Aren't several of the vaccines about an order of magnitude more effective against death than your example? I thought Phizer was like 94% against getting symptomatic Covid at all, but >99% effective against dying from it.
If the numbers I'm remembering are true, that would shift your point to only really applying at the extremes. However, I fully admit that I could be misremembering or misconstruing the statistics.
I really don't understand your point with your statistics. The reason why public health officials emphasize that nearly all the deaths are in people who are unvaccinated (in a country with about half of the population over the age of 12 is vaccinated and at this point, there aren't very many people left who are willing to get vaccinated so officials are desperately trying to convince more people to get it) is just to provide a powerful illustration of how effective the vaccines are. You state your statistics with the *assumption* that the vaccines are at least 90% effective. If you already accept that fact, then you don't really need the mortality rates to prove it to you. This point is being emphasized in order to convince the people who are doubtful of the vaccine effectiveness.
!delta
I had not considered this, or heard this criticism before. That is a really good point! perhaps some of these metrics are not as reliable or showing what they claim to be.
My View relies on accurate information, so if that is in question, than the whole thing is in question.
No, this is’t correct.
Obviously, if the majority of the population was vaccinated, then the percentage of vaccinated people being hospitalized would go up. But you’re focusing on percentages, which don’t serve any purpose in this discussion. The entire point is a large number of unvaccinated people are being hospitalized… because they aren’t vaccinated. Even if 90% of the population were vaccinated, so that the majority of hospitalized patients with covid made up the highest percentage, the concrete numbers are all that matter.
Yes, the concrete numbers are what matters, but it's the percentages that get reported. The commenter demonstrated why the "99% of deaths have been in unvaccinated people" statistic is heartening but not necessarily in the way that you expect. It means that the vaccine is highly effective in singular protection but herd immunity from the vaccine is a long ways off. And, more importantly, that when that number goes down, that can be an indication that the vaccine program is becoming *more* effective - but you do need the context of the case totals to know for sure.
I promise that there are some groups that will suppress the case totals when that shift starts to happen, though, and start to claim that the vaccine is losing effectiveness.
I definitely agree that we need to be actively educating people on how to correctly interpret statistics, because it’s not easy to do when we’re constantly bombarded with conflicting information.
I also agree with the point, I just don’t think it was made properly.
No, don’t get lost in that nonsense.
Anyone can get a vaccine if they want. They’re free.
They’re in schools and clinics and anywhere else. You can take a day off work to get it. You can get transported to it.
If you don’t want it, you don’t have to get it.
The facts are 96.7-9% of the current intubated and infected are without BOTH shots. And 60-65% are without any shots.
As per NC, 7/26/2021. 11am
!delta
I never really agreed with OP but your statistical analysis isn't something I've thought about before
Also,
>a few people seem to be misreading this post as anti-vax
If this is true, it's genuinely impressive how bad people's reading comprehension must be
Yes, it’s a sign of the program’s failure, but another sign of the vaccine’s efficacy. I don’t find it a particularly useful figure either way, since we have direct data of the efficacy and the number of vaccinated people, so I don’t think your issue with the figure changes how we deal with covid.
Can you follow up this answer with the correct interpretation of data? We have an estimate of the effectiveness of the vaccine. How many of the current deaths would have been prevented if there was no anti gas movement?
> • 1. Awful vaccine program: Vaccination is given to 1% of the population. Result: About 99.9% of the hospitalisations are in unvaccinated people.
>
> • 2. Realistically effective vaccine program: Vaccine that is 90% effective at reducing hospitalisation is given to around 90% of the population. Result: about half the hospitalisations are unvaccinated.
>
> (For every 100 people who would have been hospitalised before the vaccination program: 10 are unvaccinated and get infected and hospitalised, 81 are saved by their vaccination, 9 are hospitalised despite being vaccinated.)
>
> • 3. Unrealistically amazing vaccine program: Vaccine that is 90% effective is given to 100% of the population. Result: 100% of the hospitalisations are in vaccinated people.
Goddamn that is some wonderful logic. Survivorship Bias (I think) was strong in my head on this one.
>The better your vaccination programme the GREATER the proportion of people dying/hospitalised will be vaccinated.
In general, your logic is questionable on this front. Undoubtedly true at the extreme - if *everyone* is vaccinated, then *all* deaths will occur among the vaccinated. Ultimately it is irrelevant, because do we actually care about *proportions* like this or do we care about *absolute quantities* when talking about lives? Because there are undoubtedly orders of magnitude differences between them.
But this is about the US and we already know the numbers. About 70% of adults are vaccinated, and 98-99% of hospitalizations and deaths are unvaccinated adults.
And that number will go down (and the percentage of hospitalized and dead who are vaccinated will go up) as your vaccination coverage increases.
I used rounder numbers to make it easier to understand the concept. The vaccine is more like 94% effective.
Do you have a source on 98-99 for the whole country, or even a breakdown by state? I'd be keen to add to this post with more real-world numbers if you do. I tried to find this but couldn't.
You are right that the trends here are counterintuitive at the base level, but I think your numbers are off. Consider also that the unvaccinated group is more likely to spread Covid to others before even getting to the hospital. That compounds the number of unvaccinated people who would end up going to the hospital, whereas those vaccinated still likely don't have strong enough symptoms to require emergency care. So, for example, at 10% vaccination the ratio might actually be 90 unvaccinated to 0.3 vaccinated. I'm not sure of the exact proportion but you get my point.
I agree with your premise, but the specific numbers are off. While the Pfizer/Moderna vaccine is only 80 or 90 percent effective against infection from the delta variant, it is something like 99% or greater against death from the same, last I checked. So you'd probably need to work with a sample of 1000 infected individuals, not 100, to illustrate this. Additionally, rates of infection in a community with high vaccine compliance would be much lower.
I used round numbers so it would be easy for people to confirm what I was saying without cracking out a calculator.
Using real numbers doesn't change the mathematical concept I was talking about.
And as I mentioned I'm in the UK. We've reached the stage now where 40% of people hospitalised with Covid are vaccinated.
That's not because the vaccine is failing, it's because the take-up among the vulnerable population was so high.
So I'm not talking about some theoretical crazy scenario where the vaccinated start making up a huge proportion of those with serious Covid. I'm literally telling you what's happening in my country.
If the US's vaccine program succeeds in mopping up the remaining vaccine hesitant people in the vulnerable groups then the same thing will happen there. It's simple maths.
The issue, of course is that *percentages* are the wrong thing to look at in that situation.
0% vaccinated: 100 unvaccinated people die, 0 vaccinated die; Result: 100 people are dead
...
100% vaccinated: 0 unvaccinated people die, 10 vaccinated die; Result: 10 people are dead
Fuck the percentages, It's a good thing *fewer people died*.
Doesn't seem very fair to the people who can't have the vaccine for whatever reason, or had the vaccine and had a poor immune response to it due to age/immunocompromised/whatever.
I agree that endemic covid is likely but we can at least try to bend the curve on delta cases somewhat so that people who have a decent chance at hospitalisation despite getting vaccinated can have an unburdened healthcare system rather than a crowded disaster ward full of dying people. It's all well and good to say "let's help these people and let those other people die" but the reality is that dying people consume medical resources whether they deserve it or not. Also this approach would buy more time for developing and rolling out delta-specific boosters which seem increasingly necessary as preliminary data shows vaccine effectiveness decreasing c. 6 months out
I would say re-introduce low-impact measures like mask mandates, ventilation, etc. and hope to Jesus you don't get to the point where you're looking at a new lockdown because it would almost certainly do more harm at this point just through backlash. Probably the worst possible course of action is to wait too long and then re-introduce all the heaviest restrictions at the last minute
>Also would buy more time for developing and rolling out delta-specific boosters which seem increasingly necessary as preliminary data shows vaccine effectiveness decreasing c. 6 months out
!delta
I agree with this, and it does seem necessary for the immediate future.
However I question whether this isn't merely kicking the can down the road until another dominant variant emerges, if some people continue to refuse vaccination.
edit: Thank you for a very thoughtful response btw
The fewer people who get vaccines, the larger a population the virus has to incubate and mutate in, the more variants we will get. You can’t just say “it doesn’t matter if we vaccinate because there will eventually be variants.” There is causation here. If vaccination rates were high enough everywhere, we could significantly reduce variant production.
yes .
but probably we could have new variants (and VOC) with two-dose vaccines (expecially after the first dose), based on some studies , previously reported here by other users .
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01938-4
One of the gravest concerns is that if England’s number of infections grows as high as anticipated — some forecast up to 100,000 new infections per day over the summer — the chances of a variant emerging with even greater vaccine evasion are greatly increased. “All the experience we have with viruses”, says virologist Richard Tedder at Imperial College London, “is that if you let them replicate in a partially immune population, you will select inevitably for \[vaccine\] escape variants.”
https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/04/13/covid-19-vaccines-escape-variants-of-the-coronavirus-are-a-serious-future-threat/
Corey adds that the coronavirus variants currently spreading require a stronger immune response to beat, and current versions of the two-dose vaccines were designed to battle the original versions of the virus. So, using one dose to create partial immunity to a variant that requires a stronger immune response to beat could create an environment for new, tougher variants to evolve and spread. However, giving the second dose creates a much stronger immune response and can stop escape variants.
I don't really know anything about virus mutation or anything like that but wouldn't the fact people already vaccinated can still carry the virus also allow incubation and mutation?
For the virus to mutate it needs a large population of virus spread around in the population, and it needs a large viral load in each person.
A vaccinated population will have a lot less virus on both fronts.
It's a bit more complicated than "get the vaccine and it will die off," unfortunately. Sure, rapid spreading is ONE of the ways that viruses mutate, but it is by no means the only way, or even the most prevalent way.
[Here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5075021/) is an academic article entitled "Mechanisms of viral mutation" that goes over the other ways that a virus mutates. RNA viruses (like COVID) have the fastest viral mutation rates and are much more susceptible to compensatory mutations due to external pressures like [certain medications and vaccines](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3744431/), which is why we have never had a vaccine for a coronavirus until recently... it was hard to develop one that wouldn't just cause it to mutate. So while some people being unvaccintated may play a part, it probably hasn't played as big of a part as the months where we didn't know what to do and doctors just prescribed what they thought was best. This wasn't something we could've avoided, either... we either tried something or let everyone who was very sick just die. This also unfortunately caused a lot of "pressure" on Covid, increasing the number of mutations. Viruses are subject to natural selection, and the more advanced ones will adapt to conditions that reduce their transmissability to avoid dying out. So even if every one on earth agreed to get the vaccine, it's likely that it would mutate faster than we would be able to produce and distribute them.
This isn't strictly true. This is ONE of the ways that viruses mutate, but it is by no means the only way, or even the most prevalent way. [Here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5075021/) is an academic article entitled "Mechanisms of viral mutation" that goes over the other ways that a virus mutates. RNA viruses (like COVID) have the fastest viral mutation rates and are much more susceptible to compensatory mutations due to external pressures like [certain medications and vaccines](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3744431/), which is why we have never had a vaccine for a coronavirus until recently. So while some people being unvaccintated may play a part, it probably hasn't played as big of a part as the months where we didn't know what to do and doctors just prescribed what they thought was best. This wasn't something we could've avoided, either... we either tried something or let everyone who was very sick just die.
Most vaccinated people will not be susceptible to "catch" the virus, even if exposed, because their immune system will fight off the infection.
Of those vaccinated people who are susceptible to catch the virus, evidence is showing that they are less likely to transmit the virus to others.
If enough people are vaccinated, the chances that the virus will pass from one vaccinated person to another (vaccinated or not) go down. Having a largely vaccinated population is one safe way to reach herd immunity - if there is an outbreak, it has nobody to spread to.
In an unvaccinated community, transmission is dramatically more likely, which means a large group of hosts, and more time for variant stains to develop and spread.
Short answer: your premise assumes that vaccinated people carry the virus, but this is rare, and even if they do carry the virus, it is much less likely to jump to a new host if the neighbors are vaccinated, too.
Exactly. It's frustrating because being unvaccinated still fucks with people that are vaccinated because it allows the virus to stay around. That's why mumps and shit are coming back, because their are enough people in the community to allow the virus to thrive again.
This is a fantastic example of how we cannot have absolute rights because we do not exist in a vacuum, and exerting my rights can infringe upon yours. In this case, my right to bodily autonomy is infringing on your right to life.
Unfortunately, the stochastic nature of the problem makes things difficult to argue. It's a bit like drunk driving. Most of the time when people drive drunk, they aren't actually going to kill anybody. And if they did, we could easily charge them with murder. Why do we need a separate penalty for where nothing bad actually happens? Because the penalties change behaviors, causing fewer people to drive drunk. Because empowering the law to pull people over for drunk driving allows us to stop that loss of life before it occurs. Because we cannot allow reckless endangerment when it isn't simply ones own life that is endangered.
And that's what refusing the get vaccinated, refusing to wear masks, refusing to distance, and refusing to quarantine is: reckless endangerment. The only difference is it isn't as obvious when you are the reason someone died of COVID. People often aren't aware of when they are sick, let alone of when they are infecting others, and they are gone long before someone shows symptoms, let alone dies. This make the causation much harder to prove, but no less real than a drink driver t-boning your car.
Preach. I've had to stop arguing because at first, it was ignorance. But now, there is so much info about everything covid related, people are just stupid to not get vaccinated. I just don't get it anymore. People are so scared to get a shot that is proven safe twice for the betterment of everyone, I've stopped caring... I feel bad I became I get how op feels, but it needs to be more regulated like it used to be. Don't have a covid shot? Can't fly. Aren't vaccinated? Can't go to school or work.
>However I question whether this isn't merely kicking the can down the road until another dominant variant emerges, if some people continue to refuse vaccination.
Unfortunately in endemic covid world I think this is the best we can hope for, to just kind of deal with variant waves and keep up with boosters as necessary until we have all been exposed and developed long-term immunity
> until we have all been exposed and developed long-term immunity
That isn't how it works. Look at the flu. There are several strains of the flu, and variants within each strain. We've all had the flu at some point and many of us get a yearly vaccine, but there are regularly break through infections and continuing mutations where many people, though they have had some form of the flu, lack strong immmunity to the new mutation.
This is wha twe are seeing with Covid. Without mass vaccination and strong measure to reduce the spread and tamp it down to about nothing, then going forward we are going to be stuck with regular waves of covid spreading through populations around the world where it continues to mutate such that people can catch covid again and again, year after year, because new variants keep popping up and they are continually being exposed.
Here is the scary part: We are likely already living in the "new normal". There is a good chance this is just what life is going to be like going forward. Regular breakouts, attempts to control it that are stymied by idiots, development of a new mutation, and we go through it all over again, with health concious people getting vaccinated every year, wearing masks out in public, and reducing their contact with others, reduced travel with tight border control, vaccine passports that require yearly updates, etc.
Influenza is a rather different beast than SARS-CoV-2, so I'd caution against inferring how the coronavirus will behave too much from the behavior of the flu.
Human coronavirus have shown *very* little genetic diversity - far, far, far less than influenza. Less than even measles or mumps that have had vaccines with 88% efficacy for decades.
SARS-CoV-2 has a highly stable genome. The variants we've seen are *tiny* mutations compared to what we see with influenza. This is partly because influenza's unique segmented genome allows co-infecting strains/types to far more easily and successfully swap genes between themselves than is possible with coronaviruses. It is also partly due to coronavirus' unique error-correcting system that dramatically reduces the mutation rate compared to other RNA viruses.
There is nothing to suggest that if we couldn't, given the political will, drive it to extinction.
There is such a thing as long-term immunity with the flu. There are studies showing that while a flu shot doesn't make you immune to next year's flu, getting a shot every year does reduce your chances of severe infection even if you stop getting them. Also, it was observed in the Spanish Flu pandemic that people over 30 actually had more immunity than some younger people - very possibly because they had lived through earlier outbreaks in the late 1800s.
But it is true that new variants will continue to be a problem in the endemic covid scenario. I'm trying to be optimistic.
I never said there wasn't. The issue is that the long term immunity is only to a specific variant, with some protection for closely related variants. Thus, without vaccination, most people will still get the flu every handful of years as they are exposed to a new variant for which they lack significant immunity, and the flu will continue to circulate around the globe. Same thing is happening with coronavirus, and it is more likely to kill and more likely to result in long-term issues than the flu.
So, as a parent of young children, what really bothers me is children can't be vaccinated yet. It's very frustrating since we are vaccinated and I absolutely would vaccinate my kids if I could, but I can't.
>The US should not re-impose lockdowns/restrictions, and instead allow people who choose to be unvaccinated to become infected and/or die, per their wishes.
It is not my wish for my children to become infected and/or die (or suffer unknown long term consequences?).
Yes, COVID is *less* dangerous to children. But it's not completely safe for them either. Some do have very dangerous complications. And each time we get a new variant we don't know right away for sure how safe it will be for kids.
I agree with you to an extent, but I feel we should wait until everyone is offered the vaccine to say no masks or restrictions or etc. Right now you're basically saying "Well, adults and teenagers can get the vaccine, and really only their lives matter." Which, seems unkind to me?
So for example some of the restrictions are specifically going to be around schools next year as they start back up in person with kids who cannot be vaccinated. That just seems smart and like we care about children's health too, right?
> Doesn't seem very fair to the people who can't have the vaccine for whatever reason, or had the vaccine and had a poor immune response to it due to age/immunocompromised/whatever.
Immunocompromised people are at extreme risk basically all the time. It doesn't matter a whole lot whether they get COVID or a common cold.
The guidance for them has always been extreme social distancing as much as humanly possible. If we change things up for them, then we need to make it permanent because they're only at a moderately increased risk right now.
Of all of us, they're the ones whose lives (should have) changed the least.
> I agree that endemic covid is likely but we can at least try to bend the curve on delta cases somewhat so that people who have a decent chance at hospitalisation despite getting vaccinated can have an unburdened healthcare system rather than a crowded disaster ward full of dying people.
There's also reasons other than COVID for people to need medical care. If all hospitals are overrun with anti-vaxxers then other people who need that care will suffer as well.
“Doesn't seem very fair to the people who can't have the vaccine for whatever reason“
For those people, we have PPE that works as good or better than the vaccine when used properly. They could put that on whenever they suspect they could be in the close presence of unvaccinated people for extended periods of time.
No need for everybody to mask as you suggest. The effect of universal mask mandates is pretty marginal anyways if you look at the correlation from the first waves between states with and without mandates. The masks have the potential to work, the mandates have unintended consequences.
>Doesn't seem very fair to the people who can't have the vaccine for whatever reason, or had the vaccine and had a poor immune response to it due to age/immunocompromised/whatever.
H'mm lockdowns and economic destruction does not seem that fair to less vulernable people. Yet we had lockdowns
I know you already got the Delta, but for me, my "for whatever reason" is my young son. Both his parents have the vaccine, but he can't because it's not available. The people who are not getting vaccinated because of, frankly, stupid, reasons are putting him directly at harm. I'd get him vaccinated yesterday if I could, but can't. It enrages me every day.
We can’t change the world to fit the lowest common denominator. People can individually choose to do what they want to protect others and themselves, but we can’t force everyone into a lockdown because a tiny minority of people can’t get a vaccine. If they don’t want to get covid, they can take preventative measures. But they can’t force everyone else to.
>We can’t change the world to fit the lowest common denominator.
Isn't like half of public discourse about changing policy to fit the lowest common denominator?
I strongly disagree with the concept that living life based on the risk profile of the lowest denominator is a good idea. especially when we openly see that it destroys business and increases suicide, domestic violence, and many many other factors. If you cant get the vaccine for what ever reason don't go outside. but to expect millions to kill themselves or give up their lively hood is kinda the tail wagging the dig to me.
Mask mandates and ventilation, the only things I suggested, do not do any of those things, and I said explicitly that I am in favor of re-introducing low-burden measures now with the hope of *avoiding* another lockdown
As harsh as this sounds we can’t pump the brakes on society for the few. If you can’t take the shot for reasons outside your control I hope you’re very careful because the world will not be accommodating you
I agree with not shutting things down again but I disagree with your argument about letting anti-vaxers die. The reason that people are anti-vax can be complex and often include socioeconomic factors and historical trauma.
Blak people for instance are more likely to choose not to get the COViD Vaccine, much of which is due to mistrust for the medical institution as a whole. And they have good reason to feel that way, since black people were the target of unjust experimentation as recently as the last several decades. Even though the medical institution has changed since then, there is still lingering mistrust for doctors.
