Stanford requires booster shots for all students | Hacker News Reader

Stanford requires booster shots for all students

studentaffairs.stanford.edu

180 pointsmontefischer534 comments

Alright, now you lost me.

As someone that complied initially, holed up in an apartment solo for many months while the city descended into chaos, and began testing every 7 days when that became available and staggering interactions between people, I feel like I’ve shown that I’m willing to help mitigation efforts.

Boosters for last year’s virus makes less sense. Boosters at all make less sense, especially for a non vulnerable population, and the fairly predictable solution of stacking them every 6 months should come under much more scrutiny. Especially with the unnecessary myocarditis element.

The same for cloth masks, if they are less effective against the newer prevalent variant.

I’m not sold on this one, and I’ll totally begin bolstering anti-establishment sentiment if they are the only ones willing to disagree.

Welcome to the resistance... its not glamorous, but it is overwhelmingly obviously the right time to be a skeptic.

The skeptics have felt overwhelmingly in the right for the past 21 months, but throughout that time period, reality has not been particularly compliant to their wishes.

What reality has shown, time and again, is that medical systems across the entire world are incapable of dealing with COVID while providing the same standard of care that people generally expect. (For both non-COVID and COVID cases.)

I personally feel there are reasons to be optimistic over the next few months, but that its too early to say - and claiming otherwise is engaging in very speculative, very wishful magical thinking.

Exactly. The self-professed "skeptics" have only seemed to doubt one narrative (the mainstream one) but have seemed singularly credulous when it comes to alternative theories, treatments, etc. All in an effort to stand out, not to help. Many have even supported multiple mutually exclusive beliefs at different times, pointing to the few hits as evidence of their perspicacity, quietly hoping everyone will forget the misses.

The world would be better off with some real skepticism, not just Oppositional Defiant Disorder disguised as skepticism. Real skepticism notes the absence or weakness of evidence behind a claim, but can be overcome as the evidence becomes stronger. True skepticism also does not require assertion of an alternate or opposite theory as Absolute Truth with no more evidence than the theory one is being "skeptical" about. People should ask for - even demand - evidence, but not misportray disagreement (or disagreeableness) as skepticism.

They're using "argument in the alternative" [1], which is logically sound. The goal isn't to show that any particular alternative theory is true, just to show that the mainstream one is false.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_in_the_alternative

No they're not.

> with the goal of showing that regardless of interpretation there is no reasonable conclusion other than the advocate's

For that part of the definition to apply, there must be some particular conclusion that the advocate supports. It's multiple arguments for a single conclusion, whereas what I was observing is multiple separate conclusions. That's pure contrarianism, neither skepticism nor argument in the alternative.

Isn't "the media and government have been intentionally exaggerating the danger of COVID, and most of the mitigation strategies being mandated shouldn't be" the conclusion?

Not really. The second part alone ("most of ... shouldn't be") might qualify as skepticism, particularly if the reason given is lack of sufficient evidence, but few stop there. Most go on to express one or more other reasons and/or conclusions, such as "intentionally exaggerating" which is its own claim requiring its own proof. Also, if that's the only reason given then it can't be argument in the alternative because there are no alternative routes given to the desired conclusion. Just one route to one conclusion, contrary to the original proposition but itself lacking proof.

Plenty of the COVID skeptic types I know, and myself included, have expressed exactly the sentiment the GP described. In a way, it's nice to be vindicated after all this. I don't think it really makes a difference whether that sentiment fits into the exact Wikipedia definition you're arguing about, but it's obvious to me it's been a common one for the entirety of the pandemic.

How are skeptics vindicated by the second part? I have always agreed with both of those skeptic things however I come from a different pov than most, most likely.

Only the first has been closer to being true. We don’t have a decently sized population that did very little if anything wrt mitigating like the rest of the world. Just because the mitigation mandates have been too much doesn’t make the average skeptics correct. Considering a large amount of skeptics want little if any mitigation efforts. It’s hard to say the world would be in a better place if the skeptics decided everything. I don’t see how it wouldn’t be a shit show if that was the case.

It's "logically sound" in the sense that it's sound by disjunctive introduction. For most people, that's not an interesting sense of "soundness" (you haven't told me anything interesting by saying "it's either cloudy or not cloudy" when I've asked you for the weather.)

My real skepticism, having been vaccinated and boosted, is that institutions like the CDC, FDA, and Pfizer are just being lazy foot-draggers about bringing out vaccines updated for specific variants.

And whatever happened to the project of vaccines that provide full, sterilizing immunity? Last publication I can find is for a study in freaking mice[1]. Is there no imperative to actually provide sterilizing immunity at "warp speed", because society can just shove non-sterilizing vaccines into people and save on ICU beds?

[1] -- https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)01005-1

I too desperately want a sterilizing vaccine. Given the existence of influenza and the common cold (a bunch of rhino and corona viruses), this seems unlikely unfortunately.

If it seems unlikely, then someone should explain why it works in a mouse model but not in the real world. If the virus mutates too quickly for a full sterilizing vaccine, then nonetheless, any vaccine that reduces transmission is helpful. If the virus mutates too quickly period, all the more reason for variant-specific boosters, targeted to the strains circulating, just like the yearly flu shot.

> someone should explain why it works in a mouse model but not in the real world.

As the saying goes, 'mice lie and monkeys exaggerate'.

The current vaccines do, in fact, reduce transmission. This efficacy drops over time, but it definitely exists.

> What reality has shown, time and again, is that medical systems across the entire world are incapable of dealing with COVID while providing the same standard of care that people generally expect. (For both non-COVID and COVID cases.)

Speak for your country. Numerous countries did not blink an eye, and did not panic either.

I think people forget that it all started by "lets flatten the curve" before it turned into a pandemic of fear for absolutely no reason.

> Numerous countries did not blink an eye, and did not panic either.

'Panic' can mean anything you personally want it to, so of course there will be countries that match your criteria.

Is wearing masks at the theatre panic? If you hate masks, yes! If you don't, no? Is requiring that foreign travelers have a negative test before admission at the border panic? Depends on where you stand. Is discouraging travel before vaccines were available panic? Well, that depends on whether or not you own a hotel! Is requiring that employers provide COVID sick days panic? Depends on your political view on labour relations. Eviction moratorium? Depends on whether you are a landlord!

> is that medical systems across the entire world are incapable of dealing with COVID while providing the same standard of care that people generally expect. (For both non-COVID and COVID cases.)

That's despite billions in fundings and ever-growing budgets.

Time for a re-structuring and a culture change.

Restructuring to what? Socialized, privatized, mixed-market, none of them have had the ability to handle this pandemic in a business as usual world.

The population of skeptics might have changed during the last six months. You could be debating right now with someone who was strongly in favor of quarantine measures in 2020.

I've increasingly come to the idea that everyone is cosplaying outbreak, and somehow I didn't get the memo that this was fun.

Indeed. As a C

The immune response to the booster isn't linear relative to the response to the earlier shots.

The every six months thing doesn't apply until there's actually a government recommendation to get a 4th shot. I think there is enough chance that there will be, but there's also a pretty good chance that there won't be (because we are actually getting to the point where ~everyone has been infected or vaccinated).

The government has already determined the expiration of booster shot certificates. What am I supposed to do afterwards, never come out anymore?

Which government, what determination?

EU, 9 months

So https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_... ?

That requires the booster to be treated as proof of vaccinated status for 9 months, it doesn't predict that proof of additional shots will be required in the future. Which makes sense, as we don't have the information to make that determination!

So "get more shots of the vaccine we don't have enough information about"?

I'm drawing the line at two.

There's good data about the booster being an effective booster. There's not much data about whether another one will be beneficial (neither in terms of whether it will help immunity or whether there will be a lot of virus in circulation...).

If my vaccination pass expires then I can't go eat, get on a plane, go to work. So it's a requirement to get another shot, the politicians/government just didn't say it out loud - typical.

Last time I got the vaccine for covid I was promised 5 years. It was reduced to 5 months post-facto. Do you seriously expect me to believe it will be at least the advertised 9 months this time - or that it's going to increase?

The data I've seen about this has shown that the antibody numbers will slowly dip over time after the initial vaccine shots, but skyrocket after the booster.

I'm not sure what your argument against the booster is beyond the mention of myocarditis (which the CDC addresses here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/my...) and "it's a lot of work."

At this point, those of us who can do the maximum amount possible to avoid catching the virus and/or making sure that we mitigate its effects should do so. The most likely risk at this point isn't death, it's ending up in the hospital for enough time that someone else can't get admitted or has to put off an important procedure.

> who can do the maximum amount possible to avoid catching the virus

Hear me out - but, I suggest doing the opposite. Get vaccinated, then deliberately expose yourself to the virus every month. If you do that, you'll never get sick, and your immune response will remain high.

Just because a percentage of the population is "non vulnerable" doesn't mean getting Covid is harmless. There are measurable impacts on cognitive ability: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

This is self-reported data. Self-reported data is garbage. There's simply too much risk of bias.

To illustrate the point, a large study out of France found that the only "long covid" symptom that actually correlates with confirmed illness was loss of smell. But there were multiple "long covid" symptoms that correlated with self-reported illness.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

We have to be careful to separate populations by severity of disease, hospitalization, etc., but "long covid" is at least partly psychosomatic.

The data was from a cognitive assessment, not self-reported. There were some self-reported components, like do you have depression, anxiety, etc. But the measurement of cognition was not self reported.

The question of whether or not the respondent actually had Covid-19 was self-reported:

> People who indicated that they had suspected having COVID-19 were presented further questions including whether they had breathing difficulties, what happened as a consequence of their breathing difficulties, and whether there had been positive confirmation via a biological test (Table S1).

Also, this was a web-based test, conducted at home, where the participants self-selected into the survey. There is no universe in which this should be considered unbiased data.

Sure, the data isn't perfect, but data rarely is. You're also assuming that, because the data isn't perfect, that the effect measured would go away with better data. I actually think the opposite would happen. There is a correlation between the severity of self-reported sickness and cognitive decline. Those who ended up in a hospital show the most severe signs of cognitive decline. If they were actually in a hospital, they likely know for sure whether or not they were positive, compared to those who recovered at home and only suspected they had covid. There have also been visible changes to the brain when looking at MRIs before / after a person has covid.

> Also, this was a web-based test, conducted at home, where the participants self-selected into the survey. There is no universe in which this should be considered unbiased data.

You know, I was kinda in agreement with you until you said this. Please read the paper (which had absolutely no information about the Covid stuff in the docs or signup forms.)

Like, one could argue that the major selection factor was whether or not the subject watched TV, which would be fair but not germane to this particular argument.

In fact, the Covid stuff was added after the study had started, and they did a follow-up survey in December 2020 and of the people who reported later Covid, they were indistinguishable from the overall population.

Like, I agree that this would have been much much better if they'd had access to the NHS data and could have joined with the cognitive test data and I personally am not convinced of their modelling approaches, but there's a tradeoff between enough data to estimate important effects, and the accuracy of said data, especially when it comes to medical conditions.

Is your argument that people would preferentially report Covid-19 and throw the intelligence test? Or something else?

Like, this paper has a bunch of problems, but the main effect is not that surprising. The real question is how generalisable the findings are to other viral infections. That's something that hopefully will get investigated more over time.

> In fact, the Covid stuff was added after the study had started,

Not relevant to my point. They didn't verify infection. The people being surveyed knew that they were being surveyed about Covid-related things. Also, even if you separate the intelligence-test part from the covid-results part by time, now you have two problems: self selection bias for the intelligence part (i.e. people who are more likely to be worried about cognitive decline take the time to participate in tests of cognitive skills), and for the covid test part (i.e. people who are worried about Covid will be more likely to respond to the Covid test part).

There are so many sources of bias here, it's impossible to de-combobulate them all. It's simply a mess.

> and they did a follow-up survey in December 2020 and of the people who reported later Covid, they were indistinguishable from the overall population.

You can attempt to control for bias by doing this sort of thing, but it's not enough. Just because the sample population looked like the control population on summary parameters B, C and Z doesn't mean that they weren't biased on the primary endpoint of the study -- and remember. the participants knew they were being surveyed related to Covid (because again, they were being asked).

Also, the procedure they used also leaves open the possibility that (for example) study participants could have self-selected by finding the survey from "long covid" forums, and the like. We can't rule it out.

> Is your argument that people would preferentially report Covid-19 and throw the intelligence test? Or something else?

I have a number of problems with this study (and I've enumerated a few) but most of them fall under the category of "self-reported data is garbage", which is why I led with that. As the French CONSTANCES study (a much better study) I linked showed: when people are allowed to self-report even just their covid status, they mess up the results.

A better (but still not good) study of this sort would at least take the intelligence test and cross-check it against testing results to get an objective result on one of the parameters of interest. But there would still be too many sources of bias to enumerate -- open-ended, web-based surveys like "The Great British Intelligence Test" are simply garbage, and should not be taken seriously by anyone, anywhere.

OK thank you for expressing your issues with the paper in a much more useful fashion that your first take, it's greatly appreciated.

I would note, however, that your strong point that self-reported data is garbage would lead you to disbelieve in the existence of pain, which seems like an unlikely interpretation.

That French study is interesting, I need to dig into it a little more.

That being said, do you think that people lied about being in hospital/on ventilator. That seems unlikely to me, and the cognitive outcomes seem to respond in a dose-dependent fashion to each step of Covid infection, which is not something that I would have expected to see if there were response biases going on.

Like, the only real explanation I can come up with here is that maybe a bunch of people were still sick, and this correlation drives the observed responses with cognitive function.

Looking at the methods, the Covid stuff comes after the cognitive test, so could not have impacted the cognitive test results. Additionally the actual webform (linked from the paper) shows nothing about Covid. Again, I think the biggest bias in this sample is likely to be their TV-watching status.

That being said, they did a complete cases analysis, which can often throw away lots of useful data, but it doesn't appear that many people quit halfway through (which is weird, given my experience of doing survey research).

> As the French CONSTANCES study (a much better study) I linked showed: when people are allowed to self-report even just their covid status, they mess up the results.

This comes under the headings of different disciplines are different I guess. If this study had been done under the aegis of a medical department, then we'd have laboratory confirmed Covid but they'd have messed up the cognitive test part. Science is difficult, and messy and often not satisfying to anyone, and personally I think we can learn things from this paper.

You disagree, I guess we'll find out when the systematic reviews/meta-analyses happen ;)

> That being said, do you think that people lied about being in hospital/on ventilator. That seems unlikely to me, and the cognitive outcomes seem to respond in a dose-dependent fashion to each step of Covid infection, which is not something that I would have expected to see if there were response biases going on.

I said in my original comment that we need to be more careful about separating the degrees of severity of illness from reports of "long covid". Post-hospitalization syndrome is a thing -- people who were on ventilators have lingering after effects. It isn't "long covid", and confusing that with reports of "I had asymptomatic illness and now I am tired" is just bad science.

Unfortunately, most of these "long covid" studies do exactly that. They take all levels of severity, mix them together, correlate with self-reports of symptoms, and don't anchor anything to objectively observable criteria (like test results). Most of this stuff wouldn't pass muster at an 8th grade science fair.

> Looking at the methods, the Covid stuff comes after the cognitive test, so could not have impacted the cognitive test results.

You have no evidence that they had covid at the time of the cognitive test (or before). It's self-reported. Even if it's true that the two questions were strictly separated in time, and it wasn't possible to take the cognitive test later, after the covid questions were added (this is not clear from the methods, btw), the results are hopelessly confounded.

> Again, I think the biggest bias in this sample is likely to be their TV-watching status.

They recruited across the web as well. It's right there in the methods.

All major markets are completely open, the boosters lack the same veracity as initial vaccination and infection. We are going to learn to live with that.

The goal is to keep ICUs available for general emergencies.

Stanford, of course, is just a private institution, but is foreshadowing the predilections of influential policy makers.

>The goal is to keep ICUs available for general emergencies.

Can anybody back this up with actual data? Looking at my own state's dashboard doesn't seem to suggest that there has ever been even a remote risk of ICUs being overwhelmed.

It also doesn't really stand up to basic scrutiny: hospitals were recently firing medical staff who refused vaccines. That doesn't seem like the behavior of a system which is on the brink of being overwhelmed.

Are you looking at the numbers as a whole or county by county? If 800/1000 beds are available in the state and 19/20 in your county that’s a problem. That’s ignoring that few systems are designed to operate at capacity for any extended period of time.

Maybe the analysis should be above the level of basic scrutiny.

I have family members who work in a hospital in the US and they said that their hospital is overwhelmed with asymptomatic individuals saying "I think I might have COVID!" and panicking. The correct response to that is to refer these people to their primary care physician. But yeah ICUs have never been close to being overwhelmed by COVID at this hospital.

The sole rationale for mandatory health measures, is to prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed.

Other than that, when Covid becomes endemic, vaccinations should be offered to those who wants them, as has always been the case with winter flu.

Is that really the sole rationale? What about polio vaccination? I believe that vaccine is mandated in schools to protect children, not to keep healthcare systems from becoming overwhelmed.

I would clarify the sole rationale for the Covid situation.

Covid is not particularly dangerous to the young and healthy.

The danger is that the small percentage of people who become seriously ill is still enough to overwhelm a health system, as it is so contageous.

You’re assuming that it’s the only rationale for the Covid situation, but whether or not that is true is exactly what we’re discussing :)

I'm referring to the situation in the UK.

The sole rationale for restrictions and vaccinations has been to stop our healthcare system from being overwhelmed.

That's the way it was presented by the government to the public. It wasn't the rationale, for example, to wait for a vaccine to reduce the chances of some individuals from getting longer term symptoms of the disease, given there are any proven.

If our healthcare system was somehow able to handle every case, there would have been no rationale for restrictions.

> There are measurable impacts on cognitive ability: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

Good luck driving anything with this garbage paper. Not all published literature is reliable. (Remember the Lancet last year?)

Do you have a specific criticism of this study?

What's your justification for not rating this paper?

Having just read the Methods and Results sections, I see a reasonably well conducted study, which does suffer from some of the characteristic flaws of quantitative social sciences (an over-reliance on normality assumptions, a fetish for normality and sphericity tests and a somewhat credulous notion of analysing the residuals, and a hatred for visual displays) but the work itself is pretty solid (speaking as someone with actual domain experience in this field).

But I'd love to hear more about your problems with the paper, in the hope that I will learn something.

I came to the same conclusion. Fully vaxxed, but pressured by family into getting booster. Couldn't get out of bed for a day, and my heart still feels weird a week later. Going to the doctor to get that checked out.

