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Comment by KingMachiavelli | Hacker News Reader

Why? Probably because everyone and their uncle self-diagnosed a bad cold as COVID-19 and plenty more would lie about having natural immunity.

Still I don't understand the current approach to COVID in the US. Vaccines are safe and available yet we only just approved the use in children under 12. I have heard second hand many doctors are downplaying the importance of the vaccine for people under 18.

On the other hand places with good vaccination rates are reimposing lockdowns and mask mandates. Quite a few public events are getting canceled or rescheduled.

By any metric the COVID response of lockdowns, etc. was at best breakeven in terms of cost effectiveness. Since the risk of COVID is lower now both due to the vaccine and also just our knowledge of treatment, any lockdown/mandate response will have a lower cost effectiveness.

IMO it would make a lot more sense to just keep vaccines available for everyone older than 2 including boosters every 6 months (just in case) and end all other restrictions. Sure there is a small population that would get vaccinated but genuinely can not due to a medical issue but that scenario is no different than the seasonal flu and other viruses.

It would be better to just do a vaccine/verified immunity passport like program but that is practically impossible in the US. Too many people won't like/use the governments app including both the normal conspiracy nuts but also the privacy-minded HN crowd. It also does not help that there are half a dozen passport like apps from insurance companies and various government agencies.

View on HN

> Why? Probably because everyone and their uncle self-diagnosed a bad cold as COVID-19 and plenty more would lie about having natural immunity.

Serology is a thing, as are records of positive test results. Also, in many cases, "proof of vaccination" includes a cell phone photo of the piece of paper they handed out when you got a vaccine, so as it stands, lying is pretty easy.

> Vaccines are safe and available yet we only just approved the use in children under 12.

We don't know they are safe for children under 12. Pediatrics is a profession precisely because "children are not just small adults". Something that is safe for adults isn't automatically safe for children.

I'd lean towards "probably not safe"; we only just found that teenage boys are at 6x more risk from heart problems from the vaccine than any risk from covid itself:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/09/teenage-boys-ris...

https://archive.is/ixG5G

Woah, that's super intense. Wow. I think i will still vaccinate my 12 year old boy because he wants to get the shot and these numbers are still low, but yeah, now i want more info. Thank you.

Regardless of where we end up with respect to vaccination of children for COVID-19, I hope we can all agree that the child's opinion is irrelevant, given that they are not equipped to make an informed decision.

Neither can we expect an average adult to be able to make an informed decision on a topic like this. But if he really wants it, and the shot is optional, why do you believe that should be irrelevant to my decision?

The child's opinion certainly isn't irrelevant, especially if they are a child with special needs who can find the process of getting a vaccine very traumatic.

That one study found a 1 in 5000 risk.

The background here is that hospitalization from covid increases dramatically with age. Teenagers are at low risk of hospitalization from covid themselves, but I expect that vaccination would still reduce the risk of teenagers transmitting the virus to others.

> Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised[sic] from Covid-19

there is a large range of poor outcomes that are not "hospitalized" if they get covid. they are susceptible to getting long covid and also to bring it home and potentially infect their parents unknowingly. just because one risk is higher doesn't mean the sum of the other risks suddenly don't matter.

The vaccines only reduce risk of long COVID symptoms by about 50% on average:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

only?

That is a misleading headline. Most of these reported cases of myocarditis are mild and did not require hospitalization, so it's kind of an apples to oranges comparison.

> Most of these reported cases of myocarditis are mild and did not require hospitalization

As are the vast majority of COVID cases in young boys and girls.

If you want to say COVID and myocarditis are equally bad, you should compare the rates of both of them. You are saying myocarditis (often mild) should be compared to COVID (but only the cases that require hospitalization.)

By that logic, my investment strategy of invest in index funds (goes up over time) is inferior to yours of invest in lottery tickets (but we only consider tickets that won.)

So wouldn't the correct comparison be comparing hospitalizations due to CAE to hospitalizations due to covid?

Another important thing to ask is the risk of myocarditis due to covid, vs the risk of myocarditis due to the vaccine.

Non-paywalled article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/boys-more-at-r...

Link to (as yet not peer-reviewed) study: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...

> Researchers found that the risk of heart complications for boys aged 12-15 following the vaccine was 162.2 per million, which was the highest out of all the groups they looked at.

> Meanwhile, the risk of a healthy boy needing hospital treatment owing to Covid-19 in the next 120 days is 26.7 per million. This means the risk they face from heart complications is 6.1 times higher than that of hospitalisation.

It would seem more "apples to apples" to compare rates of hospitalization due to myo/pericarditis to hospitalization due to COVID, or rates of diagnosis of each condition.

The only case of vaccine-associated "heart problems" that I've seen required an NSAID with no further treatment. Unfortunate regardless.

> The only case of vaccine-associated "heart problems" that I've seen required an NSAID with no further treatment.

Do we want to see it? I've just found out about the this boy, who died in April:

https://twitter.com/rgvrunner01

How did I find out about it? It's trending on Twitter because the father was on Alex Jones.

I've looked at the VAERS reports of 16-year-old males that died in 2021. There are four cases (one suicide), none match this one. While it's likely that the boy died due to a pre-existing condition, his case should still show up on VAERS (even suicides are included).

The takeaway is that if you hear about something like this, it's not mainstream media. Nobody wants to "harm" the vaccination campaign. Unfortunately, suppressing such cases further erodes trust in media/authorities, which has the opposite of the intended effect. Also, VAERS data appears to be incomplete, rendering risk estimates unreliable.

> we only just found that teenage boys are at 6x more risk from heart problems from the vaccine than any risk from covid itself:

That's not what the study says. They compared all reports of possible cardiac events in the days following vaccination, including suspected transient myocarditis, to only one risk of COVID: Hospitalization. Notably, they didn't look at post-COVID myocarditis, just post-vaccine myocarditis.

This is the conclusion from the study:

> Post-vaccination CAE rate was highest in young boys aged 12-15 following dose two. For boys 12-17 without medical comorbidities, the likelihood of post vaccination dose two CAE is 162.2 and 94.0/million respectively. This incidence exceeds their expected 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization rate at both moderate (August 21, 2021 rates) and high COVID-19 hospitalization incidence.

