Sometimes I think I'm living in a parallel universe.
I know people who travel regularly and no one says anything to them. No quarantine, nothing. Most people on the streets here in Germany give zero fucks, groups of 5-10, no masks (even though there's a curfew between 10pm-5am due to an increase in cases).
And I traveled all the way from Moldova to Germany by car. No one, and I mean no one ever asked for a Covid test (which I had, of course, along with a positive antibodies test). Border guards, Hungarian border patrol, German Zoll, regular Romanian and German police, they cared about what's in the bags, didn't even mention Covid.
Hungarian border guards wanted to see a German work contract for whatever asinine reason, but I repeat, none of them ever asked for a Covid test or to at least keep the mask on (they need to see your face when checking the passport).
Whatever bureaucratic stumbling blocks there are, they have nothing to do with reality, it seems.
I'm pretty sure it's because you traveled by car -- which means the odds that you were exposing your fellow travelers was limited to the people that would get in a car with you.
I've traveled 2 times now by air from NYC -> London during Covid.
Last year, a 14 day quarantine on both sides, and on the NYC side, a phone call everyday to make sure I was quarantining.
This year on the London side, a 10 day quarantine, 1 negative test before flying, and 2 at home tests while quarantining, with a phone call everyday to confirm. I also got hassled at the airport because I didn't print out the day 2 and 8 receipt, just included the code on my passenger locator form under penalty of perjury.
So, the UK by air does care I suspect because of the increased exposure risk.
Because in most of the cases you are transiting and no one cares. If you would have said to any of those border guards that you are coming to stay in any of those countries, they would have cared and asked for more things. Saying this as I travelled recently from Germany through 4 countries. In the destination country they asked for test, proof of sickness or vaccine proof.
I traveled in the opposite direction (more or less: Vienna to Bucarest) more than 3 months ago and wasn't asked either, but on the Hungary-Romania border, they put me in a tiny room (1/3 shipping container or so) with ca. 10 people and gave me quarantine papers. They didn't check bags.
I'm pretty sure they'd check for a test or vaccination now on the way back, I'm not eager to find out and will stay here in the Covid exile for a little longer.
> Thus limiting those that are not vaccinated and making it difficult to move freely for them.
> ... that effectively will force many to be vaccinated.
Yup, that’s the point.
No man is an island. You already can’t walk around doing literally whatever you want just because it’s your body you’re doing it with. You depend on other people, and other people depend on you (or at least can’t avoid intermingling with you, especially if you decide to travel internationally). Those who don’t get vaccinated slow down our recovery from the pandemic, putting other people’s health and lives at risk. Society has to make these trade-offs, and this one seems very reasonable to me.
I agree with your points, but I'd really really like to avoid giving the impression of... glee? "Look at those unwashed unvaccinated Trump supporters, so good they'll be forced to do things our ways now!". I'm not saying you're doing it, I'm just piggybacking on your comment.
I'm pretty much a high-modernist when it comes to vaccines - I think that having governments build sewage and create vaccines go into the same category of "damn useful for civilization". But it does involve curtailing liberties, and I just can't put it in a "fell good" category.
Restricting movement due not being vaccinated is "curtailing liberties".
No shit. One can either be part of society or not. Society has minimum requirements if one wants to participate. One is free—exercise their liberty—to live as a hermit if they don't want to do either of these things. That's the price of admission of getting the benefits, whatever they may be, of interacting with other people. Added bonus, the rest of us don't need to hear about hermits complaining about their liberties then too.
Building sewage management infrastructure is not curtailing liberties. There is very little noise made about having to give up liberties because of the majority of other public works. Civilization decided that shitting on the sidewalk is not something that should be encouraged or condoned, so here we are with our sewage management infrastructure. We gain the freedom of not having to dig a hole and maintain an outhouse.
No one is giving up any "liberties" by getting vaccinated, but it's more likely they are acquiring liberties by getting vaccinated. At the very least it's the liberty of reducing the risk of dying.
This is all a "I don't want to do what you said I should do purely because you said it". Fine. The rest of us are at liberty to exclude or chastise these people.
Except putting "curtailing liberties" into scare quotes, what are you saying, exactly?
This is exactly the kind of tone and comment I was speaking against. I am _pro_ vaccinations, I am _pro_ making them soft-mandatory, I was even pro other restrictions back before vaccines. All I said, in a rather moderate tone, is that I disagree with being happy about the downsides. Somehow in the kind of comments I'm speaking against, yours included, I don't see happiness that we're getting vaccinated per se. I don't see "yey, poeple won't be dying any more". I see a lot of "chastise these people".
I also see quite a lot of scare quotes and misrepresentation. I didn't say sewage was a restriction - I gave it as positive example. I didn't say (WHO would even say that?) that getting a vaccine is giving up liberties. That's stupid, really, it doesn't even make sense. I will say that not being able to do stuff without being vaccinated is a restriction. A worthy one, yes, and one I totally agree with, but by god, how can you even try to spin ... I'm not even sure what you're trying to spin, because the more I read your comment the more I realize it's just appeal to emotion and void of content.
Are you free to rant against categories of people? Yes. I just said it's not a nice thing to do, is all.
> No one is giving up any "liberties" by getting vaccinated, but it's more likely they are acquiring liberties by getting vaccinated. At the very least it's the liberty of reducing the risk of dying.
As a person waiting to get his booster shot next week, I find this quite concerning. Those liberties we had and were taken away from us. Nobody cares about people dying. I am sitting now next to my mom who 1 month ago was diagnosed with terminal secondary cancer after all her check-ups were cancelled last year. So yeah, nobody gives a damn about anything else than seeming virtuos and better than others online. But no one cares any more about any other diseases or other people that are suffering, it’s all social signaling for the rich and well off people to show how moral they are, all while their lifestyle is supported by those that can’t afford to have any liberties.
To add to your argument: I've never encountered a discussion, much less a proposal to throttle all cars at 10 km/h. That would save around 4000 lives here in Germany alone and spare many more severely injured, scarred for their life.
It's not about saving lifes, it's about getting re-elected.
Would it, though? Sure, 4000 _might_ be saved from car crashes. But how many would die by not making it in time to a hospital? From the likely collapse of transportation, and distribution of goods? From the extra pollution of going that slow? From the general economic impacts of such a measure?
"One can either be part of society or not. Society has minimum requirements if one wants to participate"
You make it sound as if there is a fixed, god given set of rules for society. That's not the case. Societies rules are constantly being negotiated by society.
So your argument is not an argument at all. It boils down to "you have to follow the rules because you have to follow the rules".
Hobbes lays out a mixture of natural/God aspects and society negotiated aspects. But I think they all boil down to an ongoing slow shift of what society accepts as a whole.
I think society has opinions and ideas that evolve into ethics and morals that are represented in laws.
It’s not a secret. In this case, rights are curtailed to require vaccines. This is deemed acceptable. If you don’t like it, convince your country mates to change their mind. Or move to a country that feels differently. Or move to the wilderness.
Yes, certainly. The ongoing discussion is going on right now, we’re part of it as a very small amount of two strangers talking. I think it’s usually informal, but sometimes through debates, books, essays, etc. A good example are the Federalist Papers in the 18th century with back and forth on topics that ended up being articulated in the constitution, bill of rights, etc.
I think it also varies from country to country as it varies quite a bit.
But negotiation often isn't occurring in good faith. There's way too much flat-earth- holocaust-denial- style arguments from those who "just don't want to be told what to do". Getting vaccinated doesn't take away someone's liberties; "I don't want to be told what to do" is not an argument against vaccination. Many of these people are just making noise, and it's getting old.
I'm not saying there aren't good arguments for not getting vaccinated, but it falls flat when those same people got vaccinated in order to attend public school or have state issued IDs or use passports or will bitch about a loved one dying because they failed to get vaccinated.
Tone and discourse. We're not debating the merits of vaccinations here. We're talking about how this way of making conversation is ultimately toxic.
> There's way too much flat-earth- holocaust-denial- style arguments from those who "just don't want to be told what to do".
This is how you want the discourse to look like? Somebody puts an argument, and gets labeled flat earther.
Do you know Gell Mann amnesia? I shared an article the other day on facebook and got it flagged as "out of context". As it happens, it was something not out of context, just slightly against the mainstream. What do you think this did to my confidence in the mainstream?
And before you say that my article must have been wrong, let me remind you that the mainstream was against wearing masks 12 months ago. Hell, CDC was against wearing ffp2 masks... I don't know, 3 months ago?
Civil discourse and tone are much more important long term than just winning conversation points. Sure, go for points if you want. But every time you say things like "flat earth", you take a small chip out of the boat we're all in.
Mandating medical interventions is pretty much taking away someone's liberties. And your opinions about other people's opinions are also irrelevant as an argument.
Are you daft? I'm not offering what I think of other people's opinions as an argument about vaccination. I'm responding to your assertion that there is actually valuable debate to be had with rubes whose only argument is "I don't like being told what to do".
