The Plague of the Poor(tabletmag.com) |
The Plague of the Poor(tabletmag.com) |
What stands out is the authors’ favor of natural immunity being better than vaccination.
It may well be, but it has this small caveat that you need to have had the virus to become naturally immune. E.g. you need to take that 1-2% of not surviving entirely, and if too many people take that chance at the same time, even higher.
> During lockdowns, essential and frontline workers bore the brunt of COVID-19 cases while affluent professionals stayed home, teleworked, and ordered delivery. These workers were once called “heroes.” Now the Zoom class labels the same workers “anti-vaxxers” if they prefer to rely on the natural immunity many of them have already acquired from previous infections.
Also, it is extremely hard to scientifically and politically account for recovery as proof of vaccination. In some European countries, it sort of works, when you have good standards on how exactly to determine and track infection and recovery. Even then there are tradeoffs, because the immunity after vaccination is much better studied and much more predictable.
The politicalization of the vaccine is foolish and unscientific.
The goal isn't to have everyone reach a specific level of immunity. It's to get the highest possible level of immunity that is possible without taking on additional risks.
I think you're confusing cause and effect here. The politicization of the vaccine is the reason the government is now pushing vaccine mandates and such, not a reaction to it. If Fox News had spent the last year telling its viewers that seat belts make you sterile, the government would be raising fines and ramping up enforcement and generally adopting policies to force people to wear seat belts, right? And some of those policies would inevitably look like overreach, and people would be writing essays like this one complaining about that overreach.
Also, while "natural immunity" may be better in some cases, it is much more unpredictable. We can't even tell for how long that natural immunity is good enough at all.
Just look at the first paragraph:
> he stated that these measures were necessary to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” But isn’t the vaccine itself supposed to be what protects the vaccinated? Not well enough, apparently. So whose interests are served by mandating a leaky vaccine that prevents neither infection nor transmission of a disease that is chiefly dangerous to people over 75 or with serious preexisting medical conditions?
Any competent scientist could easily explain that even with an extremely effective vaccine (which Pfizer and Moderna are, at least in relation to virtually any other vaccine, not the "leaky vaccine" he wants to imply), risk will still be high if there is widespread community transmission. This is not a difficult concept to understand, it's simply basic math with any vaccine that has less than 100% effectiveness (i.e. all of them).
Besides, I've always interpreted more of "protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated" is that our ICUs we're very recently filled to capacity overwhelmingly due to unvaccinated people getting sick, and that has serious negative consequences on everyone.
We do know that a vaccination after recovery results in even better immunity than natural immunity alone.
So it's much cheaper to just vaccinate them and KNOW they are immune, rather than indulge in a massive bureaucratic nightmare about test results...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
According to oft cited data early on, many people were naturally resistant (perhaps not immune) from similarly packaged (viral envelope) coronaviruses with less dangerous infections, including a 2019-2020 season variant of the common cold.
I don't see those articles anymore. It was also supported by data (and cited by clinicians including at the Mayo Clinic) that folks with current MMR vaccinations and the tuberculosis vaccination given in India tended to test as resistant.
Anyway, just data points from real medical data at a research institute of international reknown not cited...
"Covid Confusion at the CDC"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-breakthrou...
"...The CDC’s failure to report meaningful data has left policy makers flying blind. In the absence of good data to answer the basic questions Americans have been asking, political opinions have filled the vacuum. Strong data might have prevented much of the polarization over Covid.
Sound data from the CDC has been especially lacking on natural immunity from prior Covid infection. On Aug. 25, Israel published the most powerful and scientifically rigorous study on the subject to date. In a sample of more than 700,000 people, natural immunity was 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic infections..."
"...Despite this evidence, U.S. public health officials continue to dismiss natural immunity, insisting that those who have recovered from Covid must still get the vaccine. Policy makers and public health leaders, and the media voices that parrot them, are inexplicably sticking to their original hypothesis that natural immunity is fleeting, even as at least 15 studies show it lasts..."
"...The CDC did put out a study on natural immunity last month, forcefully concluding that vaccinated immunity was 2.3 times better than natural immunity. The CDC used these results to justify telling those with natural immunity to get vaccinated.
But the rate of infection in each group was less than 0.01%, meaning infections were exceedingly rare in the short two-month time period the agency chose to study. This is odd, given there are more than a year of data available. Moreover, despite having data on all 50 states, the CDC only reported data from Kentucky. Was Kentucky the only state that produced the desired result? Why else exclude the same data from the other 49 states?
