Why does this matter? Because most of the articles claims are based on "spoke to us" quotes from anonymous staffers which cannot be independently verified. So it falls to the reputation of those publishing and their journalistic integrity/process, and at that point I leave it to you to make up your own mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss#2017%E2%80%932020:_...
I understand the argument you're making, and it's not an obvious call, but I think it comes with more downside than upside, at least for HN. It's a trope of tribal internet argument (I mean in general—not talking about you here) to follow a "DAG of shame" in which you hop from any node to the most shameful associated thing, with the intention of discrediting the node from which you started. The problem is that each of those hops loses a lot of information, and one ends up in places that aren't particularly relevant, like whatever that university project is.
What's bad about this for HN is that it makes threads more generic, predictable, and repetitive. It also polarizes discussion along the most intense axis. All of this makes discussion less interesting and more inflammatory.
So while it's not an obvious call (more like 60-40 than 80-20) I think we're better off as a community to resist the habit of replacing topic X with the biggest or most shameful other-topic-Y that the dots connect to. It's not that there's no value in it, but it's the wrong move, given what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Social media and mainstream media saw it fit to censor dissenting voices --not those of quacks, we can mostly all agree on minimizing the voices of quacks but shutting down medical professionals and medical academics and so on is very concerning.
The only people they allowed to be wrong about the pandemic were govt officials. They could get it wrong and right it as many times as necessary.
There was never a discussion of the pros and cons, and it's simply a decision of the preschool management, as the county and state have dropped it a while ago. It's just an example of how the children are rarely a considiration.
"The rest of the world has accepted the endemic nature of Covid and moved on, but the U.S. is an int'l outlier, still pushing mass testing & chasing down every case." [0]
I'm not sure what inverse universe he lives in given that we barely do any official testing, and contact tracing never even got off the ground.
His retweets are also all the other well known covid-minimizers - including the infamous Jay Bhattacharya.
[0] https://twitter.com/MartyMakary/status/1546533258187390977
A good summary with links is here: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/counting-the-lives-sa...
Following standard ideological grooves to discredit the other tribe's sources is not acting from specialist knowledge in any case. The only specialty at work in such discussion is the specialty of internet battle. That's ultimately just a way to turn every thread into a boring, if intense, flamewar.
One of the things that follows from HN's core principle of intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) is the principle of diffs (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Diffs are what's interesting. This is the positive formulation of the principle that repetition is bad for curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
For topics that burn hot, like political/ideological ones, this "diff" principle implies that discussion is most interesting (and therefore best for HN) when people don't take the obvious path from their own initial position—that is, when they don't repeat the reaction that they've had most often before. That is a hard thing to ask on the hottest topics, which tend to melt into a few (well, two) monolithic piles of tar. But I think it follows from the principle.
Here's another thing that I think follows, and is even harder to swallow. To the extent that someone has strong political/ideological views, if they're not seeing articles on HN that they strongly disagree with, at least semi-regularly, then there's probably something wrong with HN*.
That isn't always great for community spirit because it only takes a few disagreeable data points before the mind starts to defend itself with a "this place sucks" reaction (and there are people on all ideological sides who develop such reactions). I wrote about this here, if anyone wants to read more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
* To ward off one common misunderstanding: that is not a Goldilocks argument for split-the-difference centrism! It's an argument for unpredictability. Since centrism is just as predictable as other ideologies, it should encounter just as much to be put off by.
It's possible to give fair hearing without opening the door to bullshit once the bullshitter is known and demonstrated. Editorial voice is significant, as HN's own moderation strives toward and demonstrates.
There are a lot of valid scientific reasons to criticize the CDC's approach to the COVID pandemic, including their own publications[1]. One could also point to the different paths taken by other OECD nations with respect to children and see that the CDC diverged sharply, but presented no data to justify those policies.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/eis/field-epi-manual/chapters/Communicat...
"Pushing mass testing" LOL in what universe? I guess they shipped out a second wave of those mediocre home tests recently but not that many of them and only if you asked. Otherwise you just go get tested at a doctor's office or urgent care if you start to feel terrible, if you want to, just like with the flu, so you know exactly how careful you and others in your household need to be about hanging out around old folks. In fact, one of the ones we recently did was a combo test for both Covid and flu.
Anything beyond that's coming from employers, not the government, and most of them aren't doing much anymore and haven't been for a while.
“Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that lockdowns have done little to reduce COVID deaths but have had “devastating effects” on economies and numerous social ills.”
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
That doesn't sound like something she would say, and I've never encountered her making that claim. I'm pretty sure she got vaccinated and has encouraged other people to do so as well. She does seem skeptical of the ability of the vaccines to prevent infection by newer variants. To some degree, that's probably true right?
"You wear funny hats so you're not a credible expert on waffle irons" would be an ad hominem.[1]
Noting the reputation and past history of a speaker or source, or noting well-known rhetorical red flags (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/sophist_refut.1.1.html) is what we'd now call a strong Bayesian prior. It's not a proof that a source, speaker, document, or publication is wrong, but it's a fairly strong grounds for suspecting that might be the case.
https://www.thoughtco.com/ad-hominem-fallacy-1689062
And in a world in which asymmetric costs favour bullshit, it's a useful and often necessary approach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
________________________________
Notes:
1. In practice, "funny hats" might well be references to non-Western clothing (see The Little Prince for a fictional illustration), or speech, or gender, or religous affiliation (religious exclusion was common in top US universities well into the 1970s). It's still practiced in many regards. What this ignores is the specific capabilities or validity of claims or methods.
Closing schools and masks have been gone in my area has been over for a while so the article seems to be mixing timelines in a way that is hard to follow.
No I don't agree with censoring _any_ voices - precisely because of this issue. The decentralized market of ideas will address the "quacks" in the room, as I don't trust any central authority to do that for me.
If a centralized authority wields power in a way that creates negative consequences, you don't give them _more_ power, or just hope that they'll do the right thing.
Sure, let's critically evaluate the guidance put forward by our public health institutions, but quoting a statement from Norway's equivalent institution without the backing evidence doesn't make the US "wrong". If the evidence available on the efficacy of vaccines for kids is so ridiculously wide that it goes from -99% to +370% risk of infection, then surely Norway is _also_ drastically overstating its case when it says (about kids) "previous infection offers as good of protection as the vaccine against reinfection" esp since it _also_ seems like the protective effect of prior infection is both uncertain and changing.
How about flatly declaring that guidance was "wrong" about school closures because minority and poor kids did markedly worse at math? Obviously these decisions are complex trade-offs, and one can't conclude that the choice was "wrong" simply by pointing out one of the costs.
How about quoting a CDC scientist, who cannot possibly have strong evidence when making the prediction "CDC guidance worsened racial equity for generations to come. It failed this generation of children." Generations to come? Show us the data that lets this scientist predict the far future with such confidence.
I get that it's deeply unnerving when these institutions make sweeping recommendations based on less firm data than we would normally demand. But not recommending anything, or not taking decisive action because of the limited data would _also_ have been irresponsible. When schools first closed, we didn't know a lot of things, but it would have been pretty reckless if agencies said "well this is putting a lot of people in the hospital and spreading fast, but we don't have the data to give definitive guidance yet, so you're on your own. Depending on the range of things your communities choose, maybe in a few months we'll have the evidence to say something."
No, if you look in the site guidelines you'll see that they say "Most" stories on certain themes are off topic, and that word is there intentionally. It allows for exceptions, especially when there's either something interestingly different about a story, or some significant new information to discuss.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For past explanations about how we think about this in terms of political topics, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... There are lots of links there to where I've explained this in detail. If anyone has a question that I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Stories drawn from the arts, like music and also literature and painting, or more generally from history, archaeology, you name it, are most welcome here as long as they offer something of intellectual curiosity. So if HN commenters are pushing back on a story just because it's about e.g. music, that would be bad. (But if it were a gossipy story about a famous musician, say, that would be different.)
Sex is its own special case in all things, so we would have to talk about that separately.
– John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (https://www.utilitarianism.com/ol/two.html)
It'll magically take care of itself? Based on what evidence?
Name one time in the entirety of recorded history when "the decentralized market of ideas" did anything of the sort.
Those same social networks are de-ranking and blocking dissenters against the escalation of war against Russia in Ukraine. This is categorically different and a major escalation in censorship that most people are not realizing. It's very scary.
But on _short_ timescales, during an emergency when people are emotional, and in a context where media can benefit from amplifying a message whether or not it's true ... we've seen enough people believe some harmful stuff, and sometimes require extra medical attention because of it.
I'm not saying censorship alone is an answer -- but the marketplace of ideas is not functioning as you describe.
Also, a bit of perspective: we vaccinate children for many illnesses that would result in comparatively "small" numbers of pediatric deaths (lower than Covid even!). The reason is that even rare pediatric deaths, if preventable, are terrible given the life-years lost. And there HAVE been FAR too many pediatric Covid deaths by our modern standards for pediatric infectious diseases. If Covid only affected kids, the absolute numbers of deaths would be a very worrisome thing. Second, the possibility of long-term complications from even non-fatal illnesses. For pediatric COVID, MIS-C and potential super antigen links to the recent spread of pediatric hepatitis are more than sufficient to meet that bar.
Finally - there was no safety signal seen in the 5-12 year old pediatric vaccines that have been given out to millions for ~year already, and no signal in the under 5 trials as well. The myocarditis risk primarily seems in teenage and older groups and linked to puberty/adolescent hormones.
There may be contrarian voices in the FDA and CDC as there will be in any large organization. But to believe their voices over the consensus requires a heavy dose of motivated reasoning and not engaging with some basic facts about the goals of pediatric vaccines and the ways vaccine trials work. There's a reason every pediatrician parent I know was first in line to get their kids vaccinated.
It's in the wikipedia article linked by the GP. To help you out -
In September 2021, concerning COVID-19, she tweeted an article by Glenn Greenwald which argued that proof of a negative test is far more meaningful than proof of a vaccine, contradicting experts who argue that testing is insufficient and should be considered temporary to allow more time for vaccine hesitancy issues to be addressed.
Assuming she hasn't deleted her tweet:
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1440687368957095940
She said she was like Galileo here: https://www.ft.com/content/5d840a5c-fa0c-4d08-9574-59f0d3e8c...
For example, we didn't need the Vatican, a king, or some other central committee to tell us that the sun was the center of our solar system - eventually the data and market of ideas exposed the best & correct ideas.
The best disinfectant for bad ideas is more sunlight - not coverups.
This is literally how most scientific progress is made.
Yea Russia shouldn't have escalated the war.
She certainly learned a lot at the NYT.
Science absolutely does not work by just letting everyone believe whatever they want and somehow just expecting the truth to "win."
To me that's the real story - the demonstration of what amounts to a loss of legitimacy.
(FWIW shutdowns did not bother me much, I got the two mandatory vaccines my jurisdiction required for air travel but refused the boosters, I generally wear masks in public because better safe than sorry.)
