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Notes -
https://rumble.com/v1nhpkq-eu-parliament-member-rob-roos-asked-a-pfizer-representative-at-a-hearing-if.html
Apparently a Pfizer executive acknowledged to some European council of wise elders that, due to moving "at the speed of science," they never tested for transmission reduction in the vaccine.
Did I miss something in the last 2 years? Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)
What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?
Why did some countries roll out a vaccine passport?
Why were people fired from their jobs and as recently as last week members of the US military were "other-than-honorably" discharged because they didn't inject the "vaccine"?
It seems people were fired for their own health, since the jabs didnt prevent transmission.
What is actually going on? I understand the argument of vaccine mandates if they prevent transmission, (even though I dislike it, and disagree, I understand the argument.) But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?
There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose. If I dosed millions of people with two shots of saline water and only counted them as vaccinated two weeks after the second saline shot, the statistics would appear such that the "saline vaccinated" were less likely to get Covid.
On Twitter, I see many many people now claiming that noone ever said the vaccines would stop the spread, they merely reduce the severity. But that feels like a bad plot forced retcon for a soap opera. Why did we shut down schools? Why did the leaders of France, UK, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the USA all say horrible things about the "unvaccinated" and the "Antivaxxers"?
Again, I don't like it, but I could almost understand it in the context of a 100% efficacious vaccine that stopped infection and transmission. But if it never substantially stopped transmission then
None of the mandates make any sense, (except perhaps in terms of financial profit.)
Geert Vanden Bossche claims that you should never ever vaccinate during a pandemic, especially with a leaky vaccine because very bad things happen. I don't pretend to know the science but he also claims that this was generally accepted knowledge up until 2020.
(Geert's website: https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/)
Just for transparency, I am a staunch antivaxxer. My wife pressured me to get the jab in summer of 2020. I asked for more time. The argument of social responsibility did carry weight with me at the time. But in July of 2020 the Israeli data showed that the jabs did not prevent infection.
It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.
The science communication on vaccines was really bad. Expecting long-term protection from anything other than severe disease was unscientific wishful thinking that a lot of people who should have known better repeated. TWiV ("This Week in Virology" podcast which tries hard to limit their claims to ones backed by published scientific papers) talks about this a lot, especially in their recent episodes with Andy Slavitt and Paul Offit (another with Offit a few weeks earlier) (Paul Offit is a vaccine scientist who was one of two "no" votes on the FDA panel deciding whether to recommend the new bivalent boosters). (BTW, those links are all to podcasts; for transcripts, they recommend you view them on YouTube and use YouTube's auto-transcription feature.)
It's unclear where the science breakdown happened, but in general vaccines do not prevent infection, only serious disease; the question is whether the vaccine's effect on the disease progression is sufficient to prevent/reduce transmission and without modern tools like PCR tests it's really hard to tell the difference. COVID-19 is not the only disease we know this is true for. IPV (Inactivated Polio Vaccine), the injected Polio vaccine used in most developed countries) does not prevent transmission of Polio, it only protects from severe disease (mild Polio looks like any other cold and no one tests people with minor colds for Polio infection). That Wikipedia link strongly implies that the vaccine does a lot more than that, and the common belief that IPV confers immunity to Polio is probably an indirect cause of the recent case of severe Polio in New York. Polio is apparently a specialty of the host of TWiV so he talks about it a lot and in detail. Our entire Polio eradication effort is based partially on this misunderstanding and they talk on TWiV about how the entire approach may be misguided; that is, that the end-game looks like everyone gets IPV forever, not that we can eventually feel safe not bothering like with Smallpox (although, uh, see Monkeypox).
Note this appears to be mostly a property of the infectious agent (and its interactions with the human immune system), not the vaccine. For whatever reason, the human immune system doesn't maintain long-term a strong enough defense against coronaviruses to be able to fight them off fast enough to stop the infection before transmission; it's not clear to me this has anything to do with the virus mutating. Other viruses take long enough from infection to transmission that a second exposure usually does not result in the individual becoming contagious.
TWiV repeatedly harps on this, that "vaccine efficacy" without specifying efficacy against what is poor communication. Efficacy against death is relatively straightforward to define. Efficacy against severe disease... actually already gets tricky because this usually is measured through counting hospitalizations with certain codes and different countries and different times through the pandemic have had very different standards for who to hospitalize (and how good they are at coding them properly). Efficacy against infection requires defining what counts as an "infection": a rapid test? a PCR test? if so, at what cycle count threshold? or infectious viral load? once again at what threshold? (and in whose BSL-3?)
Here you’re using the scientific definitions of “infection” and “serious disease” which most people don’t know. In culture they use the colloquial definitions.
If you’re around someone with chicken pox and you don’t get big itchy spots, colloquially you didn’t catch it or “get infected”, no matter how big a viral load can be found in their systems. This could be due to vaccination or immunity due to a previous case.
Thus, what most people expected from a COVID-19 vaccine was that they wouldn’t “catch it” afterward. A sense of betrayal is, therefore, reasonable given the political medical messaging.
Yes, I was trying to get at the disconnect between what the science says and what the media/public believe the science says. That oversimplification of how vaccines work has resulted in a lot of bad policy and people feeling lied to and writing things like (quoting the original post in this thread):
which is based on a misunderstanding of what vaccines do, albeit one that was justifiably common before we had an easy way to check for infection separate from disease.
I'm really unclear from listening to TWiV how long scientists have known this / how wide-spread the knowledge was. The scientists on TWiV maintain they have been saying that all along (and, obviously, their episode history is public so they've pointed to instances of them saying it in 2020).
The following are all different possibilities:
The politicians/media lied to us, knowing vaccines wouldn't stop transmission,
Their science advisors told them vaccines would stop transmission because that was the scientific consensus,
[...] but their science advisors should have known better,
[...] there's no reasonable way their science advisors could have been expected to know better but actually new science later showed that was wrong.
I think we're unlikely to have a productive conversation if we can't agree on which of those (or possibly some other option I haven't listed; that certainly isn't an exhaustive list) worlds we live in. TWiV seems to be saying that (3) is accurate. (And TWiV appears to be a group of appropriately qualified experts to be making such claims.) (EDIT: Or to be less consensus building-y, at least be having a discussion about which world we live in.)
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Because the goals of the bureaucrats was to do something that they could easily measure so they could make pretty graphs that declared themselves successful, the goal of the zero Covid twitterati was to do something to punish people who didn’t take Covid seriously, and the goal of Pfizer was to sell vaccines.
All of these goals could be accomplished with vaccine mandates, and whether they actually reduced Covid infections, deaths, strain on the healthcare system, etc was pretty much irrelevant. The claims about the jab being a miracle cure were intended as a noble lie to justify self congratulatory graphs, restrictions on the outgroup, and lucrative contracts to vaccinate the entire population, respectively.
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I tried skimming the top few responses to your post to see if I had anything to add. I see a very wide range of perspectives on this, both internally in my own mind and across my diverse friend group.
