Parents should vax their children with the standard stuff.
It isn't their fault they were misled, however: that honor belongs to our state health apparatus for lying and moving the goalposts so many times. It was impossible for the skepticism caused by this response not to bleed into attitudes vs vaccines as a whole.
I can't help but notice that Trump has spent an awful lot of time recently crowing about how his administration developed the vaccines and he should get credit for them.
I guess I inadvertently became 5% anti-vax this year.
For young kids, the CDC recommends two initial vaccines starting around 6ish months, and then a booster every year. When my kiddo got the first two vaccines at 6 and 9 months, I was fine with it. Then we went in for the next visit (baby doctor visits are 3 months a part) and they wanted to vaccinate her again. I asked some questions about that, but ultimately let them proceed. Then we had a fourth appointment, and they had a 4th covid vaccine waiting for us - I stopped them. That was four vaccinations against COVID inside of 9 months. Why? Our particular provider had decided that very young kids - the individuals least likely to get a health threatening version of COVID - needed every brand of the original vaccine, before moving onto boosters in the next year.
So we said no. The doctor was not happy, but we were firm.
I feel like I got my first real life take on why some parents become anti-vax for their children. Doctors make up their own inconsistent rules even with vaccines. Of all things!
We will do boosters in a year, but ... I consider our child vaccinated, our own particular doctor be damned. I'm not going to over-vaccinate a kid.
What guarantees that doctors aren't weird about other vaccines, in a way that turns off parents and makes them scared and skeptical? Its indicative of the general untrustworthiness of modern practice.
What guarantees that doctors aren't weird about other vaccines, in a way that turns off parents and makes them scared and skeptical? Its indicative of the general untrustworthiness of modern practice.
Was weird how some would-be leftists went from several years of saying 'austerity kills' in relation to economic policy, to furiously insinuating that anyone who tried to discuss the effect of lockdowns on the economy was callously disregarding human life. Now, all of a sudden, there was no link whatsoever between the two. I say that as someone who is against austerity and generally can see see that lockdowns were probably necessary.
In general, a lot of people on the supposed left really lost their shit during Covid. I think it exposed a deep need in some people to identify as sensible and just, like as if this would get them through a difficult situation, regardless of the actual implications or realities of their behaviour.
"Closing racial gaps in education is extremely important." States that did more Zoom school, which leftists know to be a joke, saw larger gaps in test scores by race and class.
"Mental health is an important part of health" - Lockdowns were an absolute disaster for mental health.
"Community health can be a better measure of well-being than GDP" - Again isolation and alienation shot up during the lockdowns.
The lockdowns and vaccine mandates were such a massive error. Morons like Scocca never once gave a thought to how fucked the lower classes were vs the shut-in laptop class they belonged to.
I will always be proud that, as HR director, I was able to block vaccine mandates for my entire company of nearly 600 people. I simply refused to implement them and leadership wasn't willing to fire me for it. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Without the lockdowns, or some version of them, the entire United States would have looked like Wuhan, Bergamo or New York in January, March and April of 2020 (respectively). If anything, they should have been more robust, to accommodate more of the non-laptop class. Obviously there were things that could have been handled better, but that's what happens when you build an airplane while it's taking off.
I don't think that the "initial wave" of lockdowns in Spring 2020 should have lasted longer, and for what it's worth I also think the epidemiological evidence was there by April to be far more permissive of outdoor gatherings.
In October 2020 to around March 2021, we had an extreme version of the bifurcated situation you described, where the "laptop class" could choose to stay home (or not) while service-sided businesses stayed open at marginally reduced capacity. I think that the restrictions on all in-person business during the lockdown should have been even more stringent, as they were in Europe. These sorts of policies should have been brought back the following winter, as needed, to prevent the healthcare system from buckling.
I think it's a shame that "flattening the curve" to ensure that hospitals weren't overwhelmed lost traction in mid-2020, because it was the only strategy that ever really made any sense for dealing with COVID. And yeah, that spring or winter in most places the only way to "flatten the curve" in many areas was going to be lockdowns of one form or another.
Flattening the curve just means you lose a million people over two years instead of two months. The total number of deaths is the same either way, it's just the rate that changes.
NYC and LA got hit hard at the beginning of the pandemic. The rest of the country? Not so much. In fact there was a much discussed phenomenon of empty hospitals across the nation because people were freaked out by Covid and canceled their normal check ups.
Also there is some speculation that continuing excess mortality in the present day may be due to all the cancers, heart disease, etc. that went undiagnosed during that initial period.
Europe's lockdowns were generally totalitarian and unforgivable. There is no evidence that any hospital system anywhere would have failed without the lockdowns.
I lived in Canada during those years and its health care system in multiple cities were overwhelmed in some cases even with lockdowns. Hospitals in Canada are single-payer and run with much less excess capacity than pretty much anywhere else in the developed world.
Canada in general fared better than most peers, but its health care system fared among the most poorly among its peers, and LTC by far the most poorly. Canada got lucky in most regards outside of its hospitals because it's density seldom exceeds 10,000/km2 and it's a high-trust society with corresponding high compliance with transmission-cutting measures.
Given how contagious COVID is, it's not likely that the lockdowns even did anything to "flatten the curve."
Canada is an interesting outlier because a bunch of badass truckers made a huge convoy and forced the government to relax or remove various pandemic restrictions.
Trudeau really showed the world his ass responding to that one.
As a professional China scholar, I don't know that we can take the highly mixed (and now almost hopelessly mangled) signals from Wuhan in early 2020 at face value. The lockdown logic always only worked with the assumption that doing so would eliminate viral transmission, or put it "back into the box," which would in turn be of overall utility for the holistic health of individuals and a society. But how could that be possibly true for an instant for a pathogen deadliest to those over the age of 65 and, as Freddie underscores again, is as transmissible as any other URI has ever been? A denial of those 2 facts and of the logical conclusion (lockdowns and other restriction-first policies will simply never work and will cause huge harms, tangible and not) was always at the core of COVID maximalism imo.
