5 ms·

So does this mean we made this pandemic worse than the one from 1918 when we didn't have a vaccine?

mlang23 5y ago
This is very likely. And has already been said by various critics already months ago. But these people were silenced or ridiculed, because it apparently was already decided the vaccines need to be sold.
- evgen 5y ago
  Completely untrue. The reservoir of selfish unvaccinated individuals is what is providing a place for Covid to hide and mutate. Vax critics were silenced and ridiculed because they are dangerous deceivers who need to be called out and held to account for the consequences of their lies.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    That's not something that's ever been a problem with vaccines before. Even if you have unshakeable faith in this evidence-free perversion of biological theory, nobody was claiming the vaccines will fail without 100% adoption last year when they launched. Their reception would have been rather different if that had been claimed, wouldn't it? So you can either believe this is true, in which case governments and pharma firms deceived people about the nature of the 'vaccine', or you can believe it's false and they didn't. But you can't believe it's true and it's the other people who are deceivers. That makes no logical sense.
    - samus 5y ago
      It's a general issue with every vaccine against an illness that has a reservoir. The reservoir can be other species (birds and various other animals in case of influenza) or it can be human populations that for various reasons have not eliminated the spread of the illness yet (measles in countries that refuse or make it difficult to vaccinate, polio if not completely eradicated yet). In this reservoir the agent has opportunity to mutate, and it can never be excluded that at some point it makes inroads into populations again where it was eradicated before. Global eradication of diseases has been achieved with smallpox and bovine rinderpest precisely because they had no natural reservoir and all vulnerable populations could be vaccinated. With Coronaviruses the situation is not so simple, but it should at least be possible to eradicate the currently relevant variant.
  - thirsty-dove 5y ago
    It's not selfish to decline a medical procedure one thinks is unlikely to benefit oneself. Furthermore, it's malpractice for a doctor to advise a patient to undergo a medical procedure that is not more likely than not to benefit that specific patient. Your attitude is what's dangerous.
    - deathcakes 5y ago
      Sorry but no it is selfish - that is the definition of selfish. 'It won't benefit me; it will benefit the whole of society but I don't give a shit about them so I'm not going to' is the most selfish viewpoint you can have. I could understand if there was a significant risk of negative consequences to the individual but there aren't.
      - pigeonhole123 5y ago
        How can you be sure of the absence of long term negative consequences?
      - thirsty-dove 5y ago
        > that is the definition of selfish You're assuming you possess godlike knowledge, when actually we can't be sure what actions will lead to beneficial or harmful results. Are you selfish for refusing to undergo castration? What if I'm really sure it would benefit society? This is one of the many reasons we consider people sovereign over their own bodies. > I could understand if there was a significant risk of negative consequences to the individual but there aren't. We don't know if that's true, but we're not off to a good start considering the current number of harm/death reports in VAERS.
        Grimm1 5y ago
        Hundreds of millions have been vaccinated, there are like double digit cases of issues (per million) https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad... Your risk index is poor. Like conversely, your chance of getting hit by a car is 1 in 5000, so I guess you shouldn't ever leave your house again. https://www.reference.com/world-view/odds-getting-hit-car-8153e02f5ac36140#:~:text=Based%20on%20information%20provided%20by,are%20about%20one%20in%2047%2C273 https://www.reference.com/world-view/odds-getting-hit-car-81....
  - makomk 5y ago
    So far, the "reservoir of selfish unvaccinated individuals" that the virus has mutated in is people who literally could not get vaccinated because there weren't enough vaccines available. The most important variants so far have showed up in the UK before any vaccines were approved, South Africa during their vaccine clinical trials (rendering the vaccine they were planning on using effectively useless), and India which is just too big to vaccinate quickly at current production levels.
  - bananapear 5y ago
    > selfish unvaccinated individuals "selfish" implies you think there is some benefit to those individuals in declining it. What do you think that is?
    - QuadmasterXLII 5y ago
      You fail to take into account. that they might be stupid and selfish.
- adevx 5y ago
  This has indeed been predicted by various experts but almost completely ignored. As seen in the comment below the strategy now is to blame those who are critical of our single minded vaccination strategy.
becuzThrowaway 5y ago
No. First off, we still haven't had the level of death that we had in 1918, and almost certainly won't. Second, the narrative of vaccinated individuals being major spreaders of this disease is false. The virus is evolving due to mutations occurring while hopping from one unvaccinated person to another, full stop.
- anshorei 5y ago
  There's two major metrics to measure the severeness: the mortality rate and the infection rate. I think that "we haven't had the level of death we had in 1918 so the pandemic is less severe" ignores the fact that COVID-19 is far more infectious and therefore in a sense more severe since it will be awfully hard to get rid of for that reason (if we can indeed never get rid of it the number of deaths will keep growing, so might eventually catch up)
  - piva00 5y ago
    Varicella is more infectious than SARS-CoV-2 and it's under control with vaccines, same pattern: spread through the air, R0 chickenpox > R0 COVID-19, vaccines help with immunity and even when infected developing a mild version of the disease. There is hope, we might not get rid off it but if we could control chickenpox that is quite more infectious, we can have a little hope. Even more with more modern medicine.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      > Varicella is more infectious than SARS-CoV-2 Well. So it was in our tentative models at the time of this author's writing (8 days). So it is not any more, as of a few days only (3 days). ...Ray Kurzweil was right. /Bitter Joke.
- native_samples 5y ago
  The UK now has a similar test positivity rate to what it had in November 2020 yet a hugely vaccinated population. If the vaccinated aren't spreading it then you're suggesting that the unvaccinated have become drastically more infectious for no apparent reason and in ways that don't show up in contract tracing data. I think the alternative explanations are more likely to be correct: the vaccine is actually not a vaccine in the traditional sense, it's more like a prophylactic. Vaccinated people aren't getting an immune response in the normal areas where it would usually enter and exit, like the nose and lungs, instead it's being injected into the arm. Also, COVID tests don't actually detect COVID or even SARS-CoV-2, they detect RNA debris from destroyed SARS-CoV-2. Thus it's expected that if someone's body fights off the virus immediately if they're exposed to it, they will still test positive.
woko 5y ago
Absolutely not, or at least not yet, because: 1) the most contagious variants have emerged from countries with little to no vaccination: UK before vaccination and with very little protective measures (pubs, etc.), Brazil with Bolsonaro, India with a very high population density who are mostly unvaccinated, etc. These variants appear thanks to the high number of contaminations. Vaccination means fewer contaminations, and thus the less likely arising of mutations and a new variant. 2) Current vaccines are very effective against the current variants. This observation is inconsistent with the assumption that one of the variants could have been naturally selected to resist to vaccination. This is also expected as the percentage of vaccinated people is low in most parts of the world, thus there is little pressure to select a vaccine-resistant variant for now. If we had made the variants "worse" because of imperfect vaccination, we would have seen a vaccine-resistant variant emerge from one of the vaccinated (>50%) countries.
- makomk 5y ago
  It's looking extremely iffy right now as to whether it's even possible to achieve herd immunity against the current variants through vaccination, which will set up basically the perfect environment to select for vaccine escape globally: enough people vaccinated that it's a strong advantage, but the virus can still spread and infect more people in order to get a chance to adapt.
- native_samples 5y ago
  By "very little protective measures (pubs etc)" you mean the pubs were all closed? The UK has had some of the most restrictive lockdowns in the western world. I agree that the idea that vaccines are leading to new variants seems extremely dubious though. Like everything else in epidemiology, when you go looking for the underlying rational basis for it, there's just nothing robust there.

