply I've tried posting after an hour of "slowing down":
What would be the mandate for user error (which is what 'preventable medical errors' boils down to), beyond an ongoing attempt to improve procedures in hospitals which I'm sure they're already doing, especially since the US is very litigious and they often get sued for malpractice.
Humans are messy, can't hold all knowledge about everything in their heads at all times, and error prone. Unless you replace them entirely you're not going to be able to eliminate medical errors.
There are a staggering number of mandates and regulations around preventable medical errors. One that has been absolutely defining is CMS not compensating for healthcare-associated infections.
Also, many hospitals view things like infection control or antimicrobial stewardship as cost centers, and they're not doing nearly as much as they can.
There is evidence of statistical lies perpetuated to benefit big pharma.
- The extreme false positive rate of COVID testing
- Blindly combining "of" and "with" Covid cases for cause of death based on those same broken tests.
- Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
- PCR testing cycles at extreme highs
When all of the broken testing was finally admitted and discontinued, were the previous misclassified deaths reinvestigated or reclassified? Of course not.
The entire pool of data of Covid deaths has been poisoned. There is no interest in accuracy. But there does seem to be extreme interest in protecting the liability and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven, untested, ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection, spread, or reduce symptoms.
Just a meta comment. This exact comment 1 year ago would have been downvoted until it was dead. However, much of the evidence for this was available at that time. I sadly think we'll continue to see excess deaths climb over the coming years particularly in the US.
I'm glad I only got the J&J shot way back when it came out and avoided 3+ rounds of Pfizer or Moderna primary and boosters.
Depending on the exact claim it's often more like 12 months. A few even made it down to 6 months (affecting periods, for example) and I think one was as low as 2 months.
Ok, I'll ignore the bit where you implicitly claim that 1000's of independent county health offices colluded to produce excess corpses before the vaccine came out, and then somehow hid exponentially more corpses after it came out.
Excess mortality is higher now because we're in the middle of a massive rebound of all the other respiratory illnesses (that were stopped by widespread masking and record flu vaccination last year). Also Covid is still around. Omicron has partially "escaped" the updated vaccines (which you should take anyway).
> Surprisingly, mortality rates in 2022 for most of the 10 leading “underlying” causes of death such as heart disease, stroke, and lung and colorectal cancer have been similar to previous years, or lower than expected. An exception is the rate for “symptoms, signs, and ill defined conditions” (mostly deaths resulting from old age and frailty) which has consistently been higher than expected and also caused the most excess deaths, but not enough to explain the overall excess.4
> However, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’ (OHID) analysis of deaths by “any mention” on the death certificate—rather than just the “underlying cause” of death—shows a substantial excess, in particular, of deaths from cardiovascular diseases and diabetes since April,6 prompting an investigation by the Department of Health and Social Care. Growing evidence suggests that covid-19 increases the risk of cardiovascular problems even months after infection,7 which could in part be driving excess deaths. Covid-19 itself remains the sixth leading cause of death, causing 200-400 deaths weekly—a reminder that this virus remains a threat for the foreseeable future.
> Another possibility is that people may not be receiving the care they need from an NHS that was already overstretched pre-pandemic and is now coping with unprecedented backlogs of care and pressures on emergency services. This “crisis” situation has an adverse impact on all patients, but a lack of timely care can be especially life threatening for people with acute cardiovascular problems.
> ONS analysis shows about 3300 excess deaths occurred during the heatwaves experienced in England and Wales between June and August, mostly in older people.8
> ONS also notes that excess deaths can occur following periods when deaths were lower than average, ie, “mortality displacement.”5 Could some of the excess deaths since April reflect the lower ASMRs in early 2022?
I'm also curious about why there's such a difference in relative excess death rates between the US and UK. Currently in the US the weekly death rates are far below what they were in 2020-2021: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
The numbers were cooked particularly badly in Russia. There are 2 different government agencies reporting Covid deaths and excess deaths, and their numbers differ by a factor of 7; meanwhile many deaths are reported as caused by "viral pneumonia".
Meanwhile for the US and European countries, Covid death and excess death numbers are pretty close.
> The extreme false positive rate of COVID testing
Tools developed in one tenth of the normal time aren't perfect. Hardly surprising. If they detected covid most of the cases when people had it, they work. Much better than having no tools at all.
> Blindly combining "of" and "with" Covid cases for cause of death based on those same broken tests.
It does not matter if you die directly by a disease or by the sequels of the disease.
Lets assume that people were not dying really from covid. This still leads us with the problem that people were dying massively and more often than in normal years so we have a second hidden agent killing people that nobody found. How do we explain it?
> Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
Easily explainable when everybody was using masks and social distance in those two years. People remaining at home don't pick influenza at the same rate than people in a concert
> PCR testing cycles at extreme highs
I'm unsure about what you want say with that. PCR testing needs to chase an organism that is mutating fast. They need to change at a high pace. Lab chemicals and reactives having an expiring date is not rare
> and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven,
Green card granted by all regulatory agencies, so proven
> untested,
overtested, the entire planet toke it one year before the first antivacs
> ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection
vaccines never claimed to prevent infection. The makers repeated it again and again.
> [not prevent] spread
About spread. Too litle, too late and one step forward, two backward.
Negationists and agents actively promoted the disease, sabotaged healthcare and created chaos. People was videotaped deliberately coughing in the face of other after tearing off their masks.
The same people were videotaped later grooming the masses to commit a coup. Caught trying to sell a computer stolen from the capitol to Russian agents. None of them where found linked with pharma companies (and is very unlikely that a pharma company would lobby for convincing people to reject pharma products).
Not really fair to blame pharma while people were sabotaging the control.
>, or reduce symptoms.
This is simply false. Is a proven fact that vaccines reduced symptoms and saved people. Just take a look at the statistical data.
Is proven empirically that most of the zillions of people that received the vaccines didn't developed serious collateral effects.
Is proven than the group that received vaccines had a lower mortality than the group that rejected them. There are dozens of notorious antivacs videotaped bragging about the "inoffensive" disease, actively trying to caught it, doing everything wrong on purpose... and realizing too late that they will were dying from covid.
I agree that the main cause of death here should be stupidity, not covid.
It is. With the exception of a very narrow age range of young men, the COVID vaccine is protective against heart disease alone, even ignoring all other outcomes.
> the COVID vaccine is protective against heart disease alone
Wait, what? As in people should just take it as a prophylactic for heart disease, without even taking covid into consideration? It seems like this would be shouted from the rooftops if it were true.
The issue isn't Covid vs vaccine heart risks, it's that you're going to get Covid 100% after having the vaccine, so you've essentially doubled your risk. That's the issue.
That is such a biased study. They aren't comparing Covid postive + no vaccine with covid negative + vaccine. If that was the comparison 1st group fares better as they did not find any covid positive + non vaccinated being diagnosed with myocarditis.
Also their dataset had 13% covid positive rate. So ideally we should multiply the non vaccinated risk by 13%.
I don't know about the rest of your methodology and I'm suspicious of the concept of "Oh they forgot to multiply by 13%" cause you just don't multiply percentages (with very few exceptions).
But more to the point, the group "Covid Positive + No Vaccine" has a high sampling bias built into it. Because you're sampling "People who lived through covid without the vaccine".
Except you can get infected even if you get the vaccine. In fact it seems to me that people got it despite the fact that they were vaccinated or not, without a particular logic.
Yes. In particular, the contents of the mRNA vaccines are a subset of what a covid infection produces.
The anti-vax stance is similar to the claims that tightly regulated nicotine vapes are worse than high tar cigarettes. (Except that you can just choose to not smoke, of course.)
I hear a lot of anti-vaxy stuff about how the spike protein is damaging in itself (implying that you shouldn't get the vaccine because you'll have spike proteins flowing around in your blood), but they seem to ignore the fact that when you get actual covid the virus is multiplying in your cells and spike proteins are more widespread and more numerous.
I see the argument here in this thread that the vaccine isn't really preventing you from getting covid at this point (which is probably largely true) but shouldn't being vaccinated mean that you'll have a lower viral load and shorter duration of illness?
The mRNA vaccines work by causing the spike protein to multiply in your cells. Yes, the mechanism is different - the virus copies itself and the spike protein just happens to be part of the virus, whereas the vaccine mRNA just causes the spike protein itself to be copied. Note that with the vaccine, you're getting a massive number of cells "infected" all at once, equivalent to quite a bit of virus self-replication. So the result is the same, a lot of spike protein floating around and doing damage. The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected (and which therefore have to be eliminated by your immune system), whereas with the virus there is effectively no upper bound. But that doesn't translate at all into a difference of how much damage the spike protein produced by X infected cells produces, and it doesn't mean that the number of infected cells with mRNA is significantly less than the number of infected cells you would have gotten with a successfully-fought-off infection. So it could do just as much damage.
> The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected
Reverse-transcriptase enzyme in liver cells in a lab has been shown to convert the mRNA vaccines into DNA. While it's unclear if it would actually be a permanent change to cells, DNA is a lot more stable than RNA and could hang around a lot longer than expected, and result in a lot more spike protein than expected.
You're missing part of the argument: Vaccine-generated spike protein is free-floating, while virus-generated spike protein is attached to the virus. The free-floating spike protein is a lot smaller than the virus, so it can get a lot more places, and while some will break off of the virus and become free-floating it wouldn't be in anywhere near as large amounts as vaccine-generated spike protein.
It's been a while since I've looked at the ins-and-outs of the immune system, but doesn't this basically not hold up to scrutiny? Again, correct me if I'm wrong:
A) The general method of action of the vaccines is that the mRNA enters a cell (generally dendritic cells), the cell transcribes it into the spike protein, then the cell detects something off about the proteins and presents them on their cell wall for the immune system to respond to. The proteins aren't just "free floating" unless your immune response is
B) The likelihood of an immune response to an active infection never doing the same thing with cells that contain partially constructed virons / viron components, or achieving the same effect by breaking down full virons, is basically zero. So it's almost certain that an active infection would have "free-floating" proteins in some capacity as well.
No, not for younger men: the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine does not appear to offset the benefit. So if you only care about that one single dimension, younger men shouldn’t have the vaccine. That said, other costs and benefits matter far far more I think.
In men younger than 40 years, we estimate an additional 4 and 14 myocarditis events per million in the 1 to 28 days after a first dose of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273, respectively; and an additional 14 , 11 and 97 myocarditis events after a second dose of ChAdOx1, BNT162b2, and mRNA-1273, respectively. These estimates compare with an additional 16 myocarditis events per million men younger than 40 years in the 1 to 28 days after a SARS-CoV-2–positive test before vaccination. [ChAdOx1 == AstraZeneca, BNT162b2 == Pfizer, and mRNA-1273 == Moderna]
The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.
Disclaimer: I try to be apolitical however there is a strong aura of bullshit around this topic so double check everything!
> Associations were stronger in men younger than 40 years for all vaccines. In men younger than 40 years old, the number of excess myocarditis events per million people was higher after a second dose of mRNA-1273 than after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test (97 [95% CI, 91–99] versus 16 [95% CI, 12–18]).
> The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.
That's from the study you linked; for the group most at risk of vaccine myocarditis, the vaccine was associated with a higher risk than the virus. In this study, this was true for Moderna, with Pfizer being about equivalent risk to the virus (albeit without considering that the risk of infection remains after vaccination). However, there have been other studies that found this to be true for all mrna vaccines.
So to answer your question, its technically true, but only if you dilute the at-risk group by including the entire population.
The problem seems to be that the vaccine isn't decreasing infection risk all that much. Is it also decreasing myocarditis risk among the infected? I've seen mixed results, so it isn't clear to me.
Earlier in pandemic 196k post Covid patients were monitored a year... "We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection."
It also seems like, in the absence of assurance of long-term safety, you would recommend the vaccine for at-risk groups only. It's known now that the risk to young people (under 19) is minimal: IFR < 3/1,000,000. And that was during the much more dangerous early strain of Covid-19, not the ones circulating now. Yet here we are in 2022 with a recommendation from the CDC to vaccinate ages 5 and up, regardless of health condition.
It is wild to me that people look at a number like 3/1,000,000 and don't think wow, that's 1900 Children who could die from something we have a vaccine for, that actively prevents the cause.
Also, can you imagine losing a child to something that was preventable? You can play numbers and statistics all day, but we're talking about children's lives.
You're probably not a parent? But for reference, go find examples of people who are parents that have lost children to some cause, and see what they're doing now? I would bet 9/10 times they're trying to prevent that from happening to others.
same. it's also interesting that many of the folks commenting are not likely to be in the most vulnerable group at risk of developing myocarditis from the vaccine [0] -- that unfortunate category is one that i belong to. as a young man, i spoke about this risk nearly a year ago to the tee [1]. since then, i've also found out i am particularly vulnerable, as i had a history of heart issues as a young child (heart murmer -> arrhythmia). it will be nice to see more data available, but i don't regret any of the vaccines in the slightest.
there are plenty of comments here that speak to the general age recommendation other countries have provided, but i have yet to see people connect the other MAJOR group of people that should, by all means, totally, 100% consider getting their nth vaccination -> anyone with a comorbidity! if you are a young man with diabetes, the risks you face from the vaccine vs a covid infection are no longer as murky.
It's not a case where no children die if everyone takes the vaccine and 1900 children die if nobody does. There are numerous other variables at play, each of which contains some unknowns and affects quality of life or even the continuity of it. I can't say that I know what the currently best course of action for children is, but the problem is far from black and white.
There are 5 reports of death following Covid-19 vaccination in VAERS for children 0.5-5, and ‘1.6 million US children ages 6 months-4 years have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine’ as of 11-2-22. This is 3.125 deaths per million, and VAERS notoriously undercounts.
There are 31 reports of death following Covid-19 vaccination for children 5-12, and ‘10.9 million US children ages 5-11 have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine’ as of 11-2-22. This is 2.84 deaths per million. Again, VAERS notoriously undercounts.
EDIT: I wasn't kidding when I said I can play numbers and statistics all day.
When you say "VAERS notoriously undercounts", I think you're probably referring to the flu vaccine (where we would have historical data), but I don't think it's fair to say that would be true for the Covid vaccine.
Specifically because at the onset of this new vaccine, people are much more likely to report that a death happened after a covid vaccine. There is a segment of the population that has never trusted the covid vaccine, so they are a lot more likely to report a death after vaccination of a loved one. Also as the vaccine is new, there's probably a lot more data gathering around it because scientists would definitely like to know if the vaccine causes death. Lastly, it's an event you're much more likely to have talked to with your loved ones before you passed away, than with the flu vaccine.
My family knows I got a covid vaccine. My family has no idea about my flu vaccine status.
Lastly, and most importantly, the numbers for those are not intrinsically linked. There's not actually any implied causal link in any of those numbers "VAERS Covid/Flu Vaccine Reported Deaths by Days to Onset all Ages". They are all just correlated. If you want to look for a causal link you'd have to compare against the total number of people who got vaccines on that day. And then compare against total number of deaths for the whole population.
When I say VAERS notoriously undercounts, I’m referring to the literature on the subject. For example, the Harvard report Electronic Support for Public Health - Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (ESP:VAERS) https://digital.ahrq.gov/ahrq-funded-projects/electronic-sup...:
Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported.
Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event,
less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events
are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low
reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs
and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for
drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed. Barriers to reporting
include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what
to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part
of clinicians’ usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative.
Sensitivities ranged from 72% for poliomyelitis after
the oral poliovirus vaccine to less than 1% for rash
and thrombocytopenia after the MMR vaccine.
Regarding your speculation that deaths associated with the Covid-19 vaccines are probably reported at rates higher than that of other vaccines: I have a hard time believing that the report rate is higher than poliomyelitis after the oral poliovirus vaccine which is itself underreported.
And regarding the protestation that correlation does not imply causation, it’s not on me to prove that the treatment is harmful, and otherwise it’s safe and thus administered—-it’s on you to prove that it confers an all cause mortality benefit. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that such a benefit obtains in children, and suggest that this dearth of evidence explains the failure to approve the vaccines for children in many European countries.
I mean, there is no standard of proof that will convince you that the vaccine is better than the virus. But also, I'm not really trying to convince you of anything. I'm just stating why your sources don't say what you think they do.
As well as explaining confounding variables that your reference doesn't take into account for what that means. None of your sources are accounting for how politically embroiled this vaccine is, and how much of a difference that would make in who/what gets reported.
Just in case, I will make this point. If you had a loved one get a covid vaccine, and then die 20 days later, would you report it to VAERS?
I personally experienced a week of heart palpitations following my second dose of Moderna, as well as an acute visual aura, having never had a migraine. Not only did I fail to report this to VAERS, it only occurred to me as a vague possibility that the vaccination might be related, so I didn’t think twice about getting the booster. After her second dose of Moderna my sister developed a migraine (having never had one previously) that lasted a week, culminating in an emergency room visit, for which no VAERS report was made. My mother recently intimated that ever since her second Moderna shot she periodically experiences heart palpitations, and especially when ingesting caffeine, whereas before this was not the case. Again, no VAERS report.
Knowing what I know now, were a family member to die 20 days after a vaccination I would certainly submit a VAERS report, but I find this question incredible: are you really disputing multiple studies that conclude that VAERS underreports adverse events by appealing to your nebulous feeling that family members surely would not neglect to file a VAERS report after the death of a family member?
Does the fact that only a tiny minority of the population even knows VAERS exists provoke doubt?
“Underreporting" is one of the main limitations of passive
surveillance systems, including VAERS. The term, underreporting
refers to the fact that VAERS receives reports for only a small
fraction of actual adverse events. The degree of underreporting
varies widely.
Further, even if I granted that literally every death due to the vaccines was reported to VAERS, there still remains the extant signal which logically admits the possibility that children 0.5-5 suffer a higher rate of death to the vaccine than they do the disease.
As for the insulting claim that no standard of proof would convince me that the vaccine is better than the virus: all I require is a sufficiently powered RCT with a genuine placebo in the control, full disclosure of patient level data, and all cause mortality as the primary endpoint. It baffles me that you don’t demand the same.
The COVID-19 fatality risk for children is very low overall (0.002% estimated by the CDC). Those deaths have almost all been in patients with severe pre-existing health conditions such as obesity. For pediatric patients without pre-existing conditions, the death rate is virtually zero. So from a public health perspective it's most important to focus vaccination campaigns on those at greatest risk.
To be clear, I am not telling anyone to avoid vaccination for themselves or their children. Vaccination is a good option for the vast majority of patients. Talk to your doctor.
And ironically, school closures and lockdowns during the pandemic actually increased the rate of childhood obesity. The purported "cure" was not only worse than the disease, it actually made the disease worse by placing children at greater risk.
If you want my "appeal to numbers" argument, you can see it all over this thread.
It seems like I'm getting a continual -2 on votes for all of my arguments just cause I'm coming off as "pro-vaccine". So it doesn't actually seem to matter what appeals I make.
Also though, I don't really believe I'm changing anyone's mind on this. I'm just inviting people consider the humanity of things like "child deaths". Which, is much easier to consider as a number than it is as an actual concept.
I have a couple kids (teens). I'm worried about many other things, not COVID; it's just far down on my list of things that I consider active risks to my children that I have the power to impact.
I don't really have time to cross reference all your different comments, but when you post a comment that is just appeal to emotion, I tend to mention it.
<s> I mean, it's definitely the kind of good constructive criticism that really helps improve the discussion. </s>
In all honesty, I will say that pointing out rhetorical styles is probably the least constructive internet discussion you can have. Mostly because even if you can point to a logical fallacy, doing so doesn't negate the underlying argument unless you can actually explain it.
Also, brief note, that you might think you're an emotionless rational machine, but very few people actually respond well to that. So it's important to use everything in your rhetorical toolbox including appeals to emotion to try and convince the wide range of responses people might have.
I am a parent. It's not that I don't think some children should be vaccinated; some should. Overweight, diabetic, etc. We know where the risk is, and we know the vaccine reduces serious outcomes. It's recommending it across-the-board that I object to.
Now if your argument is "what's the harm?, why not vaccinate everyone?" my answer would be we don't actually know what the harm might be to these kids later in life. No one does. Probably no harm, I guess? Maybe a 3/1,000,000 chance of harm? no one knows.
> It's recommending it across-the-board that I object to.
Early on, the goal was to reach herd immunity while we still had vaccines that were fairly effective at reducing transmission against the variants we had had, before they mutated.
But also, I don't know how familiar you are with gov't messaging. But the more widespread you make a message, the less nuanced you can make it. People at large don't take nuance very well, and people at large are bad at evaluating circumstances. So if you give them a message like "People over the age of 65 should get 3 doses, and people over 30 should get 2 doses, etc." You're going to end up with most of the people not knowing what to do.
To add to that, you have people "doing their own research" who have no idea what the requirements for actual peer-reviewed research is, screaming from the rooftops that you can't trust anything coming out of anyone's mouth. And they will latch onto any piece of nuance and tear it to shreds.
Now, I still think that American institutions have done a bad job communicating, but considering they were undermined at every step of the process, I'm inclined to believe that it's more reasonable for them to give a blanket across-the-board recommendation than it is to destroy their own goal by adding confusion of "nuanced recommendations".
It does not need to be that nuanced. It's basically if you (think you might) have these X conditions, get vaccinated. You can give the detailed recommendations to doctors and other caregivers, and refer the public to them and the CDC website to check more in case they don't know.
What are the conditions, please list all of them in a way that makes it easy for me to find?
What age groups does this affect?
I think I have condition Y so I should go get vaccinated, but I have conflicting information on that from multiple doctors. Should I get vaccinated?
Also, in the US people often take advertised medications to their doctors and ask if they should take it, rather than doctors recommending things to people.
Finally, there are large segments of the population that don't consult doctors for varying reasons.
> Early on, the goal was to reach herd immunity while we still had vaccines that were fairly effective at reducing transmission against the variants we had had, before they mutated.
The mRNA vaccines weren't even tested for transmission during the early trials. It was impossible to make educated statements about reaching herd immunity through mass vaccination without any data. This did not stop people from introducing mandates in some places, even after it became clear that herd immunity will not be reached, which goes a little beyond bad communication.
I think that was a reasonable assumption given our understanding of infectious diseases.
In hindsight, that was incorrect, but you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time. It is reasonable to assume that viruses would be subject to herd immunity, because it's been true for the vast majority of viruses we've interacted with in the past.
> you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time.
I can absolutely criticize handwavy low knowledge / high impact decisions afterwards, because that's what they were and that was clear to many at that time already. Consensus wasn't reached based on knowledge, but based on power.
Luckily I came to that conclusion early during the pandemic, so I don't feel compelled to defend unethical decisions now.
No, that gets it totally backwards. The miniscule risks of the vaccine are blown out of proportion by bad reporting and people reading the statistics wrong.
In converse: we should have skipped phase 3 trials (effectivity) and should have started vaccination after safety was approved.
If anything the vaccination campaign has shown that sometimes acting fast can be tremendously helpful.
I think now I can finally write this in public: I didn't take COVID vaccine at all, because for coincidental reasons, my dad ended taking it first. Despite the fact he is already 50+ he had really severe, but thankfully mostly temporary cardiac side effects (mostly, because even months later he needed to go to his cardiologist and change his cardiac-related medicine, because since the vaccine his blood levels changed and he kept having weird symptoms).
Since my dad had his health go so poorly after the vaccine, I decided to not risk it, specially considering my existing conditions.
I think most people misunderstand the point of emergency use.
It was an emergency.
At the time the vaccine got authorized, we were in a middle of a pandemic, millions of people with no immunity were getting sick, and we couldn't stop the spread even with heavy restrictions. It was clear that we will all have some immunity eventually. The point of the emergency use of vaccine was to give people immunity in a way that wasn't as bad at getting sick. Wait too much, and the vaccine would have been mostly useless. It was a game of how much uncertainty we allow vs how much more deaths if we do nothing. And I think the (fairly conservative) bet saved millions, maybe we could have saved a bit more if we actually vaccinated people before the end of phase 3.
We are now in the end game, and the rules have changed. We are now almost all immunized in one way or another, the virus is now optimized for immune escape instead of raw speed, thankfully making it less deadly in the process. Because of that, the way we approach vaccination needs to change too. We can't compare today's situation with the beginning of 2021.
Some time in 2021 there was a story about COVID vaccines and heart issues here on HN. The comments filled up with people saying that ever since they'd got their shots they were experiencing new heart-related symptoms they'd never had previously like permanently racing heartbeats, palpitations/fluttering, inability to do exercise and more. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to re-find that discussion. I also have a good friend who works in IT who had a heart attack in the weeks after his shots, but he refused to believe that's what happened and never went in to get diagnosed (the symptoms were an exact match however).
Some rough calculations indicate the numbers affected by this kind of (hopefully) low level heart damage seem much higher than claimed. They say of the "hundreds of millions" of shots there are only 1000 cases of diagnosed heart damage from the vaccines. Call it 1000/100,000,000 or one in a million. There are approx 5M readers of Hacker News per month, so far less per day. Of those only a tiny handful have accounts and post comments. If their numbers are right then there should be ~no HN commenters with post-vaccine heart problems but this thread filled up with people posting their own experiences of such a thing.
Then there's also the other health problems. My gfs friends who took it have been complaining that they seem to get sick with colds/fluey things way more frequently since the shots, I heard similar complaints from a couple of old coworkers. One of those girls complaining of frequent sickness also reported disrupted menstruation but the doctors have ignored it all because as far as they are concerned, the vaccines are 'perfectly safe'.
I, anecdotally, can report the same. Anecdotally, it seems doctors are drowning in too much paperwork already to be bothered filing reports, as well as suffering from denial that this could be an issue (also preventing filing a report).
Me too. A few days after the latest booster I had some really weird heart palpitations while resting, and I was feeling dizzy with chest/shoulder pain after some moderate exercise. I've stopped exercising which sucks, but will ease back into it. But there's a history of arrhythmia in my family (heart issue killed my dad at a young age), so that's probably a big risk factor, and I'm in the "young male" risk group.
I don't know if I should keep getting boosters or risk a potentially worse outcome from covid, which I haven't had yet, though I've been very exposed to.
Unless you've been getting weekly PCR tests since the beginning of the pandemic, there's no way to reliably know that you haven't been infected. Many people experience asymptomatic infections.
I wish I could find it, but google is insistent on working against me here, but I remember reading from one of Pfizer's data dumps that children in the vaccinated group of their studies were at an increased risk of other respiratory infections compared to the control group.
Anecdotally, some, not all, but some of my triple vaccinated friends are getting sick constantly and they've said that every time they catch covid, it gets worse. This is just a few people out of several that I know, so it doesn't mean much if anything.
Do you have any idea if this effect was found for the non-mRNA vaccines as well? I had the Johnson & Johnson vaccine with no boosters and I've been getting an unusual number of colds this year, though I assumed it was due to life returning to normal with a backlog of viruses I hadn't been exposed to in 2020-2021. I did get covid twice after being vaccinated though and both cases were very mild with the second being almost asymptomatic. The two days after the vaccine were the sickest I've been in a decade but it seems it did its job re: making covid milder.
Officially the increased sickness effect doesn't exist at all. We only have these sorts of anecdotes and vaccines can only be discussed occasionally on HN, and not at all on most other forums, so notes can only be compared rarely.
Unofficially the effect does exist and goes by various names: OAS, Hoskins Effect, immune imprinting. It can be seen in some of the vaccine effectiveness data back when it was being collected by places like the UK, where vaccinated people were getting COVID at 4x the rate of unvaccinated by the time they stopped reporting (and the rate was worsening with time).
It can also be seen in the boosters trial data where they had to switch the definition of success to antibody production, because the boosters were not actually reducing infection incidence e.g. the bivalent boosters were tested on all of 8 mice and all 8 got COVID when exposed so effectiveness is zero, but that didn't stop them being approved on the basis that they caused production of antibodies (to the variant targeted by the OG vaccine, not Omicron).
OAS unfortunately can be caused by any vaccine tech. It's not mRNA specific. The antibodies you produce are for the older extinct variants that the vaccine trained you for, not the current variants. The body doesn't recognize that there's a difference.
Pfizer's clinical trial showed 95% efficacy as a "relative risk reduction" when researchers checked the clinical trial data (which FDA wanted to withhold for 55 years but a Texas judge ordered its release) , for the actual risk reduction it was shown to be a negative value. Here is one resource on the subject https://www.pandata.org/understanding-relative-risk-reductio... I tried to find a better reference but can not find the exact one I'm looking for which came from a Canadian university (ryerson I believe)
> wish I could find it, but google is insistent on working against me here
Bing/DuckDuckGo go is much better for anything with a negative vaccine sentiment. I stopped using Google altogether, because of the pandemic, after repeatedly watching news articles and research papers disappear from search results. I want a list, not a guided experience.
It's not required that this happened for nefarious reasons. My naive assumption was that it was a casualty of trying to downrank misinformation. The early misinformation nets, around COVID, were unnecessarily wide, catching objective truth. Searching now, it looks like things have improved.
What I understand based on a study posted here is the vaccine reduces your bodies ability to reactive and after 9 months the vaccine's preventive properties disappear making you more likely to get sick. The more shots the worse the affect.
As someone who experienced heart attack like symptoms as an under 30 year old, did go into the hospital and got a pericarditis[1] diagnosis, I think that describing your friends unknown heart condition as a heart attack is unnecessary fear mongering considering similar symptoms can present themselves as a much less severe condition. Both the Vaccine and Covid are known have a low chance of causing heart issues.
I'm not a doctor, so maybe there's some deep difference between something that has the same symptoms as a heart attack and a heart attack. Regardless of what exactly it was, it freaked him out, it freaked me out too and I'm glad there doesn't seem to have been a recurrence (or if there was he chose not to tell me, knowing that I'd tell him again to see a specialist).
"Both the Vaccine and Covid are known have a low chance of causing heart issues."
It is 'known' by people who are deeply conflicted by their own pushing of the shots and could thus never admit it, if their policies had led to immune or heart damage. Nothing much can be said about vaccine safety given that the public health and research system are clearly terrified of doing or saying anything that might reduce compliance with their policies.
I posted in that thread - saw a cardiologist and they confirmed it. In retrospect, it was probably the worst illness I've ever had, being completely out of commission for a month at age 29, where even doing simple things like rolling over in bed would cause my heart rate to spike and cause me to be short of breath. Couldn't do anything but lay there. Luckily a scan confirmed no long term damage.
For some reason still decided to get the third booster.. and I still ended up getting COVID twice (very mild both times). Don't think I'll be getting any more COVID vaccines.
Well the study is funded by the vaccine makers. So we can toss it out before it's even conducted.
Same goes for anything done by parties who have equated taking the vaccine with moral righteousness. If there are serious health risks it will only be found by a skeptic with a lot of perseverance.
I think the fact that it's much easier to get diagnosed with covid than to get diagnosed with vaccine illness is working against us here. You can test for covid pretty accurately and cheaply. Then, if someone starts having symptoms, we can say it is covid. There is unfortunately no PCR test for vaccine illness. So if you have symptoms of it it's hard to say that it's the vaccine because there is no unique indicator we can test for.
Norway recommends booster doses for 65+ [0], Denmark for 50+ [1], Australia for 50+ [2], Sweeden for 65+ [3], Finland for 65+ [4]. United States recommends booster does for 5+ [5]. "The (Florida) State Surgeon General now recommends against the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for males ages 18-39 years old." [6]
Worth noting, the Florida Surgeon General's opinion was lambasted in the mainstream media as him embracing conspiracy theories (and there is some interesting added context there as to why they believe so). Which... maybe two things are true at once. Perhaps he was - but also, perhaps his stance is not that radical. Radical compared to most Surgeon Generals in the United States; but on an international level?
Even the neighbouring country Canada stopped giving Moderna to people under 30 a year ago in September 2021. The CDC on the other hand is still continuing on. Clearly something is wrong in the US.
"Students may request an exemption from the vaccination requirement for medical or religious reasons"
Even as an atheist, I'd be getting the religious exemption for sure! Mandating boosters for healthy young students doesn't make a lot of sense. We know now that vaccination is not the way transmission of the virus is managed.
Flu shots also use a vaccine mechanism that's been known/used for decades and is not a first of its kind in history mRNA treatment. I feel like this difference would lead towards one requiring more testing than the other, at least in a rational society.
[Edit] For anyone that wants to downvote this, please explain what I said that was untrue. Flu shots in the US have never been mRNA based. Covid shots in the US are mRNA based. Before covid, there was never at any point in history an mRNA based vaccine rolled out to the public.
I didn't downvote you but if the 12 billion or so COVID vaccine doses issued world wide don't convince you that the vaccine is statistically safe, at least as safe as something as common as paracetamol or aspirin, then what amount of testing would convince you?
It doesn't convince me because I do not know anyone personally that has had an adverse reaction to aspirin, that didn't also overdose on it. Meanwhile, I know several people that have had adverse reactions to the vaccine ranging from issues with periods, to heart problems, to death.
No one is seriously tracking the adverse reactions, we've handed that off to the companies that produced the vaccines. And doctors are afraid to or don't care to raise concerns either. The vaccines are as statistically safe for me as COVID is for my age and health profile. And the vaccine makes no guarantee that I won't still catch COVID. Why would I double my risk when I've caught COVID, and it was nothing for me.
Just a nurse, this is true. I’ve been running a vaccine clinic. Very few to none are putting in adverse events to the proper place, there are competing data banks to report adverse reactions to (many of which are black boxes, data goes in and nothing comes out), doctors are dismissive, and in the few cases they do admit x,y,z caused by vaccine it is documented lightly.