Even outside of the China example, lockdowns were incredibly effective in New York, California, Italy, Spain and the rest of Europe. In many of those places, hospitals were overflowing; a couple more weeks of unrestricted transmission and people would have been dying in the streets (as they already, in some cases, were). And remember, at this time COVID tests were pretty hard to come by and the disease was poorly understood, so it was hard to maintain any degree of certainty about how far your area was from being completely swamped.
The problem has always been that lockdowns only work for the duration of the lockdown. Once you let people start moving around again the virus resurges and transmission rates go up.
The country as a whole, lockdowns or not, went through multiple waves of transmission. About a million Americans have died of Covid. Two thirds perished under Biden, primarily during massive waves of infection due to the delta and omicron variants.
I don't disagree with any of that. I do not consider zero-covid realistic, and never did. The vaccine helped but it was not the panacea that many hoped it would be. What I am in favor of, unequivocally, is preventing the healthcare system from being overwhelmed, and lockdowns were necessary in most places to ensure this.
I find it curious that you list Wuhan among your examples of presumably bad outcomes from the virus. Recall that in the initial stages of the pandemic the Chinese response was hailed for its effectiveness.
What killed the Chinese later on was _reopening_. Remember, the majority of Americans who have died from Covid did so after the initial wave. Again, at least two thirds of all US deaths came after Trump left office. Arguing for lockdowns is one thing but not even the Chinese, autocratic government and all, were able to prevent huge numbers of deaths and massive social disruption after reopening their borders.
There is no evidence that our hospital systems would have been overwhelmed without the lockdowns. We know they weren't overwhelmed in subsequent waves when there were no lockdowns. This myth just refuses to die, though.
The whole "just stay home" line of reasoning was and is some of the most disconnected elitist nonsense. The people of this class literally think you can have a functioning society if everyone just became shut-ins and never went anywhere again. I wasn't against the lockdowns at first, but what got me was this utter refusal to do a cost/benefit analysis, and the way you got excoriated for wanting to off the old and disabled if you even brought it up.
I agree with you about the effect of lockdowns on the lower classes, but how exactly do vaccine mandates have a negative effect on them? The first few doses of the vaccine were paid for by the government. You just needed to make an appointment, show up, and get one. I wasn't financially well-off in 2021, but it was easy for me to make it happen.
Yeah...it's a weird take. The issue was never take it/don't take it (mostly)...it was how that was used as a phony political barometer, which was just chaotic. And then ofc, the BS behind 'it'll stop the virus ', etc....
There was no benefit to third parties from the vaccines. That's the only circumstance that could justify a mandate. There was never evidence for benefit to others when vaccine mandates came in force and then we learned there definitely was no benefit to others and still no change to policy.
It was well known within the first few months of the pandemic that the virus was a threat to the elderly and the infirm and basically no one else. That is why Dr. Phil can go on the View and rake school officials over the coals about school closures--it was well known _at the time_ that children had almost no risk from the virus.
Schools weren't closed universally in this country, much less in Europe and the rest of the world. Some of the best information available at the time that showed almost no risk to teachers came from Europe.
Again, the information was available. There were just massive political incentives for some parties to ignore it.
I'm of two minds in this. It was clear that children and the young in general weren't at risk. I don't see the sense in pushing for them to be vaccinated. However, when I was a teacher in a poor urban school many of my kids were living with grandparents who were in ill health that would have been very susceptible to COVID.
"Sending vaccines overseas? Sounds like 20:20 hindsight to me." Does it? Because the availability of vaccines to poorer nations, the withholding and stockpiling of vaccines, and also the necessity (or lack thereof) of vaccination for the younger and not critical groups were all criticisms made in 2021, in very active debates in the left - here in Europe, but obviously also in the US.
I live in Germany and can tell you that part of the reason for that is that most Germans are already vaccinated at least twice and the medical establishment has not strongly recommended boosters.
Big Pharma ghouls are also to blame. They won't let many EU nations out the massive vaccine contracts they made when they were terrified, and so Germany, among others, is forced to take delivery of vaccines that will never be used and cannot be given away.
This is true, but I remember at first people really believed these vaccines were going to stop transmission. That clearly wasn't the case in the end, but there was all this talk about the early trials showing 90%+ prevention of the disease at the time, and if that were true, and it did stop transmission, then this point isn't very relevant. It wasn't just about protecting yourself, but others, which was the logic of the mandate.
Again, this didn't happen, so it was bad in hindsight, but it was a huge part of the mandate agenda and just because it was wrong, doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize it was part of the logic at the time.
There was no logic involved, though, because the trial designs could not possibly tell us if the product reduced transmission or not. They just assumed it would, which is laughable.
Yes, it was a bad assumption. But that doesn't mean people weren't assuming it, and that it wasn't why they wanted the mandates.
You can call them stupid and wrong all you like, and you'll be right, but you can't accuse them of wanting young people to get vaccines only to protect themselves. That just wasn't the case.
I can certainly judge Western governments for being stupid, and for wanting to enrich their Big Pharma buddies. By the time mandates came into play, the vaccines had been out for long enough to reveal that they didn't affect transmission. The percentage of people who needed to use their product "to get to herd immunity" just kept going up over time. Governments should have known better, but zealots incapable of reason had taken over by then.
They are still in power, and are not to be trusted.
That's true, but there's a simple way around that that is available to both the poor and the wealthy: Don't choose not to get the vaccine. If you do that you won't lose your job, you'll be able to go place, and if you get COVID your symptoms will probably be milder than if you didn't get the vaccine. There are literally no downsides!