I am not addressing your discomfort with policies, because I share many of them.
A practical anecdote because my dad has severe COPD
My household (girlfriend, brother, father, myself) all got covid last December. My father is 72, has COPD, diabetes (afaik reduces ability to heal the body to SOME degree), 1 partially collapsed lung that never recovered after hospitalization, severely overweight, etc. etc. etc. He's on all the medicines. While he's surprisingly spry for someone in his condition it is clear that he is highly at risk from a respiratory illness. Even the cold makes me worry.
We got vaccinated summer 2021, and my father got boosted about 2 weeks before I caught Covid. Normally, he takes a while to recover from colds and other things, but he had a markedly shorter infection with Covid than my brother and girlfriend. He was like 2-4 days. I was 3-5 days and my brother and girlfriend took about 7 days to get back to normal.
Yes, there's luck involved, but luck must also get applied on a bell curve, right? How likely do I find it that the "vaccine" didn't perform it's utility function appropriately by giving my father increased active antibodies for a while?
Does that mean I support mandatory vaccination policies? Absolutely not, but I also push back against this idea that the vaccine doesn't do anything, or shouldn't have been approved or delivered to people.
Vaccine legitimacy
People seem to mix up "totally eliminates risk from a virus" and "primes the immune system in some meaningful way." A lot of people wanted total protection from the Covid virus, and what we got was a priming of our immune system to a virus which mutates rapidly. I feel like some of your argument falls (E.g. using "vaccines" in quotes) in to word games in order to discount the utility of priming the immune systems of the population.
If there was a medical intervention that reduced the chances of catching HIV or cancer by some amount (20, 50, 90%), how many people in the population would take it? At what efficacy threshold would you take a pill or injection against a form of cancer?
There was a really good ZDogg MD podcast with Paul Offit (on the CDC vaccine advisory board, voted against youth boosters based on the evidence presented to CDC [maybe that increases his credibility?]) https://zdoggmd.com/paul-offit-10/
They get in to some of the technical details on why a vaccine for a rapidly mutating corona virus has no chance of totally stopping the virus, and how that compares to a virus with different characteristics. The technical details matter.
If consenting adults want to take an experimental medicine, I have no problem with that.
But when medical experimentation is mandated, at risk of losing your job, or ability to participate in society, then I have a huge problem with it. I see it as a brazen violation of the Nuremberg Code by the authorities.
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Somewhat. In my blue-tribe environment, the primary story was always about the health system getting overloaded. If it's true that vaccines reduce COVID severity to at least normal cold levels, then even if they have no effect on transmission, in a setting where everyone is vaccinated COVID can be ignored from the perspective of societal organisation and policymaking just as mild seasonal flu is.
Of course, there was always an unspoken sense in which the most technocratically-minded people thought that those who_don't take COVID seriously_ are a real problem, which unlike the other thing I do find to be an instance of ugly tribalism - that is, those who would still go to a friend's birthday party and hang around in their personal space and go on a road trip and hug the stranger next to them at a football game. Legal and enforcement feasibility prevented going after those people directly, but it was understood that not taking the vaccine was a reasonable proxy for the worst offenders. On paper, you fire for refusal to get vaccinated; really, you want to fire for believing that COVID is not a big enough deal (and therefore probably sabotaging all aspects of the response).
Why?
Within a 3 month period, the saline vaccinated are only being being measured for 6 weeks. Since they only count as vaccinated 2 weeks after the second saline shot. We would expect them the saline vaccinated to have 50% less likelihood to develop Covid within the three month period.
It's a sleight of hand magic trick.
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To be fair to Pfizer, as far as I know they never said the vaccine reduced transmission. They didn't contradict the various public health officials who said it did, of course. It's also fairly likely that it did reduce transmission, for a short period.
It *probably did, from the release of the vaccines until omicron showed up at which point it stopped attenuating the spread.
Edit: changed absolutely to probably because yeah, let's be reasonable
I don't think we can go farther than probably did. The apex of reduced transmission coincided with summer months in most countries where we have good data. The omicron case load increase occurs as we head into winter at around the time that initial dose course vaccine immunity likely begins to wane. The confluence of new strains, waning immunity, and seasonality all likely played a role in the apparent reduction of vaccine efficacy against transmission. Still, the apparent efficacy at preventing infection and demonstrable induction of a significant neutralizing antibody response makes it seem pretty likely that the initial vaccine worked as intended against the prevailing strains, at least for a few months.
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How, exactly, would you propose to measure transmission reduction in the context of a clinical trial? You enroll a thousand people, 500 vaccine, 500 placebo. 50 in each group get COVID. What next? Do you test whether their cohabitants get sick? Couldn't those people have gotten it somewhere else? You'd have to massively increase your study size to find a signal in the noise, or else try some kind of challenge study.
When you run a clinical trial, to my knowledge (and to be fair I'm not exposed to many infectious disease/vaccine style trials) you need endpoints that focus on the people you actually enrolled. Other papers will try to measure spread at a more macro scale.
And indeed, this is false - the vaccines did reduce spread (I linked 6 studies there with varying effect sizes) early in the pandemic, back when the vaccine actually matched the virus in circulation and (speculatively) the variant in question was much less infectious and more severe. I'd hazard a guess that the updated boosters could also reduce spread, although this might prove to be false given the characteristics of omicron plus some fringe possibilities like original antigenic sin.
You run into some weird semantic problems trying to strictly define it, and other problems disseminating information to the public through media outlets rather than directly from ID docs. As far back as February 2021, people were saying reducing symptomatic disease. You can also read how the Pfizer group defined vaccine efficacy in their original clinical trial paper, and it's not related to transmission.
It might have made sense very early on. I'd agree that it rapidly became counterproductive and foolish as new variants emerged and the vaccines certainly did not prevent spread. You could maybe make an argument that in some places like Canada the healthcare system was truly getting fucked at some points by COVID patients, although by then the data wasn't even clear that the vaccines had a strong effect against severe COVID anymore as far as I'm aware. Whether these policies persisted due to incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, malice or something else - who knows. You'll find plenty of folks here convinced that they know the answer to that question, so I'll leave it to them.
We probably shouldn't be.
Can you cite the study you're referring to?
How would you know that? The only real comparator that makes sense is Flu, and we vaccinate for that every year; regardless of whether we did or not, annual flu strains have emerged for much longer than we've vaccinated. HIV was a pandemic, but has no vaccine regardless and is a very poor comparator. SARS, MERS, etc never really took off. So we have no empirical data to support that argument.
But, assuming you're referring to this page (since you didn't actually link to anything), what do you want to do in this counterfactual world? Let everyone get COVID and then his hope is that children generate sterilizing immunity? Moreover, why wouldn't a population where 50% have natural immunity and the other 50% are spreading the virus behave any differently compared to a population where 50% have vaccine immunity and the other 50% are spreading in terms of variants emerging? His argument would hinge on natural immunity restricting transmission whereas vaccination did not, which as far as I'm aware, is not the case.
