Delta Variant
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
> COVID deaths [...] And if you think Europe or the US will be spared
This is not reflected at all with the current numbers and the author is mixing deaths in one country with infections in another. There hasn't been even a single uptick of deaths in EU so far that I've seen, and we are past the potential 2+ week delay from cases to deaths so if it was of importance for EU, we'd see a massive climb in death graphs. That is just not happening, so regarding deaths this seems, so far, not to be a concern at all for highly vaccinated countries.
Yes there are many other concerns for which we want to avoid more infections (saturation of hospitals, potential for more mutations, etc.) which are worth discussing, but this article is instead just conflating numbers. See a comparison taken 2 days ago of "infections" vs "deaths" in Spain, which includes this delta wave:
Not everywhere. See here, for example: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/netherland...
The Netherlands went from 550 cases/day at the end of June to 10,000 cases/day now. The Delta variant took less than two weeks to spread as much as the EU variant did in two months (Sep 1st - Nov 1st). Of course, it was helped a lot by the government deciding to open up bars, dancings and nights clubs on June 26th so it's not a fair comparison :/
Point is, we'll have to wait two weeks to see what effect this will have on the death rate. I expect the death rate to be a lot lower than in November, partly because of vaccinations but also because the age group that flocked to the bars and night clubs is a lot younger than the earlier wave victims.
Still, I don't expect our death rate to remain in the single digits as it has been since the beginning of June.
> As of 4th July, 2,118,096 (93.8%) of the clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) population have been vaccinated with at least one dose. This includes all CEV individuals, even if they were vaccinated as part of a higher priority cohort. Of those, more than 9 in 10 (2,046,244, 96.6%) have received a 2nd dose (90.7% of all CEV individuals).
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sit...
It is a bigger issue in countries like the US where vulnerable populations are refusing the vaccine.
I'd expect something closer to a 4-6 week delay in the statistics.
https://github.com/ctesta01/animated_covid_rates/blob/master...
I'd be curious whether we're detecting noticeably earlier than symptoms now, in countries like Australia with very proactive testing and contact tracing.
The first table is for non-medical personnel without high-risk indication. People under 30 have only been able to book their first shot since a month (but they were able to choose the J&J vaccine, which only needs one shot).
The only area where he says deaths are getting worse are for the unvaccinated: that fatality rates may be significantly higher for unvaccinated individuals due to a faster replication rate of the virus and therefore a much higher viral load.
But then shows infections growth (not deaths) to prove the point, so yeah it's conflating infections with deaths.
> So Delta, like Alpha before it, is both more transmissible and more fatal. Both of these effects have the same root: the virus is much better at binding to human cells, so it reproduces much faster.
> Are people dying more then? Not in Britain.
> But Delta is very hard in developing countries, especially in dense urban areas where the poor are forced to work but live in close quarters with many others. India, Argentina, Tunisia, South Africa, and Indonesia are very sad examples of this.
The first part of the article is an exposé of the evolution of the epidemic, transmissibility and fatality rates. Fine, but at this point, I haven't read any thesis, question, point, claim or argument he would like to answer or prove. It's just a wall of data.
Halfway through, he finally asks the million dollar question "How good are vaccines against Delta?"
That's where he has to retreat to the fact that any data about large populations available is limited:
> The best data we have is from Israel, which used Pfizer.
He then mentions percentages from an article from marketwatch.com and a briefing from technical briefing from the UK government, and goes on to extrapolate several claims based on those sources.
The takeaways in the latter part of his article are generic and have been repeated at nauseam by the medical community and health policy experts at large.
Thomas Pueyo isn't a medical or policy expert. He's a data analyst / publicist. Sure, he's entitled to write musings on his blog. But I don't regard him as an authoritative source because he's able to compile online graphs and stats into an piece which seems to be easily digestible on the surface level.
so basically like the last 15 months
there is a clear separation of critical thinkers on this planet such that we are almost two different species if it wasnt for the viable offspring
Yup. It started with conflating CFR and IFR (picking CFR of course because it is the bigger number). Comparing raw numbers between two regions that report their data completely different, etc.
Worse is when you show public data and get called "dangerous" because it doesn't fit the narrative that this all is the worst thing ever.
And it changed over time. You remember hearing news media 3% at the beginning of the pandemic?
When did you hear them update it to <1%? Nope by that point they had moved to raw case counts, which by then then the higher statistic.
Selective reporting all day long.
“Well that is what the experts say” is what their source is.
It’s disgusting how this whole thing is nothing but raw appeals to authority the entire way down. Thinking for yourself, expressing doubt or skepticism or having hope and optimism gets met with scorn, shame and ridicule.
I think there's a simple difference in scale between this other events, that makes it hard to assimilate - COVID was, statistically, the most deadly single natural disaster to happen to my country (the UK) in a century. That's hard to relate to, hard to make policy about, hard to put in perspective. Bear in mind the last pandemic (Spanish Flu) was before antibiotics, before oxygen, before all of the techniques that made COVID something you can treat to some degree of success in a hospital.
Technically true because of the "natural disaster" qualifier, but the world wars killed 890k and 450k Brits.
And smoking killed 750k in the last decade. And now that's been overtaken by obesity.
COVID won't even come close to touching that.
Manmade disasters have fearful consequences too. Perhaps that makes it easier to "relate to."
Now, I don't think casualty figures alone provoke the kind of reassessment and realignment that made WW2 such a watershed, but honestly, I think they probably should.
The optimal strategy for all people unable to determine if they're critical thinkers is to either go with the weight of opinion or to attempt to exploit their edge. The middle where you try to convince people is just free labour.
If you talk to hesitant people, and there are a lot of them, the reason is a mistrust of the people leading the effort and managing the pandemic. Why mistrust? Many reasons, but the most challenging one is because of numbers that don't pass a smell test coupled with apopleptic ad-hominim aggression directed against anyone who questions them. This all but guarantees a 20%+ rejection rate from people who just dig in because they do not make health or other decisions based on fear and shame. There will be a defiant group of about 5-10% who you just can't reach at all, so if your plan needs them, you will need a new plan.
Calling people hesitant is patronizing and was probably the stupidest PR move of all time and the committee responsible for it will have to live with those consequences.
But instead of arming people with a litany of whataboutisms, I would say this to an unvaxed person: given your objections, how does getting the shot prevent you from resisting or even fighting a battle you percieve you need to fight against these authorities you do not trust? Polite euphemisms aside, let's call it what it is, because that's the crux of it.
If it does, you need to just act now and literally overthrow your governments in the next few weeks, but if you aren't going to act today and do that, then get a shot, and use the time to figure out how to depose these people that you do not trust in good time. If, as many hesitant people believe, there might be long term harm to them, your long term still involves a conflict to replace these people, but risk from hypothetical side effects still nets out of that equation.
My rationale to the so-called hesitant would be this: get the shot, and then use the time to organize and support your revolts against untrustworthy leaders and institutions, because once you are vaccinated, you can draw from the ranks of others who were also forced into it. Use this to unite people to your causes against untrustworthy authorities, because your skepticism comes directly from people using this to divide you. Take that from them, and then commit to organizing and scaling the change that has to come. Having the shot gives you skin in the game with the people you are going to need on your side.
This issue isn't the main battle, but I will absolutely support efforts to ensure trustworthy people get into positions of authority after this.
The main authority on this, the FDA has not even officially approved the vaccine and likely won't for quite awhile. For some people it is logical to ask why other vaccines require 10year+ trials and for this a few months was sufficient.
While personally, I think the risk of the virus greatly outweighs the risk of getting the vaccine, I do not think we should force that choice on everyone. Either the FDA is ridiculously over-conservative in their other trials, or this one is extremely rushed. Can't have it both ways.
My premise is that the facts we choose for our opinions are for support of an underlying belief, and that this underlying belief is that the people running things are full of shit, if not deceptive. I can't change someones mind about that (and wouldn't try), but I'm addressing that concern directly vs. getting a shot.
The FDA process took a long time, but wasn't all that effective at guaranteeing safety either. There was a ton of process.
I think you're attributing far too much rationality to an administrative government process.
I'd note that the FDA didn't do the first thalidomide. Thalidomide is one of the first big FDA success stories; it was rejected, despite being approved by numerous other countries and pressure from the manufacturer and politicians at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Oldham_Kelsey
To answer your question:
(1) Most vaccines don't have 10+ year trials. A year is not even the fastest; the flu on 1957-1958 has a vaccine developed in 4 months.
(2) Most medical trials are slower since everything is done sequentially, since there is no rush. You can do an animal trial, a first-in-man, a small group, then a medium group, and so on. It's a better way to go.
(3) This vaccine has had over 3 billion doses administered. It's far better studied and validated at this point than the vast, vast majority of medical trials.
If you believe "the risk of the vaccine greatly outweighs the risk of getting the virus," can you provide any back-of-the-envelope numbers to back up that statement? From my perspective, the virus already killed half a million Americans, and likely brain-damaged millions. We have enough data on the vaccine to know it doesn't do that.
1) Did that 1957-58 vaccine use existing tech? My understanding is that other RNA vaccines and therapies were already under FDA trials with ~10 year time-frames since the method is new.
2) Why is sequential better, because it is considered safer?
3) Yes, short-term we know it is extremely safe. But there are zero people that have had the vaccine much over 1 year. Long-term effects are unlikely but it's just not scientifically correct to say that this vaccine is better studied than any other just because of the number of doses administered. Duration matters a lot.
Our scientific knowledge in 1957 was limited at best. The double-helix was discovered just a half-decade before. Today, we understand in-depth most of the mechanisms of action involved. There just isn't a comparison here. The COVID19 vaccine is far safer than what we put together in 1957, no question.
> 2) Why is sequential better, because it is considered safer?