This is a common fallacy that many on both sides of the debate fall victim to. Even if the vaccine is safe and effective at reducing severity (and that's a huge if), it does not follow that people should be forced to take it.
This is especially true considering the common side-effect of feeling like shit for a few days after the shot. People operating under financial pressure often cannot afford to be off work for that long. This is an obvious downside.
Maybe. Lots of people still genuinely think that the vaccines are 100% safe, and they don't think about how feeling like shit for 2-3 days can really hurt people who work 2+ jobs and can't get time off.
Do you know what else makes you feel like shit for a few days, usually more than 2-3? COVID. It seems pretty short-sighted to have to take four or five days off of work because you can't take two days off of work. Or to develop life-threatening pneumonia.
I agree in principle that people should not be forced to take the vaccine for bodily autonomy/rule utilitarian reasons. People have a right to be idiots.* But I don't think it's accurate to say that the poor are disproportionately harmed by vaccine mandates, because it isn't being required to get a vaccine that harms them, it's that the punishment for noncompliance will mess up their lives more. That's true of every punishment for everything, laws against drunk driving, shoplifting, etc also disproportionately affect the poor by that logic.
*The obvious exception is people who work in hospitals or in elder care, where their idiocy puts other people at serious risk. In that case if they don't get vaccinated they should be fired.
There are plenty of people who got COVID before getting injected and report that the side-effects from the product were worse than COVID itself. There are also plenty of people who catch COVID and report few to no symptoms. The product has only downsides for these two groups, even if we don't consider the evidence of sub-clinical heart damage caused by the product in a significant number of young people.
Many workplaces (mine was among them) offered extra paid sick leave for confirmed cases of COVID. This protection was not in place for post-injection malaise.
I don't understand your last point. The product does not prevent or even reduce transmission.
I ran an "essential business" all through COVID...30 plus people, working side-by-side, every day. Vaccines were personal choices. One person got sick (and came back to work) over the entire time.
It was originally thought that being vaccinated meant you could no longer pass on covid to anybody else, so it made some sense to enforce that for an organization in the same way we don't let people smoke indoors anymore.
But then it turned out that vaccinated asymptomatic people could still help spread covid, at which point vaccine mandates made very little sense, and were still enforced for way too long after. This is more akin to forbidding people to smoke in their private lives - sure, maybe it would be advisable, but it wouldn't affect anyone else and is a violation of personal liberty and privacy.
I point this out since I think this important detail is lost in the post-facto analysis of the policy.
This is a huge reason why many people sensibly updated to stop trusting the government health apparatus: the original vaccine trials never even tried to determine if the product stopped transmission.
There was no basis to believe it would, other than the fact they were labeled vaccines. They even changed the definition of the word 'vaccine' because their product was so underwhelming.
Thoughtful piece. I hope for health and flourishing for all who continue to suffer.
The PMC seemingly is unable to admit error.
- Lockdowns didn't work
- Masks didn't work
- We knew early on that children were not at risk, but millions of kids were kept out of school anyway. Predictably, the results across every metric of learning and mental health are a mess.
- We were told the vax would stop us from contracting the virus and would prevent us from spreading the virus. The goalposts on these promises moved at a record clip.
- "Stay home, save lives" unless it's taking to the streets with thousands of other people in a pandemic to protest a PMC-worthy cause.
I don't think it's necessary for healthy young people to get the vaccine, so I didn't. I don't care nor judge anyone who decided to get the vaccine. Their choice.
I knew masks didn't work, but I wore one anyway in public because I'm not a dick. I don't mind at all if people choose to still wear a mask. I won't say anything.
In my opinion, the memoryholing is happening with all the lies that were told by government and public health officials - not to mention the media.
Hopefully lessons were learned, but I'm not optimistic.
People still don't seem to understand that, unless you're wearing an N95 or better, the microplastics you breathe in from the usual disposable masks are not worth the statistically negligible protection they may or may not give you against COVID.
W/ the masking, I just want to know: how long do people expect to wear them for (if to counter COVID)? Because wearing them seems to suggest they believe there will come a day when COVID simply vanishes.
I think it makes sense to require masking (of N95s) in medical settings (hospitals, pharmacies, doctor's offices). The combo of "truly immunocompromised people can't avoid these places" and "sick people come here for treatment" and "hospital acquired infections" makes the cost/benefit fairly clear.
Personally, in the winter, I mask in places that are indoors/crowded/poorly ventilated/essential. For example, I live in a city and mask on the subway because I regularly see people who are visibly unwell who sometimes I am in VERY close quarters with. It also helps filter out certain smells. And I don't want to engage with people on public transit anyway so masking is no real burden. If I'm feeling under the weather, I mask everywhere indoors. Otherwise, I live a normal life and go to restaurants and concerts and travel.
But is there actually good evidence that masking, even N95, defers respiratory infection (for a person who wants to wear one to avoid such infections), including but not limited to COVID? As Slaw mentioned upthread, afaik there has not actually been such work. The flimsiness of that premise behind mask wearing seems to have been totally memory holed...
My attitude toward the pandemic relaxed when I started tuning in to Vinay Prasad at UCSF. He was meticulous with the evidence and, as a Bernie supporter, gave permission to lefties like me to second-guess the party line.
We all know how the left got here, but predictably, even those barely brave enough to acknowledge it's a problem feel too cowed to try and change things.
We watched the death rates and read the scientific evidence to guide our decisions. I took care of my elderly mother, my husband has COPD and I was in a slightly higher risk bracket...those factors went into my decision making.
I think part of the liberal overreaction was tied in with the racial reckoning. When evidence (that I never fact-checked but assume to be true) emerged that black Americans were dying of Covid at higher rates, it became incumbent on white liberals to take every conceivable precaution. To do otherwise was to exhibit anti-black racism.