I had a rash cover half my body that started at the vaccination site. My GP, who is the head of internal medicine at a famous hospital, call me directly during the holidays as it's not that common apparently.

God speed.

Did this get entered in reporting database VAERS? How would you know?

It helps everyone to accurately report adverse reactions.

> Did this get entered in reporting database VAERS?

Yes

> How would you know?

Like I said, my doctor, who spent some time digging into this, mentioned it was not a common occurance.

I had a friend. 75. Health nut. Swam every day. Organic vegetarian. Regular checkup. Never a blip.

2 months after the second shot, dead of sudden heart attack.

Post-hoc, ergo propter hoc. 75 year olds have a tendency to die, a plurality from cardiovascular failure (pre-covid).

I had the similar friend, swam everyday 10 laps at least. Never a blip during regular checkups. Organic Vegan

2 months after the second shot, hes perfectly fine

> I’m not sold on this one, and I’ll totally begin bolstering anti-establishment sentiment if they are the only ones willing to disagree.

I’m a compliant, conformist Asian, and they’re beginning to lose even me. My nine year old’s private school required everyone to get vaccinated (and we’re in a county where vaccination rates are high) but for some reason she is still wearing masks and eating lunch outside in the winter. My three year old—who is a hyperactive little boy to begin with—suffering developmental delays because he can’t understand instructions from masked teachers. For example, we do a gym class on Saturdays and he can’t tell which of the instructors he should be listening to, against the background noise. I cheat and take off my mask to give him instructions. I’ve noticed—that in a class where I suspect everyone is a democrat (blue state, almost entirely non-white or interracial)—about half the other parents are doing the same thing.

Masks inhibit the most fundamental communication API we have. Faces. Our occipital lobes and the vision system is trained to identify faces for a number of things from gauging emotions to assessing symmetry for mating. It is so deeply ingrained in us. It makes me think that cutting off half of the face is going to lead to developmental issues in people, I am not qualified to predict. Not directly relevant but there was a cool neurology experiment where they flipped faces upside down and people couldn't even recognize President Obama [1].

I also understand that Masks prevent people spitting large droplets. But no one seems to be raising concerns that we've starved kids from one of the most evolutionarily significant aspects of humans - facial communication. Would be great if academics/scientists who are far greater qualified in this matter try to understand what impact masks will have on kids - something tells me they are going to face opposition.

[1] I learned about this experiment from the Introduction to Human Brain course at MIT. I watched the entire thing a couple of years ago, it was truly eye opening and I believe the professor had an AMA on HN at time. Check it out: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-1...

Non-white != democratic / blue

So, will you refuse tetanus boosters as well? Flu shots? Malaria, et.al.?

This reluctance to accept medications that have proven to minimize the impact of deadly infections doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

We have been over this so many times here: Tetanus and Malaria also affect younger people, median COVID-19 fatality age is over 80. No one criticizes an 80 year old for getting vaccinated. Herd immunity is elusive, as we see in regions with 95% vaxxed.

The vaccines help protect you from long COVID and from very serious complications that can form (or even death).

It is very misleading to imply that only old people suffer from that as there are countless stories of “I have a 35 yold friend with no pre-existing conditions who’s fighting for their lives”. If it were only old people the hospital situations would look drastically different and we wouldn’t have capacity issues. We maybe are now better at saving those people than at the start of the pandemic but we’re not perfect yet.

Hopefully the COVID pills coming out to treat it are going to meaningfully reduce the outsized burden anti-vaxx people are putting on the health care system (overwhelmingly, if not even exclusively, the people ending up in hospital due to COVID are unvaccinated)

> there are countless stories of “I have a 35 yold friend with no pre-existing conditions who’s fighting for their lives”

You can't say this about rare serious COVID cases but also point out that the plural of anecdote is not data when other people say similar things about rare serious vaccine side effects.

> It is very misleading to imply that only old people suffer from that as there are countless stories of “I have a 35 yold friend with no pre-existing conditions who’s fighting for their lives”

Those stories are breathlessly reported on because they are rare, 2.4% of Covid Deaths in the US are people under the age of 40[1] which is 50% of the US population, it's harder to find data but most of them had whom had other issues or were not direct covid deaths. Covid Risk goes up orders of magnitude by age [2].

[11 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

Furthermore, that 2.4% is composed nearly entirely of unvaccinated individuals (~99%). Chance of death or hospitalization from covid is exceedingly small for vaccinated individuals <40.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-s...

Nowhere am I saying that failure to get a vaccine puts you at risk of death. I'm saying they get hospitalized [1].

60-69 yolds had ~2k hospitalizations last week

50-59 yolds had 1.5k hospitalizations last week

40-49 yolds had 1k hospitalizations last week

30-39 yolds had ~1k hospitalizations last week

Thus we see each age range has roughly the same number of hospitalizations. Not sure how this correlates on a per capita basis although in this case it doesn't really matter since the healthcare system is a shared resource.

Why are hospitalizations important? At this point, you dying or having complications from a failure to vaccinate is thankfully mostly your own problem since vaccinations are supremely effective at preventing this regardless of the COVID strain from the looks of it. Overwhelming the medical system and placing an undue burden on it because of refusal to vaccinate is why we're still facing lockdowns due to spikes of variants. Hopefully with the new treatment pill and evolutionary direction Omicron is taking means we're on our way out of the pandemic.

Again, focusing on the mortality when a massive problem is overwhelming our shortstaffed medical system is myopic. 25% of hospitalizations result in an ICU visit [2].

> Patients who were hospitalized more recently with COVID-19 (April to June 2021) were younger (median age of 59 compared with 68) and experienced lower in-hospital death rates (10% compared with 18%) than those who were hospitalized between January 2020 and March 2021.

This indicates the old people are smartly getting vaccinated or dying off. But again, deaths is not the primary problem the unvaccinated have at this point. Primarily they form a reservoir for the virus to mutate and put burden the health care system.

[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admis... [2] https://www.cihi.ca/en/covid-19-hospitalization-and-emergenc...

The fact is that young people are at very low-risk for covid. If you want to bring vaccine status into it, you get way more ROI vaccinating older groups. We've seen Hospitalizations per capita have go from 5 per 100k/day in Jan 2021 to 3 per 100k a day in December 2021[1] because of lower hospitalization rate's in older groups, not from lower rates in younger groups. Hospitalization is also not that clean of a comparison, since a 35yr old who is discharged after a day is taxing the system way less than someone there for a month.

32% of people 25-39 [2] aren't fully vaccinated, sure it would help some if they were but if you really wanted to solve the problem you'd address the large % of older groups that aren't vaccinated and are contributing to the majority of deaths & strain on the health system.

28% of people 40-49

21% of people 50-64

10% of people 65-74

15% of people 75+

[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admis... [2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...

The Delta and Omicron variants are sufficiently contagious that there will be no significant herd immunity effect. Everyone will eventually be exposed.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

Tetanus booster is once every 10 years or so, isn't it? Flu shots aren't a requirement, are they?

The time frame for a booster is based on the longevity of its protection.

The flu shot (and many others) are required for some professions. Protection for the vulnerable they interact with.

Opinion: if you don’t want to protect the vulnerable in society, you should refrain from participating in it.

Aren't the vulnerable already protected with boosters? Where is the logic?

Like the flu shots, there are people who legitimately (shorthand for “have a medical reason”) can’t get vaccinated.

My vulnerability is that I take immunosuppresants, which makes the vaccines significantly less effective (last I heard a few months ago, fully half of the breakthrough infections of the vaccinated were in the small population of immunosuppressed people).

OK, I get your point. It's an ideological dilemma then - you'd prefer as many people around you to be vaccinated and boosted to lessen your chance of getting infected (although, even those boosted could transmit). On the other hand, those younger cohorts getting vaccines mostly to protect the others are subjecting themselves to low, but still tangible risk of getting vaccine complications. So there is some altruism at play and this is something which shouldn't definitely be mandated by the governments. (PS: It's good that very effective pills are now coming to help immunosuppressed).

vaccines are more effective the more people have them.

It’s not proven how good this booster is. A (preliminary?) study was showing recently that the protection against infection fades away after merely 10 weeks.

And? Thats >10 weeks of protection at no monetary cost to you.

Its not some different product, its the same vaccine.

The benefits are always balanced against the potential harm.

For young males, the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine may be comparable to that from the disease according to a UK study - until that’s clarified, booster mandates have no place in colleges.

Myocarditis is only one COVID-19 symptom. The total risk of injury and death is far higher from COVID-19 than the vaccine.

We’re talking about already vaccinated individuals which are protected against harm and now should get a booster that’s associated in a study with increased risk of myocarditis. This connection must be studied more before anybody thinks about mandating boosters.

The cost is potential health risks associated with taking the vaccine/booster. We don't know exactly why myocarditis rates are elevated and some people would rather wait for more information.

Do you have a place I can read about myocarditis rates?

The WHO acknowledges there may be a link between myocarditis and the vaccine.[1]

Sudden cardiac arrest incidents increased in 2020 (vaccine was not officially realeased until Dec. 2020).[2]

I added the second link to show there may be a rise of cardiovascular disease not due to the vaccine. I'm interested in seeing data for 2021.

[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/26-05-2021-gacvs-myocarditis-r...

[2] https://www.heartrhythmjournal.com/article/S1547-5271(21)007...

> Thats >10 weeks of protection at no monetary cost to you.

monetary costs are not the only costs you pay

When I took the vaccine I was sick for a few days. I don't have any risk factors. I have multiple double vaxxed and non-vaxxed family members for whom covid was a minor cold and none for whom it was serious. I assume that as I am genetically closest to my family members they are a good predictor for how I will fare, if I haven't already had it without knowing it.

Why would I sicken myself for a few days with the next vaccine shot to marginally decrease the odds I will be sick for a few days from covid?

Again, this 10 week (the most data they had) suggested that this was only true for Pfizer, but not Moderna.

It's far too early to be sure though.

But apparently not too early to force others to be the test group.

Sorry, can you clarify what you mean here?

It sounds to me like "since we don't have the data yet, by mandating it now anyway, we're forcing people to test it".

Sure, but that's not a global thing. I chose to get a booster, and there have been no mandates in my country (and given rates of vaccination, it's unlikely that there will be).

Sorry, how is that relevant as a comment on an article about a school requiring booster shots for all students?

I may not refuse tetanus and flu shots but I will 100% retain my RIGHT to refuse those shots. It's 100% the responsibility of the government to prove both the utmost necessity and the spread-prevention efficacy of any medical procedure the government forces upon its citizens.

And society has an equal right to quarantine people who could spread a deadly, infectious disease to protect the vulnerable.

As George Washington himself did.

Whose rights are greater?

> Whose rights are greater?

No one's "rights are greater." This is a false dichotomy. Does the government have a right to force people to take the flu shot? No. If a flu came along that was so deadly that the government wanted to force people to get the flu shot, then the government would need to prove the necessity and the spread-prevention efficacy of that medical procedure.

>Does the government have a right to force people to take the flu shot? No.

If you're talking about the United States, this question has been settled at the federal level by the Supreme Court for over a century. At the state level, the first vaccine mandate was in 1809. Most states have vaccine mandates for children, many of them with only medical exemptions. It's legal. It's not some great infringement on your rights.

> It's not some great infringement on your rights.

The fact that the treatment varies state by state shows that people do consider this to be a right worth retaining, and in high enough populations to hold sway over local Government up to the state level.

>The fact that the treatment varies state by state shows that people do consider this to be a right worth retaining

Yes, we live in an age of mass-indoctrination. If Fox News runs Anti-Food Safety segments 24/7 for months, we're probably going to have a few states that remove punishment/fines/laws for people who prepare food with shit on their hands. That doesn't mean that serving food with shit in it is an inalienable right.

Ironic

More likely you end up with farmers who can sell milk according to the buyers desires.

> this question has been settled at the federal level by the Supreme Court for over a century.

Right, the Federal government does not have the right to force the public to take a shot, while states may. It may appear that public health is being run at the national level, but really the CDC issues recommendations and many states ignore these recommendations and replace them with their own. Public health is run by the states, but that doesn't mean the state can do whatever it wants. Each state has its own constitution, and its own state supreme court that verifies whether any mandate is lawful, so this is going to depend on the state constitution and local public health laws.

George Washington by all accounts was a rebel traitor (in the best way possible). Should we see whatever words of wisdom he had? What would he see in our government today?

* George Washington was dealing with smallpox which kills 20—30 % of those infected.

* Quarantines have been used since the middle ages and they were used against people showing symptoms or groups of people likely to have the disease. We haven't had quarantines with covid. We've shut down society as a whole.

Omicron spread all throughout the world via vaccinated people at historical record speed. Vaccination is evidently not a good way to prevent spread right now, mandating vaccines to prevent spread therefore doesn't make sense. If you want to prevent spread you mandate a lockdown or similar, not vaccine. Vaccine might help lessen severity, in which case you need to mandate it for populations at risk. But it doesn't make sense to mandate it to prevent spread, since it doesn't.

You cannot conclude your 2nd sentence from your first. The relative rates of serious disease AND the transmission rate have both been demonstrated to be lower for vaccinated and boosted people - even with the Omicron variant.

Vaccines, even when not fully effective, greatly reduce the amount of virus you shed, and thus significantly reduce transmission.

Anecdotes are near-worthless, but I will share that my neighbor got covid. He was vaccinated and boosted. His wife and him felt sick, as did their infant (obviously not vaccinated), for two days. TWO DAYS ONLY. ...and their other two children never contracted it at all - tested negative twice each.

Getting vaccinated reduces disease severity AND transmission.

A disease that kills 20-30% of the population halted in its path by the smallpox vaccine which gives IMMUNITY for decades!

The Covid vaccines are fraudulent and more and more people are realising this. The CDC changing the definition of a vaccine from "providing immunity" to "increasing protection" just after Covid-vaccinated people started getting infected shows arm-in-arm corruption with big pharma.

Your 10th booster shot will kill you not save you.

Stanford is a private school. Do they not have the right to self determination and to choose how to build their own community? If they want people whos response to a booster are either "yes please" or "no skin off my back, I have better things to worry about" or "I personally dont agree with this but not a hill worth falling on" then I think that is their prerogative and within their power.

What doesn't make a lot of sense is comparing vaccines that have been around for ages (tetanus, flu) to ones that were developed like yesterday (COVID, malaria).

I have the COVID vaccine but that doesn't mean I am not concerned about potential long-term effects that we know nothing about. That, and the possibility of original antigenic sin [0] permanently screwing over our ability to mount an effective immune response to novel strains.

What justification is there for pushing a non-sterilizing vaccine, that doesn't prevent spread, on non-vulnerable populations?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin

Even if it's not sterilizing, it does reduce the spread. Lower viral loads means less virus transmission.

Let's say antigenic sin fears became a reality. Then the short term solution is mass production of a next gen regeneron regencov? Or a different enough vaccine that causes a response?

What leads you to believe long-term effects are possible?

> have proven to minimize the impact of deadly infections

if Omicron is as mild as shown by the current data, you won't be able to show any kind of baseline difference between boosted and unboosted.

> if Omicron is as mild as shown by the current data, you won't be able to show any kind of baseline difference between boosted and unboosted.

That's a massive if to base a health care system on.

Like, look at the incentives. If they over-react and Omicron is much less severe, people will be upset but they'll get over it.

If they under-react, and it turns out to be Delta-level with much more vaccine escape, that will be much, much worse.

And this is one of those un-reversable decisions beloved (or hated, I guess) by Jeff Bezos.

This is a good question I've been also trying to get an answer to, and I've never had a reason to ask before now: with the seasonal flu drive are we often reusing a prior season's flu vaccine? I always assumed they developed new ones all the time, is the answer "it depends"?

Seasonal flu vaccines are reformulated every year based on the circulating virus strains. Leftover doses from the previous season are discarded, not reused.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/flushot.htm

The tetanus vaccine has been used for over a century, it really is not comparable to a rushed vaccine like those against COVID.

I think the Covid vaccines have proven to be utterly ineffective compared to other shots. No one talks about "Covid immunity" via vaccine but the 'immunity' word is overwhelmingly used for other vaccines. Looks like Pfizer/BioNTech made bank and laughing their way while rising in the top billionaires list.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/malaria...

Dec: "The co-founder of BioNTech SE on Thursday joined the world's 500 richest people after the U.K. this week approved use of a Covid-19 vaccine that the German firm created with Pfizer Inc."

> Boosters for last year’s virus makes less sense.

The antibodies elicited in response to the booster, 6 months later, are different and more diverse in their neutralization capabilities than the ones elicited in response to the first shots.

Although it is likely an omicron-tuned booster would be more effective, time is of the essence and there is both evidence and a reasonable explanation as to why the original booster works. Specifically, the immune system is not static and also changes over time.

Here is a presentation by a virologist on the research his team performed that leads to this conclusion (amongst other lines of research) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIcaSqQFrX0

Okay, but why demand boosters from those younger than 40?? Considering new myocarditis studies and how low the risk is for someone already vaccinated and how negligible it is with Omicron (even for non-vaccinated)? This blind boosterization is only demonstrating how the governments are still shitless scared of their medical system collapses with vulnerable groups, so that they want to boost anyone in sight, just to be on a safer side.

Because if protection from symptomatic infection increases at a population level, then overall transmission becomes less likely.

Look, the risks are pretty low for younger people, but from a population level every extra bit of immunity helps to reduce the likelihood of health care system collapse (which has been the goal throughout the pandemic).

Then all you need is bullet-proof evidence that transmission is significantly impacted by the vaccines. It ain't a guessing game, do the measurement. Do it all over the world and compare and contrast.

This seems to suggest viral loads are the same for everybody - vaxxed, unvaxxed, symptomatic or asymptotic.

https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...

Vaccinated individuals hit the same peak mRNA loads for the same symptom severity on average. Their time to recover is faster though, and at peak you recover less viable virus indicating they are producing more viral debris.

And that's after fewer people who are vaccinated catch the virus, and there's more aborted infections and asymptomatic infections after vaccination.

All of those studies use PCR Ct values as proxies for viruses and compare vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals with similar symptom severity, and it turns out that correlates at peak because symptoms are on average due to antigen loading. Those studies aren't very good at showing how effective vaccination is at preventing transmission. They just show that its nonzero.

None of those old studies apply now that omicron is around. Omicron spread all throughout the world at record breaking pace via vaccinated people, so it doesn't seem like vaccines are doing much at all to prevent spread of omicron.

