6 ms·

My problem is that the whole thing is based on old data and a false premise that life is safe when vaccinated people are only around vaccinated people. We know

My problem is that the whole thing is based on old data and a false premise that life is safe when vaccinated people are only around vaccinated people. We know this is slightly more true than among the unvaccinated, but only by about 40%. This is real data. Fears of privacy implications: Tracking data/metadata, How data is recorded, How long are records kept. What other data is linked to vaccination checks? Fears of discrimination: How is vaccination proven? Are special IDs required? What is the cost of identification? What about people who are ineligible to get vaccinated due to age, health status, medical conditions. What percentage of minority groups are vaccinated in comparison to other groups? Unintended consequences: Will this make unsafe behavior appear safer to vaccinated individuals? What about future variants? Are there future plans to extend the list of businesses/places this applies to like public transport, medical facilities, etc? Lastly, If you are vaccinated and feel safe doing these activities, why should you care about those who chose not to get vaccinated

alecst 5y ago
Great reply, thank you. I don't want to get into a long argument, but a lot of what you say hinges on that 40% number. I'd like to know what that refers to. My reply to that 40% number: I thought that vaccines made you something like 20x less likely to end up in the hospital from coronavirus (widely cited as 95% protective.) And that unvaccinated people spread at 5x the rate of the vaccinated ones. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z Despite having done some research in virology for my MSc I definitely don't claim to be an expert. The field is really complex, and I'm always open to learning. So feel free to reply and educate me as long as we can keep it cordial. To answer your last question (presumably non-rhetorical) I worry about unvaccinated people allowing for mutations via community spread, as well as getting sick when they didn't have to, hurting themselves while taking up healthcare resources in the process. Is that unreasonable?
- keneda7 5y ago
  Not the original poster but The article you link says the delta is unknown. Delta is rapidly becoming the most common variant in the US. (https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210720/delta-variant-now-accounts-for-83-of-us-covid-cases https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210720/delta-variant-now-a...) I believe the 40% is coming from the data out of Israel. (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-vaccine-39percent-effective-in-israel-prevents-severe-illness.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...) Also data from the CDC on the latest outbreak they studies shows that 74% of the positives were vaccinated. At the time the vaccination rate was about 69% for the state. I can't find anything on the actual town. (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/this-900-person-delta-cluster-in-mass-has-cdc-freaked-out-74-are-vaccinated/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/this-900-person-delt...) The CDC also has said vaccinated do in fact have high viral loads of the virus and can spread it (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/07/30/1022867219/cdc-study-provincetown-delta-vaccinated-breakthrough-mask-guidance https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...) Do you happen to have any actual studies showing unvaccinated people are causing mutations? I have seen it repeated but never seen the study behind it. I do know leaky vaccines cause outbreaks to spread faster. This can be seen in the past. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...) As for your last part. Lets look at it another way. Heart disease is the leading killer in the US. One of the best way to prevent heart disease is being physically fit and active. By your logic we should be mandating exercise for everyone to prevent it right? Shouldn't we also be forcing people to quite drinking and smoking as well? Overall its just a slippery slop when you give the government this right. What happens if conservatives get in power and decided abortion should be banned outright as they consider a fetus a person? By the same logic you are using, they would be perfectly reasonable to do that.
  - hellisothers 5y ago
    While it’s possible to be infected and vaccinated the possibility is lower right, even “only” 40% is a huge number! If only vaccinated people are in a space it dramatically decreases the likelihood I’ll become infected by more than 40% because every one of those people is also personally 40% less likely to be infected, so this is compounding. Please correct me if I’m wrong on that assessment. As to the hear disease comment those comparisons are disingenuous because you can choose to exercise or not and your choice doesn’t impact others. My 7yo son cannot be vaccinated, he has no choose but to rely on others doing their part
    - keneda7 5y ago
      I am not sure about the compounding 40%. I don't know enough about infectious disease transfer. The previous poster had asked about the 40% so I was giving him the source. Personally I agree with you 40% is still better than 0%. As far as heart disease, in my opinion it does drastically impact other people. Heart disease patients take up hospital beds, they take up medical supplies, they take up doctors time. The CDC says ~1 in 4 deaths is due to heart disease. (https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm) It is a massive drain on our medical system (perhaps the greatest).
  - thinkharderdev 5y ago
    Whether it is proper for the government to mandate vaccines in certain situation is a complicated question but I think some of your priors are incorrect. 1. The data out of Israel on vaccine efficacy with Delta is out of line with other studies on the matter and is generally considered to suffer from some methodological flaws. See https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891 for a study out of Britain showing an efficacy of 88% against symptomatic infection. There is much more data that corroborates only slightly reduced efficacy and the Israel study is the outlier so anchoring to that number is probably a mistake. 2. The Pronvicetown study (where 74% of infected were vaccinated) doesn't tell you anything about vaccine efficacy. The vaccine rate for the town or state are irrelevant since the event in question included a large number of tourists. The town itself only has ~3000 people but there were 60k people there from all over the country at the week-long event. 3. Here is a study showing higher mutational variance in unvaccinated patients: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v.... This is exactly what we should expect. Vaccines drastically reduce the rate of transmission so we should have a strong prior that they would also reduce the rate of mutation.
- coding123 5y ago
