Vaccines that have a large impact on transmission and infection are there not just for you but for your community.
The covid shots were good against hospitalization and death in older folks, but they were not great at preventing infection or transmission (despite what you may have gleaned from the speakers blaring ads in every public setting for all that time).
You can fall back to the "flooding the hospitals" argument, that works a little better here.
You're misinterpreting data here. You are conflating the fact that the clinical trials didn't measure infection/transmission (which is very hard to do in a clinical trial) with the distinct claim that they didn't reduce transmission in reality.
The vaccines were extremely effective at reducing transmission during the first waves of COVID, where such an intervention was most valuable. And due to viral growth dynamics, even small reductions in transmission yield big net outcomes.
Later waves made the vaccine much less effective at reducing transmission, but still highly effective at reducing hospital utilization which is (despite your snarky aside), extremely valuable. Fatality rates doubled when ERs hit full capacity.
All I'm saying is if you sum up the time (between vaccine release and today) that a person was strongly protected from covid infection and transmission, it's a relatively small portion of that time.
Thats my pushback against gp's argument that you have to give this thing to your young kids to protect me.
I suspect that you and GP and GGP are talking about different time scales.
Vaccinating your children for COVID during peak COVID was the right thing to do both for them and for the adults they interact with.
Vaccinating your children for COVID today is much lower ROI for them and anyone around them.
Vaccinating your children in general is very much the right thing to do, both for them and for anyone around them.
I struggle to think of a decision or conversation where the relevant metric is "what % of time from vaccination until today were you protected" and I doubt that's what GP was discussing either.
> Vaccinating your children in general is very much the right thing to do, both for them and for anyone around them.
Isn't this kinda like saying medicating your children in general is very much the right thing to do?
Like it's obviously one of those things that everyone expects you to just agree with directionally, but the actually correct answer is no, there is no in general. All drugs have a context where they make sense. E.g. you're probably not vaccinating your kids for rabies, unless you live in an animal sanctuary or something. MMR, sure.
It actually seems pretty questionable to me that it was ever a net benefit to your average young kid to get the covid shots.
No there actually is in general and it's the same exact way in which there's generally good guidance for medicating your children: they're called evidence-backed guidelines.
The contexts in which drugs make sense is captured by the clinical guidelines.
And sure, it is arguably questionable whether there was ever a net benefit to an average young kid to get a COVID vaccine. However that is a distinct claim from "it never made sense to give kids COVID vaccines." There was certainly a point in time in which a logical interpretation of the information available at the time indicated that kids should get vaccinated. The risks were (correctly) understood to be near-zero and the benefits were (arguably incorrectly) understood to be significant.
Someone who, in early 2021, decided against vaccinating their children was making a decision that was not indicated by the best-available information at that time.
Someone who bets on Red doesn't get to claim they were "correct" in betting on Red even if Red comes up, and certainly not if Green comes up (arguably neutral outcome).
This is the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" argument. It works in a world where you have trustworthy institutions and its safe to just outsource your decision-making to the authorities.
Your interpretation of events might be that a collective of all well meaning people just got it wrong, and that's your right. A lot of people ended up with different conclusions, like the machine did what it does and made a lot of money, the truth be damned.
Not really. It's the "making decisions based on best-available evidence is good, even if every once in a while it leads you astray."
You're more than welcome to read the evidence they use to create their policies. If you have evidence that is of higher quality than that which "the authorities" are using, then you should depend on that!
But... you almost certainly don't have higher quality evidence than they do. That's the fundamental problem.
If you think that you do, then you too could actually make a fuckton of money with that information. But again: you don't have superior information.
I don't think people even got it wrong. They got it correct with the information available, and they for the most part got it right even in retrospect.
I did read a lot of evidence available at the time. It's why I opted to skip the vaccine for myself given that I had already recovered shortly before the shots were available. That decision was very at odds with authoritative guidance at the time. You'd think I was a damn leper, yet that decision seems to have held up pretty well.