Some public health officials are afraid to acknowledge natural immunity because they fear some will choose infection over vaccination. But leaders can encourage all Americans who aren’t immune to get vaccinated and be transparent with the data at the same time..."
"Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity: reinfections versus breakthrough infections"
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
-------------------------
Conclusions:
"This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity. Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant."
-------------------------
Author lost me there, I'm afraid.
Although regional numbers vary of course, in my state the death rate by county has averaged between 0.0004 and 0.0032 percent.
Or, in decimal notation, 0.000004-0.000032
These numbers were calculated based on the Covid data repository maintained by the New York Times (https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data) and US Census data (http://www.census.gov/).
0.000004 * 320,000,000 = 1,280 deaths for the entire USA. Your higher estimate yields 10,240 deaths. In reality we’ve had at least 700,000 deaths.
For those who are infected, the naive Case Fatality Rate is about 1-2%. See for example, https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid There are reasons to suspect the real rate is lower in several countries - many places under test cases, so the denominator in deaths/cases is too small.
Additionally, this rate isn’t static - we were seeing upwards of 10% death rates before effective treatments became known and available.
Since 30 to 40 percent of humans experience no illness with this thing the denominator can be quite different depending on what you use for it. Notwithstanding that...
John's Hopkins Website https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda759474...
USA
Total Cases Total Deaths
44,318,179 712,975 1.6%
This is with oxygen support and whatever treatments have been used.
In Mexico where health care seems harder to access
Total Cases Total Deaths
3,720,545 281,958 ~7.6%
So IF you get sick and you don't have modern medicine it's a serious disease.
IF you are one of the lucky 30..40% it's a piece of cake. Flip a coin.
- a significant portion of the US-Population (my remark: similar to other western countries) is not willing to take the shot
- a huge proportion of which are underprivileged, from "working classes"
- the pharmaceutical companies have a gigantic financial leverage, in total $1.3 trillion. (My remark: an example from Germany: Biontech Investors: Thomas & Andreas Strüngmann (Hexal) €48 billion; Biontech Founders: Özlem Türeci & Uğur Şahin: €13.5 billion.)
- basic violations of informed and voluntary consent
- criminal past ("Pfizer paid out the biggest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history as part of a $2.3 billion fine for illegal marketing, along with numerous other penalties.")
- revolving door (Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA who accelerated the agency’s drug approval process, now sits on Pfizer’s board.)
- lobbying spending etc.
So, if one is willing to step outside the danger of being killed or seriously harmed by the virus, it is actually scary from a mere power standpoint, a trojan horse for totalitarian elements which once installed are very difficult to get rid of.
Basically there are broadly two camps: One side is afraid of the virus the other side is afraid of losing their freedoms. And they are each accusing one another to be "over-sensitive" to the point that there is barley any exchange anymore but an adherence to be on the "right side" of history, science whatever. This split can be observed way before, the recent one with Trump. And from my perspective the long underlying mechanism (beginning with the 70's) is indeed the ever greater gap between the rich and the poor.
So my point: take the fears of the persons around you seriously, however irrational they seem to you. Social media is a very bad representation since it is designed for the single purpose to capture your attention. Try to take the conscious effort from time to time to get out of your bubble in which you were socialized. And then, try not to lecture immediately but instead listen and perceive the real persons before you, their motiviations, their stories etc.
The perspectives were interesting. I won't get into all the details here. I'll just say that the well-reasoned opinions spanned a range.
The teachers had legitimate concerns about their safety while teaching in-person classes. One of them told me that the students pull down their masks all the time and that it is impossible to enforce it (she even said it was somewhat cruel for some). Yet she was genuinely concerned about her safety and that of her family.
A tech executive, older than the rest of the group, said he waited as long as possible before getting vaccinated because he wanted to see more data. Or, to be more accurate, he said something like: I wanted to give it enough time to see if fully vaccinated people were going to end-up in the hospital because of the vaccine. He was concerned about potential long term issues (a decade or more). In the end he reasoned he is old enough that he was far more likely to die from something else anyway, so, in his case, the potential for long term effects could be discounted.