Full text: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v... )

They're comparing apples and oranges. It would have made more sense to compare post-vaccine CAEs to post-COVID CAEs, but instead they chose to compare CAEs against COVID hospitalizations, which is a number known to be very low in teenagers.

It stands to reason that the number of CAEs in a COVID infection would be a subset of hospitalizations. If anything, this would make the vaccines look even worse.

> It stands to reason that the number of CAEs in a COVID infection would be a subset of hospitalizations.

No, the CAEs in the vaccine study included a lot of transient issues that didn't require hospitalization. Most cases of myocarditis resolve on their own relatively quickly.

Myocarditis is common after COVID infections, too. They're just less likely to be explicitly noted because everything gets chalked up to COVID and the patient is already resting anyway, which is the primary treatment for myocarditis. It's not clear why the authors didn't try to compare against that.

In addition to being somewhat misleading as other commenters hawe pointed out, the first author of this non-peer-reviewed study appears to have a degree in the questionably relevant field of sports medicine.

> Serology is a thing, as are records of positive test results.

Serology is a thing, sure. But two points:

Getting a serum test rather than getting the vaccine is not going to be cheaper, easier, or better studied. We are not constrained on vaccine supply. So the practical advantage of allowing a totally different pathway is not obvious.

Creating another pathway adds a lot of cognitive load and confusion. The bar bouncer checking vaccination status at the door is not likely to know anything about serology. The same goes for people eager not to get Covid and the people eager not to accidentally kill grandma. Every bit of complexity is met with complaints and confusion; every change in regulation makes it harder for people to know what to do and therefore less likely to do it.

In some future pandemic might we want to create a two-pathway system? E.g., such that there's a government-issued "safe to mingle" digital passport? Sure. That seems like a great thing to start preparing now so it's ready the next time a disease hops the species barrier. For now, though, I think we should stick with the current plan: vaccination for (almost) everybody.

Cognitive load does not justify imposing potentially involuntary medical treatments on people, particularly not onto people for whom the benefit is likely of very little marginal value.

The cognitive load could be built into the "vaccine card" anyway - I have a driver's license with a couple of extra checkboxes showing that I need corrective lenses and am authorized to drive a motorcycle, but most people need only be concerned that the card itself exists.

> Cognitive load does not justify imposing potentially involuntary medical treatments on people,

FYI: The current legislation requires weekly testing or proof of vaccination, but it doesn't actually impose the vaccine on anyone who doesn't want it.

Which employers are taking as a green flag to terminate those who don’t get it. Maybe legally wrong, maybe they get compensated in a few years.

Yep my employer has said they will terminate the unvaccinated (limited medical and religious exceptions excluded).

Which is a move the mostly vaccinated are fine with, because we're really done with the idiocy.

Fuck off and die somewhere else, seems to be the general sentiment of people I know.

That doesn't sound insane at all. Where can I sign up for Team Psychopath? I need to hurry as I'm told patience is wearing thin.

It is my understanding that the latest executive orders do require vaccination of US federal employees and contractors; other employers may offer weekly testing as an alternative. So I believe that, if you are a federal employee or contractor, you do in fact have to choose between getting vaccinated or keeping your job. (Or do you consider allowing people to choose to quit rather than get vaccinated sufficient flexibility to not be an "imposition"?)

Cognitive load is the mediating resource. It doesn't on its own justify it, yes. The justification comes from saving lives in a global pandemic. As you can see here and elsewhere, people complain endlessly about shifting recommendations; they reduce trust. That's a very strong incentive to pick an approach and stick with it until the benefit of changing things again becomes very large.

And yes, I agree that next time we do this, we should build it into the card. And better, that card should be digital, so that it can adapt as science discovers more as the pandemic goes on. But what we had was a vaccine, slips of paper, and a lot of questions.

In my experience talking with people, trust is reduced a lot more when politicians and the media fixate on a vaccine and largely ignore natural immunity. A lot of people are perceiving this as authoritarian and punitive (governments want to compel citizens to receive an unnecessary injection) which burns a lot more trust than "good news! we've learned that natural immunity is sufficient to earn privileges that were previously reserved for the vaccinated!".

> Cognitive load is the mediating resource. It doesn't on its own justify it, yes. The justification comes from saving lives in a global pandemic

I specifically don't see how your hypothesis works: "if we allow for natural immunity, it will confuse people and some of them will die". Presumably the failure mode is that some of the "bouncers" of society are too dumb to understand "vaccine OR natural immunity" and will thus reject more people than necessary (either the vaccinated or the naturally immune) and thus our risk of spread will be slightly reduced at the expense of our liberties. In any case, I have a hard time imagining large failure rates here, and the risk associated with any given error is very small (a given failure doesn't significantly increase anyone's risk of serious illness or death).

> Cognitive load does not justify imposing potentially involuntary medical treatments on people, particularly not onto people for whom the benefit is likely of very little marginal value.

No, this is just not correct. Compulsory vaccination has been a thing for hundreds of years.

Nobody has a full system of vaccination status cards and databases. There are just too many people who will avoid vaccination at the slightest excuse. We're in a war and every day of delay costs thousands, or tens of thousands of lives.

We need simple rules that we can apply on a massive scale quickly. The US is a country where more than half of people can't work out if a 1/3 pound burger is bigger or smaller than a 1/4 pound burger.

No one said anything about multiple cards, nor about any databases whatsoever.

Single-mindedness is not a rationale for imposing medical treatment on people.

I'll circle back to my driver's license analogy - the bouncer does not need to know that I was docked 3 points from my driving test for failing to signal - he only needs to know that some granting authority, with expertise in the realm being licensed, granted me the license. (or that I'm old enough to enter the bar, etc.)

'Mandatory medical treatment' sounds like a big deal, but the tragedy of the commons happens with every vaccine. No one benefits much from their own vaccination, we all benefit must from others'. Which is why vaccinations almost always have a requirement, or they don't work (cf flu, cf hpv).

