16 ms·

Younger Americans benefit less from booster shots than older people

101 points by lxm 5y ago

vmception 5y ago
- tomrod 5y ago
  What is your concern regarding the booster?
  - The_rationalist 5y ago
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  sure that’s what at-risk means, but I’d like to be dealing with a little less risk personally… is not “at risk or not” it’s a vast spectrum
mewse 5y ago
> Booster doses cut the risk of infection in vaccinated people by about half across all age groups. I’m not convinced the story actually says what the title claims it does.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  Journalism and statistics, oil and water.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    I'd even say journalists don't understand statistics. Without proper math education, they see stats as a game of numbers where the goal is to pick the right numbers to support a desired conclusion. I can't seriously expect a journalist to understand what "2 sigma" means, and even less likely they'd be willing to learn the difference between gaussian and poisson distributions.
    - nkurz 5y ago
      Certainly some journalists don't understand basic statistics, but counter to your insinuation, I'd guess the author of this piece does. Among other degrees, she has a Masters of Science in Biochemistry from UW-Madison: https://www.nytimes.com/by/apoorva-mandavilli https://www.nytimes.com/by/apoorva-mandavilli. Rather than lowering the standards and expectations for science journalists, I think we should raise them, and applaud the people like this who (likely) do understand what they are writing about.
      - tedunangst 5y ago
        Even when the author understands the topic, the challenge is writing an article such that the reader reaches the same conclusion.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  The title may be correct, if you look at the absolute difference instead of the relative difference. Making up numbers here, but if 10 out of 100 unvaxed people get sick among the elderly, and 6 out of 100 unvaxed get sick among younger folks, then the vaccine "helps" 5 elderly but only 3 younger folks. But I agree with you that it's certainly misleading.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  If infection is less harmful to younger people, less likely in younger people, or both, then cutting the risk of infection by half across all age groups is less beneficial to younger people.
  - Moto7451 5y ago
    I see a benefit to not getting sick. Even when it won’t kill you, catching a cold sucks. I have no concern that I’m going to die of Covid but I’ll happily get a booster to avoid getting sick. My sisters caught Omicron days before their boosters were available and they missed ten days of University and work. The booster doesn’t guarantee you won’t get a breakthrough but every bit helps. I will offer though that if we’re not seeing a massive public health benefit, as opposed to an individual health benefit, that should factor into how many doses you need when they create vaccination requirements. I don’t think a double dosed 20 year old should be told they can’t eat inside if their risk of death or hospitalization is less than a triple vaccinated 65 year old.
- polote 5y ago
  - smt88 5y ago
    The risk is not zero. Also, lots of younger Americans have at-risk relatives, teachers, coaches, taxi drivers, coworkers, etc. Even if they're not worried for themselves, many of them care about their risk to loved ones and acquaintances.
    - nxm 5y ago
      Then those loved ones should vaccine themselves. Time to move on with the virus, as countries in Europe, and even Bill Maher, is realizing
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  Depends how you look at it: relatives or absolutes. If the infection risk of an 18 year old is 10%, half is 5%. If the infection risk of a 70 year old is 40%, half is 20%. In absolute terms, the younger age group benefits less. This, however, is obvious based on all information we've known since almost the start of the pandemic, and is not useful at all. Even if younger people stopped getting infected with these numbers, they could never have similar benefit compared to the older cohort. These titles are designed to get clicks, but they are very "dangerous", for a lack of a better word, because of how often the title will be shared without reading and understanding.
- yuliyp 5y ago
  The story continued to talk about hospitalization and death rates in people with a standard vaccine course vs also having a booster (units in instances / 100,000 people): 65+ hospitalization: 27.4 -> 4.9 (-82%) 65+ death: 3.6 -> 0.5 (-86%) 50-64 hospitalization: 9 -> 2 (-78%) 50-64 death: 0.4 -> 0.1 (-75%) They did not break down the 18-49 hospitalization stats, presumably because they are even lower than the 50-64 group (according to the CDC stats linked from the article, < 5 people / 100k in the vaccinated 18-49 group were hospitalized due to COVID-19 in December, and < 1 person / 100k across all 18-49 died from COVID-19, and that number is well under 1 in a million per week for regularly vaccinated, meaning stats are going to be fairly noisy).
alamortsubite 5y ago
“The effect of the booster can be seen in the data sets, but it’s far smaller than the effect of vaccination compared to not,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “The real problem is the carnage among the unvaccinated.” Unvaccinated people in every age group are at higher risk of infection, hospitalization and death than those who have been immunized, according to the C.D.C.’s data — a persistent trend ever since vaccines were introduced.
stefan_ 5y ago
You write an article mixing all kinds of risks together that require careful individual analysis, discuss different kinds of outcomes (hospitalization, death, long covid), discuss different kinds of groups where my first reaction would be to see if the cutoffs are carefully chosen to support the headline - this is a fucking mess. And then you end it all with “The booster policy is the booster policy". My god, science reporting in the US is dead.
