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Alright, let's take a simple example: Australia.
2020, the year COVID hit: 906 deaths
2021: 1,355 deaths
2022, when the conservative government ended lockdowns: 10,301 deaths
(source: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/covid-19-mortality-australia-deaths-registered-until-31-january-2024)
It seems kinda baffling to say conservative policy didn't cause anyone to die when their policy decision caused the death rate to go 10x.
I think we can reasonably extrapolate from Australia to other nations: maybe not as extreme, but you can tell when conservative policies won out again and again, because each time there's suddenly a bunch more dead people. You can perhaps argue about tradeoffs, but that's not what you said. You said "I don't think Conservative behavior had any significantly disproportional impact on spreading the Covid plague". I dare say policy decisions are a Conservative behavior
I don't think I've ever seen a source that listed less than 90% immunity from the vaccine - what exactly is your standard here?
... are you really being intellectually rigorous here? If we take that 90% immunity figure at face value, it saved millions of lives. What side effects, exactly, are so severe as to compare to "millions of lives saved"?
7 million Covid deaths in 4 years VS 42 million AIDS death in 40 years. So Covid is twice as lethal per year. That's not factoring in the fact that we had 40 years of medical advancements to help us combat Covid, whereas we had absolutely no clue what AIDS was for the first two years. That is an absolutely huge difference in our technology and ability to respond - I imagine if we'd had the AIDS vaccine 2 years in, the story would be vastly different
(Also not factoring in that the US has been below-average for AIDS for decades, or that the worst-hit region for AIDS is Africa)
Your comparison is hopelessly confounded by the fact that Australia, unlike the overwhelming majority of countries which enforced lockdowns, is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders, which has far more explanatory power in explaining the country's low rate of Covid deaths than does the strictness of their lockdowns. It's true that Australia ended lockdowns in 2022. It's also true that 2022 was the year the country first reopened its borders after Covid. I guess you could say that these are "deaths caused by a conservative policy" - but are you seriously proposing that Australia ought to have kept its borders shut to immigrants and tourists permanently? All to prevent a few thousand old people dying from Covid every year? A significant proportion of whom, if not an actual majority, would have died of flu or pneumonia within the period if Covid hadn't got them?
The vaccines were very effective at preventing serious illness, but practically useless at preventing transmission. Users on this forum have been gaslit for years with politicians and representatives from the pharmaceutical industry claiming after the fact "we never said that the vaccines would prevent transmission!" but we were there and yes they did and we have receipts.
Not a like with like comparison. By a very wide margin, the vast majority of people who died of AIDS were otherwise healthy adults or young adults between the ages of 15-49 (https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids). By contrast, 75% of people who died from Covid were aged 65+, and more than 50% were older than 75 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge). For a very high proportion of these people, if Covid hadn't gotten them in the last four and a half years, something else would have. Thus your comparison fails from a QALY perspective. A young American man in his twenties dropping dead from an infectious disease is unusual; an immunocompromised 85-year-old dying of a respiratory illness is not even news.
The claim was "COVID was too infectious to be controlled", and here we have a very clear example of controlling it.
More generally, my point was that it's absurd to say conservative policies had nothing to do with the death toll from COVID, which @FCfromSSC seems to be rather rigorously denying ("I don't think Conservative behavior had any significantly disproportional impact on spreading the Covid plague.")
It's impossible to discuss trade-offs if one side refuses to acknowledge that there was any actual price. We can absolutely discuss freedom -vs- death! But you have to acknowledge that it's an actual tradeoff, and not just freedom for free.
Fair enough, but that's a radically different claim from the broader "the vaccine wasn't very effective."
From what I understand, the initial vaccine approval didn't require any testing for preventing transmission, but later testing did in fact reveal that there was a significant drop in transmission: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/preventing-transmission-never-required-covid-vaccines-initial-approval-pfizer-2024-02-12/
Can you provide a source for a near-zero effectiveness there?
First off, I don't think people really reason via QALY that much. If elderly lives are worth radically less, why does murdering someone in their 80s carry the same penalty? Why do people spend so much money buying a year or two of life when they get cancer?
Second, AIDS largely killed people that took voluntary risks that exposed them to infection, whereas COVID was a routine workplace risk that people were forced to endure.
Third, AIDS hit in an area where our medical and communication technology was vastly worse - it took a year just to work out that it was sexually transmitted, and you couldn't just post that information on a website because the internet didn't really exist. Conversely, for COVID, we had a vaccine available to the public in like a year and a half!
With AIDS, avoiding it would have required not having any relationships for the next decade or two, because we had no clue how it was transmitted or when it would end. Failure to do so only risked your own health.
With COVID, you were asked to wear a mask and avoid big parties for a few months. Failure to do so placed everyone around you at risk.
I don't really see much of a meaningful distinction between "Covid was too infectious to be controlled" and "it is possible to control Covid, provided your country is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders and you keep your borders shut indefinitely". It's so telling that "zero Covid" types always fall back on the examples of Australia and New Zealand to demonstrate that of course lockdowns work at controlling Covid (and it's just a complete coincidence that both countries are geogprahically isolated island nations without land borders). Show me an example of a country which isn't a geographically isolated island nation with land borders which was able to control Covid with vaccines and NPIs. I'm going to assume we can't. Given that most countries are not geographically isolated island nations without land borders, it seems perfectly reasonable to argue that, for 90%+ of countries on earth, Covid is too infectious to be controlled.
And insofar as you're labelling the decision to reopen the Australian borders a "conservative" one, we both know full well that if Anthony Albanese (Labor party) had taken office a few months earlier, he would have made the same decision. In point of fact, Albanese did take office in May 2022, and did not immediately reverse the previous administration's decision to reopen the border. New Zealand reopened its borders a few months after Australia did, a decision made by a Labor prime minister (who was previously, consistently praised for her aggressive response to Covid and "girlboss" energy throughout the Anglosphere), and saw the same dramatic spike in Covid deaths. Are you just defining "conservative" policies as any policies which do not pursue the minimisation of Covid deaths as a terminal goal, at the expense of all other considerations? Or are you only interested in discussing the relative rates of Covid deaths when you can blame conservative decisions for them, and studiously ignoring progressive politicians who make almost identical decisions in almost identical circumstances?
I never said elderly lives are worth radically less. You claimed that Covid is more lethal than AIDS, but this is obviously untrue for the simple reason that it is much easier to kill a sick elderly person than a young healthy person.
TIL the Internet was the first ever medium for disseminating medical information. In point of fact the CDC (among other bodies) ran massive nationwide campaigns throughout the 1980s intended to raise awareness of the disease and how to avoid catching it, as did various governmental bodies in the UK. There was a very brief window, only a few years, in which a person who'd contracted AIDS could legitimately plead ignorance and say they didn't now better.
Or, you know, wearing a condom.
Yes, we were asked to do that. But even getting massive buy-in from the public on both counts had virtually zero demonstrable impact on the rate of transmission of the virus. China was unable to control Covid even using vastly more punitive measures (like literally locking people inside their apartment buildings) than any Western government, even in 2022 after 90%+ of their adult population had been vaccinated. I mean, even in your preferred example of Australia, even while their borders were shut, people still died. Or are you claiming that Australia really could have gotten its Covid death rate down to zero if literally everyone had always worn a mask outside the home?
Well, no: it placed every old and immunocompromised person around you at risk. Most people are neither, and Covid poses little more threat to them than the flu.
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