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The vaccine debate has to be the least productive of any topic. has anyone on either side ever had their minds changed on this issue despite all the ink spilled? Given how many people have taken the vaccines (billions worldwide) if there was even a small uptick in deaths and other complications, it would be a huge deal and unavoidable. You would not need to comb through huge troves of data to find maybe a tiny uptick in deaths for some small cohort
Don't regret the first two shots, regret the booster and don't think the vaccine should be taken by people <50 years of age.
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I had my assumptions challenged. I thought the vaccines would be fine (ie a net benefit across all age cohorts), but when they were being recommended to children and young men I found myself to opinions other than the vaccines are the best/worst thing ever.
In a bunch of countries there is newish data indicating increased excess deaths not attributable to Covid. The confounders are myriad, but there is allegedly an unattributed signal to analyse.
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I also changed my opinion after researching it. I was happy to get the first 2 jabs knowing what I did then, but the case for boosters in a post-Omicron world seems weak at best. Agree, however, that the magnitude of vaccine-related deaths is very small at this point.
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Raising my Hand. My mind was changed on vaccine. Never a mandate fan. And I do think one dose of vaccine is useful if you haven’t had COVID but I’m solidly against jabbing every 6 months.
I think a lot of people on this camp
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An easy way to falsify 'has anyone on either side ever changed their minds' is to ask: "where did all the anti-covid-vaccine people come from"? There are many more of them than there were vocal antivaxxers in 2016. It's not really productive as it stands though, few involved (I'm not one of them) understand enough about immunology, pharmaceutical development, epidemiology to really add anything .
I'm having a hard time seeing how even experts are adding much here. The subject matter is too complex. It's like trying to describe the flight of a baseball by the interactions of the atoms within the baseball. Theoretically possible, but not likely to be useful. That's why we need to take an outside view. Group A takes the vaccine. Group B doesn't. What are the outcome differences of those groups (taking into account externalities as much as possible)?
We can talk about spike proteins until we're blue in the face, but that's just theory, compared to the results which can be measured from a vaccine given to billions of people.
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Yes? Many people took the first round and adamantly refuse to take any boosters.
I took the first round and then later got COVID. And then later got COVID yet again. My understanding is that getting COVID gives immunity around as good as the shot. I'm not sure if boosters would significantly help me.
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Almost all those not taking boosters - which is more than half of those who've had a shot - do so because they think they're already vaccinated and protected / the pandemic's over / don't see the point, but are still happy about the first shots.
How do you know it's almost all? The first booster was out before the pandemic was "over" (the mask/test/recovery/vax mandates were still in effect, and the propaganda was still in full force). Me and my wife took the first 2 shots, and now regret it, several of our friends are in the same situation, and some even took the boosters against their will.
Both from talking to people IRL in a variety of walks of life, casually browsing many parts of the internet - probably 10% of the population at least has some form of vaccine-concern, but at least >75% of the vaccinated-non-boostered are content with the initial vaccines, probably.
Glancing at a study here - data from june/july 2022, published a week ago - seems to agree.
... okay, more than glancing, I downloaded the data, and filtered for the US (idk maybe i messed something up, but it matches with the figures):
\3. The risks of COVID-19 disease are greater than the risks of the vaccine
{ 'Strongly Agree': 507, 'Somewhat Agree': 202, 'Unsure/no opinion': 157, 'Somewhat disagree': 64, 'Strongly disagree': 70, Unanswered: undefined}
\4. The COVID-19 vaccines available to me are safe
{ 'Strongly Agree': 470, 'Somewhat Agree': 238, 'Unsure/no opinion': 156, 'Somewhat disagree': 60, 'Strongly disagree': 76, Unanswered: undefined}
And when filtered for answered anything other than 'no' on 'have you received a dose' q7
\3. The risks of COVID-19 disease are greater than the risks of the vaccine
{ 'Strongly Agree': 493, 'Somewhat Agree': 172, 'Unsure/no opinion': 94, 'Somewhat disagree': 27, 'Strongly disagree': 20, Unanswered: undefined}
\4. The COVID-19 vaccines available to me are safe
{ 'Strongly Agree': 465, 'Somewhat Agree': 224, 'Unsure/no opinion': 89, 'Somewhat disagree': 20, 'Strongly disagree': 8, Unanswered: undefined}
Open access data is really nice.
On the other hand, here's a rasmussen poll - https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/covid_19/concerns_about_covid_19_vaccines_remain_high . Polling is hard.
