5 ms·

The vaccines against Covid actually work, and (probably) come with a small risk. Sure, just getting Covid does too and probably a bit better, but comes with a g

by icoder 5y ago

The vaccines against Covid actually work, and (probably) come with a small risk. Sure, just getting Covid does too and probably a bit better, but comes with a great risk. Now, does that warrant mandating? I'm not so sure, that's a much more difficult discussion swaying us (among other things) back and forth the between freedom of one person and the health of another.

raxxorrax 5y ago
Not for kids and people talk about mandating vaccination for them. Aside from that it should be voluntary for adults as well.
- icoder 5y ago
  Yeah for kids it is even more difficult to defend a mandate, even to defend their vaccination altogether (we don't do general vaccination for kids here in the Netherlands, yet). There still IS something to discuss, as we see kids spread it (a lot), which does eventually increase the risk of adults for which the vaccine doesn't work. But to me that's not enough. As for adults, what we've seen here (86% of 18+ vaccinated) is a lot of pressure on health care (and especially, the people working there) directly and on people in need of non-immediate, non-covid care indirectly (as that gets dialed down), as well as society as a whole through new lockdown like measures. This pressure came from unvaccinated people, initially mostly, later still disproportionately (and after boosts, possibly mostly again). It's a crazy difficult dilemma. Luckily we've managed to stay away from mandates so far, but it's costing.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    It's not settled yet, but it's pretty likely that males under 12 are at still higher risk of a severe course of illness (hospital care) than they are at risk of myocarditis following vaccination.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      And how many would that would be? 15 people? Please, elaborate in regard to the demographics of any country of your choice.
      - maxerickson 5y ago
        I am (somewhat speculatively) comparing rates of a specific demographic. I expect it will be true everywhere that vaccinating younger males leads to an overall reduction in harm to the vaccinated.
    - concinds 5y ago
      At most, moderately higher risk, and that's assuming 100% would get covid (just like the government wants 100% to take the vaccine). You can't compare infection vs vaccine if only 50% would ever have caught Covid (without even counting children with previous infections who are practically guaranteed to never be hospitalized from it), while 100% will get vaccinated; the risk-benefit is likely to shift into the mostly-nefarious territory. Also keep in mind that risk-of-myocarditis-from-infection is overestimated, because plenty of people are utterly asymptomatic and aren't counted in the stats.
      - maxerickson 5y ago
        Correct, higher risk from infection than from vaccination.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    In Germany in the last summer we had monetary incentives to reduce intensive care units. Active ones, as you got funding for reducing the amount of beds in intensive care. To now blame the situation on unvaccinated instead of policy makers is misattributed. Also, we had severe problems even before covid became a problem too. I heavily doubt that the 14% are the cause of the problems instead of being a very convenient excuse.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      German stats unfortunately mis-attribute the number of cases in the unvaccinated very severely. Actually what they do is so bad it is really just making the numbers up. Article is sadly paywalled: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus235442252/Fakten-zu-Inzidenzen-und-Patienten-Pandemie-der-Unwissenheit.html https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus235442252/Fakten... But what it says is that the German authorities don't have data on the vaccination status of most COVID cases. Instead of admitting this they just relabel all people of unknown status as unvaccinated.
      - icoder 5y ago
        Germany stats all COVID cases wrt vaccination? Ah, in the Netherlands most if not all stats I've seen involve hospitalisation and especially IC. Those are often misattributed the other way around, 50/50 sounds equal, until you consider 85% of the population is vaccinated (and most of the 50% vaccinated IC patients are old / sick / immunodeprived).
        native_samples 5y ago
        Yes, the German stat I'm talking about is all cases. Hospitalization and IC numbers have other problems, especially with confounding. I don't think Germany provides enough data to check for problems and anyway their stats are meaningless for as long as they are playing such obviously dishonest games. But the UK data seems to be more honest. There a problem can be seen: vaccines don't get administered to the very sickest people who are dying anyway, which makes vaccines look artificially good / non-vaccination look artificially bad. This shows up in the UK data as a spike in deaths in unvaccinated people for non COVID causes that correlates with vaccine rollouts. Obviously, that's not biologically caused. Rather it's because the sickest people aren't given the vaccines because there's no point, and end up concentrated into the unvaccinated cohort. Then they pick up COVID in hospital anyway as so many do, and this is used as evidence for why everyone should take the shot without de-confounding. Paper explaining the problems with the UK data that appear to show this confounding: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356756711_Latest_statistics_on_England_mortality_data_suggest_systematic_mis-categorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356756711_Latest_st... They also try to control for this problem and when they do, effectiveness goes away, which is very distressing. VE against death is supposedly very strong so it shouldn't disappear when the rigor of the analysis is increased. There are other problems, like the standard delay period where people have been given a vaccine but count as unvaccinated. In one study, buried in the appendix, they show data that when this period is included the incidence between those who were vaccinated and those who weren't was equal, i.e. no effectiveness. This article summarizes some of these statistical issues: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/12/is-vaccine-effectiveness-against-death-mostly-a-statistical-illusion/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/12/is-vaccine-effectiveness... It's very problematic that these data issues can occur but inevitable. Normally you want RCT evidence exactly to avoid these confounders, but COVID kills so few people that nobody was able to mount a trial big enough to show impact on mortality. Actually in the Pfizer trial more people died in the vaccine arm than the control arm, but there were so few deaths in total (from anything) they said this wasn't significant / meaningful. Hence you end up trying to find evidence in real-world observational data but those are hard to control.