What you don't see here, for example, is any mention of a "President of Science" or other committee making that call, nor particular suppression of lines of inquiry.
Tools that have been painstakingly engineered to exploit bugs in the human brain's OS.
What a bizarre idea.
> On a more positive note, Ferguson and other researchers at Imperial College London published a model in Nature around the same time estimating that more than 3 million deaths had been avoided in the UK as a result of the policies that were put in place.
3 million people is ~5% of the entire UK population. Even using the high end of COVID IFR estimates (2%, from northern Italy), it would have required everyone in the UK to get COVID twice with no natural immunity to reach that kind of death toll.
Also:
> The most effective measure, they found, was getting people not to travel to work, while school closures had relatively little effect.
That article appears to agree with this one.
Even if you're okay with all of that, the US is not trying to help Ukraine win, it's trying to make the war as long and as expensive as possible for Russia. The US is sacrificing Ukrainian lives to harm Russia.
It's complicated.
If you want people interacting with other people without tranmitting COVID, what she is is absolutely correct. She said that proving you’re currently negative is more accurate that just asking for vaccine status. This is scientifically correct since people can get reinfected and spread the disease regardless of vaccine status. I just got reinfected with COVID this past week after 3 shots plus prior infection in January. So vaccines do NOTHING in terms of preventing infection anymore. Of course, it protects from serious symptoms but that’s not what they were talking about. It was in the context of effectiveness of vaccine mandates for preventing spread, which it doesn’t.
You are the one spreading disinformation at this point.
- did you make a reasonable decision with the information available at the time, but later evidence showed that another decision would likely have had better outcomes?
- did you make a poor decision which missed or disregarded information available when you made the choice?
- did you make a choice which was appropriate for your declared aims at the time, but now priorities have changed?
These decisions _are_ complex. That doesn't mean we can't find fault and demand improvement. But I think it's not constructive to merely highlight the negative outcomes; we have to find better processes which would make smarter choices next time.
Linguistics being an example where ideas about grammar are only accepted because Chomsky is still around forcing everyone to accept them; AI language models don't seem to follow them.
Though, Poroshenko (the guy who was elected in 2014 post-revolution and is some kind of chocolate factory oligarch) fled the country over a prosecution but has since come back to fight in the national guard, so it seems like even he's in favor of it.
With that said, I do agree with the proposal that if a kid has already had covid then why vaccinate them if the general consensus is that the vaccines only provide limited protection for a few months. All for vaccinating high risk people and I am vaccinated against covid with a booster from when they first came out but will not get another booster now that I have already had Covid. Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable. I fully understand the rush to vaccinate adults in the beginning when Delta was raging and we had limited understanding of the virus. Luckily Omicron is dominant now it seems to be much less damaging. This is not to downplay the very real consequences and deaths that do occur still from Covid. At this point in time my whole family has had it and I have accepted it as endemic and moved on.
It's never that Ukrainians took to the streets in 2014 because their government was corrupt and undemocratic (literally imprisoning the leader of the opposition party), it's that they took to the streets because the US artificially manufactured dissent.
It's never that Ukraine had an independent desire to increase defense spending after it suffered military humiliation and loss of territory in 2014, it's that the West armed Ukraine to agitate against Russia.
Anything that could be interpreted either as an independent action by Ukraine or a Western intervention is automatically labeled as the latter without any explanation as to why.
The irony, of course, is that the only three things in this story that are unambiguously interventionist are Russia's 2014 invasion, the 'proxy' war between 2014 and 2022, and the 2022 invasion. There is simply no other way to slice it - Ukraine didn't invite foreign troops in to come and start shelling things. That is the elephant in the room that is never brought up in these narratives.
>I'm not saying censorship alone is an answer -- but the marketplace of ideas is not functioning as you describe.
Honestly, neither is curated news. At the time of this poll, 41% of people who identified as Democrats believe that if someone caught covid, their chance of hospitalization was 50% or higher. The actual number is 1-5%. Massive amounts of Republicans and Independents also believed this as well. You assume a fair, pure and incorruptible curator, which doesn't exist. Censorship isn't the answer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/briefing/atlanta-shooting...
Now, what should happen to Obama for committing the coup in Ukraine? He bragged about negotiating the coup before the previous leaders had to flee and the Assistant Secretary of State and Ukrainian ambassador were caught on tape talking about "midwifing this thing in" and making sure their hand-selected candidate became the leader.
I find there's nothing bad enough I can say about Putin that allows anyone to even consider any nuance.
Mostly, they are good people wanting to do good work, but imo, public health agencies have become a para-intelligence services with explicitly political aims. There is a network of academics who see health and health information as a policy lever, and they have been out in force leveraging it through public health agencies during the pandemic.
I think they have discredited themselves over travel bans, vax passports, the objectively insane and poisonous rhetoric about the "hesitant," and arbitrary mandates with no accountability for those who enforced them. I don't think they can be trusted to be arbiters of science for people with a basic statistical reasoning skills and a belief in the existence of truth. The article articulates a more general and relevant sentiment, which is that the medical establishment has forfeited its public trust.
You're right, though, public vaccine discourse would have been significantly better if we required internet research experts like Joe Rogan or any of the talking heads on Fox to have a PHD in immunology or epidemiology or at least a double-masters in biology and economics before we allowed them to speak to more than ~ten people at a time.
Now I'm curious. What is the reasoning behind pediatric flu shots? Is it dangerous to the child?
As evidence, I gesture about me.
| "Then they ignored natural immunity. Wrong again. The vast majority of children have already had Covid, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust."
But I think Russian plants should be allowed to post. They're obvious, and I think they do more harm to Russia than benefit.
We're the West. We thrive on freedom that would make Russian tyrants squirm. We can handle some dissent, even as we (figuratively) tear them apart.
I think they had good intentions behind them and may have been necessary from certain points of view, but there are questions about their legality and continue to be challenged and some overturned.
Let's see your numbers of <6 years and <8 etc.
> If Covid only affected kids
In all age groups, it affected children the least.
'In total, 540,305 people were tested for SARS-COV-2 and 129,704 (24.0%) were positive. In children aged <16 years, 35,200 tests were performed and 1408 (4.0%) were positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 19.1%–34.9% adults.' https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/12/1180
> "Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.
The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health."
So can we finally stop blaming the general public for the ongoing narrative that simply doesn't pass the smell test?
Meanwhile, in Brazil, two doctors are trying to invent their own mRNA vax. And if they do they're promising to give it away...because The First World Healthcare Industrial Complex is more concerned about money over saving lives? And the media and political powers are silent?
Too much of the past couple+ years has been a shit show. If it's not negligence then it's intentional. Neither is good.
Many, if not most of the epidemiologists at the CDC hold M.Ds, and I can speak from personal experience that many have disdain for both political parties
For example there is a lot of frustration at how the media is making a giant scare about Monkeypox, when it is isolated to certain communities and can be prevented with the smallpox vaccine which we already have stockpiled.
> they operate as surveillance organizations with the same kind of secrecy culture as intelligence work
This is blatantly false - the CDC publishes almost everything it does. Mostly boring statistics, reporting, investigating claims
>public health agencies have become a para-intelligence services with explicitly political aims
Really?
>I think they have discredited themselves over travel bans, vax passports, the objectively insane and poisonous rhetoric about the "hesitant,"
You should visit the CDC's public museum in Atlanta - I think you will see all the good that vaccines and antibiotics have done for the world. Little else in medicine matters, comparatively, in terms of increased lifespans around the globe
> You are the one spreading disinformation
Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, so please don't do that.
Your comment would be much better without those bits.
I have 12 years of postsecondary education in life science (medicine, health sciences, biochemistry and cancer/cell bio research at the graduate level) and this is completely, unequivocally false.
The way it’s framed now, you’d think officials were weighing a 1% fatality rate against lockdowns. That’s silly. Before the vaccines were prepared and distributed, mutation was the much higher threat.
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...
I read parent as talking about things that happened during covid. Do the measures around covid deserve the same kind of reverence that things like penicilin (why are antibiotics relevant in this thread anyway?) or the first vaccines do?
Sorry you couldn't do more with your background, but epidemiologists in public health just need a master's, and often just an undergrad with some stats skills. Many even have PhD's, but in policy areas, and not life sciences. There was not a single microscope let alone a biolab in the municipal public health units who were responsible for pandemic response and policy advice. Hospitals? Sure. But the people who were making pandemic policy were absolutely not analyzing samples.
I would go so far as to say that epidemiologist has become like software engineers and architects, but for public policy. They are teaching epidemiology in cultural studies programs. The real thing is as rigorous as infectious disease research, but if we are being unequivocal - the policy people are hacks.
Testing is way safer at this point than two doses against a strain that hasn't been dominant since late 2020. Lots of people are getting sick anyways even if they are vaccinated from other strains they aren't protected against, yet we discriminate against anyone who decided not to get the shot for religious reasons, or who can't get it for medical reasons.
The world will look back on these years as collective insanity.
More kids have died in the same period from drowning in America.
Flu in the US kills around 12k to 50k per year, with a particularly bad year every few decades getting up to maybe 80k. Omicron killed somewhere between 150k and 250k in the US in less than a year, and that was with free vaccines that were highly effective against death easily available to pretty much everyone who was not a young child.
That doesn't sound like no worse than the flu to me.
Pandemics are hard. If the CDC doesn't present a unified public voice, then a large chunk of the population will latch on to the people they agree with, and no policy would be effective. So I can understand how it came to this.
Ultimately we need someone we can trust running that org (I'm not taking a position here). And not everyone is going to trust them and they will be blamed for any mistakes. Sometimes there isn't time to do the science, so it ends up being an educated guess at maximizing reward vs risk. It's not a position I would want to hold.
On the whole I tend to view it as a good thing overall rather than a negative.
An argument against the idea was almost presented (anonymous staffers whose quotes cannot be independently verified) but was let down by its conclusion (it falls to the reputation.)
There was nothing in OP's argument that contradicted the claims that were made other than those that go against the reputation of the author, ergo even if they are valid, they are definitely _ad hominem_.
It's common russian rhetoric those days: they flat out deny that Ukraine is an independent state. It comes in a few variants
- After 2014 Ukraine doesn't have legitimate government therefor they are not a state
- Ukraine was never a state, it's just mistake
- Ukraine is just a project of communist party after 1917 revolution and it failed
- Ukraine is managed by USA/Anglo-Saxons/Collective West, hence it's not a real state
- Mix of above
It's also rather common instead of writing Ukraine to write 404
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense
It certainly has populist appeal, and is consciously used to evoke same.
Aaron Swartz warned bout this a lot. It was like his main thing.
The Ukrainians got fed up with Viktor Yanukovych and his corrupt government so they voted him out.
That annoyed Putin so he hit back with the invasion of Crimea and then he really pushed his luck with a full scale invasion of Ukraine.
