__blockcipher__

Well good for you, but you actually do need to look on the impact on behavior of the things you advocate for. Unless your goal is purely to punish/harm those that don't share your beliefs rather than some tangible outcome in terms of vaccination or [insert primary endpoint here].

We're already seeing the impact of vaccine mandates in places like New York: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-mandate-new-york-...

> "We stopped elective inpatient surgeries. We stopped some of our outpatient patient visits. We stopped ICU medical transfers from other referral rural hospitals. ... We've asked for more time to work on strategies with the state to ensure that as many people as possible get vaccinated," said Tom Quatroche, the president and CEO of Erie County Medical Center.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we already know beyond a shadow of a doubt that mass COVID vaccination doesn't magically stop the virus from doing what it does. Israel has absurdly high vaccine uptake - including a sizeable proportion of triply-vaxxed people - and we're still seeing more "cases" than at the same time the previous year. So I wonder how much you've actually looked into the efficacy (in terms of chance of infection and spread) of these vaccines given the data. And I wonder how rigorously you've thought about the second and third order effects when phenomenoms like antigenic drift and immune escape and Marek's disease are very well known.

Anyway, I won't go too far down that rabbit hole since the discussion is more of "assuming vaccination is good and we don't have any ethical qualms with using violent police power to compel people to consume a pharmaceutical product where the manufacturers have literally no liability to the consumer for any adverse reactions, what is the best way to modify behavior" than about examining the premise of the utility of mass vaccination itself. It's probably already obvious that I completely reject the ethics of what you are in favor of. So setting the pesky notion of ethics aside for the time-being, I still think you're failing to see the very obvious harms that come from the brand of coercion that you're advocating for.

Like I said above, we're already seeing the effects of these mandates on healthcare capacity. Firing 5% of one's hospital staff is no small thing. And you seem to very much not see how censoring and suppressing alternate points of view only reinforces those points of view. Implicitly you seem to think that adopting a policy and actually enforcing it in the real-world are the same thing - which is a trap that many a naive intellectual has fallen into since time immemorial.

> Take eugenics, has suppressing that idea made the belief in eugenics worse?

Ideas like eugenics clearly have something to them that resonates with people, at least until they think hard enough about the ethics or logistics involved. There's a reason eugenics cropped up in the first place. So yes, insofar as you suppress a dangerously seductive idea, you do make it worse, because it takes actually explaining what the flaws were with the idea to shake people out of it.

Agreed. As one example, take Amazon banning Parler from AWS. That clearly isn't a positive move for revenue (at least ignoring any potential shady behind-the-scenes kickbacks they could have gotten for doing so), but they did it because it aligned with many of their employees' ideology (among other reasons).

(As an aside Parler was idiotic for not running on their own hardware given they were billing themselves as the censorship resistant twitter, but that's neither here nor there)

Depends what you consider the radicalization pipeline to be. For example, if you ban a user from Twitter, and they end up on Parler, they're gonna be exposed to a lot more "radical" (for lack of a better word) stuff than when they were just on Twitter. It's really not guaranteed that banning "undesirable" content actually does disrupt the pipeline, so much as just further balkanize and radicalize the dissidents.

Most people who are "COVID vaccine hesitant", or whatever term we want to use, aren't opposed to the concept of vaccination in general. Many of them have even gotten flu shots many times in the past, which as an aside when analyzed rigorously are barely better than placebo:

https://www.cochrane.org/CD001269/ARI_vaccines-prevent-influ...

> Injected influenza vaccines probably have a small protective effect against influenza and ILI (moderate-certainty evidence), as 71 people would need to be vaccinated to avoid one influenza case, and 29 would need to be vaccinated to avoid one case of ILI. Vaccination may have little or no appreciable effect on hospitalisations (low-certainty evidence) or number of working days lost.

So 71 shots to avoid one case, or if we want to be charitable we should use the 29 shots per one ILI since really ILI is what we care about. And no actual effect on hosp. or working days lost (both of which is what we should really actually care about)

--

Anyway I got off track with the flu vaccine stuff, but anyway surely you're aware that far more people are "hesitant" about the COVID vaccine specifically than any of the other vaccines? So to cast it as a case of "anti-vaccine advocacy" is just wrong. That's not what's going on here and as long as you refuse to try to understand these people you will continue failing to impact their behavior.

While I almost entirely disagree with you, I agree with the general idea that most people aren't "hesitant". Personally I'm vaccine "hell no!" (because I don't have a personal medical need for the COVID vaccine, potential side effects aside, and I reject the societal benefit argument given the population dynamics of what happens when you vaccinate against just the spike).