So why are the companies in the article researching the risks if according to you there clearly are no risks? Do you know better than the manufacturers?
Please try to keep the level of discussion one step above junior school. Otherwise there is no point in us communicating further.
I didn't say there are no risks but those risks must necessarily be very low, as otherwise with a sample size of billions of doses issued even effects in the 1 in a million would be readily identifiable.
>..risks must necessarily be very low, as otherwise with a sample size of billions of doses issued even effects in the 1 in a million would be readily identifiable.
it's by no means easy to identify trends that are worth pursuing for a medical investigation in a varied cohort of a billion people, and poll size is only a single attribute -- this is made even harder during a vacination campaign that is trying to effectively drive the un-vaccinated rates to as close to 0% as possible, making comparative studies even more difficult to establish.
Time/race/status/age/health all matter. You can't just take a look at what conditions that the billions of vaccinated share, that's ineffective for any kind of impact study.
It's my opinion that any 'precise' data is going to come about in years and years once we can establish a generational gap between this event and others so that we can effectively create a cross-generational comparative study.
I agree with you that measuring precisely whether the vaccine was beneficial for 15 year olds or not is difficult.
However, at the same time we have people in sibling comments claiming to know multiple people with conditions ranging from changes to their menstrual cycle to death. This can't possibly be related to the vaccine at anything like the rate people are for some reason inclined to believe.
Personally I found the effects from the 3rd booster almost as bad as COVID itself so I'm unlikely to get another unless there is a compelling reason.
Yet we managed to publish papers on myocarditis[1] whose incidence rate is reportedly 1900 (or fewer) cases per 190 million individuals. If you look up the numbers that triggered the concerns and walking back of recommendations, they are quite small. There's much we won't know for a long time, but the idea that we can't detect statistically significant trends of concern, much less large ones, is demonstrably untrue.
Right, so you already have all the answers, it’s a big mystery why the manufacturers are doing this research. A big mystery to you, that is.
Indeed there is no point in communicating further, you made up your mind years ago and you will probably never progress beyond repeating the old talking points. Luckily most of the rest of the world has started to see reality is a bit more nuanced than ‘COVID is doom, vaccine is good’.
The 12 billion or so COVID vaccine doses given also only have a history of ~2 years. If the adverse effects of it were say for instance, minor cardiac damage that resulted in no acute symptoms, but instead an overall reduction in life expectancy by 5 years, the costs of such would not be known for some time. Another side of this is the possible cumulative effects of ongoing covid vaccination boosters that have no long term data.
Finally also the danger of immunological imprinting[1] possibly resulting in less than optimal immune response. The fact these vaccines have little impact on transmissibility means basic evolutional biology theory is at play, driving selective pressures for antigens humans are less capable of mounting defenses against thanks to an already primed imuno response of the original virus' antigens. This is evident with the proliferation of variants and sub variants.
The risk of taking action was compared against the risk of not taking action. I imagine most scientists would have loved to have developed this vaccine 10+ years ago and done long term studies, but that wasn’t an option.
It may have been influenced by the bias for action, but the trade off was the death and disruption we saw in 2020-21, compared to a future risk that scientists projected as minimal.
It still seems like a solid decision to me. But if this research shows that millions die from increased myocarditis rates, I think it would have been a bad outcome. Still not sure if that would influence my perception to the process.
I don't blame rushing the vaccines at all. In fact, maybe we should have skipped more steps to get the vaccine to 70+ year olds or people who are obese faster. But let's just be honest, the risk profile for younger people just wasn't high. The data was clear very early on. That was even with underreported numbers. It should have never been mandated and if you were at a decent weight and under 40 you were never at that much of a risk, especially to say something like the flu.
Enforcing vaccination before it's possible to know the long-term effects, for all groups including those at low risk from Covid, was and is a terrible idea. Offering it to the elderly, obese and otherwise-at-risk, where there's a clear and obvious net benefit, was all that should have been done.
I disagree. The information at the time was the vaccine was massively impactful at reducing spread. They got that part wrong, but the decision to require vaccination was rational IMO.
The decision didn't have a great result because the assumptions didn't hold. Good process, bad outcome.
(Not to mention that if everyone had actually just gotten the shot, we might have stalled the viral evolution into the delta + subsequent variants. My understanding is those mutations reduced vaccine transmission efficacy. If people hadn't turned public health into politics, we could have possibly avoided the endemic nature of the virus, which I think we can all agree would have been a far superior outcome versus where we are today.)
And that is where I vehemently disagree. Bad process, bad outcome. Many people lied to make the information appear as you said. The incentives they had to lie should have a lot more scrutiny, rather than being shrugged off, and many of these people should be in jail.
I don't claim any special ability to differentiate lies from inherent complexities in public health communication in a novel situation. However, the claim in early 2021 that the vaccines were both safe and effective, before enough time had elapsed for either to be known, was a bit of a red flag. I don't think you needed much expertise in anything to have reached this conclusion.
I believed at the time (and still believe) the risk/reward ratio still favoured offering the vaccines to at-risk groups. Making it mandatory or de-facto mandatory for all was a colossal clusterfuck. It worked out well for big pharma though, but at what long-term cost?
Isn't the road to hell paved with good intentions? Based on what I know about human nature, especially those who self-select into public health, it seems just as plausible they were overly optimistic. That's not a lie, which requires concrete knowledge that the opposite is true.
I didn't mean to suggest you had any special ability. I was just wondering how you reached that conclusion. Internet text boards are bad at tone, I apologize if it sounded attacking. But I think it's a wide gap between officials lied and someone had a different interpretation and did not exhibit as much caution as I prefer in my p.h. officials.
I am certain people lied about covid. I'm not certain that was the ph officials.
> The 12 billion or so COVID vaccine doses given also only have a history of ~2 years. If the adverse effects of it were say for instance, minor cardiac damage that resulted in no acute symptoms, but instead an overall reduction in life expectancy by 5 years, the costs of such would not be known for some time.
Can you explain how this standard of rigueur leads to anything less than a complete halting of medical research?
The original trials for the Pfizer vaccine were conducted on 46k people (half of which necessary recieved a placebo). At the time of those trials there was no shortage of willing volunteers to take part in the trial, no limit on the amounts of funding available and a considerable appetite to do something. Other trials have to make to with much fewer participants with hundreds to low thousands seemingly typical.
>Can you explain how this standard of rigueur leads to anything less than a complete halting of medical research?
~10 yrs of trials and safety data collecting (Including long term studies) is the historical norm. We've certainly not had a complete halting of medical research from doing that.
My main point though is that with the level of data provided and the fact long term studies have not, and cannot have been conducted in this time frame - the push to mandate (and coercively pressure vaccination uptake through fear of losing your job, or access to regular life things bars, cafes, travel etc.) is unjustified and arguably doesn't even reach the bar for informed consent (with many people getting it under the impression it would prevent contraction and transmission).
>The true incidence of myocarditis after influenza vaccination may be underestimated because of the subclinical and nonspecific clinical manifestations of myocarditis. A prospective study about the incidence of cardiovascular adverse events after smallpox and influenza vaccination revealed that the rate of clinical or subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis after smallpox vaccination was approximately 1:5,500, despite the fact that the rate of troponin elevation was 1:200 [9]. Similarly, 2.6% of the influenza vaccine cohort showed new onset cardiac symptoms, such as chest pain, dyspnea, and palpitation, but no case of clinical or subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis
- informed consent at the time of signing an employment (e.g. military, medical) contract with known career conditions
- new conditions (mandates) being added to existing labor contracts, while there is active litigation on the purpose and legality of those conditions, and re-definition of legal language (e.g. CDC's 2021 redefinition of "vaccine") used in mandates
There are also many places in the US where influenza shots aren't contractual, they're law, particularly for those in schools, long-term care facilities, and healthcare settings. And vaccine mandates have hundreds of years of precedent in the US. It ain't the mandates that are new, it's the political climate.
These mandates aren't only occupational. You may be required by law to be vaccinated to attend school in some places, or to be in certain care facilities.
And the CDC wrote zero of these laws. The CDC's rephrasing of an FAQ article on their website may be a good starter for a right wing conspiracy theory article, but it has no bearing on this topic.
Laws apply to humans, who read the CDC website for both health information and guidance on compliance. When the US declared a Covid emergency in 2020, specific laws were invoked, some of which require policy input from HHS, including the CDC. Government agencies routinely interpret laws for application in specific circumstances. Such agency interpretations carry legal weight and real-world consequences. CDC definitions are not changed often, or casually.
It’s both a novel virus and a novel vaccine. Without clinical trials we really don’t know if the boosters are helping or hurting.
Also, we should be doing clinical trials on flu shots as well. New drugs, even if they are only slightly different still require clinical trials. Why is hacking the immune system not subject to the same scrutiny?
Clearly, the flu shots are fairly established science (1945, 77 years), of a well researched virus. They're not a new form of vaccine delivery, pushed through on an emergency basis, with exclusions to testing, with legal protection against any damages for those exclusions, and 70 year trial document release plans.
Could you help me understand why you think the context is so similar between the two?
What's your opinion on members of the FDA leaving due to widely publicized political pressure to approve the vaccine? Do you think they were wrong for pushing back?
Could it be because lifestyle factors in the US put more u30 at risk of dying from Covid than in Canada? Or that the most vulnerable populations in Canada still have access to healthcare if they do need a ventilator?
Genuinely hypothesizing, I am not sure of the answer but that’s what came to mind when I read your question.
Access to ventilators or lack thereof has no significant impact on death rates. Very few patients are put on ventilators now since those are considered salvage therapy only used when all else has failed. The initial focus on ventilators early in the pandemic was misguided and not based on any reliable evidence.
You're not quite asking the right question. In 2020 there was no reliable evidence to favor early use of invasive mechanical ventilation over other therapies. Some clinicians were quick to put patients on invasive ventilators because they wrongly assumed that non-invasive devices would increase the risk of virus transmission to hospital workers.
As with most other aspects of pandemic management, people made bad assumptions and jumped to incorrect conclusions based on little real evidence.
No one is claiming that ventilators don't help. They have been an effective salvage therapy in some cases where less aggressive treatments failed. But at the population level the number of patients who actually survived only because they were put on a ventilator is so small that it didn't have a major impact on survival rates.
Where else in the West can you sway a country the size of Europe by funding maybe 20 influencers across the Legislative and the Executive Branches? President, VP, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, and maybe some key committee chairs and Cabinet members are really all you need. They are the playmakers. Add to that the amount of influence the US has with Western trading partners and we become a prime target for a lot more "donations" than other Western countries. Didn't Biden and Trump each spend $1B on their 2020 campaigns? Anywhere else spend that kind of money in the West?
Isn’t there an ongoing scandal involving the top ranks of EU leadership regarding the Pfizer vaccine contracts and how they were procured? It seems like you don’t have to look too far in the West outside the US to find somewhere you can spend a little cash on an “influencer” to get ahead. And luckily, it’s even less people than you’d have to bribe in America plus there’s no real way for the people to get rid of someone they never voted in, even though all of Europe can smell Ursula’s corporate stink.
And according to other posters in this thread, it seems like the Pfizer vaccine is the vaccine recommended broadly over the Moderna vaccine in Europe. Coincidence, I’m sure.
In Australia it appears they're changing public messaging on vaccination for <30 yrs due to increased risk of myocarditis and lack of notable benefits[1]:
"One of the nation’s top advisers on vaccination says it is unlikely young people under 30 will be approved for fourth doses, as Australia turns its attention to antiviral access to tackle yet another Omicron wave."
"Former ATAGI co-chair and current member Professor Allen Cheng said the increased risk of myocarditis and the lack of notable benefit from additional boosters meant it was likely the recommended vaccine schedule for younger people would remain as is. Some are approaching a year since their booster shot."
> Primary series in individuals age 6 months and older, or as a booster dose in individuals age 18 years and older (Moderna Spikevax® COVID-19 vaccine)
> As a booster dose in individuals age 18 years and older (Moderna Spikevax® Bivalent COVID-19 vaccine (Original/Omicron B.1.1.529 (BA.1))
> As a booster dose in individuals age 18 years and older (Moderna Spikevax® Bivalent COVID-19 vaccine (Original/Omicron BA.4/5)
There's a lot of daylight between "recommendations for some higher age groups, no recommendation for lower age groups" and "recommendation against for lower age groups." The international recommendations cited above seem to be in the former category. Florida's recommendations seem to be in the latter. This might make them an outlier.
Whether it makes them conspiracy theorists is another matter. If their position is sound, well, sound positions can be embraced for sound or unsound reasons. If their position is unsound, of course it will be for unsound reasons. So whether they're called conspiracy theorists matters much less than their reasons.
What are their reasons? They appear to cite a large relative increase in myocarditis risk in younger men. A statistically literate response would involve asking what the absolute increase is... and the proper place to reckon with relative comparison would be vs the unvaccinated infected:
I would absolutely recommend anyone wondering about a specific vaccination consult with a doctor or two (I do this and have had a certain class of vaccines contraindicated). But no red flags from medical pros on this one for me, and personally, even as a man outside the high-risk age groups, I can't remotely see a reason for assuming myocarditis would be a reason for avoiding the vaccine. As far as I can tell, it's almost on the order of your lifetime chance of being struck by lightning, and the chance of developing myocarditis from infection is significantly higher.
Have you read this exception in the link you posted:
- "with one exception. Men under 40 who received a second dose of the Moderna vaccine had a higher risk of myocarditis followingvaccination. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are available in the U.S."
I'd say it's worth a mention.
But then it's also quite an unfair comparison if you compare the all the vaccinated against a filtered group of unvaccinated people.
I read that passage as "men who received a second dose of the Moderna vaccine had a very modest increased risk of myocarditis over those who both did not receive such a dose and remain (apparently) uninfected" -- eg, it's possible that specific intervention slightly increases absolute risk of myocarditis vs whatever group can avoid both vaccination and infection indefinitely (a group I suspect is not large).
It's also possible I'm not reading it correctly, but I'm not sure how else to square it with the observation that men have higher baseline and post-covid-infection myocarditis risks generally (and covid patients have something like 10-20x elevated risks of myocarditis).
So the full passage below.
Seems quite unambiguous to me that for the second moderna shot,the risk is higher than for unvaccinated Covid infection.
I also wonder how to square it with the rest of their claimsc Seems that you can't take any publication headline of any instance on any side of the argument on face value when stuff gets politicized like this.
"But the risk of myocarditis associated with the vaccine was lower than the risk associated with COVID-19 infection before or after vaccination – with one exception. Men under 40 who received a second dose of the Moderna vaccine had a higher risk of myocarditis following vaccination. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are available in the U.S."
>Ladapo claims his analysis was based on a Florida Department of Health study showing an 84 percent increase in cardiac related deaths among men aged 18 to 39 years old within 28 days of becoming vaccinated through mRNA vaccines. Yet the medical community rejected the analysis Ladapo promoted.
…
> “I just cannot fathom a group of epidemiologists who would perform an investigation, looking at the risks of vaccination, and not also have performed an analysis that looked at the risks associated with the infection itself,” Salemi said.
The obvious explanation for other country's vaccine recommendations is based in data. COVID kills the elderly (75+) who are more likely to be battling multiple negative health conditions beyond COVID.
No, those countries initially gave the Covid injections to all adults, then altered their recommendations to exclude some young adults, based on post-vaccine adverse events.
> Finland on Thursday paused the use of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine for younger males due to reports of a rare cardiovascular side effect, joining Sweden and Denmark in limiting its use.
> All three countries based their decision on an unpublished study with Sweden’s Public Health Agency saying that it signals “an increased risk of side effects such as inflammation of the heart muscle or the pericardium” — the double-walled sac containing the heart and the roots of the main vessels. It added: “The risk of being affected is very small.”
They haven't changed the advice for the initial 2 doses. They have given different advice for additional booster doses. Which, per there own guidance seems to be largely because people already have immunity (either through vaccination or infection), and younger populations are not considered to require additional immunity.
For example, from the second link above (Denmark):
> Why are people aged under 50 not to be re-vaccinated?
> The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.
> People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population.
> The obvious explanation for other country's vaccine recommendations is based in data. COVID kills the elderly (75+) who are more likely to be battling multiple negative health conditions beyond COVID.
That something so obvious was enough to get you labeled a conspiracy theorist and banned off all major social media for close to two years has set back trust in science by decades.
And yet despite that these countries have much much higher rates of booster vaccination than the USA does (not to mention there are dozens of other countries not listed in your comment with similar policies to the USA). I think this has more to do with how the health agencies in these countries choose to communicate than anything else; that is I don't think the wording and nuance of all recommendations can be directly compared so easily.
> Is that counting the 1st booster? These policy changes came after the 1st booster.
Yes it is counting any booster after primary 2 doses - which policy changes specifically? Most of these countries have been relatively consistent in their approach to boosters.
They stopped recommending further boosters to younger people after the 1st booster. These 50+ or 65+ only recommendations are rather recent. That's all I'm saying. You would need to account only from the 2nd booster onwards basically.
> They stopped recommending further boosters to younger people after the 1st booster.
Which country(s) specifically changed their guidance about boosters after the 1st booster was released? Again I'm not aware of large swings in policy in most of these countries. Some aren't recommending 4th doses yet but I don't think any have changed policies about boosters after the fact.
Almost all European countries (perhaps all?) have changed policies about further boosters. For example in Italy the first booster was recommended to everyone and required to prolong the validity of the vaccination certificate, but the second (Omicron specific) is only recommended to the same categories for which the flu vaccine is recommended yearly.
You are reading the wrong news sources then. So many European countries have changed their recommendations “after the fact” especially for children and young adults
The 1st booster was recommended to everyone, further boosters only to older population. In US (with the exception of Florida), further boosters are still recommended to 5+ (five year olds and up), while that's no longer the case in lots of countries. Or, you are implying the cited above sources were for the 1st booster as well and thus they haven't changed their minds?
At least in Sweden the policy regarding booster after the 3rd shot has changed [1]:
> Adults
> For adults aged 18–64, the recommendation for three doses of the vaccinate remains in force. But anyone who wants to receive an additional booster dose, dose 4, may do so in the autumn of 2022.
65 plus and risk groups
> An additional booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine is recommended for the autumn and winter 2022/23 for adults aged 65 years or over, as well as people aged 18 or over who are in an at-risk group. This recommendation is valid from 1 September 2022 and covers everyone who is at an increased risk of serious Covid -19 disease.
That is still recommending boosters 18+ though, its only clarifying for additional doses beyond 3rd doses - they didn't change their recommendation for boosters after the fact.
What are you talking about? Only 54% - or only 18% if you consider 4th dose, not available to general population - are boosted. The number in NYT is blatantly false.
Surely you are not adding 3rd + 4th dose together? You can't do that. They are the same group of people. If everyone who got the 3rd shot got the 4th today, 108% of Finnish population would be boosted?
A lot of this has to do with social trust and politicization. For a number of reasons, going back to the early days of Tuskeegee syphilis studies, public health in the U.S. is viewed by large portions of the public as imperious, corrupt, unaccountable, beholden to big business and/or utopian ideologies, and is generally viewed with suspicion by many on the left and on the right. African Americans have the lowest vaccination rates by race.
But this is across the board. Prior to covid, for example, the ground zero for anti-vaccination movements was Marin County, California -- one of the most liberal counties in the nation, where only 50% of students in some schools were given smallpox/measles vaccines and there were outbreaks as a result.
Given this environment, American public health authorities should recognize their credibility gaps and embark on a program of transparency, consistency, accountability, and humility.
Unfortunately this is the exact opposite of their behavior. There remains deep ties between public health agencies and large pharmaceutical companies, public health officials continue to invest in and hold patents owned by companies that fall under their purview, there is still a revolving door between the two, there is very little transparency, no accountability for funding research in foreign labs to skirt US safety rules and congressional restrictions, public health officials were widely photographed in meetings without wearing masks (surrounded by masked servants), and they adopt imperious tones demanding draconian punishments for deviations from policy as well as calling for censorship of their critics. Fauci's declaration that "I am the science" is an example of this imperious attitude, which is frankly disastrous.
Until there is real reform, the U.S. is going to maintain a huge credibility gap vis-a-vis other nations, which will make public health efforts that much harder here, and will also lower long term public health outcomes.
It's interesting the narratives you hear with regards to antivaxxers.
My sister is vegan and is in many vegan, all-natural, etc Facebook groups. She told me there's a lot of overlap of people there and people who chose not take the COVID vaccine.
One of her best friends is a teacher in Canada from Trinidad; she grew up without vaccines and similarly never gave her child the COVID vaccine
These two examples just seemed very different than the typical "antivaxxer" I hear about. Although it still seems premature to call someone who only doesn't take the first mainstream mRNA vaccine an antivaxxer.
Sinovac (China) and Novavax (only just given EUA a few weeks ago) are AFAIK the only options if you want something more traditional. I think might have been one more, from India..? But J&J and AstraZeneca are adenovirus-vector, something almost as new as mRNA, and work by basically the same mechanism. Sputnik (Russia) is also adenovirus-vector.
At least the former has been a common stereotype with other vaccines too. (and people I know who are into yoga have generally complained that there's a lot of influencers peddling various "natural" cures and conspiracy theories there)
Before covid, I think the "hippy dippy" vegan, naturepath, yogi stereotype was associated most strongly with anti vaxxers.
Covid was politicized, and so it became a right wing stereotype to not want the vaccine. But specifically the covid vaccine. I don't think most right wing anti-covid-vaxxers are anti vax in general.
How is this a rebuttal? A single site exists and this is evidence? The antivax movement started on the left. The right very much didn’t want the COVID vax specifically. Pointing out once site that disagrees is too easy.
It's one example. Nobody given any evidence that anti-vax had been a mostly left-wing thing before covid, so there's nothing for me to rebut.
Other examples abound if you just look a little bit. Infowars has been running anti-MMR content for years. And for decades, polls have shown that anti-vax views are independent of the political spectrum.
Do not forget that those numbers including people who has boosters only on paper. I know plenty of people that has just papers for both vaccination and boosters. Including doctors and health care staff.
You konw... If there is push, you'll pushed to find another way.
In fairness UK conservative media have been reporting on it (Spectator, Telegraph). But it's being blamed on lockdowns and NHS collapse. That might be true; not all countries have excess deaths and it's a bit unclear to what extent the effect is real. It depends a lot on how you model the baseline.
Which countries do not have excess deaths 2020-20201? China, Australia, NZ might be on that list as they were pretty good about keeping the virus out but I'm curious if you know of any others. That's a wide claim, that not all countries have excess deaths
I think quite a few people caught omicron and didn't bother getting it confirmed. You have to go out into a public space, where you're presumably possibly spreading it, and get the more advanced test, even after you've already done the regular Bürgertest. Additionally, during the omicron wave the exemption from restrictions one would get for a confirmed case only lasted for a number of months, making it not worth it for many people. I caught it and then had to get boosted again so I could be with my wife during the birth of our child. The regulations around this are luckily more lax in NRW, and there were (are?) other places in Germany where the father would not be allowed in the delivery room even with an up-to-date booster. Quite awful, in my opinion.
> Additionally, during the omicron wave the exemption from restrictions one would get for a confirmed case only lasted for a number of months, making it not worth it for many people.
I was waiting in the cold with covid symptoms for over an hour in the line, just to be told that I was not eligible for the Bürgertest, even though my partner was confirmed PCR-positive, but rapid tests did not detect my and my partner's covid.
It was already known at that time that rapid tests had poor detection rates for omicron.
I then found a doctor who was willing to do the test, which turned out to be positive. I only went through this instead of just recovering at home, because I really wanted to have the certificate, because I suspected already that it would later serve as certificate for "full immunization", because that's what science already suggested at that point.
The STIKO at that time clearly advised against getting booster shots within three months after infection, but without certificates there was no way to prove prior infection and people were cut off from 2G, even though they were technically entitled to the exemptions. The BMG and RKI basically bullied people into taking boosters. Enhanced myocarditis risk was known too already at that point. The BMG and RKI constantly changed the rules in hand-wavy last-minute decisions to make it extra confusing for everyone.
The same people who wouldn't be charitable with, say, Exxon, are bending over backwards to defend global pharmaceuticals.
Exxon has an interest in minimizing (disregarding) the harmful effects of their products and same goes for Pfizer & friends who's got every govt funneling money to them seemingly without limit.
It’s incredible how they managed to rehab their image almost overnight. Anybody remember the bextra scandal? Yeah, these are the same corrupt corporations.
We went from finding out pharma companies exploded the opiate epidemic to people getting tattoos of the brand of covid vaccine they got in a few years. Just because pharma companies make some useful products does not make them good actors. Of course Pfizer is going to say everybody needs another covid booster shot. Every time they convince people they need another it's billions in revenue.
At a first approximation, everybody is charitable with Exxon, as demonstrated by continued popular uptake of their products across at least two spectra of political beliefs. Some may also embrace critical beliefs about exactly how much oversight/restraint Exxon should have and/or what forms of public support alternatives should receive, but it's about as rare or rarer to have Exxon's products treated with the suspicion that vaccinations are more dangerous than the diseases they treat.
Nah, Pfizer is a terrible company. Pharmaceutical companies can rot in hell.
But that doesn't change the fact that vaccines save lives.
It's not that I am bending over backwards to defend Pharma. It's that people are bending over backwards to find shitty things in the silver linings of these companies, instead of just complaining about the thunderclouds themselves like the rest of us.
Corporations are big. Companies can be capable of doing shitty things and good things at the same time. If you wanna complain about Opioids, I'm happy to have a conversation about how terrible pharma is.
> It's that people are bending over backwards to find shitty things in the silver linings of these companies, instead of just complaining about the thunderclouds themselves like the rest of us.
I'm sorry.. but wasn't it the US Government make significant investments in both companies producing this therapy? Wasn't the the US Military that drove much of the initial interest into mRNA therapies in the first place?
Why do we continue to consider these companies as anything other than conduits of government research and funding? When then is it a surprise when these companies don't recognize this that people become offended?
If I'm reading your response correctly you're basically saying "The silver lining that you're talking about wasn't even initiated by these companies, but instead a function of gov't interest/investment."
That sounds about right. I could believe that the only good thing to come out of these companies is the result of the Gov't makes them do things for the people. Profit is not a good motive for a company investing in making people healthy.
>But that doesn't change the fact that vaccines save lives.
Yeah, all fine and good when you have informed consent. I took my life in my own hands by not getting vaccinated for covid after I looked at the mortality age graph, and knew I was fit and healthy and didn't need to worry.
Society at large, however, castigated me, threw me in the same box as a conspiracy theorist, denied me my rights. People acted goddamn stupidly about this subject. I'm angry about this and I won't forgive and I won't forget.
Are you still, three years after the initial outbreak, continuing this nonsense? None of your talking points make sense and have been repeatedly shattered into the brittle sophistry that they are.
The risk of myocarditis is an existential risk to my being, and one that only a fool would take.
> I'm angry about this and I won't forgive and I won't forget.
Me neither. They attempted an unconstitutional mandate even after promising they wouldn't do it during the election.
I'll never forgive that or forget the social cruelty, scapegoating and illegal breach of limited governance.
I decided not to get the vaccine based on the data. Took me 2.5 years to finally get covid. It was 4 days of fever and feeling lame. I now have immunity based on the entire virus rather than a subunit of a protein that doesn't even exist anymore.
I also (rightly) assumed masks are not effective just observing the spread being very clearly seasonal. And that just being in open air would be far better than any mask could do. Completely disrupting normal life would cause far greater health consequences for general healthy people than covid itself. We ended up not saving the vulnerable and inflicting very real, unnecessary harm on the healthy - the worst of both worlds.
Does oil consumption not have any positive externalities? Have mass vaccinations never had a negative externality? Remember, the first world is not the entirety of humanity before answering.
Because the Big Pharma played the centuries-old trick from a conqueror's handbook: give your vassals a tiny bit of power over their peers, while pillaging the land for profit. So the activists now enjoy the newly given power to bash, shame and deplatform anyone who could be labeled as "antivaxxers", while predictably turning a blind eye towards the hand that gave them that power.
There's a control aspect, but I think the labels are just standard totalitarianism. That maybe 30%~40% of the population (hopefully not more) don't have a spine & just conform to anything in the hopes of social reward. So labelling is just a way to say "I'm not a bad person" when in fact the people who just blindly conform end up solidifying the worst trends in society. It's scapegoating.
Check out "Asch conformity experiments" [0]. The idea is that if you can make it look (make believe, basically) that the majority swings in a certain direction, a large chunk of the population will simply follow EVEN IF they think otherwise. Mattias Desmet goes deeper into this in his "The Psychology of Totalitarianism" [1]
The mRNA vaccines were developed by BioNTech and Moderna, two small and relatively new companies specializing in that technology. BioNTech chose to partner with Pfizer to scale their vaccine production. This may have had some positive impact on the Pfizer brand. In contrast, Moderna chose to take investment and scale their own production.
In either case, people are taking the vaccines because of the physical benefits the vaccines provide, not because of how they feel about the corporate history of the companies producing them.
> In either case, people are taking the vaccines because of the physical benefits the vaccines provide, not because of how they feel about the corporate history of the companies producing them.
I'm sure there's a cohort of people that fit your description, but a whole lot of people took it because they were forced to. I think at this point it's safe to say that some others took it willingly but were lied to and told it would make others safe when that was never tested before it was repeated thousands of times, and turns out to be completely false.
In all of these cases however it was not informed consent.
One of my kids, 15 at the time, was one of the reported cases of myocarditis. At the time of his hospitalization he was one out of 700 cases. He was in the hospital for two weeks. While under observation after his release, we have not seen indications of lasting damage. No way to know what the future holds. So far, so good.
We are still not anti-vax at all. In fact, I might go for my next booster today.
The one thing that angers me is that this incident cost us $10K. Obamacare, which was forced upon us and costs us $2,400 PER MONTH, did not cover it. We have no recourse whatsoever for this incident and any future care requirements.
There's plenty of would-do-it-again testimonials from a hospital bed caused by a vaccine injury/side effect. There's a famous Mark Twain quote that comes to mind.
Making the statistically best choice is still the best choice even if you get an undesired outcome.
Good poker players can lose all their chips at the table to an unlucky draw and walk away knowing that they made the right play and that they'd do it again, even if they got unlucky on the river card. Good basketball coaches will still draw up plays to get the ball into the hands of their best shooter at the end of the game even if they miss sometimes.
If you're choosing between option A that has a 0.0001% chance of hurting you and option B that has a 10% chance of hurting you, and you choose A and still get hurt, that doesn't mean you made the wrong choice or that if you have it to do over again you should choose B.
Except the issue is how certain we are of these percentages. In poker, the win rate of AA against 72 heads up is well known.
In reality, we don't have that. We get whatever ideas have the largest marketing budget behind them, and we just have to trust them. It's more like "nobody gets fired for buying IBM (or pick your favorite pundit)" than running a poker scenario through a solver. And that's fine, I don't think you can expect much more than that out of people.
> Overall, the risk of myocarditis is greater after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after COVID-19 vaccination and remains modest after sequential doses including a booster dose of BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine. However, the risk of myocarditis after vaccination is higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of the mRNA-1273 vaccine.
An Israeli study reported here:
https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/07/08/no-increase-myocarditi... [‘The Incidence of Myocarditis and Pericarditis in Post COVID-19 Unvaccinated Patients—A Large Population-Based Study’.] finds “no increase in incidence of myocarditis” after Covid infection in unvaccinated adults.
1. Risk of Myocarditis is higher for males under 40 from the vax than from infection. Only if you look at the entire population and dilute that risk do you see risk being higher from infection.
2. The vax doesn’t prevent infection anyway, so whatever the point they are making is moot.
3. The risk is being compounded each time- first from vax, then from infection, then from boosters.
Btw, this was all known with increasing confidence by July '21 (Israeli data showed increased myocarditis risk after second shot), and December '21 (Nature paper stratified myocarditis risk by vaccination status and age).
You're saying "If you survive getting covid without serious injuries once, then you'll be less likely to get serious injuries on a re-infection later". The vaccine is to make it less likely that you get serious injuries from that first exposure.
Are there any people left that haven't had their first exposure?
The argument makes more sense when you take into account that the interesting case is actually "given that you've already had covid, should you get vaccinated?" rather than "given no exposures yet, should I make out with someone that has it or should I get vaccinated". I've seen a lot of noise about the latter case, and a lot of overlooking the former.
Please read the context of what you're responding to.
COVID was around before the vaccines, and before the boosters, and between the boosters. Some of us got it before the boosters were available, and before the next booster was due. This is the context you're responding to.
For a stupid real world example, my college friend had COVID was required to get the booster while he was recovering from COVID, so that he could continue school after. There's plenty of nonsense still going around. Natural infection usually doesn't count in the school system, from what I've seen. Surprisingly it does, where I work.
Wife for a booster. Arm swelled up. Been a year. No improvement. We had already had Covid. Current time in school boosters. All the teachers kept getting covid anyway. Hard to be anything then hostile toward anyone that is on the forcing people to get shots or to cut them from services train.
Same here. Since 1 day post vaccination pain in elbow for almost a year (if she was doing physical job, she'd not be able to work for amlost a year) On top of that constant unending headache for first ~6 months.
Doctors help basically just "we don't know, there's no research, it will hopefully get better". It did after a year. Great. Govt pushed people to vaccinate to prevent the spread (despite individual's risk being very low) with promise to compensate in case of issues. lol, they didn't even compensate people who were paralyzed after vaccination with response "You can't prove it's from vaccination, sorry."