"In hindsight we perhaps should not have pushed vaccine mandates on the young and healthy, given what we now know about their risk profile, but public officials were making difficult decisions in the middle of a disaster."
We knew the risk profile at the time, though. Polling at the time showed everyone and especially self-identified liberals overestimated the risk of hospitalization or death for young and healthy by a huge magnitude, yet we were making consequential decisions about people's ability to earn a living and participate in society based on that deeply flawed understanding and acting like the danger of misinformation was solely on the other side.
I think the missing piece is that for a while we thought that getting everyone vaccinated would halt the spread of the disease. But that turned out not to be true, and once we knew that vaccinated asymptomatic people could be helping spread covid, it *really* made no sense to mandate it.
COVID is really globalist fear manufacturing to leverage for authoritarian power like is climate crisis. We have become pansies that think we are entitled to live forever without any risks or impacts to the "natural" world... ignoring completely that humans are in fact part of the natural world and death is inevitable.
This "thinking" causes us to WAY over-react and create more misery and pain than the actual thing we are afraid of. Mass hysteria pushed through the Matrix too many of us to twitch the same.
My neighbor still wears a mask everywhere. She told me she is afraid to catch it and die. I told her that everyone dies and why does she drive a car because the risk of dying in a car is higher than dying from COVID. She does not like talking to me now. People clutch their irrational fears like their life depends on it.
I had both shots and a booster because I had a vacation scheduled to liberal Italy. But I still got COVID twice and it was a cold.
And 2014 - 2022 there was a global cooling trend.
And extreme weather has always happened. Just read the historical Farmers Almanac.
This airborne virus can severely damage the human immune system. I am someone who hasn't dined indoors since the outbreak and who wears an N95 mask in public indoor spaces. I have dear family members who are at risk for severe illness or mortality if they were to become infected. Thankfully, none of us has. The reason for that is that we all care about each other so that we test before we gather (48 and 24 hours before) and mask with N95s when we know we're going to be in crowded spaces with lots of people and poor ventilation. I was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2021, and I don't want to find out what could happen to my body if I become infected with COVID-19.
This whole conversation seems wrong-headed to me. The public health establishment used to operate more or less in the service of public health. Measles was eradicated in the US, but it is now making a comeback. Where's the guidance from our CDC? Smallpox was exterminated thanks in part to cooperation among countries across the world. Polio killed far fewer people than COVID-19 has, but it has been thoroughly defeated thanks to public health efforts.
It now seems as if demanding, let alone politely asking for, a robust, sensible, fact-based public health response to an ongoing global pandemic that is inclusive and all-encompassing has become some kind of identity politics game piece that people use to yell at each other.
A robust, sensible, and fact-based public health response would reflect the fact that a) we know beyond doubt that close to 100% of Americans have a degree of Covid protection thanks to prior infection or vaccination, b) the excess death event is over, meaning that while people are dying with Covid almost none of them are dying from Covid, and c) because the mortality rate was extremely low even in the height of the pandemic, and even lower now thanks to Paxlovid and Remdesivir etc, the risk of Covid-19 for all but the oldest and the severely immunocompromised or ill is extraordinarily low. Those are all facts. At some point, you have to move on.
I understand. We all want to get back to normal. I will say, Freddie, that there's a lack of humanity here that is uncharacteristic of you. I won't spend much time wondering why--I can't possibly know--but I do hope that you'll have time to reflect on what you've said here and perhaps adopt a different view.
He made factual claims; I responded factually. None of this is remotely emotional to me. There is no such thing as compassion or respect that stems from a refusal to tell the truth.
Yes. Thank you for the graph at the top that convinced me that, as a healthy 60 year old who has had 4 Covid shots (each leaving me fucked for 36 hours) I can finally stop. My husband and I felt like we fought it off after two jabs, and then our 11 year old kids got it the next week as a massive snot cold. We are done. Thx.
Before we gather, we all test twice (48 hours and 24 hours before. Those tests can be expensive--health care affordability is a related topic here--but we do this for each other.
That doesn't imply that they have never been infected, only that they are not _currently_ infected. And that doesn't even address the rate of false negatives.
We do the best that we can do because we care about each other and we also don't want to become infected ourselves. I know that they've never been infected because we gather every week. The 2-shot 48- and 24-hours prior approach with the lateral flow instant tests is what we've decided on as sufficient to address the false negative problem.
Just like I care about my family and they care about me, we all care about our fellow humans, right? One of the reasons I've hesitated to spread the "gospel" of my family's approach is because of posts like Freddie's up above. The only reason I even replied is because I know Freddie and how brilliant and kind he is.
Testing every week simply isn't the comprehensive solution that you think it is. Can you discount the possibility that someone was infected and recovered (or was simply asymptomatic) before Covid tests were widely available and you presumably began your regimen?
And even if somebody is currently infected whether or not a swab test detects anything is completely dependent on viral load--and there are some very fortunate individuals who apparently have massive levels of built in immunity to Covid to the point that the virus can never really gain a foothold.
You are right: This devious, deadly, destructive virus can spread from host to host even if there are no apparent symptoms (fever, dry tickly cough, aches, nausea, etc.). COVID can spread asymptomatically. There's at least one study out there that shows that up to 50% of people who are infected are asymptomatic and also contagious.
My family and I are just trying to do the best we can to protect each other and ourselves and everyone else we come into contact with on a daily basis with the knowledge and the tools that we have readily available. I'm going to share sources for relatively affordable N95s and COVID test kits below.
When I had COVID I never tested positive with a RAT. I was positive with a PCR and had most of the symptoms (fever, loss of smell, sore throat etc.) I tested every day with both the oral and nasal swab types and never got the test line to show up.
I’m sorry about your health challenges (and some of the presumed challenges of several of your close family members).