So while I come at it from the total opposite reason, you're right that with the massive amount of propaganda and outright coercion that everyone (at least in the US) has been exposed to over the last several months, most people who are not vaccinated are fairly strongly opposed to getting it (not necessarily all for the same reason). There are definitely a bunch of "I wanna wait and see" type people, but given all the coercion/propaganda they are few and far between.

Maybe it’s me but I’m having trouble understanding their argument. It seems like they’re arguing that the vaxed cases came from cities and therefore the VE is not a reliable metric? (VE has many problems btw but we need to apply that standard both when the VE favors and disfavors the vaccine)

You need to adjust for the total # of infections. We can also talk about the of covid/with COVID distinction but frankly we don’t even need to go there. But suffice to say Influenza and COVID deaths are measured very differently

You’re sure that you know these >5 adults enough to make that statement confidently? What about their significant others?

IMO you are clearly making an unfounded assumption

I think what makes me the saddest is that the pro-lockdown pro-school-closures pro-vaccine-passport-to-engage-in-society people never seem to think that the onus is on them to prove anything.

They don't need to prove that school closures aren't deleterious.

They don't need to prove that the supposed epidemic of long COVID is actually real.

They don't need to prove that the missed medical appointments and missed routine non-COVID vaccinations aren't going to outpace the supposed benefits of doing the epidemiological equivalent of hiding in your closet from the monster (SARS-2).

They don't need to account for second-order effects, such as the fact that "avoiding" COVID for a month or two is really just postponing it and that we exist in a state of dynamic equilibrium with the countless pathogens we're surrounded by.

No, they just get to assume that their intervention de jur is without harm, and conversely that COVID is the worst thing ever and that SARS-2 is 10 times as deadly as all the other shit we don't spend an excessive amount of time worrying about (Influenza, OC43, noravirus, rhinovirus, you name it)

Indeed. And to flesh out in more detail, we caused:

- lack of sleep/exercise (which destroys the body's immunoregulatory capacities, leading to either a sort of acute immunosenescence like you said wrt fear, or alternatively leading to an overreactive immune system that kills via cytokine storm)

- decline in social interaction

- more time spent inside (which apart from the other correlates, very obviously leads to less sunlight). sunlight => vitamin d + nitric oxide; vitamin d is critical for respiratory pathology specifically, as well as just general health, and nitric oxide is very important as an immunoregulatory compound and as a preventer of strokes

- the general environment of fear/stress/anxiety (again, going to screw up the immunoregulatory balance of the body)

I always catch flak for saying it, but we need to be honest about the fact that long COVID is largely a psychogenic illness. It can be a real thing, in the way that any infection can leave a sort of malaise that persists for years or even decades for the unlucky, but such reactions are incredibly rare. Yet based off the self-reported surveys, you'd think the rate of long COVID was like 10% among progressive twitter users in their early 20's...

I don't have the link to it but I saw a hilarious pre-print on "long COVID" the other day that was comparing the incidence of long COVID amongst people that had vs never had COVID. In many groups the people with COVID had more long COVID (but not enough to reach significance), but in the age range of like 12-15 years old there were literally more kids who never had COVID who reported long COVID than those who had COVID. It's as if people forgot that fatigue and malaise and chronic inflammation are all things that happened before COVID and will continue to happen long after...

I'd also note that an even-more-infectious variant of SARS-2 (Delta), in which children transmit just as readily (I haven't seen proof of this whatsoever but let's accept it for the sake of argument), and which largely-but-not-completely bypasses vaccine immunity (this is definitely the case; the Israel data confirms that the approach of vaccinating against just the spike protein was an incredible failure given that a couple point mutations on the spike like we saw with Delta was enough to drop vaccine efficacy to <=40% against infection), should tell us that trying to run away from this virus or wage war on it is folly and that, yes, your kid is going to be exposed to COVID, and that's okay.

This is a bit of a side tangent but it never ceases to amaze me that the supposed asymptomatic spread of COVID (which was never proven; pre-symptomatic was but asymptomatic appears to have been a myth) was used as a justification for the necessity of lockdowns and the like, when really it should have been a screaming indicator that we should stop trying to aggressively contain the damn thing and just focus on population health and focused protection of the severely vulnerable.

