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.
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.
I was 30 when I got COVID in October of 2020. I spent 6 months recovering from the illness with symptoms ranging from myocarditis to Reynauds syndrome. As I type this message, pain erupts in my right lung as I inhale. If I had the vaccine available to me at that time maybe I wouldn’t be experiencing a constant reminder of my illness every time I inhale.
I think what GP meant to say is "I would've taken that vaccine/booster to reduce the chance of suffering these six months".
It's a game of chance.
Digressing, some people suffer much more than others from the vaccines, and ditto from the disease. I've wondered whether they're the same. Is it the same unknown factor at work? Does suffering for days from the vaccines mean that you're someone who'd suffer for months from the disease, or even die?
Consider two possibilities, both fairly remote and I have absolutely no reason to believe that they're real.
First, suppose that the people who suffer badly from the vaccines/virus do so 100% because of some factor that comes and goes, such as having slept badly. In this case, suffering badly from a vaccine does not mean that you would suffer badly from the disease.
Second, suppose that the people who suffer badly do so 100% because of some genetic factor, such as having a single gene for a particular recessive disease. In this case, if you suffer badly from a vaccine it means that you've saved yourself even worse suffering when the disease finally finds you.
You're lucky if opting out is a practical choice for you. For a lot of people now, opting out means being expelled from your school or fired from your job.
Wow this is ridiculous. I'm not antivaxer and got all 3 shots but I cannot understand this attitude from companies and the legal framework that allows them to act like this. I assume you work in the US?
Santa Clara County has started disciplining workers who don't comply with their booster mandate. (I'm not endorsing punishing workers on that basis, just noting that it is occurring.)
From the opposite point of view, many people consider themselves lucky that coworkers who decided to opt out are expelled/fired.
The focus should be on whether a given imposition has a net positive for society or not, rather than the imposition itself. I actually find it very indicative that the root comment's conclusion is entirely about the ROI for the individual.
It's fair to judge that not boosting doesn't have any net positive for society, but that discussion should be the focus.
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.
I may have misspoke when I said "bad" flu-like symptoms: they were on par with symptoms from the flu, not relatively worse (although, unpleasant), and they were all expected side effects and began the night I got the vaccine. The several months of lethargy accompanied with random pains was the unexpected part.
I was quarantining at the time and hadn't gone anywhere except the place where I got the vaccine. It would be ironic if I wound up getting COVID there, which lengthened and intensified my side effects. I hadn't considered that before.
For what it's worth, the J&J aftermath experience for me was on par with actually having covid 8 months prior.
Having also had omni (apparently getting covid is my superpower) with symptoms on par with a mediocre sore throat, I have absolutely no desire to repeat the vaccine experience.
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.
Some degree of caution is warranted on the part of the individual when unwelcome side effects manifest following a drug or vaccine. Doubly so when you can find cases where others have reported the same side effects.
We are also dealing with a novel (and evolving) virus and an even more novel set of vaccines. We're still learning about both. I find it silly that one could possess hubris about their stance on such a matter.
40, but same story. I just got over Omicron last week. It was roughly the same experience I had when I got the first Moderna shot. I rarely get the flu, and never get a flu shot for the same reason— the shot guarantees me a week of flu symptoms. At some point, I’ll be far enough along the risk curve to warrant that annual unpleasantness, but I’m not there yet.
Since we are doing anecdotal stories, I also had COVID before the vaccines and the disease was far, far, worse than the reactions I got from the shots. And I had rather shitty reactions from the shots as well. My reactions to the shots were about the same as what you described for your shots. I am younger than you and reasonably healthy.
I am inclined to agree with this. Getting one booster as an extra precaution was one thing (and in my case definitely made sense because my primary series was J&J, which is said should have been two dose to begin with).
Getting one every 6-12 months for an indeterminate number of years needs to be based on more than just a general precautionary instinct.
You didn't mention the risk of other people getting it from you. Each shot has lessened that risk considerably. That alone can be worth it - it only takes so many generations (person passing to person) for one person's infection to cause a death in another.
"Being exposed to chickenpox as an adult (for example, through contact with infected children) boosts your immunity to shingles."
"If you vaccinate children against chickenpox, you lose this natural boosting, so immunity in adults will drop and more shingles cases will occur."