"Then they ignored natural immunity. Wrong again. The vast majority of children have already had Covid, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust."
What the fuck is "natural immunity" when we have had 5 variants of omnicron and infection doesn't provide immunity to the other variants?
The real crime IMO, is that... U.S. Public Health Agencies Aren't ‘Following the Science,’... the science of how we could actually reduce spread and decrease the 350~ DEATHS per day adding to the more than 1 Million dead already.
It makes more sense now that several USA politicians have had "unscripted" moments in which they admitted that we are at war with Russia. [0][1] It will make even more sense when someone admits we have had "special forces" killing civilians in Donbas for years. As in, if we're at war, even if we don't dare declare it and even if most Americans would vote against it despite constant corporate media gaslighting, it is in some sense "disloyal" for pacifists to complain about war.
The censorship made no sense in February when we all pretended that the whole thing was totally unprovoked Russian aggression and we were just sad witnesses. At that time, the censorship just proved that something stunk about the war-media story.
[0] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/26/ukra-a26.html
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/04/ukraine-nato-rus...
For example, it is obvious now that vaccines do not prevent one from getting COVID and spreading COVID. Yes - vaccines definitely make having COVID like a mild fly: I got it just now and I was just a little sick for a couple of days.
But they still claim that vaccines are preventing the spread.
And then the approach is really bad: instead of running “viagra style” commercials on TV for vaccinations they decided to go with heavy handed mandates and requirements. I bet a couple of Steph Curry and Tom Brady commercials about vaccination will do wonder.
This is the same partisan complaint no matter the topic. Everything is a nail since all you have is this one hammer.
The protective effect of prior infection is not uncertain, nor is it changing. There have been dozens of papers now, all saying the same thing: natural infection is at least as protective (if not more so) than even 3 doses of the current vaccines. If you are hearing otherwise, you are being misinformed. Full stop.
Here's the latest paper in a long line of consistent evidence, last week in the NEJM:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2203965
> No discernable differences in protection against symptomatic BA.1 and BA.2 infection were seen with previous infection, vaccination, and hybrid immunity. Vaccination enhanced protection among persons who had had a previous infection. Hybrid immunity resulting from previous infection and recent booster vaccination conferred the strongest protection.
Norway is saying what it is, because we know that most people -- vaccinated or previously infected -- will eventually get re-infected. But even if you are re-infected, you will be well-protected against severe illness.
[1]: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/development-resources/table-surrog... "Table of Surrogate Endpoints That Were the Basis of Drug Approval or Licensure"
That's a fine principle. By extension, it should also be fine for commenters to note facts about sources. You are right that internet discussion can be derailed by the DAG of association, but internet discussion based solely on "what does the article say?" is naïve, amounting to borderline sealioning.
Part of critical thinking and reading is understanding the POV of the author(s) and publisher(s), and considering their motivations and incentives.
CDC might be wrong here but they will never admit. Never.
They (we) did. A list containing children under 12 who got vaccinated is at the center of a data breach this very week.
There was also an uptick in deaths among young school-age children, which was somewhat 'offset' by lower deaths in the 12+ age-ranges. Vaccinating children doesn't do nothing, but with a small effect focusing on small at risk groups might be wise.
All policies have good intentions. Whether it's that nobody is the villain in their own story or that the worst tyrannies are those done for the sake of their victims, having good intentions really doesn't count for much.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-booed-al...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/20/politics/donald-trump-booster...
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture...
With enough amplification from drown child's noses some virus fragments might be found. But vaccines won't help with drowning or car crashes, which each kill more children.
The fact that vaccines make you less likely to become infected in the first place and also they make the disease shorter means that vaccines also reduce transmission.
What I don’t understand is how vaccination and boosting using an mRNA vaccine that contains only spike protein from the original SARS2, and which is almost completely evaded by the BA.4 and BA.5 variants, can confer protection against severe illnesses caused by those variants.
What is the biochemical process that provides that protection?
EDIT: Is this protection just a happy mantra, or is it actually that there is no protection against the new variants, but the intensity of the disease from them is far less than from the original variant (and our treatment is getting better)?
Meaning we did not have any - zero - nada - none - commericals on TV for vaccinations. And many many crypto ones.
Sure they will say “we never said it will stop transmission” but it was never clearly worded as that. Of course, since they wanted mandates.
It makes a kind of intuitive sense: if you make your own body produce some key portion of the virus, maybe your immune system gets tricked into thinking it's not such a big issue?
This claim is directly contradicted in the paper you linked:
> The effectiveness of previous infection alone against symptomatic BA.2 infection was 46.1% (95% confidence interval [CI], 39.5 to 51.9).
...
> The effectiveness of three doses of BNT162b2 and no previous infection was 52.2% (95% CI, 48.1 to 55.9).
Not necessarily. You can have the data and you can have bad data. You can selectively ignore the good data to come to a drastically different decision and conclusion. Motivated thinking political or otherwise can bias the data that you select.
It still provides a very high degree of protection against severe disease, which is already vanishingly rare in children without comorbidities. And is also all you get from the vaccines, along with all their attendant known and unknown risks.
My intuition is that people underestimate the impact of forcing kids and toddlers to wear masks.
What I observe is that for folks without kids, life has gotten back to normal, but somehow everything related to kids is still over cautious.
If the comment opened with something like "I stopped reading at commonsense.news because Bari Weiss is bad", that'd be a different matter, but they have a substantive critique of the actual article.
Given the weak sourcing, it feels like this article, in particular, flunks the "divisive subjects require more thought and substance" test.
I loathe Bari Weiss, so, grain of salt on all this.
That's sad your country didn't see the need to advertise. In the US we had tons of them.
Flu numbers typically are a small sample size and extrapolated based on respiratory-like illness admissions in hospitals nationwide.
Things have been substantially better for my wife and I since we started Paxlovid. Our seven year old is feeling fine, and our three year old who is disabled and tends to get sick fairly often has a fever and slept for a day straight and had the world's worst diarrhea. Her doctor (who almost exclusively sees disabled kids like her) seems completely unconcerned about it and said to just treat it like any other illness, push fluids and give her Tylenol and Ibuprofen alternately to keep her fever down.
They are still pushing for vaccine mandates for children that will not change anything materially.
The same applies to mask mandates. The only studies I have seen only show a marginal impact on preventing infections. At the same time we are told new variants (omicron) are many times more contagious that the variants the masks were not really stopping in the first place. Mask mandates have become a similar security theatre than bugging old ladies with their liquids at airport security.
The problem is that on insisting on measures that even laymen can tell are bullshit, they are undermining the credibility they will need the day there is something that needs to be done that will make a difference.
Credibility takes decades to build and minutes to lose. Look at Ukraine. No one believed the US intelligence when they claimed Putin was serious about invading, because of the bullshit they pushed 20 years earlier with Iraq.
“In the current study, most COVID-19 cases among students and staff were acquired from the community and approximately 10% of cases were acquired within school. The researchers found that for every 100 community-acquired cases, school districts with mandatory masking had approximately 7.3 cases of in-school infections, while optionally masked districts had 26.4 cases of in-school infections. In other words, school districts with optional masking had approximately 3.6 times the rate of in-school COVID-19 cases when compared to schools with mandatory masking. These data also show that mandatory masking was associated with a 72% reduction of in-school COVID-19 cases, compared to districts with optional masking.”
From Pediatrics:
https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/149/6/e20220...
I'm a biochemist, and I can assure you that scientists have been dismayed at the collective insanity since around March 2020, but we're definitely not dismayed at the same things as you are.
That said there are conflicting studies: “This report details the findings of a case-control evaluation of the association between vaccination and SARS-CoV-2 reinfection in Kentucky during May–June 2021 among persons previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020. Kentucky residents who were not vaccinated had 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with those who were fully vaccinated (odds ratio [OR] = 2.34; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.58–3.47).” https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
The nuances are complicated. False positives are a real concern for people avoiding vaccination. People that survive the first infection without vaccination are a meaningfully different population than the vaccinated population. Similarly people that get vaccinated after infection have received vaccination more recently etc.
Long covid, and greater impact on certain individuals were well known by that point. Just saying "let 'er rip, go natural immunity" isn't the responsible move. Perhaps you're ok with the risks for you, but faulting a health officer for taking a different more conservative position is hardly a reasonable opinion.
At a very high level, this is the explanation: the spike protein in Omicron has many differences from the vaccine strain spike, but it's still largely the same protein. The immune system is chopping up the protein into chunks, and T- and B-Cells are specializing to recognize those chunks. This kind of immune response (the "cellular immune response") is slower to ramp up than the antibody response that many people have fixated on, but it's a much more robust defense mechanism; B- and T-Cells are very good at providing generalized antigen recognition. There have been at least 2-3 papers I'm aware of where labs have directly demonstrated that vaccinated people are producing robust immune responses to Omicron proteins.
I'd have to dig these up again, and they're not exactly comprehensible by non-specialists, but the executive summary is that we have laboratory and clinical and epidemiological data that the vaccines are still very effective against severe disease.
What the vaccines don't do anymore, is protect against infection. That was probably never a realistic goal for a respiratory virus, but it's definitely not practical with a vaccine that produces antibodies that target a very old spike protein.
And even for the rest, becoming a severe covid case isnt a lottery. Risk groups are a very real thing.
https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-are-covid-19-deaths-c...
"Long covid" is not defined. There is no test. There is no objective signature. Literally anyone can claim that they have it, and not be wrong. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I'm telling you that we have no idea how prevalent "it" is, and we don't have any idea how "it" compares to the consequences of other common respiratory illnesses. We've simply never bothered to look, and uncontrolled studies where someone enumerates a long list of things that happened after Covid, in a large group of people, are not evidence of those things being caused by Covid.
Said differently: if you have a nearly ubiquitous illness, how can you say anything about causality regarding anything that follows?
So what we have here is a pile of questionable research, a large group of people who are scared and demanding that action be taken, and politicians who are more than willing to "take action" by pushing aside, censoring, and otherwise bullying the scientists who stand in the way of their actions.
For example, let's take just this single paragraph:
> As of February, 75% of children in the U.S. already had natural immunity from prior infection. It could easily be over 90% of children today given how ubiquitous Omicron has been since then. The CDC’s own research shows that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity and a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Israel has questioned the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons. Many countries have long credited natural immunity towards vaccine mandates. But not the U.S.
First, there's this statement: "The CDC’s own research shows that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity." The linked study, reading through it, makes a different claim. The study showed that completion of a course of primary vaccination PLUS having had a prior Covid infection led to reduced severe outcomes more than just having had the primary course of vaccination alone. And even there, the CI (0.27 (0.09–0.84)) on the first scenario overlaps with the CI for vaccination alone.