But it's such a nonsense strategy, there is no way that this will provide eradication, covid is just too virulent and not deadly enough, it will remain in small pockets, remember there will be many countries that won't be able to afford this on going pharmaceutical tax. If it does provide protection vaccinate the at risk and be done.
The aim is to prevent the virus from clogging up the healthcare system. Countries which vaccinated all the citizens they could(e.g. Israel) already achieved that.
One dose of the Pfizer vaccine costs €16, while AstraZeneca's is less than €3. This is affordable by any measure.
I'm in the US and I got my Pfizer shots at my local small hospital. They had storage because they have a pharmacy. Seems like an easy thing to just have, ya know. It was free to me. I'm 32. Was such an easy process to get. Big shrug
Before mixing, the vaccine may be stored in an ultra-cold freezer between -80°C and -60°C (-112°F and -76°F). Vaccine may be stored until the expiration date.
Before mixing, the vaccine may be stored in the freezer between -25°C and -15°C (-13°F to 5°F) for up to 2 weeks. The total time vials are stored at these temperatures should be tracked and should not exceed 2 weeks.
So once they reach their destination they can be put in a normal freezer, which in turn are abundant and cheap.
You get refrigerated trucks, which are already common for food distribution, and essentially a fridge that can store a thousand doses and be re-used as new stock comes in.
It's not a negligible cost but it's far from highly specialized.
> there is no way that this will provide eradication
FWIW, it is not feasible to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 anyway since it can survive in certain types of animals as well. All the germs we eradicated thus far were limited to human hosts.
(Source: A German podcast that interviews professors of virology every week.)
In my country shitting on sidewalks, had higher priority than health or liberties. Dog walking was allowed, while exercise and outdoor activities were prohibited.
Society already excludes many people due to expensive housing, education etc... Living as hermit in a van is not that bad. But society should not expect taxes from excluded people :)
It's a shame your comment has been found to be polarising, I think your phrasing is quite moderate.
Looking at social media it feels like too many people are celebrating because they've been given another opportunity to show how virtuous they are. They're not one of those people that oppose vaccines and progress, oh no. The clout associated with putting up pictures of you with a needle in your arm is probably the most off-putting thing I'd gotten to gawk at.
My assessment is similar to yours. The situation just kinda is. We've had a novel viral agent, what followed is what you'd expect of a society that optimised for lack of novel viral agents. Now the viral agent is mostly gone and we have two new taxes to show for it: further encumberement of civil liberties and more revenue for the pharmaceutical industry.
It's not a bad result but there's no big win to point at either
It contained a few key words/ideas, so it became immediately polarized. I guess given enough years we'll become inoculated against such failure modes, but meanwhile, it is what it is.
I completely disagree. As we say with code, there’s freedom in restrictions. I, for example, don’t ever have to worry about my safety because the “freedom” of others have been curtailed on several points, and I deeply appreciate that. There’s no inherently moral good in limitless freedom. Especially because humans are far from rational agents that can reasonably act without boundaries.
If you don’t want to be vaccinated or pay your taxes, you are, on some level, a danger to society.
>I, for example, don’t ever have to worry about my safety because the “freedom” of others have been curtailed on several points, and I deeply appreciate that.
Isn't is possible for someone to stab you? So in theory you could have some small degree of worry about your safety. Different people have different places they draw the line for an acceptable amount of worry vs an acceptable amount of freedom restrictions.
In (most of) the EU, it’s illegal to carry a weapon of any kind unless you have a reason to do so (ie, going hunting). You can’t even carry pepper spray.
Fun fact: In Germany, anti-people pepper spray is considered a weapon but anti-animal pepper spray is not. There is no difference of course, and you're allowed to use anti-animal pepper spray in self defense.
Not entirely. There are people at the boarder searching some cars that come in, and searching some mail. Laws could be passed increasing those searches, and even searching everyone's house regularly. This would reduce the risk that you get shot, because some illegal guns would be found in these searches.
To take it to the extreme, the law could force you to live in a little cell locked away from everyone. This would prevent you from being stabbed by someone else (except one of the guards).
Like I said, there's a tradeoff between security and freedom.
By most of, it's about 50/50 and a bad law, since it almost never prevents abuse. I put it alongside band on specific melee weapons.
(As opposed to gun control.)
Use of it should constitute assault, which gets turned into legitimate self defense in various situations, just as if you were hitting someone.
Some of those bans and laws are just reasons to jail or fine people and do not in particular help with safety. After all, anyone can have a knife or martial arts on them anywhere for legitimate reasons, and you better have means to defend against these.
Seatbelt laws curtail liberties, too, but most societies have decided that the good effects massively outweigh the small freedom inconvenience of putting a buckle in a latch and going about your day.
Also, I bet you're vaccinated against polio. Do people feel their freedom has been limited because of being vaccinated against polio?
If we know that people who recovered from covid are effectively as if they were vaccinated, why do they have to wait until they have the privilege to be in the lucky age group to receive the vaccine before they can go visit a loved one they don't see for more than one year?
Are you assuming that everyone in the world is living in a privileged country where people as young as 30 can already access vaccines?
I read a lot from Americans complaining how bad their country was and all that, but hey, all my American coworkers got vaccinated and I can't visit my mom in Switzerland because she aged 68 just got her first shot yesterday. That's right, Switzerland not some third world country. Switzerland with all its pharma industry can't get the same vaccine production capacity and rollout throughput as your "utterly unorganized federal state that totally botched covid", as I often read Americans.
You don't actually have a birth-given right to enter all other countries - which might be a surprise to people with good passports that effectively used to let them travel anywhere (try entering the USA with a passport from Pakistan or Iraq and see how it compares with a Swiss passport!).
This is about what other countries want to restrict in terms of non-citizen's entering the country without isolation.
These are countries which have had a significant portion of their economy shut down for more than a year, so unsurprisingly they might want to ensure non-citizens who travel in have done something to limit the risk (even if that is isolating for 2 weeks).
Sure. But if the bar to entry is "scientifically proven immunity", then both natural immunity and the one induced by vaccinations are reasonable bars to entry.
You may say "ok, we don't have yet the beurocratic apparatus to accept natural immunity in our protocols and for the time being we're going to focus on vaccinated people, sorry".
You may not say "we want to force you to vaccinate, that's the whole point, duh"
That's a dangerous attitude. It feeds vaccine skeptics or denialists, who use this attitude as a proof that there is as much dogma in the "official scientific community" who are in big pharma's pockets. They are a bunch of nuts, but they are infecting otherwise reasonable people I know all around me.
Let's avoid setting up official policies and discourse tones which effective feed the trolls.
Just want to interject that a lot of us Americans are pleasantly surprised with just how quickly and effectively the vaccine rollout has gone. It has been a real turnaround for those living in states whose government was able to pull it off.
(But it should be noted that many states are not doing as well)
Yes kudos to America for actually having an effective rollout, even with all the Trump drama.
There are also many diverse ways the individual states have handled restrictions, it will be interesting to see if some consensus will be reached regarding keeping restrictions or not.
My Body, My Choice went the way of the gutter I see.
My family is vaccinated, but I don't see why this should be forced on people. Anaphylaxis and Thrombosis are rare reported conditions after vaccination - some even causing deaths. Vaccination should be a choice.
ELI5, if someone is not vaccinated isn't the only person being put at risk themselves? I have heard speculation of how this could cause more variants to arise which seems to be mostly just that: speculation. Or how this can be problematic for at-risk (elderly, immuno-compromised etc) but how frequently does that happen? I am 100% confident I have not encountered any such people in the last 6 months (or well atleast for any amount of time that would actually be harmful). FWIW I'm fully vaccinated, I'm genuinely curious about this.
That you haven't met someone who can't take vaccines is not a reason to dismiss them. Intuitively, such people may prefer to stay in self-quarantine to protect themselves, making you even less likely to encounter such a person during a pandemic.
However, getting vaccinated should also help reduce the transmission of the disease to people who haven't yet had a chance to get a vaccination even though they could; the pandemic will end faster than if you let it run its natural course.
For any vaccine (and the corresponding disease) there are people that cannot be vaccinated, but that can have quite severe symptoms (and/or die). If a person is not vaccinated - then this person can spread the disease among those vulnerable people. How this can be problematic - here is an example. One of the reasons Sweden has so high mortality from COVID is that during the first wave elderly care homes were hit hard, because workers spread the virus (mostly unknowingly). That you have not met such people in the last 6 months depends, I guess, on your social interactions style and on the structure of the society you live in in general.
Except that the people who are worried can simply get vaccinated themselves.
There may be a few people who can not be vaccinated (old and very sick), but it hardly seems appropriate to restrict billions of people just to protect those few. It would be more efficient to isolate them, which most of them probably already are (in care homes or hospitals).
Seems incredibly selfish to force vulnerable people into isolation because some people allow themselves to get absorbed into conspiracy theories about a harmless vaccine.
Requiring certain vaccines for travel has been something that has existed for decades and was never controversial.
