Are you suggesting that people are missing in the workforce in the US because of the federal reserve's policies, and if so, by what mechanism do you believe this is happening?
Primarily by reducing lower working class wages via inflation. It is now more expensive for a number of people to work than it is to not work, which often requires childcare, transportation, and food near the job. The housing bubble also pushed these people further away from job centers. Both are a direct result of the federal reserve with a lot of help from congress.
The federal reserve has a blunt instrument, the target benchmark rate, to control aggregate demand. Raising the rate destroys demand. Why is raising the target rate good? Destroying demand slows inflation. It also deflates asset bubbles (real estate, equities, etc). Does it negatively impact employment? Typically, it increases unemployment, but perhaps not in our current circumstances due to labor supply shortages [1] [2].
The Fed has engineered a soft landing and some moderate wage gains have occurred over the last 1-2 years. It’s up to workers to organize if they want to accelerate wage increases and lock them in. Fiscal policy is the domain of Congress, and at this time (most unfortunately), they aren’t willing to do anything to improve Labor’s situation.
I do want to touch on why the Fed took extraordinary measures during the pandemic (both with lowering the benchmark rate and with acting as a backstop of last resort wrt buying large swaths of bonds) [3]. With enormous uncertainty at the time (will there be a vaccine? When if at all?), there was a risk of total economic collapse and loss of collective faith. Lowering the benchmark rate was like a pilot light ready to relight the economy once lockdowns were lifted, and them buying bonds ensured liquidity (preventing a collapse in bond values, as well as the mortgage backed securities market freezing up).
There is strong evidence that remote work allowances during the pandemic contributed to driving up home prices [4], but zero interest rate policy didn’t help frothy real estate prices either.
The Fed is strictly against labor, even by their own statements as well as Powell's own words numerous times. Their plan is to depress wages [1] and remove power from labor component of the economy. If any indication is correct, then the most recent tech layoffs are a compliance move to the fed's goals (^a).
It's not a willing situation out of lack of care, when the will is strictly antagonistic.
The Fed might believe they are adversarial against labor (I’m aware of Yellen’s and Powell’s labor comments during their tenures as Fed chairs), but they have an uphill battle against structural demographics and an inverse population pyramid.
Tech layoffs are Capital dictating to management to improve profits. If you don’t like it, unionize (dead serious). To not do so means continued powerlessness and to be at the whims of billionaire fund managers whining about their fund performance. Even with the total tech layoffs this year and last (~250k per layoffs.fyi), that’s one month of US added payrolls. I understand they’re not equivalent roles and pay, but I suggest taking it into consideration as a macro sign. It’s not 2001 or 2008.
The US does not have a true inverse population pyramid, it is only true for the next few years, maximum 10 years. The Fed is fully aware of this, pushing off too much capital to the generation with the least amount of labor is terrible idea for their goals. The US is also fully positioned to mitigate the effects of the thinning labor market to a place where we are minimally impacted by depressed growth by way of immigration, strategic investments in silicon, semiconductors, the complete demographic collapse of China that is currently underway, and numerous other items including a strengthened relationship with the EU.
The US, and further the Fed have little to worry about by way of demographics.
Tech layoffs consist of more than 'Capital', significantly more. 'Capital' is not reacting out of pure hatred for labor either, they are reacting to a specific phenomena, which is the Fed swiftly raising rates.
> The Fed might believe they are adversarial against labor (I’m aware of Yellen’s and Powell’s labor comments during their tenures as Fed chairs), but they have an uphill battle against structural demographics and an inverse population pyramid
Don't rationalize and defend top-tier sociopathy like this. These people say what their intentions are, openly declare that they will do what they intend to, and they do it. At this point, there is no objective conclusion that can be reached other than these people waging a war against the majority of the people for the benefit of minority capital.
Janet Yellen is 76, Jerome Powell is 69. Does it do good to rail against folks who only have another 5-10 years of life expectancy? They are who they are, they will not change. No. Focus on building systems to arrive at your desired outcome. I am entirely serious when I suggest unions and organizing; it is the only civil solution against tyranny at the top.
> Does it do good to rail against folks who only have another 5-10 years of life expectancy
This has little to do with actual individuals. When those go away, they will be replaced by those of the same ideology by those who put the current ones to those places. This is an ideology.
> I am entirely serious when I suggest unions and organizing; it is the only civil solution against tyranny at the top.
Hopefully. History shows that when things come to a head, the elite does not hesitate from using violence at any cost. That was how the fascist movements came to being - as 'strike breakers' for private industrialists. Then they were funded and politically backed by those industrialists to have them become 'movements'.
Saying that wages are growing too quick for what the economy can sustain and being anti labor are not the same to me.
Why do you read the layoffs as a compliance move instead of a symptom of what the Fed saw coming? If I follow what you’re saying, if the Fed hadn’t made the comment the layoffs wouldn’t have happened?
If I tell you that you might cut yourself by juggling with knifes and then you do, did the knife comply to my request or I just simply called it due to my observation?
The government has tools to target inflation without reducing lower working class wages. Unfortunately, they lie in the domain of fiscal policy, not monetary policy, which only really has a hammer.
Lower-wage workers' wages have increased over inflation and in fact are the only wages that have done so.
It's an unchanging fact of the internet that people show up complaining about inflation/the Fed/not being on the gold standard and are always cranks. Strangely, this is still true even when there is inflation.
So it's interesting. The stated goal of the fed is to keep inflation and unemployment low. As of recently one of the reasons for the inflation is supply chain disruptions stemming from the shutdown of China.
Over the last 13 years the fed has played a much greater role in the market by purchasing securities and setting the discount rate near to zero. The goal being to soften the blow of the housing collapse and to help being the economy back up. What I find interesting about the low interest rate is that low cost lending changes what types of projects are economically viable. If you look at the formula for NPV the discount rate is within the denominator. What this is saying in other terms is that a projects value is manipulated by the discount rate. On the whole low yield capitally intensive projects are possible to take on during a time of low lending costs. Sure the math makes sense here but what does this mean in aggregate. Does it make sense that the value a project supplies to humanity is dependent on the interest rate? No it really does not, it's not required for it to be proportional whatsoever. Capital is just a standardized term for motivation. All that money can buy is someone else's time or effort at the end of the day. What the NPV formula is truly giving us is a ratio of how much human effort will be required and how much output you are likely to get from such efforts.
One of our issues both nationally and globally is that our interest rate is too low, (and we have no way to fairly correct for this). Higher cost of lending prunes projects that are low yield. This prunes projects that are not a large benefit to society. The fed has a hard time moving back to this because of the extreme difficulty everyone would face. Let's say they raise the rates to 18% suddenly homes value must drop to reflect the people's ability to pay the new mortgage rates. Best case this would dramatically reduce worker mobility. Worst case you wipe out the largest asset most might have.
I do believe the fed is used as a tool is used to keep people working. If you track the cost of staples such as a loaf of bread or milk vs the hours required to earn such things on minimum wage you will find that it's all about the same over time. Logically this makes no sense whatsoever. Does this mean that we have gotten no better at producing these commodities over the last 100 years?
If supply chain disruption caused inflation, we'd see deflation when the disruption ends. The same for other alleged causes of inflation the government puts out.
The explanation that stands up, however, is the government printing and spending excessive amounts money, backed only by the promise to print even more.
That's a valid hypothesis, and I think there are some counter examples to your claim, certainly. GPUs are a great example of a manufactured good that encountered an enormous supply chain disruption event, inflated massively, and then now that the supply chain disruption event is over, deflated massively.
It isn't really a counterclaim. I'd go as far as saying 'supporting evidence'. Supply chain disruptions get sorted out pretty quickly as people move heaven and earth to try and catch the inflated profits before they vanish.
Sustained multi-year inflation is more or less always due to government policy of printing money. Although these days the stats suggest it might also stem from a general energy crisis; the West has done a pretty solid job so far of cutting loose any reliable sources of energy. Still government policy, but it'll be a change from the running printing presses.
The fed more specifically is trying to avoid labor price inflation, as in the price of labor goes up in the price and the disconnect between capital returns and labor's share of income is maintained instead of starting to match again, which is a key reason why there is general increasing inequality in the USA and it started in the early 1970s when volcker made it fed policy
>Primarily by reducing lower working class wages via inflation
There's no indication that this is a real thing given that leisure, hospitality, transport and warehouse workers have seen the strongest wage growths in decades, the first two groups outpacing inflation and seeing real wage gains.