You may be correct, but it's too early to tell.

As I have stated elsewhere in this thread, the rate of vaccine escape has gone up by about 5x, (from 6% to 30%), but that's still much better than one would get from no vaccination.

But it spreads so fast that it doesn't seem like that matters. It spreads basically as fast as people are interacting, if it gets into the student body then everyone will be infected in a matter of days even if they are all vaccinated.

I can't see how it could spread any faster than it already does through vaccinated people. A few people there being unvaccinated wont make a difference.

> And that's after fewer people who are vaccinated catch the virus, and there's more aborted infections and asymptomatic infections after vaccination.

This is the big one. Conditional on symptoms the viral load may be similar betwee vax/no vax, but if the vax have much less probability of getting symptoms then all is good.

Shouldn’t we be distinguishing between unvaxxed who had Covid, and unvaxxed who didn’t?

I haven't read the full paper, and it's pretty small data (maybe n=120 in total) but this would seem to suggest that there's about a 40% reduction in transmission associated with vaccination: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

I honestly don't understand how there wouldn't be protection from the vaccine. It's not a sterilising vaccine, but it does offer protection.

"SAR among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% [95% CI 15–35] for vaccinated vs 23% [15–31] for unvaccinated)."

In other words, once infected, there is no reduction. How effective are these boosters against Omikron infection, weeks and months down the line?

Maybe if the health care system had lots of staff, meaning lots of doctors, not just the trickle that comes from the tiny amount of medical schools, the system wouldn't collapse?

Has America tried addressing COVID that way, increasing the number of doctors?

Has America considered doubling the number of doctors, nurses, hospitals, and all other medical support, building and bootstrapping many more medical schools, and graduating an enormous cadre of recruits from a seven year program, all at a cost probably over a trillion dollars a year, so that we can care for a massive influx of Covid patients in preference to advocating booster shots?

That's not the real cost. They could double the number of doctors by cutting the amount of education required by half, and get better results. And they wouldn't need to expand medical school capacity at all.

The amount of education doctors get is harmful. It actually makes them worse at their job. It's effectively a form of hazing by AMA.

There's a combinatorial explosion of effects and side effects in the human body. It's important to learn and memorize, and memorization is undervalued, but not to that extent. It's like memorizing optimal solutions to traveling salesman instances. Other times it's like memorizing a times table of the three-digit numbers. That is a waste of time and will make you a much worse mathematician.

That's one of the dumbest things I heard in a long time

We need to do that anyway, but then the doctors that make those decisions wouldn’t get paid nearly as much. There is absolutely an artificial scarcity of MDs in the medical field that needs to be discussed.

You're getting a massive influx even if the booster shots have 100% uptake, so let's just stop restricting the number of residencies and let the doctors we already train... work as doctors!

> Because if protection from symptomatic infection increases at a population level, then overall transmission becomes less likely.

Protection from Omikron quickly wanes. At what point does that "extra bit of immunity" justify heart injury? We're talking about roughly 1 in 10000 doses administered causing Myocarditis in a young male. We don't know if the risk increases after each dose, but preliminary data suggests that it may:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v...

We're talking about ~1:10000 odds for one specific vaccine when vaccinating young males, which is why many countries are no longer using that vaccine for this demographic. Other vaccines are closer to 1:100000, which isn't far from the myocarditis risk of an infection with COVID-19.

The study also shows that there was practically no increase in risk for the third shot (though with a fairly wide CI), so it's possible the risk may just depend on whether someone is immunonaive or not.

> Other vaccines are closer to 1:100000, which isn't far from the myocarditis risk of an infection with COVID-19

The risk is given by the FDA as up to 1:14285 (males aged 12-17) for the second dose:

https://www.fda.gov/media/154869/download

However, a study from Hong Kong found an incidence of up to 1:2700 in the second dose (males aged 12-17):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34849657/

What we don't know is whether a vaccination would actually prevent Myocarditis in a breakthrough infection. These risks may well not be mutually exclusive. In any case, the risks are not directly comparable unless you assume 100% PCR-confirmed infection risk over six months, which is of course unrealistic.

1:100000 was in reference to the "males < 40" age bucket in the UK study linked by OP. The myocarditis risk from infection for the 12-17 age group appears to be significantly higher according to this study[1] (1:1141), which gets us quite close to the Hong Kong study incidence if we assume two shots after the first dose.

> In any case, the risks are not directly comparable unless you assume 100% PCR-confirmed infection risk over six months, which is of course unrealistic.

I do wonder how unrealistic it is with Omicron, but maybe we'll get lucky and Omicron's less likely to cause myocarditis.

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

"every extra bit of immunity helps" - Agree. But this shouldn't be mandated. Rewarded, yes. But not mandated.

All the above applies for the flu as well, so why do we insist on inventing a new set of rules for Corona ?

With vaccine and booster shots, both require a similar amount of hospital resources.

The current way is simply not sustainable.

> This blind boosterization is only demonstrating how the governments are still shitless scared of their medical system collapses with vulnerable groups, so that they want to boost anyone in sight, just to be on a safer side.

I mean yes, that's still sort of the point.

There's still probably about 10% of the population which is unvaccinated and unexposed. If they all wind up catching Omicron in the next 2-3 months (due to its ability to reinfect and ignore neutralizing antibodies to travel through the population to find those still-vulnerable hosts) then the fraction of them winding up in the hospital will be sufficient to knock over the hospital system again. We didn't have any excess capacity in our medical system when this started, and we have less now.

The population's tolerance for any sort of behavioral changes is low, and the unvaccinated aren't listening to anyone, so the real only remaining lever to pull is recommending boosters to try to provide some level of protection against disease and transmission over the next couple of months in order to flatten the curve yet again.

The modelling estimates that I've read though are that we're at about 90% of the population being exposed (depends somewhat widely on vaccination status and how hard the area was hit by Delta though), so we're just about done with the pandemic. Omicron should mostly finish the job that Delta started of finding all the holdouts and burning through all the dry wood in the population. In the meantime though that last 10% is enough to put the medical system under too much stress again.

When 100% of the population was dry tinder hospitals were under strain X.

Now we have 1/10th that by your estimate. Why wouldn't we be under significantly less strain?

Current variants are significantly more infectious (R0 used to be around 2.5-3.0 for the ancestral strain, Delta was 5+, Omicron estimates go up to 10). Vaccine efficacy is also reduced for these variants. We've also scaled back non-pharmaceutical interventions in many places.

You've neglected to account for the substantial difference in average hospital stay period between Delta and Omicron.

Do we know how large this effect is for the unvaccinated? I'm still not sure if the numbers we're seeing from countries with relatively high seroprevalence through either vaccination, infection, or both can easily be applied to other countries.

This UK report[1] does show a corrected Hazard Ratio of 0.76 relative to Delta, but more than half of this group seems to have had a previous infection. Not sure what it would look like if you exclude them.

[1]: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...

Because it has never taken more than a small fraction of the immune-naive population getting coronavirus to have the severe cases overload the hospitals and Delta made that worse.

And Omicron is able to reinfect through the recovered/vaccinated population and we're not taking any precautions at all now so the rate of infections is through the roof.

The Omicron curve in South Africa looks like a Bell curve and is in the process of dropping as fast as it rose. Without vaccines or boosters.

Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/28/omicron-is-not...

"Omicron is “not the same disease we were seeing a year ago” and high Covid death rates in the UK are “now history”, a leading immunologist has said."

There should be special scalable government covid wards to handle overflow at this point. This is no longer a collective problem, considering that the remaining unvaccinated are mostly by choice. The externalities are far worse than the disease now.

There aren’t any excess medical professionals to staff a scalable COVID ward.

Are we really that unimaginative as a society so as to walk the decision tree all the way down to "not enough doctors and nurses" as the intractable problem behind all this suffering and strife? I used the word "scalable" with intention. There has been more than enough time to design a protocol and train less experienced staff that could be utilized in most cases. Highly trained medical professionals would be reserved for unique situations, which surely are not the bulk of covid hospitalizations. Hundreds of billions could have been invested into a scalable protocol that doesn't require drafting of existing medical professionals, and the cost would have still just been a drop in a bucket compared to how much has been spent on relief and how much has been lost by society as a whole. Other than R&D in pills and shots, the response to covid has been lethargic and hopeless. They didn't use this excuse of lack of medical professionals during the polio epidemic - for those that got left behind by the vaccine, they used ingenuity and created the iron lung.

> those younger than 40

I think your concern is based on the heightened risk of myocarditis, right?

My understanding (mostly from [0], made by a UK cardiologist) is that the danger of myocarditis from the vaccine is higher than the danger of myocarditis from COVID only for males under the age of 30 who receive a Moderna shot. For every other case, the vaccine is an improvement (so males under 30 should get Pfizer/BioNTech, which is the government recommendation at the moment in my country).

[0]: https://youtu.be/5iABaxRWGxk

I think you missed the point, people under 40 are not very likely to be hospitalized so why should they get the boosters.

People should be free to choose booster shots, those who are worried can continue to get booster shots.

In essence the same system we have with the flu is what we should have with Corona.

And then we can focus on some of the bigger problems such as Global Warming.

> I think you missed the point, people under 40 are not very likely to be hospitalized so why should they get the boosters.

I don't see the point written anywhere so I suppose I did.

In my opinion, people should get the vaccine as long as the harm of not having it is greater than the harm of having it. Adverse reactions are very uncommon and unvaccinated people are at heightened risk of hospitalisation (even under 40s) so the balance tips in favour of the vaccine. The booster seems like a good idea due to Omicron.

> People should be free to choose booster shots, those who are worried can continue to get booster shots.

I do agree that people should have a choice to take it or not.

However just as I believe the right to free speech doesn't mean I'm obliged to listen, I believe the right to choose not to be vaccinated (or receive a booster) doesn't mean I'm obliged to be around you. That is, I think it's fine for participation to be refused to people based on their vaccination status (though I support say testing as an alternative).

> That is, I think it's fine for participation to be refused to people based on their vaccination status

This doesn’t make sense either. You are already free not to participate. You can’t demand non-participation. Especially as it is not proven that vaccination prevents transmission.

> And then we can focus on some of the bigger problems such as Global Warming

Funny how that got dropped from the spotlight, I didn’t even notice.

Myocarditis is not the same as death. Boosters are required because the efficacy of the vaccine has been observed to wane with time.

Too bad the health systems couldn't come up with one tiny sugar pill that would confer 100% protection against all variants for the next 100 years. The are asking us to take 3 shots, the horror!

Actually there’s a UK report saying that protection against symptomatic disease wanes significantly after only 10 weeks: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Effectiveness against severe disease is unknown.

And there’s also https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v... claiming that for males younger than 40, risk of myocarditis from the vaccine and disease is similar.

Under these circumstances, mandating boosters for students is not justified.

That UK report suggests that protection from symptomatic infection reduces (at the 10 week mark) for Pfizer, but not for Moderna.

It reduces for both, but Moderna's still high at that "9+" week mark because of the larger dose. It's only reasonable to assume that it will plummet fast as more weeks pass. Notice also how the AstraZeneca vaccinated are disadvantaged yet again: they both have less protection in the first place and lose protection no matter what booster they get.

The conclusion is that the current boosters are essentially obsolete for infection control. When considering also the risk of myocarditis, vaccine mandates in colleges don't make sense.

>for males younger than 40, risk of myocarditis from the vaccine and disease is similar.

When a person has COVID-19, is myocarditis the only symptom that can kill them?

Total risk of death and injury from COVID-19 is far greater than the total risk of death and injury from vaccine-induced symptoms.

Mandating boosters is very easily justified.

It’s may not be justified, because the subjects are already vaccinated and protected, but there is an increase in myocarditis risk for them.

Protection from the vaccine wanes over time. For the entire population, boosters reduce COVID-19 death/injury more than they increase vaccine death/injury.

Many European countries are segmenting the population by age and making different recommendations for different segments.

Creating policies "for the entire population" is irresponsible given that we know that these vaccines have side-effects which are more frequent at specific age spans, so I expect that the appropriate institutions are verifying the latest data and are adjusting their recommendations. This is generally happening e.g. in the UK or Germany.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but we didn't have a delta-specific boosters yet, what makes you think we will have those for omicron? With insensitives like that, why big pharma even think about doing anything beyond press-releases?

As far as I’m aware, the boosters are not specific to any variant. Aren’t they the same formula as the initial mRNA doses?

Me neither. I was replying to a comment with "omicron-tuned booster" catched my eye.

did you read the rest of my comment? or were you just keyword scanning? your question doesn't really follow from anything I said

I did, but then I saw a link to YouTube instead of PubMed or arXiv.

And yet you participate in the topic on "hacker news".

cool, cool. it's from HHMI and is a talk on multiple published works but okay. thanks for taking the time to process literally any of the information I am trying to communicate rather than just surface level cues from random words. it shows in the deep discussion you've provided us so far.

Which means they're specific to the original, pre-variant virus.

Slide 15 of this current CDC document for boosters with what they share as the relevant measured data on how effective the two dose vaccine is over time. Look at the severe disease vs. time. Without stating my opinion, Draw your own conclusion.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

There are guaranteed to be healthy 18 years who've been double-vaxxed and fought off a COVID infection, possibly as recently as right now during the massive Omicron wave. Their near-term risk of winding up dead/in ICU from a potential new COVID infection is effectively zero.

The idea of a blanket mandate that these young people must be immediately boosted regardless of how many times and how recently their immune system has fought off SARS-CoV-2 or what their current antibody levels are is totally unsupportable as science or public policy. We're moving from cloth mask theater to potentially screwing up your immune system and endangering yourself with unnecessary-to-harmful booster theater. Enough.

Stanford is also remaining willfully ignorant of prior infection-conferred immunity, easily measured by IgG assay. This is all becoming very embarrassing.

Infection-conferred immunity is inferior to vaccine-conferred immunity.

Inferior in what way? There are several measures of effectiveness. When it comes to consistency of immune response, the vaccines are superior. When it comes to broad spectrum immunity to variants, infection-conferred immunity is superior. When it comes to how long immunity lasts, infection-conferred immunity is vastly superior.

That isn't so, and both controlled studies and population-level statistics make that clear.

> .. I’ll totally begin bolstering anti-establishment sentiment if they are the only ones willing to disagree.

What does this mean? It’s not enough to be against vaccine mandates?

It means I have to listen to wildly absurd theories and hang out in Orange County, just because I didn't get the 3rd++ booster

The writing was on the wall as soon as governments started normalizing vaccination passports. Governments and businesses can now take that same mentality forward for whatever type of shot they want. Meanwhile they continue to antagonize those who choose not to take these shots, employing the classic citizen vs citizen tactic from the playbook.

Another weird take on a government's rights to dictate who is allowed to enter and exit their own country.

Countries have always been able to impose vaccine requirements for smallpox polio, yellow fever, meningitis and now covid.

Businesses didn't need to validate that people coming into their stores had these vaccines because the government already would have validated it for them.

Businesses have the right to ensure the health of their employees and customers.

> Another weird take

It's not the "take" that's weird, it's the situation. I said nothing about whether the government or businesses have the right or not. Just that since it has now started it is likely to be used further. That's not a weird take, it's just a fact proven by the current situation that previous poster was describing.

I've been entering businesses my entire life and until now I've never had to show private medical information about vaccinations in order to enter. Similarly, I've traveled through multiple countries in my life and until now I've never had to show private medical information about vaccinations in order to enter. What's weird is that now I can't go to a funeral without telling someone at the door about what shots I have.

It's also interesting that pointing out this very unusual state of affairs and its likely continuance results in a response suggesting that it's "weird" to even point it out, suggesting that it should not be pointed out, because who wants to be "weird" or say "weird" things. That's a type of antagonization.

You risk the institution effectively having to shut down if too many students/faculty are sick at any given time.

Students live in dorms with other students. If one gets sick they have to isolate away from other students. This is effectively impossible in a traditional dorm so they have to be moved to quarantine. There is likely a limit to quarantine space available. If quarantine is filled the University will have to shut down because they cannot follow CDC guidance.

It is not about the immediate health risk to the students as that is relatively low, but the University being able to continue operations.

> oo many students/faculty are sick at any given time.

Whats the rate of hospitalization for COVID among students right now? If you dont have that kind of actual data in hand, you can't make a proper decision.

because of the demographics that number should be close to zero, except for students that have multiple comorbidities.

The CDC has guidance for how colleges should handle students who test positive for Covid. You cannot have a student who has tested positive living in the dorms with other students.

You do not need to be in the hospital to be sick, no?

Colleges and schools in general are also very unforgiving of sick time, compared to work.

If you miss a week or two of a difficult class, you may not be able to make up for that lost time in order to pass. With some classes only being offered at specific quarters/semesters and many being impacted, a single failed or dropped class can put you a year behind graduation, assuming you can pay for it. If a professor or teaching assistants gets sick, it would have pretty significant impacts for a larger number of students.

Or they could not? Among college-aged folks, Corona has mild symptoms - maybe approaching a bad flu.

When I was at school, we had flu outbreaks. People got sick, their roommates got sick…and no one was tested or quarantined or had to wear masks. Life continued.

What if we just stopped? We could treat Corona outbreaks at schools like cold or flu outbreaks. Would anyone even notice Omicron ripping through the student body if we weren’t obsessively looking? I doubt it.

I too was in college during a major flu outbreak. I got very sick. It actually changed a lot of operating procedures at my school and was the start of hand sanitizer being everywhere. It also kicked off the increased recommendation of the flu vaccine for everyone.

The CDC has guidance for colleges and universities on how to handle any number of outbreaks. Colleges are following guidance on how to handle Covid-19. Will that guidance change in the future? Probably. But it hasn’t changed yet.

That guidance needs to change now, there is little difference to flu and Corona outbreaks due to the vaccines.

Thus spake someone who has never actually had influenza.

How can you be so sure ?

Because people who've had a bad dose of influenza never call it a bit flu.

I'm not sure what the definition of a bad dose is, but i have never taken any flu shots and have managed just fine.

So with three vaccine shots for Corona, I'd say that the chances of getting seriously ill with the flu is much higher than Corona.

Thus my original point stands, we should start treating Corona the same way we treat the flu, starting now.

There are a lot of older (and otherwise susceptible) people on campus. Regardless, no they can’t do that because if something did happen, they’d get blasted.

It’s the same with anything safety-related, really. Driving a car is super unsafe, but rather than banning cars, you wear a seatbelt.

