> "A Nordic study involving Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark found that men under the age of 30 who received Moderna Spikevax had a slightly higher risk than others of developing myocarditis," he said.
I find it frustrating that we’re still not putting numbers on statements like this in news articles. How slight?
> Det här är väldigt osäkra data från en preliminär studie, så vi har inte pekat på någon särskild nivå. Vi har fått ta del av den här studien från Läkemedelsverket och ser att det finns en skillnad mellan de vaccin som finns tillgängliga och då menar vi att det i nuläget är bättre att vi använder det vaccin där man inte ser de här signalerna, säger statsepidemiolog Anders Tegnell till TT.
Translation (my own): These are highly insecure measurements from a preliminary study – there is no established certainty. This study was recieved from Läkemedelsverket [translation: Medical Products Agency] which acknowledges there is a difference between available vaccines. Our opinion is that we currently should use a vaccine where we cannot correlate these types of indications [personal remark: relations to myocarditis], says Swedish state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell to TT [ref: media]
Apparently there's like two millions of cases of myocarditis globally, so on average you'd probably expect tens of thousands of cases among 177M people. In what way would 145 cases be embarrassing for "normal figures"? I'd expect that a medical miracle would be praised at that point.
Quite a lot of health impacts globally are unevenly distributed locally. I don’t know the local numbers either, but I’d caution against extrapolating from global numbers.
You're comparing yearly numbers to a one/two shot event. A relevant timeframe needs to be selected, otherwise you may as well use cases/people/hour (0.2 .. 2 case per 177Mp·h) or cases/people/decade (18k..180k cases per (177Mp·decayear)).
Article says most cases happen within a few days from second shot. Guesstimating at 5 days, we get 1800..1800/365*5 => 25..250 cases per 177Mp·5d.
145 cases would be around the number of otherwise expected cases, if measured on a population level. Assuming young people have lower incidence rate and it is not already accounted for, there would be more vaccines carditis than natural occurrences (EDIT: during the relevant 5 days after 2nd shot).
Still likely less than those expected from covid infection (didn't do math).
I'm not quite sure how this is relevant here. The vaccination is not going to be repeating with a larger than annual frequency. And the vaccinations themselves happen throughout the year anyway, so how does it matter how much the side effect is delayed? The side effect is also going to be happening throughout the year; it's not like 177M people are going to be vaccinated on the same day, which is what you seem to be assuming for some reason.
> Assuming young people have lower incidence rate and it is not already accounted for, there would be more vaccines carditis than natural occurrences.
No, absolutely not. Definitely not according to your flawed reasoning.
Why a year? Why not daily? The vaccinations happen throughout the day. Why not per lifetime? You can only get the second dose once. I could pick any interval, either customary (hourly, daily, monthly) or completely arbitrary (per 47 seconds) and get any number as a result. If you can't argue why a per-year incidence is the proper number and not any other, then that by itself disproves the validity of the approach. You can't just pick an arbitrary number for what is effectively a scaling factor and say works for me.
I wanted to compare vaccination occurrences with regular ones. Most of reported vaccine carditis happens a few days after second dose, so I compared those with the average incidence for a few (5) days. I.e. how likely is one to get vaccine carditis vs. background carditis during the same or equivalent time.
Sorry about the last paragraph. I meant vaccine carditis vs. non-vaccine for young males during the same time one would be at risk from vaccine carditis. Mainly as a sanity check for the signal-to-noise ratio.
> Why a year? Why not daily? The vaccinations happen throughout the day.
Because vaccinations take months, perhaps up to a year. In my country it's been at least half a year by now and we're at something like 55-60% of the population.
> Why not per lifetime? You can only get the second dose once.
Lifetime makes it an even worse comparison for natural myocarditis since you can get that in any year of your life. (But if need arises in the future for annual boosters against new strains or something like that, chances are that annual risks will again be the number to look for.)
> I could pick any interval, either customary (hourly, daily, monthly) or completely arbitrary (per 47 seconds) and get any number as a result.
You can pick garbage methodology and get garbage results, agreed. You can do pretty much what you want.
> Most of reported vaccine carditis happens a few days after second dose, so I compared those with the average incidence for a few (5) days.
Which is a complete red herring since how do you know that other kinds of myocarditis don't happen a few days after the initial viral infection as well? Either delay is completely irrelevant since shifting infections of individuals in time does nothing to overall statistics of incidence.
According to Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, an additional 4 cases per 100k men under the age of 30.
They also note that having covid is a risk factor for myocarditis. So perhaps still worth it to take the shot.
Possibly they are doing this to put out the antivax wildfires in social media by reacting to statistical information about risks. So as to show that when there are scientifically established risks, there will be reaction to that as well.
>Your risk of myocarditis from COVID is 10x-20x your risk of myocarditis from a vaccine
It really bothers me that people are still touting such numbers around as obvious, indisputable facts given the poor quality of both covid and adverse effect statistical data.
1. What are the odds that you will experience symptoms if you get myocarditis?
2. What are the odds that vaccine induced myocarditis will be reported as such? There is a wealth of anecdotal evidence of people complaining about all manner of possible vaccine reactions to completely dismissive doctors, and filling out a VAERS report is time consuming and already overwhelmed medical practitioners are unlikely to spend 30+ minutes on a report.
3. Does vaccine (or covid) induced myocarditis have long term consequences, even if asymptomatic or mild? I've read repeatedly that myocarditis of any severity represents some degree of permanent damage but have not been able to conclusively verify this statement.
4. Why are we putting so much faith into the statements and research of pharmaceutical companies who stand to gain tens (hundreds?) of billions from vaccines+boosters, when we know that these same companies have been repeatedly sued in the past for dangerous/defective medications (and vaccines) as well as deliberately sociopathic business practices? We are talking about a massive conflict of interest from parties which have repeatedly demonstrated dishonesty in the past.
And then with respect to VAERS self reporting, the average person has been convinced that the vaccine is safe and is not likely to connect strange symptoms weeks after vaccination with the vaccine, if they even know about VAERS or the European equivalent. There's far too much uncertainty in the positive data to support such a rigid social orthodoxy around expression of negative sentiment toward the vaccine.
The virus is very proinflammatory so it's not surprising that vaccines that simulate parts of the virus are also proinflammatory. There even appears to be a dose dependence: Moderna packs in a lot more than Pfizer-BNT. So there is a rational framework to think about this. What is bizarre is how people could in the same breath show a lot of fear of the vaccine but then brush off the risk from uncontrolled viral reproduction in one's body from an infection.
There are at least three reasons that an injection is not the same.
1. The sudden viral load is orders of magnitude larger than typical exposure and given the complexity of the immune system, may produce a different response. Also recall that unlike traditional vaccines this mRNA hijacks your cellular machinery to produce an inflammatory protein - so comparing it to past vaccines in this respect is invalid.
2. Again because of the complexity of the immune system, its possible that a sudden, massive injection of spike protein mRNA will not activate the immune system in the same way that a gradual infection by the full virus.
3. From what I've read, the spike protein when manufactured from snipped mRNA is then expressed on cell surfaces, in contrast to a true viral infection which releases the full viral particles into the bloodstream. This could induce autoimmune reactions which would explain many of the documented side effects.
My main point though is that many in the vocal pro-vaccine crowd are underestimating the borderline chaotic complexity of the finely tuned chemical soup that is our biology. And we are injecting an engineered substance which we know is biologically active in a novel way. It's hubris to casually presume that we got this right the first time.
Edit: for the programmers, think of it as a very clever and involved hack. And hacks can have unintended side effects, especially when the system is poorly understood.
No. It doesn't. This is completely ignorant misinformation. Your molecular machinery for creating proteins are doing so constantly. Introducing a bit of code that produces a protein that looks like the virus is in no way "hijacking" your molecular machinery. Your machinery happily chugs along with every other of the 10s of thousands of other proteins being produced at the same time. Nothing is hijacked.
Technically it is nothing else than hijacking and it will lead to the cells death because it produces the foreign protein as instructed until it is killed by your immune system.
And what about the spike protein, which becomes embedded in and expressed at the cell wall? What do wayward spike proteins do inside cells? What are the full consequences of your immune system suddenly attacking your own cells? Are you potentially inducing permanent or semi permanent autoimmune conditions?
And such an autoimmune disease, if caused by the vaccine, would possibly be difficult to detect, especially on short timescales, and/or if no one is looking for them. Add in the stigma/silencing of professionals who criticize the vaccines and you're unlikely to get such research done/published, and it is a very real possibility that we just dosed hundreds of millions of people with a substance that may cause long term issues.
There's plenty of room for uncertainty here. It is irresponsible to suggest otherwise, regardless of the media's manufactured consensus.
Next time you read something on the internet that sounds like something you would reasonably like to believe, please ask for a citation before you spread misinformation. The cell types that produce it and display it are exactly the same cell types that do it for every bit of foreign protein your immune system needs to protect against. There is nothing sneaky or take-over or unnatural about this process that happens all the time in your body.
Why do you assume that people critical of the vaccines aren't consuming scientific literature?
This source[1] cites the following from a dead link to the cdc website:
>Upon entering the cell’s cytoplasm, the mRNA redirects some of the cell’s protein production machinery (of which ribosomes are the workhorse) to begin producing viral spike proteins. The produced spike proteins are then incorporated into and “displayed” on the host cell’s outer membrane surface
If you want something meatier, here's a detailed source[2] discussing this very point, that because the spike protein is not manufactured with the rest of the virus, at least some S protein expression is expected at the cell surface from the vaccine, in contrast to a true covid infection. And this source links to multiple others on the same subject.
People seem to presume that any information which reflects negatively on the vaccines is automatically misinformation and/or argued in bad faith. Its incredibly toxic to productive discussion.
>The cell types that produce it and display it are exactly the same cell types that do it for every bit of foreign protein your immune system needs to protect against.
I'm not sure what you're implying here - that its normal for your cells to absorb foreign RNA and manufacture inflammatory proteins that are then expressed on cell walls and used to induce what is effectively an autoimmune response?
>There is nothing sneaky or take-over or unnatural about this process that happens all the time in your body.
I'm not saying anything about this is "sneaky" but injecting mRNA with the purpose of manufacturing inflammatory proteins is hardly "natural".
It is perfectly fine to discuss the adverse effects of vaccines, but it is not good faith to open the discussion with a conspiratorial tone. Billions of shots have been given. That is a tremendous amount of statistical power to discern problems. There are also millions of deaths from confirmed COVID alone. It helps no one to even hint that somehow the side effects of vaccines are comparable to the real disease.
You apparently didn't understand what an APC is. APC is Antigen Presenting Cell. The entire purpose of that cell is to present bits of foreign protein to the rest of your immune system. It is full of foreign bits of protein because that is what it does. It is no more going to be hurt by presenting antigens than your neurons are hurt delivering electrical signals from sensory perceptions.
If you are going to cite literature at least understand what you're citing.
> Antigen-presenting cells (APC) are cells that can process a protein antigen, break it into peptides, and present it in conjunction with class II MHC molecules on the cell surface where it may interact with appropriate T cell receptors.
APCs do not hoover up random mRNA to translate. They hoover up remnants after a carnage.
The vaccine is jabbed into the muscle, the spikes are (likely) expresses from the muscle cells, most definitely not only APC cells. Even if they were, it is not normal for APCs to be producing the proteins.
It is normal for your cells to manufacture bits of RNA into proteins. It's what they do all day. There is no hijacking. Cells do this constantly. And massively parallel. If each cell could only translate one rna sequence at a time you wouldn't have made it past zygote.
It's normal for Antigen Presenting Cells to present antigens on the surface of their cell membrane. It's what they do all day.
So, yes. Every bit of the process is completely natural and normal.
No. The claim is false. There is nothing close to "hijacking" going on. They are all very standard, highly parallel molecular mechanisms. I can't help that neither of you have basic understanding of biochemistry.
> Assembling mRNA using pseudouridine, a nucleoside variant that occurs naturally in the body, greatly reduced the tendency of immune sentinels called dendritic cells to shoot out inflammatory molecules in response, they reported in 2005.
Before claiming other people don't know what they're talking about, it would be polite sufficiently understand it and refrain from making false claims yourself.
> When a vaccinated cell dies, the debris will contain many spike proteins and protein fragments, which can then be taken up by a type of immune cell called an antigen-presenting cell. [1]
Is it true that host cells need to die for the vaccine to take effect?
I'm not entirely sure and couldn't find good sources to verify or disprove OPs claim, but I recall some claims that the vaccine kills cells.
> it will lead to the cells death because it produces the foreign protein as instructed until it is killed by your immune system.
Different sites have different descriptions, but even [2] mentions:
> The priming of CD8 T cells can induce the formation of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (5b) which are capable of directly killing infected cells.
Which likely means killing cells presenting the vaccine spikes? Most sites mention some form of cytotoxic action or reponse, which I do not understand, but I take it to mean that some cells are killed.
Have I claimed it is a primary source? I have listed a source, as my time is limited. If you disagree feel free to list a better one. You have listed exactly 0 sources for your claims. By logic, you are the one spreading your own ignorance.
I would especially be interested in a source claiming APCs transcribe RNA to present antigens; that antigens enter the cells; and that they (rather than you) are full of it.
Note, I think both you and OP presented false claims and misconception. OP probably more, but it is you that will help spread and affirm more anti-vaxers with the - you're wrong, here's what I think, now shut up and take the jab - attitude towards their concerns.
You may not like the connotation of the word but if "hijack" can be used to refer to taking over something and repurposing it for yourself, then yes, this is a "hijacking".
Especially when viruses are commonly described in the same way, since the mechanism and outcome is the same: an entity other than the human cell is controlling the output of the organelles.
In any case this is a pedantic argument and changes absolutely nothing about any of my points, nor is it misinformation.
Comparing mRNA technology to conventional vaccines is borderline disingenuous. I don't think we've ever vaccinated people with live pathogens (or at least not deactivated), and we certainly have never repurposed our own cells to manufacture an inflammatory protein which then migrates to cell surfaces.
Autoimmune disorders in particular are not necessarily going to appear in 6 weeks. Especially when the data is so noisy and there's a clear, career risking stigma against reporting anything.
>Regulators are largely looking at facts on the ground before making decisions.
My point is that the "facts on the ground" are extremely noisy and in large part coming from the pharmaceutical companies themselves. This proof is overstated, ignoring the fact that there hasn't been enough time to detect mid-long term effects, its own can of worms.
All of this doubly so given the chilling effect of the stigma associated with what has seemingly been decided to be "misinformation". Clinicians, researchers, nurses are less willing to stick their necks out to criticize the research/data, and so the problem is dangerously self-reinforcing.
These are the same circles that gave us the opioid crisis. And suddenly we've all forgotten about regulatory capture? None of these criticisms deserve this rabid bullying. This is supposed to be science, not religious dogma.
Edit: and let's not forget that these pharmaceutical companies are legally not liable for any adverse effects. Informed consent requires freedom of discussion.