In fact fairly large wage increases in the service economy are one of the biggest contributors to inflation (wage-push inflation) and the basis for these rapid pay rises is the constantly tight labor market, hence the title of the thread.
It's not like it's hard; and mind, I think it's a good thing interest rates are going up, bringing a return to sanity to the economic landscape, but the Federal Reserve by it's own admission wanted to increase unemployment.
They succeeded. Now they're screeching because people are dropping out of the rat race/clearly orchestrated insane financial environnent because it is straight up clear to anyone with more than a handful of neurons to rub together that things have been completely unsustainable for a while?
If a million people die, that's "acceptable losses". But if GDP starts to decline, now that gets attention.
It's beginning to look like having COVID-19 ages people faster than usual.[1] Hard to tell yet; that's the sort of study that takes years to gather data. More studies are turning up long-term damage. Here's one for COVID in kids.[2]
I feel like I lost a decade of my lifespan because of Long Covid. I got it right at the start, March, 2020 an otherwise mild case. Then I noticed the fatigue, and exhaustion on what should have been effortless things.
Almost 3 years later, Even just speaking to someone for more than a few minutes gets me winded. I saw a new doctor today, and he gives me hope that I might get my life back.
I used to work on my feet 8 hours/day making gears, and gear like objects.
This may indicate an onset of a postcovid syndrome. At the beginning, it is primarily characterized by a chronic fatigue and loosing the ability to work the full shift. Take a look [1].
Try to stay optimistic, eat healthy and exercise. With some luck, it might pass. Many people have reported recovering after a couple of months but I don't see why it couldn't take longer.
No OP but similar situation. It's easy to make the difference: I've been in terribly stressfull situations before. I went to live in Mali, started business, got Malaria, lost everything to the war and had to start all over, going back to my country.
It's not the same. Covid got me bad.
But strangely, only after the third dose of vaccine. Right after it in fact, and ever since.
But it's possible we will learn we are coupounding effects on a lot of fronts: stress from the situation, covid itself, unexpected side effects from the vaccine, and maybe something else.
Hard to tell.
But yeah, this is not regular run of off the mill, stress response.
For myself: because I went through a couple of real world crises without batting an eye and the moment of onset coincides perfectly with the moment of onset of COVID-19.
As for the upheaval: some experienced it as such, for me it actually reduced stress considerably because I didn't have to travel for work anymore which normally would take about 25% of my time and was always super stressful, it also caused a lot of follow on stress because that 25% needed to be made up for somehow.
I'm no longer spending 2+ hours in traffic on 2 of the most busy expressways in the nation each day. We've had (until recently) enough funds to ignore the losses from not working.
My stress level really didn't rise, but my ability to move and do things fell off a cliff.
Do you have any other ageing symptoms not related to the cardio-respiratory system?
The linked paper focuses on telomeres and genetic markers for ageing. Since Covid directly impacts the lungs, I wonder if the symptoms you described are related to lung damage or to another mechanism such as the one the paper proposed.
What's been interesting me with this is how much novelty there is in observing a new pandemic virus hit humanity (or any species for that matter) with the attention and accuracy of modern medicine and population statistics.
It could just be (does anyone know?) that when new viruses pop up like this, the target species often just takes a global health hit that includes not just deaths and acute illnesses but other effects on broader time scales. Maybe this is normal in human, primate or even mammalian history, part of the bumpy evolutionary road, but we didn't really know how much of an effect there is to be had until now, or the soon future?
If true, it's kind of a kick in the guts for modern humanity, as we've probably had a good run on pathogens in recent history (at least globally, with the spanish flu being the obvious recent precedent) and didn't really appreciate that there are still "monsters" lurking out there in Earth's shadows that we're not really "better" than.
I also wonder, if there's truth to the above, to what extent modernity, or at least this (perhaps) middling phase of it, is part of the problem, where high urban population densities can transform what were relatively rare and local pandemics into more common, global and devastating affairs ... ?
Some have theorized this and there certainly are a few examples. For examples syphllis seemed especially severe when it first appeared in Europe, and this was probably because it was a novel disease.
But thing is it also is just severe and didn’t become just another cold or just another bacteria.
There’s a lot of just-so stories about how things are bad till your immune system strengthens upon encountering all the viruses and then everything is ok.
Bollocks. Half of kids used to die before adulthood and it was mostly due to disease.
We associate disease as being mostly mild now because we took decisive action over a couple centuries to reduce, treat or prevent the worst diseases.
We were left with the ones that seem inconsequential, and the flu, which was consequential.
The bet is that Sars-cov-2 is inconsequential because it shares a transmission mechanism with the other inconsequential viruses and because it often feels inconsequential in the acute phase.
Hopefully so, we won’t really know the long term effects for a long time. Post-polio syndrome takes decades to manifest in a patient, as does multiple sclerosis from EBV.
> Half of kids used to die before adulthood and it was mostly due to disease.
Yes, and this is why the current strain of anti-vaxx sentiment is so dangerous: if enough people buy into that crap then eventually we'll get below the immunity levels required for these diseases to remain suppressed, there is a noticeable uptick in unvaccinated kids since COVID, about -1% for now which is manageable. But if it would get higher it could lead to trouble.
And then there are the vaccinations that have simply been postponed on account of COVID-19:
I think public trust has been eroded by overconfident statements made by authorities, plus the occasional noble lie.
I wish that public health communication had been more congruent with what was actually known, something like:
"This is a vaccine authorised under emergency conditions and data is still incomplete. It's clearly very beneficial for older citizens but the situation is less clear in the young. We are fairly confident that the rate of serious side effects is quite low" (and then ideally those statements would be followed up by whatever numbers were actually known at the time).
Sure, but a lot of that can only be said in hindsight. That's the hard part: to be right on everything in a fluid situation. It just isn't possible and for every little detail you get wrong there is a small army of well organized detractors that try to use it to destroy everything else as well. What drives those people is still a mystery to me.
The World Health Organization lists pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria as the leading causes of child mortality globally.
Pneumonia's main risk factor in children is malnutrition. So it's food, not medicine, that's cured the world of child pneumonia.
Diarrhea's main risk factor is contamination of food with feces. Again, the food, and its production, storage, and transport sanitary conditions. Washing with soap is the medicine here, not vaccines.
Malaria's transmission vector is mosquitos. This one you do need a vaccine for, but these mosquitos only exist on the equator.
So while your claim that half of kids used to die mostly due to disease is technically correct, it's actually malnutrition and living in shit that allowed it to happen, and it's our natural immune systems that prevent it (when healthy), not vaccines.
Is that listed for today or for the last 100 years? Because it sounds like this excludes things that vaccines may have solved like small pox, polio and other things a basic vaccine schedule has taken care of. Basically if we exclude diseases that vaccines have reduced or eradicated we are not surprisingly left with things that vaccines do not address.
You are using evidence from the present to consider the past. This is not very sensible.
There is a long list of diseases we effectively blocked from killing people:
* Almost anything bacterial
* Measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria and other commonly immunized childhood diseases
* Smallpox, which we eliminated
No country has anywhere near a 50% child mortality rate now, even when diarrhea and pneumonia are present. They’re the dregs of the scourge of disease we mostly controlled
But was it by vaccines? The book "Dissolving Illusions" argues it wasn't, and that smallpox vaccination was a failure similar to the one we just witnessed with COVID vaccines (which are unambiguously a failure by the criteria on which they were originally presented to the populace).
It builds the case by citing many historical texts and news reports from the time when Jenner had first developed his vaccine, showing how it was at first advertised by him as granting 100% immunity only for many cases to emerge where the vaccine failed or outright gave people full smallpox infections. It also shows how the authorities went into denial and became utterly totalitarian, forcing vaccine mandates on people, refusing to accept that Jenner's invention wasn't perfect and forcing children to take it against the will of the parents, some of whom went to prison rather than allow their child to be vaccinated.
It concludes by arguing that smallpox was actually wiped out in the west (along with many other illnesses) by the general improvements in health and sanitation in the 20th century, rather than a vaccine that was very far from being 100% effective.