Zero benefit from the vaccination itself, since she didn't go for a second shot after this.
Cost/benefit very negative, since she likely didn't need the vaccination in the first place since she's not in the risk group and this was just "for the society" thing. And turns out it doesn't work againt spread much either.
> Obamacare, which was forced upon us and costs us $2,400 PER MONTH, did not cover it
Can you expand on this please? I find it extremely hard to understand how an ACA-compliant health care plan could "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis. Unless you're on a high-deductible plan and the entire stay was less than your deductible?
Exactly right. People with insurance have zero idea how much medical care actually costs because it's really hard to keep up with all the health insurance documents one receives.
Try being hospitalized without insurance. You'll find out really fast. (I was, twice, circa 2010. I was unemployed and uninsured)
People who get their insurance through their employer also typically have no idea how much their insurance premium costs because the average employer pays 70-80% of the actual monthly premium and what gets deducted from your paycheck every month is just the remainder.
I'm guessing you are correct, seeing as in a similar fashion I'd imagine there are a lot of people who have no idea what their 401(k) is even invested in.
However when going through the annual election process it generally makes it very clear how much you are paying out of each paycheck and what the employer contributes. Now whether people pay attention at all I can't say.
I would suggest a slight shift in wording from "how much medical care actually costs" to "how much medical care actually bills" since as we've seen both by examining the meteoric raise in healthcare billing from 1930s-today and by comparing the US health system to single payer systems abroad it's pretty clear that the billing for US medications, procedures, therapies and other healthcare items is completely fabricated and arbitrary when compared to the costs.
I think Obama-care (as much as I still support it in contrast to just letting private healthcare continue as-is) actually made things worse in the US by letting insurers and providers use the government involvement as a justification for their BS.
When you compare US costs to countries like the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and similar it is indeed true that US is significantly more expensive.
It is also true that over time US costs are rising significantly.
However, the ratio of US costs to the costs of other countries has stayed roughly the same over time.
In other words, the rest of them are having the same problem of rising costs that the US is, and their costs are rising at roughly the same rate. We pay a lot more than they do now because we paid a lot more than them a long time ago.
This is worrisome, because it suggests that even if we can lower our health care costs to be in line with the rest of the developed world we are still heading for unaffordable healthcare--all we'd be doing is making so we reach that when the rest of the world does instead of a few years before they do.
Here's some comments from earlier discussions with numbers and a link to the data [1] [2].
The majority of healthcare spending goes toward treating patients with chronic conditions primarily caused by lifestyle factors such as overeating, lack of exercise, and substance abuse. There is effectively infinite demand for healthcare services in that population. Depending on how you count, something like 1/7 of all healthcare dollars go to type-2 diabetes and related conditions alone.
There is certainly some inefficiency in the US healthcare system but mostly it reflects the poor health of the population. Switching to some form of socialized medicine won't fix that problem. Other developed countries are doing a little better at the moment but they're on the same trend line and will inevitably hit the same crisis. At some point if we want to prevent a systemic collapse we're going to have to get serious about emphasizing prevention over treatment.
Speaking as someone intimately familiar with healthcare pricing working really close to the industry specifically in pricing tracking - I can say yes - you aren't incorrect about the fact that healthcare costs going up over time (and the sibling comment about unhealthy lifestyles also isn't incorrect) but the US does indeed have completely arbitrary pricing.
As a personal anecdote when I lived in the US there were three months in a row where I paid 10/pill, 3/pill and 1/pill (I also had earlier paid 0/pill when I qualified for VT medicaid) for the same medication[1] as I was 1) initially uninsured 2) covered by the "cigna preferred rate" but otherwise had no drug coverage 3) had regular drug coverage. As a bonus a few months after that run a generic for my medication came out and I paid .10/pill for the brand name because the generic existed but they didn't have it in stock.
Please explain how that makes any sense at all.
1. Concerta - the 54mg version now apparently retails for $545 per 30 here's a weird website talking about it (I now live in Canada and while there isn't Pharmacare in my province the drug is free with some cheap insurance) https://www.singlecare.com/blog/concerta-without-insurance/
> Try being hospitalized without insurance. You'll find out really fast
Actually no, you still won't. Because the hospitals send out fraudulently inflated/overitemized bills to help their negotiating positions.
To know how much medical care actually costs, you need to have "insurance" and read through the itemized bills and explanations of benefits. The top line large number is the fraudulent amount that has no basis in reality, there is an "adjustment" based on the rates the "insurance" company has actually agreed to pay, there is the amount the "insurance" company pays them, and then there is your portion. Adding the last two, or taking the first minus the second, is as close to knowing how much something costs as you can get in this fucked up system.
Also it bears repeating, never pay a medical bill unless you're damn sure you're responsible for the amount [0]. Even if you have "insurance", often you'll get sent the fraudulent bill right away, and it will take a month or two for "insurance" to bother doing their job. Also billing departments have no problem blatantly lying to you about your (non) responsibility for the fraudulent bill, since it might get them more money.
[0] Of course some times they have you over a barrel like ongoing care getting denied if you have an unpaid balance. In which case you just have to eat it and then hassle your "insurance" company for half a year to get your money back.
> Also it bears repeating, never pay a medical bill unless you're damn sure you're responsible for the amount [0]. Even if you have "insurance", often you'll get sent the fraudulent bill right away, and it will take a month or two for "insurance" to bother doing their job. Also billing departments have no problem blatantly lying to you about your (non) responsibility for the fraudulent bill, since it might get them more money.
In practice how do you do this? I've never got a medical bill that made complete sense to me and when I did argue it went around in circles for so many months that it was not worth my time so I just paid it.
Most of the time, just wait a few months for them to bill your "insurance" and for it to do its thing. The "due dates" on medical bills are basically meaningless.
Then, you need to know your general deductible and copayment schedule. The bill should show original charges (fraudulent), "adjustments" to those charges to make them line up with what your "insurance" company has negotiated to pay, and then payment by the "insurance" company. The part remaining that you need to pay should line up with your deductible.
If you've got a large deductible (common) and this is one of your first bills, then the "insurance" company won't have anything to pay, but there will still be an adjustment. If you think that is off, you can contact your "insurance" company to check if it matches their negotiated rates. In my experience, their customer service departments haven't been totally gutted yet.
Calling the provider's billing department is generally pointless unless/until you know exactly what you're talking about. Once, a phone rep (at a small place even) called me to nag me about a bill. I told them that their charge was above the Medicare limit for a service, and that it needed to be corrected before I could pay. In response, they insisted harder that I "owed it" and I "had to pay". I told them they were wrong, ended the conversation, and just waited. Lo and behold 4-5 months later they finally billed the "insurance" and sent the correct bill. I think they were just hoping I'd fall for their fraud so they could pocket a few extra bucks.
I'm certainly not an expert on this subject in particular, just generally experienced at cutting through the avalanches of paper that psychopaths try to bury us with.
> Annual and lifetime coverage caps on essential benefits were banned.
> Insurers are forbidden from dropping policyholders when they become ill.
> All policies must provide an annual maximum out-of-pocket (MOOP) payment cap for an individual's or family's medical expenses (excluding premiums). After the MOOP payment is reached, all remaining costs must be paid by the insurer.
The problem field is slighty different: if your income is constrained and you are generally in good health you are going to choose a low premium plan with consequent higher deductible. When it's your turn to end up in hospital you get to pay up to the (substantial for you) out-of-pocket limit, even though you belong to the demographic that cannot afford it and Obamacare was sold to you as making healthcare affordable and accessible.
All of this was true pre-ACA, but worse (in my family's case, much worse; we went bankrupt over $90k in medical bills back in the 2000s). As it was, the thing barely passed.
’Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.’ ... I said, ‘Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself.’ ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I will let you bake your bread over cow dung instead of human excrement.’
We could be dealing with worse shit, however shit remains shit.
No, it's not. The prophet is with the Jewish exiles in Babylon and is enacting the siege of Jerusalem. Food, water and fuel are running short in Jerusalem, and he plays out what it looks like.
> All of this was true pre-ACA, but worse (in my family's case, much worse; we went bankrupt over $90k in medical bills back in the 2000s). As it was, the thing barely passed.
Sorry to hear that.
One of the massive negative side-effects of ACA will come to the national forefront in a few years. We now have tens of millions of people enrolled in Medicaid. What most don't understand is that, after 55 years of age, this isn't insurance at all, it's a loan you are required, by law, to repay.
Don't take it from me, here's a summary directly from the Medicaid website:
I looked into this a while back. The State can place liens on your estate and your children could be stuck with a bill because of that. For example, if you have a home it is very likely that 100% of the value of your home will be consumed by your healthcare bills if you needed what I am going to call a normal level of care for that age group from 55 onwards.
In other words:
People were told they they were getting health insurance through Obamacare. In reality, they agreed to receive a credit card using their estate as collateral. If this isn't fraud, I just don't know what is.
Obamacare might just be the largest private-property grab by any government in the history of this nation, if not humanity. I wonder how many people actually understand they will not be able to leave anything to their children. Or worse, leave them a huge bill owed to the State.
These are the things that really rattle me: Politicians selling pushing programs in the most dishonest ways possible. How many people would have supported ACA had they were told they would have to sign-over their estate to pay for their after-55 medical bills? Very few, if any.
What really sucks about this is it affects the low to middle class portion of the population in a disproportionate manner. They are the ones who end-up on a Medicaid plan, not people who can afford to pay for something else. Once again, politicians claim to be for the little guy and, instead, they royally shaft them every time they are able to. All they care about is their votes.
I'd rather have to do a little estate planning in my 50s than not make it there because I was uninsured in my 30s. The nursing home thing is very, very well known, you can plan ahead to avoid it, and most of the folks poor enough to benefit from Medicaid expansion weren't going to pass down much anyways.
Medicaid expansion is also just one portion of the ACA.
No, Joe Lieberman was a sellout, and Senate Dems refused to kill the filibuster, so we got the best we could get at the time. And even those insufficient changes were considered such an affront to "personal liberty" or whatever that it resulted in a historic midterm "shellacking."
Adding up the premiums plus the out-or-pocket max for the plan options that had my providers on my exchange, the low premium option was the least expensive, despite its higher deductable.
The low premium option is the least cost option if you don't use much healthcare, or if you use a lot; but there's a range somewhere in there where the higher premium plan may lower your total costs. Of course, if you're getting a premium subsidy, the calculation changes.
But yeah, Obama promised access to healthcare and delivered access to healthcare insurance. It's not unuseful, but it's not really enough.
If it were up to me, I'd lower the medicare eligibility age every year, and gradually grow the system, a couple decades later we'd have Medicare for All (ish, not all seniors are eligible).
The problem is that incidence for individuals is 100 %, and someone who gets to pay the full yearly deductible is likely so sick that he can't work. Lovely. Not only do you get to pay the hospital, now you are missing a chunk of income, too, when you can least afford it!
An Obamacare Bronze plan is like the bank extending credit - they carry the umbrella after you when the sun is shining, but at the first drop of rain they disappear.
My point is the Platinum or whatever plan isn't any better. It's probably worse for most people. Total out of pocket is going to be higher because out ot pocket max + premiums is worse than the Bronze.
Of course, paying the hospital is usually sort of optional. They're most often happy to bill you later and send you to collections, and you can let it accrue. It's not great, but if you're so sick you can't work, what are you going to do about a debt you can't afford to pay? Better to not pay it.
The issue is that deductibles used to be 1/10 as much before the ACA. And you had the option to buy "emergency only" coverage, which had a high deductible, but a much cheaper premium.
These days, because of the ACA all plans are "emergency only", except without the lower premium.
> The issue is that deductibles used to be 1/10 as much before the ACA. And you had the option to buy "emergency only" coverage, which had a high deductible, but a much cheaper premium.
Do people not remember how insurance was like before the ACA? You actually could get less expensive insurance that actually covered things. Not this junk insurance you're linking to me, which only exists because of the ACA.
These days all coverage is emergency only coverage, because of the insanely high deductibles. Except without the benefits of lower premiums.
I am aware that some things improved, but not for the average low risk person.
> Do people not remember how insurance was like before the ACA?
I do. My wife and I went bankrupt with it, via $90k in copays and coinsurance.
We had good insurance, but back then insurance could have uncapped costs of this kind. As a bonus, they could a) set a maximum annual and lifetime amount they'd pay and b) decline to renew our coverage, leaving only high-risk pools (4-5x as expensive for premiums) available.
I have a zero-deductible ACA plan. There are plenty of them.
>A two week hospital stay is orders of magnitude more than $10k, so presumably the $10k representes the out of pocket portion of the care.
No, that's not the case at all. We had to negotiate with the hospital and settled for this amount. The ACA covered none of it or a very small portion. I don't remember the actual bill, my wife dealt with all of it (she is a doctor and knows how to discuss such things with hospitals).
> The ACA covered none of it or a very small portion
The ACA is not an insurance plan, so I assume you are using "ACA" as shorthand for "ACA-compliant insurance coverage".
It is simply not plausible that an ACA-compliant plan would wholesale "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis, absent extremely niche and bizarre circumstances.
Given that you don't seem very familiar with the specifics, I have to assume that your information is either missing some very important details, or incorrect.
The reason that it's not covered is that insurance plans don't cover damages caused by experimental procedures that the insured chose to participate in.
Recall that the vaccine is not FDA approved for children (only adults), it only has an emergency use authorization for children.
That is not true. Health insurance in the US has to cover all healthcare, but not experimental treatment.
Suppose the insured did use a non evidence supported vaccine or whatever, the vaccine itself would not be covered by insurance, but the healthcare needed by the damage caused by the use of unsupported medicine would be covered.
Similarly, health insurance has to pay for your healthcare if you get into a car accident and do not have sufficient auto insurance to pay for your healthcare costs. Technically, you are sort of buying redundant insurance if you buy PIP.
> Recall that the vaccine is not FDA approved for children (only adults), it only has an emergency use authorization for children
Falling while skiing is not FDA approved. A woodcutting axe applied to the hand is not FDA approved. Drinking bleach is not FDA approved. And yet, health insurance will cover medical complications arising from any of these actions.
> It is simply not plausible that an ACA-compliant plan would wholesale "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis
As a lifelong heart patient, I've had many post-operative stays not covered, past a certain duration regardless of my current condition and I've always paid for the highest tiers of health coverage (for over 2 decades now). I find it very likely that ACA would not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis.
And there lies the issue with propping up the demand side of the equation with unlimited money from the government rather than regulating the supply side with affordable charges.
I don't think you can use ordinary market dynamics to regulate healthcare. During an emergency you should be driving to the closest hospital, not the most affordable one. And during an emergency you really have no insight as to how much of an emergency you have on your hands. Healthcare can essentially demand your entire worth. The market also has not even provided sufficient incentive for hospitals to announce their prices up-front.
That's kind of my point actually. I do think hospitals should publish their rates and so be forced to compete, but the government should also be regulating the price of services, overhead, and medicines for everyone instead of just medicare/medicaid patients. It's such an essential service that going to a hospital shouldn't be a decision to ruin you for life or not financially while hospital administrators, pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and lawyers are raking in millions or billions. Instead, there should be some guarantee that you are getting "fair" rates.
I'm of the personal political opinion that almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this. If they do step in, they also have to regulate the supply side as the free market is effectively broken at that point, and people who...say want to pay their own bills or for their own education by working or don't qualify for whatever government program is helping others, are screwed by the system.
Government intervention always seems to rake money into companies' pockets rather than helping consumers and tax payers.
> government should also be regulating the price of services, overhead, and medicines for everyone instead of just medicare/medicaid patients.
> almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this.
I agree with all the points you make in your comment. I'll just add that the problem is far more complex than this. And, yes, it is all, 100%, caused by government intervention.
Without diving too deep, the problem starts with substandard education in the US all the way down to K-12 level. From there it goes to the insanely high cost of university education due to the government being involved in guaranteeing loan. Nobody in their right mind would give an 18 year old a $300K loan or $120K loan for a bullshit degree with no prospects of repaying it in their lifetime. Then we have heavy, expensive regulatory frameworks and horribly slow and bureaucratic processes to build or make just-about anything. And, finally, lawsuits.
When someone is laying on an operating table in the hospital, they are surrounded by a team with somewhere in the order of three to five million dollars in student debt. The same team likely spends somewhere close to a million dollars a year in liability and other licensing and insurance.
Each and every manufacturer of the equipment in that room and the tools used for the surgery, employs people with student debt in the range of $100K to $300K per person. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. The companies has huge regulatory, legal and insurance costs.
The hospital is in a similar situation. Millions of dollars per year in legal, insurance and other costs and a workforce that owes millions of dollars in student loans. Not to mention the various laboratories and services that make the hospital run.
If you follow the various tentacles and construct financial cost model showing what it takes for a person to be on a table in an operating room, the resulting number will be massive.
That's the key to our broken healthcare system and why no socialist utopia is going to fix it.
Until we fix the underlying cost structures driving the system, it is impossible to pass laws to truly control such costs. The "single payer" idea is, in this context, in a range between utopia and demented.
Why is it demented?
here's an analog: We take out one credit card with zero interest for a year. The intent is to use it to pay off all of our other credit cards within that period using this card by transferring the balance. People do this all the time.
Here's the problem: They don't change their spending behavior. Instead of ending-up with no credit card bills after twelve months, they wake up one glorious Monday now owing more money and having one more card to pay off.
You have to fix the underlying cost structure first. The problem can't be solved without this important first step.
This means getting the government out of education, student loans and a bunch of other areas. It also means demanding that the government be efficient and effective in doing the work we hire them to do.
The problem with this concept is that the people need to understand reality in order for them to vote appropriately. We don't have an informed citizenship. Not even close. We have clans fighting against each other and a few of us in the middle yelling "the emperor has no clothes!", and nobody listens.
The risk from myocarditis from getting Covid-19 is higher than getting it from the vaccine. The decision to vaccinate even young people made sense during the height of the pandemic and it doesn't make so much sense now anymore.
According to this study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/ there is no increase in Myocarditis cases among unvaccinated people who have contracted Covid-19. This study tracked 196,992 people which is a huge number, so the data here is quite good and clear. Contracting Covid-19 does not put you at increased risk for Myocarditis, the same cannot be said when evaluating a population that simply received the vaccination.
Of note is that this study is based on PCR tests. We would need a blood tests for more accuracy to ensure no historical infection took place. This also doesn't compare vaccinated infected vs unvaccinated infections.
> We estimated extra myocarditis events to be between 1 and 10 per million persons in the month following vaccination, which was substantially lower than the 40 extra events per million persons observed following SARS-CoV-2 infection.
and they include a brief literature review:
> Our findings are consistent with those from a case-control study of 884,828 persons receiving the BNT162b2 vaccine in Israel21. That study observed an association with myocarditis in the 42 days following vaccination (risk ratio of 3.24), but no association with pericarditis or cardiac arrhythmia. Two further studies from Israel add to our observations by providing clinical review to ensure robust case ascertainment22 and reporting investigations and outcomes in individual patients with myocarditis following the BNT162b2 vaccine23. Witberg et al.21,22 observed a small excess in events 3–5 days following the second dose of BNT162b2 vaccine, but most were mild presentations and just one classified as fulminant22. Mevorach et al. observed an incidence ratio of 5.34 for myocarditis in 5,442,696 persons following BNT162b2, although this was attenuated when restricted to the 136 definite and probable cases of myocarditis23. Risk of myocarditis was restricted to males under the age of 40 years and only observed following the second dose. Similarly, two studies from the United States have reported an incident rate ratio of 2.7 for myocarditis in the 10 days following the second dose of both mRNA vaccines24 and an estimated 6.3 and 10.1 extra cases per million doses in the 1- to 21-day period following the first and second dose of both mRNA vaccines, respectively, in those younger than 40 years25.
And conclude:
> In summary, this population-based study quantifies for the first time the risk of several rare cardiac adverse events associated with three COVID-19 vaccines as well as SARS-CoV-2 infection. Vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 in adults was associated with a small increase in the risk of myocarditis within a week of receiving the first dose of both adenovirus and mRNA vaccines, and after the second dose of both mRNA vaccines. By contrast, SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a substantial increase in the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis, pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmia.
This study is, actually, irrelevant to disproving the claim above.
It checks for the myocarditis infection from COVID-19, but it doesn't actually control for vaccination status. The people studied either are believed to have been COVID-19 infected, or had been vaccinated, but there was no designated unvaccinated control group.
In which case, you are potentially using "breakthrough cases" of COVID-19 causing Myocarditis to make your point (assuming they would be the same pre- and post- vaccination), rather than a definitive look at people who did not get the vaccine and how they fared. All the study proves is that COVID-19 infections cause increased Myocarditis... in vaccinated people. If you assume that COVID-19 has the same Myocarditis effect in vaccinated and unvaccinated people, it works; but if you accept that maybe the effects of COVID-19 are different in vaccinated people, it could fall apart, which is why the study about how Myocarditis doesn't seem to effect the 160,000+ unvaccinated people studied still has value.
Risk of myocarditis following infection before vaccination was 11.14 [95% CI, 8.64–14.36] greater than the risk of vaccination, and risk of myocarditis following infection after vaccination was 5.97 [95% CI, 4.54–7.87] greater than the vaccination itself.
The German vaccine watchdog issue a warning letter because there were roughly 300 cases in total reported for the approx. 200m doses administered until May 2021 in the entire EU.
Myocarditis/pericarditis are very rare and the effects for young people were mild.
I suppose this is where someone who actually knows what they are talking about should chime in. Myocarditis is actually extremely serious, whether deemed "mild" or not. Once an inner chamber or valve in the heart has been inflamed, the damage is permanent and that area is hardened from scar tissue or fibrosis, which is not reversible. Pericarditis (which I've had for many years since being a young person) isn't as serious, but it will cause hardening just the same.
More often than not it goes away on its own, but the sad thing is there is no surefire way to treat either condition. I've been to the best pericarditis/myocarditis doctors in the world, and I'll let you in on a secret - even these people don't know. Docs will throw Ibuprofen, Colchicine and steroids at it, maybe an experimental drug, or sometimes will just take that portion of the pericardium out. If it's myocarditis, well then, hopefully the medication works.
Like I said, the damage is irreversible. A year or two have passed for some of these kids. Many of them won't experience the long term effects until much later in life, or when it recurs. Just like the scar forms on the outside of the body, scarring forms on the areas damaged in the heart. A young person's heart isn't going to feel the immediate effects, but over the course of 10/20/30 years, quite the opposite.
I'm not anti or pro COVID vax as there is no reason to be tribal here, but there was definitely a more pragmatic path than simply vaccinating everyone. The logical side of my head says these kids were unjustly exposed to a risk they never should have been exposed to. It just doesn't make any sense why a healthy kid should take a vaccine when they could still spread COVID. We were all in the dark about this at that time, but the lack of debate and long term studies should have at least raised some kind of flag for people, especially the average Hackers News user. You cited 300 cases in 200 million like it's no big deal, but that is not justification for the 300 families or parents who voluntarily or forcefully exposed their children to this vaccination. Even if it's just a blip, it's 300 too much, not to mention all the cases across the world.
I'm chiming in to your intellectually lazy comment claiming any kind of myocardits being mild, so I can guarantee it's at least one internet stranger. Also, I never claimed being exposed to COVID without vaccination doesn't carry higher risk. It feels as though you are attempting some kind of HS debate class tactic here, so I'll give you an upvote for your efforts.
Well thank you. It was obviously intellectually lazy of me to say that the myocarditis in young people were mild without any qualifying term such generally. And indeed the German vaccine watchdog from which I was quoting from memory uses 'primarily mild' to describe the myocarditis cases identified to coincide with vaccination.
> You're not angered that you were advised to give this to a 15 year old with no upside even after he was hospitalized for 2 weeks as a result?!
I am being as honest as I can be with regards to our feelings on this. I can't say we are angry about that incident at all. I think I can say we are not happy about not having been provided with all of the information before he got his shot. Frankly, I don't even remember if the data was available (I do think it was, BTW). Remember, at the time, only about 700 cases.
Of course, the outcome might have had something to do with the lack of negative emotions. I can probably admit our position today would be massively different had we had to face a range of negative outcomes post-hospitalization. These can range from life-long afflictions to death.
I'm happy for you that you aren't mad, as there is no reason to wear the burden of anger in your life. At a young age I had pericarditis (idiopathic), which developed into both myocarditis and pericarditis. I've now had pericarditis off and on for over 10 years now and hope that it never comes back for your child.
"I think I can say we are not happy about not having been provided with all of the information before he got his shot."
You pretty much hit the nail on the head here and is my biggest gripe about this whole fiasco.
I'm not sure about your situation now, but if this disease recurs and you feel like your kid's heart doctor has no idea what they are talking about, I recommend either Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic. I don't have Facebook, but I've been told there are many support groups for this disease as well there.
Good luck to you, and my prayers go out to you and your family.
What data do you base this on? According to QCovid.org, a 19yo old white male had annualized odds of hospitalization of less than 1 in 10,000 given the prevalence of the third and second COVID waves in the UK. That is less than the incidence of Myocarditis from the vaccine in that age group.
> The one thing that angers me is that this incident cost us $10K. Obamacare, which was forced upon us and costs us $2,400 PER MONTH, did not cover it. We have no recourse whatsoever for this incident and any future care requirements.
Seriously? That's shitty. What's the insurance company's rationale for denying the claim?
Isn't there some kind of government fund to compensate people for vaccine side effects? Seems like you'd have a strong claim to get reimbursed from them.
Keep in mind the CICP has both lower payout rates and payout amounts than the VICP. Side effects from the covid shots can only be compensated out of the CICP
Naive q: why are the mRNA COVID vaccines still covered by CICP & not VICP if they're now fully authorized by the FDA? I assumed the initial coverage under CICP was due to the emergency authorization.
> What's the insurance company's rationale for denying the claim?
They didn't, if the parent poster only got billed $10k. Two weeks in the hospital costs more than $10k; that amount is likely their insurance plan's annual deductible, coinsurance, and copays.
These expenses were a thing pre-ACA, to be clear; deductibles, coinsurance, and copays existed before it. The ACA capped the amount you can be charged.
As in you paid the whole cost, and it was $10K, and it didn't count on your deductables / out of pocket max? Or the patient paid portion was $10K, the insurance paid portion was $0, but now you're a lot closer to your maximums?
Well... according to CICP themselves, as of October 1st 2022, they have only paid out 6 claims for COVID-9 vaccines - ever. Which, even by this NBC News article standard, is low. However, 5 of them were for myocarditis, 1 for anaphylaxis.
Yes, we did. It's worse than dealing with the DMV. I don't know where we are in the process other than my wife (she is a doctor) telling me not to hold my breath.
> deciding not to get a covid-19 mrna vaccine != anti-vax
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that. I just wanted to make it clear that, despite this incident, we have not changed our position with regards to vaccines of any kind. That's not to say we might exercise more caution in the future.
Covid definitely isn't over, it's just that we've gotten better at treating it and people have decided that they are over it. It is still killing almost 2000 people a week in the US and it's very possible that we will see a huge spike in that as we get further into winter.
the "next" booster is referring to the updated vaccine that more effectively targets the dominant "Omicron" variant.
> the "next" booster is referring to the updated vaccine that more effectively targets the dominant "Omicron" variant.
Ah thanks for the context.
I've only gotten the J&J vax (the worst one?) back in April of 2021, no boosters. I considered getting one but by then they were recommending boosters every few months and I decided to just "risk" it by not getting them? (I'm in my 30s and in good shape/health so don't feel vulnerable, but I understand that could be hubris and back-fire).
Back in those first few months I was keeping an eye on reports of side-effects, and J&J actually looked like the safest of the 4 available in the US. But it and AstraZeneca got absolutely vilified while any claims against Pfizer and Moderna got ignored as crazy conspiracies.
I've also only got the J&J, once, only because my employer was threatening me with termination if I didn't get vaccinated. They actually never followed through on that threat for those that held out. I wish I hadn't. Lesson learned, never again.
People I know are getting COVID in the Bay Area -- multiple weeks sick (I can count at least 6 -- in the moment -- for the span of middle of October until now).
We are still in the pandemic.
The problem is it has to stop everywhere for us to get complacent.
Especially, given that everyone wants to travel
-- and travel abroad.
Pandemic is here. Nothing is over. We are distracted with other things. Things are "good" in San Francisco and the Bay now. No guarantee it will be so tomorrow.
Not necessarily, endemic might mean that it matters, but those who are especially at risk are taking more precautions.
E.g. I see lots of young not wearing masks to protect themselves, and I see more older people protecting themselves with masks. Seems like a reasonable balance.
It does not describe severity. Ebola is endemic in parts of Africa. I still hope nobody gets it.
We can change the meanings of words for political reasons but who do we do a disservice too?
Given that it is a word from my mother language I find it a bit insulting when politicians decide to change my language though to benefit for a year or two.
Tl;Dr: Saying that covid is "endemic" to the whole world, is an insult to my ears, logic, and a whole language and people. They should pick a different word if they want to disagree with doctors worldwide.
Same here. I live just north of NYC and it seems like pretty much everyone is getting covid. Luckily, mortality attributed to covid is continuing to decrease suggesting it's becoming less of an issue (in terms of deaths), but even with ~320 deaths a day, we're still looking at over 100k dying in the US every year of covid - despite the fact that a lot of the most vulnerable already died.
I think we just have a new normal in terms of life expectancy and mortality :(
I think 20k/50k + an additional 100k from covid is pretty nasty, so I don't think it's the same at all. It's not like flu and covid are the same disease. I'm thinking covid will just add tens of thousands (or up to 100k like GP said). Sucks.
That is not "of Covid", it is "with Covid". We are still counting a Covid death for each person who has Covid at the time of death, regardless of what actually caused the death. Probably some of those people died exactly of Covid, but many died of at least two things, counting "having Covid" as one of the co-morbidities.
Yea, it's not even remotely over. People are bored of it, and it makes them sad, so a lot of them stopped taking precautions, but it's not over. It just ripped through my family in Florida (again) since nobody is masking there and everyone is just carrying on as if it were 2019. My kid's school seems to perpetually has a case or two. I take it seriously by getting boosted, masking, continuing to avoid crowds and public places that are indoors, and I intend to keep doing so. People act like it's a TV show that got cancelled or something. Nuts.
Nuts is that on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence, your ascribing an efficacy in disease prevention to an intervention (wearing masks) that was widely understood to do no such thing prior to 2020.
Furthermore, respiratory disease avoidance on a society-wide scale has never and almost certainly will never be achieved. The assumption that it is an attainable goal is truly nuts.
It should be clear by now that covid is never going away. No country managed to stop it, no matter how strict their policies were. Unless you plan to be a hermit for the rest of your life, expect to get covid every few years.
Several of my friends and coworkers do that. All of them have gotten covid. N95 masks reduce the risk of getting a respiratory disease, but they're nowhere close to foolproof.
A CDC study found that people who wore N95 masks were 83% less likely to get covid than people who wore no mask,[1] but that overstates their effectiveness. People who wear N95s tend to behave differently than people who don't wear masks. They get vaccinated more, avoid gatherings, and generally try to reduce their risk of infection in other ways. Also the timing of the study is important. It was conducted before more infectious variants such as omicron were around. And since it was conducted when California required masks indoors, only 5% of participants claimed no mask usage. So the study compared N95 people against the most hardcore anti-maskers, not the typical person who doesn't wear a mask these days.
It is for these reasons that I would bet that the real effectiveness of N95 masks is around 50%, not 83%. Useful, but not something that lets you go back to normal life risk-free.
I have been traveling a lot this past year (a dozen flights), vigilantly wearing an N95 mask while indoors, and I've yet to get sick. Meanwhile, my slightly less vigilant travel companion got Covid during one of our flights, possibly from removing her mask to take a drink of water. Was it luck? Maybe to some extent, but I'm much more confident in the effectiveness of a well-sealed N95 than I was a year ago, that's for sure.
I've noticed no pattern with me or my friends. I haven't gotten covid despite spending days unmasked, indoors, with people who were infectious. Some of my friends have gotten ridiculously unlucky, getting covid and taking weeks to recover despite being young, healthy, boosted, and wearing N95s everywhere. Of course general rules apply: A mask is better than nothing. Vaccines reduce the risk and severity of infection. But these interventions aren't as effective as originally claimed, and the variance in outcomes is massive. You can't just put on an N95, live life normally, and expect to avoid this disease.
Or maybe no one you know is talking about it. A few weeks ago, I went for my annual Flu vaccine and saw that I was eligible for the bivalent Covid booster as well. I didn’t go around telling people I got either vaccine. At this point, as far as I am concerned, covid is jtst another vaccine to be taken routinely as directed. Maybe that will settle down to be anually like the flu, once or twice a lifetime like chicken pox, or something in between like TDAP (once per decade)
TBH, I tend to agree. Vaccines are readily available and most of us have been exposed to COVID at some point. By this point, there is little reason for behavior modification.
The boosters likely make sense for some people, but there's little real data on their effectiveness. Outside of the more vulnerable, I'd avoid them personally. The proof just isn't readily available of continuous boosters being worth it to me.
> Where do you live and what are the circumstances like there that you're considering getting your "next" one? (you've been boosted before?).
Los Angeles.
I know lots of vaccinated people who are getting infected. Just last week I went to a conference here in LA. I was going to meet-up this week with on of the people I saw there. He told me he got COVID at the conference.
Yes, I've had one booster. I travel a lot for business. I think it might be prudent to take further precautions. I have no reason to believe this is unsafe for me.
