8 ms·

Long COVID-like symptoms or not, the protection afforded by COVID vaccines still clearly outweighs the negatives. This holds true especially for at-risk populat

Long COVID-like symptoms or not, the protection afforded by COVID vaccines still clearly outweighs the negatives. This holds true especially for at-risk populations.

henriquez 5y ago
mfcl 5y ago
Yes, we know that, thank you. This is not what the story is about.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  Yes. But it still needs to be said. Other they may or may not work as good
RONROC 5y ago
This doesn’t seem like the case at all, considering, you know, the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything. In my experience (and this is anecdotal) there’s no rhyme or reason as to why this virus affects some people more than others. You can try to tell me why, but it would ask me to betray what i’ve witnessed (or lack thereof) over the past two years. The data isn’t reliable nor convincing, so i’m not sure how you’re in the definitive “experimental jab better than nothing” camp. PS - Two doses here.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  > the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything Unvaxxed people have 75x more hospitalization, 48x more death. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-breakthrough-infections-vaccines.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-brea...) "Compared with the unvaccinated, fully vaccinated people overall had a much lower chance of testing positive for the virus or dying from it, even through the summer’s Delta surge and the relaxation of pandemic restrictions in many parts of the country." (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-breakthrough-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-brea...) Vaccination definitely mitigates hospitalization and death.
  - landemva 5y ago
    It's starting to seem like the group who had it and recovered are ignored by the media. At least now the CDC is saying this group has more durable protection than the vaccinated. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm 'By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.'
    - 8note 5y ago
      The people who would have been hospitalized and died of covid already died in the previously infected group. You're looking at a fundamentally different group of people. If you didn't consider the vaccinated people who then died of covid, you'd see a lot less hospitalizations there too
      - landemva 5y ago
        Can you help me understand the focus of your comment? Should the current group who have recovered take the side-effect risks, or is the CDC note about reduced susceptibility to infection something to consider when making a decision about the first vaccine shot?
    - jb1991 5y ago
      There was an article just one or two days ago that indicated that vaccination prevents against hospitalization something like many multiples of times greater protection than recovery from prior infection.
      - peteradio 5y ago
        Link?
        jb1991 5y ago
        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029152244.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029152244.h...
- nradov 5y ago
  Beyond the vaccination factor, it's clear that this virus affects obese people more than others. Regardless of what you might have witnessed the data is crystal clear on that point. https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-children-in-covid-icus-are-overweight-but-public-health-officials-rarely-talk-about-obesity https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c... https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/view/1118/1127 https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/vi... https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospitalization-obesity-teenagers/ https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything. tell me that you're completely uninformed without telling me that you're completely uninformed.
john_moscow 5y ago
Well, then like with any other trade-off, we need to quantify and refine: * How much does the vaccination status reduce the chance of death/hospitalization? * How does it differ among age groups? * How does it change over time (not 2 doses vs. booster, but by time since the last dose)? * How does it affect the transmission rates? Given how many people are critical to masks/vaccines, you can easily find volunteers to do transmissibility tests in 2 buildings of comparable layout. * What about comorbidities? How does the benefit of losing extra weight compare to an extra vaccine dose? * What about suicides and the mental health in general? * How often are new variants expected to appear and what is the estimated vaccine efficiency against them? * What about the treatments? Can they be scaled up to be more affordable? Considering and openly discussing these factors could help our society find a reasonable compromise, but we are not doing that. We are pushing a single solution that benefits a small economic group at the expense of everyone else, and are recruiting the general population to wage a holy war against the dissenters. I don't like this at all.
- JimTheMan 5y ago
  You can already see the stats you mentioned. The unvaccinated get admitted to the ICU at staggering rates compared to the vaccinated. And given the spread of omicron, odds are that almost everyone will get exposed. I've had two near misses this week alone... Even at the anecdotal level everyone I know is vaccinated and no one is long term ill from it. I suspect the incessant querying from bad faith actors is more of an ideology than a true wish to seek an actual answer.
  - exodust 5y ago