When 1500 Americans are dying every day of a preventable disease, it is absolutely reasonable to take feasibility of enforcement into account. And enforcement has to be done where the greatest risk of spreading occurs. People might not like getting carded at a restaurant, but there is a point where lots of people are dying and it makes sense, right? We card for alcohol, we card for driving, and those we do every day.

I would think someone who tested positive should be able to get a ca state qr code. It seems the science supports that. Having each validator check that the test is the right test, and the doctor and hospital exist, seems not feasible, but getting a state qr code - then using that at the point of enforcement - seems practical.

I largely agree with most everything that you said, regarding enforcement pragmatism and the like.

But I must remind that, at least in this particular conversation, we're talking about people who've just had the illness in question. We don't know how many of the 1,500/day are people who have previously contracted the illness or else contracted the illness from someone else who previously caught the illness, but in all likelihood the proportion of such cases is likely very low. So referencing the 1,500/day likely has very little relevance to a discussion of natural immunity.

> Getting a serum test rather than getting the vaccine is not going to be cheaper, easier, or better studied.

The difference is that the serum test is risk free. If I knew I was already immune, I would not have gotten the vaccine to be completely honest, no matter how small the risk is. For the same reason I don't get other safe and effective treatments for diseases I do not have.

The effects of the test, sure, because that's just a blood draw. The downstream impact to disease and transmission risk, definitely not.

> The downstream impact to disease and transmission risk, definitely not.

In what way?

It will definitely not be better studied because it the focus and the funding is on how well vaccination works. Vaccines have a revenue model; natural immunity doesn't.

Not sure what you mean, if the test determines I have immunity similar to what a vaccine provides and knowing that I choose not to get it, what are the downstream impacts?

I think the parent is saying "we don't know that natural immunity affords the same protection as vaccination", but I believe he's mistaken.

I see, I guess I don't know either way, seems like something that isn't particularly difficult to study though so I'd be surprised if it wasn't known at this point.

I'm sure it's quite difficult to study, but no less so than studying the vaccine. I'd be surprised if we didn't already know at least as much about natural immunity, but whether the media are effectively communicating that information is another question.

Isn't the science showing that we do know the downstream impact to disease and transmission risk is preferable in the case of natural immunity?

You are making all those strange excuses to force people to get vaccinated. Some people don’t want to for whatever reasons, if they want to get positive test results, that’s their choice. Stop using twisted logic and marginal cases to make up arguments to satisfy your authoritarian desire.

The people who would be confused by two pathways are already confused. It would not increase confusion. You have a vaccination card or you have a positive test card.

Right now there are already at least two pathways. You have a vaccination card or a negative test card within an allowable date range.

The bigger issues are privacy, etc. Not, "Oh no, there are two options! I'm so confused."

If the bar bouncer can see a card that says you have been vaccinated then they can see a card that says you have covid antibodies or that you have had a positive covid test at some point in the past. I don't think this is too burdensome for our hypothetical bouncer.

Do some people simply photoshop their names onto the cards and show them on their phones ? Is it really such a dumb system?

You probably don't even need to photoshop your name on the card. In most scenarios you could take a small and slightly blurry photo of anyone's card, bring it up on your phone to show someone, and they'll shrug and accept it as evidence that you're vaccinated.

They usually ask for your ID to match the info on the card

I asked and they may have a city agent scanning cards — then you simply stand in line behind someone and see whether or not they are scanning it versus just visually inspecting. If the latter — you are good to go

That doesn't strike me as particularly dumb. It's pretty easy to print out a fake driver's license (or use someone else's) that's going to work fine getting into most bars, and the risks of getting into legal trouble for attempting to use a fake ID to buy alcohol are probably pretty similar to the risks of using a fake vaccine card, and yet most people don't argue that that system is a dumb way to enforce the drinking age (ignoring whether the drinking age itself is a reasonable policy).

For decades, we gave young children aspirin, before eventually connecting it to Reye syndrome. Indeed, children are not just small adults.

there was a fitness instructor in colorado that didn't get the vaccine because he had tested and had antibodies in his blood. then he got covid again(or maybe the first time?) and it just absolutely decimated his body. he lost 70 lbs and is walking around with an oxygen bottle. the only real way to make sure you have proper antibodies and B and T cell responses is to have either gotten a symptomatic case of covid that lasted a while or getting the vaccine.(yes that's also not foolproof wrt antibodies/t/b response but it's a generally good method)

Bill Phillips, author of Body For Life and founder of EAS supplements before selling it to Abbott.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article253708748.htm... (Unvaccinated fitness guru gets COVID and spends 47 days intubated. ‘I made a mistake’)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Phillips_(author)

yeah that guy is the one I was talking about. The virus is like playing russian roulette without a vaccine in you.

> The virus is like playing russian roulette without a vaccine in you.

Some people love to gamble.

There exist people who are risk averse, risk neutral, or risk loving (in an economic or psychologic sense): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion

That's cool - you can also love playing Russian Roulette itself - that doesn't mean we have to make it legal for you to actually do that.

If the worst thing a vaccine mandate is doing is preventing you from getting your jollies from being an idiot I see no problem with enforcing a mandate.

Russian Roulette has 1-6 odds, COVID is much closer to 1-6000 than it is to 1-6.

You may be surprised to hear this - but it's actually the case that fewer people died this year to Russian Roulette than to COVID - and a lot of those people didn't volunteer to spin the wheel. I don't think the specifics about proportional chance of loss are particularly relevant.

You may be surprised to hear this - but you need to normalize for frequency to make a meaningful comparison.

He has likely done major damage to his body through the use of steroids. He was a professional bodybuilder who admitted to using. This is definitely not a good anecdote.

You can't learn much from a sample size of 1. In particular, there are people who have been vaccinated who have also died of COVID. The question is whether or not natural immunity affords comparable (or better) protection to the virus than the vaccine, and it seems that the data are indicating that it does. This should be a good thing--instead of being angry that it takes away our justification to force others to do something, we should be happy at the prospect of combatting covid without having to force people to do anything.

If we're using anecdotes... how about the fully vaccinated guy that didn't have antibodies? Seems like issues can exist on both sides.

Not the specific guy, but... https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/half-people-did-had-no-11063...