But your cohort is not and can not be the target of public health policy. For the average person that public health needs to care about, omicron is a nuisance but not a serious health hazard.
In your situation, I’d get every vax possible and maybe 1 or 2 more besides. And I’d keep masking as you have been doing. That is your prerogative and your right. And none of my business.
But how i conduct my business in the era of omicron is none of yours.
Covid was successfully politicized so we are never going to manage the disease unless a miracle happens. Even now, 4 years later, no one pays serious attention to improved ventilation which would remove much of the threat of an airborne virus. Most of us appear to understand that principle when someone is smoking a cigarette but for some politicized reason, we are unable to apply that reasoning to viral spread. And then there is Long Covid which I am most concerned about. With every re-infection, the chances of developing Long Covid increase so if the virologists are right, we can look forward to becoming a nation of zombies. Meanwhile, the CDC has disgraced itself for generations to come, our ruling class pays no attention to improved ventilation unless the venue is Davos, and Covid remains the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
points of fact: the chances of LC do not rise with each reinfection (and have plummeted to infinitesimal with the latest iterations of omicron), and covid is not the third leading cause of death in the U.S. you are, however, right about the CDC and about indifference to ventilation.
I'm not terribly concerned about death from COVID at this point, but the long-term impacts still seem nasty. Anecdata, but my mom (previously pretty healthy) got COVID twice and now seems highly susceptible to minor illnesses. My cousin (in his 30s, fit, healthy) got COVID in October and says his running and lifting metrics still haven't recovered. Although thankfully, no one I know has gotten Long COVID in the same truly nasty way as the pre-vaccination days.
Myocarditis is not thst rare in young men and the risk goes up with subsequent shots as any additional benefit rapidly goes down in this already really low risk of COVID death group. Evidence for boosters was much weaker than you think and it was nutty that prior COVID infection wasn't taken into account. Masking kids was always nutty and there was no evidence community masking helped and an understandable reason why it didn't. Vinay Prasad is hardly a conspiracy theorist. He lays out in this talk to Heterodox Academy what had good evidence (1 or 2 shots of MRNA vaccine) and what didn't (nearly everything else). He talks about the actual risk of myocarditis and how the "rare" as far as young men goes isnt quite right starting at 21:45. Risk/Benefit for young men wasnt there after 1 dose. https://youtu.be/S9MVwhFlViM?si=1gwHlpa6Wg3LgYJ2
Masking does nothing. The harm to certain cohorts from vaccines is probably equivalent or greater than the risk of Covid itself. This stuff should be obvious by now but because the pandemic was politicized the left cannot admit that they were (disastrously) wrong because it would be interpreted as points scored for the right.
Love that FBD is writing about this. I wish that the rage felt by many of us wasn't distilled to essentially right wing vaccine birtherism. For many people, the Lockdowns continue to be a source of immense and sustained anger because of the smug refusal of those who advocated for Lockdowns to acknowledge the obvious and now proven iatrogenic or second order consequences like learning loss.
Just thinking about my profound shock and rage at nearly every single establishment of authority genuinely triggers some post-traumatic stress. Seems like a lot of other folks in the comments feel more or less the same.
Also keep in mind that excess mortality rates have not declined in many industrialized countries even after the end of the pandemic. Very curious indeed.
Thanks; I thought you were on target. I'm old and will avoid attending large meetings for the rest of my life. I have immunocompromised friends whose lives have become more complicated. Stuff happens, and most of it isn't the fault of the government.
Some elements of government policy WERE misguided, but retrospective critique of the management of an extraordinary catastrophe is kinda cheap. Despite some errors in judgement, NIH bureaucrats and 100,000+ scientists worldwide were responsible for remarkable new vaccines (with the assistance of a hundred years of basic biomedical research). Ironically, Trump also deserves plaudits for Operation Warp Speed.
Yes, but administering the vaccines to everybody has turned out to be a terrible mistake. If you're 80 years old, go for it. If you're 24 and wrestled in college you need to have a serious discussion with your doctor about complications before getting the shot.
It would be one thing if nobody knew at the time and was just blindly flailing about. But it was almost immediately apparent that the virus was mainly a threat to the old and infirm and everybody else had almost no risk. That's what makes this whole thing a tragedy.
I think you overstate. Yes, it was clear by the time the vaccine was introduced that risk of death was much higher amongst the sick and elderly, but the risk of damage/injury to the young was not certain (even now there's uncertainty about the magnitude of risk when the outbreak began). Also, there was the reasonable notion that vaccination would stop or slow spread of the pandemic. With what we know now, it is indeed reasonable for the young and healthy to weigh risks and benefits of the vaccine. Both public health and social harmony considerations argue that the mandates were unwise, but to argue that suboptimal vaccine policies are "what make this whole thing a tragedy" seems overstated in the face of the massive damage caused by the pandemic itself.
Yeah, I'm mostly mad on the other side from most people. The ideas of doing human trials on willing subjects or releasing the vaccines before the elections were both completely off the table for some reason, notwithstanding the scope of the emergency.
If this had been a worse plague, would we just all have died, or did public health officials somehow conclude that this pandemic was dangerous enough to merit shutting down the economy and schools and locking everyone in their homes, but not so dangerous to allow people to voluntarily take vaccines or participate in studies?
The volunteer issue reflected the conservatism of the US medical/regulatory system, which even now has trouble getting its collective mind around the notion that sometimes stuff has to happen fast. I don't think elections had anything to do with the "timing" issue; the regulatory staff etc. thought that the public would accept the vaccines better if full Phase 3 trials were published prior to release.
Thanks, I think you're probably right. That said, I don't think most public health workers' opinions on public acceptance are evidence based.
(I'd love to be proven wrong and learn that there was a conference room somewhere in which a bunch of wonks looked at data and calculated the years of life saved in an early release scenario vs a later release.)