I think the reasoning is, they have two vaccines, one that in rare cases causes this one that doesn't. Even if the liklihood of the side effect is very low and the severity is also pretty low (its generally not life threatening or anything), if you have two vaccines, one that causes the side effect and one that doesn't, why would you use the one that does, regardless of how insignificant the risk is in absolute terms.
The comparison isn't moderna vs no vaccine (in which case moderna would win the risk trade-off). The comparison is moderna vs pfizer.
It seems like if you take everything into account, taking the vaccine might not provide any benefit from men under 30. Any medical intervention must be beneficial to justify the use. If it's so and so, or equal risk, then it's not done.
EDIT: The alternative is not stopping vaccinations. Men under 30 are given Pfizer.
Based on the data in the study linked below, the risk for myocarditis among COVID-19 patients is 0.146%, and 0.009% among people without COVID-19 (study was done pre-vaccine).
> During March 2020–January 2021, the risk for myocarditis was 0.146% among patients with COVID-19 and 0.009% among patients without COVID-19. Among patients with COVID-19, the risk for myocarditis was higher among males (0.187%) than among females (0.109%) and was highest among adults aged ≥75 years (0.238%), 65–74 years (0.186%), and 50–64 years (0.155%) and among children aged <16 years (0.133%).
The number of C19 fatalities under 30 in the US appears to easily exceed the number of vaccine-related myocarditis cases. The overwhelming majority of those myocarditis cases followed a benign course.
Later
Another thing to consider is that the myocarditis rate from C19 itself may exceed that of the vaccine, which would basically refute the argument against vaccination.
Even if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for society you cannot make that calculation. You cannot administer a vaccine to a healthy person just because it doesn't increase their risk of dying as much as it decreases someone else's risk of surviving. Young healthy men should not be coerced into accepting an elevated risk because getting to herd immunity or whatever might save old and at risk persons.
For children and healthy young people below the age of 30, Covid is mostly harmless (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717). The risk of vaccination may actually be higher since the vaccines currently used aren't fully researched nor fully approved yet. The situation is not black or white. Vaccination may be very useful for people aged 50 and above but at the same time counterproductive for children.
I don't think that's the right question or comparison.
If this young person below 30 gets a side effect from the vaccine, is that side effect worse than what they'd get by having the virus?
It should be clear that we aren't going to suppress or eradicate covid, so you shouldn't be comparing getting the vaccine or nothing happening, but getting covid with or without the vaccine
It doesn't matter if the virus is worse than the vaccine since the vaccine is intentionally administered. Someone who is cautious might attempt to avoid the virus altogether thus their risk might be much lower than the average.
Furthermore, there is no guarantee that Covid won't mutate so that you will have to refill your vaccination every year to stay immune like with vaccines against the flu. If so, mass vaccinations probably won't be employed again and we'll only vaccinate at risk groups.
Good luck with avoiding it. Scotland had no restrictions and when they opened schools, about 8% of 12-15 children got infected within first 5 weeks. Delta variant is so infectious that it will not disappear until about 90% of all the people are immune to it. For seasonal flu only 25% is required.
More precisely shouldn't we be comparing the number of life years lost. If for every young healthy person that develops myocarditis or increases his lifetime cancer risk by 1%, how many 84 year old getting to live another year, is worth the risk to the young healthy person.
There are additional questions here. How long does vaccine immunity last? How many shots do you need? Does the risk of side effects add up or is an absence of side effects indicative of further shots being safe?
With an endemic Covid, how often will people get an infection on average?
That number for under 30’s is full of people who are extremely fat or otherwise have preexisting health problems. If you’re under 30 and seemingly healthy your fatality rate is much lower.
Except the risk is not 0 if you don't have comorbidities.
People keep throwing this statement out as though somehow the risk of vaccination is higher then the risks due to viral infection. It is not.
The risks of adverse reactions to COVID infection is reduced across the board if you are fully vaccinated regardless of your health status.
Also worth noting: plenty of young people have comorbidities they don't know about yet, because they haven't found them. It is actually quite difficult to exclude yourself from the "has comorbidities" risk group apriori. A common one is in fact undiscovered heart conditions for people in their 30s, since they usually only become an issue later in life when symptoms are more likely to present.
>Another thing to consider is that the myocarditis rate from C19 itself may exceed that of the vaccine, which would basically refute the argument against vaccination
No, because you need to consider not just the odds of getting myocarditis from covid vs vaccine (Pc:Pv), but the bayesian probabilities of getting infected (Pi) or vaccinated (1) and then getting myocarditis, such that the full risk analysis would look more like Pi*Pc:Pv[1]. Point being when you are talking about vaccinating the entire population, you can easily end up in a position where there are more cases of heart inflammation from fully vaccinating the population than simply letting the virus run its course. I believe the term is relative risk reduction but don't quote me.
1. This isn't quite right, there should be a 1-x term or two in there somewhere to account for the probabilities of getting vaccinated/infected and not developing myocarditis, but its been a few years since my probability course...In any case the point still stands, that the vaccine may be less likely to cause heart inflammation does not imply that it would produce fewer cases overall if a sizeable proportion is vaccinated. To properly estimate that you need an accurate estimate for the myocarditis rate from both covid and vaccine, which I don't think anyone has.
This is true and if it was flu kind of virus with very low reproduction number, it would be right but Delta variant has very high reproduction number and it is guaranteed to infect eventually almost everyone who is without immune response against it.
There is also this fact that myocarditis has high prevalence among teenage boys (even CDC might underestimate it) and it looks like it is caused by some form of immune reaction and its occurrence is immune reaction size dependent (Moderna causes more myocarditis than Pfizer that causes more than AstraZeneca). It allows to postulate that it might be that the people who get myocarditis after vaccination have high risk of getting it after infection.
I mean, yeah. If vaccines don't protect against virus spread... Fuck it, let people decide. Either take a vaccine or risk getting Covid in the wild.
Just make it so you can't use a hospital bed in that case. It's only fair to people who are actually forced to go to the hospital, as opposed to gambling for it.
Smokers are routinely denied organ transplants if they refuse to quit. Same thing for alcohol.
"Heart and lung transplant candidates must be free of nicotine and tobacco use, including chewing tobacco, for six months prior to an initial listing."
If they overwhelmed the medical system to the detriment of others then yes. And this is coming from an ex smoker who knew it was bad for you when begun smoking. Now this is slightly different for other age groups that started their habit when the tobacco industry were paying doctors to promote smoking.
This line of reasoning goes to a dark place. You can't know what makes sense in someone else's life. A heroin addict self-medicating unbearable pain is, to me, a tragic figure deserving help. A morbidly obese person may be suffering from an undiagnosed underlying condition that makes diet and exercise impossible. A smoker may need the stress release.
Should we refuse to treat any injury sustained by the Wright brothers during their experimental flights? Surely that's highly dangerous highly voluntary stuff. Should we refuse to rescue hikers if they become lost or trapped? Should the coast guard never help recreational sailors? Should we have to submit to a proscribed diet exactly to prove we deserve medical care? Should we forgo treatment for tendonitis if it can be shown we ignored known warnings about typing too much?
To me, people are precious, and they lead messy, imperfect lives. They make bad decisions and good ones, and decisions I don't understand. They'll take risks I never would in pursuit of goals I don't see as valuable. Sometimes, when you really get to know someone, a decision that didn't make sense from a distance really starts to. And sometimes people are being self-destructive and there's no more to the story, and sometimes it's something they go through and come out the other side of.
My conviction is to love and help them no matter what.
Sometimes I can't, and that's a different thing, but deciding that someone doesn't deserve help is a level of judgement I don't want and can't justify. Maybe what they were doing really was worth it. I don't know. Even if it's not, it's essential to let people try.
I would find someone else trying to exert this degree of control over my life - requiring me to comply with their particular take on what risks were worth it - suffocating and unbearable. I am sure others feel the same way, about control in areas in which I wouldn't mind it because I happen to already be normal. So I am against it on principle. People need to be people, in all their messy glory. And we should help them if we can, regardless of how they got there. I think the only case in which I would act differently was if I thought letting someone suffer natural consequences was for their best - and I would have to be incredibly sure.
Leaving people to a fatal condition when we could help them is incomprehensible and inhumane to me, and represents a dangerous level of escalating disagreement into dehumanization.
I should clarify that I live in the free world, where healthcare is a right and broadly speaking provided by society. Additional helathcare is of course available on a pay basis. However, to clarify, my comment was in regard to this system.
> Should we refuse to treat any injury sustained by ...
You break it you buy it. Should the state and society in general be expected to shoulder the burdeon for people who chose to put themselves in danger, should 10 people be sent into danger to save the sailor who makes the choice to take on a hurricane?
Who do we save if we can only save 1 person, the heroin addict with a fatal condition we can probably save or the child that would be a flip of a coin?
> My conviction is to love and help them no matter what.
What of the children of the helicopter crew flying into the hurricane to save the lone sailor? No love and help for them? Or the person who doesnt get a bed because it is take up by others?
> I would find someone else trying to exert this degree of control over my life - requiring me to comply with their particular take on what risks were worth it - suffocating and unbearable?
Your choices are other peoples consequences. As a functioning member of society, philosophically you comply with these things on a constant basis, and no doubt demand it of others. It is not a matter of principle, it is simply a question of where the line is. If you have ever complained about anything you have exerted your control over someone elses life.
Sometimes you cannot help everyone and have to make hard choices, but be wary: atrocities don't happen in a vacuum. Behind every historical Red Terror or Holocaust is a narrative, and it almost always goes along these lines: they're a danger to us and they deserve it. Even the eugenicists had a (temporarily) convincing tale.
You cannot rely on "being right this time" to avoid participating in tragedy. The liars are too good. But you can refuse to hate and dehumanize those you are told to.
If you truly believe that medical care is a human right, then you should extend it to every human, regardless of how they wound up in the situation they're in. While you sometimes do have to choose, it is abhorrent to choose the rich over the poor, the socially well-adjusted over the outcasts, ideological friends over ideological foes. The standard we actually use is to do the absolute best you can for everyone you can.
You're right that it doesn't make sense to cause greater harm to avoid lesser, but rationing too quickly, especially from a place of moral judgement rather than medical triage, seems much more likely to be coming from a place of spite than a place of tragic necessity. We take care of enemy soldiers. We take care of people on death row. We take care of people who would see us dead, because this is what civilized and humane people do. If you are quick to deny care to people you perceive as not doing their part, you're coming from a perspective much, much darker than the general thought and ethics of this civilization.
I know everyone is angry and has suffered in the last couple years, and I know everyone wants to fight. There are people running around right now stirring up that anger and trying to direct it at their ideological enemies. By all means, fight for what you think is right. But if you find yourself indifferent to the death of your fellow man or even cheering for it, beware - it may make sense to you right now, but that will be no comfort in five or ten or twenty years if what you wish for comes to pass and you have to remember cheering for it.
Vaccines do protect against spread though. Not perfectly mind you, but the effect is still significant if a significant portion of the population is vaccinated.
The data I've seen seems to show that the Moderna vaccine is the best of them in terms of long-term efficacy against breakthrough infection and hospitalization. I got Pfizer, and honestly I wish I would've had Moderna regardless of some very slim chances of myocarditis. My increased chances of getting a breakthrough infection on the Pfizer vaccine outweigh my chances of getting myocarditis on Moderna.
That's very unclear, since people who got Moderna are getting fewer breakthrough infections that people who got Pfizer, and are being hospitalized less (from studies by the Mayo Clinic and confirmed elsewhere). So you can't look just at side effects, you also need to look at effectiveness. They could inject you with a placebo known to be side effect free.
It has been clearly spotted in 2 mRNA vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna). There is limited information about vector based vaccines.
It is fairly clear that adverse effect is dose dependent and it may be the reason why we do not see that many with vector vaccines - immune system creates some immunity against the vector virus and actual amount of vaccine entering cells is limited. It is also evident from the limited immune response from vector vaccines.
The study is preliminary - but they're being cautious and recommending young men switch to the Pfizer vaccine since the risk of myocarditis is lower.
But just so people don't get the wrong idea, they're finding that the risk of myocarditis in young men who've actually caught Covid is something like 6x more likely than in those who received the vaccine:
So if you're a young male, the correct response to avoiding myocarditis (among all of the other downsides that come with actually catching Covid) is to get vaccinated with the Pfizer or J&J shots.
As a young male who got myocarditis from both covid and the vaccine, the other thing that's worth knowing that I wish I'd known earlier: if you do get it, then the best thing to do to prevent long-term damage is to avoid exercise completely (potentially for 6 months to a year, or until you've been cleared by a doctor).
Just out of curiosity, did you get COVID first and then decided to get the vaccine later on? Or was it the other way around? I'm guessing the former - I've had friends who had COVID and their doctors still advised them to get the vaccine - and find it quite troubling if so. We've known for so long now how robust natural immunity is - and before we "knew for sure" any sane person's priors would still assume natural immunity works the way it does for any other respiratory pathogen - yet there was a concerted institutional/media push to act as if immunity literally didn't exist, or the more subtle form that immunity might exist but that vaccine immunity is "better".
Not that it's super relevant but the friends I mentioned were mid 20's and in fine health, no weird immune disorders or anything, so the fact that their doc advised the vaccine was frankly just negligence in my book.
A friend had COVID, positive by PCR result, loss of taste and all of that, at the beginning of the year. Mild case anyhow, she went to her doctor for a check-up 2-3 months later to make sure everything is fine and was asked afterwards if she is planning to go to get the vaccine, when she said no, at least not anytime soon, rollout was still in the early phases in our country, she got an absolutely insane scolding about how she doesn't care about others and is anti vaccines, and all this from a medical professional. Officially it wasn't even recommended to get it if you are in the first 6 months after recovery. She was quite shocked and dropped the doctor after that.
BTW the feeling of being sick is literally the feeling of your immune system doing its thing. No immune response = no sickness symptoms (until huge swaths of your body have been destroyed by the pathogen)
Because the officials are fucking cretinoids who can't understand it.
I had Covid, had immunity, and no one gave a flying fuck. I had to follow the same procedures as everyone else. PCR tests up the ass, waste of money, travel blocks.
Half a year later I got the J&J vaccine and had a mild fever for a day (proving my previous infection worked for immunity, just imo). Yet I still wear a fucking mask and shit. At least I have a QR code that I can use to travel...and some countries don't accept J&J as a valid vaccine.
I didn't have COVID, and I also only had a day or so of fever after my J&J shot in June. My girlfriend had a similarly mild reaction, and we've both been tested regularly for various reasons, we're pretty certain that we haven't been infected.
I just got my recommended booster shot of Moderna yesterday, now I'm waiting to see how hard that will hit me.
There are no certainties, but I know that here you would also been considered immune if you had previously been infected, but not yet vaccinated.
Bad public policy unfortunately exists, same with the thing about not accepting the J&J vaccine as valid. It works about as well as the mRNA vaccines against hospitalizations and death, but with somewhat less efficacy against base infection, and of course a slightly larger risk of complications. That doesn't make it a bad vaccine, so countries not accepting it is completely insane.