It's just false; the half-life of antibody titers for both natural immunity and vaccinations is much too short for anyone to maintain sterilizing immunity for long. For a while, the antivaxx crowd latched onto original antigenic sin (OAS) and argued that natural immunity would be better, but the last time I looked at the data coming out, OAS was a larger problem for people who were naturally infected with the alpha variant as opposed to vaccination, with T cell responses being the wild card. We don't have a counterfactual world where we tried Geert's approach so he can claim he was right until the end of time, but most of the evidence points away from his model.
The rationalization for vaccines was a huge mess of idealogues on twitter, the media and talking heads on TV pushing their favored ideas with about as much exposure to scientific data and literature as the two sources you give.
Meanwhile, Florida's AG is fearmongering about vaccine side effects (scroll down to 'Florida man' section. I think Zvi is a bit dismissive of myocarditis because other papers have shown it is a side effect, but why Florida tried to do this...I don't know) and it seems like significantly more Republicans died of COVID (although I'm a bit leery of politically-charged population scale studies like this). Even John Nolte repeatedly argued that the mRNA vaccines were a triumph, and the anti-vaxx movement was orchestrated by the left to try and kill old Republican voters.
They controlled for age and locations, which are the two most obvious confounders. I'd be interested in seeing the 2022 data when it comes out, since you could still argue the April-December 2021 die-off is going to end up being mortality displacement, much like anti-lockdown Sweden having higher excess deaths in the early pandemic but lower excess deaths later.
It seems to me the origins of the Republican anti-vaccine turn is coterminous with their anti-lockdown turn: June 2020 and the "racism is the real virus" BLM riots. The seeds were there before, but the real resistance started when it became clear Covid rules didn't apply to public events that benefit the left.
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The obvious answer is, "yes". The malice was expressed in sufficiently open fashion that there's no way that a desire to stick it to "antivaxxers" wasn't part of the equation. Likewise, there was enough public health incompetence over the past couple years that I can't imagine it didn't have a role to play here. Finally, bureaucratic inertia is such a constant that even the most pro-government intervention people acknowledge it as an issue. Combine the three and there's not a chance in hell of the people who implemented mandates admitting that they were wrong.
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I'm not a fan of the vaccine mandates but there's a couple of things I think we should keep in mind here. These facts combined don't justify the mandates, but it does explain some of the situation.
Vaccine efficacy is the relative risk difference of infection, severe illness or death (3 different measures) between a vaccinated and control groups, over a set duration. This is the standard way to measure a vaccine's efficacy and it doesn't take transmission into account. It obviously doesn't take into account what happens after your experiment duration is over. So we quickly found ourselves estimating efficacy by looking at hospital admissions and vaccination base-rates once experiments were finished.
The vaccine seemed much more promising against the initial strains of the virus. If I recall correctly it prevented ~95% of infections for a few months. Such a strong efficacy against infection does a lot to prevent transmission.
There is reason to believe a milder case results in less transmission. You're spreading for shorter periods and expelling smaller viral loads. There was evidence of this. (Admittedly I don't think this is significant enough)
Testing for transmission reduction would have been infeasible. There is no standard objective way to measure this. Even with infinite money and without red tape it's not clear whether we should have counted covid particles in the infected's breathing air or something like that, and we couldn't have confidently turned into a "X % transmission reduction"
Regarding vaccinating during a pandemic, maybe Bossche is right, we'll never know. However, so far, it looks like the escaping variants we got mostly came from areas that weren't vaccinated. Perhaps it would be less risky if we didn't "meddle with nature" but we were rightly confident that the vaccines would save many vulnerable people's lives.
More people died in the vaccinated group than in the control group in Pfizer's trial.
Edit: You can downvote me all you like but the simple fact remains that more died in the vaccinated group than the control group. That's only 1 out 3 criteria but a pretty big one. By itself probably nothing but you might want to check the overall excess mortality rate of highly vaccinated countries to see if it went up or down afterwards just to be safe...
You appear to be repeating the claim referenced here. 14 people died in the control group and 15 people died in the vaccinated group - from all causes. The linked article is obviously not unbiased, but I cannot find any fault with the facts presented. Unless you're asserting that the researchers lied or miscategorized causes of death, you haven't rebutted any criteria.
But all-cause mortality is arguably the MOST important measure for any drug or vaccine - especially one meant to be given prophylactically to large numbers of healthy people, as vaccines are.
I never claimed to "rebut any criteria." I pointed out that the Pfizer trial failed 1 of the 3 criteria, arguably the most important one.
It gets worse-
9 vaccine recipients died from cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or strokes, compared to 6 placebo recipients who died of those causes. The imbalance is small but notable, considering that regulators worldwide have found that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are linked to heart inflammation in young men.
Where can I find that argument?
You keep using "arguably" as a sneaky hidden appeal to authority, when what you mean is "In my opinion."
Yes, that's an interesting piece of information which is certainly worth following up on to see if it has any significance, but by itself it does not provide meaningful evidence for an anti-vacc argument.
Speaking of appeal to authority, we have a moderator with a poorly concealed grudge against me, speaking "ex cathedra," to apply an AP factcheck on my very true statement. Nothing you posted contradicted my factual statement in the least.
I would recommend that you not take discussions so personally as that tends to generate more heat than light, but you do you.
Dude, first of all, I was not speaking as a moderator. We're allowed to participate like everyone else. Consider addressing the arguments instead of reaching for ad hominems because you got pulled up on the facts.
You need to get rid of this persecution complex you have where every time a mod interacts with you, you think it's because we have a grudge against you. None of us have a grudge against you. We don't know you or care who you are. You started claiming a grudge the very first time you got modded as a new user, when it was impossible for anyone to have formed a personal bias against you. (I presume you are probably someone who came here from reddit, but I neither know nor care who you were there.)
That last line is the most obvious case of projection I have seen in quite a while
This never happened.
Again, I would caution you against taking these discussions so personally.
Good luck!
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[citation needed]
The Pfizer trial is my citation. I thought that was clear.
That's not a citation, you have to be more specific, like providing a link to a paper or report and, if it's long, preferably quoting the relevant section. For example, the first citation I found while googling was this paper, which says, under "Adverse Events":
So I would conclude that your claim is simply wrong until you provide actual evidence.
edit: someone linked numbers above. 15 vs 14 deaths out of a population of almost 22,000 in each group is obviously noise. You cannot consider a "primary end point" which you do not have the statistical power to measure.
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All else aside for a moment, I really object to this being what we're now calling "antivax". As some here know, I was an immunologist by training and research, I spent about ten years of my life working on vaccine and vaccine-adjacent research, and I used to spend a decent bit of time on social media arguing in favor of childhood vaccines and trying to convince people to get them. It would never have occurred to me to call someone antivax on the basis of them saying, "I don't know about this specific new vaccine, I'd really like to see what the dose course and long-run efficacy is before I take it".
