The headline is somewhat misleading. At least many in this thread have misunderstood the issue.
Danish health authorities still recommend everyone to get vaccinated against COVID, including healthy people under 50. Everyone should get two jabs, everyone over 18 should get a third "booster" shot.
The vaccine talked about in the OP are the fourth vaccine jab, i.e. second booster shot, which is only offered to above-50 and people with certain heath issues.
Yikes, that is not somewhat misleading, that is extremely misleading (assuming your comment is accurate—I haven't dug through the article). I've edited the title now.
Submitted title was "Denmark no longer offering Covid vaccinations to healthy adults under 50". That title was highly editorialized, which breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Editing a title to make it more misleading (and linkbait for that matter) manages to break all 4 things that that guideline asks submitters not to do. We eventually remove submission privileges from accounts that do that, so please don't.
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I don’t think the original title was misleading.
It says on the page:
Who will be offered vaccination against covid-19?
People aged 50 years and over will be offered vaccination.
People aged under 50 who are at a higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19 will also be offered vaccination against covid-19.
It doesn’t say people under 50 who have had 2 or fewer shots.
The comment you responded to seems to be a partial if not total fabrication.
I don’t see indication of any sort of “roll over eligibility”.
And I don’t think the official recommendation would be 2 shots for everyone since the linked page clearly states it is no longer offered for under 18s, and Søren Brostrøm, director of the health authority, saying it was a mistake to give it to any under 18s, and if you read between the lines and look at the data it was probably a mistake to give it to any under 50s.
The page explicitly and repeatedly affirms the argument made upthread, is about "re-vaccination", and cites population-wide adherence to Denmark's first round of vaccinations as the reason why re-vaccination is required only for high risk groups. You aren't meant to "read between the lines" to generate a new title on Hacker News.
Put two and two together, if they are saying the risk benefit from the shots is negative for children who aren’t at risk from the virus, then don’t you think the same would apply to adults who aren’t at risk from the virus?
The extent to which people seem to have given up independent thinking around this issue seems troubling.
Read between the lines because unfortunately it is highly unlikely to see politicians and public health authorities say this so bluntly when they were the ones just recently pushing these, on net deleterious shots. A sensitive issue and political minefield to say the least.
Why should people get the original shot if they haven’t already? It clearly doesn’t work, it clearly has potential for very negative side effects, and even if it did work it is designed for the original strain, which isn’t around anymore. Makes no sense…
I meant read between the lines for your own well being and that of others to see the writing on the wall of what is going on here, not as a principle for the HN style guide.
>cites population wide adherence
That is just face-saving.
“Re-vaccination” is offered not required.
It has nothing to with previous widespread injections. That had if anything negative overall effect.
More people have died from the virus after the shots than before. The shots were supposed to stop contraction of the virus, let alone dying from it.
I know it’s sucks to think about, cognitive dissonance inducing even, especially if you were gung-ho on the injection bandwagon just a year ago, but let’s face facts.
> 10. Do you still recommend that one take the 1st, 2nd and 3rd shots against covid-19 if one has not yet been vaccinated?
> The Danish Health Authority continues to recommend that persons who have not been vaccinated be vaccinated with the 1st and 2nd shots. This also applies even if they are younger than 50, as there may be a certain risk of serious illness if you are not vaccinated.
"Denmark no longer offering second Covid booster shot..." suggest that Denmark have at one point offered the second booster to below-50 and have now stopped.
This is not the case.
Until now, the second booster have only been offered to a smaller group of very old or very vulnerable individuals. Now Denmark is rolling out larger scale vaccinations, offering the second booster to everyone over 50.
> assuming your comment is accurate—I haven't dug through the article
The article is somewhat unclear since it just assumes everyone already has the three jabs. The "autumn vaccination programme" is the second booster. A better source to the official policy is the page in Danish:
> 10. Do you still recommend that one take the 1st, 2nd and 3rd shots against covid-19 if one has not yet been vaccinated?
> The Danish Health Authority continues to recommend that persons who have not been vaccinated be vaccinated with the 1st and 2nd shots. This also applies even if they are younger than 50, as there may be a certain risk of serious illness if you are not vaccinated.
Danish health authorities still recommend everyone to get vaccinated against COVID, including healthy people under 50. Everyone should get two jabs, everyone over 18 should get a third "booster" shot.
The vaccine talked about in the OP are the fourth vaccine jab, i.e. second booster shot, which is only offered to above-50 and people with certain heath issues.
That is not true. You just made that up didn’t you?
What is compelling you to spread misinformation?
It says this right on the linked page:
Vaccination of children against covid-19
Children and adolescents rarely become severely ill from the Omicron variant of covid-19.
From 1 July 2022, it was no longer possible for children and adolescents aged under 18 to get the first injection and, from 1 September 2022, it was no longer possible for them to get the second injection.
A very limited number of children at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill will still be offered vaccination based on an individual assessment by a doctor.
So, no it is not recommended, because it is not even an option.
Does this sound like someone who would recommend what you said he would?
The director-general of Denmark’s Health Authority said that in retrospect injecting children with the Covid vaccine was a mistake.
Søren Brostrøm said while hosting “Go Evening Live” on TV 2: “In hindsight, we did not get much out of vaccinating the children. I want to look all parents of children who have vaccinated their child in the eye and say, ‘You did the right thing, and thank you for listening,’ ”
“But at the same time… and this is the important thing to maintain confidence… I will admit and say that we have become wiser and we would not do the same today. And we will not do that in the future either,” he added.
Christine Stabell Benn, clinical professor at the University of Southern Denmark, has long been critical of the vaccination of children. She told TV 2 that she had no doubt that the recommendation to give the Covid vaccine to the age group 12-15 was unnecessary.
“We had some vaccines with a very unknown side effect profile, and at the same time we had some children who had nothing to gain by being vaccinated,” Stabell Benn told TV 2.
Point 10 confirms that those under 18 should no longer get the first two jabs, contradicting what you wrote in the text being disputed here. You seem to acknowledge this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32853039
Still, why stop offering boosters for your population? Most Danes I knew were dutifully getting their boosters when called in by the health authorities. This sets a bad precedent.
> Why are people aged under 50 not to be re-vaccinated?
> The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.
> People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population.
> It is important that the population also remembers the guidance on how to prevent the spread of infection, including staying at home in case of illness, frequent aeration or ventilation, social distancing, good coughing etiquette, hand hygiene and cleaning.
But all of this sounds like spin on why the health ministry doesn't want to spare the expense on general vaccination of all members of the population or else why generally vaccinate the population before? Even with third boosters we're seeing rapid mutations that break through so I'd assume gen pop would be in need of a fourth booster and fifth etc. to qualify for the protection to all members of society that general vaccination affords.
This reads like obvious flip flopping that's a primarily economic decision.
> We recommend influenza vaccination for everyone aged 65 and over as well as for persons with certain chronic diseases, children aged between 2 and 6, pregnant women in the second and third trimesters and staff in the healthcare and elderly care sector and selected parts of the social services sector.
They offer it for 85+ year old people right now, soon to 50+ people.
What happens in the future is still open. There is no spin.
If you are young with 3 shots you have relative good chances against covid.
Right now there are 6 people with covid in a intensive care unit and 0 on respirator in all of Denmark.
Denmark is still offering boosters - in a prioritized manner. First those aged 85+, second 50+, even below that if exposed by diseases. From what is written I would expect (third) general 50- boosters to occur during winter if needed.
It sets a good precedent, the shots aren’t safe or effective. Does everyone have amnesia about how these things were sold? They were supposed to stop the virus cold. So much for that.
It’s a very good precedent. It wasn’t supposed to be an ongoing thing. The risk benefit just isn’t there except maybe for the most comorbid.
Most got their booster shots, but not as many as I thought or would like. 80% got the two shots, but only 61,7% got the booster. Both numbers are honestly MUCH lower than I'd expect.
It's honestly not economical to keep up the high level of testing and vaccination, not if most don't really get that sick. People are also a lot better at staying home when sick, compared to earlier.
Bit by bit, it is becoming the new influenza. Not saying we're there yet, but that's clearly where we're headed.
Now, influenza kills lots of people; in 2018 over 60,000 people were killed by influenza in the USA alone. But we don't have border closing or "show your papers" or all the rest for influenza, and we're not going to.
Even with the "low" death numbers right now (averaging between 400 and 500 people a day), it is still times worse than the worst flu epidemic in recent decades! Nevertheless, they will not be that low in the months from October to March, so this would be 4-5 times the worst flu with an epidemic "under control"! However, what if the virus reinvents the high mortality of SARS or MERS combined with being the second most contagious virus known to science? Again, this is nowhere close to the flu and far from over!
Well, it will never be "over". This is how it is now.
It's not like it was ever ok that the flu killed tens of thousands of people every year in the US alone. It's just not a thing that is going to be going away, so the tradeoff of temporarily staying home or wearing masks or etc. is different than if you think it will be gone in a few months.
Not exactly - there's enough data that each infection accumulates damage. This is not the flu and you're not back to where you were before the COVID-19 episode.
Each time you catch the flu you also accumulate damage. Same with every disease.
Just because you feel back to normal after getting over an illness it doesn't mean there isn't a permanent hit taken in terms of future repair & recovery capacity.
I suppose the argument is that Covid-19 causes more long term damage in many people when compared to other similar illnesses? That's interesting, but part of me wonders if this is just a false flag due to how much research there is going into covid.
Glad we don't have to worry about Long Covid because you said it's the same as every other disease. Hey scientists, you can stop studying it, a person on HN has cracked it.
Why would you even think that it's a false flag? I'm lost as to your logical progression.
I think the commenter you're responding to was indicating that we're moving towards COVID as the new influenza, not that we're there yet.
Case numbers and deaths seem to be plateauing at a pretty low rate, especially considering the relaxed restrictions these numbers are occurring under. It seems reasonable to think that we won't suddenly see a more dangerous strain of this particular virus, or that vaccines will lose a significant amount of effectiveness.
People stopped taking special precautions for COVID six months ago in most of Europe. As soon as most of the population was vaccinated, it was pretty much over.
Also, in my country, a lot of people got Omicron - and I mean a lot - realised it didn’t do much and pretty much stoped worrying.
All masks that keep some of your spit in your mouth decreases viral transmission where the chance of transmission is linearly related to the number of potentially infectious particles in the environments
Sure but as immunity (natural and otherwise) becomes common, deaths from covid are way down. It seems likely that covid will end up looking something like the flu: a seasonal virus with significant costs but not warranting lockdowns or mandates.
It still (just barely) shows part of the 2018 influenza spike, which is pretty similar to where we were at in July (note that the last few weeks on this chart are likely to come up a bit, but from what I've seen they don't rise much once they're 2-3 weeks old).
Now it's always possible that the winter will be just like 2020/21 and 2021/22 winters, in terms of deaths, but I highly doubt it. Anyone who has not either been infected or vaccinated (or both) by now, is almost certainly naturally resistant. There isn't much of an "immunologically naive" population left.
Where we are now is analogous to influenza in 1920, just after the big flupandemic of 1918/19.
You're making some very big claims here, especially has repeated infection by the same strain of Covid (nevermind differing strains) has been demonstrated to occur.
That's a two-year period that doesn't include mass vaccination, and includes now-effectively-eliminated strains that were significantly more deadly than the current Omicron-based ones.
It's remarkable how few people died from flu the last 2 years. I know people were (probably still are) being tested for COVID when visiting the hospital. Do we test for flu?
I also feel COVID deaths are overblown, should probably be much lower in these graphs (many people that died /with/ COVID have been marked as dying /from/ COVID).
The hint is in the word "excess". If there's a pandemic, and concurrently the amount of deaths in a population increases, there's a strong argument for correlation.