It's safer to the original research subjects, but not to the general public. For general safety, you don't find out more by going slowly. You generally learn strictly more from a human study than an animal one, and you learn more from a large study than from a small one.
The point of an animal study before first-in-man is to not endanger a human subject. Small groups come before big ones to pick off things which might e.g. harm 10% of subjects. And so on. The decision was made to skip that step, slightly raising the risk of the subjects, in order to save millions of lives.
Part of that is we had pretty darned good reason to believe the vaccine was safe, and part of that was the grave risk.
> 3) Yes, short-term we know it is extremely safe. But there are zero people that have had the vaccine much over 1 year. Long-term effects are unlikely but it's just not scientifically correct to say that this vaccine is better studied than any other just because of the number of doses administered. Duration matters a lot.
Not so much:
- We have historical evidence. Do you know of any vaccine in the history of mankind which had long-term effects not visible the first few months? I don't.
- We understand mechanisms of action pretty well at this point. Your body gets all sorts of junk thrown at it all the time -- random polens, plastics from your water bottle, randomly mutating cold viruses, and so on. There just isn't any reason to believe a new vaccine is any more dangerous than a random bug bite. Indeed, we understand the stuff going into the vaccine a lot better than we do a random bug.
I cannot trust the institutions pushing this vaccine at all. At worst, I trust the opposite of what they say about anything politicized. But let's just say I don't trust them. In the absence of a trusted authority, I can only make this decision based on my own research. Unfortunately I am not qualified to interpret the data meaningfully, and I truly believe that if there was data suggesting that the vaccine was equally dangerous to the virus, it would be suppressed.
What remains is essentially a total vacuum of information. I then have to make decisions based on intuition and the error bars I perceive. What I expect is that the publicized covid numbers are better or equal to the reality, and the vaccine danger is worse or equal. The publicized numbers for covid give me essentially a zero risk of any problems, because I am young, fit and healthy. The real numbers are going to be even better. Meanwhile, the vaccine problems don't seem to be fewer for young people, but just kind of random. I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times. I have no idea what to expect from a MRNA vaccine, whether there could be problems that appear years later, etc, and I cannot trust any authority that says there is no risk.
There is also the aspect of direct action. If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life. If I get some bad side effects from an untrusted injection, I did that to myself and it will feel mentally much worse. All of this is to say, I don't care at all if I get covid, because I'll be fine. I won't inject myself with an untrusted medicine to avoid that.
I agree the CDC has done a terrible job of representing science and establishing trust, but the virus is less politicized in other countries. Look at what those health institutions with better track-records are recommending.
We humans certainly suffer from omission bias, it was probably safer in our selection environment.
Our everyday life is full of cases where we do dangerous stuff which we don't feel as dangerous because, everybody is doing that, since forever, so yeah you know some things may be dangerous but c'mon, it's not that bad, you don't want to miss out on life by being the only crazy person who doesn't get in a car or something.
When something totally new happens like covid vaccines, it's hard to get the right intuitions, and probably each will have their own, using their own biases.
My personal rules of thumb are:
1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).
2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy
3. I don't trust journalists to obey to the conspiracy; money in media is about attention grabbing, if there were serious side effects they would have ridden the tide (and probably even inflated it)
4. I personally know a few people who died of covid; I don't know anybody that had serious side effects of vaccines. Even if the media is hiding the problem, I would expect it to be visible in my direct experience (as it was for covid)
> 1. I don't trust authorities to pull off a major conspiracy (and hide the data of bad vaccine effects).
I do trust the authorities to be incompetent enough not to collect such data.
> 2. I don't trust governments ability to effectively coordinate among themselves to pull off a conspiracy
I do trust governments to engage in groupthink. That's kind of like the idiot's version of coordinating a conspiracy.
In the process, I trust authorities to "message" and dishonestly manipulate information going out in ways which appear coordinated.
I mean, sure. Governments have been and will be dishonest and lying and have been and will be again caught red handed. They also have been and will be accidentally right about various things.
If whatever a government says is always the opposite of true, then it would be super easy to have certainties! I wish that were true. Unfortunately I don't think that works that way.
Without vaccines, at present, my risk of COVID19 would be marginal at best:
- I live in an area with a high vaccination rate, and a low incidence rate
- I take pretty strong precautions, including proper masks (which are probably more effective than vaccines), and pretty strong social distancing, which I can do working from home.
I'm vaccinated, but if I wasn't, my odds of catching COVID19 would be nominal at best.
That's different than, for example, a retail worker.
If I didn't believe vaccines were perfectly safe, OP's decision wouldn't be crazy. I am a general-purpose nerd, and I know enough biology to make an informed decision without relying on political authority figures. If that wasn't the case, I might make the same decision as OP.
Now, I can do the math on why, if many people make the same decision as OP, we'll have a serious problem, but again, most people (not OP specifically) can't do math.
You can have empathy without agreement.
Will you take this strong precautions forever?
I may be wrong (because what do I know?), but my assumption is that COVID will become endemic and sooner or later we'll all get it. I don't know that for sure, I didn't spend a lot of time following the numbers and reading right and left about this topic. I just can't devote significant time into doing a "proper study" of the matter. So, instead I'm going to apply my personal heuristic, like everybody else.
In my previous comment I shared my personal heuristics about "can the government effectively hide the dangers of the vaccine?"
Here I'll respond to whether I believe it's rational to not get vaccinated because other people will be vaccinated and the problem will go away without me risking it:
From what I could see, COVID seemed to be very transmissible; despite strong social distancing and lockdowns the contagions kept going. The only way to stop it would be to either doing a prolonged and airtight global lockdown (hard to implement) or to have a vaccination rate that exceeds the herd immunity threshold.
And this vaccination level has to be maintained throughout the world, or else we have to lock down travel in perpetuity, which is again, IMO hard to implement.
Currently we do observe regional variation in covid spread; my intuition is that a lot that can be attributed to the "reverse tinkerbell effect": we're avoiding travel, in some cases forbidding travel, testing people who travels; we cannot reach the conclusion that if you live in an area where vaccination level is high you're going to be fine; as soon as travel resumes you'll encounter unvaccinated people more often.
As I said, I don't know; it's just a heuristic. I think it's possible that I'll catch covid in the next few years. Let's put a generously low probability of 0.1%. Then let's attach a generously low probability of having serious problems if I do catch it, again 0.1% (probably higher than that, but lets be generious). With those number I'd have a chance of one in a million to get severe problems of covid in the near future.
There have been 3.4 billion doses of vaccine administered so far; if 1 in a million of them had severe side effects, that would mean 3.4 million people would be affected; I think somebody would have noticed. This is why I was focusing on addressing whether the governments can actively hiding this problem. That's the main counterarguments I hear to my heuristic about pros/cons of getting the vaccine now, namely that there are indeed million of people who're suffering from the vaccine but we don't know about them because the government is lying (I find this hard to believe; I cannot rule that out logically, but my credence in that proposition is quite low)
Now, regarding long term side effects, there are a lot of "alternative news" sources, and random internet anecdotes, which claim relatively common heart problems following vaccination, and some stories of healthy people dying a few days later, though these deaths can't be explicitly linked to a vaccine necessarily. These sources are not more trustworthy than the mainstream media, but if the 2020 election has shown anything, it's that the media is willing to die on the hill for their narrative. These alternative sources are the same sort that were correct about Russiagate and other such media nonsense. So I can trust neither side, and there is at least some fringe evidence that the vaccines are worse than we know.
About long term effects appearing, I can't know if this is possible, and I can't trust anyone who says they do know, since it has been so politicized. There are actually medical doctors who say it could be dangerous in this way, so again, I can't know whether they're crackpots or if a large number aren't just fearful for their jobs and such. If you were a researcher right now and you had some evidence to believe this vaccine could be dangerous long after the injection, I find it hard to believe you could get your message out to any credible mouthpieces at this point.
If, in a couple of years, everything is still fine, then I may relent and get the jab. But right now there is just no way to trust it without trusting institutions which have proven themselves liars.
1) I know enough about molecular biology to tell you the vaccine is safe. You pick up novel stuff all the time. In abstract, we don't know a pebble in your backyard doesn't have some odd chemical which will end humanity, but the odds of that are astronomically low. There just isn't any voodoo in the vaccine.
2) In this case, the claims from "alternative news" are nonsense. With hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine administered, there will be instances of virtually everything happening after the vaccine. That's not to say they're always nonsense -- I read a variety of media -- but in this case, they are.
3) Doctors who fear vaccines are crackpots.
4) You're absolutely right about institutions lying. You're not only right about researchers not being able to get a message out contradicting the party line, but worse, their career would be destroyed. It's the story of the boy who cried wolf.
I think COVID19 spread because, at every point, people said "It can't be that bad," and it turned out it was. Our response was characterized by wishful thinking.
People can and do catch COVID19 multiple times, and that will only increase as it mutates. Let's start with your assumptions and go one level deeper:
1. COVID19 is highly transmissible
2. COVID19 will become endemic
3. You'll be exposed to COVID19 multiple times
With vaccine breakthrough rates of 5% for the original, and perhaps 20% for delta, and more with growing mutations, you'll catch COVID19 multiple times. Each time, you'll lose a little bit of gray matter in the brain, and sustain other damage. By the time you're old, you'll be a drooling, exhausted zombie idiot.
This makes a lot of additional assumptions, a key one being that breakthrough and brain damage are random events (as opposed to e.g. at-risk individuals), but it is a plausible scenario. We can argue about whether it's 20% odds or 80% odds, but it's definitely not 5% or 95%.
From my perspective, social distancing, masking, and similar just aren't that bad relative to even a moderate risk of the alternative. Proper masks are $2 (ones that filter down to <300nm), mildly uncomfortable, and more effective than vaccines. If we assume independence, proper mask+vaccine+modest social distancing reduces odds of infection to be infinitesimal. I don't believe in independence, but they certainly reduce R0 below 1. Why not?
