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England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

bbc.co.uk

271–280 of 460 posts

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#271
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expedited approval in the middle of a pandemic is not the same as "abandoning all previous procedure".

Except that it is. They were already able to distribute the product under EUA. The push for 'full approval' was entirely political. What's the bar for full approval? Whatever the FDA says it is. Usually that includes convening the advisory committee. That didn't happen. Recently, 3 members resigned from said committee. While these resignations weren't about the vaccines, they were about a lack of trust in FDA (interi…

People avoiding vaccination and thus dying because the FDA hasn’t done full approval is more than a political issue. It’s a real heath issue and exactly the kind of public health problem the FDA is concerned with.

The general public doesn’t understand that expedited approval was a well understood category years before COVID and designed exactly for situations like this. Check the way back machine of your feeling paranoid.

As to the actual science we have vastly more data on COVID vaccinations than most drugs or vaccines the FDA is approving. It really isn’t some ad hoc process it’s well designed procedures and massive quantities of scientific data.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#272
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it is. They were already able to distribute the product under EUA. The push for 'full approval' was entirely political. What's the bar for full approval? Whatever the FDA says it is. Usually that includes convening the advisory committee. That didn't happen. Recently, 3 members resigned from said committee. While these resignations weren't about the vaccines, they were about a lack of trust in FDA (interi…

People avoiding vaccination and thus dying because the FDA hasn’t done full approval is more than a political issue. It’s a real heath issue and exactly the kind of public health problem the FDA is concerned with. The general public doesn’t understand that expedited approval was a well understood category years before COVID and designed exactly for situations like this. Check the way back machine of your feeling para…

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Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#273
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, I'm just pointing out that there were (and still are in my opinion) valid scientific and rational thinking for being hesitant of getting the vaccine.

> valid scientific and rational thinking for being hesitant of getting the vaccine. Care to expand what these "scientific" reasons are?

I think the landscape for child and newborns is not entirely understood. Given that long COVID is rare in children, the personal risk tradeoff for a child is unclear at best. I would be hesitant to vaccinate my children (if I had any). Certainly if they were homebound.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget what makes COVID19 so insidious: without testing, it takes time before an infected contagious person shows symptoms. By the time they decide to stay off public spaces, they have already potentially spread the virus. With the common flu, you know almost instantly so you stay home to recover. Fat people know their condition and it's their choice to eat fast food anyway. And obesity is also non contagious.

> Symptoms can begin about 2 days (but can range from 1 to 4 days) after the virus enters the body. That means that you may be able to pass on the flu to someone else before you know you are sick, as well as while you are sick. Some people can be infected with the flu virus but have no symptoms. During this time, those people may still spread the virus to others. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/spread.htm

For comparison:

> People with COVID-19 have had a wide range of symptoms reported – ranging from mild symptoms to severe illness. Symptoms may appear 2-14 days after exposure to the virus. Anyone can have mild to severe symptoms.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/s... (emphasis added)

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delta has an R value of 6 to 7. Measles has a much higher R value of 12 to 18, yet the vaccination is highly successful. You’re promoting disinformation.

The vaccine for measles is sterilizing. The vaccines for COVID are not. They're two completely separate classes of intervention. I'm not the one spreading disinformation here. Just because substance A and substance B are both called "vaccines" doesn't mean that A and B have comparable effects and can be treated the same way. It is simply not medically possible for COVID vaccination to stop the spread of COVID. We hav…

It's quite possible that if measles were introduced to our global population now it would be exactly the same: has so much spread that it has the chance to mutate to evade the immune system next time around.

If 99% of people were vaccinated then covid wouldn't have populations in which to mutate.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is snarky but poses a real question. If we ban people from spaces or events due to their vulnerability to COVID then why do we not do the same for those vulnerable to other diseases? Flu is a good example for the young and elderly since it poses a significant risk. It would strain the argument but you could make a case for banning the obese from fast food restaurants based on this reasoning as well.

Because covid is 10-50x more deadly than the flu, it makes more sense to advocate for precautions against it. Just got my flu shot this week, but even for the young and healthy covid is more dangerous than the flu, except possibly in young children ages 0-12.

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Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#277
post #127

The thing that people seem to be ignoring in all of this is that people like having power. The vaccines are helpful to the recipient, but unless you are successful at completely shutting down travel to the rest of the world: not really that helpful to the people who haven't taken them. In fact, there is an argument for how over-vaccinating will be harmful to the unvaccinated. If you're vaccinated, you can still get a…

All the data suggests that vaccines significantly reduce transmission, both by decreasing the likelihood of infection and onward transmission from vaccinated individuals. Additionally, anything that incentivizes more people to get the vaccine will result in higher uptake, which benefits everyone in terms of lower overall spread and hospital usage.

All the current data suggests something very different.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/08/06/fully-v...

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#278

The thing that people seem to be ignoring in all of this is that people like having power. The vaccines are helpful to the recipient, but unless you are successful at completely shutting down travel to the rest of the world: not really that helpful to the people who haven't taken them. In fact, there is an argument for how over-vaccinating will be harmful to the unvaccinated. If you're vaccinated, you can still get a…

> The graph here you are looking for is the one that shows the percentage of staffed beds and icu beds occupied. Notice that it is entirely flat.

Compare June to September, total staffed beds is about even, total ICU beds grew somewhat, and usage of both jumped from about 80% to 88% for overall beds, and 90ish to 96% for ICUs (which is a bigger increase in use than it might seem because capacity increased)

If overall use increased 10% and covid users are 20% of overall and 40% of ICU, up from maybe 5% and 10%, it seems there are a lot of non-covid users whose care is being delayed or denied because of covid. There's some room for misleading statistical information, such as ICU patients in for something else that happen to have asymptomatic covid and are only tested because of other patients, but the difference in stats seems large enough to ignore that. Stats I've heard are that the vast majority of hospitalized covid patients in most states had not been vacinated, so it does seem useful to the person taking them, and by reducing the overall hospitalization rate, seem to have kept Texas within hospital capacity, if barely (I haven't heard stories of Texas hospitals running triage and tents in parking garage like some other states)

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#279
post #175
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Showing your ID to buy alcohol because the govenment has decided that under 18's cannot buy it. That's widely practiced and accepted without issue

>That's widely practiced and accepted without issue There's two components to this. 1. It's widely accepted because in most cases the cashier just glaces at the ID. How is the vaccine passport going to be implemented? Are they going to give you a laminated ID card, or is it going to be some QR code thingy on your phone? The latter would necessitate some sort machine scanner, which would mean it's trivially easy to tu…

The last time I was asked for ID to buy alcohol in a supermarket in the UK was over 15 years ago (and the last time I was asked in a pub was probably 20 years ago). It's not like parts of the US where venues are required to check literally everyone - it's only people who look like they might be underage.

Re: England vaccine passport plans ditched, health secretary says

#280
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> valid scientific and rational thinking for being hesitant of getting the vaccine. Care to expand what these "scientific" reasons are?

I think the landscape for child and newborns is not entirely understood. Given that long COVID is rare in children, the personal risk tradeoff for a child is unclear at best. I would be hesitant to vaccinate my children (if I had any). Certainly if they were homebound.

That's a different point than before, though. That's child vaccination vs. general population vaccination.
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