[avereveard]

That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it.

Then there's whatever percent of vaccinated that would have allowed the fabled reopen, we engaged trough most of these metrics, and we're still far from normalcy.

Heck my vaccine passport has a very clear, very bold expiry date on it, talk of normalcy are nonsense.

Oh and there's that "let's not tell peasants masks are useful as not to cause shortages to professionals." Maybe warranted, given what happened with hoarders and toilet paper, but still definitely a lie.

edit:

jesus christ look at the mess of downvotes this whole thread attracted, replies included, this place is populated by people more toxic than facebook's and more sensitive than twitter's.

and you wonder why the content platform are in full on containment mode. truth is you're bringing your corporate dystopia unto yourself.

[jjwiseman]

From reading comments, it seems like a lot of people don't understand that Delta changed things.

In a world without Delta, the vaccines did do an incredible job of actually preventing infection. "Effectiveness [against confirmed infection] remained above 95% regardless of age group, sex, race, or presence of comorbidities."[1] But that study used data up to March 2021, which means mostly non-Delta variants. Against Delta, vaccine effectiveness in preventing infection might be closer to 50%+ (e.g. [2]) -- which is still very effective! It's just not effective as we would like. "Hi, here's a shot that cuts your odds of getting infected in half. Do you want it?" Um, yes please.

You have to change your behavior when the facts in the world change. The messaging had to change with the facts. Of course you can't use the old vaccination thresholds for re-opening if the virus is now infecting 10x (50% vs. 95%) as many vaccinated people as it was 2 months ago, that doesn't make sense.

The virus moved the goalposts. You can be angry about that, but that's reality.

We are so lucky that despite everything, the vaccines are still incredibly effective at keeping you from dying if you get COVID. I'm actually very angry at how the mask messaging was handled (there should absolutely be consequences for that), but it doesn't matter how angry I am, if I don't get vaccinated I am irrationally refusing the single best way to avoid dying in this pandemic.

[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-1577 [2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e4.htm

[chana_masala]

Delta was encouraged through the evolutionary pressure from a leaky vaccine

[meepmorp]

Bullshit. It came from India, and the unchecked spread of the virus through the largely unvaccinated population.

Evolutionary pressure is exerted by all immune responses, not just ones conditioned by vaccines.

[chana_masala]

> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]

The covid vaccine is just that - limits symptoms but still allows transmission.

> In an unvaccinated population, mutations occur at random producing a wide genetic spread with very few progeny resulting in long lasting lineages (Muller's ratchet), with a selection pressure that favors those variants that can (a) win the competition of replication among its cousins within a host, and (b) not kill the host so that it can thrive in new hosts.

> In a highly vaccinated population, mutations occur at random, but the genetic spread among versions of the virus is narrowed to those that can evade immunity, which has now been made more uniform among the vaccinated population. This further encourages such lineages even when they would not have won out within individual hosts in competition among its cousins. Such evasion increases chances of reinfection. [2]

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.13...

[2] https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/variant-roulette-evo...

[KVFinn]

>That vaccine granted immunity was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit, but you'll be less likely to die from it.

Please look up the medical definition of immunity.

[mythrwy]

I'd be curious if the definition has changed in the past year (word redefinition seems to a thing lately and it is Literally not for the better!).

Immunity obviously means being immune. Immune has a specific definition and that is not "helps sometimes".

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/immu...

Resistance or, decreased susceptibility, or whatever other term you wish to use, is not the same as immunity.

Otherwise what word do we use for "immunity" now?

[avereveard]

no? I know very well the definition. that why I'm stating that the way it was worded at the beginning was a big fat lie, told to the public to coerce compliance, and latter reduced to a more realistic target to manage expectations.

[Tostino]

You are entirely ignoring the point the other commenter made about delta changing things. You are simply repeating talking points I've heard over and over, it's exhausting.

[avereveard]

you are willfully merging two separate topic into one trying to shut down an argument by adjacency, as if the trite answers you bring could move the discussion forward. do you have points of your own that relate to the topic at hand?

[betterunix2]

"That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it."