It's seemingly not the primary justification the vaccine isn't offered, but I wonder if, to cut to the core question, those who are pro/anti vaccinating the low-risk to protect the high-risk feel the same way when it's flipped.
I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated, but that won't stop widespread community transmission. Everyone will be exposed to the virus.
I had 3x Moderna. The last two shots made me feel like shit for 36h and 24h respectively. It wasn’t fun but ok.
A friend of mine, same age, is in a couple where he isn’t vaccinated and she is (Pfizer). Of course he got sick last month and contaminated her because they live together.
He had to take 10 days off and felt like shit the whole time, unable to do anything. She kept working because since sh was vaccinated she had very very mild symptoms that didn’t hinder her.
Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, and you don’t even mention what vaccine you got.
What I’m considering doing for the next booster is to check how many antigens I still have before deciding if I take the booster when it’s due or wait a bit longer (barring a virulent mutation that would change the decision making).
In any case, I’ll take 24–36h of flu like symptoms (without having an actual virus damaging my body) any day over 7–10 days of agony like my friend went through.
Which antigens are you referring to? If you mean antibody titers, that doesn't actually tell you much about your immunity level. In practice cellular immunity is more important, but it's not easy to assay.
I was going to leave that up to my doctor because they know much more than I do. What I meant is that I’d want to check how much I need the next booster (or wait if I don’t) before actually getting it.
You're missing the point. You can take your doctor's advice, or not. But that advice will necessarily be generalized based on public health guidelines and not personalized based on any relevant quantitative tests. Your doctor doesn't have access to the assays necessary to accurately measure cellular immunity levels. Those are rather complex and typically only used in small research studies.
Antibody levels will always decline over time after infection or vaccination. A third booster might have some long-term benefits for certain patients but beyond that trying to keep those levels elevated with repeated boosters is pointless for most patients.
Same here: mild muscle ache for the Pfizer booster. If I didn't know I'd had the booster the previous day, I would have attributed it to falling asleep on a lumpy part of my comforter or something, assuming I'd even noticed it at all.
My understanding is the Moderna booster, being a 1.5x dose, often results in stronger side effects that knock a person out more often.
Same (pfizer) and this was the typical reaction in friends and family. A couple had minor flu-like symptoms for an afternoon but nothing like some have described here (days of "agony" etc), totally unheard of in my circles.
Yeah but you're almost guaranteed to catch the virus at least once, and even if your symptoms aren't severe, they're likely to be worse had you not been vaccinated. 5-6 days of discomfort from vaccination may have saved you 5-6 days or more of discomfort from covid.
But presumably now he's had 5-6 days of discomfort, the vaccine antibodies will get flushed out and at some point he's going to get COVID and suffer 5-6 days of discomfort from COVID anyway. These first generation vaccines are a bit harsh which would make sense given that they were rushed through. It is unclear if they are suitable for frequent use given the side effects.
COVID isn't going away, everyone's going to catch a couple of varients in the next 60 years assuming they live that long.
To the best of our current understanding, the benefit of vaccination doesn't seem binary, so even if antibodies and thus immunity fades over time, it might still be beneficial to fight off a serious, life-threatening infection.
The current stats suggest that even though the latest variants are way more infectious and can defeat the vaccine, most deaths still occur within the unvaccinated cohort.
FWIW. I’m also in my mid-30’s and relatively healthy.
I had a mild reaction to vaccination and lost no time to it.
I also recently caught COVID. I had severe fever, headache, muscle ache and chills. I still get much more tired after mild exercise, like a long walk, than I did before.
Vaccination certainly didn’t stop me from catching COVID but it likely did help me avoid a more severe outcome.
I don’t believe in forcing it on others but I would strongly recommend it.
I would love to know if anyone has looked at data from identical twins re: vaccine side effects and succeptibility to Covid reactions. It seems like a strong reaction to the vaccine might correlate to a strong viral reaction. Are there any studies that refute or corroborate this?
Identical twins rarely have the same immune system, part of the immune system develops with our exposure to pathogens which is unlikely to be the same for both twins.