It would be notable if this showed that prior infection alone conferred better protection than vaccination alone, which is the author's claim. This study doesn't show that. It shows infection plus vaccination confers better immunity than vaccination alone. And, well, that's what basically any expert would have predicted as the most likely result.
The second linked study (the NEJM one) gets closer, but largely only looks at infection rates (it does have some commentary on severe covid-19 rates, but this isn't adjusted for any confounders). It's most useful as a study on how immunity against infection wanes since the last immunity-conferring event, although it allows for some cross comparisons, such as comparing infection rates for natural immunity alone vs 2 doses alone vs 3 doses alone vs hybrid immunity. Possibly the biggest caveat is that the rate of testing for the different cohorts wasn't adjusted for:
> Although differences in testing rates among cohorts and among subcohorts within specified cohorts were observed, their overall magnitude was relatively small. The rate of PCR testing was typically lower in the recovered, unvaccinated cohort than in the other cohorts, so the level of protection in this cohort as compared with that in the two-dose cohort may have been overestimated.
So, it makes it harder to directly compare across cohorts. But, even assuming the cross comparison does hold up if you did correct for testing rates, there are a couple of things to call out in this study. First, three doses had significantly better numbers than two doses. However, the three-dose cohort was new at the time of this study, so this cohort only has results for the very first time slice, and that time slice doesn't exist for the natural immunity scenario, so we can't directly compare them. Second, this study also seems to show, with respect to immunity, that infection followed by vaccination is better than infection alone.
Third, and most notably given this piece's commentary, is vaccination after natural immunity has waned. The study linked explicitly ends with this sentence in its discussion section:
> We found that protection against the delta variant waned over time in both vaccinated and previously infected persons and that an additional vaccine dose restored protection.
Let's look back at the wording in the original piece:
> a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Israel has questioned the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons
It is telling that a study that ends by recommending a dose of vaccine to restore waning natural immunity is used to "question the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons" in this piece.
Now, there's a reasonable debate around how previous infection should be counted w.r.t. to immune status. E.g. one can make a reasonable case that documented prior infection plus a single dose should count as "fully vaccinated." Or, that hitting a minimum threshold on an antibody test should count as documentation of immunity. Etc. But, that's not what the piece is arguing - it misrepresents both of the studies linked in this one paragraph, and then puts forward a conclusion that is unsupported by either study. If anything, both studies provide evidence that is quite supportive of getting vaccinated at some point after infection, yet you'd never know that if you just read the paragraph from this piece.
Pieces like this one are frustrating because they have the veneer of legitimacy - written by someone in the field, linking studies, etc. It takes a lot of time to really dive in to understand whether or not the claims being made are supported. And even then, it often takes broader knowledge of the state of research in the field. It's easy to cherry pick research that supports a bias while simply leaving out competing research.
Ultimately, this piece does not come off as a good faith review of the scientific evidence.
"Response" is many different things. The vaccine boosts response b/c you have antibodies, so it's much less likely that your body has to do a hail mary las ditch (cytok storm).
> why so many governments have stopped publishing the case rate breakdowns by vax status.
But there's enough data out there to have a clear picture: vaccines or previous infections won't protect you from being infected by the recent strains (BA.2.75, BA.5, etc) but will protect you from severe disease or dying. Maybe it can be improved by nasal vaccines (what happened to those?) but who knows...
> It makes a kind of intuitive sense: if you make your own body produce some key portion of the virus, maybe your immune system gets tricked into thinking it's not such a big issue?
This one is completely off the mark. For starters, not all vaccines have your "body produce part of the virus", yet all help to prevent severe cases and death.
You know you have to substantiate such a wild claim, right? Nobody is counting patients with broken arms that happen to have Covid as Covid patients.
Here in Italy there's still a mask mandate on public transport, which is not uniformly enforced even, but that's it.
But covid is different because it is under the spotlight and faces more scrutinity. And the disctinction as covid being the main cause, a comobidity or a unrelated pathology was never clearly made since the beginning of the pandemic.
You would also have to consider people who cannot be treated for other diseases (e.g. appendicitis), compound effects on the number of available beds due to doctors and nurses being sick, etc.
But also, it was just methodologically flawed -- they didn't bother to correct for the bias that people who were vaccinated after infection in early 2021 were probably behaving differently than those who had not been vaccinated at that time.
If you're going to cite an old MMWR article as "evidence" against the now overwhelming pile of papers demonstrating that the immune system works pretty much as we expect from immmunology 101, don't forget that in early 2022 they released this much better, much larger (N=1.1M people) cohort study, which dramatically showed the opposite of what you're claiming. Prior infection obviously provided robust protection against Delta, on par with the vaccines:
okay, well, others with relevant qualifications are saying it DOES exist, so since nobody seems to be saying it doesn't, I guess we can go with their expert conclusions.
where did you read this?
GP is citing a part of the paper where they show...that natural infection is statistically indistinguishable from 3 doses. QED.
Thats a bit outdated information. Yes, some cloth mask doesnt protect you. A correctly worn N95 however does offer a ~99%+ protection against contracting COVID. Once they are available in enough numbers to go to non medicinal personal as well, which they have been for years at this point, personal protection does absolutely work.
>No one believed the US intelligence when they claimed Putin was serious about invading
I don't know from where you draw this conclusion, considering his track record of doing it previously in Ukraine in 2014, and Georgia before that, and given his moving of an entire army to the border, and subsequently issuing threatening ultimatums to the world they knew the world would never subjugate themselves to
That argument doesn't make any sense. Why would masks have to be worn correctly 100% of the time, otherwise it's theater?
If a type of mask works well at 100% use, it probably also works pretty well at 85% use.
There was SO MUCH discussion of the pros and cons.
I promise. You may not have seen it, but it was in so many places.
If you made a trade-off that folks of a certain political persuasion believe was the wrong trade-off, but most people and most qualified experts believe was a reasonable trade-off? That's the job.
In March 2022 (this year), sleuthing by members of the public into inflated pediatric death counts resulted in the CDC deleting 72k alleged covid deaths, blaming a coding error for the overcount: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/cdc-coding-err...
In one county in Colorado, a coroner pointed out that 2 of 5 covid deaths were actually due to gunshot wounds: "Grand County Coroner Raises Concern On Deaths Among COVID Cases" (Dec 2020): https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/grand-county-covid-dea...
The way that a "covid case" or alleged "covid death" has been counted may have improved over the past 2 years, but 70+ thousand purported covid deaths were just admitted to have been illusory a few months ago and there most definitely have been significant financial incentives for hospitals to claim a particular patient had covid and further incentives for specific treatments (remdesivir, placing them on a vent, etc.).
What?! No one wants to go back to the office because it fucking sucks to commute, not because of vaccine mandates. I would even like to see evidence that many tech companies have strict mandates or are enforcing them; worst I’ve heard is that non vaccinated staff have to test weekly at Stanford. Most companies will probably be less strict than there.
I don't really understand this thinking. Yes, covid deaths in the under 18 group are a drop in the bucket compared to covid deaths in other age groups. But that's only because covid had such a massive toll in other age groups. We're still talking over a thousand deaths in the under 18 group, tens of thousands of hospitalizations, and many many more who had symptoms that persisted beyond a month. Even knocking those numbers down by half would be significant.
And, re masks, the general scientific consensus at this point is that yes, masks do have an effect on transmission rates, and the quality of the mask matters in how much of an impact is seen. Mandates also have an impact, although it depends on how much the mandate actually impacts behavior. It's not security theater, but some mandates will be much more effective than others.
And I'll note - US public health authorities did, in my view, lose some credibility on masks. But for different reasons than you mention. Statements early on saying masks weren't necessary for general use I think did a lot of harm. Personally, I can understand - evidence was weaker for general population usage at the time, and there was a dire shortage of even surgical masks for healthcare workers. So, I get that they wanted to avoid even more shortages for healthcare workers, but this original messaging really hurt later on when masks were being recommended. My second complaint is that, once the supply was there for surgical masks (and then for N95 and equivalents), public health authorities were really slow to push better masks, and only meekly did so.
> Credibility takes decades to build and minutes to lose. Look at Ukraine. No one believed the US intelligence when they claimed Putin was serious about invading, because of the bullshit they pushed 20 years earlier with Iraq.
Lots of us who were entirely skeptical of US intelligence re Iraq found US intelligence re Putin's intent to invade entirely believable and plausible.
Let me also point out that this wasnt some grand failure. We were in a situation in which what ever information we could get was really helpful. But you have to be aware, that there is not magic box somewhere that spits out perfect information. All data collection has its limitations, its why we still know very little about long covid. Because getting that data is incredibly difficult, especially at scale.
A few months ago, the CDC quietly cut the covid death toll by 72k: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/cdc-coding-err...
People who died for any reason within weeks of a positive covid test result were being counted as covid deaths, even gunshot victim: https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/grand-county-covid-dea...
The loosey-goosey way covid deaths have been counted in the USA, inflating the death toll, seems to be an area of curiously selective collective amnesia.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v...
Looks like the article on the-scientist summarized the relevant study incorrectly. The study itself posits 3.1 million deaths averted across 11 countries in Europe, not just in the UK:
> We find that across 11 countries 3.1 (2.8–3.5) million deaths have been averted owing to interventions since the beginning of the epidemic.
A bit concerning though that the second paragraph in the the-scientist article made such a significant mistake in summarizing the research.
"Duration of Shedding of Culturable Virus in SARS-CoV-2 Omicron (BA.1) Infection" (see "Figure 1. Viral Decay and Time to Negative Viral Culture."): https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2202092
if you replace witch with "unreliable source", a thing that does exist, it would be a more intellectually honest rephrasing
Or differently put, if you have absolutely unrealistic expectations and deferred any critical thinking to another party, you are putting said party in a very very difficult situation. And if they not just lack the backbone to tell you this, but start pretending to be that competent and certain to match your expectations, it can become very dangerous.
Shocker. Why did we have to learn this again? How were the policies that diverged from the immunology 101-based position justified? This should be our starting point and we should not base policies on the opposite conclusion without good evidence to the contrary.
https://www.businessinsider.com/covid-patients-nyc-hospitals...
Pretty much anything public health people say on the topic of COVID turns out to be wrong on close inspection. It's really astounding. Even very basic things like getting an actual clinical definition of COVID itself (let alone long COVID) turns out to be impossible, which is why the official definition governments use is "got a positive on a COVID test". That's not actually a disease symptom but COVID isn't defined by symptoms any more than long COVID is.
The reason this happens is that public health is an authoritarian collectivist concept - the government will make decisions for the collective good even if individuals must suffer as a consequence. The entire culture of that space is dominated by a mindset that says, "we will obtain compliance by making scientific sounding claims, because people respect science and will follow it". That's why COVID research is so full of conflicting and nonsensical claims.
"Ultimately we need someone we can trust running that org (I'm not taking a position here)"
Or, those organizations should just be scrapped. There's no fundamental reason a CDC must exist. Sweden's CDC boiled down to one man, and his entire policy response was to tell people to chill out. The country was rewarded with better outcomes than most other places - lower COVID mortality than the European average, less economic damage, way less damage to the fabric of society and so on.
