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Sure, but we can make the virus largely irrelevant in terms of its impact on peoples lives. We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequence

Sure, but we can make the virus largely irrelevant in terms of its impact on peoples lives. We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals. We can make it harder for new, more dangerous, variants to arise.

runarberg 5y ago
I do think it is important to use the correct terminology here. This disease and the vaccines are already a huge spread of misinformation, so lets expand on the “sure” bit from this sentence a little. It is saying quite a lot: I don’t think any expert nor any public health department is working with the goal of eradication in mind. So we should acknowledge the fact that these vaccines will probably not eradicate COVID. We will have people getting sick from COVID and we will have more COVID variants for the foreseeable future. Even after most people have been thoroughly vaccinated. And given the slow global spread of vaccines we will also probably see more lockdown measures to slow the spread of the virus beyond the current vaccine capabilities. Now that said, remember that with the vaccines: > we can make the virus largely irrelevant in terms of its impact on peoples lives. We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals. We can make it harder for new, more dangerous, variants to arise.
- VoodooJuJu 5y ago
  >I don’t think any expert nor any public health department is working with the goal of eradication in mind I believe I speak for many when I say, "I have no idea what the experts' have in mind" (and that's not a good thing). So they're trying hard to get everyone vaccinated - a noble goal, perhaps, as our current roster of vaccines diminish symptoms and greatly reduce hospitalization and fatality rates. But..."Stop the spread, get vaccinated"...what? Like the parent said, all of the currently-approved intramuscular Covid-19 vaccines have proven to have a negligible effect on transmission rate. Early on, experts probably made an educated guess or wish that these vaccines would be sterilizing and started information campaigns on this premise. When this turned out to be not true, their "Stop the spread, get vaccinated" became "You unvaccinated are the problem, you are holding us back, and you will be locked down immediately". Rather than address their mistake, rather than open up transparently, they doubled down on the lie. Not a good way to build trust.
  - tchalla 5y ago
    > Like the parent said, all of the currently-approved intramuscular Covid-19 vaccines have proven to have a negligible effect on transmission rate. Multiple studies show that vaccinated people have lower transmission than unvaccinated. > In studies conducted before the emergence of the Delta variant, data from multiple studies in different countries suggested that people vaccinated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines who develop COVID-19 generally have a lower viral load than unvaccinated people.(157, 165-169) This observation may indicate reduced transmissibility, as viral load has been identified as a key driver of transmission.(170) Studies from multiple countries found significantly reduced likelihood of transmission to household contacts from people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were previously vaccinated for COVID-19.(171-176) For the Delta variant, early data indicate vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with Delta have similar levels of viral RNA and culturable virus detected, indicating that some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 may be able to transmit the virus to others.(163, 164, 177-180) However, other studies have shown a more rapid decline in viral RNA and culturable virus in fully vaccinated people (96, 177, 180-182). One study observed that Delta infection in fully vaccinated persons was associated with significantly less transmission to contacts than persons who were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.(181) Together, these studies suggest that vaccinated people who become infected with Delta have potential to be less infectious than infected unvaccinated people. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/fully-vaccinated-people.html#infections-fully-vaccinated https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
caeril 5y ago
> We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals. Huh. Curious, what kind of insane abrogations of bodily autonomy have you been advocating for the last 20 years of the obesity epidemic? I can't find anything in your post history advocating for mandatory calorie restriction for fat people, to "reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals" for a condition that has not only killed FAR more people than COVID itself, but is the second significant comorbidity of it, and is likely responsible for more COVID deaths than vaccine hesitancy.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  Obese people don't take up literally the entirety of ICU capacity in heavily-affected areas[1], nor does obesity spread exponentially in a matter of months. [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/indiana-covid-boy-cancer-treatment-1621966 https://www.newsweek.com/indiana-covid-boy-cancer-treatment-...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - remarkEon 5y ago
    But obese and overweight people are the strain on the system. That's it, to the tune of 78% of hospitalizations as of March '21[1]. I sincerely doubt the numbers have changed much since then and I'm not going to bother to look for a follow-up study. If people in the United States weren't outrageously unhealthy, this pandemic would not have caused the awfully high number of deaths that it did. You are totally correct that obesity doesn't spread exponentially, but it exponentially increases your risk of having a bad time with this disease. This will sound harsh, but I'm not really a fan of locking down young healthy people and forcing them to put their lives on pause because so much of America can't go for a run or get in the squat rack. The conversation no one wants to have right now, because were so steeped in arguing over what vaccines - mandated or not - can or cannot do, is one about how we actually get Americans to shed some weight and eat better. Ironically, closing the gyms "because covid" will make this problem worse. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughly-78percent-of-people-hospitalized-were-overweight-or-obese.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughl...