    > The unvaccinated get admitted to the ICU at staggering rates compared to the vaccinated. Without breaking that down by age group, we are no better informed. Emotive words like "staggering" without mentioning the data, is unhelpful. It's common knowledge that elderly and unhealthy/vulnerable represent most ICU beds. I think it was Italy or Greece who have mandated the jab for over 60's. This sounds like an expert has formulated a policy that matches the challenge: that the 60+ age group are filling the hospital beds. If only more countries could formulate measured, level-headed responses to match the reality of the pandemic. It's not commonly known whether younger unvaccinated people who end up in ICU, are there because they're unvaccinated vs existing health condition. That comes down to individual hospitals and doctors reporting efforts. What we hear in media reports is a broad mashing of data, reduced down to an oversimplified message that unvaccinated people are filling the hospitals. When in fact, it's more likely that unvaccinated people from a specific age and health status group, are filling hospital beds.
throwme431 5y ago
> Long COVID-like symptoms or not, the protection afforded by COVID vaccines still clearly outweighs the negatives. I don't think it's that simple to make such a blanket statement anymore. In much/most of the developed world, over half the population has already received 2 doses of vaccine and the conversation is moving from "What about the people who choose to remain unvaccinated?" to "Are you fully vaccinated with just 2 doses?" and "How many boosters do we give and how frequently do we give them?" We've gone from thinking that we might need a booster a year to advising people to get boosters just months after a previous jab. In light of omicron, the cost/benefit analysis is not anywhere near as clear anymore, especially when it comes to these boosters. There's also the issue that risk varies by magnitudes of order between age and comorbidity risk groups, and overall risk of severe outcomes is lower for all groups with omicron. From the article: > She says she has preliminary evidence that vaccination can lead to microclots, although in most cases they go unnoticed and quickly disappear—an effect she and a colleague saw in their own blood and that of eight other healthy volunteers, which they sampled after their vaccinations. This highlights the fact that there's a ton we still don't know. What if there are subclinical effects of vaccination that have the potential to affect people's health in negative ways, either in the near term or long term? Even small changes in uncommonly tested biomarkers can be clinically meaningful over longer time periods. Perhaps it's reasonable to argue that made the right decision early on by accepting these unknown risks in light of the efficacy of the vaccines at preventing hospitalization and death pre-omicron. But is it reasonable to do that with never-ending boosters when the currently dominant strain is proving to be far less virulent in all groups? Is it still reasonable to push for vaccination and boosting of children and younger and middle-aged adults who are otherwise healthy and at significantly less risk than older, unhealthy groups? If we just blindly accept that the cost/benefit analysis of vaccination always favors vaccination, how would we ever know that we've crossed a line where that is no longer the case?
- mattzito 5y ago
  The cost-benefit of vaccination doesn’t always favor vaccination, which is why we mandate the polio vaccine but not the dengue fever vaccine, because the latter comes with attendant risks relative to the potential benefit. As far as the evolving science on what has to happen, well, it’s a rapidly changing situation. If someone had said at the start of the vaccine schedule, “hey, there’s going to be an incredibly infectious strain in late 2021 that will render vaccines much less effective”, maybe they would have mandated three shots up front. But they didn’t know that, and so when the first round of vaccine trial results came back with a 90%+ efficacy rates, I remember there were people arguing that those numbers were TOO effective, and we should reduce the volume of the second dose or remove it entirely in order to vaccinate more people. Good thing we didn’t do that. As far as the whatabouts - great, yes, therapeutics are great. More therapeutics. But focusing on omicron’s reduced level of severe cases misses the point of vaccination, which is that we don’t only vaccinate for ourselves, we do it to try to reduce spread in the community. We vaccinate to try to make it less likely that new variants that are better at escaping immune response arise. Maybe if everyone had embraced vaccination we wouldn’t be close to 2k dead/day.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
native_samples 5y ago
It's not that clear unfortunately. Consider that all-cause death rate is a lot higher in the under-40s vaccinated than the under-40s unvaccinated (UK recently released stats on this): https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-covid-deaths https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-cov... That simply shouldn't be happening. The death rate gets 4x higher over last summer, it's an enormous difference. Even if you think there's some statistical or other problem causing this it cannot be said things are "clear" when such basic data has gone in the wrong direction.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Your article points out why this might be the case. If the vaccinated are less healthy, independent of the vaccine, they will die more.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    The bias runs in the opposite direction: the vaccinated are supposed to be more healthy, not less, because people on death's door aren't being vaccinated at all.
blub 5y ago
Although this comment is a cliche and it's been already shown to be incorrect in another reply, I'd like to also point out that any such new data that surfaces will likely change the risk/reward ratio for subsets of the population or in regard to boosters.