Excess deaths doesn't care what your cause of death was, it just compares deaths in period X to deaths in previous periods.
> When we are talking about the US, in particular, the whole pandemic has been politicized
Yeah, it was very sad to see the Republicans and Trump in particular pursue that course of action.
The population is growing and hence the number dying is also growing. The way you handle the data to determine what is considered 'excess' changes the value.
Actuarial science has been used to make that determination in more recent studies. Those studies suggest that the 'excess' number used by politicians and in news media is not accurate.
Actuarial science used by insurance companies now shows historic changes in occurrence of deaths, over this period of time, that are not caused by SarsCoV2.
Again, I suggest you investigate where the information comes from that you consider to support you base assumptions.
Hasn't the pandemic also taught us that we don't need to accept so many deaths by influenza? I mean, here in Denmark influenza almost vanished because we started using hand sanitizer and facemasks.
> ... travel restrictions, quarantine on arrival, social distancing, school and workplace
closures, mask wearing, surface disinfection, and enhanced hand hygiene
So to eliminate influenza we just need to destroy the economy, restrict travel, force people to pay $1000s in quarantine, cover our faces and close schools and office. And ignore all the negative consequences of that. Got it.
Your comment "almost vanished because we started using hand sanitizer and facemasks." is false. It was much more than that.
EDIT: and your links prove a reduction in influenza, yes, not "taught us that we don't need to accept so many deaths by influenza". That's a much wider debate and involves much more than scientific studies
I feel you're just being overly pedantic here. Surely those links are not the end of the story, they were just links that I could find very quickly. I'm sorry that they don't match your expectations.
I am also sorry that you don't like the “we don't need to accept”. I merely meant that we should have learned by now that we can avoid lots of influenza infections by very simple means, of which improved hand hygiene is probably the most important (I don't have time to look for links, so feel free to ignore the claim).
Denmark has no COVID-19 restrictions, but we do have extensive influenza sentinel surveillance, so we will see how it goes in the upcoming influenza season.
I'm bothered by your ignoring the cost and consequences of eliminating influenza. You mention hand hygiene but the reality is - by admission of the links you yourself provided - that it's much more than that. As if washing our hands is what led to the severe reduction of influenza, and not gigantic changes in our society such as banning travel, banning socialising, closing offices, closing schools etc! At huge, huge cost.
On the other hand consuming huge amounts of face masks generates a lot of emissions which will have negative effect in future. The question is if those measures are actually net positive in case of influenza or we just kill more people later by air pollution and climate change.
So you can get a visa, a green card, and live many years in the US without any proof of vaccination, but if you want citizenship THEN you need a proof of vaccine?
You need your vaccination papers if you’re getting your green card as well, although I agree that it should probably be a visa requirement if we wanted to be serious about it
> Bit by bit, it is becoming the new influenza. Not saying we're there yet, but that's clearly where we're headed.
That's what we're hoping for - and it's generally the trajectory novel viruses take - come out of the gates with a bang and a whallop into a vulnerable population, eventually tone down as people build immunity and selective pressures favour mutations that don't dramatically and fearfully kill their victims.
> But we don't have border closing or "show your papers" or all the rest for influenza
We very much did when H1N1 killed millions from 1918 to 1920. Closing the borders, lockdowns, quarantines etc. Not so much "show your proof of vaccination" due to well, you know, there not being a vaccine for influenza then.
However, you might find this illuminating - a 1905 Supreme Court decision upholding the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. [0]
> and we're not going to.
If a novel strain of influenza were to emerge that current vaccines can't handle, and it was proving to be highly efficient at causing severe illness or death, you really don't think similar preventive measures would be taken?
It is real in that virus infections can have long-term consequences. This is not new and has been known for a long time, and this of course can happen with COVID too.
It is not real insofar one assumes COVID is special or particularly more dangerous in this regard. It isn’t, except for temporary loss of smell and reduced aerobic capacity.
The posters on r/the_donald with disagree with you about the 2020 election being stolen too... a subreddit's fringe opinion doesn't move the needle on what is factual.
Long Covid already is a real thing, it just was known under different names: chronic fatigue syndrome, myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome, or systemic exertion intolerance disease.
The only difference is that Covid caused the number of viral infections to skyrocket, and with that, we see a corresponding jump in the occurrence of post-viral autoimmune disregulation, so now there's more effort being spent on finding out what's really going on.
I thought that long COVID was proven to be a mental disorder, not anything physical? That's why even people who were never infected with COVID experience it.
I think it's no replacing influenza, just taking a spot at the table, no? Influenza isn't going anywhere and COVID-19 still kills at something like 4x the rate of influenza even with the new more “moderate” strains. That's nothing to sneeze at. Also, there's no sign of “long influenza” like there is with Covid-19. It has ruined many people's lives, making them unable to work/live like they used to.
Aside from obvious egregious examples such as sending Covid infected patients back to rest homes in New York State, what other aspects of official reaction do you consider contributed? Genuine question.
I thought it was clear as day this was where it was heading. The fact the virus mutates so often made it clear that herd immunity to wipe it out wasn't possible. And that it mutates so much made it clear that we would need constant booster shots, and it isn't really viable to keep giving everyone one while paying drug companies tons of money for it.
For me, the only thing I care about is if I need to wear a mask and if I need to have a vaccination to do things. If I need to have a vaccination pass to do things then I don't think we should be getting charged for getting it. And I just hate wearing masks.
We change strategies based on the expected cost/benefit of different strategies. The expected cost of covid is much higher than the flu and may be much higher for decades. We are basically never fully getting back to normal unless the cost of spreading your sneeze around gets back to where it was in 2019.
Instead we are looking at plentiful deaths and accumulating damage courtesy of even mild infections. We aren't actually going back.
>But we don't have border closing or "show your papers" or all the rest for influenza
Except for when we do shut things down.
It's far from without precedent for the government to mandate personal safety requirements, tho. Seatbelt laws for cars are near universal in the US and that's a much more only-effects-you decision compared to vaccination.
Because it infects cells with the ACE2 receptor covid is never going to be the new influenza. It's going to kill 100-200,000 people a year in the US indefinitely.
I don't think any responsible medical researcher would claim this. We honestly don't know what the longer term implications of annual COVID are, and the distribution of deaths strongly suggests that the population of people who would die from covid in the US already did, and the remaining population (with the exception of people entering the risk profile) is not as susceptible to extremely bad outcomes.
This is unconscionable. Most groups considered at risk had less than a 10% mortality risk ergo almost all of them are still alive albeit potentially damaged and actually at higher risk.
IFR means "infection fatality rate". The operative word is rate. So no, you are completely wrong.
You are comparing number of deaths as opposed to rate of death per infection. The number of COVID infections are orders of magnitude higher than the number of flu infections. The rate of death from COVID per infection is now lower than the flu.
tl;dr - COVID and Influenza may have similarities, but the comparison is premature, faulty, and doesn't reflect the actual threat of COVID as we understand it currently. At this point I'm no longer asking people to change their behavior, it's pointless. However, the very least you can do is not be dismissive of people who are still being cautious.
Comments about "show your papers" are bullshit. We had an opportunity to prevent this from becoming a pandemic, and once it became a pandemic we could've worked together to limit spread and protect one another. Instead we had a large chunk of society that decided letting COVID burn through millions of victims was preferable to wearing a mask or not having parties.
--
CDC says the 2018-2019 Flu season killed about 28K people, hospitalized 375K people. The vast majority of those were in the 65+ age group. (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html) The 2017-2018 season estimate was 61K, the 2019-2020 estimate was 22K, prior years from 2010 through 2017 were as high as 51,000 and as low as 12,000.
The U.S. is averaging 400-500 deaths from COVID per day. If you split the difference and call it 450, that's more than 160,000 per year. Note that COVID numbers are probably shaky given that we have states like Florida trying to block reporting, and inaccuracies in reporting since COVID deaths may be misreported (e.g. someone recently "recovered" from COVID dies of stroke or heart attack that may be linked to COVID but the person isn't tested for COVID or isn't currently testing positive but the death is likely a result of COVID).
So, our averages are far higher than Flu and that doesn't even take into account deaths we aren't counting as COVID. The excess deaths reported from March 2020 - March 2022 were 15% higher than reported COVID deaths.
We also have no evidence of "long-flu" the way we're seeing complications of COVID infections long past the initial sickness.
And we don't yet know if we've reached a plateau or if we have more mutations/waves in front of us that will spike numbers. Or, maybe we are seeing the tail end and we'll stay at current numbers or decline further.
Several experts are predicting a fall surge - which may or may not happen, and may or may not be severe. Like Flu, yes, many people now have some exposure and/or have been vaccinated -- so COVID is less "novel" and may keep declining in severity, but given lax attitudes towards masking and vaccinations/boosters and other precautions, we'll see more sickness and death than we need to.
Anecdotally: Between March 2020 and March 2022 I knew maybe two people in my immediate circle of friends and family (about 30 people) who tested positive for COVID, and two who likely had COVID but didn't get a positive test. The two likely cases were prior to vaccine availability and one of the couple works in health care and had no real way to isolate and avoid exposures. Happily, none of them died or were hospitalized.
Since March of this year my immediate family (4 people) and my wife's brother & his wife (who's pregnant and being super-cautious) are the only people I know who haven't tested positive for COVID at least once. Most of my co-workers have had it. While, again, no one has required hospitalization or has died, the reported symptoms & after-effects often are higher in severity with a case of the flu. We're talking weeks long "brain fog" and loss of smell/taste, shortness of breath, and so forth in several cases. (To be fair, some cases have been mild - usually spouse or children of someone who's been sicker, but tested positive after exposure.)
The page isn't very clear on this, but it looks to me like these are the terms for the 4th booster program. So this does not necessarily say anything about initial vaccinations, but about who to boost this fall/winter.
In terms of mortality, the boosters have a significant effect for the elderly. For younger people without serious risk factors the immunity seems to keep longer and mortality is very low after only two or three vaccinations.
Also, for nearly all people affected, pericarditis and myocarditis adverse effects from vaccines were a) temporary and b) easily treatable.
During the pandemic, ICUs were hammered as they desperately tried to save the lives of people with Covid. Do you genuinely believe that the vaccinations caused the same influx into intensive care?
If you really think more young people were killed by vaccines than Covid, well, your pamphlet better have some really fucking compelling research backing it.
How about Any number that is greater than the pre-pandemic average for persons that age before the vaccines
Also, if your standard is going to be “temporary” and “easily treatable” as core components of “insignificant risk” for the vaccines…that would also apply to COVID itself in most people under the age of 50.
But…I think your equation could have some value if the vaccines were effective at preventing covid infection. However, since they don’t, and they don’t appear to diminish hospitalization risk of covid for younger people (like older people), but the vaccines do have a statistical increase on more pericarditis and myocarditis, logic would dictate that there is a possible slight negative risk by younger folk getting the vaccine. Especially for males.
While pericarditis and myocarditis are not immediately fatal/morbid, we should not just hand wave it away. I got all my vac+booster, but I was better off knowing that there are some potential and serious side effects. Knowing about rare but fatal vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia helped me to be more certain in my preference for the MRNA vaccine, even with myocarditis risks.
Yeah, I had the same question. Maybe that is just such a small demographic there that they didn't think it needed to be explicitly clarified.
It does clearly say that for <18, primary series vaccines stopped in July of this year. So it doesn't seem out of the question that they would stop them for adults too. My guess is that the relatively few people people there who never got one and now changed their minds could still get one from a doctor, but will not be target by whatever clinics they are using for fall re-vaccinations.
Has this been updated since the new BA.1 and the BA.4/.5 booster have been approved in the EU? Because currently e.g. Germany has the same recommendation but it is expected to be updated in the next few days since they started rolling out the omikron boosters.
