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I don’t get it, there was some hope that vaccines could end the pandemic. They didn’t. But they still help, at least by making people much less likely to die. I

I don’t get it, there was some hope that vaccines could end the pandemic. They didn’t. But they still help, at least by making people much less likely to die. Is there something to be mad at? Hell, even if they ended up not helping much, I wouldn’t be mad at governments for trying. I must be missing something.

peteradio 5y ago
Nobodies pissed at the government for making vaccines available, they are pissed that they are having their livelihoods threatened based on false premises.
spookthesunset 5y ago
Doesn't matter if the pandemic ended or not. Society (or at least the politicians) chose to regress. The virus is a virus. It doesn't tell us how to react to it. We do. Many states didn't regress during delta. They kept calm and carried on with normal. Only some states decided to regress. And the outcomes are almost identical--in the same ballpark at least.
- altcognito 5y ago
  I’m always amused by mask mandates as regressing and “doing nothing for public health” as keeping calm.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Mask mandates say “vaccines dont work” and “stay scared”. They are dehumanizing. Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them. We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence. Especially post vaccine. Maybe people want to move on? Mayne those people have incredibly valid reasons for they wish? Maybe the government should respect that?
    - notriddle 5y ago
      > They are dehumanizing. It's a piece of cloth worn over your nose and mouth. How fragile is your sense of humanity? > Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them. I don't like wearing shoes, but that doesn't make shoe mandates (which are totally a thing, but only private businesses, not by government order) dehumanizing. > We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence. Is that straw man dead yet? > Especially post vaccine. On this point, I actually agree. Would vaccine mandates be acceptable instead? It would be much more effective than mask mandates (which, while I have no real problem with them in principle, don't actually work that well because so many people don't wear them correctly).
      - throwaway22032 5y ago
      - darkerside 5y ago
        What about a mandate against wearing shoes, when many are more comfortable wearing them? I think the argument here is that any mandate beyond the bare minimum is harmful to freedom. Just because you don't mind wearing a mask doesn't mean others can't. I say this as someone who doesn't mind masks and wears them often.
        qsdf38100 5y ago
        If not wearing shoes was potentially helping health services to keep being functional, then yes it would make sense to mandate it. Harmful to freedom? What about the freedom of having functional health services? I keep hearing about freedom but freedom isn't about doing whatever we want, we also have to consider the freedom of others not to suffer from our actions. I consider my suffering of wearing a mask laughable compared to the suffering of people unable to get health care when their life depends on it. I'm happy to wear it even if in the future it turns out they weren't helping significantly.
  - throwaway1777 5y ago
    Because masks never really made any statistical impact on the virus spread, so requiring them at this point means you’re not following the data you’re following something else. (I was pro-mask for a while before we had data)
    - altcognito 5y ago
      Let the surgeons know. Yes, compliance and knowing how to wear a mask has been an issue. That's not the same thing as "masks don't work." This is a random place to put this, but I just want to point out that I think for the most part even mask wearing is not required anymore (unless you are sick, but why are you going anywhere sick?) Part of the reason I put it here is that I want to make sure it's understood that despite the fact I'm pretty pro-vax, pro-mask and generally supported the lockdowns at the time -- we're past all that for now with Omicron. Things are still a mess, and the facts on the ground could change, but I think it's important that everybody gets on the same page that we're moving on.
      - throwaway1777 5y ago
        Sounds like we basically agree even though we are coming at it from different angles.
        altcognito 5y ago
        Not really. I'm saying masks work and mandates are necessary public health policy. Regardless of a mandate, people will do what they do even if it's not in their best interests, or in the interests of their loved ones, or the interests of their neighbors. They will smoke in public places, they will goto work sick, they will drive drunk. Frankly put, people can be jerks. So you put a mandate out there, and you do your best. Masks work. In areas where mask utilization is high, there is good air filtration and people follow distancing rules, the spread is slowed.
      - vondur 5y ago
        Masks are still required where I live, yet we have some of the highest infection rates in the country. (Southern California)
  - nradov 5y ago
    At this point there's no valid scientific or medical reason to continue with mask mandates. I recommend listening to UCSF infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi who provides a clear explanation of the current situation. https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/
asveikau 5y ago
What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic. By that I mean... That is a very reasonable position to hold only 3 months ago. And I still think the vaccines are substantially accelerating the end. So I'm not even sure what the complaint is. That it isn't the only factor? Sure, but it's a huge one, and one of few that we can control.
- ssl232 5y ago