Given the CDC's performance it's pretty clear it has no idea how to control diseases and isn't even institutionally capable of maintaining a very basic, grandmother level understanding of respiratory diseases (natural immunity exists, seasonality is important, not actually everyone will get ill simultaneously, etc).
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01453-0 relating to the study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01840-0
The cause seems to be aggressive filter bubbling. We see it above too - there are highly upvoted people saying nothing more than "it can't be true, I don't believe it, it must be a right wing conspiracy". Any information that undermines government narratives just gets mentally erased, causing a distressed reaction of "that claim is CRAZY" to almost any attempt to discuss known data or facts.
Any scientist who isnt deeply ashamed of this should really get the money for their degree back.
Pretending that vaccines are in any way safer then or as safe as actual tests is simply horrific.
Children younger than 5 years old–especially those younger than 2– are at higher risk of developing serious flu-related complications. A flu vaccine offers the best defense against flu and its potentially serious consequences and also can reduce the spread of flu to others. Getting vaccinated against flu has been shown to reduce flu illnesses, doctor’s visits, missed work and school days, and reduce the risk of flu-related hospitalization and death in children.
Other countries with excellent control: New Zealand, Iceland, Taiwan, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Go read the Wikipedia page for Dr. Makary; he's a well published and awarded researcher, not a partisan hack like your comment makes him out to be. It's distressing to me that in America "he/she supports a different party than I do" is enough reason to cast doubt on an entire career of great work.
Someone with COVID could well be in hospital for weeks if not months and if things get serious they could end up taking a bed in the ICU.
It would be highly unlikely to see someone in ICU with just a broken arm.
Do you think we all have the memory of goldfish? In the height of the pandemic people were saying natural immunity was insufficient to prevent further infection to the degree that would matter the few who were talking about the "cost of natural immunity" (or any other sort of level headed adult discussion about tradeoffs) were ridiculed as enabling the anti-vaxers.
>Perhaps you're ok with the risks for you, but faulting a health officer for taking a different more conservative position is hardly a reasonable opinion.
This is a two way street. If you get to be conservative about natural immunity the other guys get to be conservative about the vax.
Further googling reveals this similar headline: "Over 40% of NYC’s COVID-infected hospital patients admitted for other reasons"
This then begs the question, if in fact 60% of people are going to hospital because of COVID that indicates a very big problem.
Hospitals by their design are always meant to be full and their size will be determined based on an expected amount of demand.
If the hospital contains these unexpected COVID cases that then means many people who need to go to hospital will not be going to hospital only because the beds are taken up by these COVID patients.
> An elderly man arrived at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital Midtown last month so stricken with advanced cancer that it could take his life within months ... Was his death caused by COVID-19? ... Yes, Auld says: “While he was very weak and frail from his underlying cancer, his death was undoubtedly accelerated and precipitated by COVID-19.
care to provide evidence of significant figures saying this?
Saying a study is garbage when you disagree with the results is not how evidence based medicine works. Unless there was actual fraud or gross incompetence, every study should provide something of value.
Hypothetically, if vaccination provides enhanced short term protection for people after catching COVID which also provides short term protection then recommending waiting X months after getting COVID to get vaccinated is one option. Alternatively, if post COVID vaccination did absolutely nothing then you could recommend skipping it, ignoring false positives.
Don't forget to consider the baseline risk of myocarditis in this cohort as well as the risk of myocarditis with COVID itself.
I'm also not sure where you're finding numbers about the risk of serious morbidity or mortality with COVID-vaccine-associated myocarditis, please share if you know. My impression is that -- much like COVID -- while cases can be serious / fatal, most cases end up making a full recovery without further sequelae.
I am an emergency physician in an area extremely hard-hit by COVID. I'm fully aware of what "they" are counting, and certainly tired of these kinds of bad-faith speculations by un- and misinformed onlookers.
> More kids have died in the same period from drowning in America.
Absolutely -- and every one of those is also a largely preventable tragedy.
if you used it as a stand-in for "unreliable source", it would be a more intellectually honest rephrasing, as that is the actual objection here, and your attempt to reframe an unreliable source as "oh people just disfavor them" obviously disregards their unreliability, as well as ignores why the source is disfavored (because it is not reliable)
a minority of laymen who started with a conclusion and have yet to make a convincing case for it to either the experts OR the majority of americans, can't be the ones to decide, for the same reason we can't have them decide if a shooting is justified.
not sure why people qualified to do so, like public health experts and the politicians briefed by them who the people elected, can't be, though.
"Persistent Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging Findings in a Cohort of Adolescents with Post-Coronavirus Disease 2019 mRNA Vaccine Myopericarditis" https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(22)00282-7/fulltext
I don’t know that masking in schools was the best idea. In my limited purview I think it was a good idea in our child’s school, because things seemed to go well overall. I was responding to the GP who appears to think it’s idiocy to even countenance the idea because there are no studies, when there are, and that it’s so wrong that it’s a form of superstition.
> I don't really understand this thinking. Yes, covid deaths in the under 18 group are a drop in the bucket compared to covid deaths in other age groups. But that's only because covid had such a massive toll in other age groups. We're still talking over a thousand deaths in the under 18 group, tens of thousands of hospitalizations, and many many more who had symptoms that persisted beyond a month. Even knocking those numbers down by half would be significant.
You are ignoring the comorbidities aspect GP was talking about.
> It's not security theater
Cloth masks are security theater. Nobody’s disputing properly worn N95s. GP is talking about what has been pushed for two years and the credibility that has been destroyed. They’re not talking about recent shifts.
the opposite of an expert is a layman. Neither a majority of experts, nor a majority of laymen, have, after analyzing the issue as you have, come to the same conclusion you have, that the trade off decisions showed bad judgement
> It doesn't really matter if the experts were "acting on the best available evidence"
is this just you stating your opinion, or do you have a compelling argument to convince a majority of americans that they should also believe this?
Where do I argue that? It's going to be years until we understand if the effects were net positive or negative. The positive effects are much more immediate, we have a generation of kids that how to grow up now to see how their development was impacted for example.
> is this just you stating your opinion, or do you have a compelling argument to convince a majority of americans that they should also believe this?
This is how leadership has worked for four thousand years. You can find elements of what I am saying in the Code of Hammurabi, The Art of War, as well as the Magna Carta. If a general orders his men to run into a minefield, even if he doesn't know that it is one, even if he uses the best available evidence, he is responsible for their deaths because he gave the order. That's the reason we play hail to the chief when the president walks into a room, that's why he gets to eat fancy dinners and hobnob with celebrities, that is the reward for the great risk you take for being responsible. Leaders eat first because they take responsibility, to have leaders who only take authority is unworkable, it is tyranny manifest.
In other words, someone is always going to jump up and down for your attention, willing to spew bs (sometimes mixed with fact), to slow you down and delay you. Being able to ignore it and focus on real issues is important.
no, it didn't. most of the objection flowed from the lack of reliability of the source.
> If he was affiliated with a Democratic governor, somehow I don't think it would be brought up with the same implication.
It would be, but from the other side (e.g. Dr Fauci anyone?)
But such intellectual dishonesty is discouraged on HN, so one shouldn't.
The paper you linked shows effectiveness of previous infection alone at 46%, 3 vaccine doses at 52% (and slightly above the upper end of the confidence interval for infection only), and previous infection and 3 doses at 77%. When I looked for earlier studies, the first one that popped up was this one from Sept 2021, which finds that previous infection gives a 90% reduced risk re-infection.
This seems to be consistent with what has been reported more popularly; in 2020-2021 it seemed that the immune benefit from a previous infection could last several months, and that this informed the timing on when boosters were recommended. Whereas now it seems it's significantly easier to be re-infected with an omicron variant relatively soon after a previous infection.
The finding of 90% in late 2021 vs <50% now does sound like the protective effect of prior infection _is_ changing.
when you argued with this:
> If you made a trade-off that folks of a certain political persuasion believe was the wrong trade-off, but most people and most qualified experts believe was a reasonable trade-off? That's the job.
If you believe that it's not for a majority of experts to decide, or for a majority of laymen to decide, or for a majority of americans to decide, then who do you think should make the decision?
>It's going to be years until we understand if the effects were net positive or negative.
sure, and as soon as a majority of experts, maybe even of Americans, believe that the trade-off showed poor judgment, then we can talk about it as if it did
>This is how leadership has worked for four thousand years.
this is not how people believe leadership works in the US at least, where people (not you personally, clearly) judge based on the circumstances present at the time of the action being judged, not at the time of judgement
most people understand that the CDC is a normal org like any other, or indeed, like any normal person, which tries its best to do what it can with what it has, and aren't expected to be able to predict the future
And before you tell me “oh it’s just a minor inconvenience”, no it’s not. It may be for you, but I hate that I have to breathe my stale exhalation, hate that I can’t hear people wearing masks clearly, hate that I can’t see peoples facial expressions when they speak, hate that I get out of breath wearing them. Added to this sometimes is a self-righteous attitude from some mask wearers who can’t tell a virus from a bacteria. These are the questions that should be asked and answered, but asking such questions suddenly labels you as an anti-science moron which is very ironic.
Edit: oh and forgot to mention that I hate how much masks (reusable cloth masks are a placebo) add to an already horrible trash situation. Funny no one cares much about this.
did you forget something here?
> If you believe that it's not for a majority of experts are not to decide, and a majority of laymen are not to decide, and a majority of Americans are not to decide, then who do you think should make the decision?
Democracy. In our system of government we elect leaders, those leaders are responsible to the people who have elected them. This has been sidestepped in recent decades by appointing experts who have the ability to use the force of law without explicit congressional approval. This is unconstitutional and the supreme court in the past year has twice affirmed this view[0][1]. We can't allow our leaders to hide behind people that they themselves have appointed when those appointees make choices that may have disastrous consequences.
> most people understand that the CDC is a normal org like any other, or indeed, like any normal person, which tries its best to do what it can with what it has, and aren't expected to be able to predict the future
Funny they didn't mention that while making proclamations from on high. "I did my best" is of little comfort to someone harmed by their choices.
[0]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/21a23_ap6c.pdf
[1]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-1530_n758.pdf
>It would be, but from the other side (e.g. Dr Fauci anyone?)
You've actually illustrated my point very well here. What I'm saying is that it's great that places like HN are largely able to discuss public health at face value, rather than through the Red v. Blue lens that most Americans insist on reducing things to. Unfortunately, as soon as you accuse "the other side" of doing just about anything, your intentions are revealed, the water is muddied, and the discussion becomes useless.
January 2022 would include ~3/4ths of the pandemic's time and deaths so far.