Good to know. I was basing my opinion on the fact that the actual infection (confirmed via PCR) had me very fatigued for a week, with a fever for about half of it. And online reports for J&J showed several days of response effects.
I could've opted for Pfizer, but the wait time for it to arrive and to get the full two doses was too long. J&J is one shot, and some say it works better than "older" vaccines.
I did get into the country that didn't have it on their list to be fair. They probably added it later, AZ was on there.
One answer I can think of is if you caught covid and then got regeneron. A month later, after the regeneron wears off, you’d probably want to build up your body’s immunity.
The study you linked does not prove what you think it does. Check out the inclusion criteria:
> Inclusion criteria were a first COVID-19 diagnosis during the April 1, 2020 - March 31, 2021 time period, with an outpatient visit 1 month to 2 years before, and another 6 months to 2 years before that
To actually compare fairly against vaccination, you need to compare the infection myocarditis rate, not the case myocarditis rate. (Technically you should really compare infection myocarditis rate * chance of actually getting infected w/ SARS-2 [while very slightly adjusting for time decay], but let's ignore that especially since the chance of getting COVID over a 2-3 year window is quite high)
So the study you linked will give an unfairly high estimate of the rate of myocarditis. This is the same principle as the fact that looking at hospitalized COVID-19 patients will show much worse effects than looking at rates of bad effects for all PCR+ individuals, and even moreso if extrapolating from serology.
To be clear the result in the paper is that myocarditis in that age group is greater than hospitalization risk from covid. No?
"For boys 12-17 without medical comorbidities, the likelihood of post vaccination dose two CAE is 162.2 and 94.0/million respectively. This incidence exceeds their expected 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization rate"
There's no result there about myocarditis from covid infection.
TL;DR: up to a 6.1x rate of cardiac adverse effects from mRNA vaccination compared to Covid 19 hospitalization for teen-aged boys.
> Results A total of 257 CAEs [cardiac adverse effect] were identified. Rates per million following dose 2 among males were 162.2 (ages 12-15) and 94.0 (ages 16-17); among females, rates were 13.0 and 13.4 per million, respectively. For boys 12-15 without medical comorbidities receiving their second mRNA vaccination dose, the rate of CAE is 3.7 to 6.1 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk as of August 21, 2021 (7-day hospitalizations 1.5/100k population) and 2.6-4.3-fold higher at times of high weekly hospitalization risk (7-day hospitalizations 2.1/100k), such as during January 2021. For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly COVID-19 hospitalization.
Ahh yes the classic “if it doesn’t agree with my preconceived notions it must be a poorly done study” but if it furthers my beliefs then “anyone that questions it is obviously denying the truth/anti-science”. You dismiss this study without realizing that one of the authors is a very good cardiologist who chose strict criteria for what data to allow into this study.
Not quite enough info available yet, to be certain.
First need to know what the risk of myocarditis is when being vaccinated and having covid, and how much lower the risk of covid-infection is when having been vaccinated.
I don't think all of that data is available right now, so I would hesitate coming with certain conclusions about the right thing to do for young people. (Especially boys)
Also I would be a little careful using the 6x estimate for myocarditis caused by covid infection for these age groups, as in these age groups there may be quite a few undetected/asymptomatic covid infections. (That is it may be that: P(detected infection | covid, myocarditis) >> P(detected infection | covid) in young people)
> So if you're a young male, the correct response to avoiding myocarditis (among all of the other downsides that come with actually catching Covid) is to get vaccinated with the Pfizer or J&J shots.
This is probably also the reason the health authorities stopped recommending the Moderna vaccine for that demographic. Since the Pfizer vaccine is available, and AFAIK it's not in short supply, it's pretty much just a question of which vaccine to use for that demographic.
When I got the second (Pfizer) shot, I was also given a leaflet saying that extreme physical exertion should be avoided for a few days afterwards as that might increase the risk of myocarditis.
Do you if the study you link considers someone who gets myocarditis that is vaccinated and had covid as vaccine caused case or covid caused case? I couldn't find it in the full text.
Taken and translated from THL's website[1] (Finnish Institute for Healt and Welfare ) "in its study, THL has examined the incidence of myocardial inflammation requiring hospitalization in different age groups.
In boys and men aged 12–39 years, a total of 6 cases of myocarditis have been reported in Finland per 381,000 doses of Comirnaty and less than 5 cases per less than 49,000 doses of Spikevax in Finland.
A total of less than five cases of myocarditis have been reported in girls and women of the same age, and the prevalence of myocarditis in women and girls after vaccination has not differed from that normally seen in the general population."
The study is still ongoing in Finland, but as the early results seem to match with the other nordic countries the limitation has been placed.
2.7 per 100k [1] according to an Israeli study. Couldn’t find these details on the Scandinavian study. This article at least in text said you’re more at risk of getting it from Covid than the vaccine — I wish this context with numbers were always printed in these cases. The non-scientifically trained public isn’t taught or should be expected to know how to contextualize these things.
Wow. I'm trying to do a sanity check on this study, and I'm not convinced they found anything but noise?
They looked at 25 "averse events", and only half of them (12 of the 25) had higher prevalence with the vaccine than in the control group, which is what "no difference" looks like. The normal way you protect against this is by adjusting for the fact that you're doing multiple tests (one for each of the 25 adverse events), but "As is standard practice for studies of safety outcomes, no adjustment for multiple comparisons was performed.". Am I missing something?
Or to put it differently, if the vaccine puts you at risk for intracranial hemorrhages, does it also protect you against acute kidney injury (irrespective of Covid)? The difference is just as big in the other direction.
I'm not sure any of the studies that measured it for any of the 3 main vaccines are distinguishable from noise. All the numbers that I managed to find weren't.
I'm starting to think that we should redesign all the older vaccines to be more like those ones.
> This article at least in text said you’re more at risk of getting it from Covid than the vaccine
But the risk of getting COVID in any time period is less than 1 (based on % of population that has actually had it, possibly less than 0.1 or 10% per year), so it's worth waiting for the safest vaccine for certain groups.
44.1M verified cases in the out of 329.5M ~= 13%, and that's with verified cases, so it's likely much higher. My guess is younger people are even more likely to get it given their lifestyle is highly social at that age, and risk tolerance is similarly high.
Given it's not slowing down, the likelihood of getting covid is actually quite high over time.
These are US numbers, though. Norway, e.g., has tested like crazy and diagnosed 4% of its population with covid throughout the pandemic. Given that the US numbers for covid cases are at least three times higher, the risk assessment will necessarily be different.
The Scandinavian solution will likely be to just delay vaccination for a week while a dose of the Pfeizer vaccine is tracked down. The change of contracting covid in that timeframe is very small.
These ethical considerations are necessarily local.
My point is it won't go up much during the small delay when the small percentage of as-yet unvaccinated young men simply take the other vaccine instead.
Not to mention as time goes by, many other things are de-risked such as literally our understanding of vaccine side effects and proper mitigations, and new therapies.
In Scotland about 8% of 12-15 year olds got it in 5 weeks after the beginning of the school year. UK did not vaccinate <16 year olds till 20th September. Now they got forced natural immunity.
It don't wear off to 0, you're risk of hospitalization or death is far far far greater if you're unvaccinated (even with declining efficacy of catching it), the safety profiles are known to be great especially considering the hundreds of millions vaccinated, and unless you're very extreme you'll want to come out of the woods at some point.
The Israeli study was on Phizer. Finland is recommending people people not take Moderna and instead take the Phizer.
Without a more detailed case behind this it feels like "just trust us".
I'd really like some trust but verify. The lack of ability to verify many of these directions, especially with some of them from different organizations contradicting each other, is bothersome.
New study using Kaiser data with both Pfizer and Moderna all ages [1]. 15 cases out of 2,392,924 (0.8 cases per 1 million first doses and 5.8 cases per 1 million second doses over a 10-day observation window), of which all were men with a median age of 25 years.
While that's both vaccines, it's still quite rare especially given the large population size (2.3M people), especially considering for under 16s your risk of myocarditis is 37x more likely if you get Covid [2].
In a world where people like to talk about their opinions, it's great to have some form of foundation. When I speak to folks and can talk about these details it often sways opinions on those who aren't at the extremes. I wish more people shared data and the foundation for their opinion.
27 out of a million, or 1 out of 37000. For some reason using "whole people" in statistics makes it seem a little more real to me, 2.7 of 100k seems too dry and remote.
"Ontario now recommending against Moderna vaccine for men 18-24 years old...This comes after public health officials determined there is a 1 in 5,000 risk of myocarditis — a form of heart inflammation — following a second dose of the Moderna vaccine."
> Among patients with COVID-19, the risk for myocarditis was higher among males (0.187%) than among females (0.109%) and was highest among adults aged ≥75 years (0.238%), 65–74 years (0.186%), and 50–64 years (0.155%) and among children aged <16 years (0.133%).
> In adjusted analyses, patients with COVID-19 had, on average, 15.7 (95% CI = 14.1–17.2) times the risk for myocarditis compared with patients without COVID-19;
Okay, so it's 'just' an order of magnitude higher. Unfortunately, myocarditis is one of the least serious side effects of COVID.
If you have a choice between a vaccine that offers 95% protection against COVID, and a 1 in 5000 chance of myocarditis, and one that offers 90% protection against COVID, and a zero chance of myocarditis, you're better off taking the former. You're also far better off taking either one, compared to being unvaccinated.
The decision depends on country, pandemic course, mitigations in place and personal risk. Making general claims regarding vaccination is spreading misinformation.
Now you've already been caught making false claims once, the decent thing to do would be to stop being so cocksure and apologize, not dig in.
On the other hand communication during this pandemic has been littered with point estimates where confidence intervals should have been used. Based on the FHI announcement, I think the result is not significant, but the decision was made because the Moderna vaccine is now redundant in Scandinavia.
Indeed. A little clicking, and I couldn't find numbers either. Luckily raw numbers aren't all that necessary for decision making because:
> The risk of myocarditis is substantially increased for those who contract COVID-19, and vaccination is the best way to protect against this.
So even if only Moderna is available to you, you are still safer getting it than COVID-19. I think these countries are just making sure that each demographic gets the safest vaccine for them which is great.
Well my kid was in the hospital for two weeks with myocarditis. One of 700 cases in the US at the time. Not sure what the number might be up to now. He is fine.
Interestingly enough, my father was in the hospital at the same time being monitored for a potential heart attack.
The were both going through exactly the same testing and treatment. In other words, my young son was, among other things, being tested for the heart attack enzyme.
In this case it was the Pfizer vaccine. The rest of the family, myself included, got Moderna.
The issue --with kids-- seems to have been that the second dose had to be lower than what they were/are giving them. I haven't followed developments since he got out. He had a three month checkout and all was well.
While our entire family is vaccinated, this event made me realize that we must not vilify those who have doubts.
Yes, of course, I wish everyone was vaccinated. And yet, I have to ask myself: What would we had done had we known there was a potential for our young kid to actually suffer a heart attack because of the vaccine? As small as the probability of something like that might be, I am not sure how I would answer the question. My wife is an MD. Her opinion is we probably would have given them just one dose. Still, it's easy to say things like that after the fact.
I personally know three persons that got some degree of chest pain. I had worse symptoms than they did, now 3 months later I can let my heart rate hit maximum, which is significantly lower than before.
My cardiologist says that without an MRI he can't diagnose me and my insurance did not cover it. It's quite likely imo that there is a relevant diagnosis not being made because it's inaccessible.
> My cardiologist says that without an MRI he can't diagnose me and my insurance did not cover it. It's quite likely imo that there is a relevant diagnosis not being made because it's inaccessible.
I would suggest you report it to VAERS, but everyone's decided that data should just be ignored so what's the point?
Nobody says it should be ignored. You just can't take the reports at face value and use any loose connection to a condition as proof positive that the condition was present and associated with the vaccine. It's meant for identifying possible correlations for further study, not relaying the true rate of events.
Why are people only focusing on numbers. There are tons of negative stuff with higher odds of happening to you but I don't want to risk myocarditis. I'd rather get bitten, unless it's a rabid dog.
Because people focus on the idea that the vaccine induced myocarditis is bad, while ignoring the rate of myocarditis from the condition the vaccine is there to prevent. But you're right, there's a whole spectrum of other problems.
>> "A Nordic study involving Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark found that men under the age of 30 who received Moderna Spikevax had a slightly higher risk than others of developing myocarditis," he said.
> I find it frustrating that we’re still not putting numbers on statements like this in news articles.
This article on the same general topic has numbers:
> A New Vaccine Strategy for Children: Just One Dose, for Now
> Myocarditis, a rare side effect, occurs mostly after the second dose. So in some countries, officials are trying out single doses for children....
> Officials in Hong Kong as well as in Britain, Norway and other countries have recommended a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children ages 12 and older — providing partial protection from the virus, but without the potential harms occasionally observed after two doses....
> Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed data on myocarditis in June, and unanimously voted to recommend the vaccine for children ages 12 and older, saying the benefits far outweighed the risk.
> Agency research has estimated that for every million vaccinated boys ages 12 to 17 in the United States, the shots might cause a maximum of 70 myocarditis cases, but they would prevent 5,700 infections, 215 hospitalizations and two deaths. Studies have also shown that the risk of heart problems after Covid-19 is much higher than after vaccination....
> The latest analysis, which was published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that the incidence of myocarditis after vaccination in Israel was highest among males aged 16 to 29. About 11 of every 100,000 males in that age group developed the condition a few days after being vaccinated, a rate higher than most earlier estimates. (The risk was negligible in females of any age.)
That article also had some interesting discussion about reducing vaccination for young people because of myocarditis. Whether that's a wise decision or not really depends on how well the country in question has contained COVID.
The more important question to me is how bad it is. Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle. If you get that as a long term thing with no obvious cause it's obviously bad. But if you get it for a couple of days after a vaccine and it goes away it wouldn't seem a big deal.
The problem is that the perception of public trust is eroding significantly the more we learn and the more fervent the mandates become. We pulled the swine flu vaccine for way less back in 2010, I think it was 12 cases of GBS only! The fact that I know of people who have either had mycarditis AND clots tells me the rate is much higher then reported by VAERS.
The reason damn near everyone except for adamant anti-vax have the perception that VACCINE=SAFE/GOOD is that 93% of experimental candidates are rejected and it takes 10-15 years of trails and data to get full approval. It's the reason you are confident giving it to your own children the safety standards are so stringent. These comparisons to your chances of car accidents and being struck by lighting are totally bogus, you need to compare the data to past vaccines! And yet we think we got this mRNA/Adenovirus vector formula right on the first try times 3 different brands with 2 years of reduced trials?
That's all gone out the window for the sake of the pandemic emergency and that's fine as long as the choice is clear and consensual, let those who want it take the risk, but don't mandate it. The VAERS data is abysmal, worse then the past 50 years of all vaccine combined, and yet people are now in the mode of dismissing the VAERS system entirely because its self reported, with no alternative to fall back to! The FDA even had the option of setting up a separate system for covid vaccine adverse event reporting and rejected it. Fine, then VAERS it is! The only system we have ever had to judge this by.