This is very likely. And has already been said by various critics already months ago. But these people were silenced or ridiculed, because it apparently was already decided the vaccines need to be sold.

evgen 5y ago
Completely untrue. The reservoir of selfish unvaccinated individuals is what is providing a place for Covid to hide and mutate. Vax critics were silenced and ridiculed because they are dangerous deceivers who need to be called out and held to account for the consequences of their lies.
- native_samples 5y ago
  That's not something that's ever been a problem with vaccines before. Even if you have unshakeable faith in this evidence-free perversion of biological theory, nobody was claiming the vaccines will fail without 100% adoption last year when they launched. Their reception would have been rather different if that had been claimed, wouldn't it? So you can either believe this is true, in which case governments and pharma firms deceived people about the nature of the 'vaccine', or you can believe it's false and they didn't. But you can't believe it's true and it's the other people who are deceivers. That makes no logical sense.
  - samus 5y ago
    It's a general issue with every vaccine against an illness that has a reservoir. The reservoir can be other species (birds and various other animals in case of influenza) or it can be human populations that for various reasons have not eliminated the spread of the illness yet (measles in countries that refuse or make it difficult to vaccinate, polio if not completely eradicated yet). In this reservoir the agent has opportunity to mutate, and it can never be excluded that at some point it makes inroads into populations again where it was eradicated before. Global eradication of diseases has been achieved with smallpox and bovine rinderpest precisely because they had no natural reservoir and all vulnerable populations could be vaccinated. With Coronaviruses the situation is not so simple, but it should at least be possible to eradicate the currently relevant variant.
- thirsty-dove 5y ago
  It's not selfish to decline a medical procedure one thinks is unlikely to benefit oneself. Furthermore, it's malpractice for a doctor to advise a patient to undergo a medical procedure that is not more likely than not to benefit that specific patient. Your attitude is what's dangerous.
  - deathcakes 5y ago
    Sorry but no it is selfish - that is the definition of selfish. 'It won't benefit me; it will benefit the whole of society but I don't give a shit about them so I'm not going to' is the most selfish viewpoint you can have. I could understand if there was a significant risk of negative consequences to the individual but there aren't.
    - pigeonhole123 5y ago
      How can you be sure of the absence of long term negative consequences?
    - thirsty-dove 5y ago
      > that is the definition of selfish You're assuming you possess godlike knowledge, when actually we can't be sure what actions will lead to beneficial or harmful results. Are you selfish for refusing to undergo castration? What if I'm really sure it would benefit society? This is one of the many reasons we consider people sovereign over their own bodies. > I could understand if there was a significant risk of negative consequences to the individual but there aren't. We don't know if that's true, but we're not off to a good start considering the current number of harm/death reports in VAERS.
      - Grimm1 5y ago
        Hundreds of millions have been vaccinated, there are like double digit cases of issues (per million) https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad... Your risk index is poor. Like conversely, your chance of getting hit by a car is 1 in 5000, so I guess you shouldn't ever leave your house again. https://www.reference.com/world-view/odds-getting-hit-car-8153e02f5ac36140#:~:text=Based%20on%20information%20provided%20by,are%20about%20one%20in%2047%2C273 https://www.reference.com/world-view/odds-getting-hit-car-81....
- makomk 5y ago
  So far, the "reservoir of selfish unvaccinated individuals" that the virus has mutated in is people who literally could not get vaccinated because there weren't enough vaccines available. The most important variants so far have showed up in the UK before any vaccines were approved, South Africa during their vaccine clinical trials (rendering the vaccine they were planning on using effectively useless), and India which is just too big to vaccinate quickly at current production levels.
- bananapear 5y ago
  > selfish unvaccinated individuals "selfish" implies you think there is some benefit to those individuals in declining it. What do you think that is?
  - QuadmasterXLII 5y ago
    You fail to take into account. that they might be stupid and selfish.
adevx 5y ago
This has indeed been predicted by various experts but almost completely ignored. As seen in the comment below the strategy now is to blame those who are critical of our single minded vaccination strategy.

