[xcjs]

I registered an account just to respond to this: "So, I guess we all just have to go along with the booster shots until they 'get it right'."

The Pfizer and especially Moderna vaccines were as close as we could get to an ideal vaccine and had a high efficacy rate - for the Alpha variant. We did get it right. Additionally, the risk of death from the vaccine is effectively zero outside of extremely rare and very specific circumstances that are much less common than death or long term to permanent side effects of COVID-19.

The target is a moving one, especially when a substantial part of the population allows (or can do nothing to stop) the virus to mutate unchecked. The Delta variant has a slightly different spike protein, and we are very lucky the vaccines remain effective at all against it.

[Lochleg]

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/spike-pr...

If there was a tradeoff between making the vaccine safer or more effective, I guess I would agree to making it safer. That's what it seems like they did by focusing on the spike protein, which was said to not be a defining characteristic of coronaviruses in general. You should understand that the spike protein they did produce may not be nearly close enough to resembling an easily recognizable virus for the immune system to do exactly what we want it to do. This is also one of the reasons that natural immunity seems to be so much stronger than vaccine-acquired immunity. The vaccine might be called good enough by some, but the delta variant overwhelming all our efforts so soon has to be called less than ideal. In fact, the vaccine was supposed to be the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's obviously not. Little has changed, and we aren't doing all that much besides chasing after a magical vaccination or booster shot rate even as Israel is showing us that it's all for naught and mutations are still appearing.

Teenage boys are at a higher risk of heart complications from the vaccine. If one of them dies from a sudden heart condition, are we supposed to say something that make it seem like getting the jab was the honorable thing to do? Imagine if a parent went through the trouble of proving that their child has already been infected with the virus and has a family history of heart conditions or something. With the current, inflexible thinking about vaccine mandates, the powerful might end up pressuring or forcing them to get vaccinated anyways.

I think you only implied it, but the idea that the unvaccinated were the source of mutations was based largely on estimates that the viral load would be higher when they get infected. That turned out to not be the case when looking at the high viral load of people with breakthrough infections. In fact, as a lockdown skeptic, I think it's becoming clear that locking down indefinitely and losing sight of hospital capacity was a mistake that can explain our current plight. The perfectly healthy and young population normally become our shield from viruses each year. The vulnerable were the ones that needed to avoid infection, and they can't do it forever (and a booster shot may still not even be enough). Then again, we listened to Dr. Neil Ferguson and told Dr. Sunetra Gupta that she didn't know what she was talking about, so I am sure you see it differently.

[xcjs]

While interesting, the article you linked to doesn't really corroborate much of what you're claiming, though obviously I didn't post any sources at all in my claims.

Teenage boys are at a slightly higher than normal rate for myocarditis after the vaccine, but this is still far lower than the risks associated with COVID-19 itself: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/17/1007447...

It's also worth mentioning that many of these symptoms are caused by immune response and not the compounds of the vaccine itself.

It still sounds like you're over-inflating the risks of vaccines and deflating the risks of COVID-19.

You're still proposing herd immunity (of which we're not there yet) as a solution while ignoring the deaths and suffering that will occur until or if we reach that point. I find the ethics of that proposition questionable at best. It also ignores the higher lethality of COVID-19 compared to the flu: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

The more I hear people respond to or ignore the numbers, the more I'm convinced that most people just don't have a good number sense or sense of risk assessment.

1% chance of death from COVID-19? That fine. ~0.009% of myocarditis after receiving the vaccine which is close to the normal rate of incidence without the vaccine? Unacceptable.

[Lochleg]

You aren't clear about things, but are you really saying can't begin to consider exceptions to the rule? If so, there's not much more to say because we aren't connecting at all. Chance of death is not a precise nor often-calculated figure. Whatever you were talking about, you likely overstated it by 5-10 times. You could look at IFR, mortality rate, or excess deaths, but none tell the full story when you consider the chaos and disruption of 2020.

To list a few other things: We don't have reliable numbers for adverse effects, so clinical trials will have to be done. It was just one example, but it was about teenage boys that you have the numbers backwards for if you account for age of an individual. The immune response is cited as a major factor that leads to more serious and fatal cases of COVID, so I am not sure why you are treating that as an important distinction with the vaccine.

When the death count of children reached 300, there was a mainstream MD that questioned why researchers had, thus far, failed to contact the attending physicians to find out the circumstances of these unusual deaths. That should have been pretty important, but it wasn't. England may have dug a bit deeper to verify that 25 children had died from COVID in their country. If teenage boys are the highest risk group for myocarditis as a side effect, and their risk of death is infinitesimal, what kind of math are you offering? Teenage boys and young men generally were not being warned about the relative risk to themselves. That's seems like a problem. I guess heart damage could be considered _no big deal_, but it's substantial and much more visible than often-exaggerated long COVID, at least for the young and healthy. Maybe you prefer to speak about society at large, but there's not an automatic justification for that. If that's what we are actually doing, it should be acknowledged that we are asking children to make sacrifices for adults because I think many people see that as backwards, unethical, and completely unacceptable.

Herd immunity is not how you summarize any strategy, but it's kind of important just like food, money, and a functioning society. Spoiler Alert: We did technically pursue focused protection for the wealthy in wealthy countries. That's one hell of a game plan. If the vaccine worked as advertised, we would be rounding the corner on herd immunity. We are not, and that may be the least of what's gone wrong. Lastly, Bill Maher exposed his fellow liberals for getting the numbers on COVID wildly wrong, and this is consistent in survey data. The liberal media failed to inform when it's much more profitable to fearmonger and create clickbait with junk science. You aren't doing much better in my opinion, and it's probably not your grasp of stats but your bias that is the problem.