Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

news.harvard.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 370 posts

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#341

Post by tinus_hn »

tshaddox wrote: post #321
tinus_hn wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you’d only need one strict lockdown if you’re not opening up everything every couple of months. It just never ends. Is this a joke?

Well, no, that’s exactly what I’m saying would not be the case. The longer lockdown would not need to be anywhere near as strict as the lockdown that comes after a month of opening everything back up.

Wow, so now instead of the ‘three weeks strict lockdown to stop the spread’ fantasy we now have this ‘lockdown light’ idea. Where did this theory come from?

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#342

Post by WalterBright »

vladTheInhaler wrote: post #332
WalterBright wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social science studies tend to be agenda driven, too.

Do you have any evidence showing that social scientists are any more agenda driven than, for instance, biologists?

What, I should do a social science study to show that social science studies are driven by agendas? :-)

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#343

Post by ddingus »

luxuryballs wrote: post #326
ddingus wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize health is not a "me" problem? It is an "US" problem. Frankly, we have a number of US problems brewing and we have them due to not having our priorities in order as a people, human beings.

Genuinely curious where you got that idea, my health is absolutely none of your business.

Yes it is. We live in a closed ecosystem.

Mother Nature has boundary issues.

I understand you hold that opinion. Also understand it is a minority opinion. And hey, I get it. Many people do not like to be told what they have to do.

Humans, this place we inhabit works the way it works. There will be tradeoffs.

Managing public health is one of them. There are many others.

Sincerely, I wish you had the option to live in a personal vacuum, "you do you" style, but that option is currently unavailable.

There are some options given you are willing to either forego many of the benefits that come with a well developed society, or accumulate wealth sufficient to isolate yourself.

Barring those, yeah. You are just another member of the public.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#344

Post by GuB-42 »

8ytecoder wrote: post #307
statstutor wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps unpopular opinion If I was responsible for policy, I would ask (have asked) a scientist to model this rather than stating it as opinion. I suspect that any model would just show you to be extremely wrong, for a virus which is already circulating freely.

It’s not a scientific problem. The scientific solution to contain the pandemic would be a full 21 day absolute shutdown of everything with people surviving on rations. It becomes a political problem if you try to do that in any functioning democracy. Decisions made about people must have a feedback loop to learn from how people react to it. For example, the lockdown became ineffective when it was extended too long. P…

> The scientific solution to contain the pandemic would be a full 21 day absolute shutdown of everything with people surviving on rations.

It is not even a guaranteed solution. It will bring back cases to almost zero. In some rare cases, incubation time can be way longer than 21 days, you are also going to have people with weak immune systems that can contain the infection but not eliminate it completely, plus all the bad things that can happen: mutations, animal transmission, etc...

Then, if we just go back to business as usual after the super-lockdown, it will spread again, just as it started. As long as R>1 there is no way to win. And for now the only way to keep R<1 is to make our lives more or less miserable (today's solution), herd immunity through infections (and let millions die), and herd immunity though vaccines (our goal).

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#345

Post by stormbrew »

tinus_hn wrote: post #212
stormbrew wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last pandemic with a death toll anything like (actually much worse than) COVID-19 is the still-ongoing HIV pandemic. It's entering its 40th year .

With PReP and PEP HIV is preventable, containable, manageable and no longer leads to AIDS and death. It’s just a chronic infection with no health effects. Is it really still considered an ongoing pandemic?

Yes, because it continues to spread widely and access to treatment, let alone PReP, is extremely uneven across the world.

Both PReP and antivirals are also not easy. You don't just get a shot and not worry about HIV for a few years, you have to take a pill every day as long as you're sexually active, and then treatment antivirals are expensive and need to be used consistently as well. One person slipping up can mean a lot of people catch it. Even assuming you know you have it to begin with, which is often not obvious until you've been a carrier for a while.

Never mind religious groups going around vilifying condoms doesn't help.

It's getting better, but yes it is still considered a global pandemic.

I mean, it's not the same thing as COVID but like COVID it carries with it its own unique challenges and at no point has the world dumped billions of dollars into single-use vaccines for it like we've done with COVID. Its stigma has migrated (or compounded) from a "gay disease" to an "african disease".

Honestly, I really hope that one silver lining out of all this is that an mRNA vaccine for HIV might get some development now. There was some work that way before everything got diverted to COVID and now that tech has proven itself so...