At what point is it ethical to hand someone a long list of side effects that occur at x50+ higher rates then past vaccines and then say "but you must take this or you can't work".
I think in 10 years, we will see this technology as higher risk but much faster turn around times compared to traditional vaccines. Just be up front about it and let people choose.
Anecdote. Fear mongering. Misleading statistic. Misleading/demonstrably wrong information presented with an air of "obviously". Conspiracy... What is eroding trust in vaccines are narratives like this. You pretend like every single point you raise (accelerated development, VAERS) doesn't have a clear explanation that is readily available with a single search. You pretend as if these "issues" you identify are swept under the rug to push unsafe vaccines on people, when in fact they are openly and frequently discussed. It's a (sadly common) argumentative sleight of hand.
Back when the virus was less infectious and it was plausible to get to herd immunity with 60% of the adults vaccinated, I thought a good information campaign can get you there. In the US about a third of the population believes that Biden won through Voter fraud. Factual information, no matter how well presented or corroborated, only gets you so far if someone with a megaphone has a narrative to push.
Is it "factual" Biden didn't win through voter fraud? How exactly did you determine this? (to be clear I'm not suggesting he did, only questioning your methods of determining truth).
"Back when it was plausible to get to herd immunity with 60% of adults vaccinated".
That was never possible with these series of vaccines which don't prevent transmission, don't give full protection, and don't last very long. It's frankly stunning to me someone would make such a statement at this point in time.
> Is it "factual" Biden didn't win through voter fraud?
Yes.
> How exactly did you determine this?
By waiting for all the people who did assert voter fraud to present their hard evidence in court. There wasn't any.
It's like asking whether it's "factual" that Obama is a human man instead of a secret lizard person wearing an advanced nanotech disguise. I can't affirmatively prove the non-existence of something, but that doesn't mean it's less of a fact.
That's exactly what I'm saying. I can't prove a negative -- the burden of proof is on the other party.
By your reasoning, being unable to prove a negative means that, outside of maybe math, facts don't really exist. I can't prove that WW2 wasn't an elaborate hoax, I can't prove that Texas is a real state, I can't prove that babies aren't brought around by very stealthy storks.
The point is, you already accept WW2 as factual -- or you certainly wouldn't object to someone presenting it as such on an internet forum -- despite it possibly being a shared worldwide hallucination, so you're not even being internally consistent.
The probability Texas is a real state is very different then the probability fraud caused Trump to lose the 2020 election.
You again are appealing to ridicule.
Once again, just to be clear, I'm not saying Trump won the 2020 election. Trump's claims he won for sure and "everyone knows it" are just as nonfactual and people who claim Trump actually won is a "fact" are also making preference based statements of faith, just as you and original poster are doing. Unless they have top secret proof they are not sharing which as you alluded to earlier, appears unlikely.
What I'm taking about is the nature of "absolute fact" and "probability" and stating things as certain facts that are not certain facts. Also assessing the possibility or probability of events occurring.
Here are statements I'd have no problem with:
"No conclusive evidence has been presented that fraud tipped the scales in the 2020 election"
"It appears extremely unlikely Trump actually won the 2020 election because the evidence thus far presented in court has not held up to scrutiny"
Here is a statement I do have a problem with:
"1/3 of people are so dumb they don't even believe the "fact" that the 2020 election was legitimate so XXX because facts don't matter to unwashed idiots" (which was the gist of the original post I took exception with).
You are imposing arbitrary and extreme standards for the usage of the term fact. These standards neither reflect real world usage, nor do they reflect any sensible first principle definition.
You also consistently conflate trust and faith. I have to trust a number of entities to come to the conclusion that this is a fact. Just like I have to trust a number of social entities to come to the conclusion that the existence of atoms is a fact. The point is that there are excellent reasons to trust these entities. Faith is trust without reason. That is _not_ at play here.
It's entirely within the realm of probability that an election was fraudulent enough to alter the outcome. That has happened in world history more then once.
On the other hand it's not within the realm of reasonable possibility that Texas doesn't actually exist.
These two scenarios are not comparable.
It very simply is not a "fact" that Joe Biden won the election cleanly (nor the converse). It might be most probable but it is not "fact" and there are people who feel the evidence points to a different conclusion then you have arrived at. Perhaps they are wrong but the issue here is one of "fact" and determining "fact" in this case is a very large search space. At most (right now) we can say what evidence we see and what we believe is most probable, not beat our opponents over the head for how stupid they are for not seeing "facts". (this was my whole point).
faith
/fāTH/
noun
1.
complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
You are right, Texas is not a good example here. I will give you another one instead:
September 18, 2006 light from a massive supernova reached earth. The star exploded in galaxy NGC 1260 238,000,000 light years away. This was the most energy intensive supernova ever recorded, and it's observation made it onto the Time magazine Top 10 scientific discoveries of the year.
This explosion is considered a scientific fact. You can not prove that this was not faked. I consider the likelihood that it was faked considerably higher than the likelihood that Trump won the election. Why? You would need to coordinate fewer people to fake it, and the people whom you would need to coordinate would be roughly neutral towards the outcome you are manufacturing. In contrast to tip the election without _any_ evidence of this subterfuge emerging you need to coordinate a lot more people, and many of those are actively working _against_ the outcome you are manufacturing.
I mean, i get where you are coming from: "Texas I can go and look at, microbes I can get a microscope and check myself, the electio I obviously can't!". Your problem is just that you stop thinking at this point. There just is more to it.
Either way, it's abundantly clear that the reason that 30% of the US believe the election was tipped has nothing to do with these philosophical points you raise. The election was not any more or less secure than the last couple of dozen that people by and large accepted. The only thing that changed is that Trump, for personal gain, actively undermined the trust in institutions specifically engineered to make cheating hard and to certify results.
But I suspect you probably know that on some level already.
They reduce the likelihood of catching it, and reduce the likelihood of transmission when you get it.
A herd immunity situation still involves individuals catching and spreading a disease, but the R value is below 1, so it fizzles out quickly.
Have a node in the graph reduce both incoming and outgoing probability of transmission reducea the R value.
The argument you can make is that covid's R value is so high that it doesn't matter how many people get vaccinated or catch covid, it will continue spreading, but "full protection" is irrelevant
The "reduce likelihoods" would need real numbers to determine if the R value would be below 1 and thus fizzle.
Hand waving doesn't show this and I feel it's unlikely given the amount vaccinated infection observed.
We didn't know everything we do now, but near as I can tell herd immunity was never a realistic possibility. It was with for the foreseeable future as soon as it went multinational and became a management rather then elimination task.
> The fact that I know of people who have either had mycarditis AND clots tells me the rate is much higher then reported by VAERS
My daughter's bf's friend's mom died of a stroke two days after getting the vaccine. Two of my brother-in-laws where hospitalized for heart issues after the vaccine. Another friend of ours now has bad tinnitus after getting the vaccine. A guy at my dad's work stroked out within 48 hours of getting the vaccine. I have a small social circle and I can think of 5 cases off the top of my head of negative reactions to the vaccines.
This is not to say the vaccine is bad. This make me think we are not properly tracking and reporting all the side effects. I want more time and more data. A couple of years at the minimum I'd think.
A couple of data points from the UK. I know more people who have had vaccine issues than some of the 1 in 400,000 have problems stats would suggest. On the other hand the national death rates vs cases are about 1/10 what they were before the vaccines so they definitely improve your chances.
Time does not give you anything beneficial. Administering more doses with better tracking does. If we just waited for some years and started to use the vaccine, we would be still in similar situation.
>And yet we think we got this mRNA/Adenovirus vector formula right on the first try times 3 different brands with 2 years of reduced trials?
Actually mRNA vaccines/tech been in development and trials for a long time (decades). What was done in last year is to encode specific mRNA and trial it. Not the entire "envelope".
> Actually mRNA vaccines/tech been in development and trials for a long time (decades).
Obviously the parent was not referring to the entire development history of mRNA tech, any more than one would include the initial work on inventing the internal combustion engine when talking about how much safety testing had been carried out for a new model car.
The usual safety trials were not carried out for these vaccines, full stop.
They were not using 40,000 people trials in 2015 for mRNA based technologies. That was the point. Just because something was in its infancy in the lab doesn't mean you can say its been around almost 7 years already. The concern that there is no long term data is a valid one. Adenovirus vector formulations do have a longer history but have caused leukemia's in the past that manifest 4 years later for single gene mutation correction trials.
It really depends on disease prevalence, technological capability and urgency. For example during ebola epidemic RVSV-ZEBOV vaccine was administered to infected people prior any previous human testing. H1N1 vaccine was developed in number of months (3rd phase trial size was 2200 persons) but sufficient and timely mass production failed.
>Obviously the parent was not referring to the entire development history of mRNA tech, any more than one would include the initial work on inventing the internal combustion engine when talking about how much safety testing had been carried out for a new model car
Not obviously. Many people think that tech only appeared for first time "yesterday"
>The usual safety trials were not carried out for these vaccines, full stop.
Kinda yes and kinda no. They were trialing technology for a long time to know overall safety profile. In a moment that it's clear, it's not much different than early flu vaccine updates that don't go through "usual safety trial"
Here's my vaccine anecdata. My wife and I are at the age when everyone we know is starting to have kids. My wife and I got pregnant on the first try, and 3 of her other friends had similar easy success. All 4 unvaccinated. On the vaccinated side of her friends there are two miscarriages, one stillbirth, one who has been trying since June, one trying much longer than that, and one that we think has been trying for a while but hasn't announced it to the group.
If these were caveman times and those people were drinking from a different stream, we would tell them not to drink from it. 3/3 success stories vs. 3 traumatic failures and two or three infertility issues.
While we are sharing meaningless anecdotes, almost everyone I know (since I live in Seattle) has been vaccinated. No one has reported any issues, a couple have since successfully had a child. None have even gotten a breakthrough infection of covid. Among friends I know from back east, who haven't gotten vaccinated, one had just turned 30, only health issue was obesity. He died. One was 35, best shape of any of my friends, was in ICU for 7 days with double pneumonia. And one miscarriage.
But hey, the good thing is, we also have data. And the data, shows no correlation between vaccination and these problems you're referring to, and yet a VERY HIGH correlation (and some good reasons to say causation) between getting covid and having these issues.
Leading vaccine developer Nikolai Petrovsky (who's working on a traditional, protein-based vaccine) recently mentioned in an interview that if he had a pregnant wife he'd advise her to avoid both the virus and the vaccine (something only the privileged could attempt, so not a one-size-fits-all recommendation) [1]
(In a more technical interview aimed at a scientific audience, he outlines a number of issues he has with the current options. [2])
One of Petrovsky's key issues is that on pregnancy and children, the sensitivity is so high and risks so great that there is usually a much, much higher bar before vaccines are authorised for use: that's been the history of traditional, protein-based vaccines where it can take decades before they're authorised for use in pregnant women, babies, children.
Pfizer only began their pregnancy and safety trials in February this year - so only a little over 7 months ago. It is designed to observe pregnancy through to newborns reaching 6 months of age, and will complete in a year.
So we currently have no safety data in pregnancies from pre-conception via all-important and sensitive first trimester, through to full term + 6 months.
Keep in mind the WHO changed position on safety and aligned with the CDC on recommending the vaccine 3 weeks before Pfizer even started its safety trials.
None of this is to say that getting Covid isn't currently provably worse than getting a current vaccine.
It's just to say the safety data is incomplete, there are still unknowns which could change the calculation significantly considering the nature of the technology used, and we just won't fully understand the issues for some time to come.
(Also keep in mind that with mandates, the proposal is for all to receive the current options, but the alternative is not for all pregnant women to become infected. The risk calculation generally assumes wrongly here.)
I personally think avoiding getting infected ever, just is so impractical as to not lay out as an option. As evidence more and more is showing both infected and vaccinated people are likely to spread the infection (even if they don't get symptoms) as soon as 3 months after the acquired "immunity". Combined with how infectious delta is, this third choice of never getting infected just feels disingenuous.
Do we even know the real number? VAERS is highly underreported and how many vaccine cases are just getting labeled as "covid cases"... I love the southpark skit about this "covid related"... worth a watch.
This is complete nonsense. If anything VAERS would be over-reported, the people who are most against vaccination, blast it so often I see it in my facebook feed more often than advertisements. Anyone can add to VAERS, and I'm sure with all the antivaxx advertisement of it, they DO. Not to mention that doctors are required to, and report even unrelated deaths that happen right after vaccination. Meanwhile the reporting standards for covid, are the same as flu, nothing's changed there just a bunch of people grasping at straws, toward what goal I can't imagine.
You can hone your vaccines as long as you want when the disease prevalence is low. For example when you have archived a large enough immunity by unfortunate natural infection or by previous vaccines.
During pandemic, vaccines are quickly developed like happened with H1N1 in 2009 that was last modern pandemic before SARS-Cov-2. Before that was Hong-Kong flu pandemic and before that Asian. In all cases the vaccine development was very fast. For Hong-Kong flu it was 4 months. For Asian flu it was a little longer. Development a vaccine for Swine flu took also few months but rapid production failed and the vaccine was delayed.
> The problem is that the perception of public trust is eroding significantly ...
There are many problems. That's not one of them. Here is a better list of problems:
1. People don't understand what "research" means. Hint: watching a Youtube video with no peer-reviewed research is not "research";
2. People fundamentally don't understand and assess risk correctly. This long predates the anti-vaxxer hyseria. It's why, for example, people are afraid to fly but not (usually) afraid to drive when the chances of dying while driving are significantly higher;
3. We've had 700,000 deaths of Covid-19 in the US. According to the CDC, 1% of those are for people aged under 30. It's also likely the Covid deaths are underreported (eg New York not attributing nursing home deaths to Covid last year) but let's take the conservative view. That's 7,000 Americans under 30 who have died from Covid. Roughly 120M/330M people are under 30 so that puts the death rate at roughly 6 per 100,000 people. Even the most pessimistic view of negative side effects of vaccines rooted in reality is significantly less than that. Thus the correct risk response is to take the vaccine;
4. I've long held the view that climate change won't be fixed by collective altruism. The only option (IMHO) is for the solution to be economic. Covid has done nothing but confirm this for me. Climate change involves massive collective cost and inconvenience. Taking a vaccine involves the mildest inconvenience and, at best, one in a million odds of serious negative results yet people won't even do that.
5. The deep-rooted idea that unfettered selfishness if a virtue combined with anti-intellectualism is a pervasive and dangerous problem.
6. This idea that the whole world is in on this conspiracy to hide the truth is farcical narcissism. Occam's Razor tells you this is wrong. People just aren't competent enough to keep secrets. It's what gives me confidence there are no aliens in Area 51 and that pretty much every conspiracy theory is bullshit.
