961–970 of 1001 posts
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yeah small note to add here: the last pediatric vaccine (garadasil / HPV) went through a decade of clinical trials before approval
Think about this for a second. If you give 100,000 pre-teens an HPV vaccine, how long do you have to wait to discover if they are more or less likely to contract genital warts? Now compare that to how long you would have to wait to see if they contract COVID. This is not a valid comparison.
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We can test for natural immunity. That then counts as fully vaccinated.
> We can test for natural immunity. That then counts as fully vaccinated According to who? It's not in the US or Canada, as examples. That's the point of the topic you're replying to. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2313728/canada-refuses-entry-to...
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> If lots of people independently choose to take the risk and they're not harming anyone else, why shouldn't they be allowed to? There just isn't a way to ensure the "not harming anyone else" with a highly transmissible virus like this, even if we were to somehow convince hospitals to assume the legal and ethical risks of denying treatment to COVID patients when they have room to preserve hospital capacity, and even…
If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected. If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need. The reality is that covid isn't dangerous enough…
> If you're at risk of covid, you can get vaccinated and are protected from covid. That's all the defense you need in order to not worry about anyone else being infected.
Vaccinated people can still get coronavirus variants, albeit with seemingly milder symptoms and at a lower rate. There is some evidence that they can still be transmissible as well.
More importantly, there are also whole categories of people who cannot get vaccinated or who are not allowed to get the second vaccine dose due to an allergic reaction to the first. My mother is in the second category. https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/who-cant-have-covid-19-vac...
> If you're in an at-risk category where you feel the vaccine isn't enough of a defense, you can wear n95 masks, get a third booster shot, or do whatever other extra mitigation measures you feel you need.
Masks work in part by catching and redirecting particles that come out of your own mouth. I am not an epidemiologist and have limited understanding of the effect, but my limited understanding is that models that epidemiologist have used suggest that effect might be more important than the filtering effect of the mask itself given the other mucus membranes like the eyes or gaps in most masks. So your mask helps protect others as much as yourself if you are carrying the virus asymptomatically. https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/covid-19-pandemic-ma...
Why? Probably because everyone and their uncle self-diagnosed a bad cold as COVID-19 and plenty more would lie about having natural immunity. Still I don't understand the current approach to COVID in the US. Vaccines are safe and available yet we only just approved the use in children under 12. I have heard second hand many doctors are downplaying the importance of the vaccine for people under 18. On the other hand p…
> I have heard second hand many doctors are downplaying the importance of the vaccine for people under 18. Maybe because there's concerns. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v... > "for boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day Covid-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly Covid-19 hosp…
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To reply as the devils advocate to this comment, what is the tolerance to social costs that society is willing to bear? Also why would one segment of society have to do something that it doesn't want e.g. not bear risk if they want to? Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? Overweight and obesity are going to cost much more in increased healthcare costs than COVID will in the coming decades (pls prove m…
>Should we tell people to get their BMI under 25 too? >What about drinking and smoking? There's a lot of investment in trying to fix these problems already, or at least offset the costs. For example, there are "sin taxes" for things like cigarettes and alcohol, which means smokers and drinkers are paying disproportionately more taxes than those that don't. You could argue that overweight folks are also paying disprop…
1. No it doesn't. It only requires eating less.
2. One of these is invasive, the other is not.
> There's a lot of investment in trying to fix these problems already
Not really. We have culturally embraced "health at any size", we don't clamp down on unhealthy food advertisers, we install vending machines in schools. We are now FIRING people for noncompliance with vaccine mandates, but shrugging impotently when childhood obesity rises 9% in 18 months of pandemic lockdowns.
Further, the obesity issue isn't just a baseline problem: it's also the #2 comorbidity of COVID itself. If these tinpot tyrant vaccine mandate people were even remotely serious about actual harm reduction from the pandemic, we've had approximately 72 weeks since we knew of the obesity-COVID severity link to include weight loss as a preventative protocol along with masks and vaccines.
The fact that we've heard no significant public messaging on this front during a period of time that high-risk obese populations have had the chance to dramatically reduce their risk profile tells you everything you need to know about how serious "public health officials" are about actually reducing deaths. Hint: they're not.