You spent 5-6 days over the last year recovering from side effects, but you don't really know what the alternative would have been. You may be healthy and relatively young, but without the vaccine shots you would most likely have had much more severe symptoms.
I don't need a citation as I know that the more people that get vaccinated to the best extent possible, the better for our economy and the better for our older citizens who also deserve to live as well as those who are immune compromised. I think we all owe at least a bit of self-sacrifice for the benefit of society as we profit personally from a stable, productive, slightly enlightened society. It's not all about "how will this benefit me personally, directly, and immediately".
You might use your faith in "TheScience"TM to conduct your life, but for those of us paying attention to almost every public health official that told us that double dose vaccine would entirely prevent infection (something I knew was wrong before the CDC director said it) - we know they are at minimum incompetent and as such I require actual science to make decisions for myself.
They never said it would prevent infection. Find me one instance of Fauci or the head of the CDC saying that and I'll retract what I said. Sure you'll find some quack on extremes of vax/antivax but not a single scientist of any renown said "the vaccine will 100% prevent infection and sickness", you won't find it, I guarantee it but if you want to waste a few hours on google the go right ahead.
>And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials but it's also in real world data.
--Rochelle Walensky, Director CDC
I would recommend reflecting on what kind of bias it takes to be so confident without spending even the 30 seconds necessary to find that quote via google.
>Blood from individuals who received one or two doses had little ability to neutralize Omicron. But blood from people who had received a booster dose of an mRNA vaccine fought the variant effectively. Their neutralization capacity against Omicron was only four- to sixfold lower than against the original strain.
While younger healthier folks are much less likely to have severe symptoms in the first place there is no reason to believe that what chance they have of experiencing such doesn't decrease further with boosting.
from the study referenced in the article you linked
> Finally, the number of hospitalized individuals included was too small to draw definitive conclusions regarding VE[1] and durability of 3 doses in preventing hospitalization.
[1] Vaccine Effectiveness
effectively this isn't a source that supports the claim that young, no-comorbidity individuals are more likely to get severe disease with 2 doses compared to 3
It seems exceedingly likely that this is so and that the small number of hospitalized individuals merely means that the absolute risk is very low either way whereas the risk of the vaccination is lower yet and the optimal strategy to minimize risk to yourself and more importantly to others is to vaccinate.
This is from 1-dose - I couldn't find the supplementary data for that study on 2dose/3dose
but needless to say that no this study does not in any shape or form suggest that it's exceedingly likely that a young no-comorbidity person is more likely to get severe disease with 2dose vs 3dose.
edit: found the data for 2/3 dose comparison - which again does not support the claim, because this is not age stratified data - and we know covid had significant age preference
The main issue IMO is that the original dose schedule of 2 doses 1 month apart is stupid, goes against pretty much all of our first principles understanding of immunology, and was driven by a regulatory need for a short time window for testing/deployment (it’s quicker to test a vaccine w 1 month window than one with 6 month window), not due to science. The optimal dosing schedule is more likely to be once mRNA vaccine and a second one 6 months later. Source: family member is a chief scientist at a few drug discovery startups. Most people will have a durable immune response with the schedule above.
No, the second dose greatly increases the efficacy against hospitalization and death in the short term. It wasn't "stupid" or "not due to science".
It optimized for maximum vaccine efficacy at around the 5 week timepoint.
Canada took a slightly longer dosing schedule to get more people their first doses faster due to having less available doses. But they didn't go with a 6 month interval either, and there's a difficult calculus there where it isn't at all obvious that one choice is "stupid".
With Delta slamming into India and a lot of doses available in the USA the short schedule got the bulk of the population as immunized as possible.
There's a whole lot of hindsight bias going in trying to claim that was just dumb or unscientific. It probably did save some lives in the summer of 2021 because we did have the doses in this country. Someone who got vaccinated in early April would have only been getting boosted then in early Oct 2021 and that would have been after 75% of the Delta wave had already passed. Second doses clearly needed to be going into arms sooner than 6 months and you can only figure out what timing might have been in optimal in retrospect when you know what the virus was going to do.
It is correct that it didn't allow time for the immune response to mature before the boost and that is the rationale for the third shot. And for anyone getting vaccinated now, particularly young people a 6 month schedule of 2 doses may make more sense (although you always have to look at that 6 month interval and do the calculation on what the risk is of getting COVID during that interval -- at this point though presumably a person who isn't vaccinated isn't very concerned about that and probably has already been exposed at some point).