7. People conflate long-term drug side effects with vaccine side effects. Drugs have complicated interactions with pretty much every part of body chemistry and these can take years to surface. Immune responses are entirely different and very quick with a narrower risk profile. It's why we already know of issues like clotting with AZ and (allegedly) slightly elevated mycarditis risk with young people and Moderna, mere months into their usage;
8. We've now administered billions of doses of Covid vaccines. If there were serious problems they'd be evidence by now;
9. People don't understand what "emergency authorization" (from the CDC) actually means. It's essentially an administrative not medical issue. The Covid vaccines still went through Phase 3 clinical trials;
10. All the while claiming the true dangers are hidden, the VAERS data is confused and misstated. For one, it's reporting of what could be potential side effects to those who have had the vaccine. That data is mined for patterns to identify issues. Those issues have largely not been identified as you and others have claimed.
It's sad to me how many people who supposedly have a science education are able to fall for this crap. I mean just look at the vaccination rates of nurses (/sigh).
It's hard not to look at all this and think that humanity is screwed.
It may seem macabre (and it is) it's that the unvaccinated now are ~99% of Covid deaths and one can view this as evolution in action.
> We've now administered billions of doses of Covid vaccines. If there were serious problems they'd be evidence by now
An economist steps over a $20 bill asserting it must be fake; someone else would have picked it up if it were real.
My family is sending me videos and articles about people who are claiming side effects and being ignored, and I'm wondering if there are some $20s laying on the ground.
Have they contacted local and/or state and/or federal health and regulatory agencies?
Have their claims been evaluated by professionals or officials? Does "ignored" actually mean investigated, and found to not be credible?
On top of this, articles and videos from people claiming side effects fall squarely into the anecdata category. Evidence from billions of administered vaccine doses falls squarely into the empirical category.
Believing that these claims must be real because someone put them on the interwebz is making the same logical error as your economist.
> We've now administered billions of doses of Covid vaccines. If there were serious problems they'd be evidence by now.
Listen, this sort of argumentation creates mistrust. If this is how seemingly rational people argue (and dear god i hope it's not) then no wonder there is a lot of mistrust in society around these matters. Or maybe you were sarcastic, and in that case, you got me!
Why? People use this kind of logic all the time to say that commonplace activities are unlikely to be that risky — in fact we have the opposite problem with so many people being used to things like influenza being softened by widespread vaccination that they collectively under-estimate the risks of the untreated form.
Just because lots of people do it doesn't mean it's a rational thing to do. As i see it, the only thing that matters in science is to be factual. If we stop being impeccable with our words, we are no better than the conspiracy nuts.
To say that the evidence would have been here now is simply not true because we can't possibly know WHEN symptoms will present.
What would be more appropriate would be to say that in the time frame from when people started getting vaccinated until now it doesn't seem like the vaccines are causing to many serious side effects. That is fair to say. What about in 5 years? We DON'T know. This is a fact.
> To say that the evidence would have been here now is simply not true because we can't possibly know WHEN symptoms will present.
Actually, we can. Vaccination isn’t long-term exposure but a brief immune trigger — this is very different from medication being taken over a long term because the vaccine is only in your body for such a short period of time. In the multi-century history of vaccination, side effects are almost always immediate and the longest delays are measured in weeks, not years. There’s no mechanism for a longer reaction time because your immune system doesn’t work that way.
I don't wanna be a jerk, but honestly that proves my point. The correct wording would be; "there's a high probability that we can". But saying "we can" is clear cut. You provide strong arguments, but unless you have a time machine, you can't argue in definitives.
That's just providing that your point is about pedantry. It is commonly accepted in life that there are many events which are not completely impossible but are so low probability that they are not worth considering. Just as we do not commonly go around accounting for the possibility of a meteor strike or alien invasion, we also do not commonly describe the risks of common medical procedures involving the discovery of a previously-unsuspected immune mechanism with a time delay measured in years.
Absolutely. I am nitpicking. And i am in a mood to debate to be honest so i hope you're not offended. I too use commonly accepted assumptions in daily life. However, in debates i try to steer clear of them (reasons outlined above). But to each his own! Have a good night fellow human :)
It's unlikely to be that frequent — I'd expect more like the annual combined flu + COVID vaccinations being tested — but again, there's nothing in the history of vaccination suggesting that would be a high risk. Vaccines trigger your immune system and it doesn't have delayed action mechanisms which would trigger a response months later.
You have my sympathies if indeed you did have a severe adverse reaction from a Covid vaccine. I say "if" because honestly, anyone can say anything on the Internet. That doesn't make it true.
But let's assume it is: by itself, it's basically irrelevant. What you've presented, if 100% true, is an anecdote. These situations need to be looked at in aggregate. To start with:
- How common is it? Is it 1 in 10,000 or 1 in a billion? What level is acceptable?
- Is the likelihood of adverse effects related to Covid risk factors? Example: this submission is about the prospect of an elevated risk of myocarditis for young recipients of the Moderna vaccine. Well, that's also an issue for people who get Covid. So the vaccine's adverse reaction may go hand in hand with an elevated risk of severe Covid outcomes due to the same underlying risk factors;
- How does the likelihood of severe vaccine reactions compare to the decreased chance of severe Covid outcomes (eg being on a ventilator, long Covid, death)?
- Factored into the above, what about the improvement in outcomes for the population as a whole from having a sufficiently large number of vaccinated people (ie herd immunity)? This also includes people who genuinely cannot get the vaccine.
- Not getting the vaccine clearly increases severe outcomes from getting Covid. Based on the data, this is undeniable (eg 98-99% of Covid deaths are now among the unvaccinated). Being unvaccinated means you increase the chance of needing expensive medical treatment. It may also mean using up a bed that's needed for something completely unrelated to Covid (eg a heart attack).
On the last point, I guarantee you you'll be dealing with medical professionals who essentially have PTSD because they have to come to terms with the fact that they've chosen who gets to live and who gets to die because there simply aren't enough beds.
But sure, never mind that. There's a one in a million chance of an adverse reaction so screw em, basically.
This is a meaningless wall of text since you did not read my original message.
It is an attempt, one of so many, to victim blame. You might think that's not what you are doing because it is ok to attack any of the millions of statements like mine because in the end: each of them is an anecdote by themselves and since you make no effort to aggregate them. They always will remain that.
You are what's wrong in this situation.
Your anecdotal and marginal position is irrelevant because it fails to see the larger picture of available vaccines and complications. You are hyperfocused on myocarditis as if that is the only valid diagnosis of the issues we have or as if it was well known what the long term effects are of the un-named side effects caused.
I'm tired of this goalpost moving (mRNA vaccines against spike protein and the idea that the only side effect is myocarditis). And honestly if this is where you will hold your stand I think it's regretful you didn't suffer with us.
I've had crippling chest pains and ended up in the ER after a heartattack-like symptoms later to be determined as "spasms with unknown cause". My cardiologist can't diagnose it, says he need and MRI which I would have to pay for out of pocket.
3 months later and I can do some degree of exercise but not the same amounts as before. I know more people, that I meet in person, with similar symptoms, just lesser degree and they have recovered faster. A couple fully.
There is definitely something going on here that is not being talked about because it's inconvenient. It's unnecessary as it only happens with one specific type of vaccine applied to a specific part of the disease. The effects last long enough that it's worth being cautious.
The USDA and AHA recommended cutting out saturated fat for decades and eating 9-13 daily servings of bread and grain. The authorities you say all should blindly follow are grossly incompetent and shown to be wrong time and time again. How long has the medical field been failing with its reproducibility crisis? How many deaths per year are attributed to malpractice in the US?
If you want to listen to a bunch of well meaning morons and take their experimental treatment, have fun. The rest of us will appreciate your sacrifice up until the point you try to drag us into your suicidal cult.
> If you want to listen to a bunch of well meaning morons ...
Oh the irony. The sad reality is that anti-vaxxers are highly susceptible to being manipulated and that is actively happening by people who are completely hyprocritically doing so for their own personal gain.
Every living president (including Trump) and governor is vaccinated. All but 3 Senators are vaccinated. All but a handful of Congresspeople are vaccinated. Fox News has a vaccine mandate for their office. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham... all vaccinated.
Yet they're happy to play into irrational fears for their own empowerment and enrichment. That's all that's happening here.
Why do you assume I get information from the idiot box? Is it because that's where you get all of yours? You clearly have no idea what I was saying if your first statement tries to say the AHA is more of an authority than some TV taking head.
In #6, I'm not sure if Occam's razor is an actual proof of anything. Not countering the rest of the arguments, but I just can't see why Occam's razor should have any authority over anything except the things we already think are true.
First let me just say I hear you loud and clear. I think you might be reading into my position more then I intended.
My responses:
1: I agree. You really have to dig deep.
2: I agree. But you can at least assess risk vs other vaccines.
3: My point is that people should not be mandated to take that risk. The technology is good and fine but let people choose. This boils down to a collectivist vs
individualist argument. Largely western culture is born of prizing the individual over the collective. We have seen the horrors in the past of where collectivism leads.
4: I agree, it has to be an economic solution.
5: This is a complex statement to unwrap. I don't know anyone who isn't maybe a fervent Atheist Hedonist that thinks that unfettered selfishness is a virtue. Only sociopaths think that way by design and will justify it with whatever means necessary, be in intellectual or anti-intellectual. I will say that I don't like the fact that being against a mandate for ethical reasons as I pointed out automatically = anti-vax.
6: I agree. I don't like that fact that my opinion gets lumped in with people who think Bill Gates is a lizard trying to chip everyone. I do however think the "conspiracy" here is that the US public health authorities are going out of their way to squash any answer to this pandemic that is not a vaccine for the sake of reducing "vaccine hesitancy", the magic word. I would not be surprised if this was primary motivator and is admitted to years down the line, and its not necessarily the same as a "conspiracy" if this is the key term behind closed doors. Fauci already did the same with masks, first being anti-mask to protect the supply, then pro-mask once supplies were ample. He admitted to this himself. He also slowly creeped up the herd immunity % from 60% to 85%. When asked about this, he said he did it deliberately because "the American public couldn't handle the truth". That sort of logic is bad for public trust. Vaccine Hesitancy mitigation explains why any discussion of repurposed drugs, natural immunity, etc is shut out of the conversation. Look at how they are treating Mercks announcement of a new drug, with constant reminder that its no replacement for a vaccine. Why? In a "war" situation against a virus, why are not all options on the table? Why would you give a vaccine or even boosters to people with natural immunity when there are still entire countries waiting on theirs? This idea that the pandemic will end when 95% of the USA is vaccinated is ridiculous. You need global immunity. Its why Norway and Denmark have already accepted the disease and endemic, never going away.
7: Adenovirus vector technology (JJ, Astro-Zen shots) has only been recently adapted into a vaccine, same as mRNA. You cannot say there are no long term side effects based solely on a "drug vs immune response" durations. Trials of adenovirus vector based technology have failed in past trails. HIV vaccine based on this was a miserable failure. They tried using adenovirus based gene therapy on children on single gene mutations in in children, 40% got leukemia within 4 years. We dont even have 4 years of data for the current vaccine. I would agree they have somewhat passed the initial stages, albeit with with way worse VAERS profiles then any other vaccine in the last 50 years. Good enough though safety to give to people who want it, not force it on those who don't. The risk calculus is different for everyone especially given age and health.
8: Evidence where? Again, VASER is all we have because they opted to keep it as all we have. Like how they just banned Moderna for under 30 year olds in scandanavian countries and totally banned it in Iceland.
9: EUA has specific rules defined well before Covid. There cannot be any alternative treatments: Monoclonal antibodies, repurposed drugs, etc. Saying it went through "phase 3" trials means nothing when they cut out tons of checks in those trials. Cross-reactivity, Carcinogenic studies, to name a few.
10: Agreed VAERS is bad, but we have no other mechanism is my point. Really no issues identified? Not clots, not mycarditis, not nervous system issues, not GBS, nothing? I dont see how you can make that statement, its not true. Look at what just happen with Moderna in Europe. Go watch the FDA's publicly broadcast meeting regarding booster authorization. Every single doctor on the panel hammers the mycardidits point for boosters, and now we see Moderna getting pulled for it. The data is still trickling in. VAER is only between 1-5% of reported issues they estimate because it takes 30 minutes just to fill out the forms and most doctors wont bother, and its still abysmally bad for these vaccines.
I have a STEM degree in Physics and work in simulation. My wife is an ICU nurse. She also won't take it, along with 50% of the staff including the doctors at each hospital she floats to (more then 5 per week). Why? Because they witness the adverse events first hand, especially the mycarditis and clots. you can't just collectively dismiss their witnessed experience. I have made the point to her that she is at the epicenter aggregator of all those people but once you see it happen first hand you start to realize its not as rare as they say given that in a small enough town, there should only be a handful according to the CDC/FDA.
I think the rights of individuals to make their own choices should be upheld no matter the cost, otherwise we fall into this collectivist mindset that can justify anything it wants for "greater good". What if 5 years in we find out that the mRNA causes arterial and heart damage as some claim to have evidence for, and that some express the pulmonary conditions more immediately then others with mycarditis but everyone has some long term damage that will come back to haunt them. We would all be lamenting at how dumb we were to blindly trust a new technology adapted for a new use just because someone put the word "vaccine" on it and we all unquestionably trusted that. What if the intellectual objectors were the smart ones in the end? Careful that Darwins selection doesn't end up reversed in this case.
1. That only uneducated 'researchers' have concerns, and ill-formed ones. Petrovsky, as a leading vaccine developer, outlines a clear, educated position on why it's still reasonable to have concerns over the current options [1]
2. That because billions of doses have been administered, there are no serious problems. You can certainly make a very sound case that Covid side effects are worse in defence of using these current options. But they are irrefutably far less safe and effective (relatively) than any other vaccines authorised and widely used over the last few decades. Considering this it's understandable why there is still concern over overdone claims around the safety of the current options. Even in a pandemic numerous regulatory authorities have had to add additional warnings and modify use of the current options.
3. Your last cited point on Covid deaths is very wrong. You just need to look at UK statistics (and other countries) to realise there is something very, very odd about the claimed US stats from the CDC.
This is the fallacy in your argument. It's an infectious disease that spreads through the air. An infected individual will emit particles of the virus which will cause other people to become sick, permanently disabled or potentially die.
The rules of society are generally built around preventing and minimizing harm to other people. Sometimes that harm is intentional and obvious, like person A punching person B. Many times that harm is unintentional and non-obvious, which is why we need regulations to make buildings have safety-codes for how they're wired to the electric grid or controlling what chemicals can be emitted into the air or groundwater.
We don't let people say "it's my choice to drive drunk at 100mph (160km/h), if you want to drive slower and sober that's your choice" because when a drunk driver kills someone it's obvious to everyone the cause-effect and responsibility. Spreading a disease that kills someone is fundamentally the same thing, it's just not as obviously observable.
>This is the fallacy in your argument. It's an infectious disease that spreads through the air. An infected individual will emit particles of the virus which will cause other people to become sick, permanently disabled or potentially die.
This argument would be stronger if a) People who wanted to be vaccinated couldn't get the vaccine that protects them and b) if vaccinated people themselves weren't able to spread the virus too.