- less than 18 years old. For everyone older, all countries in the world have come to the conclusion that vaccination is safer than staying without vaccination.
- only considering yourself and not the risk that you are part of the reason it spreads.
What lies at the foundation of all this is your distrust and I would suggest you consider how to deal with that. If you can't trust the media and governments (and you actually should trust them to a large part), how about following role-models or friends? Or best how about following data and science? If a whole nation such as Israel goes for a vaccine such as Pfizer don't you think they do their homework?
Up until December we had the Pres/VP candidates saying they would not take any vaccine that Trump endorsed. Then they won, and were faced with convincing everyone to take those very vaccines. Do you believe them now, or then?
It’s perfectly reasonable to agree or disagree with rushing vaccine deployment even further, but don’t attack a straw man.
The problem with that calculation though is that it doesn't take into account the increased risk to other people. If you do catch it you'll become a vector for infecting other people, some of which might be a lot more vulnerable or less lucky than yourself. Even if you only pass it on to other younger people, the odds of someone having a bad reaction still go up with infections.
>I can only make this decision based on my own research.
>Unfortunately I am not qualified to interpret the data meaningfully,
You do your own research but admit that you are unqualified to do that research.
> and I truly believe that if there was data suggesting that the vaccine was equally dangerous to the virus, it would be suppressed.
You believe institutions are untrustworthy yet somehow all of them are able to perfectly coordinate to suppress data.
>The publicized numbers for covid give me essentially a zero risk of any problems, because I am young, fit and healthy.
Nothing about your youth or fitness reduces your risk of transmitting this virus.
>I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times.
It's clear you either do not know nor desire to know how to protect yourself and others from respiratory viruses. This is a new virus that seems like it jumped to us from bats.
>There is also the aspect of direct action. If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life. If I get some bad side effects from an untrusted injection, I did that to myself and it will feel mentally much worse. All of this is to say, I don't care at all if I get covid, because I'll be fine.
You live in a society. Delta is looking to have an R0 of 4-9, that means if you are infected, on average, you will infect 4-9 new people with the virus. If you are infected and suffer long-term damage to your brain and lungs that makes you unable to work, you will qualify for disability, which is paid for by everyone.
This one surprised me. Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic, and the viral load you're carrying, affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others? That was my understanding, along with young fit people having shorter, milder bouts.
> Doesn't the length of time you are symptomatic... affect how likely you are to transmit the virus to others?
Infected people transmit the virus for a number of days prior to when they first (or ever) show systems.
Edit: following up, I found a recent study[1] that used a pretty extensive contact tracing effort to find
> Most transmission events occurred during the pre-symptomatic phase (59.2%). SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility to infection increases with age, while transmissibility is not significantly different between age groups and between symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals.
Your likelihood to become infected does depend on your age, but once you are infected your likelihood to transmit the virus is the same as everyone else's.
"I also know what to expect from a respiratory virus, because I've had those a number of times."
No one whom I know who has had COVID describes it like any normal respiratory virus, and it attacks multiple systems. I'm terrified of brain damage, and before-and-after MRIs shows brain damage in >10% of people who contract COVID19.
"If I get covid, darn that sucks but people get sick and that's life"
And if you kill a loved one by sharing COVID19? Or give them brain fog? That's not something I could live with.
The deeper argument, though, is about herd immunity. If we don't stop the spread, really bad things happen.
I'll mention: Do you use proper masks? N95 and proper nanofiber masks are widely available, and appear to do more to stop the spread than the vaccine. They're also risk-free.
The odds of this are far less than the odds of me killing my wife by taking a drive with her. In the same way that I can live with the risk of driving a car with her in it, I can live with this risk. Of course if that actually happened I would feel terrible, in both cases. But life is about weighing risks, and for now I'm comfortable with the risk of remaining unvaccinated.
No, I don't wear masks. That's a different ethical discussion. I don't feel or accept a moral burden for potentially spreading a virus in any case. I wouldn't walk about while sick of course, or have uninformed sex if I had an STD, but if I'm asymptomatic and end up accidentally giving someone an illness in the course of normal life, sorry, but that's just life. People who spread the flu accidentally are not immoral people, whether they get the flu shot or not. Likewise here.
As a baseline number, about a half-million Americans died of COVID already. For comparison, there were about 40k car deaths in the US. For someone like yourself, taking no precautions, the odds of catching COVID19 are way more than 10x of a fatal car accident.
The more critical problem is a systemic one. If no one takes precautions, nearly 10 million people in the US will die. If everyone does, virtually no ones needs to die. It's like polluting or littering.
And COVID19 isn't flu. The flu doesn't leave a quarter of people with brain fog 9 months later.
It has not passed the testing that a vaccine needs to have, to be FDA approved. Especially long-term effects testing, which I guess is us now. I doubt the tests will ever be completed now since the makers can already sell every dose they can make.
That said, I'm not too worried about the safety of the vaccine, but I certainly understand people who are.
I happen to have some rare professional insight into how evil this all may get, but if it's as bad as I suspect, a small risk of rare side effects is really the least of your worries on that time horizon, and you can't do anything about it if you are on the target list.
If that's on your radar you need to know that doing nothing is not fighting evil. If you are going to fight, get out there and do it, but if you aren't going to do that now, then I'm recommending you take the benefits of a vaccine with some known risks and some unknown ones, keep your family and social connections who will otherwise write you off and isolate you when it counts, and then fight or continue to do nothing when you are ready.
Dismissing someones beliefs as conspiracy theories has never once convinced anyone of anything, so addressing how to effectively navigate a world with a belief is much more logical.
I don't think the reason to take it is scientific. Literally nobody who didn't invent it has taken it as the result of their own emperical research and discovery. I'm saying this vaccine is not the hill to die on. There will be plenty of other opportunity for that.
Bottom-line: If you’re 2x vaccinated, hospitalization is highly unlikely for Alpha and Delta variants.
See this report, page 44 bottom: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1413537810296950786
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It is quite clear that for a vaccinated population, it isn't a threat. These are facts that simply aren't being reported by the news media. It's unfortunately quite common for talking heads to prefix "the highly infectious Delta variant" to any discussion, and never offer any context or nuance.
So they are all clearly reporting this. And the reality is that there are tens of millions of people who are not vaccinated who are extremely susceptible to the Delta variant.
It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t being made by every news outlet and government agency that I have been following.
Maybe they do this five paragraphs down. I almost never see this mentioned within the same paragraph as the "highly infectious" claim, which is always at the very top of the story.
> It’s not clear to me what point you’re trying to make by insisting that it is significantly less dangerous to the vaccinated that isn’t being made by every news outlet and government agency that I have been following.
Two things:
1) I am not "insisting"...I'm providing data. Nobody should believe me blindly. I am nobody.
2) If you already know these facts, great! Most people don't.
ok, three things:
3) I'm not sure why you're so prickly about the fact that I'm sharing factual information.
What you say you’ve never seen is literally what they’ve done.
I haven't found that latter part to be true in general. We can disagree on that.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/07/13/world/covid-variant-...
Besides the headline, here are some other phrases in it pointing out the difference in impact on the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
> the recommendations of health experts, even as the virus’s Delta variant and other mutations fuel outbreaks in areas where vaccination rates are below the national average.
> Public health experts have said that a strong vaccination effort is critical for the United States to outrun the virus
The (apparent) reality that Delta appears to have a lower IFR and that hospitalization rate for vaccinated people for Alpha or Delta is extremely low do not seem to get the same level of coverage as context for the click/view-generating reporting.
Let's be clear: the good data so far is coming from a country with a high vaccination rate. I'm not willing to extrapolate from the UK data to countries who haven't vaccinated their vulnerable populations.
> By far, the most widely studied trade-off involves transmission and virulence (Anderson and May, 1982; Frank, 1996; Alizon et al. 2009). Transmission and virulence are linked by within-host replication: increasing parasite abundance increases the likelihood of transmission, but also increases the likelihood of host death; mathematically, this assumption can be formalized by making transmission rate β an increasing function of parasite-induced mortality rate ν. Nearly all of the literature we summarize below assumes this trade-off.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/parasitology/article...
And also all of:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1420-9101....
The trade-off hypothesis should apply in this case specifically because the proposed mechanism is via improved spike binding to ACE2 and that it has been claimed that increased viral loads have been observed.
This wouldn't be a worry for anyone vaccinated, of course, but for still immunologically naive people (antivaxxers in the first world, and those without access to vaccination elsewhere) then Delta should be of greater concern.
Hospital admissions are also skewing a lot younger. Fortunately even if they do get hospitalised younger people are still less likely to die.
Still, deaths are happening. My wife is in health care and she hears stories of people swearing blind Coronavirus doesn't exist and that vaccines are a conspiracy, while dying of it.
Most media (except, of course, certain anti vaccine organs, which unfortunately seem to have infected an entire section of the mainstream US media) is reporting the significantly better outcomes for the vaccinated.
That being said, considering how small a percentage of people are vaccinated, it’s still a massive threat we cannot simply ignore.
We need to double down on vaccination even more. Delta only underscores that need that already existed.
> That being said, considering how small a percentage of people are vaccinated, it’s still a massive threat we cannot simply ignore.
OK, so your issue is that I've critiqued the media for sensationalism.
You think the media is not being sensational, because There Is a Major Threat. That's fine. We can disagree. The facts are still the facts, and people can interpret threats in light of those facts. You've now triple-responded to my comment with essentially the same thing. Maybe you're seeing this through an emotional lens?
(FWIW, I haven't seen any major news outlet report that the latest data for secondary transmission of "the Delta variant" indicates that it is not more contagious in the UK. That's a pretty big change, and it's new information. Even if you can find a single news source that has reported it, it's not widely known.)