Circumstances change - super super glad I got my booster.
When I got it, I was a healthy, fit person without any of the comorbidities that go along with COVID.
Last week I had a mountain biking accident and broke half my ribs and punctured a lung. Then I got COVID in hospital. Fortunately it was quite mild, and even that was a bit of a nightmare as coughing was hell and I had quite low blood oxygen.
Given the risks of a booster are so low (though non-zero) and the risk that your health can change before you manage to contract COVID, it seems like the smart proposition to me to get the booster.
In my family sphere, covid is over. Though, to them covid was always overblown with the response being worse than the illness.
In my main friend group, most still feel we are still in the middle of covid. Though, from my perspective, their words/fears seem to differ from their actions.
People aren't talking about it anymore, but that doesn't mean that they aren't getting boosters. Like, I just got my flu shot, but haven't mentioned it to anyone.
> Nobody I know is getting boosters or is worried about it anymore
Your San Francisco social circles are different from mine. Most people I talk to about this got the bivalent booster and got the old booster last year.
But people do not seem super worried at this phase. The booster is something routine like a flu shot.
Last I checked only about 50% of people ever get the flu shot routinely. And isn't the idea of flu shot that it prevents symptomatic infection? The whole reason why people get the flu shot is they don't want to get the flu. Covid vaccine doesn't stop symptoms the same way.
> And isn't the idea of flu shot that it prevents symptomatic infection?
I don't recall it ever being sold to me as that, and though I regularly get them, I've never gotten a flu shot with that expectation. It reduces your odds and makes the thing more mild. That's the point. That's what I've been told my whole life. They're not magic solutions to everything in your life, they can't even be 100% sure about how to tweak them for the dominant strains that season, but they help.
This stuff makes people go a little crazy with unreasonable expectations. I remember people complaining in pre-pandemic years ... "the flu shot is only x% effective so why bother?" And the reason has always been that x > 0, any two-digit number for x is pretty worth it, even if it intuitively sounds small. It's pretty similar for COVID.
A good thing he is so young - seems like a good indicator for no lasting damage.
We really don't know much about this virus and by association it's vaccine - it does not behave like the flu - lost a colleague to Beta who was way fitter and way healthier than me (he did Murtai and BMI) - he ended on a ventilator and died, and I was just man down for week and a half at home.
It still took me weeks to recover back to myself again - still got the booster shot afterwards.
> The one thing that angers me is that this incident cost us $10K. Obamacare, which was forced upon us and costs us $2,400 PER MONTH, did not cover it. We have no recourse whatsoever for this incident and any future care requirements.
that angers me too. america bumbled its way through the pandemic, and we're no closer to getting single payer healthcare. not even for medical care related to the pandemic, which is collectively beneficial.
my sister ended up with endocarditis and nearly died. She went from "i feel bad, i should go to the doctor" to emergency heart valve replacement surgery in about 8 days.
Natasha Leone (famous actress) talks about getting endocarditis and it was serious as well. She was very vulnerable to it because of some behavioral factors. My impression is that myocarditis is not as serious as endocarditis though.
Although it wasn't vaccine related, my wife had a similar bill for a similar reason and I learned a couple things:
They may be saying the hospital or some provider within it was out of network, challenge this on the grounds it was an emergency. Challenge everything on the grounds that it was an emergency.
We had excellent grounds to challenge a few of the charges from the hospital (clear billing mistakes), but it never got to the point of evidence. We just called to argue and they instantly dropped them. I would strongly advise just calling and complaining and seeing what that gets you.
Many hospitals offer interest/fee free installment plans, you just have to ask.
I am, by nature, a mild mannered (perhaps even meek) person, but let me tell you that just doesn't work with hospitals and insurers. Their process requires you to take an adversarial/demanding role with them otherwise you will not just get billed unnecessarily but also not receive all the care you are entitled to.
I would say acceptably? I don't suppose it matters that much since he's uncollectible in the best of circumstances, but he seems to like avoiding the pretense that he'll be paying back any medical providers.
You didn't have any luck making a CICP claim? It says they have approved five myocarditis claims in principle, but it seems a lot less well documented than the corresponding VICP ("vaccine court") for regular vaccines. It's a bit disconcerting that the CICP is not overseen by a court the way the VICP is.
ACA isn't an insurance plan. What was or wasn't covered, and what your out-of-pocket costs were, have nothing to do with ACA. ACA forced you to pick a plan or face tax penalties, that's all, the rest is on the plan you chose. If you had chosen to not have insurance at all, you'd have paid way more that 10k and maybe even more than what you've put into your premiums already. I pay $1640 a month for full family coverage with a $600 deductible per person, per year, the second best plan I could find. I think you got a pretty bad plan at 2400/month with a 10k deductible.
True, but kinda irrelevant to the point; that the ACA isn't responsible for OP's situation. The ACA sets minimum levels of coverage, and maximum levels of deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses. No plan was required to reduce healthcare coverage offered, or to raise their OOP max amounts due to it.
Well COVID also causes myocarditis, so it’s not surprising there were a lot of cases at the hospital. The question is whether the vaccines cause myocarditis at a higher rate than unvaccinated/unboosted COVID infections. They might for young men. For every other group, unvaccinated/unboosted infection is way more likely to cause myocarditis than the vaccine.
"Retrospective cohort study of 196,992 adults after COVID-19 infection in Israel between March 2020 and January 2021. [...] We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection."
If you pay premiums out of pocket, it can count towards a potential deduction (medical expenses above 7.5% of your AGI are tax-deductible); that form is your evidence.
> Obamacare, which was forced upon us and costs us $2,400 PER MONTH, did not cover it. We have no recourse whatsoever for this incident and any future care requirements.
Calling this out as bullshit. Show me a reference.
You can get a PLATINUM plan on the California exchanges for less than that for a family--and your co-pay for everything will be under $250.
I would also like to point out that "myocarditis" qualifies as a preexisting condition. Without Obamacare, your child would never be able to get health insurance at all.
The fact that they are labeled "Platinum" is nice marketing. We've had family members and friends on some of these plans, they are --and I am being kind-- not great.
The context shouldn't be what's on the CA exchanges today. It should be what we and others had prior to being forced into ACA. Which was fantastic insurance for the entire family for $650 per month. Our deductibles were half what they are today and we had all the catastrophic stuff just the same. I assure you that, with my wife being a doctor, we did not have shit insurance.
What should horrify everyone is that, today, in the US, a family has to spend $30K per year for health insurance. That's just insane.
Before you say "we don't". If you get your insurance through your employer you should ask them how much they are spending for your insurance. Unless they got you on a shit program, they are likely spending $20K to $30K on you. This is money that is not available to give you a raise. In other words, you are still suffering the consequences of the ACA scam, you just don't know it.
Oh, yes, and don't get me started on the Presidential promise that families would save $2,500 per year, keep their doctors, etc. We went from $7,800 per year to $27,600 per year. More than that actually. Due to the high deductibles we have to spend thousands of dollars per year before any of it actually kicks in. I haven't done the math at this point. I would not be surprised if we've reached $40K.
Again, no problem helping others. That doesn't mean robbing families of tens of thousands of dollars per year. That's fucking criminal.
I know many don't feel this way. That's only so because they have never been on the receiving end of something like this. We love to talk about the concept of "fair share". Well, tripling health insurance costs isn't anywhere close to "fair share", it's government-enforced theft under false promises.
Ambetter is known to be horrible. Why on earth would you pick them when there are so many options?
I'm standing here with a friend who got full mental health care ($0 copays for almost everything) from "Sharp Health" and didn't even need to use the exchange to get the rate ($600/mo direct retail from Sharp). Kaiser is on the same order of magnitude.
Hell, even straight up Blue Cross/Blue Shield is better than what you picked. Good grief.
> The context shouldn't be what's on the CA exchanges today. It should be what we and others had prior to being forced into ACA. Which was fantastic insurance for the entire family for $650 per month.
Okay, okay, let's refresh your memory:
My mother was widowed and had to buy health insurance at 60. She got lucky and could tap into the PA Teacher's Pension system for a mere $1,100 per month. She paid that for 5 years until Medicare. This was prior to Obmamacare. Where was her $650 plan?
My wife was 35 and had sleep apnea and her cheapest plan that would even cover her was $3,500 per month with an enormous deductible. This was prior to Obamacare.
10+ million people couldn't get coverage. "Excision panels" worked hard to dump you off the rolls the moment you tried to use them.
Okay THAT was the system before Obamacare. Remember now?
What you are pining for was the old "indemnification" system that was due to the extremely strong labor unions. Unfortunately, that went away in the 80s due to the rise of the HMOs and the fact that everybody dumped on the labor unions. Many of us fought against that knowing that the HMOs were picking off the "profitable" people and were eventually going to to collapse the indemnification system--which is precisely what happened. And then the HMOs weren't so profitable once they got those patients and would dump them--which they did.
The objection is not "there aren't $2400/month plans". I'm also on a Platinum exchange plan, also for $2400/month this year. We net out well into the $30k range annually out of pocket, probably $40k with various uncovered items like medical marijuana and compounded medications.
The objection everyone's having is that the $2400/month plans are exceedingly unlikely to refuse a medically necessary hospital stay for myocarditis. People are trying to figure what critical piece of information is being left out there.
> Oh, yes, and don't get me started on the Presidential promise that families would save $2,500 per year, keep their doctors, etc.
Nothing in the ACA changed how doctors pick which insurance networks to honor, but if you switch insurers as part of picking an ACA plan you may have a different network just like you'd have if you did so with a non-ACA plan.
Agreed, as the CoveredCA website points out: "Platinum and Gold plans have a $0 deductible."
The whole point of the Platinum and Gold plans is that you pay more upfront each month in exchange for lower out-of-pocket expenses when you actually utilize your insurance.
We did not vaccinate our 3 teen boys. They all contracted COVID and recovered in 48 hours. I’m sorry to hear about your experience. The emotional strain from that was probably awful.
It boggles my mind that despite inflicting obvious and severe harm on your very own kids, people still believe in "vaccines". Let alone $10k.
Chances you kid would have gotten any troubles from covid are statistically absolutely negligible, given his age and hopefully absence of other illnesses.
Now you can blame as anti-vaxxer and sorts, but at least I didn't get myocarditis.
"Wild success"? That isn't helpful. While I don't agree with previous comment implying obvious and severe harm from vaccines, it's well known that kids rarely get sick from covid. It's well known the vaccine effectiveness wanes in a short time, and doesn't stop symptomatic infection, and is doing very little to stop transmission. It's only real benefit is prevention of serious illness in those most vulnerable. Given these facts, you can't blame people for not wanting to jab their kids with covid vaccines.
Assumed GP was talking about vaccines in general. But the COVID vaccines alone has an order of magnitude impact on body count, before you even look at reducing severity, reducing spread, and the other benefits.
Hard for me to consider that anything other than a wild success. Is it perfect? Of course not. Do I wish it was better? Obviously. But it reduced the risk of COVID significantly for a huge number of people.
Those of us in countries that had successful lockdowns look at the mortality rate of those that were not able or willing to do so & pretty thankful we were able to postpone the virus until the vaccine was deployed.
Many who blanket-praise the vaccine as you have, are doing so from a pre-existing "team sport" position on the subject. I'm not saying you are, but it's common.
I live in a place which has the unfortunate claim of longest, harshest lockdown in the world (Victoria, Australia). Multiple lengthy lockdowns, curfews, masks outside enforced by cops, sitting on the beach was illegal, taking kids to park illegal; people were literally chased down the street by cops demanding to "see your papers". Many cops resigned, and now in 2022 Victoria is struggling to find new recruits after a mass exodus of cops - many of whom did not agree with the job they were ordered to do.
Most people here do not consider those lockdowns a "success", and experts including epidemiologists have referred to our lockdowns as "draconian", and harmful.
Now, in 2022 we have more covid deaths than before, and that's with a very high rate of vaccination in the community, particularly the older age groups. But they're still dying at a record rate. The virus still spreads and still takes out vaccinated and boosted victims. Therefore, I would never adopt the blanket "thankful" rhetoric that you've shared. Thankful for lockdowns, thankful for mandates, thankful for what is frankly, an underwhelming vaccine compared to other vaccines. Yet, "saved millions of lives" is the go-to catch-phrase, and anything else can't possibly be true. Can it.
I'll cheer lead vaccines from a team sport position all day long; in this case I'm doing so from that perspective and from the perspective that the vaccine has shown to have a significant (order of magnitude) impact on death (etc, etc).
I don't think it's totally unfair to call it 'underwhelming' though. We are so used to vaccines being wildly successful at stamping out a bunch of diseases that when something as virulent as this comes along & the efficacy isn't as high (in no small part due to the fact that so many countries decided to make it the only line of defence), it's easy to be disillusioned.
I live in Queensland, Australia, where we had lockdowns that were similar in harshness but much more limited in length. I am very familiar with the Melbourne lockdowns (one of my colleagues got stuck there for months after he got trapped there after going down for a 1 week holiday).
We probably just got lucky that we didn't have a Melbourne-style outbreak. But the simple fact is the lockdowns prevented us from having a widespread outbreak before the vaccine was deployed. The lockdowns sucked but my anecdata from my network (certainly generally privileged people whose careers were not wildly affected, so not a representative sample) was the lockdowns were worth it.
It is trivial to look at mortality rate data between, say, US/UK and Australia to see the impact that the lockdowns had. It's simply undeniable that they saved lives. People complaining loudly about 'draconian' tend, in my experience, to be dipshit libertarians that would never brook any lockdowns under any circumstances simply because of their insane political views. Others complaining about lockdowns not working tend to be talking about their own lockdowns in their own contexts which were not as harsh as Melbourne (which, arguably, ended up working).
Of course we have more COVID deaths than before - we've dialled back all the preventions! The policy decision was made to let COVID run free through society and that the vaccines (which we both agree are imperfect, but perhaps I'm the only one that acknowledges they're vastly better than nothing) were the only mitigation that we're apparently willing to tolerate.
We've done fuck all about it and everyone seems surprised that the body count is still so high. I don't know why people are still surprised people are dying - we've clearly decided the policy position is to sacrifice people on the altar of the economy and that people are bored of dealing with COVID. We're not bothering with other mitigations despite it being a top 5 cause of death in Australia (top 3 in the US?).
All you've done is double-down on "lockdowns are worth it", and assigned slurs for those who called them draconian.
The pursuit of being a responsible citizen can cause people to find themselves in the red zone. Pushed by coercive campaigns designed to make you not only think and act a certain way, but also spread the message and attack those who disagree. It's fascinating stuff.
"Dipshit libertarians"? Wow. I do wonder where the line is, if any, for those loyal to whatever lockdown rules are enforced. 100 days at 2 hours of outdoor exercise per day? Or are you the ambassador of compliance, willing to sign on to 500 days lockdown, 9pm curfew, and 5km travel limit from home.
It so happens that one of those "dipshit libertarians" who used the word "draconian", is professor Adrian Esterman. He appeared on TV in Australia many times during the pandemic, encouraging vaccines and encouraging preventative measures. He promoted caution and safety every time. But even he used the word draconian in an interview to say "no, we don't need draconian lockdowns" when asked recently whether lockdowns are needed again.
> "Of course we have more COVID deaths than before"
What do you mean "of course"? If you're suggesting everything that has happened was expected, you'd be wrong. Experts have REPEATEDLY said the virus has surprised us and behaved in unpredictable ways. The increased deaths in Australia this year were NOT expected.
And finally, part of the data about vaccines saving lives, comes from the over-represented numbers of unvaccinated people ending up in hospital. Early on at least, this was repeated often, with the footnote jab "pandemic of the unvaccinated". While the statistic is generally accepted, there are many factors involved in why certain people end up in hospital with covid. You may not have considered that unvaccinated people were more likely to take LESS precautions in general. After all, they didn't bother getting vaccinated, even though they were in the high risk age group. So they wouldn't take precautions with social distance, or hand sanitizing, or reducing social events. Those who quickly got vaccinated however, would be more likely to be cautious - therefore stay at home, social distance, and generally avoid the virus. But was anything like this discussed in relation to higher representation in hospital? No way. Nothing like that was ever discussed because they were so focused on pro-vaccine messaging. All we were left with was "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and a large group-think onboarding of that message, the remnants of which still can be found in posts such as yours.
I'm going to call bullshit on someone paying $2400/month and then having to pay $10,000 for a hospital. Such a plan does not exist in California.
Just did a search on CoveredCA. Monthly premium for Platinum Plans for a family of 4: $1200-1800 for a zero-deductibleplan (range includes Blue Shield, Kaiser, Anthem, Health Net, and OSCAR).
Because, as the CoveredCA website points out: "Platinum and Gold plans have a $0 deductible."
The whole point of the Platinum and Gold plans is that you pay more upfront each month in exchange for lower out-of-pocket expenses when you actually utilize your insurance.
The ACA mandate afaik no longer carries a fine so as of today at least you are free to go without insurance if you so choose.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 eliminated the fine for violating the individual mandate, starting in 2019. (The requirement itself is still in effect.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act
Furthermore how many people are covered by that $2400 a month? I'd assume it's at least 4 if not more?
Cool, now what's the incidence of Myocarditis and similar after COVID-19 infection?
It's possible that such a vaccine causes a number of such cases, and still prevents a much larger number of them. In fact it also seems to be true in this case.
Discussing the vaccines out of this context, is scaremongering. You're much better off taking your chances with the COVID-19 vaccine than taking your chances unvaccinated.
According to this study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/ there is no increase in Myocarditis cases among unvaccinated people who have contracted Covid-19. This study tracked 196,992 people which is a huge number, so the data here is quite good and clear. Contracting Covid-19 does not put you at increased risk for Myocarditis, the same cannot be said when evaluating a population that simply received the vaccination.
Now, to balance between you and the OP: Great, Covid looks like it won't give me myocarditis. It can still kill me, though. So now we have to balance a "may give me myocarditis" vaccine against a "may kill me, but won't give me myocarditis" virus.
You can't make the trade-off solely on myocarditis.
Then we have to account for the much reduced risk of that though. sure it can, but relative risk is important. Covid when vaccinated is far more likely to kill you than all possible combinations of the vaccine and whatever else.
> Then we have to account for the much reduced risk of that though
I fail to see any evidence of "much reduced risk". We know before vaccinations existed some people died, some people were a-symptomatic. After mass vaccination campaigns, same results. Have the deaths gone down? Sure, but there are obvious factors, outside of vaccination, that are certainly contributing to that, if not wholly responsible for it. We know the virus has been getting less deadly with each new strain, we know that putting people on ventilators and cranking them up was 100% the wrong treatment. The media has largely stopped beating the fear drum, there are no more death counters up on the news stations 24/7 so people aren't freaking-the-fuck-out. I highly suspect you could have given out placebos instead and would have seen the same results.
> I fail to see any evidence of "much reduced risk".
If you just do a basic per-capita analysis the reduced risk of death is in the range of 5-16x depending on age group and vaccinated or vaccinated+boosted. There are obviously confounding variables (do vaccinated people behave differently? are healthier people the ones getting the vaccines?) but I would argue that those numbers are a pretty big W for vaccines as far as risk reduction goes.
And of course that is just deaths. You could certainly look at numbers for severity of infection or long-covid outcomes to further measure the efficacy of the vaccines.
>If you just do a basic per-capita analysis the reduced risk of death is in the range 5-16x
I am not questioning that, but couldn't that 5-16x be contributed to the latest strains being far less deadly that the first few strains, much better and accessible treatments (monoclonal antibodies), safer hospital practices (not putting people on ventilators so quickly/easily), etc.? How can we be so sure that the majority of that 5-16x was from vaccination?
Because that rate of reduction is in comparison to the "control" group of unvaccinated people who are exposed to the same strains and have access to all the same treatments and hospital practices
> Great, Covid looks like it won't give me myocarditis. It can still kill me,
... COVID can still kill me, or give me one of a number of other long-term health issues. If myocarditis isn't one of them, it doesn't really change the risk ratio.
> Doesn't that still apply to someone vaccinated though?
Not at close to the same rate, no.
"can" would be a technically true but entirely misleading word there, as the topic of conversation is the risk ratio. "1 in 10 chance" things can happen. "1 in a million chance" things can happen, also.
But these two "can" usages are not the same.
You should know this. You should not be playing word games. Do you think, falsely, that COVID vaccination it totally useless? If not, why imply it?
So, what's the risk ratio? I haven't said that it's totally useless, you simply excluded that possibility as a given. Most countries around the world have stopped recommending any further boosters to those under 50/65 years of age.
> Most countries around that world have stopped recommending any further boosters.
What makes you say that? It doesn't sound accurate at all, given that Autumn booster programs are underway in USA, UK, EU - and those are the only ones that I have checked. And what are you attempting to imply?
I also see the _late addition_ of "to those under 50/65 years of age" in grandparent comment, which changes the meaning quite a bit. These countries, for many people, are recommending further boosters.
In the UK's case, the NHS "invites people 50 and over for autumn boosters" (1) which doesn't rule out any further action later for under 50s.
I've later added that "50/65 age" mention. Apologies for that. So, you reckon this a not important change in policy? I personally find it as a radical change in policy, almost short of an apology to be honest.
That is highly debatable, especially with the current (weaker) strains. Unless you have comorbidities or are otherwise in a high-risk category the chance the Covid will kill you is near 0.
When data disagree, then you need better studies. Certainly not blanket recommendations and requirements including firing people who refuse to comply and making it impossible to feed their families.
>In 42 842 345 people receiving at least 1 dose of vaccine, 21 242 629 received 3 doses, and 5 934 153 had SARS-CoV-2 infection before or after vaccination. Myocarditis occurred in 2861 (0.007%) people, with 617 events 1 to 28 days after vaccination. Risk of myocarditis was increased in the 1 to 28 days after a first dose of ChAdOx1 (incidence rate ratio, 1.33 [95% CI, 1.09–1.62]) and a first, second, and booster dose of BNT162b2 (1.52 [95% CI, 1.24–1.85]; 1.57 [95% CI, 1.28–1.92], and 1.72 [95% CI, 1.33–2.22], respectively) but was lower than the risks after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test before or after vaccination (11.14 [95% CI, 8.64–14.36] and 5.97 [95% CI, 4.54–7.87], respectively).
BEFORE OR AFTER VACCINATION.
Every single person in that study was vaccinated, some of them caught covid (either before or after being vaccinated), some people did not catch covid at all. The people that were vaccinated and contracted covid fared the worst. There is no un-vaccinated group that caught covid and never took the vaccine at all in this study.
I had COVID twice, never got the vaccine (still haven't), and I was diagnosed with Myocarditis. I personally know 2 other young (< 30) males that have as well. Not "my buddy's friend" but first-circle of separation friends. All 3 of us got diagnosed with it. No other heart-related issues.
I might say there's a "statistically insignificant increase", but to say there's no increase is just factually wrong. (And statistically wrong too).
Myocarditis existed long before covid. You can get it without covid nor the vaccine. Your anecdote is as informative as my friend who got it several years before Covid.
Can you point me to that? The abstract isn't calling that out very clearly to me.
"Inpatient myocarditis and pericarditis diagnoses were retrieved from day 10 after positive PCR. Follow-up was censored on 28 February 2021, with minimum observation of 18 days."
"Retrospective cohort study of 196,992 adults after COVID-19 infection in Clalit Health Services members in Israel between March 2020 and January 2021. [...] We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection."
If you don't get COVID because of the vaccine, then the vaccine stopped the transmission. Even if you get COVID, the chance you transmit COVID is reduced becuase the body spreads less. If you do get it, but your body will also clear it faster which is less time to transmit. Sure the above is 100% stop all transmission, but it still stops the majority.
It cannot stop transmission, clearly. The country is mostly vaccinated and cases continue, no herd immunity ever showed up.
The vaccines do reduce transmission in the minority of cases where full-blown symptoms last long enough that the reduction in infection length conferred by the vaccine is significant. But for most cases, they never progress to the point that the antibody response would become a factor, so most vaccinated people spread it just as much as if they were never vaccinated, in the early portion of their infection at minimum. So even if everyone got their booster today at the same instant, and every 6 months repeated that, it would still not stop the free movement of the virus among the population.
The only way to stop the spread is to do what China is doing, but with air-tight effectiveness, which is impossible.
That said, there's a big reason to get vaccinated and boosted anyway if you are in a risk group, since it is somewhat effective in protecting against serious and deadly outcomes.
You quoted two statements. For the first, I'm not going to further defend it, see above, it is widely accepted these days.
For the second statement there are two assertions, that the country is mostly vaccinated, and that no herd immunity ever showed up. The country is mostly vaccinated, so I think you must be questioning whether herd immunity showed up.
I do think some amount of immunity showed up, if by immunity you mean spreading a little bit of Covid but not as much as if you had not been vaccinated and were unfortunate enough to get a serious case of it. But I'm not sure that would qualify as "herd immunity".
You can't get herd immunity from a vaccine that does not stop the spread of the disease, even with 100% coverage. Covid starts spreading early in the infection, before your vaccine-stimulated antibodies get into the action. For that kind of contagion, vaccines cannot stop the spread.
For other diseases that become contagious later in the infection, vaccines can, and at the outset it seemed like Covid might behave that way, but it turned out not to.
What the current vaccines can do, is lessen the possibility of serious outcomes, which is great.
Also, myocarditis can be more or less severe, IIUC. The article links to this CDC presentation, and on slide 5 they characterize myocarditis associated with mRNA vaccination vs myocarditis associated with viral illness. The proportion that recover cardiac function, and the time to recover cardiac function are better in the mRNA case.
Like just about everything, I would expect myocarditis to have some distribution such that there's a group of people who feel bad, but not bad enough to see a doctor. For the vaccines I would expect that people would be less likely to see a doctor because the vaccine side effects were so widely talked about, and going to the doctor carried a risk of COVID exposure.
The second does of vaccine knocked my wife and I on our asses for three days. I broke a sweat unloading the dishwasher and then had to go take a nap to recover. I figured we were just unlucky enough to have an especially strong reaction and didn't bother a doctor about it. Was that mild myocarditis? I'll probably never know.
> These findings indicate that introducing the mRNA vaccine into the circulatory system can lead to acute cardiac inflammation. The mechanism behind this requires further elucidation. However, it is speculated that this may be due to the pro-inflammatory properties of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used as carriers for mRNA.
The actual COVID-19 infection doesn't have any lipid nanoparticles, does it?
Agree with overall sentiment of your comment though: the overall real-bad symptoms caused by an infection when fully unvaccinated are probably not worth skipping vaccine.
The clinical trials in op's article as well as nradov's comment on "aspiration" to reduce myocarditis risk during vaccination are both important topics to explore.
> During March 2020–January 2021, patients with COVID-19 had nearly 16 times the risk for myocarditis compared with patients who did not have COVID-19, and risk varied by sex and age.
> To minimize potential bias from vaccine-associated myocarditis (6), 277,892 patients with a COVID-19 vaccination record in PHD-SR during December 2020–February 2021 were excluded.
The data is very unclear on this. Sure you found sources that back your claim, but plenty of replies with sources that say the contrary (From reputable sources). So in the meantime, given the conflicting nature of all the reports, mandating vaccines should NOT be a thing.
One mouse study found that vaccine injection without aspiration did significantly increase the risk of adverse cardiac events such as myocarditis. That research hasn't been reproduced in humans but this area deserves further investigation. As per CDC guidelines, US healthcare providers don't routinely aspirate prior to intramuscular injection.
It means after inserting the needle you draw back on the plunger to see if any blood is drawn into the syringe. If so it means you hit a vein and should reposition the needle because the shot is meant to go into the muscle rather than directly into a vein.
And young male athletes with the greatest development of blood supply in the deltoid represent the most common demographic affected by acute cardiovascular injury post vaccine. Coincidence?
The vaccines were not built to be aspirated, once the plunger is up they can not be reset. It represents a fundamental lapse in standard harm reduction.
Also "wait 15 mins to see if emergency care is needed" could well have been replaced by allergy screening given before the injection. Many thousands of cases of anaphylaxis from the shot have been documented some of which were fatal, all avoidable with allergy screening which is practically free.
I have asked for aspiration when I was vaccinated, all four times. I’ve had Pfizer and Moderna. It was no problem.
There exist syringes which the injection cannot be aspirated with, but those weren’t used when I was being vaccinated.
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Strong agreement on the concern about deltoid vasculature.
(I have direct, lived experience with someone at risk of death from a substance going into a capillary which was supposed to stay under the skin on injection. It happens. It’s real. Some doctors will claim it’s “impossible”, which is obviously false when you look into it. The datasheet that came with the injector needles even state that they’re “over 99.5 accurate in delivering a subcutaneous injection”. I forget the exact phrasing. It means that statistically, 1 in 200 injections tends to go into a capillary.)
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Also, it’s interesting to look into the reasons why aspiration was removed from standard practice. In a nutshell, it’s because of two things:
1: Some syringes exist which cannot be aspirated with.
2: Aspiration can be painful for infants and is tricky to perform because they are small and they struggle.
These are the reasons why aspiration was essentially removed from clinical practice. Really. Those are the reasons. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s obviously harmful that aspiration was stopped.
The papers the grandparent post links to are good.
I would just like us all to stop pretending that any of one's fear of COVID or skepticism of vaccines or distrust of whoever or whatever is about rational calculated risks. It's about how we feel, so let's talk about that.
Look, everyone is scared of doing something until they're scared of not doing it. Everyone distrusts government until they trust it, and distrusts pharma until they trust it. Some people will wear their mask in the grocery store even though it's a cloth mask that's as good as doing nothing because now it feels weird not to. Some people won't take the COVID vaccine but they'll happily take remdesivir and ivermectin. (Who do you think makes remdesivir and ivermectin?) Some people will happily go to an indoor comic convention that's an hour's drive from them, but not to an outdoor wedding, because it would mean getting on a plane (this actually happened with a family member of mine and I am not over it).
All of which is to say that what people are really doing is going with their gut. If your gut instinct is "COVID's not a big deal", then of course taking an emergency-use-authorized vaccine for it seems risky. If your gut instinct is "COVID is dangerous and deadly", you'll take anything you can get. Now that things are subsiding, and the fear is waning, I read an article like this and I think "hmm, that does seem bad, we should look into it, but also I am gonna keep doing what I'm doing and getting my COVID vaccine because it seems like it's helping." On the other hand, you have people who are literally dying of COVID who are still relieved they were able to dodge getting the vaccine because it felt scary to get a not-fully-tested drug.
So I'm pro-vaccine because they seem like a good idea and my experiences with them (four shots so far) have been positive, in that my side effects were limited and I know there were situations where I could have gotten COVID and I didn't. (And when I did get COVID, it was extremely mild.) Who's to say how I'd have felt if I were one of the few cases of myocarditis out there? Who's to say how I would've felt if I'd had mild COVID and recovered from it pre-vaccine? What if I'd been hospitalized with COVID pre-vaccine?
Can we just admit this isn't about logic or statistics, and never was? It was always a persuasion game either way.
Having some uncertainty around novel things seems reasonable. We were all uncertain around COVID and around new vaccines using a novel mechanism. People balanced those uncertainties differently. I took the course of asking people I generally trusted for their opinion and concluded that taking the vaccines (3 for me so far, plus a bout of naturally-acquired resistance via infection) was indicated. There were other doctors whom I knew before COVID was a thing who were recommending ivermectin. If that was your doctor, why wouldn't you believe them just like I believed the doctors that I had more association with?
My gut tells me "be skeptical of novel things, but balance that skepticism a bit by asking people whom you trust to have greater knowledge on the topic, ultimately making the best decision you can".
Except when the only thing that can inform a good decision is _time_ ; and when you can ask every trustworthy people you know, and they will simply not have a clue _yet_, because no one does and we're in the middle of the fog of war.
But I suppose we all preferred pretending we knew _somethings_.
How about we get some empathy for the people who just ended up on the many bad sides of the many bets ?
I'm not sure where the lack of empathy is above. I have/wrote about empathy for people whose doctors gave them advice that when followed will turn out, in retrospect, to be wrong. Maybe that will be mine; maybe that will be the others.
It was nowhere in your writing, sorry if that got confused.
I meant basically: "maybe give the few young people who suffered from some unforeseen side effects a break, and the right to keep their job without a next round of jabs" ? As far as I can tell, "having suffered side effects from the first 1/2/3 injection" is still not a valid exemption cause for vaccine mandates.
Sure there was and still is uncertainty, but we need to talk about the other side of that coin. You used the term novel, which means: "new and not resembling something formerly known or used" and that's just not the case here.
We didn't just invent a completely new vaccine mechanism for covid, the mRNA technology has been known and in development for half a century. This is just the first time it was effective. Likewise with the disease itself, we know that it shares a significant portion of its DNA with the disease behind the 2002 SARS-CoV pandemic and has many other similar parameters.
Was there a previous vaccine widely deployed using mRNA tech? If not, it seems like "novel" is entirely appropriate concerning certain uncertainties of using such a vaccine.
This seems like a setup for a gotcha, or did you label it as novel in your comment without knowing the answer to this question?
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines targeting infectious diseases including HIV-1, rabies, Zika and influenza were already in clinical trials, as were mRNA vaccines targeting multiple hematologic and solid organ malignancies (Pardi, 2018).
You seem to be the one arguing that, with respect to uncertainties about possible side effects, mRNA vaccine deployment was not novel. It's not a convoluted argument; it's a straight-forward "I think it was novel [with respect to the unknowability of low-percentage side-effects]".