All in all you are cramming down a rushed vaccine down peoples throat at the risk of their livelihoods for marginal impacts in the virus's ability to spread and little significant risk to those who are already vaccinated.
We don't live in the society you describe. If it is fair to force people to take vaccines so that they wont spread the virus then it damn sure is fair to redistribute all the billionaires wealth to poor people. Because doing so would save many more lives than any vaccines ever could. We let the billionaires have their money, despite the cost to society so we must let people decide over their own bodies, despite the cost to society.
Actually what happened with the 2010 swine flu vaccine was that people developed narcolepsy starting about a year after the first shots were administered (many of them to people who were never at particularly high risk from the swine flu itself). It took about another year after those symptoms first arose for authorities to acknowledge the link to Pandemrix.
A lot of comments here asking for specific numbers and making comparisons to other risks. That's exactly how one should be looking at this. What I don't understand is why people don't apply this same critical thought process to the risks of Covid?
For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated?
If you said >50%, you would be in good company. It's the most common answer.
But what's the actual risk?
<1%.
When vaccinated, the risk is even lower! Yet people are still more afraid of Covid than myriad other risks we accept on a daily basis and don't even think about, and certainly don't rearrange our lives around. For whatever reason, we are avoiding a basic cost benefit analysis and vastly overestimate the risks.
"92% overstate the risk that unvaccinated people will be hospitalized, and 62% overstate the risk for vaccinated people"
There isn't a medical system on planet earth that is prepared or capable of having 1% of their population in the hospital at the same time.
So "<1%" means absolutely nothing without context. And the context is: if we do nothing, we run out of hospital beds. Period. Full stop.
Ignoring the massive financial burden on hospitals who are also not financially setup to have the entire hospital full of people sick with COVID - they are bleeding cash without elective surgeries. They can only bleed for so long without significant government intervention. The piddly sums being handed out for COVID patients that all the conspiracy theorists think the hospital is making hay off of is not enough to keep the doors open.
The problem is that the lockdown was initially tied to hospital capacity. Then, we somehow thought we could wait for a vaccine, which I guess is a workable plan at this point. In the meantime though, we tore down field hospitals, and hospitals failed to develop more flexible ICU capacity after almost two years to "prepare". There's apparently a huge amount of COVID money going to drug companies, but there's not a pipeline for investment into healthcare infrastructure. In any case, it's strange to hear you talk about things we were hearing in early 2020.
The number of intensive care beds available in New York City pre-pandemic was about 1,600 - total.[1]
The population of NYC as of 2019 is 8.419 million. 8,419,000.[2]
NYC couldn't have more then 0.02% of its population in hospital at any given time. And that number is not available capacity - that's total. Generally at any given time 50 - 80% of those beds are in use for other patients since you don't build ICU capacity just to have it (remembering that ICU capacity is beds + equipment + supplies + staff).
Those are all true and useful facts. And things sucked in NYC for a while.
Now that we have vaccines and people with natural immunity, I imagine the percentage of the population contracting covid and getting sufficiently sick is (should be?) going down. Hopefully that plus better therapeutics should keep things from sucking as bad again.
Of course, with large numbers of nurses quiting over vaccine mandates, the capacity is going down and things might suck again.
"Beds" is a meaningless figure... it really refers to staff. Now they are massively firing nurses who won't get vaxxed (which should be red flag in and of itself, wonder what they are seeing day to day) which in turn leads to less beds... which then in turn helps justify the "need" for mandates. All of those nurses have been getting daily boosters of covid from actual patients every day and we are pretending like they all don't have preexisting immunity.
> The American Medical Association (AMA) today released a new survey (PDF) among practicing physicians that shows more than 96 percent of surveyed U.S. physicians have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19, with no significant difference in vaccination rates across regions. Of the physicians who are not yet vaccinated, an additional 45 percent do plan to get vaccinated.
> As the vaccination mandate went into full effect on Monday, 92 percent of the state’s more than 650,000 hospital and nursing home workers had received at least one vaccine dose, state officials said. That was a significant increase from a week ago, when 82 percent of the state’s nursing home workers and at least 84 percent of hospital workers had received at least one dose.
> Novant Health spokeswoman Megan Rivers told The Washington Post that more than 99 percent of the system’s roughly 35,000 employees have followed the mandatory vaccination program. She said in a statement that Novant Health was “thrilled” those who chose to be vaccinated have given patients and visitors “better protection against COVID-19 regardless of where they are in our health system.”
From a public health point of view, deciding whether you should take the vaccine or not is an undoubtedly selfish and short-sighted way to calculate risks. It assumes that hospitalization carries no second-order risks which simply is not the case.
For any given area, the question that must be asked is if a COVID outbreak were to occur does that given area have the health resources to manage an outbreak. <1% risk is meaningless if you don't have an ICU bed. It becomes a public policy problem when someone in a car accident can not get adequate resources or if nurses are doing 18 hours shifts.
Plus hospital acquired infections love overcrowded hospitals! and if people think "oh man, long covid really sucks", I can't wait for them to pontificate about "short sepsis MRSA sucks" /s
“Yet people are still more afraid of Covid than myriad other risks we accept on a daily basis” keep in mind a lot of people are older than 40 or have treasured family members who are 65 or older.
COVID’s risk isn’t symmetric across the population. It is definitely extremely dangerous though and killed 700,000 Americans, for instance.
> For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated?
> <1%
Risk numbers are totally useless when not stating the time over which the risk is incurred. A 1% lifetime risk is very different from a 1% daily risk.
For example, the 0.89% population hospitalization rate in the last 1.5 years for the unvaccinated from the article you linked corresponds to a 38% chance of hospitalization over a 80-year lifespan. (Note that this is just an example to point out the problem with GP's reasoning, in reality this is an overestimation as it neglects that you build immunity after an infection).
But that risk level of catching COVID is more or less a 1-time event. Once you've caught it and recovered (or gotten vaccinated) it's no longer a novel virus to your immune system and subsequent infections have an even lower risk for the vast majority of people. The real problem is when everyone in that 1% of hospitalizations catches it all at once, because we don't have nearly enough hospital beds to treat even a fraction of that many people.
> But that risk level of catching COVID is more or less a 1-time event
No. You can treat the risk of being hospitalized from COVID as a one-time event, but the risk of catching COVID is a continuous event until you've either caught it or it has been eradicated.
>> For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated?
> Risk numbers are totally useless when not stating the time over which the risk is incurred. A 1% lifetime risk is very different from a 1% daily risk.
In this specific case the timeframe is not relevant. The metric here was "probability that you will be hospitalized IF you are infected with COVID-19". That means the timeline is "however long it takes to get better from Covid". Adding "lifetime risk" to that doesn't make sense, and "daily risk" makes even less sense (for example, someone who is sick for 130 days, is admitted to a hospital, and dies, would be counted as adding 1 "positive day" and 129 "negative days", making it an awful metric).
> The metric here was "probability that you will be hospitalized IF you are infected with COVID-19".
That's a good metric, but it's not the metric the numbers GP quoted were for. Those numbers were for the metric "probability that you would catch COVID-19 and be hospitalized with it over the past 1.5 years". That's fundamentally something different.
What's your alluding to is also known as infection hospitalization rate, and while numbers differ (it's hard to accurately count infections), in the unvaccinated population it's generally somewhere around 5%.
> That's a good metric, but it's not the metric the numbers GP quoted were for. Those numbers were for the metric "probability that you would catch COVID-19 and be hospitalized with it over the past 1.5 years". That's fundamentally something different.
Where did you see that? I looked up GP and didn't find that 1.5 year time anywhere. Furthermore, it makes no sense in the context of GP, where they said:
> > For example, do you know what the risk of hospitalization from Covid is when unvaccinated?
> If you said >50%, you would be in good company. It's the most common answer.
I don't believe there is any place on earth where you can poll people and reach an average response of >50% to the question "what is the probability that you would catch covid AND be hospitalized for it over the next 1.5 years, if you don't get the vaccine". Let's think for a moment what that would require: first off, it would require a large proportion of the unvaccinated population to get COVID. Second, a large proportion of those unvaccinated infected people would need to be hospitalized. So basically, it would require a place on earth that doesn't yet have significant natural immunity due to previous infections, and doesn't have anywhere close to herd immunity due to vaccinations, and somehow, a place like that would need to be ravaged by COVID in the future. Furthermore, it would need a strain of COVID that hospitalizes something like 70% of those infected, compared to current strains of COVID, which hospitalize something like 1% of infected (remember, most COVID infections do not cause symptoms and thus are not counted in infected counts).
This scenario is so outlandish it is very very clearly impossible. It's so outlandish that you will not be able to find a population where most people would believe such a scenario. Instead, what GP was likely referring to, was the "risk that you are hospitalized IF you catch COVID" (where, again, people overestimate the risks, but it's less outlandish).
> Where did you see that? I looked up GP and didn't find that 1.5 year time anywhere.
In the appendix of the Gallup link from GP, the <1% figure is calculated by dividing the total number of hospitalizations through August 9, 2021 (which is roughly 1.5 year after the pandemic started*) by the average unvaccinated population through that same timeframe. That doesn't result in hospitalization risk if infected, it results in hospitalization risk if infected multiplied by risk of infection.
* Actually, now that I'm looking at the actual CDC data instead of taking their word, the figure they used is for hospitalizations from August 1, 2020 through August 9, 2021, so it should be a year instead of 1.5 year (and their adjustment for reduction of unvaccinated population due to vaccinations is off, so the 0.89% is an underestimation). Doesn't matter for the point I'm making here, though (except to reinforce that we should leave statistics to the professionals).
> I don't believe there is any place on earth where you can poll people and reach an average response of >50% to the question "what is the probability that you would catch covid AND be hospitalized for it over the next 1.5 years, if you don't get the vaccine".
I agree, the people asked probably interpreted the question differently. This makes presenting the result of that question in opposition to the <1% figure misleading, since they are numbers for different things.
> current strains of COVID, which hospitalize something like 1% of infected
This is and cannot possibly be correct. The CDC reports that the US has had 3.1 million COVID-19 hospitalizations since 1st of August 2020, on a population of 329 million. If only 1% of infected is hospitalized, that means by now everybody must've had COVID. That's clearly not the case. Furthermore, if we add hospitalizations from before August 2020, clearly hospitalizations of the population already exceed that 1% number.
You're right though that it's hard to accurately calculate infection hospitalization rate, because counting infections is hard. It has been reported to be somewhere around ~5% in the unvaccinated population, but I can see it being anywhere between 2% and 8% (probably depends on the characteristics of the population under study as well). Since August 2020 the US also reported 39.2 million cases, which gives an upper bound of 7.9%, and assuming three-quarters of infections are asymptomatic gives a lower bound of 2.0%. Note that since a significant part of the population has been vaccinated during that timeframe, and the vaccines protect better against hospitalization than infection, the current infection hospitalization rate is lower than that in the unvaccinated.
My interpretation of that phrasing is that it refers to the risk of hospitalization from a single infection of COVID-19, so I don't think the time frame matters all that much (other than perhaps much later hospitalizations from long-term effects that we still don't know a lot about yet).
> My interpretation of that phrasing is that it refers to the risk of hospitalization from a single infection of COVID-19
That interpretation is not supported by the source linked by GP. The risk you allude to (infection hospitalization rate) was generally reported as ~5% (it's probably halved now that half the population is vaccinated). See for example [0], the first Google hit I got, or the CDC COVID tracker [1], where reported hospitalizations divided by reported infections gives 3.6%.
I don’t blame him for misinterpreting it though, Gallup basically made a trick question and then write an article about how stupid Americans were for getting it wrong.
C’mon we’re almost two years into this, how is it we’re still under this idea that it’s about individual risk, and hospitalization (or death) is the only meaningful risk factor? A pandemic is a population-level problem, risk is dependent on how everyone acts collectively. This includes mutation rate and resource limitations. If it keeps spreading, it keeps mutating (see: Delta). If hospitals are overflowing, risk goes up for everyone - whether or not they even have covid. Things that were treatable with a visit to an ER before are now life threatening due to resource constraints. And there’s tons of people with postviral covid complications that weren’t hospitalized.
You can’t do apples to apples with things like ‘getting bitten by sharks’ or whatever things get dragged out in typical risk comparisons. That’s why this is hard.
How is Gallup calculating risk? As far as I can tell from their appendix, they're using total hospitalizations / total US population. Ie, 2.6mm hospitalizations / 330mm population = ~0.8% risk of hospitalization.
This is obviously misleading: the pandemic is still ongoing. We're now at 3.1mm hospitalizations, does this mean risk has grown from 0.8->1% between Aug 9 and today? Or that in May 2020 the risk was essentially nil?
Once infected, risk of hospitalization (across all ages) is currently 7-8% (using 7-day rolling averages from CDC). Lower than people assume, but still concerning.
As someone who had a "mild" (I only had a 103 fever for 3 weeks, swelling in all manner of weird places, and exhaustion) Covid Original Flavour(tm), I still have symptoms due to the aftermath even a year later.
Research keeps increasing the percentage for people who have "long Covid" symptoms and the length of their duration.
And I didn't have a symptom like losing my smell which seems to be very common. Losing your sense of smell for a very long time really sucks.
People are vastly underestimating the risks of actual Covid and vastly overestimating any risks from the vaccine.
And this is before we talk about the fact that people are dying of treatable, non-Covid diseases because Covid patients who won't get a vaccine are clogging the hospitals.
I think I'm missing your point. This article is talking about the relative risk of developing myocarditis, but you are talking about the risk of hospitalization from COVID. Wouldn't the correct comparison be to look at the risk of myocarditis after catching COVID? Or going the other way, shouldn't we be comparing the risk of hospitalization due to COVID (if unvaccinated) to that of hospitalization after receiving the vaccine?
The real ethical tradeoff is "what's your chance of contracting covid and getting complications in the one-week delay between cancelling your Moderna appointment and getting the Pfeizer vaccine instead" vs. "what's the chance of getting myocarditis from side effects of the Moderna vaccine".
Seems like most people in this thread hear "Scandinavian authorities are stopping the vaccination program", when the recommendation is rather to switch vaccines for men under a certain age.
The ethical consideration is not particularly complicated, and Scandinavian health authorities are not risk-averse idiots. They simply care about an equation that might lead to a couple of saved lives in total. I think this level of care speaks highly of the intentions of the healthcare systems in Scandinavia.
> Seems like most people in this thread hear "Scandinavian authorities are stopping the vaccination program", when the recommendation is rather to switch vaccines for men under a certain age.
> The ethical consideration is not particularly complicated, and Scandinavian health authorities are not risk-averse idiots. They simply care about an equation that might lead to a couple of saved lives in total. I think this level of care speaks highly of the intentions of the healthcare systems in Scandinavia.
In a vacuum, I agree.
The unfortunate reality is that many will take this in the "Scandinavian authorities are stopping the vaccination program", as you're seeing already here, and that confusion is likely to be weaponized by antivax activists.
That's a subtle point. My stance is that their ethical obligation in that regard stops at the border, given that the reason it's a consideration is malicious actors rather than a direct consequence. Otherwise you're letting external, malicious actors hold your population hostage.