- wolf550e 5y ago
  Why don't they write/draw a Sankey diagram with something like 1 million people on December 1st 2019, with age bracket percentages, and then draw how some got COVID, some got hospitalized, some died, some got the vaccine, some got a booster, some died from things that are not COVID, all in proportion to how it happened in US population. The width of the flows would make it clear how effective vaccines are.
  - yuliyp 5y ago
    Trying to draw a Sankey diagram that accurately describes what is happening are quite difficult: many of the numbers for those < 65 years old, and especially for those < 50 years old) are so small as to be hard to read: telling 1/1k vs 1/100k in a Sankey diagram doesn't work. They're both 1 pixel wide.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Sankey doesn't work well because we moved from SIR to SEIR+S with Delta -- meaning that we had breakthrough infections and the potential for waning immunity. Omnicron continues this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology#The_SEIS_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...
- alea_iacta_est 5y ago
  2 years in, we don't even have the numbers of people hospitalized from covid or with covid. It's not science reportings that is dead, it's science itself.
pessimizer 5y ago
It brings your chances of death from vanishingly small down to undetectable. I didn't think it was personally worth it; I might as well wait until my double vax decays a bit farther, more research is done, and new reformulations specifically targeting new variants that have gone around have been formulated. As policy it's definitely not worth it. We can pretend that we as a country care about covid, but if we're stressing the importance of patents and boosting our own over vaccinating the world, we don't really care. If we take years to send out masks, we clearly think more about masks as a public declaration of loyalty than disease prevention devices. I hate that we've split into two groups, one of nationalistic bleach drinkers that don't believe in the germ theory of disease, and the other of nationalistic OCD paternalists. Now I'm expected to believe that there's no level of protection that is enough i.e. evidence that a booster helps is evidence that I should be taking a booster is evidence that everyone should be taking a booster. I'm worried about covid, but I'm worried about things other than covid. At least the NYT is staying pretty steadily rational about this.
- javagram 5y ago
  Mass boosting _everyone_ made a lot more sense in the August-November timeframe it was originally proposed and implemented. The booster brought vaccine efficacy against infection back up to 90-95% against the Delta variant. If everyone who came in contact with seniors or almost-seniors was boosted, it would bring down the transmission of the virus (since you can't transmit if you aren't infected) and hopefully prevent those seniors from running the risk of death or serious injury from COVID. Since the Omicron variant emerged in late November and it bypasses even boosted immunity to infection in somewhere between 30% and 60% of people, as a result we've seen worldwide that vaccination is unable to bring R0 below 1 and stop the spread of the virus. > If we take years to send out masks, we clearly think more about masks as a public declaration of loyalty than disease prevention devices. The masks being sent out by the US Government seem more like a reaction to the realization that Omicron bypasses vaccine immunity to infection in a massive number of people, who still want some way to protect themselves from the virus. In 2021, the government was attempting to push vaccination as the only way to protect yourself from catching the virus, because social distancing and wearing masks annoys their voters (especially swing/independent voters) and they have an election to win this year. They only sent out masks and tests when the media/people began to demand it after the vaccine failed to stop Omicron.
tomrod 5y ago
Younger Americans mix with older Americans. Decreasing their potential to spread the virus (even if not totally nullified) is a net positive, IMO.
- 650 5y ago
  The booster for omicron reduces spread potential?
  - empthought 5y ago
    Of course it does, that’s how vaccines work.
    - ghiculescu 5y ago
      Does it?
      - codyb 5y ago
        If your symptoms are milder and fought off by your body quicker it certainly seems like, intuitively, you’d spread the virus less.
        dnautics 5y ago
        Or if they're so mild you don't think you have a cold, you might go out and spread it more. This would be a genius evolutionary play by the virus -- have such mild symptoms that most healthy people don't even know they have it and spread it like crazy. Ok wow downvoted. Well, if this actually happens, I will be sure to link back to this downvoted claim. Be careful, I have been right about "out of left field" events in the past that I've recorded on hn (such as failure of the Boeing starliner https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21839565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21839565) and in this situation I do have PhD training in biology, so this wasn't one point at least reasonably close to my wheelhouse
fungiblecog 5y ago
Younger people benefit less from booster shots than older people There fixed it for you
jurassic 5y ago
I’m 34 and healthy. Each of my shots and the booster gave me severe flu-like side effects (chills, body aches, etc). I’ve lost 5-6 days over the last year to recovering from these side effects. Given my low risk from the actual virus, I don’t see myself getting another booster. I’m not anti-science, but there needs to be significant ROI for that level of discomfort and time lost to recovery.
- CoryAlexMartin 5y ago
