> US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) quietly ended its policy of differentiating within COVID-19 prevention guidance between those who have received Covid vaccines and those who have not:
Unvaccinated people now have the same guidance as vaccinated people.
> CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.
Perhaps someone has the patience to review the track record of the last two years on attribution accuracy for classification of death causes, including the CDC's (re)statements on this topic.
If you have another explanation backed by something other than a conspiracy theory - like another massively correlated global cause of excess death that everyone else missed - then please share, because you will have uncovered the greatest internationally coordinated cover-up or cognitive lapse in human history.
"Due to Covid" is open to debate. Is there international consensus on the statistical mapping between excess all-cause mortality, "with Covid" and "from Covid" deaths? All-cause mortality is especially useful when attribution of cause is open to debate.
> Is there international consensus on the statistical mapping between excess all-cause mortality, "with Covid" and "from Covid" deaths?
International consensus isn't required. Scientific consensus is the best we can do, and per Occam's razor, COVID is the best explanation we have for the excess deaths.
The articles I linked make that falsifiable claims.
You are making unfalsifiable speculative statements and asking vague unrelated rhetorical questions about process.
Please make a specific claim about what you think the cause of the excess deaths is, like "influenza" or "car accidents", "natural die off of a previous population bubble", or some combination thereof, and provide citations to studies and data to back it up, as people would be interested in learning about that.
> and per Occam's razor, COVID is the best explanation we have for the excess deaths.
I don't buy that. It upsets me how people skirt around what should be a straightforward, reasonable question to answer. "Did people die with covid or from covid". Without knowing that, all you can do is look at shadows. What age bracket did these deaths come from? Does it line up with what we know about who is most at risk from covid?
... And even then, the demographics most at risk of covid are the same that are at risk for many, many other things too. And when we scared the living fuck out of people such that they stopped getting routine care a lot of deaths could start to occur.
I've yet to hear any "expert" actually assert that the "official death count" is composed of only people who died as a direct result of covid. All I ever hear is people dancing around the issue. Which really ought to make one wonder about the statistics presented. After all Occam's Razor would suggest that the simplest course of action for these "experts" would be to assert that all deaths were "from covid"--they'd love to assert that. Yet they dont. Why is that? Hmmmmmm........
Except it's not a straightforward answer at all. I'm not even in medicine and I can intuitively see how unclear the answer to that question could be. Take someone who is a lifelong smoker and gets COVID and dies from COPD/Chronic Respiratory Failure. What killed them, the COVID or the smoking? This is probably one of the most elementary examples of how complicated determining cause of death can be, I am sure there are many many more that someone who is a professional in that field could cite.
> The present study estimates the burden of COVID-19 on mortality. The state-of-the-art method of actuarial science is used to estimate the expected number of all-cause deaths in 2020 to 2022, if there had been no pandemic. Then the number of observed all-cause deaths is compared with this expected number of all-cause deaths, yielding the excess mortality in Germany for the pandemic years 2020 to 2022.
> In 2020, the observed number of deaths was close to the expected number with respect to the empirical standard deviation. By contrast, in 2021, the observed number of deaths was two empirical standard deviations above the expected number. The high excess mortality in 2021 was almost entirely due to an increase in deaths in the age groups between 15 and 79 and started to accumulate only from April 2021 onwards. A similar mortality pattern was observed for stillbirths with an increase of about 11 percent in the second quarter of the year 2021.
> Something must have happened in April 2021 that led to a sudden and sustained increase in mortality in the age groups below 80 years, although no such effects on mortality had been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic so far.
Maybe when people started going back outside to do stuff? Did they account for the reduction in death in 2020 from other causes due to the lockdowns? Are you arguing no one really died from Covid but did die from the vaccines?
Say what the heck you mean, Mr Bright, because you’re dancing around it like you’re on American idol or something.
> Did they account for the reduction in death in 2020 from other causes due to the lockdowns?