If you have data that we did have a widely deployed vaccine using that tech (which I think, but don't 100.000% know, hadn't happened), then I'm interested to learn that.
Just how wide do you want "widely" to be? Are you trying to say we don't learn anything about this subject from clinical trials? I'm sure data related to the many clinical trials I mentioned is available.
Wide enough to hit the vast majority of ages, races, health statuses [pregnancy, cancer, other medications/medical conditions] to which the vaccine will be deployed and in numbers sufficient that 1 in 10K [or even 1 in 1K] frequency adverse reactions would be reasonably sure to have shown up. (1 in 10K across an 8B population is 800K adverse reactions; 1 in 1K is 8 million people...).
Are you trying to say that we learn everything about this subject from clinical trials?
"Can we just admit this isn't about logic or statistics, and never was? It was always a persuasion game either way."
Kind of? The fact is that we've turned into a society where we can't even be unified in trying to prevent disease. If "the left" is for vaccines, masking, social distancing, etc. then "the right" has to immediately be against it.
I don't recall any of my friends or family needing persuasion at all. They believed in the science and were willing to adapt as we learned new things about COVID (e.g. around masking and social distancing). When vaccines were becoming available I know my circle spent time looking over what information we could find about which ones were better, side effects, etc., but were onboard with vaccine risk being better than COVID.
The FOX crowd, OTOH, went looking to scare people off vaccines and made not masking a point of pride. It was tribalism, pure and simple. If it were a persuasion game you might have seen a lot more diversity in who was for/against the vaccines.
30 years ago if we'd faced COVID (at least in the U.S.) and had the vaccines available, I think we'd have fared far better. People who couldn't agree on much else could've come together in the face of a deadly disease. Persuasion, and logic, are out the window.
I'm against social distancing because there is no scientific basis or justification for it. Scientists just went on TV and talked about an idea they pulled out from their behinds. I guess that makes me on the right for not believing everything that was presented to me on television, unlike my family, who are on the left.
If "stay away from people who might be sick" is an idea you think scientists made up just now, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's not that big a stretch to "anyone could be sick because we don't know how this disease works yet, so stay away from everyone."
Not advocating for social distancing as a policy at this point in time, just saying, it made a lot of sense from a risk-prevention perspective at the time.
But again, this is my point. It's trivially easy for me to provide a logical explanation for why social distancing was a sensible tactic. You are (probably) not going to be persuaded. You (probably) like your evidence because it matches how you feel, and I like mine because it matches how I feel.
To be clear, I don't mean this in an aggressive way - I don't think it is bad that you don't agree with me on this in some kind of a moral way, at this point. I just don't think any sort of evidence-based argumentation will bridge the gap between us.
>If "stay away from people who might be sick" is an idea you think scientists made up just now, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's not that big a stretch to "anyone could be sick because we don't know how this disease works yet, so stay away from everyone."
that wasn't the guidance. It was stand 2 meters from anyone, even if no one is sick.
> The fact is that we've turned into a society where we can't even be unified in trying to prevent disease
The vaccines weren't trialed and aren't approved to prevent the spread of the disease....so? I don't know about you, but I actually read the FDA's initial report on the Pfizer trials, and it was complete nonsense. They didn't even test each participant for covid, only some participants, with no clear reasoning as to which.
I'm never going to take experimental gene therapy drugs, it's just never going to happen.
The use of this term to describe an mRNA vaccine suggests you do not understand how these vaccines work whatsoever. I am not surprised you didn't understand the FDA's report given that you don't understand how the vaccines work at all.
A vaccine requires an antigen. There's no antigen in the mRNA or Adeno-vector vaccines. I'm not willing to pretend that these new medical products are in any way similar to the previous technology.
Gene therapy accurately describes the drug's effect. It injects instructions into your cells to replicate a protein, that's gene therapy. In this case, rather than treating some disease, it's designed to provoke an immune response. Hard pass.
> "A vaccine requires an antigen. There's no antigen in the mRNA or Adeno-vector vaccines."
That's not what a vaccine is. Vaccines do not "require" an antigen, they "act as" an antigen. Whether they include the antigen directly or a mechanism for producing it doesn't matter. Live-virus vaccines are just a more imprecise version of the technology that powers mRNA vaccines. They're doing the same thing, but more sloppily.
> It injects instructions into your cells to replicate a protein, that's gene therapy.
Again, you don't understand the term. "Gene therapy" involves actually changing the DNA housed in the nucleus in your cells. mRNA vaccines can't do that.
This is also how every virus, including COVID works. "Injected into cells" is imprecise terminology that makes it sound like it's doing something novel that will persist in your cell after the mRNA decays. That isn't true. The mRNA doesn't become part of your DNA. It eventually decays and becomes useless. Until then, mechanisms within the cell use it to produce the protein - one of the same proteins COVID produces when you are sick with it.
If you are scared of this mechanism of action, you should be downright terrified of ever getting a viral infection, or any vaccine at all, or really just living in the world. Real viruses do the exact same thing, except some of them (like retroviruses) also alter your DNA. The human genome is littered with the genes for viruses that wormed their way in over time.
mRNA vaccines are just doing the same thing the virus already does, but in a more controlled, less dangerous way, and obviously without viral replication in the host.
But, again, the whole point of my original comment is that none of this will matter to you, most likely. I suspect you will keep believing false things about these vaccines which justify your position that you don't want to take them. Hopefully this information makes some difference to someone else.
Anyway, I think this is enough back-and-forth with you; between this and the "Marxist-level thinking" comment it's pretty clear there's nothing to gain by this anymore.
> involves actually changing the DNA housed in the nucleus in your cells.
No, that's gene modification, one type of gene therapy.
Here's a paper that discusses using mRNA as gene therapy to treat cancer [1]. Transcription into a cell's own DNA isn't a requirement for something to be gene therapy, only that the intent is to have a cell produce something it otherwise wouldn't. That can be permanent (DNA transcription), or temporary (mRNA that doesn't replicate).
I'm sorry you've been misled by the media, but mRNA and Adeno-vector 'vaccines' are not vaccines, they are gene therapy drugs. Vaccines contain an antigen.
> between this and the "Marxist-level thinking"
I mean, you seem to be sharing ideas that are ideologically similar to Marx. Control the population with propaganda, if they don't comply, use force.
> I don't recall any of my friends or family needing persuasion at all. They believed in the science and were willing to adapt as we learned new things about COVID (e.g. around masking and social distancing).
And now that science shows the vaccines have risks that weren't clear before, will this change how they feel about them, or are they going to stick to their preconceived ideas? Did they believe the science because they understood it, or because they chose to trust people who were ideologically aligned with them?
Its useless at this point. You can't unvaccinate someone and there is no antidote. So I don't go around saying I told you so. I am really sorry this all happened. The best thing would be to dismantle gain of function and figure out the intention of a company that called themselves ecohealth aliance. The answer is in the name.
Quite a bit of vaccine drama is not political but either mistrust of the system or alternate beliefs. Here is an anecdote - My family has a bunch of anti-vaxers who have not had a single dose of COVID vaccine yet and claim they have never gotten COVID. These are highly educated (masters in engineering) and hard left leaning (Bernie/AOC supporters.) They also mostly reject modern medicine and believe in Homeopathy. So much so that their toddler had a pretty bad fall that almost cut his tongue in half but they refused to take the kid to emergency room and treated him with some homeopathy chart of medicines they keep in their home. Their family doctor convinced their elderly mom to get the vaccine and now the mom claims to have gotten nut allergy from the vaccine. Their mom is pretty left leaning too.
> Kind of? The fact is that we've turned into a society where we can't even be unified in trying to prevent disease. If "the left" is for vaccines, masking, social distancing, etc. then "the right" has to immediately be against it.
That's your takeaway? Perhaps you should start taking people at face value. It was about coerced vaccination, and enforcing masks, lockdowns, expanding government power, etc. You're conflating that with spreading the disease.
Yes, "do this or you're fired" is a coercive tactic. People who are pro-vaccine want everyone to get the vaccine. They believe it is a matter of life or death (frankly, I agree with them, but I am trying to present this neutrally). So that level of coercion, "fear losing your job if you don't do this" is exactly what I'm talking about.
If people could be persuaded to do things that are in their interest via rational discourse, and evidence favored vaccines, it wouldn't be necessary to do that kind of coercion. (Nor would it be necessary to so strenuously resist getting them, you'd just say "here is the evidence I don't need to get this," and everyone would accept it and let you live your life.) That's my whole point.
>If people could be persuaded to do things that are in their interest via rational discourse, and evidence favored vaccines, it wouldn't be necessary to do that kind of coercion.
Interesting. Of course, in this particular case that coercion happens to coincide with a position you agree with, but not in every instance that apparently justifiable coercion will agree with you. I assume, for the sake of consistency, you'll defend them in that case too.
> This thread is, predictably, a complete shit show. Flag and move on.
Is there a way to counter-flag?
People who are passionate about discussing some topic may get heated but I don't think that's a good reason for a Reddit-style "thread locked by mods".
You can 'vouch' for the thread (or a comment), but only after it's been marked as flagged. Personally I think that's unbalanced, since flags accumulate for a longer and more visible period than when a thread can be vouched for.
Not really, unless you're only reading the threads that match your bias. Most of the higher-voted top-level comments are fairly substantial...unlike yours.
It's kind of sad cause ideally the company using a portion of the money they made on the product, to study adverse effects from the product, is the responsible and transparent thing to do. I wonder what options there are for ensuring/verifying that this kind of research is not swayed or influenced by the sponsors.
I don't think polio and kids is a good example here, since the COVID vaccine isn't sterilizing like polio, meaning boosters are required, which were never approved for kids because they failed to prove reasonable efficacy. Most kids haven't been vaccinated for COVID in years, and have little protection against it, beyond the continuous exposure now present in the school systems.
I think that all this COVID stuff was everything opposite than using science, starting from the people, including government, taking of "trusting science".
Science is not a religion, and we don't have to believe in it. Instead we need to be critic, conduct experiments, evaluate our thesis, put everything into discussion. Something we didn't, because you are a fool if you have doubts about vaccines, if you talk about negative effects, they are 100% safe and you are an ignorant.
This is the contrary of doing science. We didn't studied these vaccines enough, we didn't take for serious people lamenting adverse reactions, we did hide the news about that because we feared people not taking the vaccine. Is this science? It's not.
If you look at the news, vaccines are 100% safe and doesn't have any side effect. You ask people that got that, you get another opinion. Me too after the third dose (that I wouldn't had got if I wasn't forced to do so by our "democratic" government, no wonder here in Italy last elections won the "fascists", if these are the democratic people) I had serious side effects, I was basically not feeling well for a week. To take into prospective, when I got COVID in March 2020 when it was still a new thing I only got a slight fever for two days, nothing compared of the effect of the vaccine itself...
Correct, political science displaced science so quickly. Dark days are ahead unless the public is informed and able to resist. How did they force you to take a booster? Was it in order to keep your job?
Not him, but I had arm pain for over a year, under the injection, along with extreme weakness in a particular muscle/motion, from the first shot. I couldn’t sleep on that side at all, and could barely sleep on the other. It eventually went away, but I was terrified it was permanent.
I did not get the boosters. I’ve had people say I’m anti-vax, from this.
Also classification of seriousness of side effects was kinda skewed, too. If you didn't read into details of studies, you'd think that claims like "serious side effects are rare", as something that is a meaningful input to your decisionmaking about getting vaccinated. But if it was defined as conditions requiring hospitalizations or urgent care, then there are other very comon side effects that don't require it and can still upend your life if they last long time.
Being unable to work properly for longish time (say months to a year), without needing hospitalization is quite serious to anyone in working age. There was no way to judge how long particular side effects can last (and likelihoods) from vaccine studies, because data for judging this were not published, despite for sure being available from the original trials to the researchers.
There's apparently a lot of research about how to push people to vaccinate and about vaccination hessitancy, though. :) But providing some useful data about side effects, like how likely they'll last 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months for a vaccination that was intended to quickly give to almost everyone... No, can't have that. That was almost impossible to find. And if you did find something, it was some independent research with small sample size.
Masses of people are, to all appearance anyway, incapable of understanding anything even as slightly nuanced as "vaccines are probably a worthwhile risk compared to COVID as we understand it today". It gets flattened to one of "vaccines are 100% safe, you must take them" or "vaccines are evil, you must not take them". I really hope that's only an appearance, that we can learn to do better, because otherwise civilization is walking dead.
And if the truth was actually "vaccines are probably not a worthwhile risk for a young adult without comorbidities?" Would that change your analysis? Or did you just feel the need to prove your COVID orthodoxy?
Some added information: Some might wonder, won't the US government pay me if I am injured (as unlikely as that is)? For example, the young man the article talks about as having been injured?
Yes - there is a fund, the CICP (Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program). However, your odds of getting paid are basically nil, as an adult; due to an extremely high standard for proving causation, lack of awareness, and limited claim time (1 year from date of vaccination). So if you have a long-term effect after, say, 3 years needing compensation, you won't be paid.
"As of October 1, 2022, the CICP has partially compensated one COVID-19 countermeasure claim. There are potentially additional expenses to be calculated for this claim, therefore, the claim is still in the “Pending” compensation status. Forty-seven COVID-19 countermeasure claims have been denied compensation because the standard of proof for causation was not met and/or a covered injury was not sustained. Six COVID-19 countermeasure claims, all of which are COVID-19 vaccine claims, have been determined eligible for compensation and are pending a review of eligible expenses. One eligible claim is the result of anaphylaxis, and five claims are the result of myocarditis."
I can add my experience to this thread, as I was diagnosed with "atypical" pericarditis a little over a week after my first Pfizer shot.
This started with chest pains, gradually increasing over the course of a day or two before I went to the hospital. I had to ask them to test for myopericarditis, because they were pretty much only considering an embolism or a panic attack. In that sense I was lucky that I had read a paper a month or so before, indicating young men (such as myself) as having an increased risk after Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccination. After diagnosis I had to go through a 3-month medication regimen which, I'll be honest, wasn't all that fun for my intestinal tract.
Thankfully I was deemed healthy after half a year, with low probability of lasting damage. Yet, the psychological weight of being confronted with heart disease in your mid-twenties is heavy. My opinions on vaccinations haven't really changed, though I think the legal and societal pressure to get everyone vaccinated was out of line and that opinion has gotten stronger. Especially after knowing that vaccination doesn't affects transmission as much as they hoped, I expected them to focus much more heavily on the at-risk groups, but that didn't happen.
The worst part about all of this though is the obstinate denial my cardiologists had of any possible relation between my Pfizer shot and the pericarditis. They'd point to the fact that young men can develop myopericarditis without vaccination. This is true, though it's almost always the result of an infection, and in my region of the world the vast majority of these cases result from flu infections. However, when I had my diagnosis there were barely any flu cases in the country, it just wasn't the season, and most of all I wasn't ill. Pointing to the close proximity to the vaccination was met with immediate and absolute denial.
I think that's what bothered me most: I did my part, I tried to protect society by getting a shot, but when confronted with negative fall-out I had to fight for a diagnosis and was pretty much laughed out of the room for suggesting a relation to the booster. I don't think I've processed this yet. It really feels like I did everything I was told, giving up much of my hobbies, social life etc., but when my health was on the line... "Ho pal, can't be saying anything that could be contorted into criticism of vaccination".
I understand where you're coming from, I really do. It's rough to give up personal liberties for the "greater good", even though we already do on a daily basis. You can't run red light, you can't dodge taxes, ...
I don't think there was much malice in these new COVID-related laws. Sure there was some cronyism for financial gain in their execution, but that's not the point. I think they were motivated by an seemingly ever-increasing aversion to any form of risk and responsibility, both on governmental as well as societal level.
I'd love to understand and internally evaluate every law and practice that is put upon me, take my own responsibilities based on a thorough understanding of the issue. However, the world has grown too complex for any individual to understand why we are supposed to do the things that we are told to. It has become impossible to even be aware of every law.
I don't know what the "solution" to this extreme risk aversion is. I wonder if there is some historical precedent of a society undergoing the same tendencies and how that eventually got solved. Or didn't.
>I think that's what bothered me most: I did my part, I tried to protect society by getting a shot, but when confronted with negative fall-out I had to fight for a diagnosis and was pretty much laughed out of the room for suggesting a relation to the booster. I don't think I've processed this yet.
I recently came to believe that it's not accurate to model random humans as reflections of self. Situations like this make much more sense if you think the humans to be not much more but nodes of some greater societal 'meme' (as in infectious idea/ideology). Almost everyone is such a node in almost every respect. Better to drop the belief that you're operating in a world of copies of yourself, and rather embrace the model that you're operating in a world of memes, the nodes of which the people around you are. At least when it comes to explaining behavior which you have trouble understanding.
Just so we now for next time: what is the proper way to express concerns about _this_ kind of things with enough nuance and moderation so as not to be automatically considered an anti-scientist tin foil hat ?
What is the scientifically acceptable way to phrase "I'm not concerned about BigPharma planting 5G chips in my future children's eyeballs to turn them into communist ; but I'm very concerned about blind spots during testing and biases in protocol and just plain bad luck that made us miss something ?"
Maybe I just write too much software for a living, but my only certitude was that something, somewhere, was going to break. At least I can TDD the hell out of my paranoia. Don't let me write health policy, ever.
Sidenode: if this kid had chosen the wrong profession in the wrong country, he would now be facing either "getting a couple of other shot" or "loosing its job".
If he had made a tiktok video about his problems, or a facebook post, or a twitter thread, etc... at some point it would have been flagged, and it would have only garnered the attention of the worst possible scammers.
And, worst of all, I'm pretty sure his grandmother would now refuse to get boosted.
Well, at the peak of the epidemics, there was a whole industry devoted to claiming the most bogus things and preventing the people with the highest risk / benefit ratio from taking their shots. I made fun of the most hilarious of them too.
That did not make me any less scared of the "oooops" moment.
This will get worse (myocarditis today, menstural cycles tomorrow, maybe strokes and cancer later ?), then worse (vast number of people completely loosing faith into their docs and letting a much worse epidemy settle), then worse, before it gets... well, before life goes on and we mostly forget, as it has ever done and as we ever did, I suppose ?
People don't care about being scientifically honest. If we did, more people would be annoyed by internet atheists championing science above all else. Pushing science as the end all be all path to knowledge isn't the wholesome thing it seems. Some people take it too far and turn it into a cult
Eric Weinstein had a great segment on his Portal podcast about this very thing. I can't recall the interview (maybe with Balaji?), but if it comes to me I'll comment it. The gist was that he was talking about Covid and he observed that the guest had to spend an inordinate amount of time saying what he was not saying, to the point of being absurd. He had to constantly preface his comments with a long series of statements of disassociation. "Now I'm not saying X, or Y, and I'm definitely not a P, and I don't agree with everything Z said but..." How can you have a conversation if so much time is spent not saying things?
> How can you have a conversation if so much time is spent not saying things?
Slowly, in carefully written form reviewed by people with the right training.
Unfortunately, in the middle of an emergency with the bodies of voting-aged people piling up... Not at all.
(Although, I guess not going to the other extreme of "having this conversation in bits of 140 characters among strangers with advertisers at each corner" did not help much.)
Mind explaining what you mean by his arc of disillusionment? I don't follow the guy, my only recollection of him is from listening to him on a podcast about some wild "physics theory of everything" a while back. I recall it being one of those "I'm not sure if I'm an idiot, or he's crazy, but this sure is a fun ride" kinds of experiences.
“The idealism of every era is usually the cover story of its greatest thefts.”
this is my favorite eric quote, which he also just applied to the ftx mess.
Eric's way of seeing things isn't a linear thing I can summarize, there's a few youtube vids you can search for the concepts of Kayfabe or his anger at the Consumer Price Index methodology which he's been making noise about for a decade, way before all the cool kids today tweeting about inflation.
It's about seeing narrative frames and language games that institutions play to intrinsically hide (to others and themselves) the mechanics of power/money. If you believe in beautiful liberal middle-class dreams it's really painful to square with reality of those machines.
He calls his own podcast The Portal because to see these patterns you need that moment where you step out of the calcified frame of current understanding, like in those kids books where youre stuck in a drab deadened state and then find a magical portal to narnia, can return transformed.
(You have to have those moments yourself, it usually feels like a loss of innocence imo)
>"Now I'm not saying X, or Y, and I'm definitely not a P, and I don't agree with everything Z said but..." How can you have a conversation if so much time is spent not saying things?
Further, it intellectually constricts the speaker, both in thought and speech. It's running a race with lead weights and straitjacket.
For a smaller, but longer-lasting example, think of how many times in the past six years you heard someone preface a statement with "I hate Trump, but". Those who lived under Communism and Nazism experienced the same thing: Anything that might be perceived by another as being against approved thought in any way had to uttered in a way that would plausibly insulate the speaker from undesirable consequences. Now, think of how long-term adherence to such behavior crabs the intellect and soul.
> what is the proper way to express concerns about _this_ kind of things with enough nuance and moderation so as not to be automatically considered an anti-scientist tin foil hat ?
The nuance is key. Frankly, I don't recall much in the way of nuance, I pretty much always saw concern about vaccines framed as a battle for freedom against a tyrannical political party.
Well, if you're scared of something, and it becomes mandatory, even when the decision comes from the most democratically elected government, you'll feel attacked.
Which raises a lot of questions (is "being scared" enough of a justification for refusing a law ? On the other hands, do democraticaly elected officials automatically get the right do decide what people should be "scared" about, without having any more evidence than anyone else - given that the only thing that can give evidence is time, time, and more time ?)
Questions that, unfortunately, had to be answered hastly and withouth much concerns for the unlucky ones - which, to be honest, is pretty much the theme of history, and we have been among the lucky one until now, so maybe we don't have that much to complain about.
> I pretty much always saw concern about vaccines framed as a battle for freedom against a tyrannical political party
You don't understand why someone with concerns about the safety of a vaccine might frame the problem not as the existence of a vaccine with tradeoffs other people might want to make, but rather as a political party forcing the decision on everyone? Or are you just being disingenuous? Be better.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] threadThe fact that this research is just now being done ought to be enough to immediately revoke the FDA emergency use authorizations and pull the product from the shelves.
The covid vaccines have been a complete and utter disaster at every level. The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
We now have victims of vaccine injury so scared of societal backlash they don't speak out, and doctors so scared of losing their license/job they ignore the evidence in front of them.
People in the control branch were told they were controls so that they had the option to get the newly-authorized vaccine for real. Standard practice for trials that go well.
I think it's standard practice for therapeutics, but not for vaccines?
The emergency use authorization seemed absolutely like the appropriate course of action given the circumstances.
This sort of claim can’t be made on that basis because a lot of people do not produce antibodies after infection.
Paper: “Predictors of Nonseroconversion after SARS-CoV-2 Infection” – https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042_article
Abstract: “Not all persons recovering from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection develop SARS-CoV-2–specific antibodies. We show that nonseroconversion is associated with younger age and higher reverse transcription PCR cycle threshold values and identify SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx as a major correlate of the systemic antibody response.”
Please note that this was already known when the study which is taken to show that people are imagining long COVID was published.
It’s not a good study.
Quite a bit of research has been done since then which further pins down the fact that long COVID is very real and how to diagnose it with biomarkers, which turn out to correspond very well with people saying that a SARS-CoV-2 infection messed them up.
Please also consider how harshly judgemental it appears when someone accuses a large number of people of imagining or making up a severe and disabling condition. You have to be very certain.
Also using steroids like dexamethasone were a later advent in treating covid that helped a lot. (They should have been standard of care right away like they would have been for any other respiratory illness).
These early follies increased the perceived need for a vaccine then and today still; risk : benefit analysis for the vaccines consider worst possible scenarios for covid, which include defunct practices like high PIP ventilator use and forgoing of common first-line treatments
The time frames for the graphs are not the beginnings of covid (EoY 2021). By that time the initial standards of care had improved to the steroid treatments (I can't say specifically which ones, because I do not know, but I do know they were generally the standard of care at that time).
The risk benefit analysis of the vaccine vs the disease is ultimately something that's impossible to do at this point, because it's impossible to be impartial to whatever side you think is riskier. In general, I think a disease is just always going to be riskier than a vaccine. Anything you say about the vaccine could be true of the disease as well until we have complete information about the disease.
I think for a lot of people COVID isn't "real". They don't know anyone who died. Or if they do they were old, and/or it happened in the hospital far away from whatever their personal reality is.
Believe me when I tell you the risk associated with the vaccine is nothing compared to what he went through. I fully believe had he been vaccinated he'd still be here today.
Sorry for your loss, but there’s no way you could know that. The very same logic you would require you to espouse the belief that any person who received a vaccine and died, died because the vaccine.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/media/151710/download
You don't get a choice about COVID getting into your body, and that is far worse than whatever possible long term effects of the vaccine might be.
There may be concerning long term effects, but keep persepcive, the worst possible case is still better than the known case of COVID. And of course long term studies on COVID are also still in progress with all signs pointing to even more bad effects of COVID coming out in the coming years.
And I only mean that as it relates to specific demographic cohorts, not overall. If I were elderly, diabetic, immunocompromised etc. I don't think I'd hesitate. But the data I've seen on my demographic cohort is a toss-up at best, or even shows the vaccine to be riskier.
You don't know that, because we don't know what the "long term effects of the vaccine" actually are.
The most common outcome of Covid is feeling bad for a couple of days (up to a week), and then moving on with life across all age groups. This has always been the case.
However, when you are talking about populations of 10s of millions in low risk age ranges, it's 10,000's of preventable deaths!
Even if you don't care about the deaths (it's their choice to die; whatever), note that for every death, there are 10-100 long covid cases that are pulling resources from the health care system indefinitely.
The vaccine seems to cut those by about 90% too. Why should we waste tax dollars on medicare and welfare for anti-vaxxers?
Not in young age groups its not. Those 10k at risk of Covid death are at significantly higher risk of death from other causes too. If we stratified by more than age you'd see significantly reduced IFR among all age groups in the group without comorbidities. Quit lumping all people together, this is the age of big data and we should be using it to enhance lives not subjugate with blithe renderings.
You seem certain of this, but the vaccines are new enough that we can't possibly have long term data to even evaluate.
Bodies are complicated, even more than software systems. I've been in enough SEV reviews where the root cause was seemingly innocuous to know that I can't anticipate with much confidence that any particular change won't result in some cascading failure scenario. This is why we have test environments. Luckily in software it's extremely rare for a change to take years to manifest bad behavior, but not so in medicine.
I'm no biologist, but an obvious question to ask is if the spike protein by itself, which the vaccine will produce, has different impacts than the spike protein coupled to the virus envelope. It's certainly smaller, will it be able to pass through areas where the whole virus package wouldn't? What about the end of the spike that would otherwise be attached to the envelope, will it have an effect?
You can't naively draw a Venn diagram of virus and vaccine impacts where the vaccine impacts are fully a subset of the virus impacts.
Well... if you think that there's a case for an emergency use authorization, then you kind of can't wait to determine long-term risks. If there's a Covid epidemic threatening to kill millions of people in 2019, you can't wait for a study of long-term consequences that terminates in 2027. You have to decide with the information you have in 2019.
Was there a case for an emergency use authorization? Covid did in fact kill millions of people, so arguably yes.
> ... and certainly before any mandates.
Yeah, there I'm with you.
Sure, except for the 20+ million lives they saved:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/06/covid-19...
> The erosion of trust in the institutions that are supposed to protect consumers has alone done exponentially more damage than the virus it self.
Source needed. Reading these comments, one would think nobody ever died of COVID. One would think we didn't have hospitals crammed to the gills with them.
There is no reason to expect 20 million people in the United States would have died if we had taken a european approach to vaccination approvals.
The anti-arthritis medications I take cause terrible side effects.
These options are still better than the underlying problems. Throwing out pithy feel good quotes doesn't capture the nuance of the line that doctors walk when trying to treat illnesses. "Do no harm" is the ideal. In reality it's to do less harm than the disease.
At the time, he wrote (https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...):
> Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? How can we tell at what point such a curve might stop?
It did exactly that.
They fortunately can tolerate a few degrees higher core temperature than the hornet - it can't be good for the bees but if your lifespan is 60 days.
210,000 to 448,000 Americans die every year to preventable medical errors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventable_causes_of_death#An...
This is more people than COVID kills in the same time period, but strangely there's no panic about that. No mandates. No significant steps from any authorities to do anything about it. Perhaps because there's no money in that, unlike pushing a remedy for something that's not as significant as people feel.
edit: Since HN is ratelimiting me and not letting me reply to the below, here's the reply I've tried posting after an hour of "slowing down":
Checklists: https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/checklists-can-reduce-fata...
The same thing NASA uses to prevent human error: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19910001641
Mandatory checklists would wipe out most of them, yet there's no mandate for them.
Humans are messy, can't hold all knowledge about everything in their heads at all times, and error prone. Unless you replace them entirely you're not going to be able to eliminate medical errors.
Also, many hospitals view things like infection control or antimicrobial stewardship as cost centers, and they're not doing nearly as much as they can.
Excess mortality is higher now than during Covid https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-excess-deaths-hi...
There is evidence of statistical lies perpetuated to benefit big pharma.
When all of the broken testing was finally admitted and discontinued, were the previous misclassified deaths reinvestigated or reclassified? Of course not.The entire pool of data of Covid deaths has been poisoned. There is no interest in accuracy. But there does seem to be extreme interest in protecting the liability and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven, untested, ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection, spread, or reduce symptoms.
I'm glad I only got the J&J shot way back when it came out and avoided 3+ rounds of Pfizer or Moderna primary and boosters.
Excess mortality is higher now because we're in the middle of a massive rebound of all the other respiratory illnesses (that were stopped by widespread masking and record flu vaccination last year). Also Covid is still around. Omicron has partially "escaped" the updated vaccines (which you should take anyway).
Source for the respiratory illness spike:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/southeast-us-has-hit...
Interesting analysis of the UK's excess mortality published in the BMJ: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2524
> Surprisingly, mortality rates in 2022 for most of the 10 leading “underlying” causes of death such as heart disease, stroke, and lung and colorectal cancer have been similar to previous years, or lower than expected. An exception is the rate for “symptoms, signs, and ill defined conditions” (mostly deaths resulting from old age and frailty) which has consistently been higher than expected and also caused the most excess deaths, but not enough to explain the overall excess.4
> However, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities’ (OHID) analysis of deaths by “any mention” on the death certificate—rather than just the “underlying cause” of death—shows a substantial excess, in particular, of deaths from cardiovascular diseases and diabetes since April,6 prompting an investigation by the Department of Health and Social Care. Growing evidence suggests that covid-19 increases the risk of cardiovascular problems even months after infection,7 which could in part be driving excess deaths. Covid-19 itself remains the sixth leading cause of death, causing 200-400 deaths weekly—a reminder that this virus remains a threat for the foreseeable future.
> Another possibility is that people may not be receiving the care they need from an NHS that was already overstretched pre-pandemic and is now coping with unprecedented backlogs of care and pressures on emergency services. This “crisis” situation has an adverse impact on all patients, but a lack of timely care can be especially life threatening for people with acute cardiovascular problems.
> ONS analysis shows about 3300 excess deaths occurred during the heatwaves experienced in England and Wales between June and August, mostly in older people.8
> ONS also notes that excess deaths can occur following periods when deaths were lower than average, ie, “mortality displacement.”5 Could some of the excess deaths since April reflect the lower ASMRs in early 2022?
I'm also curious about why there's such a difference in relative excess death rates between the US and UK. Currently in the US the weekly death rates are far below what they were in 2020-2021: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Meanwhile for the US and European countries, Covid death and excess death numbers are pretty close.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/10/world/europe/covid-russia...
> Excess mortality is higher now than during Covid
When did Covid disappear? This year, every week at least 2000 people died of Covid in the US.
> - Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
Have you heard of mask mandates? How do you think they affect the spread of Influenza?
Tools developed in one tenth of the normal time aren't perfect. Hardly surprising. If they detected covid most of the cases when people had it, they work. Much better than having no tools at all.
> Blindly combining "of" and "with" Covid cases for cause of death based on those same broken tests.
It does not matter if you die directly by a disease or by the sequels of the disease.
Lets assume that people were not dying really from covid. This still leads us with the problem that people were dying massively and more often than in normal years so we have a second hidden agent killing people that nobody found. How do we explain it?
> Influenza, pneumonia magically took a couple of years off during Covid
Easily explainable when everybody was using masks and social distance in those two years. People remaining at home don't pick influenza at the same rate than people in a concert
> PCR testing cycles at extreme highs
I'm unsure about what you want say with that. PCR testing needs to chase an organism that is mutating fast. They need to change at a high pace. Lab chemicals and reactives having an expiring date is not rare
> and profits of the pharma companies that coerced unproven,
Green card granted by all regulatory agencies, so proven
> untested,
overtested, the entire planet toke it one year before the first antivacs
> ineffective "cures" that do not prevent infection
vaccines never claimed to prevent infection. The makers repeated it again and again.
> [not prevent] spread
About spread. Too litle, too late and one step forward, two backward.
Negationists and agents actively promoted the disease, sabotaged healthcare and created chaos. People was videotaped deliberately coughing in the face of other after tearing off their masks.
The same people were videotaped later grooming the masses to commit a coup. Caught trying to sell a computer stolen from the capitol to Russian agents. None of them where found linked with pharma companies (and is very unlikely that a pharma company would lobby for convincing people to reject pharma products).
Not really fair to blame pharma while people were sabotaging the control.
>, or reduce symptoms.