  I was 28 when I got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine last April. I had bad flu-like symptoms for a week, which was followed by 3 months of lethargy, among other things. I can't even begin to imagine how much time I lost from that. Needless to say, I opted not to get a booster.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    I'm not aware of anyone having bad flu like symptoms for a week or 3 months of lethargy from J and J. Are you sure you didn't actually get covid? On balance that seems substantially more likely.
    - N1H1L 5y ago
      yep - OP got COVID.
      - michaelmrose 5y ago
        This is kind of an example of why relying on personal experience and anecdotes is so bad. OP took intelligent countermeasures to avoid a negative outcome which was unfortunately ineffectual due to mischance. Despite the theory making no sense OP assigned the consequences of covid to the vaccination he received not due to a sound theory but due to proximity in time and will now make measurably worse choices for decades for lack of communicating with a medical professional. We rarely know what we don't know.
        5y ago
xivzgrev 5y ago
Why is the only measure of success deaths and hospitalizations? As a younger person it has been my observation that vaccinated folks are more likely to get break through cases 6+ months after vaccine / booster. Speaking for myself I got COVID almost exactly six months after being fully vaccinated. These break thru cases, while not life threatening, are nonetheless NOT fun, may lead to long haul symptoms, and put others at risk. I personally would like to see boosters available every 5 months for those who want it
- RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    > testosterone attacks the spike protein causing inflammation and permanent microscopic scarring of tissue I'm not an immunologist, but I am curious... even if this were true, how's getting covid and generating lots of the spike protein better than getting vaccinated and generating some of the spike protein? Because almost everyone on Earth is guaranteed either A or B will happen within a year or two.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
      You know, if the science would allow research to be conducted, we might have a very good answer to that question. But as you can guess from my original post I side with the decisions the science has chosen to take. We can't let anyone question the validity of the vaccines as that would deter us from gathering people into a herd where they can be protected with proper herd immunity. Israel was able to reach a 90% vaccination rate and because of that herd immunity, most people who get covid there are the ones with the vaccines. Obviously the vaccines are doing something. Its exactly as you have said, everyone is guaranteed either A or B which is why looking at alternative forms of treatments might as well be considered racism. The propositions of Freedom Truckers, Nazis, and Joe Rogans must be silenced. Horse dewormer is only effective against RNA viruses like zika, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile, Hendra, Newcastle, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chikungunya, Semliki Forest, Sindbis, Avian influenza A, Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome and has been safely and effectively used for decades on humans, therefore its considerations as an alternative treatment is a danger to the people who take them. Unlike horse dewormer, the vaccine poses no threat, especially like the ones shown in the videos created by these racist conspiracy theorists I posted links to. Those links, by the way, are not on YouTube because they are verifiably misinformation. We need to be thankful of the organizations who want such harmful words abolished, because they are spending massive amounts of their own hard earned money to help news networks contain misinformation from spreading. They spend all that hard earned money because truly, they care about you. They care about your family. They care about your children. Our health industry is one of the most virtuous, most caring, most protective industries on the planet. They are profitable, not because they extort you for simple procedures, or because they mark up everything multiples of what they cost to produce, or because they hold onto patents like Martin Shkreli to make egregious amounts of money. They are profitable because they provide a genuine service that saves lives and keeps everyone supplied with the drugs, instead of choosing to practice preventative health. As they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And our health industry is dedicated to providing that cure. When Dr Fauci became a doctor, he took a hippocratic oath to do the right thing for the patients he saw. We need to trust his judgement on the matter, because the only way he could have become the head of an organization like the NIAID is by being a virtuous all knowing man of science, and not a theatrical, political, power grabbing, venal liar who discredits anyone who disagrees with him. No one who gets to lead large organizations get there by playing power games. Speaking of people who disagree with Dr. Fauci, other doctors who disagree with him have clearly not taken the same hippocratic oath he did, which you can tell because they speak about science, medicine, and their patients very differently. If you wanted to ask questions instead of trusting in the science like I do, then go right on ahead. You can find any misinformation you want to confirm your theories, but I recommend you do what I did and get the vaccine. Like you said, you're guaranteed either A or B, so your better off doing things the way good obedient citizens of society do it, by submitting to his righteous authority and letting him jab you until your heart throbs for him.
macrowhat 5y ago
nohr 5y ago
tremon 5y ago