There was a time when I would have ignored this sort of alternate history take on medical consensus. But having just lived through an event exactly like the one the book describes it all sounds extremely plausible. COVID vaccines went from 95% effective and so clearly able to stop transmission that it was ethical to force people to take it, to "it doesn't stop infection or transmission or sickness, but it does reduce severe disease, let's hope that's not because it's inducing tolerance to spike protein in which case it'll actually be creating more serious disease without that being correctly attributed to the shots".
Lots of tables of figures if you'd like to peruse them, although its more concentrating on Polio. Anyway I guess the point is, yes there is an alternative take, but just because you read that in a book doesn't mean you should believe what you read. A significant amount more research would need to be done and um the author makes enough mistakes to take this with something of a grain of salt.
I haven't actually read the book, I just know some quotes from it and the gist of what it argues about smallpox.
Anyway, I flicked through the paper. It has a habit of making what it thinks are rebuttals but which either are agreeing with what the book says, or rebuts arguments she didn't actually make. If this is the highest quality sort of rebuttal that's out there then I guess I should read the book because it must be pretty solid.
Example 1. Humphries points out that the vaccine rollout was coincident with a change in how polio was classified, which was guaranteed to significantly reduce the rate at which polio was reported regardless of the vaccine because the prior classification criteria had been very loose. The rebuttal is that yes this is true, but there were still a "significant number" of polio cases being reported after the change. This isn't a real disagreement yet the author uses it to claim that Humphries has callous disregard for polio cases, a nasty ad hominem they constantly repeat. It reduces their own credibility as it's so unlikely to be true. She's a medical doctor, not a profession famous for its callous disregard of disease.
Example 2. Humphries points out that "more than half of the cases [in Michigan] were not polio virus related at all" and the rebuttal is that if you restrict to paralytic polio then that statement isn't true any longer, but, again, that wasn't the claim she made.
Example 3. Another non-rebuttal is to point out that the author of one of the studies she cites was a vaccine fan. So? She was citing the data, not the author's general opinions.
Example 4. The overall thrust of the argument here is that Humphries says the threat of polio was exaggerated, and the author admits this was true (redefinitions, FDR etc), but then claims again that anyone who objects is "callous" and it was OK if FDR was "dramatizing" his illness - which maybe wasn't even polio at all - because it spread awareness. Also that it doesn't matter if polio was actually rare because that's also true of childhood cancer and Americans care about that. Again a non-sequitur of a rebuttal that actually supports the points Humphries was making.
What a crap set of counter-arguments. They don't point out any mistakes, it's just a big set of disagreements over emphasis and tone. If anything this seems to reinforce the overall impression formed in the past two years that pro-vaccine people seem systematically unable to accept that tradeoffs exist, accurate data matters and misleading people to win their support is bad. They also radically over-estimate their own rationality.
Polio's death rate was around that of the flu. It was so feared because of the paralyzed survivors, but even that was <1% of infections, not the huge percentage as commonly portrayed nowadays. Around 3/4 of those infected never even had symptoms, and most of the remaining 1/4 only had flu-like symptoms.
On top of that, like the other one GP mentioned, one of its main methods of transmission is feces contamination. It's possible hygiene was also a major factor in stopping it.
Fatality rate of 0.2%. Worst fatal complication: Pneumonia, for which the biggest risk factor is immunodeficiency from malnutrition.
> mumps
Fatality rate of 0.04%. Worst fatal complication: Encephalitis, for which the biggest risk factor is immunodeficiency from malnutrition.
> rubella
This one's nasty when it infects a pregnant mother. All women should get rubella vaccinated.
> polio
Fatality rate of up to 30% and debilitating post-effects in up to 50%. You'd be an idiot not to get polio vaccinated.
> diphtheria
Penicillin works.
> Smallpox
Was eliminated with a vaccine that is no longer administered.
You said:
> We associate disease as being mostly mild now because we took decisive action over a couple centuries to reduce, treat or prevent the worst diseases.
My point is that the diseases were bad because there wasn't enough food to maintain healthy immune systems. That's not "decisive action", that's farming and trade. It was the cooking of food and the boiling of water and the washing with soap that prevented deaths from most diseases.
In researching this reply, I've found a respect for some vaccines though. But I still hold food and our natural immunity as the undisputed kings of healthy living.
> Fatality rate of up to 30% and debilitating post-effects in up to 50%.
Only if you developed paralytic polio. Those percents don't apply to the polio virus in general. Only 3% ever developed anything worse than flu-like symptoms, and paralytic polio was something like 10% of that 3%. (I'm going from memory here, these numbers are on the CDC website)
So we're talking an IFR around 0.1%, very close to the estimated flu IFR of 0.07%
To be clear: I was talking about the past. The original comment covered the whole breadth of human evolutionary history.
We vanquished these diseases in the past 50-100 years mostly. My argument is that diseases did not just all become benign without intervention
Native Americans, to take one example, were incredibly healthy in their traditional lifestyles. This did not give their immune systems sufficient strength to fight off smallpox and other diseases.
On your point about modernity. I think the main risk factor is actually close proximity to animals and poor hygiene around them. That is what allows the rare event of a jump between species to happen. A modern society could reduce this risk a lot.
...That and not doing Gain of Function research where we deliberately go out of the way to serial passage/DNA clone/chimera viruses to make them more infectious.
Lets be real here. No one hangs out in bat caves for the lulz.
You are right, transmission from animals is really difficult. But that also explains why those transferred diseases can be so dangerous. We don't have existing immunity because humans don't hang out in bat caves. And the threat is very real when we live in close proximity to domesticated animals or eat bush meat. And people do both of those things. There is a very long list of infectious diseases that started in animals. We need to be careful. And even in richer countries the threat still exists. People keep chickens in the garden. Environmental surveys look for bats. We have factory farms and abbatoirs.
Honestly, since everyone dies, it's such a banal shared experience, like sex, that trying to prevent it from naturally occurring is bound to face some limits. Just like sex.
Im ok wearing masks and staying home at peaks, but let me die sometimes, we organize in countries to delegate to some extent but it went too far this time. Make the vaccines mandatory and force give it to people, if really that's the reason we re in trouble (I have 3 shots of the mrna).
I'm in Hong Kong where we can still go to jail for not wearing a mask, but even in Europe it went too far and the backlash was insane.
Anecdotally: having had COVID sets you up for being ill much more frequently afterwards. Anything at all that does the rounds and I've got it, and usually bad enough to put me out of action for a couple of weeks. Right now in the middle of one of those and fortunately so far it hasn't interfered with work which is also quite spotty due to market conditions so on my end no economic damage but it sure is annoying and your point about aging faster than normal is a good one, I'll have to read up on that. It certainly feels that way.
>Anecdotally: having had COVID sets you up for being ill much more frequently afterwards. Anything at all that does the rounds and I've got it
Anecdotally, same with me. After I got covid a few months back, despite being vaccinated 3 times, I then got the flu a month later which hit me harder than covid, and another month later I find myself saddled with a nasty infection right below the root of one of my molars, which baffled my dentist as the x-ray shows absolutely nothing there a year ago and I have very good dental hygiene.
His hypothesis is that covid weakened my immune system enough to allow other "bugs" that would normally be fought by my immune system, to thrive and take hold much faster than normal, including the random tooth infection.
Similar with some of my friends, afte they got covid, they were on a marathon of getting sick the whole winter season despite being young, vaccinated, fit and living healthy lifestyles.
Having attended a number of rallies against lockdowns and other government overreactions, where presumably a lot of participants were not vaccinated, I still don't personally know a single person who ever got Covid, let alone died of it. The few second hand accounts that were delivered by word of mouth to me, the people recovered after being sick for a while.
Of course, Covid exists and needs to be treated seriously, especially for people with compromised immune systems. But it turns out, it wasn't nearly as deadly a threat to the average person as was initially feared.
> I still don't personally know a single person who ever got Covid
If even remotely true, this is simply a statement about your economic standing and social circle.
Outside of work, most people I know work low wage service or gig jobs and they all got covid, most multiple times. Seven members of my church died of covid in the first 18 months.
You don't know anyone who got Covid? I am frankly astonished.
Most members of my family have had it, multiple times. Most of my colleagues have had it. In fact, the majority of people in the UK have had it at least once. I am an outlier; I haven't had it to my knowledge.
Quite a few friends also don't have anyone in their immediate circle who has had it. Now, this group is all pretty concentrated geographically, and has an overrepresentation of unvaccinated people, so take that for what you will. But there are some who have asserted that the vaccine can make you more susceptible to reinfection, and I tend to believe that's true.
