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So do the COVID vaccine mandates, frankly. Relatively short lived (~months) protection against infection, which itself comes at the cost of encouraging vaccine

So do the COVID vaccine mandates, frankly. Relatively short lived (~months) protection against infection, which itself comes at the cost of encouraging vaccine escape variants to become the dominant strain. Furthermore while protection against infection/transmission wanes incredibly quickly compared to natural immunity, the protection against severe disease/hospitalization does much less so. Therefore it is quite silly for a vaccinated person with a functioning immune system to be afraid of catching COVID. (This is usually the point in the discussion where people start saying "what about this one super rare immunocompromised person who the vaccine doesn't work well for"...) So the whole idea of population-level vaccination to stop the spread is absurd on its face. And the real world data only further underscores that (mass vaccination did not stop the 2021 waves, and if anything it seems like vaccination helped briefly prevent some people from acquiring natural immunity due to briefly protection them against infection, which just made the vaccinated population even better substrate when Delta came roaring). If someone's concerned about COVID, they need to get vaccinated and stop trying to control everyone around them. It's really quite simple. The collectivist benefit of vaccination is poor at best, and has a lot of theoretical concerns associated with it such as https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou.... Whereas the individual benefit wrt mortality&morbidity is a much stronger argument.

malermeister 5y ago
Mass vaccination did not stop the waves in 2021 because vaccination numbers were too low. Your whole argument is that vaccination wasn't effective on a population level... because the population was not vaccinated enough. With delta we need to reach 90% (https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-herd-immunity-90-percent-2021-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-herd-immunity-...), but we got nowhere near that thanks to people wanting to treat a collective problem like an individual one.
pfg 5y ago
Reduction of infection/transmission is only one endpoint to consider. We also need to consider the overall effect on the quality of healthcare we can expect to receive in a situation where low vaccination rates causes hospitals to be overrun. This is where the line between personal health decisions on whether to get vaccinated or not and what is fair to society as a whole gets blurry. People tend to argue "but what about $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit, we don't regulate that!" when someone mentions this, but $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit has been accounted for in terms of resources required to treat people (assuming a working healthcare system), whereas a once-in-a-century-level pandemic hasn't, so it's not a valid comparison.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  That's a fine argument, but I've never seen a proper quantitative assessement of the risk of hospital over-run with respect to vaccination rates (or in general, frankly). The vast majority of COVID infections are mild or completely asymptomatic, so something like 90% of the hospitalization burden is being caused by 10% of infections. Mandating that some random 20-something year old get vaccinated does not move the needle (no pun intended) whatsoever. The at-risk populations can be vaccinated. Let's get them (voluntarily) vaccinated and be done with it. Enough of these mandates which serve more to enrich giant pharmaceutical companies than they do to improve public health. BTW, while mortality isn't the only outcome of concern, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Pfizer's 6 month RCT - the highest quality data we have of this kind, period - showed no improvement in all-cause mortality in the 20,000+ people they vaccinated compared to the control: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v... > During the blinded, controlled period, 15 BNT162b2 and 14 placebo recipients died; during the open-label period, 3 BNT162b2 and 2 original placebo recipients who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered related to BNT162b2 by investigators. So the highest quality evidence indicates that vaccinating a similar population will make no difference in net deaths. (One possible counterargument would be to argue that transmission was unusually low during the study period, but AFAICT that's simply not the case) -- Back to your comment: > People tend to argue "but what about $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit, we don't regulate that!" when someone mentions this, but $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit has been accounted for in terms of resources required to treat people (assuming a working healthcare system), whereas a once-in-a-century-level pandemic hasn't, so it's not a valid comparison. I won't make that argument, but I did want to mention that - while unrelated to mandates per se - we basically scaled down our healthcare capacity across 2020, at least in the US, due to all the furloughs and the like from the missed medical appointments, as well as (in many places) suspension of "elective" surgeries. And more relevant to the vaccines, a small but real number of healthcare workers have been or are in the process of being fired for non-compliance with the mandate, regardless of their prior infection history etc
  - rini17 5y ago
    Parent was not so much asking about mortality as about health care management. Do you imply all the data that shows unvaccinated are much more likely to require hospitalization, is flawed or fake?
CodeShmode 5y ago
There are so many half truths in your arguments it would take far too long to refute them all. It’s hard to believe you’re not acting in bad faith, either that or completely indulging your confirmation biases.
deleted 5y ago
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malermeister 5y ago

Mass vaccination did not stop the waves in 2021 because vaccination numbers were too low. Your whole argument is that vaccination wasn't effective on a population level... because the population was not vaccinated enough. With delta we need to reach 90% (https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-herd-immunity-90-percent-2021-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-herd-immunity-...), but we got nowhere near that thanks to people wanting to treat a collective problem like an individual one.

pfg 5y ago

Reduction of infection/transmission is only one endpoint to consider. We also need to consider the overall effect on the quality of healthcare we can expect to receive in a situation where low vaccination rates causes hospitals to be overrun. This is where the line between personal health decisions on whether to get vaccinated or not and what is fair to society as a whole gets blurry. People tend to argue "but what about $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit, we don't regulate that!" when someone mentions this, but $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit has been accounted for in terms of resources required to treat people (assuming a working healthcare system), whereas a once-in-a-century-level pandemic hasn't, so it's not a valid comparison.

__blockcipher__ 5y ago
That's a fine argument, but I've never seen a proper quantitative assessement of the risk of hospital over-run with respect to vaccination rates (or in general, frankly). The vast majority of COVID infections are mild or completely asymptomatic, so something like 90% of the hospitalization burden is being caused by 10% of infections. Mandating that some random 20-something year old get vaccinated does not move the needle (no pun intended) whatsoever. The at-risk populations can be vaccinated. Let's get them (voluntarily) vaccinated and be done with it. Enough of these mandates which serve more to enrich giant pharmaceutical companies than they do to improve public health. BTW, while mortality isn't the only outcome of concern, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Pfizer's 6 month RCT - the highest quality data we have of this kind, period - showed no improvement in all-cause mortality in the 20,000+ people they vaccinated compared to the control: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261159v... > During the blinded, controlled period, 15 BNT162b2 and 14 placebo recipients died; during the open-label period, 3 BNT162b2 and 2 original placebo recipients who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered related to BNT162b2 by investigators. So the highest quality evidence indicates that vaccinating a similar population will make no difference in net deaths. (One possible counterargument would be to argue that transmission was unusually low during the study period, but AFAICT that's simply not the case) -- Back to your comment: > People tend to argue "but what about $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit, we don't regulate that!" when someone mentions this, but $arbitrary_unhealthy_habit has been accounted for in terms of resources required to treat people (assuming a working healthcare system), whereas a once-in-a-century-level pandemic hasn't, so it's not a valid comparison. I won't make that argument, but I did want to mention that - while unrelated to mandates per se - we basically scaled down our healthcare capacity across 2020, at least in the US, due to all the furloughs and the like from the missed medical appointments, as well as (in many places) suspension of "elective" surgeries. And more relevant to the vaccines, a small but real number of healthcare workers have been or are in the process of being fired for non-compliance with the mandate, regardless of their prior infection history etc
- rini17 5y ago
  Parent was not so much asking about mortality as about health care management. Do you imply all the data that shows unvaccinated are much more likely to require hospitalization, is flawed or fake?

CodeShmode 5y ago

There are so many half truths in your arguments it would take far too long to refute them all. It’s hard to believe you’re not acting in bad faith, either that or completely indulging your confirmation biases.

deleted 5y ago

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