Long COVID-like symptoms or not, the protection afforded by COVID vaccines still clearly outweighs the negatives. This holds true especially for at-risk populations.

henriquez 5y ago

mfcl 5y ago

Yes, we know that, thank you. This is not what the story is about.

NullPrefix 5y ago
Yes. But it still needs to be said. Other they may or may not work as good

RONROC 5y ago

This doesn’t seem like the case at all, considering, you know, the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything. In my experience (and this is anecdotal) there’s no rhyme or reason as to why this virus affects some people more than others. You can try to tell me why, but it would ask me to betray what i’ve witnessed (or lack thereof) over the past two years. The data isn’t reliable nor convincing, so i’m not sure how you’re in the definitive “experimental jab better than nothing” camp. PS - Two doses here.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago
> the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything Unvaxxed people have 75x more hospitalization, 48x more death. (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-breakthrough-infections-vaccines.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-brea...) "Compared with the unvaccinated, fully vaccinated people overall had a much lower chance of testing positive for the virus or dying from it, even through the summer’s Delta surge and the relaxation of pandemic restrictions in many parts of the country." (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-breakthrough-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-brea...) Vaccination definitely mitigates hospitalization and death.
- landemva 5y ago
  It's starting to seem like the group who had it and recovered are ignored by the media. At least now the CDC is saying this group has more durable protection than the vaccinated. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm 'By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.'
  - 8note 5y ago
    The people who would have been hospitalized and died of covid already died in the previously infected group. You're looking at a fundamentally different group of people. If you didn't consider the vaccinated people who then died of covid, you'd see a lot less hospitalizations there too
    - landemva 5y ago
      Can you help me understand the focus of your comment? Should the current group who have recovered take the side-effect risks, or is the CDC note about reduced susceptibility to infection something to consider when making a decision about the first vaccine shot?
  - jb1991 5y ago
    There was an article just one or two days ago that indicated that vaccination prevents against hospitalization something like many multiples of times greater protection than recovery from prior infection.
    - peteradio 5y ago
      Link?
      - jb1991 5y ago
        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029152244.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029152244.h...
nradov 5y ago
Beyond the vaccination factor, it's clear that this virus affects obese people more than others. Regardless of what you might have witnessed the data is crystal clear on that point. https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-children-in-covid-icus-are-overweight-but-public-health-officials-rarely-talk-about-obesity https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c... https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/view/1118/1127 https://cardiologyres.org/index.php/Cardiologyres/article/vi... https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospitalization-obesity-teenagers/ https://reason.com/2022/01/03/cdc-covid-19-children-hospital...
lamontcg 5y ago
> the fact that they don’t really definitely mitigate anything. tell me that you're completely uninformed without telling me that you're completely uninformed.

john_moscow 5y ago

Well, then like with any other trade-off, we need to quantify and refine: * How much does the vaccination status reduce the chance of death/hospitalization? * How does it differ among age groups? * How does it change over time (not 2 doses vs. booster, but by time since the last dose)? * How does it affect the transmission rates? Given how many people are critical to masks/vaccines, you can easily find volunteers to do transmissibility tests in 2 buildings of comparable layout. * What about comorbidities? How does the benefit of losing extra weight compare to an extra vaccine dose? * What about suicides and the mental health in general? * How often are new variants expected to appear and what is the estimated vaccine efficiency against them? * What about the treatments? Can they be scaled up to be more affordable? Considering and openly discussing these factors could help our society find a reasonable compromise, but we are not doing that. We are pushing a single solution that benefits a small economic group at the expense of everyone else, and are recruiting the general population to wage a holy war against the dissenters. I don't like this at all.

JimTheMan 5y ago
You can already see the stats you mentioned. The unvaccinated get admitted to the ICU at staggering rates compared to the vaccinated. And given the spread of omicron, odds are that almost everyone will get exposed. I've had two near misses this week alone... Even at the anecdotal level everyone I know is vaccinated and no one is long term ill from it. I suspect the incessant querying from bad faith actors is more of an ideology than a true wish to seek an actual answer.
- exodust 5y ago
  > The unvaccinated get admitted to the ICU at staggering rates compared to the vaccinated. Without breaking that down by age group, we are no better informed. Emotive words like "staggering" without mentioning the data, is unhelpful. It's common knowledge that elderly and unhealthy/vulnerable represent most ICU beds. I think it was Italy or Greece who have mandated the jab for over 60's. This sounds like an expert has formulated a policy that matches the challenge: that the 60+ age group are filling the hospital beds. If only more countries could formulate measured, level-headed responses to match the reality of the pandemic. It's not commonly known whether younger unvaccinated people who end up in ICU, are there because they're unvaccinated vs existing health condition. That comes down to individual hospitals and doctors reporting efforts. What we hear in media reports is a broad mashing of data, reduced down to an oversimplified message that unvaccinated people are filling the hospitals. When in fact, it's more likely that unvaccinated people from a specific age and health status group, are filling hospital beds.

