Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

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:

> 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

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.

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