> recent research shows that previous infection with an older variant (such as Alpha, Beta or Delta) offers some protection against reinfection with BA.4 or BA.5, and that a prior Omicron infection is substantially more effective
It would be news if this weren’t true. Of course infection from an ancestor virus provides some immunity and a more recent ancestor provides more than an older one.
The bigger effect may be that a more recent infection provides more immunity than an older infection because neutralizing antibodies wane.
And we DESPERATELY need to come up with better terms to talk about immunity than just having one word for it.
It really is likely that conserved t-cell epitopes confer life-long immunity against severe disease and death no matter which variant you are infected with or vaccinated against. While there is clear statistical evidence of the virus attempting to evade Nabs there's no evidence that mutations are concentrated around t-cell epitopes (probably one effect and reason why we have multiple tiers of immunity rather than just pumping out NAbs every time?).
Why does it only provide _some_ protection and not full protection? How do we quantify _some_ protection? Why do I know people that have been sick with Covid 4+ times?
Like basic microbiology here is being denied or treated like it is surprising when it would otherwise just be basic facts from your first course in infectious diseases.
Previous released papers have found that the earlier Omicron variants did not provide protection from middle variants. (Original omicron vs BA1/2). So some bA.2 to BA4/5 immunity protection would be a new behavior.
That's not actually what this paper says. Reduced neutralization in a lab experiment doesn't necessarily imply zero protection in the real world. (As we're now finding out.)
Of course some variants were found not to protect against reinfection. The inability to predict protection against future variants is stuff you'd learn in any first course in infectious diseases.
People keep treating rocket science like it's epidemiology, but it really isn't.
How is immune protection measured? It would seem like you can't skip serology measurements - otherwise how would one know if the participants even had an immune response to the variants you were studying? But it does make sense to further associate outcomes with the serology. But that doesn't have to happen in the same studies and coudl be covered by separate studies.
Immunity doesn't only come from antibodies, but frustratingly we get misleading headlines like "prior infection from omicron does not boost immunity" or the like and when you look at where those statements are coming from you discover its based entirely on blood tests which only cover a narrow window of the immunity picture. Its like putting a hand over one eye and claiming you can't see.
In science it’s extremely important to confirm expected findings and not just new stuff. Especially when important public health decisions will be made on the basis of those expectations
Sure, I’m not criticizing the science, and the varying amount of protection is an interesting and useful metric for managing the disease. The basic fact that there’s immunity for previously effected people which declines based on genetic distance of the variants though is not surprising and people even in this thread act like it is.
I see. You're pretending to know what you're talking about by claiming something was obvious _to you_ and anyone else that "knows what they're talking about."
I’m pretty sure before covid made disease doom a political issue you could have gotten most any kindergarten teacher to give you the same idea about how immunity works. I remember my own kindergarten teacher doing so when I was 5.
> before covid made disease doom a political issue
Seeing how the hyper-policization of covid "facts" made common-sense discussion almost impossible has been interesting to me. It's not the first time I've noticed it, but it's probably the clearest example in my experience of how once something becomes politicized and lines are drawn (and/or litmus tests identified), rational public discourse becomes extremely difficult/impossible.
Immunity also depends on viral load. If you are hot-boxing in a tiny subcompact car for 48 hours cross country road trip with someone who is highly contagious, is different than sitting in a large, indoor restaurant across the table for an hour from someone who has covid, but is mostly recovered (I still wouldn't sit with this person, but seems to happen a lot) the viral load you will receive, is a lot less than the subcompact car scenario. Your friend could be immunocompromised, or they could be "living their best life" and spending a lot of time indoors with strangers, or both. It's hard to say.
There are a lot of people I know who only eat on outdoor patios, minimize time indoors with others, but end up finally getting covid for the first time when a family member comes over for sunday night dinner and infects the entire household.
It also appears to depend on what blood types the infected and not-yet-infected people have[0]
Which intrigues me greatly, because no-one in my immediate family knows their blood type.
Our middle child had Covid in March (infected at his school) and promptly gave it to my wife. He spent 10 days at home as he kept testing positive, she spent almost as long. Despite the rest of us taking no precautions whatsoever within our home, the other three of us were not infected.
Then our eldest child had Covid in May (over half his school class were positive around that time), and he promptly gave it to me.
The (ex-)scientist in me would now like to have our blood types checked!
Well, we had it all - initial original covid variant, first omicron variant, and last week either of these sub-variants. All came from small kids, so it really didn't matter at all what precautions and social distancing we adults did. Kids still went to kindergarten with 15 other, plus all teachers.
First one was by far the worst - fever, tiredness, sleeplessness, a lot of mucus in the throat, loss of smell and taste (was smelling 52% alcohol and it was like mountain air). Even few months after ie my cologne smelled foul. Smell turned OK in cca 6 months.
Second was only (a lot of) mucus in the throat, and resulting dry cough.
Third now was barely noticeable, again only mucus in the throat. The only reason we did tests were because we got clearly infected from sister-in-law's kids visiting who upon coming home had 40 degrees celzius fever.
I don't mind this level of covid for myself, much more preferable than proper flu or even intense sore throat. But others around me fared less well - some kids having very high fever where you start having concerns about spasms and Kawasaki syndrome. My wife had headaches, developed some sore points in her mouth, from which she got ear aches etc.
Everybody seems to push whole covid saga away from their minds (me including), but its not going anywhere, probably ever. Thanx to Ukraine invasion by russia focus of concerns shifted, it seems its too much to worry about 2 dreadful things in parallel.
Based on present death rates, COVID will be number three for all cause mortality in the United States this year after all combined cancers and all combined heart disease -- possibly number two!; above all other infectious disease by an order of magnitude; above diabetes, COPD, organ damage, etc. This is despite a low overall mortality rate from COVID per infection.
It is possible that as it continues to be endemic the rates will tick down and so this will not necessarily be true in 2023, 2024, 2025, etc. I am not proposing any policy change or any lockout or anything. but your position is a little bit like saying "a rocket launcher is a weapon, just like a bread knife".
Put another way: a 9/11 every week, still. It would at least behoove us to be sombre about the bloodbath around us.
Five years ago if you were in a nursing home, got a cold (i.e. a coronavirus) and died, no one would have tested you or made you a statistic to go into the top ten causes of death. Things like that pushing the nearest to end of life are common and not a disaster.
2/3 of the deaths are people over 85 now. If a cancer patient gets covid and dies did the cancer or the Covid do it?
Everybody is going to die, i don’t feel too sad about it. It is very slightly more dangerous to be human now that covid is around and sure that sucks but meh, there are better things to give your attention to.