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
We could do that for smoking too, but since smoking is a choice, we let people smoke and die. Why not do the same with the vaccines? As with smoking, the unvaccinated are taking all the risks.
- mattzito 5y ago
  Except that the resources that are going to care for the unvaccinated might block someone who is vaccinated from needed medical care. It also increases the amount of exposure someone who IS vaccinated needs to contend with, and as is mentioned over and over again, vaccines are imperfect. A colleague of mine has an elderly father who is vaccinated and in the ICU with Covid. The odds are much higher that he was infected by an unvaccinated person. Also smoking is a terrible example - we tax cigarettes highly to discourage smoking because it’s a drag on our medical system. We ban the act of smoking in a wide variety of locations because it has an impact on other peoples health. Some buildings even disallow people to smoke in their private homes, and some cities disallow smoking in offices. We put restrictions on almost every aspect of smoking because it doesn’t only affect the smoker.
  - EricE 5y ago
    >Except that the resources that are going to care for the unvaccinated might block someone who is vaccinated from needed medical care. This was the great excuse euthanasia advocates used for aborting babies with disabilities. Some great company you are keeping there.
    - lxgr 5y ago
      Surely you can‘t be comparing administering a vaccine (which has much fewer adverse effects than the disease of which it prevents severe outcomes) to euthanasia?
    - mattzito 5y ago
      Aside from the absurdity of comparing recommended vaccination as a responsible social welfare act to the murder of children, the comparison isn’t even apt. My point was about short-term and critical healthcare resources, and the eugenics argument was about long term waste of societal resources. If anything, the smoking comparison is a little more apt because smokers ARE long term drains on societal resources. But still no one is arguing about killing smokers.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
We have no real studies, but if covid does "irreversible" small damage, even in vaccinated and that accumulates, it could lead to a life-expectancy drop of 30 years. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95565-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95565-8 We could all dance the Darth Vader after 20 years of Covid even with vaccination. But we certainly will without.
- kelnos 5y ago
  > We could all dance the Darth Vader Er... what now?
EricE 5y ago
How can you do that by only vaccinating humans. You do know COVID is carried by animals too, right? https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/health/covid-deer-animals/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/health/covid-deer-animals/ind... You going to vaccinate all the animals too? Or just dogmatically stick to the "unvaccinated people are selfish" because it best fits your political world view - damn the science? Want to make this virus irrelevant? If Omicron is as mild as the doctors in South Africa are reporting then here is our path to herd immunity. Which is going to happen no matter what governments fuss and fume about. Even New Zealand finally gave up on their ridiculous quarantine strategy.
- mattzito 5y ago
  I’m just confused about the argument you are making here - that if our options are: A) let’s all get a couple of shots to reduce our risk of death, serious illness, and make it less likely that other people get sick, not to mention making it less likely that new variants will emerge by making transmission harder or B) let’s have no vaccinations and let the virus sort it out, like we did with, say, the 1918 flu? Or polio, measles, or smallpox? or C) let people get vaccinated or not, it’s their business, but putting societal pressure on them is overbearing and eventually pointless That of those options we should choose either B or C? Because B is how we dealt with illnesses until we had vaccinations to make them harder to get and less deadly. Then we started…vaccinating people. And now measles is still a thing, but no one worries about it, except that cases are going up because people aren’t getting vaccinated. So B seems like a bad plan, because we tried that and it sucked, and then we did A with measles and things got a lot better. C is certainly a lot more personal liberty-oriented, which I get the appeal of, but society is fundamentally about giving up some amount of individual liberty in exchange for shared and communal benefits. C is actually what is happening in some places with measles vaccinations, where individuals say, “I don’t need to be vaccinated because herd immunity will save me”, which not only means that (despite claiming personal liberty) those people are relying on the vaccinated people to protect them, but that they’re willing to put others at risk (because vaccines aren’t perfect) in exchange for their individual liberty. This seems like C is a pretty raw deal for the liberty and rights of the people who would rather not get infected by, say, measles. Or Covid. B and C both seem like bad plans. A seems pretty good, but I realize you’re not going to be convinced of that. B is pretty indefensible, I don’t think anyone would argue we should just let Covid run through the world and kill millions and millions more people. Or maybe you do, I don’t know. Seems bad. But with C, the only way you can argue it’s not selfish to look after your own preferences is if you believe that the outcomes of option A, B, and C are the same. That it doesn’t matter - the same amount of people will die, and the same amount of people will get infected, and the same amount of people will permanently lose their sense of taste or smell, and the same amount of people will end up in the hospital. That fundamentally the outcomes of all three scenarios are identical. But there’s no way that’s the case, right? It just doesn’t make sense. So if there IS a difference, then A is everyone doing as much as reasonably possible to make things better, B is everyone giving up and accepting whatever happens, and C is valuing your interests above the opportunity to help others. That’s the definition of selfishness.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