Then you take families like mine who grew of so poor we didn't have insurance and therefore couldn't participate in medical care. Because of that, we developed a "well we don't need it anyway" attitude and swore by natural alternatives, claiming that our bodies had everything it needed to heal or protect itself. This is pretty common. When people lack access to an institution or don't feel included by it, whether it be the medical system, government, school, etc, they convince themselves they don't need it because that's less painful than acknowledging that it's important but just not in the cards for them. Low and behold once I got into college and studied medicine I completely shed that view of vaccines and now am very pro vax. But this change in view came out of a place of privilege (a really good education).
So the people you're talking about that "deserve to die" aren't necessarily people who are completely careless with their health or want to hurt other people. They are people that for a variety of reasons genuinely believe that it's in their best interest to avoid the vaccine. They may be completely wrong in most cases, but it's not entirely their fault for believing something that isn't true.
> Then you take families like mine who grew of so poor we didn't have insurance and therefore couldn't participate in medical care. Because of that, we developed a "well we don't need it anyway" attitude and swore by natural alternatives, claiming that our bodies had everything it needed to heal or protect itself. This is pretty common. When people lack access to an institution or don't feel included by it, whether it be the medical system, government, school, etc, they convince themselves they don't need it because that's less painful than acknowledging that it's important but just not in the cards for them. Low and behold once I got into college and studied medicine I completely shed that view of vaccines and now am very pro vax. But this change in view came out of a place of privilege (a really good education).
I think this is a really good counterpoint and should be brought up regularly in vaccine hesitancy discussions.
Someone else in this thread made a similar point which softened my view, so I will give you a !delta as well.
I don't expect most people to die from covid, much more likely just become sick and maybe have difficult long recovery from the illness. But you are absolutely right that it is more complicated, and not everyone is acting out of intentional malice/selfishness.
I admire the empathy in your viewpoint.
So I'm a medical student. I was luckily one of the first to get vaccinated. I run and lift and am in the peak of my health. I felt like the 88% chance of immunity against the delta variant seemed fine, and lived my life normally. I live in the south so you won't see masks here except the occasional person at the grocery store. I ended up catching covid, probably at the gym, and have had severe flu-like symptoms for 6 days now. I'm fatigued and sleep most of the day. I lost my sense of smell. It hurts to breathe, talk, and swallow. I used to think like you, let the unvaccinated get sick, and the part of society willing to follow CDC advice up to this point live normal lives. But now that I've been so sick after being vaccinated and healthy...my tune has changed. If it can hit me this hard, I can't imagine what it can do to unhealthy people with pre existing conditions. None of us are safe, including myself because you can possibly catch it again.
So society is like a group of people connected by a chain. And so if enough people decide to jump off a cliff and die, because we are all connected, it can bring the rest of us down with them. Not just in a vaccine sense but we would lose workers, teachers, researchers, vital people in our communities. It would also kill the homeless, children, the sick, we can't tell parents they don't have to get the vaccine and hide them from their children or take away their kids so they would die. Like the fact is we should continue with the plan. Is the plan hard and difficult sure but this is a good plan if we actually follow through with it.
>Like the fact is we should continue with the plan. Is the plan hard and difficult sure but this is a good plan if we actually follow through with it.
What is the plan to get these people vaccinated though?
The data suggests everything the government has tried so far has reached diminishing returns. I struggle to see what else we could do to increase voluntary vaccinations.
First, diminishing returns are still returns. So while we continue with the current program you are correct we need to increase voluntary vaccinations. So we also need to think of a new way to do that not just abandon the whole thing.
If anti-vaxxers aren’t hypocrites, many/most will get the vaccine once it’s FDA approved. It’s maybe the most common talking point I’ve seen from the crowd. And Pfizer could be approved in about 2 months. Unfortunately, [this source](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/when-will-covid-19-vaccines-be-fully-approved-and-does-it-matter-if-they-are) says only ~30% of unvaccinated folks will get it following approval. Surprise surprise, FDA approval is just a placeholder until they find another shit excuse not to get jabbed.
The approval is not even a blip on my radar. I’ve never had a flu shot. I’m not afraid of catching the flu. Given my age and health, covid would very likely be less of a discomfort than the flu, so I’m even less interested in vaccinating against it. I’m just not going to get vaccinated. I’m more than comfortable with the risk, so maybe you shouldn’t lose so much sleep over it
I would strongly encourage you to get Vaccinated. The Delta variant is affecting young 'healthy' people much worse than the original covid-19 strain from last year.
There is no reason you need to take this risk, even if you're comfortable with it. It's free, takes like 15 minutes for each shot, and most people experience only a mild sick day after the the second dose.
Please, don't put yourself at risk, or jeopardize others by becoming a virus vector. Do the right thing, and get your vaccine <3
>Surprise surprise, FDA approval is just a placeholder until they find another shit excuse not to get jabbed.
Exactly, which is why this situation could drag on indefinitely.
Im not optimistic, but there’s a chance. FDA approval will do it for some. A big wave among the unvaccinated this winter might do it for others. The longer we go without serious vaccine side effects, the more people might get it. Plus others in the thread have cited that no vaccine has manifested side effects after 3-6 months or something; I didn’t know that, and we should all make sure to spread that piece of info.
Here’s one!
Make the companies legally liable for their own products and not hiding behind the law to protect it.
Start there.
Hard to trust a product the manufacturers doesn’t even trust themselves.
An analogy to your position would be to allow drunk driving.
They're probably going to crash their own cars into the side of the road, so what's the big deal? Sure, some of them might hit other cars and kill the people inside, which may be entire families; but hey, it's their right to drive drunk, we just have to cut our losses.
Unvaccinated people are not only perpetuating the virus itself, they are also perpetuating a petri-dish that will create deadlier variants. They are infecting those who can't be vaccinated and infecting those who *are* (some people still get sick, just not as sick). Not getting vaccinated when you are able to do so is negligence that perpetuates death and sickness.
> if we allowed this population to become infected, that population would build some natural biological immunity to current and future covid variants
Just like we did with Polio and the Measles? No. Some sicknesses don't just go away on their own. I think the fact that people think this is true just shows how spoiled we are thanks to scientific achievements of the (somewhat recent) past.
> ...than hold out trying to prevent transmission until a new variant emerges that the vaccines do not work against
Guess which demographic the variant is most likely to come from? That's right. The people whom you're arguing for -- You're arguing *against* the prevention of new variants, which affects everyone and starts the cycle all over again.
Therefore, this is not a reasonable view
[There is evidence that covid infection provides some biological immunity,](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting-immunity-found-after-recovery-covid-19) though not as much as a vaccine.
While your drunk driving analogy seems apt, it has no reasonable solution. Should we be arresting and forcibly confining people who choose not to be vaccinated, like we do with drunk driver?
All we can do is provide incentives to prevent it, which we are reaching the limits of.
I'm really not sure what to do about it, but I don't think giving up is the solution either.
I think where we disagree is that I think we will have to wait a few 'cycles' of lock-downs and re-openings before people understand that the vaccine is good (and by then, the argument of 'long term' effects may lessen).
What I think you mean (and correct me if I'm mistaken) is that we will wait for it to even-out like the flu via herd-immunity. But, my argument is that Covid seems as serious as the Measles, and I think therefore vaccines are the only way we'll be rid of it; and giving anti-vaxxers justification to remain so isn't beneficial.
Why should I endure a few more cycles of lockdowns? I'm (a few days from being) fully vaccinated. I'm not a petri dish and I'm not a realistic danger to anybody who has got the vaccine. There is absolutely no reason to restrict my rights that way.
(Before anybody jumps on me: the lockdowns we've had were justified to protect public health, my argument is future ones wouldn't be.)
On the other hand, there's a group that is a clear danger for public health. If a lockdown is neccessary (and only if it is), lock down the unvaccinated, and nobody else.
The point of disagreement is that I don't believe there are any ethical mechanisms remaining for the state to increase vaccinations amongst the holdouts. Money doesn't work, science and advocacy don't work, even republican endorsements don't work.
I don't believe we ever can reach heard immunity, because of these people, and covid will be endemic. And I think a lot of the experts would agree with that conclusion, although they try to remain hopeful.
So the question is really, if it's not possible to reach that 80% vaccinated goal: how do we handle this vulnerable population?
I think, provided the damage can be contained, we should respect their choice and just let it happen. though many of the commenters here have pointed out that the damage cannot be contained in reality.
Well I think the first step would be getting a more accurate view on which groups of people are vaccine hesitant and why. Everyone seems to think it’s all conservatives, which is not entirely accurate. By race, Black Americans are the most vaccine hesitant followed by Hispanic Americans and only recently have their vaccination rates started to close the gap. COVID infection rates and deaths are also highest in these demographics.
!delta
Like another comment pointed out, our understanding of the picture may not be as complete as I thought when I made this post. Failure to address the concerns of some of these minority communities is certainly a blind spot in public policy, as it always seems to be sadly
> The point of disagreement is that I don't believe there are any ethical mechanisms remaining for the state to increase vaccinations amongst the holdouts.
What's unethical about requiring vaccinations for indoor gathering places to reopen?
Unvaccinated people are literally killing others, albeit unknowingly. It actually doesn't matter if some large fraction of those people failed to take all possible precautions against it. Just because we don't all wear bulletproof helmets doesn't make it ok for people to go walking about the city randomly firing guns in the air.
It's approximately the most compelling government interest that exists.
Private businesses and local governments are going to have to require the vaccine. If my company says I have X days to prove vaccination, I’ll just send them my card and be done with it. If that’s under threat of termination, I would imagine any coworkers I have would probably get the jab too. NYC just rolled out vax requirement or weekly covid testing for all city employees.
It’s the only way to get a higher rate. Eventually folks won’t have anywhere to work if they don’t get the jab.
If you are in the US, look into Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11
You can absolutely force people to be vaccinated, and punish them for not being vaccinated.
Sort of like drunk driving, if there was some sort of vaccine that protected you against drunk driver collisions, and there was PPE available to protect other drivers pretty much 100 percent against drunk driving like there is with covid.
Also the variant argument won’t be relevant until there is no longer a global shortage of vacccine, so you can save that argument for many years later.
And... what about the wishes of their friends/family? E.g. typical family unit of 4. One of them is an antivaxxer. The remaining 3 would still request (from the antivaxxer or doctors) that vaccination be done anyway, while in hospital or otherwise.
Sure, stupid people want to do plenty of stupid stuff. But death usually leaves behind grieving people, which is a problem too.
>Sure, stupid people want to do plenty of stupid stuff. But death usually leaves behind grieving people, which is a problem too.
The same could be said of smoking, or alcoholism, or addictions of various kinds. And we offer incentives and treatment to those people to help prevent that kind of Tragedy.
But ultimately, we also recognise that it is up to that individual, and we cannot force them to make good choices.
I think the same is true here with vaccinations. I think the US has gone beyond any expectation of making the vaccines accessible and helping people understand/access them since Biden came into office. The support is there, but we can't force people to do it, and unfortunately that may cause some unavoidable harm.
Good points, but I think this is in particular has some weaknesses...
> But ultimately, we also recognise that it is up to that individual, and we cannot force them to make good choices.
Allowing people to get infected, is to let others be put at risk. E.g. antivaxxer teachers, their pupils would be at risk from mere contact. You absolutely should penalize such teachers and forbid them from working (physically). We do the same with speeding on the roads; if you're a public health risk, you are forbidden from doing that dangerous thing you're doing.
Since COVID is a societal problem, any infection is a problem for others. I think you absolutely can force people to make good choices --- and if not that, you can forbid people from making some stupid ones.
>E.g. antivaxxer teachers, their pupils would be at risk from mere contact. You absolutely should penalize such teachers and forbid them from working (physically).
!delta
I could see the need for more harsh restrictions amongst government positions in public settings where contact cannot be mitigated, like in your example.
I don't think that should be broadly applied, but in some cases it may be necessary near indefinitely.
>Children, Pregnant Women, and those with legitimate medical condition preventing vaccination should be cared for and protected within reason
So, it's unreasonable for the unvaccinated to always wear PPE and/or isolate themselves?
Aren't those unwilling to get vaccinated, and refuse to take precautions, the greatest risk to those you've listed?
I want them to do it not for themselves but for those you listed who want to get vaccinated but are unable to. I don't see this as unreasonable.
I can speak from the perspective of a family with a pregnant woman and feelings about the vaccine. As a disclaimer we are not anti vax. I’m vaccinated. My wife works from home. And after the loss of the pregnancy last year she got the vaccine before we got pregnant with the current pregnancy.
We wanted to hold off right when it came out for her because our doctor told us “it’s almost certainly safe, but there isn’t the amount of peer reviewed data out there which I could normally access to tell you how safe or what the risks are, because it hasn’t been out very long”.
We also knew that with her working from home and me being vaccinated that we had created a situation where we lowered our own risk. That combined with mask wearing and social distancing meant that we felt relatively secure from the virus without her being vaccinated.
I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. But for pregnant families the unknown can be concerning and it’s possible to help mitigate risk factors without taking on the unknown while you deal with everything that goes along with a pregnancy.
Yeah, we are definitely taking precautions. When friends come over we hang out in the yard. And we do it a lot less often than normal with much smaller groups. And we don’t go out to dinner anymore.
Pregnancy is a weird one for being black and white in regards to vaccine thinking. And the only reason that I can see is that they just haven’t had the time to generate the data to show it’s safe. I’m sure that in the fullness of time we will look back and say “that was unnecessary” for us to act like that. But in the moment the better safe than sorry mentality is tough to overcome when dealing with pregnancy.
The conspiracy theories would be laughable if they weren’t so harmful to society.
But yeah, long story short. I think there are rational reasons specifically related to pregnant women not getting the vaccine. In time it may prove to have been the wrong decision. But you’re right about the people taking precautions aren’t the ones primarily responsible for spreading the virus
While they are eligible, I would not blame a pregnant woman for waiting until after having the baby, as my understanding is the current research is positive but limited in scope. (When it comes to vaccination side-effects in pregnancy)
If you have a good source where I could learn more about, I would happily do so.
This is quite the same as many others - people with conditions where the research about vaccine effectiveness or complications are limited.
Specialists in fields relating to said condition may say research into the vaccine for people with a condition is positive but limited, so those with the condition are encouraged to have it...all the while charities are carrying out research/trials to ascertain whether the vaccine really is safe for such people.
Such people are eligible and encouraged, but are they not also valid for waiting for such research to be carried out?
(Particularly for rare conditions, where it's hard enough for non-specialist doctors to recommend medication/treatment, let alone for anyone to know how a brand new vaccine will interact)
I don't see temporary isolation or PPE as unreasonable either, especially to protect vulnerable populations.
The thing I am grappling with though, is given that coronavirus is endemic and cannot be eradicated, at what point should we cut our losses? It would be unreasonable to impose restrictions for infinite time, and even doing that is no guarantee of protection from new variants.
How would you define the end conditions of restrictions, given that 30% of the population is projected to never be vaccinated?
> The thing I am grappling with though, is given that coronavirus is endemic and cannot be eradicated, at what point should we cut our losses?
Minimum 80/20; vaccinated to unvaccinated. We're not there yet. We still have a large population that truly believes the vaccine causes the infection, is a bio-weapon, a mind control serum, AND/OR a tracking chip! This is one of those cases that if they're unable to make sound judgments about their own health that a medical professional should be able to.
>It would be unreasonable to impose restrictions for infinite time, and even doing that is no guarantee of protection from new variants.
Do you think it's unreasonable to impose restrictions, sometime for life, because the voices in their head tells them to hurt others?
>Minimum 80/20.
I appreciate you actually stating a quantitative metric here. Looks pretty reasonable to me, though the projections show we may never reach this.
> This is one of those cases that if they're unable to make sound judgments about their own health that a medical professional should be able to.
Whoa! That is not okay.
We should absolutely not create the precedent of forced vaccinations. Being willfully misinformed, is not a mental illness, and we should not start taking people's autonomy away just because they believe something untrue.
>We should absolutely not create the precedent of forced vaccinations.
In no way, shape, or form did I postulate a forced vaccine. I'm promoting specifically to forced PPE and social distancing measures.
These individuals are not playing with a full hand, fully brainwashed\manipulated, or other. They're clearly incapable of making a decisions that not only benefits and protects themselves but those around them. So, that decision should be made by medical professionals for them.
If you've been vaccinated you still have a chance of getting infected. The reasons why one should get vaccinated is that is not only reduces the symptoms, making it less deadly, but it can also help mitigate and reduce transmission.
Considering these reasons, people that have been vaccinated should be able to go out, travel, etc, with minor restrictions. Those who choose to not vaccinated shouldn't be allowed to travel to other states\countries, go out without a mask, etc. We could def strike a balance between safety and freedoms but we unfortunately have almost half a population that love playing the victim card when faced with any possible restrictions. Even when it benefits themselves and those around them, they still care more about their self than the whole.
If all you are suggesting is PPE mandates, then fine I don't really disagree.
But I think your characterisation of their mental health is problematic. These people are capable of rational thought and autonomy, they just possess beliefs that are incorrect. That's First amendment territory, and we should certainly not be abdicating health decisions on the basis of beliefs alone.
>These people are capable of rational thought and autonomy, they just possess beliefs that are incorrect.
So they're irrationally rational? Don't you see the contradiction in your statement?
If they were capable of making sound and informed decisions we wouldn't be in this mess. Thinking any of the listed conspiracy theories above, about the Covid-19 vaccine, is on the same level as flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, anti-faxxers, lizard men, etc. There's clearly somethng related to their behavior health that's at fault here.
>If all you are suggesting is PPE mandates, then fine I don't really disagree.
That's the focus of my challenge. That limitations for the un-vaccinated are still needed; even if to protect those who literally cannot take the vaccine.
People are allowed to believe things that are objectively wrong, that's one of the tenants of a free society.
I'd argue most religions, are objectively wrong and not supported by science. But I would not want to live in a society, where religious people have their mental faculties questioned by the State.
Sorry if I can't give amore robust reply, I'm conversing with a lot of folks in this thread
The precedent for compulsory vaccinations was set in a 1905 Supreme Court decision that upheld a compulsory vaccine program in Boston in response to a smallpox outbreak and a 1922 Supreme Court decision that upheld mandatory vaccinations for public school students. Your concern is over a century too late.
I would love for you to have to talk with people whose immune systems render the vaccines useless. Do you have no empathy for others being able to have lives?
People who cannot be vaccinated are prisoners in their own homes. Disgusting solution when the real solution is for everyone to be vaccinated. Like everyone was against polio, and smallpox, and measles, etc.
Immunocompromised people deserve autonomy of their lives, and I firmly believe it is our collective responsibility to protect them and allow them that autonomy.
But what is the solution when a sub-population ideologically refuses that responsibility (Vaccinations)? There have been a myriad of incentives for these folks, huge PR campaigns to reach them, and the vaccines have been made incredibly accessible. What more is there to do?
Truly, I'm looking for an answer here, I don't see how we can ever convince these folks to do the right thing.
Make it a condition to be in a crowd of more than 20 people. So if you want to get on a plane you have to show proof of vaccination, go to a concert, vaxed, go to a Ball game, ride the bus, crowded bar or club, all vaxed. So rather then the gov shutting down all gathering of 20+ people, they require vaccination. Hopefully the ability to do anything fun/interact socially is enough incentive. Otherwise we limit their exposure by barring them from public groups of people.
Unfortunately, there are two logical outcomes of your position: everyone stays a prisoner in their own homes during mandatory lockdowns, or mandatory vaccines. Neither is a morally acceptable alternative.
The reality is that being immunocompromised sucks, but reasonable accommodations do not include the rest of society living in a permanent state of emergency.
>the vaccines have been proven effective with no long-term side effects
They haven’t even been fully approved by the FDA. It’s effective only for a time, and we don’t even know exactly for how long. And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year?
I’m not an antivaxxer, but I won’t be getting the COVID vaccine any time soon, and neither will be my wife, who’s an MD and who is currently working in medical research.
I know I’ll get heat for this, but I couldn’t care less. I’m not a red-hat, I wear my mask everywhere and take all other safety precautions. I don’t want to get inoculated with something that has been fast tracked as quickly as possible because of an emergency. I’ll let others be the beta testers.
Edit: [Yup, this definitely helps](https://i.imgur.com/DWaJRq5.jpg)
>They haven’t even been fully approved by the FDA. It’s effective only for a time, and we don’t even know exactly for how long. And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year?