Okay. However, I would just like to mention that every honest and straightforward attempt I've made to push back against the prevailing opinion here, has resulted in my comments being flagged and ignored. It's a little frustrating that every conversation about Covid ends up so one-sided on this site. I apologize for letting it get the better of me.
Yes, it's extremely frustrating to go against prevailing opinion on the internet. The only thing I know of that works is to take responsibility for being extra scrupulous in how you do that.
Unfortunately this effect is widespread and appears to actually be caused by the vaccine. Anecdotally of our friends who got the shot they complained last year of being sick two, three even four times whilst I got omi once and my gf never. One friend even stated specifically that it was only the vaccinated people in her group where that was happening.
The shots trained the immune system against the obsolete 2019 version of the spike protein, but our bodies can't tell the difference between the mutated versions and the original. They spot a SARS-CoV-2 spike and start making the same antibodies they were trained to, but those antibodies aren't fully effective because of the mutations. And unfortunately the body doesn't seem to be able to 'unlearn' this because people keep taking boosters, and/or it may be incapable of unlearning anyway even without boosters. It's a bit unclear.
The problem can be seen most clearly in UK government data because they were willing to show data on case rates by vaccine status pre-adjustment, which by the time they stopped publishing the data showed 3x-4x higher rate of COVID infections in the vaccinated cohort and still getting worse. That's why even the headline rates (subject to much invalid data game playing) showed effectiveness start at 95% and fall rapidly as the months went by.
Such problems have happened before, pre COVID. Fauci even noted in an interview that this can happen, safety testing is meant to detect it but the process was so accelerated there was much less time to see it than normal.
People are such an unreliable reporter when it comes to health and causation. We see links between everything when we want those explanations to exist.
Kind of like how searching “back pain [thing]” will show people reporting that everything causes back pain. Or listening to the most insecure bald guy in the world explaining how every dismal thing about his station in life has something to do with his baldness. Or the certainty in which someone will blame some random food item for why they are sick when it could have been anything they’ve eaten in the last few days.
It drives the value of anecdotes and conversation around covid to zero, or worse.
For your sake and that of your family and friends I sincerely hope it remains that way. Of course if it would change you'd be honest enough to tell us about it, right?
From a purely US perspective, we had a fairly large percentage of the population and political representation vocally against taking precautions. One notable example: "The lieutenant governor of Texas argued in an interview on Fox News Monday night that the United States should go back to work, saying grandparents like him don’t want to sacrifice the country’s economy during the coronavirus crisis." [1]
Maybe I don't understand the question? I'm saying that there were a sizable amount of people that viewed those measures as unnecessary and thus viewed the natural number of deaths as acceptable. I'm not arguing the positions, just stating that many people viewed precautions as worse than the outcomes of those who got COVID.
A secondary point perhaps is that some locations did not have lockdowns or masks for the most part and still have low vaccine numbers. Some locations may have shut down schools at the beginning of 2020 but decided that even masks in schools were a step too far by August 2020. The US response varied wildly depending on location.
The current version is the "Pandemic is Over Act", H.R. 382.[1] This is the "declare a victory and go home" approach.
There's progress in nasal spray vaccines, but they're not really ready yet. There's one that that works in monkeys.[2] Human Phase I testing is starting. China and India have approved nasal vaccines.[3] Effectiveness is maybe 50%. Too soon to tell how fast immunity falls off. The US government is not funding work in this area.[4]
If an effective nasal spray vaccine is developed, even if it has a short immunity period, that could work. It might mean quarterly sprays. (COVID-19 antibody levels seem to drop off after about 90 days, which is why people get COVID multiple times.)
Excess deaths number are way higher in many Western countries after Covid officially ended, I'm talking about the second part of 2022 going forward. This Economist article [1] is a good round-up. Looks like many of those Western countries overfitted when it came to the first to middle stages of the pandemic.
> If a million people die, that's "acceptable losses". But if GDP starts to decline, now that gets attention.
But that's disingenuous - we just spent 3 years handling our losses. One little article comes out on the economy blaming covid for worker shortages and you lose your shit. As proof we have probably 50 1000 comment threads on covid suffering and this one is dead after 100 comments.
Wow hacker news really is a dark corner of the internet full of confirmation bias and lies these days. How's your little hero virus going? The one that gives you a reason to live, to post, to think? Did you come up with the 'ages people faster' symptom yourself, or are you stringing pieces of propaganda together?
> In a November 30, 2022, speech on “Inflation and the Labor Market,” Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell blamed most of the 3.5 million estimated shortfall in the U.S. labor force on premature retirements. He also blamed a large portion – between 280,000 and 680,000 – on “long Covid.” In a footnote, however, Powell acknowledged a far more somber factor: an estimated 400,000 unexpected deaths among working age people.
... In 2020, the vulnerable died of Covid at unusually high rates. In 2021 and 2022, Covid continued its assault, but the young, middle-aged, and healthy also died in aberrantly high numbers of something else.
But really, it's easy to see that vast majority of reduction is in 55-65 years old range. These are people who retired in 2020 and 2021 because on one hand, it was scary to keep working in Covid environment, and on the other, spectacular stock market performance through that point let them retire a lot earlier than they planned.
110k died of fentanyl OD, that’s already a good chunk of people dying unrelated to COVID.
Also I still wonder what makes a COVID count. If you were almost dead and COVID is what pushed you over, did you really die of COVID or anything would’ve done it? Do they count that as “was terminal before COVID”?
My grandpa got pneumonia in the ICU and died because of it, but I wouldn’t say he got pneumonia and died, there is a reason why he was in the ICU.
I cant remember if it was Thiel or Andreessen, but it was postulated that the consequence of "Software eating the world" is the unemployment it will create will keep interest rates low... until the pandemic had other ideas.
Is it reasonable to expect software to resume eating the world or will the population decline from low birth rates to pick up where the pandemic left off and we are in a permanent tight employment market... for blue collar jobs anyway, while "AI eats the white collar jobs"?
> See how much more automated things are in places without immigration and super low birth rates (Japan, South Korea).
I am not sure that Japan actually follows that trend. It's a big and complex country but in my experience there were more workers on jobs that in my western country would be just one guy, or no one at all, perhaps just a sign.
Japan has fairly low wages but good social services, public infrastructure, and affordable daily life so I suspect that the line to cross into "poverty" is actually quite a bit lower in Japan. Perhaps that allows the math to make sense since a company can afford to hire more people, and those people can still afford to make ends meet.
Happy to be corrected, my knowledge of Japanese economics is pretty shallow.
> keep interest rates low... until the pandemic had other ideas
the pandemic did not drive interest rates up. Flooding the economy with money ignited inflation, and higher interest rates are necessary to tamp down a recession.
People like to accuse him of it. His earliest and wildest claim was that SARS-Cov-2 was widely transmissible and risked becoming a global pandemic if swift action wasn’t taken
This was in January 2020. Fortunately, top commentators leapt into action, determined his calculation of the R0 may have had some technical issues and in any event he didn’t have specific expertise in the area
I'm sure most people here know variations of the phrase "economists predicted 11 of the last 2 recessions", it's talked about often enough. What they may not be aware of is the same is true of pandemics. Offhand I'm aware of 5 predicted in the past 15 years or so, 2 of which happened.
He just systematically over-states the risk of absolutely everything despite knowing nearly nothing about viruses. Other great Feigl-Ding takes:
- If China doesn't control Omicron they'll suffer a "world of hurt" and it's "literally make or break".
- "Danish political leaders have completely lost their frigging minds releasing all #COVID19 mitigations" and "this is what happens when a country's leaders gaslights its own citizens", talking about the end of restrictions at the start of 2022.
- "New world record — More than 1,000 daily #monkeypox cases (7 days average). Those who said #MPXV would fizzle out soon are plain wrong. This fall school year will need radically new / more safety mitigations."
- "In other news – Schools across England are reopening again today. No school mask requirements. No school air quality and ventilation guidelines – it is so dangerous that it is ‘medieval’ says Professor Alice Roberts. God save and its children from B117. COVID19."
The guy is a Harvard epidemiologist, which means he knows nothing about disease and will constantly exaggerate any possible threat regardless of science or truth.
> The guy is a Harvard epidemiologist, which means he knows nothing about disease and will constantly exaggerate any possible threat regardless of science or truth.