This is simply false. Is a proven fact that vaccines reduced symptoms and saved people. Just take a look at the statistical data.
Is proven empirically that most of the zillions of people that received the vaccines didn't developed serious collateral effects.
Is proven than the group that received vaccines had a lower mortality than the group that rejected them. There are dozens of notorious antivacs videotaped bragging about the "inoffensive" disease, actively trying to caught it, doing everything wrong on purpose... and realizing too late that they will were dying from covid.
I agree that the main cause of death here should be stupidity, not covid.
There is no credible epidemiologist who wouldn't call the COVID-19 vaccines a vaccine.
And there are a number of vaccines with limited reduction in transmission but effectiveness against more severe outcomes.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
Wait, what? As in people should just take it as a prophylactic for heart disease, without even taking covid into consideration? It seems like this would be shouted from the rooftops if it were true.
Also their dataset had 13% covid positive rate. So ideally we should multiply the non vaccinated risk by 13%.
[0] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
The anti-vax stance is similar to the claims that tightly regulated nicotine vapes are worse than high tar cigarettes. (Except that you can just choose to not smoke, of course.)
I see the argument here in this thread that the vaccine isn't really preventing you from getting covid at this point (which is probably largely true) but shouldn't being vaccinated mean that you'll have a lower viral load and shorter duration of illness?
The mRNA vaccines work by causing the spike protein to multiply in your cells. Yes, the mechanism is different - the virus copies itself and the spike protein just happens to be part of the virus, whereas the vaccine mRNA just causes the spike protein itself to be copied. Note that with the vaccine, you're getting a massive number of cells "infected" all at once, equivalent to quite a bit of virus self-replication. So the result is the same, a lot of spike protein floating around and doing damage. The main difference in result is that with the mRNA, there is an upper bound to the number of cells which can be infected (and which therefore have to be eliminated by your immune system), whereas with the virus there is effectively no upper bound. But that doesn't translate at all into a difference of how much damage the spike protein produced by X infected cells produces, and it doesn't mean that the number of infected cells with mRNA is significantly less than the number of infected cells you would have gotten with a successfully-fought-off infection. So it could do just as much damage.
Reverse-transcriptase enzyme in liver cells in a lab has been shown to convert the mRNA vaccines into DNA. While it's unclear if it would actually be a permanent change to cells, DNA is a lot more stable than RNA and could hang around a lot longer than expected, and result in a lot more spike protein than expected.
https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
A) The general method of action of the vaccines is that the mRNA enters a cell (generally dendritic cells), the cell transcribes it into the spike protein, then the cell detects something off about the proteins and presents them on their cell wall for the immune system to respond to. The proteins aren't just "free floating" unless your immune response is
B) The likelihood of an immune response to an active infection never doing the same thing with cells that contain partially constructed virons / viron components, or achieving the same effect by breaking down full virons, is basically zero. So it's almost certain that an active infection would have "free-floating" proteins in some capacity as well.
covid vaccines are always present in the bloodstream after injection, even if injected intra-muscularly
an early study in japan showed only ~25% of the vaccine stays at the injection site
Absolutely terrible reporting in that link - instead look at the paper: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
Disclaimer: I try to be apolitical however there is a strong aura of bullshit around this topic so double check everything!> The risk of vaccine-associated myocarditis is consistently higher in younger men, particularly after a second dose of mRNA-1273, where the number of additional events during 28 days was estimated to be 97 per million people exposed. An important consideration for this group is that the risk of myocarditis after a second dose of mRNA-1273 was higher than the risk after infection.
That's from the study you linked; for the group most at risk of vaccine myocarditis, the vaccine was associated with a higher risk than the virus. In this study, this was true for Moderna, with Pfizer being about equivalent risk to the virus (albeit without considering that the risk of infection remains after vaccination). However, there have been other studies that found this to be true for all mrna vaccines.
So to answer your question, its technically true, but only if you dilute the at-risk group by including the entire population.
Earlier in pandemic 196k post Covid patients were monitored a year... "We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/
i.e. I would think that number has significant survivorship bias.
Also, can you imagine losing a child to something that was preventable? You can play numbers and statistics all day, but we're talking about children's lives.
You're probably not a parent? But for reference, go find examples of people who are parents that have lost children to some cause, and see what they're doing now? I would bet 9/10 times they're trying to prevent that from happening to others.
there are plenty of comments here that speak to the general age recommendation other countries have provided, but i have yet to see people connect the other MAJOR group of people that should, by all means, totally, 100% consider getting their nth vaccination -> anyone with a comorbidity! if you are a young man with diabetes, the risks you face from the vaccine vs a covid infection are no longer as murky.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33480849 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29221924#29223881
Children are not dying from covid. So there is no need to vaccinate them unless they are in a high risk category.
The NY Times reported "For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify."
And it would be just as backed up as if I were to say "Children are not dying from covid vaccines."
There are 31 reports of death following Covid-19 vaccination for children 5-12, and ‘10.9 million US children ages 5-11 have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine’ as of 11-2-22. This is 2.84 deaths per million. Again, VAERS notoriously undercounts.
https://openvaers.com/covid-data/mortality
https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...
When you say "VAERS notoriously undercounts", I think you're probably referring to the flu vaccine (where we would have historical data), but I don't think it's fair to say that would be true for the Covid vaccine.
Specifically because at the onset of this new vaccine, people are much more likely to report that a death happened after a covid vaccine. There is a segment of the population that has never trusted the covid vaccine, so they are a lot more likely to report a death after vaccination of a loved one. Also as the vaccine is new, there's probably a lot more data gathering around it because scientists would definitely like to know if the vaccine causes death. Lastly, it's an event you're much more likely to have talked to with your loved ones before you passed away, than with the flu vaccine.
My family knows I got a covid vaccine. My family has no idea about my flu vaccine status.
Lastly, and most importantly, the numbers for those are not intrinsically linked. There's not actually any implied causal link in any of those numbers "VAERS Covid/Flu Vaccine Reported Deaths by Days to Onset all Ages". They are all just correlated. If you want to look for a causal link you'd have to compare against the total number of people who got vaccines on that day. And then compare against total number of deaths for the whole population.
And regarding the protestation that correlation does not imply causation, it’s not on me to prove that the treatment is harmful, and otherwise it’s safe and thus administered—-it’s on you to prove that it confers an all cause mortality benefit. I am aware of no evidence to suggest that such a benefit obtains in children, and suggest that this dearth of evidence explains the failure to approve the vaccines for children in many European countries.
As well as explaining confounding variables that your reference doesn't take into account for what that means. None of your sources are accounting for how politically embroiled this vaccine is, and how much of a difference that would make in who/what gets reported.
Just in case, I will make this point. If you had a loved one get a covid vaccine, and then die 20 days later, would you report it to VAERS?
So... what you're saying is that the vaccine is not better than the virus? Because that is the simplest and best explanation for this observation.
Knowing what I know now, were a family member to die 20 days after a vaccination I would certainly submit a VAERS report, but I find this question incredible: are you really disputing multiple studies that conclude that VAERS underreports adverse events by appealing to your nebulous feeling that family members surely would not neglect to file a VAERS report after the death of a family member?
Does the fact that only a tiny minority of the population even knows VAERS exists provoke doubt?
How about what HHS has this to say about the matter (https://vaers.hhs.gov/data/dataguide.html):
Further, even if I granted that literally every death due to the vaccines was reported to VAERS, there still remains the extant signal which logically admits the possibility that children 0.5-5 suffer a higher rate of death to the vaccine than they do the disease.As for the insulting claim that no standard of proof would convince me that the vaccine is better than the virus: all I require is a sufficiently powered RCT with a genuine placebo in the control, full disclosure of patient level data, and all cause mortality as the primary endpoint. It baffles me that you don’t demand the same.
https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2021-052273
https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fijpo.12920
To be clear, I am not telling anyone to avoid vaccination for themselves or their children. Vaccination is a good option for the vast majority of patients. Talk to your doctor.
And ironically, school closures and lockdowns during the pandemic actually increased the rate of childhood obesity. The purported "cure" was not only worse than the disease, it actually made the disease worse by placing children at greater risk.
https://www.cureus.com/articles/107920-increased-incidence-o...
It seems like I'm getting a continual -2 on votes for all of my arguments just cause I'm coming off as "pro-vaccine". So it doesn't actually seem to matter what appeals I make.
Also though, I don't really believe I'm changing anyone's mind on this. I'm just inviting people consider the humanity of things like "child deaths". Which, is much easier to consider as a number than it is as an actual concept.
I don't really have time to cross reference all your different comments, but when you post a comment that is just appeal to emotion, I tend to mention it.
In all honesty, I will say that pointing out rhetorical styles is probably the least constructive internet discussion you can have. Mostly because even if you can point to a logical fallacy, doing so doesn't negate the underlying argument unless you can actually explain it.
Now if your argument is "what's the harm?, why not vaccinate everyone?" my answer would be we don't actually know what the harm might be to these kids later in life. No one does. Probably no harm, I guess? Maybe a 3/1,000,000 chance of harm? no one knows.
Early on, the goal was to reach herd immunity while we still had vaccines that were fairly effective at reducing transmission against the variants we had had, before they mutated.
But also, I don't know how familiar you are with gov't messaging. But the more widespread you make a message, the less nuanced you can make it. People at large don't take nuance very well, and people at large are bad at evaluating circumstances. So if you give them a message like "People over the age of 65 should get 3 doses, and people over 30 should get 2 doses, etc." You're going to end up with most of the people not knowing what to do.
To add to that, you have people "doing their own research" who have no idea what the requirements for actual peer-reviewed research is, screaming from the rooftops that you can't trust anything coming out of anyone's mouth. And they will latch onto any piece of nuance and tear it to shreds.
Now, I still think that American institutions have done a bad job communicating, but considering they were undermined at every step of the process, I'm inclined to believe that it's more reasonable for them to give a blanket across-the-board recommendation than it is to destroy their own goal by adding confusion of "nuanced recommendations".
What age groups does this affect?
I think I have condition Y so I should go get vaccinated, but I have conflicting information on that from multiple doctors. Should I get vaccinated?
Also, in the US people often take advertised medications to their doctors and ask if they should take it, rather than doctors recommending things to people.
Finally, there are large segments of the population that don't consult doctors for varying reasons.
You wanna try and make that message simpler?
The mRNA vaccines weren't even tested for transmission during the early trials. It was impossible to make educated statements about reaching herd immunity through mass vaccination without any data. This did not stop people from introducing mandates in some places, even after it became clear that herd immunity will not be reached, which goes a little beyond bad communication.
In hindsight, that was incorrect, but you can't criticize a decision made with limited information with perfect information, and pretend like you would've seen the perfect information at the time. It is reasonable to assume that viruses would be subject to herd immunity, because it's been true for the vast majority of viruses we've interacted with in the past.
I can absolutely criticize handwavy low knowledge / high impact decisions afterwards, because that's what they were and that was clear to many at that time already. Consensus wasn't reached based on knowledge, but based on power.
Luckily I came to that conclusion early during the pandemic, so I don't feel compelled to defend unethical decisions now.
In converse: we should have skipped phase 3 trials (effectivity) and should have started vaccination after safety was approved.
If anything the vaccination campaign has shown that sometimes acting fast can be tremendously helpful.
Since my dad had his health go so poorly after the vaccine, I decided to not risk it, specially considering my existing conditions.
It was an emergency.
At the time the vaccine got authorized, we were in a middle of a pandemic, millions of people with no immunity were getting sick, and we couldn't stop the spread even with heavy restrictions. It was clear that we will all have some immunity eventually. The point of the emergency use of vaccine was to give people immunity in a way that wasn't as bad at getting sick. Wait too much, and the vaccine would have been mostly useless. It was a game of how much uncertainty we allow vs how much more deaths if we do nothing. And I think the (fairly conservative) bet saved millions, maybe we could have saved a bit more if we actually vaccinated people before the end of phase 3.
We are now in the end game, and the rules have changed. We are now almost all immunized in one way or another, the virus is now optimized for immune escape instead of raw speed, thankfully making it less deadly in the process. Because of that, the way we approach vaccination needs to change too. We can't compare today's situation with the beginning of 2021.
Some time in 2021 there was a story about COVID vaccines and heart issues here on HN. The comments filled up with people saying that ever since they'd got their shots they were experiencing new heart-related symptoms they'd never had previously like permanently racing heartbeats, palpitations/fluttering, inability to do exercise and more. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to re-find that discussion. I also have a good friend who works in IT who had a heart attack in the weeks after his shots, but he refused to believe that's what happened and never went in to get diagnosed (the symptoms were an exact match however).
Some rough calculations indicate the numbers affected by this kind of (hopefully) low level heart damage seem much higher than claimed. They say of the "hundreds of millions" of shots there are only 1000 cases of diagnosed heart damage from the vaccines. Call it 1000/100,000,000 or one in a million. There are approx 5M readers of Hacker News per month, so far less per day. Of those only a tiny handful have accounts and post comments. If their numbers are right then there should be ~no HN commenters with post-vaccine heart problems but this thread filled up with people posting their own experiences of such a thing.
Then there's also the other health problems. My gfs friends who took it have been complaining that they seem to get sick with colds/fluey things way more frequently since the shots, I heard similar complaints from a couple of old coworkers. One of those girls complaining of frequent sickness also reported disrupted menstruation but the doctors have ignored it all because as far as they are concerned, the vaccines are 'perfectly safe'.
I don't know if I should keep getting boosters or risk a potentially worse outcome from covid, which I haven't had yet, though I've been very exposed to.
Anecdotally, some, not all, but some of my triple vaccinated friends are getting sick constantly and they've said that every time they catch covid, it gets worse. This is just a few people out of several that I know, so it doesn't mean much if anything.
Unofficially the effect does exist and goes by various names: OAS, Hoskins Effect, immune imprinting. It can be seen in some of the vaccine effectiveness data back when it was being collected by places like the UK, where vaccinated people were getting COVID at 4x the rate of unvaccinated by the time they stopped reporting (and the rate was worsening with time).
It can also be seen in the boosters trial data where they had to switch the definition of success to antibody production, because the boosters were not actually reducing infection incidence e.g. the bivalent boosters were tested on all of 8 mice and all 8 got COVID when exposed so effectiveness is zero, but that didn't stop them being approved on the basis that they caused production of antibodies (to the variant targeted by the OG vaccine, not Omicron).
OAS unfortunately can be caused by any vaccine tech. It's not mRNA specific. The antibodies you produce are for the older extinct variants that the vaccine trained you for, not the current variants. The body doesn't recognize that there's a difference.
Bing/DuckDuckGo go is much better for anything with a negative vaccine sentiment. I stopped using Google altogether, because of the pandemic, after repeatedly watching news articles and research papers disappear from search results. I want a list, not a guided experience.
[1]https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pericarditis/....
"Both the Vaccine and Covid are known have a low chance of causing heart issues."
It is 'known' by people who are deeply conflicted by their own pushing of the shots and could thus never admit it, if their policies had led to immune or heart damage. Nothing much can be said about vaccine safety given that the public health and research system are clearly terrified of doing or saying anything that might reduce compliance with their policies.
There are people talking about heart palpitations or pains, yard to say if that's enough to say they had myocarditis though.
For some reason still decided to get the third booster.. and I still ended up getting COVID twice (very mild both times). Don't think I'll be getting any more COVID vaccines.
Well the study is funded by the vaccine makers. So we can toss it out before it's even conducted.
Same goes for anything done by parties who have equated taking the vaccine with moral righteousness. If there are serious health risks it will only be found by a skeptic with a lot of perseverance.
[0] https://www.fhi.no/en/id/vaccines/coronavirus-immunisation-p...
[1] https://www.sst.dk/en/English/Corona-eng/Vaccination-against...
[2] https://www.health.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2022...
[3] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency...
[4] https://thl.fi/en/web/thlfi-en/-/thl-recommends-coronavirus-...
[5] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/stay-up-t...
[6] https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/21/florida-c...
https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/health-news-florida/2022-10-12...
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/11/medical-experts-rej...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scientists-pan-analysis-florid...
https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2022/10/15/they-are-right-w...
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/2-top-fda-officials-resigned...
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/11/white-house-threatens-to-fir...
3. https://www.health.com/news/new-covid-boosters-human-testing...
Even as an atheist, I'd be getting the religious exemption for sure! Mandating boosters for healthy young students doesn't make a lot of sense. We know now that vaccination is not the way transmission of the virus is managed.
https://www.harvard.edu/coronavirus/covid-19-vaccine-informa...
Yale students will be required to get an updated, bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster by the start of the spring semester.
https://yalecollege.yale.edu/get-know-yale-college/office-de...
Tufts University followed suit on Sept. 16, announcing it would require students, staff, and faculty to get the omicron vaccine booster by Dec. 2.
https://coronavirus.tufts.edu/healthy-at-tufts/covid-19-vacc...
"With this recommendation, the UC Vaccine policy now requires all staff and students to get the bivalent booster, when eligible"
[1] https://campusready.ucdavis.edu/covid-vaccination
[Edit] For anyone that wants to downvote this, please explain what I said that was untrue. Flu shots in the US have never been mRNA based. Covid shots in the US are mRNA based. Before covid, there was never at any point in history an mRNA based vaccine rolled out to the public.
No one is seriously tracking the adverse reactions, we've handed that off to the companies that produced the vaccines. And doctors are afraid to or don't care to raise concerns either. The vaccines are as statistically safe for me as COVID is for my age and health profile. And the vaccine makes no guarantee that I won't still catch COVID. Why would I double my risk when I've caught COVID, and it was nothing for me.
I didn't say there are no risks but those risks must necessarily be very low, as otherwise with a sample size of billions of doses issued even effects in the 1 in a million would be readily identifiable.
it's by no means easy to identify trends that are worth pursuing for a medical investigation in a varied cohort of a billion people, and poll size is only a single attribute -- this is made even harder during a vacination campaign that is trying to effectively drive the un-vaccinated rates to as close to 0% as possible, making comparative studies even more difficult to establish.
Time/race/status/age/health all matter. You can't just take a look at what conditions that the billions of vaccinated share, that's ineffective for any kind of impact study.
It's my opinion that any 'precise' data is going to come about in years and years once we can establish a generational gap between this event and others so that we can effectively create a cross-generational comparative study.
However, at the same time we have people in sibling comments claiming to know multiple people with conditions ranging from changes to their menstrual cycle to death. This can't possibly be related to the vaccine at anything like the rate people are for some reason inclined to believe.
Personally I found the effects from the 3rd booster almost as bad as COVID itself so I'm unlikely to get another unless there is a compelling reason.
[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346
What you posted was condescending and demonstrative of a large blindspot as to the degree of adverse event surveillance actually being carried out.
Hope that helps you achieve the tone of discussion you're aiming for, in the future.
Indeed there is no point in communicating further, you made up your mind years ago and you will probably never progress beyond repeating the old talking points. Luckily most of the rest of the world has started to see reality is a bit more nuanced than ‘COVID is doom, vaccine is good’.
Finally also the danger of immunological imprinting[1] possibly resulting in less than optimal immune response. The fact these vaccines have little impact on transmissibility means basic evolutional biology theory is at play, driving selective pressures for antigens humans are less capable of mounting defenses against thanks to an already primed imuno response of the original virus' antigens. This is evident with the proliferation of variants and sub variants.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Original_antigenic_sin
It may have been influenced by the bias for action, but the trade off was the death and disruption we saw in 2020-21, compared to a future risk that scientists projected as minimal.
It still seems like a solid decision to me. But if this research shows that millions die from increased myocarditis rates, I think it would have been a bad outcome. Still not sure if that would influence my perception to the process.
Making decisions under uncertainty is hard.
I don't blame rushing the vaccines at all. In fact, maybe we should have skipped more steps to get the vaccine to 70+ year olds or people who are obese faster. But let's just be honest, the risk profile for younger people just wasn't high. The data was clear very early on. That was even with underreported numbers. It should have never been mandated and if you were at a decent weight and under 40 you were never at that much of a risk, especially to say something like the flu.
The decision didn't have a great result because the assumptions didn't hold. Good process, bad outcome.
(Not to mention that if everyone had actually just gotten the shot, we might have stalled the viral evolution into the delta + subsequent variants. My understanding is those mutations reduced vaccine transmission efficacy. If people hadn't turned public health into politics, we could have possibly avoided the endemic nature of the virus, which I think we can all agree would have been a far superior outcome versus where we are today.)
And that is where I vehemently disagree. Bad process, bad outcome. Many people lied to make the information appear as you said. The incentives they had to lie should have a lot more scrutiny, rather than being shrugged off, and many of these people should be in jail.
I believed at the time (and still believe) the risk/reward ratio still favoured offering the vaccines to at-risk groups. Making it mandatory or de-facto mandatory for all was a colossal clusterfuck. It worked out well for big pharma though, but at what long-term cost?
I didn't mean to suggest you had any special ability. I was just wondering how you reached that conclusion. Internet text boards are bad at tone, I apologize if it sounded attacking. But I think it's a wide gap between officials lied and someone had a different interpretation and did not exhibit as much caution as I prefer in my p.h. officials.
I am certain people lied about covid. I'm not certain that was the ph officials.
Can you explain how this standard of rigueur leads to anything less than a complete halting of medical research?
The original trials for the Pfizer vaccine were conducted on 46k people (half of which necessary recieved a placebo). At the time of those trials there was no shortage of willing volunteers to take part in the trial, no limit on the amounts of funding available and a considerable appetite to do something. Other trials have to make to with much fewer participants with hundreds to low thousands seemingly typical.
~10 yrs of trials and safety data collecting (Including long term studies) is the historical norm. We've certainly not had a complete halting of medical research from doing that.
My main point though is that with the level of data provided and the fact long term studies have not, and cannot have been conducted in this time frame - the push to mandate (and coercively pressure vaccination uptake through fear of losing your job, or access to regular life things bars, cafes, travel etc.) is unjustified and arguably doesn't even reach the bar for informed consent (with many people getting it under the impression it would prevent contraction and transmission).
>The true incidence of myocarditis after influenza vaccination may be underestimated because of the subclinical and nonspecific clinical manifestations of myocarditis. A prospective study about the incidence of cardiovascular adverse events after smallpox and influenza vaccination revealed that the rate of clinical or subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis after smallpox vaccination was approximately 1:5,500, despite the fact that the rate of troponin elevation was 1:200 [9]. Similarly, 2.6% of the influenza vaccine cohort showed new onset cardiac symptoms, such as chest pain, dyspnea, and palpitation, but no case of clinical or subclinical myocarditis and pericarditis
https://www.cdc.gov/immigrantrefugeehealth/laws-regs/vaccina...
https://ihpi.umich.edu/news/most-hospitals-now-require-worke...
- informed consent at the time of signing an employment (e.g. military, medical) contract with known career conditions
- new conditions (mandates) being added to existing labor contracts, while there is active litigation on the purpose and legality of those conditions, and re-definition of legal language (e.g. CDC's 2021 redefinition of "vaccine") used in mandates
Very different from mandates being applied to existing jobs previously not subject to mandates.
> It ain't the mandates that are new.
The CDC (re)definition of vaccine is new.
Also the redefinition of pandemic around 2010.
And the CDC wrote zero of these laws. The CDC's rephrasing of an FAQ article on their website may be a good starter for a right wing conspiracy theory article, but it has no bearing on this topic.
Also, we should be doing clinical trials on flu shots as well. New drugs, even if they are only slightly different still require clinical trials. Why is hacking the immune system not subject to the same scrutiny?
Could you help me understand why you think the context is so similar between the two?
What's your opinion on members of the FDA leaving due to widely publicized political pressure to approve the vaccine? Do you think they were wrong for pushing back?
Genuinely hypothesizing, I am not sure of the answer but that’s what came to mind when I read your question.
Was there reliable evidence to the contrary during the initial infection window (2020)? (IE, anything showing that vents don't help)
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2021/non-invasive-ventilat...
https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30181-8
As with most other aspects of pandemic management, people made bad assumptions and jumped to incorrect conclusions based on little real evidence.
No one is claiming that ventilators don't help. They have been an effective salvage therapy in some cases where less aggressive treatments failed. But at the population level the number of patients who actually survived only because they were put on a ventilator is so small that it didn't have a major impact on survival rates.
TLDR It's a matter of degrees.
And according to other posters in this thread, it seems like the Pfizer vaccine is the vaccine recommended broadly over the Moderna vaccine in Europe. Coincidence, I’m sure.
"One of the nation’s top advisers on vaccination says it is unlikely young people under 30 will be approved for fourth doses, as Australia turns its attention to antiviral access to tackle yet another Omicron wave."
"Former ATAGI co-chair and current member Professor Allen Cheng said the increased risk of myocarditis and the lack of notable benefit from additional boosters meant it was likely the recommended vaccine schedule for younger people would remain as is. Some are approaching a year since their booster shot."
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-you-won-t-get-another-co...
> Approved for:
> Primary series in individuals age 6 months and older, or as a booster dose in individuals age 18 years and older (Moderna Spikevax® COVID-19 vaccine)
> As a booster dose in individuals age 18 years and older (Moderna Spikevax® Bivalent COVID-19 vaccine (Original/Omicron B.1.1.529 (BA.1))
> As a booster dose in individuals age 18 years and older (Moderna Spikevax® Bivalent COVID-19 vaccine (Original/Omicron BA.4/5)
Whether it makes them conspiracy theorists is another matter. If their position is sound, well, sound positions can be embraced for sound or unsound reasons. If their position is unsound, of course it will be for unsound reasons. So whether they're called conspiracy theorists matters much less than their reasons.
What are their reasons? They appear to cite a large relative increase in myocarditis risk in younger men. A statistically literate response would involve asking what the absolute increase is... and the proper place to reckon with relative comparison would be vs the unvaccinated infected:
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
I would absolutely recommend anyone wondering about a specific vaccination consult with a doctor or two (I do this and have had a certain class of vaccines contraindicated). But no red flags from medical pros on this one for me, and personally, even as a man outside the high-risk age groups, I can't remotely see a reason for assuming myocarditis would be a reason for avoiding the vaccine. As far as I can tell, it's almost on the order of your lifetime chance of being struck by lightning, and the chance of developing myocarditis from infection is significantly higher.
Conjecturing about whether or not a particular situation might be explained by a conspiracy does NOT make one into a Conspiracy Theorist.
The term Conspiracy Theorist would accurately describe someone who makes a living at it -- like Alex Jones or David Icke.
- "with one exception. Men under 40 who received a second dose of the Moderna vaccine had a higher risk of myocarditis followingvaccination. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are available in the U.S." I'd say it's worth a mention.
But then it's also quite an unfair comparison if you compare the all the vaccinated against a filtered group of unvaccinated people.
It's also possible I'm not reading it correctly, but I'm not sure how else to square it with the observation that men have higher baseline and post-covid-infection myocarditis risks generally (and covid patients have something like 10-20x elevated risks of myocarditis).
I also wonder how to square it with the rest of their claimsc Seems that you can't take any publication headline of any instance on any side of the argument on face value when stuff gets politicized like this.
"But the risk of myocarditis associated with the vaccine was lower than the risk associated with COVID-19 infection before or after vaccination – with one exception. Men under 40 who received a second dose of the Moderna vaccine had a higher risk of myocarditis following vaccination. The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are available in the U.S."
>Ladapo claims his analysis was based on a Florida Department of Health study showing an 84 percent increase in cardiac related deaths among men aged 18 to 39 years old within 28 days of becoming vaccinated through mRNA vaccines. Yet the medical community rejected the analysis Ladapo promoted.
…
> “I just cannot fathom a group of epidemiologists who would perform an investigation, looking at the risks of vaccination, and not also have performed an analysis that looked at the risks associated with the infection itself,” Salemi said.
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2022/10/11/medical-experts...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsoverti...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-pauses-use-mode...
> Finland on Thursday paused the use of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine for younger males due to reports of a rare cardiovascular side effect, joining Sweden and Denmark in limiting its use.
https://www.fox19.com/2021/10/07/some-european-countries-sus...
> All three countries based their decision on an unpublished study with Sweden’s Public Health Agency saying that it signals “an increased risk of side effects such as inflammation of the heart muscle or the pericardium” — the double-walled sac containing the heart and the roots of the main vessels. It added: “The risk of being affected is very small.”
For example, from the second link above (Denmark):
> Why are people aged under 50 not to be re-vaccinated?
> The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.
> People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population.
Anyone over 12 can get vaccinated and get a booster, but it will be the Pfizer vaccine.
Moderna did reduce its dose for the booster, but its original dose was also 3x that of Pfizer.
That something so obvious was enough to get you labeled a conspiracy theorist and banned off all major social media for close to two years has set back trust in science by decades.
Norway: 70% Boosted
Denmark: 63% Boosted
Australia:56% Boosted
Sweden: 71% Boosted
Finland: 74% Boosted
USA: 34% Boosted
SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina...
Yes it is counting any booster after primary 2 doses - which policy changes specifically? Most of these countries have been relatively consistent in their approach to boosters.
Which country(s) specifically changed their guidance about boosters after the 1st booster was released? Again I'm not aware of large swings in policy in most of these countries. Some aren't recommending 4th doses yet but I don't think any have changed policies about boosters after the fact.
> Adults
> For adults aged 18–64, the recommendation for three doses of the vaccinate remains in force. But anyone who wants to receive an additional booster dose, dose 4, may do so in the autumn of 2022. 65 plus and risk groups
> An additional booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine is recommended for the autumn and winter 2022/23 for adults aged 65 years or over, as well as people aged 18 or over who are in an at-risk group. This recommendation is valid from 1 September 2022 and covers everyone who is at an increased risk of serious Covid -19 disease.
[1] https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and-risks/disaster...
+1.6% in the past month seems reasonable to me
Surely you are not adding 3rd + 4th dose together? You can't do that. They are the same group of people. If everyone who got the 3rd shot got the 4th today, 108% of Finnish population would be boosted?
But this is across the board. Prior to covid, for example, the ground zero for anti-vaccination movements was Marin County, California -- one of the most liberal counties in the nation, where only 50% of students in some schools were given smallpox/measles vaccines and there were outbreaks as a result.
Given this environment, American public health authorities should recognize their credibility gaps and embark on a program of transparency, consistency, accountability, and humility.
Unfortunately this is the exact opposite of their behavior. There remains deep ties between public health agencies and large pharmaceutical companies, public health officials continue to invest in and hold patents owned by companies that fall under their purview, there is still a revolving door between the two, there is very little transparency, no accountability for funding research in foreign labs to skirt US safety rules and congressional restrictions, public health officials were widely photographed in meetings without wearing masks (surrounded by masked servants), and they adopt imperious tones demanding draconian punishments for deviations from policy as well as calling for censorship of their critics. Fauci's declaration that "I am the science" is an example of this imperious attitude, which is frankly disastrous.
Until there is real reform, the U.S. is going to maintain a huge credibility gap vis-a-vis other nations, which will make public health efforts that much harder here, and will also lower long term public health outcomes.
My sister is vegan and is in many vegan, all-natural, etc Facebook groups. She told me there's a lot of overlap of people there and people who chose not take the COVID vaccine.
One of her best friends is a teacher in Canada from Trinidad; she grew up without vaccines and similarly never gave her child the COVID vaccine
These two examples just seemed very different than the typical "antivaxxer" I hear about. Although it still seems premature to call someone who only doesn't take the first mainstream mRNA vaccine an antivaxxer.
Non-mRNA COVID vaccines do exist.
Covid was politicized, and so it became a right wing stereotype to not want the vaccine. But specifically the covid vaccine. I don't think most right wing anti-covid-vaxxers are anti vax in general.
Other examples abound if you just look a little bit. Infowars has been running anti-MMR content for years. And for decades, polls have shown that anti-vax views are independent of the political spectrum.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-arent-new-t...
You konw... If there is push, you'll pushed to find another way.
Vaccinated twice without booster, you are still considered unvaccinated
I was waiting in the cold with covid symptoms for over an hour in the line, just to be told that I was not eligible for the Bürgertest, even though my partner was confirmed PCR-positive, but rapid tests did not detect my and my partner's covid.
It was already known at that time that rapid tests had poor detection rates for omicron.
I then found a doctor who was willing to do the test, which turned out to be positive. I only went through this instead of just recovering at home, because I really wanted to have the certificate, because I suspected already that it would later serve as certificate for "full immunization", because that's what science already suggested at that point.
The STIKO at that time clearly advised against getting booster shots within three months after infection, but without certificates there was no way to prove prior infection and people were cut off from 2G, even though they were technically entitled to the exemptions. The BMG and RKI basically bullied people into taking boosters. Enhanced myocarditis risk was known too already at that point. The BMG and RKI constantly changed the rules in hand-wavy last-minute decisions to make it extra confusing for everyone.
Exxon has an interest in minimizing (disregarding) the harmful effects of their products and same goes for Pfizer & friends who's got every govt funneling money to them seemingly without limit.
They rank higher than Tesla on ESG ratings.
Yes, Exxon.
But that doesn't change the fact that vaccines save lives.
It's not that I am bending over backwards to defend Pharma. It's that people are bending over backwards to find shitty things in the silver linings of these companies, instead of just complaining about the thunderclouds themselves like the rest of us.
Corporations are big. Companies can be capable of doing shitty things and good things at the same time. If you wanna complain about Opioids, I'm happy to have a conversation about how terrible pharma is.
I'm sorry.. but wasn't it the US Government make significant investments in both companies producing this therapy? Wasn't the the US Military that drove much of the initial interest into mRNA therapies in the first place?