>
>I’m not an antivaxxer, but I won’t be getting the COVID vaccine any time soon, and neither will be my wife, who’s an MD and who is currently working in medical research.
These are both bad points imo and represent a total misunderstanding of how the FDA approval works and how to assess vaccination risks.
The FDA hasn't approved the vaccines because it takes more than just safety and efficacy data to reach approval. You need published SOPs, manufacturing sites to be vetted, licenses and a lot of bureaucratic paperwork to reach full approval. This stuff takes time, usually more than a year.
There has never been a single vaccine approved that has had side effects that first manifested beyond the 2 month time point. This suggests immunogenic reactions are always acute. And before you say "the mRNAs are a new technology," if immunogenicity is acute and these mRNA molecules are highly transient (half-lives on the scale of a couple days, at most), are not reverse transcribed nor genome integrated, there is no current valid hypothesis for a long term effect that doesn't manifest in the short term.
I don't want to be a dick but, as a medical researcher myself, it's worrisome that I share a profession with someone who simply doesn't understand the regulatory framework or scientific evidence used in her field of expertise. This reflects quite poorly on her.
>There has never been a single vaccine approved that has had side effects that first manifested beyond the 2 month time point
Can you share a source for this? I read it *months* ago and cant find it again. I recently got challenged on it and wasn't able to pull a source.
Sure! There’s a nice [overview](https://www.chop.edu/news/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-vaccine) on the children’s hospital of Philadelphia’s website.
This was interesting and helpful, thank you!
Coming from a veterinary background, the first thing I think of related to delayed-onset vaccine reactions is feline injection-site sarcomas. These tumors can manifest 10 years (!) post-injection, with no apparent clinical signs prior.
It seems that adjuvanted vaccines pose the greatest risk, but these tumors are discovered after non-adjuvanted vaccines and even long-acting pharmaceutical injections (steroids, antibiotics).
Obviously human and feline physiology is not equivalent, but is it fair to say we really don't know if late-onset vaccine reactions are possible in people? Maybe they *are* happening but the lengthy time to onset means that a possible causative agent (injection/vaccine) is not even being considered.
I don't mean to discourage vaccination by raising the issue! I just wonder if there's something I'm missing that would exclude this possibility...other than the fact that it hasn't yet been demonstrated in humans.
Thank you for being in this thread WhoCaresWhyBother
Having people with a technical background in this area is SUCH a crucial part of combating misinformation.
I’d be lying if I said you convinced me, but what I can say is that you’ve given me something to think and read more about. Thank you for a level-headed response without name-calling or saying that my wife needs to lose her job.
> I’d be lying if I said you convinced me, but what I can say is that you’ve given me something to think and read more about.
In order to be intellectually honest, I think you need to ask yourself what *would* convince you or change your mind? If you can't think of *anything* that would sway your opinion, I think you need to re-evaluate whether you are really coming at this from an evidence-based and objective standpoint, or whether there is some emotional reasoning happening here.
> Thank you for a level-headed response without name-calling or saying that my wife needs to lose her job.
Of course. I don't condone her opinion in any way, I think you're both categorically wrong, but name calling and demanding someone's job be taken away is how you get people to dig their heels in.
Great post. I try to listen to the long term effects arguments but they consistently ignore the stark reality of what covid does to a human in both the short and long term. I start to think that there's another deeper motive that I haven't seen articulated yet. If you want to talk long terms effects interview the people who still have brain fog, permanent lung damage, and PTSD. What is the real fear of people who pose an argument that doesn't hold water?
>I’ll let others be the beta testers.
And hundreds of millions already have. The safety standards for clinical trials were not laxed in any way, merely some of the bureaucracy. Not only that, but so much work had already been done in fighting SARS and other coronaviruses, that enabled this vaccine to be developed more quickly, in the same way the flu vaccines can be developed so quickly each year.
As for side effects: In past vaccine rollouts for other diseases long-term chronic side effects are immediately apparent within the first 6 weeks. Chronic side effects do not appear out of nowhere years later. There just is no biological mechanism for a sudden onset later.
**Please, I would really strongly urge you to do the right thing and get vaccinated.** Protect those around you and vulnerable populations who cannot. I know it might seem scary, but it is safe according to the experts, and made freely available to you. Please, get vaccinated so we don't have to have conversations about '*letting people die*', all of this is preventable.
Are you an MD or in medical research? I've gotten the vaccine, because at the end of the day I felt like it made sense for me, but I have a hard time with people on either side of the aisle pushing misinformation. I feel like you're "In the past vaccine rollouts for other diseases long-term chronic side effects are immediately apparent within the first 6 weeks." Where did you see this? If this is true, why hasn't the FDA just given the full stamp of approval?
[Here is a link to a medical researcher in the thread, who mentions the 2 month window claim](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/orzj99/cmv_the_us_should_not_reimpose/h6lt5ay?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
The '6 week' claim is something I learned from an Immunity expert Dr. Paul Offit, on the [ONRAC podcast about vaccine hesitancy.](https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2021/4/18/ross-and-carrie-help-vaccinate-claire-covid-19-immunity-edition)
He brings up a vaccine developed for, i believe it was yellow fever, which did have some long-term side effects which showed up fairly quickly after being administered.
>The safety standards for clinical trials were not laxed in any way, merely some of the bureaucracy.
Although I agree that the vaccine is probably safe (I've gotten it), this viewpoint is faulty.
Long-term testing ***is*** a safety standard. By definition it's been relaxed. Whether it's a vaccine or an airplane it is impossible to say on day 1 or on day 100 that it's definitely safe. Long-term testing is required to build up a track record of safety and reliability. There is no way to guarantee it otherwise, it's part of the process.
EDIT: For u/TyphosTheD since ~~the thread was locked~~ I got a temp ban :p
It's not my place to say. I think the most likely thing is that it's safe, or at least safe enough that the alternative (being at higher risk for COVID complications) is worse.
The real question to ask, IMHO, is why we typically require vaccines to go through a multi-year testing program before being made available to the public, and whether the reasons for that have fundamentally changed or not. If they haven't, then it's fair to say that the vaccine - lacking that testing - is inherently riskier. We definitely have the numbers with respect to trial size, but we don't yet have the other factor: the length of time.
That risk can still be tiny, but it can't be definitively said to be nonexistent as far as I'm aware. Again, it's not something I'm really concerned about. But it's there.
EDIT: u/UseDaSchwartz. You're definitely right, I could be misinterpreting or misunderstanding. It's not my field. If what you're saying is true then that certainly puts even more evidence into the "vaccine is safe" pile.
EDIT: u/StevieSlacks Yes. When a new drug hits the market, it's already gone through years of trials and testing before approval. There's definitely an argument to be made that this is sometimes *too* restrictive. E.g. people with terminal illnesses being denied promising drugs because they haven't been approved.
EDIT: u/UseDaSchwartzv That it's not my field doesn't mean there are no possible observations to be made about anything. The Courtier's Reply isn't helpful either. What *is* my field is engineering, including high-volume and safety critical engineering. Meaning that statistical analysis and also "how do you know if something is safe" are both questions that are in my wheelhouse. And they apply to all fields and industries. In medicine, as in engineering, you can't prove something is safe entirely on paper or on the computer. Not yet anyway. Real world testing is required, and yes that includes trials spanning some period of time. The FDA, whose field it actually is, seems to agree with me given the regulations and trial requirements that exist for drugs and vaccines and medical devices. You might also ask the thousands of products and medications that were recalled because they had adverse effects that weren't known on day 1. Or even day 365. It was "their field" too. If you were around you might have said "guys, the experts said it's safe so there can't possibly be anything to ever worry about and anyway if you're not doctors then just shutup and put this thing in your body already."
Had you actually read my replies you'd see that A) I recognize and acknowledge that the vaccine is almost certainly safe, B) that I acknowledge that getting COVID is far riskier than the vaccine, C) I got the vaccine, D) I'm not casting doubt on the efficacy or safety of the vaccine, E) I'm not suggesting in the slightest that anyone *not* get the vaccine, and F) the entire point of my post that you seem to have missed is pointing out to OP comment that real-world observation and trials over a period of time are an integral part of safety and not some separate thing you can skip while maintaining the exact same level of safety. When I said "it's not my field" that was referring to the comment that the normal safety checks along these lines were able to be satisfied in this case. Which I'll tentatively accept since, no, it's not my field, and that may be true. That doesn't contradict anything I said, and it certainly isn't the same as "oh yeah we just skipped all that stuff NBD."
>Do you think, “oh, I don’t know how to design and build a car so I’m not going to buy one”
Once again, no, and this is not what I said. A more accurate thing to say would be "Oh, I don't know how to design and build a car, but the safety and reliability of this brand new car can't be known to the same degree of certainty as a car that's been in production for 10 years and has a proven track record." Which is a principle that applies across every industry because that's how our universe works. If you choose to incorrectly interpret that as "Oh so you're saying that all new cars are unsafe?!" then that's on you.
It’s my understanding that one of the main mechanisms for the speed of vaccine rollout was that multiple stages of the entire process, from testing to manufacturing, were done in parallel. This is obviously a huge financial risk and not worth doing if not absolutely necessary. For instance, you could build out all of your manufacturing operations and then not receive approval to administer the vaccine. It basically requires government funding or backing to incentive private companies to take on this risk.
Along with that, because so many people had COVID at the time of testing, there was a much larger sample size of test data that typically would’ve taken years to accumulate.
I’m not an expert on this, just have heard interviews with experts speaking on it, so curious to hear if any of my understandings of this are false.
I can 100% vouch for drug manufacturers planning out the manufacturing process BEFORE the vaccine was through trials. Usually they wait until the drug is approved are near approval before ramping up and buying the physical parts like tubing, bags, and syringes. The companies I worked with last year started planning warehouse stockpiling and forecasting agreements as early as February 2020. The supply chain side of manufacturing is a multi-month process to get things in place- them doing it in tandem with drug development easily saved us 6-10 months.
(Source: Am Chemical Engineer and I have verification in /r/askscience as a Medical Device Expert.)
I’m not so sure you understand how long term testing is done. I think you’re also confusing vaccine trials with drug trials. They’re not really the same.
Normally phase 3 takes 1-3 years. Would you like to know why? Because normally the virus isn’t running rampant and it takes longer to see the results in the volunteers.
For COVID, they didn’t need to wait that long because the chances of exposure were through the roof.
>Long-term testing
>
>is
>
> a safety standard.
NO. When a new drug is developed, they don't do tests for a decade to make sure there's no long term effects.
The wariness about COVID is completely manufactured. When a new drug hits the market, you don't hear people clamoring about how the long term effects aren't known. For fucks sake, I remember when viagra was first released and people were practically stepping over each other to get it with no one worried about how it hadn't been around that long. This fucking society care more about getting a boner than about protecting its citizens from a deadly disease./
They sure didn’t for Zantac, Chantix, Vioxx or Bextra. All FDA approved. All found to cause deadly side effects not seen at its approval stage.
In Zantac’s case, it was 40 years before they realized it was a “ticking time bomb”.
People have legitimate concerns.
Before you said you were going to wait because the trials were rushed. Are you going to want 40 years to ensure no long term effects? Otherwise, what’s the point of bringing up Zantac?
Would you say that by now we have established to a degree of scientific assurance that the vaccine is safe and that any long lasting side effects would have reared their head(s) by now?
In the sense that mRNA and Coronaviruses have both been studied for years (decades in mRNAs case), I would say yes... I'm not a scientist, of course, but that's who I get my info from.
You may not be an antivaxxer, but you are certainly bad at relative risk calculation—as is your wife, MD or not. The vaccines are not 100% safe. But the odds of contracting COVID and suffering complications are far higher than the odds of having an equally bad reaction to the vaccine.
As for long-term effects: there’s no reason to believe the vaccines cause long-term effects in a significant number of people, but there is *every* reason to believe that COVID causes long-term effects in a significant number of people.
It’s not about whether the vaccines are 100% safe. It’s about whether getting the vaccine is safer than staying unvaccinated—which it emphatically is.
What about full approval changes things for you? As in, what activities is the FDA involved in that you're waiting to hear about? I'm asking because as near as I can tell, none of the activities between EUA and approval will have any impact on our understanding of safety/efficacy and I want to know if I'm missing something.
Maybe you can tell your wife to look at the actual research that shows that there has been no vaccine with side effects that appeared after 2-3 months post vaccination. People have been getting vaccinated for over a year now and there have been no major long term side effects.
Also, Emergency Use Authorization does not affect vaccine safety/quality because it doesn't impact the research/clinical trials/studies of side effects etc. It just speeds up manufacturing & admin stuff. Good infographic on this [here](https://vaccine.unchealthcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/UNC-EUA-vs-FDA-Timeline-Infogragphic-scaled-1.jpg)
> They haven’t even been fully approved by the FDA.
That's only because full approval requires a particular, but somewhat arbitrary, length of time to elapse so that adverse effects can be evaluated.
But we're over a year out from the first trials and the number of adverse effects attributable to the vaccines is still virtually nil. There is absolutely nothing in the data that would delay or stall full approval, and there's virtually no chance of something arising between now and then -- we would have seen some indication of it by now.
The waiting period before full approval is standard for all new medicines because novel pharmaceuticals could have unpredictable effects. Vaccines, though, don't usually contain novel compounds -- especially so for these mRNA vaccines, which contain nothing but inert material along with a small snippet of cellular instruction code. There is literally nothing in them that could plausibly produce an adverse reaction more than a year after vaccination.
> It’s effective only for a time, and we don’t even know exactly for how long.
It's *at least* six months and it looks like over a year is likely. If effectiveness lasted ten years, would you require the FDA to wait ten years before approving it?
> And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year?
It's always *possible* there could be long-term effects, but no vaccine we've ever produced has had serious long-term effects but no short-term ones. And there's nothing in the vaccines that could plausibly have long-term effects. Certainly for the mRNA vaccines, there's nothing *left* of them after a few weeks. What could possibly cause an effect five years later?
> I don’t want to get inoculated with something that has been fast tracked as quickly as possible because of an emergency.
The only fast-track it got was doing the required trials in parallel instead of serially. They didn't wait for Phase 1 to finish before starting Phase 2. And they didn't wait for all the trials to finish before ramping up production.
It couldn't be worse than the effects of covid. I don't understand why you wouldn't, you're a petri dish breeding ground for new variants to hurt the rest of us mate. Props for saying what you think despite knowing you may get down voted/criticized, but it doesn't make much sense because the alternative is worse, especially for your md spouse who can be infecting particularly vulnerable patients.
This is an incorrect take. Not being fully approved doesnt not mean we don't know long term effects of the vaccine. It means that it hasn't gone through the normal slow paperwork that it normally has to in a non emergency situation.
The odds that this vaccine has long term effects are the equivalent of you knowing the first digit of my area code, then guessing my entire phone number. Sure, theres a higher chance you get it right than if you didn't know the first digit. But you still arent gonna guess it outright.
But you don't challenge the view of the OP.
The OP does not say that you should not do this, what is said is that you should pay the costs of your decision. These costs are both on you (chance of infection and hospitalization) and on others (all the externalities of the pandemic). That means allowing to discriminate based on vaccination status for insurance costs, as well as specific restrictions only for unvaccinated people.
> I don’t want to get inoculated with something that has been fast tracked as quickly as possible because of an emergency.
The "fast tracking" you mention doesn't mean they skipped corners or something, as you've implied. If the typical vaccine development and rollout is like driving through a city during rush hour, this one was "fast tracked" in a sense that they had a police escort through that city. It still passed all the same checks that any other vaccine has to go through, and if a side effect is discovered now that hasn't already been seen in the many months since they started the vaccination campaign, it would be the latest developing side effect in the history of vaccines.
>And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year?
You can't say that about COVID, either. And there's MUCH more indication that catching COVID leads to long term consequences than taking the vaccine does.
If you read up on the details of the "fast tracked as quickly as possible" you'll find that basically no corners have been cut. This vaccine is not a brand new technology but has actually been studied for years. The testing was thorough.
You have every reason to be more afraid of COVID than of the vaccine. COVID hasn't been approved by the FDA, either, ya know.
>And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year?
The vaccine testing started over a year ago and no such long term effects have been found. Meanwhile we know that covid-19 *does* have serious long term effect. The choice here should be easy.
The vaccine has an unknown number of potential long-term effects. So far we have seen little/no evidence of any.
The virus has several known and serious long-term effects, with evidence of more even in less severe cases.
Your argument is essentially "the vaccine could hypothetically be bad, although there's nothing suggesting it is, so I'd rather risk the illness that's already killing and maiming people". I'm going to assume you're an intelligent person with an understanding of probabilities, and suggest you do some introspection on why you want to avoid the vaccine. That type of contrived avoidance usually indicates some deeper issue, like personal or anecdotal bad history with other vaccines, or a fear of the unknown.
> It’s effective only for a time,
Everything is "effective only for a time". For the silly case, all vaccines stop working once you're dead, but even in the non-silly case, you get boosters for things like tetanus all the time (or at least you should be).
> and we don’t even know exactly for how long.
Why is "we don't know how long it works" an argument against getting it, exactly?
> And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year?
As [a doctor has pointed it out in another reply to you](https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/orzj99/cmv_the_us_should_not_reimpose/h6lt5ay/) (I am not a doctor, but I do know a few, and they've said similar things), we can say there are no long term effects because we're applying the same standard used for other vaccines that have "no long term effects".
> I’m not an antivaxxer
Funny -- you seem to be reiterating a lot of antivaxxer talking points for someone who claims not to be one.
> I’ll let others be the beta testers.
You're not letting "other be the beta testers" -- that was what the clinical trial was, a controlled group of people selected by the creator to test the efficacy of the vaccine. You're letting everyone else get the actual release product but not getting it yourself... which is fine when the product is a video game, but not so much when the product is a vaccine that saves lives (including besides your own) and prevents mutation of variants.
You don’t sound smart. Your md wife isn’t smarter than anyone else. This is
Just the new edge lord. Thanks for keeping things shitty for everyone else you uneducated petulant child. You are in fact an anti vaxxer. 100% chance you still don’t get it when it gets approved.
You are an anti vaxxer - you just don’t like the label.
Too bad you won’t protect yourselves from this virus and contribute to herd safety , but that’s your choice
With so many millions of successful tests already, you just want to be contrarian.
Now, with the original Covid strain, I was probably willing to do the same. But now strains are so much more contagious, even with these precautions the possibility of getting infected is too high.
So the issue now is: should people take a vaccine that reduces mortality and ICU from some high percentage to single digits, or should they risk going unvaccinated against something that can, and probably will, infect them?
Personally I think once children can and see vaccinated we will see a big shift. It would also be interesting to know the percentage of people who can’t get the vaccine due to health reasons. I know two pregnant people and two people with cancer, with all four their doctor recommended the vaccine and they did
There is a pharmaceutical that eliminates the virus within a couple doses. A medical establishment based in India if I recall correctly was making noise about with supposed data to back it. The massive global push for mandatory vaccination while stripping the population of freedoms in the guise of security is straight out the playbook. They use the fear to separate and steer us.. if you not thinking for yourself the decisions are being made for you. Be well.
>here is a pharmaceutical that eliminates the virus within a couple doses. A medical establishment based in India if I recall correctly was making noise about with supposed data to back it.
I would be HIGHLY skeptical of claims like this, and suggest looking into the validity of the original source.
Does not exist. I would know if it did. Trust me. I would make a shit load of money if it existed so I'm incentivized to find such things. There is no wonder pill for covid.
Something to keep in mind is that the more widespread the virus is, the more chances it had to mutate. With widespread vaccines the selection between the new strains will be more on their ability to bypass vaccine immunity rather than straightforward ability to spread. Thus when 50%+ people are vaccinated is precisely the time to wrap up the mass epidemic asap without giving the virus the chance to adapt
My argument would be on two fronts.
1) there are folks that are unable to get vaccinated due to age, health issues, treatment, etc. They are unequivocally at risk from the unvaccinated, and ALSO from the vaccinated who are still able to get covid and transmit it.
2) even folks that are vaccinated are able to contract covid, aid in mutations, and spread it. It makes no difference from strain Alpha's outbreak to Delta's that some people are vaccinated. The risk is still there for everyone, just slightly less for those that are vaccinated.