It's not a harmless vaccine. You want to mandate vaccinating people who are at no risk from the disease, and expose them to unnecessary risks. And that means children - all to protect sick people who for the most part are already isolated. They are in hospitals or sick people homes, where you can protect them in other ways.
Also the comparison with other vaccines does not automatically make sense. All vaccines are not the same. At least in my country, so far recommendations for vaccinations had been "conservative" to only vaccinate against things that seem especially risky. There is a reason why people are not simply being vaccinated against all possible diseases.
First of all it’s entirely false that it’s just “sick and old” people affected; there are also children and young adults with immune disorders who can live somewhat normal lives today because of minor sacrifices from others such as vaccinations. Secondly, sick and old people are also human beings who deserve consideration.
We mandate that people take all kinds of minor risks in life; that’s always been part of being in a society.
The reason vaccine advice is conservative is because anti-intellectualism and belief in conspiracy theories has gone off the charts and politicians now have to coddle these people. It’s a collective mental illness.
There is a nonzero risk to the vaccination. I really don't understand why you consider the plight of the people who can't get vaccinated, and dismiss the plight of the people who die or come down with severe disabilities from the vaccination.
The mental disease of many anti-intellectuals and conspiracy theorists is the inability or refusal to understand scale and proportion; it's the single source of an enormous amount of flawed logic.
Scale and proportion is the reason. 7 per 1,000,000 risk of blood clotting if you are a woman between 18-49 (and basically no risk if you're a man or outside that range, or use one of the vaccines that have not shown this risk). This is on the level of shark attacks and getting hit by lightning. Actually getting COVID has more serious risks and a much higher rate of being affected by them.
We regularly ask of citizens to do things that have a 7 per 1,000,000 risk of injury; it's a reasonable ask.
Your comparison does not make sense, though. The question is, how many people who are not at risk from the disease do you have to vaccinate, and how many people are there who can not be vaccinated and would contract Covid-19. Let's say with your numbers there are thousands of (young) people who die from the vaccination. How many people who can't be vaccinated would die if those young people would not get the vaccination?
What other risky things to we ask citizens to do, exactly? People certainly choose to do other risky things. But how many are mandated?
Even if we're only talking about 18-29, there have been 2,100 deaths from COVID in that age group in the US already. Even in the most generous interpretation, that means that it would be at least 10 times as dangerous for someone in that age group not to get vaccinated than it would to be vaccinated. The numbers are so blatantly obviously in favor of having everyone vaccinated.
Anyway, I'm done feeding a troll account created today.
I should have added - risky for the person who might contract the disease.
In any case, yes, both disease and vaccination have risks, that should be weighed against each other. Matters are complicated because risks differ among different age groups.
Vaccines aren't 100% bullet proof. The few people effected are still people. If you were one of them, wouldn't you be fairly distraught by your point of view?
> The travel pass is a horrible idea, that effectively will force many to be vaccinated.
Good. It’s not like a concentration camp. There are other options if you don’t want to vaccinate.
You can just stay at home (I’ve been declined Schengen visa in the past for no reason), you can get PCR-tested. You also can get ill with Covid and then recover (hopefully).
PCR tests don't analyze your DNA. They are only testing for the presence of some characteristic virus DNA segments. Other than showing your infection status, no information is obtained and consequently cannot be stored.
The potential exists for DNA harvesting. Dismissing it as impossible seems inaccurate.
>(CBS) — The largest biotech firm in the world wasted no time in offering to build and run COVID testing labs in Washington, contacting its governor right after the first major COVID outbreak in the U.S. occurred there. The Chinese company, the BGI Group, made the same offer to at least five other states, including New York and California, 60 Minutes has learned. This, along with other COVID testing offers by BGI, so worried Bill Evanina, then the country’s top counterintelligence officer, that he authorized a rare public warning. “Foreign powers can collect, store and exploit biometric information from COVID tests” declared the notice. Evanina believes the Chinese are trying to collect Americans’ DNA to win a race to control the world’s biodata.
>China's push to control Americans' health care future:
U.S. officials say the Chinese government is trying to collect Americans' DNA, and they believe a recent offer from a Chinese company for assistance in COVID-19 testing was suspicious. Jon Wertheim reports.
>"I haven't bothered to read, but I'm dismissing it as a conspiracy theory"
I hope you can appreciate the problems with that reasoning.
Yes, there are costs involved in data collection. If the data is valuable, organizations will foot those costs. We've seen this in the tech sphere. Why is it hard to imagine it in the health/biosecurity realm?
Even if this were true, the accusation only derails the conversation.
We are attempting to discuss the topic. Dismissing the speaker out of hand because he sounds a certain way isn't helpful. Similarly, dismissing an article because it "sounds like conspiracy theory" isn't helpful.
I ask this as I understand your concern about politics forcing personal decisions, yet I am not finding a pragmatic workable solution to the current crisis.
As exemplified by the UK, enough people will want to get vaccinated to reach herd immunity. Then you don’t need to care about / oppress those who don’t want to / can’t get vaccinated.
I would like a lot to believe that this is how it will be in all EU states, but I am not sure.
As far as I can see the vaccination rhythm is decreasing in some countries and it is not even approaching 50% of population. It might be because of the back and forth with Astra Zeneca the EU did or it might be because EU is pretty big as in diverse with respect of culture, set of beliefs, approach to health …
Anyhow everyone is demanding EU to do something so their response will not be “wait so that everybody wants to be vaccinated”. Also because being that big means that heard immunity will not be reached.
The European way should be to treat the EU as one country and stop restricting movement. We've had Schengen for a long time, which meant no border checks whatsoever on most borders (we were driving through without even stopping or slowing down most of the time). With this vaccine passport, Schengen is pretty much history and that removes one of the main liberties the EU was offering.
> The European way should be to treat the EU as one country and stop restricting movement.
At least in Italy, movement was restricted inside regions (sometimes provinces) of the same country due to the epidemy.
It's not nice for anyone involved, but the primary goal is to stop/limit the contagion.
I'm an expat, so it goes against one of my interests, but I'm in favor of limiting border crossings, unless you can show that you won't spread COVID around.
As long as we can have quarantine of cities, then we will have quarantine of countries => deadlock, each country, like now will restrict movement from other countries, thus making the freedom of movement almost impractical for everybody.
So I think in this case (we are in a global pandemic) it makes sense to see freedom of movement not in a binary way (yes/no) but more in shades: allow more movement of more people as we get better at containing the pandemic.
Also please note EU is not a federal state, nor many of the founding members want that to be. So countries have a lot of power to decide how to handle pandemic. Still I think EU as a block did a good job negotiating vaccines in the context of not having a unity or a fast decision process.
So while I don't agree with restricting rights, I also don't agree with restricting rights of people who can move (like the ones vaccinated or immunised naturally) just because everybody cannot do it (cannot get vaccinated for personal or medical reasons).
Schengen has been deteriorating for a long time. Denmark has totally ignored it and has road checks at the border for more than 5 years now and other nations have done similar (although to a less extreme extent).
I’ve been to Denmark two years ago and I have no memory of any border check. It was by plane btw, maybe the checks are different but it would be surprising. It is totally possible however that the check was so fast that I don’t remember it. Do you have any information about this ?
Note I said “road checks” as in arriving by car. They totally closed the border and stop basically all non-Danish license plates for inspection. They are only supposed to be able to do this for emergencies for a max of 6 months. Instead, every 6 months they declare a new “emergency” so they can keep it closed indefinitely.
Can't speak for Denmark. But usually those border-checks are done couple km/miles after the border. Police will just stop "random" cars/trucks and do a "routine check".
And "random" it might be as much as 50% of the passing cars.
No, for years it was already required that you vaccinate against certain diseases if you want to visit some countries. It’s not a novel idea. It’s just common sense.
Liberty. It's a terrible a precedent to restrict freedom of movement on a forced personal health decision. It's basically subverting your body to the state.
This isn't rocket science. I don't know where people get this idea that international travel was some kind of libertarian utopia before covid. There are a lot of things that restrict your ability to travel, and vaccinations are one of the least problematic.
> international travel was some kind of libertarian utopia before covid. There are a lot of things that restrict your ability to travel, and vaccinations are one of the least problematic.
You are obviously not referring to the EU, where, within Schengen, international travel was a libertarian utopia and one of the main reasons this bureaucratic construct had so many supporters despite the downsides.
I am going to assume you are American by the reference to liberty.
Every US immigrant is /already/ required to have eight different vaccinations and a negative TB test. They quite literally take your blood before you can become a resident.
Yes, but as I understand it, the EU purports to be a proponent of human rights as well.
Immigration to the U.S. is of course, a regulated activity. They can make you take a physical, pay a fee, inspect your background, call your mom and make sure you're a good person, etc, before accepting you as an immigrant. Sure. There's no limits to that, because there's no U.S. Constitutional protection for non-U.S. citizens and immigration can be stopped altogether if desired (assuming it's enforced).