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Vaccines don't seem to reduce spread and this conclusion - which you could find on blogs long before it was officially admitted - is now the position of e.g. the UK official vaccination committee. In fact they're now arguing that the vaccines were never even designed to do that in the first place, although it would have been good if they'd said that before vaccine passports were invented. Here's a summary of an paywalled interview in the Telegraph with former Vaccine Taskforce chief Clive Dix: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/14/vaccine-taskforce-ex-chief-the-vaccines-were-not-designed-to-end-transmission/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/14/vaccine-taskforce-ex-chi... "The battle over Covid transmission was lost some time ago. I am afraid that the vaccines will not stop the spread of the virus in the short or medium term – but that is not a disaster. Indeed the vaccines were not designed to end transmission. It was evident to me at the time I helped with the procurement of doses, as interim chair of the Vaccine Taskforce, that the intention was to stop people from getting severely ill or dying." "Given that young and healthy people not only have a very low chance of suffering severe Covid in the first place, but also already have substantial immunity from severe disease thanks to the first two jabs, I cannot see how boosting them is more valuable for public health than doubling our focus on the most vulnerable and cracking down on the backlog of chronically sick patients, such as those with hypertension, diabetes or even cancer."
    - icoder 5y ago
      Yes, that indeed is a very good point that I overlooked, I agree it weakens the case for (mandating) vaccinating minors even more. Having said that, I've also seen graphs with 4 quadrants (vaccinated or not on both axis for the two persons involved in a transmission) where the transmission was clearly higher in the case neither were vaccinated. So I'm not sure if it does absolutely nothing for transmission, but at least not enough to be a strong argument in this discussion.
      - native_samples 5y ago
        I think the issue may be time related. Immediately after a second shot there seems to be some effectiveness but it decays very fast, and can even go negative. This sounds impossible but the UK data shows very clearly that once the vaccine wears off you're nearly 2.5x as likely to catch COVID than unvaccinated people are! This kind of negative effectiveness has happened before and immunologists know about the effect. They call it "original antigenic sin" and it refers to a type of imprinting effect, whereby the immune system misfires when presented with slightly mutated viruses by re-manufacturing the same antibodies it made before. Thus, if you trick your immune system with a vaccine, it learns to fight whatever the vaccine was targeting but that's a now obsolete and extinct 2019 strain of the virus. Then you get hit with the new strains and the antibodies it makes aren't so effective anymore, creating a delay before the body realizes its mistake and spins up new antibodies (or sometimes it seems, it may never do this - gulp). This can cause negative VE when vaccinating against something that can mutate very quickly.
etherael 5y ago
When you say "work" do you mean better than an absolute risk reduction for mortality and hospitalisation of say 2%? Because that doesn't sound like "working" to me, even completely ignoring the potential side effects of endless mandated boosters, which if you don't do makes it look even more ridiculous.
- icoder 5y ago
  I'm not arguing for mandating anything. And note that boosters boost, they are not for maintenance. A lot of existing vaccins have a booster without it being 'endless'. If Covid-19 mutates enough we might need different vaccins yes, perhaps that's what you meant, but I don't think those are technically boosters. With "work" I mean they get rid of a large percentage of mortality, hospitalisation and (a bit less certain) long haul covid. How big that absolute risk reduction is differs per person. But more importantly: I don't see our society getting through Covid-19 in a humane manner without vaccins. Without vaccins, the IC's will flood, or we'd need (suffocating) measures and a lot of patience. But I'm ver much open to different ideas here.
  - etherael 5y ago
    Sure it varies, and the high number on ARR is 1.32 percent. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33652582/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33652582/) I added a margin over that for safety and its still just not impressive. As far as getting through this without vaccines that's not the question I asked. I asked in light of the data on the ground why are people still trying to push mandates. If people want to take these products with the efficacy rate and risk factors as they are knowing the manufacturers are wholly shielded from any and all liability that's one thing. The suggestion anyone ought to be forced to is entirely another.
    - icoder 5y ago
      I'm not really debating that ARR for hospitalisation (or worse) may be only a few percent on average, but the article you linked to doesn't help. If I understand it correctly they say: more people got infected (!) in the control group, but that's still a very low percentage of the entire group. Calculating the ARR in that case is only 'absolute' for the duration of the experiment right? That didn't age well at all, especially with newer variants, it's assumed most will eventually get infected, increasing the ARR. Then again de RRR for infection seems to drop by itself, which works the other way. So the conclusion of this paper is debatable at the least, and regardless it doesn't even cover what we were discussing, ARR for hospitalisation or worse. I really was trying to answer your question regarding pushing mandates. Again I'm not saying I'm for them (here in the Netherlands we're staying away from mandates, for now at least). Individual efficacy (vs risk) is not the ONLY argument for mandates (actually I'd find that a less strong reason by itself even with a higher ARR), my argument would be the benefit for society as a whole. Sure, we should be able to make it through also without 100% vaccination rate, that's probably why mandates are less clearly on the table in places where it's high without mandates already.