> Also, in many cases, "proof of vaccination" includes a cell phone photo of the piece of paper they handed out when you got a vaccine, so as it stands, lying is pretty easy.

One critical difference is that there will be legal consequences if you're using a fake proof of vaccination.

That makes absolutely no sense, why would the same penalties not apply for lying about natural immunity?

Because we don't have a good legal definition of "natural immunity"? Compared to that, vaccination status is official record which is subject to forgery law and its effectiveness has been well studied against most COVID variants.

Note that it is pretty tricky to define natural immunity in a legal way since there is no good scientific consensus on the correlation between some proxy of natural immunity (e.g. antibody level) and its effectiveness against infection/transmission.

Yep, crazy that this is the top comment when clearly we already know that none of the studies for kids are completed. Is it likely to be safe? Yes. But we still need to go through the proper process to ensure confidence in the vaccine.

> We don't know they are safe for children under 12. Pediatrics is a profession precisely because "children are not just small adults". Something that is safe for adults isn't automatically safe for children.

True, and the obvious example is that kids don't die of covid, or so little that it is hard to make statistics. For just that reason, vaccines have to be incredibly safe (basically zero risk) for the risk/benefit to be acceptable.

If it wasn't for the risk of transmission to adults there would be no reason for vaccinating kids.

>I have heard second hand many doctors are downplaying the importance of the vaccine for people under 18

The vaccine is not important for people under 18.

Only 412 people age 17 or younger in the US have died from covid. [0]

Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19. [1]

[0] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/09/teenage-boys-ris...

I'm not sure why death is the only thing we're trying to avoid. Currently, children's ICUs in Oklahoma are full in part due to the number of Covid patients. I'd rather my child not end up in the hospital, much less be turned away from one in a time of need.

Then you should be concerned about the considerable risk they will end up there due to heart inflammation (in the case of male children).

Edit: I'm not going to respond to every comment below that points out that it's extremely rare, other than to ask that you compare that chance to the chance of hospitalization due to covid, which according to the link above is less likely.

Source for “considerable risk” needed.

It’s still considered extremely rare post vaccination.

The sources are literally three comments up! And the point is that the risk is higher than the risk from COVID!

“ Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19.”

This is comparing rates of myocarditis vs rates of hospitalization, which is two different things.

We would need to see rates of myocarditis due to vaccination vs rates of myocarditis due to natural infection.

Plus that's comparing one risk of the vaccine to one risk of the virus. You need a holistic comparison. COVID messes you up in lots of other ways too, ways in which the vaccine does not.

I'm curious how, in your mind, myocarditis is being diagnosed and reported in children if not at the hospital?

Heart inflammation is not typical in children or adolescents. This is not based on self-reporting.

Are you aware that UK regulators have not approved the vaccine for 12-15 year-olds (or any children younger), based on this risk, specifically?

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58438669

“Myocarditis (or pericarditis or myopericarditis) from primary COVID19 infection occurred at a rate as high as 450 per million in young males. Young males infected with the virus are up 6 times more likely to develop myocarditis as those who have received the vaccine.” [0]

So there’s a preprint stating that COVID-19 causes myocarditis at a higher rate than via vaccination. So it’s not quite clear to me whether or not, if looking at it from a risk of myocarditis, that not getting vaccinated is the better choice.

And according to the JCVI, it still is marginally beneficial to get vaccinated over not getting vaccinated. So it’s not like they are advising that natural infection is safer than vaccination.

“For otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year old children, their risk of severe COVID-19 disease is small and therefore the potential for benefit from COVID-19 vaccination is also small. The JCVI’s view is that overall, the health benefits from COVID-19 vaccination to healthy children aged 12 to 15 years are marginally greater than the potential harms.” [1]

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-issues-updated-advic...

The part of the JCVI decision you omitted is:

"The medium- to long-term effects are unknown and long-term follow-up is being conducted.

Given the very low risk of serious COVID-19 disease in otherwise healthy 12 to 15 year olds, considerations on the potential harms and benefits of vaccination are very finely balanced and a precautionary approach was agreed." [1]

As a concerned parent, this is how I will be approaching vaccination for my sons.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/jcvi-issues-updated-advic...

The term hospitalization implies an inpatient (or at least observation) stay, as opposed to an outpatient encounter like the emergency department or a clinic. Most diagnoses made in the outpatient setting do not require hospitalization, which could include both COVID and myo/pericarditis.

EDIT: speling

> myocarditis is being diagnosed and reported in children if not at the hospital?

The vast majority of people who visit a doctor are diagnosed with no hospitalization and the recommended course for most myocarditis cases is not hospitalization. If the recommendation were hospitalization then many more infected young males would be hospitalized based on myocarditis diagnosis.

Did you miss the data point that boys are 6x more likely to be affected from the therapy than the illness?

Many of us view that claim with skepticism and prefer that the analysis of this data be left to experts who understand how misleading data can be.

you're deferring thinking to an unnamed mystery expert and then arguing on behalf of that unnamed mystery expert as if you know what they'd say. lol, just lol.

The cdc link provided raw numbers. The telegraph link is a journalist deducing a conclusion. I don’t think any experts provided any conclusive evidence in this thread (which I gather was the point of the comment you replied to)

Anyone can claim to be an expert. Once one comes forward we can evaluate to see if their claims hold up.

In this case experts have pointed out that the analysis is wrong because it doesn't compare mycardius in the control group even through we know covid also causes that. Nor do they consider harm, despite vaccine caused mycardious being mild.

This is a blatant misrepresentation.

Did you miss the point where any death is likely preventable and 400+ in the US is still too many ?

That "data point" is that that group is 6x more likely to be affected by myocarditis after receiving a vaccine than to be hospitalized due to COVID. I would like to see an actually useful comparison, like, say, the likelihood of being affected by myocarditis after receiving a vaccine versus the likelihood of being affected by myocarditis after a COVID infection.

Myocarditis, in this circumstance, were cases reported in VAERS, which isn't a mild or asymptomatic condition -- it usually means hospitalization. Furthermore, the researchers who have been analyzing the rates are going back to the VAERS records and actually looking at the case data.