> We need to double down on vaccination even more
I'm not sure what "double down" means, but I never said that people should not get vaccinated.
It is definitely a massive threat to people who cannot get vaccinated if they want to. In my country, we passed that threshold months ago, so the vast majority of deaths are people who simply chose to not get vaccinated.
Vaccination still continues apace, but nowadays it's mostly people under 25, who are much less likely to be hospitalized. When the vaccinations per day start falling below the max we can physically vaccinate, that'll be the point where everyone who wants a vaccine has gotten one.
Unfortunately for the people who have legitimate reasons to not get vaccinated, there are enough people who distrust vaccines that we'll never be truly free of COVID.
Please forward the discussion by showing how you would present the data.
In the What About You section he doesnt even mention those that have had covid, only vaccinated and unvaccinated.
It’s way more. The UK especially is testing like crazy. But that means a lot more cases appear in the statistics than before, even if the R rate is only marginally higher.
We simply don’t know what the actual r rate of all the different variants are because we had different test velocities as well. And this is crucial in whether we should be hysterical about Delta or not.
Also, wtf happened to cases in India? It’s not exactly all that catastrophic any more. In fact by the time the media had their 2 week India is dying narrative, cases declined. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/india/
R is an exponent. Small changes in an exponent lead to huge differences in the result.
That’s a big claim with no data.
And thanks I understand how exponential works.
We are definitely doing more testing in the UK than a year ago and it’s likely reflected in the case stats, but at the same time the rate of case growth during the last few weeks looks like a straight line up and that’s not a good thing.
We will likely see fewer hospitalisations than before due to a fairly successful vaccination effort, particularly with the edlerly, but as cases go up so does the number of people who may not die but end up with long covid. Also, the more people infected, the better breeding ground for the virus to develop new variants, and a higher chance of vaccine escape due to evolutionary pressure.
It all depended on the availability of tests.
Media may cry wolf, whether there is one or isn't. But trust me it was a tough time for India this time. I live in Bangalore. And for the "2 weeks" you mention, there was severe Oxygen shortage in hospitals in most cities. Patients could not get beds in time. There were queues outside funeral homes and graveyards. It was hell.
I am not the one to panic easily. And kept on going for my runs during the first wave in 2020, when Alpha was there. As the curve was so flat. Please note case numbers can't be compared, but you can compare positivity rate (positives/tested) and fatality chart[1].
The 2021 Delta wave in India was approximately 4 times severe by all measures. Because of the shortage of Hospital beds and Oxygen, many more people ended up dying than what normally would have.
I know several of my relatives including a 42 year old strong built man who died (his O2 count was 30 unfortunately by the time he got to the Hospital). There are numerous fund raisers going on for people who died. In few cases both the parents dying.
Yeah it was a short wave mercifully. But did a lot of damage. If you just search you can see images of bodies floating in rivers, as the people didn't have means to do last rites etc.
Also the actual span felt like 6 weeks. There was panic as the curve was so steep, and it was spreading like wild fire from the the west (Maharastra/Gujarat) etc to the east. And the peaks at different places were at different times. So the period starting April beginning to May 20th or so was pure nightmare.
Even if one was not affected by the virus. As thankfully in my family's case, there was this fear of not getting a hospital bed/Oxygen cylinder should there be a need.
Overall, I agree UK looks much better thanks to being vaccinated. Although I would say, one needs to keep observing for another month, before making a call, and if by then the fatality curve remains flat, then we can call it a big success.
PS: I got vaccinated after the wave. Only dose 1 yet. And ended up catching delta variant 2 weeks after that. Thankfully, a mild one. But I still wonder how I got it, as I remained very cautious through out. N=1, delta is very very contagious. But yes, if you are vaccinated, no need to worry too much.
[1] https://www.covid19india.org/ (Look at the bottom most curve on the right hand side for positivity chart of the two waves)
Edit: A point regarding fatality numbers in India in the 2nd wave. They were under reported by some multiple. There are various articles comparing total registered deaths during months of the 2nd wave in 2021 with previous years. And there is a sharp bump in the figures, which shows that fatality was severely under reported.
Edit2: Now the same playbook is playing out in un-vaccinated Indonesia unfortunately, with Oxygen shortages and everything. I think, in another month when we compare how delta plays out in UK and Indonesia, we would have several answers to questions of effectiveness of vaccines etc.
It does seem a narrative is being spun.
He's very opinionated about what he writes, and has gained good readership and influencer status on this topic. It's clear in his writings that he fancies himself as an "amateur of expert insight". He may be 100% correct. He may also be 100% wrong. It's hard to tell (let alone without invoking the conditional fallacy).
However, the most lasting impression I have of him is when he was invited in one of those "both sides" TV programmes in the UK on the basis that his "Hammer and the Dance" blogpost at the time became very popular. He was invited to debate with a renowned epidemiologist, who was part of the COVID-19 team advising the UK government at the time, and who was there to discuss the rationale for the policy after copious simulations by his research team. The epidemiologist was considered an expert and leading figure in his field. Meanwhile, Pueyo's self-described title on his blogpage at the time was "data visualisation expert" or something along those lines.
Now, like I said, he may be 100% correct (or not). This is not about making an "ad verecundium/hominem" argument. But all I remember from that TV debate is that his main argument tactic on TV was effectively interrupting all the time by saying "wtf", "people will die because of you" and visibly eyerolling and audibly sighing an awful lot, without offering much counterargument except by referring to his blogpost and the "obviousness of his claims". All this to the dismay and visible frustration of the epidemiologist who was trying to remain civil, objective, and doing his best to remain calm, relay the science as clearly as he could, while trying to avoid unnecessary panic and drama. Honestly watching it made me feel like you had just pitched the dalai lama in a debate against trump.
Pueyo has now changed his blogpage's tagline from "data visulisation expert" (or whatever it used to be) to "Understand the biggest problems and how to solve them". Forgive me if that doesn't sound as vague and grandiose to you as it does to me, but at best it doesn't come across to me as very humble from someone who, at the very least, is not particularly qualified for that description (then again, who is).
So, good on him for writing these blogposts and taking a stand, but while he may (or may not) be 100% correct (if there is such a thing), after that TV performance I witnessed, I'm taking his (otherwise professionally edited) blogposts with a large pinch of salt.
Yes, it was a good blog post.
> "this is the definition of ad-hominem"
It is not. Ad hominem would be "his argument is false because he is [personal attack]". Ad-verecundium would be the specific case where the personal attack is "he's not an expert in the subject".
Cautioning against grandiose claims by pointing out the author has made unverifiable grandiose claims before, which are objectively beyond their expertise, and was unable to defend them or reason properly against a peer with known expertise, is not an ad hominem. It's just skepticism. Having said that, good for him for doing his bit and writing the blog post. I've done far less.
> also black-and-white thinking (100% right or 100% wrong):
I think you are misreading this, so I apologise. I'm not advocating "splitting". The point of the "he may be wrong or right" part is that the only way to evaluate his claims of "what a public figure should do" etc, is via the conditional fallacy, i.e. "This is the correct course of action because IF you did the opposite, THIS would have happened". This is effectively an unverifiable claim, which is why, as a form of argument, it is fallacious. His claim in absolute terms, however, may in fact be true. Or false. We can never know.
Now obviously, you might say, "but he provides evidence for his opinion on what a public person should do". True. But here is where the earlier argument comes in. It's worth keeping in mind that this is a blog post, by a non-expert, who has shown inexperience against experts previously, and where he is free to take creative liberties to promote his view, as he has done in the past. It is not a scientific article that has undergone peer review, nor is it a disinterested exploration of the literature. It's purely an opinion piece (albeit a well-meant and well-presented one) backed by the evidence and visualisations he feels make his point and linear narrative best.
Which is absolutely fine for a blogpost. Kudos to him.
It also seems to be often the most natural approach taken by people who make a living from gaming the attention economy. It isn't about the merits of one idea or another but the engagement it generates from outrage, self-righteousness or other reactionary emotions.
Then regardless of how weakly he presented himself on TV, Pueyo was more right than that epidemiologist who civilly advocated for a policy that would've killed hundreds of thousands.
Which was an apporpriate tactic given that the United Kingdom was one of the hardest hit countries in Europe and the entire world. Visible anger in the face of complete and abject failure of an expert class and in the face of a rapidly worsening pandemic was an entirely reasonable reaction and the situation was indeed obvious to anyone who didn't have his head up his own ass. You might remember all of this happened against the backdrop of a government that was willing to 'let the bodies pile up' to 'keep the economy going'.
The absolute veneration of "civility" as if being civil actually is worth anything in the face of tens of thousands dying as a result of hesistancy is mad. Any sane person should have been ragiung.
It may come as a shock to you, but people do not like having their viewpoint challenged by such tactics. It's not very persuasive; if anything it entrenches opposition.
I haven't seen the debate you are referring to so I won't say much more, but there is a l a r g e space between being civil and "interrupting all the time by saying "wtf", "people will die because of you".
Disclaimer: I don't think this guy is legit, based on his cherry-picking of numbers and facts, and his over the top fear-mongering style.
First, the UK mortality rate was only somewhat higher in 2020. In fact, it was lower than it had been in any year before 2009.
Second, even if that were true, you vastly overestimate the efficacy of such tactics in persuading people.
Remember the hand washing phase of the pandemic? Aerosol transmission was basically ruled out because it was assumed that spread would have been much faster if it happened by aerosol. Turns out like it was aerosol all the time, just slowed down massively by all those "compatibility bugs" that are now slowly ironed out. Fortunately, our immune systems adapt as well (both individually and industrially, by ramping up mRNA capabilities and production)
Did I miss something? COVID-19 was highly contagious from the beginning, thus the drastic measures, or not?