There is no universal right to immigrate to the US, or anywhere else generally, so immigrants can be subject to whatever requirements the local govt decides at any given time. The discussion here was about a supposed "free travel" zone where citizens of member countries are giving up much of their autonomy in return for travel and trade freedoms.
But this kind of arguments are precisely the point when it comes to concern about precedents. It becomes less of a barrier to adding new rules just because the law already has vaguely similar rules.
There is no universal right for citizens of one country to enter another country either, even within the EU (there have always been limitations based on considerations of public security, public policy and public health grounds).
I think they should require vaccination for travel (and schools and many other things) but I also think it is a problematic precedent.
How is limiting state power during a particular emergency situation a terrible precedent? The state can always grab more power at a later emergency, as history has shown. The difficult task is getting them to give up power once it is no longer needed for the emergency.
No, once everyone who wants it is vaccinated, their health is their problem not mine. If anyone is still scared of unvaccinated people, they can keep themselves at home forever, they don't get to force medical choices and restrictions on others.
Actually, they do. Being vaccinated from an infectious disease is part of your civic duties, to help protect those who can't be vaccinated for various reasons.
If anyone is scared of getting vaccinated due to nonsense conspiracy theories, they can keep themselves at home forever, they don't get to force a deadly disease on others.
> If those 100 people are still worried about that, they can choose to keep themselves locked away forever.
You must be trolling, no way you're so self-centered.
"I like to drive with 200km/h through cities, those who don't like it or are scared of my driving can stay home"
"I like to take my aggressive pitbull for a walk without a leash, if you don't like it you can stay home"
"I like to play with guns, if you don't like me handling guns in public you can stay home"
It's all recklessness, and of course not acceptable. You know what's the better solution for those 100 vaccinated people? To force you to stay at home. Because they're 100, and you're 1. It's not the whole world that needs to adapt to you, it's the other way around.
Nice army of straw men. You're trying to redefine literally existing in public as recklessness.
Self-centered? The people demanding the nonvaccinated cease existing in society because of their fears are the selfish ones. I'm saying nothing about anyone else's choices or activities whatsoever. Restricting someone else's behavior and bodily autonomy is the selfish act.
100 people forcibly removing 1 person from society who has done nothing wrong? That's a concentration camp. This is mob rule, you're just okay with it because you're part of the mob.
You can't walk naked on the street, despite it "doing no harm", because of other people's sensitivities. You need to adapt to the society, it's not the society's duty to adapt to you.
If it bothers enough people, you can't do it. Call it law, call it mob rule, call it whatever you wish - it's just how the world works.
Exactly, it's not societies duty to adapt to you, and some societies are more beholden to principles surrounding liberty; there are plenty of other more authoritarian societies available for those who want more restrictions.
And the 100 vs 1 argument is very poorly thought out; we have just had a year of people shut in their homes for the sake of the few who were at risk. For the argument to suddenly swing on its axis, it would strongly suggest an authoritarian thrilled at the opportunity to exercise their will on others.
This isn't some theoretical scenario - we have plenty of experience with other infectious diseases. People choosing not to be vaccinated creates opportunities for the disease to spread and either infect those who can't be vaccinated (young children, immunocompromised people etc), or gives the disease opportunities to mutate and evade the vaccine in the future.
Your right to not be vaccinated does not trump public health concerns, or shouldn't.
I think people should get vaccinated, but 'think of the children' is not a strong argument since they seem to be at very low risk of becoming seriously ill or death compared to every other age category.
I was discussing in a more general context of vaccination rights/obligations, even though for the particular case of Covid19 you are right.
Note however that we still don't know exactly what long-term consequences Covid19 may have, so even with this, if we can avoid infecting young children, we should.
Vaccines work - but they are not 100% effective. If an unvaccinated, COVID positive person comes in close contact with 100 people that are vaccinated, a number of them will get sick. Way less than had they not been vaccinated. But way more than is acceptable.
Is it? Far fewer of them still will get severe symptoms. And this of course requires the unvaccinated person to actually be infected. From what I read, my risk (of at least an unpleasant time) is worse if that person had some other virus instead, since I'm much more likely to catch it and guaranteed to have unpleasant symptoms if so. At some point there needs to be a cutoff in risk level where it's low enough for a free society.
A bigger concern in my mind is that as long as the virus is spreading it is mutating, potentially becoming dangerous again to the vaccinated too. But this seems to be increasingly not likely with this particular category of viruses.
> EU Travel Pass doesn't care about your antibodies.
Hmm, you are right :(
The rules are still evolving. They will need to care, since the people who recovered after a positive test are much fewer than people who recovered without being tested.
> The period of relevance of certificates depends on scientific evidence and will be determined by the verifiers following their national rules. As new scientific evidence is emerging, the periods for which certificates are relevant for waiver of applicable public health requirements could be adjusted ...The regulation also introduces some basic principles, for example, setting the maximum validity period of the certificate of recovery at 180 days. These principles could be adjusted by the Commission through delegated acts to align with new scientific evidence once it is available.
Going strictly by the text above, what would happen to the recovered people after 180 days? If they have immunity they cannot get another positive test, so no recovery certificate and no travel? Or if you already recovered more than 6 months ago, you cannot travel?
It will come down to some metric of immunity, which is apparently "TBD" but will almost immediately be a concern, as all stakeholders look more closely at the rules, logic and implications.
The EU and many western governments are not dictatorships, relying on human judgement to enforce policy. If proposed policies fail basic checks of reason and fairness, humans at border checkpoints can exercise judgement. If and when policy makers find their policy is not enforceable, they can improve the policy until it is supported by science, citizens and enforcers.
The travel industry expects these passes to bring their customers back. They will not sit quietly while their recovered/immune customers are blocked by incompetent bureaucracy from spending money across the EU, without a substantive scientific case.
They cannot legally force/mandate vaccinations, and they repeat that statement throughout the docs.
At most, they could insist that recovered people continue to get PCR tested: either you're negative and free to travel, or it will be a false positive, then you wait two (?) weeks and get a magical DHCP lease for 6-month "recovery certificate".
That would equate to a PCR-test industry tax on travel, which opens up several avenues for legal/policy challenge, e.g. test types, costs, subsidies, profit margins, supply chain ownership, benefits, numerical parameters, equipment calibration, performance (false positives/negatives).
Ludicrous rules don't punish people (who find workarounds), they decrease state power and credibility, reducing compliance with other, sensible, regulations. Sanity will eventually prevail, as long as citizens hold all policy proposals to high standards of transparency, reason and science.
Airplanes and hotels and tourist-destination cities want their customers back, and they will advocate on their behalf. The key is to avoid fights about specific interventions (like decade-old vaccines) and focus on laws (including liability) developed over centuries, and immune systems battle-tested even longer than laws.
This is all speculation. We'll see soon enough how this all plays out - I was just expressing my doubt that any country will say "if you had COVID 3 years ago, you're free to travel". They might lift restrictions completely, but if they keep restrictions, I don't expect them to be lifted for people who had COVID really long ago. There will be other rules, but "had COVID more than 180 days ago" seems an unlikely one. That's all.
There have been studies which claim that prior infection by SARS1 (2003) has conferred some immune protection against SARS2 (2020). That would be 17 years, not 180 days.
With billions of dollars at stake on multiple sides of proposed policy, there is sufficient financial incentive to study very closely the mechanisms of both natural and artificial immunity.
Policy makers can selectively highlight or ignore science, but not forever. In the US, some early policies were overturned by later court rulings, as data became available for lawsuits.
I wouldn't claim it's a conspiracy, but lots of companies are benefiting from the lockdowns due to the lockdowns killing their competitors.
I'm not allowed to shop at most stores in my neighborhood at the moment, but I'm allowed to buy from Amazon. Until recently I wasn't allowed to buy non essentials from family owned stores deemed non essential, but Walmart was still allowed to sell them.
This was completely expected, since this is the case with the other coronaviruses. People that contracted SARS-CoV-1 still have a strong immune response almost 20 years later.
Saying that coronavirus infections in general produce long-lasting immunity is too strong, I think. For non-SARS coronaviruses (e.g. HCoV-OC43), immunity seems to drop off within a year: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1083-1
What has been shown is that if you introduce the SARS-CoV-1 peptide ex vivo into cells drawn from the blood of survivors that there's a IFN-gamma response from T-cells.
That shows that there's clearly some memory in the immune system, but it isn't like they did challenge testing with live SARS-CoV-1 virus to survivors to see if they got sick or not.
And we now know that the presence of a T-cell immune reaction is not sufficient to prevent you from getting sick or hospitalized. The cross-reactive T-cell responses between previously circulating human coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 was found to simply not be protective at all against disease:
So the paper on T-cell responses in SARS-CoV-1 patients 17 years later is not remotely as meaningful as some people suggest. It doesn't prove anything about disease or reinfection.