These are severe enough cases to require medical attention.

What is the baseline utilization of ICU space? I’m also curious what happened to those heroic efforts of retrofitting parking garages into field-expedient hospitals. Oh, and the notorious “gunshot victims are being left to die because of all the covid, bros!” misinformation that respectable journalists printed without any effort to check the facts.

>that respectable journalists printed without any effort to check the facts.

Journalists from the same publication (Rolling Stone) were responsible for the whole fabricated "A Rape On Campus" article as well. I would not give them the respectable journalist moniker anymore except in jest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus

Kids can also be carriers, and more spread among a partially resistant population means more mutation and more variants. Vaccines are in the process of being approved for all ages.

Vaccinated individuals can also carry it. It does not stop spread or contraction. These Vaccines are just supposed to reduce the extreme Symptoms

Vaccination greatly reduces transmission.

That's incorrect. Vaccinated people are contracting Covid at a bit less than 1/5 the rate of the unvaccinated. See for example

https://covid19.sccgov.org/dashboard-case-rates-vaccination-...

I think it is very likely that vaccinated people are contracting COVID-19 less than unvaccinated people, but because most testing is done on symptomatic people, and the vaccine is known to reduce symptoms, the sampling bias is likely overstating the effect.

No they are not. They are supposed to allow the immune system to react more quickly after infection (essentially immediately if you have antibodies).

Kill pathogens more quickly, you'll be infectious for less time, and whoever do you infect will have a lower viral load.

Stop? No. Reduce? Yes.

"A growing body of evidence indicates that people fully vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna) are less likely than unvaccinated persons to acquire SARS-CoV-2 or to transmit it to others."

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

Vaccinations reduce your chance of getting infected and reduce the average duration of the infection. The combination of these two factors thus reduce the R value of covid in vaccinated populations when compared to unvaccinated populations with identical network topologies and behaviors.

> Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19.

What use is it to compare two different things? Those heart problems aren't all hospitalizations. Teenage boys who get COVID-19 are more likely to have heart problems than teenage boys who get vaccinated. Teenage boys who get COVID-19 are more likely to be hospitalized than teenage boys who get vaccinated. Many young men have died of COVID-19, and none have died of the vaccine.

> Only 412 people age 17 or younger in the US have died from covid. [0]

More than twice as many died in August as in July or as in August of last year. With Delta and school in session, expect this number to go up for September.

This is comparing myocarditis to hospitalizations.

Where is the comparison between myocarditis induced by vaccination vs natural infection?

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...

This is out of date and incorrect. The latest data shows that the risk of myocarditis in children after two doses vastly exceeds the risk of myocarditis posed by the virus:

https://twitter.com/ID_ethics/status/1437876328640876544

Better breakdowns by age and gender show a risk of myocarditis after two doses as high as 1 in 3000:

https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1437067899089219589

This number has been steadily increasing, as time passes. Current consensus seems to be that one dose is the optimal tradeoff between risk and reward for young children.

That report doesn’t appear to talk about case rates of myocarditis due to COVID at all. It compares COVID hospitalization rates to vaccine-related myocarditis case rates. Is it your assumption that all myocarditis cases are as serious as a COVID hospitalization?

Covid hospitalizations are a superset of myocarditis cases. If you broke out Covid-induced myocarditis, the comparison would be even more lop-sided against the vaccines.

> Is it your assumption that all myocarditis cases are as serious as a COVID hospitalization?

Yes. It is not an assumption. Myocarditis is not a mild condition, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

Hmm. https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccin...

> With or without treatment, the "clinical course appears mild"

> Patients commonly received NSAIDs, steroids, and colchicine for treatment of vaccine-associated myocarditis.

These are.. not comparable to typical COVID hospitalization outcomes, are they?

In children? Yes.

The (very) few kids who end up hospitalized for Covid have serious co-morbidities that are easy to pre-screen (e.g. severe obesity). For these children, a full vaccination is recommended. Nobody is arguing about that. For healthy kids, it's very different.

It's great that most kids with myocarditis don't end up in the ICU, but being put in the hospital to get hooked up to an IV and an MRI scan is not a good outcome for an otherwise healthy kid who would would have -- at most -- a head cold from SARS-CoV2.

Even if we accept this reasoning (It’s not clear to me that the myocarditis cases are more than ‘call your doc, rest up and take ibuprofen’, and I believe that applies to cases among non-hospitalized COVID patients too), but the last I saw the effective reproduction rate for COVID was >1, so every otherwise healthy kid who gets a ‘head cold’ is also going to pass it on to someone else, right?

Within that Twitter thread, there’s an interesting article on science based medicine that goes into this topic in detail.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-does-it-mean-to-be-ant...

Good thing people under 18 are never in contact with people over 18.

> Only 412 people age 17 or younger in the US have died from covid.

How many avoided death because they had good health care?

One of my pet peeves about this pandemic is how death metrics keep being pushed around, as if it was not a big deal.

If this pandemic had hit before we had modern health care facilities, it would have been comparable to the great pandemics in history.

Besides, what happened to the children that didn't die? What sort of issues this could cause that may affect their development? We don't know, so we should play it safe.

> from the vaccine

There isn't just one vaccine. There are several. If one is potentially causing issues, use another.

Also, what about heart problems from Covid-19, even among those not hospitalized?

I can't read your paywalled article, but I've found another link. The 'heart problems' are myocarditis, which in most cases is mild and _resolves_ by itself.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

> How many avoided death because they had good health care?

If you are going play that game, you also need to ask how many died between March - June 2020 because of panicked doctors intubating everyone left and right with no one around to advocate for the patients.

> you also need to ask how many died between March - June 2020 because of panicked doctors intubating everyone left and right with no one around to advocate for the patients.

Not sure what this is implying, or what kind of advocacy would have made a better call. Doctors intubated people (despite a shortage of ventilators and the difficulty of triage) because the patients were struggling to breathe, and given available data the medical profession though it would help those patients recover. They've since learned more about the outcomes from this particular disease and when a ventilator is appropriate. Your comment makes it sound as though any idiot off the street could tell who should be on a ventilator and who should not.

It's nothing to do with them catching it, it's about them spreading it.