The benefit of 1 shot is very high for the first 6 months, it prevents the large majority of hospitalizations and deaths, but it does not prevent transmission. The decision to have a 1 month period between doses was determined by "time to market" not the ideal dosing schedule. Had drug makers tried to optimize for the ideal dosing schedule, then we would have had 6 more months of deaths while we waited for result which was a negative outcome. Now that the drugs are on the market, and we have sufficient evidence without running an additional stage 2 and 3 trial, the FDA should change guidance to suggest 2nd dose at 6 months instead of 1 month for people who aren't at high risk.
Per the article, the ROI is a 2-4x reduction in hospitalization risk vs. a vaccinated-but-unboosted individual. Given that the side effects of the mRNA vaccines have essentially zero hospitalizations[1] and no deaths[2], that seems like a good deal to me.
I mean, it's true anecdotally that the immunization is worse that the disease. It was true for my family at least (four Omicron cases, all extremely mild). But it's not true for everyone, and some of those people are going to die. I regret nothing.
[1] I haven't seen numbers but haven't heard of any
2-4x reduction doesn't mean anything unless you know the original risk probability. For a low 30s person that isn't obese... The original risk is already probably a tiny number. It's like saying because an anti shark ointment that makes you break out in itchy rashes reduces your risk of getting attacked by a shark by 2-4x, therefore everyone at the beach should use it.
Right, so that potentially 4x increase from skipping the booster takes it to 0.08% total mortality risk, which is 20% of my total overall risk.
You're saying you don't think trading vaccine side effects for a 20% lower risk of death is a good trade? I mean, this seems like a no brainer to me. Are you really saying this is a bad choice?
It's .02% -> .005%, not .08 -> .02. In other words, a few days of life expectancy. I certainly understand your decision, and I made the same decision, but I can also understand reaching an alternative decision about a booster (especially for those younger than you, or those who had worse reactions to the initial vaccine), where the discomfort and hassle might not be worth the small increase in life expectancy.
The current recommendation is to get a booster because it both reduces the severity of the disease and the chance of either catching a breakthrough infection or another variant[1]/[2].
I don’t remember where I read it originally, but the lancet is roughly what I recall. It’s not 100% conclusive, but the data seems to point towards roughly the same transmission rate.
That will always be true, and how true that is now is way lower than when nobody was vaccinated. There was only upside, now there is not only upside for a merely marginal potential optimization for higher risk profile people. The current variants are weakened versions of the virus that they are essentially the vaccine.
> The current variants are weakened versions of the virus that they are essentially the vaccine.
If that were true we would not be seeing 2,500+ deaths/day in the US which was higher than the initial first wave(2.2k/day) and is approaching the previous peak(~3k/day).
The overwhelming majority of those deaths are not from breakthroughs of double vaccinated or boosted people. So the prior vaccination effort has reached its plateau of interest and efficacy, and thats going to be good enough. As in, it will have to be good enough because thats whats happening.
Everyone’s made their bed.
So to ask more of the actually compliant people - most of which wouldn't have ever noticed they had covid even during unvaccinated hardcore delta times - is not really that convincing. Even the fear of “long covid” has dissipated, as it looks like that will never be quantified and both vaccinated and unvaccinated have experience with actual covid by now. Add in a slight and unnecessary myocarditis risk and that introduces just enough unnecessary downside to make another shot from two seasonal covids ago a hard pass.
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].
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.
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.
Sounds like how we handle the Flu. Those who are more at risk get flu shots. We should prioritize everyday, holistic health as we work toward a more robust society against future viruses.
The CDC actually recommends every adult and child get flu shots, but a lot of people have always ignored that recommendation (I knew someone who claimed the flu vaccine would make you get the flu, people have strange ideas about vaccines even before covid). EU did not have the same recommendation though.
Covid-19 is much more dangerous than the flu though, so the reaction and concern has been different…
Getting the flu shot one year can have negative net efficacy in the following year[1]. Its not necessarily going to be more shots == better for Covid shots either.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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):
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
Currently about half of COVID-19 patients in hospitals are incidental cases who were admitted for another reason and then tested positive during admission screening.