At the same time the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 actually is likely to be durable for many years as has been seen with HCoV-229E:
What the researchers there found is solid evidence that our immunity to HCoVs doesn't wane but that the virus mutates in order to reinfect. That contradicts some other studies which seem to show reinfection of ordinary coronaviruses on short timescales, but the methdology of that study seems to be more sound. That's the one that I'd cite as evidence of durable multi-year disease-preventing immunity. Although the catch is that given this viruses ability to mutate in multiple locations around the spike protein while actually increasing affinity it seems very likely that it'll eventually mutate to achieve immune escape. It is looking like it'd be pretty surprising for this to be a one-and-done like measles.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone is modeling this as something that can be eradicated, even ignoring the zoonotic aspects. The assumption, which seems quite reasonable from my perspective, is that it will become background noise long term. Never eliminated but with greatly reduced virulence.
The parent is not saying exposure to Cov-1 provides long-term immunity to Cov-2. Why are you confusing this? It says exposureto Cov-2 provides long-term immunity to Cov-2, as you would expect.
The immediate parent comment is saying that ex vivo IFNgamma responses from T-cells in the blood to SARS1 is evidence of long term immunity to SARS1.
I'm using the example of the cross-reactive immune response from other human coronavirus to SARS2, and the lack of any protection conferred by that immune response towards prevention of disease or hospitalization to be a counter example to the idea that the ex vivo immune response is necessarily predictive of useful infection/disease/hospitalization prevention.
We can't say that the spike in IFN gamma correlates to disease protection 20 years later, there's a lot of dots to fill in.
There's a big difference between an immunologists definition of "immune response" and the public's definition of "survivor island" style bulletproof "immunity".
We know the body still recognizes SARS1 17 years later. We have no idea if that person would get infected if they had dinner with someone who had SARS1. They'd probably do better than an otherwise naive person, and i wouldn't bet against that, but a T-cell response in a dish in a lab, that isn't even neutralizing, is weak evidence of an immune response.
There are several such studies, all trivially discoverable. Here is one published in Nature last year, where they specifically also studied cross reactivity of SARS-2003 immune response with SARS-2019:
The question was about "SARS-CoV-1". I went to Google and typed SARS-CoV-1. Since I wanted to know about immunity I typed the letters "imm" and the first suggestion was "SARS-CoV-1 immunity duration". I clicked these and was immediately shown link to studies showing the very long duration.
This is trivially discoverable. Claiming that finding this information was not trivial appear dinhonest to me.
The discussion is improved by having sources for key claims linked directly here. I'm glad the question was asked, especially since it was done so politely.
I worked on COVID epidemiology last year for a couple governments, so I am more familiar with the literature than most people. I don’t expect people to be as familiar as I am.
However, the bane of my existence the last year have been people with strong opinions on “the science” on both sides that use “citation please” as a passive aggressive dismissal from a position of ignorance, and will promptly ignore any citations offered. The Internet is rife with it, and I generally avoid these kinds of discussions.
That may not have been the OP’s intent but I was admittedly playing the overwhelming odds. People that genuinely want to know these things can easily find and access most of the primary sources (some government research is non-public). That’s the best source for all information on COVID, the media has done a terrible job representing it. I didn’t have the above citation ready, I googled it and it came up right near the top.
i literally selected "SARS-CoV-1 still have a strong immune response almost 20" from OP's questioning comment, right clicked, selected "Search Google for..." and the same article was the first result.
Nature is a reputable publication.
I think this boils down to internet folks assuming their conversational partner has the same level of knowledge they do, don't believe the other party, and then ask for proof, rather than educate themselves. The citation was trivial to produce.
"Citation needed," and it's cousins should be reserved for things that aren't easy to find. This is just embarrassing.
As the parent comment mentioned, there are "both sides" out there, making it difficult and unreliable to expect people to educate themselves.
If someone is asking for citations in bad faith, they probably have "educated themselves" already, just with the wrong education. If someone believes a conspiracy, and they "educate themselves" as you propose, they will probably come to believe even more strongly in the conspiracies.
Half the time people ask for citations they probably believe the claim and just want more confirmation. If I ask for citation it's often because I want the authors personal opinion on what sources are good. I don't want to Google, I want to discuss things with people, that's why I'm in a comment section. And, of course, being a comment section sometimes people just stop talking, whether intentionally or not.
I don't like to see people who ask for sources be treated as though they're the bad guys. I'd rather see more focus on sources than less. If you don't want to be asked for sources say "I think...", but don't be upset if you say "studies have shown..." and somebody asks what studies you're referring to.
Sure, people should be able to identity what is a valid source and what isn't. It's fine to ask about what classifies as good or bad sources (format, publications, etc), how to search, or whatever.
But this isn't what happened. It wasn't "help me to find good articles on the topics like these" it was "citation needed." In fact, I don't think I have EVER seen anyone ask how to find reputable publications on a certain topic.
I also like sources, and when I'm saying things that have provable claims, I like to back them up. Still, what I DON'T go into the comments for is a long list of people going "citation needed!" I come for interesting debate and perspectives. But that's not what i'm getting—i'm getting people disagreeing with each other by putting the onus on the other party.
> i literally selected "SARS-CoV-1 still have a strong immune response almost 20" from OP's questioning comment, right clicked, selected "Search Google for..." and the same article was the first result.
I don't know why you think that's obvious. In fact, I wouldn't have expected that query to yield anything relevant, so I wouldn't have even thought to try it. That's what "knows what to search for" means, it doesn't strictly mean "coming up with obscure jargon keywords".
I have to agree with the previous poster, quite often citation needed is being used as a passive aggressive form of "countering" an argument (I have to admit to having used it myself). And if, like in this case, the study (which was what the poster claimed existed) comes up as one of the first results in a google search, I find "citation needed" either to be disingenuous or lazy. Just as a test I searched for "SARS-COV-1 immunity" and got quite a few relevant references as first results as well (even though not the exact study mentioned above).
This is HN, so I think we can expect people know how to search google.
Oh I definitely agree that "citation please" is rampant as a way to tire out your "opponent", I just think that it's usually in good faith on HN, or at least in this instance.
My demonstration was to prove that you don't even need to know what to search for. I literally took the words he typed into a comment box and put them into a search engine instead. And that was WITHOUT trying to massage it to get better results.
Thanks. I have a lot of sympathy, but a productive discussions requires an assumption of good faith. It's of course true that there are forums where every honest-looking question is really nefarious, but the solution then is to not participate in those forums. Mocking others isn't appropriate in this forum, regardless of what the other person's motives appear to be.
A claim referencing unspecified sources on the internet is essentially unfalsifiable. How does anyone debunk such a claim? Do a Google search and start on page 1?
You could ask more politely by showing you did the bare minimum of independent research before asking for a citation.
'That's an interesting assertion but I couldn't find anything backing it up searching for "SARS immunity 20 years" or "long lasting SARS immunity", do you have a cite I could read?'
Even showing you've put in even the teensiest bit of effort makes people much more charitable about helping you.
I Googled "SARS immunity 20 years" and the first result is a research paper abstract[1] stating "SARS patients might be susceptible to reinfection >3 years after initial exposure".
How much effort do I spend assessing whether I believe this research paper? It's probably not what the OP had in mind since it conflicts with what they were saying. Do I make arguments from this paper (either for or against the OP's claim)? Again, it's probably not even what they were referring too.
I know just asking for a source is low effort, but it often seems like the best starting point.
If someone claim X and you are not familiar with the subject, why is your reaction "How do I debunk this claim?" rather than "How do I learn more about this?".
The beginning of the thread where a citation was asked for and given is interesting. This continuing discussion on the matter is a tedious digression whichever side you are on.
Yeah that's my fault for making that quip. I am sorry it is getting upvoted, I forgot that humor isn't required here. @dang, can you please detach my comment and all the replies? Sorry about that.
The consensus I’m hearing from epidemiologists is the mRNA vaccines should offer better immunity than infection. So it would seem the 8 month for immunity after infection should be a lower bound for the vaccine effectiveness.
> The consensus I’m hearing from epidemiologists is the mRNA vaccines should offer better immunity than infection
Serious question: How can we possibly know this? I'm all for vaccinations (I'm going in for my second shot this weekend), but I just worry about commentary backed by intuition that doesn't carry sufficient disclaiming.
I had this exact question and asked around before finding out a friend's brother specializes in immunology. Apparently two separate exposures triggers a much longer lasting immune response, and because of the nature of the vaccine it's much more targeted to one specific aspect of the virus, and consequently more potent in a way. Moderna also made a statement that they expected their vaccine to last for 2 years based on their ability to measure the number of antibodies and its decline over time [1].
They also measured significantly higher density of antibodies at the six week mark in people who had their second vaccine dose vs people who recovered from an infection.
> They also measured significantly higher density of antibodies at the six week mark in people who had their second vaccine dose vs people who recovered from an infection.
I am not seeing evidence of this from the source you provided. It only mentions that natural infection "produces variable antibody longevity and may induce robust memory B-cell responses despite low plasma neutralizing activity."
And this part I'm less confident in, but my understanding is the protein spike is unlikely to mutate because it's exactly what allows the virus to bind where it does. If that mutated and that mutation was still somehow successful, I believe it likely wouldn't be as bad a virus.