  It's hardly capturing anything. People in HN complained a few months back that after they got the vaccine they felt like they suddenly had long covid. The CDC stopped measuring outcomes for vaccinated people in May. Isreal's data is showing things that are not published in the United States. Policy in the United States is not based on Isreal's data. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/quick-update-on-the-israeli-vaccine https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/quick-update-on-the-isra... Basically here's the gist that I'm guessing is happening: (This next part is just me and I haven't seen this ANYWHERE in the world - just fyi this could be considered mis-information but I'm sharing it anyway because I think I'm right and why wouldn't I ? lol) The Covid vaccines are NOT generating memory T-Cells that react to the spike protein. Instead the vaccine is simply causing a slow IgA reaction, much like you would get when you catch a cold. That IgA is protective against Covid - that's something we already know. We already know that if you recently had a cold or anything really that boosts your iga, you're going to have temporary protection against covid. That's what I think the vaccines are doing. We know that mrna does cause an iga boost, so one hypothesis I have is to just find things that can help boost IGA, and something less dangerous than mrna of the spike protein would be a much better idea for a iga booster than something that is failing as a memory t-cell responder.
  - thinkharderdev 5y ago
    This could be considered misinformation because it is misinformation. We can in fact measure these things and the mRNA vaccines have been demonstrated to generated a robust immune response including memory B cells: https://immunology.sciencemag.org/content/6/58/eabi6950 https://immunology.sciencemag.org/content/6/58/eabi6950 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6529/eabf4063 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6529/eabf4063
    - coding123 5y ago
      Thank you for sharing, that is effectively what I had been looking for! Please ignore my misinformation.
    - peteradio 5y ago
      That second link seems to be about natural immunity not vaccines.
- tzs 5y ago
  There was some CDC data published recently on breakthrough infections in the US (I don't have a better site--saw it somewhere on Apple New+). It worked out to 4 COVID hospitalizations or deaths per 100k. For comparison, that's about twice the US death rate due to flu in 2019, and about 1/40th the US death rate due to COVID before vaccinations were available (and before the delta variant was in the US). That's about 10x better than death rate pre-vaccination in the state that had the lowest death rate (Hawaii).
  - kadoban 5y ago
    Aren't you comparing Delta numbers for vaccine and pre-Delta numbers for no-vaccine then? So really you'd expect the difference to be even greater than that.
- YooLi 5y ago
  "To answer your last question (presumably non-rhetorical) I worry about unvaccinated people allowing for mutations via community spread..." Then you also should worry about Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE). "...as well as getting sick when they didn't have to, hurting themselves while taking up healthcare resources in the process." Like obese people?
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
New York state has an "Excelsior pass" that currently serves no purpose. You can use an app or print out a card with QR code to prove vaccination.
bern4444 5y ago
Vaccination in NY/NYC is easily proven. Picture of your vaccine card is sufficent and there's also the excelsior pass which is a QR code. Super easy to get from a city/state website after entering a few details (think name, when your last vaccine was, which vaccine etc). This can be downloaded as an image, into apple wallet etc. For those who chose not to, they can stick to carrying around their vaccine card (just as anyone carries around an ID, cash, credit card, cell phone, mask, etc) or just keep a picture of it on their phone The vaccine is free for everyone, so there's very little discrimination there. In NY there are plenty of sites to go to where you can walk in and be out today in under an hour. Likely half an hour. As to the privacy, yes, that's a fair concern but its literally no different than having to get a vaccine to travel to certain countries. Data exposed is minimal and not that much more than what would be gathered showing your ID when buying alcohol which contains your name, dob, address, etc. Far more personal information then if I'm vaxxed. Those who are ineligible for the vaccine (due to age mostly now) I don't think are subject to this. Most people with medical conditions are still able to get vaxxed. If not, they especially should not be going out. Those who are vaxxed and also immunocompromised have far less protection as well compared to their peers who aren't immunocompromised. Anyone over the minimum age qualifies for the vaccine. If people at this point are willfully choosing not to get vaccinated tough luck. Its absurd and they shouldn't be allowed to prevent those of us who care about each other and the community from enjoying life again.
- analyte123 5y ago
  Getting a vaccine to cross an international border is not the same as getting a vaccine to walk to a bar on your own street in your own country. Besides, people who have not had the Covid vaccine are not directly preventing anyone from enjoying life. The people are either choosing to not enjoy life themselves, or their government is putting restrictions on them (and then they are obeying them) while blaming the restrictions on non-vaccinated people.
  - Daishiman 5y ago
    Anywhere where an ICU bed is taken by an unvaxxed COVID patient is a bed that was available for anyone else for any other reason. Anwhere where unvaxxed people have to take time out because they're sick is time they could have spent working, contributing towards their families or communities, and someone is going to have to take up the work. So not, at a collective level, unvaccinated people are _very much_ preventing others from enjoying themselves.
dougmwne 5y ago
Yes, I am concerned about the "security theater" aspect of this. I want evidence that this is a valid approach, not moralizing. Otherwise we might as well start tossing virgins into Mount Etna for all the good it'll do.
creato 5y ago
> My problem is that the whole thing is based on old data and a false premise that life is safe when vaccinated people are only around vaccinated people. We know this is slightly more true than among the unvaccinated, but only by about 40%. This is real data. This is not "real data", it's not even clear what your number refers to. "Life is safe"?
dragonwriter 5y ago
> My problem is that the whole thing is based on old data and a false premise that life is safe when vaccinated people are only around vaccinated people. No, its not; its based on transmission being reduced and infections less dangerous among the vaccinated, which mitigates (though does not fully eliminate) the dangers of being fully open, and the policy judgement that the burden of requiring the (freely available) vaccine for such activity is warranted by the public health benefit.