Everyone in this gathering was vaccinated, yet, vaccine hesitancy came up in a number of conversations. There were also threads about the idea of the government forcing people to do something with their bodies under threat of losing their jobs, not being able to travel, not being able to go to any public places, etc. In many ways it is an argument that rhymes with the abortion debate: In that case we (well, some of us) believe it is the woman's right to choose. In other words, the government should not have anything to do with a woman's body. And yet, with vaccines, we accept being forced to inject a substance under threat of harm? It's an interesting and very complex comparison.
If I had to summarize the various conversations I would say everybody there wants everyone to be vaccinated. The difference is in how different people think we ought to get there. Some were OK with forcing the issue, others though it was a potentially dangerous precedent.
As is always the case, when you have in-person conversations with people you can actually explore issues in a far more civilized and informative way, everyone is respectful and there is no down-voting or flagging. Just people talking and sharing ideas. Refreshing when compared to the shit show online discussions often turn into.
Anti-vaxxers need help. The path is education, not a hammer over the head. They are not elementary school dropouts without teeth. They come in all shapes, sizes, races and levels of education.
For example in the UK vaccination rates amongst Conservative and Labour voters are the same.
So why is there such disparity in the US between Biden voters and Trump voters when it comes to Covid-denialism, pseudo-cures, and antivaxxing?
The poor don't care about authoritarianism. They care about having jobs, people coming into their stores, and their children going to daycare.
The poor suffer when the state does not function and does not do its job. Countries like China, both Taiwan and the mainland, Singapore, Vietnam even New Zealand and a few others avoided much harm to the poor by means of crushing the disease. They avoided both economic and disease burden by taking strong measures that anyone in Western Europe would have flinched about. (and then I had to live through anyway during three different lockdowns in Europe after live in China returned to normal in summer 2020.)
Vaccine passports suck but not because they're too authoritarian but because they're not authoritarian enough. They're half measures done by governments that were too indecisive to go all the way, at the expense of the most vulnerable in society.
Reading an anti-vax article afraid of authoritarianism after a crisis caused by weak and dysfunctional governance is like some sort of comedy. As if someone wrote an article in 2010 arguing the financial crisis harmed the poor because we regulated the financial sector too heavily or something
> Countries like China, both Taiwan and the mainland, Singapore, Vietnam even New Zealand and a few others avoided much harm to the poor by means of crushing the disease.
The rural poor were likely fine. I do think there's an uneven impact of self-isolation for the urban poor, though. Wealthy people have more space, meaning more options for things you can do inside and less clashes over personal space. They're also more likely to live in an area where they can get to a green space without violating a curfew.
How much would someone have to pay you to self-isolate for a year in an apartment in the bottom 10% of rents in your city?
Should I keep reading? I think not
If people want to convince me, they need to lead with their strongest evidence.
There’s value in reading things that fall outside your preferred narrative. But that’s not an excuse to value everything, no matter how far removed from reality it is.
But, if you disagree, by all means feast yourself.
> almost half of the COVID-19 cases in hospitals are mild or asymptomatic
Why on earth would asymptomatic people be hospitalized?
And “mild” just means “you are not at immediate risk of death,” not “it’s going to be an easy illness.”
So back to the hospital we went, just in case it was a reaction. They gave her some IV fluids and sent us home after 2 hours.
So there’s one. I bet a good portion of them are people freaking out once they realize they have it as a considerable portion of the population thinks the survival rate is ridiculously low.
Testing patients is reasonable. If they are counted in the statistic, it can easily be misleading. Not sure if that's the case.
In New York City it is now 40% of Black adults fully vaccinated, 49% at least 1 dose. Numbers for whites are 57% and 61%. (Latinos are 63% and 76%, Asians 89% and 91%).
For the people most at risk, those 65 and older, it is currently 57% fully vaccinated 60% at least one dose for Blacks. The numbers are 60% and 63% for whites, 64% and 67% for Latinos, and 82% and 87% for Asians.
Data: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.p...
Here's another well-done analysis, by the Kaiser Family Foundation:
https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...
What I find interesting is that the rate of vaccination is higher in Hispanic and Black groups than Whites, so the gap in the cumulative numbers of vaccinations is slowly closing (this is most clearly visible in Figure 3, which shows a timeline).
If the article has a message it cerianly isn't found in the writing.
What I find truly repellent are highly educated and erudite people who spend huge effort on developing tortured arguments supporting their own agendas - such as to subvert the institutions of the United States in order to usher in an eternal Trumpian dictatorship.
The measles vaccine is not 100% effective.