Therefore: traditional means of preventing spread (ie: staying home from work and/or school) are ineffective. Measles or Ebola (or plenty of other diseases) have a much smaller window of spreading (because you feel sick sooner).
> The virus can linger in the air for about two hours after a person with measles has left the room. It can infect those who enter the room if they are unimmunized.
From: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
Is there a lot of evidence of this? Last time I checked, asymptomatic spread was not well understood.
Here's a couple relatively recent links: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/4/20-4576_article
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/most-...
If the delta variant jumps the vaccine hurdle we are back to early 2020 but with something 2-4X as contagious.
Scientific literacy matters and know-nothing populist bullshit (regardless of whether it is "left" or "right" in flavor) is dangerous. There is no such thing as a "post-truth era." Being wrong carries the death penalty, eventually. Civilization insulates us quite a bit allowing a lot of people to go nuts with little consequence, but if enough people are wrong enough for long enough the wall collapses and the consequences arrive.
If you think this is fun, your kids and grandkids are gonna have a blast with 800ppm CO2 levels.
You seem to be ignoring the time variable. If wide-spread vaccination slows the spread, then the spread lasts longer, unless and until the virus is totally eradicated.
More virulent virus does not always mean worse disease. It maybe that more virulent variants will be also causing less severe diseases. Hints of this are present now (low deaths/day) but we will see what the variants really do in the coming months.
> That's how evolution works. The more chances the virus has to replicate, the more likely it is to become more virulent or even worse learn to evade the vaccine.
Yes but this process happens in the whole interacting population, you can't blame just the unvaccinated people for this. The virus is likely to mutate towards variants that are better at infecting vaccinated people. Realistically, we can't stop this process without isolating everyone all the time.
Vaccination will protect most people who chose to get vaccinated from getting the severe disease. It won't stop evolution of the virus.
When we are living in a "state of nature" we have a very small circle of concern, mostly around things like finding enough food, avoiding predators, and creating shelter. Having correct opinions about these subjects is a matter of life and death. But when we introduce society things get kind of unbalanced.
We start getting information about all kinds of events from outside our immediate surroundings, which is really exciting to the "opinion having" part of our brains. But we aren't really accountable for those opinions - we won't die if we think the moon landing is fake, or Obama is a lizard-person. So it allows for a lot of "mental rot" to accumulate unchecked.
The beliefs that have the most direct impacts on us are still heavily constrained though. Stuff like "My boss will fire me if I stop coming to work" or "I will be hungry later if I don't buy groceries" etc. largely keep society functional. But we don't actually have any sort of consensus reality - we just think we do because people's crazy beliefs don't usually impinge on the public sphere. And without any evidence to the contrary, we just sort of assume other people think roughly what we do.
But with issues like COVID-19, suddenly everyone's crazy opinions about which secret society is using 5G to control our minds actually matter a great deal. And as society becomes more interconnected, those things will matter more and more. How can we solve collective action problems like climate change or pandemic response when we can't agree on basic facts about the world? It seems possible that "society" as a whole might be an unsustainable condition. It can last long enough that we become dependent on each other, but then it destroys itself because of that interdependence.
Guidelines need to be enumerated, like product releases.
So much angst would be avoided. When there's a disagreement, the parties (operating in good faith) could go meta and compare guideline versions. Which would help resolve differences.
"Oh, you're following guidelines USA-1.4. I see. FYI, last week our governor issued USA-NY-1.5, clarifying protocols for open air retail. All these revisions! Such a bother, I know. I'm so glad you and me are back on the same page. Be safe! We'll get thru this."
Further, many exposés and post mortems are in progress.
The Premonition https://www.amazon.com/Premonition-Pandemic-Story-Michael-Le...
Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-Inevitable-Normal-Survive-E...
Preventable https://www.amazon.com/Preventable-Leadership-Failures-Selfi...
Move on.
To be fair to our conservative friends, I'm sure this behavior is not limited to only one political party.
Politicians have to appeal to people who crave stability above all else, and trying to do otherwise will just get them replaced by someone who knows how to appeal to stability.
Why?
On top of that, in the US, the previous president was so politically polarizing that literally any statement he made was aggressively opposed by many people. A lot of SARS-CoV2 response got caught up in this dynamic.
Wide segments of the population are simply misinformed of basic scientific facts, and slick charlatans (like the author of this article) twist information in subtle ways to scare people. Terrified people are naturally going to be more volatile, and this has been exploited throughout the last year and half.
Now, people overcompensate, if there is any questioning or hesitancy to take the vaccine, ask questions about origins etc you might be a...Trump guy, or a nut and so you need to be told by the Non-Trump guys what' up, by being downed.
It's Kind of like Post-Trum-Stress-Disorder, PTSD. It's really quite fascinating.
Obviously, taking a position that is the opposite of an illogical person makes you just as illogical, but it's much easier than thinking.
Also, let's face it, no one likes to lose karma :)
It isn't equivalent, it is politics. In the end I suspect the last 15+ months will be a story of:
10% disease mitigation, 20% intellectual error, 30% media fear mongering and 40% politics.
Unfortunately well educated knowledgeable people are falling prey to this tribalism as well. I don't view a pandemic as at all political. There's a balance as to what amount of financial, social, and loss of liberty pain we should take versus the harm COVID 19 causes. And there should be a healthy debate about that, and opinions should change with statistics coming out and changing conditions. Meaning hardline anti-vaxers should probably soften up a bit as the vaccines have been shown to be extremely effective and safe and hardline lock down the world adherents should look at the dramatic drop in deaths and hospitalizations, and compare the risk of COVID with other risks we take in our life like driving.
The broader world-wide phenomenon, visible also here, is that most people got divided into two camps:
1) "COVID-19 is so dangerous that we must restrict freedoms", "the other camp is a harm to society's health"
2) "COVID-19 is not that dangerous, mortality below 2% (or even lower depending on how it is calculated) and young and healthy people are safe from it, so we must preserve the freedoms", "the other camp is destroying democracy and freedoms".
You can see this in U.S. and in Europe too.
Camp 1) was right at the start of the pandemic when we had little knowledge and people were dying in large numbers. But as time advances, treatments and vaccines are developed, the narrative naturally shifts. Eventually Camp 2) will be seen as the correct one.
Now we're somewhere in the middle it seems.
1) COVID-19 is not a static, singular disease. Now that it is circulating widely in the human population it has the potential to mutate, as it already has several times. SARS had a mortality rate on the order of 10%. MERS was above 30%. Part of the miscommunication seems to come from camp 2 assuming that things will largely continue as they are, while those remaining in camp 1 are saying "If we let this keep going, things could get much worse".
2) What about people who aren't healthy and young? Do we just permanently shut immunocompromised people out of society?
3) Developing a vaccine is not the same as actually getting the population vaccinated, as the last six months have demonstrated. Nobody in camp 1 wants society to stay locked down for its own sake. If 99% or even just 80% of the population was vaccinated, I think you would find a huge majority of camp 1 move to camp 2. Unfortunately the attitude of camp 2 has turned out to be the biggest obstacle to actually getting that done.
That sounds somewhat overly deterministic. The situation is always evolving and you can’t predict what will really happen especially with new variants etc. Of course you may argue that no variant will ever be so dangerous as to warrant lockdowns in a country whose population is largely vaccinated, but a problem as this article pointed out (accurately or with exaggerations) is that if a large portion of the population refuses to be vaccinated, how things will play out doesn’t seem certain.
I can't imagine why it would get worse. Immunity of people gets better with time, and so do treatments.
"Unfortunately, I turned out to be right. The short explanation is that the viruses that tend to win do so because they reproduce faster. Such a virus will grow faster inside a person, and will make that person more infectious, faster. It will also kill that person faster."
This is a fairly vague statement with broad implications (and a pinch of hubris) supported with insufficient evidence. I appreciate that he is trying to simplify a complex issue into lay-mens terms but I worry that writing like this only adds fodder to the anti-science movement because it is full of quasi-truths.
Which, even logically, makes sense - it turns out that a mildly infectious alive person walking around is a better reproduction vector for the virus than a highly infectious dead person.
There is not a single part of this sentence that is actually true:
1) the Delta variant does not "reproduce faster", except perhaps in the broad sense that it (may) be more successful in a population than other strains.
2) the variant does not "grow faster inside a person". This is nonsense.
3) "will make that person more infectious, faster." Also nonsense. There's no evidence of this, nor any bioplausibility for the statement. There's limited evidence that viral loads are higher, but that isn't the same thing.
4) "it will also kill a person faster". There's no evidence of this, either.
This paragraph is exactly what's wrong with Pueyo, in a nutshell: he takes a tenable fact ("Delta is more fit in the population") and twists it in ways that sound plausible and scary to laymen, but that are absolutely not supported by science or evidence.
As someone who lives in New York and has been vaccinated for months, should I worry about this? It seems like the answer to that question is no, I shouldn't.
Also notable is that walk-in instant and free vaccinations are available everywhere in the city, I see signs all the time when walking around, so anyone (who's older than 12) who isn't vaccinated is making a clear choice.
I really do get that other parts of the world don't fit this description, and that there's subtlety to this and it's complicated. Like I really get that.
But what are articles like this trying to convey? They seem to be telling me that I should feel differently than I do now, and that I should take different actions than I am taking.
But what are those arguments? What's the intent of writing an article like this?
I see the takeaways section at the end but it doesn't feel like it matches the tone of the rest of the article, which seems to clearly imply that letting your guard down on COVID is a mistake. The first sentence sends that message clearly, saying "I don’t think people are paying enough attention to Delta".
I disagree with that thesis statement, I think vaccinated people with no policy authority who are overwhelmed and often in mental crisis after a year of this shouldn't pay attention to Delta at all.
"If you’re vaccinated, you’re mostly safe, especially with mRNA vaccines. Keep your guard up for now, avoid events that might become super-spreaders, but you don’t need to worry much more than that."