Older people should WFH and be careful. They shouldn’t burden younger generation for their disproportionate susceptibility to this disease.

I know what the next counter argument is: But they will get COVID from their children. Then I guess we should discourage older people from hanging out with anyone without testing and precautions.

Why aren’t we placing burden on older generation to protect themselves?

I am sympathetic to this point, but many of the older people are the professors, ostensibly the reason for students being there in the first place.

Yes, and the professors are also part of the government and financial success of a research-based school. Undergraduate students are perhaps only 50% of the school’s priorities.

> Older people should WFH and be careful.

Do we have or are you pushing for policies requiring WFH accommodations for them? What about people without jobs that can be done remotely, which yes does include a lot of the elderly population.

And careful how? Like for example frequent testing of those around them? Or policies requiring employers to not allow people back to work until they are confirmed non-contagious?

> Older people should WFH and be careful.

Absent any of those policies existing, this line like so so many others in here just reads as "it seems pretty safe for me now so good luck everyone."

There are at least two reasons not to treat Corona outbreaks at schools like cold or flu outbreaks, and TBH even during a flu outbreak, it's reasonable to expect people to get vaccinated, even if it's not required like other vaccines. In some cultures, it's even expected that if you're at all sick, even with the common cold, you'll wear a mask to protect others as well, but I get that that's not the norm in the US or around Stanford.

First, there's not just healthy "college-aged" students on campus. With that in mind, there's a risk that area hospitals could get overloaded with patients. You don't want the hospital to be full when there's a car accident or someone needs their stomach pumped, someone suspects they might have an STD, or whatever. Requiring a booster mitigates that risk as it lessens the symptoms to the point where hospitalization is shorter/unlikely.

Second, there's a chance for a mutation each time the virus spreads from one person to another. For that reason, you don't want it ripping through everyone.

I encourage everyone eligible to get vaccinated, but vaccination won't prevent the virus from ripping through everyone. The primary benefit is reducing severe symptoms.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646

The current thinking is that mutations are most likely to occur in immunocompromised patients who experience prolonged infections. Vaccines aren't very effective for them.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...

The vaccine doesn’t prevent infection; it mainly prevents death. The other way to interpret this is that they do not want to be responsible for deaths, but are fine with low-risk infections.

I anecdotally know people who had a booster and were still subsequently infected. Packing 200 people in a room over 100 days and these rare cases will happen.

> Boosters for last year’s virus

You're announcing confidently to the world that you don't know anything about immunology, and haven't seen the studies that show that boosters produce broad neutralization against Omicron even though they haven't been updated (and you probably lack the ability to theorize as to how that could be possible).

> the fairly predictable solution of stacking them every 6 months

Outside of Israel nobody is suggesting boosters every 6 months. We'll see how that goes for them. Lots of experts are actually very suspicious of the idea that we'll be boosting constantly (outside of the 3% of the vulnerable population that is immunosuppressed).

>Outside of Israel nobody is suggesting boosters every 6 months.

Why would any other country stop with 1 booster? I think rather that they are just slow rolling their mandates. The data suggests that the immune boost is temporary so I don't see how the situation will be any different for shot 4.

Perhaps the only difference will be increasing fatigue with compliance.

A 4th shot is unlikely to produce substantially better immunity than a 3rd shot.

The realistic goal is also not to prevent transmission but to prevent severe disease and death, and a 4th shot won't help much with that at all.

Once everyone has T-cells the pandemic phase is over and it really does just become a cold or the flu and we're getting close. Estimates are that around >90% of the population is exposed or vaccinated. Once we get there then the reaction to the virus should look more like a cold or flu virus. We don't recommend anything for colds. For the flu we mandate it for health care workers and highly recommend it for vulnerable people and offer it to everyone. We're going to wind up there soon.

There's also going to be a narrower number of people who have been vaccinated and never caught the virus who think that the goal is zero covid, sooner or later nearly everyone catches it. Once they've been vaccinated and caught mild disease they're going to stop treating it as an existential threat. Once that happens their appetite for supporting mandates will disappear.

My guess is that Omicron is the last gasp of the pandemic phase of the virus. And I can't see mandates for 4+ shots being anything other than political suicide in the US outside of health care.

>There's also going to be a narrower number of people who have been vaccinated and never caught the virus who think that the goal is zero covid, sooner or later nearly everyone catches it.

Right, see, the issue is that these people who want Zero COVID but are just slightly bothered by that never having been the stated goal are planning to go down fighting.

Also lost me and I'm not even a Stanford student.

But the wording is exactly the same as used by companies. "Strongly encouraged" is now the preferred wording to express: "You MUST comply with this."

But since everyone who is worried have gotten the vaccine and will continue to get booster shots ad infinitum, there is zero reason to force this on everyone else.

It's time to stop this nonsense.

>Classes at Stanford will be online for the first two weeks of the winter quarter. The quarter will still begin Jan. 3 for most students, as scheduled. We will resume in-person instruction Tuesday, Jan. 18, after the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday. We continue to expect students and instructors to be on campus for the winter quarter.

>If you are healthy, you are encouraged to come back to campus on-time and get settled. You can return to campus later if you choose to, but we advise against waiting until in-person classes are about to begin. This is because if you return on-schedule, test positive upon arrival and need to isolate for at least 10 days, you will be able to continue your coursework during the online instruction period. Once in-person instruction begins, any accommodations for those in isolation will need to be arranged with individual instructors at their discretion.

The reader with an understanding of university finances is encouraged to arrive at his own conclusions.

They'll really allow a professor to impact a student who has covid?

They're being so careful that they force another booster shot, but if you get covid, you might fail a course? What a great way to artificially lower future covid numbers by having people refuse to self report.

What happens with immune system if you get booster shots every 3 months for, let’s say, 3 years?

Presumably not much. If you look at the amount of antibodies produced they’re a pretty insignificant amount (if that’s what the concern is).

How about we stop presuming things and do some actual science. This is supposedly one of the most prestigious universities in the world throwing out the foundations for modern thought in the name of fear and profits for the greediest companies in the entire world.

Their slogan is literally "the wind of freedom blows". Has the wind stopped blowing?

How do you accumulate 3 years of data on a vaccine about a year old? Presuming and modeling is what we can do.

This is exactly the problem. You have simply decided science isn't needed because "we don't have time". Covid is not nearly as risky as the government and media has tried to convince everyone it is. The vast vast vast majority of people are at essentially 0 risk to covid.

Eroding the foundations of democracy and modern thought in the repeated failed attempts to prevent the spread of covid is extremely stupid. I really wonder if people like you are even aware of how miserably every single policy aimed at slowing the spread of covid has failed.

1) lockdown to prevent the spread - did nothing, covid spread rapidly the moment the lockdowns ended, and we did nothing to prepare for it during the time of the lockdowns. We didn't build hospitals, we didn't train nurses, we simply wasted money.

2) Masks Mandates - A minor slow of the spread at the cost of erosion of freedoms, you don't have to be an anti masker to realize this, and the production of huge amounts of waste.

3) More Lockdowns - Same thing as first time.

4) Vaccines - We were promised this was the end, but thanks to people who think like you we pushed the idea that we don't need long term studies we can simply trust big pharma to tell the truth.

Remember this: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta..., here they "Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis"

This is simply a lie. There vaccine literally never was 90% effective in the real world, and currently their vaccine actually has negative efficacy in preventing omnicron.

5) Vaccine Mandates - Look around you. They did absolutely nothing. 6) Booster Mandates - ... if you still believe this can work there is nothing that can be said.

We have a lot of science. These MRNA vaccines didn't come from nowhere; they have been in development for decades. Thats why the vaccine came so quickly: the foundation was well established.

> Eroding the foundations of democracy and modern thought in the repeated failed attempts to prevent the spread of covid is extremely stupid.

Quarantine and vaccinations as solutions to infectious, deadly diseases is older than the US. They were even used by the founding fathers in the war for independence.

>These MRNA vaccines didn't come from nowhere; they have been in development for decades.

And not once could they even get to stage 3 clinical trials. This should be a red flag, not something used to promote them.

The vaccine does not have negative efficacy against Omicron. We don't have very solid data here because Omicron is so new, but one recent paper indicates that in a household setting a booster prevents around 50% of Omicron cases. That's not as good as with Delta, but it's not nothing and it's certainly not negative.

This hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but preliminary studies are showing that the vaccines actually do have negative efficacy after 90 days:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...

Yet another point in favor of "Let's not presume until the studies have been completed."

> The negative estimates in the final period arguably suggest different behaviour and/or exposure patterns in the vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts causing underestimation of the VE. This was likely the result of Omicron spreading rapidly initially through single (super-spreading) events causing many infections among young, vaccinated individuals.

That's from the linked paper. The authors don't claim at all that the vaccine has negative efficacy, and the study is simply not set up to measure that anyway. You cannot draw this conclusion from the data in this paper.

The study indeed did not set out to prove negative efficacy but a negative VE of 75% is a result that absolutely warrants further research.

Assuming that Denmark vaccinated oldest/most vulnerable first, this could be a confounded estimate (because age both means you got the vaccine first, and that your immune system will be less effective against Covid).

Personally, I think it's a statistical fluke, and was going to argue that it must be due to a smaller sample size until I saw the width of the confidence intervals (CI's get narrower as observations increase).

Very odd, and I'll be surprised if that makes it through peer review intact.

It's a statistical fluke that has been observed with Delta as well, particularly with the AstraZeneca vaccine:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3949410

It stands to reason that the unvaccinated at this point are in large parts hermits who are "protected" by their lifestyle. However, it's also plausible that the non-neutralizing antibodies from the vaccine induce a suboptimal immune response with Omikron.

That's the problem. If we haven't had the time to observe the effects it seems foolhardy to assume everything will be fine.

In the midst of a global pandemic, I think it’s fine to make educated guesses that may not be fully backed by the scientific method. A rational approach requires making the best choice out of the options available.

There's plenty of science on vaccines

Look at how many vaccines active service members are required to have for example

Please read what I said, you completely failed to understand. There is no science on the effectiveness of vaccine or booster shot mandates. Or on the long term effects of either.

And why is what the military mandates on people meaningful whatsoever? Review some history on what the military has mandated in the past.

> Presumably not much. If you look at the amount of antibodies produced they’re a pretty insignificant amount (if that’s what the concern is).

Trusting common sense is the opposite of Science.

It actually is not. Understanding anything first starts with observations about the world, pattern matching and data gathering… leading to hypothesis which are then put to test using the scientific method.

The scientific method does prove common sense incorrect a lot of times (eg there is a maximum possible speed) but it doesn’t mean that all of common sense is wrong.

Nobody knows.

Only because we haven’t had 3 years to study. We have lots of data about the impact of the vaccine so far though, and its largely positive.

According to what we have today there is no need to vaccinate healthy young people.

According to what we know, if you have recovered from delta variant you have much stronger and longer-lasting immunity then if you get vaccinated against original Wuhan strain. Yet, EU Covid pass is valid for 12 months post vaccination and only 6 months post recovery.

No matter which way you cut it- it's shaping up to be another great quarter for big pharma!

This statement would be true regardless or covid

- Pfizer net income for the quarter ending September 30, 2021 was $8.146B, a 454.53% increase year-over-year.

- Pfizer net income for the twelve months ending September 30, 2021 was $19.889B, a 149.36% increase year-over-year.

- Pfizer annual net income for 2020 was $9.616B, a 40.91% decline from 2019.

- Pfizer annual net income for 2019 was $16.273B, a 45.91% increase from 2018.

- Pfizer annual net income for 2018 was $11.153B, a 47.66% decline from 2017.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PFE/pfizer/net-inc...

Any reason why you omitted the other recent years in which it nearly or more than doubled?

Fine, the following page shows their net profits from 2006 - 2020.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266194/net-income-of-pha...

This shows three years of Phizer netting in the neighborhood of 20 billion. This year they've hit 20 billion net in the first nine months. Let's see in a couple of weeks by how much they've blown away their previous record of 22 billion.

Ultimately, is there any reason to pretend these profits have nothing to do with the vaccine?

I made no suggestion either way, but I see you’ve switched from providing the dollar and percentage increase to dollar increase only for some reason.

Are profits good or bad? Should they have profit from the vaccine?

How many of those enacting mandates for a particular product of certain publicly traded corporations also happen be shareholders of those corporations? I wouldn't know, because that information needs not be disclosed.

If they’re smart, all of them. An index fund is probably the best investment for most people.

More seriously though, there’s widespread support for vaccines and even vaccine mandates worldwide.

All the universities in the UC system are also requiring booster shots by end of January.

I know Cornell requires me (staff) to get a booster by February. I was looking for one in early December and couldn't get one in Ithaca in the near future so I wound up booking a shot three weeks later (this week) in Cortland, the next town over.

It was surreal being right next to a student outbreak with 1000+ positives but having almost no transmission to faculty and staff.

Aren’t faculty and staff generally already socially distanced from students — even before the pandemic? It’s not like pre-K.

Sounds like the students are partying outside of school hours and the professors aren't. Also dorm/shared living can't be helping either.

Aren't they partying together all day in a classroom anyway ?

The administration claimed that there was no evidence of transmission in classroom situations and I'm certain that what true up until the surge at the very end.

I work in a unit that runs a web site and we were all sent home early in the pandemic. Students came back the academic year after that but I think we had only two staffers from my unit who were authorized to come back to the office that year.

In that time frame Cornell kept in-person instruction running, they were testing all students twice a week.

My unit returned to the office last summer, they restarted instruction with most students being tested on a once weekly schedule. There was a panic early in the semester with the delta variant being brought in by incoming students so we had strict mask requirements both indoors and dense outdoor situations.

Throughout most of the fall 2021 semester both Cornell and Tompkins County were testing about 5000 people a day, Tompkins was getting about 50 positives a day, Cornell more like 5.

At the end of the semester we had the Omicron outbreak that was featured on CNN. Myself I have very little contact with undergraduates at all, my unit has only a handful of interns, once in a while I talk to undergraduates waiting in line for food or at the library or something.

I've tried to sort out the social hierarchy of frats and sororities by how expensive the cars are in the parking lots are but other than that I know nothing at all about their partying habits.

My son and I almost went to that anime convention at the Javits Center which had an Omicron outbreak but couldn't get tickets for Saturday so we settled for going to the comic-con in Scranton (in an equally overdense environment that seems outright cruel to the socially awkward attendees, some of whom we saw cowering under tables.) Looking back we're glad we didn't go because I bet attendees of that convention spread the virus all over the Northeast.

I'm vaccinated but do not plan to get a booster of the original vaccine. If a new and dangerous variant shows up, and we have a vaccine specifically for that variant, I will consider that new shot, just as I do with yearly flu shots.

What many people miss when they advocate for boosters is that antibody count is not the full story. When it comes to protection against severe disease, cell-mediated immunity is key and doesn't go away.

Here's the most relevant science I've found about the effectiveness of the booster.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2115926

If you look at the results table, the booster does benefit everyone. I can't argue with that. However, the absolute counts shown in that table paint a more nuanced picture.

While the 60+ crowd gets significant benefits from being boosted, making it a no-brainer for them, the under 60 crowd has less benefit. The under 60 crowd is already relatively safe from severe disease and death with the original vaccine dose.

Being healthy and under 60, I need to weigh these mild benefits with the cons: 1) normalizing mandated boosters as an ongoing way of life and 2) extending the pandemic by using up booster doses instead of sending them to undervaccinated countries (the ones where new variants are popping up).

Instead of getting in the habit of being boosted with the same vaccine every 3-6 months for mild benefit, I think it makes much more sense to take a holistic view that helps us end this pandemic.

[Edited for clarity]

> While the booster does have significant benefits for the 60+ crowd, the benefits are not nearly as great for other age groups. For me, the cons of getting boosted outweigh the pros, and so I won't.

Hmmm, interesting. I read that paper and thought, wow, I'm glad I got a booster ;).

> What many people miss when they advocate for boosters is that antibody count is not the full story when it comes to protection against severe disease. Cell-mediated immunity is key and doesn't go away.

This appears to be very true (although I am not an immunologist).

> Instead of boosting our antibody counts ever 3-6 months with the same vaccine and normalizing mandated boosters, I think it makes much more sense to send these to undervaccinated locations where variants are evolving.

Sending the boosters to the rest of the world makes far more sense than boosting the general populations in the developed world. We should definitely do both, but if we can only do one then it should be vaccinating as much of the world as possible.

> Hmmm, interesting. I read that paper and thought, wow, I'm glad I got a booster ;).

I think your take and mine are both reasonable and based on different interpretations of tradeoffs.

With the original vaccine doses, you and I probably agreed. There was a somewhat objective case to strongly encourage vaccination of everyone. The alternative was to remain in lockdown indefinitely or risk some sort of collapse of the healthcare system.

Now, though, as we consider the booster, I think the choice is less objective or obvious. Our healthcare system is not at risk, and we can largely be free of lockdown with just the vaccine. There are real cons to a booster, including normalizing government mandates and not vaccinating the rest of the world. Some people may choose to have the peace of mind that comes from a booster. Others may choose not to. I'm hoping, though, that we can agree that mandates are not the way.

I assume you are talking about the US there, since here in Germany we are racing to booster as many folks as possible right now as the nth wave is tsking over the country again. Hard restrictions for unvaccinated people, as makes sense. But the thing that counts is: our health care system is on the brink of collapse. The hospital staffs around the country are edging on breakdown. Health care workers simply can't hold off the storm much longer and we are headed right into a big wave of infections and thus bad disease courses. Unvaccinated people are clogging our ICUs, directly leading to deaaths of multiple groups of people waiting for surgery of various means. There's also an uptick in healthcare professionals leaving the field and major mental health issues even leading up to higher suicide rates.

Meanwhile, the Nevada state legislature decided against extending the vaccination requirement for the Nevada System of Higher Education (https://lasvegassun.com/news/2021/dec/21/college-students-in...) and the NSHE board of regents may be on the verge of reversing their staff vaccine mandate instead of firing those who refuse to comply (https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/education/regents-to-rea...).

At this point what is the case for vaccine requirements?

* They aren't risk free (like we were all told initially)

* They don't prevent transmission (like we were all told initially)

Full disclosure: fully vaxxed, got it the very first day I was allowed to. Wouldn't change the decision. That said: man I really cannot get over the fact that it feels like public health officials are just straight up lying to us all at this point. That is something that I really do not like for several reasons. Not the least of which is that it will prevent people from trusting them in the future, and that will have negative consequences for everyone.