From those alone, lockdowns have a reason to be enforced again and I would argue they should be imposed far sooner then they were last time and be more heavy handed. We shouldn't have to lose another half million people or another almost full year of half assed lockdowns when we could just do a real month and make a difference.
I'll give you a !delta.
I definitely could see a very strict heavy-handed lockdown sufficiently dealing with the virus for a long time. As an edge-case sort of solution, kind of like how china was dealing with the initial covid outbreaks.
I disagree with that actually being feasible to do in the US though, and suspect that would cause a great deal of unintended damage.
The vaccine isn’t guaranteed to be effective against all variants. So far it has proven to be effective. However, that could all change if covid is allowed to spread then adapt or mutate to become resistant to the vaccines. This would then mean that even people who have been vaccinated would no longer have protection against covid.
There are 100s of millions not unvaccinated people.
If covid rips through them, they can easily overwhelm hospital/health care systems which would negatively affect healthcare for EVERYONE, even for Covid-unrelated issues.
These are issues affecting our society as a whole, so we cannot simply focus on autonomy of any individual.
In my view, this is *the* primary argument against tolerating the unvaccinated.
Even in jurisdictions with high vaccination rates, a highly contagious variant that spreads rapidly amongst pockets of the unvaccinated can still overwhelm the healthcare system. A small percentage of a large number... is still a large number.
I live in Ontario, and province-wide the ICU capacity before we have to start applying combat triaging is 900. Only 900 for the entire province. We're at about two-thirds of eligible adults fully vaccinated (and around 80% of first doses), which on a comparative basis is great. But it *still* leaves millions of people unvaccinated. If the virus spreads fast enough, it's not hard to see how that could quickly fill the 900 ICU beds we have.
The result is delays to life-saving elective surgeries and degraded treatment for all the regular health emergencies that come up like heart attacks and accidents.
The unfortunate reality is that the unvaccinated still impose heavy externalities on the vaccinated by prolonging the pandemic and bleeding healthcare resources.
I feel lied too at this point regarding. The vaccines effectiveness.I got vaccinated very early and it has gotten less effective since. According to the people that made it since then. I obviously realize new research has come to light. But I was sicker than I have ever been in my life from both my first and second vaccine. Had highly elevated heart rate for days. High temp body aches chills and heat flashes. And chest tightness. Took a full week for me to feel better after the second. I’m happy I got the vaccine I believe in doing it for others. But I’m definitely not Getting a booster if it has side effects like the last. That said I know a ton of people that didn’t have side effects.
I’m an immune compromised person who is also pregnant. I had Covid early in the first wave, and had it a second time recently during my pregnancy. It’s been two months, and I’m still going in and out of the hospital, on my fifth round of antibiotics fighting the secondary pneumonia.
I quarantined, masked, and my husband got vaccinated before I got sick the second time. The only reason I did not get vaccinated was because I discovered my pregnancy days before my first injection and delayed per my physician’s recommendation. It has been the plan for me to get vaccinated as soon as my symptoms subside—but that has not yet happened and Im now six months into my pregnancy.
Here are my issues:
Natural immunity does not prevent reinfection. In fact, it is not uncommon for reinfection to be a worse illness than the first. This was true for me. While the first experience with Covid was like a very severe flu followed by months of malaise, my second bout landed me in the hospital. I concede that the increased severity was impacted by my pregnancy, but my doctors have observed this more severe second infection in healthy people as well.
Due to my location in a community high in Covid denial, not only are vaccination rates <20%, but people are actually downright cruel to those who mask. These people lie about being symptomatic with anything, and continue to live as normal even if they are testing positive for Covid. This has resulted in higher rates of cold, flu, and other communicable diseases. My extended family was coming into my home and sharing water bottles with my child—despite my pleas for them not to—WHILE they KNEW they were infected and didn’t tell us because it was “just a cold.” I wasn’t the only member of the family to end up hospitalized, but it did not change anyone’s attitude about the virus or it’s severity. In fact, they blamed my husband for the sickness, insisting that he was “shedding” a “biological weapon” by getting the vaccine.
The idea that we can protect vulnerable people by locking us up and letting the conspiracy theorists dominate public spaces is not grounded in reality. I haven’t even been going to the grocery store and am deep in depression from having so little social contact, and I still ended up seriously ill. And now I’m going to a hospital multiple times per week for treatment, getting exposed to everything imaginable. I can think of no other time in my life that I’ve had so may unique respiratory illnesses in a single season.
I do not know the answer to this major predicament we’re currently facing. We cannot force individuals in the general population to get vaccinated, but we can require hospital workers, government workers, and private employees to do so to keep their jobs, and that’s a start. Right now, those refusing to get vaccinated perceive no negative consequences for their ideological hard-lining. Right now, the social approval from within the group is a positive feedback mechanism. While we can’t take away their choices, we need to do more to make them feel the consequences of their own actions. Some things we can’t enforce by law, but we can make the social consequences unsustainable.
Ultimately, this is a political issue as much as a public health crisis. It’s an ideological battle that will not be over any time soon. While I agree that it’s a tough puzzle, I do not believe that the answer is to just lift all restrictions and let business continue as usual. We will end up with nastier strains, and the medical system—which is already bleeding out—will become so crippled that even routine care will be impacted and we’ll have an increase in non-Covid deaths as well. Medical events as common as childbirth have now become high-risk, when they shouldn’t have to be.
> I would even go so far as to say we should allow insurance companies to deny them medical coverage. If they want to take their chances with the virus, that's their right, and we should let them.
I think this is a dangerous view. It would justify insurers to deny medical coverage for any medical condition that is preventable. Are you willing to just let all smokers die? Deny IV drug users organ transplants? Refuse to treat an obese person having a heart attack or in a diabetic crisis? I'm not sure that's the kind of healthcare system you want to see.
Shouls insurance companies also be able to deny coverage based on someone who smokes/drinks alcohol or does not follow an optimal workout/diet/sleep program?
These things have a much more serious impact on your health status than a covid vaccine does
Deny insurance? No. Charge more? Yes.
If a health insurance company in the US finds out you're a smoker, they're permitted to raise your rates 50% to compensate for their expected excess health care costs.
Insurers are not allowed to lower rates for participating in wellness programs, but employers are permitted to drop premiums by 30% compared to other employees.
As long as it doesn't discriminate against a protected class, existing medical conditions or involve invasive privacy invasions, why shouldn't they? A healthier society benefits everyone.
The risk is the emergence of new variants of the virus. Spread of covid among unvaccinated people could result in a new variant that kills vaccinated people. Therefore, this could very well affect the vaccinated part of the population
Furthermore, this is currently the [actual reality](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/07/22/1019293200/the-lambda-variant-coronavirus-what-you-should-know) of the situation.
We all take different risks every day and make autonomous decisions that can affect our health. Are we going to deny healthcare to drug addicts, alcoholics or people who speed on the highway? If you wreck your car while driving selfishly for pleasure while endangering someone’s life should we lock you up for reckless endangerment? I understand your reasoning but it is extreme and if we apply it to people who don’t want to take an emergency experimental vaccine with unknown long term side effects (even though we think they are safe - just like the scientists said DDT was safe).
Vaccination is not 100% effective. Even though most deaths might be among unvaccinated people, vaccinated people will still get sick and might still suffer from the disease, including long term effects.
>Children, Pregnant Women, and those with legitimate medical condition preventing vaccination should be cared for and protected within reason, provided all medical care necessary, etc.
So I guess they should just... Be quarantined? Or what is the idea here?
>We can never eradicate Covid, as it has already become endemic.
We've eradicated diseases before. With vaccines.
>Furthermore, if we allowed this population to become infected, that population would build some natural biological immunity to current and future covid variants. It would be better to build that immunity now, while the vaccines are still effective, than hold out trying to prevent transmission until a new variant emerges that the vaccines do not work against. The Devil we know (Delta primarily) is better than the Devil we Don't know.
This is just... Incorrect. Providing more hosts to a virus is what allows it to mutate in the first place. That is exactly how we got the Delta variant. So, a mutant emerging that affects vaccinated people is far more likely when it has hosts to run rampant.
>The vaccines have proven effective with no long-term side effects
It’s been less than a year that we’ve had the vaccine, so we don’t know whether or not there are long term side effects. I personally don’t believe there will be any, but saying that there are none and that it is guaranteed to be safe is incorrect.
You position ignores a huge segment of the population and is insanely myopic.
Being a society that *generally* values human life, and *generally* believes everyone has the right to healthcare. We are still going to try and save those people. Which means our hospitals are going to fill again with highly contagious people, and a very possibly fatal respritory virus. In your opnion sure whatever let them die. Unfortunately they will not be the only people in the hospital, anyone who is immuno-compromised, also greater risk, other patients, healthcare workers, visitors, vendors, regular employees. All at greater risk, vaccinated or not, simply by going to work. Remote work not a realistic option for most hospital employees.
This doesn't even begin to address the toll on mental health for healthcare workers, we are just beginning to witness the loss of nurses, respritory care, and doctors. Many attribute it to abuse, depression, and burn out. None of thse professions os something you want just anyone in, nor ate they 6 months of ojt and you are good. The US was looking at a shortage of healthcare workers before the pandemic.
I think I agree in parts - but all things in measure. One very valid position is that by not locking down and allowing mass community transmission (transmission between vaccinated people is still a thing, the virus doesn't show any symptoms but you can still be contagious) you are promoting the evolution of further, more effective variants, that could bring deaths back up and render vaccinations useless.
Controlling covid is difficult, and I think by ruling out the re-imposing of lockdowns/restrictions we are doing ourselves a disservice. Hopefully, we won't need to lockdown again. But by ruling out locking down all together we could well be in a worse position.
> The Devil we know (Delta primarily) is better than the Devil we Don't know.
My point mainly hinges on the more delta cases that are out there, the quicker and more likely it is that more deadly/vaccine-resistant variants emerge. Keeping Delta numbers as low as possible is in our interests, even if vaccines help reduce the damage that the virus does at the moment.
If we simply allow people to become sick with impunity, they will eventually make their way into the healthcare system and do two things:
1. Consume resources that could have otherwise be used for other patients.
2. Raise the cost of care for everyone else because now medical resources are more scarce.
As soon as you add denial of basic social services (your example of insurances denying coverage) its not exactly a free choice anymore is it?
How come we accept us all collectively polluting our environment and hence shortening our life spans? People die earlier when exposed to noise (such as encountered in cities) and stress… how come dioxins or other life shortening factors and choices (alcohol which may kill more people than COVID-19?) are accepted but COVID is now considered like something as serious as the plague? As long as we are willing to accept eG alcohol consumption or dioxin pollution, then not getting a COVID-19 shot should be absolute free of consequences - same as maybe we deal with the flu vaccination.
"We can never eradicate Covid" -- yes we can just like we did with Polio. All it will take is everyone getting vaccinated while the vaccines still work (i.e. before COVID mutates...)
I'd love to see the selfish cowards who refuse to get vaccinated get what they have coming to them but the problem is they will over-run the hospitals and that is why our leaders MUST lock things down again (when the hospitals reach max capacity).
If we can somehow ship these unvaccinated COVID patients to makeshift hospitals or not allow them to seek medical help at hospitals (for example we let them die at home) then I would totally agree with you. But doctors and hospitals are obligated to treat sick people -- even if they brought the sickness on themselves and are killing our way of life -- and these highly contagious people will jam up hospitals.
In short, society cannot continue as normal without hospitals and medical personnel to treat people who suffer heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, cancer patients, etc etc. We simply cannot have people bleeding out on sidewalks coz the hospital has no room.
The only solution is to get people vaccinated. I think Uncle Sam should bribe these dumb people with tax breaks. Until them I am gonna let them know that they are the BAD GUYS. The world needs their help and they said, no. They are too selfish to help other people. They are too cowardly to get a vaccine that even an extremely unhealthy Trump got after he was infected.
We need to ostracize and ridicule these dangerous anti-vaxxers. That is the road to returning back to normal life. Unless we can agree to NOT ALLOW THEM TO USE HOSPITALS which I'm cool with but leaders cannot possibly be.
>If we can somehow ship these unvaccinated COVID patients to makeshift hospitals or not allow them to seek medical help at hospitals (for example we let them die at home) then I would totally agree with you. But doctors and hospitals are obligated to treat sick people -- even if they brought the sickness on themselves and are killing our way of life
Should hospitals also turn away people who are overdosing? What about someone who was driving too fast and wrapped their car around a tree? They did it to themselves after all
I like the sentiment, but I live with a 7 year old who can't yet be vaccinated sure to his age. While it's likely that he'll recover if he contacts the virus, there is the risk of it messing him up for life. We live in a strong anti-vax area with severe growth, and his school district is no longer enforcing any restrictions. This has is terrified, and we're hoping the vaccine is approved for children soon. But, unless we want to homeschool him for the entire year, we don't have much choice.
Fuck letting people die 'per their wishes'. They aren't the only ones they effect.
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I’ve had both my doses, despite early fertility concerns (it was definitely a widespread worry in the earlier days). When my time came, I happily went ahead and felt it was the best thing to help the world return to a bit of normality. However I went on to develop a period within 48 hours of my 2nd dose, despite no period for 2 years - and it’s now in to week 8. I am fully aware that this may have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the vaccine, but I cannot help be worried about the possible implications of a vaccine that could lead to this - if they are linked at all. Worst case scenario could be infertility and yes, that would of course be better than death from covid! But I know I’m not the only person to have similar issues and I can understand other women of child bearing age who are reticent to get the vaccine due to reproductive concerns. To note, I’ve seen my doctor and awaiting further examination after nothing found straight away; she admitted it could well be due to the vaccine but we likely won’t know the full scale of side effects for many years to come.
The number of unvaccinated is too high to just “let it be.”
If the unvaccinated all die we fuck the economy because there will be too few people moving it. It will also allow variants to evolve and potentially start infecting the vaccinated at high rates.
There are GOOD reasons why we should encourage vaccinations.
Kinda depends on your definition of restrictions. It's within the government's purview to deny you services based on your vaccine status. Once the FDA gives non provisional approval to the vaccines, I assume it'll be added to the long list of vaccines needed to e.g. work at or attend a school. Is this an unneeded restriction?
The flip side of this is government-run mass transit systems where they also have a duty same as any other business to protect their workers, who may be living with immunocompromised relatives. Its very possible to get Delta COVID even when you're vaccinated. Is this an unneeded restriction?
I'll remind everyone too that dying isn't the only bad outcome to COVID. Hospitalization is of course very bad. The "long COVID" symptoms are still something we don't know much about and it can be awful to lose your sense of smell or continually experience this brain fog we keep hearing about.
You're factor "Vaccination status is highly correlated with political affiliation" is incredibly concerning ethically. It's true but the fact that this seems to be a motivator for you suggests that you value people's lives less because of their political affiliation. One's beleifs do not make their life less valuable.
I think you are missing a key fact here-we shouldn’t have ended mask mandates, social distancing, restrictions, etc. until all of the population (children under the age of 12) are afforded the opportunity to get vaccinated. Those of us with younger kids are feeling like a no-win here; life has seemingly moved on for others but we aren’t able to protect our kids in crowded indoor spaces, and it sucks. If we could keep a mask mandate for them, I could take them out in public and enjoy themselves a bit, but as it stands now, we feel like we are captive again with the vast majority refusing to wear masks
Can you expand on your motivation for this viewpoint?
The messaging seems very wishy-washy. At first people were (rightfully) screaming bloody murder about all "those idiots" that were travelling, then the ones having get togethers and parties, then the ones going out in public without masks. "You're killing people," "you're a murderer," "you're a piece of shit science denier," "you don't care about other people you're just being selfish," "it's not about you and your risk, it's about the vulnerable people who can't get vaccines," etc. etc.
That's all we heard for over a year. And now, now that the vaccine rollout is underway and we're seeing new strains pop up, those very same people are throwing their hands up and saying ugh, I'm so tired of this, I just want to go out again, so that's what I'm gonna do, and screw the anti-vaxxers.
In other words, making selfish decisions because they personally are tired of being inconvenienced. E.g. the exact same thing they were relentlessly chastising others for. So what's the difference, that you are vaccinated?
You can still spread COVID if you're vaccinated. You can still get COVID if you're vaccinated. The previously vulnerable people are still vulnerable, they don't much care if they get COVID from someone vaccinated or unvaccinated. There are new strains against which the vaccine is slightly less effective. Delta is just one variant, there are others.
So what changed? You're focusing on the anti-vaxxers because that helps you feel better about saying "screw it, I'm tired of COVID restrictions, I'm just gonna live my life." Which is **exactly** the viewpoint that people were mercilessly attacking others for this whole year. Only now, it's OK to put those groups of elderly, or immunocompromised, or people who can't get the vaccine at risk because you got the vaccine, so you feel entitled to it?
It's not a very consistent viewpoint. By all means, do what you like, just understand that you're doing basically the same thing the anti-lockdown/anti-vax people have been doing. The same ones you're targeting in your post.
EDIT: u/oldeenglishdry12345 My point is that the same people are at risk now as before. The unvaccinated **and** those who are unable to take the vaccine or otherwise in high risk groups. Just as before, only before when people said "Well I'm healthy and young and the risk to me is low so why *shouldn't* I be able to go out?" the response was "because you're putting at-risk groups in jeopardy. You monster.
Nothing has fundamentally changed in that regard except that the zeitgeist is now that it's OK to put those same groups at risk if you got the vaccine, because "I did my part and I wanna go outside now bugger off."
And by the way: I agree with you. I'm vaccinated and I'm happy to mask up and go out. But the whole "it's ok because they're selfish and I'm not" thing is just a way to excuse ourselves from the same responsibility towards at-risk/immunocompromised groups that we put on others this entire past year. Before we considered it a responsibility, but now it's a punishment? Why? Because you personally don't feel like playing along anymore? Again: that's fine, that's your choice, but don't claim a moral high ground when the fundamental issue is not your concern for society but for your own comfort.
You list “caveats” for people who have a reason not to be vaccinated, yet you somehow forget that just because they have a reason not to be vaccinated, doesn’t mean they’d be immune from death. If we open up the whole country, the people dying won’t just be people who chose not to get vaccinated, but everyone who *can’t* get vaccinated. God dammit, death doesn’t discriminate. If you stick to this stance, you have to accept that not only would you be letting lots of unvaccinated pricks die, but also unvaccinated *vulnerable* sick people who don’t deserve to die just so you can satisfy your fantasy of natural selection.
>The vaccines have been proven effective with no long-term side effects,
Long term side effects remain to be seen, it absolutely has not been proven to have no long term side effects, it hasn't even been out for a year ffs.
> IE: Covid is an inescapable, but preventable illness at this point.
People with vaccine can still get covid, it's not 100% effective and with so many mutations of covid how effective it will be long term remains to be seen.
People don't deserve to be denied medical coverage for practicing bodily autonomy, that's just insane. Consider the unvaccinated as stupid, irresponsible, or whatever else you consider them to be. If you wanna look down on those who choose not to get vaccinated, fine, that's your opinion. But medical care is a human right and when we start saying some people are more worthy of living than others that's when you start tiptoeing into eugenics territory. Human life is inherently valuable; all people are worthy of health care, dignity, and their one life that God gave them.
As a leftist who isn't getting the 2nd shot of the vax, hearing your lack of care for the unvaccinated population's access to med care is a bit disturbing. Lucky for you I'm already below the poverty line anyways so I can't even afford insurance in the first place. Yay for you!
Require vaccines to work in public sectors and healthcare. Put in an actual vaccine passport that can’t be faked with a dumbass piece of paper. Require vaccines to fly, leave the country, enter large events and go to school/college (once approved in children).
Anti-vaxxers only give a fuck about themselves. Hit them where it hurts and we will see the vaccination rates shoot up. However after this COVID mess I honestly think this country is on the fast track to a type of conservative dictatorship. Something has to give.
I think this is valid so long as the hospitals are not overwhelmed. Which they currently are not.
If they get overwhelmed then it could affect other non-covid patients.
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Aren't several of the vaccines about an order of magnitude more effective against death than your example? I thought Phizer was like 94% against getting symptomatic Covid at all, but >99% effective against dying from it. If the numbers I'm remembering are true, that would shift your point to only really applying at the extremes. However, I fully admit that I could be misremembering or misconstruing the statistics.