runarberg 5y ago

I do think it is important to use the correct terminology here. This disease and the vaccines are already a huge spread of misinformation, so lets expand on the “sure” bit from this sentence a little. It is saying quite a lot: I don’t think any expert nor any public health department is working with the goal of eradication in mind. So we should acknowledge the fact that these vaccines will probably not eradicate COVID. We will have people getting sick from COVID and we will have more COVID variants for the foreseeable future. Even after most people have been thoroughly vaccinated. And given the slow global spread of vaccines we will also probably see more lockdown measures to slow the spread of the virus beyond the current vaccine capabilities. Now that said, remember that with the vaccines: > we can make the virus largely irrelevant in terms of its impact on peoples lives. We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals. We can make it harder for new, more dangerous, variants to arise.

VoodooJuJu 5y ago
>I don’t think any expert nor any public health department is working with the goal of eradication in mind I believe I speak for many when I say, "I have no idea what the experts' have in mind" (and that's not a good thing). So they're trying hard to get everyone vaccinated - a noble goal, perhaps, as our current roster of vaccines diminish symptoms and greatly reduce hospitalization and fatality rates. But..."Stop the spread, get vaccinated"...what? Like the parent said, all of the currently-approved intramuscular Covid-19 vaccines have proven to have a negligible effect on transmission rate. Early on, experts probably made an educated guess or wish that these vaccines would be sterilizing and started information campaigns on this premise. When this turned out to be not true, their "Stop the spread, get vaccinated" became "You unvaccinated are the problem, you are holding us back, and you will be locked down immediately". Rather than address their mistake, rather than open up transparently, they doubled down on the lie. Not a good way to build trust.
- tchalla 5y ago
  > Like the parent said, all of the currently-approved intramuscular Covid-19 vaccines have proven to have a negligible effect on transmission rate. Multiple studies show that vaccinated people have lower transmission than unvaccinated. > In studies conducted before the emergence of the Delta variant, data from multiple studies in different countries suggested that people vaccinated with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines who develop COVID-19 generally have a lower viral load than unvaccinated people.(157, 165-169) This observation may indicate reduced transmissibility, as viral load has been identified as a key driver of transmission.(170) Studies from multiple countries found significantly reduced likelihood of transmission to household contacts from people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were previously vaccinated for COVID-19.(171-176) For the Delta variant, early data indicate vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with Delta have similar levels of viral RNA and culturable virus detected, indicating that some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 may be able to transmit the virus to others.(163, 164, 177-180) However, other studies have shown a more rapid decline in viral RNA and culturable virus in fully vaccinated people (96, 177, 180-182). One study observed that Delta infection in fully vaccinated persons was associated with significantly less transmission to contacts than persons who were unvaccinated or partially vaccinated.(181) Together, these studies suggest that vaccinated people who become infected with Delta have potential to be less infectious than infected unvaccinated people. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/fully-vaccinated-people.html#infections-fully-vaccinated https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

caeril 5y ago

> We can reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals. Huh. Curious, what kind of insane abrogations of bodily autonomy have you been advocating for the last 20 years of the obesity epidemic? I can't find anything in your post history advocating for mandatory calorie restriction for fat people, to "reduce the number of people who suffer long term consequences, the number of deaths, and the load on hospitals" for a condition that has not only killed FAR more people than COVID itself, but is the second significant comorbidity of it, and is likely responsible for more COVID deaths than vaccine hesitancy.

crooked-v 5y ago
Obese people don't take up literally the entirety of ICU capacity in heavily-affected areas[1], nor does obesity spread exponentially in a matter of months. [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/indiana-covid-boy-cancer-treatment-1621966 https://www.newsweek.com/indiana-covid-boy-cancer-treatment-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- remarkEon 5y ago
  But obese and overweight people are the strain on the system. That's it, to the tune of 78% of hospitalizations as of March '21[1]. I sincerely doubt the numbers have changed much since then and I'm not going to bother to look for a follow-up study. If people in the United States weren't outrageously unhealthy, this pandemic would not have caused the awfully high number of deaths that it did. You are totally correct that obesity doesn't spread exponentially, but it exponentially increases your risk of having a bad time with this disease. This will sound harsh, but I'm not really a fan of locking down young healthy people and forcing them to put their lives on pause because so much of America can't go for a run or get in the squat rack. The conversation no one wants to have right now, because were so steeped in arguing over what vaccines - mandated or not - can or cannot do, is one about how we actually get Americans to shed some weight and eat better. Ironically, closing the gyms "because covid" will make this problem worse. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughly-78percent-of-people-hospitalized-were-overweight-or-obese.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/08/covid-cdc-study-finds-roughl...