The point since the start was to prevent serious cases. In my country the only target value under consideration for intensifying/reducing measures is just ICU occupations in hospital, and this rapid increase of cases, even with lower risk of serious cases compared to delta, is seriously jeopardizing our hospitals (again)

> The point since the start was to prevent serious cases.

It was sold as preventing transmission:

It's official: Vaccinated people don't transmit COVID-19 https://fortune.com/2021/04/01/its-official-vaccinated-peopl...

> "Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it's also in real-world data," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told Rachel Maddow on Monday, March 29.

I admit I don't know the narrative in the US/CDC. For what I understood reading around on various international news networks the idea it would prevent transmission via reducing the viral charge to almost zero was related to the variant to which the current version of the vaccines were built for. The new variants (delta first and omicron in particular) require new updated and targeted vaccines to keep the viral charge so low to keep avoiding transmission.

But again, I am no virologist and my understanding is just a sum of what I read around.

That's a fairly week post-hoc claim that was oversold in the media. The actual clinical, controlled studies weren't checking for stopping transmission.

> That's a fairly week post-hoc claim that was oversold in the media.

Besides CDC Director Walensky's claim that the vaccines would prevent transmission, another well-known and trusted figure named Tony Fauci made the same claim:

Masks off? Fauci confirms ‘extremely low’ risk of transmission, infection for vaccinated https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/dr-fauci-confirms-extreme...

> “The risk is extremely low of getting infected, of getting sick, or of transmitting it to anybody else, full stop,” says Dr. Fauci, explaining the new CDC mask guidance for fully vaccinated folks.

> They don't prevent transmission (like we were all told initially)

No "real" public official I believe ever said this.

December 2020:

> Fauci Predicts U.S. Could See Signs Of Herd Immunity By Late March Or Early April

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/1...

> "I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact," Fauci said. "But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity."

Talking about herd immunity doesn't make sense unless the vaccine prevented transmission.

Then, May 2021:

> Masks off? Fauci confirms ‘extremely low’ risk of transmission, infection for vaccinated

https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/dr-fauci-confirms-extreme...

Herd immunity != getting vaccinated means you can't ever transmit the virus to anyone else.

>They don't prevent transmission (like we were all told initially)

They do prevent transmission to a certain extent.

How much is "to a certain extent"?

Has this been quantified? Because I recall Fauci saying it "100%" prevent hospitalizations and it turns out it was far, far less than 100%.

Unvaccinated 12-34 year-olds in Washington are

• 3 times more likely to get COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 12-34 year-olds.

• 12 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 12-34 year-olds.

Unvaccinated 35-64 year-olds are

• 4 times more likely to get COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 35-64 year-olds.

• 18 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 35-64 year-olds.

Unvaccinated 65+ year-olds are • 7 times more likely to get COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 65+ year-olds.

• 13 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 65+ yearolds.

• 15 times more likely to die of COVID-19 compared with fully vaccinated 65+ year-olds.

https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/...

When everything is multiplied by a fraction of a percent, the result is a bunch of small magnitudes overall. Like 12 times more likely to be hospitalized than fully vaccinated 12-34 year olds? What the latter's rate of hospitalization? Near 0, I assume?

This is all just weaponized statistics to generate fear. Or at least, vaccine sales.

I honestly don't have the strength for this discussion anymore, but it does make a pretty signifcant difference between seeing two thirty-somethings struggling for their lives vs. 20. I don't care about people like you anymore, I just want to protect the people that are actually important to me, which includes multiple people having to work in the ICU, and multiple people who might die if hospital capacities are full.

I've lost close friends and family to preventable circumstances, it hurt. I however did not try to justify imposing changes to people's behavior, autonomy, or freedom.

I'm against vaccine mandates and don't think the state should have the ability to impose so much on bodily autonomy, especially given that these booster shots might become a semi-regular thing for a couple of years. At the same time, I generally don't want to associate with unvaccinated people, and am happy that my employer has the same view.

I'm not obligated to treat people with respect that they don't deserve, and I think it is heartbreaking - but important - that hospital staff are doing their best to treat everyone the same despite the obvious negligence on the side of the unvaccinated. Autonomy is cool as long as you do not need to rely on others.

Looking at the linked document, the hospitalization rate for fully vaccinated 12-34 year olds is 2.5 per 100,000. For unvaccinated it's 30.4 per 100,000.

For 35-64 it's 8.2 vs 148.8 per 100,000.

For 65+ it's 29.2 vs 382.9 per 100,000.

Interesting that they grouped together 12-34 and 34-64 age groups for death statistics table, noting that "For tables showing hospitalizations by vaccination status and deaths by vaccination status, age groups are collapsed to protect privacy"

Does it mean that number of deaths throughout the year in 12-34 age group is so low that you can guess who is who?

He tells you that he distrusts a popular authority, so you cite a popular authority.

Actual studies are a very different thing from the government's TV doctor.

You are telling us that your authority is a better authority.

Fascinating honesty in a lot of comments in this thread. HN trends liberal and the sentiment here feels growing frustration with how gov, corps, schools are handling things. I sense the general population is turning a corner, where despite what your politics are on the vaccine, everyone is over it and will demand life prior to covid.

It's amazing seeing so many people have such strong opinions on this. Worse still, people make blanket statements or seem to just want to trot out their on conclusions.

Why?

Can't we all just take a breath?

Reddit abortion debates are higher quality than this. Come on.

Generally curious and would love input from others, but from the research I've done, boosters are not recommended for all people and there was significant misgivings in the FDA officials who approved the booster: - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/25/health/covid-boosters-cdc...

As it's said a bit in that article, it's important to know that the response to anything should be based on a variety of factors and in this case including severity of getting the virus.

From my research, Omicron _is_ similar to getting a common cold. We should be adjusting our response based not only on how transmissible it is but on the consequences of us getting it, but it seems there is a much more black & white approach.

When the chance of death was significantly higher in other variants, holding off seeing ones kids made sense, when long-term covid meant going without taste or smell, that's a significant risk. I still see a lot of "do whatever is necessary to not get Covid" -- but that is now not including the severity of what you're getting. If we removed the name "Covid" and considered each to be a separate virus, would "Omicron" be something you freak out about?

If I were to do a generalized formula it would be something like:

[severity of illness] * [transmissibility] = [strength of response justified]

--------

Would love additional data that changes this mindset.

* I am vaccinated but not boosted.

-------

EDIT: Getting downvoted without responses when I'm looking for genuine information to understand more thoroughly is a pretty poor approach to helping fight C19. It dichotomizes and turns people against each other rather than facilitate discussion or learning.

The answers you are looking for have been posted a million other times in response to a million other questions by millions of other people. To claim that silence on your particular question means there are no answers or that you are correct is disingenuous.

We know this, so we downvote.

This is a very uncharitable response. GP wants a legitimate discussion that doesn't have an obvious/well-known/established answer at this point.

My objection is not to asking questions or wanting discussion. It's the implication that because people didn't respond to his specific set of questions (which weren't unique and were echoed/responded to many other places on the same page) means there weren't good answers and that his speculative position had merit.

It doesn't make sense to have a US centric approach to this topic, FDA recomendations are just some among many. All the independent comissions in Europe are coming to similar conclusions, too.

> [severity of illness] * [transmissibility] = [strength of response justified]

I think that's quite a fair metric, but slightly incomplete. The most important factor here is ICU capacity vs. ICU occupancy rate, because this also measures if you die from shit like appendicitis. Winter in general sees more ICU cases, so the strain the system can take is already lower. Switzerland for example is still doing quite well despite incidence rates of more than a thousand due to their extremely advanced healthcare sector. Death is actually secondary in this. If you live after having taken an ICU bed for 6 weeks, you might have killed 2 other people completely unrelated to your case due to your own negligence.

The fact of the matter is that the healthcare sector is getting flooded again, and lots of countries have a serious risk of overstraining their healthcare sector to the point of triage. Booster shots substantially reduce the risk of serious illenss, at least that is what we are believing to see in our hospitals. Unvaccinated are close to 90% of ICU cases, while boostered people make up less than 1%, although it is important to note that doubly-vaccinated still make up more than half of the local population (and roughly 20% unvaccinated).

Of course it takes time to do good studies on the actual impact of booster vaccinations, and I'm super annoyed by the lack of full transparency of research bodies tasked to make recommendations, but you can't just sit on your balls in times of crisis. The risk to ones own health due to boostering also seems to be negligible, it is just a minor annoyance.

Thanks for this, I do consider severity to include hospitalization and death: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Note that it's now talking about effectiveness in transmissibility, rather than what defined effectiveness when they were being tested which was hospitalization and death -- which is still at 90% after 6 months, including against Delta.

I do follow many nurse friends of mine who share daily counts of local ICU case increases, and very much agree that I consider ICU capacity (or hospital in general) to be something that must be monitored. That was a statistic I didn't have -- and thank you spurred some more study digging and I found this:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2115624

This feels pretty relevant, 90% reduction in mortality between those who got a booster and those who did not (for ages 50+), though I'm still looking at people for my age.

Anyway-- thanks, this is useful, going to dig more

I think part of the problem is that Omicron is too new to really quantify risks for the vaccinated but unboosted population.

That said, what we do know is that the side-effect risks associated with getting boosted are extremely low.

So, I would pose the question: why not?

The health risks associated with getting boosted is vanishingly small compared to other risks you take. For example, as an average 30-40 yo, the risk of death by simply getting out of bed and engaging in normal activities for one day is 1 in 200,000. That risk is far greater than the risk of getting boosted.

My take is that people are making a big deal out of nothing. If there's a chance that getting boosted will help us put an end to this virus sooner, and I'm not taking on any meaningful risk by getting boosted, why not?

I hear you, and you're not wrong, but the "why not" approach does feel like a slippery slope, which could be considered a logical fallacy except in that _it has already been slipping_. It is important for me for the numbers to justify the cause, and not just because "why not".

If the disease appeared today with its current severity, would the world stop?

Posted earlier. Related. One student's response.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/life-is-too-shor...

This response is directed at the plan to delay in-person instruction (and the assumption that other campus restrictions will follow), not to the booster mandate that is the headline here.

Given the relative weakness of the (current) vaccines vs Omnicron, do these mandates make any sense, or is it largely security theatre at this point?

there is pretty good evidence that a booster provides relatively strong protection at least in the short term

I believe there is data that fully vaccinated individuals on average have less severe symptoms and significantly fewer hospitalizations. Feel free to refute (I don't have time at the moment to look it up) but I feel confident saying that.

Put yourself in the shoes of the school leadership. They need to weigh the negative publicity from this mandate against the potential negative publicity of an unvaccinated outbreak at their school (or god forbid, death(s)). It's really a no-brainer without even plugging the numbers in.

If the motivation is to avoid bad publicity, isn't that security theater?

There's a lot of room between 95% effective and useless. From everything I've read the vaccines are still a significant help, especially for preventing severe cases, even if they are less effective than against previous waves.

Would be interesting to know if/to what extent it prevents transmission. Assuming the booster reduced severity, but not transmission, it would make little sense to require it, since there is little/no negative externalities by someone not getting it.

One of the potential negative externalities is overwhelming hospitals, pushing out others in need of help.

This line of thinking could be extended to banning junk food, motorcycles, cars, etc.. Where do you draw the line?

Being in the hospital is a negative externality in a world where health care is delivered by humans with a lot of long training.

All of the current data shows that the vaccines being used in the US provide strong protection against severe illness.

That's completely useless. Vaccines are only useful if they stop or slow the spread. There are plenty of other treatments that are successful at preventing severe illness.

So what does forcing people to get a third vaccine really accomplish? In my opinion two things, further erosion of our freedoms, and huge profits for big pharma.

As I said elsewhere in this thread, the slogan of standford is literally "The wind of freedom blows". This policy does absolutely nothing to further anyone's freedom.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/breakthrough-covid-19-infectio...

“Breakthrough infections are not evidence that vaccines don’t work anymore than the fact that car crashes [that] are still sometimes fatal is evidence that seatbelts don’t work. We use prevention tools because they help reduce our risk of serious disease or death, not because they are guaranteed to 100% always keep us safe,” Murray [, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health] said.

Why would a vaccine only be useful if it stops the spread? It's a medical treatment like any other, and we universally recognize the importance of medical treatments that reduce severe illnesses to manageable levels even when they are not themselves cures.

(And moreover, this has been true for all vaccines ever made: no vaccine guarantees 100% protection from its illness, but nearly all significantly reduce the severity of breakthrough cases.)

Edit: to emphasize: there are other ways to prevent severe illness from COVID, like monoclonal antibodies (at least, the ones that still work against Omicron). But none of them counter what you've posited (making pharma companies money), and none have as mature, reliable, and freely available of a supply as do vaccines.

Because as I said, there are other treatments that are effective at treating covid. We can simply use those instead without need for mandates.

Could you elaborate on which treatments you think those are? I'm aware of monoclonal antibodies and other antiviral treatments, which are generally more difficult and expensive to distribute compared to vaccines, and are more susceptive to variant changes.

To reiterate: that doesn't mean that people shouldn't get antibody treatments, only that we should continue to practice "needs based" care: vaccinate everyone, and use the more drastic (expensive, logistically complex) treatments on those who need it the most.

Quite a few indications the booster is important.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/covid-booster-dose-is-crucia...

> The U.K.’s Health Security Agency published a report last Friday, citing initial findings from a real-world study, that said a two-dose course of Covid vaccines were significantly less effective against the omicron variant than the delta strain. However, it found that a “moderate to high vaccine effectiveness of 70 to 75% is seen in the early period after a booster dose.”

> More research emerged from Israel on Saturday, with researchers also finding that a three-shot course of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine provided significant protection against omicron.

Yes they do. The data still show pretty good protection against severe consequences from Omicron for boosted people, even despite the vaccines not being as amazingly effective against Omicron as they were against earlier variants. This is especially true for largely young and healthy populations such as the Stanford student body.

Some of them may still catch and spread Omicron, true. But overall far fewer will than without the three doses of vaccination, and those that do catch it will tend to have far briefer and milder symptoms than otherwise. It's still a big help to both the vaccinated/boosted students and all of their close contacts in the dense community that is a university.

Data from who? Because the population data from South Africa and Denmark with hugely different levels of vaccination point to omicron being mild regardless of vaccine protection. And frankly, unless we started RCTing the hell of it, population wide data is the only thing that allow us to infer any conclusions right now.

For example, in Canada and the US, the unvaccinated are hugely overrepresented in ICUs now, including in areas where Omicron is dominant. Most of the initial reports I think you're citing were preliminary when Omicron was new and hospitalization data (which is a lagging indicator) hadn't yet caught up.

Protection is not super relevant for young students who are not at risk. It also seems unlikely that the booster will slow down the spread all that much if even two doses of the vaccine have low efficacy.

In this kind of context (residential university) where you’ll have a concentrated group of people living and working together and where the consequences of an outbreak would be extremely disruptive, I think it makes perfect sense.

The question is if/to what extent does the booster prevent transmission of Omicron. We already know its transmissibility is significant greater than prior variants. If the effect on transmissibility is small, this argument would not hold much weight.

There seems to be little relationship between percentage vaccinated and case-counts. Open to being proven wrong on this.

E.g. given total new cases today, California (30k new cases) has a higher number of cases per capita, vs Texas (15.5k), despite CA having 10% higher vaccination rate. Granted there are other variables at play, but its hard to make the case that vaccination has a large impact on transmission, currently.

Of 288,072 people aged 16-39, only 6 people who had only 2 doses were hospitalized, compared to 1 person who had 3 doses [1]. This study was published before Omicron in October, for which the vaccine is even less effective and the disease is less severe.

I'm not yet aware of any other study that indicates the booster is useful for people in this age group.

I thought that a spike in antibodies might be useful in the short term, but a recent CDC presentation [2] said of an Omicron case study:

> 79% fully vaccinated; 32% with booster dose; Five of the 14 persons received additional dose <14 days before symptom onset

which doesn't give me any confidence.

> security theatre

Since mandates don't exclude people that were previously infected, to me, they seem punitive.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...

From the lancet study:

"Vaccine effectiveness evaluated at least 7 days after receipt of the third dose, compared with receiving only two doses at least 5 months ago".

Literally no control for recency. Newer research (admittedly, not yet peer-reviewed) seems to show that efficacy of the vaccines dwindles over time. As little as 90 days. [1]

The results from the booster may have more to do with having received a vaccine more recently than they do with the overall efficacy of any of the vaccines.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...

Wow, that's not an encouraging paper!

It doesn't just say that "efficacy of the vaccines dwindles over time," but that the 2-dose vaccine effectiveness against omicron is significantly negative in the 91-150 day bucket.

Does anyone have a summary of the current science regarding the third vaccine shot for covid?

I had the impression that the safety effect for someone in good health under 45 was neglible, although with a significant decrease in risk of catching or passing on the virus. With these effects waning on a time-scale similar to the first two doses.

Particularly curious regarding the risk-benefit ratio for a healthy young adult. How much of a no-brainer is an extra vaccine dose at this point? And do we know something yet about a decrease in the «no sense of smell» long-term complication?

I'm not really sure anyone knows for sure with Omicron since the data is too fresh and limited. The experts claim not to be able to tell how severe Omicron is yet, so I'm not sure how'd they know boosters are effective at reducing severity.

Science like in peer-reviewed long term Randomized Clinical Trials? I couldn't find much, it looks like it is basically navigating from the seat of the pants and let's measure it later.

Well that seems dangerous. Imagine the reaction if they get something wrong, the next time it won’t be just divisive, it’ll be war.

My understanding as a layperson is that we're only just now (this week) entering the window for which Omicron cases should (in turns of trending with other variants) be turning into deaths.

As a result, we don't have a great deal of high-quality data on how short-term dangerous Omicron is yet, other than knowing that it's more contagious than Delta and that vaccinated (and especially boosted) individuals seem to have milder symptoms when infected.

That’s true from a USA-centric perspective. I guess we’ll soon see how dearly omicron is here.

Here is a study that observes waning immunity over time for vaccinated individuals: https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/11/09/israeli-study-shows...

Long story short, the study observes that there are progressively higher rates of infection in vaccinated cohorts who were vaccinated 4, 5, and 6 months ago. There were 1.7 infections per 1000 people in the cohort vaccinated 4 months ago. There were 2.2 infections per 1000 people in the cohort vaccinated 5 months ago. There were 3.3 infections per 1000 people in the cohort vaccinated 6 months ago.

Obviously, nobody knows how Omicron changes this.