by icoder 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago

Not for kids and people talk about mandating vaccination for them. Aside from that it should be voluntary for adults as well.

icoder 5y ago
Yeah for kids it is even more difficult to defend a mandate, even to defend their vaccination altogether (we don't do general vaccination for kids here in the Netherlands, yet). There still IS something to discuss, as we see kids spread it (a lot), which does eventually increase the risk of adults for which the vaccine doesn't work. But to me that's not enough. As for adults, what we've seen here (86% of 18+ vaccinated) is a lot of pressure on health care (and especially, the people working there) directly and on people in need of non-immediate, non-covid care indirectly (as that gets dialed down), as well as society as a whole through new lockdown like measures. This pressure came from unvaccinated people, initially mostly, later still disproportionately (and after boosts, possibly mostly again). It's a crazy difficult dilemma. Luckily we've managed to stay away from mandates so far, but it's costing.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  It's not settled yet, but it's pretty likely that males under 12 are at still higher risk of a severe course of illness (hospital care) than they are at risk of myocarditis following vaccination.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    And how many would that would be? 15 people? Please, elaborate in regard to the demographics of any country of your choice.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      I am (somewhat speculatively) comparing rates of a specific demographic. I expect it will be true everywhere that vaccinating younger males leads to an overall reduction in harm to the vaccinated.
  - concinds 5y ago
    At most, moderately higher risk, and that's assuming 100% would get covid (just like the government wants 100% to take the vaccine). You can't compare infection vs vaccine if only 50% would ever have caught Covid (without even counting children with previous infections who are practically guaranteed to never be hospitalized from it), while 100% will get vaccinated; the risk-benefit is likely to shift into the mostly-nefarious territory. Also keep in mind that risk-of-myocarditis-from-infection is overestimated, because plenty of people are utterly asymptomatic and aren't counted in the stats.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      Correct, higher risk from infection than from vaccination.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  In Germany in the last summer we had monetary incentives to reduce intensive care units. Active ones, as you got funding for reducing the amount of beds in intensive care. To now blame the situation on unvaccinated instead of policy makers is misattributed. Also, we had severe problems even before covid became a problem too. I heavily doubt that the 14% are the cause of the problems instead of being a very convenient excuse.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    German stats unfortunately mis-attribute the number of cases in the unvaccinated very severely. Actually what they do is so bad it is really just making the numbers up. Article is sadly paywalled: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus235442252/Fakten-zu-Inzidenzen-und-Patienten-Pandemie-der-Unwissenheit.html https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/plus235442252/Fakten... But what it says is that the German authorities don't have data on the vaccination status of most COVID cases. Instead of admitting this they just relabel all people of unknown status as unvaccinated.
    - icoder 5y ago
      Germany stats all COVID cases wrt vaccination? Ah, in the Netherlands most if not all stats I've seen involve hospitalisation and especially IC. Those are often misattributed the other way around, 50/50 sounds equal, until you consider 85% of the population is vaccinated (and most of the 50% vaccinated IC patients are old / sick / immunodeprived).
      - native_samples 5y ago
        Yes, the German stat I'm talking about is all cases. Hospitalization and IC numbers have other problems, especially with confounding. I don't think Germany provides enough data to check for problems and anyway their stats are meaningless for as long as they are playing such obviously dishonest games. But the UK data seems to be more honest. There a problem can be seen: vaccines don't get administered to the very sickest people who are dying anyway, which makes vaccines look artificially good / non-vaccination look artificially bad. This shows up in the UK data as a spike in deaths in unvaccinated people for non COVID causes that correlates with vaccine rollouts. Obviously, that's not biologically caused. Rather it's because the sickest people aren't given the vaccines because there's no point, and end up concentrated into the unvaccinated cohort. Then they pick up COVID in hospital anyway as so many do, and this is used as evidence