I don't have numbers for Scandinavia as a whole, but 95% of Norway's population have stated that they will get vaccinated, and we're approaching that number. Antivaxxer disinformation is not a problem that has significant effect here.
While it's a tragedy that the USA and others have large populations that are susceptible to propaganda from malignant forces, it's ultimately a matter of US interior politics. It's a whole separate question that not something other countries should shape their politics to conform to. There's very little the international community can do about US poverty, its ridiculously polarized political climate, education system, power imbalances and so on.
It's not that I don't care at all; I can see the mathematics of it. But that kind of butterfly effect consideration will quickly lead you down a rabbit hole that prevents you from doing the right thing because someone is holding a gun to a stranger's head.
I agree with you, the correct way to look at any medical intervention is to assess the risk/benefits ratio. And it is therefore a personalized decision that needs to be taken by your doctor and with your consent.
Blanket rules are often missing out the complexity that doctors can assess. And this ratio is indeed questionable for young people:
"As a general rule, the ICU cardiac injury described in COVID-19 illness is subclinical and largely reflected by a minor elevation of cardiac troponin, whereas CIRM is characterized by a clinical syndrome often warranting hospitalization, dramatic ECG changes, and very large elevations of cardiac troponin that are sustained over time. "
"Again, children are not a high-risk group for COVID-19 respiratory illness, and yet they are the high-risk group for CIRM."
Source : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014628062...
Or the odds of dying of covid for young people vs a car accident. car accidents are significantly more dangerous.
And before people bring up side effects or other long term damage, most people don’t die in car accidents and suffer from ptsd, whiplash, broken bones etc.
Yet bring this up and you’re automatically an anti Vaxxer.
People are absolutely terrible at evaluating personal risk.
One of my coworkers drove across Canada to visit home at one point instead of taking a flight because of covid.
Young people should be more concerned with staying away from opioids, social media, friends that are racing cars, and binge drinking at parties.
Yet, the media has 14 year olds terrified of covid.
Actually deaths because of car accidents are less frequent than dying because of COVID-19 for 25-45 year old in US this year. For 15-24 year old COVID-19 is third leading cause of nonviolent death after cancer and cardiovascular problems. Dying of flu is 10 times less likely and this year almost infinite times less likely so far.
There is one very important difference - reducing risk of death because of COVID-19 can be done very easily. Not so with driving.
Do you have a source for "third leading cause of nonviolent death"? According to CDC, a 24yo female death has a 113 : 2416 = 4.7% chance of being caused by covid, and a 24yo male death has a 195 : 6756 = 2.9% chance of being caused by covid. Not trivial, but I wouldn't call something with < 5% prevalence 'leading cause'. More accurate: "for 15-24 year old covid is a minor cause of death".
Thanks for sharing. It comes across as a stretch to focus on 'nonviolent causes of death', when the first three causes of deaths in 2019 10-24 age group (page 11) dominate the charts with cumulative 73%, and the first 'nonviolent cause of death' is cancer, coming in a distant fourth at 5.4% of total deaths.
If it was not US, homicide would be somewhere below diabetes so I would say that it is not a stretch to ignore these causes. Beside, these are more or less environment and genetics determined. If you are black man in 20s in US, I feel really sorry for you but this is your reality. But the risk of COVID-19 death can be manipulated.
> Yet bring this up and you’re automatically an anti Vaxxer.
I would only make that guess if you brought up car accidents and were opposed to driving test requirements, wearing seat belts, car safety regulations, etc.
I wished this was a sarcastic comment but it wasn't. It's so sad we're years into this and people still have no sense of scale. Is it hubris? I'm not sure, but it's overwhelmingly sad.
It's heretical to say such things and "anti-science" as branded by the media. The fact that California now wants kids to get the vaccine is bonkers to me. Kids don't even feel this shit if they catch it. Pharmaceutical companies must be paying big bucks to the politicians in that state.
Not all countries vaccinate kids for chickenpox. The UK still doesn't for example. I'm pretty sure it's easily the least necessary of the childhood vaccinations.
> A retrospective study of nearly 8,000 trauma patients found that seven percent of people who came in sober died of their injuries, while those who were hurt while drunk only died one percent of the time. A positive blood alcohol level seemed to increase the likelihood of survival, even after the researchers took into account the age of the patient and the severity of the injury. Trauma patients who came in to the hospital drunk were discharged sooner, too.
The impact on others can be significant, and important.
Then the establishment should just be honest about it instead of trying to fear-porn parents into wanting to "protect your kids from the deadly disease".... Just say.... we are going to put your kids at risk from the vaccine because we think the ends justify the benefits for old people.
They can't do that because they stupidly backed themselves into a corner with 20+yr of "think of the children" rhetoric to justify all sorts of stupid things so now any risk to the children is not acceptable.
> To state that children will be put at risk by the vaccines is not "fear porn," it is clearly the case.
To argue that COVID is not a threat to children, but the vaccines are, is an inconsistent position. Children are, statistically, at quite low risk from both.
As a parent, I'm quite comfortable with the idea of my children taking the very very very small risk of a vaccine reaction in order to not go grandparent-less.
If kids "don't even feel this shit if they catch it"
Why have pediatric ICU beds been near or at capacity and care as a whole on the brink of failure from months of completely fucked working conditions for the doctors and nurses?
Along with other kids not dealing with COVID having life saving medical procedures/treatments indefinitely delayed until beds are back down below a certain fill for some amount of time? I've personally had to see effects this in my extended family.
Seriously - what is wrong with you? What makes you have to say things/come to conclusions like this when you're very clearly factually incorrect?
There are 3006 counties in the USA. Given that the pandemic is not trivial, it is possible to find a couple counties with overwhelmed ICU beds on any given day. The catch is that the counties change as the pandemic waves come and go. The media chases around for the counties that get overwhelmed, and ignores the vast majority of counties that are not overwhelmed. That before taking in account that, for economic reasons, ICUs are not build for pandemics, with double digit occupancy rates even outside epidemic waves.
For example, here's actual pedriatic ICU data from Seattle metro area with ~4M people. I bet this never made the news.
MARY BRIDGE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, 55.5%, 6.1 of 11.0 beds used
SEATTLE CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL, 83.0%, 71.4 of 86.0 beds used
Edit: Turns out that the KitsapSun app has county-level data for all of USA. For Tarrant county (your top 2 links), right now the pedriatic ICU data is:
COOK CHILDRENS MEDICAL CENTER, 82.5%, 34.3 of 41.6 beds used
Not great, but not months-long-near-capacity-brink-of-failure situation either. The adult ICU situation is much worse, hopefully it will retreat in the coming weeks.
The parent comment is valuable, but the numbers do seem wrong. I think it is part of the argument for ending strict lockdowns once vaccination rates are high.
Where did you get that number? As of Sep 29, 2021, US reported 43,289,203 cases where 3,047,033 of them are hospitalized, including vaccinated. This is nowhere close to <1%. I'm pretty sure the number could be much higher with saner medical insurance system.
Cumulative numbers since the beginning of time are kind of meaningless to evaluate risk, though. They can be useful to assess the damage when all is said and done, but risk is about the future and not the past. Also, probabilities should be per unit time, otherwise they go up forever by definition.
From Table 3, we learn that somebody unvaccinated in their 20's has a chance of 10/100,000 to end up in the hospital over a period of 28 days. So something like .1% per year. Vaccination reduces the risk by a factor of O(10), old age increases it by a factor of O(10). These data refer to a recent snapshot of a 28-day period, and I'd feel safer to assume that the next month looks more like the previous month than March 2020.
He's considering the odds of both getting covid, and then ending up in the hospital. There are more than 300mm people in the US, so your chances of both getting covid and then being hospitalized is < 1%. If you already have covid then it's closer to 7%.
The correct answers to hospitalization risk can be calculated using data from the Department of Health and Human Services (via HealthData.gov) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One needs only the following figures: 1) the population of vaccinated and unvaccinated people 2) total hospitalizations resulting from COVID-19 3) hospitalizations of vaccinated people. We used data through August 9, 2021, one week before the survey was fielded. At that time, total hospitalizations from COVID-19 were estimated to be 2.6 million, with 7,608 vaccinations found among vaccinated people. The size of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations was nearly equal on August 9 (with 168 million vaccinated and 163 million unvaccinated).
A simplistic analysis of these numbers would yield hospitalization rates of 0.005% for the vaccinated population (1 case in 22,118) and 1.6% for the unvaccinated population (1 case in 62), but those numbers exaggerate the benefits of the vaccine because the unvaccinated population confronted many more days of risk, since vaccination was gradually rolled out starting in December of 2020. For that reason, we take the average population totals over the relevant periods for each population (March 1, 2020-Aug. 9, 2021 for the unvaccinated population and Dec. 15, 2020,-Aug. 9, 2021, for the vaccinated population). The adjusted population of vaccinated people comes to 83 million and 295 million for the vaccinated population, since the entire U.S. population was unvaccinated -- except a small number of participants in clinical trials --up until December of 2020.
Using these adjusted figures, we calculate that the hospitalization rate for the vaccinated population is 0.01% (or 1 in 10,914), and the rate for unvaccinated adults is 0.89% (or 1 case in 112 people). In both cases, therefore, the correct answer is less than one percent, but the implied efficacy rate of vaccination is 99% at preventing hospitalizations. This is calculated as the hospitalization rate for the unvaccinated minus the hospitalization rate for the vaccinated, divided by the unvaccinated rate. In other words, it is the percentage decrease in hospitalization risk. This high rate of protection -- even against Delta -- is consistent with a recent article published in the Lancet, which reviewed large-scale empirical data from the United States and around the world.
Some may argue that patients may have been hospitalized as a result of COVID but not diagnosed as such. We think this is highly unlikely to result in significant downward bias in the rates of hospitalization risk since testing at hospitals became widespread after only a few weeks at the start of the pandemic, and the vast majority of hospitalizations would have occurred since May of 2020, given data on deaths, which are more comprehensively documented. Nonetheless, using various modeling assumptions, CDC epidemiologists estimate that the actual number of hospitalizations may be 1.8 times higher than the reported number. If these estimates are accurate, the true rate of hospitalization risk for the unvaccinated population is 1.6% and as high as 0.2% for the vaccinated population. In either case, the public's misunderstanding of risk is roughly just as inaccurate. One criticism of these inflated estimates is that they assume that many people were hospitalized while asymptomatically carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus, leading to an undetected case. The problem with this reasoning is that it would count people admitted to the hospital for non-COVID reasons who coincidentally had an asymptomatic infection. These cases were correctly omitted from official statistics since the absence of symptoms cannot cause hospitalization.
A more serious limitation is that we count each admission from COVID-19 into a hospital as a unique person. In fact, we know from scholarly research that some patients are readmitted multiple times. One paper estimates that 9% of COVID-19 patients were readmitted to the hospital. This implies that, at minimum, our hospitalization estimates should be multiplied by 0.91 to capture only hospitalizations of unique individuals. Doing so would shrink both hospitalization risk estimates, and they would still both be well below 1%.
Ah, this is doing something dumb/misleading: it's not conditioning the chance of hospitalization on catching covid.
That is, the normal way someone interprets the question "what is the chance you're hospitalized due to covid" is "what is the chance you're hospitalized due to a covid infection", while you're actually asking "what is the chance you, a randomly chosen person, will be hospitalized due to covid [in the next year]". They're conditioning on a time window, and not a case rate.
Another way of looking at their approach is to consider what happens over the lifetime of a person. If you have a .89% chance of being hospitalized due to covid this year, what's the chance over your lifetime? Unless the risk drastically drops, it's something like a 30% chance of being hospitalized over the next 40 years, or for me, very close to a 50% chance of being hospitalized over my entire life.
Note a cultural memory component: in Finland (and Norway, Sweden) there was a rash of narcolepsy after the swine flu vaccinations of 2009-2010. Gov't was criticized for not reacting quickly enough (to be fair, side effect was not observed until vaccinations were ~complete, and so it was all just rearguard action after that). Lots of memory, bad press about kids being damaged. There is a cultural-political component here beyond the science.
There is not a political component to this, we (Sweden) have probably the most objective and science based Health system in the world. For this reason we get criticized by other nations for not having lockdowns and not wearing masks, there is no indication that these actually work and they probably cause more harm than good. Our leaders have shown great competence to follow the science and not make a knee-jerk reaction to what France and America are doing.
If Moderna is clearly worse than Pfizer, then why shouldn't we stop it?
Except your scientist(s) were wrong this time and killed 10 times more people by not implementing quick and mild restrictions and letting the disease spread. Sure, what US and France did was also different kind of wrong but it does not make you right. Only thing that has been life saving is very quick reaction that limits the spread at its infancy. Also of course quick vaccination.
>Except your scientist(s) were wrong this time and killed 10 times more people by not implementing quick and mild restrictions and letting the disease spread.
This is the dumbest hunk of shit I've ever heard. We have the exact same death rates and infection rates as the rest of Europe.
Maybe at the moment but not during spring 2020. Other Scandinavian and Baltic states did not do the mistakes Sweden did and their death rates were 10 times lower. Also see Greece vs Spain and Italy. Well, Italy and Spain did not have change because they were the first to get hit by COVID-19 but Sweden had plenty of time to not make mistakes.
But perhaps Sweden is better off than others. You have now less burden on social system and economic loss was perhaps a little smaller, not much but perhaps still worth the sacrifice.
Give me any country in Europe and I'll show you when their rates were 10 times higher. Corona hits mostly in waves, the only worthwhile numbers to compare are the totals over the entire pandemic, not a specific period. We certainly wouldn't "sacrifice" our citizens for the economy.
Yes, it hits in waves and every wave should be handled properly. It is pointless to compare totals. It is important to understand what can be done better and for that it makes sense to analyze each wave separately. Sweden miserably failed the first one and did not really care about others. Other Scandinavian and Baltic countries fared much better but could not continue to make perfect choices. Baltic is at the moment totally messed up by their poor vaccination rates.
But if you insist to compare totals, here is small list. Not really 10x difference but close.
Deaths per 100000
Sweden 144
Denmark 46
Finland 20
Norway 16
For sure, there are countries with even worse outcome. Still presenting Sweden as some kind of success story makes me sick.
Well you did surprise me, I didnt expect Finland and Norway to be so low. Although these along with Iceland are outliers in Europe to say the least and Sweden is well in the middle. The baltics is comparable to Sweden.
But the reason we have more deaths than our neighbours is not because of no lockdowns, Finland was also very lenient. A _massive_ proportion of all of our deaths were from the nursing homes. The thing we did really bad was to not have any way to check the workers in the nursing homes for covid, which they did in Norway I know for sure and very likely in Finland. Had we done that then we likely would have the same as our neighbours, but don't pin it on lockdowns, they DON'T work.
~2.7 cases of myocarditis per 100k. Deadly car crashes in the US is about 11 deaths per 100k (between 3.3 and 25 when looking at states directly, 18.2 worldwide average). That's not even counting indirect deaths caused by car fumes.
