It seems perfectly reasonable to me that "The SARS-Cov-2 vaccines occasionally cause health problems" and "Almost everyone should get vaccinated/boosted" are both entirely true statements.
"Almost everyone should get vaccinated" does not mean the government should coerce everyone into making the correct medical decision by barring them from employment or access to private establishments.
Absent a very compelling reason, people should be free to go against medical advice. People have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies. People have the right to make the wrong choice.
In this case, the reason given for overriding that freedom was a highly specious argument that the unvaccinated were putting other people at significant risk. That argument did not pass the smell test from the very beginning.
Likewise, the initial (honest) advice not to bother with masks for covid was based on the fact that covid, like other coronaviruses and influenza, is aerosol-borne and aerosol particles pass through surgical mask material easily (so wearing a 2nd tight-fitting mask over a surgical mask to get a better fit doesn't matter).
The u-turn on masks for covid wasn't based on science. The justification later given was that the earlier, correct advice not to bother with masks was a noble lie to conserve supplies of masks for healthcare workers. At the time, the reversal was publicly predicated on hand-wavey (and false) claims that covid might be droplet-spread (droplets are larger than aerosol particles and droplet emissions could conceivably be greatly reduced by well-fitted surgical masks with no gaps).
The only record you’ll find of a public health official saying we DO know they DON’T help is USSG Jerome Adams.
It’s weird that you’re writing this implying that we now know masks don’t work. That’s not true. We DO know that SOME masks work, others work hardly at all or none at all.
Closing the beach however, was 100% BS.
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
The unvaccinated were filling up the hospitals which was putting other people at risk.
Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/environment/covid...
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20221127/more-vaccinated-peo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinate...
The top article you cite has all this information in it, and even mentions the base rate fallacy. It is criticizing the framing of the pandemic as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" and trying to focus attention on the elderly, but that is orthogonal to the question of if the unvaccinated are disproportionately clogging up the hospital system. Both statistics are true. Everyone should still get vaccinated to reduce the load on the hospital system (although this concern is now fading as antivaxxers actually do pick up immunity the hard way). We should also focus on the elderly more.
As a simple example: if a population begins entirely susceptible and there's a vaccine from day 1 which is available and reduces the risks of hospitalization by 9x and 90% of the people get the vaccine, then the rates of hospitalization will be split 50/50 between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Vaccinating the rest of the population would increase vaccination rates by 10% but would decrease overall hospitalization rates by 44%.
I wonder how that would apply to obesity and unprotected sex.
Can you please provide a dictionary or other reference?
In case you were wondering when ICUs were full of respiratory diseases, that would be last week.
There are 23k ICU beds in the US.
The population of the US is 330M.
The hospitalization rate for COVID was ~120/100k in 30 year olds.
Average stay in ICU for COVID was 2-5 weeks.
Normally, 30 year olds are healthy and don't present so highly in the hospitals or ICUs so on a percentage basis it's even worse (normal ~2%/decade vs ~20%/decade for 80yrs old). God forbid you're in rural America or your skin color is dark so you don't have access to the beds available in the cities. If you can't be polite to others, you shouldn't expect them to be polite to you.
So I think that roughly answers the question, you might expect something like .12 people to be hospitalized (does that include ICU? Do these people have prior exposures? Comorbidities?).
I just ask because I think not everyone is aware yet that covid was (and is) a disease with a wide range of outcomes. I think the number you cited would surprise quite a few people. Many seem to think it was basically like playing russian roulette no matter your situation, and would have guessed a double digit number.
I'm not making any kind of claim that people shouldn't get vaccinated. Just trying to show that some individuals deciding not to get vaccinated isn't exactly as murderous as some might think.
I apologize if this didn't seem like a polite question. Thank you for indulging me.
I think the other thing that people forget is that covid immune response can give you the same myocarditis (along with clots and heart attacks) as vaccines for much the same reasons, but at higher rates. The fact that the stabilized (Novavax, Pfizer, Moderna) vaccines have 10x lower rates of myocarditis than unmodified spike RNA (ChadOx, Sputnik) indicates that reducing the immune surface variation lowers risk.
> Your right to gamble with your health ends when you expect to be able to get treatment if the gamble comes out badly.
My right to choose my own treatment outweighs any right you have to feel safer. That includes you feeling safe that the local hospital system will not be at capacity if you have to be admitted.
It’s no different than having a bunch of chain smokers, alcoholics, or morbidly obese people clogging the medical system. People have the right to make potentially destructive choices that are not directly harmful to those around them.
That's the normal load and it is scaled for it[*].
COVID is like a DDoS.
And there is no elastic cloud scaling for nurses, you can't just turn up more instances from a ready pool.