In NL, the general recommendation [0] is that children shouldn't be given a booster shot since the benefits are marginal. Children (or their parents) may still ask for one and they won't be denied, but it's not automatic. My attempt at translating the report conclusion: The direct health benefit from the booster shot for 12-17-year olds is very limited, even for high-risk individuals. Break-through infections with the Omicron variant are very mild and the chance of hospitalization for vaccinated teens is minimal. Similarly, the risk of developing MIS-C due to infection is deemed very small. Moreover the booster shot also carries the (very rare) risk of developing myocarditis. The European Medical Agency also has not officially weighed the booster benefits against the risks for teens, making its use effectively off-label. In the same publication they make the following claims regarding booster effectiveness (for all age groups, not specifically teens): - full protection (only asymptomatic infection) drops to 50-75% within four weeks, drops further to 25-40% after three months. - protection against hospitalization due to Omicron is around 90%, drops to 75% after three months. - vaccinated but not-boostered people still have 70-80% protection against hospitalization due to Omicron in the first six months, drops to 60% efficacy after that. - Against the Delta variant, non-boostered people still have above 80% protection against hospitalization even after more than six months. The citations for these claims are from NL,UK,IS and US, but only two have a hyperlink. If someone wants to hunt them down, they're cites 10,21,23,24,25,36,37 in the PDF linked from [0]. [0, in Dutch]: https://www.gezondheidsraad.nl/organisatie/vaccinaties/documenten/adviezen/2022/02/04/boostervaccinatie-van-adolescenten-tegen-covid-19 https://www.gezondheidsraad.nl/organisatie/vaccinaties/docum... [25] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4011905 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4011905 [37] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm7104e3_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm...
oakasokww 5y ago
It should be proof enough I feel it necessary to make a throwaway to even comment on this because it's so easy to get marked "anti-science" for being a skeptic. This article (typical of NY Times, honestly) is editorialized. There are so many questions to ask: > Booster doses cut the risk of infection in vaccinated people by about half across all age groups. The gap between unvaccinated and vaccinated groups was much greater. The numbers most likely reflect only symptomatic cases, and may be different for asymptomatic infections, Dr. Barouch noted. To this day I have not seen a single study that controls for the obvious confounders. In particular, people who get vaccinated are likely "safer" in general. They most likely work out more, they most likely care about their health, they most like wear masks, and most likely listen to their doctor unquestioningly. ALL of these are confounders that MUST be controlled for in order for any study on booster efficacy to meet the bar of actual science, and not this pseudo-scientific idol worship we have right now. > Some people have worried about persistent symptoms even after a mild bout of Covid. But a recent study suggested that the risk of so-called long Covid is highest among people with one of four predisposing factors, including Type 2 diabetes and the presence of autoantibodies. Weird, just recently we were hearing long covid is unavoidable even with vaccination in some cases. This was never mentioned. Yet another ultra low quality "studies say" post written by a non-scientist. > In those age groups, vaccination itself — two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — decreased the risk of hospitalization and death so sharply that a booster shot did not seem to add much benefit. Indeed, despite my area being pretty well boosted we still had a massive peak in cases. Without a doubt the "journalists" spun it as a catastrophe that is the unvaccinated's fault. Well, if 80% of my location is vaccinated, do you think a positive rate of 38% can only be because the unvaccinated? I suppose if you listen to MSM like NY Times and the mouthpieces at the CDC you'd probably believe so. This calls into question the vaccine effectiveness in general. Which have the same problem, confounders are everywhere and no one is controlling for them. It's far easier to sell fear than science, because science takes time. One day we'll get actual information. Until then we're stuck with these faux-journalistic pieces that are just cleverly dressed up op-eds with reddit-tier "studies say" bait.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  > To this day I have not seen a single study that controls for the obvious confounders. In particular, people who get vaccinated are likely "safer" in general. They most likely work out more, they most likely care about their health, they most like wear masks, and most likely listen to their doctor unquestioningly. ALL of these are confounders that MUST be controlled for in order for any study on booster efficacy to meet the bar of actual science, and not this pseudo-scientific idol worship we have right now. Clinical trials give people a placebo. The efficacy is well established. > Weird, just recently we were hearing long covid is unavoidable even with vaccination in some cases. This was never mentioned. Yet another ultra low quality "studies say" post written by a non-scientist. Some study suggesting something does not imply consensus. There has never been a consensus that long covid is unrelated to disease severity. > Indeed, despite my area being pretty well boosted we still had a massive peak in cases. Without a doubt the "journalists" spun it as a catastrophe that is the unvaccinated's fault. Well, if 80% of my location is vaccinated, do you think a positive rate of 38% can only be because the unvaccinated? I suppose if you listen to MSM like NY Times and the mouthpieces at the CDC you'd probably believe so. Seems almost purposefully obstinate in how you try to refute a claim about metrics of hospitalizations and death with a fact about new cases.