I also frequently tested before any gatherings, and avoided contact when I had any kinds of symptoms, test or not. I saw plenty of people figure they had gotten the shots so why not go out with the sniffles?
"Best information" and what was blasted out of the TV or considered "common sense" at the time I think have quite a bit of daylight between them.
What gives you the idea that a low-risk person opting not to get the vaccine is "at odds with authoritative guidance?" Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. Not sure that can be pinned on public health authorities. People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.
Answer: no. Go get tested, and if positive, don't gather.
Yes, agreed that people were listening primarily to a game of telephone and vibes and not actually reading any of the linked PDFs or listening to the actual words spoken by actual public health officials firsthand, and then they (like you are now) were confused about what the actual guidance said.
I misspoke, right at rollout when supplies were short, they did say you could wait. Once they had enough to sell, everyone who didn't jump in line was a grandma killer.
> Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. ... People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.
This is asinine. There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else, and by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.
Also, I made the choice with my doctor's agreement.
> by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.
Short of vaccination yes, you were. But also people have no way to actually trust anything you say, whereas even saying that you aren't vaccinated (again, correctly) indicates quite a lot about some combination of your information, selfishness, or care for others.
For example, if you had gone around thinking or saying "I'm not vaccinated because prior infection protections me (and therefore you)" you would have been wrong. That's why people's alarm bells go off when you go around saying that you're not vaccinated.
This entire conversation is a validation of their heuristics. You're acting like public health authorities said X and then they didn't, or acting like there's no evidence of Y when there is, and then saying "see I didn't get vaccinated!" is exactly what everyone was cuing into: this is almost certainly either a confused or selfish person, or both.
You might consider reading the actual Kentucky study (as I did at the time) and looking at the limitations. This and the one in October are exactly the kind of shit that would get published and then reports like your link would way overstate what they were actually capable of showing.
Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.
You're misunderstanding btw, I didn't go around telling anyone but my closest friends and family. I wasnt about to out myself as a heretic when the likely biggest propaganda campaign in history was going on (pandemic of the unvaccinated, etc). It was mostly in hn threads on studies like the ones you posted where I would say anything about it.
And yes, all studies have limitations, especially observational studies done in the middle of an emergency.
Here's your claim: "There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else"
That is quite obviously false.
If you believe there was superior data available at the time, please share it. Otherwise, yes that is exactly what the data showed (imperfect as all data is).
> Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.
Like which studies? (Not that more recent studies could've possibly time-traveled to inform your decision-making in the past, of course).
A reasonable prior (which my doctor ascribed to) was that immunity after recovery from an infection with a coronavirus would be pretty durable and effective, and you can find plenty of reporting to support the effectiveness early on.
To believe otherwise would take some solid evidence, and maybe the Kentucky study is enough to convince you, but it was not enough to convince me (or apparently my doctor, though we didn't talk about that).
It even said this: Finally, this is a retrospective study design using data from a single state during a 2-month period; therefore, these findings cannot be used to infer causation.
So maybe "any indication" was too strong. How about any convincing indication?
There were others as well, I was following this very closely because it seemed pretty important to not be wrong, and all of the messaging was very insistent.
The study you linked is evidence that prior infection reduces the rate of reinfection. Yes, this would be surprising if it were not true.
Your prior claim was that prior infection is equivalent to or superior to vaccination (i.e. relying on prior infection was not "heightened risk"). That was, and remains, completely false.
"Conclusions: Naturally acquired immunity confers stronger protection against infection and symptomatic disease caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 2-dose vaccine-indued immunity."
During May–November 2021, case and hospitalization rates were highest among persons who were unvaccinated without a previous diagnosis. Before Delta became the predominant variant in June, case rates were higher among persons who survived a previous infection than persons who were vaccinated alone. By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone."
"That was, and remains, completely false."
Would you like to amend your claim? You might have an argument if you stick to "could have been false for short periods of time after people were freshly vaccinated", but otherwise that's pretty indefensible.