alecst 5y ago

Great reply, thank you. I don't want to get into a long argument, but a lot of what you say hinges on that 40% number. I'd like to know what that refers to. My reply to that 40% number: I thought that vaccines made you something like 20x less likely to end up in the hospital from coronavirus (widely cited as 95% protective.) And that unvaccinated people spread at 5x the rate of the vaccinated ones. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02054-z Despite having done some research in virology for my MSc I definitely don't claim to be an expert. The field is really complex, and I'm always open to learning. So feel free to reply and educate me as long as we can keep it cordial. To answer your last question (presumably non-rhetorical) I worry about unvaccinated people allowing for mutations via community spread, as well as getting sick when they didn't have to, hurting themselves while taking up healthcare resources in the process. Is that unreasonable?

keneda7 5y ago
Not the original poster but The article you link says the delta is unknown. Delta is rapidly becoming the most common variant in the US. (https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210720/delta-variant-now-accounts-for-83-of-us-covid-cases https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210720/delta-variant-now-a...) I believe the 40% is coming from the data out of Israel. (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-vaccine-39percent-effective-in-israel-prevents-severe-illness.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...) Also data from the CDC on the latest outbreak they studies shows that 74% of the positives were vaccinated. At the time the vaccination rate was about 69% for the state. I can't find anything on the actual town. (https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/this-900-person-delta-cluster-in-mass-has-cdc-freaked-out-74-are-vaccinated/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/this-900-person-delt...) The CDC also has said vaccinated do in fact have high viral loads of the virus and can spread it (https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/07/30/1022867219/cdc-study-provincetown-delta-vaccinated-breakthrough-mask-guidance https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...) Do you happen to have any actual studies showing unvaccinated people are causing mutations? I have seen it repeated but never seen the study behind it. I do know leaky vaccines cause outbreaks to spread faster. This can be seen in the past. (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...) As for your last part. Lets look at it another way. Heart disease is the leading killer in the US. One of the best way to prevent heart disease is being physically fit and active. By your logic we should be mandating exercise for everyone to prevent it right? Shouldn't we also be forcing people to quite drinking and smoking as well? Overall its just a slippery slop when you give the government this right. What happens if conservatives get in power and decided abortion should be banned outright as they consider a fetus a person? By the same logic you are using, they would be perfectly reasonable to do that.
- hellisothers 5y ago
  While it’s possible to be infected and vaccinated the possibility is lower right, even “only” 40% is a huge number! If only vaccinated people are in a space it dramatically decreases the likelihood I’ll become infected by more than 40% because every one of those people is also personally 40% less likely to be infected, so this is compounding. Please correct me if I’m wrong on that assessment. As to the hear disease comment those comparisons are disingenuous because you can choose to exercise or not and your choice doesn’t impact others. My 7yo son cannot be vaccinated, he has no choose but to rely on others doing their part
  - keneda7 5y ago
    I am not sure about the compounding 40%. I don't know enough about infectious disease transfer. The previous poster had asked about the 40% so I was giving him the source. Personally I agree with you 40% is still better than 0%. As far as heart disease, in my opinion it does drastically impact other people. Heart disease patients take up hospital beds, they take up medical supplies, they take up doctors time. The CDC says ~1 in 4 deaths is due to heart disease. (https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm) It is a massive drain on our medical system (perhaps the greatest).