You have given more of your attention to letting everyone know you don't care about dead people because that's life than I have to worrying about COVID, with the added bonus that your position comes off as sociopathic and mine doesn't.
Just to give my personal exposure here, my wife had a stroke during the omicron surge and when the hospital wheeled her away on a gurney to get an emergency thrombectomy, making it clear she had a decent chance of just dying on the table, I could not be with her because the COVID burden in the hospital was too high. After she survived the operation she was admitted to a ward full of 80 year olds. Later that night she had a stroke recurrence and the way I found out is that she didn't reply to my text messages for half an hour. My wife is 35, healthy, yoga, biking, hiking, and she had a stroke on our anniversary. We're in the middle of trying for kids. She lived, but it could easily have been the other way.
One response to this is "the problem here is the COVID restrictions, the hospital should have just let infection disease spread, hospitals have never tried to stop infectious disease before, stop treating COVID as anything special" but another response to this is that the medical system has been more or less in perpetual crisis mode this entire time because of the underlying infectious disease burden that you described as "just another of many diseases". And I believe that the infectious disease specialists are better able to gauge the actual risk to their patients than a SV devops guru.
When we got COVID it was two days of fever and a week of fatigue, worse than a cold, better than influenza. Do you understand how it's possible to be impacted by COVID even if like us, you are at little risk from COVID?
Again, I am not calling for any restrictions, any lockdowns, any infringements on your freedom, or any reaction beyond simply a sombre acknowledgement that a lot of people have died, there's a lot of pain, the deaths continue, there remains a huge burden on our society because of the effects of this disease, and we gain nothing from being glib or pretending the people who died don't matter. You have the capacity for empathy, but you need to use it.
> Five years ago if you were in a nursing home, got a cold (i.e. a coronavirus) and died, no one would have tested you or made you a statistic to go into the top ten causes of death
There might not have been a test but it's not like cold & flu deaths weren't being recorded, or that we didn't bother to record the cause of death for old people. If you got a cold or flu and died it'd be recorded as such.
It may be true if you consider hospitalizations: sometimes people with mild or no COVID symptoms count as COVID hospitalizations because 1) they do need to be in the hospital for something unrelated but 2) they must be kept in a COVID ward until they're not infectious anymore.
However, death cause is not COVID if the hospital finds that you are positive after a car accident and you die of the injuries the day after.
And if you were already say very very old or with comorbidities, and you die of pneumonia with a positive COVID test, then maybe you would have died anyway in a couple months, but still the immediate cause of death is COVID and nothing else makes sense.
Which country are you referring to? Last I checked (few months ago) the CDC in the US was still counting COVID deaths as any deceased with active COVID infection. They are collecting minor comorbidity data, at least that is what they made public in their dataset.
I realize this site has global users but the parent comment was correct. Not sure why he's being downvoted.
If you die in a car accident with Covid-19 in your system, the UCOD is massive trauma from car accident, not “Covid-19”. The CDC reporting guidelines make it clear that Covid only rises to the level of UCOD if it meets the criteria of “ (a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death”
That is only regarding death certificates.
Some states have rule to report COVID death like this: COVID death certificate plus if tested positive in last 60 days (California just changed to 30 after backclash). And California has only have natural death requirement listed for younger that 18. It is interesting these rules are only in dem states.
So I bet that California has overreported number of deaths while Florida has underreported.
> Some states have rule to report COVID death like this
The claim was specifically about CDC reporting rules, not the rules of how individual states report statistics themselves (which the CDC has no control over).
> And if you were already say very very old or with comorbidities,
> and you die of pneumonia with a positive COVID test, then maybe you
> would have died anyway in a couple months, but still the immediate cause of
> death is COVID and nothing else makes sense.
I 100% agree if we go by what is written on their death certificate.
But...
For example in state of Massachusetts the COVID death definition includes anyone who has COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate, and any individual who has had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days but does not have COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate [1].
CDC guidelines [2] are 100% clear but the problem is that we started counting also people which do not have COVID listed in certificate signed by doctor. I do not know - kinda crap.
The California rules are kinda interesting also [3]:
• The decedent had confirmatory laboratory evidence for SARS-CoV-2
(i.e. detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a clinical or autopsy specimen
using a molecular amplification test) AND at least ONE of the following
criteria is met:
- A case investigation determined that COVID-19 was the cause
of death or contributed to the death.
- The death certificate indicates COVID-19 or an equivalent term
as one of the causes of death, regardless of the time elapsed
since specimen collection of the confirmatory laboratory test
used to define the case.
- The death occurred within 30 days of specimen collection for
the confirmatory laboratory test used to define the case and
was due to natural causes
In other words, if somebody dies within 30 days of being tested for COVID and death was due to natural causes then the death is counted as COVID death. Even if it is not on the death certificate.
“Prior infection with Omicron granted stronger protection: it was 79.7% effective at preventing BA.4 and BA.5 reinfection and 76.1% effective at preventing symptomatic reinfection.”
I feel like the time to be more nuanced may be upon us. People are generally aware that infection grants some levels of immunity. But it’s not a simple probability distribution or something like a score card or political poll. You can see how many antibodies people produce to BA.4/5 with whatever they had previously. And of course time is a factor. Numbers I saw some time ago were every new lineage seems to halve the number of antibodies produced (per a John Campbell video) as a trendline.
Though I am grateful the medical professionals are still keeping an eye on this despite whatever cultural trends may seem. Wonder if we’ll ever see some retrospectives and changes made so a future pandemic doesn’t hit the globe and nations/regions so unprepared. At least take peoples temperature more often and the sick to stay home. It’d help if it weren’t a personal resource expense to simply not bring a cold/flu to work. Ie don’t have that use personal leave time.
> At least take peoples temperature more often and the sick to stay home.
For things like this by the time someone has a fever they've already been spreading their virus for days if not weeks. Temperature check wouldn't be nearly as useful as just letting workers take time off when they're feeling sick without risking losing their jobs or their ability to pay rent.
>it was 79.7% effective at preventing BA.4 and BA.5 reinfection and 76.1% effective at preventing symptomatic reinfection
Shouldn't the numbers for preventing symptomatic infection be better that those for preventing any infection? I wonder if they've got those the wrong way round.
Something I've been wondering, and I'm not sure if there is data on this. If you were to get vaccinated once a month, would that be expected to produce notable protection against the new variants? I'm aware that vaccines for prior variants seem to be considered ineffective against BA.5, but I'm unsure of what impact the recency of the vaccine has.
> If you were to get vaccinated once a month, would that be expected to produce notable protection against the new variants?
Neutralizing antibody levels are highest after antigen encounter and diminish over time. So, you get the most protection after vaccination or recovery. After some time, T cells play a more prominent role in fighting the disease.