for why everyone should take the shot without de-confounding. Paper explaining the problems with the UK data that appear to show this confounding: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356756711_Latest_statistics_on_England_mortality_data_suggest_systematic_mis-categorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356756711_Latest_st... They also try to control for this problem and when they do, effectiveness goes away, which is very distressing. VE against death is supposedly very strong so it shouldn't disappear when the rigor of the analysis is increased. There are other problems, like the standard delay period where people have been given a vaccine but count as unvaccinated. In one study, buried in the appendix, they show data that when this period is included the incidence between those who were vaccinated and those who weren't was equal, i.e. no effectiveness. This article summarizes some of these statistical issues: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/12/is-vaccine-effectiveness-against-death-mostly-a-statistical-illusion/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/12/is-vaccine-effectiveness... It's very problematic that these data issues can occur but inevitable. Normally you want RCT evidence exactly to avoid these confounders, but COVID kills so few people that nobody was able to mount a trial big enough to show impact on mortality. Actually in the Pfizer trial more people died in the vaccine arm than the control arm, but there were so few deaths in total (from anything) they said this wasn't significant / meaningful. Hence you end up trying to find evidence in real-world observational data but those are hard to control.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Vaccines don't seem to reduce spread and this conclusion - which you could find on blogs long before it was officially admitted - is now the position of e.g. the UK official vaccination committee. In fact they're now arguing that the vaccines were never even designed to do that in the first place, although it would have been good if they'd said that before vaccine passports were invented. Here's a summary of an paywalled interview in the Telegraph with former Vaccine Taskforce chief Clive Dix: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/14/vaccine-taskforce-ex-chief-the-vaccines-were-not-designed-to-end-transmission/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/12/14/vaccine-taskforce-ex-chi... "The battle over Covid transmission was lost some time ago. I am afraid that the vaccines will not stop the spread of the virus in the short or medium term – but that is not a disaster. Indeed the vaccines were not designed to end transmission. It was evident to me at the time I helped with the procurement of doses, as interim chair of the Vaccine Taskforce, that the intention was to stop people from getting severely ill or dying." "Given that young and healthy people not only have a very low chance of suffering severe Covid in the first place, but also already have substantial immunity from severe disease thanks to the first two jabs, I cannot see how boosting them is more valuable for public health than doubling our focus on the most vulnerable and cracking down on the backlog of chronically sick patients, such as those with hypertension, diabetes or even cancer."
  - icoder 5y ago
    Yes, that indeed is a very good point that I overlooked, I agree it weakens the case for (mandating) vaccinating minors even more. Having said that, I've also seen graphs with 4 quadrants (vaccinated or not on both axis for the two persons involved in a transmission) where the transmission was clearly higher in the case neither were vaccinated. So I'm not sure if it does absolutely nothing for transmission, but at least not enough to be a strong argument in this discussion.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      I think the issue may be time related. Immediately after a second shot there seems to be some effectiveness but it decays very fast, and can even go negative. This sounds impossible but the UK data shows very clearly that once the vaccine wears off you're nearly 2.5x as likely to catch COVID than unvaccinated people are! This kind of negative effectiveness has happened before and immunologists know about the effect. They call it "original antigenic sin" and it refers to a type of imprinting effect, whereby the immune system misfires when presented with slightly mutated viruses by re-manufacturing the same antibodies it made before. Thus, if you trick your immune system with a vaccine, it learns to fight whatever the vaccine was targeting but that's a now obsolete and extinct 2019 strain of the virus. Then you get hit with the new strains and the antibodies it makes aren't so effective anymore, creating a delay before the body realizes its mistake and spins up new antibodies (or sometimes it seems, it may never do this - gulp). This can cause negative VE when vaccinating against something that can mutate very quickly.