101 points by lxm 5y ago

tomrod 5y ago
What is your concern regarding the booster?
- The_rationalist 5y ago
micromacrofoot 5y ago
sure that’s what at-risk means, but I’d like to be dealing with a little less risk personally… is not “at risk or not” it’s a vast spectrum

> Booster doses cut the risk of infection in vaccinated people by about half across all age groups. I’m not convinced the story actually says what the title claims it does.

tedunangst 5y ago
Journalism and statistics, oil and water.
- akomtu 5y ago
  I'd even say journalists don't understand statistics. Without proper math education, they see stats as a game of numbers where the goal is to pick the right numbers to support a desired conclusion. I can't seriously expect a journalist to understand what "2 sigma" means, and even less likely they'd be willing to learn the difference between gaussian and poisson distributions.
  - nkurz 5y ago
    Certainly some journalists don't understand basic statistics, but counter to your insinuation, I'd guess the author of this piece does. Among other degrees, she has a Masters of Science in Biochemistry from UW-Madison: https://www.nytimes.com/by/apoorva-mandavilli https://www.nytimes.com/by/apoorva-mandavilli. Rather than lowering the standards and expectations for science journalists, I think we should raise them, and applaud the people like this who (likely) do understand what they are writing about.
    - tedunangst 5y ago
      Even when the author understands the topic, the challenge is writing an article such that the reader reaches the same conclusion.
QuercusMax 5y ago
The title may be correct, if you look at the absolute difference instead of the relative difference. Making up numbers here, but if 10 out of 100 unvaxed people get sick among the elderly, and 6 out of 100 unvaxed get sick among younger folks, then the vaccine "helps" 5 elderly but only 3 younger folks. But I agree with you that it's certainly misleading.
josephcsible 5y ago
If infection is less harmful to younger people, less likely in younger people, or both, then cutting the risk of infection by half across all age groups is less beneficial to younger people.
- Moto7451 5y ago
  I see a benefit to not getting sick. Even when it won’t kill you, catching a cold sucks. I have no concern that I’m going to die of Covid but I’ll happily get a booster to avoid getting sick. My sisters caught Omicron days before their boosters were available and they missed ten days of University and work. The booster doesn’t guarantee you won’t get a breakthrough but every bit helps. I will offer though that if we’re not seeing a massive public health benefit, as opposed to an individual health benefit, that should factor into how many doses you need when they create vaccination requirements. I don’t think a double dosed 20 year old should be told they can’t eat inside if their risk of death or hospitalization is less than a triple vaccinated 65 year old.
polote 5y ago
- smt88 5y ago
  The risk is not zero. Also, lots of younger Americans have at-risk relatives, teachers, coaches, taxi drivers, coworkers, etc. Even if they're not worried for themselves, many of them care about their risk to loved ones and acquaintances.
  - nxm 5y ago
    Then those loved ones should vaccine themselves. Time to move on with the virus, as countries in Europe, and even Bill Maher, is realizing
xboxnolifes 5y ago
Depends how you look at it: relatives or absolutes. If the infection risk of an 18 year old is 10%, half is 5%. If the infection risk of a 70 year old is 40%, half is 20%. In absolute terms, the younger age group benefits less. This, however, is obvious based on all information we've known since almost the start of the pandemic, and is not useful at all. Even if younger people stopped getting infected with these numbers, they could never have similar benefit compared to the older cohort. These titles are designed to get clicks, but they are very "dangerous", for a lack of a better word, because of how often the title will be shared without reading and understanding.
yuliyp 5y ago
The story continued to talk about hospitalization and death rates in people with a standard vaccine course vs also having a booster (units in instances / 100,000 people): 65+ hospitalization: 27.4 -> 4.9 (-82%) 65+ death: 3.6 -> 0.5 (-86%) 50-64 hospitalization: 9 -> 2 (-78%) 50-64 death: 0.4 -> 0.1 (-75%) They did not break down the 18-49 hospitalization stats, presumably because they are even lower than the 50-64 group (according to the CDC stats linked from the article, < 5 people / 100k in the vaccinated 18-49 group were hospitalized due to COVID-19 in December, and < 1 person / 100k across all 18-49 died from COVID-19, and that number is well under 1 in a million per week for regularly vaccinated, meaning stats are going to be fairly noisy).

alamortsubite 5y ago

“The effect of the booster can be seen in the data sets, but it’s far smaller than the effect of vaccination compared to not,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. “The real problem is the carnage among the unvaccinated.” Unvaccinated people in every age group are at higher risk of infection, hospitalization and death than those who have been immunized, according to the C.D.C.’s data — a persistent trend ever since vaccines were introduced.