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  Whether it is proper for the government to mandate vaccines in certain situation is a complicated question but I think some of your priors are incorrect. 1. The data out of Israel on vaccine efficacy with Delta is out of line with other studies on the matter and is generally considered to suffer from some methodological flaws. See https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2108891 for a study out of Britain showing an efficacy of 88% against symptomatic infection. There is much more data that corroborates only slightly reduced efficacy and the Israel study is the outlier so anchoring to that number is probably a mistake. 2. The Pronvicetown study (where 74% of infected were vaccinated) doesn't tell you anything about vaccine efficacy. The vaccine rate for the town or state are irrelevant since the event in question included a large number of tourists. The town itself only has ~3000 people but there were 60k people there from all over the country at the week-long event. 3. Here is a study showing higher mutational variance in unvaccinated patients: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v.... This is exactly what we should expect. Vaccines drastically reduce the rate of transmission so we should have a strong prior that they would also reduce the rate of mutation.
coding123 5y ago
It's hardly capturing anything. People in HN complained a few months back that after they got the vaccine they felt like they suddenly had long covid. The CDC stopped measuring outcomes for vaccinated people in May. Isreal's data is showing things that are not published in the United States. Policy in the United States is not based on Isreal's data. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/quick-update-on-the-israeli-vaccine https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/quick-update-on-the-isra... Basically here's the gist that I'm guessing is happening: (This next part is just me and I haven't seen this ANYWHERE in the world - just fyi this could be considered mis-information but I'm sharing it anyway because I think I'm right and why wouldn't I ? lol) The Covid vaccines are NOT generating memory T-Cells that react to the spike protein. Instead the vaccine is simply causing a slow IgA reaction, much like you would get when you catch a cold. That IgA is protective against Covid - that's something we already know. We already know that if you recently had a cold or anything really that boosts your iga, you're going to have temporary protection against covid. That's what I think the vaccines are doing. We know that mrna does cause an iga boost, so one hypothesis I have is to just find things that can help boost IGA, and something less dangerous than mrna of the spike protein would be a much better idea for a iga booster than something that is failing as a memory t-cell responder.
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  This could be considered misinformation because it is misinformation. We can in fact measure these things and the mRNA vaccines have been demonstrated to generated a robust immune response including memory B cells: https://immunology.sciencemag.org/content/6/58/eabi6950 https://immunology.sciencemag.org/content/6/58/eabi6950 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6529/eabf4063 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6529/eabf4063
  - coding123 5y ago
    Thank you for sharing, that is effectively what I had been looking for! Please ignore my misinformation.
  - peteradio 5y ago
    That second link seems to be about natural immunity not vaccines.
tzs 5y ago
There was some CDC data published recently on breakthrough infections in the US (I don't have a better site--saw it somewhere on Apple New+). It worked out to 4 COVID hospitalizations or deaths per 100k. For comparison, that's about twice the US death rate due to flu in 2019, and about 1/40th the US death rate due to COVID before vaccinations were available (and before the delta variant was in the US). That's about 10x better than death rate pre-vaccination in the state that had the lowest death rate (Hawaii).
- kadoban 5y ago
  Aren't you comparing Delta numbers for vaccine and pre-Delta numbers for no-vaccine then? So really you'd expect the difference to be even greater than that.
YooLi 5y ago
"To answer your last question (presumably non-rhetorical) I worry about unvaccinated people allowing for mutations via community spread..." Then you also should worry about Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE). "...as well as getting sick when they didn't have to, hurting themselves while taking up healthcare resources in the process." Like obese people?