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I used to do vaccine research for a living and when the Covid vaccines rolled out, I advised people that asked me that they should take them because they'll probably work just fine. The couple years of evidence that we now have has led me to switch over to saying that the Covid vaccines are comically bad, the authorities saying otherwise are ridiculous liars, and the retconning to "it was never supposed to prevent infection" undermines the credibility of all future vaccines. So yeah, I'd say that my mind has changed.
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I’m not sure we haven’t. Look at this. https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/another-look-at-uk-all-cause-mortality
Where is the author wrong?
I'm thinking of doing a top-level post on this next week, but it seems like this data doesn't necessarily jive with results in other countries. For example, in France, in a country with high vaccination rates, 2022 excess deaths in the 15-64 age category are actually down considerably from normal levels:
https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/
England and U.S. mortality is up however. Perhaps its obesity or fentanyl related?
It would be interesting. And maybe there are just abnormalities in country by country numbers but given the high excess deaths in 20-21 you’d expect a large drop in excess deaths in 22.
Would also be interesting to see data on births. I’ve seen some series suggesting there has been a large drop in births and there was the Israeli data on sperm motility. It’s frustrating that we don’t get this info easily since a lot of country possess this info.
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Well, let's say you did not want to take the vaccine, and you were mandated to take it. You could choose either J&J, mRNA, Novavax, or even fly overseas to get Covaxin. You may begin debating at that point.
mRNA vs. Other vaccines is a very difficult topic, because defanging a countries ability to give mandated vaccines is bad, but mandating vaccines that are bad isn't good. In fact, perhaps extreme caution should be taken based on the prior.
Why should a state even have the ability to mandate medical treatment when that's a very clear bright line violation of natural rights?
I care much more about the ethics of mandates than I do the specifics of efficacy. The individual must make the informed decision on this, not the state, and any mandates are tyranny that must be defended against to the death.
There is certainly a debate to be had about mRNA, a very necessary one, which was poisoned by the will to impose without discussion as we now know for a fact, but the idea that we should assume from the beginning that the State has to retain tyrannical powers in the name of public health is insane.
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As an observer of the vaccine debates, its not useful to me on the specifics of the vaccine. I didn't take it and probably wont have to ever, had covid, its over.
But the meta-debate does allow me to calibrate my opinion of who to trust. Whose predictions panned out, who lied, who was okay with lying for the "greater good", etc. Im predicting in the coming years, a lot of people will be vindicated and a lot of people will have pies on their faces. The rhetorical stakes are too high for it to be any other way now.
If anything, atleast now I know who (almost everyone) is totally okay with me being a second class citizen on the premise of refusing certain medication. Some masks are off permanently. Them denying this in the future wont change my opinion of them.
Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of people for which it's not yet over. The federal gov't is still litigating at least two of their mandates, a mandate is now firmly implanted in immigration law, and there may well be state mandate battles still going on to boot. I probably cannot capture the absurdity of it, either, because what they are still trying to force on people is the original vaccine. Not even updated vaccines that are tailored to the current strains. They're still fighting in courts for the ability to force people to take shots now that are essentially useless (especially since most non-vaxxed folks have almost certainly had some strain of COVID by now), under threat of firing them, taking away their contracts, or prohibiting them from entering the United States.
In the Fifth Circuit's en banc oral argument, the fact that the vaccines don't do a great job at preventing infection or transmission came up, and the gov't said that their position could still be sustained on the grounds that it reduces the risk of severe cases/death. When pressed on whether the gov't could, on the same grounds, require everyone to get below a certain BMI, as obesity brings severe risks which are endemic in our society, they basically just said, "Yeah, we wouldn't do that tho."
This is why it's still so important. If there is not enough anti-authoritarian energy to form a hard consensus that the gov't should not even have the option to do such things, those people will go beyond the mask of "we won't force you to take certain medication". There will be more masks to come.
I am fully aware that the "real fight" is far from over given that many questionable laws are put into place and there is no precedent that all that was done for covid would not be repeated in the future. If anything the probability that it would be repeated is not infinitely higher. So that is a new CW battlefront in the making.
However, this seems to be mostly a (country with high state capacity) problem. Many countries have really left covid in the past and anything associated with it altogether.
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same here. i got it twice. the first time it was like a cold, second time only very mild. it's over .
Isn't there some worry that repeated Covid infections (or boosters) could cause long-term damage? I've definitely heard this claimed. Not sure how much of this is crackpot.
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Agreed. I personally have a high esteem for many people on both sides of the issue - that's what makes this query so incisive and important.
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