431–440 of 794 posts
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Yes nothing could possibly go wrong with this strategy. This is an example of one of the reasons why there is growing distrust of experts.
A hypothetical situation is why people don’t trust experts?
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Nothing completely prevents infection, but vaccines are the best way to mitigate it.
> Under normal conditions, highly virulent strains of the virus are not selected. A highly virulent strain would kill the host before the virus would have an opportunity to transmit to other potential hosts and replicate. Thus, less virulent strains are selected. These strains are virulent enough to induce symptoms but not enough to kill the host, allowing further transmission. However, the leaky vaccine changes this…
On the other hand, it seems like a kind of inverse prisoners' dilemma.
If no one vaccinates, this particular pathway for the evolution of super-viruses is closed (although others remain open). If some people vaccinate, and a super-virus evolves, they're fine and the rest are screwed, classic P.D.
But it deviates where unlike the classic P.D. where things get worse if everyone defects, once everyone vaccinates, it doesn't matter if a super-virus evolves, because everyone is protected.
So while this raises an interesting policy question on whether non-sterilizing vaccines are worth the risk, once people begin "defecting" by getting vaccinated, it seems like a bad move to risk staying unvaccinated yourself.
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That's plausible, but it's not the whole picture. It may only partially explain some of the problem. We have, in the wealthy west, millions of vaccine-hesistant and vaccine-denialist people. I'm not just talking about poor or uneducated people, either. I personally know wealthy, educated, analytical people who have bought into the fearmongering and propaganda. I was shocked to find how deeply skeptical they were. I w…
Is the propaganda really that good? Or did they want to be skeptical to begin with?
It might have tighter correlations with economic and education status, but that’s not all of it.
Whatever skill allows some to see the signal through the noise while others descend down rabbit holes that lead to delusion is hard to teach.
The best community I’ve found that works towards it is the less wrong rationality community, but none of us are immune from cognitive bias or motivated reasoning. It’s all about recognizing it and trying to correct for it in order to struggle closer to the truth.
Even so, I worry most people continually exposed to false ideas will eventually get infected by them - even if you have really good tools, it’s hard.
Ok, my 2 cents. This happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries. They can’t afford them. The moral of the story? It doesn’t matter if you 100% vaccinate your western country. We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’…
When I hear words like everything, everyone, everywhere to describe any system I get disheartened failure is almost assured. I wouldn't design software like that for example. Whether they are engineering systems, social systems, or in this case viruses. Relying on every part to comply is the opposite of redundancy. The probability of getting everyone to comply in a group as large as this planet all at once, at the same time without lags (e.g. vaccine rollouts), etc is sadly IMO extremely small.
We probably need new approaches, some which may challenge the current status quo. I remember watching a video early in COVID where isolating populations into smaller groups allows quick treatment of each group and the ability to contain the spread (i.e. limiting the R factor). As long as highly available world air travel is around, reducing redundancy and increasing the interconnectness of our populations into a single system the virus will have an advantage IMO.
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I don't think the virus could ever be stopped with today's vaccines, even if everyone was vaccinated. Data from fully or almost fully vaccinated countries clearly show that this doesn't eliminate the virus. It of course helps, but we have to depart from the idea that the "zero covid" strategies work.
I mean, there are Zero Covid strategies that work, see China or New Zealand. The problem is just that those measures are so drastic that many countries would probably not accept them. The goal in western countries is to get to the "endemic phase" of the infection - i.e. "live with the virus". That's all well and good, unfortunately this requires the disease to become significantly less deadly than it still is. We're…
Are we really trusting China's data? They still have less than 100k cases reported. That makes zero sense from what we've seen from other countries. How would they have tracked down every case after it ran rampant for 3 months in a major city?
Ok, my 2 cents. This happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries. They can’t afford them. The moral of the story? It doesn’t matter if you 100% vaccinate your western country. We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’…
So vaccinated populations are creating the pressure on the virus to mutate. And un-vaccinated population may get effected (irrespective of which version of virus they encounter at the time)..
my 2 cents.
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Albert Einstein: > Quantum mechanics is very impressive. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice. Scientists get things wrong. I'm more concerned about someone who won't change their position when better information becomes available.
That statement hasn't been proven wrong.
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They teach the immune system how to fight the virus, reducing duration and quantity of infection, which reduces opportunities for the virus to replicate and potentially mutate.
A non-sterilizing vaccine only increases the evolutionary pressure on the virus to evolve to be vaccine-resistant. Such a vaccine more or less becomes like taking a half-course of antibiotics.
Viruses can't do gene exchange, so the only factor for developing resistance is the total number of viral particles produced, so even if it's a weak vaccine or half dose of antiviral drug, it would be helpful
Ok, my 2 cents. This happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries. They can’t afford them. The moral of the story? It doesn’t matter if you 100% vaccinate your western country. We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’…
This isn't quite true. All epidemics come to an end eventually, vaccines or no vaccines. There were no vaccines to end the 1918 flu epidemic, but that one too died out just like all the ones before it in a few years' time. At a far greater cost to human life, of course, but we "got out" of it.
Ok, my 2 cents. This happened because there isn’t enough vaccines in third world countries. They can’t afford them. The moral of the story? It doesn’t matter if you 100% vaccinate your western country. We’re all in this together. When COVID spreads in Africa and makes a new strain, it may as well be on your own doorstep. The world needs to step up and distribute vaccines to every corner of the globe, for FREE, or we’…