[mauvehaus]

A good first step might be making sure the population is educated sufficiently to identify and weigh the risks between a 1 in 1,000,000 side effect, the disease the vaccine protects against, and the pure bullshit peddled by fear mongers.

Right now, we have people in the US who still believe that Covid is no worse than a bad case of the flu. All the evidence (at least for the pre Omicron variants) suggests that the reality, as viewed by death rate, is orders of magnitude more bleak.

[dev360]

> All the evidence (at least for the pre Omicron variants) suggests that the reality, as viewed by death rate, is orders of magnitude more bleak.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Director of CDC was actually in an interview recently where she said 75% of Covid deaths occurred in people with 4 co-morbidities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa7N-iNkaUE

This statement begs the question of what percentile of deaths occurred with no co-morbidities at all. In my mind at least, I don't know enough about the death rate to inform if its bleak or not judging as a healthy 41 year old without complicating medical factors.

[manwe150]

I was looking at the CDC data for that claim, it looks to me like many of those "co-morbidities" referenced appear to be sepsis, respiratory failure, heart failure, and co-infections:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fb...

Most of those sound like they would have been caused by COVID. So, were they probably a fairly normal 41 year old, until they were in the hospitalized for COVID, developed complications, and died. Or is there more to the model here?

Even more confusingly, about half of the US population is obese, but it is only mentioned in a small percentage of death reports (up to about of quarter in the younger populations). Taken naively, this would seem to imply that being obese actually strongly protects from death. But I suspect that it is instead simply not being listed in the causes of death in most cases.

[manwe150]

To answer my own question two weeks later, it turns out that number quoted on GMA was specifically the percentage of vaccinated people (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/covid-deaths-4-comorbiditi...). Her statement had no relevance to an unvaccinated person, as the grand-parent's comment was asking about.

[core-utility]

I'm just an anecdote, but I've had COVID. It was less than a bad case of the flu. To pretend that it affects everyone equally and that they're all the worst thing ever is malpractice. Risk communication should always have been striated by age/comorbidity and let people make decisions from there.

[cromwellian]

I’ve had it to, after I was vaccinated. The thing is, you don’t know ahead of time how it will affect you. There are lots of examples of 30 something, fit, athletic even, people with no preexisting conditions, getting very sick and hospitalized, dying, or ending up with long COVID.

Beyond that, many people who are sick with it won’t quarantine themselves for 10 days or wear masks and end up infecting others —- assuming they even know they’re infected.

So this attitude of “well it was no big deal for me” does nothing to attenuate the risk downwards for others.

There’s a hell of a lot of selfishness going on by people who just don’t want to be inconvenienced by behavioral changes to protect others.

[voisin]

> There are lots of examples of 30 something, fit, athletic even, people with no preexisting conditions, getting very sick and hospitalized, dying, or ending up with long COVID.

These are anecdotes that stand out specifically because of their rarity. This is why we need what the other poster said - Data striated by age and gender.

[raxxorrax]

While true, there are also examples with vaccine reactions.

There's a hell a lot of selfishness going on by people demanding perfect security and therefore whole industries to be shut down.

I am vaccinated and get tested at least 3 times a week because I still have contact to others, but the selfishness doesn't just affect on position in this debate.

[mauvehaus]

Even if it's true that Covid most direly affects people in certain cohorts (and I think it's fairly clear that this is the case), the behavior of everyone is still a matter of public health for the reason that people in low-risk cohorts can pass the disease on to people in high risk cohorts.

Part of the "public" part of public health is that sometimes it's necessary to take actions as an entire population to limit the risk to a subset of people with higher risks.

I recognize that there are many factors besides dying of Covid at play here. A lot of people have certainly suffered economically, among a great many other affects, as a result of both Covid and the response to it.

I'm not trying to oversimplify here, but it's also not as simple as "let everybody make the best decision for themselves based on the available data". Which I'll point out we (mostly) didn't have in March and April of 2020.

[joshuahughes]

I'm a very similar anecdote. Yes, covid sucked, but it was a mild 48hr illness in my experience. (And in the experience of dozens of my friends.)

It's quite incredible that the GP can complain on the one hand about "the pure bullshit peddled by fear mongers" and then — without apparently recognising the irony — goes on to peddle fear themselves.

[PickledHotdog]

Congrats to you and your friends.

Unfortunately that's not the case for hundreds of thousands of your compatriots and millions of your fellow humans.

Conflating fear mongering around vaccines with very few cases of serious side effects (none of which are contagious) with "fear mongering" around the virus itself which has caused literally millions of deaths and untold post-infection issues for millions more is what's really quite incredible.

[native_samples]

You don't actually know how common vaccine side effects are, because standard practice is to assume anything that happens >7 days after a vaccine isn't caused by it. This was the standard used in the trials for example. But from the paper:

"the mean time to onset of symptoms [for VITT] after vaccination is 8 days ... The mean time to onset of symptoms after vaccination [for auto immune hepatitis] is 13 days, ranging from 4 to 26 days"

etc. The trials had many other problems like smartphone apps for reporting side-effects that had a fixed list of 'expected' side effects, without any free-form input field to enter new ones. It's clear when you look into the details here that nearly the entire medical system is strongly biased against any findings of side effects and sets things up carefully to let them make such claims, regardless of common sense or what you might expect ethically.

[PickledHotdog]

Surely we can deduce whether there are meaningful numbers of serious side effects by looking at past years in population data - especially in populations that have high vaccination rates. If rates have increased markedly, then there's obviously something to investigate. But as noted elsewhere, the rates seem to be 'in line' with pre-vaccine rates for a fair few side effects in a given population. They just get more press now because of the focus on health issues in the media and the hysteria around "vaccine injuries"

You'll get no argument from me that reporting standards leave a bit to be desired. The trials are the trials - they could be improved, sure - but side effect reporting didn't end with trials. Plenty of governments kept tabs on side effects post vaccine once they were being widely administered

[native_samples]

But again, you don't know what the true current side effect rate is because it's not being measured honestly. There's a dropbox for people to write in and say they were injured:

https://openvaers.com/covid-data/mortality

which isn't nothing but all such reports are dismissed as coincidences or trolling. That's very unlikely to be the case, but even if you accept that argument, it means governments are forcing the entire population to take brand new drugs on the back of "drug firms assure us there are no long term side effects where long term means more than a week", which beyond being incredibly dishonest, would also be incredibly risky. Asteroids crashing into Earth or nuclear wars have nothing on governments forcing everyone to take a dangerous substance because they blindly trusted the makers.