I’d be very careful about frequent vaccinations. We know that chronic antigen encounters could produce exhausted cells incapable of differentiation.
The first 2/3 weeks your immunity to drops. So taking one every month would make things worse. Plus you have that recent study that says the more vaccines you take the lower your immune system after 8 months. I would follow what health official suggest or get off the vaccine train.
It's a nice idea but I haven't heard anyone describe an infection control approach that could have prevented the spread of this virus, short of isolating every single person in the world in their homes including all medical and food production workers, which is obviously impossible.
A doubling rate means it doubles within a period of time.
Let's arbitrarily pick 10 days as a doubling rate.
If, at a time when the doubling rate was 10 days, a particular mitigation measure had been taken, sufficient to knock R0 below 1, ten days earlier than it actually happened, then for the population in question, the situation is half as prevalent. Project that forward, everything that happens since that point flows from a situation that is half of what it actually was. It's a huge difference.
The situation isn't discrete, it's continuous. Getting hung up on 100% prevention is beside the point. Knocking it back by 50%, or even 20%, or 10%, is huge compared to the alternative.
People check the weather every day. I wish our nation had developed a very clear signal that everyone could check every day. Just check it in the morning to know whether it's advisable to wear a mask that day. Back in the post-Delta pre-Omicron days, I did a project of my own to develop something I could check every day. (https://tunesmith.github.io/covid-dashboard/) It's messy and hacky and some of its math is out of date and I haven't gotten around to updating it for omicron, but imagine something like that that is funded, tailored for everyone's county, and really easy to report and communicate. It would have helped, just to know whether today is a mask day or not.
That’s all I want: a report on how prevalent communicable respiratory disease is in my community, so that I can make an informed decision. I don’t need it to be covid-specific: I don’t want the flu either. It has been really nice not catching cold this past few years.
Isolation only serves to slow spread to a level that your health care system can accommodate. We've tried isolation in a bunch of places. In my state in Australia, we even isolated with nearly zero cases all the way up until 90% vaccination rates. But once you open up, it still spreads. Most of our cases were for vaccinated individuals, who surely were better off for being vaccinated, but it didn't stop the spread. Unless you want to stay isolated for the rest of eternity, the best we can do is be hygienic and get vaccinated, and take care around vulnerable people.
Australia really messed up. They had it eliminated from their population entirely, but then let it back in by not screening or quarantining people coming in from the outside. Australia could have had zero restrictions and zero covid.
I think you're overestimating how tight a border can be while still allowing movement. Even when we had 14 day police enforced mandatory quarantine and no international travel, cases still got through from returning Australians. There is also all the staff at the interface, cleaners, hotel staff, security, airport staff, screeners, it was not a foolproof system. With that in mind, it was only a matter of time. The only reason it didn't spread as fast in spite of that leaky interface, was because of the lock downs.
Even in spite of those knockdowns it spread, and in spite of high vaccination rates it spread. It's not a solveable problem, citizens would not (did not) accept the terms necessary to be covid zero forever, so why delay it once everyone is vaccinated?
I was on team Covid Zero to begin with, but it was never meant to be a long term strategy. You can't exile a whole country while the rest of the world moves on and expect people to accept that.
> I think you're overestimating how tight a border can be while still allowing movement.
We have the technology to lock things down at borders as hard as we'd need to, if Australia doesn't have that capability now they'd better start working on it.
COVID-19 has (so far) only ranked as the fifth deadliest pandemic in human history, but it was the perfect opportunity for Australia to test and evaluate their ability to defend against deadly viral outbreaks which would rank much much higher. Experts agree that global pandemics will be increasingly more common in the future and that it's only a matter of time until we face something else like this or worse. We couldn't even make it through this pandemic before seeing another one starting!
Cleaners, hotel/airport/quarantine center staff, security, staff, screeners, etc. could have been in full HAZMAT etc. just as they'd absolutely have to be if the virus were much more deadly anyway. It would have been better to make sure they could do it right last year when the cost of failure would have been limited to locking down one city for a few weeks to contain the spread than to scramble to figure it all out when a single fuck up could wipe out a huge percentage of the country's population.
> You can't exile a whole country while the rest of the world moves on and expect people to accept that.
As long as people were still coming in and out of the country (albeit with a 7-14 day delay for those coming in) the nation wouldn't be "exiled" and it would have been the people of Australia who got to "move on", by living their lives without the virus, while the rest of the world was stuck in our ongoing cycle of wave after wave of infections, new variants, new/lifted/renewed restrictions, increases and decreases in hospitalizations, increasing numbers of deaths/disability, exhausted healthcare workers, economic uncertainty, etc. all while we try our hardest to just pretend that the virus around us doesn't exist.
I'd gladly trade the mess we have now for making entering the country a little more obnoxious by tacking on a short, enforced, unexciting, but all expense paid mini-vacation onto the itinerary of anyone coming in.
> It would have been better to make sure they could do it right last year when the cost of failure would have been limited
What do you think they did?
> I'd gladly trade the mess we have now for making entering the country a little more obnoxious by tacking on a short, enforced, unexciting, but all expense paid mini-vacation onto the itinerary of anyone coming in.
That isn't enough, that is what we did. Whilst that remains the case it makes that stance pointless to have. I agreed with you, I did all the right things, I advocated for lockdowns and was happy to see the 14 day quarantine periods. Guess what, expections are everywhere. It wasn't enough. It is absolutely not possible to lock down and still let people in and out. We are messy, shitty and selfish. Either borders stay closed or you accept cases will come in. The half measures are a waste of time.
Australia is a good example, because we had the 14 day quarantine period in an isolation hotel, and were technically closed borders to anyone but exceptional circumstances yet outbreaks kept happening. Melbourne was in full home isolation for months and months, while borders were closed to interstate and international, and that didn't stop the spread.
It really doesn't seem fair to call their efforts "somewhat half-assed" given that they did so much better than other countries, but they didn't go to the extent or take the care that they would have if the virus were more deadly.
The staff at hotels and airports weren't decked out like this (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Hazmat_D...) or this (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Army_tra...), proper ventilation wasn't considered and staff weren't even being tested properly leading to the virus spreading amongst staff, in hallways, between rooms, and as a result of the generally lax attitude (in deadly plague terms) the virus got out of those hotels and into the public not once or twice but over and over, tens of times!