The world changed between the beginning of vaccine availability and today. New variants emerged from unvaccinated populations and some of those variants (Delta being the most prominent currently being reported) are able to evade the immune response generated by the vaccine (breakthrough infections). The guidance was updated to reflected newly available information -- would you prefer that the CDC ignore new data and just stick with its initial statements?

The reason we are far from normalcy is that since the beginning of this pandemic people have been refusing to do what they need to do to slow the spread. If people had done what health officials asked, we might have been closer to normalcy. Take your complaints to all those right-wing extremists in the media and the government who politicized a public health crisis and who continue to tell people to ignore the CDC.

[silver-arrow]

No. Variants spring up because of non sterilizing vaccines. We always knew to NEVER engage in mass vaccination during a pandemic situation. We also knew we can’t vaccinated against corona viruses. As evidenced by Israel and other countries.

[chana_masala]

> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.13...

[meepmorp]

This doesn't even make sense as biology. You're essentially saying the virus evolved exclusively because of the pressure vaccines, which is absurd on its face.

[chana_masala]

> Could some vaccines drive the evolution of more virulent pathogens? Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population. [1]

The covid vaccine is just that - limits symptoms but still allows transmission.

> In an unvaccinated population, mutations occur at random producing a wide genetic spread with very few progeny resulting in long lasting lineages (Muller's ratchet), with a selection pressure that favors those variants that can (a) win the competition of replication among its cousins within a host, and (b) not kill the host so that it can thrive in new hosts.

> In a highly vaccinated population, mutations occur at random, but the genetic spread among versions of the virus is narrowed to those that can evade immunity, which has now been made more uniform among the vaccinated population. This further encourages such lineages even when they would not have won out within individual hosts in competition among its cousins. Such evasion increases chances of reinfection. [2]

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/info:doi/10.13...

[2] https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/variant-roulette-evo...

[ZoomerCretin]

Immunity: the ability of an organism to resist a particular infection or toxin by the action of specific antibodies or sensitized white blood cells.

The vaccine gives immunity, by the definition of what immunity is. The reduced efficacy was communicated as soon as it was confirmed. There was no lie. This is how science occurs. The best conclusion was given from the data at the time.

Regarding the metrics for vaccination rates that would allow full normalcy: they existed before the Delta variant, and unfortunately this new variant has made herd immunity impossible.

[creaturemachine]

The science is evolving, and these differences from a year ago are proof of that. I don't think the vaccine makers were very proud to admit that their wonderdrug wasn't what it was promised to be, but that's the way it is. The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call.

[cies]

> The science is evolving

Science got massively oversold. Who did that? Who benefits from that?

> The only remaining choice for anti-vaxxers in the face of increasingly contagious variants is take the shot or risk death. Your call.

I think if you call anyone hesitant to take these shots an anti-vaxxer, you contribute to making the narative so everything extreme. Many that are "c19 vaccine hesitant" are vaccinating their children on the locally standard schedule. It is just that this c19 vaccine is a bit different: did not yet stand the test of time and it is in many cases a whole new therapy (mRNA therapy's debut).

> take the shot or risk death

This sounds so dramatic. This choice is everywhere, just not with so much media attention. Diets, traffic accidents, extreme sports, ...

I think we should use vaccines only to protect those at risk, and/or those who want protection by it. Once they have the shot it's over.

The media is pushing a story that we need to all get vaccinated to protect others. I think, given the research, that this is never going to happen (virus will stay in corners of the world with unvaccinated people, virus will have new variants: virus will stay with us).

[Reason077]

> "It is just that this c19 vaccine is a bit different: did not yet stand the test of time and it is in many cases a whole new therapy (mRNA therapy's debut)."

At this point, surely the various c19 vaccines are the most highly scrutinised and widely administered vaccines developed in the past 50 years or so. More than 6 billion shots administered, and counting. How much more time do you need?

[oceanplexian]

Speaking specifically to the Pfizer vaccine, it’s gone from 95% effective against preventing severe symptoms against the Alpha variant to 88% against Delta in less than 6 months of the vaccine being widely available to the public (With some even less optimistic peer-reviewed studies coming out of Israel, I’m just going by what the CDC is reporting). So under these circumstances, maybe it makes sense to wait a year or two before making claims about the long-term effectiveness of the vaccines. If they aren’t effective long-term some people might make different decisions about what vaccine they decide to take.

