41–50 of 417 posts
In terms of mortality, the boosters have a significant effect for the elderly. For younger people without serious risk factors the immunity seems to keep longer and mortality is very low after only two or three vaccinations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought it reduces the severity of the illness, does it not?
But, as I understand it, does not affect how contagious the person is. Given that, reducing the severity of the illness is arguably counterproductive, as it reduces the odds that the person will go out and about as opposed to staying at home away from others.
Sounds like misanthropy to me.
There's no value proposition to vaccination at this point.
For a significant time, the vaccine showed strong evidence of reducing hospitalization and fatality rates, esp for at risk populations. Did that change? I thought the main thing that changed was it stopped being effective at reducing transmission.
This will change once they have boosted the 50+ population, or that's at least how it usually works. The Omicron targeted vaccines should be ready by then, so we are not necessarily out of luck. I'm 49.
I took the BA.5 variant vaccine just two days ago (Pfizer, if anyone is interested) BA.5 is targeted and ready. The only question left is one of policy and distribution.
At the beginning they didn’t make it available to children (below 18) anymore. Then UK followed for the children since September 1’st. Now those unter 50 in DK. It’s getting interesting and looking more and more like science instead of The Science.
And yes the scientific position will evolve as new variants and herd immunity become common place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought it reduces the severity of the illness, does it not?
The effects are extremely small for variants that arose recently. If there is a new round of vaccines that work on current and future variants, it would make more sense to get vaccinated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought it reduces the severity of the illness, does it not?
The narrative around the vaccine flip-flopped so often that it is pretty unclear what it is actually doing. Our health minister (Karl Lauterbach/Germany) actually said that it accelerates symptoms, so they stay at home earlier than those without. It's just so versatile it does everything and the opposite at this point.
Bit by bit, it is becoming the new influenza. Not saying we're there yet, but that's clearly where we're headed. Now, influenza kills lots of people; in 2018 over 60,000 people were killed by influenza in the USA alone. But we don't have border closing or "show your papers" or all the rest for influenza, and we're not going to.
2018 was an exceptionally bad year for influenza. Typically influenza deaths in the U.S. are between 20-30k. COVID deaths in the U.S. over a two year period amounted to over 1 million.