The bookkeeping was sketchy and dishonest due to creating different start points for the experiment, but the underlying principle would be basically fine as long as you adjusted time courses appropriately. Obviously, we do want to know what happens immediately after vaccination (in case there are adverse outcomes that include increased risk of infection), but if we're thinking about long-run quality of a vaccine, it does make sense to start your ticker a couple weeks after a boost, because there is little or no expected benefit in the short-run. With appropriate statistics, this would be fine.
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The folks at Politifact disagree.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/oct/13/instagram-posts/alleged-revelation-about-pfizer-vaccine-trial-noth/
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
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As usual they're gerrymandering the claim so they can get the sticker result they want. Pfizer "were hopeful in spring/early summer 2021 that vaccines would be effective against transmission" but "transmission was not a study endpoint". "Prevention of transmission (and asymptomatic COVID) were not primary endpoints of these trials and were never a claim of the pharmaceutical companies in developing these vaccines"
So the vaccines were developed and tested for preventing severe disease. Fair enough. But the "point" of this story is that vaccine mandates were sold politically as preventing transmission, while that was never actually the aim of these vaccines and was not scientifically demonstrated, as admitted by the FDA in their emergency use authorization. Whether Pfizer technically collected some data on transmission while researching symptom reduction is besides the point.
@Skylab's argument stands completely.
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Is there a reason that you find Politifact credible?
Why would I not find it credible? Have they been known to lie?
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Whether or not he does, and whether or not politifact is actually credible (fwiw I think they are not), I see lots of people both leftist and vaguely unaligned pointing to politifact as a bipartisan source. The fact that politifact doesn't agree, and that they were able to spin this in a way to make it seem less damning for the pro-vaccine crowd, doesn't bode well for this being the story that convinces the world that vaccine mandates were wrong. I'm sure more organizations and publications will follow suit.
Maybe I misread @Skylab's post, but he seemed to present this story as further evidence that the Powers That Be acted immorally. Not that this story will remove wool that covers the eyes of the sheeple.
I wouldn't disagree with anything you just said. It's unclear to me why you're presenting this as potentially disagreeing with my above post, could you explain?
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There was a lot of wild talk of all sorts about the shots, what they would or would not do, and what refusal/hesitancy to get them would/would not do. In particular, the claim that the shots were primarily about lessening severity of symptoms is at odds with the primary justification for coercive measures - that the shots would make one immune to, or at least not able to transmit, COVID to other vulnerable persons, and so refraining from getting the shots was tantamount to recklessly endangering the lives of everyone who came into coughing range.
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I suppose your gcentral point is that "A lot more outrageous things other than the covid response are concurrently being done, why devote so much bandwidth to that?"
You can reach that conclusion if you think the covid response is entirely in the domain of politics. Which it more or less has been. Evidenced by the vastly different restrictions by country/region.
However, here's a counterpoint. It shouldn't have been. And that is very hard for people to swallow. The covid fiasco turned me into a conflict theorist.
Covid is an outside threat. Its the natural world vs humans. If there was ever any time for all sides of the political aisle to cooperate, it was against against covid. It was prime time for mistake theorists to shine. As opposed to immigration, foreign conflict or almost any other CW issue; the threat of covid could have been minimized using hard scientific metrics. Just argue out the methods, tally up the costs and benefits, let the process of "doing science" deal with it, problem solved....
LMFAO that totally happened! Instead we got vibes based methods (mask mandates, they just work), copying CCP with no regard for cost/benefits (lockdowns), shit that makes no sense (travel bans after local spread), multiple instances absolute retardism (killing 17 million minks ???), LIES LIES LIES (lab leak hypothesis, vaccines 1,2,3,4,5,6,9000), I think I don't need to reiterate any further, its a dead horse.
It showed that being correct or effective is worth noting at all. It's all about the vibes. Our ideas are amazing their ideas are icky. It's nice when our ideas work too, but that's secondary. What you really need is social capital. You need people to get the right vibes off of you, and you can do whatever you want, you are the science!
I suppose if you were sufficiently jaded, this wouldn't have been nothing new. But I and many others were probably not as jaded. Some of us thought that problems will be solved using the most objective means possible with regards to practicality and efficiency and etc, you know.. competence ?
Having that illusion broken was a watershed moment for me. I still continue to talk about covid because it possibly can't be like this, all the way down. There has to be some hope right?
It is absolutely like this all the way down. And indeed that is the only way it can be. The curtain must remain undisturbed, the sausage factory must not be observed. It is only the fictional layer of "Surely they know what they are doing" that keeps our society together at all. There are not truths that keep us together. Only lies. Which is why they have to be protected. That is where your hope lies I think.
Consider this. The original UK response was very muted. They were going to let it burn through. Very little contact tracing, no lockdowns. 6 weeks later they climbed down and changed tactics. Why?
"Initially, Prime Minister Boris Johnson largely kept Britain open, resisting the kind of lockdowns seen elsewhere in Europe. In a speech on 3 February, Johnson's main concern was that the "coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage".[30] On 11 February, a "senior member of the government" told the ITV journalist Robert Peston that "If there is a pandemic, the peak will be March, April, May" and, further, that "the risk is 60% of the population getting it. With a mortality rate of perhaps just over 1%, we are looking at not far off 500,000 deaths".[31] On 8 March, Peston reported that the government believed the Italian government's approach to lockdown to be based on "several of the populist – non-science based – measures that aren't any use. They're who not to follow".[32] "
** and then**
"The slogan "Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives" was first suggested internally in a government conference call on 19 March, days before they imposed a full national lockdown.[citation needed] The slogan was introduced concurrently with the national lockdown imposed on 23 March, ordering the public against undergoing non-essential travel and ordering many public amenities to close."
Because MPs were getting their inboxes flooded with emails and letters about doing nothing. The public faith was shaken. People like politicians who "do something" and so something had to be done. The faith of the public is essentially the only important thing, and while you can influence that, it is a wild beast and cannot be tamed entirely. Sometimes you have to let the herd have its head so to speak.
The theatre in security theatre is and always has been the most important part. And for that, the suspension of disbelief must be maintained. People must think it is effective even if it isn't. Because the truth that there is very little one can do is too much. And it is the same for Covid. The reason most nations ended up going the same way is not because they were particularly authoritarian in and of themselves (see the UK initially deciding not to) but because it is what their populace wanted. But you can't say that out loud because that destroys the illusion. So you move from:
"On 11 March, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England Jenny Harries said that the government was "following the science" by not banning mass gatherings. She also said, on face masks, "If a healthcare professional hasn't advised you to wear a face mask... it's really not a good idea and doesn't help""
**to **
"Essential travel included food shopping, exercise, medical attention, and travelling for necessary work, which included those working in the healthcare, journalism, policing, and food distribution industries.[66] To ensure that the lockdown was obeyed, all shops selling "non-essential goods", as well as playgrounds, libraries, and places of worship, were to be closed.[67] Gatherings of more than two people in public were also banned, including social events, such as weddings, baptisms and other ceremonies, but excluding funerals.[68]"
We are capable of great things in the service of shared illusions. As long as we don't look down, we can walk on air. But we are also herd animals and it is what the herd sees and does not see that counts.