There are many people who have these numbers and study them.
Public health officials in the US have both the reported numbers as well as piggy backing on the system set up for influenza monitoring (CLI & ILI).
Simply because not all public reporting is as rich as, say, Illinois or Pennsylvania's, doesn't mean these figures aren't carefully scrutinized -- especially when threatened by political leaning from either side of aisle (such as when the then-current administration pressured the CDC to change and alter reports).
In my experience, hospital operations officers, health information exchanges, and, depending on the state, state HHS agencies don't mess around.
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.
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.
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.
You have to read the methodology carefully. While I believe there's nonzero effect of the booster, you don't know that infection is measured with symptomatic numbers and you don't know that a subsymptomatic viral load isn't transmissible. As for policy, with the fact that getting vax + covid will give you better immunity than a vaccine-only regime in general (probably even more so with omicron), you don't know that it isn't strategically better to have vaccinated, low risk people get breakthrough infections and get immunity to omicron proper, and aggressively self-quarantine, versus getting a booster that omicron has evolved to escape.
“you don't know that infection is measured with symptomatic numbers and you don't know that a subsymptomatic viral load isn't transmissible”
That is mentioned in the article, but right now there isn’t really any evidence suggesting the vaccine doesn’t actually stop infection in at least some cases. PCR tests can discover asymptomatic infections for instance and some workplaces had mandatory testing regimes. The initial moderna trial tested everyone even without symptoms on reception of the 2nd dose and found that just one dose of the vaccine had greatly reduced PCR + compared to the placebo group, there seems no evidence that behavior of the vaccines isn’t generalizable.
“ you don't know that it isn't strategically better to have vaccinated, low risk people get breakthrough infections and get immunity to omicron proper”
How do you you see this as an alternative while still suggesting the vaccine wouldn’t work or provide immunity?
If the vaccine makes a specific person immune to Omicron infection, they don’t need breakthrough immunity because they already have it. If it fails to make that person immune to Omicron infection, they’ll still “strategically” get sick by being in the community and being infected.
Unless you are suggesting an alternative of young vaccinated people specifically exposing themselves to Omicron positive cases en masse in an attempt to have a breakthrough case and boost their immunity I don’t see how your comparison makes sense.
Deploying an omicron-specific vaccine without any safety trials or testing seems likely to be safer than variolation using live omicron virus to intentionally infect millions (moreover, expecting those millions to actually self isolate is unrealistic - a significant percentage of them would go out to stores or social events and spread the virus more rapidly to seniors)
Our health authorities are too scared of making mistakes to do either though, so it seems purely hypothetical either way.
No, that's how almost everyone would have believed them to work. The definition has now been updated (some would say the previous widespread misconception was corrected) to mean that a vaccine can also "prevent severe infection" while not actually stopping transmission or reducing infection.
The above is what has been used to justify why vaccines still have to be mandatory, despite everyone who wants one getting one, while at the same time, masks and other restrictions need to stay, because the vaccine doesn't actually prevent the spread.
When you say it like I have above, people dont like it, but we've celebrated and mandated a "vaccine" that is a lot different in it's protection than what we would normally think of.
I have all three of my shots FYI. I'm really curious to hear a substantively different take than mine.
> The definition has now been updated (some would say the previous widespread misconception was corrected) to mean that a vaccine can also "prevent severe infection" while not actually stopping transmission or reducing infection.
“ The reason this is a problem for Marek’s disease is because the vaccine is “leaky.” A leaky vaccine is one that keeps a microbe from doing serious harm to its host, but doesn’t stop the disease from replicating and spreading to another individual. On the other hand, a “perfect” vaccine is one that sets up lifelong immunity that never wanes and blocks both infection and transmission. [. . .] But the results do raise the questions for some human vaccines that are leaky – such as malaria, and other agricultural vaccines, such as the one being used against avian influenza, or bird flu.“
That said, the covid-19 vaccines we have do prevent some infections even of the mutant omicron variant, just not 95% of infections like it did against the original strain of COVID-19. And luckily omicron, while still dangerous and not really “mild”, is milder than the delta variant and the vaccine seems to be able to save a lot of lives.