How about an increase in deaths from other causes due to the lockdowns? Because that happened in the US, where covid-19 only accounts for about 60-70% of the excess deaths: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2778234
That's an interesting article, but it focuses exclusively on statistics from Germany, a country that had a pre-pandemic mortality rate 50% higher than the US (presumably due to an older population), and a COVID CFR half that if the US.
Therefore it's not surprising that the pandemic's excess mortality signature isn't as clear there.
I’m not going to read a 43 page paper, but it seems like you’re just promoting FUD here because you don’t want to actually say anything other than to ddos us with 43 page papers.
I'm sorry if you missed the last two years where this topic has been discussed at length on HN. Now, two years later, there has been enough time for data collection and structured analysis, so there's less need for real-time hot takes and we now have both hindsight and papers. If you're looking for opinion rather than papers, the HN comment archive will be happy to provide.
"the death rate for the unvaccinated was many multiples that of the unvaccinated"
This is false. You're assuming no deaths caused by vaccines, which isn't a valid assumption. When people compare all cause deaths they find little difference; this was also observed in the Pfizer trial where in fact the vaccinated arm had more deaths overall than the unvaccinated arm. Simply trading one cause of death for another is a bad move especially because "COVID deaths" were overwhelmingly in the elderly, very sick or both, but vaccine deaths tend to affect the young more than the old for some reason.
This obviously doesn't include all the non-fatal injuries, of which there have been a staggering amount.
Finally, the USA did not have 1 million COVID deaths. It had 1 million deaths labelled as COVID which is not the same thing given the financial incentives to over-label and minimal/zero checking of attribution accuracy. That's how you got the New York Times publishing a list of 1000 names of "COVID deaths" on the front page where literally the sixth name on the list was someone who was shot to death. Nobody was doing even the most basic sanity checks and as a consequence the data is garbage quality.
A bit too late! I'm sure there's a hidden wave of BA.2.75 as nobody gets tested officially due to the omnipresence of at-home antigen tests. Pretty much everybody I know got hit relatively hard, but I don't see a rastic raise in the cases in California. The sore throat is terrible and another common symptom I hear from people is dizziness. My wife and daughter got it, my son and I didn't thanks to a science-based respiratory hygiene at home, but they needed benzocaine throat spray to even just breathe - our friends also had to get it as one got severely dehydrated due to fever and not being able to even swallow his own saliva from pain and even less so - drink water. And days after negative antigen tests, my family members are starting the third week with still positive PCR tests!
> Individuals 18 years of age and older are eligible for a single booster dose of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent if it has been at least two months since they have completed primary vaccination or have received the most recent booster dose with any authorized or approved monovalent COVID-19 vaccine.
So if you haven’t had the primary course of shots you can’t take this one? Why not? I’m pretty sure I can take the flu shot even if I didn’t take it last year, or in the last ten years for that matter. So what gives? I thought this was supposed to be a “vaccine” just like any other?
They only approve that which they've tested for; in this case, they've only tested using this dosage as a booster. If, later, there's more testing on people who have not had any vaccine, they may expand the authorization. It's not a conspiracy.
With most things there's the right way to do something, the wrong way to do it, and the bureaucratic way. Honestly I'm happily surprised that they're going with the Flu system for Covid because the rules for the yearly Flu vaccine are grandfathered in from a time when the vaccine approval process was very different. There were a lot variances in the ways that vaccines can be administered, like "first doses first", that would have made a huge positive difference in our overall response and that other countries like the UK employed successfully but that didn't match existing procedures. Well, except that given years of work the procedures were changed and now we're doing that with Monkeypox vaccination. So yeah, it's stupid but it isn't sinister, it's just a big bureaucracy being a big bureaucracy.
> Most people in the USA have gotten the first two shots, so it's probably best to speed the release of the booster by doing a shorter study of just booster use
I understand that, but I think you’re missing the bigger issue. Let’s say five years from now they’re on the fifth new booster (optimistically, since this one took longer than a year to come out), will you have had to complete all 6+ earlier boosters in sequence before you can get the latest one? Surely at some point it’s not a reasonable assumption to think that everyone has diligently gotten the latest shots, like clockwork. Eventually the shots have to be able to work independently, right? Again, we seem to be able to pull off a new flu shot every single year...