etherael 5y ago

When you say "work" do you mean better than an absolute risk reduction for mortality and hospitalisation of say 2%? Because that doesn't sound like "working" to me, even completely ignoring the potential side effects of endless mandated boosters, which if you don't do makes it look even more ridiculous.

icoder 5y ago
I'm not arguing for mandating anything. And note that boosters boost, they are not for maintenance. A lot of existing vaccins have a booster without it being 'endless'. If Covid-19 mutates enough we might need different vaccins yes, perhaps that's what you meant, but I don't think those are technically boosters. With "work" I mean they get rid of a large percentage of mortality, hospitalisation and (a bit less certain) long haul covid. How big that absolute risk reduction is differs per person. But more importantly: I don't see our society getting through Covid-19 in a humane manner without vaccins. Without vaccins, the IC's will flood, or we'd need (suffocating) measures and a lot of patience. But I'm ver much open to different ideas here.
- etherael 5y ago
  Sure it varies, and the high number on ARR is 1.32 percent. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33652582/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33652582/) I added a margin over that for safety and its still just not impressive. As far as getting through this without vaccines that's not the question I asked. I asked in light of the data on the ground why are people still trying to push mandates. If people want to take these products with the efficacy rate and risk factors as they are knowing the manufacturers are wholly shielded from any and all liability that's one thing. The suggestion anyone ought to be forced to is entirely another.
  - icoder 5y ago
    I'm not really debating that ARR for hospitalisation (or worse) may be only a few percent on average, but the article you linked to doesn't help. If I understand it correctly they say: more people got infected (!) in the control group, but that's still a very low percentage of the entire group. Calculating the ARR in that case is only 'absolute' for the duration of the experiment right? That didn't age well at all, especially with newer variants, it's assumed most will eventually get infected, increasing the ARR. Then again de RRR for infection seems to drop by itself, which works the other way. So the conclusion of this paper is debatable at the least, and regardless it doesn't even cover what we were discussing, ARR for hospitalisation or worse. I really was trying to answer your question regarding pushing mandates. Again I'm not saying I'm for them (here in the Netherlands we're staying away from mandates, for now at least). Individual efficacy (vs risk) is not the ONLY argument for mandates (actually I'd find that a less strong reason by itself even with a higher ARR), my argument would be the benefit for society as a whole. Sure, we should be able to make it through also without 100% vaccination rate, that's probably why mandates are less clearly on the table in places where it's high without mandates already.