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We as a society didn't stop COVID 3 years ago, so now we're stuck being either guinea pigs for the vaccine or for the disease. So far the vaccine has been a safer bet by far.
There is risk in both the virus and the vaccine. And the vaccine is a statistically safer bet, although I’m sure specific biological/genetic factors can alter this calculation.
Given that the risk of infection is well studied now for average healthy people, where measuring severe outcomes is a matter of how infinitesimally close to 0% it is, I trust my immune system that's the product of millions of years of evolution vs. overly self-confident scientists working alongside pharmaceutical companies maximizing profit and minimizing any knowledge of side-effects and risks associated with their products.
You're right, the correct comparison for COVID is actually measles. And it's more evasive than that - the vaccine and acquired immunity does not hold nearly as well.
Measles was controlled by mass vaccination that provides for years of neutralizing antibody response combined with merciless quarantine on outbreaks.
COVID vaccine of today does not achieve that. It's still much better than nothing, but insufficient to control it.
Literally Rt for either of those is much lower, and sequelae plus death rates don't match in severity. Measles, similar to COVID, temporarily messes up immune system in a number of cases. (Though by a different mechanism.) Besides vaccine effectiveness - which is why COVID is not under control. And it took 20 years to reduce deaths from that virus worldwide. COVID explodes in similar ways as measles when it gets into a school or care facility.
We are slightly lucky the Omicron is not as deadly as Delta... but new variants might be getting there soon.
Even the worst influenza epidemic did not meet the Rt, and it was less deadly than Delta. That 100 years ago, before vaccines, after a huge war with starved people.
Flu now has also a half decent vaccine if the predictions work, better at neutralizing it and limiting the spread.
I want to hear a reasoned argument why it should be compared to influenza or SARS, besides "it is an airborne spread". Even MERS is not there.
> We are slightly lucky the Omicron is not as deadly as Delta... but new variants might be getting there soon.
this is exactly the type of unbounded fearmongering and disinformation that supposed science-advocates love to spread, as though covid will slip into a wave of death at any moment after experts forced everyone to get injected under the promise that it'd all end
> Flu now has also a half decent vaccine if the predictions work, better at neutralizing it and limiting the spread
half decent? that's a really generous framing for hit-or-miss low efficacy.
BA.5 and XBB do lead to more severe disease than BA.1, though still not as many deaths as Delta. There are further even worse developments already getting percentages over BA.5. (BA.4.6 and BQ.7)
Again, not much worse, but still an increment. The worst symptom that's new is extreme fatigue.
It is only a few mutations to return to origin and start wrecking lungs again in addition to being spreadable.
Some researchers brought back a chunk of Delta spike into BA.1 and got 80% kill rate in mice. And it is just a few genes. Since XBB shows that variants can, though not easily, crosslink, someone might become this unlucky patient one generating a deadly cross between Delta and Omicron.
A variant of Delta that gained some of Omicron features by evolution was also quite deadly, but fortunately it did not catch on and become a variant of concern. We're lucky so far.
Flu vaccine is half decent in that when it works, it gives neutralizing immunity. Keyword is when it works. That is, if the variants in the vaccine match well enough to the current wild ones.
It is high efficacy if the guess is right.
When the guess is off, having been vaccinated for a similar variant reduces severity and complications a lot, still.
Current COVID vaccine does not in general give neutralizing immunity even when variants match. It means it cannot stop the virus being passed around to immunocompromised, sick or unvaccinated. It reduces the time it's being spread but that is not sufficient.
It also reduces chance of people ending up in hospital or dead and severity of symptoms. We do not know how much it reduces chances of Long COVID yet.
Because it's not doing much to the spread, people get ill at a similar rate, just milder.
There are developments for mucosal vaccine that can fix this problem.
Covidists seem to love it when other people die, as long as their deaths reinforce the narrative they tell themselves. It's interesting to watch them suddenly lose every shred of the 'empathy' they love to preach to others about, almost as if it was never anything but a paper-thin facade of virtue signalling. Why do you feel victory when your words cause pain?
I mean it’s not anecdata. They considered Covid a hoax and didn’t take any precautions or obviously vaccines and they all caught it. There’s thousands of real life cases exactly like that because people forget we aren’t God or immortal.
this is such a utopian and impossible dream, a "real communism has never been tried" escape hatch from reconciling the obvious failures of the so-called expert class & political left who's unleashed authoritarianism upon the world
Authoritarianism was not required. Just science and common sense. I recall a state department representative flying to wuhan to evacuate us citizens back to the us. No mask, shaking hands. Bro…
It became apparent early that it was a respiratory infection, but masks were resisted due to idiocy and politics.
It became apparent early on that there was a week or two incubation period.
Those two facts, had they been taken seriously, would have utterly changed the outcome.
Then again. Maybe you’re crying out against the authoritarianism of facts. It is true they can be a harsh taskmaster. They are utterly unforgiving and totally uncaring. They don’t give a shit what you believe or who’s side you are on. If you love freedom I could understand wanting to be free of facts. Let me know how that works out for ya.
I think the point is that once the cat is out of the bag with a pandemic authorization measures aren't gonna fix it - so implementing them is just authoritarianism for the sake of authoritarianism
Emotional language aside, it was disappointing to see how ineffective the CDC was at emergency response. At their budget and with their mandate there’s really no excuse.
Covid spread out of Wuhun very early. Once it did, all the masking and quarantining post-infection wouldn't stop it.
The few countries that did keep it under control closed their borders to keep it out and tested/traced the few infections they had to preemptively track it down. But countries that already had a nigh number of cases tried those tactics and it failed. The only country with large number of infections who got back down to Covid Zero was china, and they absolutely used authoritarian tactics.
The third world was never going to accomplish that even with authoritarian tactics.