[alexpw]

The mRNA vaccines were developed to target the spike protein of the Alpha variant. We got lucky it works so well against Delta, or else they would have had to roll out a new vaccine.

Based on your wording, it sounds like you have the mistaken impression that the mRNA vaccines are expected to account for and target all future variants. A future variant may have a large enough mutation to the spike protein and render them 0% effective. But they can rollout a new vaccine very quickly with EUA. Sorry if I've misinterpreted.

I don't remember ever seeing #s promising long term effectiveness, but eventually later seeing a chart with projected effectiveness waning over time. What they should do is be careful to present variant specific numbers. There's too much generalizing, like I did as well, lumping Pfizer and Moderna together.

[Reason077]

My comment was in regard to vaccine safety/side effects, not long-term efficacy.

[cies]

If it is quite safe but ineffective I also dont want it.

[silver-arrow]

That is a pretty naive take on “safe”. Would you like for me to list the MANY actually tested and approved drugs that turned out to have nasty or deadly effects realized years later which resulted in them being pulled? It is actually stunning to see such trust in something so untested in real world situations knowing from who is producing it. Oh I could list many other drugs! This not even counting drugs like OxyContin or benzodiazepines.

[cies]

> How much more time do you need?

Test of time. How come there's a recall for pregnant women? While a few days ago they were still pushing those pregnant to get jabbed?

> the most highly scrutinised and widely administered vaccines

Where do you get yr data from? Is not polio vaccine administered to more people world wide?

Are we even talking about 1 product? There are many c19 and many polio vaccines. All can have unique problems.

[avereveard]

> How much more time do you need?

well it's not like you can study long term effect by virtue of having a very large large short term datasets, no matter how much large the current dataset is.

[Reason077]

My comment was in regard to vaccine safety/side effects, not long-term efficacy.

Flu vaccines are only really effective for a single season. Hopefully it’s longer, but even if c19 vaccines give you only 1-2 years protection before requiring a booster, I’d say that’s still pretty good.

[LudvigVanHassen]

The 3-5 year clinical trial like all of the previous vaccines.

[Reason077]

‘flu vaccines roll out annually and certainly don’t get 3-5 year clinical trials.

[chana_masala]

Those are not entirely new vaccines, though. They're just slightly modified from before

[LeoPanthera]

> That vaccine granted immunity was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit, but you'll be less likely to die from it.

You're being downvoted but the medical industry in the US honestly has terrible PR. It's not surprising that people misunderstand.

Vaccines do grant immunity, but immunity doesn't mean "you cannot catch the virus" and it never has. It means that your immune system will recognise the virus immediately and fight it.

This is the same thing as "less symptoms".

"A week of feeling like shit" has nothing to do with the virus at all, they're not symptoms of an infection that you are feeling, they are side effects of your immune system learning to fight the virus that the vaccine is teaching it about.

All, or at least most, vaccines require occasional boosters, but if everyone is vaccinated when they should be, the virus will die out before any significant number of further infections can occur, as has now happened with Polio and Smallpox.

So in short: You were not lied to, but you absolutely should have had this explained to you with greater clarity.

[oceanplexian]

If vaccines don’t provide immunity then what’s the point of all the public policy such as vaccine passports, etc? If you can still catch and spread it those who are vaccinated should be subject to the same testing requirements as the unvaccinated.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> If you can still catch and spread it those who are vaccinated should be subject to the same testing requirements as the unvaccinated.

You're misunderstanding the precise use of the word "can" here. I can win the lottery. I can win a coin toss. But the odds are drastically different, and so en masse, we should plan and test much more for the "much more likely" case than the other. Now, vaccination against COVID gives better odds of not catching and not spreading COVID. You still _can_, though.

> If vaccines don’t provide immunity

But they do, statistically they provide a high level of immunity. Not 100% though. You know this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699699 So why are you contradicting yourself?

[JshWright]

It's not a binary thing... Vaccines make it significantly less likely that you will be infected, or if you are infected that you will develop the viral load necessary to be infectious, or if you are infectious, the period of time you are infectious for will be much shorter. At each step along the way the vaccine makes less likely that the vaccinated individual will infect someone else.