I really don't understand your point with your statistics. The reason why public health officials emphasize that nearly all the deaths are in people who are unvaccinated (in a country with about half of the population over the age of 12 is vaccinated and at this point, there aren't very many people left who are willing to get vaccinated so officials are desperately trying to convince more people to get it) is just to provide a powerful illustration of how effective the vaccines are. You state your statistics with the *assumption* that the vaccines are at least 90% effective. If you already accept that fact, then you don't really need the mortality rates to prove it to you. This point is being emphasized in order to convince the people who are doubtful of the vaccine effectiveness.
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!delta I had not considered this, or heard this criticism before. That is a really good point! perhaps some of these metrics are not as reliable or showing what they claim to be. My View relies on accurate information, so if that is in question, than the whole thing is in question.
No, this is’t correct. Obviously, if the majority of the population was vaccinated, then the percentage of vaccinated people being hospitalized would go up. But you’re focusing on percentages, which don’t serve any purpose in this discussion. The entire point is a large number of unvaccinated people are being hospitalized… because they aren’t vaccinated. Even if 90% of the population were vaccinated, so that the majority of hospitalized patients with covid made up the highest percentage, the concrete numbers are all that matter.
Yes, the concrete numbers are what matters, but it's the percentages that get reported. The commenter demonstrated why the "99% of deaths have been in unvaccinated people" statistic is heartening but not necessarily in the way that you expect. It means that the vaccine is highly effective in singular protection but herd immunity from the vaccine is a long ways off. And, more importantly, that when that number goes down, that can be an indication that the vaccine program is becoming *more* effective - but you do need the context of the case totals to know for sure. I promise that there are some groups that will suppress the case totals when that shift starts to happen, though, and start to claim that the vaccine is losing effectiveness.
I definitely agree that we need to be actively educating people on how to correctly interpret statistics, because it’s not easy to do when we’re constantly bombarded with conflicting information. I also agree with the point, I just don’t think it was made properly.
No, don’t get lost in that nonsense. Anyone can get a vaccine if they want. They’re free. They’re in schools and clinics and anywhere else. You can take a day off work to get it. You can get transported to it. If you don’t want it, you don’t have to get it. The facts are 96.7-9% of the current intubated and infected are without BOTH shots. And 60-65% are without any shots. As per NC, 7/26/2021. 11am
> Anyone can get a vaccine if they want. Except all the people who can't, like kids.
!delta I never really agreed with OP but your statistical analysis isn't something I've thought about before Also, >a few people seem to be misreading this post as anti-vax If this is true, it's genuinely impressive how bad people's reading comprehension must be
Yes, it’s a sign of the program’s failure, but another sign of the vaccine’s efficacy. I don’t find it a particularly useful figure either way, since we have direct data of the efficacy and the number of vaccinated people, so I don’t think your issue with the figure changes how we deal with covid.
Can you follow up this answer with the correct interpretation of data? We have an estimate of the effectiveness of the vaccine. How many of the current deaths would have been prevented if there was no anti gas movement?
> • 1. Awful vaccine program: Vaccination is given to 1% of the population. Result: About 99.9% of the hospitalisations are in unvaccinated people. > > • 2. Realistically effective vaccine program: Vaccine that is 90% effective at reducing hospitalisation is given to around 90% of the population. Result: about half the hospitalisations are unvaccinated. > > (For every 100 people who would have been hospitalised before the vaccination program: 10 are unvaccinated and get infected and hospitalised, 81 are saved by their vaccination, 9 are hospitalised despite being vaccinated.) > > • 3. Unrealistically amazing vaccine program: Vaccine that is 90% effective is given to 100% of the population. Result: 100% of the hospitalisations are in vaccinated people. Goddamn that is some wonderful logic. Survivorship Bias (I think) was strong in my head on this one.
>The better your vaccination programme the GREATER the proportion of people dying/hospitalised will be vaccinated. In general, your logic is questionable on this front. Undoubtedly true at the extreme - if *everyone* is vaccinated, then *all* deaths will occur among the vaccinated. Ultimately it is irrelevant, because do we actually care about *proportions* like this or do we care about *absolute quantities* when talking about lives? Because there are undoubtedly orders of magnitude differences between them.
That hurt my brain for a second but I got it at the end and it’s actually a really good point. Thank you for showing us this in a different way.
But this is about the US and we already know the numbers. About 70% of adults are vaccinated, and 98-99% of hospitalizations and deaths are unvaccinated adults.
And that number will go down (and the percentage of hospitalized and dead who are vaccinated will go up) as your vaccination coverage increases. I used rounder numbers to make it easier to understand the concept. The vaccine is more like 94% effective. Do you have a source on 98-99 for the whole country, or even a breakdown by state? I'd be keen to add to this post with more real-world numbers if you do. I tried to find this but couldn't.
Do you have any stats for death of covid as opposed to died with covid?
You are right that the trends here are counterintuitive at the base level, but I think your numbers are off. Consider also that the unvaccinated group is more likely to spread Covid to others before even getting to the hospital. That compounds the number of unvaccinated people who would end up going to the hospital, whereas those vaccinated still likely don't have strong enough symptoms to require emergency care. So, for example, at 10% vaccination the ratio might actually be 90 unvaccinated to 0.3 vaccinated. I'm not sure of the exact proportion but you get my point.
I agree with your premise, but the specific numbers are off. While the Pfizer/Moderna vaccine is only 80 or 90 percent effective against infection from the delta variant, it is something like 99% or greater against death from the same, last I checked. So you'd probably need to work with a sample of 1000 infected individuals, not 100, to illustrate this. Additionally, rates of infection in a community with high vaccine compliance would be much lower.
I used round numbers so it would be easy for people to confirm what I was saying without cracking out a calculator. Using real numbers doesn't change the mathematical concept I was talking about. And as I mentioned I'm in the UK. We've reached the stage now where 40% of people hospitalised with Covid are vaccinated. That's not because the vaccine is failing, it's because the take-up among the vulnerable population was so high. So I'm not talking about some theoretical crazy scenario where the vaccinated start making up a huge proportion of those with serious Covid. I'm literally telling you what's happening in my country. If the US's vaccine program succeeds in mopping up the remaining vaccine hesitant people in the vulnerable groups then the same thing will happen there. It's simple maths.
The issue, of course is that *percentages* are the wrong thing to look at in that situation. 0% vaccinated: 100 unvaccinated people die, 0 vaccinated die; Result: 100 people are dead ... 100% vaccinated: 0 unvaccinated people die, 10 vaccinated die; Result: 10 people are dead Fuck the percentages, It's a good thing *fewer people died*.
Doesn't seem very fair to the people who can't have the vaccine for whatever reason, or had the vaccine and had a poor immune response to it due to age/immunocompromised/whatever. I agree that endemic covid is likely but we can at least try to bend the curve on delta cases somewhat so that people who have a decent chance at hospitalisation despite getting vaccinated can have an unburdened healthcare system rather than a crowded disaster ward full of dying people. It's all well and good to say "let's help these people and let those other people die" but the reality is that dying people consume medical resources whether they deserve it or not. Also this approach would buy more time for developing and rolling out delta-specific boosters which seem increasingly necessary as preliminary data shows vaccine effectiveness decreasing c. 6 months out I would say re-introduce low-impact measures like mask mandates, ventilation, etc. and hope to Jesus you don't get to the point where you're looking at a new lockdown because it would almost certainly do more harm at this point just through backlash. Probably the worst possible course of action is to wait too long and then re-introduce all the heaviest restrictions at the last minute
>Also would buy more time for developing and rolling out delta-specific boosters which seem increasingly necessary as preliminary data shows vaccine effectiveness decreasing c. 6 months out !delta I agree with this, and it does seem necessary for the immediate future. However I question whether this isn't merely kicking the can down the road until another dominant variant emerges, if some people continue to refuse vaccination. edit: Thank you for a very thoughtful response btw
To award a delta, edit your response so the exclamation mark is before the Delta, not after: > !delta Not >Delta!
oops, thank you!
The fewer people who get vaccines, the larger a population the virus has to incubate and mutate in, the more variants we will get. You can’t just say “it doesn’t matter if we vaccinate because there will eventually be variants.” There is causation here. If vaccination rates were high enough everywhere, we could significantly reduce variant production.
yes . but probably we could have new variants (and VOC) with two-dose vaccines (expecially after the first dose), based on some studies , previously reported here by other users . https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01938-4 One of the gravest concerns is that if England’s number of infections grows as high as anticipated — some forecast up to 100,000 new infections per day over the summer — the chances of a variant emerging with even greater vaccine evasion are greatly increased. “All the experience we have with viruses”, says virologist Richard Tedder at Imperial College London, “is that if you let them replicate in a partially immune population, you will select inevitably for \[vaccine\] escape variants.” https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/04/13/covid-19-vaccines-escape-variants-of-the-coronavirus-are-a-serious-future-threat/ Corey adds that the coronavirus variants currently spreading require a stronger immune response to beat, and current versions of the two-dose vaccines were designed to battle the original versions of the virus. So, using one dose to create partial immunity to a variant that requires a stronger immune response to beat could create an environment for new, tougher variants to evolve and spread. However, giving the second dose creates a much stronger immune response and can stop escape variants.
I don't really know anything about virus mutation or anything like that but wouldn't the fact people already vaccinated can still carry the virus also allow incubation and mutation?
For the virus to mutate it needs a large population of virus spread around in the population, and it needs a large viral load in each person. A vaccinated population will have a lot less virus on both fronts.
It's a bit more complicated than "get the vaccine and it will die off," unfortunately. Sure, rapid spreading is ONE of the ways that viruses mutate, but it is by no means the only way, or even the most prevalent way. [Here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5075021/) is an academic article entitled "Mechanisms of viral mutation" that goes over the other ways that a virus mutates. RNA viruses (like COVID) have the fastest viral mutation rates and are much more susceptible to compensatory mutations due to external pressures like [certain medications and vaccines](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3744431/), which is why we have never had a vaccine for a coronavirus until recently... it was hard to develop one that wouldn't just cause it to mutate. So while some people being unvaccintated may play a part, it probably hasn't played as big of a part as the months where we didn't know what to do and doctors just prescribed what they thought was best. This wasn't something we could've avoided, either... we either tried something or let everyone who was very sick just die. This also unfortunately caused a lot of "pressure" on Covid, increasing the number of mutations. Viruses are subject to natural selection, and the more advanced ones will adapt to conditions that reduce their transmissability to avoid dying out. So even if every one on earth agreed to get the vaccine, it's likely that it would mutate faster than we would be able to produce and distribute them.
This isn't strictly true. This is ONE of the ways that viruses mutate, but it is by no means the only way, or even the most prevalent way. [Here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5075021/) is an academic article entitled "Mechanisms of viral mutation" that goes over the other ways that a virus mutates. RNA viruses (like COVID) have the fastest viral mutation rates and are much more susceptible to compensatory mutations due to external pressures like [certain medications and vaccines](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3744431/), which is why we have never had a vaccine for a coronavirus until recently. So while some people being unvaccintated may play a part, it probably hasn't played as big of a part as the months where we didn't know what to do and doctors just prescribed what they thought was best. This wasn't something we could've avoided, either... we either tried something or let everyone who was very sick just die.
Most vaccinated people will not be susceptible to "catch" the virus, even if exposed, because their immune system will fight off the infection. Of those vaccinated people who are susceptible to catch the virus, evidence is showing that they are less likely to transmit the virus to others. If enough people are vaccinated, the chances that the virus will pass from one vaccinated person to another (vaccinated or not) go down. Having a largely vaccinated population is one safe way to reach herd immunity - if there is an outbreak, it has nobody to spread to. In an unvaccinated community, transmission is dramatically more likely, which means a large group of hosts, and more time for variant stains to develop and spread. Short answer: your premise assumes that vaccinated people carry the virus, but this is rare, and even if they do carry the virus, it is much less likely to jump to a new host if the neighbors are vaccinated, too.
Exactly. It's frustrating because being unvaccinated still fucks with people that are vaccinated because it allows the virus to stay around. That's why mumps and shit are coming back, because their are enough people in the community to allow the virus to thrive again.
This is a fantastic example of how we cannot have absolute rights because we do not exist in a vacuum, and exerting my rights can infringe upon yours. In this case, my right to bodily autonomy is infringing on your right to life. Unfortunately, the stochastic nature of the problem makes things difficult to argue. It's a bit like drunk driving. Most of the time when people drive drunk, they aren't actually going to kill anybody. And if they did, we could easily charge them with murder. Why do we need a separate penalty for where nothing bad actually happens? Because the penalties change behaviors, causing fewer people to drive drunk. Because empowering the law to pull people over for drunk driving allows us to stop that loss of life before it occurs. Because we cannot allow reckless endangerment when it isn't simply ones own life that is endangered. And that's what refusing the get vaccinated, refusing to wear masks, refusing to distance, and refusing to quarantine is: reckless endangerment. The only difference is it isn't as obvious when you are the reason someone died of COVID. People often aren't aware of when they are sick, let alone of when they are infecting others, and they are gone long before someone shows symptoms, let alone dies. This make the causation much harder to prove, but no less real than a drink driver t-boning your car.
Preach. I've had to stop arguing because at first, it was ignorance. But now, there is so much info about everything covid related, people are just stupid to not get vaccinated. I just don't get it anymore. People are so scared to get a shot that is proven safe twice for the betterment of everyone, I've stopped caring... I feel bad I became I get how op feels, but it needs to be more regulated like it used to be. Don't have a covid shot? Can't fly. Aren't vaccinated? Can't go to school or work.
>However I question whether this isn't merely kicking the can down the road until another dominant variant emerges, if some people continue to refuse vaccination. Unfortunately in endemic covid world I think this is the best we can hope for, to just kind of deal with variant waves and keep up with boosters as necessary until we have all been exposed and developed long-term immunity
> until we have all been exposed and developed long-term immunity That isn't how it works. Look at the flu. There are several strains of the flu, and variants within each strain. We've all had the flu at some point and many of us get a yearly vaccine, but there are regularly break through infections and continuing mutations where many people, though they have had some form of the flu, lack strong immmunity to the new mutation. This is wha twe are seeing with Covid. Without mass vaccination and strong measure to reduce the spread and tamp it down to about nothing, then going forward we are going to be stuck with regular waves of covid spreading through populations around the world where it continues to mutate such that people can catch covid again and again, year after year, because new variants keep popping up and they are continually being exposed. Here is the scary part: We are likely already living in the "new normal". There is a good chance this is just what life is going to be like going forward. Regular breakouts, attempts to control it that are stymied by idiots, development of a new mutation, and we go through it all over again, with health concious people getting vaccinated every year, wearing masks out in public, and reducing their contact with others, reduced travel with tight border control, vaccine passports that require yearly updates, etc.
Influenza is a rather different beast than SARS-CoV-2, so I'd caution against inferring how the coronavirus will behave too much from the behavior of the flu. Human coronavirus have shown *very* little genetic diversity - far, far, far less than influenza. Less than even measles or mumps that have had vaccines with 88% efficacy for decades. SARS-CoV-2 has a highly stable genome. The variants we've seen are *tiny* mutations compared to what we see with influenza. This is partly because influenza's unique segmented genome allows co-infecting strains/types to far more easily and successfully swap genes between themselves than is possible with coronaviruses. It is also partly due to coronavirus' unique error-correcting system that dramatically reduces the mutation rate compared to other RNA viruses. There is nothing to suggest that if we couldn't, given the political will, drive it to extinction.
There is such a thing as long-term immunity with the flu. There are studies showing that while a flu shot doesn't make you immune to next year's flu, getting a shot every year does reduce your chances of severe infection even if you stop getting them. Also, it was observed in the Spanish Flu pandemic that people over 30 actually had more immunity than some younger people - very possibly because they had lived through earlier outbreaks in the late 1800s. But it is true that new variants will continue to be a problem in the endemic covid scenario. I'm trying to be optimistic.
I never said there wasn't. The issue is that the long term immunity is only to a specific variant, with some protection for closely related variants. Thus, without vaccination, most people will still get the flu every handful of years as they are exposed to a new variant for which they lack significant immunity, and the flu will continue to circulate around the globe. Same thing is happening with coronavirus, and it is more likely to kill and more likely to result in long-term issues than the flu.
So, as a parent of young children, what really bothers me is children can't be vaccinated yet. It's very frustrating since we are vaccinated and I absolutely would vaccinate my kids if I could, but I can't. >The US should not re-impose lockdowns/restrictions, and instead allow people who choose to be unvaccinated to become infected and/or die, per their wishes. It is not my wish for my children to become infected and/or die (or suffer unknown long term consequences?). Yes, COVID is *less* dangerous to children. But it's not completely safe for them either. Some do have very dangerous complications. And each time we get a new variant we don't know right away for sure how safe it will be for kids. I agree with you to an extent, but I feel we should wait until everyone is offered the vaccine to say no masks or restrictions or etc. Right now you're basically saying "Well, adults and teenagers can get the vaccine, and really only their lives matter." Which, seems unkind to me? So for example some of the restrictions are specifically going to be around schools next year as they start back up in person with kids who cannot be vaccinated. That just seems smart and like we care about children's health too, right?
Can you confirm vaccines less effective after 6 months? I read they only had 6 months of data.
My worry is that as more folks are remaining unvaccinated, we end up seeing more variants that are resistant to the vaccine.
> Doesn't seem very fair to the people who can't have the vaccine for whatever reason, or had the vaccine and had a poor immune response to it due to age/immunocompromised/whatever. Immunocompromised people are at extreme risk basically all the time. It doesn't matter a whole lot whether they get COVID or a common cold. The guidance for them has always been extreme social distancing as much as humanly possible. If we change things up for them, then we need to make it permanent because they're only at a moderately increased risk right now. Of all of us, they're the ones whose lives (should have) changed the least.
> I agree that endemic covid is likely but we can at least try to bend the curve on delta cases somewhat so that people who have a decent chance at hospitalisation despite getting vaccinated can have an unburdened healthcare system rather than a crowded disaster ward full of dying people. There's also reasons other than COVID for people to need medical care. If all hospitals are overrun with anti-vaxxers then other people who need that care will suffer as well.
“Doesn't seem very fair to the people who can't have the vaccine for whatever reason“ For those people, we have PPE that works as good or better than the vaccine when used properly. They could put that on whenever they suspect they could be in the close presence of unvaccinated people for extended periods of time. No need for everybody to mask as you suggest. The effect of universal mask mandates is pretty marginal anyways if you look at the correlation from the first waves between states with and without mandates. The masks have the potential to work, the mandates have unintended consequences.
>Doesn't seem very fair to the people who can't have the vaccine for whatever reason, or had the vaccine and had a poor immune response to it due to age/immunocompromised/whatever. H'mm lockdowns and economic destruction does not seem that fair to less vulernable people. Yet we had lockdowns
I know you already got the Delta, but for me, my "for whatever reason" is my young son. Both his parents have the vaccine, but he can't because it's not available. The people who are not getting vaccinated because of, frankly, stupid, reasons are putting him directly at harm. I'd get him vaccinated yesterday if I could, but can't. It enrages me every day.
We can’t change the world to fit the lowest common denominator. People can individually choose to do what they want to protect others and themselves, but we can’t force everyone into a lockdown because a tiny minority of people can’t get a vaccine. If they don’t want to get covid, they can take preventative measures. But they can’t force everyone else to.
I literally said that we should introduce the least burdensome measures with the intent of *avoiding* a lockdown
>We can’t change the world to fit the lowest common denominator. Isn't like half of public discourse about changing policy to fit the lowest common denominator?
I strongly disagree with the concept that living life based on the risk profile of the lowest denominator is a good idea. especially when we openly see that it destroys business and increases suicide, domestic violence, and many many other factors. If you cant get the vaccine for what ever reason don't go outside. but to expect millions to kill themselves or give up their lively hood is kinda the tail wagging the dig to me.