stefan_ 5y ago

You write an article mixing all kinds of risks together that require careful individual analysis, discuss different kinds of outcomes (hospitalization, death, long covid), discuss different kinds of groups where my first reaction would be to see if the cutoffs are carefully chosen to support the headline - this is a fucking mess. And then you end it all with “The booster policy is the booster policy". My god, science reporting in the US is dead.

wolf550e 5y ago
Why don't they write/draw a Sankey diagram with something like 1 million people on December 1st 2019, with age bracket percentages, and then draw how some got COVID, some got hospitalized, some died, some got the vaccine, some got a booster, some died from things that are not COVID, all in proportion to how it happened in US population. The width of the flows would make it clear how effective vaccines are.
- yuliyp 5y ago
  Trying to draw a Sankey diagram that accurately describes what is happening are quite difficult: many of the numbers for those < 65 years old, and especially for those < 50 years old) are so small as to be hard to read: telling 1/1k vs 1/100k in a Sankey diagram doesn't work. They're both 1 pixel wide.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Sankey doesn't work well because we moved from SIR to SEIR+S with Delta -- meaning that we had breakthrough infections and the potential for waning immunity. Omnicron continues this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology#The_SEIS_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...
alea_iacta_est 5y ago
2 years in, we don't even have the numbers of people hospitalized from covid or with covid. It's not science reportings that is dead, it's science itself.

pessimizer 5y ago

It brings your chances of death from vanishingly small down to undetectable. I didn't think it was personally worth it; I might as well wait until my double vax decays a bit farther, more research is done, and new reformulations specifically targeting new variants that have gone around have been formulated. As policy it's definitely not worth it. We can pretend that we as a country care about covid, but if we're stressing the importance of patents and boosting our own over vaccinating the world, we don't really care. If we take years to send out masks, we clearly think more about masks as a public declaration of loyalty than disease prevention devices. I hate that we've split into two groups, one of nationalistic bleach drinkers that don't believe in the germ theory of disease, and the other of nationalistic OCD paternalists. Now I'm expected to believe that there's no level of protection that is enough i.e. evidence that a booster helps is evidence that I should be taking a booster is evidence that everyone should be taking a booster. I'm worried about covid, but I'm worried about things other than covid. At least the NYT is staying pretty steadily rational about this.

javagram 5y ago
Mass boosting _everyone_ made a lot more sense in the August-November timeframe it was originally proposed and implemented. The booster brought vaccine efficacy against infection back up to 90-95% against the Delta variant. If everyone who came in contact with seniors or almost-seniors was boosted, it would bring down the transmission of the virus (since you can't transmit if you aren't infected) and hopefully prevent those seniors from running the risk of death or serious injury from COVID. Since the Omicron variant emerged in late November and it bypasses even boosted immunity to infection in somewhere between 30% and 60% of people, as a result we've seen worldwide that vaccination is unable to bring R0 below 1 and stop the spread of the virus. > If we take years to send out masks, we clearly think more about masks as a public declaration of loyalty than disease prevention devices. The masks being sent out by the US Government seem more like a reaction to the realization that Omicron bypasses vaccine immunity to infection in a massive number of people, who still want some way to protect themselves from the virus. In 2021, the government was attempting to push vaccination as the only way to protect yourself from catching the virus, because social distancing and wearing masks annoys their voters (especially swing/independent voters) and they have an election to win this year. They only sent out masks and tests when the media/people began to demand it after the vaccine failed to stop Omicron.

tomrod 5y ago

Younger Americans mix with older Americans. Decreasing their potential to spread the virus (even if not totally nullified) is a net positive, IMO.

650 5y ago
The booster for omicron reduces spread potential?
- empthought 5y ago
  Of course it does, that’s how vaccines work.
  - ghiculescu 5y ago
    Does it?
    - codyb 5y ago
      If your symptoms are milder and fought off by your body quicker it certainly seems like, intuitively, you’d spread the virus less.
      - dnautics 5y ago
        Or if they're so mild you don't think you have a cold, you might go out and spread it more. This would be a genius evolutionary play by the virus -- have such mild symptoms that most healthy people don't even know they have it and spread it like crazy. Ok wow downvoted. Well, if this actually happens, I will be sure to link back to this downvoted claim. Be careful, I have been right about "out of left field" events in the past that I've recorded on hn (such as failure of the Boeing starliner https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21839565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21839565) and in this situation I do have PhD training in biology, so this wasn't one point at least reasonably close to my wheelhouse

fungiblecog 5y ago

Younger people benefit less from booster shots than older people There fixed it for you

jurassic 5y ago

I’m 34 and healthy. Each of my shots and the booster gave me severe flu-like side effects (chills, body aches, etc). I’ve lost 5-6 days over the last year to recovering from these side effects. Given my low risk from the actual virus, I don’t see myself getting another booster. I’m not anti-science, but there needs to be significant ROI for that level of discomfort and time lost to recovery.