I do agree that Australia did do a lot to try to stop the virus! The 14 day quarantine was a good idea (at the time), severely limiting the number of people coming in was good too (although I doubt that would have been sustainable for long) and there's no denying that people's shitty actions hurt their efforts, but I just can't believe they gave it everything they had. There were reports that they didn't even have a plan to work from initially, and were just kind of making it up as they went along. That's just tragic, but it means they also had the benefit of writing a plan with our current technology and understanding on the subject in mind from inception. You could have asked a random person on the street decades ago to come up with a plan on how to quarantine a family and prevent the spread of a deadly possibly airborne virus and and you'd get something that looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn0-nPOb_KM and while moves are fiction and not sound policy, they'd have had the "protected staff" and "ventilation" boxes checked at least.
It's clear that for all Australia did to stop the virus (and again, I'm not bashing their efforts here which were well above what others were doing) it was clearly not being taken as seriously as it would have if they were dealing with the next Black Death. I'd really like to think that if they had tried their best in this scenario to keep the virus out they'd have been more successful and that while some people will probably always act terribly selfish, that it is still possible in 2022 to let people in and out of an island nation while keeping out a highly deadly virus. I'd really like to think that because one day we might not have the choice to do otherwise. If Australia really can't manage it, what chance do the rest of the nations have?
I'm sure they've since used this experience to help shore up their defenses for the future, I'm sure it was eye opening for a lot of people, but not going all out in their containment efforts while they had the chance to stay ahead of covid was a lost opportunity. The good/bad news is that they're certain to get the chance again with a new virus sooner than they'd like and hopefully the stakes won't be that much higher.
You're right mind you, there was indeed a golden period for our state, where other states had covid, and we didn't (we had interstate borders closed too). We had no restrictions and it felt like some kind of freedom utopia, like we had "won". But it was clear that it wasn't something that we could sustain for long. The community didn't want it to and eventually people have to move around again, to say nothing of required movements like transport and emergency health.
When we think about international travel, I think it's the same discussion. I do believe you that it's technically possible to have that level of containment, but I'm skeptical that it's possible at the scale that humans want to move about. The scale of travel is easy to underestimate, even mid-pandemic when the world was closed.
Australia only has a population of around 25 million, and in 2019, 4 million people flew in or out of Australia every month. In 2019 we moved close to the equivalent of the entire country across the border TWICE. For all of 2020 and 2021 it was still above 100,000 people per month, while we were locked down and international travel was banned, that's a lot of movements to get perfectly right to prevent a breach. Trying to scale that up to levels people are happy with is going to be really tough to get right. ( https://www.bitre.gov.au/statistics/aviation/international )
I think you're right that if a disease we decide is deadly enough comes along that we'll have no choice but to reduce throughput entirely, but at the moment I think you can reduce part of this discussion to a tradeoff we're making, between throughput and level of containment.
Reducing the spread is preventing it, for a lot of reasonable definitions of preventing (where incidents of spread are prevented vs all spreading).
Better testing, giving people options to isolate from their household, etc, all could have reduced the spread. I think they don't make as much sense after vaccines are widely available (but we haven't necessarily hit that point globally).
Figuring out how to do good public health messaging would also probably be worthwhile. Vaccine uptake in lots of places was pretty bad.
The virus is highly infectious, always was. There's no prevention, just delaying the inevitable, and possibly waiting for a variant that is more severe (to someone without any prior exposure), and not having any protection other than vaccines that are based on much earlier/different strains. I'm a little worried about this for my parents, for what it's worth.
Yes, if you read my comment I sort of discuss how kicking the can down the road can be a good thing (you can change the vulnerability of the population!).
The Omicron targeted vaccines likely provide a worthwhile improvement in protection against the recent variants. Hopefully the public health apparatus chooses to release them, rather than doing nothing.
The whole point of the phrase "kicking the can down the road" is that it's not something you should do forever.
As difficult as it was to live through, I'm supportive of what was done here in Melbourne to suppress the virus in 2020-21 when the variants were more severe and the vaccines weren't around. It's what enabled our fatality rate to be kept to one of the lowest in the world.
It doesn't make sense to keep doing it now, and doing so could make the problem worse. In a complex system these issues aren't without tradeoffs.
Luckily our health officials agree so we're all good.
(Btw saying “if you read my comment” is poor conduct here as I’m sure you know.)
- I ask a parent commenter who has asserted that society should still be preventing transmission of a highly infectious virus if they know of a system that could actually achieve that;
- A few commenters invoke China's approach (whilst conceding it was excessively draconian), others insist that it's not about preventing transmission, just slowing it, conveniently avoiding confronting the fact that the original point was about prevention, and even if it wasn't, slowing spread still means infection is inevitable;
- Nobody suggests an approach that would have been effective or palatable;
- Many hours later, a new commenter slides in to point out that it really is literally possible to keep kicking a can down a road forever, as if this is either true in practice, consistent with the rhetorical point of that metaphor, or relevant to the point at hand.
I'll ask the central question again: can anyone describe a system that would have (a) been effective at preventing spread of the virus, and (b) resulted in a society that anyone wanted to continue living in, or that could even function at all?
Once again you choose to attack me instead of confronting the issue I’m raising. I’m not being a decider of anything, I’m asking for an answer to a very simple question.
The question is: how can spread of this virus be completely prevented, so that nobody gets infected? This is clearly what the root commenter and the XKCD cartoon they shared are asserting should be happening.
Methods that just slow the inevitable are clearly sidestepping the point. And methods that make society into a dystopian nightmare may be technically argument-winning but not practical and thus make lame contributions to the discussion.
Testing, ventilation, supported isolation are fine; we’ve had and still have some of those measures in Australia, and I agree it’s helpful to slow spread and protect those most vulnerable for a while. I’ve been fine with that happening here. But that’s not the primary topic of this discussion.
Please stop with the ad-homs and side-stepping and address the point.
Their methods are particularly draconian, but China has managed it. To my knowledge without the mass starvation or collapse of their medical systems alluded by your comment. Probably they couldn't go to Wendy's for a bit though.
Yeah, as the sibling comment said, "couldn't go to Wendy’s" is a pretty flippant way to describe what was imposed on Shanghai residents this year.
I'm in Melbourne, Australia, which locked down hard to suppress the virus in 2020, then for several more months attempting to suppress it again in 2021.
Since everyone had had the chance to be vaccinated by Nov last year, restrictions have been lifted and the virus has been allowed to spread, and almost everyone is much happier living with the virus than continuing to be locked down.
What is China going to do? Keep locking everyone down every few months forever?
For myself, having a young child at daycare means getting exposed to infections and being sick with something different almost every week, which is of course annoying but it's a part of life. I had covid for the second time last week (must have been BA.5 as it's dominant here), and it was no big deal; I felt a bit off for under 48 hours. It certainly felt like my body knew what to do with it having first encountered an earlier omicron variant in Feb.
How is shutting down all of society for weeks/months at a time preferable to that?