My understanding is that virologists and immunologists can't really estimate the chance of a more virulent strain that escapes antibodies analytically, because the probability space is too big. A mutation might escape antibodies but also greatly inhibit how fast it spreads, and so on.
Its been passed around on TWiV and immunologist twitter awhile back that there's ~20 different epitopes on the spike protein that would need to mutate in order to achieve immune escape.
The read on that is that immune escape should come at a cost to fitness and less virulence and transmissibility. The virus will have to "pay" with fitness in order to buy stealth.
At the same time though there have very obviously been multiple different mutations on the spike protein which have enhanced binding / viral load / transmissibility / virulence. So the virus clearly has some room to maneuver in that space.
Depends on the significance of the mutation. The vaccines have shown to be pretty good at protecting at the mutations we have observed so far. However, it is right to assume, that eventually a mutation comes around which evades any existing immunity. That is one the biggest reasons to reduce infection count globally. The higher the infection count, the larger the risk of a mutation that resets everything back to the beginning immunity-wise.
From my understanding, there are two main reasons.
1) The two spaced exposures. Repeated spaced exposures build a significantly stronger response.
2) Isolation of the spike protein. Just like ML might pick up on a correlated part of the image while learning to recognize things (many examples, no good links), your immune system may learn to react to different parts of the virus. The spike protein is the most unchanging part, and all the vaccine will teach your body to attack.
> The spike protein is the most unchanging part, and all the vaccine will teach your body to attack.
Does that mean that a natural immunity may offer protection against other coronaviruses that have a different spike protein structure? The logic being that the less targeted defenses built through a natural immunity would latch onto some other commonality?
Not necessarily. They will likely try to key on something very specific, as this reduces the risk of it triggering on you (creating an autoimmune disorder). So natural infection may be less effective. We assume that mutations to the virus that hide it from the natural defenses against a random part, but have no impact on the virility, are generally more frequent and numerous than mutations to the important spike protein.
As far as I understand it is less likely for the spike protein to have a radical mutation and keep the ability to attach to cells at the same time. That's why the variants we are seeing have the same spike protein as other mutations of the virus tend to quickly disappear.
If a new variant with a different spike emerges, I guess we'll call it SARS-CoV-3 and produce a new mRNA vaccine for it.
The consensus one year ago was that immunity doesn’t last longer than 6 months (hint: it does). I’ve learned to mostly disregard “expert opinion”, especially when they’re talking straight out of their asses as in this case (we haven’t had the vaccine long enough yet to have any kind of experimentally informed view on this topic).
> The consensus one year ago was that immunity doesn’t last longer than 6 months
No, it wasn’t.
The consensus was that it was uncertain the degree and duration of immunity conferred because the available evidence was insufficient and contradictory.
As much as I'd like that to be true, I think it's impossible to separate that statement from the political pressure to motivate vaccination.
ie, if the opposite was true — vaccination did not provide the same strength of immunity as infection — no epidemiologist would ever state this publicly.
So I'll be happy if it's true, but this statement doesn't move my belief-meter one way or another.
Political pressure or rather information on the benefits of the vaccine is the best way to improve the situation for any country.
Where it goes wrong is if said country begins to deny participation in society, by for example requiring continuous testing for those who are not vaccinated. These measures in reality decreases your ability to participate.
The public health profession has lost so much credibility over the last year. No one should feel the need to reverse engineer latent preemptive anticipatory inverted Stockholm syndrome like this, but here we are.
They've lost credibility because of a concerted effort to discredit them. An effort that was initiated specifically by people who didn't want to follow their broadly reasonable medical advice.
There's been plenty of unforced errors on the part of the government agencies. Claiming that masks don't help because they didn't want average citizens to buy them all up and still saying you shouldn't wear a K/N95 mask come to mind. Also, the horrific early failures with broken tests and bans on testing anyone who hadn't been in a specific area of China until it was far too late. Heck, the CDC just this week finally admitted the virus was airborne, something that anyone paying attention knew literally a year ago just from looking at early contact tracing of how the virus spread.
They’ve proven already that they’ll sacrifice the health of the masses for the greater good when they lied about masks. I don’t think it’s a stretch to consider that they may be doing the same with vaccines.
It was a legitimate concern and a ruinous strategy.
I believe that competent leadership could have rallied the public to the cause of reserving PPE for hospitals for a month. Even if you don't believe in the basic nobility of the common person, congress could easily have passed emergency confiscatory legislation to pull all PPE off consumer markets without public health officials knowingly misrepresenting the truth.
Trust in institutions was already low at the start of this, and the sort of misdirection that a series of supposedly noble lies has evinced has taken it to a new low and left us where we are now.
This is a conspiracy theory. An alternative observation is that some very credible critics see failure andrer failure and report on it.
Here’s an article in today’s New York Times just to pluck one of dozens of data points out of the air. To the extent that the amateur game theory, vulgar p-fishing, and playing of telephone that is public health qualifies as a science, it is the most dismal. Rather than communicate the truth about unknowns, or maybe even be curious about the data that they were basing the guidance to mask outdoors on, the CDC scores another own-goal by seemingly misreporting the threat of ourdoor transmission by 3 orders of magnitude.
> Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.
…
> In one study, 95 of 10,926 worldwide instances of transmission are classified as outdoors; all 95 are from Singapore construction sites. In another study, four of 103 instances are classified as outdoors; again, all four are from Singapore construction sites.
> This obviously doesn’t make much sense. It instead appears to be a misunderstanding that resembles the childhood game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled as it passes from one person to the next.
> The Singapore data originally comes from a government database there. That database does not categorize the construction-site cases as outdoor transmission, Yap Wei Qiang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, told my colleague Shashank Bengali. “We didn’t classify it according to outdoors or indoors,” Yap said. “It could have been workplace transmission where it happens outdoors at the site, or it could also have happened indoors within the construction site.”
This sort of institutional negligence makes the Challenger o-ring disaster look like a paragon of careful professional judgement. Intelligent reporters with an ounce of capacity for independent thought like Zeynep Tufecki are able to get up to speed on the subject and single-handedly provide better guidance than the entire CDC. An institution that can put out false information and bad guidance with all the attendant psychological, political, and economic costs, where no one lifts their hand to argue against the group think is broken at a deep level.
If I sound frustrated it’s because we do need a credible source of information and the CDC should provide that. Every time they do stuff like this they lose more institutional credibility. Instead we get more conspiracy theories in every direction. Even worse state and local governments make policy based on CDC guidance that mis-measures risk and results in worse spread of the virus. See for instance California’s sudden decision to halt outdoor dining which many have argued caused people to substitute a low risk activity for a higher risk activity (meeting anyway, but indoors at someone’s house) potentially resulting in a surge of cases.
scientific approach requires changing your mind in presence of new evidence and when there's not enough evidence, there will be differences in opinions. duh.
> The “no evidence of human-to-human transmission” used by the WHO isn’t science.
You've misquoted them, for starters. The actual quote is "no clear evidence", and they make it clear it's based on what data they had from China at that point. https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
> WHO held a press briefing during which it stated that, based on experience with respiratory pathogens, the potential for human-to-human transmission in the 41 confirmed cases in the People’s Republic of China existed: “it is certainly possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission”.
> WHO tweeted that preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities had found “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission”. In its risk assessment, WHO said additional investigation was “needed to ascertain the presence of human-to-human transmission, modes of transmission, common source of exposure and the presence of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases that are undetected”.
Five days later:
> The WHO Western Pacific Regional Office (WHO/WPRO) tweeted that, according to the latest information received and WHO analysis, there was evidence of limited human-to-human transmission.
"The 5-sigma approach used in physics is science."
So is the process used to get to a five-sigma result. Hypothesis, data gathering, analysis, etc. Like the WHO was having to do back in January of 2020.
You’ve quoted the WHO accurately which is actually more damning.
Taiwanese scientists had observed evidence of human-to-human transmission and submitted it to the WHO well before that and they ignored it. Positive evidence of human-to-human transmission had also been reported in Thailand.
See Zeynep Tufecki’s Account of the timeline from last April.
> Hong Kong and Taiwan remembered that China has a history of covering up epidemics. In 2003, the world didn’t learn about SARS until after it had escaped China and become impossible to deny. (Back then, the WHO openly criticized China for its lack of transparency and cover-up, and we contained the epidemic just in the nick of time.) This time, the WHO was told the truth early on: Taiwanese health authorities sent their own medical teams to Wuhan in December. Those scientists confirmed human-to-human transmission—the most crucial piece of information for determining the difference between a local tragedy (if viruses are only jumping from infected bats or pangolins to humans in wildlife markets where people interact directly with them) and a brewing global pandemic. Taiwan isn’t allowed to be a member of the WHO, because of China’s objections, but it still informed the organization. Hong Kong health authorities, too, announced as early as January 4 that they suspected human-to-human transmission was already occurring, as they also looked at the evidence and their own contacts in Wuhan.