I really doubt there was much. The public health silo doesn't communicate too well with the spin/optics/persuasion silo, which is kind of ironic, considering that in our system of government, the people at the very top are expert practitioners of the latter. On a different topic, Ithink it was Collins who said basically that he regretted that the response was entirely focused on preventing Covid, failing to consider the costs of e.g. lockdowns.
Parents should vax their children with the standard stuff.
It isn't their fault they were misled, however: that honor belongs to our state health apparatus for lying and moving the goalposts so many times. It was impossible for the skepticism caused by this response not to bleed into attitudes vs vaccines as a whole.
I can't help but notice that Trump has spent an awful lot of time recently crowing about how his administration developed the vaccines and he should get credit for them.
For measles? Yup. For Covid? There's no point.
You would think it would be that easy.
I guess I inadvertently became 5% anti-vax this year.
For young kids, the CDC recommends two initial vaccines starting around 6ish months, and then a booster every year. When my kiddo got the first two vaccines at 6 and 9 months, I was fine with it. Then we went in for the next visit (baby doctor visits are 3 months a part) and they wanted to vaccinate her again. I asked some questions about that, but ultimately let them proceed. Then we had a fourth appointment, and they had a 4th covid vaccine waiting for us - I stopped them. That was four vaccinations against COVID inside of 9 months. Why? Our particular provider had decided that very young kids - the individuals least likely to get a health threatening version of COVID - needed every brand of the original vaccine, before moving onto boosters in the next year.
So we said no. The doctor was not happy, but we were firm.
I feel like I got my first real life take on why some parents become anti-vax for their children. Doctors make up their own inconsistent rules even with vaccines. Of all things!
We will do boosters in a year, but ... I consider our child vaccinated, our own particular doctor be damned. I'm not going to over-vaccinate a kid.
You have to watch doctors on everything.
What guarantees that doctors aren't weird about other vaccines, in a way that turns off parents and makes them scared and skeptical? Its indicative of the general untrustworthiness of modern practice.
How do you know?
Do have any sympathy for other people that might not feel the same security that you when taking doctor's advice?
Trust me, I was surprised as hell when my doctor got weird about over vaccinating for COVID.
What guarantees that doctors aren't weird about other vaccines, in a way that turns off parents and makes them scared and skeptical? Its indicative of the general untrustworthiness of modern practice.
Sorry to hear that some things are not going so well. Godspeed brother.
Was weird how some would-be leftists went from several years of saying 'austerity kills' in relation to economic policy, to furiously insinuating that anyone who tried to discuss the effect of lockdowns on the economy was callously disregarding human life. Now, all of a sudden, there was no link whatsoever between the two. I say that as someone who is against austerity and generally can see see that lockdowns were probably necessary.
In general, a lot of people on the supposed left really lost their shit during Covid. I think it exposed a deep need in some people to identify as sensible and just, like as if this would get them through a difficult situation, regardless of the actual implications or realities of their behaviour.
Not just austerity kills!
"Closing racial gaps in education is extremely important." States that did more Zoom school, which leftists know to be a joke, saw larger gaps in test scores by race and class.
"Mental health is an important part of health" - Lockdowns were an absolute disaster for mental health.
"Community health can be a better measure of well-being than GDP" - Again isolation and alienation shot up during the lockdowns.
The lockdowns and vaccine mandates were such a massive error. Morons like Scocca never once gave a thought to how fucked the lower classes were vs the shut-in laptop class they belonged to.
I will always be proud that, as HR director, I was able to block vaccine mandates for my entire company of nearly 600 people. I simply refused to implement them and leadership wasn't willing to fire me for it. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Without the lockdowns, or some version of them, the entire United States would have looked like Wuhan, Bergamo or New York in January, March and April of 2020 (respectively). If anything, they should have been more robust, to accommodate more of the non-laptop class. Obviously there were things that could have been handled better, but that's what happens when you build an airplane while it's taking off.
Do you think they should have lasted longer, been more intense, or both?
I don't think that the "initial wave" of lockdowns in Spring 2020 should have lasted longer, and for what it's worth I also think the epidemiological evidence was there by April to be far more permissive of outdoor gatherings.
In October 2020 to around March 2021, we had an extreme version of the bifurcated situation you described, where the "laptop class" could choose to stay home (or not) while service-sided businesses stayed open at marginally reduced capacity. I think that the restrictions on all in-person business during the lockdown should have been even more stringent, as they were in Europe. These sorts of policies should have been brought back the following winter, as needed, to prevent the healthcare system from buckling.
I think it's a shame that "flattening the curve" to ensure that hospitals weren't overwhelmed lost traction in mid-2020, because it was the only strategy that ever really made any sense for dealing with COVID. And yeah, that spring or winter in most places the only way to "flatten the curve" in many areas was going to be lockdowns of one form or another.
Flattening the curve just means you lose a million people over two years instead of two months. The total number of deaths is the same either way, it's just the rate that changes.
NYC and LA got hit hard at the beginning of the pandemic. The rest of the country? Not so much. In fact there was a much discussed phenomenon of empty hospitals across the nation because people were freaked out by Covid and canceled their normal check ups.
Also there is some speculation that continuing excess mortality in the present day may be due to all the cancers, heart disease, etc. that went undiagnosed during that initial period.
Europe's lockdowns were generally totalitarian and unforgivable. There is no evidence that any hospital system anywhere would have failed without the lockdowns.
I lived in Canada during those years and its health care system in multiple cities were overwhelmed in some cases even with lockdowns. Hospitals in Canada are single-payer and run with much less excess capacity than pretty much anywhere else in the developed world.