By the same logic (this is me basically restating my first paragraph), the idea that a variant that infects kids more easily or as was argued above that kids can transmit more easily, is a sign that we should stop trying to close schools, not that we need to double down. And regardless it seems like people seem to have forgotten that we're now in late September 2021. It's almost been two years of this now.

Hell, I remember catching major flak here (on a different account) in early-mid 2020 for saying that we were going to stay locked down until they coerced everyone into being vaccinated, and at the time I was called a conspiracy theorist; nowadays people act like I'm crazy for not wanting vaccine passports, and will turn around and act as if we all collectively knew they were going to happen from the beginning! More than 18 months of this, a third-world child starvation / missed medical appointment crisis, a massive worldwide uptick in missed preventative care like cancer screenings, a >30% rise in y/y fentanyl overdose deaths in the US alone, and yet people still insist on more of these ineffective and outright authoritarian measures?!

> The big story last year was that cases of/deaths from influenza dropped worldwide[1].

There's a huge difference between "influenza plummeted worldwide" and "influenza plummeted worldwide as a direct result of school closures [or lockdowns, physical distancing, and universal masking]". Influenza did plummet worldwide. Indeed, it did so even in places that didn't go to nearly the same extent as the US did as far as school closures and the like. That should already hint at you that it's not actually related to what we did intervention-wise (which also makes sense given that everything we did was ineffective at slowing the spread of COVID more than a marginal amount [granted, SARS-2 spreads more easily than Influenza so it's theoretically possible the COVID measures were completely ineffective for COVID yet were completely effective for Influenza, but seems farfetched])

To me the most plausible explanation is that of viral interference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30950360/

> Since the interferon system can control most, if not all, virus infections in the absence of adaptive immunity, it was proposed that viral induction of a nonspecific localized temporary state of immunity may provide a strategy to control viral infections.

Briefly, infection with a virus causes one's cellular hackles to get raised, so to speak. That is to say, that infection with virus A leads to a ramp-up in innate immunity, particularly cell-mediated innate immunity, which decreases the probability of being infected by virus B in the ensuing days/weeks. The paper I linked is about leveraging that intentionally, but obviously it's a mechanism that occurs naturally as well. This next point is orthogonal to our discussion but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that SARS-2 is, in a sense, actually the ideal candidate for intentional exploitation of viral interference, given how readily it infects human cells and how in large swaths of the population it is very non-threatening (and yes, in a small proportion of the population it is very threatening)

--

So to tie it back to the Influenza dropping, I suspect that viral interference was quite significant, and that altered social interactions accounted for a big chunk of it as well. Specifically, it seems like social networks got much more "local". There was still people going out and doing stuff, but overall the average person was significantly less likely to visit extended family, attend large events, etc. This is somewhat related to the lockdowns/forced shuttering of businesses, but I think a lot of it was broader than that as well.

---

> Can you link to those studies [regarding influenza and school closures]?

I'll start with one review that does seem to suggest a benefit in school closures for Influenza: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/2/e002149.short. It has the usual problems associative studies do, but in this case specifically the confound of regression to the mean is incredibly great. They mention as such in the results:

> However, as schools often closed late in the outbreak or other interventions were used concurrently, it was sometimes unclear how much school closure contributed to the reductions in incidence.

Here's one from Hong Kong. I really like their discussion because it points out just how difficult it is to actually show a link, given the way epidemic curves naturally rise and fall and the delayed natural of intervention impact: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2609897/

> Although we can only speculate, given the limitations of an uncontrolled natural experiment on the population level, routine surveillance data did not detect a large effect from the school closures. In particular, we noted a decline in laboratory isolations of influenza viruses that preceded the intervention and the lack of association between school closures and Rt. In fact, sentinel data may not accurately represent the incidence of influenza in the underlying population because, for example, other cocirculating upper respiratory viruses contribute to overall influenza-like illness consultation rates. Laboratory data, however, should be less affected, and extra testing in response to the heightened awareness of influenza activity might have artifactually lowered the positivity rate. The epidemic curves generated from the surveillance data showed a decline in cases that may have naturally concluded without any intervention. We note the difficulty of making inferences directly from changes in epidemic curves because changes in the epidemic curve may lag behind changes in the underlying transmission dynamics by at least 1 serial interval, as has previously been shown for severe acute respiratory syndrome

-

This next one is more about the ethics, but I think the abstract is pretty sensible:

"Mitigating Pandemic Influenza: The Ethics of Implementing a School Closure Policy" - https://journals.lww.com/jphmp/Abstract/2008/07000/Mitigatin...