Criticizing the meat of the article is fine, or pointing out a particular ax the author might have to grind is valid too. I'm taking issue with the criticism that Bair Weiss is a bad woman therefore anything on her site is fake news.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32100018
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss#2017%E2%80%932020:_...
"There were no appreciable between-group differences in the time to PCR conversion or culture conversion according to vaccination status"
The figure (specifically Fig1D and Fig1E of https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...) speaks for itself.
I would rather the authors soft-pedal the alarming results and get published than not get published at all. Just as I approve of POWs appearing to collaborate by sitting for media interviews that may, on the surface, make their captors seem humane and then blinking "T-O-R-T-U-R-E" in Morse code.
Ignoring the charts and clutching at that line of text still requires one to accept that vaccinated and boosted persons didn't clear covid any faster than unvaccinated persons, which completely contradicts the vaccine-pushers' dogma that the adverse effects and deaths occurring in younger demographics (especially but not solely among younger males) post-vax are worth it, on balance, because the shots reduce spread to and hence deaths among more vulnerable groups.
I feel like everywhere I look in the anti-COVID-vax community, no one reckons with the fact that their position gets others sick, and those people might die. Even this article focuses strongly on children not needing masks or vaccines, mentioning not at all kids getting others sick.
Some cites:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33721405/
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/children-spread-covid-19
https://ufhealth.org/news/2021/uf-study-sheds-light-roles-ch...
FTFY
> see huge disparity in myocarditis risk found to result from a 2nd Moderna jab vs. covid infection for males under 40 in Patone et al. on MedRxiv
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v...
""" This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed ... Of the 42,200,614 persons included in the study population, 2,539 (0.006%) were hospitalised or died from myocarditis during the study period; 552 (0.001%) of these events occurred during 1-28 days following any dose of vaccine ... First, we confirm and extend our previous findings in more than 42 million persons that the risk of hospitalization or death from myocarditis following COVID-19 infection is higher than the risk associated with vaccination in the overall population. ... Despite more myocarditis events occurring in older persons, the risk following COVID-19 vaccination was largely restricted to younger males aged less than 40 years, where the risks of myocarditis following vaccination and infection were similar. However, the notable exception was that in younger males receiving a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine, the risk of myocarditis was higher following vaccination than infection, with an additional 101 events estimated following a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine compared to 7 events following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test ... Third, although we were able to include 2,136,189 children aged 13 to 17 years old in this analysis, the number of myocarditis events was too small (n=43 in all periods and n=15 in the 1-28 days post vaccination) in this population and precluded an evaluate of risk. ... In summary, the risk of hospital admission or death from myocarditis is greater following COVID-19 infection than following vaccination and remains modest following sequential doses of mRNA vaccine including a third booster dose of BNT162b in the overall population. However, the risk of myocarditis following vaccination is consistently higher in younger males, particularly following a second dose of RNA mRNA-1273 vaccine. """
I'm not sure that this strongly supports your apparent position.
> recent studies indicate vaccinated persons take longer to clear recent Omicron variants than those who have refused the vaccines... so younger people aren't helping anyone else by subjecting themselves to the risks of the vaccines
Except that absolute risk of getting infected in the first place is decreased in a vaccinated cohort. Which is pointed out by the same study you're referencing: "vaccination has been shown to reduce the incidence of infection and the severity of disease." So that kind of sounds like a way in which they might be helping both themselves and "anyone else."
> And myocarditis and pericarditis aren't the only severe or fatal adverse effects being observed.
What else? At what rates? Because I've certainly care for plenty of (by and large unvaccinated) people that have died from the disease, young (20s-30s, thankfully none younger have died in my care) as well as old.
> It's madness.
In that we agree.
Is that right? I just keep hearing that there is some conspiracy trying to obscure the data, I figured it would be unavailable.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34865500/
We report on 139 adolescents and young adults with 140 episodes of suspected myocarditis (49 confirmed, 91 probable) at 26 centers. ... Twenty-six patients (18.7%) were in the intensive care unit, 2 were treated with inotropic/vasoactive support, and none required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation or died. Median hospital stay was 2 days (range, 0-10; IQR, 2-3).
Of 97 patients who underwent cardiac MRI at a median 5 days (range, 0-88; IQR, 3-17) from symptom onset, 75 (77.3%) had abnormal findings: 74 (76.3%) had late gadolinium enhancement, 54 (55.7%) had myocardial edema, and 49 (50.5%) met Lake Louise criteria. Among 26 patients with left ventricular ejection fraction <55% on echocardiogram, all with follow-up had normalized function (n=25).
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346
Approximately 96% of persons (784/813) were hospitalized and 87% (577/661) of these had resolution of presenting symptoms by hospital discharge. The most common treatment was nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (589/676; 87%).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34734240/
All cases occurred within 2 weeks of a dose of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine with the majority occurring within 3 days (range 1-13 days) following the second dose (6/7 patients, 86%). Overall, cases were mild, and all patients survived.
COVID-19 Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis in Adolescents: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34389692/
None of the patients required inotropic, mechanical, or circulatory support. There were no deaths. Follow-up data obtained in 86% of patients at a mean of 35 days revealed resolution of symptoms, arrhythmias, and ventricular dysfunction.
From the paper you linked to:
""" Median hospital length of stay was 2 days (range 1-4 days) with no intensive care unit admission and no significant morbidity or mortality. All patients had resolution of chest pain and down-trending serum troponin level before discharge.
Follow-up cardiac MRI LVEF (57.7 ± 2.8%) was significantly improved from initial (54.5 ± 5.5%, P < .05), and none of the patients had regional wall motion abnormalities. LVEF by echocardiogram was normal for all patients at the time of follow-up. """
Though to be fair -- because I think there are too many shills on both sides of this topic -- it also notes:
""" Notably, in our cohort, although there was significant reduction in LGE at follow-up, abnormal strain persisted for the majority of patients at follow-up. """
So thank you for prompting me to delve a little more into the outcomes of the vaccine-associated myocarditis cases. I feel even more reassured than before -- the cases seem to be exceedingly rare, even in the highest risk demographic. For anyone outside that highest-risk demographic, the risk of COVID-related myocarditis is higher than vaccine-related. When this exceedingly rare complication occurs, the majority of cases result in a brief hospitalization during which they are treated with ibuprofen.
I think it will be interesting to see how the risks of having COVID a second time compare with the risks of vaccination. I think it's fully possible that the immunity from prior infection could drastically reduce the risks of disease and shift the balance, but until this is better understood, it seems that the risks of vaccination seem to be extremely low -- even lower than the risks of COVID, even for the lowest risk demographics.
> What I'm saying is that it's great that places like HN are largely able to discuss public health at face value, rather than through the Red v. Blue lens that most Americans insist on reducing things to.
Not really true anymore, sadly.
...sure? We should balance that no matter what the effectiveness is.
does the site have a track record of reliable fact checking from their editorial team which reviews submitted content?
What else? At what rates? Because I've certainly care for plenty of (by and
large unvaccinated) people that have died from the disease, young (20s-30s,
thankfully none younger have died in my care) as well as old.
Are you claiming to have personally provided care to large numbers of previously healthy twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who unambiguously died of covid?
You can judge this article on its own merits, it's essentially a one off. It cites some sources, is written by subject matter experts, and is making claims about publicly available data. Do you really need a fact checker to gate keep here? I fail to see how the place of publication has any bearing here on the correctness or soundness of the arguments in the article.
that is precisely what happened, and what has been happening, and the result is still that neither most voters nor most voters' elected representatives believe that the trade-offs made constituted poor judgement
> This has been sidestepped in recent decades by appointing experts who have the ability to use the force of law without explicit congressional approval.
most americans would not agree with this framing or sentiment, as we are fine with our elected representatives delegating some of their power, given how slowly and infrequently congress can act
> This is unconstitutional and the supreme court in the past year has twice affirmed this view
to some degree, recently, yes, but not all delegated authority is unconstitutional
> We can't allow our leaders to hide behind people that they themselves have appointed when those appointees make choices that may have disastrous consequences.
We don't believe that is happening at all, neither the hiding, nor the disastrous consequences
> "I did my best" is of little comfort to someone harmed by their choices
pithy witticisms are of little use in convincing the country that people or organizations should be judged for not acting based on knowledge they didn't have at the time of the action being judged
If you filter something as bullshit, you should at least be able to say why it is bullshit, outside of just who wrote it.
~ Noam Chomsky
I don't think the DAG-of-shame game really has to do with curiosity about facts. It has to do with tarring ideological enemies. Maybe they deserve it, maybe they don't, but it's not the quality of discussion we want here.
Rather than an ambiguous phrase like "noting facts about sources", I think we're better off applying the clearer distinction between curious conversation and ideological battle. There's a binary distinction between those two things (as binary as these things can get), and we know which one we want on this site.
Moreover, one destroys the other, so it needs to be actively moderated. I don't just mean what moderators do, but the general sense of dampening excesses and avoiding extremes. We want a culture of moderation on HN—not for its own sake, but because curiosity only flowers in a temperate climate.
(By the way, I'm not disagreeing ideologically with any of the comments that I'm objecting to here. This is about discussion quality and attempting to organize the site around one specific value: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....)
Maybe because few people had the means to shout everyone else down in the past. When everybody has a printing press or a radio station, it turns out that the noise floor gets really high. Everybody spends more time writing and talking, and less time reading and listening.
We're finding that the ability to boost your signal above the noise floor isn't even vaguely correlated to the merits of the message, the way overcoming resistance from editorial gatekeepers was in earlier times. Freedom of the press used to be the exclusive preserve of those who owned one, and that wasn't right, but now it goes to whoever yells the loudest, and I'm not convinced that's going to work out better for us all in the long run.
Sure hope it does, but early signs aren't inspiring.
Exactly as we would expect to find in the output of ideologically-driven academics working far outside of their own fields.
Most blatant examples:
- Masks are not protective
- The vaccine prevents infection (entire basis for mandates)
- There is no evidence for lab leak
- Natural immunity is not as effective as vaccine immunity
- the virus is not spread via aerosols
I just wanted to address the 100% thing. So have a nice day, I guess.
1) in retrospect it was obviously incorrect, and
2) even at the time, a reasonable scientist could have concluded that it was flawed
I don't generally call papers "flaming garbage", but some are so egregiously, transparently awful -- at the time of publication -- that saying otherwise is dishonest. That MMWR study was one.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
Here's another:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04460-3
> Between 70% and 80% of the CD4+ and CD8+ T cell response to spike was maintained across study groups. Moreover, the magnitude of Omicron cross-reactive T cells was similar for Beta (B.1.351) and Delta (B.1.617.2) variants, despite Omicron harbouring considerably more mutations. In patients who were hospitalized with Omicron infections (n = 19), there were comparable T cell responses to ancestral spike, nucleocapsid and membrane proteins to those in patients hospitalized in previous waves dominated by the ancestral, Beta or Delta variants (n = 49). Thus, despite extensive mutations and reduced susceptibility to neutralizing antibodies of Omicron, the majority of T cell responses induced by vaccination or infection cross-recognize the variant.