throwme431 5y ago

> Long COVID-like symptoms or not, the protection afforded by COVID vaccines still clearly outweighs the negatives. I don't think it's that simple to make such a blanket statement anymore. In much/most of the developed world, over half the population has already received 2 doses of vaccine and the conversation is moving from "What about the people who choose to remain unvaccinated?" to "Are you fully vaccinated with just 2 doses?" and "How many boosters do we give and how frequently do we give them?" We've gone from thinking that we might need a booster a year to advising people to get boosters just months after a previous jab. In light of omicron, the cost/benefit analysis is not anywhere near as clear anymore, especially when it comes to these boosters. There's also the issue that risk varies by magnitudes of order between age and comorbidity risk groups, and overall risk of severe outcomes is lower for all groups with omicron. From the article: > She says she has preliminary evidence that vaccination can lead to microclots, although in most cases they go unnoticed and quickly disappear—an effect she and a colleague saw in their own blood and that of eight other healthy volunteers, which they sampled after their vaccinations. This highlights the fact that there's a ton we still don't know. What if there are subclinical effects of vaccination that have the potential to affect people's health in negative ways, either in the near term or long term? Even small changes in uncommonly tested biomarkers can be clinically meaningful over longer time periods. Perhaps it's reasonable to argue that made the right decision early on by accepting these unknown risks in light of the efficacy of the vaccines at preventing hospitalization and death pre-omicron. But is it reasonable to do that with never-ending boosters when the currently dominant strain is proving to be far less virulent in all groups? Is it still reasonable to push for vaccination and boosting of children and younger and middle-aged adults who are otherwise healthy and at significantly less risk than older, unhealthy groups? If we just blindly accept that the cost/benefit analysis of vaccination always favors vaccination, how would we ever know that we've crossed a line where that is no longer the case?

mattzito 5y ago
The cost-benefit of vaccination doesn’t always favor vaccination, which is why we mandate the polio vaccine but not the dengue fever vaccine, because the latter comes with attendant risks relative to the potential benefit. As far as the evolving science on what has to happen, well, it’s a rapidly changing situation. If someone had said at the start of the vaccine schedule, “hey, there’s going to be an incredibly infectious strain in late 2021 that will render vaccines much less effective”, maybe they would have mandated three shots up front. But they didn’t know that, and so when the first round of vaccine trial results came back with a 90%+ efficacy rates, I remember there were people arguing that those numbers were TOO effective, and we should reduce the volume of the second dose or remove it entirely in order to vaccinate more people. Good thing we didn’t do that. As far as the whatabouts - great, yes, therapeutics are great. More therapeutics. But focusing on omicron’s reduced level of severe cases misses the point of vaccination, which is that we don’t only vaccinate for ourselves, we do it to try to reduce spread in the community. We vaccinate to try to make it less likely that new variants that are better at escaping immune response arise. Maybe if everyone had embraced vaccination we wouldn’t be close to 2k dead/day.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

native_samples 5y ago

It's not that clear unfortunately. Consider that all-cause death rate is a lot higher in the under-40s vaccinated than the under-40s unvaccinated (UK recently released stats on this): https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-covid-deaths https://bartram.substack.com/p/the-impact-of-time-on-non-cov... That simply shouldn't be happening. The death rate gets 4x higher over last summer, it's an enormous difference. Even if you think there's some statistical or other problem causing this it cannot be said things are "clear" when such basic data has gone in the wrong direction.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
Your article points out why this might be the case. If the vaccinated are less healthy, independent of the vaccine, they will die more.
- native_samples 5y ago
  The bias runs in the opposite direction: the vaccinated are supposed to be more healthy, not less, because people on death's door aren't being vaccinated at all.

blub 5y ago

Although this comment is a cliche and it's been already shown to be incorrect in another reply, I'd like to also point out that any such new data that surfaces will likely change the risk/reward ratio for subsets of the population or in regard to boosters.