Canada in general fared better than most peers, but its health care system fared among the most poorly among its peers, and LTC by far the most poorly. Canada got lucky in most regards outside of its hospitals because it's density seldom exceeds 10,000/km2 and it's a high-trust society with corresponding high compliance with transmission-cutting measures.
Given how contagious COVID is, it's not likely that the lockdowns even did anything to "flatten the curve."
Canada is an interesting outlier because a bunch of badass truckers made a huge convoy and forced the government to relax or remove various pandemic restrictions.
Trudeau really showed the world his ass responding to that one.
As a professional China scholar, I don't know that we can take the highly mixed (and now almost hopelessly mangled) signals from Wuhan in early 2020 at face value. The lockdown logic always only worked with the assumption that doing so would eliminate viral transmission, or put it "back into the box," which would in turn be of overall utility for the holistic health of individuals and a society. But how could that be possibly true for an instant for a pathogen deadliest to those over the age of 65 and, as Freddie underscores again, is as transmissible as any other URI has ever been? A denial of those 2 facts and of the logical conclusion (lockdowns and other restriction-first policies will simply never work and will cause huge harms, tangible and not) was always at the core of COVID maximalism imo.
Even outside of the China example, lockdowns were incredibly effective in New York, California, Italy, Spain and the rest of Europe. In many of those places, hospitals were overflowing; a couple more weeks of unrestricted transmission and people would have been dying in the streets (as they already, in some cases, were). And remember, at this time COVID tests were pretty hard to come by and the disease was poorly understood, so it was hard to maintain any degree of certainty about how far your area was from being completely swamped.
The problem has always been that lockdowns only work for the duration of the lockdown. Once you let people start moving around again the virus resurges and transmission rates go up.
The country as a whole, lockdowns or not, went through multiple waves of transmission. About a million Americans have died of Covid. Two thirds perished under Biden, primarily during massive waves of infection due to the delta and omicron variants.
I don't disagree with any of that. I do not consider zero-covid realistic, and never did. The vaccine helped but it was not the panacea that many hoped it would be. What I am in favor of, unequivocally, is preventing the healthcare system from being overwhelmed, and lockdowns were necessary in most places to ensure this.
I find it curious that you list Wuhan among your examples of presumably bad outcomes from the virus. Recall that in the initial stages of the pandemic the Chinese response was hailed for its effectiveness.
What killed the Chinese later on was _reopening_. Remember, the majority of Americans who have died from Covid did so after the initial wave. Again, at least two thirds of all US deaths came after Trump left office. Arguing for lockdowns is one thing but not even the Chinese, autocratic government and all, were able to prevent huge numbers of deaths and massive social disruption after reopening their borders.
There is no evidence that our hospital systems would have been overwhelmed without the lockdowns. We know they weren't overwhelmed in subsequent waves when there were no lockdowns. This myth just refuses to die, though.
The whole "just stay home" line of reasoning was and is some of the most disconnected elitist nonsense. The people of this class literally think you can have a functioning society if everyone just became shut-ins and never went anywhere again. I wasn't against the lockdowns at first, but what got me was this utter refusal to do a cost/benefit analysis, and the way you got excoriated for wanting to off the old and disabled if you even brought it up.
I agree with you about the effect of lockdowns on the lower classes, but how exactly do vaccine mandates have a negative effect on them? The first few doses of the vaccine were paid for by the government. You just needed to make an appointment, show up, and get one. I wasn't financially well-off in 2021, but it was easy for me to make it happen.
Yeah...it's a weird take. The issue was never take it/don't take it (mostly)...it was how that was used as a phony political barometer, which was just chaotic. And then ofc, the BS behind 'it'll stop the virus ', etc....
There was no benefit to third parties from the vaccines. That's the only circumstance that could justify a mandate. There was never evidence for benefit to others when vaccine mandates came in force and then we learned there definitely was no benefit to others and still no change to policy.
Covid kills the elderly. The young and healthy have almost nothing to fear.
This country mandated vaccination for young, healthy college kids while old brown people died overseas. Disgusting.
Is that what you were advocating for in 2021? Sending vaccines overseas? Sounds like 20:20 hindsight to me.
It was well known within the first few months of the pandemic that the virus was a threat to the elderly and the infirm and basically no one else. That is why Dr. Phil can go on the View and rake school officials over the coals about school closures--it was well known _at the time_ that children had almost no risk from the virus.
Nobody mandated vaccines for children. Answer my question please.
People argued that schools should be closed to protect children. True or false?
As for your "question" I presumed that this response addressed it, unless you were asking something else.
"It was well known within the first few months of the pandemic that the virus was a threat to the elderly and the infirm and basically no one else."
Schools also have these things called "teachers" that are rarely children
Schools weren't closed universally in this country, much less in Europe and the rest of the world. Some of the best information available at the time that showed almost no risk to teachers came from Europe.
Again, the information was available. There were just massive political incentives for some parties to ignore it.
They are also usually not elderly either.
I'm of two minds in this. It was clear that children and the young in general weren't at risk. I don't see the sense in pushing for them to be vaccinated. However, when I was a teacher in a poor urban school many of my kids were living with grandparents who were in ill health that would have been very susceptible to COVID.
"Sending vaccines overseas? Sounds like 20:20 hindsight to me." Does it? Because the availability of vaccines to poorer nations, the withholding and stockpiling of vaccines, and also the necessity (or lack thereof) of vaccination for the younger and not critical groups were all criticisms made in 2021, in very active debates in the left - here in Europe, but obviously also in the US.
Can confirm
The Global South does not want our shitty vaccines. Germany literally cannot give them away, they are seeing millions of vaccines expire as we speak.
I live in Germany and can tell you that part of the reason for that is that most Germans are already vaccinated at least twice and the medical establishment has not strongly recommended boosters.
Big Pharma ghouls are also to blame. They won't let many EU nations out the massive vaccine contracts they made when they were terrified, and so Germany, among others, is forced to take delivery of vaccines that will never be used and cannot be given away.