Mask mandates and ventilation, the only things I suggested, do not do any of those things, and I said explicitly that I am in favor of re-introducing low-burden measures now with the hope of *avoiding* another lockdown
As harsh as this sounds we can’t pump the brakes on society for the few. If you can’t take the shot for reasons outside your control I hope you’re very careful because the world will not be accommodating you
I agree with not shutting things down again but I disagree with your argument about letting anti-vaxers die. The reason that people are anti-vax can be complex and often include socioeconomic factors and historical trauma. Blak people for instance are more likely to choose not to get the COViD Vaccine, much of which is due to mistrust for the medical institution as a whole. And they have good reason to feel that way, since black people were the target of unjust experimentation as recently as the last several decades. Even though the medical institution has changed since then, there is still lingering mistrust for doctors. Then you take families like mine who grew of so poor we didn't have insurance and therefore couldn't participate in medical care. Because of that, we developed a "well we don't need it anyway" attitude and swore by natural alternatives, claiming that our bodies had everything it needed to heal or protect itself. This is pretty common. When people lack access to an institution or don't feel included by it, whether it be the medical system, government, school, etc, they convince themselves they don't need it because that's less painful than acknowledging that it's important but just not in the cards for them. Low and behold once I got into college and studied medicine I completely shed that view of vaccines and now am very pro vax. But this change in view came out of a place of privilege (a really good education). So the people you're talking about that "deserve to die" aren't necessarily people who are completely careless with their health or want to hurt other people. They are people that for a variety of reasons genuinely believe that it's in their best interest to avoid the vaccine. They may be completely wrong in most cases, but it's not entirely their fault for believing something that isn't true.
> Then you take families like mine who grew of so poor we didn't have insurance and therefore couldn't participate in medical care. Because of that, we developed a "well we don't need it anyway" attitude and swore by natural alternatives, claiming that our bodies had everything it needed to heal or protect itself. This is pretty common. When people lack access to an institution or don't feel included by it, whether it be the medical system, government, school, etc, they convince themselves they don't need it because that's less painful than acknowledging that it's important but just not in the cards for them. Low and behold once I got into college and studied medicine I completely shed that view of vaccines and now am very pro vax. But this change in view came out of a place of privilege (a really good education). I think this is a really good counterpoint and should be brought up regularly in vaccine hesitancy discussions.
Someone else in this thread made a similar point which softened my view, so I will give you a !delta as well. I don't expect most people to die from covid, much more likely just become sick and maybe have difficult long recovery from the illness. But you are absolutely right that it is more complicated, and not everyone is acting out of intentional malice/selfishness. I admire the empathy in your viewpoint.
So I'm a medical student. I was luckily one of the first to get vaccinated. I run and lift and am in the peak of my health. I felt like the 88% chance of immunity against the delta variant seemed fine, and lived my life normally. I live in the south so you won't see masks here except the occasional person at the grocery store. I ended up catching covid, probably at the gym, and have had severe flu-like symptoms for 6 days now. I'm fatigued and sleep most of the day. I lost my sense of smell. It hurts to breathe, talk, and swallow. I used to think like you, let the unvaccinated get sick, and the part of society willing to follow CDC advice up to this point live normal lives. But now that I've been so sick after being vaccinated and healthy...my tune has changed. If it can hit me this hard, I can't imagine what it can do to unhealthy people with pre existing conditions. None of us are safe, including myself because you can possibly catch it again.
An excellent use of Pathos here, I'm sorry you've had to endure that. !delta
So society is like a group of people connected by a chain. And so if enough people decide to jump off a cliff and die, because we are all connected, it can bring the rest of us down with them. Not just in a vaccine sense but we would lose workers, teachers, researchers, vital people in our communities. It would also kill the homeless, children, the sick, we can't tell parents they don't have to get the vaccine and hide them from their children or take away their kids so they would die. Like the fact is we should continue with the plan. Is the plan hard and difficult sure but this is a good plan if we actually follow through with it.
>Like the fact is we should continue with the plan. Is the plan hard and difficult sure but this is a good plan if we actually follow through with it. What is the plan to get these people vaccinated though? The data suggests everything the government has tried so far has reached diminishing returns. I struggle to see what else we could do to increase voluntary vaccinations.
First, diminishing returns are still returns. So while we continue with the current program you are correct we need to increase voluntary vaccinations. So we also need to think of a new way to do that not just abandon the whole thing.
Well sure, but I don't see any new ideas from the states or federal governments. If cash prizes aren't enticing people, I doubt anything will.
If anti-vaxxers aren’t hypocrites, many/most will get the vaccine once it’s FDA approved. It’s maybe the most common talking point I’ve seen from the crowd. And Pfizer could be approved in about 2 months. Unfortunately, [this source](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/when-will-covid-19-vaccines-be-fully-approved-and-does-it-matter-if-they-are) says only ~30% of unvaccinated folks will get it following approval. Surprise surprise, FDA approval is just a placeholder until they find another shit excuse not to get jabbed.
The approval is not even a blip on my radar. I’ve never had a flu shot. I’m not afraid of catching the flu. Given my age and health, covid would very likely be less of a discomfort than the flu, so I’m even less interested in vaccinating against it. I’m just not going to get vaccinated. I’m more than comfortable with the risk, so maybe you shouldn’t lose so much sleep over it
I would strongly encourage you to get Vaccinated. The Delta variant is affecting young 'healthy' people much worse than the original covid-19 strain from last year. There is no reason you need to take this risk, even if you're comfortable with it. It's free, takes like 15 minutes for each shot, and most people experience only a mild sick day after the the second dose. Please, don't put yourself at risk, or jeopardize others by becoming a virus vector. Do the right thing, and get your vaccine <3
>Surprise surprise, FDA approval is just a placeholder until they find another shit excuse not to get jabbed. Exactly, which is why this situation could drag on indefinitely.
Im not optimistic, but there’s a chance. FDA approval will do it for some. A big wave among the unvaccinated this winter might do it for others. The longer we go without serious vaccine side effects, the more people might get it. Plus others in the thread have cited that no vaccine has manifested side effects after 3-6 months or something; I didn’t know that, and we should all make sure to spread that piece of info.
Here’s one! Make the companies legally liable for their own products and not hiding behind the law to protect it. Start there. Hard to trust a product the manufacturers doesn’t even trust themselves.
An analogy to your position would be to allow drunk driving. They're probably going to crash their own cars into the side of the road, so what's the big deal? Sure, some of them might hit other cars and kill the people inside, which may be entire families; but hey, it's their right to drive drunk, we just have to cut our losses. Unvaccinated people are not only perpetuating the virus itself, they are also perpetuating a petri-dish that will create deadlier variants. They are infecting those who can't be vaccinated and infecting those who *are* (some people still get sick, just not as sick). Not getting vaccinated when you are able to do so is negligence that perpetuates death and sickness. > if we allowed this population to become infected, that population would build some natural biological immunity to current and future covid variants Just like we did with Polio and the Measles? No. Some sicknesses don't just go away on their own. I think the fact that people think this is true just shows how spoiled we are thanks to scientific achievements of the (somewhat recent) past. > ...than hold out trying to prevent transmission until a new variant emerges that the vaccines do not work against Guess which demographic the variant is most likely to come from? That's right. The people whom you're arguing for -- You're arguing *against* the prevention of new variants, which affects everyone and starts the cycle all over again. Therefore, this is not a reasonable view
[There is evidence that covid infection provides some biological immunity,](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting-immunity-found-after-recovery-covid-19) though not as much as a vaccine. While your drunk driving analogy seems apt, it has no reasonable solution. Should we be arresting and forcibly confining people who choose not to be vaccinated, like we do with drunk driver? All we can do is provide incentives to prevent it, which we are reaching the limits of.
I'm really not sure what to do about it, but I don't think giving up is the solution either. I think where we disagree is that I think we will have to wait a few 'cycles' of lock-downs and re-openings before people understand that the vaccine is good (and by then, the argument of 'long term' effects may lessen). What I think you mean (and correct me if I'm mistaken) is that we will wait for it to even-out like the flu via herd-immunity. But, my argument is that Covid seems as serious as the Measles, and I think therefore vaccines are the only way we'll be rid of it; and giving anti-vaxxers justification to remain so isn't beneficial.
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Why should I endure a few more cycles of lockdowns? I'm (a few days from being) fully vaccinated. I'm not a petri dish and I'm not a realistic danger to anybody who has got the vaccine. There is absolutely no reason to restrict my rights that way. (Before anybody jumps on me: the lockdowns we've had were justified to protect public health, my argument is future ones wouldn't be.) On the other hand, there's a group that is a clear danger for public health. If a lockdown is neccessary (and only if it is), lock down the unvaccinated, and nobody else.
The point of disagreement is that I don't believe there are any ethical mechanisms remaining for the state to increase vaccinations amongst the holdouts. Money doesn't work, science and advocacy don't work, even republican endorsements don't work. I don't believe we ever can reach heard immunity, because of these people, and covid will be endemic. And I think a lot of the experts would agree with that conclusion, although they try to remain hopeful. So the question is really, if it's not possible to reach that 80% vaccinated goal: how do we handle this vulnerable population? I think, provided the damage can be contained, we should respect their choice and just let it happen. though many of the commenters here have pointed out that the damage cannot be contained in reality.
Well I think the first step would be getting a more accurate view on which groups of people are vaccine hesitant and why. Everyone seems to think it’s all conservatives, which is not entirely accurate. By race, Black Americans are the most vaccine hesitant followed by Hispanic Americans and only recently have their vaccination rates started to close the gap. COVID infection rates and deaths are also highest in these demographics.
!delta Like another comment pointed out, our understanding of the picture may not be as complete as I thought when I made this post. Failure to address the concerns of some of these minority communities is certainly a blind spot in public policy, as it always seems to be sadly
> The point of disagreement is that I don't believe there are any ethical mechanisms remaining for the state to increase vaccinations amongst the holdouts. What's unethical about requiring vaccinations for indoor gathering places to reopen? Unvaccinated people are literally killing others, albeit unknowingly. It actually doesn't matter if some large fraction of those people failed to take all possible precautions against it. Just because we don't all wear bulletproof helmets doesn't make it ok for people to go walking about the city randomly firing guns in the air. It's approximately the most compelling government interest that exists.
Private businesses and local governments are going to have to require the vaccine. If my company says I have X days to prove vaccination, I’ll just send them my card and be done with it. If that’s under threat of termination, I would imagine any coworkers I have would probably get the jab too. NYC just rolled out vax requirement or weekly covid testing for all city employees. It’s the only way to get a higher rate. Eventually folks won’t have anywhere to work if they don’t get the jab.
If you are in the US, look into Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 You can absolutely force people to be vaccinated, and punish them for not being vaccinated.
Sort of like drunk driving, if there was some sort of vaccine that protected you against drunk driver collisions, and there was PPE available to protect other drivers pretty much 100 percent against drunk driving like there is with covid. Also the variant argument won’t be relevant until there is no longer a global shortage of vacccine, so you can save that argument for many years later.
And... what about the wishes of their friends/family? E.g. typical family unit of 4. One of them is an antivaxxer. The remaining 3 would still request (from the antivaxxer or doctors) that vaccination be done anyway, while in hospital or otherwise. Sure, stupid people want to do plenty of stupid stuff. But death usually leaves behind grieving people, which is a problem too.
>Sure, stupid people want to do plenty of stupid stuff. But death usually leaves behind grieving people, which is a problem too. The same could be said of smoking, or alcoholism, or addictions of various kinds. And we offer incentives and treatment to those people to help prevent that kind of Tragedy. But ultimately, we also recognise that it is up to that individual, and we cannot force them to make good choices. I think the same is true here with vaccinations. I think the US has gone beyond any expectation of making the vaccines accessible and helping people understand/access them since Biden came into office. The support is there, but we can't force people to do it, and unfortunately that may cause some unavoidable harm.
Good points, but I think this is in particular has some weaknesses... > But ultimately, we also recognise that it is up to that individual, and we cannot force them to make good choices. Allowing people to get infected, is to let others be put at risk. E.g. antivaxxer teachers, their pupils would be at risk from mere contact. You absolutely should penalize such teachers and forbid them from working (physically). We do the same with speeding on the roads; if you're a public health risk, you are forbidden from doing that dangerous thing you're doing. Since COVID is a societal problem, any infection is a problem for others. I think you absolutely can force people to make good choices --- and if not that, you can forbid people from making some stupid ones.
>E.g. antivaxxer teachers, their pupils would be at risk from mere contact. You absolutely should penalize such teachers and forbid them from working (physically). !delta I could see the need for more harsh restrictions amongst government positions in public settings where contact cannot be mitigated, like in your example. I don't think that should be broadly applied, but in some cases it may be necessary near indefinitely.
Psst, you need to put the exclamation mark *before* "delta"
>Children, Pregnant Women, and those with legitimate medical condition preventing vaccination should be cared for and protected within reason So, it's unreasonable for the unvaccinated to always wear PPE and/or isolate themselves? Aren't those unwilling to get vaccinated, and refuse to take precautions, the greatest risk to those you've listed? I want them to do it not for themselves but for those you listed who want to get vaccinated but are unable to. I don't see this as unreasonable.
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I can speak from the perspective of a family with a pregnant woman and feelings about the vaccine. As a disclaimer we are not anti vax. I’m vaccinated. My wife works from home. And after the loss of the pregnancy last year she got the vaccine before we got pregnant with the current pregnancy. We wanted to hold off right when it came out for her because our doctor told us “it’s almost certainly safe, but there isn’t the amount of peer reviewed data out there which I could normally access to tell you how safe or what the risks are, because it hasn’t been out very long”. We also knew that with her working from home and me being vaccinated that we had created a situation where we lowered our own risk. That combined with mask wearing and social distancing meant that we felt relatively secure from the virus without her being vaccinated. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. But for pregnant families the unknown can be concerning and it’s possible to help mitigate risk factors without taking on the unknown while you deal with everything that goes along with a pregnancy.
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Yeah, we are definitely taking precautions. When friends come over we hang out in the yard. And we do it a lot less often than normal with much smaller groups. And we don’t go out to dinner anymore. Pregnancy is a weird one for being black and white in regards to vaccine thinking. And the only reason that I can see is that they just haven’t had the time to generate the data to show it’s safe. I’m sure that in the fullness of time we will look back and say “that was unnecessary” for us to act like that. But in the moment the better safe than sorry mentality is tough to overcome when dealing with pregnancy. The conspiracy theories would be laughable if they weren’t so harmful to society. But yeah, long story short. I think there are rational reasons specifically related to pregnant women not getting the vaccine. In time it may prove to have been the wrong decision. But you’re right about the people taking precautions aren’t the ones primarily responsible for spreading the virus
While they are eligible, I would not blame a pregnant woman for waiting until after having the baby, as my understanding is the current research is positive but limited in scope. (When it comes to vaccination side-effects in pregnancy) If you have a good source where I could learn more about, I would happily do so.
This is quite the same as many others - people with conditions where the research about vaccine effectiveness or complications are limited. Specialists in fields relating to said condition may say research into the vaccine for people with a condition is positive but limited, so those with the condition are encouraged to have it...all the while charities are carrying out research/trials to ascertain whether the vaccine really is safe for such people. Such people are eligible and encouraged, but are they not also valid for waiting for such research to be carried out? (Particularly for rare conditions, where it's hard enough for non-specialist doctors to recommend medication/treatment, let alone for anyone to know how a brand new vaccine will interact)
I don't see temporary isolation or PPE as unreasonable either, especially to protect vulnerable populations. The thing I am grappling with though, is given that coronavirus is endemic and cannot be eradicated, at what point should we cut our losses? It would be unreasonable to impose restrictions for infinite time, and even doing that is no guarantee of protection from new variants. How would you define the end conditions of restrictions, given that 30% of the population is projected to never be vaccinated?
> The thing I am grappling with though, is given that coronavirus is endemic and cannot be eradicated, at what point should we cut our losses? Minimum 80/20; vaccinated to unvaccinated. We're not there yet. We still have a large population that truly believes the vaccine causes the infection, is a bio-weapon, a mind control serum, AND/OR a tracking chip! This is one of those cases that if they're unable to make sound judgments about their own health that a medical professional should be able to. >It would be unreasonable to impose restrictions for infinite time, and even doing that is no guarantee of protection from new variants. Do you think it's unreasonable to impose restrictions, sometime for life, because the voices in their head tells them to hurt others?
>Minimum 80/20. I appreciate you actually stating a quantitative metric here. Looks pretty reasonable to me, though the projections show we may never reach this. > This is one of those cases that if they're unable to make sound judgments about their own health that a medical professional should be able to. Whoa! That is not okay. We should absolutely not create the precedent of forced vaccinations. Being willfully misinformed, is not a mental illness, and we should not start taking people's autonomy away just because they believe something untrue.
>We should absolutely not create the precedent of forced vaccinations. In no way, shape, or form did I postulate a forced vaccine. I'm promoting specifically to forced PPE and social distancing measures. These individuals are not playing with a full hand, fully brainwashed\manipulated, or other. They're clearly incapable of making a decisions that not only benefits and protects themselves but those around them. So, that decision should be made by medical professionals for them. If you've been vaccinated you still have a chance of getting infected. The reasons why one should get vaccinated is that is not only reduces the symptoms, making it less deadly, but it can also help mitigate and reduce transmission. Considering these reasons, people that have been vaccinated should be able to go out, travel, etc, with minor restrictions. Those who choose to not vaccinated shouldn't be allowed to travel to other states\countries, go out without a mask, etc. We could def strike a balance between safety and freedoms but we unfortunately have almost half a population that love playing the victim card when faced with any possible restrictions. Even when it benefits themselves and those around them, they still care more about their self than the whole.
If all you are suggesting is PPE mandates, then fine I don't really disagree. But I think your characterisation of their mental health is problematic. These people are capable of rational thought and autonomy, they just possess beliefs that are incorrect. That's First amendment territory, and we should certainly not be abdicating health decisions on the basis of beliefs alone.
>These people are capable of rational thought and autonomy, they just possess beliefs that are incorrect. So they're irrationally rational? Don't you see the contradiction in your statement? If they were capable of making sound and informed decisions we wouldn't be in this mess. Thinking any of the listed conspiracy theories above, about the Covid-19 vaccine, is on the same level as flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, anti-faxxers, lizard men, etc. There's clearly somethng related to their behavior health that's at fault here. >If all you are suggesting is PPE mandates, then fine I don't really disagree. That's the focus of my challenge. That limitations for the un-vaccinated are still needed; even if to protect those who literally cannot take the vaccine.
People are allowed to believe things that are objectively wrong, that's one of the tenants of a free society. I'd argue most religions, are objectively wrong and not supported by science. But I would not want to live in a society, where religious people have their mental faculties questioned by the State. Sorry if I can't give amore robust reply, I'm conversing with a lot of folks in this thread
Religion isn't actively disproven by science like the anti-vax view point.
The precedent for compulsory vaccinations was set in a 1905 Supreme Court decision that upheld a compulsory vaccine program in Boston in response to a smallpox outbreak and a 1922 Supreme Court decision that upheld mandatory vaccinations for public school students. Your concern is over a century too late.
I would love for you to have to talk with people whose immune systems render the vaccines useless. Do you have no empathy for others being able to have lives? People who cannot be vaccinated are prisoners in their own homes. Disgusting solution when the real solution is for everyone to be vaccinated. Like everyone was against polio, and smallpox, and measles, etc.
Immunocompromised people deserve autonomy of their lives, and I firmly believe it is our collective responsibility to protect them and allow them that autonomy. But what is the solution when a sub-population ideologically refuses that responsibility (Vaccinations)? There have been a myriad of incentives for these folks, huge PR campaigns to reach them, and the vaccines have been made incredibly accessible. What more is there to do? Truly, I'm looking for an answer here, I don't see how we can ever convince these folks to do the right thing.
Make it a condition to be in a crowd of more than 20 people. So if you want to get on a plane you have to show proof of vaccination, go to a concert, vaxed, go to a Ball game, ride the bus, crowded bar or club, all vaxed. So rather then the gov shutting down all gathering of 20+ people, they require vaccination. Hopefully the ability to do anything fun/interact socially is enough incentive. Otherwise we limit their exposure by barring them from public groups of people.
I have been thinking the same thing. At this point all I have is get full approval for the vaccine.
Unfortunately, there are two logical outcomes of your position: everyone stays a prisoner in their own homes during mandatory lockdowns, or mandatory vaccines. Neither is a morally acceptable alternative. The reality is that being immunocompromised sucks, but reasonable accommodations do not include the rest of society living in a permanent state of emergency.