There is no scenario where COVID doesn't become an a global pandemic once it escapes Wuhan. It's just too contagious.
That on its own is not necessarily a problem. Vaccination research is a variation on multiarmed bandit game, and pulling some arms is a requirement to play. Not pulling is a strategy, but not necessarily the best one.
Are you the product when you drive on roads? When you visit the park? When you look up the forecast from the National Weather Service? The government (aka. tax dollars) pays for those too…
It's becoming pretty clear that vaccine doesn't really protect against infection, it protects against severe disease, do your experience is pretty much in line.
I can't answer this for Omicron however for delta and original strain, it took 3 days on average to become contagious and 5 days on average to become symptomatic/test positive with a RAT. (There are extreme examples of it being 14 days). It is more than reasonable that you were infected after the booster and before it was fully effective.
The vaccine is reported to take 14 days to be considered to be in full effect.
It is possible. I chalk the booster up to giving me a very, very mild (borderline asymptomatic) case but the timing perhaps not giving me the zero symptoms.
I'm pro vax, but I'm hesitant to get my fourth.. I'm aware I may be an idiot here, but I just don't want to inject myself every six months for the foreseeable future.
I've had covid two/three times now, and while the first time was hell, the other times I just had like a bad cold.
The jabs on the other hand completely knocked me on my ass. I get a kind of full body lethargy and aches that last for a couple of days.
Do I need to keep taking them? I'm honestly just holding out for a pill or spray form now..
Same here. All three jabs..no response. Finally caught Covid last month and had 3 days of a bad cold but still have a lingering 2 pack a day smoker's cough 4 weeks later. The wildfire smoke didn't help but I don't think it's the only cause of my cough.
Are otherwise healthy people really getting boosters? I had covid in early 2021 before the vaccines. I got a first dose in March 2021, and a second dose in November, only because I needed it for a wedding. I haven’t gotten sick since.
I’m not an anti-vaxxer by any means, but I also am not a fan of unnecessary medical intervention. To me, healthy people under 40 getting boosters seems like people freaking out over drinking half a glass of wine during pregnancy. It’s more about extreme risk aversion than major reductions in mortality.
This is a weird take. People get annual flu shots, despite far lower risks of severe flu illness, and have for decades. Not everybody gets them, but if you tell your 40 year old peer group "I'm going to go get a flu shot", none of them are going to bat an eyelash; it's just a thing people do. Do you... not get flu shots? I'm not moralizing it, but like, it seem kind of silly to avoid them. They take like a minute (you get them when you were going to the drug store anyways) and spare several days of work you'd otherwise lose to an extremely annoying illness. Get the COVID shot at the same time, for the same reason.
No, if you like it, go for it. Seems better than getting laid up for a week if that's the alternative. But you seemed surprised that anybody might decline to get one.
It may be the case that you are in a demographic that has very low risk for serious infection, it may be that you’ve been quite lucky, but you haven’t indicated any information on that.
Regardless, anecdotes like this are about as useful as saying “there’s an orange tree in my garden” when it comes to evaluating medical decision making.
When I had covid it was pretty bad, but not bad enough to need hospitalisation. I’m a “high risk” group. My partner had it, and her experience has been 6 months of heart problems, despite being in a “low risk” group.
What have we learnt from these two stories? Absolutely nothing.
Almost all demographics are low risk for serious infection. I'm not lucky. If you have a serious reaction to covid it's because you're statistically very unlucky. The vast majority of people do not need to get the covid "vaccine."
people still push back against that kind of opinion, on the internet, because it is overrepresented by at risk people who stay indoors and have internet access
but the market has clearly decided it isn't interested in additional shots and nobody ever needs to say anything, ironically because at risk people have already self-segregated (or died) already
of the people not interested in additional shots, many of them are willing to take boosters for a seasonal covid variant, because its a ridiculous standard to be getting shots for covid alpha from 2019. this is the first of the shots for a seasonal covid variant.
I happily received my fourth dose a while ago. Although I'm not in the official risk group in my country, they decided to give me one because of my (treated) hypertension. You get an SMS, confirm, and then go to the center to get the shot. I was aware of studies that indicate a decreased effectiveness for the fourth shot, but I leave such decisions to my doctor and the health authority who have dealt with this pandemic in a nearly optimal way.
I've never had any side effects of vaccinations and also never knowingly had Covid so far, which probably helps with such decisions.
I also had no side effects of the latest booster. Earlier doses have me some arm ache, but that seemed irrelevant vs the benefits.
I get a flu shot every year and have no concerns over repeated Covid shots.
Also, never had Covid, In part because I don’t want to be responsible for giving it to someone with a weakened immune system. People who look at vaccination only in terms of their own risk/reward calculus are failing the communities they're part of
n=2, I was on the fence about a 4th shot, but decided on a whim to get it. No side effects previously, but this one gave me full bodies aches and extreme fatigue for about 36 hours.
Now that almost every person has been exposed to at least some minute amount of COVID and/or a vaccine, why are we still pushing 3rd/4th doses? Can't we just treat it like an endemic virus like the flu?
We can't because it is too damaging to health. Long COVID and death rates are too high, it wipes out anyone even close to immune compromised, like having had a cold recently.
A wave instantly overloaded hospitals in Germany, which is well equipped to handle it all...
Many of those people will be disabled for months if not permanently. People are dying in USA by the thousands.
It is way too easy to catch, being more spreadable than measles. There is no currently working treatment besides supportive. (The one remaining mAb has some low remaining efficacy in old people.)
> I really shudder to think how bad it would have been for her if she weren't vaccinated.
I've heard this sentiment expressed by a number of people.
How are you certain that the opposite couldn't have been true? How do you know, for instance, that the shots she took didn't happen to decrease her natural ability to fight off an infection?
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review
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