But this one requires only the primary course - why would you assume that you would need "all 6+ earlier boosters in sequence" when this one doesn't even require any previous booster?
Agree, those are questions we need to understand the answers to, and I would guess that's the next focus area: how to improve the initial series of vaccinations using this bivalent vaccine, or maybe a later a more-multi-valent vaccine. My guess is that right now, it's a matter of doing what needs to be done now to cover the majority of people, since we can't do it all at once.
you mean an advanced epidemiology degree like the one Jay Bhattacharya has who had been finding it sketchy since before the lockdown but was actively shut down politically instead of being addressed by the greater community and who only was able to get his voice out well after he was proven correct?
or do you read it more as 'i want such a small group of people to voice concerns so that everyone can virtually ignore it because of my significant amount of bias and personal feelings so that minorities and lower income communities can be negatively affected by my bullshit execution of terrible ideas'
The goal of calling things FUD is not some automatically pure thing, though. A question is easy to identify. Calling a question FUD is a subjective judgment by someone whose motives we also don't know.
My random guess which should be taken with a grain of salt is there is some kind of workaround based on the fact that the original vaccine and this are both under the EUA.
Context info: FDA approved one of the original vaccines (Pfizer I think?) but the approved version has never hit the market because the approved version comes with liability. Literally no one has access to the approved vaccine, only the EUA one. If the EUA version harms/kills you then you can't sue anyone.
The approved versions of the vaccine are not actually being distributed, at least as of a few months ago. Your own FDA article differentiates them.
>The vaccine has been known as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, and the approved vaccine is marketed as Comirnaty, for the prevention of COVID-19 in individuals 12 years of age and older.
The Pfizer-BioNTech version is different than the Comirnaty version. Even if the difference is just the label, we have no way of knowing. The difference is likely the difference between name brand and generic. There's no reason, as far as I know, to believe there's any difference in efficacy or safety. However, the one that is being distributed is still the Pfizer-BioNTech version because that one carries liability immunity for Pfizer due to the EUA. They would be foolish to produce and distribute the approved version. I believe the prevailing narrative that the vaccines are safe enough and effective enough to use.
In fact both the eua and fully approved version have the same protection due to the PREP act.
OP please stop spreading false rumors that originated on Steve bannons war room. Now that you know the rumors you posted are false it would be appreciated if you go back to wherever you’ve posted the wrong info and post updates indicating the mistake.
Original post:
Please provide a citation for saying the fda approved version is not being distributed because it seems highly illogical that the full approval wouldn’t supersede the eua, with all the legal entailing implications, and the eua would cease to be valid. The fda has done some odd things in the past but a citation is needed on that claim that the approved version is not distributed and that both approvals coexist rather then the eua is superceded.
According to vaccines.gov, I can get COMIRNATY at a number of drugstores near by.
There are subtleties around the precise vaccine series, in that the FDA approved, and COMIRNATY marketed thing is precisely a two dose series for people 12 and up, and there are a bunch of places where only the EUA applies (a three dose, non-booster series for immunocompromised folks, anything for kids 4-12 years old, etc.).
Your claim about the EUA appears to be wholly unfounded, as I don't think there are significant liability differences between an EUA and full FDA approval anyway (you get limited liability with FDA approval normally, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program existed pre Covid-19). And there's tons of resources that trivially confirm that the vaccines are identical and that you can even get half COMIRNATY and half not, which makes the whole liability argument even less legitimate looking.
They are approved differently, as is detailed further in the article.
I already stated the difference may just be the label. Or perhaps like the difference between name brand and generic. I explicitly stated there's no reason to believe there's any difference in safety or efficacy.
My commentary is about skirting liability laws, not efficacy or safety.
“The two formulations of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) differ with respect to certain inactive ingredients only and have been shown to be analytically comparable.”