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

"For boys 12-17 without medical comorbidities, the likelihood of post vaccination dose two cardiac adverse event is 162.2 and 94.0/million respectively. This incidence exceeds their expected 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization rate at both moderate and high COVID-19 hospitalization incidence."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf

"myocarditis after vaccination was higher than myocarditis after sars-cov-2 infection for people <40"

Why is it comparing CAE with hospitalization rate? What's the CAE for 120-day COVID-19 infection, or the hospitalization rate for post-vaccination?

Because it's a garbage preprint of a paper written by unqualified anti-vaxxer weirdos. But it suits the "experts must be wrong" HN trope, so it's being posted all over this thread.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dumpster-diving-in-vaers-do...

> “Dumpster diving” is a term used to describe studies using data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System database by authors, almost always antivaxxers, who don’t understand its limitations.

Is it really productive to just label people who wrote the paper researching data of vaccine side effects as "antivaxxers"? Does it mean that nobody can question the safety of vaccines now, because the only data that is being captured about side effects, apparently can't be used in data analysis?

No - but there are good ways and bad ways to use the VAERS data. The linked paper is a perfect example of the bad ways for all of the reasons laid out in that post. Of course researchers should be questioning the safety and side effect profile of vaccines -- but that doesn't mean that everyone who purports to do so is acting in good faith or has the capabilities/expertise to do so.

There is some controversy regarding that paper: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/peer-review-of-a-vaers-dump...

I don't get it, it says that they've used the data from "Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System VAERS", and it says that "In large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind."

What's the point of the system of reporting adverse events from vaccines if it's can't be used in data analysis? How do people have to report adverse effects then? How do we measure valid data?

> the «no sense of smell» long-term complication

A couple of weeks is "long-term"?

I personally know two people who have reduced or no sense of smell after a year post infection.

I've been infected twice.

I can smell, but it's muted relative to how it was previously. It also feels like the spectrum of smells was shifted -- I can smell stuff and identify it fine, but it's not how I remember things smelling before. I've been unable to really put this into words.

This is my experience as well. Was infected February 2021 and was totally without smell for around 4 months until it slowly recovered. But like you said it's different now, where certain things smell differently but I can still identify them. Same goes for taste, in particular onions smell and taste almost entirely different than before I got sick.

Very curious. Is there anything that smells the same, or is absolutely everything different? Also, how much of a difference is it - slightly off, or completely new?

Most people have no obvious long term symptoms from infection. Some % have symptoms like no or distorted sense of smell, heart issues, lung issues, etc for more than a year. Vaccination seems to reduce the odds you'll have these problems. My guess is serious lingering symptoms 5% for kids and more like 10% for sub-50 adults. Hard to get good data though, the best I've seen is this survey from the UK:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

All this to say there will be fortunes built on the expansion of the market for chronic disease management tools.

Boosters are beneficial even if you’re under 45: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-12-09/large-studi...

Edit: critical to beneficial

Your article says they are beneficial, not critical.

Thanks I updated my comment

There may be newer data, but I'm aware of this analysis

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/addendumcorrection-to-dan...

My only criticism of that analysis is that the original study reported all the counts based on the population of over the age of 12. And when he back calculated the expected values he used the full population. The bias I see there is that it's highly likely that all of the under 12s would be unvaccinated which would change the denominator a bit. I re-did his analysis in the most drastic case by saying that all the under 12s were unvaccinated and I get a -59% VE. Not as big negative as he reports, but still negative. So that's a problem.

> although with a significant decrease in risk of catching or passing on the virus. With these effects waning on a time-scale similar to the first two doses.

Food for thought: https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...

Or the actual paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v...

The vaccine seems to result in less symptoms and makes your body clear the virus faster, but the evidence is coming in that peak viral load is not changed.

To me, this is the nightmare scenario of us going forward with emergency use authorizations. The whole theory behind the vaccine was that if your body was primed to handle the spike protein, you'd clear it faster and you'd feel better and critically: that you'd actually spread less virus because your body won't collect as much of it waiting for your immune system to react.

But only the first two parts of that ended up being true, because it appears that peak viral load isn't impacted. So now if you're vaaccinated, you feel fine so you don't test yourself and you don't isolate, but you're still spreading the virus as much as before, and r0 across the entire population is basically unchanged. It would almost be better for others if you weren't vaccinated, because you would have a lower chance of presenting asymptomatically and would be more likely to isolate.

The only silver lining is that it seems to clear faster, so the timespan where you're walking around with a high viral load (ie: superspreader) is smaller. But this isn't what they wanted.

This interpretation is misleading. There is no significant viral load difference between groups, but only looking at the subset of vaccinated people who actually got infected. Also, the study also suggests lower viral loads for the symptomatic population - regardless of vaccination, which is counterintuitive; and a higher ratio of vaccinated people developing symptoms (see counts in fig 1.).

Also, the individual variability in viral load within each group is enormous, such that finding a "significant difference" would probably require many more participants than what the study recruited.

Some time ago I looked at the odds of dying from covid Delta, which was less virulent but more deadly than Omicron. Based on the Zoe study from the U.K. the odds of catching Delta where 17,000 to 1. https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/uk-rates-holding-steady-in-sp...

The odds of dying, I took from the CDC, because there are issues with counting deaths in U.K. For anyone up to 40 the odds of dying after catching covid are 1 in 5,000 for those with 2 or more co-morbid diseases, and 1 in 100,000 for those with fewer than 2 co-morbid diseases. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

That makes the chance of dying from covid for a 40 year old or younger = 1 in 83,333,333 for those with 2 co-morbid diseases and 1 in 1,700,000,000 for those with fewer than 2 co-morbid diseases.

Omicron may be different, but as it spreads faster and kills fewer, I doubt it will be any worse in the end.

Now you need to know the chance of dying from a vaccine adverse event but I don't have that to hand.

I’m all for requiring booster shots for $ACTIVITY, but we need to collectively get our shit together on informing folks of how to get said booster. Or maybe it’s just Washington. I was looking for a booster, so I went to our handy state Department of Health website for the vaccine locator. Nearly every single listing said something to the effect of “last updated: three months ago”. IOW, the site is now abandoned and unmaintained because, hey, we rolled out those vaccines and PROBLEM SOLVED! “Oh, shit, ‘boosters’? But the off-shore development contract only went through July!”

Okay, I’ll try CVS/Walgreens/et. al. If you don’t mind waiting until February, I guess that’s an option. Finally I just gave up and scheduled an appointment within the next two weeks at a clinic 90 minutes away. Then we happened to walk into healthcare provider Kaiser that is ten minutes from home: big fucking arrows and signs, “Walk-ins welcome!!!!11” And so we went back the next day and got our booster shots. But here’s my question/complaint: Kaiser is also the clinic that’s 90 minutes away, where we scheduled our original appointment. On the Kaiser site, there is not a single mention of a walk-in option.

My conclusion is that we appear to have to rely on Facebook posts, and rumors from friends to find a booster because the “official” channels are either not useful or just plain abandoned.

Is there really nobody attempting to be the single source of truth on where you can get vaccinated?

I had the exact same experience as you, but figured I just didn't know where to look. The earliest appointments on my local government website were for weeks out. And, each pharmacy had its own booking website. Surely, there must be someone working on integrating all these fragmented schedules into a single source of truth, and they're just doing a poor job advertising their solution?

Another poor UX is: every pharmacy’s scheduling site asks you 500 questions across multiple web pages before finally telling you they have no appointments for two weeks. Start with the goddamn schedule and then after you find a time slot and location that works, THEN ask the questions!

Complete opposite of my experience. You can an appointment at most cvs or Walgreens near me same day in most cases.

That’s a bit different from my experience. Every time I became eligible, I immediately went to Walgreens website and made an appointment for that week. No hassle at all. Where do you live that it’s that difficult?

SF hasn’t had timely Walgreens booster appts since booster became generally available. I ended up waiting in drop in line at SFGH.

Where do you live that it’s that difficult?

The backwater of Redmond. CVS, Walgreens (EDIT: Walgreens now shows appointments 2 weeks out), not a one of them showed an appointment less than a month out, if they bothered to show an appointment at all. Which reminds me of another annoyance: why not show ‘next available’ instead of making me click through each day to see if there’s an appointment?

I think the key is how fast you do it.

My wife instantly signed up when it was available and got a booster within a couple days. I waited a few days and my appointment was a month out.

We also waited a couple of days for our 6 year old and the appointment was 2 weeks out.

Must just be your location. Here in suburban DC, shots are readily available at most CVS locations, Kaiser offices, and other places you’d go for flu shots.

Vaccines.gov seems to be kept up to date for people in the US.

https://www.vaccines.gov/search/ works perfectly fine, at least in Texas. It shows all the Walmart, CVS, etc. by which vaccine is available

That site is incomplete. When I search for my zipcode, it doesn't return a CVS that I know for a fact is offering boosters every day.

I'm in a dense area of Washington and I walked into a Safeway and got my booster in 10 minutes

I find that the CVS website for scheduling an appointment is trash. It feels like it was designed by a college student with no common sense.

Honestly, I've been able to get both my vaccines (flu and Covid booster) by chance. I came across a vaccine drive run by my town's senior center and went to that for Covid, and then yesterday I happened to walk by the pharmacy in a Target and they were taking walk-ins for flu shots.

Thankfully I live in a state where the leaders really want people to get vaccinated. Yesterday I was driving around an area where there are a lot of illegal immigrants and there were signs all over the place saying "no ID necessary" for a COVID vaccine.

I had the same experience as you here in the bay area. Trying to use the official sites, either from the state government or my healthcare provider, was a chaotic array of dead links, months-old information, and ultimately, a scheduling system that had my waiting several weeks to drive a couple of hours away.

Which is what I was resigned to, until I drove by a huge outdoor, drive-through setup that took walk-ins, located in the parking lot near the animal shelter in San Martin. Very professionally run, and I was in and out in 20 minutes. And yet had I not chosen to drive Monterey instead of 101 that day, I would never have heard or seen it, and it is not on a street most people would use.

Testing too! Last time I had to get a PCR test for travel, there weren’t even test time slots available until like 1 week out. Plane leaves in 4 days? Too bad. I ended up just driving to one of them without an appointment. They were completely empty (despite the booking site saying they had no appointments available) and the bored guy said sure, drive through and do your test. Total scheduling incompetence!

compliance !== safety

I think you're being down voted for using JS syntax. You should really only need !=

I think your statement applies equally well to many other things. Computer Security popped into my head when I read it.

I truly don't understand what is so difficult about getting the booster shot.

Outside of that, a private institution is absolutely allowed to make a rule like this.

If you don't want to get a booster shot that's fine - the government should not force you to do so, but that action has consequences. Private - and several public - institutions should impose vaccine requirements as they deem fit. I want to be able to go see a play, or a movie, or to a restaurant without fear that I'm putting myself more at risk because someone at the table next to me got a vaccine 8 months ago and is no longer protected and far more likely to be carrying and spreading covid. I want to be able to see friends and then my family without having to wait days at a time in between to get a covid test result back because places are allowing not fully vaccinated people in.

My personal belief is that fully vaccinated should, today, equate to the initial vaccine plus the booster. I expect it might even further change to include a second booster.

I have a difficult time understanding why compliance with a life saving decision that is in the best interest of the individual as well as society is so hard. Reasonable exceptions should continue to exist.

If you choose not to get a booster then I don't want you to be able to continuously put me at risk.

I fully support mandates by private and public entities. This does not mean I will always do so - I'm not playing the slippery slope argument fallacy game. For covid booster shots I would be in full support of a government mandate.

> I want to be able to go see a play, or a movie, or to a restaurant without fear that I'm putting myself more at risk because someone at the table next to me got a vaccine 8 months ago

Why do you believe that you're any more at risk in this situation if you're boosted?

> ... and is no longer protected and far more likely to be carrying and spreading covid

Antibody levels are not the full story. Cell-based immunity remains intact without boosters and is key to preventing hospitalization/death.

> Why do you believe that you're any more at risk in this situation if you're boosted?

Covid spreads far more easily indoors. Breakthrough cases are becoming more common. Group immunity through boosters (or exposure) is more effective at preventing the spread of covid and reduces the chance that any one individual will catch COVID (and continue to spread it).

> Cell-based immunity remains intact without boosters and is key to preventing hospitalization/death.

Source? And further, preventing hospitalization and death is great - but we should aim to do better, preventing sickness, stopping the spread, reducing the chance of mutation etc which is what the vaccines (initial and boosters) enable.

ETA: in another of your comments you cited an article with this conclusion:

"Across the age groups studied, rates of confirmed Covid-19 and severe illness were substantially lower among participants who received a booster dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine than among those who did not."

and still somehow came to the conclusion that not getting boosted is better for society.

Do you also wear a helmet while driving? Your tolerance for risk is pretty low it seems.

Cars are mandated to include safety features and undergo testing to be deemed safe. This was not done of the car companies' own volition. They were forced to adhere to safety standards. An obvious example of which is to include seat belts. Now every car company boasts about how safe their vehicles are.

Of course I'd wear a helmet while riding a bike. Have you seen what a sidewalk can do to a watermelon?

> Covid spreads far more easily indoors. Breakthrough cases are becoming more common. Group immunity through boosters (or exposure) is more effective at preventing the spread of covid and reduces the chance that any one individual will catch COVID (and continue to spread it).

I'm not aware of any data saying that group immunity through boosters has significantly stronger effect than boosting itself or than group immunity through the original vaccination. Care to share that? My priors are that group immunity among boosted individuals would be very mildly better, but I'm not aware that that study has been done.

When we evaluate policy decisions, we should base those decisions on quantifiable tradeoffs, not simply on whether there is benefit to a policy. At some point, the diminishing returns of marginally increased safety are not worth the societal costs. To me, given the current data, it seems we're at that point for vaccination.

As to the other comment thread, I'm happy to address any questions you have there, in order not to repeat the discussion here.

Wonder how many weeks until everyone in CA realizes everyone has already gotten it.

Race to the bottom. Faster!

Does booster have same contents as dose 1 or can it use a fraction of the material? I heard about research of mixing vaccines by different manufacturers but not about stretching a dose to more individuals.

I don't understand how this is any different than the normal vaccines that are required for you to attend public and private universities. This isn't a new concept.

Risk of myocarditis following sequential COVID-19 vaccinations by age and sex

https://www.reveddit.com/v/COVID19/comments/rofrig/risk_of_m...

Really interesting paper from authors with major roles on advisory committees and public health. This is an important and comprehensive dataset that will absolutely be used to further inform public policy in the UK and abroad.

The main take home:

"the risk following COVID-19 vaccination was largely restricted to younger males aged less than 40 years, where the risks of myocarditis following vaccination and infection were similar. However, the notable exception was that in younger males receiving a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine, the risk of myocarditis was higher following vaccination than infection, with an additional 101 events estimated following a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine compared to 7 events following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.

i.e The second dose of "full strength" Moderna in males 13-40 gives a spike in myocarditis that is markedly higher than the risk of myocarditis from covid infection.

There weren't enough cases of myocarditis from this very comprehensive dataset to properly assess myocarditis in children aged 13-17, so as the authors state, this now needs to be pursued by pooling international datasets, and I expect they are already pursuing that.

Very interesting data, thanks for posting.

As I stated elsewhere, this is one piece of the public health puzzle. There are obviously a number of risks and benefits that all feed into the recommendations made. But all else being equal, this data could certainly affect recommendations for Moderna vs other vaccine options in males under 40. Watching with interest, thanks for posting OP!

permalinkhide replies (2)author-focusas-ofpreserve [–]a_teletubby113 points4 days, 20 hours ago* (edited 3 hours, 2 minutes after) It's not just a Moderna problem though. Even for Pfizer, we see a weaker but clear signal:

Infection: 2.02 (1.13 - 3.61)

Dose 1: 1.66 (1.14 - 3.41)

Dose 2: 3.41 (2.44 - 4.78)

Dose 3: 7.60 (1.92 - 30.15)

This is a "bombshell" for the lack of better words. I really wish someone could show this to college administrators who are mandating 3d dose for college students after just 6 months, with no regard for recent breakthrough infections.

Edit:

I know the CIs overlap, but the fact that the point estimate of infection (2.02) is clearly outside of Dose 2's CI (2.44 - 4.78) is already concerning. I'm merely advocating for caution for healthy young males for whom Covid is a miniscule threat.

What religious exemption is the page referring to ? How are vaccines a religious subject ?

Every vaccine available in the US was developed or tested using stem cells from aborted babies, and the J&J one is also manufactured with them. A lot of religions forbid intentionally benefiting from others' sins.

Isn't this true of nearly every pharmaceutical on the market?

Even the Catholic Church has given the A-OK for its adherents to take these vaccines. At this point, anyone you encounter citing a "religious" objection is more likely to be citing a personal preference.

Isn't religion supposed to be a deeply personal thing, not necessarily tied to some earthly institution or organization? What if I sincerely believe that complete and total bodily autonomy is a God-given right but I'm not a member of a church who shares my views, are my beliefs invalid?

> Isn't religion supposed to be a deeply personal thing, not necessarily tied to some earthly institution or organization?

You are asking the wrong guy, but I'd note that the person I was responding to mentioned sin. That implies some things about which religions he was including, and membership in those religions implies some other things about obedience to religious authority and so on. If you're in the clear with the Catholics and the Baptists when it comes to sinning, that covers a lot of ideological ground.

> What if I sincerely believe that complete and total bodily autonomy is a God-given right but I'm not a member of a church who shares my views, are my beliefs invalid?

As I implied in my other comment, I do think there's a distinction to be drawn between religion and personal preference. I don't have a really deep take on this, but I'd note that it wouldn't be the first time the law had to take these things into account. I do not know that much about this stuff, but I think being a member of a group (even the Scientologists!) helps if you want your beliefs recognized as religious beliefs. A problem prophets and mystics have had to contend with for quite some time, I imagine.

If the bit about others' sins was even remotely consistently applied, then adherents to that religion would simply not be able to participate in modern society.

So I guess their official stance is that god will save you from COVID if you're worth saving?

Our whole existence is a religious subject. And everything we do while we exist falls under it. Also no, it does not have to be organized to be a religion.

Some organized religions forbid them.

https://www.vumc.org/health-wellness/news-resource-articles/...

It's like the old joke: "They broke up over religious differences - He thought he was God, and she disagreed!"

