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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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).
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:
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:
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.
That's interesting, such confounding is an example for how difficult such research is. It's also two articles hammering on a single piece of data and making conclusions using Occam's razor. The comments on the second article don't help either.
Most importantly it's not just death I'm worried about, it's also not getting hospitalised (or worse, staying in coma for days on the IC). Not only for the individual, but also for society. At least here in the Netherlands, that was spot on the point we had to go back to lockdown like measures. There's a lot of numbers that suggest vaccins do wonders for that, for all ages (a bit less for elderly actually). An obvious one is the much bigger amount of daily infections we could now support with less beds compared to before vaccinations. These numbers are dropping, possibly because vaccinations being longer ago. Hopefully boosters will mitigated this.
The second article also discusses the problem of the 2 week delay period and links to the study appendix - different data and argument.
Hospitalization is unfortunately also hopelessly confounded by the same factors - if you don't vaccinate people who are already dying then they are much more likely to be or end up in hospital - but then additional problems too. Again, RCT data didn't prove any effects on hospitalization, that just wasn't an end point they cared about.
Why not? Well, partly because it's extremely subjective. To be hospitalized for a disease like COVID you must either catch it in hospital, or choose to go. COVID isn't a sudden collapse like a heart attack or stroke where bystanders may rush you to hospital in an ambulance. It's a steady degradation and at some point someone has to call a doctor or emergency number and say, I think I need to go to the hospital. Hospitals can turn you away if your COVID isn't serious enough but in many places they have monetary incentives not to do so, and that's ignoring all the psychological issues - if you have some spare beds giving someone who's terrified some attention may be better than turning them away.
In normal/sane times this wouldn't really matter, as we can hope that people are roughly OK at judging whether they need this or not, and hospitals wouldn't spend resources on cases that aren't really needing to be there. But with COVID, years of relentless misinformation from newspapers and authority figures have totally destroyed people's understanding of the severity of the disease. US adults over-estimate the risk of hospitalization if you're unvaccinated by orders of magnitude:
"The results show that most Americans overstate the risk of hospitalization for both groups: 92% overstate the risk that unvaccinated people will be hospitalized, and 62% overstate the risk for vaccinated people .... For unvaccinated hospitalization risk, 2% of Democrats responded correctly, compared with 16% of Republicans. In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19."
41% of left leaning voters think HALF of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized for COVID! The true number is less than 1%. That's an astonishing stat. I suspect these polls aren't representative and the true numbers are better than this but even so, they are indicative of the problem.
What happens if you trust the media and government so much that you're totally convinced testing positive for COVID = required hospital visit, and then those same authority figures tell you that vaccines will "protect" you from hospitalization? Well, you're much less likely to go, even in situations where previously you would have gone straight to the ER and demanded attention. And that's fine, they'll recover on their own as they almost certainly would have done anyway, and they'll say "thank god I was vaccinated otherwise it would have been much worse".
This is the sort of confounder a rigorous trial would seek to control for, but we don't have any useful trials. The vaccine trials were complete failures: for the only end point they targeted, they reported 95% effectiveness, which started dwindling to near or even below zero in the months after the trial period ended. No usefully accurate information was provided by them, which is shocking.
So vaccines are bad because Americans overestimate risks due to trusting media and government too much (and those apparently misusing that trust) and therefore don't go to the hospital (and apparently surviving at home instead of needing to be brought into a coma at the IC, because that's only for the hospital's profit) which confounds the numbers that were missing in the original trials?
Nearly - have you reversed a part of the argument there? The argument is that people over-estimate the risk of COVID if unvaccinated, meaning they do go to hospital. You said "therefore don't go". Lots of marginal cases will end up going to hospital, right up until those people get vaccinated at which point the publicity campaign switches direction and tries to convince people with COVID to stay home because they're protected. Which indeed would hopelessly confound any attempt to determine true effects on hospitalization from simple rate data, and the trials simply didn't measure this at all. In fact the study paper:
doesn't even contain the word hospital anywhere in it.
It's not just Americans by the way. There's a French survey that shows something similar with respect to estimated IFR. Actual value between 0.1% and 0.3% depending on study, estimated value average of 14%. The misinformation campaign has been global.
I'm not saying something as simple as "vaccines are bad" - although COVID vaccines specifically could well be for younger age ranges, where disease risk is so low that it would require an astonishingly weak sauce to avoid tipping the cost/benefit balance negative. But the actual argument is that we don't really know any of these things with the level of rigor that should be required for a forced global vaccination programme. Literally all the data is either wrong or hopelessly confounded, and scientists are not only mostly ignoring these problems
but doubling down on them by insisting that analyses of side effect databases are illegitimate because they're "correlational" (which is a bogus argument but apparently enough to repeatedly get such papers retracted).
I'm not blaming anyone. I'm not even saying we need mandates. All I'm saying is that the numbers I've seen very strongly suggest that if 'all' would be vaccinated, we'd see a lot less pressure on health care, which during the last peak was where we hit the wall. I see that as an argument for mandates, not that it outweighs the arguments against.
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:
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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