It makes it sufficiently less likely that if everyone was vaccinated, each infected person would, on average, go on to infect less than one other person, and the pandemic would end. The more people who are vaccinate, the lower that average of "people that get infected by each infectious person" goes. That is why vaccinations are important to everyone, not just the individual who is vaccinated.

[nradov]

Vaccination provides good protection against severe symptoms. However even a high level of vaccination won't be sufficient to end the pandemic.

https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...

[silver-arrow]

Past attempts to vaccinate corona viruses say you are wrong. Israel’s current live study says you’re wrong

[jokethrowaway]

It's unlikely the virus would have died out in any circumstance, given how infectious it is and easy to transmit.

We're probably going to get progressively less deadly variants until the end of times.

Vaccines' downsides were definitely overplayed because they were trying to push vaccines.

Talking about the increased risk of blood clots, saying that you would still get symptoms, that you would still infect other people, that you would still have to wear a mask, that you would still have to do a test whenever you travel, that vaccines would lose efficacy and need a booster every 6 month - that's the kind of stuff that would get you branded as an no-vax and banned from youtube.

[dlp211]

> Vaccines' downsides were definitely overplayed because they were trying to push vaccines.

We paused the use of the J&J vaccine over the blood clot issue that turned out to be a common side effect of many drugs and it was at a rate lower than common birth control pills.

No one has downplayed the side effects or done something nefarious is some nebulous attempt to exert power and disinformation over people.

[orangepurple]

Innate immunity in a world of many unvaccinated individuals is going to gradually reduce this virus to another variant of the common cold. In the mean time, the vaccinated like myself are going to harbor and evolve dangerous variants which will kill many of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated are the real victims here, since the vaccinated ones won't help the virus become more benign as effectively as those who develop innate immunity against it.

[effie]

Even if you are eventually proven correct (vaccinated putting pressure on the virus to get more dangerous), I think your personal decision to favour personal health to public health is the correct one. Everybody should primarily watch their own interests and their own health.

On the other hand, public policy leading to creation of more dangerous viruses would be a disaster and if that happens, it should be stopped.

[YossarianFrPrez]

> That [the] vaccine granted immunity.

Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system. "Immunity" in the context of vaccines does not, and has never meant something like 'diplomatic immunity.' Instead, it means that a vaccinated person's body has the tools to fight off the virus. Which looks like reduced symptoms and drastically reduced likelihood of death from the virus. Mild side effects are expected. [1]

This has been true since vaccines were first discovered /invented, and will continue to be true. Measles, Smallpox, Polio, etc.

Perhaps many people misunderstood what "immunity" meant... But that initial misunderstanding doesn't mean that they were being lied to by doctors and scientists. What it really means is that they were unintentionally lying to themselves about the definition of immunity.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/parents/why-vaccinate/vaccine-d...

[JuliusPullo]

The Covid vaccine does not work by directly stimulating the immune system, like all other vaccines do. Instead, it inserts synthetic molecules into some cells, turning them into little machines that constantly produce a toxin that is released into the blood stream. The immune system is supposed to learn to fight this toxin. This has NEVER before been done in any other vaccine. We could speculate for hours about what could go wrong, but for the moment lets just say that myocarditis and blood clots are definitely NOT mild side effects.

[edmundsauto]

Myocarditis and blood clots are also (more frequently) side effects from getting C19.

Just because it's never been done before does not mean we have no idea what it will or won't do. Biology is uncertain, but it's important to examine the vaccine risks AGAINST COVID RISKS.

Nothing is no-risk, including the vaccine. However, the accurate comparison is getting covid without the vax, versus with the vax. Looking at the vaccine risks in isolation is somewhere between misleading and dishonest.

[effie]

The vaccine can 1) hurt me with probability p1, and 2) help me with probability p2, in case I get COVID later in a few-month-window after the vaccine when it is efficient.

I can choose to not get the vaccine, but I can't choose to not get COVID. COVID may hurt me either way.

Depending on the values p1, p2, it's better to get the vaccine or not get it. The problem is, most people have no idea about values of p1, p2 and that they are highly dependent on personal details.

[edmundsauto]

Transmission to others is still an issue in the un-vaccinated.