"The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.
People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population."
> People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population."
Please say one in a million, because the fatality rate for Covid for young healthy folks with no comorbidities is extremely low.
Such a travesty that people were mandating vaccines with known adverse events for people at such a low, dare I say, negligible amount of risk.
You're making these very vague statements all over this thread. Why don't you just look up the current estimated fatality rate from Covid booster shots vs. the current estimated fatality rate from Covid infections from a reputable source like the CDC and post it?
The title is a little misleading; they're not currently offering a second booster. They're presumably still doing primary vaccination, and the language implies they may offer a booster later.
Primary vaccination and first booster have already been offered to everyone. The posted article is about the second booster, which is now being offered the anyone above 50.
It sounds like Danes over 50 can get a free vaccine, and those under are prohibited from getting one. Why can't we have a middle ground where young people can get a vaccine if they really want to (and e.g. pay for it themselves)? This mirrors the common thread in Covid policy where everything is either forbidden or compulsory.
Summary is a bit misleading. This is about the fourth vaccine shot (2nd booster if you will). Vaccines are still recommended (and free) in Denmark if you are not vaccinated yet. The fourth shot is offered to above-50 residents and below-50 residents in risk groups.
> It sounds like Danes over 50 can get a free vaccine, and those under are prohibited from getting one. Why can't we have a middle ground where young people can get a vaccine if they really want to (and e.g. pay for it themselves)? This mirrors the common thread in Covid policy where everything is either forbidden or compulsory.
Yeah. It's insane if they prohibit under-50s from getting the vaccine. There are more reasons to get vaccinated than just self-protection: pretty much the only reason I get boosted is to lower my risk of infection to prevent passing it to an immunocompromised parent.
“In addition, we recommend that relatives of persons at particularly higher risk accept the offer of vaccination to protect their relatives who are at particularly higher risk.” I think in this case you can get the vaccine
To be absolutely clear, it is only the second booster shot which is not offered to people under 50. The primary vaccine (two shots) and first booster is still offered and recommended to anyone over 18.
because it's a scientific /public healthcare question whether the vaccine makes sense or not and in Denmark healthcare isn't a 'choose your own adventure' book.
With medical questions there's not much middle ground. Either a treatment is indicated or not.
that discourse is already reflected in the consensus on who to vaccinate which is presented to you on that site as far as Denmark goes. Doctors don't just wing it, they go by those very same research results.
Doctors may disagree about individual cases of disease, they don't disagree at all about who to vaccinate, they follow guidelines.
the only way to judge whether a vaccine has merit is by evaluating population level statistics on its risks and benefits. You either match the profile or you don't. There's nothing any individual doctor can add, that's not how vaccinations work. On what basis is a physician supposed to reject a vaccine when it would be indicated by the data, they just feel like it?
Sweden does it that way (or at least my home region of Stockholm). 4th shot is only recommended for 65+ and 18+ with risk factors, but everyone 18+ can get it. It's free either way.
At the beginning they didn’t make it available to children (below 18) anymore.
Then UK followed for the children since September 1’st.
Now those unter 50 in DK.
It’s getting interesting and looking more and more like science instead of The Science.
Sweden hasn’t vaccinated under 15 I believe even with a first dose and as far as I know there are no plans to either. The recommended number of total doses (2-5) is now simply depending on your age from 15-65.
> Vaccination is offered to all children from 12 years of age since COVID-19 can cause serious illness also in children. The vaccine used in Sweden, Comirnaty, is approved for use from 12 years of age. It provides a high level of protection against serious illness.
> Several EU countries are vaccinating children aged 12–15 years, including Denmark, Finland and Norway. So far, almost 20 million children worldwide have received vaccines. This means that the knowledge on vaccination of children against COVID-19 is much greater today.
Title seem inaccurate to me. Article says they won't be offering a booster to under 50s. Presumably under 50s who have not yet had the first two doses can still get it.
I listen to TWiV, and the prominent virologists there are suggesting that we don't actually know what to do. In some of the latest episodes, they discuss frankly the fact that yearly boosters may or may not actually have any meaningful impact for normal healthy folks. They get into the details of why we know annual influenza boosters are effective, and that we really don't know yet whether COVID boosters will have the same effect.
on a personal level it's still an easy choice. the fact is, covid is so contagious that you WILL get it if you are not immune. no real way around it unless you isolate yourself to the extreme.
but the booster made me sick for about a day. i chose not to get boostered a second time, and around 7 months after the first booster i got covid.
I was out solid for a week, feeling really sick. and was still sick for the full second week but good enough that I could do home office. I couldn't exercise (for me, climbing) until the start of week 4. the annoying coughs continued for another 2-3 weeks, but a minor issue overall.
mind you, my resting heart rate is around 55 and I'm quite the sporty guy. I'm 33 so not in any risk group.
no way I want to be about of doing fun physical stuff for 3 weeks at some point in the near future again. so I'm going to get boostered probably in 2-3 months if it's still possible. I'll take the 1 day of sickness and then back to normal over 3 weeks of general suckage every time.
I really wish all the anti-vaxxer types would just listen to TWiV.
The hosts and guests both openly and candidly talk about some of the disagreements they have with the prevailing public health guidelines while at the same time give so much detail and depth into virology and immunology so as to show how full of shit the big anti-vax misinformation peddlers are.
So many anti-vaxxers say you can't have any disagreements with the party line or you get cancelled and then these prominent experts at the top of their fields do it every week on TWiV and don't get cancelled (because they aren't full of shit).
In my experience, it’s usually not about finding out the actual facts / truth for these groups of people, but rather based mostly on emotion. I have an extremely hard time believing that letting them listen to TWiV would have any meaningful impact.
Just curious - if you say so many other people are forming their opinion based on emotion rather than facts / truth and don't realize that - why do you think you are immune to the same phenomena? I don't mean it as an insult, I probably also have a few beliefs like that, with no way to realize which ones. Certainly feels good to believe I am protected from a deadly disease and feels bad to wonder about side effects. So why listen to any critique of COVID-19 vaccines after I already got my shots?
'these groups of people' does imply there are (other groups of) people immune to it, whichever group they believe themselves to be in.
(That's an everyday speech 'imply', not a mathematical 'imply'; where of course the existence of sets containing x says nothing about the existence of sets not containing x.)
Hey, that’s not how vaccines actually work. I think you’ve had fragments of the truth presented in a way to try to make you believe things that aren’t true. Vaccines aren’t a platform that can be triggered to do different things. It does use RNA which is cool because it allows for more rapid changes. The vaccine will mostly work with a wide variety of RNA payloads with the only difference being the exact antibodies it encourages. In a few decades that might mean we could start developing and deploying vaccines in weeks. But rna doesn’t last long. It’s pretty unstable so the only thing getting updated is your bodies natural immune response
Technically uwagar is correct, if perhaps overestimating the capability of the "payload". The mRNA could in theory produce a wide array of proteins. Personally I'm excited by the potential for treatments for other conditions using mRNA tech, with research on autoimmune conditions already progressing. Also it's probably possible already to develop and deploy vaccines in weeks, though safety and efficacy tests trials still take months.
Hum, it pretty much is how classic attenuated vaccines worked, except here we are directly controlling the rna that gets stuck in your cells rather than trying to evolve the virus a bit and then stick it in you
u are just reinforcing my understanding. so payloads, triggering and 'specific' products are all real. surely 'bugs' in this sequence are inevitable too with maybe devastating consequences for which no one is liable. who is to say the boosters are not updates that sneak in backdoors with additional 'features'? + these vaccines are peddled by for profit companies that refuse to share IP and emergency approved by govt agencies that have these company officers on their boards.... sorry, i refuse this workflow that treats my body like a phone that needs constant 'security' updates.
Did you get flu updates in the past? What about yearly physicals? Obviously I’m not going to convince you, but I would like to invite you to wonder what the difference is. RNA tech is potentially scary, but the idea that vaccines are secretly doing something else is a bit silly. For one thing the number of people who can “decompile” the vaccine is pretty large. I believe there have been some research papers on it even and beyond that biology is pretty limited. You’d need a lot more than is in the vaccine to do anything more than your run of the mill virus does to you dozens of times a year and honestly a lot less than some because it can’t modify your dna, it can’t save itself anywhere.
Ah, you link to (your) "actual facts": a few short sentences, and a demand based on one graph. Plus speculation (no details though) that the vaccine is interacting with Omicron. A title with a demand in all caps.
Yay for facts, and not emotions! For the obtuse: the last sentence was sarcastic.
Give me a long detailed scientific paper and then maybe it's worth considering.
The “actual facts” are the numbers represented in the graph. (My bad, I thought that would be clear)
The shots were sold as “If you get this shot you won’t get the virus” but apparently people still are getting the virus. And not just getting the virus, but dying from it. And dying from it in greater numbers than before the shots! WTF is up with that?!
Clearly the shots don’t work as they were supposed to.
And they are killing people.
Excess deaths are way up in mRNA injected countries.
And they are preventing people from being born. Birth rates are way down in mRNA injected countries.
Sorry, that is poor application of the scientific method. The blogger - and you - have made hypotheses, and conclude (the page:) "How can anyone view this chart as evidence of anything except - at best - complete vaccine failure?" and (you:) "Clearly the shots don’t work as they were supposed to.". You've concluded these things because emotionally that's what you want to happen, because (I'll assume) you're afraid[1] of the vaccine.
From 1 screenshot graph! Is that all the data you need to draw your conclusions? Is the graph even real, or is a graph from a random blog good enough because it supports your viewpoint? (Let's be honest, "both sides" have this deficiency; "This PNG supports my viewpoint, I'm right!"). Let's see the vax rates (to me the page is trying to trick people by presenting "Over 95% are vaccinated" but that's for people over the age 50. Let's see the rate of "returning to normal" and partying and mingling by people who think since they were vaxxed 6 months ago they were safe.
> And they are preventing people from being born. Birth rates are way down in mRNA injected countries.
Oooh... it must be the vaccine! How about the fact that there's been economic instability since the pandemic? Nah: mRNA introduced, birth rates down, must be mRNA!
Sorry if you're insulted, but geez, either this comment slaps some sense into you (here I am fighting against a windmill) that you're an idjit who needs to be more scientific about his way of thinking, or you're just going to reaffirm your beliefs, because it's more comforting to think that you have a clue and everyone else are the idjits[2]. A toast to that!
[1] Yeah TBH it's a foreign substance, I don't know what liquid they injected into me, at the end of the day I had my faith in the scientists making and checking the vaccine, just like we all put faith that the burger we're eating have been checked properly - by whoever is in charge for checking those things - for mad cow and other diseases.
> Is the graph even real, or is a graph from a random blog good enough because it supports your viewpoint?
It's Google's chart. Search for "covid", then select Israel from the country drop down.
The poster you replied to is asserting that this chart should look much better by now, given the promises made when the vaccine when it was introduced. I don't see why you need "a long detailed scientific paper" to agree or disagree with this.
Public health rights and not clogging up hospitals with easily preventable diseases readily outweigh your individual right to not get vaccinated, in general. Had the discussions around the specific Covid vaccines been argued with this in mind, a more productive conversation could be had, but instead it jumps immediately to a conversation about “muh rights” which is wholeheartedly disingenuous and/or selfish.
To protect or support one individual's rights is to protect or support everyone's individual rights. That is why, for example, prominent free speech activists will support the right of people they vehemently disagree with to voice their opinions, as it protects one's own right to voice opinions.
How is that selfish?
> If you would like to be selfish, you should do it in a very intelligent way. The stupid way to be selfish is … seeking happiness for ourselves alone. … the intelligent way to be selfish is to work for the welfare of others.” - Dalai Lama
Individual rights do not trump collective rights in all cases. If I have the right to shoot a gun, that does not mean I have the right to shoot a gun while people are down range. This lack of nuance in your argument is absurd. The selfish part is suggesting that your individual rights trump everyone else’s rights.