> Pandemic influenza response plans have placed a significant emphasis on school closures as a community mitigation strategy. However, school closures raise serious ethical concerns, many of which have been largely overlooked. First, evidence of this intervention's efficacy has not yet been firmly established, calling into question whether it will be useful against the threat. Second, school closures have the potential to create serious adverse consequences, which will disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. Thus, policy makers should focus on gathering more evidence about the efficacy of school closures and on strengthening communication and transparency about the strengths and weaknesses of any school-closure plan that they decide to adopt.

> It was to protect staff & their families, and generally reduce community spread.

There is no evidence that school closures had any positive impact on community spread, FWIW. Hell, even for Influenza, which kids are much less resistant to than they are for COVID, studies have often found that school closures are counterproductive due to actually ending up with an increased number and diversity of contacts/events.

> but I don't think we'd have been able to keep fully in-person school running last year anyway.

But why do you think this? Are you aware that many parts of the world have returned to fully in-person school for several months or longer at this point? That here in deep blue parts of the US we are unique in our rabid devotion to denying children in-person school?

> The ones that went in-person suffered badly, in some cases worse than fully-online cohorts.

[Citation Needed]

> The only way to fix it would have been a policy of having teachers & students who very likely were COVID-exposed but not actively ill-feeling come in until it was proven that they were COVID-positive—but that policy would also have increased spread, so I wouldn't guarantee that'd actually improve the situation of having too many staff out for quarantine.

First of all I actually reject the premise that avoiding spread is necessarily a good thing. Indeed it only prolongs the epidemic stage and as the rise of variants like Delta have shown, even rushing out vaccines in an unprecedented amount of time hasn't actually allowed people to avoid the virus. I should also mention that for teachers who are quarantining (which remember is also a result of policy, you're not talking about teachers being unable to teach due to being sick, but rather being forbidden from in-person teaching because they or someone they know hit a positive on a PCR test), they could still teach remotely to a class of in-person kids (yes you might need some other adult to oversee things, but I'd wager even without such supervision you'd still have far better results than the unmitigated disaster that "distance" learning has been)

The kids who have survived distance learning have done well in spite of it, not because of it. They have access to tutors and learning pods and actually have a quiet space at home to do work, and actually have parents that give a shit. Not everyone has those resources.

But yeah I really want to hammer home the point that, the only possible way in which we wouldn't have "been able to keep fully in-person school running last year" is purely itself an artifact of absurd COVID quarantine policies, and has nothing to do with an actual lack of staff nor an actual crippling health problem preventing people from being able to work.

Somehow nobody seems to feel a need to justify why would we make any changes* to in-person schooling. Instead it just seems to be a foregone conclusion that having kids in school is dangerous.

Why is split learning even on the table? Who are we trying to protect? The kids? The teachers? Are most people in these hyper-partisan democrat areas (I'm speaking from a US perspective, but it's largely the US that has voluntarily wrecked now almost 2 years of education) aware that the kids are not at serious risk of COVID? Are they aware that, not only is the mortality of common comparisons like Influenza way higher, but that the common rebuttal of "but what about long COVID" is basically an evidenceless assertion and there is no evidence that children are getting permanent damage from their largely asymptomatic COVID infections? Are they aware that, even if it were right to try to prevent kids from ever getting infected with SARS-2 (spoiler: it's not), that we don't even have quality studies proving that going to school is even associated with greater COVID infection?

Are they aware that, unlike the H1N1 pandemic, it's actually pretty miraculous that SARS-2 almost entirely spares children? That therefore to undergo these measures like school closures and constant indoor masking of toddlers, and 6 foot distancing, and plastic dividers, and restricted extracurricular events, has no relation to actually keeping children safe, except insofar as those measures very clearly harm the wellbeing of children?

I weep for what we've done to children throughout this. We as adults are supposed to be the ones saying, "hey, even if there's risk to us adults, you guys are more important, and we're never going to ask you to sacrifice your life out of some misguided effort to prevent the transmission of an endemic highly infectious human coronavirus, and on the contrary we will make whatever sacrifices are necessary to keep you guys growing and developing". Instead we turned around and said, "kids are inherently gross, they're spreading this killer virus like crazy, if they develop a cough and hug their grandmother and the grandmother later dies of COVID then they killed their grandma".

As someone who lives in California - which together with New York and Illinois has led the country in absurd and ineffective and incredibly authoritarian COVID policy - I feel like I don't recognize my fellow citizens.