The smallpox vaccine is not 100% effective.
"By one estimate" and statistics drawn from single rogue studies are not a decent or proper basis for an argument like this, this is not a court of law when precedent and legal text are fundamentals - this is science where the aggregate of evidence and analysis is used to support provisional hypothesis.
This kind of thing is disingenuous and malicious and corrosive to society. The author should be drummed out of wherever but since that's Twitter I'm not sure that that would be good thing or a bad thing.
In other news : just get the vaccine.
Except those few occasions where a single experiment/paper/observation can throw out an entire field. It is rare, but science remains open to the possibility that even the most treasured law can be invalidated by a single, repeatable, experiment.
Is this true in the US? It seems unreasonable.
What I've seen in the EU is that antibodies and frequent PCR testing are deemed just as acceptable as vaccination, and I think it makes sense.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Your comment does sound a lot like confirmation bias.
This seems very, very concerning and presents a conflict of interest. Can someone help me understand how that is not the case?
It is far more pronounced in the US than it is in other western countries. There was an interesting article on that yesterday in USA Today, but it is so paywalled I can't even get a reasonable link there, but here it is on Yahoo [1].
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/cambodia-canada-dozens-other-nations-...
For me, the past two years will go down in history as a spectacular example of marketing messaging.
We set the precedent for forced vaccination nearly a century ago. There is no slippery slope here, or at least if there is we already slid down the hill and are resting comfortably on flat ground.
> It is rarely acknowledged that this decision also made possible the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, in which the court determined: “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” This ruling legitimized eugenics laws and led to 70,000 forced sterilizations in the United States
Many people still don't trust forced medical proceedings.
Like NYC and Boston famously have a "fuck you, mind you own business" stereotype contrasted with a rural stereotype expectation of cooperating for the community.
I think the higher order bit is Repliblicans pushing an anti-institutional agenda more recently (including Trump saying bad things about historically conservative institutions like the FBI) which naturally lines up with an antivax agenda.
And creationism vs. evolution, and global warming denial, and the "Trump won" big lie, etc... See a pattern here?
I call it anti-science ignorance.
And, it's not anti-science for the sake of anti-science. It's part of an overall anti-establishment theme. The point of it is to sell people on the idea that they are under attack and only one party (man) is their savior. To do that, they have to cleave people away from reality. So, it's all mistrust built primarily on misinformation and conspiracy theories, whether it's Q or COVID.
And, voilà: with these grievances and fears so viciously stoked, you now have an army of programmed drones under your command who believe they're fighting an existential war for their freedom vs simply being asked to be a responsible member of society.
That's how you end up with people like this woman, who are closer to the center of the party than many people want to admit:
https://mobile.twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1447211987717...
I will now have some of your downvotes.
Now that Biden is president, it is apparently a different vaccine (for both sides of the aisle)
See https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/23/tiktok-pos...
Also not necessarily in the first or second wave...
> If people want to convince me, they need to lead with their strongest evidence.
Yes and:
I considered myself a Popperian. I used to think discourse and reason could solve all of our problems. Ha.
How do I talk to my creationist (for instance) family members? What can I say that hasn't been said before?
I can't. And even if I could, I don't have the resources or wherewithal to counterbalance the tsunami of noise.
So I adapted.
One consequence is I'm now a predictionist. Whatever that's called. (Utilitarian?) For public discourse, rhetoric, policy I no longer care about base truth, objective reality.
Just make some predictions and stand by them. How does a belief in creationism, young earth, supply side economics, herd immunity, or whatever (for instances) help me navigate the world?
As I aged, I had less drive to refute every utterance about astrology (for instance). Now I no longer feel compelled or obligated to refute any other given cult.
Okay, I think that's my rant. Oh my god, family can push our buttons.
Any risk is stupid if you already have better immunity than taking the vaccine. Once again, other diseases are handled exactly like this. Vaccine if you haven't had it, and no vaccine if you have. Doctors recognize that adding risk is a bad idea.
I like to always highlight not to reduce reality to a single variable, when the correct model contains so many we can't even enumerate them.
I also try very hard not to be told what to think. This requires work. Sadly our society, perhaps fueled by social media, sees individuals who "know" the truth about all kinds of subjects. In quotes because, more often than not, what they believe is in a range between false, a fantasy or, at best, inaccurate or incomplete.