Specific individual rights can and do trump collective rights, but this is a conversation we have to have as a society. For instance, if I am down range, my individual right trumps everyone’s right to fire a gun down that range. It’s the flip side of the same coin. Positive freedoms are zero sum with negative freedoms. Realizing that is step one to having a productive conversation about these things.
Once we get past that fact, by realizing that it is zero sum, and your individual right takes away some collective right (and vice versa) we can look at specific instances and debate those. But when the conversation begins with “you’re taking away my rights”, the rest of the conversation is guaranteed to be unproductive, because, depending on your perspective, both outcomes take away someone’s rights.
> Individual rights do not trump collective rights in all cases.
I agree, though:
a) I didn't make that claim
b) You may as well just say "one right does not always trump another", which is just as true and more insightful
Which makes this part:
> This lack of nuance in your argument is absurd.
actually absurd. And this part:
> The selfish part is suggesting that your individual rights trump everyone else’s rights.
as I've already pointed out, is not something I claimed. This was my claim:
“To protect or support one individual's rights is to protect or support everyone's individual rights."
Perhaps you'd like to try again, and this time actually address me with some respect, not least by actually replying to what was written and not what is most convenient to you in the fantasy argument you've spilled out from your head.
The shots don’t work.
Even if they did, people’s choice over what is injected into their bodies comes first.
Even if they did work, the profile of who was at risk was clear, it wasn’t healthy young people. So why was it pushed on healthy young people?
From the outset the risk reward ratio was not clear for those without high comorbidites, the minute the myocarditis signal showed up it should have been pulled for most people.
Bearing in mind we now know myocarditis is just one of a multitude of negative side effects.
So why did it go on being pushed and coerced to healthy people, actively harming them?
Depends what you mean by anti-vaxer. It goes from crazy conspiracy theorist to people who don't see the point of vaccinating healthy children. I don't think I am an anti-vaxer, I got two shots despite having had covid. I totally see the benefits for the population at risk. But for a mild virus like omicron, for a population that wasn't even at risk of the original strain, I just don't see the point of mandating vaccines. It is certainly doing nothing meaningful to transmissions (if it did it would be another matter), and it does have side effects (I spent a full day in bed with fever after the second shot, and this is quite common), and what happened to "my body my choice"?
So not being in the population at risk I have no intention to take a booster. Am I an anti-vaxer? I certainly disagree with public health policy in most countries.
According to Merriam-Webster you are an anti-vaxxer if you oppose the use of some or all vaccines, or if you oppose vaccine mandates, or usually both[1]. So if you oppose vaccinating healthy children then yeah, you are likely an anti-vaxxer. If you also oppose any vaccine mandates then you are definitely an anti-vaxxer.
By that definition, "anti-vaxxer" is so broad as to be meaningless. Certainly useful as a way for people not caught up in its expansive definition to feel superior, I guess.
From your link: “ As a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the use of the term anti-vaxxer has both increased and broadened.”
It used to refer to parents which completely refused to vaccinate their children. It has transformed into a weapon, like racist, fascist, etc and is used to silence and manipulate discourse.
Depending on the country, people lost their jobs, weren't allowed to travel and were locked inside for not getting the vaccine(s), Austria even went as far as to introduce a law mandating everyone to get those vaccines (which they never executed and then promptly overturned).
Now whole governments are admitting that people under 50 don't really need those vaccines after all. We now have studies claiming that serious vaccination side effects are more likely than serious covid sickness in young men.
The anti vaxxers were proven RIGHT by this in many of their claims. How should they EVER trust governments again? How should they ever leave their anti-vax echochambers again? It was shown time and time again that governments and their high profile rockstar twitter "experts" get the facts right as many times as a broken clock the time, sometimes even spreading deliberate misinformation/lies ("Faucis noble lies") and absolutely can not be trusted.
My government as well scammed me into getting a second vaccine, after the retracted their claim that the single shot J&J vaccination would suffice.
I am not even an anti vaxxer -I am happy my parents are vaccinated. They always were at an at-risk age, but I am not and I am not interested in getting another covid vaccine. I remain terrified at the prospect of a reinstatement of the green pass system.
> Now whole governments are admitting that people under 50 don't really need those vaccines after all. We now have studies claiming that serious vaccination side effects are more likely than serious covid sickness in young men.
Wtf are you talking about. TWiV absolutely thinks everyone needs two cycles of vaccination period… and it’s likely beneficial to get three.
> I really wish all the anti-vaxxer types would just listen to TWiV.
We call it science the process/method, rather than science the religion.
> The hosts and guests both openly and candidly talk about some of the disagreements they have with the prevailing public health guidelines while at the same time give so much detail and depth into virology and immunology so as to show how full of shit the big anti-vax misinformation peddlers are.
I'll keep that in mind next time I am censored.
> So many anti-vaxxers say you can't have any disagreements with the party line or you get cancelled and then these prominent experts at the top of their fields do it every week on TWiV and don't get cancelled (because they aren't full of shit).
Profanity aside, it sounds like you are touting controlled opposition, or, Establishment figures critiquing establishment positions.
Bearing in mind that being ignored, or the owners of publishing systems choosing not to cooperate with you in propagating your opinions on platforms they own or operate, is editorialising and not censorship.
There’s plenty of evidence for a strong correlation between some opinions and mortality rates. There are probably in the region of 135,000 or more dead Americans who would probably be alive today if they’d not been persuaded to hold a particular opinion.
Censoring anyone saying ageing is natural or not a disease or arguing against funding an anti-aging project would probably have an even bigger impact, but still seems like a bad idea.
How do we know you're not 'controlled opposition'? If you want to make the argument that the people in question are establishment figures, then doesn't the same argument fly for you as well? How do we know you're not some agent of some other establishment pushing their own agenda other than 'trust me I'm a real person'?
This line of debate leads nowhere other than a dead end where each side is convinced that the other is a spy. And considering your post history, I don't know if there's a reason to lend you much credence at all.
The proper medical response, and ethical one, is pretty simple.
To any medical intevention there is risk. A chance of adverse events. A chance it won't work. Side effects. Your physician should make you aware of these potential issues, making you aware of them, before treating you. We call it informed consent.
The ethical angle is a little more complex. Considering above, but also, knowing the statistics around fatality rates of various conditions, and the adverse events that go along with the interventions. Some cases it means they should, or shouldn't be treated. Also, you have to consider a patient's personal beliefs, religion, etc. Running roughshod over patient beliefs is considered unethical.
Each person should make their own decisions based on knowing their health, and consulting with a competent medical professional that understands all of above. There are simple calculators that exist for fatality rates around covid depending on age, weight, mordibities, etc. Thank JHU.
Which I do, thanks mostly to my wife that is a dual board certified surgeon.
> This line of debate leads nowhere other than a dead end where each side is convinced that the other is a spy. And considering your post history, I don't know if there's a reason to lend you much credence at all
Either I am a liar, well-informed, or quite crazy. Take your pick. I'd just like to think that I married well
Not to mention trying to "force" the issue often isn't effective. There was a study on HN a while back showing higher rates of vaccination of newborns when the expectant mothers were given information on vaccines and their effectiveness months before and asked to consider them.
It's almost like most people can be reasonable if given the opportunity and proper information. People are also surprisingly good at picking up on BS, even if they then misattribute the source or reasoning.
>So many anti-vaxxers say you can't have any disagreements with the party line or you get cancelled and then these prominent experts at the top of their fields do it every week on TWiV and don't get cancelled (because they aren't full of shit).
On the one hand you say anti-vaxers are not cancelled but on the other hand you refer to them as full of shit. In spite of so many of their claims about the vaccine having been proven correct: it doesn't prevent transmission, it doesn't prevent severe covid or death, and for some age groups the risks outweigh the benefits: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4206070.
He didn’t say they weren’t cancelled, he said that their claim that you can’t have any disagreements with the party line or you get cancelled.
Anti vaxxers tend to not discuss nuanced details and instead come out with unsubstantiated claims like “vaccines cause autism” which is going to get most people to stop listening to them
>Anti vaxxers tend to not discuss nuanced details and instead come out with unsubstantiated claims like “vaccines cause autism” which is going to get most people to stop listening to them
I’m finding it difficult to summon the energy to read through these fully when the abstract of the first link has a political dog whistle[1] in the abstract before it gets to any actual hypothesis or claims. Finishing the abstract I see they end it with this sentence[2], implying this isn’t even original research? Is this actual research or a statistical analysis of the VAERS database?
This second link is even worse, it’s a blogpost with a a short paper riddled with citations linking to other blogposts from the same site making wild claims about how the vaccine actually makes things worse. I started on section 1 after his synopsis and he just points to a diagram included in his paper and then trots out the debunked anti vaxxer claim of
> vaccinees are now increasingly becoming asymptomatic shedders of SC-2.
There is no data or citation supporting that beyond his diagram. He just makes a claim and then starts making logical leaps off that claim.
This is the kind of “evidence” that makes everyone groan and roll their eyes when people claim that the anti vaxxers actually have proof and no one’s paying attention to them because it’s a conspiracy or doesn’t toe the party line. I am legitimately upset that I gave you the benefit of the doubt and wasted my time reading through these just to find out that your claims are as weakly supported as I had assumed.
[1]the sentence below, anti vaxxers commonly bring up lack of precedent as a reason the vaccines can’t possibly work
> The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease has no precedent.
[2]
> We show evidence from the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis.
I really wish there was a normal conversation on this topic. If you would state that it might be better to offer vaccinations to the 50+ a few months back, you were an anti-vaxxer. That wording alone is also just to ridicule everyone that is somewhat critical on the Covid vaccination rules.
There has been hardly any science in the regulations and mandates, just as there has been little science in the conspiracy people. And that is where we are now: A soccer match with hooligans shouting non-sense.
So I agree with people that have to listen to specialists. At the same time your statement (2nd part) tells me that you are not open to listening, or having a conversation with anyone saying anything outside the allowed communication path.
> If you would state that it might be better to offer vaccinations to the 50+ a few months back, you were an anti-vaxxer.
And rightfully so. Policies adapt to the currently prevailing COVID variant. A change of policy today is not a vindication for statements made months ago under different circumstances.
Also, if the one making the statement is not an expert themselves, they're typically cherry-picking statements of real experts to match their preoccupations, while the topic is in fact still under debate and the verdict can swing either way.
There are several kinds of anti-vaxxers. It's easy to focus on the tinfoil hat kind but there are others that just kept an skeptic outlook and were equally by the ridiculized by media, when not directly accussed of being accomplices of homicide (I'm talking about Spain here, may be in other countries the situation was different).
True experts' doubts just reinforce their positions instead of weakening them, IMO.
For the record, I have got 3 shots (2 Pfizer + 1 Moderna), and I don't regret it. But I respect people who chose differently because the unknowns about the vaccines.
There actually really isn't any difference between the two groups. They differ only in how they articulate the same bad logic.
Vaccines became broadly available in relatively wealthy countries in 2021 wherein the only reasonable position would have been that vaccination of all groups would decrease net mortality even among those unlikely to die and reduce damage to people's bodies that we were already seeing even with mild infections of otherwise healthy people.
A reasonable analysis of a complex topic with an unknown number of unknown factors is ultimately going to have at least some support among smart people for niche positions.
Going with what your emotions proves you are intellectually incapable.
Picking out one smart person with an articulate position that matches your emotional position proves you are an intellectually incapable person who thinks they are smart.
Picking out a niche position and searching for a handful of smart people who support it because it makes you feel smart to be a contrarian makes you intellectually incapable AND smug.
