Covid vsccine

I think you're taking his comments and misapplying them. I read an editorial by him in the WSJ way back in Feb - here - and he's pretty consistent that vaccines are part of, but not exclusively, the herd immunity strategy. The real evil here are people who are moving the goalposts and suggesting that natural immunity is NOT contributing. I think some of this messaging is probably akin to the noble lie, and they don't want people who have not been ill to not get vaccinated en masse because they think it's over, which is counter productive. The wisdom of this is above my paygrade. I think his editorial is spot-on by the way. The conclusion is money:



I don't think that there is any medical evidence that natural immunity is stronger than vaccination induced. And it appears that the vaccine has stronger immunity than some cases, because cases with very mild symptoms don't seem to promote immunity as much. I was trying to find an article on it and I cam across the exact same doc (Makary) talking with an expert about it in May where he says


Right now the answer about immunity is - we don't know. And Makary says that clearly - he's asking experts and they don't know.

That same interview where Makary is interviewing an expert (he said - if this guy doesn't know, nobody knows) concludes with the expert saying - "I would just like to assure people that vaccination is going to take care of this pandemic. You know, there's a lot of narrative about variants and escaping vaccines... I think the vaccines will handle them for now. I think we can get out of this. So please get vaccinated, continue to be safe. And I'm suspecting that in the fall, we can get back to life as usual."

I really don't understand your point here. Of course if you get infected from the disease you either get better and have immunity, or you die. The whole point is to get immunity without getting sick. Of course people can choose to get natural immunity by getting exposed. But from a public health or society perspective, why is that good? They're taking risk on themselves but also increasing the net risk to society. 

This idea that you can pick natural immunity or vaccine immunity as equivalents on a macro level is a false choice. Vaccine immunity has a near zero health cost. Natural immunity has known rates of hospitalization and death. 


This also needs to be side-eyed. Look at this thread. Secondary immune system activation is the cause of the vaccine side effects - soreness in your arm, general muscle soreness, fever, fatigue...all of that is your secondary immune system kicking in.  Any argument we can make about the unknowns of this vaccine's performance against future variants can also be made about natural immunity protecting from future variants. We don't know.

My wife has had it.  My in-laws have had it.  Several close friends have had it. ALL ARE BEING PRESSURED heavily to take the vaccine by various organizations they have to work with or go into.  Why?  Politics.

Wife tried to have anti-body testing to prove her situation.  Doctors would NOT approve it.  Why?

Svart, I wanted to preface this by saying that you and I are likely on the exact same side of this discussion economically and politically, but I don't really agree with the structure of the argument that you're putting out here.

I think everyone is well aware of the relatively low IFR. But a low IFR across a large population creates large numbers. We don't know the number of asymptomatic carriers (it's kind of difficult to measure) put the low end of seroprevalence estimates (which is one of the few ways to find out) put the IFR of this disease around 0.3%. On the other hand, roughly 0.4% of the population of New York City has died from COVID, so unless they are at 100% infection, the absolute IFR is bounded by this number. Obviously this number has changed over time as treatment has improved.

I do think there is a really insidious kind of argument that because this disease is more severe for people with hypertension or obesity or who are older that it's less of a concern. For one, those make up a majority of our country. A LOT of people have hypertension who are otherwise healthy. For two, they're still humans and a life is a life. I'm not saying this is you, but I've seen some shockingly callous responses from people who I know are pro-life Christians.

I don't think that we know nearly as much as you're implying we do one way or another about how this disease spreads, how well non-pharmaceutical interventions work, etc.. I think there are a lot of studies producing a lot of conclusions, but studies always have limitations. These things are incredibly difficult to study. The study which said mask mandates produce etc. 1% was a growth rate, not an absolute number. It was widely misrepresented in the media. It also doesn't mean masks work, for example - mask mandates can change outcomes without the mask itself doing anything. The rest of the information here is consistent with how respiratory illnesses work - flu is mostly spread in the home, because it seems to be a cumulative exposure kind of thing. But obviously that can't be the only way it spreads, because it does spread.

The other big mistake that people make is assuming homogeneity of spread, or comparing large countries like the US to small ones. The US total is like a ton of superimposed mini-pandemics, and even then we know for a fact that it's pockets within pockets. On the contrary to your assessment, superspreaders and the resulting heterogeneity of spread is probably the defining characteristic of the pandemic. The good news is that this calls for a much lower herd immunity threshold than random homogenous spreading suggests! Here are some interesting articles on this if you want to geek out a bit - one, two, and three.