But maybe this is a good summary to send to those who aren't in your position yet?
The unfettered spread of variants in unvaccinated populations risks the rise of one that can evade your vaccine (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6527/329). In areas where a variant is spreading rapidly, it might not be a bad idea to voluntarily mask in indoor crowds.
If you’re vaccinated, you’re mostly safe, especially with mRNA vaccines. Keep your guard up for now, avoid events that might become super-spreaders, but you don’t need to worry much more than that.
If you’re not vaccinated though, this is a much more dangerous time than March 2020. The transmission rate is higher than it used to be, and if you catch Delta, you’re much more likely to die—or get Long COVID. You should be extra careful, only hang out with other vaccinated people, and avoid dangerous events.
This is irrational. 1) According to available data, if you got vaccinated or pulled through COVID, you are well protected against severe COVID illness in future (cell immunity lasts for years). 2) You can get infected with variants both from vaccinated and unvaccinated people. You can't hide from unvaccinated people forever.
only hang out with other vaccinated people
That said, I wish more papers and studies would talk about rates for those who pulled through a previous strain of covid and how bad it was when discussing immunities rather than focusing only on vaxxed vs unvaxxed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/3-princip...
Indeed, Pfizer has announced that it is working on a booster that specifically targets Delta, so that says to me that there is very much still a concern here:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/08/pfizer-says-it-is-developing...
What data are you looking at? Even the waist pessimistic data - Israel - shows the vaccine working at great effectiveness.
> But even against Delta, full vaccination—with a heavy emphasis on full—is effective. Two doses of Pfizer’s vaccine are still 88 percent effective at preventing symptomatic Delta infections, according to a U.K. study, and 96 percent effective at preventing hospitalization. (A single dose, however, is only 33 percent effective at stopping symptomatic infection.)
It's the "still" in there— basically that Pfizer effectiveness was 95% against OG COVID, and now thankfully it's "still" 88% against delta, but much lower than that and we're back to a place where the vaccine alone is not enough, it would only be able to work in conjunction with other measures like limiting contact.
Letting it escape is not a bad thing? Are you kidding?
Think of what the Flu costs the world each year, now this on top ?
The only people who benefit from an escape are big pharmaceutical companies who will now sell you a 2 for 1 package, yearly flu shot and yearly Covid19 shot.
I might push back slightly on this. some data on 538 I saw a month or so back seemed to suggest a significant gap in people who say they plan to get the vaccine and people who have. I think the dirty secret is that if you’re poor or living in a rural place, making time to get the vaccine is a challenge. There’s a reason why when J&J came out there was a lot of talk of deploying it in rural communities.
No, you shouldn't be worried because you're vaccinated and living in an area of the country that's largely vaccinated. (Even if we don't reach herd immunity, 60% or 70% vaccination rates will protect you more than 30% vaccination rates).
On the other hand: Arkansas has a 35% vaccination rate and is already spiking. There are large swaths of this country which have straight up refused to get vaccinated and they're about to get what's coming for them...
The "Delta" storm has arrived on our shores. We've got one last good push (since it takes over a month to get vaccinated) before the Delta wave washes over our country. Its basically inevitable at this point (not even 70% or 80% vaccination rates will prevent the Delta-based pandemic), but we can at least vaccinate as many as possible to help mitigate the damage.
The thing we ought to be worried about is what happens if a new variant pops up that hurts kids. I’d like to see analysis from a virologist on the odds of this happening given selective pressures.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/25/world/asia/in...
Cases going up without dramatic increases in death or hospitalization might not be a bad thing. The alternative is lockdowns that will never completely end the virus, and have a significant impact on our lives. It will just slow the spread over a very long time. There are ever present dangers that we just live with like the chances of getting in a car accident and dying, but we decide that these risks are low enough that we carry on normal life.
Have you not noticed how we have put a lot of time, effort and money into increasing the safety of road travel? Do you just 'live with' the chance of dying in a car crash, or do you have technology like seat belts and air bags?
So if technology produces ways to make living with COVID less onerous and safer then why not? It is easy for us as mostly tech people to be like yeah lock that down forever. I am still getting paid full pay working from home, and my packages still come to the door. But for a lot of people it is a very large cost to pay. And eventually we will not be able to keep printing money out of it. People need to work and live.
Because there are no other (tenable) options for car accidents. If there was a vaccine you could take that would prevent you from being harmed in a car accident, and it was cheap (free even) and available, the expectations around car accidents would be quite a bit different.
Lockdowns are equivalent to restricting automobile travel or lowering speed to a extremely low limit. Sure they would be fine if there were a blizzard and lots of people were crashing. All one can do is wait for the snow to melt and then it would only be a temporary disruption.
But in the case of lockdowns there's no chance they are going to end the spread of COVID, they just slow it at best. And they have a very large cost, and it has been a long time. It would be as if the temporary restrictions to save lives during the blizzard were persisted when an ice age occurred.
In the end, that's what all the drama is: how we measure risk vs reward (perceived or actual) and handle it as individuals or society. Since this is a new and evolving risk, we struggle to put it into place relative to other "known" risks like traffic accidents, smoking, unhealthy eating, etc.
Drugs like antivirals are "vulnerable to mutations and waning efficacy over time" just like vaccines are, and they're a lot harder to make.
It's just harder to make effective ones. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-its-so-hard-t...
> In contrast, viral pathogens live inside our own cells and depend on our proteins for most of their needs, so they offer no such easy targets. And few natural antivirals exist, so scientists need to invent them from scratch, says Kathie Seley-Radtke, a medicinal chemist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
So maybe it's hard to get rid of viruses? As an uneducated person in this subject, it looks that way to me.
The severe cases of COVID-19 after a week have usually very little virus replication and the disease is about tissue inflammation, organ damage and immune system disorder. There are some treatment protocols for these and they are evolving.
If you google “nih covid treatment guidelines” you can read the official US 355 page pdf of the current treatments with summaries and more in depth.
Overall mortality in the hospital has improved quite a bit, by my estimate from ~10-15% to 5-10%, which may not seem like much but is 50% improvement in about one year! (Edit: I want make sure I point out that this is from a US medium sized city hospital viewpoint, there are biases in my view).
'move fast and break things' is not applicable when it comes to the human body. :)
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1414254993536786433
Highlights are (symtoms/hospitilization):
- Phizer: 79-88%/96%
- Moderna (one dose, not much data): 72%/96%
- Astra: 60-67%/92%
"A preprint submitted by the Company today to bioRxiv contains a new analysis from blood samples obtained from a subset of participants (n=8) in the Phase 3 ENSEMBLE study. These data showed that the Johnson & Johnson single-shot COVID-19 vaccine elicited neutralizing antibody activity against the Delta variant at an even higher level than what was recently observed for the Beta (B.1.351) variant in South Africa where high efficacy against severe/critical disease was demonstrated."
https://www.jnj.com/positive-new-data-for-johnson-johnson-si...
(I also got J&J, so I hope they're right. But the sample size makes this little better than anecdote.)
Far from it. Those of us who got it now feel like the weird step-children of the COVID pandemic, constantly left out of headlines and media. Though, I guess at least, it can very rarely cause an extremely dangerous nerve condition, so we got that going for us which is nice.
In the US probably. In Europe Delta has been followed closely even in mainstream media for at least a month.
I don't know how accurate that is. It may depend on where/how you book the vaccine. I'm in my 40s and live in Madrid, and only got my first dose last week in the local health center rather than a large vaccine hub, because it hasn't been very well advertised. I assumed I still wasn't eligible.
You should just try booking a vaccine, worst that can happen is the system won't let you.
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/newsticker/liveblog-coronavirus-di...
We're also about 7.75% ahead of the US when it comes to the percentage of the total population who has gotten their first dose, with the trend still being upwards. So I'd say that the problem isn't really willingness.
Here it was open to everyone 2 months ago.
Once the vaccines began bringing the pandemic under control here, the Delta variant as the new big risk is what the news media began focusing on heavily. That began shortly after case counts exploded dramatically higher in India and gained coverage the further it spread around the globe.
So far the # of hospitalizations have stayed low, but if the delta variant continues to spread through groups of people who have been reluctant to vaccinate, this might change.
VS
> the # of hospitalizations have stayed low
Who shall I believe?
The spike in cases is very recent, most hospitalizations occur between 3-10 days of onset. [1] reports 31 hospitalizations yesterday (preliminary), a 3-fold increase over last-week's average.
[1] https://coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl/landelijk/ziekenhui...
What will likely come soon is reimposed restrictions on Dutch travelers by other European countries, just as people had been given the go ahead.
The government’s test-for-entry system has also shown itself to be problematic.
It is fantastically disruptive. “Wreaking havoc” is certainly accurate.
And parts of the use (including my county) have >70% of 2 doses. (parts of) the US are in a completely different place vaccine wise compared to most of europe.
As the article states, for vaccinated people, the risk is low and the Delta variant is likely of little concern, especially when cases are as low as they've been since the start of the pandemic here in the US. However, it seems that the media is pushing the Delta variant as a narrative to help get people vaccinated but it's all falling on deaf ears of those who are specifically choosing not to get vaccinated. The stronger media coverage winds up making those who are vaccinated overly concerned about it, when they as protected as they will be from the variant.
For the unvaccinated countries and people, the Delta variant is definitely something to be concerned about. What we should be doing is trying to get vaccines rolled out to as many countries and people as possible, as that's our best tool for getting things under control.
>The difference between 95% protective and 88% is more significant than you think if you live in a low vaccinated area.
..but if I live in a low vaccinated area, the only thing that will help me after getting vaccinated is other people getting vaccinated. Also, the 88% effective rate of the mRNA vaccines against the delta variant is still significantly higher than the non-mRNA vaccines like Astrazeneca against the primary strain. Is 95% better than 88%, sure, but as far as vaccines go 88% is still very effective. The FDA was originally targeting 50-65% effectiveness in their initial approval guidelines.