They go on to explain that the modified formulation uses a different buffer. He is correct at least regarding a formulation difference.
Okay, now the next issue is whether or not they're withholding Comirnaty from the US Market.
Again, no proof of this. Just speculation and fearmongering.
Further they have to show that have potential legal exposure from a fully approved vaccine over an EUA.
From my understanding of the PREP [1] act, Alex Azar declared a public health emergency in 2020. The PREP act gives immunity for all medical companies working on Covid 19 treatments until 2024.
I didn’t read fearmongering from OP’s comments, just speculation.
I have no idea about the liability issue. The more interesting one to me was the government vaccine mandates last year (medical vs legal interchangeability, eua vs approved).
Interestingly, according to Pfizer the 08/23/2021 originally approved Comirnaty formulation (PBS buffer) was never available: “… These NDCs will not be manufactured. Only NDCs for the subsequently BLA approved tris-sucrose formulation will be produced” (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/iis/COVID-19-related-c...).
As for if its available, I guess you would have to go check a few pharmacies and ask if the Pfizer vaccine they have is labeled ‘Comirnaty.’ Some articles from the end of last year say they couldn’t find it, but who knows now. I have not looked into this at all, and to be honest I’ve already spent too much time searching this stuff up today so I’ll leave that for another person.
I'm less familiar with EU liability laws. In the US the FDA differentiates an EUA version and the regular FDA approved version. The difference may only be the label, but Pfizer would be foolish to distribute a version with liability attached when they could distribute a version without liability attached.
Are you familiar enough with EU drug liability laws to speak to whether Pfizer has any liability?
I hate having these autistic fine detail discussions in this context because people assume I'm anti-vax. I will state here again I believe the vaccines are safe enough and effective enough to justify use.
As I stated in my comment, the difference may only be the label. But the FDA article clearly differentiates them and explicitly discusses how the approvals vs EUA are different for each.
"The two formulations of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and COMIRNATY (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) differ with respect to certain inactive ingredients only and have been shown to be analytically comparable.35
35 Analytical comparability assessments use laboratory testing to demonstrate that a change in product formulation does not impact a product's safety or effectiveness. For the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, multiple different release parameters were evaluated to assess the comparability of the modified formulation (the formulation with the Tris buffer) to the originally-authorized formulation (the formulation with the PBS buffer). These release parameters ranged from product appearance to size of the lipid-nanoparticle to the integrity of the modRNA in the product. Release and characterization tests include tests for purity, composition, and critical attributes of mRNA associated with the activity of the vaccine. The combination of release testing and characterization testing demonstrated that the modified formulation is analytically comparable to the original formulation."
Changing one buffer to another (to keep the vaccine at a similar pH to the body) isn't likely to have any active effect.
Advil and Motrin are two products with differences in inactive ingredients that are analytically comparable. They are however legally distinct. If Motrin slips on QC, you don't get to sue the manufacturer of Advil.
So, what are the legal distinctions? Is this legally distinct product actually available and what are the distinctions, for instance, regarding liabilities?
Sure, why not inject a pharmaceutical with indeterminate benefit and a minor risk of heart injury of unknown etiology, on an annual basis. Scrutinizing the methodology and motivations of the people responsible is totally uncalled for.
It is not negligible - there is enough data already. The benefits depends on age (above 40) and comorbidities. Given we have a decently working antiviral and monoclonal antibodies, the vaccine has little appeal today. Vaccinating healthy kids will be damned in the very immediate future once this administration is gone!
"Two top scientists who recently announced their retirements from the US drug watchdog have criticised the policy of giving most people Covid-19 booster vaccinations, just days before the Biden administration plans to start doing so.
Philip Krause and Marion Gruber, who resigned from the Food and Drug Administration two weeks ago, are among the authors of a scathing critique of widespread booster shots, which was published in The Lancet on Monday.
The article, which argues that the scientific evidence does not yet justify giving most people third shots of messenger RNA vaccines, offers an insight into the internal tensions in the Biden administration that were ignited by the White House’s sudden decision to back the booster plan."