The usually bandied figure is 80% immunity to stop the pandemic.

Without the teenagers vaccinated, that's never going to get hit.

Wait until winter hits and the cases spike, then it's suddenly going to become "necessary", but if they'd made that hard decision 3 months ago this would already be over.

How can they know that figure (80%) without knowing % of people with natural immunity? We can guess but there hasn't been much of an effort made to track this.

If you mean anti-bodies, then they've been sampling the population and know the percent of people who've got anti-bodies.

If you mean something else, you're a victim of fake news.

> The usually bandied figure is 80% immunity to stop the pandemic.

That was pre-Delta. The higher the R0, the more mitigation we need to do. The question is what gets RE below zero.

At this point, with Delta's R0 and the vaccine's effectiveness, it looks like mere vaccination without masks is going to be insufficient in large groups (e.g. at a giant concert, a big play). But, since all the precautions have a multiplier, that's fine. It means we can keep doing those things as long as we take precautions while we do it and not assume vaccine = ignore COVID.

Minor correction.

That 412 number is "covid involved", not "covid caused".

This could be that the death was not at all due to covid, but the cadaver tested positive. They were in a car accident, for example.

This could be actually caused by covid primarily.

This could be covid tipped someone over the edge who was already very ill.

EDIT: also hospitalizations for children are rare

https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html

> This could be that the death was not at all due to covid, but the cadaver tested positive. They were in a car accident, for example.

That's not how "covid involved" is defined, no.

Source?

EDIT: please post a url or something.

The CDC documentation for the data they publish.

If you are skeptical and think "COVID involved" according to CDC might mean they could have died of other things but also happened to have COVID, then here is an exercise you should do: First, go to CDC and download all the death data for 2015-2020. Second, import this into your spreadsheet of choice and plot all of these deaths as 6 individual time-series plots with Jan-Dec as the X axis. Third, observe that the curves are nearly identical for 2015-2019, with the exception of a very slightly elevated curve for one of the flu seasons (I think it was the tail end of 2017 / start of 2018). Now observe that the curve for 2020 has several giant bumps in it that precisely correlate with the COVID surges in both size and shape. Calculate the area between that curve and any of the previous years. Now observe that it very, very closely matches the number the CDC is reporting as "covid involved" deaths for 2020.

I did this. This is quite convincing to me that the "COVID involved" deaths are not mis-categorized and they actually are related to COVID unless CDC is straight up fabricating death numbers on a massive scale. The stories about the COVID death categorizations being overstated are pure FUD.

The OP asked about kids specifically. Counterpoint:

> Data from the first 12 months of the pandemic in England shows 25 under-18s died from Covid.

> Around 15 had life-limiting or underlying conditions, including 13 living with complex neuro-disabilities

> Six had no underlying conditions recorded in the last five years - though researchers caution some illnesses may have been missed

Were the children with complex neuro-disabilities pushed over the edge by covid? Quite possibly. Is that a reason for parents of healthy children to worry? Unlikely.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717

Good thing the only thing that matters is death, not any other issue.

Good thing children never transmit viruses to adults.

Good thing reservoirs of disease never allow for novel mutations.

Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare projections in one case to actual results in the other.

Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare one rate in the general population to a rate in an already selected group.

Good thing your source[1] didn't do something fundamentally dishonest like compare self-reported issues to actually verified cases.

Good thing your source[1] didn't make a big deal about the huge multiplier difference between two exceedingly small numbers (0.01622% vs 0.00261%)

Good thing your source[1] didn't falsely imply "hospitalization" and "myocarditis " as equivalently severe, ignoring that the myocarditis responded well and quickly to treatment[2] whereas COVID does not, leading to long hospital stays and/or ventilation and/or death.

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...

Please don't argue in the flamewar style on HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It is exactly what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not arguing with you, but I'm not 100% sure what specifically was wrong. Can I trouble you to provide a little more context? Was it stylistic? I originally wrote up my issues with his source as a paragraph, but that seemed harder to read. Was it the repetitive beginning of each line? Or was I just being too snarky?

Oh, and sorry.

Yes, too snarky, and that sort of repetition is a rhetorical device that acts as a hammer. It is a device for political battle, not curious conversation. No one speaks that way in a conversation.

The thing about comments like that is that they polarize the discussion even further, because those who agree with you will become intensified in their agreement while those who disagree with you will react the way people react when someone hammers them repeatedly. This kind of polarization makes curious conversation impossible, because curious conversation has to do with maintaining connection across differences.

I've got a child under 12, and while everyone in my household over 12 is vaccinated, I'm not sure if the vaccine has any point for him. If you look at CDC stats, today there are only 412 reported covid19 deaths in the 0-17 age group, 138 in the 0-4 group, meaning 274 in the 4-17 group out of 670,000. Furthermore, kids rarely need treatment, so most infections go undiagnosed.

While I have no objection to a vaccine, and I don't question the efficacy of these, the trivial chance of my son's covid19 complications versus forcing him to a doctor's office over his fear of needles, which will cause him a lot of angst, makes me question whether to do it. These decisions aren't always entirely about death percentages.

Not sure how accurate that is based on the children’s hospitals in the southern United States being at capacity from COVID. Long symptoms have also become an issue in children.

>Long symptoms have also become an issue in children.

Source?

>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01935-7#ref-CR2 >https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

“Long Covid” symptoms are unfalsifiable.

Thanks! Based on the nature.com link, it looks like there needs to be more time and work done to make concrete claims (as I suspected with something as complicated as "long covid").

I would also be interested in seeing comparisons to "long <other infectious diseases>".

I'd like to see a better definition of what "long COVID" is. The minimum definition I see most often is symptoms lasting longer than 3 weeks. I've never had a cold where all symptoms were gone at the 3 week mark.

We have been made to associate the term "long COVID" with debilitating illness lasting many months, talk of people joining online support groups, etc. I'd like a better breakdown of what is common.

Edit: Downvotes why? It isn't reasonable to want to know how many people are having "any symptom at all past 3 weeks" and how many are suffering from debilitating syndromes?