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#346

Post by boldpandabear »

mikem170 wrote: post #280
boldpandabear wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because viral theory is unproven and likely wrong. Much more likely that illness is the result of stress & conflict.

What relevant viral theory do you think is wrong? Virologists know a good bit about coronavirusus, and so far I haven't seen where any of their prior knowledge that has not been applicable to the covid19 coronavirus. I've been reassured by what this body of knowledge has always had to say about the dangers of retransmission, the longevity of immunity, and the immunity conferred across variants, amongst other things.…

Any theory that suggests a particle causes illness is still unproven.

Any theory that suggests particles jump from human to human and cause illness is also unproven.

All studies where they’ve attempted to prove it, have failed.

Almost all of viral theory rests on a study where mice trapped in dark chamber got sick when TB particles were piped in. Never been replicated.

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#347

Post by nl »

erklik wrote: post #93
spyspy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalistic interpretation of these tiny, rushed studies has also been god awful since the beginning. This is true during the best of times, but every clickbait headlines spreading disinformation during an actual pandemic should not be tolerated, especially amongst the more reputable news sources (looking at you NYT).

This right here. If people look at the actual study, they'll see the number of caveats and various exact conditions where the study proved something, whereas the media tends to pretend that those caveats or conditions don't exist therefore, the study works everywhere. That's why people don't trust science, "oh, its probably wrong again".

This isn't always really true.

Some of the worst offenders have been scientists, who promote their own studies (eg, the French hydroxychloroquine studies).

It's possible to pick holes in these studies if you know the field. But these holes aren't pointed out in the papers themselves, and peer review doesn't stop this.

Peer reviewers are experts in the field. So they know if they are looking at a 30 person study it isn't conclusive, and wouldn't expect the author to state that. It's just assumed the readers know that.

We see the real impact of this with things like the Vitamin D studies. Experts know that Vitamin D deficiency is highly correlated with age and other health issues, but that the causation chain is "Person is unhealthy so doesn't get outside as much so gets less Vitamin D, and in some cases are deficient which can make health issues worse". Non-experts read the report and see the causation going the other way, ie, they think: "High Vitamin D fixes health issues".

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#348

Post by chrismcb »

silisili wrote: post #140

Perhaps unpopular opinion, but the US vaccination system is about the worst when it comes to preventing spread. Instead, it seems to be attempting to prevent death. I've always argued that preventing spread would as a byproduct prevent death, but I'm obviously not studied in the field. Put shortly, I would have vaccinated college kids and working age folks first. They are not likely to die from it, but are far more l…

The issue is, something like 80% of the deaths and hospitalizations come from about 20% of the people. It is far quicker to vaccinate 20% of the population than it is to vaccinate the 80% (will less than 80 but more than 20) that covers the group you mentioned. If course the us didn't do that...

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#349

Post by lenkite »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #327
loveistheanswer wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>China doesn't have the power to censor Western expats on Twitter, Yes, they do, directly and indirectly. Directly: Li-Meng Yan, the Chinese virologist who blew the whistle on covid in December 2019, but the Chinese government covered that up. She defected to the US, and published a research paper critical of the Chinese government, and Twitter banned her account. Indirectly: How likely do you think it would be for t…

Li-Meng Yan didn't blow the whistle in December 2019. She's a Hong Konger who started making crazy claims months after the outbreak began. She flew to the US, claimed she was persecuted, and now works for Steve Bannon. She's made all sorts of crazy claims, including that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon. The first pneumonia patients in Wuhan got their test results showing a suspected SARS-related coronavirus on 27 December…

As far as I know, it was well-reported in the papers that the WHO team was first blocked from entering. And then once they were allowed in, all the data was sanitised for them.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-ch... https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...

Re: Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

#350

Post by scott_w »

trulyme wrote: post #337
scott_w wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers absolutely do support my claim. A quick check shows the U.K. death toll increased by 15% in 2020 (600,000 in 2019, 690,000 in 2020). That was WITH the lockdowns in place. 40,000 people died of Covid in January 2021 alone as a result of the government's ineffective response leading up to Christmas. Compare that to New Zealand’s 26 total Covid deaths, or South Korea’s 1,669 total Covid deaths. I think my nu…

> Oh, and we wouldn’t have 130,000 dead in the UK and 500,000+ dead in the USA! No they don't. Unless you have a way to create and investigate a parallel universe where you can put your thesis to a test, but I assume you don't.

I’ve pointed to countries we can compare strategies with to back up my case. What’s backing up yours beyond “I said so?”
Post reply on HN