Religious exemptions bother me quite a bit as a non-religious person. Why can people demand special treatment because of "religion" but my beliefs don't count unless I an hiding behind religion. I don't think the beliefs of religious people are more valid or deserve more respect than mine.

Either everybody should follow a rule or nobody.

And then another one by end of September...

I wonder if we'll get to the point where they require a booster shot every month or every week and how many people would still comply at that point.

This is a dumb policy. Covid presents essentially no risk to young people. We also now know that the risk of myocarditis to young men from vaccination exceeds the risk of same from the virus itself:

https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myoca...

Moreover, additional vaccination offers minimal -- if any -- benefit to young, healthy people. As Paul Offit -- a pediatrician, creator of the Rotavirus vaccine, member of the CDC ACIP committee and one of the biggest SARS-CoV2 vaccine advocates -- said in a recent NY Times article:

> Boosters are likely to provide the best protection against infection with Omicron. But for most healthy young people, the original two-shot series — or one dose of Johnson and Johnson — should be sufficient to prevent hospitalization and death, Dr. Offit said. If that’s the purpose of vaccination, then “these vaccines continue to hold up,” Dr. Offit said.

https://archive.fo/b3raO

Meanwhile, the WHO continues to beg western countries to stop boosting younger, healthy people. Nobody listens.

> The focus of COVID-19 immunization efforts must remain on decreasing death and severe disease, and the protection of the health care system....In the context of ongoing global vaccine supply constraints and inequities, broad-based administration of booster doses risks exacerbating vaccine access by driving up demand in countries with substantial vaccine coverage and diverting supply while priority populations in some countries, or in subnational settings, have not yet received a primary vaccination series.

https://www.who.int/news/item/22-12-2021-interim-statement-o...

This push for repeated vaccination of the young is based on antibody titers and other "correlates of risk", not on clinical data. But antibody levels decline over time -- particularly in the nasal mucosa. It's basic immunology, and a principal reason that vaccines against respiratory viruses were rare prior to Covid.

We're quite literally conducting a societal experiment based on fear and speculation, while "experts" forget what they learned in biology 101.

The author forgot to include statistical significance in the data. A difference of 1-5 parts per million is statistically insignificant for the study sample size.

Also, while focusing on myocarditis he forgets to count actual deaths from covid19 which is increasing for younger people with the new variants.

https://theconversation.com/younger-adults-can-get-very-sick...

Death rate per million for age 25 is 100.

Yet the author complains about a non statistically significant difference of 1-5 per million of myocarditis for under 40?!

Does the author have an agenda you are aware of?

> Death rate per million for age 25 is 100.

...and even this miniscule risk is divided by 10 after primary vaccination (a 90% risk reduction in serious illness). So yeah, now you're in the 10-per-million realm, where risk of myocarditis starts to matter.

You're confusing "booster mandates" with "vaccination". Neither the author nor I are questioning vaccination in general. We're questioning mandates for young people -- and in particular, mandates of booster doses that have no proven clinical benefit.

> and even this miniscule risk is divided by 10 after primary vaccination (a 90% risk reduction in serious illness).

This risk doesn't get reduced by 10. Which is why the booster is required. If you have followed any of the research the 95% efficacy starts waning dramatically 6 months in, as Israel found out. So this is a false argument.

> So yeah, now you're in the 10-per-million realm, where risk of myocarditis starts to matter.

Let me get this straight -

1. 100 deaths in a million is a "minuscule risk"

2. Non statistically significant 1-5 in a million incremental risk of myocarditis, NOT DEATH is a cause for grave concern. I repeat non statistically significant increase in NON FATAL MYOCARDITIS is a cause of grave concern. Irrespective of the increased protection from spreading infections to elderly or deaths.

100 deaths with no vaccine protection === whatever.

1-5 non stat sig incremental myocarditis for the same population vaccinated - GRAVELY CONCERNING

I am not sure where you are going with this line of argument.

> This risk doesn't get reduced by 10. Which is why the booster is required.

Incorrect. There is no evidence of reduction in efficacy against severe illness or death.

As Paul Offit said in the New York Times article that I linked and quoted above, which you clearly didn't bother to read:

https://archive.fo/b3raO

The benefit of boosters for the young is unproven -- likely zero. The harm is proven, and non-zero.

> This is a dumb policy. Covid presents essentially no risk to young people. We also now know that the risk of myocarditis to young men from vaccination exceeds the risk of same from the virus itself:

You're the second person here to cite this study and imply that the risk from covid is lower for young men than the risk of the vaccine. But that's...not what the study says.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.7384... suggests the case fatality rate for Covid in 20-39-year-olds is 0.62%. In comparison, the excess risk of myocarditis following a vaccination, per the Nature paper, was 15 per million, or 0.0015%.

I implied no such thing. I said exactly what the data says: risk of myocarditis from the vaccine is on par with (or exceedds) the risk of myocarditis from the virus itself.

Comparing that to CFR is irrelevant. Also, you don't understand the meaning of CFR -- the rate of death amongst confirmed illnesses. It overstates actual risk by at least a factor of 10, and probably more than that. There have been far more cases than ever confirmed by testing.

Best estimates of IFR for SARS-CoV2 by age indicate a mortality risk of approximately 0.004% for those under age 34:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-020-00698-1...

> Also, you don't understand the meaning of CFR

Friend, you don't know what I don't understand. :)

Maybe in the future try something like, "In case you aren't aware..." or "You may already know this, but..."

> It overstates actual risk by at least a factor of 10.

As it happens, the CFR from covid is still more than 10x the excess myocarditis risk from the vaccines, so...I don't know. I guess I don't understand something.

> I implied no such thing.

Perhaps not, but then I don't understand how, on its own, this paper is relevant to the decision in question. It's like observing that the risk of a plane crash is higher if you fly on an airplane, so you're going to take a car.

> Best estimates of IFR for SARS-CoV2 by age indicate a risk of approximately 0.004% for those under age 34

Yet broken down more narrowly, the same paper suggests 0.01% for 25 year olds, which would seem to still strongly support vaccinations for university students.

As I've noted elsewhere, the comparison is, of course, more complicated: policymakers should also consider the effect of vaccinations on community spread, since other age strata are substantially more vulnerable, as well as the non-mortality cost of infection (as economists like to frame it, in QALYs, or in terms of lost working days).

But even excluding all of that, your implication that vaccination makes one less safe is just not born out by the data you linked to.

As an aside, and to your parent comment: I do think it makes a lot more sense for these booster vaccines to be distributed to people in countries who have not had access to the initial vaccination. But, taken out of context, your comments seem to suggest that vaccination is a net negative to the health of young adults, which is not at all supported by the data shown.

> But even excluding all of that, your implication that vaccination makes one less safe is just not born out by the data you linked to.

That was not my implication. I am not talking about "vaccination" -- I am talking about booster mandates, for which we have no affirmative clinical data, and known harms.

We have no evidence that boosters do anything at all to mitigate serious illness in young, healthy people. And for this, we are exposing them to known, non-zero risks.

You'd wish there were adapted vaccines and especially nasal vaccines, but that's not even on the government's radar.

Where's the revolution?

There are some oral vaccines in development - https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Nasal, too. https://news.yale.edu/2021/12/10/nasal-vaccine-may-aid-fight...

I know. It's the lack of discussion in the media that's worrying.

I've seen tons of media coverage about oral and nasal vaccines, what are you talking about?

yes it is, pfizer and moderna are already testing omicron specific vaccines.

Vaccines aren't that great to stop the spread. We have ample evidence of the fact by looking at the winter 2021 numbers in highly vaccinated regions. They are even less effective against Omicron.

Omicron is mild anyway. Heaven forbid that students will experience a "a sore throat, runny nose and a headache":

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59768366

Why is this one being downvoted when in fact what OP is saying is a 100% truth? Vaccines won't stop the spread because it's a sliding window problem. You vaccinate 10m people today, then you vaccinate 10m people tomorrow, by the time you vaccinate another 10m, the first 10m already lost their antibodies. We'd have to vaccinate the entire population within 4-6 months, which is impossible given the current state of things. There are no transactional guarantees, so to speak.

On top of all of that, vaccines do not stop the spread, but just ease out symptoms. You can be vaccinated and your symptoms can be so mild that you won't even know you are sick. So you'll walk around infecting others.

Because "stop the spread" is a very nice goal, but not the actual one. "Slow the spread so hospitals can handle the load" is closer to the real goal. Without the vaccines, too many people get sick at once and more people start dying.

On top of that, it's not just the vaccinations. Those who get the disease are also helping to slow the spread as they build their own resistance.

There's been enough resistance to the vaccines that it's probably impossible to end this with the best possible result, so we're going for second-best now. And that still involves keeping as many people vaccinated as possible.

From the link you shared:

>For most, Covid is a mild disease. Some get no symptoms at all. But it can still cause very serious illness in some people, including those who have not been vaccinated.

>[A] massive wave of infections would still mean many people needing hospital care, as well as lots of doctors and nurses being off sick with Covid.

I would like to share this link with you, which explains the effectiveness of vaccines against infection:

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/breakthrough-covid-19-infectio...

I (fully vaccinated) wasn’t an anti-vaxxer until Webster literally changed the definition of the word to include those “who oppose regulations mandating vaccination“

I feel pretty good about the safety and efficacy of the current vaccines, but the discourse is poisonous bordering on religious zealotry. What happens when vaccine with genuine safety issues comes along and is mandated?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer

I didn’t believe you.

I wouldn’t be surprised about the opportunistic chances to push an ideology taken by supposedly apolitical orgs. There are examples all over even if you don’t want to see it.

So I was willing to believe that MW made a small addendum to their previous definition of antivaxxer. Despite it being a cheap and dirty abuse of their institution.

But no. They removed it entirely and replaced it with exactly what you said. Wtf.

Opposing a vaccine mandate for completely precedent and objectifiable legal reasons “now makes” you an antivaxxer huh?

Well… I’m new to the club apparently, where do I pick up my Karen haircut and homeopathic treatments?

Wow! That means by just sticking to the until recently common view that humans have the property right to their own body, not the government, now makes me an anti-vaxxer as well.

Stanford is a private university, students may face some costs if they dis-enroll, but there is nothing forcing them to continue to attend.

Private doesn't mean they can do what they want. It used to be frowned upon (and illegal) to discriminate based on medical status, but it looks like it doesn't matter any more when it comes to vaccines.

Hasn't society decided that private entities still have to follow some rules? For example, private employers can't fire someone for getting pregnant, and private landlords can't enter their leased properties on a whim.

The precedent for vaccination is that they can require them.

https://vaden.stanford.edu/about/entrance-health-requirement...

On the heels of changing "vaccine" definition too. And of course the self-appointed "fact checkers" are all over it: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fac...

Webster's anti-regulation definition predates Covid: https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-034481134066

I totally agree that it's nonsensical. The tendency of many people to conflate the positions of "X is a good thing to do" and "everyone should be forcibly compelled to do X" is routinely frustrating.

They updated it after observing the usage of the word. That is how dictionaries work, because they are descriptive and not prescriptive.

Many people do in fact use the term anti-vaxx(er) to refer to people who are against vaccines and also against regulations around them.

> They updated it after observing the usage of the word.

It's just coincidental that many in the political arena and media started to label their opponents as anti-vaxxers for questioning mandates.

Words/terms aren't static, and can change over time.

I'm not against skepticism or conspiracy theories, but this one doesn't really make sense. Word usage and dictionary definitions update all the time.

Y'all are overthinking this. The answer is "Do Not Identify". Your vax status is between you and your doctor.

From "trust the science" to "just take the shot"

The science indicates that you should take the shot.

We're talking about how there is no such science just few comments up. The only link to a scientific article here (that says otherwise) was downvoted into oblivion.

Yea, I don’t get what is so hard to understand! The vaccines are partial and waning. I need to get a shot to make sure your works, because you can still get and spread the virus after getting the shot, and then so can I. Then we can discuss boosters.

I feel like anyone that doesn’t understand plain and clear logic must be a FauxNews addicted lunatic. What other explanations even are there?

The science indicates a mild disease for under 50s, is becoming even milder

Refusing education for young people because of a booster can only be described as a crime against human rights

The science indicates that you are likely at a lower risk of having a severe case of covid if you take the shot.

Science cannot answer moral questions.

Is there a notable difference in case loads between Socal and Norcal?

Florida seems to have done relatively well for themselves (unless you buy into conspiracy theories about misreporting case loads), but I wonder if vit D and general level of outsideness plays a big role, but it's hard to make apples to apples comparisons between Florida and e.g. New York.

I'm a bit baffled by the assertion Florida's doing well.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

NY: 300/100k

FL: 289/100k

NY's deaths are also more heavily weighted towards the initial outbreak, when the mortality rate was much higher due to lack of treatment knowledge/options. https://imgur.com/a/fdb1tl7

Also there's plenty of reason to believe that Florida's numbers are serious underestimates. IIRC their testing rate has been low, and they've been in the news for suppressing bad numbers more than once. I might trust numbers from an independent study, but not from anything under the DeSantis regime.

Florida also has a significantly older population than NY, so those figures should be age-adjusted to take into account COVIDs disparate mortality across age groups. [1] Amongst large states Florida (239) is much closer to California (216) than NY (299) after adjustments, and California had some of the most severe lockdowns, while Florida had some of the most lax.

Still, if they merely kept even with NY, and also managed to have a booming economy, a net influx of population, and very little disruption in primary school education, I’d say that’s pretty good.

The damage that has been done to a generation of disadvantaged kids in states that shut down schools for extended periods is going to have to be reckoned with for years.

[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...

Hi, former Florida-man here. Is this accounting for the considerably larger portion of old people in FL vs NY? 42.1% vs 45.6% 45+, 15.4% vs 19.3% 65+ for NY and FL respectively.

Sources:

http://edr.state.fl.us/content/population-demographics/data/... https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2016/t...

Methodology: Took the Florida 2010 and estimated 2020 numbers and averaged them together to get a "2015" estimate, then compared it to the 2016 NY data.

If we're handicapping stats, it seems only fair to account for the fact that most of NY's deaths were in the March 2020 spike long before the vaccine or therapeutics like remdesivir hit.

Relatively well for themselves over what time frame? If you're referring to the last few weeks or the current state of affairs, I'm not sure there's anything to say Florida is either worse or better off than New York, as opposed to their curve just bring time shifted.

There’s a lot of extremism on both sides. I’m vaccinated, boosted etc. and very much pro-vaccine, however, I try to avoid extremism and I also like to understand the non-extremist opposition to my view. As such, I’ve been trying to find the non-extremist[1] anti-vaccine argument… but I’ve struggled. I guess this is as good a place as any: anyone here want to share their own anti-vax thoughts, or the thoughts of someone anti-vax that they respect?

[1] I define extremist as the satanism / 5g microchip stuff.

Preliminary note: I don't claim to be an expert in any field relevant to vaccines. This is just an everyday layman's opinion. (Also, I'm vaccinated and boosted as well).

I think "anti-vax" sounds inherently extremist and conspiracy-theorist, and isn't an accurate representation of the middle ground here. To be fair, it's more like "pro-choice."

Plenty of vaccines are given to children every year and required for them to attend school, and there hasn't really been any negative side-effects of that policy. It's tough to argue that we should not be required to have any vaccine to attend school, and that would break the status quo in the other direction.

The question then becomes: What could make the Covid vaccine different from other vaccines, such that it shouldn't be required?

* If these vaccines were approved earlier and with more early-stage preliminary data than other vaccines?

* If Covid is not as severe as the diseases we currently require a vaccine for? [1]

[1] The current required vaccines for school in New York, for example, are Diphtheria, Hepatitis B, Measles, Polio, and Chickenpox. The mortality rate and permanent damage for some of these diseases are much higher than Covid. With others, I'm not sure of the pre-vaccine mortality rate as it's been around for a long time.

With all that in mind, Covid spreads as much if not more as the diseases we saw fit to require vaccinations against, and the mortality rate for the older population is high. I think a fair argument is whether schoolchildren should have to be vaccinated to protect against infecting the more vulnerable population.

This is an excellent analysis, and I wish we saw more of these comparisons.

The status quo (which differs by country!) for compulsory or somewhat-compulsory vaccination provides a great benchmark for what's seemingly "reasonable."

I think that benchmark--and your analysis seems to show similarly--suggests most developed countries are sorta fine with compulsory vaccines for diseases like Covid. But looking at things through this lens helps contextualize and normalize the current policies--people who are concerned about Covid vaccines might feel a lot better when the vaccine is put into perspective.

I think the "anti-vax" are drawing the opposite conclusion: Covid (for most people, and particularly for young people) is orders of magnitude less dangerous than measles, polio, diptheria, and the other compulsory vaccines. The feeling is that for this large subset of the population, it's on par with, or less dangerous than, the flu. Given that belief, it's understandable to question the logic behind compelling vaccinations.

I think it's understandable, but not necessarily accurate.

First, in the US, seasonal flu vaccines are used by >50% of the population (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-2021estimates.ht...). Yes, they're not mandatory, but many employers heavily encourage it.

Second, chickenpox is compulsory for public schooling in a majority of states, and has a CFR of about 1/100k (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/varicella.html#:~....), which is, if I am reading https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.7384... correctly, significantly lower than the covid CFR for the same age strata.

Obviously it also makes sense to consider things like safety of the vaccine, risk to vulnerable populations, etc. But just on its face, it's not obvious that the covid vaccines are in any way contrary to prior precedent, at least not to me.

I mostly agree. It is genuinely hard in this environment to rationally discuss individual options. As an example, here is an example of Hep B vaccination for infants.

How is it transmitted: "This can happen through sexual contact; sharing needles, syringes, or other drug-injection equipment; or from mother to baby at birth. "[1]

Why do I need it? My kid's doctor paraphrased: um, chart says so and school won't her in if she does not have it.

And that does not mention super annoying conversation with wife, whose entire argument for it is: 'it won't do damage'.

[1]https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/hbv/index.htm

It’s because people cheat on their spouses a lot more than people think and a baby getting hepatitis B during vagina birth is just awful. Basically everything in standard of care assumes the worst about the individual.

Then perhaps cheaters should be punished, and not parties not involved in the cheating?

The state doesn't track who is cheating, so all they can do to protect kids is to assume everyone is equally likely to cheat. If you think it is better they tracked your sex life to ensure they didn't punish the wrong people then you have very different values than most.

It doesn't have to be active sex life tracking, there are other ways. When cheater are punished, it will make others less likely to cheat. Win win for everyone.