  > What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic. I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths. This avoids all of the problems around classifcations of deaths with/from COVID, vaccination statuses, etc. It's much harder to disguise deaths or lack of deaths. EuroMOMO [1; scroll 60% down to the z-scores] shows excess deaths in Europe basically went back to normal in most countries after the European wave in spring 2020, long before vaccines were available. This was the case despite widely varying levels of lockdown stringency - with at least one country, Sweden, not doing any significant locking down at all. And many countries' peaks at this time were, if you scroll back in time, comparable in magnitude to excess deaths during previous winters. If you draw a line in your mind down the various countries' graphs at early 2021 when significant fractions of the populations of these countries were starting to get vaccinated, you will probably struggle to determine that they've had any real positive effect at all. Once you do that, consider an alternative hypothesis could better describe the data, for example that the virus is highly seasonal and we have very little control over it. Now, a bonus: change the age group from "all ages" to younger cohorts and observe that in many countries excess deaths did not shift from resembling noise during the entirely of the past 2 years. There are even some countries, not known for being paragons of good health such as Scotland, that barely saw any out of the ordinary excess deaths in the young during the whole period. I think people seem to think things are far worse than they actually are in most countries because of the panic created by media and politicians. This is why I am very unconvinced by the argument that vaccines have been helping to end the pandemic, at very least amongst most of those who have been locked down. It seems much more reasonable to me that other factors are at play here. [1] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
_0ffh 5y ago
The problem is the people who still believe vaccines would end the pandemic if only (here comes the timeline, locally we're at t=0). t=-1: 70% were vaccinated t= 0: 100% were vaccinated t=+1: 100% were vaccinated & boostered t=+2: 100% were vaccinated & double boostered ...
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  If the virus hadn’t mutated from alpha to delta, and then to omega — each of those could have achieved essentially hersd immunity. Unfortunately it mutated before we could tamp it down everywhere. That doesn’t make the people who said vaccines could end the mess wrong, just means we all got unlucky.
  - _0ffh 5y ago
    Even given (for the sake of argument) that there was cause for hope at some point, that's not an excuse to cling to that hope indefinitely, especially when it demands the violation of other people's bodily autonomy. That hope is dead, and people must let it rest.
    - mikeyouse 5y ago
      More Americans died in the last month from Covid than died in the Vietnam war… to me, that’s an unacceptable toll. I get that people differ in that opinion but it can’t be too surprising that people really aren’t okay with that level of sustained death as the “end game” of this.
      - _0ffh 5y ago
        It won't keep up like this. It is inevitable that sooner or later everybody will have been infected at least once. Covid-19 will have become just another seasonal respiratory infection that everyone catches for the first time when they're young and the few bad cases will almost all be successfully handled with medicine. Some people may keep getting yearly vaccinations, like so many do with influenza. Most probably won't. Life will largely return to what it was, except for what our experiences during this time has done to our outlook in life.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
People in general can’t look at things as systems or have any understanding of probability or nuance. So trying to communicate a clear message to get people to voluntarily perform a pro-social action that doesn’t have 100% certainty turns out to be incredibly difficult. Mix in that most Western countries are highly individualistic, the existence of anti-vaxxers, the spread of things like QAnon and it’s an up hill battle. I’ve heard engineers complain saying things like “I got the vaccine, how come I haven’t gotten all my freedoms back yet? Why did I bother?” in the middle of an out break. The people whose job it is to look at complex systems fall short. Maximising their chances of getting severely ill is seen as an inconvenience. Was there any other possible outcome?
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>I must be missing something. You are missing the fact that the government and the media has been consistently dishonest and/or wrong at virtually every stage of the pandemic but they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege. People are also tired of the burdensome restrictions that are entirely performative (like masking in general) and harmful (masking in schools, especially among young children. Anyone who has eaten dinner in a packed restaurant with 200 other unmasked people but is then required to put on their mask for the 10 foot walk to the bathroom knows exactly how ridiculous and useless these restrictions are.
- qsdf38100 5y ago
  Wrong? of course, it's hard get things right when hit by a new virus, with lot of unknowns. We still don't fully understand how it transmits, why it's so harmful compared to common cold, etc. Dishonest? I'm not so sure. You say "they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege". I'm sorry I don't get what you're trying to say here. You can say this about any law. You're saying they act as if laws were important and needed to be unforced. Finally, of course laws are "dumb", they are binary, you can ridicule any law by pushing it to its limit. Driving on this road at 100 km/h is legal, but suddenly at 100.001 it's illegal?? so yeah, when you're exactly in between a place where you must wear a mask and a place where you don't, it's as ridiculous as... any law really.