Here’s a handful of reversals from the first half of 2020 alone. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t speak with such certainty about things that are not in fact certain.
Michael Fumento author of "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics"
He's been wrong about a lot of things and its usually most evident after the fact but I'm sure THIS time he is prescient instead of completely full of it unlike with every other major issue he's taken a stand on.
> * “We don’t need to ban travelers from China, that’s absurd and xenophobic!”
Fauci and the CDC were the ones who told Trump in January to ban travel, if you didn’t know. Fauci spoke in public in January 30, 2020 in favor of the ban.
Trump claimed many months later the opposite but he is a known liar.
“ According to a March 2020 Wall Street Journal article, it was HHS health officials (including Fauci) who had to convince Trump to agree to the China travel ban, not the other way around:”
> 2 weeks to slow the spread, then this will all be over”
Unclear why you put this in quotes. This was the message from certain politicians like Trump, but it was never said by anyone who would typically be called an expert.
Nobody in the infectious medicine field actually said it will be over in 2 weeks and the travel ban proposal under trump was xenophobic theater because it made a point of banning only some travel after we had community spread and didn't even stop a lot of travel after that. It was the worst of both worlds.
Looking at one side of an equation is never going to tell you whether something is worthwhile. You have to look at all sides.
It's not at all clear that lockdowns were worth it, but I wouldn't say it's obvious in either direction.
Rather, we have been conducting a grand experiment on society, far different than our reaction to other similar diseases in which there was no society-wide lockdown. In fact over several millennia spent dealing with plagues, we have never conducted a society-wide lockdown as a response to an outbreak before now.
This is the first time we've done it, and the full costs of this experiment are not yet known - and they wont be understood for decades to come.
Reinfection is not rare, Singapore has detected 26 cases of reinfection so far: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/parliament-2... Also note worthy: recent infections in Singapore includes "56 cases involving people who were infected despite being fully vaccinated"
Reinfection is very rare. The Israeli study is the most reliable, but going by your data point of 26 cases of reinfection and the ~61,000 cases[0] in Singapore, we're talking 1 in 2,500.
But that statistic is useless on its own. The more salient statistic is "how much lower was the infection rate among people who have recovered, compared to people who had never had COVID, for the same time frame?".
Seems to be on-par with antibody persistence (6 months) offered after second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine[1].
US CDC seems to suggest vaccine to those who had COVID immediately after recovery[2]. Where as news sources claim WHO suggests 6 months after recovery[3].
"Yes, you should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19. That’s because experts do not yet know how long you are protected from getting sick again after recovering from COVID-19."
This is downright false. Someone should seriously sue the CDC. I don't understand how they can get away with this anti science, anti math, illogerate bullsh*t. We know far more about the long term protective effects from recovering than we do from the vaccine (1 in 1,000 long term reinfection rate so far—https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v...).
I would send a pull request but the CDC is not on Git. What a sorry excuse for an organization they are.
I've been tracking information on COVID related immunity as my parents are due second dose, I'm due first dose and we're all COVID +ve (India).
My parents got infected after ~ 30days of first dose Astrazenica, I got from them immediately. I had COVID brain fog, they didn't face much symptoms(vaccine doing it's job?). Luckily we all seem to be recovering well.
Now since we've got immunity and that evidence suggests that it should last at least 8 months we might delay the vaccine jabs as it's of extreme scarcity in the country and many vulnerable are waiting for it.
But I would wish for a immunity research with larger study group with the mutant strains supposedly capable of immune escape properties as we're facing here. Because I'm willing to take the risk based on current data, But I don't want to be wrong in suggesting that my elderly parents delay their second jab.
I have seen an overwhelming amount of evidence that if you've recovered you are safe. I have been tracking this since early February 2020. I think if you've recovered you can stop worrying about COVID, and I have seen nothing that makes me think the vaccine is worth it in the least if you've recovered.
I would not worry about mutant strains either. It's a very genetically stable virus. Even though the numbers in India now are high, they are still significantly lower per capita than they were in the USA and UK last year. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
>I have seen an overwhelming amount of evidence that if you've recovered you are safe.
That's reassuring thank you.
>Even though the numbers in India now are high, they are still significantly lower per capita than they were in the USA and UK last year.
But there's consensus among the scientific community that it's being widely under-reported; At least 80-90% lesser than actual figures according to Dr. Ashish Jha dean of Brown University, School of Public Health[1].
P.S. Those who want to make a political comment for the above statement, I request you not to do so out of respect for the dead. I shared the information since we're discussing numbers and not for any political blame as Dr. Jha himself says.
> But there's consensus among the scientific community that it's being widely under-reported
Define consensus.
I used to work at Our World in Data, so I am biased, but I would consider them the most trustworthy curator of data sources (for one, they are open source and open to pull requests). So while there indeed may be problems with the India data (and we were constantly switching to better sources as they appeared), I would trust their data sources more than any one person on YouTube.
There are local regional(state) media trying to count the uncounted deaths like these -
BBC report on that: 'India's Covid crisis: The newsroom counting the uncounted deaths' - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56969086 . I wonder whether Our World In Data would accept these data, If so it would be worth a PR then again its just the data of a state.
Vaccine-related immunity is related to several factors. Among them:
1) The rate of "vaccine escape" of the pathogen - that is, how well new variants of the pathogen can escape recognition by a vaccine. This varies from pathogen to pathogen.
2) The strength of the immune response to the vaccine. For example, live-attenuated vaccines are basically natural infections.
3) Whether or not your immune memory is occasionally boosted by coming into contact with someone who is shedding the pathogen.
All of these vary based on the pathogen and vaccine pairing. And critically, for COVID-19, we don't know several of these parameters.
We aren't entirely certain how long the corona vaccines will be protective.
Part of it is that there's tens of millions of people infected with coronavirus right now, giving it lots of room to mutate. There's maybe a few hundred or a few thousand people infected with polio.
It hasn’t yet been possible to measure if the coronavirus vaccine protects for more than a couple of years. The first human trial subjects only received it 14 months ago.
The old oral polio vaccine (Sabin) didn't provide lifetime immunity like the newer injection. (Reading about the immunities both confer, I'm not clear on the distinction between "gut immunity" preventing asymptomatic shedding, versus "immunity" that prevents the virus from causing serious nervous system disease)
Natural immunity and vaccine immunity are expected to last around the same amount time. This is for the simple reason that the mechanism that generates the immunity is similar. (Natural immunity being a bit more diverse, while vaccine focuses on a single protein.)
Possibly not. I can't really follow most of this, but from the abstract it sounds like the (Pfizer) vaccines don't necessarily trigger a B-cell/T-cell reaction unless you've previously been infected (in which case the vaccines strengthen what was already there due to natural immunity), and that's where long-lasting immunity comes from, since antibodies will eventually degrade over time (we're just not sure how long it would take for that to happen).
> After one dose, individuals with prior infection showed enhanced T cell immunity, antibody secreting memory B cell response to spike and neutralizing antibodies effective against B.1.1.7 and B.1.351. By comparison, HCW receiving one vaccine dose without prior infection showed reduced immunity against variants. B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 spike mutations resulted in increased, abrogated or unchanged T cell responses depending on human leukocyte antigen (HLA) polymorphisms. Single dose vaccination with BNT162b2 in the context of prior infection with a heterologous variant substantially enhances neutralizing antibody responses against variants.
I’m very surprised that “proof of immunity” isn’t an acceptable alternative to a vaccine for things like travel or work. It seems it’s either vaccine or bust. Anyone know why this is the case?
I'm hoping it will be since I have longcovid and don't want the vaccine. Anyone who is willing to pay for the new T-Cell test [1] and is positive should be given the same rights as any vaccine passport provides.
I haven't had neuro/heart/gastro issues for months. My veins still bulge sometimes. Once every few days I get the hot-skin. Other than those symptoms I don't.
The EU is preparing to reopen international travel using a vaccine passport.
Israel reopened their society early after their final coronavirus lockdown by only allowing vaccinated to resume normal life.
The cruise lines that serve the USA and Caribbean islands are attempting to reopen while requiring all passengers to be vaccinated, but the governor of Florida is attempting to force them to allow unvaccinated passengers onboard.
It depends a lot on what country you are in and their attitudes towards vaccines and privacy.
How do you prove immunity? I thought that antibodies didn't tell the whole story, because your immune systems memory lasts even longer than the antibodies do.
It is done on an informal basis in Singapore. If you've recovered from Covid, they will offer an antibody test and if positive, they may let you out of quarantine early.
Everything I've been reading about vaccine passports include some reference to having a positive COVID test more than X period of time in the past as an equivalent to a vaccine.
That said, there are few (if any) reasons not to do both, so at least for now I'm okay even if we did only push for vaccines-as-validation.
> That said, there are few (if any) reasons not to do both
If recovery grants equivalent immunity, there's not only no reason to get a vaccine, there's reason to not get any vaccine: However rare complications are from the vaccines, there's no reason to risk them.