There is a test for that ( and for heaven's sake -- doctor is where you go for awkward conversations to begin with ) and I genuinely resent that the real reason is being hidden from me as a parent. How on earth am I supposed to make decision if I am getting inaccurate information? Or more importantly, as a non-doctor, why I am I forced to learn all the things I should be able to trust my healtcare provider with? Why do I have to peel the onion for various agendas for something this important? I swear.. each day it seems healthcare starts to resemble Office more and more..

It is infuriating.

Covid vaccines went through the same safety and efficacy trials as every other vaccine.

Covid has a 2%? mortality rate against the immune naive, with a much greater proportion requiring hospitalisation and suffering long term health consequences. I believe that is pretty similar to many other illnesses we vaccinate against.

There are varied and complex reasons for people being anti-vax, but none of them are grounded in science.

Phase 1 trials take several months. Phase 2 trials take months to 2 years. Phase 3 trials take 1-4 years.

https://www.fda.gov/patients/drug-development-process/step-3...

In the case of Pfizer-BioNTech, the Phase 3 trial was started before Phase 2 even completed, and was completed in less than 8 months.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04713553

Even with the rather expanded definition of "died while infected with COVID-19," the mortality rate is approximately 1.5% (845627 deaths / 55202306 cases) in the United States, or 25% lower than you claimed.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

> I think "anti-vax" sounds inherently extremist and conspiracy-theorist, and isn't an accurate representation of the middle ground here. To be fair, it's more like "pro-choice."

It's just a smear to divide and rally the left. Nobody who has received the plethora of other standard vaccines and given them to his child can reasonably be called anti-vax for refusing an experimental first-of-its-type vaccine that didn't follow the same rigorous process as the others. Especially not in a climate where natural immunity is ignored and off patent treatment are not pursued.

I got the Pfizer vaccine and a single, final booster. I'm expecting that decision made from fear to come back to haunt me at some point in my life. I have nothing but respect for people who decide not to get a COVID vaccine.

There are too many unknowns about the risks of both COVID (with its multiple strains and poor research) and the vaccines (with their novel techniques and "warp speed" approval rather than going through the normal 3-year study). As a general moral proposition, it isn't acceptable to require people to take on unknown risks to protect others.

I am young and very healthy and covid, especially omicron, does not have much of an effect on me. At this point, everyone is going to get covid even if 100% of the population is vaccinated. Folks who are worried and/or high risk should of course get the vaccine to reduce covid’s effects. No young person should be forced to take a covid vaccine much less a booster to go to school because covid isn’t the Spanish flu or polio and doesn’t have crippling effects on the young.

I have had covid and I am vaccinated with JnJ but I will not be getting boosters. I would like to see the longer term effects of mRNA vaccinations first. I have all my other vaccinations. Most of my immediate family is not vaccinated for covid (while having all other vaccines) and has a similar position.

Here's mine.

My children are very young, my wife and I are young and we workout 6 days a week. We eat healthy and are healthy.

I'm not going to give my children a vaccine against something that has a miniscule mortality rate. And I'm not going to get vaccinated because I'm not morbidly obese or old. Lose weight and stay safe.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

It's not just yourself and your family you are putting at risk, it's everyone you encounter.

Thems the breaks. I'm not going to inject my children or my wife.

Yet people who are vaccinated can still transmit the disease. So how do you quantify the excess risk? Particularly for those who are young and healthy and unlikely to develop severe viral loads or complications? Are there any studies that show transmission rate for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated by age range?

> Yet people who are vaccinated can still transmit the disease.

They're over ninety percent more likely than their unvaccinated counterparts to remain uninfected, in which case they will not transmit the disease.

The questions regarding reduced viral shedding among the infected but vaccinated, and how much that effects that population's transmission rate, is interesting but probably secondary, I would think. (I don't know quite whether those were all rhetorical questions or something you wanted a dissertation on :D )

> They're over ninety percent more likely than their unvaccinated counterparts to remain uninfected, in which case they will not transmit the disease.

Not against omicron, it basically ignores vaccines. Vaccinated people might be a bit less serious, but they still get ill and we have had many super spreader events among vaccinated populations where almost everyone exposed got it.

Vaccine might reduce spread a little, but vaccinated people spread it so much already that it can't be anywhere close to 90% not spreading.

> Not against omicron, it basically ignores vaccines. Vaccinated people might be a bit less serious, but they still get ill and we have had many super spreader events among vaccinated populations where almost everyone exposed got it.

Omicron increases vaccine escape rates from about 5% to 30% which is bad, but not ignoring vaccines.

Hey, it's you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Sinistra

One case among published CDC numbers. You should know better.

I’m vaccinated but I won’t get a booster because:

- My heart hurt as hell from the vaccines. A study from the UK shows more risk for myocarditis from the vaccines than from infection in males under 40. [1]

- Studies say vaccines stop/slow transmission but in reality we see more cases in regions with high vaccination rates than we did last year without vaccines. And more cases than in regions with a lower vaccination rate. Breakthrough infections seem to be the norm, not the exception. I’m not the US.

- Natural immunity is superior. [2]

- Vaccines don’t protect against long covid. [3]

- The people at risk are old or have other problems. Statistically you will be fine when you’re under 60.

So when we add all these things up it’s clear to me we should have only vaccinated older people and the ones with health problem. Because the vaccines only work to protect yourself. And you don’t need artificial protection when you’re young and healthy. Just like the flu.

[1] https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myoca...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03495-2

Edit: I source my claims yet people downvote me. If you downvote me just because you heard something else in the media I consider you an irrational person.

> Edit: I source my claims yet people downvote me.

The actual contents of your sources don't back up the summaries you wrote.

That’s not true. And I was downvoted immediately after posting. No one reads that fast.

> The research impresses Nussenzweig and other scientists who have reviewed a preprint of the results, posted yesterday on medRxiv. “It’s a textbook example of how natural immunity is really better than vaccination,” says Charlotte Thålin, a physician and immunology researcher at Danderyd Hospital and the Karolinska Institute who studies the immune responses to SARS-CoV-2. “To my knowledge, it’s the first time [this] has really been shown in the context of COVID-19.”

> Putrino has noticed that even being fully vaccinated doesn’t necessarily protect against long COVID. Many of his clients were infected before vaccines were rolled out, and had been coping with symptoms for a year or more before they were referred to him. But he has seen about a dozen people who experienced long COVID from ‘breakthrough’ infections — in which vaccinated people catch the coronavirus.

There are acknowledged side effects of the vaccine, notably myocarditis that is a risk for men in their teens and twenties (the risk is several fold higher for men in this age group than it is for women). The Israeli and CDC data variously put the risk at 1 in 3000-6000, but that doesn’t mean that many times more milder cases of damage aren’t more prevalent.

Various countries in Europe have balked at or delayed vaccinating under 18s for this reason. Interestingly for people who got the mRNA vaccines there was almost no myocarditis after the first dose, so this was mostly a second dose effect. We may not have enough data right now to say whether a booster dose is even more likely to produce heart damage but it’s possible.

Since myocarditis is also a risk of COVID itself, it’s probably still a better deal for many people in this age group to get vaccinated. In fact public health officials seem to think that it’s a good deal for the average person in this group. However, if you are a healthy man in his early twenties whose absolute risk from COVID is already very low, there’s a decent argument that you should be given a chance for informed consent and not have this mandated.

This is even more true if you’ve already had COVID and acquired natural immunity. In many countries proof of infection functions the same as proof of vaccination in terms of accessing services, it arguably should In this case as well.

The sorts of mandates we have had in place for things like MRR are different because we have decades of data on the safety and efficacy of these vaccines, and we know that we can lose herd immunity if we don’t have high compliance. The current COVID vaccines are clearly not providing herd immunity, given that omicron is tearing through highly vaxxed countries like the UK. Many experts are basically acknowledging that nearly everyone will get omicron eventually.

Also, unlike measles which can be kept at bay by mass vaccination, COVID is rampant in massive animal reservoirs like whitetail deer, which means that we aren’t going to make it extinct like we did with polio or smallpox. If the best that can be said about the vaccines is that they reduce hospitalization and death risk for those who take them, then is there justification for a mandate? You can argue that reduced severity is important for protecting the hospitals from being overwhelmed. But does that justify a mandate for boosters amongst college kids whose absolute risk of hospitalization from COVID is already very very small?

Anyway, I’m as fully vaxxed as I can be in my jurisdiction, but I don’t begrudge people making different choices for themselves in a case like this where it’s more about personal risk management than public benefit. Rational decisions are being made and the vaccination rates amongst elderly are much much higher than people in their twenties.

I also think that part of our resiliency as a society is having a range of perspectives. Even if the paranoid personality is annoying or maladaptive, sometimes they help bring things to light.

In the case of mRNA vaccine skeptics like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, they is just consistently very far out on precautionary principle spectrum. Like they don’t think you should learn the sex of your child before birth because it would increase the psychological trauma of a miscarriage. A lot of their concern boils down to overweighing the unknown unknowns (from my perspective). I’m on the other end of the precautionary spectrum, but I have come to value the perspective and role that people like this play in our society, and I think they should be part of the conversation.

Unvaxxed here. Lost my job due to it. Couldn't attend a close friend's wedding. So - it is not a casual decision I made.

mRNA "vaccines" are not as tested as the pharmaceutical companies want you to believe. They've been in development for years and had serious issues. The mainstream media has severe conflicts of interest, financially, with regard to Pfizer. There are smaller conflicts of interest with regard to J&J and Moderna. The Asch conformity experiments are one example of many that show that even experts can be manipulated. If I do happen to have a bad reaction to the shot, I have no recourse to get compensation for my medical bills. I have very, very low risk of complications from the SARS-Cov-2 virus itself.

The risk analysis does not justify the shot, for me.

What data did you use to perform the risk analysis?

I performed my own risk analysis and it should positive results for the vaccine for every population cohort.

If you're looking for hard data, there was some, but it was more of a logic based risk assessment. I deduced, for me, that the best bet was to avoid the disease as much as possible, and not risk a novel medicine for something that was low risk anyways.

Risk of me having major complications from Covid: Very, very low. Less than a hundredth of a percent, IIRC.

Rate of drugs recalled by FDA: Shockingly high.

Rate of fraud and abuse by large pharmaceutical companies: Also very high.

Effectiveness of the vaccine: I have an admittedly non-expert level understanding of statistics, but I did not agree with the efficacy analysis from the initial trials. I assume some modeling was applied, but I found that to be rather opaque. IIRC again - it was about 5k ea of active/placebo, and on the order magnitude of about 100 cases for placebo and 50 for active treatment.

> If you're looking for hard data, there was some, but it was more of a logic based risk assessment.

I take it that you did not look at odds ratio. This is probabilistic analysis not if-then-else. With no use of risk analysis this is an emotional judgement, not a logic based one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odds_ratio

> but I did not agree with the efficacy analysis from the initial trials.

???!! What part of the analysis did you disagree with? It was super straightforward.

> it was about 5k ea of active/placebo, and on the order magnitude of about 100 cases for placebo and 50 for active treatment.

These numbers are straight up false. The placebo group had at least 10X more infections than treatment group.

Odds Ratio can only factor in known risks. I very specifically mentioned in my comment I was concerned about the unknown risks.

If my numbers were wrong, I apologize. I mostly remember not being impressed enough

How did you incorporate unknown long term effects of a covid19 infection, even if you dont die from it - in your own analysis?

Btw, the idea behind a multi stage RCT is to identify the unknown risks in a stage wise manner. The odds ratio does just that.

At this point you left scientific reasoning and logic a long way behind, and there is really no conversation to be had. 94% efficacy is actually extremely fucking impressive.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389

"Symptomatic Covid-19 illness was confirmed in 185 participants in the placebo group (56.5 per 1000 person-years; 95% confidence interval [CI], 48.7 to 65.3) and in 11 participants in the mRNA-1273 group (3.3 per 1000 person-years; 95% CI, 1.7 to 6.0); vaccine efficacy was 94.1% (95% CI, 89.3 to 96.8%; P<0.001)."

Your own memory reflects your unconscious bias

> it was about 5k ea of active/placebo, and on the order magnitude of about 100 cases for placebo and 50 for active treatment.

>How did you incorporate unknown long term effects of a covid19 infection, even if you dont die from it - in your own analysis?

How do I incorporate unknown long term effects of the vaccine? If both offer unknowns, of unknown severity, why should I intentionally take one to avoid another? How are you quantizing these? You seem so caught up in how others have told you to analyze risk, you are unable to do so for yourself anymore.

>At this point you left scientific reasoning and logic a long way behind,

I find you rather rude

>and there is really no conversation to be had.

Fine by me

> You seem so caught up in how others have told you to analyze risk, you are unable to do so for yourself anymore.

I am a professional data scientist[1], and get paid to do these kind of analysis myself every day. Analysis far more advanced than odds ratios. I used that as a simple measure that even laymen can understand. Your non-existent analysis is not an adequate replacement for statistical methods.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671172#29674008

> I find you rather rude

Whats that popular phrase Ben Shapiro uses ..... - "Facts don't care about your feelings".

If you are willing to lose your job to avoid a protective shot, as demonstrated by every medical review and very basic math, you are long beyond the pale of logic or reason.

Looking at the vaccination materials my wife got when she was vaccinated, I noticed some disturbing notes including that animal trials had never been completed.

Being healthy and under 40, and given how quickly these vaccines were rushed out, I merely want to wait until the long-term effects are known. I don't think there's anything extreme about that.

It should be noted that I've had covid (from visiting fully vaccinated and boosted family) and have had the antibody test confirming I should have some degree of resistance now.

However government policy and messaging has all been based on vaccination - not verified natural resistance (which studies show are robust to many variants, unlike vaccination). I can only conclude that the government does not care about health outcomes: It only cares about vaccination status. After being denied entry to restaurants and events and generally punished by society for what I deem to be reasonable caution, it starts to feel very dystopian and gives me all the more reason to pause and wait for long-term studies to be completed.

Incidentally, I'm one of the most vaccinated people on Earth. I've had over 90 vaccines prior to this event, including three just prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. None of them have ever required me to sign a liability waiver. Yet another reason I'm cautious about these vaccines: If the manufacturers are more uncertain of these vaccines than usual then why shouldn't I be?

why do you care about animal studies which are fairly unreliable when it has already passed human studies?

Because the basic controls that prevent us from harmful outcomes were not observed. Did you read nothing else I wrote?

but animal trials only exist as a precursor to human trials. If the human trials have successfully concluded, animal trials are redundant. The idea of having skipped animal trials is worrying while doing the human trials, but if the human trials complete successfully, then the worry is no longer founded.

> If the human trials have successfully concluded

They have not.

yes they have. what are you talking about?

I'm vaxxed and had my booster:

1) I had my booster 2 weeks ago and still am having side effects. I had 2 days of feeling like shit and having my physical output at maybe 20%, slowly recovering but after 2 weeks still around 75% or so. Not sure if it will improve come the new competition season. Same issues were reported with teammates. (I play a sport competitively, 2 days before the vaccine I did a 4.5 hour hard intensive training day, was ok and recovered fine. Just yesterday I had a training match and after 1 hour or so was feeling the lack of strength and difficulty breathing). I am not high risk for covid related issues. Right now, the booster has been quite an issue for me, and if I don't go back to 100% soon, my next year tournaments/ranking is compromised.

2) My kid is at an age they are pushing for vaccine for his age group. His risk based on my country data is pretty much zero (4 severe cases, 3 had co-mobilities that a normal cold would get them in the hospital, and one apparent healthy kid had severe issues but recovered). Risks from the vaccine for this age group are bigger than covid for him. I am against vaccinating him. (mother isn't and he will be)

I am not anti-vaxx (I even got my booster) but if they told me I could be 2+ weeks at reduced physical capacity befora having the booster, I wouldn't have done it.

I don't see much extremism. Most of the anti-coved-vax folks are ok with the tried and tested vaccines .For all I know the mRNA technology is new and the covid vax is the first of vaccines based on the said technology to get an approval - an emergency approval. This is a gamble. And I'm sure that nobody should be forced to gamble with their health, thats it. It might be redeemed a bit if the vaccine really stops the spread. but it seems to be not he case.

> As such, I’ve been trying to find the non-extremist[1] anti-vaccine argument… but I’ve struggled

I doubt that you've really never heard any opposition to covid vaccines that aren't deranged things, but okay, I'll bite.

Simply being against forcing people to get covid vaccinated is now defined as "anti-vaccine"... So if, by chance, you also don't think people should be forcefully injected, you're anti-vax too.

Covid vaccines clearly had some positive effects, especially for vulnerable people, but:

* I don't think the balance is right between the risk of catching the virus versus forcing everyone to get vaccinated every few months

* If you think there are no problems with vaccines how do you contend with Astra Zeneca being abandoned in so many places and Moderna being disallowed for under 30s?

* Studies show that kids have more heart issues from the vaccine than from the virus. It's a sick society where we care more about the risk of passing the virus to adults than the risk on the kids.

* If everyone is following the science, why do so many countries have different policies? Especially when it comes to masking and vaccinating kids?

* It's not great to play along with the removal of your rights. How are you ever going to recover them?

But most importantly:

* I shouldn't have to have a reason. We used to think that every man is his own master and he's allowed to make wrong decisions. Do you know how some people have cards saying "do not resuscitate"? Science may decide that the person needs to be alive so he needs to be forcefully resuscitated, but we used to respect people's choices anyway.

Now, because of an infectious disease (as if we've never had one before), we've thrown the individual out the window and worship The Science, even though every government as a different The Science.

Random question for the HN crowd. Does anyone think that at this point HN is in desperate need of some categorization/filtering capability on the front page (please let me know if it exists, here or in an HN mirror site and I'm missing it)?

I'm soooo sick of these Covid threads. They basically never lead anywhere in the comments, it's the same shit over and over, folks presenting their take as unassailable fact. I'm not saying this article is deserving of being flagged, but over the past two years I greatly wish I at least had the capability to just look at "tech articles" vs. everything else.

Also, I get it, it's easy to say "just don't look", I'm just asking if anyone else things an easy way to filter out some threads like this would be useful. This sentiment is basically a follow-on to a submission I posted recently, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29532676 , where the best consensus seemed to be that it's really not possible to have insightful, thoughtful debate on these sensitive topics, or at least it's the case that the HN threads really aren't that much higher quality on these topics than on other sites, and that's not true for lots of other categories of topics.

You could set up Inoreader with a filter on it for COVID.

I takes less than two minutes to scan the front page to weed out Covid news. How is this a problem?

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