[*] Well maybe not any more, and lets not get into a discussion of the for-profit health care system.
No problem. Please sign this document stating that you will not seek treatment for Covid and that hospitals can legally refuse to treat you if you contract Covid.
But, see, that didn't happen. Instead what we wind up with are anti-vaxxers begging for the vaccine after they have been put on ECMO. Yeah, unfortunately it's too late at that point.
And even worse you are now soaking up a hospital bed for 4+ months that should have gone to someone who wasn't stupid.
And even worse that that is the dying person's family giving grief to the hospital staff because someone anti-vax dying of Covid doesn't fit their reality narrative. I could at least have some sympathy for the uneducated following foolish leaders. I have NEGATIVE sympathy for those who then abuse people trying to help them when the consequences come home to roost.
When I can see tears of relief in the eyes of a nurse simply by saying "Don't worry. I'm pro-vax." we have let the idiots have too much leeway.
As the kids say: "Fuck around. Find out." Or, as the olds say: "Play stupid games; win stupid prizes."
Why? Do you expect someone who doesn’t get a measles vaccine to sign a waiver refusing treatment if they get I’ll? Do you expect someone who refuses to wear a condom to refuse treatment if they contract an STD?
Perhaps? The advantage that we have with measles is that the vaccine can reach "herd immunity" and the measles vaccine is extremely effective. If enough people started dropping the measles vaccine because "Muh Choices!" that we fell below that and it started clogging the hospitals, yeah, maybe. The enclaves that refuse the measles vaccine find out about every 5-10 years why that's a bad idea.
These aren't comparable. Obesity or alcoholism aren't communicable and don't lead to outbreaks. If they did, we'd be having similar discussions as to Covid.
Except that wasn't happening, and so much not happening that hospitals were reducing capacity. The emergency capacity built in early 2020 was dismantled after only a month or so and never brought back.
You can find individual hospitals reaching capacity all the time every year forever, but it was never the problem the news made it out to be. Current headlines include gasp hospitals at 80% capacity! ...Except that's normal. The more empty beds they have, the more money they lose - they try to run at around 80-90% full.
But... the government has been doing that for decades and decades, since the very invention of the vaccine! Why is that "The Issue" when there's suddenly a pandemic and it's important, vs. when you needed to show your vaccination records to join the military or go to school in the 90's or whatever?
You see that the concern you're showing seems, to those of us on the other side, maybe a little insincere?
You see no philosophical difference between the government mandating vaccination records for schools and public institutions like the military vs. them mandating vaccination records for private establishments such as gyms, irrespective of the wishes of the owners of those establishments?
Should the government have the right to mandate vaccination records for entry to a private home, irrespective of the wishes of the homeowner?
Speaking of which, Fauci's early statements on AIDS in the initial outbreak were interesting.
Regardless, it's not one of the diseases listed on the linked page, and it's very different in nature than the ones there, so that sounds like a red herring to me.
Perhaps the military had some say but it's relatively easy to not accidentally enlist.
Here you're presuming that the government's role in a pandemic is to wring their hands and issue PSA's. That might be what some folks want them to do these days, but when the legal foundations of public health policy were laid the government was expected to do quite a bit more.
> People have the right to do whatever they want with their bodies.
This might be your opinion, but the majority of your fellow citizens disagree with you. Try asking them about drug use, abortion, suicide, and other "purely personal" matters.
> People have the right to make the wrong choice.
Many wrong choices come with severe state-imposed consequences. We in the US long ago delegated to our elected representatives the authority to force some choices onto individuals, including in a health emergency. We are of course vigorously debating whether they used that authority wisely this time, but it was theirs to use.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/us-extends-covid-public-heal...
That's one in a billion. No, it's not possible to reason about a weird effect affecting less than one person in all of EU + US combined.
But we do actually know what happens when there is a legit safety concern with the vaccines affecting a slice of the population, since it has happened. The AZ vaccine turned out to have rare (but not one in a billion rare), serious and even lethal, complications for young women. The public health authorities picked up on this within a month, and acted to stop the use of that vaccine first for that at-risk group and later for everyone.
That was all fairly low drama.
But the same people who believe that evolution and climate change are hoaxes are also convinced that COVID is a hoax. (The disease is a hoax, the vaccine is a hoax, the hoax disease that doesn't need to be cured by the hoax vaccine is an attack by China -- and the coverup is a hoax.)
And those people are ~40% of the US population, with an outsized thumb on the scale of elections due to accidents of geography and history. So instead of talking cogently about tradeoffs, we're barely fending off turning conspiracy theories into policy. And by "barely" I mean "succeeding slightly more often than we fail".
Yeah, we ought to be able to discuss things cogently. That ship sailed a long time ago.