We all know that the concept of vaccines (isolated from any particular event or case, just the idea) is good. From there to always religiously equate "vaccine" to "good" is a mistake. Even worse, label those who do not want to get vaccinated as stupid, well, to be kind, potentially uninformed.
We need more conversation and less hatred.
Issues rarely boil down to a single variable. Through conversation we often learn about the hundred or more we might have missed because we "know" the truth as it was told to us.
So yes, to me it sounds massively more complicated and expensive than just getting two harmless vaccinations.
So if we correct by that 40% factor the USA goes to 1% death rate or roughly 10X influenza.
Mexico becomes 4.5%. Not insignificant.
Without being too flippant, I believe the pro-Eugenics society the court came from would have found a way to twist any precedent or lack thereof to justify eugenics. Some of the same members of that court went on to sanction imprisonment and property theft from thousands of people without even the pretense of crime other than their race.
I also want to point out the current rules (and what most ppl are advocating for) aren’t forced medical proceedings. Truly involuntarily medical proceedings have almost exclusively been abused.
Everyone is free to not receive a vaccine, they just have some negative consequences for doing so.
It turns out the inconvenience of not being able to go to a restaurant was hugely compelling in France, for instance.
I’m sensitive to the fact that threats to livelihood don’t feel very voluntary. In the US, the threat to livelihood isn’t from the government. There is no national vaccine mandate - just an annoying testing mandate the vaccinated get to skip out on.
And again, she is just one example among very very many.
Harris is saying that if Dr. Fauci says to take it she would regardless of what Trump says, and that if Trump says to take it but Dr. Fauci does not she would not take it.
People need to remember the goal is to eliminate the threat, not get everyone vaccinated. These are two different things. Ignoring post-COVID immunity studies just makes officials look unscientific and doesn't contribute to the final goal. Being unscientific puts you at the same level as hucksters. Getting rid of health care workers that risked it all and put a huge strain on their families is just plain dumb and ungrateful. The idea they don't know the whole story is baffling.
For you perhaps, but some people have the terminal goal of avoiding vaccination, even if that increases the threat. That is why the government is doing anything and everything, including FUD, to push vaccines down peoples' throats. Their actions will always seem irrational if you ignore that.
The single simplest summation of the concept of evil is "the end justifies the means".
Vaccine mandates are now down the path of forbidding us to choose what we do with our own bodies.
This is a very, very dangerous path.
Punishing nurses that have aquired immunity via natural infection will hopefully be considered criminal in a not too far away future. Fortunately there are very few places in the world that thinks that doing so is a good idea.
You may not like that CNN endorses vaccination, but you'd be hard pressed to catch them in even a simple incorrect statement, much less an intentional lie, let alone at the same order of magnitude. It is hard not to endorse vaccination if you understand the science.
"If Trump tells us to take it [The Vaccine], I won't" - Kamala Harris
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/2020-vp-debate-kamala-harris-o...
Why? Germany and many other countries don't differentiate between forms of immunity.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-require-proof-c...
However, given the dysfunction in our system, and given that hybrid immunity seems much better than either vaccine-induced or disease induced[1], the decision to require vaccines for everybody does make sense.
Wouldn't this apply to getting a vaccine, what makes tracking a diagnostic test so much more difficult? People could just have a photo of their positive test, just like they have a photo of their vaccine card...
Note: My last Moderna shot was in Feb, and its been radio silence and we passed the six month mark and are about to pass the eight month mark. I would hope they get done with whatever evaluation they are doing soon.
Looking at my vaccine card, there is nothing special like a ID number or even a signature from a doctor.
The stickers for each shot have the name of the vaccine and a lot #, so that might be the tough part, but the lot numbers are screwy. The first one is a ###A##-#A sequence and the second one is a ###A##A sequence. Not sure if there is a national tracking database on that part. No barcode for easy scanning so it probably isn't checkable.
My Dad's testing cards (The VA was doing a test for every appointment so he got tested three times in two weeks because he was having a non-COVID related issue) had a doctor's signature and the results.
That's a rather strong way to describe someone who refuses to implement a policy you like.
You might be right, a natural immunity exemption might be sound policy. I personally tend to agree. But you can't make the case for it by pretending that opposition to it is based in ignorance or evil, if the opposition is due to the concern that people who would abuse it and the result would be more deaths.
This kind of illogical policy gives fuel to antivaxers.
Also, this article provides some arguments based more on biology. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/prior-infection-vs-v...