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

We could do that for smoking too, but since smoking is a choice, we let people smoke and die. Why not do the same with the vaccines? As with smoking, the unvaccinated are taking all the risks.

mattzito 5y ago
Except that the resources that are going to care for the unvaccinated might block someone who is vaccinated from needed medical care. It also increases the amount of exposure someone who IS vaccinated needs to contend with, and as is mentioned over and over again, vaccines are imperfect. A colleague of mine has an elderly father who is vaccinated and in the ICU with Covid. The odds are much higher that he was infected by an unvaccinated person. Also smoking is a terrible example - we tax cigarettes highly to discourage smoking because it’s a drag on our medical system. We ban the act of smoking in a wide variety of locations because it has an impact on other peoples health. Some buildings even disallow people to smoke in their private homes, and some cities disallow smoking in offices. We put restrictions on almost every aspect of smoking because it doesn’t only affect the smoker.
- EricE 5y ago
  >Except that the resources that are going to care for the unvaccinated might block someone who is vaccinated from needed medical care. This was the great excuse euthanasia advocates used for aborting babies with disabilities. Some great company you are keeping there.
  - lxgr 5y ago
    Surely you can‘t be comparing administering a vaccine (which has much fewer adverse effects than the disease of which it prevents severe outcomes) to euthanasia?
  - mattzito 5y ago
    Aside from the absurdity of comparing recommended vaccination as a responsible social welfare act to the murder of children, the comparison isn’t even apt. My point was about short-term and critical healthcare resources, and the eugenics argument was about long term waste of societal resources. If anything, the smoking comparison is a little more apt because smokers ARE long term drains on societal resources. But still no one is arguing about killing smokers.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

We have no real studies, but if covid does "irreversible" small damage, even in vaccinated and that accumulates, it could lead to a life-expectancy drop of 30 years. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95565-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95565-8 We could all dance the Darth Vader after 20 years of Covid even with vaccination. But we certainly will without.

kelnos 5y ago
> We could all dance the Darth Vader Er... what now?

EricE 5y ago

How can you do that by only vaccinating humans. You do know COVID is carried by animals too, right? https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/health/covid-deer-animals/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/17/health/covid-deer-animals/ind... You going to vaccinate all the animals too? Or just dogmatically stick to the "unvaccinated people are selfish" because it best fits your political world view - damn the science? Want to make this virus irrelevant? If Omicron is as mild as the doctors in South Africa are reporting then here is our path to herd immunity. Which is going to happen no matter what governments fuss and fume about. Even New Zealand finally gave up on their ridiculous quarantine strategy.

mattzito 5y ago
I’m just confused about the argument you are making here - that if our options are: A) let’s all get a couple of shots to reduce our risk of death, serious illness, and make it less likely that other people get sick, not to mention making it less likely that new variants will emerge by making transmission harder or B) let’s have no vaccinations and let the virus sort it out, like we did with, say, the 1918 flu? Or polio, measles, or smallpox? or C) let people get vaccinated or not, it’s their business, but putting societal pressure on them is overbearing and eventually pointless That of those options we should choose either B or C? Because B is how we dealt with illnesses until we had vaccinations to make them harder to get and less deadly. Then we started…vaccinating people. And now measles is still a thing, but no one worries about it, except that cases are going up because people aren’t getting vaccinated. So B seems like a bad plan, because we tried that and it sucked, and then we did A with measles and things got a lot better. C is certainly a lot more personal liberty-oriented, which I get the appeal of, but society is fundamentally about giving up some amount of individual liberty in exchange for shared and communal benefits. C is actually what is happening in some places with measles vaccinations, where individuals say, “I don’t need to be vaccinated because herd immunity will save me”, which not only means that (despite claiming personal liberty) those people are relying on the vaccinated people to protect them, but that they’re willing to put others at risk (because vaccines aren’t perfect) in exchange for their individual liberty. This seems like C is a pretty raw deal for the liberty and rights of the people who would rather not get infected by, say, measles. Or Covid. B and C both seem like bad plans. A seems pretty good, but I realize you’re not going to be convinced of that. B is pretty indefensible, I don’t think anyone would argue we should just let Covid run through the world and kill millions and millions more people. Or maybe you do, I don’t know. Seems bad. But with C, the only way you can argue it’s not selfish to look after your own preferences is if you believe that the outcomes of option A, B, and C are the same. That it doesn’t matter - the same amount of people will die, and the same amount of people will get infected, and the same amount of people will permanently lose their sense of taste or smell, and the same amount of people will end up in the hospital. That fundamentally the outcomes of all three scenarios are identical. But there’s no way that’s the case, right? It just doesn’t make sense. So if there IS a difference, then A is everyone doing as much as reasonably possible to make things better, B is everyone giving up and accepting whatever happens, and C is valuing your interests above the opportunity to help others. That’s the definition of selfishness.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]