I respect people with the aptitude and the niche knowledge to break new intellectual ground even if they turned out to be wrong. I do not respect the 1000 idiots following that one fellow into the brush who ignored all the other smart people going the other way and neither should you.
I'm playing the devil's advocate and I'm not very comfortable with it, but I think it' valuable to the discussion to do so.
You are oversimplying and again conflating both groups. You assume people made their mind first and then looked for experts' to support which it's not fair to a lot of them.
Let's focus on an specific case. A healthy 25 years old male living in on of those countries. If he's an skeptic and decides to make a data oriented decision, the truth is that his chance of dying or getting a severe infection was really slim and probably comparable to the odds of getting a myocarditis because of it.
Yet the media and the government, at least in my country, did not make any difference between his case and a 60 years old with hypertension. Everyone had to take their shot or be denied his right to go to a pub or restaurant.
One gets myocarditus from covid and even mild cases in healthy young people commonly show damage from covid which isn't true of vaccination. Furthermore its reasonable to suppose that decreasing chance of infection decreases chance of spread which effects your 60 year old with hypertension which probably exists in most exists in most people's peer,friend, or family group and would really rather not die.
Fair enough, but you are comparing a sure event (if you decide to get the vaccine) and a contingent one (getting covid). It's impossible to declare any of both as a clear winner. Furthermore the risk difference is negligible when compared to daily activities (like driving or making the dinner).
One of the problems here, and the source of a lot of trouble it's that sending nuanced messages it's very hard and goverments feared that being cautious could affect negatively to vaccination rates. So they took the simplistic path of presenting the vaccines as a silver bullet for everyone (and they were but in a very varying degree).
I can understand that decision but at the same time, it has thrown a lot of fair "skeptics" under the bus.
Your comment is a good summary of the kind of arrogance anyone pointing out problems with the vaccines was facing. When the AZ brain blood clots were discovered, when the Biontech and Moderna heart issues were discovered, etc.
IMO, your attitude is even more harmful than the typical vaccine conspiracy theories, because those are typically easily disproved!
But disguising a dogmatic attitude in the language of science is poisonous for discourse and misuses science itself.
Looking at the benefits and drawbacks of a new vaccine is the most normal thing in the world. And thanks to those that didn’t allow themselves to be bullied by misguided do-gooders is why we have a better understanding of the vaccines and doctors can explain to patients if the vaccine makes sense to them.
This reads as something written at the height of anger and frustration. Unless you’re a vaccine scientist/researcher, and unless you worked on/studied COVID vaccines, you’re parroting the position of experts: both on vaccines and on skepticism of vaccine effectiveness.
Usually, in matters with very personal consequences, I don’t submit anyone’s position to the rigor of, say, a mathematical proof—irrationality is allowed. Most people refusing the vaccine have either died or survived multiple infections. I believe the individual has unquestionable sovereignty over such matter of life and death. Likewise the vaccinated dead, either from COVID infection or vaccine complication.
Overall, it’s really quite simple to understand that different people view this life thing differently and make trade-offs accordingly. It may not favor you, but calling the other sides names or applying a pretend touchstone of intellectualism is the height of intellectual laziness. Given that your position is also the position of the majority, I wonder at all if “intellectually incapable” should be used here. The majority is provably the intellectually incapable.
Re: parroting the positions of experts. How is that distinguishable from taking expert advice precisely. When I have a plumbing problem I take the expert advice of a plumber or a guide written by same unless I have good reason to doubt. Likewise with electricians, doctors and so forth. Given finite time and resources and not being able to bake a pie from scratch by inventing the universe I lean on the reasonable strategy of analyzing and synthesizing what experts have to say on a topic in order to decide on a course of action.
> Most people refusing the vaccine have either died or survived multiple infections.
Most people refusing to wear bulletproof vests into war zones have died or survived being shot at. This says nothing for the strategy whatsoever.
> I believe the individual has unquestionable sovereignty over such matter of life and death.
We were discussing whether there were reasonable antivaxxers who had arrived at their position through commendable means as opposed to ignorant folks who got their medical advice from facebook. People's right to refuse to participate in vaccination is an entirely different question.
> Likewise the vaccinated dead, either from COVID infection or vaccine complication.
It's easy to find millions of people killed by covid. Where can I find the number of people killed by the covid vaccine?
> Overall, it’s really quite simple to understand that different people view this life thing differently and make trade-offs accordingly.
Surely many things are very complicated with no clear answer. This doesn't appear to be one of them. Given the cardiovascular and lung damage apparent in even the majority of mild infections and the potentially progressive nature of repeated infection starting out vaccine naive seems to be a bad strategy for any age and one that could only have been arrived at by failing to attend to reality.
Its not intellectual laziness to attend to the body of work done by experts. It is what one does in fields in which one is not a subject matter expert. One acquires as much information as is available much of it surface level understanding and reads a variety of sources and what other sources say about those sources until you develop enough of an understanding do operate in the relevant space to the degree required to make decisions.
In this way one learns enough about automotive tech to select a good car, to drive it, and to keep it running between visits to the shop.It is entirely normal to do this without learning enough to rebuild the engine much less build or design one from scratch.
If one discovers someone else is commuting in an eastern European sedan of antique vintage which lacks seatbelts or airbags I will happily conclude without being an engineer that they are essentially "bad at picking cars" even if it comes to pass that they have what they believe is a very sophisticated understanding of engineering and can put their death trap together blindfolded.
It turns out that one doesn't need to be an engineer to read analysis that says that these two safety features are highly desirable and that they by choosing dangerous cars have chosen a notably bad strategy for not ending up a meat crayon.
> Given that your position is also the position of the majority, I wonder at all if “intellectually incapable” should be used here. The majority is provably the intellectually incapable.
Ya people are stupid but it doesn't follow that what the majority does is necessarily stupid because the majority does it ergo being a contrarian doesn't perforce make you clever either. Claims should be evaluated on their own merit.
The claim that vaccines are more dangerous than covid seems not only unfounded but unworthy.
> There actually really isn't any difference between the two groups. They differ only in how they articulate the same bad logic.
I think the high number of adverse events, and the weirdness around allergies, and my wife's colleague that was receiving a huge amount of pressure to get a 2nd shot, despite having a severe adverse event, has ruined it for me personally.
> Going with what your emotions proves you are intellectually incapable.
No emotions. The adverse events in any number of journals, and the VAERS reporting data, as passive surveillance which underreports signficantly, convinced me there were issues.
> I respect people with the aptitude and the niche knowledge to break new intellectual ground even if they turned out to be wrong. I do not respect the 1000 idiots following that one fellow into the brush who ignored all the other smart people going the other way and neither should you.
Please don't call anyone idiots here on HN. We read the articles, and the medical journals, and the pros and cons and came to an informed opinion, not including all the noise that was public pressure.
Having had covid, I can definitely say I am happy I did not get vaccinated. If you have a bunch of comorbidities or are old, or you want it just cause, go get it. But don't force those of us that are healthy, with no comorbidities that already did the social distancing to get some therapeutic with a shady safety record and likely negative efficacy. I don't believe we needed to rush these vaccines, or therapeutics, or whatever ineffective thing they are, out the door.
What is really tragic is when I hear about the infants with severe adverse events to these vaccines..........
>Vaccines became broadly available in relatively wealthy countries in 2021 wherein the only reasonable position would have been that vaccination of all groups would decrease net mortality even among those unlikely to die and reduce damage to people's bodies that we were already seeing even with mild infections of otherwise healthy people.
It's not necessarily a reasonable position when the clinical trials themselves showed an unusually large rate of adverse events in vacinees vs the placebos: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X2.... The bad logic is the logic that it's okay to assess the efficiency of a novel therapeutic by the protection it provides against infection rather than by it's overall effect on excess mortality, as such an approach is going to miss any safety signals.
"Vaccines became broadly available in relatively wealthy countries in 2021 wherein the only reasonable position would have been that vaccination of all groups would decrease net mortality even among those unlikely to die and reduce damage to people's bodies that we were already seeing even with mild infections of otherwise healthy people."
That's about the worst case of projection I've seen on HN. Just because that's your position is very far from it being the only reasonable position. There were plenty of sensible people calling for vaccination of the over 50s and other vulnerable classes at the time.
The risk with trusting the people with "niche knowledge" is that they are susceptible to corruption. Now, given the choice between a corrupt capitalist expert and a doubtful idiot, I'd choose the latter.
The decision all over the world wasn't bought it was cleanly made all over the world. Doubt isn't a super power and an idiot remains an idiot by definition incapable of parsing a complex choice.
Many anti-vaxxer are politically motivated, in a venn diagram you can find them in the same region with the anti-globalist, national socialists, radical leftist, libertarians, anti-americans, science-sceptics etc.
The overlap is not exact, that's why I say use a venn diagram but essentially anything anti-establishment has a anti-vaxxer component since vaccinse are considered establishments' game.
I got my original two vaccines. I refused pfizer and moderna on principle. I refuse to get any boosters. The signal to noise ratio is basically 0 at this point and I am having a hard time "trusting the science".
You know the only people more full of shit than the anti-vaxxers? The "trust the science" shills. The anti-vaxxers may have the wrong idea but from 2020 to...well about the last few months we saw that anyone who even remotely questioned the efficacy of vaccines was "anti-science" and a "science denier". Major platforms spent millions (billions?) to kill as much of this as they could despite the fact the "fact checkers" had no idea either. Fact checkers by-and-large are editorial writers on a power trip. I don't think anyone whose been awake at the wheel for the last 4 years is surprised at this. But they gained an entirely new level of unjustified power in 2020.
A few years later all of the sudden some of the "conspiracies" were at least shown to have some veracity: the vaccines aren't nearly as effective as advertised, the studies were rushed/manipulated, boosters are not effective, the lab leak hypothesis, etc.
Now, a real "science believer" would simply change their view at this point to match the reality of the situation. We spent two years pretending we have a full view of exactly what COVID is, what caused it, where it started, etc. The truth is we have no idea. The best scientists so far can't even agree on if a booster works or not (and by works I mean is effective along a wide population of varying demographics). People are seemingly religious bound to the "wear your mask, trust the science" non-sense. If anything, these people are just as bad as the people saying the vaccine is carrying nano-robots.
If you recall, in 2020 especially, the idea that the virus originated in the BSL lab in Wuhan was put into several papers. None of which can be found anymore (at least I cannot find them). These scientists were "canceled" immediately.
There's a lot of nonsense coming out of both sides. But to pretend it's simply "those pesky anti-vaxxers" as if none of them can rub a collective two brain cells together is frankly funny. I have a feeling the Pfizer documents once fully released and analyzed will be a treasure trove of hindenberg level disasters once the religious party-line fervor comes to an end.
It's an evolutionary arms race. We still have the staggering spread of the virus in the wild, let alone a well controlled one like might be had with more ideal circumstances. (Circumstances of reasonable precautions, regular testing, and thoughtful actions that benefit the greater good.)
The 'bivalent' boosters, as far as I understand (non-expert), combine a widely proven safe (likely billions of individuals who've had the treatment at this point) technology and version of the vaccine, which might no longer match the dominant wild strain of the virus, with a derivative of that same vaccine tuned to that current dominant strain of the virus.
In order to be most effective that updated booster should be used while the variation it was designed to protect against is still in the wild.
Wow, that's a pretty weird misinterpretation of the data. My understanding is that almost 30% of the Israeli population refused to get vaccinated for religious reasons, which (even if you could make robust inferences from a chart like that) would throw the whole theory into doubt.
There is nothing to interpret.
Very simply - more people have died since the shots than before.
No need for goofy phd words like “robust inferences”
Much more than 70% of the at risk population were injected, they are the ones that are dying. That shots were sold as stopping the virus entirely, “If you get this shot you won’t get the virus” let alone die from it!