>It’s the spread we need to concern ourselves with, not just personal protection.
Those two concepts are interlinked. If people are not concerned with personal protection, then it's highly unlikely that they will be concerned about the spread. The best thing to minimize the spread and protect yourself is to get the vaccine. It's that straightforward.
>The more exposure to the virus you have the more likely it is you will get infected
This is the same for everything, not just Covid. As I mentioned, the numbers in the US are very low, so my chance of exposure is already low. In a nation of 330 million people the total number of cases over the last week can fit in a football stadium. In regards to the exposure risk in the US it's fairly minimal.
I initially thought that all the vaccine refusenics were politically motivated but I've revised that after actually talking to some folks about why they don't want it.
Still even with me still masking up in many situations, its probably a futile gesture on my part as not many folks share this view. Probably at this point my actions are more symbolic than anything else.
If somebody doesn't want the vaccine, that's on them. I have family members who won't get vaccinated and will give you a shopping list of reasons why they "can't". They're all bullshit.
I would think that a straightforward comparison of the risks of getting vaccination versus getting infected would be enough, but I also understand that sometimes fears are simply not based on rational thought.
In my case, one aspect of wearing a big scary kn95 mask is my way of reminding the unvaccinated that this virus is still around, heh maybe thats me being a bit of a pain by intruding into folks fantasy of the virus not being a thing anymore.
Right now, my county of residence has a vaccination rate of under 40 percent among folks 60 years or older and thats crazy, but cases have been at zero for a bit. I'm thinking that this won't last, and this county I live in is a giant target for the delta variant. I hope wearing a big ugly mask about town might remind folks that covid19 is still a thing to think about.
These are very real reasons. You may not put much weight on those personally but many people do.
And that is fine. I have no real moral issue with people not getting vaccinated. I also don't care if they get sick or if they can't ever leave their houses again.
Sitting here in my house with my thumb up my ass until 2027 waiting for the entire world to die, get covid, or eradicate it is not an acceptable tradeoff for me. More people die of acute lead poisoning from gun violence in my city every day than die of covid. It certainly doesn't stop me from leaving the house out of fear of getting shot.
Because it isn't just about you. This is a public health matter that is a different situation. We have a rapidly decreasing chance of making this NOT be the next influenza, killing many people every year. This thing, in theory, could have been basically stopped by now, regionally at the very least, but folks want to party and go to restaurants and can't be bothered to get a vaccine.
I'm very glad you got the vaccine. If everyone who could get it did get it, then (at least in the U.S. where it's free and available everywhere) we'd probably be at herd immunity by this point and this would be in the rearview mirror. Then do that for the rest of the globe before variants get too out of hand, wasting all of the previous effort.
I'm not sure why you seem so insistent that I should be fearing the Delta variant, but if you're convinced that you should, then by all means.
(Note: I understand that the overall death rate from the paper is 0.002% for vaccinated population and 0.012% for unvaccinated population.)
As I read through this more, It's a bit surprising that out of 805,124 people (includes uninfected) under the age of 45, there were only 5 deaths. Haven't looked into the data for a long time.
source https://www.ijpr.org/health-and-medicine/2021-05-13/no-the-d...
Yes.
> but increases your chance of dying if you do contract it?
No, I think not. Scroll down to table 3, page 14.
No one under 60 who was vaccinated and fell ill died. No one under 60 who was vaccinated was even hospitalized.
But even in the most at risk group, age 75+, vaccinations reduced mortality by a factor of 10.
I think it's safe to claim that "breakthrough infections are rare, the vaccine still provides a level of protection if one occurs, but when breakthroughs occur the elderly are at the most risk of death"
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Page 16-17
Delta infections:
Vaccinated with 2 doses - 10,834, died 118 (only 2 in below 50 age group). Unvaccinated - 71,932. I'll add half of those with "unknown" vaccination status, so the total is - 79,111, died 257 (26 in below 50 age group).
Mortality rate for vaccinated: 0.01089 Mortality rate for unvaccinated: 0.00324
So apparently vaccinated have a 3 times higher probability of a lethal outcome. Not exactly what you'd want to see.
I doubt these will turn out to be correct numbers. Looking at recent week’s data in Israel possibly paints another picture (keep in mind while parsing the numbers that there are plentiful many more vaccinated in the population than not in the age groups that gets hospitalized): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1kiOrQxOtBg0__IoL...
Nevertheless, it is clear that vaccination helps and is important, but I have doubts about 90+% protection from hospitalization.
The number I've seen is a 3-5 fold reduction in the kinetics of neutralization [1] - this is concerning for whether you can spread it, but seems to my eye pretty consistent with hospitalization effectiveness remaining about the same.
https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-varian...
The good news is that the differences relative to "original Delta" seem to be pretty slight.
>controversial
I would say there is some contention going on in this thread.
There's no way for me to say all that without being on a "side" even if I really do not wish to be, and for the moderators, the issue might be similar, though I suspect some can break down the issue with a clearer lens.
All kinds of articles get flagged. You have to check in on /newcomments to find interesting discussions.
To be more general: Do politicians really have the superpower to stop the spread of any information through polarization?
The question. What percentage of men under 40 have had a cardiovascular event, specifically myocarditis, after taking the Phizer or Moderns shot?
Primary reason I haven't been vaccinated yet.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/new-information-for-pare...
> Doing the math, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that for every million doses given, there have been 67 cases of heart inflammation in boys 12 to 17 (nine in girls of that age group), 56 in those aged 18 to 24 (six in girls), and 20 in males 25 to 29 (three in girls).
It's not exactly "under 40", but if you're in that 25-29 age group, it's 0.002%. If you're in that higher-risk 12-17s group, 0.0067%.
I'm fairly comfortable rounding that down to 0% for my personal risk evaluations, especially given "majority of cases have been mild".
"Clot risk to 18-39s from AstraZeneca vaccine is twice as high as Covid death risk, Euro study finds" - https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40328123.html
Hopefuly Thomas gets a bit more convincing scaredata for the Lambda Variant.
This is discussed in some detail in TWiV[777], a discussion with Ron Fouchier. If you use influenza as a model, the picture looks completely different - new strains are coming up all the time and outcompeting the older ones, but that's just because people have developed immunity to the older ones (antigenic drifts). The new ones are not fundamentally different or more transmissible. For people who don't want to listen to the whole thing, the main point is also made in a NYT opinion piece[2].
Pueyo claims that alpha is 60% more transmissible than ancestral type, but again the evidence doesn't strongly support this. Indeed, a preprint just came out[3] in which alpha looks pretty much identical to ancestral type when it comes to viral loads and clearance.
I've really enjoyed and appreciated Pueyo's writings. In particular, I think "The Hammer and the Dance" was groundbreaking and we could still learn the lessons from it. But I think this one is a miss: it could present real insight, but instead mostly propagates conventional thinking.
There's a really interesting science communication aspect to delta: it's basically a proxy for the (very true) statement, "the virus is still dangerous." In fact, one prominent evolutionary biologist accused the NYT op-ed of verging on "delta denialism". Accurately communicating reality in a way that is useful to people is fantastically hard, and we just don't have an ecosystem for it. I think this is the reason I've become addicted to TWiV and other similar highbrow sources - I hate being fed partial information and feel compelled to learn more.
[777]: https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-777/
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/opinion/covid-vaccine-var...
[3]: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/14149092626571141...
And your [3] source explicitly warns against using their findings to compare infectiousness.
> I don't believe 'infectiousness" is necessarily the ideal term here. B.1.1.7 (Alpha) could be intrinsically more 'infectious' than previous 'non-variant' lineages in circulation (e.g. higher risk of initiating an infection with the same infectious dose of virions). 4/
"there is no significant difference between B.1.1.7 and non-B.1.1.7 viruses in total infectiousness predicted by our model"
But "predicted by our model" is doing considerable work here, as the model doesn't take into account potential differences in what happens after someone is exposed to the virus, only what's measured in the study (viral shedding dynamics). So I think the critique of Prof Balloux is worth heeding: it would be a leap to conclude that alpha is definitely not more "infectious" than ancestral type when you take into account the broader meaning of "infectious." Even so, to my mind that places even more burden on demonstrating a biological mechanism.
It also refutes a major claim in TFA and calls into question the methodology used to support that claim: "In China, they estimated the viral load of Delta to be 1,000 times higher than that of the original variant." But when you look at viral load specifically, as is done in the Ke et al paper, you find no difference at all. A few things could be going wrong here, but my money would be on some problem in how that 1000 factor was "estimated."
If you don't understand my summary of the first point, then read the source the article cited for the claim that delta is 60% more transmissible:
https://khub.net/documents/135939561/405676950/Increased+Hou...
Vaccine output could be increased tenfold or more for less effort then it would take to increase medical facilities by only a few percentage points. It's a comparison like getting a second TV for seeing more frames per second vs trying to do the same by commissioning more oil paintings (from a really bad painter)
Quite frankly, I don't care if anti-vaxers get COVID (there is some nuance to this, but basically true).
There is only 1 large group in the US that is banned entirely getting a vaccine, and that is children. We need to find a way to un-ban this thing now. Vaccines are safe & effective.
Just let doctors and parents make their own decisions about giving children vaccines. I have 3 children, 6, 5, and 2. Covid is about half as dangerous as drowning for them. Sure, that isn't a ton, and not as much as the elderly, but I worry about them drowning! I would give all of them a smaller dose right now without hesitation. But I can't have that option, because the government has banned it.
We keep making the same mistake. "Lets ban vaccines for a long time, run tests, and let people die so that people have confidence in the vaccines." Then, here we are, with like half the country turned anti-vaxer. Banning vaccines is a complete and utter disaster from a policy perspective.