I'm not going to let you get away with pretending that this discussion is about the lab leak theory and some weird conspiracy theory about special knowledge China has, rather than your suggestion that a smug-but-vacuous XKCD cartoon is making an important point.
The major of Shanghai let the outbreak get out of control because of concerns over "the economy". On the other hand, the border across the Amur in Heilongjiang province is porous, there is no shortage of imported cases. Any outbreaks in Heihe across the river from Blagoveshtshensk are brought under control swiftly and without fuss.
Shanghai health officials tried to control the outbreak with testing and neighbourhood-wide lockdowns; in hindsight they should have done the full lockdown earlier.
I see two distinct points at which it would have been possible:
1) The initial outbreak. I don't know if this was ever, in any practical sense, possible. (Honestly, I don't know, maybe it was).
2) vaccine availability, presuming worldwide that we all maintained strict lockdown until the vaccine was universally available and the vast majority of the population took it. This also does not appear to ever have been possible in any practical way, or at least I do not see any realist path for it to have occured.
Short of the two above possibilities, I see only a broad spectrum of approaches designed to spread the worst impacts over a period of time that didn't overhwealm health systems even more than some of them were, while protecting the most vulnerable as best as we can. People's tolerance for the different measures for doing this vary along multiple geographic & sociopolitical lines and so we have a patchwork of approaches, a lot of which provide only loose guidance while relying on individuals to make their own personal risk decisions.
This is may not be ideal from the perspective of personal risk decisions having an impact on others that decide differently, but again I am also not sure if a different outcome was ever, in a practical sense, possible.
At this point I think the main challenges for the world are to ramp up the infrastructure for cyclical vaccine updates & billions of doses to be available worldwide at each step. In terms of infrastructure, the needs are similar, though I would say exceed, those required for annual flue vaccine production and distribution. COVID still presents more serious risks with long term effects not yet understood, so my personal opinion is that cyclical vaccine infrastructure should target something higher than annual flu vaccine cycles.
> The initial outbreak. I don't know if this was ever, in any practical sense, possible. (Honestly, I don't know, maybe it was).
Yes, Taiwan did it, as described in a JAMA article [1] published at the start of March 2020. In particular, follow the link to the supplement: "eTable: List of Actions Taken by Date and Category".
Using Taiwan to make this claim is incorrect-- or insufficient-- in at least two ways. Also keep in mind that I said for all practical purposes, which is very different than theoretically possible. But taking things one at a time:
1) Taiwan has failed to continue it's early accomplishments. It has now has had hundreds of thousands of cases. I'll preemptively address a to this that Taiwan's current cases are a separate topic from it's initial success. This is not an unreasonable point, though I myself do not think they can be separated. A discuss there however seems outside the scope of my response to you.
2) Taiwan was uniquely suited for it's early effective response to COVID. It had learned the lessons from prior scares such as 2003 and put excellent measures in place to to respond to future issues. It was only able to succeed early in the pandemic because of actions taken years earlier.
In the context of my comment it is unreasonable to deny my claim on the basis that, had the entire world 10+ years earlier acted differently that Taiwan's success could have been replicated. I clearly made "initial outbreak" the context of my comment while Taiwan's success was rooted in far far earlier actions. The actions listed in your linked article were only so rapidly possible due to that decade long preparation.
You might reasonably claim "had the rest of the world followed Taiwan's example 10+ years earlier..." But that would not be a contextual response to my comment. At the initial point of outbreak, especially with early cases in Italy traced back to 2019 & what we know of asymptomatic cases and spread rates, my claim stands: it may have, in any practical sense, been impossible at initial outbreak to have stopped things in their tracks. (I am open to further discussion that I may be wrong, but the example of Taiwan is not sufficient to demonstrate that)
The sociopolitical situation in some areas would quite literally have made it impossible as well. In the US for example even the patchwork response by states, often less extreme in restrictions than other areas of the world, prompted sporadic violence including a number of murders over simple mask requirements-- a strict policy in Taiwan that is credited with it's early success. IIRC there was at least one such murder in Germany as well.
Finally: I will concede that worldwide response was spotty and inconsistent and that a better job could have been done.
> presuming worldwide that we all maintained strict lockdown until the vaccine was universally available and the vast majority of the population took it
We all remember that the vaccines were described as being able to prevent infection and transmission, certainly by some politicians, perhaps less so by scientists. One of those very politicians is currently Covid positive after four (count them) shots of vaccine.
Doesn't mass vaccination, particularly with imperfect vaccines, increase the selection pressure on the virus to mutate?
With hindsight I wish there had been much more international focus on protecting and vaccinating those truly at risk. It seems fairly clear by now that fit and healthy under-50s really didn't gain much from vaccination, their risk from this particularly virus was already tiny. After a couple of months the vaccines didn't stop them catching and spreading the virus either, so they weren't even protecting the vulnerable indirectly.
> Doesn't mass vaccination, particularly with imperfect vaccines, increase the selection pressure on the virus to mutate?
Absolutely:
The variant that later became known as Delta was first identified in Oct 2020. The vaccines didn't start their heavy rollout until the beginning of 2021, and it took months before a decent percent of the population had been vaccinated.
Before that point there was little concern about variants, as the virus didn't seem to be mutating very much in ways that would heavily change its infectivity dynamics. But after that? That's when Delta started easily out-competing prior variants, with the "delta waves" occurring in mid/late 2021. And since then we keep getting more and more named "variants of concern" that are expected to escape immunity.
First, Alpha was from Dec 2020-Jan 2021 in the UK and was already substantially more infectious than the Wuhan wild type or D614G variant, though it did not escape immunity.
Second, as far as we know neither Delta nor Omicron (nor all the other Greek letters that were outcompeted by them) developed in vaccinated people, and both of them are anyway incredibly more infectious even in unvaccinated people.
I don't know about BA.4/5 but, at least for the three main lineages of concern that drove waves after mass vaccination, selective pressure was not a cause of either the birth or the spreading of the variant.
"Omicron forms a stronger grip on ACE2 than do previously seen variants3. It is also better at evading the virus-blocking ‘neutralizing’ antibodies4 produced by people who have been vaccinated, or who have been infected with earlier variants
[..]
At some point [..] something happened to help Omicron explode, maybe because the progress of other variants — such as Delta — was gradually impeded by the immunity built up from vaccination and previous infection, whereas Omicron was able to evade this barrier."
In the first countries where Omicron spread, such as South Africa, it was first detected in young people where vaccination was very low. And just like Delta or Alpha it started to diverge before mass vaccination was a thing. The article you linked even suggests Omicron may have developed in mice, which are obviously not vaccinated, so the mutations would not be driven by selective pressure against vaccination.