So why have there been more deaths since the shots than before?!
The shots don’t work.
Not only do they not work, they are killing people. In mRNA injected countries, excess deaths are running well above historical norms.
Not only are they killing people, they are preventing people from being born. In mRNA injected countries birth rates are way down.
The effect we are talking about is something that necessarily only shows up within the past year, 9 months after young people started getting the shots.
A line chart going back 70 years is not useful here.
If you look at the data, linked above, where it is possible to see the effect I’m referring to, it is not something to blithely dismiss with a chart where it isn’t even possible for the effect to be visible.
Birth rates may be down over the long term, but year to year they are fairly stable, we are seeing moves to the downside hugely outside the range of normal year to year variability. And we are seeing it in a wide range of different populations with the commonality that we are seeing this hugely statistically significant effect occur in all these various populations like clockwork nine months after the young people in those populations started getting the shots.
>This is a continuation of my post from yesterday about a massive 13% decline in births in Germany. Such a decline is a nine-sigma event, meaning that it is so unlikely to occur by chance, that it would naturally happen as rarely as an asteroid striking the Earth
…
When expressed in “sigmas”, units of standard deviation, the 23.24% drop in the birth rate in Taiwan is a 26-sigma event!
This is can be described as “unimaginable” in terms of the likelihood of happening due to random chance
Regarding “excess deaths,” I maybe should’ve mentioned I was referring to what has come to be called “non-COVID excess deaths.” The excess deaths are found in statistics of “all cause mortality.”
Is data for non-COVID excess deaths available for Russia and Iran?
The number of people who have died from the virus after shots were introduced, that were supposed to stop people from contracting the virus, let alone dying from it, is bigger than the smaller number of people who died from the virus before the shots were introduced.
Do you find this an important data point?
Do you think it is enough to win the prize?
Do you want to co-author with me?
Where should we publish?
Back when Germany was considering making vaccination mandatory it was already clear that they only protect against infection for a brief time and that they’re not that effective against Omicron in the first place.
I don’t have any citations on hand, but should be easy enough to search for, especially now.
>So many anti-vaxxers say you can't have any disagreements with the party line
What about the people who were silenced about their negative vaccine reactions...[1]
orjournalists like Alex Berenson that were banned from twitter from talking about the data? The first journalist to win against twitter in court and get unbanned, ever [2]
Calling alex berenson a journalist is a travesty. The fact that he is a crank is obvious from all his writing about marijuana that precedes the pandemic.
You are saying that someone cannot write about marijuana without being a crank? Not a very convincing point
He is the first journalist to take twitter to court and get unbanned, so he is in fact already a historical journalist, wether you agree with him or not.
I'm saying his writings about marijuana are cranckish, as can be confirmed by anyone with any expertise in the field.
>He is the first journalist to take twitter to court and get unbanned
The fact that he was a "journalist" had nothing to do either with the reason for banning him or why he was restored (he was restored solely because a twitter employee behaved like a moron).
Have you considered that a lot of people in the medical field have always been latent antivaxxers and that was just the moment to out themselves?
Spoiler alert, antivaxxers are always wrong.
A problem is also that both anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers have a tendency to interpret any nuanced discussion as proof that the expert don't know either and therefore it's all a lie. It's an incredibly destructive attitude to any honest discourse.
But you can't negate the fact that we have also been told a lot of bullshit. I remember the same speech in Jan 2022 where the health minister of France explained that covid was dangerous for children and therefore they will mandate vaccinating children, immediately followed by the minister of education explaining that covid isn't dangerous for children, that the number of children hospitalised for covid is less than for rare diseases, and therefore they will keep schools open during the covid wave.
That's exactly my point: if you demand that people only speak absolute truths and take any disagreement as a sign that people are intentionally lying, then you're killing any honest constructive discussion.
Clearly there was a disagreement about the danger it posed to children, and perhaps more importantly: the danger that infected children would pose for the adults around them. Because that's another frequently ignored issue: vaccination is not just about protecting the individual, but about protecting the community.
But that disagreement doesn't mean that someone is lying, and it certainly doesn't mean that everything is bullshit. It means that people disagree. And with a very new disease, that shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone. Now there was clearly also a lot of misinformation from various sources, including sometimes governments, but the only way to deal with that and figure out what's what is honest, open discussion by people who know what they're talking about.
Stop demanding absolutely truths about things we cannot yet know, and instead try to think constructively about what would be the best thing to do considering the lack of information we have to deal with.
And what's bullshit about that? Did you expect French politicians to be all-knowing robots who can never be wrong?
This sounds like a run-of-the-mill political debate that hopefully in the end was decided on the basis of an expert panel. (And no, of course, medical experts are also not infallible. I don't think we have investigated a disease and responded to it as fast as to this one ever before in the history of mankind, so there were bound to be made some wrong or misleading hypotheses.)
>> Did you expect French politicians to be all-knowing robots who can never be wrong?
I would expect government members making decisions to consult expert virologists/epidemiologists first. The fact that they can make two contradictory statements means that either they did not consult any experts, or they consulted different experts, which means there is no consensus among experts on the topic.
Incorrect logic. One of the French politicians could have consulted experts and the other one might not, for instance. That's not uncommon. In other countries that happened all the time, think about Donald Trump musing about injecting bleach to kill the virus. Personally, I'd vote for the politicians who follow expert advise in such matters.
> They get into the details of why we know annual influenza boosters are effective, and that we really don't know yet whether COVID boosters will have the same effect.
Let me stop you right there, let's quote famous antivaxxer site called CDC:
"Recent studies show flu vaccine can reduce the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well matched to the flu vaccine viruses."[1]
So 40% efficacy IF WELL MATCHED to virus, if not matched it's somewhere between 0-40%.
I'm not sure why you think COVID boosters not matched to current variant will have somehow bigger efficacy than influenza boosters which have only 0-40% efficacy, if not lucky. That's one of the reasons why it's pretty much pointless to get vaxxed against influenza/coronavirus for healthy people, the efficacy is next to zero in both cases for healthy people. For seniors, if they are lucky it will help them, if not it hopefully won't do more damage than good.
> I'm not sure why you think COVID boosters not matched to current variant will have somehow bigger efficacy than influenza boosters which have only 0-40% efficacy, if not lucky.
Let me stop you right there. I'm not sure why you think he thinks Covid boosters not matched to the current variant will have bigger efficacy, or the comment doesn't display correctly on my screen.
>>I'm not sure why you think COVID boosters not matched to current variant will have somehow bigger efficacy than influenza boosters which have only 0-40% efficacy, if not lucky.
I just don't see how you came to that conclusion. They aren't remotely similar viruses, they aren't the same vaccines, yet you confidently declare that if X is true for the influenza vaccine, it must also be true for the coronavirus vaccine? How come?
That's a disingenuous reading of the thing you just quoted.
It's 40% to 60% if well matched - assuming that that the range is evenly distributed then the middle point is 50% not 40% and reducing overall risk of flu by 50% is a good thing since flu is much more a killer of the old and young (usually - there have been exceptions, 1918 Flu (aka Spanish Flu) killed younger people at a much higher rate).
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but is it not 40-60% effective if well matched and 0% effective otherwise?
Flu shot efficiacy is typically under 50% so if they guessed the wrong strains you happen to be exposed to that season it is totally worthless. There seems to be a common misconception that it will somehow help you even if they guessed the wrong ones but I'm not sure why that is so prevalent. If there are 5 viruses, and they got 4 of them, you still have 0% protection against the missing one.
you are understanding it correctly, if they are well matched (if lucky) they have at best 40-60% efficacy, if they are NOT well matched (if not lucky) their efficacy is somewhere between 0-40%, simple as that, but these pro-vaxxers will ignore science if it doesn't suit their interest
This is about the 4th vaccine shot. Denmark has very high vaccination rates (encouraged by restrictions via a phone based corona passport) and most Danes has gotten 3 shots of BioNTech.
Headline slightly misleading. It will be interpreted as "vaccine too dangerous for under 50".
Here Denmark will keep vaccinating young relatives of people at risk. Which may make sense, or not. Who knows ? Even all doctors are not 100% confident about anything anymore.
At least it goes slighly against the narrative of "everyone's government is deep in the pocket of big pharma", and more into the narrative of "everyone is trying whatever"
Not even sure, I suppose young relatives of heavily at risk people will not have to pay for next jabs (assuming the other jabs also came at no cost, which I assume is true given Denmark's réputation, but I might be wrong.)
My understanding (again, I might be mistaken) is they the correct headline should be "Denmark to focus booster campaign on at-risk people".
Between the antivaxxers in those threads and the "singularity in 3 years" ones in the AI threads, I think a significant downwards revision of the average IQ of hackernews commenters is in order.
This does not seem to get much attention from the media here in Denmark.. Probably because it's just not very newsworthy, just common sense policy.. Why is it on the frontpage of HN?
For the original vaccination series, we had substantial safety and effectiveness trials, despite being in the middle of a crisis where arguably people should have been allowed to take their chances. With each booster though the standards are dropping, including no real world effectiveness data for the latest bivalent booster. It seems to be down to "If something is good for you, more is better", but it doesn't always work this way. So it's not crazy to limit the use of a second booster, putting aside the issue of government run healthcare vs individual right to try, which is not specific to the vaccines.
> arguably people should have been allowed to take their chances…
I’m not aware of anyone being vaccinated by force. Of course the unvaccinated were excluded from social contact in various ways, but that’s just society protecting itself from them. If they still wanted to take the risks, they could and many did. That includes one of my Aunts. She caught Covid a few months ago and had a tough time but fortunately survived.
Good for them for actually following science instead of the religion it had become. The problem of course is other countries that demand it, and no doubt will continue to demand Nth shots to appeal to their religious base, meaning people will who want to travel have to keep getting the shots anyway
Honestly, the death toll of COVID is immense, and the rates of Long COVID are several times that. Even in people who don't develop it, we're finding blood clots and dramatically increased cardiovascular risk in young, healthy, asymptomatic sufferers.
At this rate, several years from now half the population is going to be either disabled or substantially less able than before.
Dismissing COVID as you are doing is a naive and straight up stupid luxury of a young, healthy person buying into the narrative spun by others who'd rather have peace of mind and avoid inconvenience than take this threat seriously.
This is mostly about further vaccination. The FAQ answers why to there is a need to be revaccinated. Not sure if it’s bad wording or if they really mean that completely unvaccinated under 50 should not get a first pair of shots.
One should understand that in many countries with large public healthcare there is a big difference between who’s part of the vaccination campaigns and who’s actually allowed to get it, but not targeted by a campaign. I read this as the campaigns this fall focusing on boosting the over 50 and healthy under 50 need to get it themselves (be it first or subsequent shots).
Just because you disagree with a position doesn't mean it is not science and that public servants are making choices for some nefarious reason.
COVID vaccines have unquestionably saved a lot of lives and will continue to do so in the future. The question is what their involvement will be in the future. A decision that will be made by the same people, with the same scientific rigour that it's always been.
This article made no references to showing that it's not needed for that group.
This decision only attempts to address the worst off on average and completely ignores the rest of the population despite what harm it will cause or the new variants that now have a larger group to evolve through.
To each their own, but I'll happily pay the $10 or so to reduce the likelihood of getting sick over the next few months. I hate being sick so much. I would be worth it even if it only prevented a mild case of sniffles.
I got COVID just a few months ago and I've had a worse flu but it's definitely comparable. The worst of it was over in a few days but the general feeling of sickness stayed for the next 3 weeks. I'll happily take anything to avoid that again.
I got Omicron twice. The first time was pretty much what you described: a sore throat and minor fever for four days followed by a month of tiredness.