The complications from the virus are nearly always going to be worse than vaccination. I’m failing to grasp your logic.
Edit: Ah, perhaps you mean for someone who has recovered. Given the reports that vaccination helps with those who are experiencing “long COVID”, plus the added protection, I’d eagerly get vaccinated even if I had recovered from infection.
I was guessing higher than that, but even that price isn't wildly out of line with the prices that governments are paying for vaccines (between $2 and $40 per dose).
SINGAPORE - The Republic has seen 26 cases of Covid-19 reinfection as Monday (May 10), Health Minister Gan Kim Yong said in a ministerial statement in Parliament on Tuesday.
Such reinfections are known to be possible in both overseas and local cases, he noted, but it is still unclear why they occur.
The minister said investigations are ongoing to determine if reinfections are due to a general waning of immunity levels over time, or a lack of cross-protection, despite a previous infection, against specific variants of the coronavirus that a person is exposed to for the first time.
This is key. Fully vaccinated people in Singapore aren't getting seriously sick (which is great!) but they are getting infected with Covid (which isn't so great).
What that means is that fully vaccinated individuals can get infected and infect unvaccinated individuals. As such, your population won't be protected unless most people are vaccinated (80-90%+).
but they are getting infected with Covid (which isn't so great).
The US approved vaccines (so far) appear to be pretty good at preventing infection compared to lots of vaccines.
There's an obvious level of (incomplete) protection present in the population at 50% vaccination. Cases aren't falling because we are getting more careful (but then the nicer weather could be helping).
There's a scary situation happening here now for the last 2 weeks or so. There has been new clusters popping up after having been relatively tame for a few months and safety measures have been tightened (slightly, but obviously) again. Some of these cases involve those that has been vaccinated. One lesson that we can learn from this is, coming from a city that is marketed as having handled the situation well — the world is far from being done with dealing with COVID.
Looks like vaccination is around 20% there? With not that many people having acquired immunity from infection.
The US is close to 50%, with another good chunk of people with immunity from infection and our cases are dropping a good deal. The season changing is going to be some of it, but cases are dropping even as activities increase.
I'm not saying it is done, as much as anything because we need billions of doses of vaccine still, but there is lots of reason to be pretty hopeful.
Exactly. It's clear the vaccine protects the people who receive it from serious disease. But people who are vaccinated can get infected and infect others. Therefore we won't see much "back to normal" until most, if not all, people are vaccinated. This wont be one of those "60% and we hit herd immunity" situations.
>coming from a city that is marketed as having handled the situation well
Marketing which is completely bullshit. Singapore has had around ~60k covid cases, 6x more than Hong Kong and 60x more than Taiwan, just somehow the government managed to downplay it as most of the cases were in poor migrant workers and apparently they don't count as people.
“Is One Vaccine Dose Enough After COVID-19 Infection?”
> A small, NIH-supported study, published as a pre-print on medRxiv, offers some early data on this important question [1]. The findings show that immune response to the first vaccine dose in a person who’s already had COVID-19 is equal to, or in some cases better, than the response to the second dose in a person who hasn’t had COVID-19. While much more research is needed—and I am definitely not suggesting a change in the current recommendations right now—the results raise the possibility that one dose might be enough for someone who’s been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and already generated antibodies against the virus.
"The COVID–19 vaccines...offer a...more reliable means of protection than natural immunity."
This is false. She even goes on to say "Pfizer vaccine blocked 90% of infections after both doses" but we're seeing 99.9%+ protection from natural immunity.
She also doesn't put her logic on git (not surprising). If she had built a simple spreadsheet with the important data she'd realize her mistakes (assuming good faith).
No, it looked at reinfection for up to a year. "Out of 149,735 individuals with a documented positive PCR test between March 2020 and January 2021". The 100 days was the threshold they used for recovery.
Oops, you're right. But this is still just one paper with a number of limitations that concludes with "health policymakers should acknowledge the possibility of reinfection and reconsider the differential message to recovered population."
Still, it's clearly the case that people who have been infected are at reduced risk. I've been vaccinated and was never infected, so it's not a personal decision for me, but given the extremely low risk of the vaccine, even with this paper, I'd still likely get vaccinated and have family members who have done so. I don't think we have enough data yet to say they made a moronic decision.
This paper found a 0.65% re-infection rate in Denmark:
"Among eligible PCR-positive individuals from the first surge of the epidemic, 72 (0·65% [95% CI 0·51-0·82]) tested positive again during the second surge compared with 16 819 (3·27% [3·22-3·32]) of 514 271 who tested negative during the first surge (adjusted RR 0·195 [95% CI 0·155-0·246]). Protection against repeat infection was 80·5% (95% CI 75·4-84·5). The alternative cohort analysis gave similar estimates (adjusted RR 0·212 [0·179-0·251], estimated protection 78·8% [74·9-82·1])."
This paper indicates 95% efficacy due to natural infection for at least seven months in Qatar:
"Reinfection is rare in the young and international population of Qatar. Natural infection appears to elicit strong protection against reinfection with an efficacy ~95% for at least seven months."
Relative risk is still in favor of being vaccinated: "In addition to not knowing the clinical course of reinfection, we do not know the variants' role in reinfection – primarily because they were not known to be “in play” during the study period. Overall, natural immunity is protective. Perhaps not as protective as vaccination. More importantly, vaccination comes with a far lower risk of morbidity (hospitalization) or death."
Does anyone know of a statistic for how much lower the reinfection rate is vs the first infection? That's the useful metric, rather than "percentage reinfected", which may just be because those who weren't reinfected didn't have a chance to.
This is promising. Anecdotally though, I know people in India who got covid (with symptoms) twice or even thrice over the last 12 months. I imagine antibody generation is different for different people, and/or response to variants of the virus is different.
Not that I doubt you, but it is pretty common here in the USA to _assume_ every cold/allergy etc. is COVID-19, even without a positive PCR or anti-gen test. Did the folks you know get positively tested, or did sx just match?
So not to pour more anecdotal fuel on the fire, so to speak, but I know of someone who had a confirmed case of COVID last spring in the US, then was tested for antibodies this spring and had few, and then caught it again in India a few weeks ago. Each time was symptomatic. Again, a single data point, I'd be happy to believe that there's lasting immunity.
With the re-infection rate given above -- 1 in 1000 -- if people ~know about 100 people, you'd expect about 1 in 10 people to have an anecdote about someone getting COVID twice.
I appreciate the attempt at analysis, but I'm not sure the numbers are so easy. The number of people I know of who had COVID a year ago runs around 5-10 (this is all second degree connections), so that'd be 1 in 100-200. True, we don't know how many people visiting this page are willing to share similar anecdote. But as a personal matter it's enough to change my behavior and concerns.
Yeah, as per the other person's reply, it's probably more accurate to estimate that 1 in 100 people will have anecdotes of someone catching COVID twice, based on the measured reinfection rate. If we knew the number of distinct people reading this, we could estimate how many people we could get anecdotes from, but I would be unsurprised if 10 or more people could chime in.
There might be other factors that would push the reinfection rate higher (eg, if people are less likely to get another COVID test after having had it once, because they assume that's the one thing it can't be), and it's also worth remembering that a 1-in-1000 reinfection rate combined with ~10% of the population catching it means that closer to 1-in-100 people don't develop a lasting immunity [and the other 9-in-1000 just didn't catch it a second time].
This sounds apocryphal. Second infections are incredibly rare, let alone three in twelve months.
Like clockwork, every discussion of this matter on a discussion board brings out at least one person claiming to know people who have been re-infected, yet the number of confirmed examples is measured in the low hundreds, worldwide.
Confirmed examples perhaps, but if the reinvention rate is 1 in 1000 as stated elsewhere here then the true number worldwide is orders of magnitude higher than a few hundred.
It isn't 1 in 1000, or we'd be confirming far more than a few hundred examples. The lack of examples isn't for lack of trying to find them -- immunity escape is currently the #1 pre-occupation of every national health service around the globe.
The immune system works, and the failure cases here are truly exceptional, whereas the likelihood of rumor is high. Most of these "{my friend} got Covid twice" stories are either hearsay, or people imagining that their allergy symptoms were Covid, while never getting tested properly.
I think it’s low because in the beginning no one could get tested for COVID.
I had an illness back in March 2020 that knocked me out for 2 weeks. Could have been COVID but my state had 0 available test kits so no one can confirm it. February 2021, I’m I’ll again for 2 week. This time it’s confirmed COVID.
If we expect immunity to only last about 12 months, then it could have been reinfection especially considering by 2021 there were 4 more strains to get.
1) You're illustrating my point - you didn't have a first test, and are assuming it was Covid. It probably wasn't.
2) We don't "expect immunity to only last about 12 months". It's been about 12 months since the first cases were confirmed, so that's as far as we can say.
> For travellers who have recovered from the virus: date of the positive test result, an issuer of the certificate, date of issuance, validity date
The bureaucratic stumbling block will be agreement on antibody and T-cell testing definitions across country borders.