Because it's a terrible policy prescription. If natural immunity is acceptable, what proportion of the unvaccinated-uninfected population will just take the risk? Half? More? Millions of people will just (continue to) take the risk, get sick, go to hospital, and die (in decreasing proportions), incurring substantial personal and social costs along the way. Accepting only vaccination as evidence of protection reduces…
>Because it's a terrible policy prescription. If natural immunity is acceptable, what proportion of the unvaccinated-uninfected population will just take the risk? You're making a calculation not regarding health, but regarding public reaction. The problem is that the public health community sucks as far as making these calculations go; I don't think I need to list all the missteps here. IMHO, they know a lot about e…
Because it's a terrible policy prescription. If natural immunity is acceptable, what proportion of the unvaccinated-uninfected population will just take the risk? Half? More? Millions of people will just (continue to) take the risk, get sick, go to hospital, and die (in decreasing proportions), incurring substantial personal and social costs along the way. Accepting only vaccination as evidence of protection reduces…
So? If lots of people independently choose to take the risk and they're not harming anyone else, why shouldn't they be allowed to? The impact on the hospital system could be blunted simply by saying "This wing is for COVID patients, when it fills up further COVID patients will be turned away" and leaving the other wings for normal hospital patients. They have to do this for quarantine reasons anyway. Now that COVID i…
It's hard to isolate the personal risks (illness, long-term complication, death, cost) from the social risks (healthcare resource exhaustion, healthcare worker burden, socialized costs, increased transmission).
But assuming we could, how many people that choose to take the risk are _really_ prepared to accept the downside costs if their number comes up? How many would accept a reduced standard of care (or no care at all) as a risk they assumed? Or would there be much anger, regret, and gnashing of teeth?
Assuming the risk requires a degree of rationality that, while perhaps more common on this site, probably does not characterize the population that would choose to assume the risk...
Because it's a terrible policy prescription. If natural immunity is acceptable, what proportion of the unvaccinated-uninfected population will just take the risk? Half? More? Millions of people will just (continue to) take the risk, get sick, go to hospital, and die (in decreasing proportions), incurring substantial personal and social costs along the way. Accepting only vaccination as evidence of protection reduces…
If hospitals didn’t overflow and society didn’t crumble for most of 2020 (when there was 0% vaccination), it’s odd to argue that it will now that there is 65% vaccination.
2020 was the worst economic catastrophe in a century.
The US Fed printed money in terms it has never before, it's balance sheet has been massively inflated.
Government debt exploded to WW2 levels.
10's of millions were unemployed.
Most Healthcare systems had to adjust to delay and defer elective procedures.
Millions of restaurants and other businesses closed, never to re-open.
All of these measures were taken precisely because there were 0% vaccinated.
The US/World basically couldn't handle another year of those restrictions, it would probably break the economy and cause a lot of harm.
It's not going to be possible to fully re-open until COVID subsides (esp. Delta), vaccinates will be a primary driver of that.
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So? If lots of people independently choose to take the risk and they're not harming anyone else, why shouldn't they be allowed to? The impact on the hospital system could be blunted simply by saying "This wing is for COVID patients, when it fills up further COVID patients will be turned away" and leaving the other wings for normal hospital patients. They have to do this for quarantine reasons anyway. Now that COVID i…
Unrelated, but one thing I've been curious about for a while is: what useful treatments are actually available when you're hospitalized for COVID-19? Is there anything besides intravenous fluids/vitamins and oxygen that is regularly provided? From what I've read, it seems that most people that reach the critical level of needing a ventilator don't recover anyway. Does being hospitalized improve outcomes by a substant…
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You are assuming that getting vaccinated is a burden, and then comparing it to challenges that many people take years, or longer, to overcome. That makes absolutely no sense. Getting vaccinated takes just a few minutes, and has no long term consequences for virtually everyone, and does not require ongoing effort of any kind. In no way is getting vaccinated comparable to struggling with obesity, quitting cigarettes, o…
It does have consequences in some, e.g. teenagers are more likely to be hospitalised for a side effect of the vax than they are to be hospitalised for covid: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...
You're omitting a very important fact. The risk of hospitaliztion listed in the article is not based on the percentage of teenagers who had COVID; it is based on the percentage who might get COVID over the next 120 days. That's a very different number.
If things continue as they are, then almost everyone will either get COVID or get vaccinated (or both). It only makes sense to compare the risks based on actually getting COVID, vs. getting vaccinated.