Second time was far milder. I was fine after a week. It felt like a cold. It guess COVID-19 is bound to become similar to the other coronavirus which would make sense. At that point why risks injecting a whole population with a barely tested booster?
Two points: the booster wasn't barely tested, it was excessively tested. I don't think you realise how (comparitively) little testing goes into normal drug testing.
Secondly, people need boosters because immunity wanes to both the vaccine and natural infections. In about a year, you will get just as sick again if you get a natural infection, so why wouldn't you get a booster that will give you mild discomfort for a day at most.
> Two points: the booster wasn't barely tested, it was excessively tested. I don't think you realise how (comparitively) little testing goes into normal drug testing.
I’m sorry: you can’t call a vaccine tested for six months excessively tested. None of of the Covid vaccines were properly tested.
It was fine. The urgency required it. This is not the case for the booster.
> Secondly, people need boosters because immunity wanes to both the vaccine and natural infections. In about a year, you will get just as sick again if you get a natural infection
Immunity wane but we have no data which would allow you to affirm that. We know that reinfections can reoccur quickly with milder symptoms. We don’t know how long this ability of your immune system to fight more efficiently last.
There are very little data suggesting that a booster for omicron is actually useful. There is a reason European countries don’t recommend them to healthy adults.
...not getting as sick? We've had the annual flu vaccine around for decades and not a peep about "value propositions" because it was obvious. Same will go for COVID.
There's different approaches to the flu vaccine. Flu doesn't seem to be quite as widespread most years as covid has been these past two years.
For me personally, the flu vaccine usually means a few days of feeling lousy in return for maybe not getting the flu that I don't know if I've ever had to compare (flu testing has never been something I could access). Otoh, a couple incidents of maybe flu and smaller reactions to the flu shot over many administrations make me intend to get it every year.
Testing positive for COVID this summer was icky and disruptive, I'm going to get the new booster and hope it helps, cause I don't want that again.
For a significant time, the vaccine showed strong evidence of reducing hospitalization and fatality rates, esp for at risk populations. Did that change? I thought the main thing that changed was it stopped being effective at reducing transmission.
As the variant distibution changed, nearly all benefits of vaccines disappeared.
These facts are slowly trickling into the larger public knowledge, but it's been well understood within the medical research community for a while now.
You understand this is a liability for the cruise line and has almost nothing to do with your parents? If there's an outbreak on the cruise and someone dies from COVID, they have liability.
I listen to TWiV, and the prominent virologists there are suggesting that we don't actually know. In some of the latest episodes, they discuss frankly the fact that yearly boosters may or may not actually have any meaningful impact for normal healthy folks. They get into the details of why we know annual influenza boosters are effective, and that we really don't know whether COVID boosters will have the same effect.
This is correct: the current position of the medical establishment is that we simply don't have enough data to make an extremely strong argument for vaccines for healthy people.
And nobody knows enough about the flu vaccine currently yearly formulation in every year of the last 50+, but it was still recommended and administered to 40+% of US adults. Covid-related antivaxxism is just latent antivaxxers finally coming clean.
The narrative around the vaccine flip-flopped so often that it is pretty unclear what it is actually doing. Our health minister (Karl Lauterbach/Germany) actually said that it accelerates symptoms, so they stay at home earlier than those without. It's just so versatile it does everything and the opposite at this point.
You said anti-vaxxer which encompasses all vaccinations, but especially in Germany it makes no sense. In Germany most people are vaccinated[1] against something, so they are not oppossed to vaccines necessarily. This illustrates the blind crusade against people that do not want to participate in the mRNA therapy study that is still being conducted.
The effects are extremely small for variants that arose recently. If there is a new round of vaccines that work on current and future variants, it would make more sense to get vaccinated.
(yes; this is recent news; everything I'm describing above is about the previous round of viruses. The new vaccines are in only limited availabiltiy right now)
Even boosters are a bit of a question in my mind. I had forgotten they were already approved recently. There really ahsn't been much discussion at UCSF about it other than
"it's available we're still evaluating data before making recommendations".
What I should have said was "nobody should take the pre-bivalent boosters with any expectation of seeing a reduction in infection chances, or severity of disease, based on our current understanding of omicron, while bivalent boosters seem promising, even though we have extremely limited data and won't know for sure until after the winter cycle."
I believe those were approved a couple months ago and become available very recently. I was expecting Denmark to resume once that was available (they actually shut down the vaccine problem back in the spring with the plan to restart in the fall with the new booster).
But, as I understand it, does not affect how contagious the person is.
Given that, reducing the severity of the illness is arguably counterproductive, as it reduces the odds that the person will go out and about as opposed to staying at home away from others.
Note: I'm a scientist and work with/talk to medical researchers at top institutions (UCSF) all the time about viruses, vaccines, and other health areas.
My beliefs are a synthesis of what I hear from experts, and my own reading and thinking. I'm not overtly concerned by myocarditis risk - I just see this as reasonable and straightforward decisionmaking based on the data that is available and the unknown details that aren't.
This will change once they have boosted the 50+ population, or that's at least how it usually works. The Omicron targeted vaccines should be ready by then, so we are not necessarily out of luck. I'm 49.
Because it protects you and others around you from disease. Cowards will make up lies and excuses for not taking it, though. I suppose you have to decide who you trust, your doctor, or internet trolls. My guess is, if you ask your doctor, he or she will recommend you take it.
honestly, it's just not worth arguing- some folks are going to be permanently convinced that the case for vaccination is much stronger than it really is. Like I said in other comments: the medical researcher community moved on and no longer believes that vaccines were nearly as effective as originally believed, for any criterion. We certainly aren't ever going to reach ongoing herd immunity so the most reasonable approach now is to identify people at greatest risk and spend more resources protecting them.
I think it'll be interesting to follow further vaccine development in that sense.
Also, I don't know why you say researchers no longer believes that vaccines missed the mark. Yes they didn't prevent reinfection of future variants, and that I think everyone was hoping they would and no longer believes that, but just recently this study was published: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... showing an estimate of 14 to 20 million lives saved by the vaccines just during the first year of vaccination. And while 80% of that is from direct protection, 20% is from indirect protection such as:
> reducing the levels of burden placed on health-care systems, reducing the number of days that health-care capacity would have been exceeded and therefore contributing to an overall lower fatality rate from infection
That said the study highlights the same conclusion as yours, people at greater risk should be prioritized since direct protection is much more effective, and also low income countries that are not able to get or pay for vaccines are disproportionately affected, it would make sense to send vaccines that are going to young healthy low risk individuals in high income countries to these lower income places.
What has been generally disproved is the concept of herd immunity. Initially this was what scientists and researchers had hoped would occur with vaccinations, and sadly for multiple reasons this did not happen.
Vaccines does significant help in reducing the severity when a person get sick, which reduces the work load on the health care system and allowing the personal to focus their time and skill on people in worse conditions. That is great, but it changes the initial strategy in terms of application and goal.
True, though from my understanding, in some sense herd immunity was reached for the original strain and even delta, both of which are pretty much eradicated from the US.
Those were the deadliest strains as well.
What happened is that COVID started mutating much faster than expected in ways that it can avoid the immune system.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Thursday that millions of eligible Americans, including those as young as 12, get an updated omicron-targeting booster shot to bolster defenses against serious illness and death during a potential fall or winter rise in covid-19 cases.
If you doctor is telling you not to get the booster, you need a better doctor.
UCSF professor Vinay Prasad making the case against the new boosters (and claiming that those responsible for these recommendations ‘exhibit a pattern of gross incompetence’):
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it must be Vinay Prasad. Regardless of where he works he's still compared mask and vaccine mandates to the Third Reich. Most public health officials have a much lower tolerance for death or lasting injury than Prasad does. Even amongst laypeople Prasad's tolerance for someone elsedying is much higher than that of those other people.
A pattern of gross incompetence is the kind of thing you'd typically only level at people trying to Godwin their way out of scientific discourse.
By virtue of the fact that neither myself nor that guy live in Nazi Germany is prima facie evidence that he's not worth taking seriously. If you shit your pants and then proceed to smear it all over yourself and then the ceiling while humming the Bonanza theme song don't be surprised when people don't engage you.
If you want an earnest discussion find someone making an earnest argument.
You make no arguments. You adduce no facts. You repeatedly commit logical fallacies. On the other hand, I find Prasad's claims of fact true and arguments persuasive. This is a pretty easy call.
There seems to be some confusion. There is no earnest discussion to be had. I'm not addressing the content of his arguments because there is no content.
If you think that there's a persuasive comparison to be made between exterminating millions of people on the basis of their religion and vaccines, that's great. You've just plainly articulated why I'm not bothering to engage you either.
Seriously, you need a better doctor. What did your doctor say, specifically? That you should not get the newest Covid booster? Have you ever been vaccinated?
Calling me a jerk is rude. What's also rude? Refusing to get a vaccine that will protect you and others because you are afraid it will somehow hurt you.
Monica Gandhi who is a well known epidimeologist at UCSF and the
furthest from an anti-vaxxer has said publicly she will not vax her
kids with the COVID vaccine because there's no proof that it's
needed for healthy children.
No, she fucking didn't. Even the Daily Mail debunks your lies. Monica Gandhi, for all her faults, vaccinated her children.
Both Gandhi and Offit, who have advocated for the vaccine and gotten
themselves and their children vaccinated, claimed the CDC was premature
in advising teens to get a COVID booster shot on January 5, with Gandhi
saying, 'I am not giving my 12 and 14-year-old boys boosters.'
Or as she wrote for the SF Chronicle:
There should be no argument over whether vaccinating children against
COVID is necessary; instead, our focus should be on the best way to do it.
BA.5 avoids the immunity you gained from Delta, Alpha, and the original.
If you got COVID-19 this July-ish (when BA.5 was biggest), maybe you don't need a vaccine update. But given how much the virus has evolved, it only makes sense to update your body to the newest version that's out there.
If the next big strain is from the BA.5 lineage (or closely related lines like Omicron), having your body trained on the new proteins / RNA should help a lot.
------
Fortunately, it's not as big a deal because original strain / original vaccine looks like it still prevents hospitalization and deaths. So this is strictly about reducing the spread of Omicron / BA.5 and related substrains.
> BA.5 avoids the immunity you gained from Delta, Alpha, and the original.
Is this based on serology studies? Or are there studies that show sharp risk increase for my demographic?
> Fortunately, it's not as big a deal because original strain / original vaccine looks like it still prevents hospitalization and deaths. So this is strictly about reducing the spread of Omicron / BA.5 and related substrains.
That's exactly what I'm wondering. I personally don't worry for myself, if I saw something convincing that showed reduction in transmission, common good all that then I'd potentially do this for someone else. But I'm not interested in participating in free experimentation for big pharma.
Page 9 in the PDF clearly shows that original strain had the least protection, while BA.1/BA.2 (Omicron) had the most protection vs BA.5, but it was still possible to be reinfected. Yes, this includes your demographic. (Population 12-and-older for this study).
-------
Delta was the first major strain that avoided immunity (IIRC: Gamma was also avoiding immunity to a greater degree than Delta, but Delta outcompeted Gamma). Omicron outcompeted Delta and also avoided immunity, and BA.5 is the mutant of Omicron that further avoids immunity.
Getting your body used to the original strain (aka: your original infection and/or the original vaccine), plus this updated BA.5 specific booster shot, seems to only make sense.
Especially because the vaccine is like, free? Your health insurance wants you to take it because it means less costs to them than if you got sick.
------
I should note that even if you don't get hospitalized or dead from the virus, there's still the chance of "long COVID", and other such complications if you get sick. So it still is to your personal benefit to get the vaccine IMO, especially since it targets the latest strain.
> this is strictly about reducing the spread of Omicron / BA.5 and related substrains
From cdc.gov:
Updated COVID-19 boosters add Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 spike protein components to the current vaccine composition, helping to restore protection that has waned since previous vaccination by targeting variants that are more transmissible and immune-evading.