peteradio 5y ago

Nobodies pissed at the government for making vaccines available, they are pissed that they are having their livelihoods threatened based on false premises.

spookthesunset 5y ago

Doesn't matter if the pandemic ended or not. Society (or at least the politicians) chose to regress. The virus is a virus. It doesn't tell us how to react to it. We do. Many states didn't regress during delta. They kept calm and carried on with normal. Only some states decided to regress. And the outcomes are almost identical--in the same ballpark at least.

altcognito 5y ago
I’m always amused by mask mandates as regressing and “doing nothing for public health” as keeping calm.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Mask mandates say “vaccines dont work” and “stay scared”. They are dehumanizing. Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them. We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence. Especially post vaccine. Maybe people want to move on? Mayne those people have incredibly valid reasons for they wish? Maybe the government should respect that?
  - notriddle 5y ago
    > They are dehumanizing. It's a piece of cloth worn over your nose and mouth. How fragile is your sense of humanity? > Besides it doesn’t matter what you think about masks. The fact that many people resent wearing them is reason enough to rethink forcing people to wear them. I don't like wearing shoes, but that doesn't make shoe mandates (which are totally a thing, but only private businesses, not by government order) dehumanizing. > We do live in society and not everybody considers Covid the only problem in existence. Is that straw man dead yet? > Especially post vaccine. On this point, I actually agree. Would vaccine mandates be acceptable instead? It would be much more effective than mask mandates (which, while I have no real problem with them in principle, don't actually work that well because so many people don't wear them correctly).
    - throwaway22032 5y ago
    - darkerside 5y ago
      What about a mandate against wearing shoes, when many are more comfortable wearing them? I think the argument here is that any mandate beyond the bare minimum is harmful to freedom. Just because you don't mind wearing a mask doesn't mean others can't. I say this as someone who doesn't mind masks and wears them often.
      - qsdf38100 5y ago
        If not wearing shoes was potentially helping health services to keep being functional, then yes it would make sense to mandate it. Harmful to freedom? What about the freedom of having functional health services? I keep hearing about freedom but freedom isn't about doing whatever we want, we also have to consider the freedom of others not to suffer from our actions. I consider my suffering of wearing a mask laughable compared to the suffering of people unable to get health care when their life depends on it. I'm happy to wear it even if in the future it turns out they weren't helping significantly.
- throwaway1777 5y ago
  Because masks never really made any statistical impact on the virus spread, so requiring them at this point means you’re not following the data you’re following something else. (I was pro-mask for a while before we had data)
  - altcognito 5y ago
    Let the surgeons know. Yes, compliance and knowing how to wear a mask has been an issue. That's not the same thing as "masks don't work." This is a random place to put this, but I just want to point out that I think for the most part even mask wearing is not required anymore (unless you are sick, but why are you going anywhere sick?) Part of the reason I put it here is that I want to make sure it's understood that despite the fact I'm pretty pro-vax, pro-mask and generally supported the lockdowns at the time -- we're past all that for now with Omicron. Things are still a mess, and the facts on the ground could change, but I think it's important that everybody gets on the same page that we're moving on.
    - throwaway1777 5y ago
      Sounds like we basically agree even though we are coming at it from different angles.
      - altcognito 5y ago
        Not really. I'm saying masks work and mandates are necessary public health policy. Regardless of a mandate, people will do what they do even if it's not in their best interests, or in the interests of their loved ones, or the interests of their neighbors. They will smoke in public places, they will goto work sick, they will drive drunk. Frankly put, people can be jerks. So you put a mandate out there, and you do your best. Masks work. In areas where mask utilization is high, there is good air filtration and people follow distancing rules, the spread is slowed.
    - vondur 5y ago
      Masks are still required where I live, yet we have some of the highest infection rates in the country. (Southern California)
- nradov 5y ago
  At this point there's no valid scientific or medical reason to continue with mask mandates. I recommend listening to UCSF infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi who provides a clear explanation of the current situation. https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/ https://peterattiamd.com/covid-part2/

asveikau 5y ago

What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic. By that I mean... That is a very reasonable position to hold only 3 months ago. And I still think the vaccines are substantially accelerating the end. So I'm not even sure what the complaint is. That it isn't the only factor? Sure, but it's a huge one, and one of few that we can control.