You are again misunderstanding the data and its relevance to what we're talking about.
The vaccine protection was not superior for a short period after vaccination. It was superior for the initial variant. We've already established the vaccines became much less effective at reducing transmission in subsequent waves. You've just shared an article that says the Delta wave evaded vaccines for transmission. Yes, that's correct.
How on earth could the Delta variant's evasion have informed your decision not to get vaccinated?
By my "that was and remains false", I am saying it was not only apparently false at the time, but it has been confirmed to be actually false retrospectively as well.
OK, so I think I understand your position now: I made a single decision early on in the pandemic that I wasn't going to get vaccinated, and somehow your links from late 2021 (ie weak evidence that didn't even exist when I was deciding) were sufficient evidence that my one decision was obviously and completely wrong.
In reality, it was a continuous decision: does the totality of evidence coming out suggest I should go get the shots today? And it never definitvely got to that point, and over time the decision became better supported, not less.
You seem to understand the evidence differently. I'll grant you that maybe at some point early on I could have bought a couple months where I would have had a marginally lower chance of infection. This would have had no appreciable effect on the people around me in the grocery store. We'll have to agree to disagree otherwise.
I don’t disagree with your assessment of your individual contribution to overall risk.
The problem is that if everyone decided the same way, then it absolutely would have produced a gigantic difference.
So we’re back to the fundamental point of this being a (true) indicator of someone’s selfishness or attitude toward their neighbors.
Me individually choosing to dump my trash into the local drinking reservoir doesn’t have any appreciable effect on others. There’s a reason, nonetheless, that it’s frowned upon.
So if I don't do a thing that has no appreciable benefit for me or the people around me, I'm being selfish, because if everyone who was in a different context did the same thing, this would somehow produce a gigantic difference?
You dumping your trash in the local drinking reservoir would probably have a couple orders of magnitude more of an impact on others than me not vaccinating after recovery (depending on what's in your trash).
Ah, one of those "everybody knows" argument that is on the level of "everybody knows that Napoleon was short".
It's not completely wrong but it ignores important context. The part you are leaving unsaid is that the vaccine reduced transmission even if it didn't prevent it completely. 80% reduction is a significant amount.
Wearing masks on top of that was the sensible thing to do.
Stasis leads to increasing entropy and a sclerotic inability to adapt to changing circumstances. You're either growing or dying: there is no middle ground.
It's free if you don't bring up things that should technically have been a dedicated own appointment.
The idea behind physicals is they're considered preventative care... catching problems early, often before there's any overt symptoms. For example, checking your cholesterol and A1c levels before they progress to heart failure or diabetes.
Once you're showing symptoms, you've left the realm of preventative care and it's now diagnostic/treatment for a established issue.
(ACA only provides 100% free coverage for visits that are 100% within the "preventative care" box.)
> This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots.
What even is a terrorist?
If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
> "one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter"
yes, but only to weak-minded cultural relativists.
I don't mind stating a definition explicitly. If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
Note: The only real complexity in the definition is that during war, embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes, and when it does, it's the ones choosing to do that, war criminals by definition, who bear the responsibility for those innocent deaths when those locations then become legitimate military targets.
I'll omit giving examples to avoid triggering those who like to "bothsides" some of the more well-known terrorist groups lately.
> If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
The US is a "christian" nation which has been doing this for decades, even centuries at this point. As recently as a few weeks ago and the official government seems to be pretty joyous about it. I'm pretty sure it's the same "god". Not sure who this god guy is but he seems like an asshole who can justify anything.
> embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes
"happens sometimes" is in the passive voice. What if you live in a war zone and the war isn't far away? Are the people stockpiling AR-15's in the US legitimate military targets? There's a fun 80's movie about Cuba invading the US that you should watch some time. Is that "pro terrorist propaganda"?
Boko Haram is not a mentally disabled person tricked by the FBI they are real terrorists who attack schools to stop children from learning. They're the epitome of stupid and backwards.
