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Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

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Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#231
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, I can just dump a bunch of links to studies and details about how boosters are highly effective, even for young people. And I can find dozens more. This isn't baseball cards. The person with the most URLs doesn't win. You have to read the data and understand what it says. You clearly don't, because you're citing pop-science sources such as "The Harvard Gazette", and irrelevant papers about viral loads in br…

Given that a pediatric hospitalization is a hellish and expensive affair and early long COVID may have life-long effects, while a vaccine is cheap and trivially accessible, how is that still _not_ a winning strategy? _Just_ 8000 vaccinations to prevent a hospitalization? How could you even consider that to be bad? Are we in a surplus of hospital beds or guardians or am I the only person that lives in a metro area whe…

From a pure money perspective, let's say a shot is worth about $25, which I think is a low estimate. 8000 shots is $200k. From what I've seen, a hospital stay for covid is about $50k on average.

Of course, it is only when we consider trading between 1 hospital stay to 8000 shots. It assumes the numbers are right and doesn't consider anything else, like potential life-long sequelae, non-hospitalization risks and side effects of vaccination.

Anyways, while my intuition is that vaccinating kids is worthwhile, it isn't as obvious as it is for adults.

Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#232
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many (most?) of these policies ignore natural immunity that people are getting from catching COVID.

It's a bit conspiratorial to suggest health authorities including epidemiologists and immunologists would 'ignore' a foundational aspect of their underlying knowledge of the system when trying to understand it and formulate policy. Of course they are taking it into account. Most health authorities do random sampling to try to get an idea of underlying natural immunity and the various characteristics that takes on.

If you go by the CDC’s hesitancy in accepting natural immunity, including the number of dubious conducted and/or worded studies they pushed, while ignoring studies showing the opposite and what foreign governments were doing (eg 3G), one is forgiven for believing that.

Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You are misinformed. There is a paucity of data supporting boosters, " I think the misinformation might be your own here, or rather, at least based on the time frame. In September, there was little data, because very few had their 3rd shot. Now, we have Omicron - a huge, new, material development - and - large numbers of people with their 3rd shots. Here is some fairly definitive data from one source [1] which clear…

Unfortunately it turns out that the way vaccination effectiveness is measured could create this apparent effect even in the case that the vaccination was saline. This sounds absurd and wrong, but, as is sometimes the case with statistics, it's possible. Prof Norman Fenton has described the issue and also demonstrated it visually in Excel: https://twitter.com/profnfenton/status/1460339552397275149 https://probabilitya…

> number of days between first immunization and COVID diagnosis

Survivorship bias. People end up in this graph because they got a COVID diagnosis after the first immunization, but before getting the second immunization. That's only a very short time window on most vaccination schedules (3-6 weeks), so the only surprise here is that there is a long trail of people who got the first shot and then held off on the second shot for a long time.

I can understand why they took down that graph. It's very misleading when taken out of context.

Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The startup I work for must be incredibly unlucky given that 7+/14 vaccinated employees have recently tested positive if the odds really are 1 in 5000. I'm sure my anecdote is not unique. Now do the comparison of hospitalization and death of the unvaccinated against the vaccinated. > The same way that people, and doctors, have been biased against reporting side effects. Yeah, sure, its just anecdote, except there's…

>Now do the comparison of hospitalization and death of the unvaccinated against the vaccinated Official UK data shows approximately equal rates of death between vaccinated and unvaccinated. >There's papers that have been published by every single government, relevant NGO, hospitals, literally the entirety of modern medicine dedicated towards working on this. The conclusions are always the same Yes, because the orthod…

> Official UK data shows approximately equal rates of death between vaccinated and unvaccinated.

No, the UK data does not show this.

Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#235
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have the capacity to vaccinate the whole world every 6 months.

https://launchandscalefaster.org/covid-19/vaccinemanufacturi... But, we could, at 12 billion doses a year already realizable, getting to 14+ isn't far fetched -- distribution and convincing people to take them would be much more challenging. I'm not which of distribution and cooperation is the hardest, but, manufacturing is certainly not the blocker.

What's the date of that article? It seems old. I haven't heard of anyone talking about herd immunity at 70% since at least before delta.

These other articles seem to say that it's not feasible in the short term and have a better count that is nor just projections based on past capacity.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/health/andrew-pollard-booster...

https://www.barrons.com/articles/a-plan-to-break-the-vaccine...

Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#236
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now do the comparison of hospitalization and death of the unvaccinated against the vaccinated Official UK data shows approximately equal rates of death between vaccinated and unvaccinated. >There's papers that have been published by every single government, relevant NGO, hospitals, literally the entirety of modern medicine dedicated towards working on this. The conclusions are always the same Yes, because the orthod…

> Official UK data shows approximately equal rates of death between vaccinated and unvaccinated. No, the UK data does not show this.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=%2fpeoplepopulationandcommun... - table 7.

Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#237
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So at the very worst it does nothing. How is that bad? I don't want to go around checking if people had or did not have Covid, which a lot of people are prone to lying about.

No. At the very worst the vaccine causes harm , and provides no benefit. > I don't want to go around checking if people had or did not have Covid, which a lot of people are prone to lying about. We're not talking about sterilizing immunity. Even the best case arguments for booster doses in the young are citing efficacy against "symptomatic illness" that is well below 100%. Case in point: I just had it. I'm triple vac…

> I'm triple vaccinated.

Why?

Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#238
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have the capacity to vaccinate the whole world every 6 months.

I would imagine we'd have the capacity to make as many vaccines as someone will pay for. Yes the factories have to be ramped up but that can be done quickly enough. If those low to middle income countries were offering big bucks for vaccines, the vaccine makers would have just put more resources on it. The only reason it might make sense that we should stop boosting because it is taking them away from people who need…

Factories have already ramped up. Additional factories take about 5 years to build.

With a constrained supply (from continual boosting), it is logical that the wealthy countries want to keep it for themselves rather than subsidize other countries. Hopefully they'll stop at 3 doses, as recommended, and then they can roll out to the poorer countries.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/health/andrew-pollard-booster...

https://www.barrons.com/articles/a-plan-to-break-the-vaccine...

Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#239

If I understand correctly, israel mandates a third shot (to do normal stuff), as do many places in north america, either now or soon. And I can only imagine many people would be happy to mandate a fourth as soon as possible. What I find most frustrating is that politicians are happy to make these mandates live, during an ongoing situation where we actually don't know a lot about how effective things are (and in the c…

a) Billions of doses of vaccines have been administered. We know a lot about their effectiveness. b) Current vaccines with a booster are effective at preventing hospitalisations. It is enough to get the world through Omicron but special vaccines maybe useful for those who are immuno-compromised. c) Children have been forced to take vaccines for decades. It's not new. d) People trust their government every day. Who do…

> d) People trust their government every day. Who do you think builds the roads, operates the hospitals and other essential services, sets out safety regulations etc.

If they are going to take my money , I expect at least _something_ of benefit to me in return. That doesn’t mean I trust them.

Re: Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective

#240

If I understand correctly, israel mandates a third shot (to do normal stuff), as do many places in north america, either now or soon. And I can only imagine many people would be happy to mandate a fourth as soon as possible. What I find most frustrating is that politicians are happy to make these mandates live, during an ongoing situation where we actually don't know a lot about how effective things are (and in the c…

To the people asking for caution about these vaccines, how long did it take from development to roll out for the polio shot? Was there the same reluctance?

Six years and that wasn't enough time. The initial Polio vaccines were a disaster: they caused polio in the people who took them.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC2928990/

Abstract: The Salk inactivated poliovirus vaccine is one of the most rapid examples of bench‐to‐bedside translation in medicine. In the span of 6 years, the key basic lab discoveries facilitating the development of the vaccine were made, optimization and safety testing was completed in both animals and human volunteers, the largest clinical trial in history of 1.8 million children was conducted, and the results were released to an eagerly awaiting public. Such examples of rapid translation cannot only offer clues to what factors can successfully drive and accelerate the translational process but also what mistakes can occur (and thus should be avoided) during such a swift process. In this commentary, we explore the translational path of the Salk polio vaccine from the key basic science discoveries to the 1954 Field Trials and delve into the scientific and sociopolitical factors that aided in its rapid development. Moreover, we look at the Cutter and Wyeth incidents after the vaccine’s approval and the errors that led to them.

The Cutter incident:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/

In April 1955 more than 200 000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.

This isn't restricted to the past. It can still happen today.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/polio-cases-now-caus...

LONDON -- Four African countries have reported new cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine, as global health numbers show there are now more children being paralyzed by viruses originating in vaccines than in the wild.

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