* Well, any changes because of COVID specifically. Obviously there's things like later school start times for teenagers, etc that are no-brainers that should have been implemented long ago

Have you done them before? LSD’s stimulating nature should make it kind of obvious. They share the 5ht2a agonism because that’s how all the classic psychs (lsd/psilocybin/mescaline/dmt) work. But LSD structurally is like a psychedelic amphetamine/phenethylamine, whereas psiloybin doesn’t have that stimulating feeling at all

The 5ht2a agonism is what’s similar. LSD is made unique by its strong dopamine subreceptor agonism. So no, shrooms and LSD are most different in the dopaminergic effects of lsd and the half lives (lsd 2-4x longer). LSD is more of a psychedelic amphetamine whereas psilocybin is a classic tryptamine

No, cannabis is quite unique in that thc metabolites get stored in the fat, and there's not really a way to just check for acute intoxication. I've had friends who were heavy, heavy users who took 1.5 months to clear up. (Casual smokers can clear up in a few days or 1-2 weeks at most)

> The vaccines also lack a specific abnormal side effect that the infection may carry: risk of death and hospitalization.

This is well-intentioned but false. The vaccines can send you to the hospital (side-effects). It's rare but happens. Similarly, you can be vaccinated, get infected with SARS-2, and end up in the hospital, so it's not even true that they avoid hospitalization from SARS-2 itself completely. (They help a lot with hosp/death from the virus, to be clear)

It might seem small but they only said it was longer lasting, not that it was stronger:

> is longer lasting than from the vaccine

And don’t forget, it’s way more than just money:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A

You must report to them and only them.

For the GP to claim they’re not government “owned” is a rhetorical trick at best and outright ignorant absurdity at worst.

That’s like saying the federal reserve is “private”. No, the NECMEC is not a private entity. Not only was it heavily funded/created by the gov, but more importantly it is granted special legal status. You and I can’t just spin up our own CSAM database. Nor do we have any laws that say that any companies aware of CSAM must send it to us and only us.

It set the precedent for scanning server side. Which I don’t like but there’s really no way to avoid it anyway.

Now we have clientside scanning, and actually being led by the [note the scare quotes] “pro-privacy” two ton gorilla. It’s a whole different ballgame.

They almost certainly will, yes. Especially given that all the popular vaccines are spike protein vaccines only, which are relatively easy for SARS-2 to “learn” how to evade. Exposure to the whole virus provides a much broader set of epitopes for the immune system to learn.

I’d add that anyone who got vaccinated so that they can show proof of vaccination needs to understand that there’s no getting off the train. If you don’t get your booster you’ll be - gasp! - not fully vaccinated.

Slowing the spread isn’t a great goal when the vaccines are only ~40% effective at preventing Delta infection (and that number will get way worse over time)

Natural infection is so much better at preventing subsequent infection/transmission, that we should be advocating for people who are not at risk to go out and aggressively live life. Unfortunately many are not in favor of that because they don’t understand that viruses, and hCoVs specifically, are an unavoidable fact of life (and, indeed, necessary for health at a certain level)

There’s not really a way to make vaccinating kids make sense given that the main benefit of vaccination is personal risk reduction only. Furthermore conditions like myocarditis, which happens in young boys who are vaccinated at incredibly high rates (relative to no vax), are incredibly concerning given that the risk of COVID itself is so utterly insignificant in children.

I imagine they meant even mentioning a statistic like “60% of those hospitalized are vaccinated” at all would get them labelled that way.

They actually do look alike to my eye, but in a “the way the algorithm sees it” kind of way. I can see the obvious similarity. But to your point it’s not like it’s two very slightly different photos of dogs.

This is a great answer but that’s not actually the GP’s contention. Their argument is essentially “so what if there’s a collision, the human review will catch it”. And to that I’d say that the same is supposed to occur for the no-fly list and we all know how that works in practice.

The mere accusal itself of possessing CSAM can be life ruining if it gets to that stage. More importantly, a collision will effectively allow warrantless searches, at least of the collided images.

Yeah, talk to people that know nothing on the issue besides that they want to “protect the kids”.

Why stop there? Get out of the HN bubble on the patriot act, instead ask your neighbor’s wife her thoughts on it. Get out of the HN bubble on immigration, go ask a stereotypical boomer conservative about it.

I think my sarcasm already made it overtly obvious but, this is horrible advice you are giving and the fact that you don’t seem to be aware that pedophilia and terrorism are the two most classic “this gives us an excuse to exert totalitarian control” topics betrays your own ignorance (or, worse, you are aware and just don’t care).