A lot of diseases are seasonal, and just by 'hunch' we should expect to see strong seasonality with this one, too. There's a ton of correlation-causation errors being made by people on both sides, with a distressing amount of post hoc ergo propter hoc thrown in there. I do think you are probably correct about the majority of the population in the US having had COVID, simply by fatalities. If you have an IFR of 0.5% to get to 600,000 deaths you need 120M cases. When you add vaccinations to this, it seems to me that we are either at or very close to a herd immunity threshold and that this current decline isn't seasonal. However, that doesn't mean that if you randomly sampled 50 people from each city in the US you'd find the same local rates of people who have had it.

People like us who can have unemotional conversations and who are willing to do the work to be objective should lead the way. I don't think this should be a left-right issue, and there's absolutely no place for personal attacks or dogma in something like this.

Not sure where you live, but I think Arizona. I was able to get an antibody test within an hour at the CVS Minute Clinic for 38 bucks. I was surprised to come up negative.

www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/clinic-locator/az/tucson/antibody-testing.html

Early on, I came across this article (which links a Boston article as well).

www.wbur.org/news/2020/04/17/worcester-homeless-population-covid-19-coronavirus

Basically a third of the homeless at both shelters tested positive and were asymptotic. It would have been great to start running antibody tests across the board at that point to know what things really look like.

Svart, I'm reading through the papers you linked - thanks, I had not seen a couple of these as I haven't had as much time to read lately.  I'm not sure you can draw quite as strong the conclusions you have here - there is a wide spread of estimates even among these papers, and we don't really know how robust of an immune response is required to actually convey "immmunity". I'm sure the latter is a moving target anyway - is it immunity if you still get sick, but less than you would have otherwise? How would we really know?

I have to disagree that "we've just been sold the notion that it was much more contagious than it's proven to be." This seems like tails I win, heads you lose - if nearly everyone has had it, then the IFR is lower, it is quite a bit more contagious than we think. That also seems to be supported by the idea of a huge iceberg of asymptomatic cases. 

And actually, airplanes have incredibly clean air. Hepafilters to the max, and they do complete air changeouts about once every two minutes. 

Not sure I understand this. I think maybe you meant heterogeneity at scale? 

But the second half of this doesn't connect to the first. The reason that baseball games and whatever didn't produce a large outbreak can be attributed to one of two things - either there is a strong seasonal component (like flu and every other human coronavirus) or Texas has sufficient people vaccinated + immune to prevent sustained transmission. I think it's some of both with emphasis on the latter. I did tell my wife that the fact that people have been taking communion in Orthodox churches (like mine) from a common cup (we don't do it any other way) for the duration of the outbreak and there has been no reported outbreak from that means it simply hasn't happened - because you *know* that would have made major headlines.

The observation about heterogeneity is precisely what you've talked about with homes. Rather than equally likely transmission on a randomly mixed population, which gives a certain degree of herd immunity required to end an outbreak, we have non-random transmission on non-randomly mixed populations. Some people seem to be much more infectious than others, and we don't have the same levels of contact with everyone we come into. Heterogeneity requires a much lower threshold for herd immunity than random mixing. 


At any rate, at least for the time being this thing is over and done. If we get another major outbreak I'll be surprised. 

We just began lockdown No.4 here in Melbourne yesterday.
Supposed to be just for a week to stop an outbreak that began earlier in the week.

The question is are we heading towards a major confrontation with China?
If so I would initially expect an increase in cyber attacks as a precursor to something bigger.
Then there’s this supposed major UFO announcement coming. - Why and why now?
It appears something is brewing and whatever happens I suspect the reason given will be BS topped with more BS.

Mostly lurking here. But this correlates with "someone I know's" info, (fairly recently) retired from the Secret Service.
Still has contacts there too.

Oops gotta go, some big guys in suits,  from a black Limo outside... Are knocking at my door.
Chris

The study doesn't say the virus is man-made. At least, the final publication doesn't. The stuff the Mail is reporting were remarks from 2 of the authors that were retracted before final publication.


fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/

Personally, it doesn't take away much. I've seen a few too many scientists eat their own words. In this case, it's understandable as the paper's aim is to approve a vaccine. All three authors have stock or stock-options in that company.

It's also not so important. Not for Covid. It's the sort of stuff scientists have been warning for for decades but that gets completely ignored. Just recently, a trial with genetically modified mosquitos went completely wrong. The mosquitos wouldn't reproduce, according to the scientists who did the test. Yet one year later, their genes were found in wild mosquitos. Mind you, not useful genes, just marker genes.

We like playing with fire.

As the saying goes…what’s the difference between a conspiracy theory & the truth? About 6-12 months 😂