> If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
That's a great example of selection bias: if they were intelligent enough to be capable of causing harm at that scale, they would have immediately realized the new guy suggesting targets and offering to buy them explosives was an FBI agent.
I'm not admiring or excusing anyone. I'm saying you probably find a whole range of IQs among them. Because why wouldn't you? Whose to say if the userbase of this site grew up in the wrong conditions, a portion wouldn't be terrorists too?
> reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)
The myocarditis as caused by e.g. Moderna was affecting teen males and you posted a link to a blog which linked to a study about 70 year old US veterans.
If you're referring to the Mike Kwan paper, he was on (I believe, it was years ago) the Science Vs podcast to debunk claims by the likes of Malone and Rogan regarding his study.
But yes, there are instances of myocarditis from vaccines, but occurance was 4-5/100k as opposed to unvaccinated 200/100k.
Edit: in his words:
> MK: All the cases were hospitalised because we wanted to perform a detailed workup for them
> RR: So they didn't need to be there to, like, keep them alive.
> WZ: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, he said that that these these patients, they all cleared up with either painkillers[50] like ibuprofen …
> MK: Some of them even not require medications, and they just take a rest, and eventually they recover by themselves, and none of them got severe complications, and no cases of mortality, most importantly. And all of them recover and went back home. And so far, some patients are being followed up around 7 months[51] and they’re very good, no problem, so this is very good news.
I want to empathize with you, plenty of medical professionals used really reductive and inaccurate language that should be rightfully criticized. stopping people from getting covid being one of those things
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
This is the gospel that is taught. It seems to help people tolerate the fruits of their labor being quietly separated from them over time. Just another tax, except the people have even less of a say in this one.
Can you provide counter arguments to mine, though? It does not reduce wealth if dealt with correctly as an individual. It is meant to incentivize investments rather than hoarding, i.e., doing nothing with your money, as I explained.
> They're not. They're not particularly effective for preventing flu in an individual. But at the group level, they have a clear and useful effect.
This is my understanding. It basically would have marginally reduced the cost of the flu coming through, right? But thats not the impression that I would get from any of the discussion here. Am I wrong?
Parent poster is saying that even though the effect on an individual is low relative to other vaccines, the effect of a whole group taking the vaccine is actually very high.
This the opposite of your understanding. The benefit to the individuals in a group from the whole group taking the vaccine is actually much larger than the benefit to an individual in the group of taking the vaccine solo.
> Combined with the brutal arithmetic at higher R0R_0
R0 , this is a large part of why flu vaccination programs are generally justified on individual protection against illness and severe outcomes rather than on a realistic expectation of achieving herd immunity and stopping circulation.
On the one hand, in a military setting you can feasibly achieve 100% compliance. But if you don't stop transmission (which it sounds like we don't have good data saying it would), you don't get herd immunity.
So I think you're back to just the benefits of reduction in disease, which is not nothing, but it is marginal like I said originally.
I mean, I would say that preventing 40% of disease (depending on what you're measuring, etc etc) is not marginal. I guess I'd turn it around and ask, if 40% is marginal, what number would not be marginal, and why do you draw the line there?
(For me, "marginal" would mean that the costs were roughly equal to the benefits. I think you'd have a hard time convincing me that saving the lives of even just 1% of the people who would normally die from the flu -- between 10k and 50k people a year -- is roughly equivalent to the cost of giving out flu shots. I suppose you could argue that the benefit is marginal to individuals who have a low probability of dying from the flu, and marginal to a society which has relatively low vaccination rates overall.)
The other thing is that, according to the Claude data here, the vaccine is actually relatively effective at preventing the transmission of some flu variants, 50% effective against influenza B! If so, there would be a clear group benefit to that, you only need (1 - 1/1.3) / 0.5 = 46% of people to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity to that strain.