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Covid measures are very much the equivalent of TSA, the Patriot Act, Shock and Awe, and terror threat levels for people born after 1999 or so. A wakeup call that "respectable" organs of society are often (a) incompetent, run by gladhanding careerists who are trying to implement policies that make themselves look useful while filling the political checkboxes they've been handed (b) cynically trying to push through unpopular reforms by not letting a good crisis go to waste.
Reflecting on Covid (or the War on Terror) is useful. There's a good saying that goes something like "Who you are in adversity is who you always were." Well, the government you see in a crisis is the government you always have.
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What did you guys know that the people running the trials didn't? See my post here regarding what the actual endpoints for vaccine testing were.
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The scientists said that they were only
testing forproving making individuals less likely to die, which they were very good at in the pre-Omicron days.A bunch of other people, particularly in the media, showed up and said "well, that must mean it reduces transmission, right?" and then said "it obviously reduces transmission" even though the scientists said they never
testedproved that.This is some alternate kind of motte-and-bailey, where the useful idiots say wrong things that you can claim credit for in case they turn out to be right, but disavow if they are wrong.
"Distributed motte-and-bailey" is the term that seems most popular.
I could swear it was actual scientists pointing out expected reductions in R (albeit with huge error bars). And I wouldn't say they were wrong to! It would be wrong to say that reducing detectable infection rates must reduce infection-and-retransmission rates, but that's still the correct prior to have in the absence of more direct (and much much harder to obtain) evidence.
Now this is where priors seemed to be getting ignored. "Optimal virulence theory says mutations which spread fast will outcompete merely-more-lethal variants" might not have been a prior to hold strongly, but the objections I saw weren't just "that's the null hypothesis but we shouldn't just assume it will certainly be true", they went as far as "coronaviruses have a gene-proofreading function, we shouldn't assume they will mutate at all".
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No, this is not what was stated, not what was requested by the FDA, and not what anyone believed about vaccines at the time. Here's the FDA guidance for development and licensure from June 2020. Scroll down to page 13 and start looking through the Efficacy Considerations section:
This is pretty normal, what everyone would have considered the bog-standard endpoint until the Covid vaccine retconning started up. You check whether the vaccine prevents infection and you get a double-whammy - can't die from something you're not infected with and can't infect other people with something you're not infected with.
This phrasing makes zero sense if the expectation was that the only thing anyone would test for is whether vaccination impacted severity. Severity was worth checking as a secondary endpoint precisely because it's possible that you'd impact severity without impacting likelihood of infection and transmission, but this would generally be considered a disappointing result.
Of course, that might just be what the FDA wanted to see and the companies weren't able to meet that criterion, or elected to go with other study designs. We can look at the original December 2020 emergency approval of the Pfizer vaccine though:
Severity shows up under the secondary efficacy endpoints. Their results:
The specificized success criterion was preventing infection. The stated effect was preventing infection. Anyone that now tells you that the scientists were only testing whether it made individuals less likely to die is badly misinformed or is telling a whopper.
Thanks for the specific quotes. I'll save this one to reference it.
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You are saying "stops infection" where I am saying "stops transmission."
I guess when I said "only testing" I should have said "only proving."
What is the proposed mechanism for transmission without infection?
You are looking at "how do you get A without B" when I am looking at "given B can we stop A" which is a different thing.
Putting aside the logical incoherence of transmission without infection, I'm at least glad we can agree that your original claim that "scientists said that they were only testing for making individuals less likely to die" is demonstrably a retcon.
Yes, the thing that I never said, it is logically incoherent. Yes.
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This is a very interesting topic for me. Originally the vaccines were touted as "efficient and safe". The original promise during the first round of the vaccine was definitely as effective against spread - it was one of the main drivers for vaccination of certain number of people in order to achieve herd immunity. New York Times in September 2021 said that
It was then increased by some percentage points until the new story emerged that vaccines are only there to prevent severe risks of infection. Please do mind you, that originally due to herd immunity goal it was supposed that all people including children should receive the vaccine. Vaccine was literally touted as replacement for lockdown, there were literally "traffic light" systems where severity of lockdown was based on vaccination rate like this example from New Zealand
What followed is that the "or infect other people" part was dropped down as if it never existed. I will end here, but this level of amnesia of things that were blasted 24x7 all over the media and government communication is quite frankly astounding. And I am not singling you out, I have met people who had the same stance toward vaccine as you, where they literally replaced the latest narrative as if it was always the case. But to be frank it is quite scary, mostly because it hugely impedes any learnings from the current pandemic ranging from original designation of "COVID scare is racist" through "WHO says no evidence of human-to-human spread" through "no evidence that masks work" to "mask mandates" to "cloth masks do not work" to "vaccines make people less likely to infect other people" to now where we say that "experts" were always right.
It seems insane to me and do not even get me about "Lab Leak conspiracy" theory. Because yeah, a country of 1.4 billion is origin of novel coronavirus and it happens by chance that Wuhan - one of 100 Chinese cities above population of 1 million - was epicenter of the virus. And BTW it is also the only place in China where there is also Biosafety level 4 Wuhan Institute of Epidemiology that coincidentally happens to research novel coronaviruses. All the stellar Pulitzer journalists did not see anything there to investigate the biggest story of 21st century so far, not enough incentives to go deeper. Quite contrary: to ask questions about potential leak was deemed as conspiracy. For me it is incredible for journalists who regularly look for weak links - like politician getting donation from corporation only for year later to vote in favor of them, they saw nothing suspicious in such a huge red flag. And not only that, they were lock in step to suppress the story.
Because as of January 20, 2021, vaccines were still incredibly precious and our elite were fighting with each other to be first in line. It was about two months before my very elderly parents got theirs.
Now, did the media blue-checks go from "lol of course there will be no vaccine mandates, look how people are fighting to get them, stop worrying" to "lol of course there are vaccine mandates that is what it means to live in a society" in the space of a few months? Yes.
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Speaking of Biden, here's a pretty famous quote from July 2021:
I have no doubt that specific scientific writing was clear that a reduction in infections was a probabilistic thing and might wane as time goes on, but here you have the most powerful man in the world, whose administration was trying to mandate the vaccines in various ways and is still requiring them for entering the country as a foreigner, confidently stating that they confer sterile immunity. I'd say that outweighs whatever science reporting or personal anecdotes from upper-class London you can bring to the table.
Throwing in my own anecdotes, the German press was absolutely completely on the same wavelength as Biden here, solid looking and repeated promises about immunity against infection were like 95% of the reason I myself got vaccinated. A common talking point in German (social) media in early 2021 was how Israel had "vaccinated away" its Delta wave. For months on end, even as the divergence steadily shrank and several scandals in data collection undermined its trustworthiness, public health authorities and their lackies in the media obsessed over the differences in unvaccinated and vaccinated case rates, a talking point that is now completely forgotten.