What else do they have to do?
Vaccination has been the answer all along. You may still get symptomatic COVID but the likelihood of it putting you in the hospital, or worse, is greatly diminished.
The biggest issues in developed countries who have been able to vaccinate everyone willing to get vaccinated are:
1) People choosing not to get vaccinated 2) Children, who either can't get vaccinated, or parents are unsure if it's a good idea
#1 seems simple -- lockdown post-vaccine was pretty much a non-starter most places and there isn't much evidence with this Delta variant that this was a wrong decision. Those at-risk who can't get vaccinated need to isolate. Those who can get vaccinated and choose not to are accepting the risk. With the vaccine still protecting at 90%+, I don't even see the anti-vax folks causing much external effect outside of their population.
#2 is trickier. Vaccinating children feels much riskier to me and I've not decided if my own kids should get the shots or not. Given that COVID has shown to be minimally impactful for children compared to adults as well as compared to other viruses children commonly get, it seems mostly unnecessary. However, if Delta proves to be more dangerous for kids, those who feel vaccines are fine for adults but are doubtful for kids, will really need to rethink things.
>greediness
You cal that greediness, I call it markets functioning well /s
I have no problem getting vaccinated and paying for n95 masks for old and obese people.
But COVID reminds me of post 9-11 terrorist fears. Statistically insignificant and gets people glued to TVs. Instead of the military industrial complex winning tax dollars, big pharma wins tax dollars.
I just want a science based approach to these pandemics, instead we got hysteria.
It's a way to feel important and make money. Exposure, likes, quotes, clicks. People love audience.
Kudos to scientists/science presenters who keep their cool and present a balanced view of COVID-related information despite the widespread censorship and hit pieces. I can recommend dr. Mobeen Syed's YT channel, he's bringing in interesting guests (often doctors) where they discuss all new knowledge on COVID treatments, vaccines etc.
If they can't comply with those orders, it wouldn't help if the rest of the population complied either.
Oh simple. They actually understand math.
Meditation is great for Anxiety.
And nobody talks about the natural immunity aspect either. Even if it just blunts the severity of the symptoms, places like florida probably have had ~30% of their population infected. I'm going to guess the "bad" people who didn't wear masks, got infected, are mostly part of the non-vaccinated percentage of the population. They could be added to any vaccine percentages from a pandemic response perspective (with downsides of being less accurate count, presumably less consistent immune response ect...).
If it's that much more infectious than other variants, where was it til now?
Since most countries limit travel, it'll take longer to get around
In Mexico (where I live) we had the first Delta cases a couple of months ago. It is now the main variant and comprises 90% of sequenced samples (although Mexico doesn't sequence enough samples).
Here are the per country ratios of different VOC/VOI: https://covariants.org/per-country
It took a while until it became dominant in India, and then a similar pattern repeats in each new country.
(Or which kind of media you consume to come to that conclusion)
If the virus truly had a massively larger R0 value, as is asserted in TFA, then you'd expect it to catch fire extremely quickly as soon as it starts showing up, and everywhere it is found. Ron Fouchier (see TWiV 777 as cited elsethread) certainly believes that these huge R0 values are not plausible, and that antigenic drift fits the observable facts better.
My understanding is that the COVID vaccines train the body to recognize the outer protein layer of the virus. In consequence when that changes (because of mutations and natural selection) the body becomes less effective at recognizing the virus.
Geert Vanden Bossche[1] has been warning about this for months now. He says it's possible at some point a new variant will come out that makes current vaccines completely ineffective.
> The earliest documented COVID-19 case caused by the delta variant (B.1.617.2) was found in the Indian state of Maharashtra back in October 2020
It doesn't seem that blaming this variant on vaccines makes much sense.
Is my understanding correct? Can anybody point out where I'm wrong?
The issue is selective pressure. Yes, the virus will mutate. But under an mRNA vaccine, only the spike protein needs to mutate for the vaccine to be render useless. In other words: mutating the spike protein will give the virus access to very broad unimmunized population.
Up to that it makes perfect sense to me and my limited evolutionary knowledge. I can't tell wether is right or wrong. But it makes sense.
He goes further saying that antibodies from vaccines are more affine to the virus, even with mutated spike protein, this compromises the natural immune system, given it will try to fight off infection with useless vaccine-learnt antibodies rather than with natural antibodies. This will make the virus more deadly.
This seems off to me. I can't see the logic, but I will be happy to be corrected. How can something be ignored by the virus and be more affine to it?
Again, he says that all these issues are solved with his vaccine, once he finishes it.
> Up to that it makes perfect sense to me and my limited evolutionary knowledge. I can't tell wether is right or wrong. But it makes sense.
The issue with this is that the spike protein has to mutate enough for vaccine induced immunity to fail to recognize it, but the spike protein is critical for the virus actually entering and infecting cells, and therefore there isn't a whole lot of mutating it can do while remaining functional.
On the other hand, there is some evidence that vaccines targeting more than just the spike protein (as well as natural immunity) may potentially be more at risk for the "antigenic sin" trap, in which the immune system fails to respond to mutated versions of a virus as well as it does to the original version it encountered.
Leaky vaccines do change evolutionary pressure and increase the likelihood of escape variants.
For a case study in the worst case outcomes of leaky vaccines, see Marek's disease [1].
It seems like the mRNA vaccines are at least partially leaky, so there have been concerns raised and alarms sounded by researchers.
If the argument is "we should build up a big inventory of vaccines and infrastructure to deploy them to the population in a very short timespan" then I see some logic to that but it's not at all obvious that the math works out.
If worldwide vaccination rates were very high, it would drive viral transmission down to negligible levels and effectively slow the rate of evolution by decreasing the viral population size to something very small.
If there were no vaccine, we'd be back where we were, but there would be no vaccine to evolve against as a selection pressure.
When you have, say, 50% vaccination, you have a sizable population to evolve in, and the vaccine as a pressure selecting random mutations.
If the vaccine is very effective in preventing asymptomatic transmission as well as symptomatic infection, it might not be such an issue. This might be why the delta variant seems to not be doing much in vaccinated individuals. But it seems vaccinated individuals do still transmit the virus asymptomatically at some nonnegligble rate, and then you have a sizable nonvaccinated population.
What I'm worried about now isn't so much the current state of the delta variant, it's where things are headed. Specifically, how this evolves in (1) the unvaccinated populations, and (2) what the future might hold for vaccine resistance in the future.
It's one reason I'm sort of angry with the FDA for playing this power game about approving a booster vaccine. It's not their job to evaluate the need for the booster, it's their job to evaluate the safety and efficacy of it. By the time they change their minds about need, it might be too late.
How is this any different from natural immunity? The immunity conferred by vaccines won't put any more selective pressure for escape mutations than natural immunity would. And the only alternative here is for no one to get vaccinated, and therefore letting the virus run rampant through the population indefinitely. You aren't wrong about a sizeable portion of the population not being immunized quick enough may possibly result in escape mutations. But the only possible alternative fixes none of those issues, while also leaving the entirety of the public at risk.
Let's say I tell you to look for a suspect. You say "ok, what do they look like?" In one case, I show you a picture of their face. In another case, I introduce you to them and let you inspect them completely and take whatever photos or do whatever 3d scanning you want. It's probably easier for the suspect to develop a disguise in the former case than the latter? Maybe not, but I think that's the general idea.
It is interesting to think about resistance evolution in the context of the specific vaccines that are available vs natural immunity. I seem to recall reading that the choice of viral components to target in the vaccines was done in part so as to leave little wiggle room for mutations, so you might be right about evolution of resistance relative to natural exposure. But theory and reality are always different.
FWIW, I'm not trying to imply people shouldn't get vaccinated, or that vaccines are somehow causing problems. There's just reasons to think that if vaccination rates aren't high enough, it's easier for the vaccines to become ineffective over time than if almost everyone were vaccinated.
1. The same selective pressure exists for natural immunity 2. The implication is that we shouldn't get vaccines, because we may get variants that get around our vaccines. This is like asking the fire department not to put our a raging house fire because it might cause water damage to the home.
Its also worth noting that none of the major variants observed so far came about after vaccines began being used on the population at large, and the above point about selective pressure at vaccine immunity is only an issue when large swaths of people aren't getting vaccinated, allowing the virus a large number of "shots on goal" to mutate in a way that eventually provides escape capabilities.
There is absolutely no logic to these arguments about vaccines causing mutations.
It's worth noting that Delta appears to have emerged in India when and where there was very little vaccination - on the other hand there were a truck load of infections. This is how mutations happen; many cases occur... a mutation may appear and if we are unlucky it may spread. The key part for me is the "many cases occur" part - if the pandemic is brought undercontrol in the sense of few cases happening then there will be less mutations.
2x of what ?
2x of low risk is still a low risk.
The IFR (Infected Fatality Rate4) for the original variant was about 0.01% for those in their 20s and 0.2% for those in their 40s.
Direct link to the chart https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...
Thanks, so 2x of that is 0.02% and 0.4%, that was my point: 2x of a low rate is still low
The risk is low but not even healthy 20 year olds should disregard a 2/10000 risk of preventable death.
> At least 30.7% of deaths in India can be attributed to air pollution from fossil fuels--that means about 2.5 million people die every year after breathing toxic air.9
I mean who cares, all I know is how many Covid deaths they are having, probably Indian people themselves are much more aware of Covid than Air pollution. Why? Mostly because Covid is still new and pollution is old and boring.
"There's nothing I can do about it" is what many might say.
Why should we do nothing about Covid given that so much was done in car accidents?
Back to your original post:
> They aren't even in the same realm of concern for public health.
They are depending how much a virus spreads. You're relying on an implied "exponential = huge and scary" to give your argument weight. Can you say how pervasive the spread of the delta variant will be?