This seems totally uncalled for. Besides having a degree in Public Health, among others, he’s a cancer survivor. I’d say he knows a lot about diseases.
Like it or not, to say his warning about Covid-19 three years ago was prescient is an understatement.
Based on his bio, he seems more than credible:
Dr. Feigl-Ding graduated from The Johns Hopkins University with Honors in Public Health and Phi Beta Kappa. He then completed his dual doctorate in epidemiology and his doctorate in nutrition, separately, as the youngest graduate to complete his double doctoral programs at age 23 from Harvard SPH. Next, concurrently with his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, he studied medicine at Boston University School of Medicine for several years, until he left BUSM to become faculty at Harvard Medical School. Teaching at Harvard for over 15 years, he has advised and mentored two dozen students and lectured in more than a dozen graduate and undergraduate courses, for which he received the Derek Bok Distinction in Teaching Award from Harvard College.
After 2020? Totally called for. Default assumption should now be that public health "experts" are worse at understanding disease than laymen. Their predictions and recommendations were just so systematically atrocious and exaggerated.
> he’s a cancer survivor. I’d say he knows a lot about diseases.
That's a non sequitur if there ever was one. Having had cancer grants no expertise in understanding the macro behavior of respiratory viruses.
> Based on his bio, he seems more than credible
Credibility comes from accurate predictions that other people could not have made, not empty credentialism.
Someone who isn't a physician and doesn't have an MD, with DrName as their Twitter handle, shouting into the Internet abyss with caps, exclamations, and emojis. Oh boy.
> I’ve never googled his name before writing this and the first Google suggestion is „Eric Feigl Ding fear mongerer“
What Google does or doesn’t return in autocomplete results is meaningless unless you also show the search history that backs those personalized autocompletions.
Making insinuations that something is due to a personal characteristic of the person communicating about it is not generally accepted behavior on HN. It's a mild form of ad hominem attack, it suggests that someone is unreliable unless they make the discussion all about them and share the information you claim is required, and it generally makes for completely uninteresting and unedifying content. Please don't do that here.
None of them had anything to do with (Long-)Covid. In fact I have not met a single person yet that actually has "Long Covid", despite it being portrayed as this huge issue that we have to (apparently) deal with.
The people who I know left work and never returned are not rich by any means. They simply discovered more joyful things to do than their underpaid shitty jobs beforehand. Some have become full time carers for grandchildren, parents saving more money on nursery than what the grandparent was earning in some awful under appreciated healthcare job, some have created a small lifestyle business during COVID, some have retired early.
The scare quotes are unnecessary and disrespectful. Just because you don't have anyone in your network who notices long-term effects of Covid, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The plural of anecdote is not data, and all that.
Some counter-anecdotes: In my network, I know someone who is coming up on a year of disability due to long Covid. After their second infection, they just... never got better. Unloading a dishwasher takes too much energy. And I have a personal trainer friend who has told me that of their clients that have had Covid, nearly none of them have returned to their previous levels, even the ones who only had "mild" Covid infections.
I'm very glad for your friends and acquaintances who were able to use this opportunity to pursue their dreams in some fashion, but they don't represent the totality of experience here, just because you haven't noticed any examples to the contrary.
I put "Long Covid" into quotes in my second sentence because this word is being used in many ways incorrectly as it has a very fluid/blurred meaning for many people. The people who suffer from post viral syndrome often use the correct term as they would have had that diagnosis. I don't think its disrespectful to be honest about the wide stretch of how the term "Long Covid" is being used/misused. I do acknowledge that some people suffer from post viral syndrome.
I have noticed that a lot of western countries have a disfavorable view of personal handicaps and disabilities and sees them as personal failings that they ought to be ashamed of.
It wouldn't be surprising if there is a large population of people too ashamed to share a post-COVID condition.
This is probably on the money. I know more than one person who doesn't want to come across as 'complainer' and who nurse whatever they've got in quiet, sometimes until it is too late. Another part is that there are always people ready to judge you and to state things like 'you must have deserved it', 'karma' or many other ways of saying the same.
I suppose it also opens you up to discrimination within the workplace. I could see many bosses using the thought process of, "Why would you be promoted or be trusted with certain projects if you aren't going to be as productive."
Social security disabilty claims have decreased since 2020, contradicting the claim that Covid, Long Covid, or the vaccine are leaving large numbers of people too disabled to work.
I have been working with a friend who is recently disabled and apparently, it is substantially more difficult to apply for Social Security Disability. From personal experience, getting through to the SSA to have questions regarding the process answered or outstanding issues resolved has been quite the burden.
There has also been a reduction in staffing of these offices.
> My deep worry is that this long-term impact of #COVID on debilitating the workforce will continue to hit us year after year, as COVID and other infections (via COVID’s immunocompromised) slams ashore every winter.
Fairly unlikely.
Susceptibility to long COVID probably does come down to genetics, HLA subtype and/or some kind of OAS effect maybe due to prior infections. The people who have already encountered the virus and their immune system has formed a robust and successful response to the virus are likely to fight it off again fine the next time they're exposed (barring a change in their immune status due to chemotherapy or immunoscenescence or whatever, but that is a risk that those people run with influenza and other respiratory viruses as well).
We're not going to see an additional 1% of the population suffering new onset long COVID year after year.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 5402 ms ] threadThe Fed has engineered a soft landing and some moderate wage gains have occurred over the last 1-2 years. It’s up to workers to organize if they want to accelerate wage increases and lock them in. Fiscal policy is the domain of Congress, and at this time (most unfortunately), they aren’t willing to do anything to improve Labor’s situation.
I do want to touch on why the Fed took extraordinary measures during the pandemic (both with lowering the benchmark rate and with acting as a backstop of last resort wrt buying large swaths of bonds) [3]. With enormous uncertainty at the time (will there be a vaccine? When if at all?), there was a risk of total economic collapse and loss of collective faith. Lowering the benchmark rate was like a pilot light ready to relight the economy once lockdowns were lifted, and them buying bonds ensured liquidity (preventing a collapse in bond values, as well as the mortgage backed securities market freezing up).
There is strong evidence that remote work allowances during the pandemic contributed to driving up home prices [4], but zero interest rate policy didn’t help frothy real estate prices either.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34554546
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2022081pap...
[3] https://archive.is/2020.03.24-154938/https://www.nytimes.com...
[4] https://archive.is/2M8lC
It's not a willing situation out of lack of care, when the will is strictly antagonistic.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-17/powell-tr...
^a, I'm willing to forgive some tech companies because it was a deliberate twist of the arm by raising rates.
Tech layoffs are Capital dictating to management to improve profits. If you don’t like it, unionize (dead serious). To not do so means continued powerlessness and to be at the whims of billionaire fund managers whining about their fund performance. Even with the total tech layoffs this year and last (~250k per layoffs.fyi), that’s one month of US added payrolls. I understand they’re not equivalent roles and pay, but I suggest taking it into consideration as a macro sign. It’s not 2001 or 2008.
The US, and further the Fed have little to worry about by way of demographics.
Tech layoffs consist of more than 'Capital', significantly more. 'Capital' is not reacting out of pure hatred for labor either, they are reacting to a specific phenomena, which is the Fed swiftly raising rates.
Don't rationalize and defend top-tier sociopathy like this. These people say what their intentions are, openly declare that they will do what they intend to, and they do it. At this point, there is no objective conclusion that can be reached other than these people waging a war against the majority of the people for the benefit of minority capital.
This has little to do with actual individuals. When those go away, they will be replaced by those of the same ideology by those who put the current ones to those places. This is an ideology.
> I am entirely serious when I suggest unions and organizing; it is the only civil solution against tyranny at the top.
Hopefully. History shows that when things come to a head, the elite does not hesitate from using violence at any cost. That was how the fascist movements came to being - as 'strike breakers' for private industrialists. Then they were funded and politically backed by those industrialists to have them become 'movements'.
If I tell you that you might cut yourself by juggling with knifes and then you do, did the knife comply to my request or I just simply called it due to my observation?
What do they do for money?
It's an unchanging fact of the internet that people show up complaining about inflation/the Fed/not being on the gold standard and are always cranks. Strangely, this is still true even when there is inflation.
Coast, contribute to excess deaths, live in a basement, take odd jobs that are more or less on the books, panhandle, join a monestary...