The original vaccine still has strong protective effects vs even BA.5 though.
That's my point. The original vaccine may be "worse" than the BA.5-specific vaccine that came out last week. But its still doing its most important job (ie: keeping people out of the hospital and/or morgue).
"Not getting sick" is still useful (and BA.5 specific vaccines should be great at that). But is kind of a secondary or even tertiary concern of mine. Deaths and hospitalizations are my #1 and #2 statistics that I'm worried about with regards to this subject.
I just don't see where the CDC or anyone else is saying that the new boosters are meant to prevent sickness but not to protect against hospitalization and death.
This is from fda.gov:
The updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters are designed to give you broad protection against COVID-19, including better protection against the Omicron variant.
COVID-19 vaccines can help protect against severe illness, hospitalization and death from COVID-19. As the virus changes and your immunity naturally decreases over time, you may lose some of that protection.
The updated (bivalent) booster vaccines are authorized to help provide better protection against COVID-19.
The reason most people are taking the booster, if I were to hazard a guess, is because they do not want to die or get severely ill. If the booster was only good for preventing minor sickness, well that changes the equation. I mean, the booster itself will likely make them feel sick anyway.
Maybe you're right that original vaccine still provides strong protection against severe illness and death, but it would be nice to hear that from the CDC and FDA as these boosters are rolled out so that those that are trying to decide whether or not to take it have a better understanding of the potential benefits or lack thereof.
It's been fascinating for the last couple of years to see how these daily armchair epidemiologist threads have transitioned from largely in support of vaccines to now largely against them.
It seems there is some natural filtering at play. People looking for rational informed discussion about covid have realized it's no longer on HN, so they just don't participate anymore. Meanwhile,those who think this is all a giant conspiracy have found fellow travellers with bottomless cynicism, and those people now dominate these threads.
Information and knowledge on the effectiveness and side effects of the vaccines has changed in a rather extreme fashion since the earlier phase of the pandemic. And the virus itself has also changed in a rather extreme way since the earlier phase. Why would you expect peoples views, in aggregate, to not similarly change?
I think you're right about the reasons for the decline. Most people have learned enough about Covid now to be able to see how good their health systems reacted (in my country, the response was outstanding). They're vaccinated and don't care about Covid any longer. These people participate less in threads about Covid now, so the percentage of fringe positions will increase.
However, I want to point out that HN was really good in the beginning. I knew about the pandemic earlier than any of my colleagues and gave some advice about cancelling events that sounded ominous then but turned out to be excellent. I even was able to predict the case numbers reliably during the exponential growth phase in early 2020, using my own calculations. All of that thanks to HN. Early discussions from January to April 2020 on HN were quite insightful, as were later discussions of possible medications and therapies by some of the rich hypochondriacs on HN.
I agree that HN is now useless for Covid-related discussions and has mostly turned into unscientific antivax garbage. But it was very useful during the beginning of the pandemic.
> People looking for rational informed discussion about covid have realized it's no longer on HN, so they just don't participate anymore. Meanwhile,those who think this is all a giant conspiracy have found fellow travellers with bottomless cynicism, and those people now dominate these threads.
My reply, which got flagged for some reason:
Adversaries of the west want us to be unvaccinated and sick. Knowing what we know about "troll farms", I would not be surprised if there is an effort by some states to discredit the vaccine on English speaking forums.
I'll add more to make it more clear I wasn't talking only about anti-vaccine: These troll farms play both sides. They want discussion forums to be toxic.
> It's been fascinating for the last couple of years to see how these daily armchair epidemiologist threads have transitioned from largely in support of vaccines to now largely against them.
Yes, it has. Although the people haven't changed, the information has, and the most stubborn of people are still defending their initial thesis without any ability to re-examine their priors if they were wrong and actually doing very messed up things to their fellow citizens. They are dug in; because to do otherwise would be having to face guilt.
The fact that you're getting downvoted just reinforces your point. People here are thinking they are "following the science" while in reality their narrative is so outdated that it's scary. Even r/coronavirus has a more sober view now.
Adversaries of the west want us to be unvaccinated and sick. Knowing what we know about "troll farms", I would not be surprised if there is an effort by some states to discredit the vaccine on English speaking forums.
It's really funny to see this kind of covid hero discussion where one accuses people who aren't ok with vaccine policies of being "conspiracy theorists" (ignoring the difference between disagreement with compelled vaccination and believing in some imagined conspiracy) and then getting a reply theorizing that there is a conspiracy amongst "adversaries of the west" that's driving disagreement with authoritarian vaccine policy. You can't make this stuff up
> The media multiplier effect can, at times, create disinformation storms with potentially dangerous effects for those Russia perceives as adversaries at the international, national, and local level. In the past, Russia has leveraged this dynamic to shield itself from criticism for its involvement in malign activity. This approach also allows Russia to be opportunistic, such as with COVID-19, where it has used the global pandemic as a hook to push longstanding disinformation and propaganda narratives.
Screenshot of a Geopolitica.ru article promoting conspiracy theories around Bill Gates.
> Bill Gates is linked to the COVID-19 outbreak and uses the pandemic to implant microchips “in whole of humanity [sic].” COVID-19 vaccines are a fraud spearheaded by Gates and Big Pharma.
> While all nations have engaged in some form of diplomacy or messaging related to vaccines, the Virality Project focused on observing state media and social media networks linked to Russia, China, and Iran. These three nations not only promoted their own efforts, but also attempted to undermine their rivals.
This flavor of argument-by-insinuation is getting really, really old.
Dismissing people or statement because they sound vaguely similar to some foreign source is in itself an obvious propaganda technique that uses exactly the same mentality as the dumbest conspiracy theories out there.
> I would not be surprised if there is an effort by some states to discredit the vaccine on English speaking forums.
Their claim was that adversaries are spreading vaccine disinformation. This is backed up by evidence. The only claim being made is that adversaries are doing this.
>Their claim was that adversaries are spreading vaccine disinformation. This is backed up by evidence.
Their implied claim was that the comment is relevant to the current discussion. That's insinuation.
BTW, did you notice that the very first reference in your reputable report was to NYT, which says very similar things and in turn cites declassified intelligence. Government citing NYT citing government. Even ignoring its dubious quality, the report is dated August 2020, which predates all the Covid vaccines and vaccine-related policies.
Just because the Russians are saying it doesn't mean anyone has to be propagandized to also say it. Assuming your counterparts in a discussion have been led to their views through deception is rather infantilizing. The Bill gates microchips stuff is totally irrelavent.
I don't disagree with you but using US sources when talking about Russian disinformation is like using Russian sources when talking about US disinformation.
I sat with people who told me they were hesitant to vaccinate, that they heard different things left and right and didn't know what to do and would wait until it was mandatory to decide if they would get the vaccine or not. This went on for months. I didn't push them to vaccinate or anything like that, I decided it was better to keep quiet about it and maintain the relationship. Then one day I realized they were gaslighting me, organizing protests against covid measures and to regain their right to party, circulating fake news among themselves about how our government head was running pedophile ring and how the deaths were fake. etc., when suddenly they shouted at me how the government was making their life hell on purpose. I cut them off. I realized there were strong parallels with the behavior of cult members I knew long ago. They lie. They lie to appear open-minded, hesitant. Like random Chinese posters discussing alternate interpretation of Tien An Men ("it was a western fabricated lie!" "ah thanks, I never thought about that and it's intriguing, thanks for offering a more reasonable interpretation". Now when I smell someone is using the same tactics I flip off. But on HN I am not even bothering anymore. Conversations about long covid looks like conversation with covid deniers from two years ago and it almost always end up in dictionary/akshually cherry-picking battle.
All that to say that, yeah, I believe there's a lot of conspiracy theorists among people who aren't OK with Covid vaccine policies.
Need (or at least used to need) a vaccine to work, eat and travel in the USA sounds authoritarian to me, I believe that's what the GP was taking about.
The idea that you think just because my account is new that I'm some sort of troll is pretty insulting and ignorant of you. Go through my comment history.
I'm going to point out (to the original commenter's credit) that your post has been flagged, that this comment of yours is a little haughty, and that based on the other comments the title for this is misleading and could more accurately read "Denmark no longer offering Covid [boosters] to adults under 50"
Which suggests to me that that you knew what you were doing when you posted it with that title. It seems somewhat intended to spark incendiary comments and disagreement. So I think it's pretty reasonable for the commenter to be suspicious of you. If you want your first article to go better, next time post about something less controversial, or with a more accurate title.
This is just wrong. Danish health authorities still offer and recommend COVID vaccines (two doses) for everybody, and an additional booster shot for everybody above 18. It is only the second booster shot which is only offered to people above 50.
You are 100% wrong. This is the same article I myself pointed to. It says they are offering vaccination only to 50 and older or below 50 with health issues.
Why are people aged under 50 not to be re-vaccinated?
The purpose of the vaccination programme is to prevent severe illness, hospitalisation and death. Therefore, people at the highest risk of becoming severely ill will be offered booster vaccination. The purpose of vaccination is not to prevent infection with covid-19, and people aged under 50 are therefore currently not being offered booster vaccination.
I wonder how this compares to unvaccinated/once-vaccinated COVID health risk though. To be clear about the numbers: we're talking about one death. The second booster would have to be remarkably worthless to not be worth it.
China's just rolled out an inhaled vaccine, and having vaccines that target the nasal passages specifically seem very promising for preventing infection. If I could, I'd get that vaccine.
It is inconceivable that the official numbers (5226 deaths) are being understated to a significant degree, because if they were, a threshold would be crossed rendering containment impossible, and 2-4 million people would then die. January and February 2020 in Wuhan looked like the apocalypse. An event 500-1000x as bad could not be hidden.
Literally every single person at work got vaccinated and still got Covid over the last year. Every single one. I actually can't think of a single person that was vaccinated and didn't get it, although I'm sure there must be a few that I know.
I think it's fine to recommend that people get vaccinated to lessen symptoms, but we should probably stop pretending it significantly prevents the spread of infection. "The science" does not appear to support that claim anymore, and many people no longer trust "the experts" now after seeing how they all still got Covid. Long term, that destruction of trust will do more harm than good. The Noble Lie is going to bite us in the ass.
This is about Denmark and this is the reasoning they use. It is to lessen symptoms and hence it isn't given to people who have a very low risk of getting very sick by these symptoms. You are agreeing with the source but it doesn't read as if you read it.
I never considered myself a vaccine skeptic prior to this.
While serving in the military got loaded up with all number of vaccines. If you serve, with an area of operations including Africa, you will get lots of shorts..
But now, I seriously do not trust the public health authorities.
I would prefer not to have to read 500 medical studies like I have done with covid with pros and cons on everything, and return to a pre-pandemic position of trust in public health authorities. But I think I cannot because they have proven themselves to be corrupt, politicized arbiters with an angle.
What will be Big Pharma's next move to bring revenue up again? The monkeypox certainly fizzled out to nothing.
I'm asking this because Big Pharma and certain high-profile individuals made it clear in print and televised US media both before and during Covid that we had best start getting used to these kinds of pandemics, because they would become recurring.
I can't take it seriously when you talk about Big Pharma in the singular.
It's not a conspiracy, it's pharmaceutical companies maximising value for shareholders as is the craze in corporations these last 30 odd years, any perceived alignment is likely due to being exposed to the same market forces and same dubious corporate philosophies.
Danish health authorities still recommend everyone to get vaccinated against COVID, including healthy people under 50. Everyone should get two jabs, everyone over 18 should get a third "booster" shot.
The vaccine talked about in the OP are the fourth vaccine jab, i.e. second booster shot, which is only offered to above-50 and people with certain heath issues.