Evading vaccination could very well be why it was so fast to spread in mostly-vaccinated populations in Europe and North America, which happened "faster than any previous versions" as the (very interesting!) article you linked says at the very beginning, but the variant was more fit anyway.
I don't think that's true. Vaccination is still beneficial to infection.
Selection pressure exists, but they will exist whether or not the immune pressure comes from vaccination or infection, so it's preferable to protect first.
> I don't think that's true. Vaccination is still beneficial to infection.
The virus changed, thanks to Omicron not even the WHO agrees with that claim.
"Vaccine-induced immunity following a primary vaccine series is modest against infection due to Omicron in the months after vaccination, and wanes significantly over time. Vaccine-induced immunity against Omicron-related mild symptomatic disease, asymptomatic infection, and viral shedding is also modest and short-lived even following a booster dose."
“ Currently available data from emergency-use listed COVID-19 vaccines show that vaccines provide higher levels of protection than SARS-CoV-2 infection against severe disease outcomes, with modest waning in the 6 months following completion of primary vaccine series. Further, they continue to protect against severe disease, hospitalizations and death due to Omicron, albeit to a lesser degree compared with other VOC.”
> But from the same report: “ Currently available data from emergency-use listed COVID-19 vaccines show that vaccines provide higher levels of protection than SARS-CoV-2 infection against severe disease outcomes
[Now that we have them] the vaccines are indeed effective at protecting against severe outcomes. Even before the vaccines, and against this particular virus, being young and healthy is and always was also exceptionally effective:
"People of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an example, around 1 in 70,000 died from Covid over the 9 peak weeks of the epidemic. Since over 80% of these had pre-existing medical conditions, we estimate that a healthy women in this age-group had less than a 1 in 350,000 risk of dying from Covid, around 1/4 of the normal risk of an accidental death over this period"[0]
(from May 2020): "Coronavirus risk for young is 'staggeringly low', says UK's top statistician [..] “If we look at under 25s, there're 17 million of them in the country where we have 26 deaths recorded,” he said, suggesting a similar risk would be seen in “a couple of days” in general accidents and sudden deaths.
However, he said the risk for the over 90s was 10,000 times as high, with more than one per cent of over 90s having died from Covid-19."[1]
I just learned that an acquaintance of mine flew on a plane knowing they had tested positive for covid. Or my partner's family just had a family get-together (she didn't go) while one her family members had covid.
In the former case, policy changes to reduce likelihood of people flying with covid (temp checks, affidavits, allowing removal of obviously ill passengers), and to increase ventilation and filtration on planes, and perhaps to even bring back masks or at the very least encourage or incentivize them in times of high transmission.
I don't know that we can do much about the latter case other than better public health education and perhaps PSAs.
We had to cancel a lot of summer vacation plans as our kid wasn't eligible to get vaccinated (until very recently) and they abruptly cancelled the in flight mask mandate. The scenario you describe is exactly why we wear N95 in the airport and on planes even today. Case counts are going to need to come way down before the masks go away.
The number of significant digits you provided suggests you're extremely confident of this. Can you provide a source? For instance, there's this study[1] that suggests surgical masks are as effective as n95 masks.
>The journals are unreliable on this and many other topics. Objective data suggests that mandatory masking has no effect on transmission.
1. It's ironic how much you denounce the value of journals and extol the value of "objective data", yet you have not attached any "objective data" (in any meaningful sense) with your original comment, and have dodged follow up requests for sources.
2. You're moving the goalposts from masks "do not work at all" to "mandatory masking has no effect".
The Lancet knowingly lied about HCQ. Therefore I don't trust them.
Anything less than an airtight full aerosol filtration respirator will not stop aerosols infected with SARS-CoV-2 from leaving and being inhaled by people. Fact. The latest CDC data suggests that "medical masks are better than cloth masks" but never attempt to identify a difference between a cloth mask and nothing.
I don't trust the establishment because they were wrong about everything. Fauci lied about masks, then lied about lying about masks, then lied about HCQ, then about IVM and other treatments. The NIH has provided 0 guidance on treating COVID other than vaccines. They did eventually do a study on HCQ to "disprove" it's effectiveness but started the dose at 1200mg/day! Nearly lethal. This of course started on patients that were too far advanced in disease and also had co-morbidities. It was a sham and borderline homicidal. All to protect the emergency use authorization for vaccines and Remdesivir.
A course of HCQ: $10. A course of Remdesivir: $3000. Which is a more fiscally responsible opportunity for a for-profit industry that controls the NIH and FDA?
The NIH staffers including Fauci (and of course the expert who is not an expert: Bill Gates) stand to make a lot of money on vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer.
Historically the entire medical industrial complex and APA lied about the "chemical imbalance" theory for depression for decades while making billions of dollars selling SSRIs and misleading the population for profit: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0
It is my opinion that these establishment organizations have 0 credibility anymore and I would never trust anything put forth by them at face value.
2. If masks don't prevent transmission, and mandates are intended to prevent transmission then mandates don't work. Aristotelian logic.
>Anything less than an airtight full aerosol filtration respirator will not stop aerosols infected with SARS-CoV-2 from leaving and being inhaled by people. Fact.
Even if we suppose this is true, it does not support the claim that "in 99.999% of cases, non-airtight masks do not work at all. Not even a little bit". At best it supports the claim that "non-airtight masks" are not 100% effective, which is an entirely different claim.
>The latest CDC data suggests that "medical masks are better than cloth masks" but never attempt to identify a difference between a cloth mask and nothing.
Okay, but this feels like you're moving the goalposts again. In your original comment you were talking about "non-airtight masks" in general, not cloth masks in particular. Also, even if we grant that cloth masks are the same as wearing nothing, the fact that medical masks are better than cloth masks/nothing still contradicts your original claim that "non-airtight masks" (ie. including surgical masks) "do not work at all" in "99.999% of cases".
I skimmed the paper and I disagree with the characterization that it "suggest[s] masks don't work at all". The conclusion seems to be "there's no evidence that masks works in practice (ie. because no such studies were conducted, not because studies were conducted and turned up negative), but evidence does seem to suggest that they works at capturing virus particles". The relevant parts from the conclusion:
"There are no studies of individuals wearing homemade fabric masks in the course of their typical activities. Therefore, we have only limited, indirect evidence regarding the effectiveness of such masks for protecting others, when made and worn by the general public on a regular basis. That evidence comes primarily from laboratory studies testing the effectiveness of different materials at capturing particles of different sizes.