CoryAlexMartin 5y ago
I was 28 when I got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine last April. I had bad flu-like symptoms for a week, which was followed by 3 months of lethargy, among other things. I can't even begin to imagine how much time I lost from that. Needless to say, I opted not to get a booster.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  I'm not aware of anyone having bad flu like symptoms for a week or 3 months of lethargy from J and J. Are you sure you didn't actually get covid? On balance that seems substantially more likely.
  - N1H1L 5y ago
    yep - OP got COVID.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      This is kind of an example of why relying on personal experience and anecdotes is so bad. OP took intelligent countermeasures to avoid a negative outcome which was unfortunately ineffectual due to mischance. Despite the theory making no sense OP assigned the consequences of covid to the vaccination he received not due to a sound theory but due to proximity in time and will now make measurably worse choices for decades for lack of communicating with a medical professional. We rarely know what we don't know.
      - 5y ago

xivzgrev 5y ago

Why is the only measure of success deaths and hospitalizations? As a younger person it has been my observation that vaccinated folks are more likely to get break through cases 6+ months after vaccine / booster. Speaking for myself I got COVID almost exactly six months after being fully vaccinated. These break thru cases, while not life threatening, are nonetheless NOT fun, may lead to long haul symptoms, and put others at risk. I personally would like to see boosters available every 5 months for those who want it

RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > testosterone attacks the spike protein causing inflammation and permanent microscopic scarring of tissue I'm not an immunologist, but I am curious... even if this were true, how's getting covid and generating lots of the spike protein better than getting vaccinated and generating some of the spike protein? Because almost everyone on Earth is guaranteed either A or B will happen within a year or two.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - RedBeetDeadpool 5y ago
    You know, if the science would allow research to be conducted, we might have a very good answer to that question. But as you can guess from my original post I side with the decisions the science has chosen to take. We can't let anyone question the validity of the vaccines as that would deter us from gathering people into a herd where they can be protected with proper herd immunity. Israel was able to reach a 90% vaccination rate and because of that herd immunity, most people who get covid there are the ones with the vaccines. Obviously the vaccines are doing something. Its exactly as you have said, everyone is guaranteed either A or B which is why looking at alternative forms of treatments might as well be considered racism. The propositions of Freedom Truckers, Nazis, and Joe Rogans must be silenced. Horse dewormer is only effective against RNA viruses like zika, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile, Hendra, Newcastle, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, chikungunya, Semliki Forest, Sindbis, Avian influenza A, Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome and has been safely and effectively used for decades on humans, therefore its considerations as an alternative treatment is a danger to the people who take them. Unlike horse dewormer, the vaccine poses no threat, especially like the ones shown in the videos created by these racist conspiracy theorists I posted links to. Those links, by the way, are not on YouTube because they are verifiably misinformation. We need to be thankful of the organizations who want such harmful words abolished, because they are spending massive amounts of their own hard earned money to help news networks contain misinformation from spreading. They spend all that hard earned money because truly, they care about you. They care about your family. They care about your children. Our health industry is one of the most virtuous, most caring, most protective industries on the planet. They are profitable, not because they extort you for simple procedures, or because they mark up everything multiples of what they cost to produce, or because they hold onto patents like Martin Shkreli to make egregious amounts of money. They are profitable because they provide a genuine service that saves lives and keeps everyone supplied with the drugs, instead of choosing to practice preventative health. As they say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And our health industry is dedicated to providing that cure. When Dr Fauci became a doctor, he took a hippocratic oath to do the right thing for the patients he saw. We need to trust his judgement on the matter, because the only way he could have become the head of an organization like the NIAID is by being a virtuous all knowing man of science, and not a theatrical, political, power grabbing, venal liar who discredits anyone who disagrees with him. No one who gets to lead large organizations get there by playing power games. Speaking of people who disagree with Dr. Fauci, other doctors who disagree with him have clearly not taken the same hippocratic oath he did, which you can tell because they speak about science, medicine, and their patients very differently. If you wanted to ask questions instead of trusting in the science like I do, then go right on ahead. You can find any misinformation you want to confirm your theories, but I recommend you do what I did and get the vaccine. Like you said, you're guaranteed either A or B, so your better off doing things the way good obedient citizens of society do it, by submitting to his righteous authority and letting him jab you until your heart throbs for him.