It's pretty screwed up this doesn't get more attention. I don't know how many times I've seen comments "explaining" how "vaccine" has always meant the second definition.
It makes sense that the dictionary had updated its entry - they are supposed to be reflecting current usage, not defining words as an authority. But the government making changes is absolutely Orwellian.
Merriam Webster's old definition contradicted other dictionaries and actual usage. Probably you heard about diphtheria and tetanus vaccines before 2020. Those are prepared from toxins. And Merriam Webster's virus definition said viruses aren't organisms. So their old vaccine definition excluded anything made from a virus. Other popular dictionaries had better definitions and didn't change them.
The CDC working definition didn't change. They removed a redundant reference to protection from a page for the public because some people claimed it meant anything under 100% effective isn't a vaccine.
I’d suggest you’re talking about “a definition” not “the definition”. Merriam-Webster is just a dictionary, not the final authority on the meaning of words.
“The definition” would refer to how people actually use the word, and examples of pre-2020 writing (as I gave) where e.g. the vaccine for Marek’s is called a vaccine would suggest merriam-webster’s definition was too limited.
That said, I think the old Merriam-Webster definition still applies to the covid vaccine anyway, so this is a bit of a side conversation. “ produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease” an increase of immunity suggests that this definition also covers leaky vaccines.
The definition update seems to be more about, as sibling poster said, the first part of the definition not covering mRNA or toxin based vaccines accurately.
Thanks. I appreciate literature references to this instead of the disingenuous comments from an earlier poster asserting bandwagon effect and bad faith by public health officials.
Unless Omnicron dissociated it, worse experience == more viral load == more infectious; vaccine reduced (and potentially for some elimintated) viral load and thus reduced infectiousness.
> Unless Omnicron dissociated it, worse experience == more viral load == more infectious; vaccine reduced (and potentially for some elimintated) viral load and thus reduced infectiousness.
I'm not quite sure what you're stating here. You disagree with the conclusions here and believe there is evidence that vaccinations significantly impact community transmission of covid? If so, could you provide references to that evidence?
I haven't had a chance to review the study yet (but look forward to doing so); I'm stating my current understanding.
Delta allowed for breakthrough cases; the rate was dramatically lower than unvaccinated overall (I handled reporting on some these stats in our region).
I haven't been as involved since the start of the omnicron variant, but my understanding is that the relationship still holds that prob(infected | vaccinated) < prob(infected | unvaccinated and no reported prior case).
COVID-19 intensity of illness was (and may still be?) associated to the relative infectiousness of an individual to others in their network (across the entire episode). So an asymptomatic individual (vs. presymptomatic before intense illness) was less infectious overall.[0]
> Question What are the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 G614 viral shedding in incident infections in association with COVID-19 symptom onset and severity?
> Findings In a cohort study of persons who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 after recent exposure, viral RNA trajectory was characterized by a rapid peak followed by slower decay. Peak viral load correlated positively with symptom severity and generally occurred within 1 day of symptom onset if the patient was symptomatic.
I'm trying to remember if our herd immunity artcle covered the monitoring stats ratios between vaccinated and unvaccinated. I'm thinking that the lead author left it out
> All incidence and hospitalization rate ratios exceeded 1, regardless of predominant variant, indicating that the risks were consistently highest for unvaccinated persons and that COVID-19 vaccines were protective against SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19–associated hospitalization among fully vaccinated persons, and most protective among those with a booster.
This one shows a nice breakdown of the incidence rate ratio among age groups and similar.
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What does this have to do with community transmission?
[1] If you aren't infected, you aren't spreading the disease
[2] A lower transmission rate equates to lower community spread all else equal (as someone identified earlier, Jevon's paradox could come to head)
[3] The lower IRR is a lower propensity (or, if you prefer, a lower R_t) between the two groups.
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This matches what I see in my regional reporting; the IRR is significantly different between the two groups. In my area (a red state in the US) behaviors are mostly back to pre-pandemic levels of behavior, so it is reasonable to conclude that the IRR in my area is representative of life following any COVID-19 protocols being relaxed.
> I do, but since the data is not publicly released its not shareable.