FDA approval no longer means anything. Did they even do a trial at all this time? For Omicron boosters they accepted trials with tiny sample sizes, in which "not getting sick" wasn't actually the outcome they tested for (because the vaccines would have failed). Instead they only looked for antibody generation. Judging from the press release the answer is no: the authorization cites the "totality of available evidence" including evidence from other vaccines that aren't the one they authorized. They also talk about the "extensive safety data" which is all far worse than would have been tolerated for any vaccine in the pre-COVID era.
But sure, if you want to go on trusting the Experts™ then go right ahead. Please for the love of god don't try to inflict your naivety on everyone else though!
Yes, both the disease and the vaccine cause vasculitis, which is linked to ED. Of course, not all vaccinated get vasculitis, because not all the vaccine ends up in the blood stream of the vacinated, but for a good portion of them it does and it's a well-documented fact already. That's why in Germany and Austria they recommend giving the vaccine shot using the classical appraoch with aspiration. Many European dotors have been sounding the alarm for well over a year now!
I never stayed home - I wore N95 and FFP3 masks and lived a meaningful life and didn't get COVID-19 - and I won't get it, because I am using something that works and is not just wishful thinking. I had so many sick people around me, I didn't care. My wife and daughter just go it, we live together, I wore mask at home - my son and I didn't get it - and this is the second most contagious virus known to men! And you pray that your muscular shot does not end up into your bloodstream like it does with many as then myo- or periocarditis will be your fate and you can see studies - there's no such thing as a full recovery from myo- and periocarditis - every incident increases your chance for death from a CVD! And with every COVID-19 shot you will get more chance of hurting your cardiovascular system. And you're still not protected from a course of the disease - mild or not, it does a lasting and accumulating damage!
Am I the only one that doesnt read these articles anymore? Its like they are continually trying to force covid down your throats in effort for it to still be a topic of relevance, and for what? Has the world not moved on?
Given that the EU and US are both seeing around 100,000 new cases daily, no, I don't think the world has moved on.
In the US and Canada (can't speak to other countries), we've collectively agreed to pretend that COVID has just disappeared and return to normalcy because we're tired of dealing with it, but in spite of pretending it's gone away people are still getting sick and dying from this disease every day.
I caught COVID for the first time in July and my "mild" case knocked me out for five days. It was the sickest I've been in ten years and I'm a fit, healthy thirty-something.
He didn't say covid disappeared. He says that he "moved on" aka thinks that covid is here to stay or at least we didn't found something to get rid of it in the near future.
I actually don't see anything in the OP's comment to indicate whether they are pretending COVID has gone away or accepted that it has become endemic, it's clear that we both interpreted their statement through our own biases.
If we take your more charitable interpretation, I still think it is fair to ask whether we are ok just accepting 100,000 new infections/day of a serious respiratory illness as a normal thing in the summer months, a time that we usually see lower infection rates for this type of illness. For every endemic disease, there is a number of infections that are considered acceptable and public health measures are taken to keep the real infection rates at or below that. I, for one, do not think 100,000 daily is an acceptable number of infections in the US and we should be speaking out to say so. We can collectively do more to bring that rate down, but we don't want to because we're tired of wearing masks on the bus and for some reason have tied protecting yourself personally to a political ideology. We can do better as a society and should be demanding as much from our leaders, not encouraging them to do less.
> we don't want to because we're tired of wearing masks on the bus and for some reason have tied protecting yourself personally to a political ideology.
This is so incredibly rude and dismissive. It's straight up bullying. It requires a serious amount of privilege to think people should hunker down in some kind of "new normal" like the die-hard zero covid people suggest.
Perhaps the vast majority of people are well aware of the actual risks of covid and have decided that there are thousands of problems in their life that have to to take priority over one single respiratory illness with a vaccine. To expect the entire world to live this kind of myopic covid-centric lifestyle for years on end with zero defined end-state is complete and utter nonsense. It is scary to me how long society managed to get fooled into playing along.