Never ending fatigue, random muscle and joint pains, blood pressure fluctuations, constant low-grade headache, numbness of extremities, tinnitus, shortness of breath, chest pain, tachycardia, back pain, anxiety and depression.. and usually its combination of the above that come and go continuously in what seems like waves.

There are probably more symptoms I’m missing, but that is what I experienced for 9 months

My partner is a nurse, and something I think that gets lots a lot in discussing these stats is that many times 'surviving' doesn't mean 'back to normal like nothing happened".

Her stories of it radically complicating totally unrelated illnesses and the potential severe long term effects are more than enough reason to take precautions seriously despite what group or demographic you might be in.

I think about this a lot but almost never hear it brought up, so I agree that the point gets overlooked often. For every death there are probably many people experiencing serious effects. Anyone who has experienced significant long term health problems knows that they can have a massive impact on your life.

This reminds me of a bad take that comes up from time to time around war casualties. Some will see that only a thousand soldiers out of a million died in some conflict and think that it wasn't that dangerous, but for every death in war there can be dozens of people who suffer severe mental and physical harm that negatively affects the rest of their life.

From family experience: Covid can definitely hit kids much harder than the common cold and they can transmit to vaccinated parents.

IMO the issue is children & schools are the perfect combination for the spread of illnesses. While no one wants to make definitive statements on how much the vaccine reduces the duration & level of contagiousness -> it is almost certainly not 0%.

I think as long as the vaccine is an option for all/most ages then it isn't much of an issue. Although it would be interesting if we allowed kids to get the vaccine at school - possibly without parental permission. (Sort of a tricky area... I think some places provide the HPV vaccine like this since some parents won't let their kids get it.)

A large number of the breakthrough cases I'm (personally) aware of are coming from unvaccinated kids to their parents. I would definitely vaccinate your child once it's approved for under 12 - for your whole family's sake. Then tell them they're doing it to protect their family and let them feel like a brave hero.

Why wouldn't you just have the vulnerable adults get vaccinated? At what point will done of these people just start vaccinating in the womb or just treat it like circumcision? Circumcision is not needed but might as well just poke babies with needles immediately after their born to make sure we traumatize them as much as possible.

> Why wouldn't you just have the vulnerable adults get vaccinated?

My comment covered breakthrough cases. Those occur among the vaccinated.

> Still I don't understand the current approach to COVID in the US. Vaccines are safe and available yet we only just approved the use in children under 12. I have heard second hand many doctors are downplaying the importance of the vaccine for people under 18.

> IMO it would make a lot more sense to just keep vaccines available for everyone older than 2 including boosters every 6 months (just in case)

That's a terrible idea. Children are not small adults, and you can't use the same medicine for children as for adults. There are Pediatricians who work specifically with children. Giving drugs to children is unlike the scenario where a heavy car takes twice the gasoline a ligher care takes.

"Therefore, the risk of cardiac adverse events following the second dose of the mRNA vaccine could be around 3.7 times more likely than hospitalization due to COVID-19 in healthy 12-15-year-old boys during periods when the pandemic is better under control 2.1 times in 16-17-year-olds. The group found that this trend remains even when SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates are high, with vaccination being riskier than hospitalization from COVID-19. The long-term health effect of the mRNA vaccines on teenage boys is unknown. Few clinical trials have been conducted due to the early observation of adverse events." [1]

[1] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210913/The-rate-of-vacci...

> Probably because everyone and their uncle self-diagnosed a bad cold as COVID-19 and plenty more would lie about having natural immunity.

This ignores the existence of antibody tests, and there's no reason that lying about a positive antibody test would be easier to get away with than lying about being vaccinated.

I am 28. A programmer with a sedentary lifestyle.

I was covid positive last October and kicked it fine (verified with a test).

I was tested 2 weeks ago for antibodies, my results were a “76” (I assume percentage?).

Why should I get vaccinated?

While I posted above about being on the fence about vaccinating my kid, I was in a similar case as you. I'm in my late 40's, and I came down with covid early in the pandemic, before general availability of PCR tests, but I did manage to get an antibody test, and I was positive.

I did get vaccinated because the vaccine reinforces antibodies which are correlated with fewer complications upon subsequent infection. There are some epitopes on sars-cov-2 which closely resemble parts our own clotting factors and interferons, and the randomized nature of our immune response can lead to some less desirable antibodies being present. So, it seems a vaccine only helps.

One thing about getting vaccinated after recovery from covid, though, is that both the first and second doses knock you on your butt, not just the second.

> the randomized nature of our immune response can lead to some less desirable antibodies being present

Exactly! The point of many COVID vaccines is to teach the immune system to destroy a very specific and very important protein, which is the spike protein. Without that the virus can't enter cells. It's not present in our own body.

We have no idea what kind of immune response any given person might get with an actual infection. Reinfections are a thing.

Your last paragraph makes little sense. We have no idea what kind of immune response any given person might get with a vaccine (any vaccine) either. What kind of test this is? And infections after covid vaccines are sadly also a thing.

There are several orders of magnitude more documented breakthrough cases than documented reinfections.

> I was tested 2 weeks ago for antibodies, my results were a “76” (I assume percentage?).

It does not mean percentage. The fact that we cannot directly relate antibody levels to immunological protection is one of the reasons we can't [yet?] use antibody tests to "count" as immunity.

To provide additional protection (especially since given that timing it almost certainly wasn't the delta variant that you got). Maybe you are protected by your previous infection and maybe you aren't.

What's the connection to Delta here? They haven't updated the vaccines.

Which is infuriating by the way. The best explanation why (which I've seen) is "doh, that would be a bit inconvenient".

Is there, like, a rational reason?

It was my understanding that you basically just punch these mRNA sequences into a computer and you could have a new formulation ready for manufacture over the weekend. If it's a regulatory issue, maybe the regulations should be adjusted. Why have a booster of the original stuff that's not working as well?

It's really not that simple. I'm not current, but I studied immunology as part of medical school a long time ago.

The Delta variant replicates really quickly, that is its evolutionary advantage over other strains, it's not that your immune system is weaker to it. What happens is that at first it ramps up a lot faster than your immune response, and during this period, it produce a lot more virions, and your immune system has a bigger fight on its hands.