Mainstream COVID discourse was 100% thoroughly permeated with the idea that the vaccines are going to stop transmission up until late summer 2021. This only started to go away in the fall and died completely with the emergence of Omicron.
It wasn't really an out-of-line thing to say in July 2021; once vaccines became widely available infection rates plummeted. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the vaccine rollout began in earnest in January but appointments were hard to come by. Over the next couple months eligibility and availability would slowly expand, and by mid-April nearly everyone was eligible and it was easy to get an appointment. On April 19 there was a rolling average of nearly 5,000 cases per day. By the 4th of July this had dropped to less than 200, a 97% decrease. When infections started picking up again at the end of July, it was in places with notoriously low vaccine uptake and almost always among unvaccinated individuals. Given this situation, what was Biden supposed to think? Yeah, later that summer and heading into fall breakthrough cases became much more common, rates rose in areas with high vaccine uptake, and Omicron eventually blew everything out of the water, but for most of that summer it really looked like we had whipped the pandemic.
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I'm afraid "might wane as time goes on" is the sort of thing I saw in scientific papers but sadly never in the news ... But the news was quite solid on "probabilistic thing". Literally the very first sentence from the Pfizer press release was Vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective, and I don't recall news reports omitting that. News readers, on the other hand ... even news readers leading the free world? We mock or pity the innumeracy of the Pirahã, unable to count to ten, but how many of us can hold "90%" in our heads indefinitely without just rounding it up to 100...
I'm currently reading HPMOR with my younger kids, and we just hit the chapter where "It would be like a Muggle newspaper testing political candidates to rate their level of scientific literacy." is thrown out as an example of cultural changes that really really ought to happen but never ever will.
I don't want that to happen. You'd get the same kind of people rating the candidates on scientific literacy that are currently rating "misinformation" in social media or who run "fact-checking" websites.
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Okay, I get your point that you were part of enlightened community that knew what WHO message was false and what was correct, maybe you had some link to researchers and all that. You had privilege to act individually, you were probably one of the "nonessential workers" who could do so. But then I have to challenge you about your quote (bolded):
You meant "literally all my 20 friends who knew what's what" or is it "literally" billions affected and probably hundreds of millions of shills?
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"COVID’s over."
People, (in the military,) are still getting fired for not submitting to the jab. The USA still has a ridiculous requirement for foriegners flying into the country to be jabbed.
Colleges still require.jabs despite elevated risk of myocarditis in young men. Et cetera.
The battle continues apace.
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I keep seeing this clip (and then people referencing it in other media) all over the conservative internet, along with conservative people drawing the same conclusions, that this is some bombshell piece of evidence that will tear apart the myth of vaccine mandates. Let me be clear: I want this, and the conclusion to be true, because I want a piece of bulletproof evidence that I can use against people who still believe that mandatory vaccination was and still is the best way to go. I don't like those people or their mandates, and I'd like to argue against them with very firm evidence. But I'm skeptical that this clip is that, especially because I haven't really seen anyone on the other side acknowledging anything about it, whether it's to eat crow or argue back. It seems to me to be potentially something where the conservatives once again think they have rock solid proof of something, but it never goes further than that, because we never even hear the other side's response to it, because it's so miniscule that they don't even have to acknowledge it. In other words, the same old of people living in different universes.
Let me say again, I hope I eat the above words. I want to steelman this particular clip and conclusion, by attacking it the way its opponents may attack it. So here are some questions:
There's a weird splice in the video between Roos and Pfizer woman. Are we in-fact seeing something that was edited to look like some sort of damning admission, instead of an actual damning admission?
Pfizer woman says "did we know about stopping immunization before it entered the market". She doesn't say "transmission" or "spread" or "reinfection" or whatever, she says "immunization", which seems to make no sense in the context presented. Was this a clip that was taken out of context to make it sound like she was really trying to refer to the question Roos asked, but it was about something else?
Does this have any implications on other vaccines and their trials, like Moderna or J&J?
Even if the vaccine was not explicitly tested for transmission, was it still a reasonable assumption for them to make that it could have a decent chance to stop transmission? Or was it a reasonable assumption for politicians to make, and there was just some information lost in the shuffle?
I don't know much about Roos, I've never heard of him before, but does he have much bipartisan cred? He comes off in the whole clip like a conservative commentator the likes of Tucker Carlson, gloating about how he just owned some lib. He even has a gotcha-like printout saying "Pfizer CEO? Where is Transparency?" in front of him when he asks the question, as if he's only asking as a formality and has already drawn his conclusions. The way he comes off, and the above edits and strangeness makes this whole conclusion that this is a death-blow to the conspiracy of vaccine mandates seem somewhat non-credible.
The term "bipartisan" doesn't really apply in European politics, unless the two "parties" you're referring to are abstract pro- and anti-vaccination groups.
That said, he is apparently a member of a fringe right-wing party, so my guess would be "no".
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Who has bi-partisan cred these days?
Tom Hanks apparently, for one.
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If I remember correctly, the "official" vaccine discourse followed something of a curve. At the beginning, before the vaccine was actually rolled out, the promises around vaccines were indeed quite modest; they were supposed to reduce severity and maybe somewhat hinder transmission, being another tool in the toolpack (which still mainly revolved around lockdowns and NPIs at this point).
At some point around the rollout and early 2021, the vaccine-related claims spun out of control, with vaccines being portrayed as a wonder drug that would essentially considerably reduce severity and also stop transmission; it's very likely a large part of this was wishful thinking related to the idea that one-stop solution that would get us out of the crisis would exist where it was possible to combat COVID and not do the onerous lockdown/restriction cycle that was already getting dumped by the business community. It's not surprising that businesses jumped on the vaccine mandate train very quickly, either.
When this didn't quite turn out as expected, the official institutions - which continued to be unwilling to return to large-scale lockdowns after spring 2021, in most places at least - then turned towards vaccine passports as a Hail Mary, maybe the vaccines would do what the hype discourse claimed they would do if you just tried to put them in as many arms as possible, or it was possible to have your cake and eat it too by having lockdowns only for the demonized unvaccinated and not for the majority of the population that was vaccinated or would presumably get vaccinated as soon as they were prevented from going to the bar or would be under the threat of severance or whatever.
Of course we also know this didn't quite work out this way, so the whole thing was essentially just quietly shelved, and the claims around vaccines implicitly returned to the more modest framework, without it being acknowledged that the hype-and-bust cycle took place.
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There were honestly so many retcons over the course of COVID that I lost track. I can only hope someone more spiteful than me collected them all lest they be memoryholed. I at least remember when the WHO edited the definition of 'herd immunity' to exclude natural immunity after the vaccine came out, or when magazines retroactively attached prefaces to articles about how leaky vaccines might make diseases more virulent explaining this did not apply to COVID for unspecified reasons
I recall one genuinely intelligent friend who told me in late 2020 that "once the vaccines come everyone just needs to get jabbed and this will all be over" and in early 2022 "you should have gotten vaccinated because that's a fixed viral load whereas the virus in the wild might give you any sort of load and then you don't actually know what happened to you."