This might come as a shock to some of the more hard-core covid people but there exists millions of other problems in the world besides just COVID.
"Moved on" is an English idiom meaning "we don't think about it anymore". GP's interpretation was the correct one.
> a time that we usually see lower infection rates for this type of illness.
We're still mass-testing, which is drastically inflating the numbers compared to all other viruses, which we don't mass-test for. Nowhere near that many people are actually getting sick.
My elderly grandfather has never had COVID and is excited to get a new, updated shot. If he does get COVID, he has a pretty good chance of suffering a pretty severe illness. Maybe occasionally think about other people, and their varying life experiences, which may be radically unlike your own? It's a really great habit.
The recent “5 times higher deaths for the unvaccinated!!!” headline was a study the CDC cited that used predictive models to make the claim that you’re more likely to die being unvaccinated. They put a number on it of 5 times but it’s just estimates of what could happen, not what did happen.
There are no numbers that exist to back up your claim. Or post away with a source if you think it’s real.
Oh that’s for sure. You know that this is the case when the Omicron Ba4/Ba5 booster alone had higher antibody response (on mice, not humans. Humans weren’t even tested) than the EUA authorized bivalent booster which combines old and new formulas.
I enjoy constructive discussion on HN, but the downvoted/dead/flagged posts I see all seem to be short, unsubstantive comments that repeat familiar tropes and beg others to proceed with similarly trite responses. It would seem to fall short of this guideline:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
And of course people also downvote to disagree. The winds blow certain ways here.
your assumption was correct..genuinely curious and it's interesting to see how polarizing the topic is in every sphere, especially one such as this which is more than full of critical thinkers
Covid (not the infection, the social phenomenon) short circuited many people's ability to have a rational discussion. See the example from this thread, someone asks an apparently earnest question and gets a ridiculously disproportionate response.
In all serious I feel like a group has been "radicalized" from all the government propaganda, and never got talked back down, and now we're living through the consequences, in online discussion particularly, for some reason...
they have appealed to people who love to have any authority over others, because now they have a personal "moral high ground" to impose restrictions and their will on others.
they have appealed to what is probably mostly those that are intellectuals (or percieve themselves to be) with the whole "trust the science" crowd. At the same time we conveniently forget all the evidence of how science has been deeply corrupted, and "well the science changed".
but it has also, very frighteningly so, exposed that people have almost no memory, and way too high trust in authorities. looking back at all the directly insane things governments have done and pushed their citizens to endure, it has also often come with "trust the science" or whatever equivelant thing used back then. Would you line up for the DDT spraying in the streets now? and lead was surely safe in the gasoline. but now of course things are different! the government couldnt possibly be wrong now? and if you think they might be? SCIENCE DENIER YOU ARE KILLING GRANDMA!!!!
people have reverted to tribal mentality, and there was enough tribes that several people could find a spot they identified with.
Or, a bunch of people tried to do what was best for everyone, as far as they were able, meanwhile another bunch of people were pissed they couldn't go to Wendy's. Let's face it, if all Covid needed was a simple pill (that you took after infection, so no need to even think) then no one would have made the slightest fuss.
Public health is firstly of prime importance, and secondly something that only collective action can really secure. 'Personal responsibility' won't cut it. This must be a nasty shock to those who were told it was ok to be selfish. Of course, not many people are likely to own up to selfishness, even to themselves, so they dress it up with 'science is wrong' 'don't trust the government' 'they are trying to control us' etc etc.
I note in passing that life expectancy continues to fall in the US, while recovering in peer nations.
> meanwhile another bunch of people were pissed they couldn't go to Wendy's
It's this kind of dismissive attitude that really grinds peoples gears. There is a lot of reasons to be pissed about what society did besides "getting a haircut". For example, we absolutely completely fucked over the younger people when they weren't even an at-risk population.
> not many people are likely to own up to selfishness
I assert the most selfish people were those who expected all of society to shut down because they expected everybody to be as fearful as they were. It is very selfish to make that ask.