I don't believe you do and I shouldn't need to either way. "Believe me bro" isn't science.
> Hence the reason I've explained
What's that supposed to mean? What reason, what explanation?
> and pointed you to the appropriate resources.
You pointed to no appropriate resources. You actually deflected from the question and provided a lot of links and waffle that did not answer the question at all. In case it wasn't clear, I was not asking for techbro handwaving about whether vaccines impact community transmission. I was asking for actual data.
> A reduction in the incidence rate ratio among vaccinated individuals is a reduction to community spread.
An assertion that you have failed to prove and have no evidence for, as far as I can see.
> Have a good evening.
You too. And try not to make any more claims you don't have evidence for, it's misinformation.
I'll respond here in case your engagement with disinformation caused anyone confusion.
> "Believe me bro" isn't science.
Correct. This is a public internet forum where private or restricted access sources are not shareable, not an open science conference. Hence the reason the Washington State and CDC studies were shared, which align to claims made.
> What's that supposed to mean? What reason, what explanation?
I'll refer you to prior comments in this discussion chain.
> pointed to no appropriate resources. ... provided a lot of links
Read the links provided.
> An assertion that you have failed to prove and have no evidence for, as far as I can see.
Tautologies generally don't need proof. I believe you're being intentionally deceptive here.
Why tautological: a reduction in an individual's capacity to become infected with the virus reduces their individual capacity to spread the disease. A community is a collection of individuals; reducing many people's capacity through a vaccine to spread disease reduces community spread.
I refer you to both the Washington State study as well as the CDC study for the recent incidence rate ratio comparison between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
> You too. And try not to make any more claims you don't have evidence for, it's misinformation.
It's comments like these that show you are sealioning. Strong evidence for your questions have been provided in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30232957 -- your inability to acknowledge the evidence provided because it disproves your attempt at sowing confusion doesn't mean the evidence is not clearly presented and available.
Versus sealioning on a controversial topic -- that's disinformation. I find insulting when people engage in it, and I'll not entertain your comments further.
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For any reading this comment chain who may be confused -- vaccinations reduce community spread, the evidence has been provided in the comment linked, and I encourage you to strongly distrust when people are "just asking questions."
That's not what sealioning means. I'm asking for data for the one central assertion you made, and you are unable to provide it. Typing out increasingly waffling and verbose answers without providing that data, making yet more assertions you have no evidence for, and linking papers and data which do not answer the original question is the problem here.
You can't just cry "sealioning" after you make unsubstantiated claims and refuse to provide evidence for them.
> Correct. This is a public internet forum where private or restricted access sources are not shareable, not an open science conference.
Very convenient you just brought that up only after several back and forth posts that showed you were unable to substantiate your claim with actual data. You can see why I don't believe you.
> For any reading this comment chain who may be confused -- vaccinations reduce community spread, the evidence has been provided in the comment linked, and I encourage you to strongly distrust when people are "just asking questions."
Evidence was not provided. If evidence was provided, then you wouldn't be talking about these non-public sources of evidence you claim to be privy to, would you? They would be irrelevant because you would be able to just provide the evidence.
Your story has fallen apart badly. It's clearly pointless to keep beating a dead horse here and obviously you're not the type to ever admit they're wrong. Just keep it in mind for next time and stop yourself from spreading misinformation.
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) and in this situation I do have PhD training in biology, so this wasn't one point at least reasonably close to my wheelhouse
> Or if they're so mild you don't think you have a cold, you might go out and spread it more.
Yes, Jevon's paradox could exist in this instance.
> This would be a genius evolutionary play by the virus
It's not sentient. It's simply filling niches.
It would be a net benefit if, in US culture, we normalized health being a priority (including taking time to recover and not spread to others, whether a cold or flu or COVID-19).
> Ok wow downvoted.
From the guidelines:
>>> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
I've noticed here and, if I recall correctly, in other COVID-19 threads that sea-lioning comments tend to be downvoted. I expect this is because people are tired of science denialism, whether it is couched as "just speculating" or as "just asking questions."
What science denialism? I had a previous life as a working PhD in the life sciences. Honestly the crazy thing to me is just how much the mainstream discourse/policy on covid is itself science denial.
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.
> 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.
“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.