There is such a thing as testing for neutralizing antibodies by testing the antibodies against the virus directly. But in general, all of the relevant tests seem to be more expensive and harder to standardize.
Every human body creates its own set of antibodies against the virus (or the vaccine). Starting from different strains of the virus, the potential for uncertainty is too great.
Not OP, but if arguing against it is anti-vaxx, then I guess you should call me anti-vaxx and I'll call you unreasonable.
Anti-vaxers hate all vaccines. Most of this thread is about following actual science and practices used for other vaccines. If you've had it, then don't get the vaccine, otherwise get the vaccine.
And those who argue the most don't really argue about "they don't need the vaccine", but rather assume the vaccine is much bigger risk or damage than is at all reasonable. And that, yes, puts you very close to the "anti-vaxx" bubble.
Comirnaty had hundreds of millions of doses administered so far, and maybe - maybe - one woman died of myocarditis. This is nothing to potentially hundreds of thousands of prevented fatalities, much less the unpleasant to severe bouts of Covid-19.
Why is it riskier and to whom?
Next you are going to tell me you know of a vaccine-related car crash.
Please revisit your priors or who you put trust in, as they might as well lie.
Not sure what else to tell you. The math suggests this is unlikely. But here it is.
Edit: also, nice edit changing it from "next I'll tell you that car accidents are marked as COVID deaths." I didn't say that and have no data on that so I appreciate you changing it.
You might not believe in democracy, but this is still a better system than autocracy. Even if you were right (hint: you're not), this is setting a very dangerous precedent than can and will be abused down the line.
Legal requirements are shaped by such "conveniences" all the time. Of course you wouldn't need a driver's license if you could argue with a police officer at a traffic stop that you are qualified to drive, had no DOIs etc. It's a lot easier though to require a driving test and a current license.
Same thing with the vaccination.
> how complicated the testing is or how many health providers and labs there are.
AFAIK, you can actually test blood reactivity to virus protein, proving a positive.
I'm not sure how you would prove that a person actually got vaccinated and it wasn't the case of doctor pouring vaccine down the drain, someone else taking the vaccine instead etc.
She is clearly referring to the potential scenario back last year when Trump could be pushing for a vaccine to be approved and released that did not satisfy scientific medical standards, just to benefit in the election. That stance doesn't fit in a few seconds of sound bite, of course.
That the left was also guilty of politicizing the vaccine & throwing doubting on its safety when it was politically expedient.
Nor did Kamala Harris throw doubt on an existing and proven vaccine. No vaccine had been approved at that point, whereas Trump was blundering through the pandemic response in search of any way to save his political hide. There was a lot of evidence Trump put pressure on public health officials to downplay the pandemic and put people at more risk than necessary.
Trump had already been known to be conman before he was elected. Everything we learned since only put more details on that fact.
(I will concede that, in implying that Trump would push people to get a vaccine before it was ready, she was wildly wrong.)
Exactly, she (the left) also politicized the vaccine. QED
The fear that Trump might push an unproven, unsatisfactory vaccine, was legitimate. Doing so would have damaged the actual vaccination campaign immensely.
Too great for what? Even with 2 jabs, the immunity is <90% against Delta and research shows post-covid immunity is more effective.
Nor is it clear who actually has a "more effective" or even "sufficiently effective" immunity, given that the infection could be up to a year or more ago, and almost nobody knows exactly what strain they got. And no, you can't tell any of that easily, reliably or cheaply by antibody testing.
Proof of vaccination is the cheapest and most reliable proof of a reasonable chance of immunity.
And yes, standardizing such testing, as complicated and expensive as it is, across all the relevant labs across the country would be a bureaucratic nightmare.
I'm not going to engage with your bullshit about doctors faking vaccinations.
Fake vaccinations[3], including fake certificates are popular, especially when they are forced. If you want a fake vaccination, I know a guy who knows a guy. Point is - it's not bullshit.
Yes, checking certificates is easier than testing for antibodies. While harder, I still think antibody tests would have less false positives and I most certainly don't think the relative easiness to administer vaccines is a good reason to require everyone to take them, even when they are more immune then those who only got the vaccine.
A friend had an antibody test as he already had covid and didn't want to go for a vaccine. It was no big deal.
[1] https://www.covid.is/sub-categories/travel-to-and-within-ice...
[2] https://www.landlaeknir.is/um-embaettid/greinar/grein/item43...
