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I would love to have a choice in determining whether the various risks are worth it for me, but my government has insisted on shutting all "non-essential" busin

by ppf 6y ago

I would love to have a choice in determining whether the various risks are worth it for me, but my government has insisted on shutting all "non-essential" businesses, and only lifted a 3-month "stay at home" order last week.

oivey 6y ago
That’s not really the same thing since an individual who, for example, goes to large gatherings also endangers others by making essential activities like going to the grocery store more dangerous for everyone. Besides that, wider spread of the virus increases the odds of dangerous mutations that make the vaccine less effective or the illness more severe. More spread also risks hospital overloads, which will hurt the medical outcomes of everyone. Going out beyond essential needs hurts everyone. On the other hand, getting a potentially faulty vaccine would seem to mostly only be a risk to the individual, although I suppose there is some risk of overwhelming hospitals still. Please just stay home for a few more months so this shit can finally fucking end. It’s already been a year. Edit: an important factor, too, is that understanding the potential risks of the AZ vaccine is hard, and the average person may not expected to fully understand them. Right now, it seems like even the authorities don’t understand them.
- ppf 6y ago
  How exactly will staying at home "for a few more months" stop a virus mutating forever? It's not that bad, we have to live with it. Viruses mutate all the time. I'm not sure what your point is with the apparent difficulty of understanding the risks of a new vaccine. Are you saying "it's hard, so just trust what the authorities tell you"?
  - oivey 6y ago
    In a few more months everyone will be vaccinated, significantly limiting the spread, slowing mutation. To be clear, we’re talking about the risk of the AZ vaccine specifically. It seems like there might be something specifically wrong with it. Ceding approval authority to bodies like the FDA is how medicine is regulated all over the world. That’s how literal snake oil is blocked from sale. Among other things, it prevents desperate patients from making uninformed, dangerous, and expensive treatment decisions. The average person really isn’t equipped to read a medical study and adequately interpret the results. This information isn’t even at the maturity level of a study, and the risk is that people hurt themselves and undermine the confidence in this vaccine and others.
    - ppf 6y ago
      That's nice, and I suppose everyone entering and leaving the country will need vaccine passports. It's as if everything that we were told would never happen, is going to happen. "A few weeks to flatten the curve", and now we are swallowing the idea of 100% vaccination and associated papers. As for your comments on regulation - yes, that is correct, which is why I was surprised when I got so much flak for pointing out that, at least in the UK, regulatory shortcuts were taken to rush the approval of Covid vaccines.
      - oivey 6y ago
        I guess I don’t remember things the same. In my state, the most extreme restrictions (basically, everything is closed that isn’t remote or essential work) were lifted after a bit. I don’t recall ever being under the impression that restrictions would ever be completely lifted until the vaccine was rolled out. I recall at the time there being a lot of worry about how long that would take. I also don’t recall anything about vaccine passports, other than China doing it. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention to the rhetoric surrounding that. There were shortcuts taken in all countries to get the vaccines out. In the US, there is no FDA approved COVID vaccine. Every “approved” vaccine is actually under an emergency use authorization.
        ppf 6y ago
        If your (state, country, whatever) has a 100% vaccination policy to "prevent mutations", then how can you possibly not have a vaccination passport?
        oivey 6y ago
        There is no mandatory vaccine policy in the US. Where are are there?
        ppf 6y ago
        So how will "everyone be vaccinated"? It won't be mandatory, but I'm sure it'll be difficult to refuse.
- tazjin 6y ago
  COVID isn't the only health threat around, and the response is absolutely not proportional anymore. FWIW, the LCD of most relevant studies show that maybe banning large gatherings is useful, whereas all other measures we've invented in the meantime have dubious efficacy at best - and extremely high costs. There are plenty of places in the world that didn't implement the "fight COVID at any cost" policies and they're doing just fine. Trust me on that, I live in one of them.

by ppf 6y ago

oivey 6y ago

That’s not really the same thing since an individual who, for example, goes to large gatherings also endangers others by making essential activities like going to the grocery store more dangerous for everyone. Besides that, wider spread of the virus increases the odds of dangerous mutations that make the vaccine less effective or the illness more severe. More spread also risks hospital overloads, which will hurt the medical outcomes of everyone. Going out beyond essential needs hurts everyone. On the other hand, getting a potentially faulty vaccine would seem to mostly only be a risk to the individual, although I suppose there is some risk of overwhelming hospitals still. Please just stay home for a few more months so this shit can finally fucking end. It’s already been a year. Edit: an important factor, too, is that understanding the potential risks of the AZ vaccine is hard, and the average person may not expected to fully understand them. Right now, it seems like even the authorities don’t understand them.

ppf 6y ago
How exactly will staying at home "for a few more months" stop a virus mutating forever? It's not that bad, we have to live with it. Viruses mutate all the time. I'm not sure what your point is with the apparent difficulty of understanding the risks of a new vaccine. Are you saying "it's hard, so just trust what the authorities tell you"?
- oivey 6y ago
  In a few more months everyone will be vaccinated, significantly limiting the spread, slowing mutation. To be clear, we’re talking about the risk of the AZ vaccine specifically. It seems like there might be something specifically wrong with it. Ceding approval authority to bodies like the FDA is how medicine is regulated all over the world. That’s how literal snake oil is blocked from sale. Among other things, it prevents desperate patients from making uninformed, dangerous, and expensive treatment decisions. The average person really isn’t equipped to read a medical study and adequately interpret the results. This information isn’t even at the maturity level of a study, and the risk is that people hurt themselves and undermine the confidence in this vaccine and others.
  - ppf 6y ago
    That's nice, and I suppose everyone entering and leaving the country will need vaccine passports. It's as if everything that we were told would never happen, is going to happen. "A few weeks to flatten the curve", and now we are swallowing the idea of 100% vaccination and associated papers. As for your comments on regulation - yes, that is correct, which is why I was surprised when I got so much flak for pointing out that, at least in the UK, regulatory shortcuts were taken to rush the approval of Covid vaccines.
    - oivey 6y ago
      I guess I don’t remember things the same. In my state, the most extreme restrictions (basically, everything is closed that isn’t remote or essential work) were lifted after a bit. I don’t recall ever being under the impression that restrictions would ever be completely lifted until the vaccine was rolled out. I recall at the time there being a lot of worry about how long that would take. I also don’t recall anything about vaccine passports, other than China doing it. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention to the rhetoric surrounding that. There were shortcuts taken in all countries to get the vaccines out. In the US, there is no FDA approved COVID vaccine. Every “approved” vaccine is actually under an emergency use authorization.
      - ppf 6y ago
        If your (state, country, whatever) has a 100% vaccination policy to "prevent mutations", then how can you possibly not have a vaccination passport?
        oivey 6y ago
        There is no mandatory vaccine policy in the US. Where are are there?
        ppf 6y ago
        So how will "everyone be vaccinated"? It won't be mandatory, but I'm sure it'll be difficult to refuse.
tazjin 6y ago
COVID isn't the only health threat around, and the response is absolutely not proportional anymore. FWIW, the LCD of most relevant studies show that maybe banning large gatherings is useful, whereas all other measures we've invented in the meantime have dubious efficacy at best - and extremely high costs. There are plenty of places in the world that didn't implement the "fight COVID at any cost" policies and they're doing just fine. Trust me on that, I live in one of them.