Why do we continue to consider these companies as anything other than conduits of government research and funding? When then is it a surprise when these companies don't recognize this that people become offended?
That sounds about right. I could believe that the only good thing to come out of these companies is the result of the Gov't makes them do things for the people. Profit is not a good motive for a company investing in making people healthy.
Yeah, all fine and good when you have informed consent. I took my life in my own hands by not getting vaccinated for covid after I looked at the mortality age graph, and knew I was fit and healthy and didn't need to worry.
Society at large, however, castigated me, threw me in the same box as a conspiracy theorist, denied me my rights. People acted goddamn stupidly about this subject. I'm angry about this and I won't forgive and I won't forget.
Where your decisions don't affect people around you, you're absolutely correct. But infectious diseases are not one of those cases.
The risk of myocarditis is an existential risk to my being, and one that only a fool would take.
Me neither. They attempted an unconstitutional mandate even after promising they wouldn't do it during the election.
I'll never forgive that or forget the social cruelty, scapegoating and illegal breach of limited governance.
I decided not to get the vaccine based on the data. Took me 2.5 years to finally get covid. It was 4 days of fever and feeling lame. I now have immunity based on the entire virus rather than a subunit of a protein that doesn't even exist anymore.
I also (rightly) assumed masks are not effective just observing the spread being very clearly seasonal. And that just being in open air would be far better than any mask could do. Completely disrupting normal life would cause far greater health consequences for general healthy people than covid itself. We ended up not saving the vulnerable and inflicting very real, unnecessary harm on the healthy - the worst of both worlds.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WYYMR2H
In either case, people are taking the vaccines because of the physical benefits the vaccines provide, not because of how they feel about the corporate history of the companies producing them.
I'm sure there's a cohort of people that fit your description, but a whole lot of people took it because they were forced to. I think at this point it's safe to say that some others took it willingly but were lied to and told it would make others safe when that was never tested before it was repeated thousands of times, and turns out to be completely false.
In all of these cases however it was not informed consent.
We are still not anti-vax at all. In fact, I might go for my next booster today.
The one thing that angers me is that this incident cost us $10K. Obamacare, which was forced upon us and costs us $2,400 PER MONTH, did not cover it. We have no recourse whatsoever for this incident and any future care requirements.
Science is hard :p
Good poker players can lose all their chips at the table to an unlucky draw and walk away knowing that they made the right play and that they'd do it again, even if they got unlucky on the river card. Good basketball coaches will still draw up plays to get the ball into the hands of their best shooter at the end of the game even if they miss sometimes.
If you're choosing between option A that has a 0.0001% chance of hurting you and option B that has a 10% chance of hurting you, and you choose A and still get hurt, that doesn't mean you made the wrong choice or that if you have it to do over again you should choose B.
In reality, we don't have that. We get whatever ideas have the largest marketing budget behind them, and we just have to trust them. It's more like "nobody gets fired for buying IBM (or pick your favorite pundit)" than running a poker scenario through a solver. And that's fine, I don't think you can expect much more than that out of people.
Pick your poison, then.
2. The vax doesn’t prevent infection anyway, so whatever the point they are making is moot.
3. The risk is being compounded each time- first from vax, then from infection, then from boosters.
I don't understand why anyone would do that, perhaps only because they understood that it was a mistake and they want others to make the same mistake.
You're saying "If you survive getting covid without serious injuries once, then you'll be less likely to get serious injuries on a re-infection later". The vaccine is to make it less likely that you get serious injuries from that first exposure.
The argument makes more sense when you take into account that the interesting case is actually "given that you've already had covid, should you get vaccinated?" rather than "given no exposures yet, should I make out with someone that has it or should I get vaccinated". I've seen a lot of noise about the latter case, and a lot of overlooking the former.
COVID was around before the vaccines, and before the boosters, and between the boosters. Some of us got it before the boosters were available, and before the next booster was due. This is the context you're responding to.
For a stupid real world example, my college friend had COVID was required to get the booster while he was recovering from COVID, so that he could continue school after. There's plenty of nonsense still going around. Natural infection usually doesn't count in the school system, from what I've seen. Surprisingly it does, where I work.
Doctors help basically just "we don't know, there's no research, it will hopefully get better". It did after a year. Great. Govt pushed people to vaccinate to prevent the spread (despite individual's risk being very low) with promise to compensate in case of issues. lol, they didn't even compensate people who were paralyzed after vaccination with response "You can't prove it's from vaccination, sorry."
Zero benefit from the vaccination itself, since she didn't go for a second shot after this.
Cost/benefit very negative, since she likely didn't need the vaccination in the first place since she's not in the risk group and this was just "for the society" thing. And turns out it doesn't work againt spread much either.
Can you expand on this please? I find it extremely hard to understand how an ACA-compliant health care plan could "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis. Unless you're on a high-deductible plan and the entire stay was less than your deductible?
I suspect the maximum annual out of pocket.
Try being hospitalized without insurance. You'll find out really fast. (I was, twice, circa 2010. I was unemployed and uninsured)
However when going through the annual election process it generally makes it very clear how much you are paying out of each paycheck and what the employer contributes. Now whether people pay attention at all I can't say.
I think Obama-care (as much as I still support it in contrast to just letting private healthcare continue as-is) actually made things worse in the US by letting insurers and providers use the government involvement as a justification for their BS.
When you compare US costs to countries like the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and similar it is indeed true that US is significantly more expensive.
It is also true that over time US costs are rising significantly.
However, the ratio of US costs to the costs of other countries has stayed roughly the same over time.
In other words, the rest of them are having the same problem of rising costs that the US is, and their costs are rising at roughly the same rate. We pay a lot more than they do now because we paid a lot more than them a long time ago.
This is worrisome, because it suggests that even if we can lower our health care costs to be in line with the rest of the developed world we are still heading for unaffordable healthcare--all we'd be doing is making so we reach that when the rest of the world does instead of a few years before they do.
Here's some comments from earlier discussions with numbers and a link to the data [1] [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32744920
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768484
There is certainly some inefficiency in the US healthcare system but mostly it reflects the poor health of the population. Switching to some form of socialized medicine won't fix that problem. Other developed countries are doing a little better at the moment but they're on the same trend line and will inevitably hit the same crisis. At some point if we want to prevent a systemic collapse we're going to have to get serious about emphasizing prevention over treatment.
As a personal anecdote when I lived in the US there were three months in a row where I paid 10/pill, 3/pill and 1/pill (I also had earlier paid 0/pill when I qualified for VT medicaid) for the same medication[1] as I was 1) initially uninsured 2) covered by the "cigna preferred rate" but otherwise had no drug coverage 3) had regular drug coverage. As a bonus a few months after that run a generic for my medication came out and I paid .10/pill for the brand name because the generic existed but they didn't have it in stock.
Please explain how that makes any sense at all.
1. Concerta - the 54mg version now apparently retails for $545 per 30 here's a weird website talking about it (I now live in Canada and while there isn't Pharmacare in my province the drug is free with some cheap insurance) https://www.singlecare.com/blog/concerta-without-insurance/
Actually no, you still won't. Because the hospitals send out fraudulently inflated/overitemized bills to help their negotiating positions.
To know how much medical care actually costs, you need to have "insurance" and read through the itemized bills and explanations of benefits. The top line large number is the fraudulent amount that has no basis in reality, there is an "adjustment" based on the rates the "insurance" company has actually agreed to pay, there is the amount the "insurance" company pays them, and then there is your portion. Adding the last two, or taking the first minus the second, is as close to knowing how much something costs as you can get in this fucked up system.
Also it bears repeating, never pay a medical bill unless you're damn sure you're responsible for the amount [0]. Even if you have "insurance", often you'll get sent the fraudulent bill right away, and it will take a month or two for "insurance" to bother doing their job. Also billing departments have no problem blatantly lying to you about your (non) responsibility for the fraudulent bill, since it might get them more money.
[0] Of course some times they have you over a barrel like ongoing care getting denied if you have an unpaid balance. In which case you just have to eat it and then hassle your "insurance" company for half a year to get your money back.
In practice how do you do this? I've never got a medical bill that made complete sense to me and when I did argue it went around in circles for so many months that it was not worth my time so I just paid it.
Then, you need to know your general deductible and copayment schedule. The bill should show original charges (fraudulent), "adjustments" to those charges to make them line up with what your "insurance" company has negotiated to pay, and then payment by the "insurance" company. The part remaining that you need to pay should line up with your deductible.
If you've got a large deductible (common) and this is one of your first bills, then the "insurance" company won't have anything to pay, but there will still be an adjustment. If you think that is off, you can contact your "insurance" company to check if it matches their negotiated rates. In my experience, their customer service departments haven't been totally gutted yet.
Calling the provider's billing department is generally pointless unless/until you know exactly what you're talking about. Once, a phone rep (at a small place even) called me to nag me about a bill. I told them that their charge was above the Medicare limit for a service, and that it needed to be corrected before I could pay. In response, they insisted harder that I "owed it" and I "had to pay". I told them they were wrong, ended the conversation, and just waited. Lo and behold 4-5 months later they finally billed the "insurance" and sent the correct bill. I think they were just hoping I'd fall for their fraud so they could pocket a few extra bucks.
I'm certainly not an expert on this subject in particular, just generally experienced at cutting through the avalanches of paper that psychopaths try to bury us with.
The parent poster likely benefits from the following items on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act:
> Annual and lifetime coverage caps on essential benefits were banned.
> Insurers are forbidden from dropping policyholders when they become ill.
> All policies must provide an annual maximum out-of-pocket (MOOP) payment cap for an individual's or family's medical expenses (excluding premiums). After the MOOP payment is reached, all remaining costs must be paid by the insurer.
Obama was a sellout.
’Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.’ ... I said, ‘Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself.’ ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I will let you bake your bread over cow dung instead of human excrement.’
We could be dealing with worse shit, however shit remains shit.
Sorry to hear that.
One of the massive negative side-effects of ACA will come to the national forefront in a few years. We now have tens of millions of people enrolled in Medicaid. What most don't understand is that, after 55 years of age, this isn't insurance at all, it's a loan you are required, by law, to repay.
Don't take it from me, here's a summary directly from the Medicaid website:
https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/eligibility/estate-recover...
I looked into this a while back. The State can place liens on your estate and your children could be stuck with a bill because of that. For example, if you have a home it is very likely that 100% of the value of your home will be consumed by your healthcare bills if you needed what I am going to call a normal level of care for that age group from 55 onwards.
In other words:
People were told they they were getting health insurance through Obamacare. In reality, they agreed to receive a credit card using their estate as collateral. If this isn't fraud, I just don't know what is.
Obamacare might just be the largest private-property grab by any government in the history of this nation, if not humanity. I wonder how many people actually understand they will not be able to leave anything to their children. Or worse, leave them a huge bill owed to the State.
These are the things that really rattle me: Politicians selling pushing programs in the most dishonest ways possible. How many people would have supported ACA had they were told they would have to sign-over their estate to pay for their after-55 medical bills? Very few, if any.
What really sucks about this is it affects the low to middle class portion of the population in a disproportionate manner. They are the ones who end-up on a Medicaid plan, not people who can afford to pay for something else. Once again, politicians claim to be for the little guy and, instead, they royally shaft them every time they are able to. All they care about is their votes.
Medicaid expansion is also just one portion of the ACA.
The low premium option is the least cost option if you don't use much healthcare, or if you use a lot; but there's a range somewhere in there where the higher premium plan may lower your total costs. Of course, if you're getting a premium subsidy, the calculation changes.
But yeah, Obama promised access to healthcare and delivered access to healthcare insurance. It's not unuseful, but it's not really enough.
If it were up to me, I'd lower the medicare eligibility age every year, and gradually grow the system, a couple decades later we'd have Medicare for All (ish, not all seniors are eligible).
An Obamacare Bronze plan is like the bank extending credit - they carry the umbrella after you when the sun is shining, but at the first drop of rain they disappear.
Of course, paying the hospital is usually sort of optional. They're most often happy to bill you later and send you to collections, and you can let it accrue. It's not great, but if you're so sick you can't work, what are you going to do about a debt you can't afford to pay? Better to not pay it.
These days, because of the ACA all plans are "emergency only", except without the lower premium.
They were cheap for a reason. They're back in force, if you want to grab one. I don't advise it. https://www.propublica.org/article/junk-insurance
These days all coverage is emergency only coverage, because of the insanely high deductibles. Except without the benefits of lower premiums.
I am aware that some things improved, but not for the average low risk person.
I do. My wife and I went bankrupt with it, via $90k in copays and coinsurance.
We had good insurance, but back then insurance could have uncapped costs of this kind. As a bonus, they could a) set a maximum annual and lifetime amount they'd pay and b) decline to renew our coverage, leaving only high-risk pools (4-5x as expensive for premiums) available.
I have a zero-deductible ACA plan. There are plenty of them.
How much does that cost? And which state?
No, that's not the case at all. We had to negotiate with the hospital and settled for this amount. The ACA covered none of it or a very small portion. I don't remember the actual bill, my wife dealt with all of it (she is a doctor and knows how to discuss such things with hospitals).
The ACA is not an insurance plan, so I assume you are using "ACA" as shorthand for "ACA-compliant insurance coverage".
It is simply not plausible that an ACA-compliant plan would wholesale "not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis, absent extremely niche and bizarre circumstances.
Given that you don't seem very familiar with the specifics, I have to assume that your information is either missing some very important details, or incorrect.
Suppose the insured did use a non evidence supported vaccine or whatever, the vaccine itself would not be covered by insurance, but the healthcare needed by the damage caused by the use of unsupported medicine would be covered.
Similarly, health insurance has to pay for your healthcare if you get into a car accident and do not have sufficient auto insurance to pay for your healthcare costs. Technically, you are sort of buying redundant insurance if you buy PIP.
Falling while skiing is not FDA approved. A woodcutting axe applied to the hand is not FDA approved. Drinking bleach is not FDA approved. And yet, health insurance will cover medical complications arising from any of these actions.
As a lifelong heart patient, I've had many post-operative stays not covered, past a certain duration regardless of my current condition and I've always paid for the highest tiers of health coverage (for over 2 decades now). I find it very likely that ACA would not cover" a hospital stay for myocarditis.
I'm of the personal political opinion that almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this. If they do step in, they also have to regulate the supply side as the free market is effectively broken at that point, and people who...say want to pay their own bills or for their own education by working or don't qualify for whatever government program is helping others, are screwed by the system.
Government intervention always seems to rake money into companies' pockets rather than helping consumers and tax payers.
> almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this.
I agree with all the points you make in your comment. I'll just add that the problem is far more complex than this. And, yes, it is all, 100%, caused by government intervention.
Without diving too deep, the problem starts with substandard education in the US all the way down to K-12 level. From there it goes to the insanely high cost of university education due to the government being involved in guaranteeing loan. Nobody in their right mind would give an 18 year old a $300K loan or $120K loan for a bullshit degree with no prospects of repaying it in their lifetime. Then we have heavy, expensive regulatory frameworks and horribly slow and bureaucratic processes to build or make just-about anything. And, finally, lawsuits.
When someone is laying on an operating table in the hospital, they are surrounded by a team with somewhere in the order of three to five million dollars in student debt. The same team likely spends somewhere close to a million dollars a year in liability and other licensing and insurance.
Each and every manufacturer of the equipment in that room and the tools used for the surgery, employs people with student debt in the range of $100K to $300K per person. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. The companies has huge regulatory, legal and insurance costs.
The hospital is in a similar situation. Millions of dollars per year in legal, insurance and other costs and a workforce that owes millions of dollars in student loans. Not to mention the various laboratories and services that make the hospital run.
If you follow the various tentacles and construct financial cost model showing what it takes for a person to be on a table in an operating room, the resulting number will be massive.
That's the key to our broken healthcare system and why no socialist utopia is going to fix it.
Until we fix the underlying cost structures driving the system, it is impossible to pass laws to truly control such costs. The "single payer" idea is, in this context, in a range between utopia and demented.
Why is it demented?
here's an analog: We take out one credit card with zero interest for a year. The intent is to use it to pay off all of our other credit cards within that period using this card by transferring the balance. People do this all the time.
Here's the problem: They don't change their spending behavior. Instead of ending-up with no credit card bills after twelve months, they wake up one glorious Monday now owing more money and having one more card to pay off.
You have to fix the underlying cost structure first. The problem can't be solved without this important first step.
This means getting the government out of education, student loans and a bunch of other areas. It also means demanding that the government be efficient and effective in doing the work we hire them to do.
The problem with this concept is that the people need to understand reality in order for them to vote appropriately. We don't have an informed citizenship. Not even close. We have clans fighting against each other and a few of us in the middle yelling "the emperor has no clothes!", and nobody listens.
Simply because they can and no one is going to stop them, so why not? This is the system working as intended.
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-li...
According to this study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/ there is no increase in Myocarditis cases among unvaccinated people who have contracted Covid-19. This study tracked 196,992 people which is a huge number, so the data here is quite good and clear. Contracting Covid-19 does not put you at increased risk for Myocarditis, the same cannot be said when evaluating a population that simply received the vaccination.
It's a decent data point but not conclusive.
> We estimated extra myocarditis events to be between 1 and 10 per million persons in the month following vaccination, which was substantially lower than the 40 extra events per million persons observed following SARS-CoV-2 infection.
and they include a brief literature review:
> Our findings are consistent with those from a case-control study of 884,828 persons receiving the BNT162b2 vaccine in Israel21. That study observed an association with myocarditis in the 42 days following vaccination (risk ratio of 3.24), but no association with pericarditis or cardiac arrhythmia. Two further studies from Israel add to our observations by providing clinical review to ensure robust case ascertainment22 and reporting investigations and outcomes in individual patients with myocarditis following the BNT162b2 vaccine23. Witberg et al.21,22 observed a small excess in events 3–5 days following the second dose of BNT162b2 vaccine, but most were mild presentations and just one classified as fulminant22. Mevorach et al. observed an incidence ratio of 5.34 for myocarditis in 5,442,696 persons following BNT162b2, although this was attenuated when restricted to the 136 definite and probable cases of myocarditis23. Risk of myocarditis was restricted to males under the age of 40 years and only observed following the second dose. Similarly, two studies from the United States have reported an incident rate ratio of 2.7 for myocarditis in the 10 days following the second dose of both mRNA vaccines24 and an estimated 6.3 and 10.1 extra cases per million doses in the 1- to 21-day period following the first and second dose of both mRNA vaccines, respectively, in those younger than 40 years25.
And conclude:
> In summary, this population-based study quantifies for the first time the risk of several rare cardiac adverse events associated with three COVID-19 vaccines as well as SARS-CoV-2 infection. Vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 in adults was associated with a small increase in the risk of myocarditis within a week of receiving the first dose of both adenovirus and mRNA vaccines, and after the second dose of both mRNA vaccines. By contrast, SARS-CoV-2 infection was associated with a substantial increase in the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis, pericarditis and cardiac arrhythmia.
It checks for the myocarditis infection from COVID-19, but it doesn't actually control for vaccination status. The people studied either are believed to have been COVID-19 infected, or had been vaccinated, but there was no designated unvaccinated control group.
In which case, you are potentially using "breakthrough cases" of COVID-19 causing Myocarditis to make your point (assuming they would be the same pre- and post- vaccination), rather than a definitive look at people who did not get the vaccine and how they fared. All the study proves is that COVID-19 infections cause increased Myocarditis... in vaccinated people. If you assume that COVID-19 has the same Myocarditis effect in vaccinated and unvaccinated people, it works; but if you accept that maybe the effects of COVID-19 are different in vaccinated people, it could fall apart, which is why the study about how Myocarditis doesn't seem to effect the 160,000+ unvaccinated people studied still has value.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
Risk of myocarditis following infection before vaccination was 11.14 [95% CI, 8.64–14.36] greater than the risk of vaccination, and risk of myocarditis following infection after vaccination was 5.97 [95% CI, 4.54–7.87] greater than the vaccination itself.
Easier to digest press release:
https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...
The German vaccine watchdog issue a warning letter because there were roughly 300 cases in total reported for the approx. 200m doses administered until May 2021 in the entire EU.
Myocarditis/pericarditis are very rare and the effects for young people were mild.
Moreover, clinical myocarditis and pericarditis are only tips of the iceberg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vveMHtVk_mY
People who have no significant symptoms can still have troponin in their blood, indicating damage.
More often than not it goes away on its own, but the sad thing is there is no surefire way to treat either condition. I've been to the best pericarditis/myocarditis doctors in the world, and I'll let you in on a secret - even these people don't know. Docs will throw Ibuprofen, Colchicine and steroids at it, maybe an experimental drug, or sometimes will just take that portion of the pericardium out. If it's myocarditis, well then, hopefully the medication works.
Like I said, the damage is irreversible. A year or two have passed for some of these kids. Many of them won't experience the long term effects until much later in life, or when it recurs. Just like the scar forms on the outside of the body, scarring forms on the areas damaged in the heart. A young person's heart isn't going to feel the immediate effects, but over the course of 10/20/30 years, quite the opposite.
I'm not anti or pro COVID vax as there is no reason to be tribal here, but there was definitely a more pragmatic path than simply vaccinating everyone. The logical side of my head says these kids were unjustly exposed to a risk they never should have been exposed to. It just doesn't make any sense why a healthy kid should take a vaccine when they could still spread COVID. We were all in the dark about this at that time, but the lack of debate and long term studies should have at least raised some kind of flag for people, especially the average Hackers News user. You cited 300 cases in 200 million like it's no big deal, but that is not justification for the 300 families or parents who voluntarily or forcefully exposed their children to this vaccination. Even if it's just a blip, it's 300 too much, not to mention all the cases across the world.
And again: becoming exposed to Covid without vaccination has even higher risk for myocarditis.
https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/dossier/coronavirus/coronavir...
Still I thing the whole thread of discussions shows that people are afraid of something which isn't such a big deal.
I am being as honest as I can be with regards to our feelings on this. I can't say we are angry about that incident at all. I think I can say we are not happy about not having been provided with all of the information before he got his shot. Frankly, I don't even remember if the data was available (I do think it was, BTW). Remember, at the time, only about 700 cases.
Of course, the outcome might have had something to do with the lack of negative emotions. I can probably admit our position today would be massively different had we had to face a range of negative outcomes post-hospitalization. These can range from life-long afflictions to death.
"I think I can say we are not happy about not having been provided with all of the information before he got his shot."
You pretty much hit the nail on the head here and is my biggest gripe about this whole fiasco.
I'm not sure about your situation now, but if this disease recurs and you feel like your kid's heart doctor has no idea what they are talking about, I recommend either Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic. I don't have Facebook, but I've been told there are many support groups for this disease as well there.
Good luck to you, and my prayers go out to you and your family.
Seriously? That's shitty. What's the insurance company's rationale for denying the claim?
Isn't there some kind of government fund to compensate people for vaccine side effects? Seems like you'd have a strong claim to get reimbursed from them.
https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp
They didn't, if the parent poster only got billed $10k. Two weeks in the hospital costs more than $10k; that amount is likely their insurance plan's annual deductible, coinsurance, and copays.
These expenses were a thing pre-ACA, to be clear; deductibles, coinsurance, and copays existed before it. The ACA capped the amount you can be charged.
As in you paid the whole cost, and it was $10K, and it didn't count on your deductables / out of pocket max? Or the patient paid portion was $10K, the insurance paid portion was $0, but now you're a lot closer to your maximums?
Did you file with the CICP? https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrze...
https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-data
Yes, we did. It's worse than dealing with the DMV. I don't know where we are in the process other than my wife (she is a doctor) telling me not to hold my breath.
deciding not to get a covid-19 mrna vaccine != anti-vax
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that. I just wanted to make it clear that, despite this incident, we have not changed our position with regards to vaccines of any kind. That's not to say we might exercise more caution in the future.
I'm curious about this. In my world COVID is over now. I live in San Francisco. Nobody I know is getting boosters or is worried about it anymore.
Where do you live and what are the circumstances like there that you're considering getting your "next" one? (you've been boosted before?).
Covid definitely isn't over, it's just that we've gotten better at treating it and people have decided that they are over it. It is still killing almost 2000 people a week in the US and it's very possible that we will see a huge spike in that as we get further into winter.
the "next" booster is referring to the updated vaccine that more effectively targets the dominant "Omicron" variant.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/six-recent-covid-deaths-...
That's why the age skew is so high.
The last time it was under 2000 was july '21
Ah thanks for the context.
I've only gotten the J&J vax (the worst one?) back in April of 2021, no boosters. I considered getting one but by then they were recommending boosters every few months and I decided to just "risk" it by not getting them? (I'm in my 30s and in good shape/health so don't feel vulnerable, but I understand that could be hubris and back-fire).
Back in those first few months I was keeping an eye on reports of side-effects, and J&J actually looked like the safest of the 4 available in the US. But it and AstraZeneca got absolutely vilified while any claims against Pfizer and Moderna got ignored as crazy conspiracies.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsoverti...
These stats don't indicate whether other confounding factors led to an individual's death.
The problem is it has to stop everywhere for us to get complacent. Especially, given that everyone wants to travel -- and travel abroad.
Pandemic is here. Nothing is over. We are distracted with other things. Things are "good" in San Francisco and the Bay now. No guarantee it will be so tomorrow.
That's not really established for COVID-19.
Also, endemic doesn't mean something doesn't matter. In much of Africa, malaria is endemic.
What you mean is "As a society we stopped caring."
E.g. I see lots of young not wearing masks to protect themselves, and I see more older people protecting themselves with masks. Seems like a reasonable balance.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/pandemic-vs-endemi...
It does not describe severity. Ebola is endemic in parts of Africa. I still hope nobody gets it.
We can change the meanings of words for political reasons but who do we do a disservice too?
Given that it is a word from my mother language I find it a bit insulting when politicians decide to change my language though to benefit for a year or two.
Tl;Dr: Saying that covid is "endemic" to the whole world, is an insult to my ears, logic, and a whole language and people. They should pick a different word if they want to disagree with doctors worldwide.
I think we just have a new normal in terms of life expectancy and mortality :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...
Furthermore, respiratory disease avoidance on a society-wide scale has never and almost certainly will never be achieved. The assumption that it is an attainable goal is truly nuts.
A CDC study found that people who wore N95 masks were 83% less likely to get covid than people who wore no mask,[1] but that overstates their effectiveness. People who wear N95s tend to behave differently than people who don't wear masks. They get vaccinated more, avoid gatherings, and generally try to reduce their risk of infection in other ways. Also the timing of the study is important. It was conducted before more infectious variants such as omicron were around. And since it was conducted when California required masks indoors, only 5% of participants claimed no mask usage. So the study compared N95 people against the most hardcore anti-maskers, not the typical person who doesn't wear a mask these days.
It is for these reasons that I would bet that the real effectiveness of N95 masks is around 50%, not 83%. Useful, but not something that lets you go back to normal life risk-free.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm
The boosters likely make sense for some people, but there's little real data on their effectiveness. Outside of the more vulnerable, I'd avoid them personally. The proof just isn't readily available of continuous boosters being worth it to me.
Los Angeles.
I know lots of vaccinated people who are getting infected. Just last week I went to a conference here in LA. I was going to meet-up this week with on of the people I saw there. He told me he got COVID at the conference.
Yes, I've had one booster. I travel a lot for business. I think it might be prudent to take further precautions. I have no reason to believe this is unsafe for me.
When I got it, I was a healthy, fit person without any of the comorbidities that go along with COVID.
Last week I had a mountain biking accident and broke half my ribs and punctured a lung. Then I got COVID in hospital. Fortunately it was quite mild, and even that was a bit of a nightmare as coughing was hell and I had quite low blood oxygen.
Given the risks of a booster are so low (though non-zero) and the risk that your health can change before you manage to contract COVID, it seems like the smart proposition to me to get the booster.
In my family sphere, covid is over. Though, to them covid was always overblown with the response being worse than the illness.
In my main friend group, most still feel we are still in the middle of covid. Though, from my perspective, their words/fears seem to differ from their actions.
Your San Francisco social circles are different from mine. Most people I talk to about this got the bivalent booster and got the old booster last year.
But people do not seem super worried at this phase. The booster is something routine like a flu shot.
I don't recall it ever being sold to me as that, and though I regularly get them, I've never gotten a flu shot with that expectation. It reduces your odds and makes the thing more mild. That's the point. That's what I've been told my whole life. They're not magic solutions to everything in your life, they can't even be 100% sure about how to tweak them for the dominant strains that season, but they help.
This stuff makes people go a little crazy with unreasonable expectations. I remember people complaining in pre-pandemic years ... "the flu shot is only x% effective so why bother?" And the reason has always been that x > 0, any two-digit number for x is pretty worth it, even if it intuitively sounds small. It's pretty similar for COVID.
We really don't know much about this virus and by association it's vaccine - it does not behave like the flu - lost a colleague to Beta who was way fitter and way healthier than me (he did Murtai and BMI) - he ended on a ventilator and died, and I was just man down for week and a half at home.
It still took me weeks to recover back to myself again - still got the booster shot afterwards.
that angers me too. america bumbled its way through the pandemic, and we're no closer to getting single payer healthcare. not even for medical care related to the pandemic, which is collectively beneficial.
They may be saying the hospital or some provider within it was out of network, challenge this on the grounds it was an emergency. Challenge everything on the grounds that it was an emergency.
We had excellent grounds to challenge a few of the charges from the hospital (clear billing mistakes), but it never got to the point of evidence. We just called to argue and they instantly dropped them. I would strongly advise just calling and complaining and seeing what that gets you.
Many hospitals offer interest/fee free installment plans, you just have to ask.
I am, by nature, a mild mannered (perhaps even meek) person, but let me tell you that just doesn't work with hospitals and insurers. Their process requires you to take an adversarial/demanding role with them otherwise you will not just get billed unnecessarily but also not receive all the care you are entitled to.
This isn’t true at all, the ACA did a lot of mandating what insurance companies must cover, what maximum deductibles were, etc.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/
Edit: ah, yes, found the sub thread on cicp.
You had 15 kids at the time? How many kids do you have now? My hat is off!
The ACA individual mandate penalty was eliminated in 2017.
The ACA destroyed the prior insurance market. There is no way we can get what we had before for $650, in terms of cost, coverage and quality of care.
Calling this out as bullshit. Show me a reference.
You can get a PLATINUM plan on the California exchanges for less than that for a family--and your co-pay for everything will be under $250.
I would also like to point out that "myocarditis" qualifies as a preexisting condition. Without Obamacare, your child would never be able to get health insurance at all.
You mean, like this:
https://i.imgur.com/iIz30xw.png
Take note of the rating.
The fact that they are labeled "Platinum" is nice marketing. We've had family members and friends on some of these plans, they are --and I am being kind-- not great.
The context shouldn't be what's on the CA exchanges today. It should be what we and others had prior to being forced into ACA. Which was fantastic insurance for the entire family for $650 per month. Our deductibles were half what they are today and we had all the catastrophic stuff just the same. I assure you that, with my wife being a doctor, we did not have shit insurance.
What should horrify everyone is that, today, in the US, a family has to spend $30K per year for health insurance. That's just insane.
Before you say "we don't". If you get your insurance through your employer you should ask them how much they are spending for your insurance. Unless they got you on a shit program, they are likely spending $20K to $30K on you. This is money that is not available to give you a raise. In other words, you are still suffering the consequences of the ACA scam, you just don't know it.
Oh, yes, and don't get me started on the Presidential promise that families would save $2,500 per year, keep their doctors, etc. We went from $7,800 per year to $27,600 per year. More than that actually. Due to the high deductibles we have to spend thousands of dollars per year before any of it actually kicks in. I haven't done the math at this point. I would not be surprised if we've reached $40K.
Again, no problem helping others. That doesn't mean robbing families of tens of thousands of dollars per year. That's fucking criminal.
I know many don't feel this way. That's only so because they have never been on the receiving end of something like this. We love to talk about the concept of "fair share". Well, tripling health insurance costs isn't anywhere close to "fair share", it's government-enforced theft under false promises.
I'm standing here with a friend who got full mental health care ($0 copays for almost everything) from "Sharp Health" and didn't even need to use the exchange to get the rate ($600/mo direct retail from Sharp). Kaiser is on the same order of magnitude.
Hell, even straight up Blue Cross/Blue Shield is better than what you picked. Good grief.
> The context shouldn't be what's on the CA exchanges today. It should be what we and others had prior to being forced into ACA. Which was fantastic insurance for the entire family for $650 per month.
Okay, okay, let's refresh your memory:
My mother was widowed and had to buy health insurance at 60. She got lucky and could tap into the PA Teacher's Pension system for a mere $1,100 per month. She paid that for 5 years until Medicare. This was prior to Obmamacare. Where was her $650 plan?
My wife was 35 and had sleep apnea and her cheapest plan that would even cover her was $3,500 per month with an enormous deductible. This was prior to Obamacare.
10+ million people couldn't get coverage. "Excision panels" worked hard to dump you off the rolls the moment you tried to use them.
Okay THAT was the system before Obamacare. Remember now?
What you are pining for was the old "indemnification" system that was due to the extremely strong labor unions. Unfortunately, that went away in the 80s due to the rise of the HMOs and the fact that everybody dumped on the labor unions. Many of us fought against that knowing that the HMOs were picking off the "profitable" people and were eventually going to to collapse the indemnification system--which is precisely what happened. And then the HMOs weren't so profitable once they got those patients and would dump them--which they did.
And THAT was the situation before Obamacare.