Your logic doesn't make sense. You absolutely can choose to not get the serious covid version that hospitalizes you: by getting the vaccine! By socially distancing, and not hanging out with people who don't take very basic precautions. Even your second sentence: "COVID may hurt me either way" doesn't reflect reality - it's MUCH MUCH MUCH more likely to hurt you if you are unvaccinated.

And while personal details may vary, we can estimate covid risks pretty well with the population base rate, sliced by a few basic dimensions (age, BMI, smoker status). We also have a pretty good idea of vaccine risks - almost none.

We may not know vaccine side effects long term, but we also don't know the effects of long term covid. We do know that short term, the disease is way worse than the vaccine, and the more people that have it, the more chance it gets worse.

Look, I'm all for people making their own choice when it comes to the vaccine. Similarly, I think it's fair that society have a say about when unvaccinated people are allowed to participate in society.

[longhairedhippy]

I call bullshit here. If you're that worried, get the J&J vaccine, it's just like all the others. Multiple orders of magnitude more people have died or come down with long haul COVID versus had these side effects so the argument that you're doing the safe thing does not hold water.

[realreality]

J&J is not like other most other vaccines. It uses an adenovirus vector to do the same thing that the mRNA vaccines do.

If you're worried about that, get Sinovac or Covaxin, which are the only traditional, inactivated virus vaccines available (that I'm aware of).

Oh, but for the purposes of mandates, those vaccines aren't accepted.

[longhairedhippy]

Adenovirus vaccines have been in use since the 70s.

[effie]

> Multiple orders of magnitude more people have died or come down with long haul COVID

Yes but a very small part of those are relevant to my personal assessment of risk of bad COVID. The risk depends strongly on age, health status, lifestyle and so on. Absolute numbers of deaths are not that important to personal risk assessment.

[longhairedhippy]

I would be completely shocked if your "personal risk assessment" is accurate. There is no clear indications on which folks will get long COVID, "age, health status, lifestyle, and so on" are generalizations not absolutes. Your chance of dying of COVID, regardless of your health status, is much greater than the chance of experiencing serious side effects in what is probably one of the most widely distributed vaccines in history.

"Feelings" have no place in science. These are numbers not subjective anecdotes, which appear to be what you're basing your decision on. Say what you like, the data doesn't lie, only people do.

[hackinthebochs]

Risk assessment given missing data is very much personal and subjective. It's ridiculous that some try to use "the science" as a justification for their personal values or risk assessments.

[silver-arrow]

Do no harm. You have no idea of the real risk from the vaccine because they really aren’t looking. Not 1 child should have been made to suffer myocarditis or died from the vaccine vs their risk of covid. Not one. But many have.

[longhairedhippy]

"Think of the children!" one of my favorite ways to see people trying to get out of an argument. Who could possibly argue for wanting to hurt children!

I would love some citations here, as this seems to be the exact type of misinformation this act is trying to combat. The thought that hundreds of thousands of medical professionals across the world are willingly ignoring potentially fatal consequences for children out of some nefarious political agenda is ludicrous. If this was really happening, it would be trivial to show it, anecdotes are not hard data.

In the same vein, not 1 immunocompromised child should die from COVID when there is an easy and safe way to combat it. Not one. But many have.

[chana_masala]

I don't think it's from a nefarious political agenda, but more so ignorance, stubbornness and scientism/cargo cult science (trust the science is not scientific).

[pigeonhole123]

J&J also works by producing spike proteins

[longhairedhippy]

Adenovirus vaccines have been in use since the 70s.

[gmnash]

This is not accurate.

“mRNA vaccines tell our cells to make a piece of the “spike protein” that is found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Since only part of the protein is made, it does not harm the vaccine recipient, but it is antigenic and thus stimulates the immune system to make antibodies.”

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna.html

[jimbob45]

https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2021/07/bloo...

>VITT is not associated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccines.

We're talking 400 cases of VITT from two specific vaccines (AZ and J&J) out of 6.2 billion doses given. Furthermore, COVID itself is associated with getting blood clots. In fact, you have a much higher chance of getting blood clots by staying unvaccinated than getting the vaccine. Even further, blood clots are entirely treatable if caught early.

Of course, as others have said, blood clots aren't a legitimate concern for anyone. This is yet another shifting of the goalposts.