becuzThrowaway 5y ago

No. First off, we still haven't had the level of death that we had in 1918, and almost certainly won't. Second, the narrative of vaccinated individuals being major spreaders of this disease is false. The virus is evolving due to mutations occurring while hopping from one unvaccinated person to another, full stop.

anshorei 5y ago
There's two major metrics to measure the severeness: the mortality rate and the infection rate. I think that "we haven't had the level of death we had in 1918 so the pandemic is less severe" ignores the fact that COVID-19 is far more infectious and therefore in a sense more severe since it will be awfully hard to get rid of for that reason (if we can indeed never get rid of it the number of deaths will keep growing, so might eventually catch up)
- piva00 5y ago
  Varicella is more infectious than SARS-CoV-2 and it's under control with vaccines, same pattern: spread through the air, R0 chickenpox > R0 COVID-19, vaccines help with immunity and even when infected developing a mild version of the disease. There is hope, we might not get rid off it but if we could control chickenpox that is quite more infectious, we can have a little hope. Even more with more modern medicine.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    > Varicella is more infectious than SARS-CoV-2 Well. So it was in our tentative models at the time of this author's writing (8 days). So it is not any more, as of a few days only (3 days). ...Ray Kurzweil was right. /Bitter Joke.
native_samples 5y ago
The UK now has a similar test positivity rate to what it had in November 2020 yet a hugely vaccinated population. If the vaccinated aren't spreading it then you're suggesting that the unvaccinated have become drastically more infectious for no apparent reason and in ways that don't show up in contract tracing data. I think the alternative explanations are more likely to be correct: the vaccine is actually not a vaccine in the traditional sense, it's more like a prophylactic. Vaccinated people aren't getting an immune response in the normal areas where it would usually enter and exit, like the nose and lungs, instead it's being injected into the arm. Also, COVID tests don't actually detect COVID or even SARS-CoV-2, they detect RNA debris from destroyed SARS-CoV-2. Thus it's expected that if someone's body fights off the virus immediately if they're exposed to it, they will still test positive.

woko 5y ago

Absolutely not, or at least not yet, because: 1) the most contagious variants have emerged from countries with little to no vaccination: UK before vaccination and with very little protective measures (pubs, etc.), Brazil with Bolsonaro, India with a very high population density who are mostly unvaccinated, etc. These variants appear thanks to the high number of contaminations. Vaccination means fewer contaminations, and thus the less likely arising of mutations and a new variant. 2) Current vaccines are very effective against the current variants. This observation is inconsistent with the assumption that one of the variants could have been naturally selected to resist to vaccination. This is also expected as the percentage of vaccinated people is low in most parts of the world, thus there is little pressure to select a vaccine-resistant variant for now. If we had made the variants "worse" because of imperfect vaccination, we would have seen a vaccine-resistant variant emerge from one of the vaccinated (>50%) countries.

makomk 5y ago
It's looking extremely iffy right now as to whether it's even possible to achieve herd immunity against the current variants through vaccination, which will set up basically the perfect environment to select for vaccine escape globally: enough people vaccinated that it's a strong advantage, but the virus can still spread and infect more people in order to get a chance to adapt.
native_samples 5y ago
By "very little protective measures (pubs etc)" you mean the pubs were all closed? The UK has had some of the most restrictive lockdowns in the western world. I agree that the idea that vaccines are leading to new variants seems extremely dubious though. Like everything else in epidemiology, when you go looking for the underlying rational basis for it, there's just nothing robust there.