The evidence from these laboratory filtration studies suggests that such fabric masks may reduce the transmission of larger respiratory droplets. There is little evidence regarding the transmission of small aerosolized particulates of the size potentially exhaled by asymptomatic or presymptomatic individuals with COVID-19. The extent of any protection will depend on how the masks are made and used. It will also depend on how mask use affects users’ other precautionary behaviors, including their use of better masks, when those become widely available. Those behavioral effects may undermine or enhance homemade fabric masks’ overall effect on public health. The current level of benefit, if any, is not possible to assess."
Again, moving the goalposts. This is talking about the effectiveness of mask mandates, your original claim was "in 99.999% of cases, non-airtight masks do not work at all. Not even a little bit.".
>2. If masks don't prevent transmission, and mandates are intended to prevent transmission then mandates don't work. Aristotelian logic.
Right, but "do masks work" and "do mask mandates work" are two separate questions. I suspect your intention might be to argue for the latter, but by overplaying your hand (ie. making the bold and unfounded claim that non-N95 masks don't work at all) you ended up getting dimissed/downvoted.
> The Lancet knowingly lied about HCQ. Therefore I don't trust them.
>I don't trust the establishment because they were wrong about everything. Fauci lied about masks, then lied about lying about masks, then lied about HCQ, then about IVM and other treatments. The NIH has provided 0 guidance on treating COVID other than vaccines. They did eventually do a study on HCQ to "disprove" it's effectiveness but started the dose at 1200mg/day! Nearly lethal. This of course started on patients that were too far advanced in disease and also had co-morbidities. It was a sham and borderline homicidal. All to protect the emergency use authorization for vaccines and Remdesivir.
>A course of HCQ: $10. A course of Remdesivir: $3000. Which is a more fiscally responsible opportunity for a for-profit industry that controls the NIH and FDA?
>The NIH staffers including Fauci (and of course the expert who is not an expert: Bill Gates) stand to make a lot of money on vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer.
This is getting derailed from the original discussion of masks, so I'm explicitly going to not respond to it.
You’d have to align incentives to change behavior. Right now, people go to work sick because they have bills to pay. They board flights sick because it’s expensive and inconvenient to quarantine away from home.
The Federal Government can't be expected to pay/mandate payment for every citizen's inconvenience and health problem.
You lost a week's pay because you couldn't work because you were ill. Not because some politician was mean and didn't pay you or tell your boss to pay you.
Obviously we have to ban accounts that post like this. I'm not going to ban you right now, but if you pull something like this again on HN, we will have to.
Please review the rules and stick to them regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
> touching items (such as clothing or linens) that previously touched the infectious rash or body fluids
> respiratory secretions during prolonged, face-to-face contact
Sexual transmission is just one way monkeypox can be spread, not the only way. But you probably don't ever touch any items or have face to face contact so I'm sure you're good.
> Overall, 98% of the persons with infection were gay or bisexual men, 75% were White, and 41% had human immunodeficiency virus infection; the median age was 38 years.
Per an establishment journal %98 were gay men and 41% had AIDS? Ok, I've heard enough. Remember AIDS was going to kill us all by transmitting through toilet seats?
The virus fear-mongering has reached a fever pitch.
Talking in absolutes like this ("the vaccine failed, it doesn't prevent infection, it doesn't prevent transmission") is very counterproductive.
No vaccine is 100% effective.
The vaccines were sufficiently effective to let Israel skip the alpha wave altogether with ~70% of the population covered. At the lowest point in June 2021 they were down to less than 20 new cases per day. Then the delta variant came out of the bush (from India which had much less coverage at the time, the more infections, the higher the mutation risk). It's R0 was higher than alpha's and the epidemic kicked back up.
Had there been an initial, aggressive push to vaccinate globally we might have been done with the virus by the summer of 2021.
It should also be noted that COVID has cumulative effects. The all around risk of complications is about twice as high for the second infection (I don't think there's data for more than two, so we don't know if the trend is additive, multiplicative, a combination thereof, or if it peaks there). Among other things, it culls the naive lymphocyte population weakening your immunity to bugs you haven't met yet.
You keep thinking that the loss of immunity is due to new variants. That's not correct, people loose immunity to the Alpha variant as well. Historically Coronaviuses never produced lasting immunity, people hoped COVID would be an exception, but it is not.
So a couple months after the vaccine push they would have been back where they started, even without Delta.
> Had there been an initial, aggressive push to vaccinate globally we might have been done with the virus by the summer of 2021.
That's simply not true. You can never vaccinate everyone, so 3 to 6 months after this massive vaccination campaign everyone would start to get sick with the Alpha variant again.
Not to mention even someone vaccinated still has some degree of infection, allowing new variants to develop.
> You keep thinking that the loss of immunity is due to new variants.
This is our first interaction, not sure why you think I keep thinking something I never thought.
There might have been a need for boosters, it would have been possible to contain the epidemic had we not let covid mutate into more faster, more contagious and evasive variants. And the variants were much more likely to spring up as we let the epidemic go rampant.
> This is our first interaction, not sure why you think I keep thinking something I never thought.
Are you not posting a message demonstrating your current thinking? And your current message is showing the same thought process. You need to adjust your knowledge of the situation.
Giving the entire planet a booster every 3 months is not a viable strategy.
> it would have been possible to contain the epidemic
No, it would not.
> had we not let covid
We didn't "let covid" do anything. This is not a disease we are currently able to control.
Vaccines don't work stop the spread of the virus (they only stop serious disease), masks don't work, lockdowns don't work.
The only failure here is we let fear control us. Once the first vaccine was available the fear should have been over.
But even today hospitals are refusing non vaccinated visitors even if they have immunity due to getting stick. There is no scientific basis for this, it's just fear.
And it's stupid as well - the vaccine only works for a few months, but if you got vaccinated 2 years ago you are permitted entry, but you recovered from illness 1 month ago you are not. This is not science, this is dogma.
> Vaccines don't work stop the spread of the virus
They did stop the spread of the historic and alpha variant in Israel, with a 55-60% rate of vaccination (I mistakenly thought it was 70%, it was even lower). Before the onset of the delta wave, the virus was about to go extinct there.
You can check the graphs. May 11 2021, there were 4.66 new cases per million inhabitants. By June 9 it was down to 1.5. Compare with the surrounding countries, where the alpha wave lasted much longer, and was still lingering when the delta variant came around.
But the global vaccine rollout was criminally slow.
I don't know how hospitals devise their COVID policy in the US... In France you need a "Sanitary pass" to access healthcare facilities. You must either provide a negative test taken in the last 24 hours, or a proof of some level of immunity (either up to date vaccination, or a COVID recovery certificate from less than 4 months).
Compare the evolution of the alpha wave in Israel, France and Lebanon. Israel, had also drastically cut down on community measures like lockdowns, curfews and closure of non-necessary businesses.