Over the last 13 years the fed has played a much greater role in the market by purchasing securities and setting the discount rate near to zero. The goal being to soften the blow of the housing collapse and to help being the economy back up. What I find interesting about the low interest rate is that low cost lending changes what types of projects are economically viable. If you look at the formula for NPV the discount rate is within the denominator. What this is saying in other terms is that a projects value is manipulated by the discount rate. On the whole low yield capitally intensive projects are possible to take on during a time of low lending costs. Sure the math makes sense here but what does this mean in aggregate. Does it make sense that the value a project supplies to humanity is dependent on the interest rate? No it really does not, it's not required for it to be proportional whatsoever. Capital is just a standardized term for motivation. All that money can buy is someone else's time or effort at the end of the day. What the NPV formula is truly giving us is a ratio of how much human effort will be required and how much output you are likely to get from such efforts.
One of our issues both nationally and globally is that our interest rate is too low, (and we have no way to fairly correct for this). Higher cost of lending prunes projects that are low yield. This prunes projects that are not a large benefit to society. The fed has a hard time moving back to this because of the extreme difficulty everyone would face. Let's say they raise the rates to 18% suddenly homes value must drop to reflect the people's ability to pay the new mortgage rates. Best case this would dramatically reduce worker mobility. Worst case you wipe out the largest asset most might have.
I do believe the fed is used as a tool is used to keep people working. If you track the cost of staples such as a loaf of bread or milk vs the hours required to earn such things on minimum wage you will find that it's all about the same over time. Logically this makes no sense whatsoever. Does this mean that we have gotten no better at producing these commodities over the last 100 years?
The explanation that stands up, however, is the government printing and spending excessive amounts money, backed only by the promise to print even more.
Sustained multi-year inflation is more or less always due to government policy of printing money. Although these days the stats suggest it might also stem from a general energy crisis; the West has done a pretty solid job so far of cutting loose any reliable sources of energy. Still government policy, but it'll be a change from the running printing presses.
There's no indication that this is a real thing given that leisure, hospitality, transport and warehouse workers have seen the strongest wage growths in decades, the first two groups outpacing inflation and seeing real wage gains.
In fact fairly large wage increases in the service economy are one of the biggest contributors to inflation (wage-push inflation) and the basis for these rapid pay rises is the constantly tight labor market, hence the title of the thread.
It's not like it's hard; and mind, I think it's a good thing interest rates are going up, bringing a return to sanity to the economic landscape, but the Federal Reserve by it's own admission wanted to increase unemployment.
They succeeded. Now they're screeching because people are dropping out of the rat race/clearly orchestrated insane financial environnent because it is straight up clear to anyone with more than a handful of neurons to rub together that things have been completely unsustainable for a while?
Color me surprised. /s
It's beginning to look like having COVID-19 ages people faster than usual.[1] Hard to tell yet; that's the sort of study that takes years to gather data. More studies are turning up long-term damage. Here's one for COVID in kids.[2]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29801-8
[2] https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10619/presentation/67...
It’s a huge claim.
Almost 3 years later, Even just speaking to someone for more than a few minutes gets me winded. I saw a new doctor today, and he gives me hope that I might get my life back.
I used to work on my feet 8 hours/day making gears, and gear like objects.
[1] https://www.hormonesmatter.com/recovering-from-post-covid-mi...
But: how do you separate out the effects of the viral infection from the effects of the societal upheaval and stress of the last three years?
(If you somehow weren't exposed to the upheaval, then please forgive my assumption.)
It's not the same. Covid got me bad.
But strangely, only after the third dose of vaccine. Right after it in fact, and ever since.
But it's possible we will learn we are coupounding effects on a lot of fronts: stress from the situation, covid itself, unexpected side effects from the vaccine, and maybe something else.
Hard to tell.
But yeah, this is not regular run of off the mill, stress response.
As for the upheaval: some experienced it as such, for me it actually reduced stress considerably because I didn't have to travel for work anymore which normally would take about 25% of my time and was always super stressful, it also caused a lot of follow on stress because that 25% needed to be made up for somehow.
My stress level really didn't rise, but my ability to move and do things fell off a cliff.
The linked paper focuses on telomeres and genetic markers for ageing. Since Covid directly impacts the lungs, I wonder if the symptoms you described are related to lung damage or to another mechanism such as the one the paper proposed.
Hope you get well!
It could just be (does anyone know?) that when new viruses pop up like this, the target species often just takes a global health hit that includes not just deaths and acute illnesses but other effects on broader time scales. Maybe this is normal in human, primate or even mammalian history, part of the bumpy evolutionary road, but we didn't really know how much of an effect there is to be had until now, or the soon future?
If true, it's kind of a kick in the guts for modern humanity, as we've probably had a good run on pathogens in recent history (at least globally, with the spanish flu being the obvious recent precedent) and didn't really appreciate that there are still "monsters" lurking out there in Earth's shadows that we're not really "better" than.
I also wonder, if there's truth to the above, to what extent modernity, or at least this (perhaps) middling phase of it, is part of the problem, where high urban population densities can transform what were relatively rare and local pandemics into more common, global and devastating affairs ... ?
But thing is it also is just severe and didn’t become just another cold or just another bacteria.
Some viruses just knock a species out, like this virus which gives Tasmanian Devils a lethal facial cancer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
There’s a lot of just-so stories about how things are bad till your immune system strengthens upon encountering all the viruses and then everything is ok.
Bollocks. Half of kids used to die before adulthood and it was mostly due to disease.
We associate disease as being mostly mild now because we took decisive action over a couple centuries to reduce, treat or prevent the worst diseases.
We were left with the ones that seem inconsequential, and the flu, which was consequential.
The bet is that Sars-cov-2 is inconsequential because it shares a transmission mechanism with the other inconsequential viruses and because it often feels inconsequential in the acute phase.
Hopefully so, we won’t really know the long term effects for a long time. Post-polio syndrome takes decades to manifest in a patient, as does multiple sclerosis from EBV.
Yes, and this is why the current strain of anti-vaxx sentiment is so dangerous: if enough people buy into that crap then eventually we'll get below the immunity levels required for these diseases to remain suppressed, there is a noticeable uptick in unvaccinated kids since COVID, about -1% for now which is manageable. But if it would get higher it could lead to trouble.
And then there are the vaccinations that have simply been postponed on account of COVID-19:
https://www.who.int/news/item/22-05-2020-at-least-80-million...
Over time this will eventually be caught up.
I wish that public health communication had been more congruent with what was actually known, something like:
"This is a vaccine authorised under emergency conditions and data is still incomplete. It's clearly very beneficial for older citizens but the situation is less clear in the young. We are fairly confident that the rate of serious side effects is quite low" (and then ideally those statements would be followed up by whatever numbers were actually known at the time).
Pneumonia's main risk factor in children is malnutrition. So it's food, not medicine, that's cured the world of child pneumonia.
Diarrhea's main risk factor is contamination of food with feces. Again, the food, and its production, storage, and transport sanitary conditions. Washing with soap is the medicine here, not vaccines.
Malaria's transmission vector is mosquitos. This one you do need a vaccine for, but these mosquitos only exist on the equator.
So while your claim that half of kids used to die mostly due to disease is technically correct, it's actually malnutrition and living in shit that allowed it to happen, and it's our natural immune systems that prevent it (when healthy), not vaccines.
As we are plagued by media panic over every minor flu, it can be difficult to form an accurate picture of what's actually deadly.
You should still eat healthy though, your immune system evolved precisely to deal with this problem, and it works very well when fed.
There is a long list of diseases we effectively blocked from killing people:
* Almost anything bacterial
* Measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria and other commonly immunized childhood diseases
* Smallpox, which we eliminated
No country has anywhere near a 50% child mortality rate now, even when diarrhea and pneumonia are present. They’re the dregs of the scourge of disease we mostly controlled
See here for some descriptions of common childhood diseases of the past: https://www.nature.com/articles/pr200425
But was it by vaccines? The book "Dissolving Illusions" argues it wasn't, and that smallpox vaccination was a failure similar to the one we just witnessed with COVID vaccines (which are unambiguously a failure by the criteria on which they were originally presented to the populace).