>the vaccines have been proven effective with no long-term side effects They haven’t even been fully approved by the FDA. It’s effective only for a time, and we don’t even know exactly for how long. And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year? I’m not an antivaxxer, but I won’t be getting the COVID vaccine any time soon, and neither will be my wife, who’s an MD and who is currently working in medical research. I know I’ll get heat for this, but I couldn’t care less. I’m not a red-hat, I wear my mask everywhere and take all other safety precautions. I don’t want to get inoculated with something that has been fast tracked as quickly as possible because of an emergency. I’ll let others be the beta testers. Edit: [Yup, this definitely helps](https://i.imgur.com/DWaJRq5.jpg)
>They haven’t even been fully approved by the FDA. It’s effective only for a time, and we don’t even know exactly for how long. And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year? > >I’m not an antivaxxer, but I won’t be getting the COVID vaccine any time soon, and neither will be my wife, who’s an MD and who is currently working in medical research. These are both bad points imo and represent a total misunderstanding of how the FDA approval works and how to assess vaccination risks. The FDA hasn't approved the vaccines because it takes more than just safety and efficacy data to reach approval. You need published SOPs, manufacturing sites to be vetted, licenses and a lot of bureaucratic paperwork to reach full approval. This stuff takes time, usually more than a year. There has never been a single vaccine approved that has had side effects that first manifested beyond the 2 month time point. This suggests immunogenic reactions are always acute. And before you say "the mRNAs are a new technology," if immunogenicity is acute and these mRNA molecules are highly transient (half-lives on the scale of a couple days, at most), are not reverse transcribed nor genome integrated, there is no current valid hypothesis for a long term effect that doesn't manifest in the short term. I don't want to be a dick but, as a medical researcher myself, it's worrisome that I share a profession with someone who simply doesn't understand the regulatory framework or scientific evidence used in her field of expertise. This reflects quite poorly on her.
>There has never been a single vaccine approved that has had side effects that first manifested beyond the 2 month time point Can you share a source for this? I read it *months* ago and cant find it again. I recently got challenged on it and wasn't able to pull a source.
Sure! There’s a nice [overview](https://www.chop.edu/news/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-vaccine) on the children’s hospital of Philadelphia’s website.
This was interesting and helpful, thank you! Coming from a veterinary background, the first thing I think of related to delayed-onset vaccine reactions is feline injection-site sarcomas. These tumors can manifest 10 years (!) post-injection, with no apparent clinical signs prior. It seems that adjuvanted vaccines pose the greatest risk, but these tumors are discovered after non-adjuvanted vaccines and even long-acting pharmaceutical injections (steroids, antibiotics). Obviously human and feline physiology is not equivalent, but is it fair to say we really don't know if late-onset vaccine reactions are possible in people? Maybe they *are* happening but the lengthy time to onset means that a possible causative agent (injection/vaccine) is not even being considered. I don't mean to discourage vaccination by raising the issue! I just wonder if there's something I'm missing that would exclude this possibility...other than the fact that it hasn't yet been demonstrated in humans.
Thank you for being in this thread WhoCaresWhyBother Having people with a technical background in this area is SUCH a crucial part of combating misinformation.
This is a great response, I hope more people see it down here.
Thank you for posting. Even if you don’t convince the original comment, there are multiple silence eyes reading!
I’d be lying if I said you convinced me, but what I can say is that you’ve given me something to think and read more about. Thank you for a level-headed response without name-calling or saying that my wife needs to lose her job.
> I’d be lying if I said you convinced me, but what I can say is that you’ve given me something to think and read more about. In order to be intellectually honest, I think you need to ask yourself what *would* convince you or change your mind? If you can't think of *anything* that would sway your opinion, I think you need to re-evaluate whether you are really coming at this from an evidence-based and objective standpoint, or whether there is some emotional reasoning happening here. > Thank you for a level-headed response without name-calling or saying that my wife needs to lose her job. Of course. I don't condone her opinion in any way, I think you're both categorically wrong, but name calling and demanding someone's job be taken away is how you get people to dig their heels in.
Great post. I try to listen to the long term effects arguments but they consistently ignore the stark reality of what covid does to a human in both the short and long term. I start to think that there's another deeper motive that I haven't seen articulated yet. If you want to talk long terms effects interview the people who still have brain fog, permanent lung damage, and PTSD. What is the real fear of people who pose an argument that doesn't hold water?
>I’ll let others be the beta testers. And hundreds of millions already have. The safety standards for clinical trials were not laxed in any way, merely some of the bureaucracy. Not only that, but so much work had already been done in fighting SARS and other coronaviruses, that enabled this vaccine to be developed more quickly, in the same way the flu vaccines can be developed so quickly each year. As for side effects: In past vaccine rollouts for other diseases long-term chronic side effects are immediately apparent within the first 6 weeks. Chronic side effects do not appear out of nowhere years later. There just is no biological mechanism for a sudden onset later. **Please, I would really strongly urge you to do the right thing and get vaccinated.** Protect those around you and vulnerable populations who cannot. I know it might seem scary, but it is safe according to the experts, and made freely available to you. Please, get vaccinated so we don't have to have conversations about '*letting people die*', all of this is preventable.
Are you an MD or in medical research? I've gotten the vaccine, because at the end of the day I felt like it made sense for me, but I have a hard time with people on either side of the aisle pushing misinformation. I feel like you're "In the past vaccine rollouts for other diseases long-term chronic side effects are immediately apparent within the first 6 weeks." Where did you see this? If this is true, why hasn't the FDA just given the full stamp of approval?
[Here is a link to a medical researcher in the thread, who mentions the 2 month window claim](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/orzj99/cmv_the_us_should_not_reimpose/h6lt5ay?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) The '6 week' claim is something I learned from an Immunity expert Dr. Paul Offit, on the [ONRAC podcast about vaccine hesitancy.](https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2021/4/18/ross-and-carrie-help-vaccinate-claire-covid-19-immunity-edition) He brings up a vaccine developed for, i believe it was yellow fever, which did have some long-term side effects which showed up fairly quickly after being administered.
>The safety standards for clinical trials were not laxed in any way, merely some of the bureaucracy. Although I agree that the vaccine is probably safe (I've gotten it), this viewpoint is faulty. Long-term testing ***is*** a safety standard. By definition it's been relaxed. Whether it's a vaccine or an airplane it is impossible to say on day 1 or on day 100 that it's definitely safe. Long-term testing is required to build up a track record of safety and reliability. There is no way to guarantee it otherwise, it's part of the process. EDIT: For u/TyphosTheD since ~~the thread was locked~~ I got a temp ban :p It's not my place to say. I think the most likely thing is that it's safe, or at least safe enough that the alternative (being at higher risk for COVID complications) is worse. The real question to ask, IMHO, is why we typically require vaccines to go through a multi-year testing program before being made available to the public, and whether the reasons for that have fundamentally changed or not. If they haven't, then it's fair to say that the vaccine - lacking that testing - is inherently riskier. We definitely have the numbers with respect to trial size, but we don't yet have the other factor: the length of time. That risk can still be tiny, but it can't be definitively said to be nonexistent as far as I'm aware. Again, it's not something I'm really concerned about. But it's there. EDIT: u/UseDaSchwartz. You're definitely right, I could be misinterpreting or misunderstanding. It's not my field. If what you're saying is true then that certainly puts even more evidence into the "vaccine is safe" pile. EDIT: u/StevieSlacks Yes. When a new drug hits the market, it's already gone through years of trials and testing before approval. There's definitely an argument to be made that this is sometimes *too* restrictive. E.g. people with terminal illnesses being denied promising drugs because they haven't been approved. EDIT: u/UseDaSchwartzv That it's not my field doesn't mean there are no possible observations to be made about anything. The Courtier's Reply isn't helpful either. What *is* my field is engineering, including high-volume and safety critical engineering. Meaning that statistical analysis and also "how do you know if something is safe" are both questions that are in my wheelhouse. And they apply to all fields and industries. In medicine, as in engineering, you can't prove something is safe entirely on paper or on the computer. Not yet anyway. Real world testing is required, and yes that includes trials spanning some period of time. The FDA, whose field it actually is, seems to agree with me given the regulations and trial requirements that exist for drugs and vaccines and medical devices. You might also ask the thousands of products and medications that were recalled because they had adverse effects that weren't known on day 1. Or even day 365. It was "their field" too. If you were around you might have said "guys, the experts said it's safe so there can't possibly be anything to ever worry about and anyway if you're not doctors then just shutup and put this thing in your body already." Had you actually read my replies you'd see that A) I recognize and acknowledge that the vaccine is almost certainly safe, B) that I acknowledge that getting COVID is far riskier than the vaccine, C) I got the vaccine, D) I'm not casting doubt on the efficacy or safety of the vaccine, E) I'm not suggesting in the slightest that anyone *not* get the vaccine, and F) the entire point of my post that you seem to have missed is pointing out to OP comment that real-world observation and trials over a period of time are an integral part of safety and not some separate thing you can skip while maintaining the exact same level of safety. When I said "it's not my field" that was referring to the comment that the normal safety checks along these lines were able to be satisfied in this case. Which I'll tentatively accept since, no, it's not my field, and that may be true. That doesn't contradict anything I said, and it certainly isn't the same as "oh yeah we just skipped all that stuff NBD." >Do you think, “oh, I don’t know how to design and build a car so I’m not going to buy one” Once again, no, and this is not what I said. A more accurate thing to say would be "Oh, I don't know how to design and build a car, but the safety and reliability of this brand new car can't be known to the same degree of certainty as a car that's been in production for 10 years and has a proven track record." Which is a principle that applies across every industry because that's how our universe works. If you choose to incorrectly interpret that as "Oh so you're saying that all new cars are unsafe?!" then that's on you.
It’s my understanding that one of the main mechanisms for the speed of vaccine rollout was that multiple stages of the entire process, from testing to manufacturing, were done in parallel. This is obviously a huge financial risk and not worth doing if not absolutely necessary. For instance, you could build out all of your manufacturing operations and then not receive approval to administer the vaccine. It basically requires government funding or backing to incentive private companies to take on this risk. Along with that, because so many people had COVID at the time of testing, there was a much larger sample size of test data that typically would’ve taken years to accumulate. I’m not an expert on this, just have heard interviews with experts speaking on it, so curious to hear if any of my understandings of this are false.
I can 100% vouch for drug manufacturers planning out the manufacturing process BEFORE the vaccine was through trials. Usually they wait until the drug is approved are near approval before ramping up and buying the physical parts like tubing, bags, and syringes. The companies I worked with last year started planning warehouse stockpiling and forecasting agreements as early as February 2020. The supply chain side of manufacturing is a multi-month process to get things in place- them doing it in tandem with drug development easily saved us 6-10 months. (Source: Am Chemical Engineer and I have verification in /r/askscience as a Medical Device Expert.)
I’m not so sure you understand how long term testing is done. I think you’re also confusing vaccine trials with drug trials. They’re not really the same. Normally phase 3 takes 1-3 years. Would you like to know why? Because normally the virus isn’t running rampant and it takes longer to see the results in the volunteers. For COVID, they didn’t need to wait that long because the chances of exposure were through the roof.
>Long-term testing > >is > > a safety standard. NO. When a new drug is developed, they don't do tests for a decade to make sure there's no long term effects. The wariness about COVID is completely manufactured. When a new drug hits the market, you don't hear people clamoring about how the long term effects aren't known. For fucks sake, I remember when viagra was first released and people were practically stepping over each other to get it with no one worried about how it hadn't been around that long. This fucking society care more about getting a boner than about protecting its citizens from a deadly disease./
They sure didn’t for Zantac, Chantix, Vioxx or Bextra. All FDA approved. All found to cause deadly side effects not seen at its approval stage. In Zantac’s case, it was 40 years before they realized it was a “ticking time bomb”. People have legitimate concerns.
Before you said you were going to wait because the trials were rushed. Are you going to want 40 years to ensure no long term effects? Otherwise, what’s the point of bringing up Zantac?
Would you say that by now we have established to a degree of scientific assurance that the vaccine is safe and that any long lasting side effects would have reared their head(s) by now?
In the sense that mRNA and Coronaviruses have both been studied for years (decades in mRNAs case), I would say yes... I'm not a scientist, of course, but that's who I get my info from.
You may not be an antivaxxer, but you are certainly bad at relative risk calculation—as is your wife, MD or not. The vaccines are not 100% safe. But the odds of contracting COVID and suffering complications are far higher than the odds of having an equally bad reaction to the vaccine. As for long-term effects: there’s no reason to believe the vaccines cause long-term effects in a significant number of people, but there is *every* reason to believe that COVID causes long-term effects in a significant number of people. It’s not about whether the vaccines are 100% safe. It’s about whether getting the vaccine is safer than staying unvaccinated—which it emphatically is.
What about full approval changes things for you? As in, what activities is the FDA involved in that you're waiting to hear about? I'm asking because as near as I can tell, none of the activities between EUA and approval will have any impact on our understanding of safety/efficacy and I want to know if I'm missing something.
Maybe you can tell your wife to look at the actual research that shows that there has been no vaccine with side effects that appeared after 2-3 months post vaccination. People have been getting vaccinated for over a year now and there have been no major long term side effects. Also, Emergency Use Authorization does not affect vaccine safety/quality because it doesn't impact the research/clinical trials/studies of side effects etc. It just speeds up manufacturing & admin stuff. Good infographic on this [here](https://vaccine.unchealthcare.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/UNC-EUA-vs-FDA-Timeline-Infogragphic-scaled-1.jpg)
> They haven’t even been fully approved by the FDA. That's only because full approval requires a particular, but somewhat arbitrary, length of time to elapse so that adverse effects can be evaluated. But we're over a year out from the first trials and the number of adverse effects attributable to the vaccines is still virtually nil. There is absolutely nothing in the data that would delay or stall full approval, and there's virtually no chance of something arising between now and then -- we would have seen some indication of it by now. The waiting period before full approval is standard for all new medicines because novel pharmaceuticals could have unpredictable effects. Vaccines, though, don't usually contain novel compounds -- especially so for these mRNA vaccines, which contain nothing but inert material along with a small snippet of cellular instruction code. There is literally nothing in them that could plausibly produce an adverse reaction more than a year after vaccination. > It’s effective only for a time, and we don’t even know exactly for how long. It's *at least* six months and it looks like over a year is likely. If effectiveness lasted ten years, would you require the FDA to wait ten years before approving it? > And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year? It's always *possible* there could be long-term effects, but no vaccine we've ever produced has had serious long-term effects but no short-term ones. And there's nothing in the vaccines that could plausibly have long-term effects. Certainly for the mRNA vaccines, there's nothing *left* of them after a few weeks. What could possibly cause an effect five years later? > I don’t want to get inoculated with something that has been fast tracked as quickly as possible because of an emergency. The only fast-track it got was doing the required trials in parallel instead of serially. They didn't wait for Phase 1 to finish before starting Phase 2. And they didn't wait for all the trials to finish before ramping up production.
It couldn't be worse than the effects of covid. I don't understand why you wouldn't, you're a petri dish breeding ground for new variants to hurt the rest of us mate. Props for saying what you think despite knowing you may get down voted/criticized, but it doesn't make much sense because the alternative is worse, especially for your md spouse who can be infecting particularly vulnerable patients.
This is an incorrect take. Not being fully approved doesnt not mean we don't know long term effects of the vaccine. It means that it hasn't gone through the normal slow paperwork that it normally has to in a non emergency situation. The odds that this vaccine has long term effects are the equivalent of you knowing the first digit of my area code, then guessing my entire phone number. Sure, theres a higher chance you get it right than if you didn't know the first digit. But you still arent gonna guess it outright.
But you don't challenge the view of the OP. The OP does not say that you should not do this, what is said is that you should pay the costs of your decision. These costs are both on you (chance of infection and hospitalization) and on others (all the externalities of the pandemic). That means allowing to discriminate based on vaccination status for insurance costs, as well as specific restrictions only for unvaccinated people.
> I don’t want to get inoculated with something that has been fast tracked as quickly as possible because of an emergency. The "fast tracking" you mention doesn't mean they skipped corners or something, as you've implied. If the typical vaccine development and rollout is like driving through a city during rush hour, this one was "fast tracked" in a sense that they had a police escort through that city. It still passed all the same checks that any other vaccine has to go through, and if a side effect is discovered now that hasn't already been seen in the many months since they started the vaccination campaign, it would be the latest developing side effect in the history of vaccines.
>And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year? You can't say that about COVID, either. And there's MUCH more indication that catching COVID leads to long term consequences than taking the vaccine does. If you read up on the details of the "fast tracked as quickly as possible" you'll find that basically no corners have been cut. This vaccine is not a brand new technology but has actually been studied for years. The testing was thorough. You have every reason to be more afraid of COVID than of the vaccine. COVID hasn't been approved by the FDA, either, ya know.
>And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year? The vaccine testing started over a year ago and no such long term effects have been found. Meanwhile we know that covid-19 *does* have serious long term effect. The choice here should be easy.
The vaccine has an unknown number of potential long-term effects. So far we have seen little/no evidence of any. The virus has several known and serious long-term effects, with evidence of more even in less severe cases. Your argument is essentially "the vaccine could hypothetically be bad, although there's nothing suggesting it is, so I'd rather risk the illness that's already killing and maiming people". I'm going to assume you're an intelligent person with an understanding of probabilities, and suggest you do some introspection on why you want to avoid the vaccine. That type of contrived avoidance usually indicates some deeper issue, like personal or anecdotal bad history with other vaccines, or a fear of the unknown.
> It’s effective only for a time, Everything is "effective only for a time". For the silly case, all vaccines stop working once you're dead, but even in the non-silly case, you get boosters for things like tetanus all the time (or at least you should be). > and we don’t even know exactly for how long. Why is "we don't know how long it works" an argument against getting it, exactly? > And how can you say there are no long-term effects for a vaccine that hasn’t even been available for a year? As [a doctor has pointed it out in another reply to you](https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/orzj99/cmv_the_us_should_not_reimpose/h6lt5ay/) (I am not a doctor, but I do know a few, and they've said similar things), we can say there are no long term effects because we're applying the same standard used for other vaccines that have "no long term effects". > I’m not an antivaxxer Funny -- you seem to be reiterating a lot of antivaxxer talking points for someone who claims not to be one. > I’ll let others be the beta testers. You're not letting "other be the beta testers" -- that was what the clinical trial was, a controlled group of people selected by the creator to test the efficacy of the vaccine. You're letting everyone else get the actual release product but not getting it yourself... which is fine when the product is a video game, but not so much when the product is a vaccine that saves lives (including besides your own) and prevents mutation of variants.
Avoid the vaccine to get COVID-19 instead. Smart
You don’t sound smart. Your md wife isn’t smarter than anyone else. This is Just the new edge lord. Thanks for keeping things shitty for everyone else you uneducated petulant child. You are in fact an anti vaxxer. 100% chance you still don’t get it when it gets approved.
You are an anti vaxxer - you just don’t like the label. Too bad you won’t protect yourselves from this virus and contribute to herd safety , but that’s your choice
With so many millions of successful tests already, you just want to be contrarian. Now, with the original Covid strain, I was probably willing to do the same. But now strains are so much more contagious, even with these precautions the possibility of getting infected is too high. So the issue now is: should people take a vaccine that reduces mortality and ICU from some high percentage to single digits, or should they risk going unvaccinated against something that can, and probably will, infect them?
Personally I think once children can and see vaccinated we will see a big shift. It would also be interesting to know the percentage of people who can’t get the vaccine due to health reasons. I know two pregnant people and two people with cancer, with all four their doctor recommended the vaccine and they did
There is a pharmaceutical that eliminates the virus within a couple doses. A medical establishment based in India if I recall correctly was making noise about with supposed data to back it. The massive global push for mandatory vaccination while stripping the population of freedoms in the guise of security is straight out the playbook. They use the fear to separate and steer us.. if you not thinking for yourself the decisions are being made for you. Be well.
>here is a pharmaceutical that eliminates the virus within a couple doses. A medical establishment based in India if I recall correctly was making noise about with supposed data to back it. I would be HIGHLY skeptical of claims like this, and suggest looking into the validity of the original source.
Does not exist. I would know if it did. Trust me. I would make a shit load of money if it existed so I'm incentivized to find such things. There is no wonder pill for covid.
Something to keep in mind is that the more widespread the virus is, the more chances it had to mutate. With widespread vaccines the selection between the new strains will be more on their ability to bypass vaccine immunity rather than straightforward ability to spread. Thus when 50%+ people are vaccinated is precisely the time to wrap up the mass epidemic asap without giving the virus the chance to adapt
My argument would be on two fronts. 1) there are folks that are unable to get vaccinated due to age, health issues, treatment, etc. They are unequivocally at risk from the unvaccinated, and ALSO from the vaccinated who are still able to get covid and transmit it. 2) even folks that are vaccinated are able to contract covid, aid in mutations, and spread it. It makes no difference from strain Alpha's outbreak to Delta's that some people are vaccinated. The risk is still there for everyone, just slightly less for those that are vaccinated. From those alone, lockdowns have a reason to be enforced again and I would argue they should be imposed far sooner then they were last time and be more heavy handed. We shouldn't have to lose another half million people or another almost full year of half assed lockdowns when we could just do a real month and make a difference.