I don't even know how Iceland's health system is organized. But it would be a good bet that it is light years ahead of the mess of the 52 states plus territories and whatever! Much different story.
Nor does it actually prove any immunity against disease. You can only assume that these antibodies probe prior contact to the virus and that this prior contact resulted in a robust response. The strength of the immunity cannot be inferred from such titres...
It can have false negatives, making people needlessly take a vaccine, so everyone should take the vaccine in the name of equality?
Vaccine certificates neither prove you actually got the vaccine (though highly likely), nor do they prove any immunity against disease (though fairly likely).
With this level of arguments, I can argue noone should be permitted to take the vaccine.
You probably can't understand (and don't want to) why that is not the case for people who got infected at some unknown random point in the past and with an unknown, random variant of the Virus. And I don't care to explain it to you.
And you probably also don't want to understand why those lab tests aren't designed, regulated or approved as a proof of immunity. To be rigorous enough, probably every single lab would have to do control studies to find out if their tests predict immunity against reinfection.
They did exist, were 6+ months and several stages into trials & were given temporary authorization only 2 months latter.
She fomented fear & distrust about the safety of vaccines to score talking points in a debate. Not sure why you think she should get a free pass.
Trump admitted in interviews with Bob Woodward that he was lying about the pandemic. What more proof do you need for him to be completely untrustworthy on the topic?
About what?
> The vaccines weren't approved yet, end of story.
They weren't fully approved until about 6 weeks ago. They had gone through several massive trials and government approvals when she implied the vaccines were unsafe a year ago on national television.
The odds that 5 people in a row have such serious side effect is 1/10^25. That is equivalent to tossing 83 coins in a row and getting all heads.
Which is more likelier. 1/10^25 or that you have false information regarding this. : )
Edit, here's some corrections:
This isn't 5 people in a row who had issues, it's 5 people within 4 nodes of distance in their social network. 4 nodes of distance is a lot of people, probably around 200,000 - 2,000,000.
The odds of having severe complications from the vaccine are about 1 in 100,000.
Therefore, everyone should expect to have 2-20 people within 4 nodes of their social network to have severe complications from the vaccine.
The mistake is not realizing the absolutely massive amount of people within 4 nodes of distance in your social network.
The other massive issue I see here is that there should also be somewhere around 500 covid deaths in the same pool of people that produced these 5 people with vaccine complications. The fact that they are focused on the 5 and not the 500 speaks heavily to their biases.
Keep in mind, all of this also assumes that what they're saying is 100% accurate, and these complications were definitely caused by the vaccine, and were not a coincidence. In truth, for every 1 person that has complications with the vaccine, 10-100x had the unlucky coincidence of something bad occurring that would have happened even if they hadn't gotten the vaccine.
There are around 200 strokes per 100 000 people per year [1].
And number of "heart issues" is even more, only deaths because of heart issues are around ~170 per 100k people per year.
Correlation is not causation.
[1] https://www.world-stroke.org/assets/downloads/WSO_Global_Str...
Same guy as before. I know of two people who temporarily lost taste and I heard of one person who died from COVID, a coworker's uncle.
You can rationalize this however you like, but these are the cases I'm aware of.
Definition of social circle is "A social circle is a group of socially interconnected people". I doubt anyone would complain about having a small social circle if it contained 2M people. :)
What you have calculated:
(using 4 deaths at 1e-6 odds, because it's simpler and still gives 10x better odds at 1e-24)
Taking 4 death row inmates, jabbing them with AstraZeneca and expecting all 4 of them to die.
What you have not calculated:
Jabbing 1e9 people, 10k of them developing serious issues (expected prior) and there being a multi-hop connection between 5 of them. Two of them actually being brothers (familial clustering), and some with issues likely more prevalent so not even from the 10k group (1/1e5 cutoff).
Otherwise you're just arguing with double standards trying to console insecurity.
The implied qualification of - there exists a HN-er so divide by 1e9 to get odds - is nowhere close to accounting for the additional degrees of freedom from the social graph.
> My daughter's bf's friends mom
"My dad's coworker" - 2 steps
"my wife's brothers" - 2 steps
"My daughter's bf's friends mom" - 4 steps
"A friend" - 1 step
He might have a small social circle, but even a small circle is going to explode exponentially when you start hoping outwards. By the 4th jump, you're going to start seeing extreme numbers regardless of how small your personal social circle is.
Thanks.