I may have read a third, but I can't find it easily, and these two should be more than enough to back up what I wrote / get you started.
For example people in the thread are calling her an anti-vaxer even though she’s on the record encouraging people to get vaccinated.
Continuing to return to this distinction is disingenuous and suggests bad faith. I have not seen a single case of a death pronouncement for COVID which has not unambiguously been from COVID. I'm not saying that shenanigans have never happened anywhere in this regard, but I'd guess that I've seen more people die OF COVID than any other single cause over the last few years, so it's hard for me to imagine that a handful of fraudulent cases would move the needle much.
> Were these people in long-term inpatient care / skilled nursing facilities? Or dependent on home health care aides and visiting nurses?
No, none of them. We don't have any of those nearby in my rural location.
> Are you claiming to have personally provided care to large numbers of previously healthy twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who unambiguously died of covid?
You'd have to define large and "previously healthy." I'd speculate that the dozen or so deaths that I've seen in this category are "plenty" -- more than I've seen in this age group from any other cause in my short career, other than perhaps alcoholism.
I also really don't understand why this is so difficult for people on HN to believe. HN is an interesting place for technical topics, but the threads on medicine truly make me shudder. My one are is subject matter expertise is the one most likely to earn downvotes for some reason.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How about this one? https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/man-who-died-in-motorcycl...
Your only complaint relevant at the time of publication was people that where vaccinated acted differently, that’s also true of the study you linked. It wasn’t double blinded making it “hot garbage” by your logic. Presumably the only reason you linked it was it didn’t contradict your assumptions, even though it failed to address the actual question of how useful post COVID vaccination is.
Except we care about real world outcomes so a double blind study would be less relevant making your original complaint pointless.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi9069
First, note that this wasn't studying in the context of a mask mandate - in the sample villages, masks were distributed, and people were recommended to wear masks when around others. In practice, this brought mask usage up to 42% on average, as compared to 13% in control villages. So, even in this context where the majority of people weren't wearing masks, they still saw an effect in the cloth mask villages. They also saw a larger effect in the surgical mask villages.
Thread from one of the study authors: https://twitter.com/Jabaluck/status/1433036923610742789
It is worth noting that the effect was smaller and the sample size for cloth mask villages smaller than for surgical mask villages, so the confidence is lower than for surgical masks. But with that said, note this from the study author:
> We find a clear and large statistically significant impact on COVID symptoms. We find an imprecise zero for serologically confirmed COVID. The most likely interpretation is that cloth masks reduce COVID, but not as much as surgical masks.
https://twitter.com/Jabaluck/status/1433227618497728514
Now, was the effect relatively small for cloth masks? Yes. But given the results here, plus results we have from mechanistic studies of cloth masks, a reasonable conclusion is something along the lines of: cloth masks have some effect on transmission, albeit a relatively small effect. Other types of masks are better.
Additionally, if the assumption of "the types of masks worn by the vast majority of school children" is correct, then studies showing that mask mandates in schools had an effect on transmission would suggest some efficacy for cloth masks.
Two relatively large-scale observational studies: https://twitter.com/roby_bhatt/status/1502244997764157442
That said, I'm endlessly disappointed that there wasn't a consistent, strong push for people to upgrade from cloth to surgical once supplies of surgical masks were no longer an issue. And mask sizing was also an issue - there are so many masks out there that are oversized for kids. Imagine if the federal government had coordinated with schools across the country to ensure supplies of kid sized surgical masks at every school. Alas.
Do you think that news report "moves the needle?"
Did you read this part in the article you posted? "it is unclear whether or not his death was removed from the overall count in the state."
Do you think that patients' right to privacy may make it difficult to know the details surrounding a death, leading to widespread, unfalsifiable, conspiratorial speculation?
Look a Figures 1, 2 and 4, and you'll see clearly that protection against severe disease remains quite robust. Protection against severe, critical or fatal Covid-19 due to any Omicron infection is shown at 91% (95% CI 60-100) after prior infection (Figure 2D).
> Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable.
Just because you've never seen something happen firsthand doesn't mean that it never happens, or even that it's particularly rare. For example, none of my computers have ever gotten ransomware, but I don't deny that ransomware is really common today.
> Do you think that news report "moves the needle?"
This feels like asking why you should bother voting, since one vote never really moves the needle by itself either.
> Did you read this part in the article you posted? "it is unclear whether or not his death was removed from the overall count in the state."
Yes, and it makes my point even stronger. Even for the most egregious, indefensible false COVID deaths like this one, we can't confirmation that they've actually been corrected. That leads me to think there's no hope whatsoever that any of the false ones that aren't this blatantly obvious will ever be corrected.
> Do you think that patients' right to privacy may make it difficult to know the details surrounding a death, leading to widespread, unfalsifiable, conspiratorial speculation?
If we can't get details of the death, why should we default to the assumption that it really was because of COVID?
It goes into how Democrats get mired in reacting / reading / responding to everything, when detractors are acting in bad faith to consume their time / fill the airwaves and media.
I recommend the book. It's great, short, and applicable far outside Democrats / politics.
If you have 10% of the hospital population in hospital with COVID (and just for COVID) you will have degraded the performance of the hospital by 10%.
This is because hospitals are designed to operate at maximum capacity (i.e all the beds are in use and there is a waiting list to get a bed). Every bed in use by a COVID patient will just add someone to the waiting list.
So my question would be what percentage of patients are in hospital because of COVID and only because of COVID?
That number is a very good measure of the pressure that hospital system will be under and my guess is it will be much greater than 10%.
If you didn't know, consider what that means about your news sources. Even if it doesn't change your positions on Ukraine, the US overthrew a country and it wasn't big enough news that they made sure you knew it. It's just a random interview buried on CNN or whatever.
Even if we split this into two groups - those under 18 with comorbidities, and those without, there's still good evidence for both groups to get vaccinated. I don't know if there is a good breakdown nationally, but even just looking at NYC, the evidence becomes compelling. NYC has a dataset that breaks down deaths by age group and by comorbidity status:
https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data/blob/master/to...
For under 18, as of 9/11/21 (yes, I wish they'd push a more recent update), 29 total deaths, 19 with an underlying condition, 5 without, and 5 pending/unknown. Underlying conditions by NYC's metric is pretty broad:
> Underlying conditions currently include diabetes, lung disease, cancer, immunodeficiency, heart disease, hypertension, asthma, kidney disease, gastrointestinal/liver disease, and obesity.
So, in New York City alone, and as of nearly a year ago, you had 5 kids under the age of 18 with no known underlying conditions who died of Covid. Just an educated guess, but it's quite plausible we've had 100+ deaths nationally in the under 18 with no underlying conditions group. That alone is pretty strong evidence in favor of vaccinating everyone in the under 18 group, and not just those with underlying conditions.
All that said, the primary reason for vaccine mandates for schools is related to transmission. And here too, there is good efficacy.
Ultimately, the harm/benefit calculation is quite clear in favor of vaccinations for kids, outside of rare scenarios. The main debate is whether the risk of backlash from schools mandating vaccination is worth the clear benefits of increasing vaccine uptake in these age groups.
> Cloth masks are security theater. Nobody’s disputing properly worn N95s. GP is talking about what has been pushed for two years and the credibility that has been destroyed. They’re not talking about recent shifts.
Cloth masks reduce transmission. They're not great at doing so, but they do still have an effect. Surgical masks are better. KN94/N95/etc are much better. Yes, we should have long ago moved to surgical as the minimum viable mask in mask mandate scenarios. It's unfortunate that we didn't. But even still, cloth masks do still help a small amount.
Here's a transcript of the US Assistant Secretary of State and the US Ambassador to Ukraine planning the coup. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
Here's Obama saying he brokered the deal for the transfer of power, resulting in the democratically elected leader fleeing. https://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/02/01/pres-obama-on-...
> You are going to get Covid multiple times in your life, regardless of your vaccination or infection status.
Yeah but whether you expect to get it once every couple years or multiple times a year is meaningful to what living in a post-covid world looks like.
Earlier your very firm statement did not qualify the unchanged protective effect as being limited to severe, critical or fatal disease, and I think you're moving goalposts.
> The protective effect of prior infection is not uncertain, nor is it changing.
So are you arguing that, because I've never seen it, then it must be common?
> I don't deny that ransomware is really common today.
You'll need to be more precise for this to mean much of anything. I don't know a single person who has ever had a single personal computer affected by ransomware. Clearly ransomware must be a governmental conspiracy and/or the common flu.
> This feels like asking why you should bother voting
It wasn't intended to feel like that. It was intended to feel like asking whether you think one news report -- or even several individual news reports -- are meaningful evidence of widespread fraud in the setting of a very large denominator of deaths.
> Yes, and it makes my point even stronger.
No, it doesn't. It means your point may not be a point at all, and it seems like you have no evidence behind your speculation that this was ultimately counted as a COVID death.
> If we can't get details of the death, why should we default to the assumption that it really was because of COVID?
Do you really think that the details of an individual patient's medical record should be opened up to try (likely in vain) to satisfy the curiosity of some dude on HN -- who is likely so entrenched in his or her position that the results of the inquisition will be of little consequence regardless?
This directly contradicts much of the dishonest, unethical messaging urging young and healthy individuals to submit to experimental shots, which sold it to us on the basis that we would be shielding higher-risk persons, depriving those who were not at high risk yet chanced the shots for altruistic reasons of genuine informed consent.
The clearing rates indicated in the embedded figure match what I'm seeing in my own community and I'm afraid your cognitive dissonance is bound to increase as time goes on and you find you're inhabiting what you claim to view as a conspiracy theory.
Time will tell.
If you are claiming to have seen "plenty" of previously healthy 20-somethings and 30-somethings who've died of (and not with) covid and "plenty" means more than one or two of each group since Feb 2020 and you're not jet-setting back and forth across the country to attend specifically to exceedingly rare young previously-healthy patients seriously ill from covid in widely-separated locations whenever they pop up, I'm sorry but I don't believe you.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That is perhaps beyond the measure of the study to even conclude that those are properly labelled data points. It is such a small number it would make sense to publish a report detailing exactly how each death played out, when they likely were exposed, by whom, and as best as possible what they were doing each hour of the days leading to death. They may have had no known underlying condition but what was unique about their situation that it led to death? Can this really happen to anyone as you seem to be suggesting? Surely it would be prudent to be sure? Advocating for mandated vaccines based on that slim evidence is not an exercise in harm reduction, its reckless.
No. I'm saying that it's not necessarily rare just because you've never seen it.
> You'll need to be more precise for this to mean much of anything. I don't know a single person who has ever had a single personal computer affected by ransomware. Clearly ransomware must be a governmental conspiracy and/or the common flu.