The objection everyone's having is that the $2400/month plans are exceedingly unlikely to refuse a medically necessary hospital stay for myocarditis. People are trying to figure what critical piece of information is being left out there.
> Oh, yes, and don't get me started on the Presidential promise that families would save $2,500 per year, keep their doctors, etc.
Nothing in the ACA changed how doctors pick which insurance networks to honor, but if you switch insurers as part of picking an ACA plan you may have a different network just like you'd have if you did so with a non-ACA plan.
You're highlighting ongoing problems with the American health insurance industry and falsely portraying them as ACA-specific. High-deductible plans were on the rise with insurers before the ACA (https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/snapshots-the-p...). Premiums were going up 5-15% a year before the ACA (https://www.fastcompany.com/40470468/this-scary-chart-shows-...). Doctors were dropping insurers before the ACA. etc. etc. etc.
Again, look at https://www.fastcompany.com/40470468/this-scary-chart-shows-....
1999: a bit over $5k/year in average premiums
2009: about $13k/year in average premiums, the year BEFORE the ACA was passed
The whole point of the Platinum and Gold plans is that you pay more upfront each month in exchange for lower out-of-pocket expenses when you actually utilize your insurance.
Chances you kid would have gotten any troubles from covid are statistically absolutely negligible, given his age and hopefully absence of other illnesses.
Now you can blame as anti-vaxxer and sorts, but at least I didn't get myocarditis.
it boggles my mind that despite being plugged into an information network people can be this staggeringly ignorant about the wild success of vaccines
Hard for me to consider that anything other than a wild success. Is it perfect? Of course not. Do I wish it was better? Obviously. But it reduced the risk of COVID significantly for a huge number of people.
Those of us in countries that had successful lockdowns look at the mortality rate of those that were not able or willing to do so & pretty thankful we were able to postpone the virus until the vaccine was deployed.
I live in a place which has the unfortunate claim of longest, harshest lockdown in the world (Victoria, Australia). Multiple lengthy lockdowns, curfews, masks outside enforced by cops, sitting on the beach was illegal, taking kids to park illegal; people were literally chased down the street by cops demanding to "see your papers". Many cops resigned, and now in 2022 Victoria is struggling to find new recruits after a mass exodus of cops - many of whom did not agree with the job they were ordered to do.
Most people here do not consider those lockdowns a "success", and experts including epidemiologists have referred to our lockdowns as "draconian", and harmful.
Now, in 2022 we have more covid deaths than before, and that's with a very high rate of vaccination in the community, particularly the older age groups. But they're still dying at a record rate. The virus still spreads and still takes out vaccinated and boosted victims. Therefore, I would never adopt the blanket "thankful" rhetoric that you've shared. Thankful for lockdowns, thankful for mandates, thankful for what is frankly, an underwhelming vaccine compared to other vaccines. Yet, "saved millions of lives" is the go-to catch-phrase, and anything else can't possibly be true. Can it.
I don't think it's totally unfair to call it 'underwhelming' though. We are so used to vaccines being wildly successful at stamping out a bunch of diseases that when something as virulent as this comes along & the efficacy isn't as high (in no small part due to the fact that so many countries decided to make it the only line of defence), it's easy to be disillusioned.
I live in Queensland, Australia, where we had lockdowns that were similar in harshness but much more limited in length. I am very familiar with the Melbourne lockdowns (one of my colleagues got stuck there for months after he got trapped there after going down for a 1 week holiday).
We probably just got lucky that we didn't have a Melbourne-style outbreak. But the simple fact is the lockdowns prevented us from having a widespread outbreak before the vaccine was deployed. The lockdowns sucked but my anecdata from my network (certainly generally privileged people whose careers were not wildly affected, so not a representative sample) was the lockdowns were worth it.
It is trivial to look at mortality rate data between, say, US/UK and Australia to see the impact that the lockdowns had. It's simply undeniable that they saved lives. People complaining loudly about 'draconian' tend, in my experience, to be dipshit libertarians that would never brook any lockdowns under any circumstances simply because of their insane political views. Others complaining about lockdowns not working tend to be talking about their own lockdowns in their own contexts which were not as harsh as Melbourne (which, arguably, ended up working).
Of course we have more COVID deaths than before - we've dialled back all the preventions! The policy decision was made to let COVID run free through society and that the vaccines (which we both agree are imperfect, but perhaps I'm the only one that acknowledges they're vastly better than nothing) were the only mitigation that we're apparently willing to tolerate.
We've done fuck all about it and everyone seems surprised that the body count is still so high. I don't know why people are still surprised people are dying - we've clearly decided the policy position is to sacrifice people on the altar of the economy and that people are bored of dealing with COVID. We're not bothering with other mitigations despite it being a top 5 cause of death in Australia (top 3 in the US?).
The pursuit of being a responsible citizen can cause people to find themselves in the red zone. Pushed by coercive campaigns designed to make you not only think and act a certain way, but also spread the message and attack those who disagree. It's fascinating stuff.
"Dipshit libertarians"? Wow. I do wonder where the line is, if any, for those loyal to whatever lockdown rules are enforced. 100 days at 2 hours of outdoor exercise per day? Or are you the ambassador of compliance, willing to sign on to 500 days lockdown, 9pm curfew, and 5km travel limit from home.
It so happens that one of those "dipshit libertarians" who used the word "draconian", is professor Adrian Esterman. He appeared on TV in Australia many times during the pandemic, encouraging vaccines and encouraging preventative measures. He promoted caution and safety every time. But even he used the word draconian in an interview to say "no, we don't need draconian lockdowns" when asked recently whether lockdowns are needed again.
> "Of course we have more COVID deaths than before"
What do you mean "of course"? If you're suggesting everything that has happened was expected, you'd be wrong. Experts have REPEATEDLY said the virus has surprised us and behaved in unpredictable ways. The increased deaths in Australia this year were NOT expected.
And finally, part of the data about vaccines saving lives, comes from the over-represented numbers of unvaccinated people ending up in hospital. Early on at least, this was repeated often, with the footnote jab "pandemic of the unvaccinated". While the statistic is generally accepted, there are many factors involved in why certain people end up in hospital with covid. You may not have considered that unvaccinated people were more likely to take LESS precautions in general. After all, they didn't bother getting vaccinated, even though they were in the high risk age group. So they wouldn't take precautions with social distance, or hand sanitizing, or reducing social events. Those who quickly got vaccinated however, would be more likely to be cautious - therefore stay at home, social distance, and generally avoid the virus. But was anything like this discussed in relation to higher representation in hospital? No way. Nothing like that was ever discussed because they were so focused on pro-vaccine messaging. All we were left with was "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and a large group-think onboarding of that message, the remnants of which still can be found in posts such as yours.
This is so wrong I don't even know where to begin
It's not a single separated case as you may want to counterargument.
A vaccine "wild success" is only attributable to financial statements for big pharma. This is really wild, I'll give you that
Just did a search on CoveredCA. Monthly premium for Platinum Plans for a family of 4: $1200-1800 for a zero-deductibleplan (range includes Blue Shield, Kaiser, Anthem, Health Net, and OSCAR).
Because, as the CoveredCA website points out: "Platinum and Gold plans have a $0 deductible."
The whole point of the Platinum and Gold plans is that you pay more upfront each month in exchange for lower out-of-pocket expenses when you actually utilize your insurance.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 eliminated the fine for violating the individual mandate, starting in 2019. (The requirement itself is still in effect.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act
Furthermore how many people are covered by that $2400 a month? I'd assume it's at least 4 if not more?
But one thing I don't understand, are you saying that before Obamacare, the situation would have been better? If so, how?
Personally, I wish we had a healthcare system where people are simply covered for this sort of occurrence automatically.
It's possible that such a vaccine causes a number of such cases, and still prevents a much larger number of them. In fact it also seems to be true in this case.
Discussing the vaccines out of this context, is scaremongering. You're much better off taking your chances with the COVID-19 vaccine than taking your chances unvaccinated.
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
https://openheart.bmj.com/content/9/1/e001957
You can't make the trade-off solely on myocarditis.
I fail to see any evidence of "much reduced risk". We know before vaccinations existed some people died, some people were a-symptomatic. After mass vaccination campaigns, same results. Have the deaths gone down? Sure, but there are obvious factors, outside of vaccination, that are certainly contributing to that, if not wholly responsible for it. We know the virus has been getting less deadly with each new strain, we know that putting people on ventilators and cranking them up was 100% the wrong treatment. The media has largely stopped beating the fear drum, there are no more death counters up on the news stations 24/7 so people aren't freaking-the-fuck-out. I highly suspect you could have given out placebos instead and would have seen the same results.
If you just do a basic per-capita analysis the reduced risk of death is in the range of 5-16x depending on age group and vaccinated or vaccinated+boosted. There are obviously confounding variables (do vaccinated people behave differently? are healthier people the ones getting the vaccines?) but I would argue that those numbers are a pretty big W for vaccines as far as risk reduction goes.
And of course that is just deaths. You could certainly look at numbers for severity of infection or long-covid outcomes to further measure the efficacy of the vaccines.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-compare-co...
I am not questioning that, but couldn't that 5-16x be contributed to the latest strains being far less deadly that the first few strains, much better and accessible treatments (monoclonal antibodies), safer hospital practices (not putting people on ventilators so quickly/easily), etc.? How can we be so sure that the majority of that 5-16x was from vaccination?
... COVID can still kill me, or give me one of a number of other long-term health issues. If myocarditis isn't one of them, it doesn't really change the risk ratio.
Not at close to the same rate, no.
"can" would be a technically true but entirely misleading word there, as the topic of conversation is the risk ratio. "1 in 10 chance" things can happen. "1 in a million chance" things can happen, also.
But these two "can" usages are not the same.
You should know this. You should not be playing word games. Do you think, falsely, that COVID vaccination it totally useless? If not, why imply it?
What makes you say that? It doesn't sound accurate at all, given that Autumn booster programs are underway in USA, UK, EU - and those are the only ones that I have checked. And what are you attempting to imply?
In the UK's case, the NHS "invites people 50 and over for autumn boosters" (1) which doesn't rule out any further action later for under 50s.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/2022/10/nhs-invites-people-50-and...
That is highly debatable, especially with the current (weaker) strains. Unless you have comorbidities or are otherwise in a high-risk category the chance the Covid will kill you is near 0.
What makes you say that the current strains are weaker?
Well, no. That's moving the goalpost. The question was if COVID was more likely to result in myocarditis than vaccines. "Yes, but" still grants "yes."
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA....
>In 42 842 345 people receiving at least 1 dose of vaccine, 21 242 629 received 3 doses, and 5 934 153 had SARS-CoV-2 infection before or after vaccination. Myocarditis occurred in 2861 (0.007%) people, with 617 events 1 to 28 days after vaccination. Risk of myocarditis was increased in the 1 to 28 days after a first dose of ChAdOx1 (incidence rate ratio, 1.33 [95% CI, 1.09–1.62]) and a first, second, and booster dose of BNT162b2 (1.52 [95% CI, 1.24–1.85]; 1.57 [95% CI, 1.28–1.92], and 1.72 [95% CI, 1.33–2.22], respectively) but was lower than the risks after a positive SARS-CoV-2 test before or after vaccination (11.14 [95% CI, 8.64–14.36] and 5.97 [95% CI, 4.54–7.87], respectively).
BEFORE OR AFTER VACCINATION.
Every single person in that study was vaccinated, some of them caught covid (either before or after being vaccinated), some people did not catch covid at all. The people that were vaccinated and contracted covid fared the worst. There is no un-vaccinated group that caught covid and never took the vaccine at all in this study.
I might say there's a "statistically insignificant increase", but to say there's no increase is just factually wrong. (And statistically wrong too).
"Inpatient myocarditis and pericarditis diagnoses were retrieved from day 10 after positive PCR. Follow-up was censored on 28 February 2021, with minimum observation of 18 days."
Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/
That is utterly false!
If you don't get COVID because of the vaccine, then the vaccine stopped the transmission. Even if you get COVID, the chance you transmit COVID is reduced becuase the body spreads less. If you do get it, but your body will also clear it faster which is less time to transmit. Sure the above is 100% stop all transmission, but it still stops the majority.
The vaccines do reduce transmission in the minority of cases where full-blown symptoms last long enough that the reduction in infection length conferred by the vaccine is significant. But for most cases, they never progress to the point that the antibody response would become a factor, so most vaccinated people spread it just as much as if they were never vaccinated, in the early portion of their infection at minimum. So even if everyone got their booster today at the same instant, and every 6 months repeated that, it would still not stop the free movement of the virus among the population.
The only way to stop the spread is to do what China is doing, but with air-tight effectiveness, which is impossible.
That said, there's a big reason to get vaccinated and boosted anyway if you are in a risk group, since it is somewhat effective in protecting against serious and deadly outcomes.
This is a miststament.
For the second statement there are two assertions, that the country is mostly vaccinated, and that no herd immunity ever showed up. The country is mostly vaccinated, so I think you must be questioning whether herd immunity showed up.
I do think some amount of immunity showed up, if by immunity you mean spreading a little bit of Covid but not as much as if you had not been vaccinated and were unfortunate enough to get a serious case of it. But I'm not sure that would qualify as "herd immunity".
For other diseases that become contagious later in the infection, vaccines can, and at the outset it seemed like Covid might behave that way, but it turned out not to.
What the current vaccines can do, is lessen the possibility of serious outcomes, which is great.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
The second does of vaccine knocked my wife and I on our asses for three days. I broke a sweat unloading the dishwasher and then had to go take a nap to recover. I figured we were just unlucky enough to have an especially strong reaction and didn't bother a doctor about it. Was that mild myocarditis? I'll probably never know.
Which mechanism would cause myocarditis when you get COVID 19?
The 2nd link in nradov's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599243) states:
> These findings indicate that introducing the mRNA vaccine into the circulatory system can lead to acute cardiac inflammation. The mechanism behind this requires further elucidation. However, it is speculated that this may be due to the pro-inflammatory properties of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) used as carriers for mRNA.
The actual COVID-19 infection doesn't have any lipid nanoparticles, does it?
Agree with overall sentiment of your comment though: the overall real-bad symptoms caused by an infection when fully unvaccinated are probably not worth skipping vaccine.
The clinical trials in op's article as well as nradov's comment on "aspiration" to reduce myocarditis risk during vaccination are both important topics to explore.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7035e5.htm
> During March 2020–January 2021, patients with COVID-19 had nearly 16 times the risk for myocarditis compared with patients who did not have COVID-19, and risk varied by sex and age.
> To minimize potential bias from vaccine-associated myocarditis (6), 277,892 patients with a COVID-19 vaccination record in PHD-SR during December 2020–February 2021 were excluded.
https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab941
https://doi.org/10.1007/s43440-022-00361-4
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2021-141119
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/acip-recs/general-recs/admi...
The vaccines were not built to be aspirated, once the plunger is up they can not be reset. It represents a fundamental lapse in standard harm reduction.
Also "wait 15 mins to see if emergency care is needed" could well have been replaced by allergy screening given before the injection. Many thousands of cases of anaphylaxis from the shot have been documented some of which were fatal, all avoidable with allergy screening which is practically free.
There exist syringes which the injection cannot be aspirated with, but those weren’t used when I was being vaccinated.
—
Strong agreement on the concern about deltoid vasculature.
(I have direct, lived experience with someone at risk of death from a substance going into a capillary which was supposed to stay under the skin on injection. It happens. It’s real. Some doctors will claim it’s “impossible”, which is obviously false when you look into it. The datasheet that came with the injector needles even state that they’re “over 99.5 accurate in delivering a subcutaneous injection”. I forget the exact phrasing. It means that statistically, 1 in 200 injections tends to go into a capillary.)
—
Also, it’s interesting to look into the reasons why aspiration was removed from standard practice. In a nutshell, it’s because of two things:
1: Some syringes exist which cannot be aspirated with.
2: Aspiration can be painful for infants and is tricky to perform because they are small and they struggle.
These are the reasons why aspiration was essentially removed from clinical practice. Really. Those are the reasons. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s obviously harmful that aspiration was stopped.
The papers the grandparent post links to are good.
Look, everyone is scared of doing something until they're scared of not doing it. Everyone distrusts government until they trust it, and distrusts pharma until they trust it. Some people will wear their mask in the grocery store even though it's a cloth mask that's as good as doing nothing because now it feels weird not to. Some people won't take the COVID vaccine but they'll happily take remdesivir and ivermectin. (Who do you think makes remdesivir and ivermectin?) Some people will happily go to an indoor comic convention that's an hour's drive from them, but not to an outdoor wedding, because it would mean getting on a plane (this actually happened with a family member of mine and I am not over it).
All of which is to say that what people are really doing is going with their gut. If your gut instinct is "COVID's not a big deal", then of course taking an emergency-use-authorized vaccine for it seems risky. If your gut instinct is "COVID is dangerous and deadly", you'll take anything you can get. Now that things are subsiding, and the fear is waning, I read an article like this and I think "hmm, that does seem bad, we should look into it, but also I am gonna keep doing what I'm doing and getting my COVID vaccine because it seems like it's helping." On the other hand, you have people who are literally dying of COVID who are still relieved they were able to dodge getting the vaccine because it felt scary to get a not-fully-tested drug.
So I'm pro-vaccine because they seem like a good idea and my experiences with them (four shots so far) have been positive, in that my side effects were limited and I know there were situations where I could have gotten COVID and I didn't. (And when I did get COVID, it was extremely mild.) Who's to say how I'd have felt if I were one of the few cases of myocarditis out there? Who's to say how I would've felt if I'd had mild COVID and recovered from it pre-vaccine? What if I'd been hospitalized with COVID pre-vaccine?
Can we just admit this isn't about logic or statistics, and never was? It was always a persuasion game either way.
My gut tells me "be skeptical of novel things, but balance that skepticism a bit by asking people whom you trust to have greater knowledge on the topic, ultimately making the best decision you can".
But I suppose we all preferred pretending we knew _somethings_.
How about we get some empathy for the people who just ended up on the many bad sides of the many bets ?
I meant basically: "maybe give the few young people who suffered from some unforeseen side effects a break, and the right to keep their job without a next round of jabs" ? As far as I can tell, "having suffered side effects from the first 1/2/3 injection" is still not a valid exemption cause for vaccine mandates.
We didn't just invent a completely new vaccine mechanism for covid, the mRNA technology has been known and in development for half a century. This is just the first time it was effective. Likewise with the disease itself, we know that it shares a significant portion of its DNA with the disease behind the 2002 SARS-CoV pandemic and has many other similar parameters.
https://www.news-medical.net/health/How-does-SARS-CoV-2-Comp...
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines targeting infectious diseases including HIV-1, rabies, Zika and influenza were already in clinical trials, as were mRNA vaccines targeting multiple hematologic and solid organ malignancies (Pardi, 2018).
If you have data that we did have a widely deployed vaccine using that tech (which I think, but don't 100.000% know, hadn't happened), then I'm interested to learn that.
Are you trying to say that we learn everything about this subject from clinical trials?
Kind of? The fact is that we've turned into a society where we can't even be unified in trying to prevent disease. If "the left" is for vaccines, masking, social distancing, etc. then "the right" has to immediately be against it.
I don't recall any of my friends or family needing persuasion at all. They believed in the science and were willing to adapt as we learned new things about COVID (e.g. around masking and social distancing). When vaccines were becoming available I know my circle spent time looking over what information we could find about which ones were better, side effects, etc., but were onboard with vaccine risk being better than COVID.
The FOX crowd, OTOH, went looking to scare people off vaccines and made not masking a point of pride. It was tribalism, pure and simple. If it were a persuasion game you might have seen a lot more diversity in who was for/against the vaccines.
30 years ago if we'd faced COVID (at least in the U.S.) and had the vaccines available, I think we'd have fared far better. People who couldn't agree on much else could've come together in the face of a deadly disease. Persuasion, and logic, are out the window.
Not advocating for social distancing as a policy at this point in time, just saying, it made a lot of sense from a risk-prevention perspective at the time.
But again, this is my point. It's trivially easy for me to provide a logical explanation for why social distancing was a sensible tactic. You are (probably) not going to be persuaded. You (probably) like your evidence because it matches how you feel, and I like mine because it matches how I feel.
To be clear, I don't mean this in an aggressive way - I don't think it is bad that you don't agree with me on this in some kind of a moral way, at this point. I just don't think any sort of evidence-based argumentation will bridge the gap between us.
that wasn't the guidance. It was stand 2 meters from anyone, even if no one is sick.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/572926-gottli...
The vaccines weren't trialed and aren't approved to prevent the spread of the disease....so? I don't know about you, but I actually read the FDA's initial report on the Pfizer trials, and it was complete nonsense. They didn't even test each participant for covid, only some participants, with no clear reasoning as to which.
I'm never going to take experimental gene therapy drugs, it's just never going to happen.
The use of this term to describe an mRNA vaccine suggests you do not understand how these vaccines work whatsoever. I am not surprised you didn't understand the FDA's report given that you don't understand how the vaccines work at all.
Gene therapy accurately describes the drug's effect. It injects instructions into your cells to replicate a protein, that's gene therapy. In this case, rather than treating some disease, it's designed to provoke an immune response. Hard pass.
That's not what a vaccine is. Vaccines do not "require" an antigen, they "act as" an antigen. Whether they include the antigen directly or a mechanism for producing it doesn't matter. Live-virus vaccines are just a more imprecise version of the technology that powers mRNA vaccines. They're doing the same thing, but more sloppily.
> It injects instructions into your cells to replicate a protein, that's gene therapy.
Again, you don't understand the term. "Gene therapy" involves actually changing the DNA housed in the nucleus in your cells. mRNA vaccines can't do that.
This is also how every virus, including COVID works. "Injected into cells" is imprecise terminology that makes it sound like it's doing something novel that will persist in your cell after the mRNA decays. That isn't true. The mRNA doesn't become part of your DNA. It eventually decays and becomes useless. Until then, mechanisms within the cell use it to produce the protein - one of the same proteins COVID produces when you are sick with it.
If you are scared of this mechanism of action, you should be downright terrified of ever getting a viral infection, or any vaccine at all, or really just living in the world. Real viruses do the exact same thing, except some of them (like retroviruses) also alter your DNA. The human genome is littered with the genes for viruses that wormed their way in over time.
mRNA vaccines are just doing the same thing the virus already does, but in a more controlled, less dangerous way, and obviously without viral replication in the host.
But, again, the whole point of my original comment is that none of this will matter to you, most likely. I suspect you will keep believing false things about these vaccines which justify your position that you don't want to take them. Hopefully this information makes some difference to someone else.
Anyway, I think this is enough back-and-forth with you; between this and the "Marxist-level thinking" comment it's pretty clear there's nothing to gain by this anymore.
No, that's gene modification, one type of gene therapy.
Here's a paper that discusses using mRNA as gene therapy to treat cancer [1]. Transcription into a cell's own DNA isn't a requirement for something to be gene therapy, only that the intent is to have a cell produce something it otherwise wouldn't. That can be permanent (DNA transcription), or temporary (mRNA that doesn't replicate).
I'm sorry you've been misled by the media, but mRNA and Adeno-vector 'vaccines' are not vaccines, they are gene therapy drugs. Vaccines contain an antigen.
> between this and the "Marxist-level thinking"
I mean, you seem to be sharing ideas that are ideologically similar to Marx. Control the population with propaganda, if they don't comply, use force.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8949480/
And now that science shows the vaccines have risks that weren't clear before, will this change how they feel about them, or are they going to stick to their preconceived ideas? Did they believe the science because they understood it, or because they chose to trust people who were ideologically aligned with them?
That's your takeaway? Perhaps you should start taking people at face value. It was about coerced vaccination, and enforcing masks, lockdowns, expanding government power, etc. You're conflating that with spreading the disease.
If people could be persuaded to do things that are in their interest via rational discourse, and evidence favored vaccines, it wouldn't be necessary to do that kind of coercion. (Nor would it be necessary to so strenuously resist getting them, you'd just say "here is the evidence I don't need to get this," and everyone would accept it and let you live your life.) That's my whole point.
This is Marxist-level thinking.
See paying taxes, conscription, jury duty
Though judging the level of risk is very hard and there is often not a clear line of when force is needed.
Interesting. Of course, in this particular case that coercion happens to coincide with a position you agree with, but not in every instance that apparently justifiable coercion will agree with you. I assume, for the sake of consistency, you'll defend them in that case too.
Is there a way to counter-flag?
People who are passionate about discussing some topic may get heated but I don't think that's a good reason for a Reddit-style "thread locked by mods".
I've summarized every comment in this thread to save you some time for your busy monday morning.
Science is not a religion, and we don't have to believe in it. Instead we need to be critic, conduct experiments, evaluate our thesis, put everything into discussion. Something we didn't, because you are a fool if you have doubts about vaccines, if you talk about negative effects, they are 100% safe and you are an ignorant.
This is the contrary of doing science. We didn't studied these vaccines enough, we didn't take for serious people lamenting adverse reactions, we did hide the news about that because we feared people not taking the vaccine. Is this science? It's not.
If you look at the news, vaccines are 100% safe and doesn't have any side effect. You ask people that got that, you get another opinion. Me too after the third dose (that I wouldn't had got if I wasn't forced to do so by our "democratic" government, no wonder here in Italy last elections won the "fascists", if these are the democratic people) I had serious side effects, I was basically not feeling well for a week. To take into prospective, when I got COVID in March 2020 when it was still a new thing I only got a slight fever for two days, nothing compared of the effect of the vaccine itself...
Would you care to elaborate? I had really bad brain fog.
I did not get the boosters. I’ve had people say I’m anti-vax, from this.
Did you find out the root cause? Did they hit a nerve directly?
Being unable to work properly for longish time (say months to a year), without needing hospitalization is quite serious to anyone in working age. There was no way to judge how long particular side effects can last (and likelihoods) from vaccine studies, because data for judging this were not published, despite for sure being available from the original trials to the researchers.
There's apparently a lot of research about how to push people to vaccinate and about vaccination hessitancy, though. :) But providing some useful data about side effects, like how likely they'll last 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months for a vaccination that was intended to quickly give to almost everyone... No, can't have that. That was almost impossible to find. And if you did find something, it was some independent research with small sample size.
Yes - there is a fund, the CICP (Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program). However, your odds of getting paid are basically nil, as an adult; due to an extremely high standard for proving causation, lack of awareness, and limited claim time (1 year from date of vaccination). So if you have a long-term effect after, say, 3 years needing compensation, you won't be paid.
"As of October 1, 2022, the CICP has partially compensated one COVID-19 countermeasure claim. There are potentially additional expenses to be calculated for this claim, therefore, the claim is still in the “Pending” compensation status. Forty-seven COVID-19 countermeasure claims have been denied compensation because the standard of proof for causation was not met and/or a covered injury was not sustained. Six COVID-19 countermeasure claims, all of which are COVID-19 vaccine claims, have been determined eligible for compensation and are pending a review of eligible expenses. One eligible claim is the result of anaphylaxis, and five claims are the result of myocarditis."
Six payouts as of October 1st, 2022. https://www.hrsa.gov/cicp/cicp-data
This started with chest pains, gradually increasing over the course of a day or two before I went to the hospital. I had to ask them to test for myopericarditis, because they were pretty much only considering an embolism or a panic attack. In that sense I was lucky that I had read a paper a month or so before, indicating young men (such as myself) as having an increased risk after Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccination. After diagnosis I had to go through a 3-month medication regimen which, I'll be honest, wasn't all that fun for my intestinal tract.
Thankfully I was deemed healthy after half a year, with low probability of lasting damage. Yet, the psychological weight of being confronted with heart disease in your mid-twenties is heavy. My opinions on vaccinations haven't really changed, though I think the legal and societal pressure to get everyone vaccinated was out of line and that opinion has gotten stronger. Especially after knowing that vaccination doesn't affects transmission as much as they hoped, I expected them to focus much more heavily on the at-risk groups, but that didn't happen.
The worst part about all of this though is the obstinate denial my cardiologists had of any possible relation between my Pfizer shot and the pericarditis. They'd point to the fact that young men can develop myopericarditis without vaccination. This is true, though it's almost always the result of an infection, and in my region of the world the vast majority of these cases result from flu infections. However, when I had my diagnosis there were barely any flu cases in the country, it just wasn't the season, and most of all I wasn't ill. Pointing to the close proximity to the vaccination was met with immediate and absolute denial.
I think that's what bothered me most: I did my part, I tried to protect society by getting a shot, but when confronted with negative fall-out I had to fight for a diagnosis and was pretty much laughed out of the room for suggesting a relation to the booster. I don't think I've processed this yet. It really feels like I did everything I was told, giving up much of my hobbies, social life etc., but when my health was on the line... "Ho pal, can't be saying anything that could be contorted into criticism of vaccination".
Little of it seemed "fair".
I don't think there was much malice in these new COVID-related laws. Sure there was some cronyism for financial gain in their execution, but that's not the point. I think they were motivated by an seemingly ever-increasing aversion to any form of risk and responsibility, both on governmental as well as societal level.
I'd love to understand and internally evaluate every law and practice that is put upon me, take my own responsibilities based on a thorough understanding of the issue. However, the world has grown too complex for any individual to understand why we are supposed to do the things that we are told to. It has become impossible to even be aware of every law.
I don't know what the "solution" to this extreme risk aversion is. I wonder if there is some historical precedent of a society undergoing the same tendencies and how that eventually got solved. Or didn't.
I recently came to believe that it's not accurate to model random humans as reflections of self. Situations like this make much more sense if you think the humans to be not much more but nodes of some greater societal 'meme' (as in infectious idea/ideology). Almost everyone is such a node in almost every respect. Better to drop the belief that you're operating in a world of copies of yourself, and rather embrace the model that you're operating in a world of memes, the nodes of which the people around you are. At least when it comes to explaining behavior which you have trouble understanding.
What is the scientifically acceptable way to phrase "I'm not concerned about BigPharma planting 5G chips in my future children's eyeballs to turn them into communist ; but I'm very concerned about blind spots during testing and biases in protocol and just plain bad luck that made us miss something ?"
Maybe I just write too much software for a living, but my only certitude was that something, somewhere, was going to break. At least I can TDD the hell out of my paranoia. Don't let me write health policy, ever.
Sidenode: if this kid had chosen the wrong profession in the wrong country, he would now be facing either "getting a couple of other shot" or "loosing its job".
If he had made a tiktok video about his problems, or a facebook post, or a twitter thread, etc... at some point it would have been flagged, and it would have only garnered the attention of the worst possible scammers.
And, worst of all, I'm pretty sure his grandmother would now refuse to get boosted.
Talk about loose-loose :/
People who expressed concerns or some doubts just a few months ago were attacked, downvoted, silenced and socially outcast.
This is not science. This is the opposite of science.
That did not make me any less scared of the "oooops" moment.
This will get worse (myocarditis today, menstural cycles tomorrow, maybe strokes and cancer later ?), then worse (vast number of people completely loosing faith into their docs and letting a much worse epidemy settle), then worse, before it gets... well, before life goes on and we mostly forget, as it has ever done and as we ever did, I suppose ?
Slowly, in carefully written form reviewed by people with the right training.
Unfortunately, in the middle of an emergency with the bodies of voting-aged people piling up... Not at all.
(Although, I guess not going to the other extreme of "having this conversation in bits of 140 characters among strangers with advertisers at each corner" did not help much.)
A lot of us have this inner "oh if only I was a better speaker / smarter / worked on my persuasion skills ..."
It's just not how power works. It's not how society works. I get that now, and it was amazing anthropology to see it unfold.
this is my favorite eric quote, which he also just applied to the ftx mess.
Eric's way of seeing things isn't a linear thing I can summarize, there's a few youtube vids you can search for the concepts of Kayfabe or his anger at the Consumer Price Index methodology which he's been making noise about for a decade, way before all the cool kids today tweeting about inflation.
It's about seeing narrative frames and language games that institutions play to intrinsically hide (to others and themselves) the mechanics of power/money. If you believe in beautiful liberal middle-class dreams it's really painful to square with reality of those machines.
He calls his own podcast The Portal because to see these patterns you need that moment where you step out of the calcified frame of current understanding, like in those kids books where youre stuck in a drab deadened state and then find a magical portal to narnia, can return transformed.
(You have to have those moments yourself, it usually feels like a loss of innocence imo)
Further, it intellectually constricts the speaker, both in thought and speech. It's running a race with lead weights and straitjacket.
For a smaller, but longer-lasting example, think of how many times in the past six years you heard someone preface a statement with "I hate Trump, but". Those who lived under Communism and Nazism experienced the same thing: Anything that might be perceived by another as being against approved thought in any way had to uttered in a way that would plausibly insulate the speaker from undesirable consequences. Now, think of how long-term adherence to such behavior crabs the intellect and soul.
The nuance is key. Frankly, I don't recall much in the way of nuance, I pretty much always saw concern about vaccines framed as a battle for freedom against a tyrannical political party.
Which raises a lot of questions (is "being scared" enough of a justification for refusing a law ? On the other hands, do democraticaly elected officials automatically get the right do decide what people should be "scared" about, without having any more evidence than anyone else - given that the only thing that can give evidence is time, time, and more time ?)
Questions that, unfortunately, had to be answered hastly and withouth much concerns for the unlucky ones - which, to be honest, is pretty much the theme of history, and we have been among the lucky one until now, so maybe we don't have that much to complain about.
You don't understand why someone with concerns about the safety of a vaccine might frame the problem not as the existence of a vaccine with tradeoffs other people might want to make, but rather as a political party forcing the decision on everyone? Or are you just being disingenuous? Be better.