It builds the case by citing many historical texts and news reports from the time when Jenner had first developed his vaccine, showing how it was at first advertised by him as granting 100% immunity only for many cases to emerge where the vaccine failed or outright gave people full smallpox infections. It also shows how the authorities went into denial and became utterly totalitarian, forcing vaccine mandates on people, refusing to accept that Jenner's invention wasn't perfect and forcing children to take it against the will of the parents, some of whom went to prison rather than allow their child to be vaccinated.
It concludes by arguing that smallpox was actually wiped out in the west (along with many other illnesses) by the general improvements in health and sanitation in the 20th century, rather than a vaccine that was very far from being 100% effective.
There was a time when I would have ignored this sort of alternate history take on medical consensus. But having just lived through an event exactly like the one the book describes it all sounds extremely plausible. COVID vaccines went from 95% effective and so clearly able to stop transmission that it was ethical to force people to take it, to "it doesn't stop infection or transmission or sickness, but it does reduce severe disease, let's hope that's not because it's inducing tolerance to spike protein in which case it'll actually be creating more serious disease without that being correctly attributed to the shots".
Lots of tables of figures if you'd like to peruse them, although its more concentrating on Polio. Anyway I guess the point is, yes there is an alternative take, but just because you read that in a book doesn't mean you should believe what you read. A significant amount more research would need to be done and um the author makes enough mistakes to take this with something of a grain of salt.
Anyway, I flicked through the paper. It has a habit of making what it thinks are rebuttals but which either are agreeing with what the book says, or rebuts arguments she didn't actually make. If this is the highest quality sort of rebuttal that's out there then I guess I should read the book because it must be pretty solid.
Example 1. Humphries points out that the vaccine rollout was coincident with a change in how polio was classified, which was guaranteed to significantly reduce the rate at which polio was reported regardless of the vaccine because the prior classification criteria had been very loose. The rebuttal is that yes this is true, but there were still a "significant number" of polio cases being reported after the change. This isn't a real disagreement yet the author uses it to claim that Humphries has callous disregard for polio cases, a nasty ad hominem they constantly repeat. It reduces their own credibility as it's so unlikely to be true. She's a medical doctor, not a profession famous for its callous disregard of disease.
Example 2. Humphries points out that "more than half of the cases [in Michigan] were not polio virus related at all" and the rebuttal is that if you restrict to paralytic polio then that statement isn't true any longer, but, again, that wasn't the claim she made.
Example 3. Another non-rebuttal is to point out that the author of one of the studies she cites was a vaccine fan. So? She was citing the data, not the author's general opinions.
Example 4. The overall thrust of the argument here is that Humphries says the threat of polio was exaggerated, and the author admits this was true (redefinitions, FDR etc), but then claims again that anyone who objects is "callous" and it was OK if FDR was "dramatizing" his illness - which maybe wasn't even polio at all - because it spread awareness. Also that it doesn't matter if polio was actually rare because that's also true of childhood cancer and Americans care about that. Again a non-sequitur of a rebuttal that actually supports the points Humphries was making.
What a crap set of counter-arguments. They don't point out any mistakes, it's just a big set of disagreements over emphasis and tone. If anything this seems to reinforce the overall impression formed in the past two years that pro-vaccine people seem systematically unable to accept that tradeoffs exist, accurate data matters and misleading people to win their support is bad. They also radically over-estimate their own rationality.
On top of that, like the other one GP mentioned, one of its main methods of transmission is feces contamination. It's possible hygiene was also a major factor in stopping it.
Fatality rate of 0.2%. Worst fatal complication: Pneumonia, for which the biggest risk factor is immunodeficiency from malnutrition.
> mumps
Fatality rate of 0.04%. Worst fatal complication: Encephalitis, for which the biggest risk factor is immunodeficiency from malnutrition.
> rubella
This one's nasty when it infects a pregnant mother. All women should get rubella vaccinated.
> polio
Fatality rate of up to 30% and debilitating post-effects in up to 50%. You'd be an idiot not to get polio vaccinated.
> diphtheria
Penicillin works.
> Smallpox
Was eliminated with a vaccine that is no longer administered.
You said:
> We associate disease as being mostly mild now because we took decisive action over a couple centuries to reduce, treat or prevent the worst diseases.
My point is that the diseases were bad because there wasn't enough food to maintain healthy immune systems. That's not "decisive action", that's farming and trade. It was the cooking of food and the boiling of water and the washing with soap that prevented deaths from most diseases.
In researching this reply, I've found a respect for some vaccines though. But I still hold food and our natural immunity as the undisputed kings of healthy living.
> Fatality rate of up to 30% and debilitating post-effects in up to 50%.
Only if you developed paralytic polio. Those percents don't apply to the polio virus in general. Only 3% ever developed anything worse than flu-like symptoms, and paralytic polio was something like 10% of that 3%. (I'm going from memory here, these numbers are on the CDC website)
So we're talking an IFR around 0.1%, very close to the estimated flu IFR of 0.07%
We vanquished these diseases in the past 50-100 years mostly. My argument is that diseases did not just all become benign without intervention
Native Americans, to take one example, were incredibly healthy in their traditional lifestyles. This did not give their immune systems sufficient strength to fight off smallpox and other diseases.
Lets be real here. No one hangs out in bat caves for the lulz.
Im ok wearing masks and staying home at peaks, but let me die sometimes, we organize in countries to delegate to some extent but it went too far this time. Make the vaccines mandatory and force give it to people, if really that's the reason we re in trouble (I have 3 shots of the mrna).
I'm in Hong Kong where we can still go to jail for not wearing a mask, but even in Europe it went too far and the backlash was insane.
Anecdotally, same with me. After I got covid a few months back, despite being vaccinated 3 times, I then got the flu a month later which hit me harder than covid, and another month later I find myself saddled with a nasty infection right below the root of one of my molars, which baffled my dentist as the x-ray shows absolutely nothing there a year ago and I have very good dental hygiene.
His hypothesis is that covid weakened my immune system enough to allow other "bugs" that would normally be fought by my immune system, to thrive and take hold much faster than normal, including the random tooth infection.
Similar with some of my friends, afte they got covid, they were on a marathon of getting sick the whole winter season despite being young, vaccinated, fit and living healthy lifestyles.
Of course, Covid exists and needs to be treated seriously, especially for people with compromised immune systems. But it turns out, it wasn't nearly as deadly a threat to the average person as was initially feared.
If even remotely true, this is simply a statement about your economic standing and social circle.
Outside of work, most people I know work low wage service or gig jobs and they all got covid, most multiple times. Seven members of my church died of covid in the first 18 months.
Well i'm retired, and my brother is still a trucker. We're comfortable, but not rich.
> Outside of work, most people I know work low wage service or gig jobs and they all got covid, most multiple times.
I suspect the vaccine is to blame for the reinfections, and that years from now it will be confirmed that it had a negative effectiveness.
> even members of my church died of covid in the first 18 months.
If even remotely true, that says a lot about their advanced age and comorbidities.
Most members of my family have had it, multiple times. Most of my colleagues have had it. In fact, the majority of people in the UK have had it at least once. I am an outlier; I haven't had it to my knowledge.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are some longer past explanations about this here in case it's helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The shots trained the immune system against the obsolete 2019 version of the spike protein, but our bodies can't tell the difference between the mutated versions and the original. They spot a SARS-CoV-2 spike and start making the same antibodies they were trained to, but those antibodies aren't fully effective because of the mutations. And unfortunately the body doesn't seem to be able to 'unlearn' this because people keep taking boosters, and/or it may be incapable of unlearning anyway even without boosters. It's a bit unclear.
The problem can be seen most clearly in UK government data because they were willing to show data on case rates by vaccine status pre-adjustment, which by the time they stopped publishing the data showed 3x-4x higher rate of COVID infections in the vaccinated cohort and still getting worse. That's why even the headline rates (subject to much invalid data game playing) showed effectiveness start at 95% and fall rapidly as the months went by.
Such problems have happened before, pre COVID. Fauci even noted in an interview that this can happen, safety testing is meant to detect it but the process was so accelerated there was much less time to see it than normal.
I don’t understand your comment. Do you mean it’s anecdotal based on sample size = 1, or is it an accepted fact (from your phrasing using “you”)?
As for anecdotes, I’ve had Covid too and that’s the only time I’ve been sick since.
Kind of like how searching “back pain [thing]” will show people reporting that everything causes back pain. Or listening to the most insecure bald guy in the world explaining how every dismal thing about his station in life has something to do with his baldness. Or the certainty in which someone will blame some random food item for why they are sick when it could have been anything they’ve eaten in the last few days.