You're making my point for me. I acknowledge ransomware is a real problem even though I've never personally been exposed to it. I'm saying you should acknowledge that incorrect COVID death labeling is a real problem even though you've never personally been exposed to it.
> It was intended to feel like asking whether you think one news report -- or even several individual news reports -- are meaningful evidence of widespread fraud in the setting of a very large denominator of deaths.
But the whole point is that the "very large denominator" is inflated and untrustworthy.
> It means your point may not be a point at all, and it seems like you have no evidence behind your speculation that this was ultimately counted as a COVID death.
We have solid evidence that it was originally counted as a COVID death. People then looked for evidence that it was ever corrected but failed to find any. How is that "no evidence behind [my] speculation"?
> Do you really think that the details of an individual patient's medical record should be opened up to try (likely in vain) to satisfy the curiosity of some dude on HN -- who is likely so entrenched in his or her position that the results of the inquisition will be of little consequence regardless?
Are you saying I should just blindly trust that all of the ones we don't have information on are correct? That seems like it'd be a stretch even if we didn't have any evidence that any were ever misclassified.
> The protective effect of prior infection is not uncertain, nor is it changing. There have been dozens of papers now, all saying the same thing: natural infection is at least as protective (if not more so) than even 3 doses of the current vaccines.
I was saying that natural infection is equivalent to vaccination -- if not better. Then, in the same comment, I explicitly said that none of this will prevent re-infection:
> Norway is saying what it is, because we know that most people -- vaccinated or previously infected -- will eventually get re-infected. But even if you are re-infected, you will be well-protected against severe illness.
Did people originally overstate the claim that vaccination would prevent infection? Absolutely. Do we now know this to be untrue? Again, absolutely. You're going to be re-infected multiple times in your life. Cannot be helped.
But it's still true that infection and vaccination offer at least equivalent levels of protection. So if you're concerned about the protection of "natural immunity" -- by whatever standard -- then I have bad news for you: the vaccines are no better.
I live and provide emergency care in rural place that several times was reported to have the worst rates and case fatality rates in the country. Virtually every patient I see and community member I know had at least one first-degree family member die OF COVID, and many more if you include cousins / aunts / uncles.
In contrast, my parents and family live in a place not far away that had something like 5% of the case-fatality rate we experienced here. I don't think my parents know a single person who personally died of COVID, whereas I had 6? or so coworkers (not other physicians -- several hospital housekeepers sadly) pass away.
I can see quite clearly why there is so much controversy about this disease (or at least one of the reasons) -- because it's just affected different populations very differently.
We act as if each other is talking about an entirely different disease, and we may as well be.
> I'm sorry but I don't believe you.
Then I suppose it's not worth having further conversation. Best of luck to you.
> I'm saying that it's not necessarily rare just because you've never seen it.
Agreed. Though my prior is that physician-committed fraud on death certificates is probably rare in general (having seen many deaths and gone through the process myself many times), and that my personal experience also confirms that it seems rare (with respect to COVID), so hopefully you can see why an analogy to a very unrelated topic doesn't feel like particularly convincing evidence.
> You're making my point for me. I acknowledge ransomware is a real problem even though I've never personally been exposed to it. I'm saying you should acknowledge that incorrect COVID death labeling is a real problem even though you've never personally been exposed to it.
No, I don't think I'm making your point, I think you're moving the goalposts. Your words were "really common," which is what I pushed back on. I didn't say anything about whether or not it's a problem (for either case).
> But the whole point is that the "very large denominator" is inflated and untrustworthy.
Again, it would be interested to get your guesses at what kind of numbers we're talking about, it's hard to know how much we're disagreeing here. The CDC lists total deaths at 1,018,578. What percentage of this do you think are likely to be fraudulent? Feel free to speculate wildly. 1% 10%? 30%? 50%? Even 50% -- which seems wildly imaginative to me, having cared for extremely sick COVID patients regularly for years now -- would leave us with 500,000 deaths... a "very large denominator" to me. And given the single news report that's been submitted as evidence so far...
Again, even if there were 10,000 such cases of fraud, we'd be talking about a mere 1% of deaths. And I don't see why physicians would be so motivated to commit widespread fraud in such a discoverable fashion (medical examiners reviewing cases -- physicians are generally leery about legal entanglements), and I don't see why my individual experience would be systematically biased to hide this from me as compared to the general physician experience.
> We have solid evidence that it was originally counted as a COVID death. People then looked for evidence that it was ever corrected but failed to find any. How is that "no evidence behind [my] speculation"?
So far, you have a single news story from Fox Orlando, which admits that it's unknown whether or not the issue was corrected. How is that evidence? For example, I don't know if my dead great grandmother cast fraudulent votes for Biden. Is this evidence of widespread election fraud?
> Are you saying I should just blindly trust that all of the ones we don't have information on are correct? That seems like it'd be a stretch even if we didn't have any evidence that any were ever misclassified.
No. I'm saying that it's a "stretch" to assume that the common case is a bad faith attempt to pull the wool over your eyes.
Have you ever seen a death certificate form, or been part of filling one out? I think there is also room for misunderstanding and miscommunication based on how these work (which I assume varies by state).
For cases as clear-cut as this motorcycle accident, my wild speculation would be 2-5%. But I think there were way, way more "gray area" cases that all got recorded as COVID deaths, e.g., people with advanced cancer who caught COVID and then died not long after.
> For example, I don't know if my dead great grandmother cast fraudulent votes for Biden. Is this evidence of widespread election fraud?
A better analogy would be if there were solid evidence of a provisional ballot cast in your dead great grandmother's name, and there just wasn't any evidence as to whether they counted it or threw it out.
> Have you ever seen a death certificate form, or been part of filling one out? I think there is also room for misunderstanding and miscommunication based on how these work (which I assume varies by state).
I have not.
The term is actually well defined, especially what is supposed to be documented by it. I am German and they borrowed it straight from the government regulation. The "Negativnachweis" https://www.rv.hessenrecht.hessen.de/bshe/document/jlr-Coron...
>(1) Soweit nach dieser Verordnung der Nachweis zu führen ist, dass keine Anhaltspunkte für eine Infektion mit dem SARS-CoV-2-Virus vorliegen (Negativnachweis), kann dies erfolgen durch
>(1) >If, according to this regulation, proof must be provide that there are no indications of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus (negative proof), this can be done by...
And you being vaccinated with a leaky vaccine doesnt mean there is no indication you are infected. Not in any way. This is misinformation that actually kills, because it allows COVID to spread. And its not information spread by some morons who drink bleach but by the government and quite literally taped to the doors of the figurative house of science. Because people lack the integrity to call out bullshit for what it is.
the gold standard test to see if someone is infected with sars-cov-2 would involve doing sequencing of a sample from the airways and potentially also stools. A PCR test is close enough, for the sake of argument.
Good luck trying to do these tests every time you want to allow someone in a building. The task is to find another requirement that is of practical value: go.
Let's say for the sake of argument that Euromaidan was 100% manufactured by Obama. (I strongly disagree, but I'll give you that one for now.) A couple of hundred people died in the protests and riots. So far, by the Kremlin's own account, 100x to 200x that number have died in the 2022 invasion. Millions have been displaced. Entire towns and villages have been reduced to rubble. People are dying in Sri Lanka from famines because of the lack of Ukranian grain. How are you going to look anyone straight in the face and them that these evils are comparable?
This is what I mean when I say that every anti-Western narrative I've seen on this war uses different yardsticks for Russia and the West. Putin murdered 100 people? Well Obama killed 1 so it's really not that different is it? It's like asking a judge to give a thief who pocketed a candybar and a thief who robbed into a bank at gunpoint equal sentences because "both of them are thieves." I'd prefer not to have a thief as a roommate, but if my choices were a candybar thief or a bank robber, I know who I'd choose. You don't need a PhD in philosophy to understand this concept.
I'm am not sure if you are to arguing in bad faith or if you are sincere, but the drawing of false equivalencies is a favorite tool of those who argue in bad faith.
It is really quite simple. Nobody with any knowledge on the topic can in good conscience say that you can use the fact that you are vaccinated with a leaky vaccine as an indicator for not being infected. That is quite simply not how the COVID vaccines work. This is extremly dangerous misinformation. And due to the fact who spreads it, a lot more dangerous then any boogeymen of idiots drinking bleach. Focusing on those caricatures and ignoring misinformation spread by officials is utterly irresponsible and evidence for a lack of scientific integrity.
Respectfully, this is my area of expertise, and you're in the potatoes.
Few things are more seductive than the knowledge that your cause is just. And that you, and your tribe, just have to be right.
Which country, in the last 30 years, has invaded more countries and killed more innocent people in wars of aggression? US or Russia?
Rank these world leaders in order of causing most innocent civilian deaths: Bush Jr, Obama, Trump, Biden, Putin.
Which country is providing the weapons for, providing intelligence, and coordinating strikes for Saudi Arabia's genocide in Yemen? US or Russia? How does the death count in Yemen compare to Ukraine?
That seems higher than I would guess, but lower than I thought you would guess. So even at the high end, and if you think perhaps 40% of COVID deaths are gray area (and so let's split that 40% and say that 20% are on the "wrong side" of gray), that would make 75% of a very large number of deaths fall into the "legitimate" zone.
> A better analogy would be if there were solid evidence of a provisional ballot cast in your dead great grandmother's name, and there just wasn't any evidence as to whether they counted it or threw it out.
I'll bite. Is that evidence of widespread election fraud? (And if so, perhaps we disagree on what "widespread" means, and whether fraud and attempted fraud should be treated separately.)
> But I think there were way, way more "gray area" cases that all got recorded as COVID deaths, e.g., people with advanced cancer who caught COVID and then died not long after.
> I have not [had experience with death certificates]
I think these two thoughts are related.
The death certificates I've done include multiple causes of death, usually a primary or immediate cause and secondary or contributing causes.
When a patient comes into my emergency department and dies of a heart attack, I am going to list the heart attack as the cause of death -- not the decades of untreated diabetes, uncontrolled hypertension, smoking, and obesity that some opine "really" caused the death. I may list those factors as secondary or contributing causes (if I know about them -- sometimes, as an emergency physician, I know nothing about the person's background and may not even have time to obtain any testing before they pass away).
I would bet that a very high proportion of well-meaning good-faith physicians would do likewise -- that is death from the primary or immediate cause of "heart attack." There is no dishonesty there.
When a patient with end-stage cancer comes into my emergency department and dies of COVID, I am going to list the COVID as the immediate cause of death, not the cancer.
When a patient with alcoholism dies in a drunken car accident, what should be the cause of death? I would argue "car accident," not alcoholism, or COVID.
However, it seems that many people who cling to "cancer" as the cause of death don't bat an eye when someone dies of a "heart attack." What about having end-stage cancer makes Monday-morning quarterbacks forget that having COVID is a legitimate cause of death?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/01/jeff-jacks...