I'm genuinely curious. How can you be sure natural immunity cured Covid and not the vaccination? The vaccinations were correlated with steep declines in deaths and severe illness, isn't that good enough to motivate the vaccinations?

Or is your point that the vaccine just gave a temporary respite that ultimately saved few lives relative to the cost?

Because it used to be called the flu, and the rise of Covid is correlated to the decline in flu related deaths. And suddenly as Covid started to decline flu related to increased. The mortality rate, however, did not change.

But it's still "cured" in the sense that fewer people die from it today compared to 2020, right? Intensive care units are not under the same pressure as they were during the pandemic years. It's a much less severe illness today than it was before, and many people attribute that change to the vaccinations.

I still don't understand why you think we can't improve things ourselves. Do you believe every vaccine is a hoax, or only the Covid vaccine?

I said we humans aren't improving things for ourselves. What fraction of people do you see wearing a mask?

Seems to me we improved things by developing a vaccine so we don't have to wear masks

countries around the world, rich and poor, pursued different public health responses, some because of choices, some had no choices. But people around the world are not getting serious covid any more, it's just not something anybody even thinks about more than say the flu. That's the attenuation of the virus and natural immunity (and you might as well lump attenutation of the virus with natural immunity because they occur on the same timescale in the same interactions), which was predictable and was predicted. The UK initially followed that idea as a strategy, and Sweden followed it, it was accepted science.

The people who died with covid didn't necessarily die of covid, but public health officials followed policies of lumping them together, and govts incented them to do it: "more money for covid". Old and infirm people, the morbidly obese, respiratory illnesses, etc. suffered the worst, as they do from the flu. Young people were hardly affected, though young people seem to have suffered more from the vaccine side effects and the socialization developmental deficit.

The conferred immunity from catching covid protects you from reinfection far longer than the so-called vaccines, because these mRNA vaccines don't work as traditional vaccines do, that's why (along with the profit motive) we were all told to start getting boosters essentially right away.

When an event like this causes excess deaths, it is followed by a period with a death deficit, simply because many of people "who were going to die soon anyway" died early, and they aren't around to die later, it's accepted science. That has to have happened with covid because they told us those people were dying, but try to get your hands on the statistics. I'm not saying people didn't get sick from covid or that it wasn't serious, But the coverups and stonewalling stop us from getting to the truth about what happened.

but it is not because of vaccinations that we don't worry about covid today, and the vaccinations we got had more side effects (in no small part because they were not tested).

I knew I would get downvoted for this because there is a political class that is, in HN terms, not comfortable with people "being curious" about it, they'd rather censor. But since GP engaged in gratuitous soapboxing and propagandizing I thought I'd spend some karma to speak up.

When do you expect the death deficit to show up in mortality data? So far it looks like most (but not all) countries had an increase and then returned to the previous trendline: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year. For the world's total deaths per year, it definitely looks like the area under the curve increased due to covid.

>When do you expect the death deficit to show up in mortality data?

right away. I'm not an epidemiologist, but it's simple logic. A certain number of people of every age die every year. infants, toddlers, tweens, adolescents, middle aged people, old people, in each group a certain %age of people die every year of "all cause mortality". More old people die than young people (we're talking about rates here, % chance of dying)

so, if there is a period where a whole bunch extra old people who die one year, that whole bunch extra old people are not around the very next year to die, because they're already dead.

If the numbers don't add up, somebody is hiding data. the numbers absolutely should make sense.

so, one explanation for what you are saying is that extra old people didn't die, it was the same number of old people; who died must have been young people, because those "missing deaths" will not show up in the "normal" death statistics for a long time. But that's not what we were told happened, so again, something is not right with the data.

I do want to believe what you're saying because it means fewer life-years lost but... the other explanation is that covid plus the countermeasures to it really did impact people's health (not just the fatalities) and increased net mortality. We can check back in a few years but so far this explanation seems likelier to me.

Wow I haven't seen that graph before. It's very striking. It certainly shows Covid was not "just the flu"

yeah, but that's not a significant point. covid "not having been the flu" is a different statement than covid is just the flu now. the Spanish flu (1919 or whenever that was) was not "just the flu" either, but it burned bright and then died out in a very short time.

the question is not whether covid-19 happened, it did. the question is whether our various responses did anything or much at all to help, and whether it was productive to turn it into an us/them political issue and suppress speech and criticism to maintain the facade of being right. qui bono?

The severity of an infection barely has anything to do outcomes… did you ever use any iota of common sense when you wrote that?

The COVID vaccines were fairly effective in reducing infection rates and severity.

The problem comes when you present an experimental vaccine that hasn't gone through ordinary trials and requires you to sign a liability waiver before you can take it, but then superciliously impose penalties and restrictions on people who choose to decline. That is how you destroy public trust and foment conspiracy theories.

we were told the covid vaccines would prevent infection, then when they didn't, the narrative changed to reduced severity, is a more accurate statement of what you said.

In somewhat of a case in point on losing public trust, mentioning politicians and corporate media outlets lying about something seemed about as redundant to me as mentioning water being wet.

It's not politicians and media being embroiled in scandal that is surprising. It's that they still have their jobs. Politicians used to resign after scandal and reporters got fired. Now they get promoted

Politicians used to resign because of the expectation that they'd be voted out, in turn because of the expectation that the media would inform the voters of their mendacity.

The media has become so partisan that each side will attack the other with equal ferocity regardless of who was right on a particular issue, so now the politicians roll the dice and most of the time they still get reelected right after their own misbehavior.

The question is why the media continues to do this, given that they are clearly not benefiting from it -- their viewership/readership numbers are in the toilet, a lot of them have already gone out of business and the others are on the same trajectory.

I suspect it's something like, they've cultivated a partisan audience and if they now try to be neutral, they short-term lose partisans faster than they gain moderates and then some MBA who can't think past next quarter insists that they stop.

But returning to the original intercept course with the ground is hardly a genius plan.

High risk people are more likely to get the vaccine.

they are high risk, not for covid infection, but because they have other comorbidities, i.e. what are they really dying of? doctor were forced to check "covid" even if the doctors didn't believe that.