No, when it comes to managing diseases the value is in acting before things have gone bad.
It completely blows my mind how after a million covid deaths in the US alone, and the pandemic not even being over, people repeat the same kind of arguments again. or HIV for that matter if you want to draw a comparison to another sexually transmittable disease that was not taken seriously either.
And have you considered that is precisely why it peaked? HIV has killed 50 million people worldwide. 35 million of them in Africa. It still kills almost a million people a year. In countries without appropriate response, it has infected large segments of the population, and you're out here in 2022 unironically saying "It's a gay man's disease", seriously?
I'm out here unironically showing you data on the CDC's website: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/risk/estimates/riskbehaviors.html. Anal intercourse is far likelier (18x the risk from vaginal interourse per encounter) to result in HIV transmission from an infected partner. Internal tearing is likelier and hence contact of other fluids with one's blood stream.
In Africa, HIV is especially prevalent in South Africa, which happens to have a practice called "dry sex" [1] which also leads to similar internal tearing for the receptive partner.
Behavior that involves having these sorts of risky sexual encounters with multiple partners only compounds the likelihood that one will contract HIV. Not all groups engage in these behaviors with equal likelihood.
There is no value to acting at the government level. If there's any work to do here it's with pharma firms. Governments have shown repeatedly that they lack even the most basic skills needed to fight disease. They are literally incapable of even accurately defining their goals and basic words let alone actually defeating a disease:
- COVID case counts in 2022 are now much higher than at any time in the past.
- Highly vaccinated places have more cases than lower vaccinated places (e.g. Scotland vs England, former DDR vs rest of Germany). Almost all "deaths in proximity to a positive COVID test" are in the vaccinated. Fauci, vaccinated 4x, has now had COVID symptoms for a month and counting after Paxlovid failed to cure him.
- Mask mandates were repealed with no increase in cases.
- Birth rates 9 months after vaccination reached women of childbearing age (never tested in the trials) are now ~15%-20% lower than normal.
- Lockdowns are now widely recognized to have had no effect at all. Shanghai's toughest lockdown in the world led to people starving because they weren't allowed out to buy food, whilst simultaneously failing to reduce case counts.
- The vast sums of money required for these failed anti-COVID policies have now wrecked the economy, leading to the highest inflation ever seen for people under the age of about 45.
- Public health officials have repeatedly made scientific claims they knew were false in order to manipulate people's behavior and then admitted to lying on the record in major newspapers.
That's just a tiny sampling of the recent failures of public health. What we need is for these people to go away, reflect on their failures, learn about 1000 lessons and come back in a decade when they have managed to clear house and fix the systematic vulnerability to pseudo-science that typifies their field.
Of course, what they'll actually do is ignore monkeypox because fighting it means inconveniencing gay men, whilst waiting for the next virus they can try to make into COVID2.
That’s just not possible. Rapid-response vaccine platforms didn’t exist.
And indeed [1]
> The idea for Warp Speed was hatched in early April, says the official, a scientist, who was given permission to discuss it with Science if his name was not used. "Looking around, it became clear that without a really heroic effort, none of the existing efforts to produce vaccine was going to lead us to have vaccine to prevent what looks increasingly like a second wave that could sweep come October, November."
[1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/unveiling-warp-speed...
> In particular, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched in 2017; its goal is to create the technological infrastructure needed for rapid and affordable development of vaccines against several of the viruses known to have epidemic potential, including MERS, Ebola and Zika. CEPI has partly funded work on SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, including that by Moderna and at Oxford.
CEPI is where the idea for Operation Warp Speed came from...
More generally though the article I reference is chock full of instances where without government funding and help we would never have had vaccines so quickly. The crackpot poster I replied to was trying to insinuate government did nothing and could do nothing to help. This is an absolutely incorrect assertion. We have vaccines because of government help and response in the early days (and years preceding!) of the pandemic.
> COVID case counts in 2022 are now much higher than at any time in the past.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
If you're going to make counter-prevailing claims, you're going to need some solid references to back up your data, sport.
https://health-study.joinzoe.com/post/1-in-15-have-covid-in-...
"Prof Spector: While COVID cases continue to soar to all-time highs, the rate of increase is showing signs of slowing down."
That was for the end of March. ONS survey tracks similarly and shows numbers heading back up to the prior peak already achieved in March. The page has some useful graphs that put it in perspective and show the scale of the problem.
It's matched by anecdata from the people around me. In the past few weeks most of my friends have reported getting COVID. It's just a cold so it puts them in bed with lemsips for a few days, not a big deal, but the massive incidence rates are very noticeable. One friend said he got COVID and had to cancel some meetings, but two were already cancelled by the other party for the exact same reason. That sort of thing hasn't happened before and for some of them, it's their first time. So it feels correct that infection rates are off the charts. Multiple perspectives yield the same answer.
And, if you do some research among reputable sources on vaccinated vs unvaccinated hospitalization and death rates, you'll find a significant pattern there.
In the UK there was a decline after March 2022 but now, as I said, it is heading back up again and has nearly reached the same peak as previously:
https://health-study.joinzoe.com/data#levels-over-time
2022 is showing much higher peaks than other years when you use data sources not affected by the collapse in testing levels.
"vaccinated vs unvaccinated hospitalization and death rates, you'll find a significant pattern there."
I think in many countries the hospitalization rate for vaccinated/unvaccinated now matches the underlying proportions, i.e. no effect on hospitalizations or deaths any longer (and possibly never, due to how the data was being distorted by various factors previously, but that's a harder case to prove due to government data secrecy).
The increase in cases this year is being driven by a mix of Omicron and vaccine imprinting. It's not related to restrictions. If it were the latter you'd see changes in policy and changes in cases line up very closely as the serial interval of SARS-CoV-2 is only a few days.
"Once this is all truly over hopefully some good meta- studies can be done that help us understand which policies are the most effective"
Oh it's been done many times already. You aren't aware of the studies and meta-studies because they don't get reported on. They don't get reported because what they show is that everything that's been tried has failed. The media, being highly complicit in pushing restrictions on people and heavily dependent upon public sector 'expertise' for giving their stories credibility, will not report on this failure.
If you want to get a flavour of it, reserve a block of a few hours and then go flick through the archives of some non mainstream anti-lockdown sites like dailysceptic.org, where they do report such things. You'll find a bunch of studies that amount to "we looked at all the data and found no correlations between stringency of policy and outcomes".
For example, excess mortality in Sweden in 2020 (which should have been very high according to the epidemiologists due to lack of restrictions) was zero for under 75s. And if you count from the start, excess death overall (all ages) is the same as for Denmark, which had much harsher restrictions. If you examine all the data simultaneously using statistical techniques you get the same null result.
Plenty of countries avoided the horror scenes seen in others, and I'm very glad to have lived in one of the former, even if many of the restrictions introduced were unjustifiably harsh (and I argued against many of them at the time).
As a consequence you should have more faith in them, not less. Regardless, ignore the contents of the articles themselves and go direct to the sources, if you wish.
Also consider: your refusal to go outside establishment media is exactly why you aren't aware of any of the studies or meta-studies that have been done on effectiveness of counter-measures. You're literally wishing in public for information that already exists, but the only people who are willing to cover such news are those who aren't conflicted by prior pro-lockdown stances.