macrowhat 5y ago

nohr 5y ago

tremon 5y ago

In NL, the general recommendation [0] is that children shouldn't be given a booster shot since the benefits are marginal. Children (or their parents) may still ask for one and they won't be denied, but it's not automatic. My attempt at translating the report conclusion: The direct health benefit from the booster shot for 12-17-year olds is very limited, even for high-risk individuals. Break-through infections with the Omicron variant are very mild and the chance of hospitalization for vaccinated teens is minimal. Similarly, the risk of developing MIS-C due to infection is deemed very small. Moreover the booster shot also carries the (very rare) risk of developing myocarditis. The European Medical Agency also has not officially weighed the booster benefits against the risks for teens, making its use effectively off-label. In the same publication they make the following claims regarding booster effectiveness (for all age groups, not specifically teens): - full protection (only asymptomatic infection) drops to 50-75% within four weeks, drops further to 25-40% after three months. - protection against hospitalization due to Omicron is around 90%, drops to 75% after three months. - vaccinated but not-boostered people still have 70-80% protection against hospitalization due to Omicron in the first six months, drops to 60% efficacy after that. - Against the Delta variant, non-boostered people still have above 80% protection against hospitalization even after more than six months. The citations for these claims are from NL,UK,IS and US, but only two have a hyperlink. If someone wants to hunt them down, they're cites 10,21,23,24,25,36,37 in the PDF linked from [0]. [0, in Dutch]: https://www.gezondheidsraad.nl/organisatie/vaccinaties/documenten/adviezen/2022/02/04/boostervaccinatie-van-adolescenten-tegen-covid-19 https://www.gezondheidsraad.nl/organisatie/vaccinaties/docum... [25] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4011905 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4011905 [37] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm7104e3_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm...

oakasokww 5y ago

It should be proof enough I feel it necessary to make a throwaway to even comment on this because it's so easy to get marked "anti-science" for being a skeptic. This article (typical of NY Times, honestly) is editorialized. There are so many questions to ask: > Booster doses cut the risk of infection in vaccinated people by about half across all age groups. The gap between unvaccinated and vaccinated groups was much greater. The numbers most likely reflect only symptomatic cases, and may be different for asymptomatic infections, Dr. Barouch noted. To this day I have not seen a single study that controls for the obvious confounders. In particular, people who get vaccinated are likely "safer" in general. They most likely work out more, they most likely care about their health, they most like wear masks, and most likely listen to their doctor unquestioningly. ALL of these are confounders that MUST be controlled for in order for any study on booster efficacy to meet the bar of actual science, and not this pseudo-scientific idol worship we have right now. > Some people have worried about persistent symptoms even after a mild bout of Covid. But a recent study suggested that the risk of so-called long Covid is highest among people with one of four predisposing factors, including Type 2 diabetes and the presence of autoantibodies. Weird, just recently we were hearing long covid is unavoidable even with vaccination in some cases. This was never mentioned. Yet another ultra low quality "studies say" post written by a non-scientist. > In those age groups, vaccination itself — two doses of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — decreased the risk of hospitalization and death so sharply that a booster shot did not seem to add much benefit. Indeed, despite my area being pretty well boosted we still had a massive peak in cases. Without a doubt the "journalists" spun it as a catastrophe that is the unvaccinated's fault. Well, if 80% of my location is vaccinated, do you think a positive rate of 38% can only be because the unvaccinated? I suppose if you listen to MSM like NY Times and the mouthpieces at the CDC you'd probably believe so. This calls into question the vaccine effectiveness in general. Which have the same problem, confounders are everywhere and no one is controlling for them. It's far easier to sell fear than science, because science takes time. One day we'll get actual information. Until then we're stuck with these faux-journalistic pieces that are just cleverly dressed up op-eds with reddit-tier "studies say" bait.

oneoff786 5y ago
> To this day I have not seen a single study that controls for the obvious confounders. In particular, people who get vaccinated are likely "safer" in general. They most likely work out more, they most likely care about their health, they most like wear masks, and most likely listen to their doctor unquestioningly. ALL of these are confounders that MUST be controlled for in order for any study on booster efficacy to meet the bar of actual science, and not this pseudo-scientific idol worship we have right now. Clinical trials give people a placebo. The efficacy is well established. > Weird, just recently we were hearing long covid is unavoidable even with vaccination in some cases. This was never mentioned. Yet another ultra low quality "studies say" post written by a non-scientist. Some study suggesting something does not imply consensus. There has never been a consensus that long covid is unrelated to disease severity. > Indeed, despite my area being pretty well boosted we still had a massive peak in cases. Without a doubt the "journalists" spun it as a catastrophe that is the unvaccinated's fault. Well, if 80% of my location is vaccinated, do you think a positive rate of 38% can only be because the unvaccinated? I suppose if you listen to MSM like NY Times and the mouthpieces at the CDC you'd probably believe so. Seems almost purposefully obstinate in how you try to refute a claim about metrics of hospitalizations and death with a fact about new cases.