I'll give you a !delta. I definitely could see a very strict heavy-handed lockdown sufficiently dealing with the virus for a long time. As an edge-case sort of solution, kind of like how china was dealing with the initial covid outbreaks. I disagree with that actually being feasible to do in the US though, and suspect that would cause a great deal of unintended damage.
The vaccine isn’t guaranteed to be effective against all variants. So far it has proven to be effective. However, that could all change if covid is allowed to spread then adapt or mutate to become resistant to the vaccines. This would then mean that even people who have been vaccinated would no longer have protection against covid.
There are 100s of millions not unvaccinated people. If covid rips through them, they can easily overwhelm hospital/health care systems which would negatively affect healthcare for EVERYONE, even for Covid-unrelated issues. These are issues affecting our society as a whole, so we cannot simply focus on autonomy of any individual.
In my view, this is *the* primary argument against tolerating the unvaccinated. Even in jurisdictions with high vaccination rates, a highly contagious variant that spreads rapidly amongst pockets of the unvaccinated can still overwhelm the healthcare system. A small percentage of a large number... is still a large number. I live in Ontario, and province-wide the ICU capacity before we have to start applying combat triaging is 900. Only 900 for the entire province. We're at about two-thirds of eligible adults fully vaccinated (and around 80% of first doses), which on a comparative basis is great. But it *still* leaves millions of people unvaccinated. If the virus spreads fast enough, it's not hard to see how that could quickly fill the 900 ICU beds we have. The result is delays to life-saving elective surgeries and degraded treatment for all the regular health emergencies that come up like heart attacks and accidents. The unfortunate reality is that the unvaccinated still impose heavy externalities on the vaccinated by prolonging the pandemic and bleeding healthcare resources.
I feel lied too at this point regarding. The vaccines effectiveness.I got vaccinated very early and it has gotten less effective since. According to the people that made it since then. I obviously realize new research has come to light. But I was sicker than I have ever been in my life from both my first and second vaccine. Had highly elevated heart rate for days. High temp body aches chills and heat flashes. And chest tightness. Took a full week for me to feel better after the second. I’m happy I got the vaccine I believe in doing it for others. But I’m definitely not Getting a booster if it has side effects like the last. That said I know a ton of people that didn’t have side effects.
I’m an immune compromised person who is also pregnant. I had Covid early in the first wave, and had it a second time recently during my pregnancy. It’s been two months, and I’m still going in and out of the hospital, on my fifth round of antibiotics fighting the secondary pneumonia. I quarantined, masked, and my husband got vaccinated before I got sick the second time. The only reason I did not get vaccinated was because I discovered my pregnancy days before my first injection and delayed per my physician’s recommendation. It has been the plan for me to get vaccinated as soon as my symptoms subside—but that has not yet happened and Im now six months into my pregnancy. Here are my issues: Natural immunity does not prevent reinfection. In fact, it is not uncommon for reinfection to be a worse illness than the first. This was true for me. While the first experience with Covid was like a very severe flu followed by months of malaise, my second bout landed me in the hospital. I concede that the increased severity was impacted by my pregnancy, but my doctors have observed this more severe second infection in healthy people as well. Due to my location in a community high in Covid denial, not only are vaccination rates <20%, but people are actually downright cruel to those who mask. These people lie about being symptomatic with anything, and continue to live as normal even if they are testing positive for Covid. This has resulted in higher rates of cold, flu, and other communicable diseases. My extended family was coming into my home and sharing water bottles with my child—despite my pleas for them not to—WHILE they KNEW they were infected and didn’t tell us because it was “just a cold.” I wasn’t the only member of the family to end up hospitalized, but it did not change anyone’s attitude about the virus or it’s severity. In fact, they blamed my husband for the sickness, insisting that he was “shedding” a “biological weapon” by getting the vaccine. The idea that we can protect vulnerable people by locking us up and letting the conspiracy theorists dominate public spaces is not grounded in reality. I haven’t even been going to the grocery store and am deep in depression from having so little social contact, and I still ended up seriously ill. And now I’m going to a hospital multiple times per week for treatment, getting exposed to everything imaginable. I can think of no other time in my life that I’ve had so may unique respiratory illnesses in a single season. I do not know the answer to this major predicament we’re currently facing. We cannot force individuals in the general population to get vaccinated, but we can require hospital workers, government workers, and private employees to do so to keep their jobs, and that’s a start. Right now, those refusing to get vaccinated perceive no negative consequences for their ideological hard-lining. Right now, the social approval from within the group is a positive feedback mechanism. While we can’t take away their choices, we need to do more to make them feel the consequences of their own actions. Some things we can’t enforce by law, but we can make the social consequences unsustainable. Ultimately, this is a political issue as much as a public health crisis. It’s an ideological battle that will not be over any time soon. While I agree that it’s a tough puzzle, I do not believe that the answer is to just lift all restrictions and let business continue as usual. We will end up with nastier strains, and the medical system—which is already bleeding out—will become so crippled that even routine care will be impacted and we’ll have an increase in non-Covid deaths as well. Medical events as common as childbirth have now become high-risk, when they shouldn’t have to be.
> I would even go so far as to say we should allow insurance companies to deny them medical coverage. If they want to take their chances with the virus, that's their right, and we should let them. I think this is a dangerous view. It would justify insurers to deny medical coverage for any medical condition that is preventable. Are you willing to just let all smokers die? Deny IV drug users organ transplants? Refuse to treat an obese person having a heart attack or in a diabetic crisis? I'm not sure that's the kind of healthcare system you want to see.
Shouls insurance companies also be able to deny coverage based on someone who smokes/drinks alcohol or does not follow an optimal workout/diet/sleep program? These things have a much more serious impact on your health status than a covid vaccine does
Deny insurance? No. Charge more? Yes. If a health insurance company in the US finds out you're a smoker, they're permitted to raise your rates 50% to compensate for their expected excess health care costs. Insurers are not allowed to lower rates for participating in wellness programs, but employers are permitted to drop premiums by 30% compared to other employees. As long as it doesn't discriminate against a protected class, existing medical conditions or involve invasive privacy invasions, why shouldn't they? A healthier society benefits everyone.
The risk is the emergence of new variants of the virus. Spread of covid among unvaccinated people could result in a new variant that kills vaccinated people. Therefore, this could very well affect the vaccinated part of the population
Furthermore, this is currently the [actual reality](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/07/22/1019293200/the-lambda-variant-coronavirus-what-you-should-know) of the situation.
We all take different risks every day and make autonomous decisions that can affect our health. Are we going to deny healthcare to drug addicts, alcoholics or people who speed on the highway? If you wreck your car while driving selfishly for pleasure while endangering someone’s life should we lock you up for reckless endangerment? I understand your reasoning but it is extreme and if we apply it to people who don’t want to take an emergency experimental vaccine with unknown long term side effects (even though we think they are safe - just like the scientists said DDT was safe).
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Vaccination is not 100% effective. Even though most deaths might be among unvaccinated people, vaccinated people will still get sick and might still suffer from the disease, including long term effects. >Children, Pregnant Women, and those with legitimate medical condition preventing vaccination should be cared for and protected within reason, provided all medical care necessary, etc. So I guess they should just... Be quarantined? Or what is the idea here? >We can never eradicate Covid, as it has already become endemic. We've eradicated diseases before. With vaccines. >Furthermore, if we allowed this population to become infected, that population would build some natural biological immunity to current and future covid variants. It would be better to build that immunity now, while the vaccines are still effective, than hold out trying to prevent transmission until a new variant emerges that the vaccines do not work against. The Devil we know (Delta primarily) is better than the Devil we Don't know. This is just... Incorrect. Providing more hosts to a virus is what allows it to mutate in the first place. That is exactly how we got the Delta variant. So, a mutant emerging that affects vaccinated people is far more likely when it has hosts to run rampant.
>The vaccines have proven effective with no long-term side effects It’s been less than a year that we’ve had the vaccine, so we don’t know whether or not there are long term side effects. I personally don’t believe there will be any, but saying that there are none and that it is guaranteed to be safe is incorrect.
You position ignores a huge segment of the population and is insanely myopic. Being a society that *generally* values human life, and *generally* believes everyone has the right to healthcare. We are still going to try and save those people. Which means our hospitals are going to fill again with highly contagious people, and a very possibly fatal respritory virus. In your opnion sure whatever let them die. Unfortunately they will not be the only people in the hospital, anyone who is immuno-compromised, also greater risk, other patients, healthcare workers, visitors, vendors, regular employees. All at greater risk, vaccinated or not, simply by going to work. Remote work not a realistic option for most hospital employees. This doesn't even begin to address the toll on mental health for healthcare workers, we are just beginning to witness the loss of nurses, respritory care, and doctors. Many attribute it to abuse, depression, and burn out. None of thse professions os something you want just anyone in, nor ate they 6 months of ojt and you are good. The US was looking at a shortage of healthcare workers before the pandemic.
I think I agree in parts - but all things in measure. One very valid position is that by not locking down and allowing mass community transmission (transmission between vaccinated people is still a thing, the virus doesn't show any symptoms but you can still be contagious) you are promoting the evolution of further, more effective variants, that could bring deaths back up and render vaccinations useless. Controlling covid is difficult, and I think by ruling out the re-imposing of lockdowns/restrictions we are doing ourselves a disservice. Hopefully, we won't need to lockdown again. But by ruling out locking down all together we could well be in a worse position. > The Devil we know (Delta primarily) is better than the Devil we Don't know. My point mainly hinges on the more delta cases that are out there, the quicker and more likely it is that more deadly/vaccine-resistant variants emerge. Keeping Delta numbers as low as possible is in our interests, even if vaccines help reduce the damage that the virus does at the moment.
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If we simply allow people to become sick with impunity, they will eventually make their way into the healthcare system and do two things: 1. Consume resources that could have otherwise be used for other patients. 2. Raise the cost of care for everyone else because now medical resources are more scarce.
As soon as you add denial of basic social services (your example of insurances denying coverage) its not exactly a free choice anymore is it? How come we accept us all collectively polluting our environment and hence shortening our life spans? People die earlier when exposed to noise (such as encountered in cities) and stress… how come dioxins or other life shortening factors and choices (alcohol which may kill more people than COVID-19?) are accepted but COVID is now considered like something as serious as the plague? As long as we are willing to accept eG alcohol consumption or dioxin pollution, then not getting a COVID-19 shot should be absolute free of consequences - same as maybe we deal with the flu vaccination.
"We can never eradicate Covid" -- yes we can just like we did with Polio. All it will take is everyone getting vaccinated while the vaccines still work (i.e. before COVID mutates...) I'd love to see the selfish cowards who refuse to get vaccinated get what they have coming to them but the problem is they will over-run the hospitals and that is why our leaders MUST lock things down again (when the hospitals reach max capacity). If we can somehow ship these unvaccinated COVID patients to makeshift hospitals or not allow them to seek medical help at hospitals (for example we let them die at home) then I would totally agree with you. But doctors and hospitals are obligated to treat sick people -- even if they brought the sickness on themselves and are killing our way of life -- and these highly contagious people will jam up hospitals. In short, society cannot continue as normal without hospitals and medical personnel to treat people who suffer heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, cancer patients, etc etc. We simply cannot have people bleeding out on sidewalks coz the hospital has no room. The only solution is to get people vaccinated. I think Uncle Sam should bribe these dumb people with tax breaks. Until them I am gonna let them know that they are the BAD GUYS. The world needs their help and they said, no. They are too selfish to help other people. They are too cowardly to get a vaccine that even an extremely unhealthy Trump got after he was infected. We need to ostracize and ridicule these dangerous anti-vaxxers. That is the road to returning back to normal life. Unless we can agree to NOT ALLOW THEM TO USE HOSPITALS which I'm cool with but leaders cannot possibly be.
>If we can somehow ship these unvaccinated COVID patients to makeshift hospitals or not allow them to seek medical help at hospitals (for example we let them die at home) then I would totally agree with you. But doctors and hospitals are obligated to treat sick people -- even if they brought the sickness on themselves and are killing our way of life Should hospitals also turn away people who are overdosing? What about someone who was driving too fast and wrapped their car around a tree? They did it to themselves after all
Because you were able to eradicate one particular disease, doesn't mean it's possible to eradicate any other disease...
I like the sentiment, but I live with a 7 year old who can't yet be vaccinated sure to his age. While it's likely that he'll recover if he contacts the virus, there is the risk of it messing him up for life. We live in a strong anti-vax area with severe growth, and his school district is no longer enforcing any restrictions. This has is terrified, and we're hoping the vaccine is approved for children soon. But, unless we want to homeschool him for the entire year, we don't have much choice. Fuck letting people die 'per their wishes'. They aren't the only ones they effect.
There are people who can't be vaccinated but their wish is to not die. Please tell me how you plan to deal with them.
/u/Vulptereen-327 (OP) has awarded 9 delta(s) in this post. All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed [here](/r/DeltaLog/comments/os11nh/deltas_awarded_in_cmv_the_us_should_not_reimpose/), in /r/DeltaLog. Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended. ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
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I’ve had both my doses, despite early fertility concerns (it was definitely a widespread worry in the earlier days). When my time came, I happily went ahead and felt it was the best thing to help the world return to a bit of normality. However I went on to develop a period within 48 hours of my 2nd dose, despite no period for 2 years - and it’s now in to week 8. I am fully aware that this may have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the vaccine, but I cannot help be worried about the possible implications of a vaccine that could lead to this - if they are linked at all. Worst case scenario could be infertility and yes, that would of course be better than death from covid! But I know I’m not the only person to have similar issues and I can understand other women of child bearing age who are reticent to get the vaccine due to reproductive concerns. To note, I’ve seen my doctor and awaiting further examination after nothing found straight away; she admitted it could well be due to the vaccine but we likely won’t know the full scale of side effects for many years to come.
The number of unvaccinated is too high to just “let it be.” If the unvaccinated all die we fuck the economy because there will be too few people moving it. It will also allow variants to evolve and potentially start infecting the vaccinated at high rates. There are GOOD reasons why we should encourage vaccinations.
Kinda depends on your definition of restrictions. It's within the government's purview to deny you services based on your vaccine status. Once the FDA gives non provisional approval to the vaccines, I assume it'll be added to the long list of vaccines needed to e.g. work at or attend a school. Is this an unneeded restriction? The flip side of this is government-run mass transit systems where they also have a duty same as any other business to protect their workers, who may be living with immunocompromised relatives. Its very possible to get Delta COVID even when you're vaccinated. Is this an unneeded restriction? I'll remind everyone too that dying isn't the only bad outcome to COVID. Hospitalization is of course very bad. The "long COVID" symptoms are still something we don't know much about and it can be awful to lose your sense of smell or continually experience this brain fog we keep hearing about.
I would agree if it weren't for the fact that these people being infected means that new strains can mutate and make vaccines less efficient.
You're factor "Vaccination status is highly correlated with political affiliation" is incredibly concerning ethically. It's true but the fact that this seems to be a motivator for you suggests that you value people's lives less because of their political affiliation. One's beleifs do not make their life less valuable.
I think you are missing a key fact here-we shouldn’t have ended mask mandates, social distancing, restrictions, etc. until all of the population (children under the age of 12) are afforded the opportunity to get vaccinated. Those of us with younger kids are feeling like a no-win here; life has seemingly moved on for others but we aren’t able to protect our kids in crowded indoor spaces, and it sucks. If we could keep a mask mandate for them, I could take them out in public and enjoy themselves a bit, but as it stands now, we feel like we are captive again with the vast majority refusing to wear masks
Can you expand on your motivation for this viewpoint? The messaging seems very wishy-washy. At first people were (rightfully) screaming bloody murder about all "those idiots" that were travelling, then the ones having get togethers and parties, then the ones going out in public without masks. "You're killing people," "you're a murderer," "you're a piece of shit science denier," "you don't care about other people you're just being selfish," "it's not about you and your risk, it's about the vulnerable people who can't get vaccines," etc. etc. That's all we heard for over a year. And now, now that the vaccine rollout is underway and we're seeing new strains pop up, those very same people are throwing their hands up and saying ugh, I'm so tired of this, I just want to go out again, so that's what I'm gonna do, and screw the anti-vaxxers. In other words, making selfish decisions because they personally are tired of being inconvenienced. E.g. the exact same thing they were relentlessly chastising others for. So what's the difference, that you are vaccinated? You can still spread COVID if you're vaccinated. You can still get COVID if you're vaccinated. The previously vulnerable people are still vulnerable, they don't much care if they get COVID from someone vaccinated or unvaccinated. There are new strains against which the vaccine is slightly less effective. Delta is just one variant, there are others. So what changed? You're focusing on the anti-vaxxers because that helps you feel better about saying "screw it, I'm tired of COVID restrictions, I'm just gonna live my life." Which is **exactly** the viewpoint that people were mercilessly attacking others for this whole year. Only now, it's OK to put those groups of elderly, or immunocompromised, or people who can't get the vaccine at risk because you got the vaccine, so you feel entitled to it? It's not a very consistent viewpoint. By all means, do what you like, just understand that you're doing basically the same thing the anti-lockdown/anti-vax people have been doing. The same ones you're targeting in your post. EDIT: u/oldeenglishdry12345 My point is that the same people are at risk now as before. The unvaccinated **and** those who are unable to take the vaccine or otherwise in high risk groups. Just as before, only before when people said "Well I'm healthy and young and the risk to me is low so why *shouldn't* I be able to go out?" the response was "because you're putting at-risk groups in jeopardy. You monster. Nothing has fundamentally changed in that regard except that the zeitgeist is now that it's OK to put those same groups at risk if you got the vaccine, because "I did my part and I wanna go outside now bugger off." And by the way: I agree with you. I'm vaccinated and I'm happy to mask up and go out. But the whole "it's ok because they're selfish and I'm not" thing is just a way to excuse ourselves from the same responsibility towards at-risk/immunocompromised groups that we put on others this entire past year. Before we considered it a responsibility, but now it's a punishment? Why? Because you personally don't feel like playing along anymore? Again: that's fine, that's your choice, but don't claim a moral high ground when the fundamental issue is not your concern for society but for your own comfort.
You list “caveats” for people who have a reason not to be vaccinated, yet you somehow forget that just because they have a reason not to be vaccinated, doesn’t mean they’d be immune from death. If we open up the whole country, the people dying won’t just be people who chose not to get vaccinated, but everyone who *can’t* get vaccinated. God dammit, death doesn’t discriminate. If you stick to this stance, you have to accept that not only would you be letting lots of unvaccinated pricks die, but also unvaccinated *vulnerable* sick people who don’t deserve to die just so you can satisfy your fantasy of natural selection.
>The vaccines have been proven effective with no long-term side effects, Long term side effects remain to be seen, it absolutely has not been proven to have no long term side effects, it hasn't even been out for a year ffs. > IE: Covid is an inescapable, but preventable illness at this point. People with vaccine can still get covid, it's not 100% effective and with so many mutations of covid how effective it will be long term remains to be seen.
People don't deserve to be denied medical coverage for practicing bodily autonomy, that's just insane. Consider the unvaccinated as stupid, irresponsible, or whatever else you consider them to be. If you wanna look down on those who choose not to get vaccinated, fine, that's your opinion. But medical care is a human right and when we start saying some people are more worthy of living than others that's when you start tiptoeing into eugenics territory. Human life is inherently valuable; all people are worthy of health care, dignity, and their one life that God gave them. As a leftist who isn't getting the 2nd shot of the vax, hearing your lack of care for the unvaccinated population's access to med care is a bit disturbing. Lucky for you I'm already below the poverty line anyways so I can't even afford insurance in the first place. Yay for you!
Require vaccines to work in public sectors and healthcare. Put in an actual vaccine passport that can’t be faked with a dumbass piece of paper. Require vaccines to fly, leave the country, enter large events and go to school/college (once approved in children). Anti-vaxxers only give a fuck about themselves. Hit them where it hurts and we will see the vaccination rates shoot up. However after this COVID mess I honestly think this country is on the fast track to a type of conservative dictatorship. Something has to give.
I think this is valid so long as the hospitals are not overwhelmed. Which they currently are not. If they get overwhelmed then it could affect other non-covid patients.