My impression from this and similar interactions: Arguments are soldiers and covid vaccinations are primarily a tribal signal.
In late 2020, I believed the same thing as your friend, that vaccines will stop transmission. It was very reasonable belief at the time, especially given the vaccine trial data. Had it actually been true, vaccine mandates would have made much more sense, and I wouldn’t have had minded them. Too bad it turned out false.
Yeah. I won't presume to claim that everyone who was optimistic about vaccines or supportive of mandates did not actually believe in the efficacy of these things; I just find it startling that some who were proven evidently wrong still retain their absolute certainty about it and simply muster new arguments in favor of old propositions. It's not impossible to do so with internal consistency, but I doubt that most are so consistent and suspect instead that they align their beliefs and arguments with whatever their tribal identity favors.
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Wasn't the motte that vaccines are at least not more dangerous than the virus, while the bailey was that getting vaccinated is what good people do? At least that's how the arguments went in my social circles.
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You didn’t pay attention to this stuff back in 2020? We discussed it extensively at the motte.
Pfizer execs didn’t have to “acknowledge” that they didn’t test for transmission reduction, it was quite obvious from the get go, based on the actual design of the clinical studies. This was never seen as a requirement for approval.
It sure would have been nice if vaccines stopped transmission, and many (including me) believed at the time that the vaccines will in fact do so. This turning out not to be the case was initially a big disappointment, and then, when they started doing forceful vaccination mandates when we already knew they don’t do shit for stopping transmission, was pushing me into white rage every time I thought about it. Nevertheless, the actual studies never tested that.
The reason was twofold: first, the higher priority was to figure out if there actually is reduction in symptoms and negative outcomes — this is what was meant by “efficacy”. Initial studies used for approval showed pretty huge risk reductions, on the order of 90% reduction in having observable Covid symptoms with positive tests. I don’t believe that anyone believes that the vaccines have this good efficacy at blocking symptoms today. I am not sure what is the reason for this discrepancy. Maybe it’s because the vaccines were targeting original variant, and the virus evolved to be much better at spreading. Maybe the elevated response from vaccine lasts for very short time, couple of months at most. I don’t know, stopped paying attention at Covid science altogether somewhere in the middle of 2021, when I realized that the science and the truth were mostly irrelevant for the policies and narratives.
Second, it is actually pretty hard to design a study that measures efficacy at stopping transmission with any good degree of confidence that would be approved by IRB, a notoriously NIMLY (Not In My LaboratorY) bodies. Useful studies are “””unethical””” to run, so we’ll let the virus spread to billions and kill millions without trying to understand how it does so through direct experiment, instead we collectively decided to just watch its shadows on the cave’s wall.
Yes, I agree with you that most of the covid restriction have made very little sense at best, and starting from somewhere in 2021, they were basically a lunacy. But, dude, Covid is so last year, we already litigated this here to death, there is probably nothing new you can say here on this topic that hasn’t been already said last year by others. At this point, I’m so over it that I’m actually puzzled when someone around me even brings up Covid unironically. I will never trust the “””experts””” on this, or any other topic that actually matters to the society ever again, but, again, I already said it last year as well. It’s over, current thing is different now.
Well, it's still the anti-covid measures that, as far as I can tell, are the single worst thing that ever happened to me through no fault of my own, and the impact of which is still very palpable, and the perpetrators of which are currently getting away with it because the public at large is over it and I am not yet willing to let it go. Not until bodies have hit the floor, until heads have rolled, or until apologies have been spoken.
I'm biased in the opposite direction: My parents are 65 years old. In that age group, there was a 10% chance of death given infection in 2020. If one of my parents (~19% chance) had died, it would unquestionably have been the worst thing that had ever happened to me. In comparison, the lockdowns are a tiny footnote of badness. Covid was on an exponential trajectory and there were no vaccines, so I am incredibly glad that the lockdowns happened.
You know, early on in 2020 I also heard that covid would be very bad for the elderly and, as someone who takes filial piety seriously, I locked myself down tight. Stayed at home for months, didn't see anyone, wore masks and gloves and disinfected everything all the time, was disappointed that the borders weren't closed. In summer, an tiny outdoor family party was organized under the conditions that everyone would maintain maximum security measures. Turns out that a few minutes in everyone reverted to old habits and dropped the masks and distancing, much to my surprise. And a few weeks later parties were cropping up all over the place with nary a thought to the supposedly dangerous disease running rampant, and I was the only one who still stuck to the interpretation that if the disease is as dangerous as we're told, we should behave accordingly. Not even the sick and elderly were noticeably careful anymore, and there I was excusing myself and going home after waving at people from a distance. And I caught covid anyways, so much for masks and disinfectants and distancing and isolation.
And then came the vaccines and everyone rejoiced and got jabbed and continued with life as before. I declined the jab because, as I thought, I'd already had the disease so what's the point. But oh boy, did I ever miss the point! Because from that point on as everyone enjoyed normal social and family life, they sure as hell gave me a wide berth. Uninvited to gatherings, told not to visit, regularly insulted for not getting vaccinated, treated as if I were not even one vector among many but the primary source of the disease. Told in no uncertain terms that only the unvaccinated were to blame for the pandemic in the first place, that it would all be over if not for them. Rejected by polite society, by friends and even by family, for not getting this fantastic vaccine and apparently being at fault for the whole mess. For all of 2021. And then came the long, lean winter of 21/22 in which not only all the previous still held, but the vaccine mandate hung over our heads as absolutely imminent. Politics were certain, media were certain, the public seemed certain, that soon everyone would either be vaxed or imprisoned or fined until they were either of the other two. It took politics a while to get the mandate passed, but in the meantime all kinds of measures against the unvaccinated were discussed and some of them enforced. Not measures against the virus, mind you, but purely against the unvaxed. I don't know what exactly prevented the mandate from coming to pass, but those were fun months, never knowing what the next rule against you would be, what form of social participation would be banned next, or which public and tax-funded institution would no longer admit those monstrous unvaccinateds, or whether they'd go through with forcing employers to fire the unvaccinated. I still don't know what exactly prevented the mandates in the end; I suppose politics got cold feet when it came to ruining the livelihoods of millions of people and/or imprisoning them. Public and media condemned them for not getting the job done, though.
And then everyone, vaxed or not, got covid. And survived with no lasting harm. And quietly shut up about everything in what should have been a very embarrassing silence but instead just turned out to be a giant memory hole.
As you can tell by the wall of text, I am still rather sore about the whole business. We often talk about social trust as in to what a degree can you trust individuals simply because they are of the same society as you. I think there was another kind of social trust, trust that society will not turn on you at the drop of a hat for no good reason, and that one died.
I think I have been much to gentle with my compatriots. I was too happy to be allowed back at the tables. I have neglected to spit bile in their faces and return their insults and make clear to them that in spite of my love for them, I detest them and will never again be able to muster the same kind of trust in them that I took for granted in better times. I shall resolve to do so from now on. My disappointment may not be infinite, but it is a deep dark well and I will draw from it extensively before it runs dry.