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

New York state has an "Excelsior pass" that currently serves no purpose. You can use an app or print out a card with QR code to prove vaccination.

bern4444 5y ago

Vaccination in NY/NYC is easily proven. Picture of your vaccine card is sufficent and there's also the excelsior pass which is a QR code. Super easy to get from a city/state website after entering a few details (think name, when your last vaccine was, which vaccine etc). This can be downloaded as an image, into apple wallet etc. For those who chose not to, they can stick to carrying around their vaccine card (just as anyone carries around an ID, cash, credit card, cell phone, mask, etc) or just keep a picture of it on their phone The vaccine is free for everyone, so there's very little discrimination there. In NY there are plenty of sites to go to where you can walk in and be out today in under an hour. Likely half an hour. As to the privacy, yes, that's a fair concern but its literally no different than having to get a vaccine to travel to certain countries. Data exposed is minimal and not that much more than what would be gathered showing your ID when buying alcohol which contains your name, dob, address, etc. Far more personal information then if I'm vaxxed. Those who are ineligible for the vaccine (due to age mostly now) I don't think are subject to this. Most people with medical conditions are still able to get vaxxed. If not, they especially should not be going out. Those who are vaxxed and also immunocompromised have far less protection as well compared to their peers who aren't immunocompromised. Anyone over the minimum age qualifies for the vaccine. If people at this point are willfully choosing not to get vaccinated tough luck. Its absurd and they shouldn't be allowed to prevent those of us who care about each other and the community from enjoying life again.

analyte123 5y ago
Getting a vaccine to cross an international border is not the same as getting a vaccine to walk to a bar on your own street in your own country. Besides, people who have not had the Covid vaccine are not directly preventing anyone from enjoying life. The people are either choosing to not enjoy life themselves, or their government is putting restrictions on them (and then they are obeying them) while blaming the restrictions on non-vaccinated people.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  Anywhere where an ICU bed is taken by an unvaxxed COVID patient is a bed that was available for anyone else for any other reason. Anwhere where unvaxxed people have to take time out because they're sick is time they could have spent working, contributing towards their families or communities, and someone is going to have to take up the work. So not, at a collective level, unvaccinated people are _very much_ preventing others from enjoying themselves.

dougmwne 5y ago

Yes, I am concerned about the "security theater" aspect of this. I want evidence that this is a valid approach, not moralizing. Otherwise we might as well start tossing virgins into Mount Etna for all the good it'll do.

creato 5y ago

> My problem is that the whole thing is based on old data and a false premise that life is safe when vaccinated people are only around vaccinated people. We know this is slightly more true than among the unvaccinated, but only by about 40%. This is real data. This is not "real data", it's not even clear what your number refers to. "Life is safe"?

dragonwriter 5y ago

> My problem is that the whole thing is based on old data and a false premise that life is safe when vaccinated people are only around vaccinated people. No, its not; its based on transmission being reduced and infections less dangerous among the vaccinated, which mitigates (though does not fully eliminate) the dangers of being fully open, and the policy judgement that the burden of requiring the (freely available) vaccine for such activity is warranted by the public health benefit.