And plus, these public health "experts" are unelected and unaccountable. They have absolutely no right to impose any of what they did for more than two years. Especially given none of them could assert any of their mandates even worked in a way that was worth the huge costs.
Dismissing skeptics like myself in the way you did in your comment is incredibly condesending and sanctimonious. It's downright terrifying that voices like yours were allowed to dominate the discussions over the last two years. It's bullying and abusive.
> I feel like a group has been "radicalized" from all the government propaganda, and never got talked back down
At this point which group you are talking about could be anybody.
All I can personally say is I’m still incredibly pissed off at being told to shut the fuck up and obey some “authority”. I’ve been yelled at, followed by nutjobs with cameras for the crime of taking my mask off while leaving a building, I’ve had people accuse me of being some alt-right kook.
I’m especially pissed because the people who told me that (many in real life) were people I used to consider rational, intelligent people. I’ll never trust those people again.
So yeah, a lot of “skeptics”, most of which are just normal fucking people, are pretty god damn pissed off at how we were gaslit, dismissed and abused. A lot of people owe us a huge apology for being such absolute assholes.
is this round free too?? if so, at what point do the governments of the world stop subsidizing covid shots? will a new booster come out ever few months until then?
It may well be a wash, considering that many people call in sick after vaccination and that people eventually get infected at the same rates as those who did not get the latest booster.
I think we've seen it's the costs of the political reaction, not the infection itself. Which is ironic because as I understand the way covid becomes dangerous is when the immune system overreacts to it (I don't know if that interpretation is still current)
When they realize how useless the vaccines and boosters are. Studies by Pfizer, Moderna, etc already show effects of the vaccines against COVID-19 last only for a few days.
At some point the sensationalism about COVID-19 will fade away and we will we back to normal, with lots of other illnesses (many of them a lot worse than COVID-19), and viruses, and all of that. Outside the Western world, unvaccinated people just go on with their lives and guess what, bodies are not piled up on the streets. Maybe the new variants are milder, maybe there was just a lot of fear when the first wave happened and COVID-19 countermeasures caused many of the deaths. We will probably never know.
People voting negative to my comment: I am fully vaccinated (booster included) and I travel around the world for work. I know very well what I am talking about. Get out of your little world. The unfortunate reality is for most people the vaccines against COVID-19 are working for just one thing: being able to travel to other countries.
oh nice, I always mentioned I would consider an Omicron/variant specific booster. As in, completely ignore anybody talking about boosters for something 3 years ago, and not completely ignore one for the seasonal covid.
So, glad they're finally successfully catering to that sentiment. I'll look into it.
From the post, they're only available to people who are already "up-to-date":
> Who is eligible to receive a single booster dose and when:
> Individuals 18 years of age and older are eligible for a single booster dose of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent if it has been at least two months since they have completed primary vaccination or have received the most recent booster dose with any authorized or approved monovalent COVID-19 vaccine.
> Individuals 12 years of age and older are eligible for a single booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent if it has been at least two months since they have completed primary vaccination or have received the most recent booster dose with any authorized or approved monovalent COVID-19 vaccine.
>> oh nice, I always mentioned I would consider an Omicron/variant specific booster. As in, completely ignore anybody talking about boosters for something 3 years ago, and not completely ignore one for the seasonal covid.
> From the post, they're only available to people who are already "up-to-date":
> ...
I don't think so. I read that to mean, to be eligible for the bivalent booster, you must have gotten a primary vaccination and not gotten a COVID vaccine (primary or booster) in the last two months.
It sounds like you are under the impression that the boosters that exist now give no additional protection compared to the two-shot vaccine, beyond the very temporary antibody boost, right? I don't have a source right now, but I believe that impression is incorrect, isn't it? Yes, the booster does give a temporary antibody boost, but it also adds a level of increased long-term efficacy, even against Omicron.
> US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) quietly ended its policy of differentiating within COVID-19 prevention guidance between those who have received Covid vaccines and those who have not:
> CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.