The relevant question for me would be how many people would be combat ineffective for how long with and without the flu vaccine. Your Claude conversation says things like this:
"The best recent direct measurement is the FLUTES study (JAMA Network Open, 2024), which tracked secondary infections after flu entered US households across 2017–2020. The result: the estimated effectiveness of influenza vaccines for preventing secondary infections among household contacts was 21.0% (95% CI, 1.4% to 36.7%). Note how wide that confidence interval is — the lower bound is nearly zero."
And
"This is consistent with older household work. A 2013 study found no evidence that vaccination prevented household transmission once influenza was introduced; adults were at particular risk despite vaccination — strikingly, 9 of 11 adults with household-acquired influenza were vaccinated in that sample."
So most people on base who were going to get infected and transmit are still going to do so. Some portion of them have a better time with the illness if it does come around, which won't happen all the time. Contrast that with the costs of the program (side effects, time, whatever cons you can think of), and it seems like you might not be in slam dunk territory.
> I can control government more than I can control Google or Anthropic
How true is this really? With the government, you can vote in various elections, or contact your representatives, and when it comes to important issues that will do exactly squat. You can also buy politicians or legislation, or run yourself, if you have the wealth and connections to do so.
With corporations, you can vote with your dollars, which again on important issues will probably do squat. Or you can try to get hired and change the company from within. Or if you have the wealth, you can buy the company (partially or wholly), or start a competitor and win in the marketplace.
In both situations there are options, and most of them are basically impossible for the small folk.
The illusion of control is stronger with modern democratic governments-but while it’s true that if we all voted for Vermin Supreme, he’d rule, it’s also true if we all stopped using Google they’d die quickly.
But neither is a realistic outcome. And neither do you personally have anything remotely near “control”. The reason everyone argues about this stuff online is that’s literally the only power we have.
However, the same effort and energy spent elsewhere can reap much, much bigger dividends down the line.
1 small guy changing stuff is basically impossible. But 100 million small folk sufficiently annoyed with something changes a government (for better and for worse), whilst having basically zero influence over a corporation (they're not the customer, they don't have enough buying power for a hostile takeover, they certainly don't have the wherewithal to destroy them by launching a competitor... which they probably don't even want to if they think what the corporation does is bad). The exception, of course, is that if the corporation bothers that many small people that much, a government might get around to listening to the small people's arguments more than the corporation's.
> But 100 million small folk sufficiently annoyed with something changes a government (for better and for worse), whilst having basically zero influence over a corporation
They don't have influence because you designed them to be so. You said they're not the customer and implied they have no influence over customers.
Your argument says 100 million small folk in the same government jurisdiction have more government say vs 100 million small folk have in a company they have nothing to do with. That seems clear.
The inverse relation could also be said though. 100 million small folk in different government jurisdictions have less say in a government they have nothing to do with than 100 million customers of the same company do with a corporation.
Things other governments do generally don't affect me as things other companies in the same market as me get away with doing, or things a company does in my neighbourhood though, and there are a lot more companies with power to hurt my interests than countries. Also there's the little thing called foreign policy that means 100 million people do, in fact, get to vote on how their government handles things other governments do which hurt them, to the extent their government has negotiation cards to play.
On the other hand pure market solutions mean "if you're not the customer, corporations can harm you and 100 million other people interests in their locality as much as they like".
The limitations of 100 million people's ability to stop the 10 million people across the border voting for something that will harm them come because international relations look less like a democracy and more like a market...
The President of the United States visibly hates me and keeps calling me a "Dumocrat". If Sundar Pichai did that, he'd be fired, and even people who despise my politics would generally understand why companies don't let their CEOs say such things.
But Congress won't fire Trump. All of my representatives would, if given a chance, but other representatives in other districts have no accountability to me and don't want to.
So I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that I have less practical control over the federal government than I do Google, even if the formal levers of power are meant to achieve a different result.
The covid shots were good against hospitalization and death in older folks, but they were not great at preventing infection or transmission (despite what you may have gleaned from the speakers blaring ads in every public setting for all that time).
You can fall back to the "flooding the hospitals" argument, that works a little better here.