So to the person posting the same thing from new accounts about vaccines being a great risk to yourself, I hope you take driving and crossing the road as seriously as you take getting vaccinated because that's faaar more dangerous (especially if you live in Wyoming).
That's like saying "War and Peace isn't a big book because it isn't even as big as the smallest car". Yes, both can be measured in the same units (e.g. weight or volume) but that doesn't mean the comparison makes sense.
You have to compare things which are in some sense alternatives of each other. The question is not "is the vaccine safer than driving" but "is the vaccine safer than not getting the vaccine?".
Sure, if you don't get the vaccine there's a certain risk of getting COVID and subsequently having serious disease (though if you are a young and healthy that risk appears to be relatively low).
And certainly the vaccine lowers your risk of getting serious disease (for now) but it doesn't entirely erase that risk. So now you have figure out what the long-term risks of adverse reaction to the vaccine are, plus the long-term risk that you will still get serious COVID disease anyway (due to the narrow immunity provided by the vaccine).
For young, healthy people it's not clear to me the vaccine is all that much safer than not getting it. If you can show me, by a breakdown of these risks by age and health, that the I'm wrong and the vaccine is much safer I would be very open to it. As it is, I've tried to find something comprehensive and I cannot.
This perspective of "the vaccine" may not be the best approach. It might be better to instead say given the choice of Moderna Vaccine vs Pfizer-BioNTech vs Johnson-Johnson etc, which vaccine is the best choice for the recipients demographics and wishes.
Maybe convenience is the highest priority (prefer single dose).
Maybe effectiveness against delta is the highest priority (prefer Moderna).
Maybe minimizing risk of myocarditis is a priority (say you have a history of autoimmune over reaction).
Ultimately, not only do we have the choice to get vaccinated, we also have the choice of which vaccine to get and this new data allows the population to make more informed choices about which vaccine is right for them.
I can only speak to myself, but I decided that covid is not a threat to me, and neither is the vaccine (being safer than driving). Hence I would just go with the path of least resistance: take the damn vaccine so people will shut up about it and let me be part of society.
Point is that the absolute risk matters too: If it's low enough you can just shrug and do whatever.
The trouble with myocarditis caused by the mRNA vaccines is that even though the risk is low, for some of the age groups it seems to be higher than the risk of them being hospitalized due to Covid. (A risk which a lot of people seem to overestimate, but that's another story.) So even though they should be more worried about crossing the road than the vaccine, it's also entirely rational for them to consider the vaccine a bigger danger than Covid itself.
When comparing risks you need to account for the outcomes. The rare cases of myocarditis are mild and patients made a full recovery. The rare cases of hospitalization due to Covid have much worse outcomes for quality of life than myocarditis, including 3.5k cases of death in the US in that age group. [1]
So even if the risks of hospitalization were lower, which is 80 per 100k in that age group [2], it still doesn't make sense to conclude that the vaccine is a bigger danger than Covid.
Also don't forget this quote from the article:
> The risk of myocarditis is substantially increased for those who contract COVID-19
Given how easily COVID spreads, you'll be exposed to a risk vector for myocarditis whether you get vaccinated or not.
Definitely not when you take the speed of Delta into account. For example Scotland (as the rest of the UK) did not vaccinate 12-15 year old children. When the school year started, about 10% of this population got infected in 5 weeks. So during first 5 weeks you had 1:10 change of getting COVID-19. About 27:100000 of them got hospitalized when in comparison CDC assumption was 38:100000 in 4 months.
So they are wrong as were UK officials. UK started vaccinating 12 year old and older since 20th September.
In addition. If you are going to develop myocarditis after vaccine induced immune reaction, changes are that it will happened to you when you get the infection. People are getting it after flu shot but it is given only once so it is not really comparable.
The rate might be higher, but the cluster effect is completely different.
If you're in traffic, the only people you can "spread" a car accident to are the other cars around you. But with infectious disease, you have a chance of spreading it to everybody you contact, all day every day.
You can't sit near somebody on the bus who transmits car accidents to you. Nor can you get in a car accident because your child caught it from school from a classmate whose parent got it from somebody they work with.
Statistically it might make sense, but that's not how the real world works. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Sure, I agree, but I was referring to 2.7 cases of myocarditis per 100k after taking the vaccine. The cluster effect is still different but not as wildly different as comparing rates of COVID per capita to car crashes.
There’s no connection between car crashes in the US and risk of myocarditis from the vaccine in Sweden. Each country is looking at the risk for its own citizens.
As I said in the post you're replying to some people commenting here believe that the takeaway from this is that the vaccine is a great risk while interacting with cars daily, which is a far greater risk that they pay no attention to.
In that case, another poster already explained why this comparison makes no sense. Vaccination needs to be compared with the lack of vaccination, not with driving, getting out of bed or sky diving.
Yes, life has its risks and that's why it's smart to look at the data before you make each individual decisions.
Sweden have had 125 reported cases of myocarditis for people that have used Pfizer and 44 that used Moderna. But then there have been 10,6 million shots of Pfizer administered and only 1,8 million shots of Moderna.
So quite clear that the risk is higher for Moderna, even though the risk is low for both of them.
Moderna and Pfizer are both very similar and likely cause Myocarditis for the same reason.
However it's also likely that people will have a worse reaction to Moderna (if they have one) because the vaccine doses are far larger than with Pfizer.
This is born out in the statistics that show that while we see Myocarditis for both vaccines, the prevalence seems to be higher for Moderna.
I assume that the numbers reported (one comment quoted 6/39000) are actually lowballed, since you constantly hear about cases where symptoms obviously relevant to covid/vaccines are dismissed as not connected.
I would guess decisionmakers take the reluctance to report into account when estimating the true risk factors.
"In our study, definite or probable cases of myocarditis among persons between the ages of 16 and 19 years within 21 days after the second vaccine dose occurred in approximately 1 of 6637 male recipients and in 1 of 99,853 female recipients."
Moderna shot is worse then for boys. What again is the rush to vaccinate the lowest risk age group?
You really don’t have time to wait 5 years for ”complete” results.
People don’t understand basic math and threat modeling.
How likely you are going to get covid and how serious it can be (for you and others)?
How likely you get something serious from vaccine (only you) but most likely avoid serious covid (and spread it less to others)?
Of course, forced vaccine might look bad from very selfish perspective, but benefits from bigger picture are obvious even with side effects.
> What again is the rush to vaccinate the lowest risk age group?
Because they still contribute to chain of transmission to the most vulnerable members of society, likely in a disproportional way since younger members of society tend to socialize more. Fighting a virus is a collective action. In order to stop transmission to the vulnerable members, you need to cut edges along all paths through the graph. Furthermore, additional spread, even among healthy people with no side effects, increases the probability of mutations that lead to more fit variants capable of causing even more sickness and death.
Vaccinated people can still get infected and transmit the virus to others, with or without mutations. The idea that vaccinated people are ‘safe to be around’ is an outdated fantasy.
I never said it stopped all transmission, but it will stop a large fraction of it. We're playing games of probability. Anybody that deals in absolutes is living in a fantasy world.
The theory of vaccinating people to protect others is taking another hit.
It looks more that we should focus on proposing the vaccine to the people at risk (clearly identified, >65 years old, or multiple co-morbidity) for their own survival
This is HN, where smart, educated, science-literate people congregate.
Reading the comments, I'm ashamed of us. We're better than this.
Read the actual f*cking papers people. Not the YouTube videos, not the weird-ass political shit on FB. Not the New York Times, or even Reuters. The actual papers. We've all got SciHub (thankfully!), there's no excuse.
If you don't think you're educated enough to grok the actual studies then you're probably not educated enough to understand the issues, and you probably shouldn't be contradicting the experts.
Unless, of course, you think this is all a conspiracy, in which case I have a bridge to sell you...
They're restricted in the sense that the health authorities stopped recommending a specific covid-19 vaccine for a particular demographic. That demographic -- young males under 30 -- are recommended and given a vaccine from another vendor (practically Pfizer) instead.
That's rather different than the impression you might get from "these vaccines being restricted", or something similar.
That's actually not true, people who got the first dose of moderna will not get a second one, and it's being stopped for all persons under 30, not just males. In practice it will be stopped for everyone above 30 as well.
/Swede
It's probably not so helpful to look at absolute numbers of cases rather than risk reduction. If men under 30 already have a very low risk from Covid and there is an alternate vaccine available, then this policy makes a lot of sense. This is the sort of caution we used to expect from our drug regulators.
Geez, as the real data behind the vaccine slowly drips out I'm happier and happier I didn't inject an experimental drug in me. Especially considering all the "studies" thus far have taken place during summer when covid isn't an issue anyways.
What we've learned since their release:
- the spike protein is toxic
- vaccine immunity is narrow, binding to only a few epitopes on the virus
- immunity wanes quickly
- IgA antibodies aren't produced by the vaccine, causing vaccinated to still suffer infection
- heart inflammation becoming more and more common
- the mrna accumulated literally all over the body, not just the muscle as we were initially told
- manufacturing of these vaccines are subject to frequent contamination
And that's just to name a few. Glad I wasn't dumb enough to take one for a disease that's not a risk to most healthy young people.
Some stats on myocarditis - apparently about 1 in 50,000 get it from the vaccine but in one study 1 in 45 get it from covid so you are better getting vaxxed. The Scandinavians are switching from Moderna to Pfizer for the moment rather than stopping vaccination. (stats https://whyy.org/articles/myocarditis-and-the-covid-19-vacci...)
> The cases of myocarditis and pericarditis were "generally mild," and individuals "tend to recover within a short time following standard treatment and rest," Pfizer said in a statement.
This is the closest I got to any of the study. If you can link me to the actual study paper, you’re my hero.
Don't have nordic study but here's NEJM Israeli one from the other day:
"In our study, definite or probable cases of myocarditis among persons between the ages of 16 and 19 years within 21 days after the second vaccine dose occurred in approximately 1 of 6637 male recipients"
It's being limited only for kids and youth. Simple truth our media is studiously trying to sweep under the rug - almost nobody below age of 30 dies from COVID. Compared to all cause mortality the numbers are laughable and ridiculous. Fewer than 500 kids died _with_ COVID since the beginning of the pandemic in the US. Not _of_, _with_. Under these circumstances, there's simply no justification to give these experimental vaccines to children. And yes, Moderna is still experimental, and it says so in the leaflet they give out when you go for a vaccination. It seems to me that cooler heads are prevailing in at least some European countries, at least until Pfizer/Moderna lobbyists wake up and deliver large suitcases of cash to the decision makers.
I feel you’re taking the wrong message away here - the countries in question have more than enough doses, and can pick and choose between the vaccines. None of the vaccines are more dangerous than covid itself, but the government is recommending that (since they have an adequate supply) their people shouldn’t bother with the ones that are potentially extremely marginally more risky. If the “best” vaccine didn’t exist, they’d still be recommending the next best one.
As someone who has recovered from covid before the vaccines, it feels unfair to be forced to take the vaccine when the risks seem to outweigh the benefits.
No one seems to even notice the people with natural immunity, we are always skipped when having a discussion about vaccines.
There's a lot of nuance that you're not taking into account. For example, previously infected benefit minimally from getting vaccinated (they're already better protected than non-infected but vaccinated individuals). The risks of covid are strongly correlated with age and healthiness, as are risks of vaccines (e.g. affects particularly young men). There's many variables that individuals can take into account when deciding what to do.
Note that I'm mainly criticising anti-scientific propaganda sold as science, and forced vaccinations, not vaccination itself (in general or specifically for COVID).
It seems the number of myocarditis cases in Finland has been in the order of a few cases out of a few hundred thousand vaccinated in the specific demographic, so perhaps approximately one per 100,000, give or take.
That's still not far from 100 percent, and the 100 percent might be substantially more correct than "not 100 % safe" in terms of the impression it gives.
Of course nothing is actually 100 percent, in anything, ever, but sometimes it's practically close enough from an epidemiological point of view that some people probably find it easier to round things. Better than saying that there may be some rare risk of this or that, because some people are going to get hung up on that, and that might cause more harm than good.
Public communication about these kinds of risks is anything but easy to get right.
Here in Canada, we've had the mix-n-match push in June - a large Pfizer shipment was delayed and there was tons of Moderna, and entirely coincidentally at the very same time mix-n-match was approved, and the official line became "mRNA vaccines are 100% interchangeable. You get what you get. Vaccine shoppers are horrible ignorant people. The science on this is settled." With all the attendant media propaganda (is it still propaganda when its perpetrators are certain it's for a Very Good Cause?)
At the very same time, the CDC website said that mixing vaccines is *not* recommended, in nice bold letters. Our Canadian science was special though.
As you say, when we learn new things about these (generally very safe) vaccines, this is great for science, but not so much for people who constantly evoke it to conceal that their decisions are also about politics and logistics.
I just wish these public health boffins would drop the holier-than-thou smugness and stop treating the population like they're simpletons undeserving of the gory details. And the details are gory, necessarily so, in the middle of a pandemic when you're faced with tons of lesser-of-two-evils choices.
Germany has been (suddenly) mixing and matching since the AstraZeneca vaccine was found causing thrombosis issues. Consensus seems to be that it’s as good as 2 mRNA shots.
Scandinavia, and the western world, are not as desperate for vaccines as they were 6 months ago. So it makes sense that these governments and public health officials would change their recommendations to be more conservative with respect to side effects. No vaccine or medication has 0 risk, it's about balancing the risk of the vaccine with the current risk of the actual disease.
It falls to the bottom because it lies about the facts (vaccines were never declared 100% safe and effective) and reaches an incorrect conclusion (if one vaccine is determined to be safer than another, it doesn’t follow that vaccines are objectively unsafe, or that being unvaccinated is safer than being vaccinated).
It’s a silly comment to make, and potentially harmful. The majority of people in this case don’t, on average, “follow what they’re told.” They’re very capable of evaluating facts and data and responding accordingly. That’s what’s happening here.
> he majority of people in this case don’t, on average, “follow what they’re told.” They’re very capable of evaluating facts and data and responding accordingly. That’s what’s happening here.
Given articles like this, it seems unclear that this is true.
"very capable of evaluating facts and data and responding to data"
Sounds very incorrect. I'm at least very easily mislead, eg. Fusion advocates talking about the energy they put into plasma vs get out of plasma, rather than the energy they put into the system vs take out of the system. I don't know enough to know that they're lying to me about the prospects of ITER producing as much energy as it uses.
All people here pointing that you still should get vaccinated because side effects of vaccines are still less likely :
Let's not forget that :
1-some european country are already past the delta variant wave (so you have to ponderate by the chance of actually getting infected)
2- we still have no idea what the new variant of the next wave of covid is going to look like, when it is going to happen, and if the vaccine is going to offer any protection.
as an example, living in France, my personal choice atm is to not get the vaccine... ( and in all cases i'll definitely check for antibodies before getting a shot, in case i already got infected without knowing)
I find it frustrating that we’re still not putting numbers on statements like this in news articles. How slight?