There are many immunologists working on identifying the nature of the immune response to sars-cov-2, and so far, something on the order of 80 unique antibodies have been identified which are induced by vaccination, and about 200 unique antibodies which are induced by actual infection. The convalescent antibodies target the nucleocapsid (the ball) more than the spike protein.

It appears that the delta variant escapes approximately 1/8 of the antibodies in both cases, so you still have a very strong immune response, just one which doesn't ramp up as fast as the virus.

Now, as for the mRNA sequences, we can create them in a DNA printer (then transcribe to RNA), however, this triggers new safety and efficacy trials at the FDA.

Safety - yes, do we really need efficacy trials for such a change? Is it remotely likely to be worse?

Nobody knows until you test. Biology is messy, it's not like computers.

Give this a read, Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes To Die. (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-...)

I happened to read it already.

Are you willing to bet that the tweaked Moderna vaccine (the trials of it was announced, right?) shows worse efficacy than the original? Odds 51:49 in your favor, null hypothesis of the same efficacy is a tie. That's generous I think, if nobody knows.

If not - why not?

Are you arguing we should just assume the new changes are good and roll them out without testing?

Yes, without large scale randomized efficacy trials. That's what we do with the flu.

mRNA can produce basically any protein.

Not all proteins are safe to have in the body.

Most proteins are safe, of course, and the odds that any particular new mRNA target is safe is pretty good. But it's not trivial to predict with computational models, and so it requires testing.

The vaccines focus on the spike protein, which is present and consistent between variants.

I've seen several patients that were sicker the second time they got COVID, including people dying in their 20s and 30s. I can't speculate on what their antibody tests might have showed beforehand.

Why would you not get vaccinated?

Lack of evidence.

Your post is using scary anecdotes to try and persuade. That does not come off as trustworthy.

I was tested 2 weeks ago for antibodies after receiving the vaccine. My results were "0." And yet I experienced all the typical side effects from the vaccine, indicating that I probably had an immune response to it.

Nobody knows what any particular antibody count means with respect to risk to your health from a future COVID infection. Instead, we need to be looking at the hard statistics about who's getting admitted into hospitals and who's dying.

Genuine question: Do we have data on hospitalization and mortality rates of unvaccinated but previously exposed?

The data I've seen is not great, in part because reinfection is pretty rare. This study [0] indicating rates of 31.0% and 3.4% respectively is the best I've seen, but I'd hazard a guess that there's some sampling bias - i.e., healthier people are less likely to get symptomatic reinfection and therefore to get tested, so unhealthy people are overrepresented in the data - so those rates are probably overestimates.

[0] https://ehrn.org/articles/covid-19-testing-and-possible-rein...

Last October, so likely not Delta variant.

It's been widely reported by authorities on the subject that vaccination after infection with Alpha confers immunity to all currently known variants.

The same is not true for natural immunity from just an Alpha infection AIUI.

People get sick with COVID multiple times, and natural immunity is more hit-or-miss with regards to protection against variants. Reinfections are also frequently nastier than the first infection. It also costs absolutely nothing and at worst will act as an additional safety that makes you feel uncomfortable for a few days.

So why not get vaccinated?

The research I've seen is that people with a previous infection are much more protected than the vaccinated.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

Why would a reinfection be worse? How would the spike proteins in the pfizer, moderna, and J&J shots work at all if that was the case?

> Why would a reinfection be worse?

I'm not a doctor. There are numerous reports from people who got a second infection that it was worse.

To turn your question on its head.

It is a free vaccine that could save your life, has been safely administered to billions of people and greatly reduces the odds of you getting infected, transmitting to others or ending up in hospital.

What is the downside? or are you just apathetic to getting it.

"Vaccines are safe and available yet we only just approved the use in children under 12"

From what I understand, different ages of people tend to have different sorts of immune responses. While vaccines are safe and effective, it takes some time to get the dosages right for children because of the way their immune system responds to things - at least, with a new vaccine. I'm not an expert, though, and I got this information while looking up variances in side effects (older folks get less than younger folks, and folks with two x chromosomes - mostly females - tend to get more as well).

Slight correction: vaccines are still not available to children under 12.

yeah small note to add here: the last pediatric vaccine (garadasil / HPV) went through a decade of clinical trials before approval

The infection rate and how HPV spreads is completely different from an airborne virus. The time comparison to do trials isn't really meaningful.

Think about this for a second. If you give 100,000 pre-teens an HPV vaccine, how long do you have to wait to discover if they are more or less likely to contract genital warts? Now compare that to how long you would have to wait to see if they contract COVID. This is not a valid comparison.

> Still I don't understand the current approach to COVID in the US. Vaccines are safe and available yet we only just approved the use in children under 12

The main issue here is that covid is less of a problem for people who are younger.

That means rarer issues can start to outweigh benefits. It's easily possible for vaccines to be beneficial over a certain age and detrimental under.

Also - while the vaccines lower transmission they do not stop it entirely so again it comes to weighing benefits.

The other issue is about testing how well the vaccines work in different groups. Just because it works well in a 65y grandfather doesn't mean it'll work well in a 2mo baby, or help with dosing decisions.

clinical trials are ongoing for <12 year olds. The biggest change is that the dosages will have to be lower. If you give a young child the current adult dose they will have a higher chance of side effects.

> I have heard second hand many doctors are downplaying the importance of the vaccine for people under 18.

Maybe because there's concerns.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.30.21262866v...

> "for boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day Covid-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly Covid-19 hospitalization,"

i like the downvotes and lack of response. it's always a good 1-2 punch.

>Sure there is a small population that would get vaccinated but genuinely can not due to a medical issue but that scenario is no different than the seasonal flu and other viruses.

There is a difference. Covid is 10 times more lethal than the average flu. It's not always that they can't either, it's also that their body won't develop enough antibodies.

Main reason for lockdown is so that your hospitals can keep functioning, or in the case of New Zealand, so that you can go back to complete normal life except for travel outside the country.

> COVID response of lockdowns, etc. was at best breakeven in terms of cost effectiveness

Can you share some of those any metrics? Legitimately asking.

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