It drives the value of anecdotes and conversation around covid to zero, or worse.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-...
A secondary point perhaps is that some locations did not have lockdowns or masks for the most part and still have low vaccine numbers. Some locations may have shut down schools at the beginning of 2020 but decided that even masks in schools were a step too far by August 2020. The US response varied wildly depending on location.
The current version is the "Pandemic is Over Act", H.R. 382.[1] This is the "declare a victory and go home" approach.
There's progress in nasal spray vaccines, but they're not really ready yet. There's one that that works in monkeys.[2] Human Phase I testing is starting. China and India have approved nasal vaccines.[3] Effectiveness is maybe 50%. Too soon to tell how fast immunity falls off. The US government is not funding work in this area.[4]
If an effective nasal spray vaccine is developed, even if it has a short immunity period, that could work. It might mean quarterly sprays. (COVID-19 antibody levels seem to drop off after about 90 days, which is why people get COVID multiple times.)
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/382
[2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/covid-nasal-vaccines
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02851-0
[4] https://archive.is/fSkM2
[1] https://archive.is/SGW9U
But that's disingenuous - we just spent 3 years handling our losses. One little article comes out on the economy blaming covid for worker shortages and you lose your shit. As proof we have probably 50 1000 comment threads on covid suffering and this one is dead after 100 comments.
> In a November 30, 2022, speech on “Inflation and the Labor Market,” Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell blamed most of the 3.5 million estimated shortfall in the U.S. labor force on premature retirements. He also blamed a large portion – between 280,000 and 680,000 – on “long Covid.” In a footnote, however, Powell acknowledged a far more somber factor: an estimated 400,000 unexpected deaths among working age people.
... In 2020, the vulnerable died of Covid at unusually high rates. In 2021 and 2022, Covid continued its assault, but the young, middle-aged, and healthy also died in aberrantly high numbers of something else.
Also I still wonder what makes a COVID count. If you were almost dead and COVID is what pushed you over, did you really die of COVID or anything would’ve done it? Do they count that as “was terminal before COVID”?
My grandpa got pneumonia in the ICU and died because of it, but I wouldn’t say he got pneumonia and died, there is a reason why he was in the ICU.
Is it reasonable to expect software to resume eating the world or will the population decline from low birth rates to pick up where the pandemic left off and we are in a permanent tight employment market... for blue collar jobs anyway, while "AI eats the white collar jobs"?
We didn't actually need to automate jobs before. It might've been cost effective, but it was easy and risk-free to hire from an adequate pool.
Now we need automation because there aren't enough workers. So we'll probably get more automation until the pool is balanced.
See how much more automated things are in places without immigration and super low birth rates (Japan, South Korea).
I am not sure that Japan actually follows that trend. It's a big and complex country but in my experience there were more workers on jobs that in my western country would be just one guy, or no one at all, perhaps just a sign.
Japan has fairly low wages but good social services, public infrastructure, and affordable daily life so I suspect that the line to cross into "poverty" is actually quite a bit lower in Japan. Perhaps that allows the math to make sense since a company can afford to hire more people, and those people can still afford to make ends meet.
Happy to be corrected, my knowledge of Japanese economics is pretty shallow.
the pandemic did not drive interest rates up. Flooding the economy with money ignited inflation, and higher interest rates are necessary to tamp down a recession.
It was about half and half, but that's a lot better than another great recession like 2008!
And of course then there was a war and some fires at chip factories causing supply-side inflation. It's been flat in the last few months though.
I’ve never googled his name before writing this and the first Google suggestion is „Eric Feigl Ding fear mongerer“
This was in January 2020. Fortunately, top commentators leapt into action, determined his calculation of the R0 may have had some technical issues and in any event he didn’t have specific expertise in the area
The matter resolved, we waited till March 2020
Eric Feigl-Ding also claimed that monkeypox could be airborne [1] and would be the next big pandemic [2]. Both turned out not to be true.
[1] https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1528804498084446210
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/07/monkeypox...
I'm sure most people here know variations of the phrase "economists predicted 11 of the last 2 recessions", it's talked about often enough. What they may not be aware of is the same is true of pandemics. Offhand I'm aware of 5 predicted in the past 15 years or so, 2 of which happened.
- If China doesn't control Omicron they'll suffer a "world of hurt" and it's "literally make or break".
- "Danish political leaders have completely lost their frigging minds releasing all #COVID19 mitigations" and "this is what happens when a country's leaders gaslights its own citizens", talking about the end of restrictions at the start of 2022.
- "New world record — More than 1,000 daily #monkeypox cases (7 days average). Those who said #MPXV would fizzle out soon are plain wrong. This fall school year will need radically new / more safety mitigations."
- "In other news – Schools across England are reopening again today. No school mask requirements. No school air quality and ventilation guidelines – it is so dangerous that it is ‘medieval’ says Professor Alice Roberts. God save and its children from B117. COVID19."
The guy is a Harvard epidemiologist, which means he knows nothing about disease and will constantly exaggerate any possible threat regardless of science or truth.
This seems totally uncalled for. Besides having a degree in Public Health, among others, he’s a cancer survivor. I’d say he knows a lot about diseases.
Like it or not, to say his warning about Covid-19 three years ago was prescient is an understatement.
Based on his bio, he seems more than credible:
Dr. Feigl-Ding graduated from The Johns Hopkins University with Honors in Public Health and Phi Beta Kappa. He then completed his dual doctorate in epidemiology and his doctorate in nutrition, separately, as the youngest graduate to complete his double doctoral programs at age 23 from Harvard SPH. Next, concurrently with his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, he studied medicine at Boston University School of Medicine for several years, until he left BUSM to become faculty at Harvard Medical School. Teaching at Harvard for over 15 years, he has advised and mentored two dozen students and lectured in more than a dozen graduate and undergraduate courses, for which he received the Derek Bok Distinction in Teaching Award from Harvard College.
After 2020? Totally called for. Default assumption should now be that public health "experts" are worse at understanding disease than laymen. Their predictions and recommendations were just so systematically atrocious and exaggerated.
> he’s a cancer survivor. I’d say he knows a lot about diseases.
That's a non sequitur if there ever was one. Having had cancer grants no expertise in understanding the macro behavior of respiratory viruses.
> Based on his bio, he seems more than credible
Credibility comes from accurate predictions that other people could not have made, not empty credentialism.
What Google does or doesn’t return in autocomplete results is meaningless unless you also show the search history that backs those personalized autocompletions.
Jab-Kudos!!!
None of them had anything to do with (Long-)Covid. In fact I have not met a single person yet that actually has "Long Covid", despite it being portrayed as this huge issue that we have to (apparently) deal with.
The people who I know left work and never returned are not rich by any means. They simply discovered more joyful things to do than their underpaid shitty jobs beforehand. Some have become full time carers for grandchildren, parents saving more money on nursery than what the grandparent was earning in some awful under appreciated healthcare job, some have created a small lifestyle business during COVID, some have retired early.
I am happy for all of them.
Some counter-anecdotes: In my network, I know someone who is coming up on a year of disability due to long Covid. After their second infection, they just... never got better. Unloading a dishwasher takes too much energy. And I have a personal trainer friend who has told me that of their clients that have had Covid, nearly none of them have returned to their previous levels, even the ones who only had "mild" Covid infections.
I'm very glad for your friends and acquaintances who were able to use this opportunity to pursue their dreams in some fashion, but they don't represent the totality of experience here, just because you haven't noticed any examples to the contrary.
It wouldn't be surprising if there is a large population of people too ashamed to share a post-COVID condition.
Finally, admitting weakness is hard.
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/dibStat.html
There has also been a reduction in staffing of these offices.
https://abc7news.com/social-security-disability-insurance-go...
Also Long Covid wasn’t an officially recognized cause for someone becoming disabled until sometime in 2022.
Fairly unlikely.
Susceptibility to long COVID probably does come down to genetics, HLA subtype and/or some kind of OAS effect maybe due to prior infections. The people who have already encountered the virus and their immune system has formed a robust and successful response to the virus are likely to fight it off again fine the next time they're exposed (barring a change in their immune status due to chemotherapy or immunoscenescence or whatever, but that is a risk that those people run with influenza and other respiratory viruses as well).
We're not going to see an additional 1% of the population suffering new onset long COVID year after year.