This is the most common approach even if it isn’t done on purpose, and I think it should be formalized with terminology and studies. The current zeitgeist of immunity as understood by the general population and, importantly, politicians, just can’t seem to incorporate the concept of something that is so contagious but changes so quickly. But it’s the reality for almost all sickness we get, this is the norm, not the outlier. Why are we still even thinking about vaccinating people with the original covid vax? We give the annual flu shot more respect.
Despite what we want and how we wish the world would be, the reality is that if you are constantly exposed to covid you are unlikely to ever be symptotically ill. Since we can’t prevent that from happening everywhere in the world, might as well plan for it. It also puts evolutionary pressure on the disease to be less severe, since if you feel sick you stay home, but if you don’t you go out and spread it.
It is not that vacccines failed: the government failed.
If they advertise them as “you will not get sick” they are 100% success.
But they advertised it as “we need to have mandate so that everybody will get immune forever”. This is where things failed adding ammunition to crazies and conspiracy theories.
Ah that. Yeah - they've been a success but to take a more critical view not for what they were advertised for. They've been hugely successful at reducing the severity of the disease. Also, it wasn't just mRNA. J&J and AZ vaccines are not mRNA based. They haven't provided broad and lasting immunity. At least that isn't the impression I get from reading articles on them.
Not mRNA vaccines, COVID vaccines (all of them, doesn't matter the type). To be specific Coronaviruses are known not to produce lasting immunity, COVID is no exception.
They failed in their primary goal: Creating lasting immunity to this disease. They succeeded in a secondary goal: Reducing severity of infection.
The trouble with failing in the primary goal is that COVID is here forever.
The vaccine didn't fail. The Delta wave would have been far deadlier without it. It served its purpose.
But now, the vaccine effectiveness is actually negative in several places! I have even seen what seemingly look like nonsense such as vaccinated but unboosted people having much lower infection rates than both boosted and unvaccinated people. It is something that has been puzzling me for a while and that study may be final piece I needed.
What I have seen so far:
- The vaccine was very effective against Alpha, not as effective against Delta but still very good.
- The vaccine has some effectiveness against Omicron, but it wanes quickly. After about 6 months, it doesn't do much, but not nothing, especially against severe cases. I've seen around 20% effectiveness against infection, I suspect even less against BA.4/5
- Almost everyone has some immunity now, natural or vaccine induced.
So, what I think happened is that many people got their booster just before the first Omicron wave, giving them significant protection. Far from perfect, but enough to see it clearly in the stats. Most of those who didn't receive boosters or were unvaccinated caught it (with or without symptoms). Later, in the following waves (BA.2,4,5) and even in the end of the first wave, those who had their boosters found their protection diminished, while the unvaccinated were protected by their first wave Omicron infection, which, according to the article, seems to be highly effective.
I would rather avoid deliberately getting sick though... If you really want to attend these large gatherings because that's what you enjoy, fine, but doing that just to get covid is a terrible reason. There is no guarantee it will all go according you your plan. If that pandemic has taught us anything, it is than not much happened according to plans. I would rather wait for an Omicron optimized vaccine that may not do everything as planned, but at least went through trials.
The only reason I can imagine where getting deliberately infected is worth it is if you plan to be in a situation where you really can't afford to get covid. And if that's the case, getting an extra dose of the current mRNA vaccines at the right moment will offer you some limited time protection.
And finally, I think that vaccine mandates should go. Because almost everyone has some immunity, and these old vaccines offer very limited protection, it won't do much besides pissing some people off. I am still very pro-vaccine, but I don't see the need for mandates anymore.
Did you read the recent study that shows anyone who got the vaccine has lower immunity after 8 months compared to someone unvaccinated. Did that change your pro vaccine stance?
It is exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned negative effectiveness. And while the study definitely shows waning immunity, the apparent "lower immunity compared to someone unvaccinated" after 8 months is just an artefact resulting from the fact that you are unlikely to get covid twice in a row (i.e. natural immunity).
The Lancet study actually shows an overall vaccine effectiveness of 84% and naturally concludes by recommending booster doses. The 84% figure is may also be an artefact and doesn't account for Omicron, buy I could say that from the study, the vaccine is 84% effective over 9 months, which would be as misleading as the "immunity is lower after 8 months" quote.
But still, it is better than getting deliberately infected.
And sure enough current vaccines are not a viable strategy, but it tells you nothing about covid vaccines as a whole. Researchers are not standing still, new vaccines are being researched, and even if we can only make short lived vaccines, it doesn't mean that vaccines are not a viable strategy. Flu vaccines are a viable strategy, they save many lives despite a rather low effectiveness and requiring yearly injections.
>SADS was not a thing until the medical cartel started disseminating this lie through their co-opted legacy media channels.
[1] "Seeing “the better way” to disseminate and educate, the Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes (SADS) Foundation, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization, was established on December 12, 1991 by Dr. Vincent and several dedicated colleagues and LQTS family members, for the purpose of helping to prevent sudden and unexpected cardiac death in children and in young adults."
I'm talking about "Sudden Adult Death Syndrome" which the establishment is struggling to pass off as "old hat"[0] now that dozens of current and former athletes are dropping dead on the field, in the boxing ring or at home. [1]
And for all the at risk folks where this advice isn’t always an option? Also, citation needed. How often are healthy people dying and how much above the baseline is that. Harm reduction vs harm introduced? E.g is the risk worth it?
The mRNAs have been well known to cause serious myocarditis in healthy young men (including my own nurse at UCLA who had to check in to the ER after getting the Pfizer jab).
Anecdotal: The POTUS currently has BA.5 and it twice vaxxed and twice boosted. Apparently his symptoms are mild. My father is 72 years old. Never vaxxed and has not had a cold for at least 4 years. Doesn't mask, lives in Florida.
Objective:
If you watched the Town Hall meeting I linked to with the LAC+USC faculty you would hear the current situation from their own testimony. No hospitalizations at all in the last two months.
Conspiratorial:
The NYT and CDC are compromised by the establishment medical cartel and fudge numbers to trick credulous people into believing whatever they want.
I am taking a holistic approach to my thoughts on this matter.
> hi maybe do all that but also don't reject vaccines :)
> before the vaccines plenty of young healthy people died.
I think we need to put the words "plenty of young healthy" into context or that statement is at risk of failing a fact check.
Take a glance at the EuroMOMO mortality graphs by age cohort[0] and you'll see this pandemic is definitely skewed towards the elderly, and underlying medical conditions (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, cancer) are known to increase the likelihood of serious illness and death from COVID-19[1][2]
It would be news if this weren’t true. Of course infection from an ancestor virus provides some immunity and a more recent ancestor provides more than an older one.