Why did I ever just let it slide? This is not to be let slid.
I'm sorry for you, but none of that happened to me. My parents and me have still managed to avoid getting Covid. I haven't, or haven't met anyone who, slagged off on people who weren't gonna get vaccinated. (Aside from "well that's weird.") I've personally always considered "getting infected" to be equivalent or better to vaccination. On the other hand, my workplace forced a coworker with children and asthma (vaccinated, but still) to come in to work (when we're well set up for wfh) when we've had several infections in the company, and also took the absolute minimum of legally required steps. So I have a somewhat different reference class for Covid skeptics.
I went to an ACX meetup while in the middle of Covid. We were all vaccinated, otherwise healthy, and sat outside with good minimum distance. This was also the only time i was around a bunch of people with the Covid Warn app in the wild. I was also at LWCW, we did mandatory Covid tests on arrival and every morning, which seems to have avoided spread at the event. Maybe your social group is just .. not good.
That may well be. We Germans like us a witch hunt every now and then.
How confident are you that
a) lockdowns kept your parents from getting infected and
b) an infection would have been lethal for at least one of them?
Well, as mentioned, there was a 10% in that age group, so combined 20%. Chance of infection is the big one I'm not sure about, because we were looking at an exponential; at early doubling rates, a few weeks delay in imposing a lockdown could make the difference between single-digit percentage and near certainty. It's also unclear though how much of an effect mandated lockdowns would have had, given that some groups of people locked down voluntarily. I don't have a good mental model for spread here that accounts for groups with divergent risk preferences; how many degrees of distance really are there in a population? If Germany is a small-world network on a weekly scale, then assuming nobody locked down at all you'd see total spread in something like five hops. That's not what we saw, but we also don't have a good control for it. On the other hand, my parents are very pre-internet and would definitely not have done daily purchases, food etc., online. (Otherwise I'd have been very blasé about it; they had basically no other in-person social contacts through the early pandemic.) If it got to a point where there was a solid (single-digit per visit) chance of infection when visiting a supermarket, they would almost certainly have got it.
At the current stage I'm resigned to them getting it eventually; lethality is still down and they're multiply-vaccinated, so I just have to accept the diceroll. No reason not to push it out though; our tools for dealing with severe infections only improve over time.
Sidenote: IMO the strongest argument for school lockdowns is that schooling connects lots of otherwise-separate social groups. Same for WFH. I'm imagining a model of "societal layers", where each layer is a class of contact groups. Typical layers are friends/family, schools, and the workplace. Given ingroup isolation, you'd expect an infection to bounce through societal layers of connection to reach otherwise-isolated subgroups. In-person meeting, classroom, family, workplace, in-person meeting, etc. I don't know how much effect cutting one of those layers would have, but I believe cutting all but one of them would slow spread massively. Ie. if you have online schooling and WFH, then in-person meetings alone don't matter much. If you mandate social distancing and shut down schools, you can relax WFH, etc. On the other hand, if you don't do WFH and don't do social distancing, you might as well keep schools open.
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My dad is twenty years older than that. He just took care of himself rather than expecting thousands of other people to lose their jobs and not speak to each other in an entirely symbolic effort to protect him.
Not that he's ever particularly social in the first place, really... Not sure he even noticed anything different:
"Sorry, I don't eat at restaurants"
"Oh, because of Corona?"
"No, all their other beers are terrible too"
It's very challenging to take care of yourself without regularly being within six feet of many other humans.
Sorry you're being downvoted, but it really is trivial for an elderly person who doesn't have constant doctor appointments to virtually eliminate their risk. And there's very little other people could do that would complement those precautions rather than substitute for them, no matter how much effort the general public put in; all restaurants being shut down by public order doesn't give any extra help to an ancient who has already sensibly decided not to go to restaurants.
The whole thing was a generalized guilt trip intended to make people suffer pointlessly so they felt like "part of the cause"
I guess it depends on how used you are to ordering online? A lot of the risk area is shops.
If you're living somewhere with lots of foot traffic you also can't go anywhere, though that wasn't the case for me.
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Even the Great Barrington Declaration called for devoting resources to help isolate the elderly while everyone else moved on, and not just leave the elderly to figure it out or not whatever.
Yeah, throwing all policy weight behind that would have actually done something at a relatively trivial cost.
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" I am not sure what is the reason for this discrepancy."
They used relative risk reduction instead of absolute risk reduction.
That does not explain the discrepancy he raised at all. It is an entirely separate issue.
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The reason I keep bringing Covid up is because so few people seem to recognise the lunacy of Covid restrictions. The consensus in my social circle even today seems to be that "lockdowns/vaccine mandates/[insert restriction here] were unpleasant, but a necessary evil to stop the spread". No matter how much data I offer demonstrating that there's no way that these measures pass a cost-benefit analysis (or even do any good at all), they seem married to this worldview.
I'm not worried that these restrictions will be reinstated in reaction to another strain of Covid, that ship has sailed. I'm worried in a few years' time when the next pathogen comes along, and everyone thinks "Well, lockdowns and vaccine mandates worked last time, better do it again." So I'll keep on banging this drum until a majority of the populace is actually saying "never again".
I mean at this point it's just sunk cost. No way you'll convince most people that they've been actively shooting themselves in the foot for that long and that is was literally for no reason.
Maybe in ten years you'll be able to study this and say that we all acted like a bunch of panicky idiots, write a report identical to those that were available at the time that said that you shouldn't shut down the whole economy for mild and even fairly serious illnesses, and have some other epidemiology nerds nod along, as we prepare to do the stupid thing all over again next time, having learned nothing.
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Why so? You think the two week gap has that much statistical power? That would only be over a short timespan.
I would've thought a stronger argument would be that the vaccination wears off after a few months. I'm happy with vaccines that protect for decades but not the annual flu shot. IMO the two shouldn't share the same word. It's like calling a Bradley or a BMP a 'tank'. They're like tanks in that they have turrets, tracks, guns and armour. But the role is different, real tanks have bigger guns, heavier armour are less mobile and don't transport infantry.
"Two weeks after the second shot" isn't a two week gap, it's a four week or more gap.
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How much fake efficacy can be created this way depends on both how many people are infected in the beginning and the current rate at which the disease is spreading. Running a toy SIR model of a 0% mortality disease with R0 1.14 (that's apparently the median estimate for wild-type Covid under Western lockdown) and 100 people, 10 of which are infected at the start, you end up with a total of 46 infected people after 10 weeks.
If you apply the accounting trick and only count infections starting after week 2, you instead get 29 total infections, so even a saline injected population would imply a vaccine efficacy of ~40% simply by counting this way. If R0 were 0.85 instead, you'd get 50% VE, if only 2 of 100 start out as infected it'd be 20%, if 10 people were already recovered at the start of the study you'd get 60% etc. pp. Point is: how much of an effect this can have depends a lot on the initial conditions of the population you're studying.
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