ssl232 5y ago
> What's more, before omicron it was a pretty reasonable position to conclude vaccinations were ending the pandemic. I've not seen a convincing argument against simply looking at excess deaths. This avoids all of the problems around classifcations of deaths with/from COVID, vaccination statuses, etc. It's much harder to disguise deaths or lack of deaths. EuroMOMO [1; scroll 60% down to the z-scores] shows excess deaths in Europe basically went back to normal in most countries after the European wave in spring 2020, long before vaccines were available. This was the case despite widely varying levels of lockdown stringency - with at least one country, Sweden, not doing any significant locking down at all. And many countries' peaks at this time were, if you scroll back in time, comparable in magnitude to excess deaths during previous winters. If you draw a line in your mind down the various countries' graphs at early 2021 when significant fractions of the populations of these countries were starting to get vaccinated, you will probably struggle to determine that they've had any real positive effect at all. Once you do that, consider an alternative hypothesis could better describe the data, for example that the virus is highly seasonal and we have very little control over it. Now, a bonus: change the age group from "all ages" to younger cohorts and observe that in many countries excess deaths did not shift from resembling noise during the entirely of the past 2 years. There are even some countries, not known for being paragons of good health such as Scotland, that barely saw any out of the ordinary excess deaths in the young during the whole period. I think people seem to think things are far worse than they actually are in most countries because of the panic created by media and politicians. This is why I am very unconvinced by the argument that vaccines have been helping to end the pandemic, at very least amongst most of those who have been locked down. It seems much more reasonable to me that other factors are at play here. [1] https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

_0ffh 5y ago

The problem is the people who still believe vaccines would end the pandemic if only (here comes the timeline, locally we're at t=0). t=-1: 70% were vaccinated t= 0: 100% were vaccinated t=+1: 100% were vaccinated & boostered t=+2: 100% were vaccinated & double boostered ...

mikeyouse 5y ago
If the virus hadn’t mutated from alpha to delta, and then to omega — each of those could have achieved essentially hersd immunity. Unfortunately it mutated before we could tamp it down everywhere. That doesn’t make the people who said vaccines could end the mess wrong, just means we all got unlucky.
- _0ffh 5y ago
  Even given (for the sake of argument) that there was cause for hope at some point, that's not an excuse to cling to that hope indefinitely, especially when it demands the violation of other people's bodily autonomy. That hope is dead, and people must let it rest.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    More Americans died in the last month from Covid than died in the Vietnam war… to me, that’s an unacceptable toll. I get that people differ in that opinion but it can’t be too surprising that people really aren’t okay with that level of sustained death as the “end game” of this.
    - _0ffh 5y ago
      It won't keep up like this. It is inevitable that sooner or later everybody will have been infected at least once. Covid-19 will have become just another seasonal respiratory infection that everyone catches for the first time when they're young and the few bad cases will almost all be successfully handled with medicine. Some people may keep getting yearly vaccinations, like so many do with influenza. Most probably won't. Life will largely return to what it was, except for what our experiences during this time has done to our outlook in life.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago

People in general can’t look at things as systems or have any understanding of probability or nuance. So trying to communicate a clear message to get people to voluntarily perform a pro-social action that doesn’t have 100% certainty turns out to be incredibly difficult. Mix in that most Western countries are highly individualistic, the existence of anti-vaxxers, the spread of things like QAnon and it’s an up hill battle. I’ve heard engineers complain saying things like “I got the vaccine, how come I haven’t gotten all my freedoms back yet? Why did I bother?” in the middle of an out break. The people whose job it is to look at complex systems fall short. Maximising their chances of getting severely ill is seen as an inconvenience. Was there any other possible outcome?

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

>I must be missing something. You are missing the fact that the government and the media has been consistently dishonest and/or wrong at virtually every stage of the pandemic but they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege. People are also tired of the burdensome restrictions that are entirely performative (like masking in general) and harmful (masking in schools, especially among young children. Anyone who has eaten dinner in a packed restaurant with 200 other unmasked people but is then required to put on their mask for the 10 foot walk to the bathroom knows exactly how ridiculous and useless these restrictions are.

qsdf38100 5y ago
Wrong? of course, it's hard get things right when hit by a new virus, with lot of unknowns. We still don't fully understand how it transmits, why it's so harmful compared to common cold, etc. Dishonest? I'm not so sure. You say "they still act as what they say is sacrosanct and anyone that questions their edicts is committing some terrible sacrilege". I'm sorry I don't get what you're trying to say here. You can say this about any law. You're saying they act as if laws were important and needed to be unforced. Finally, of course laws are "dumb", they are binary, you can ridicule any law by pushing it to its limit. Driving on this road at 100 km/h is legal, but suddenly at 100.001 it's illegal?? so yeah, when you're exactly in between a place where you must wear a mask and a place where you don't, it's as ridiculous as... any law really.