This is true, but I remember at first people really believed these vaccines were going to stop transmission. That clearly wasn't the case in the end, but there was all this talk about the early trials showing 90%+ prevention of the disease at the time, and if that were true, and it did stop transmission, then this point isn't very relevant. It wasn't just about protecting yourself, but others, which was the logic of the mandate.
Again, this didn't happen, so it was bad in hindsight, but it was a huge part of the mandate agenda and just because it was wrong, doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize it was part of the logic at the time.
There was no logic involved, though, because the trial designs could not possibly tell us if the product reduced transmission or not. They just assumed it would, which is laughable.
Yes, it was a bad assumption. But that doesn't mean people weren't assuming it, and that it wasn't why they wanted the mandates.
You can call them stupid and wrong all you like, and you'll be right, but you can't accuse them of wanting young people to get vaccines only to protect themselves. That just wasn't the case.
I can certainly judge Western governments for being stupid, and for wanting to enrich their Big Pharma buddies. By the time mandates came into play, the vaccines had been out for long enough to reveal that they didn't affect transmission. The percentage of people who needed to use their product "to get to herd immunity" just kept going up over time. Governments should have known better, but zealots incapable of reason had taken over by then.
They are still in power, and are not to be trusted.
If people chose not to get the vaccine, they could lose their jobs and be unable to go places. This was easier for the wealthy to get around.
That's true, but there's a simple way around that that is available to both the poor and the wealthy: Don't choose not to get the vaccine. If you do that you won't lose your job, you'll be able to go place, and if you get COVID your symptoms will probably be milder than if you didn't get the vaccine. There are literally no downsides!
This is a common fallacy that many on both sides of the debate fall victim to. Even if the vaccine is safe and effective at reducing severity (and that's a huge if), it does not follow that people should be forced to take it.
This is especially true considering the common side-effect of feeling like shit for a few days after the shot. People operating under financial pressure often cannot afford to be off work for that long. This is an obvious downside.
Is this (meaning the comment you replied to) just Pascal's Wager in sheep's clothing? lol
Maybe. Lots of people still genuinely think that the vaccines are 100% safe, and they don't think about how feeling like shit for 2-3 days can really hurt people who work 2+ jobs and can't get time off.
Do you know what else makes you feel like shit for a few days, usually more than 2-3? COVID. It seems pretty short-sighted to have to take four or five days off of work because you can't take two days off of work. Or to develop life-threatening pneumonia.
I agree in principle that people should not be forced to take the vaccine for bodily autonomy/rule utilitarian reasons. People have a right to be idiots.* But I don't think it's accurate to say that the poor are disproportionately harmed by vaccine mandates, because it isn't being required to get a vaccine that harms them, it's that the punishment for noncompliance will mess up their lives more. That's true of every punishment for everything, laws against drunk driving, shoplifting, etc also disproportionately affect the poor by that logic.
*The obvious exception is people who work in hospitals or in elder care, where their idiocy puts other people at serious risk. In that case if they don't get vaccinated they should be fired.
There are plenty of people who got COVID before getting injected and report that the side-effects from the product were worse than COVID itself. There are also plenty of people who catch COVID and report few to no symptoms. The product has only downsides for these two groups, even if we don't consider the evidence of sub-clinical heart damage caused by the product in a significant number of young people.
Many workplaces (mine was among them) offered extra paid sick leave for confirmed cases of COVID. This protection was not in place for post-injection malaise.
I don't understand your last point. The product does not prevent or even reduce transmission.
I ran an "essential business" all through COVID...30 plus people, working side-by-side, every day. Vaccines were personal choices. One person got sick (and came back to work) over the entire time.
It was originally thought that being vaccinated meant you could no longer pass on covid to anybody else, so it made some sense to enforce that for an organization in the same way we don't let people smoke indoors anymore.
But then it turned out that vaccinated asymptomatic people could still help spread covid, at which point vaccine mandates made very little sense, and were still enforced for way too long after. This is more akin to forbidding people to smoke in their private lives - sure, maybe it would be advisable, but it wouldn't affect anyone else and is a violation of personal liberty and privacy.
I point this out since I think this important detail is lost in the post-facto analysis of the policy.
This is a huge reason why many people sensibly updated to stop trusting the government health apparatus: the original vaccine trials never even tried to determine if the product stopped transmission.
There was no basis to believe it would, other than the fact they were labeled vaccines. They even changed the definition of the word 'vaccine' because their product was so underwhelming.
Thoughtful piece. I hope for health and flourishing for all who continue to suffer.
The PMC seemingly is unable to admit error.
- Lockdowns didn't work
- Masks didn't work
- We knew early on that children were not at risk, but millions of kids were kept out of school anyway. Predictably, the results across every metric of learning and mental health are a mess.
- We were told the vax would stop us from contracting the virus and would prevent us from spreading the virus. The goalposts on these promises moved at a record clip.
- "Stay home, save lives" unless it's taking to the streets with thousands of other people in a pandemic to protest a PMC-worthy cause.
I don't think it's necessary for healthy young people to get the vaccine, so I didn't. I don't care nor judge anyone who decided to get the vaccine. Their choice.
I knew masks didn't work, but I wore one anyway in public because I'm not a dick. I don't mind at all if people choose to still wear a mask. I won't say anything.
In my opinion, the memoryholing is happening with all the lies that were told by government and public health officials - not to mention the media.
Hopefully lessons were learned, but I'm not optimistic.
People still don't seem to understand that, unless you're wearing an N95 or better, the microplastics you breathe in from the usual disposable masks are not worth the statistically negligible protection they may or may not give you against COVID.
W/ the masking, I just want to know: how long do people expect to wear them for (if to counter COVID)? Because wearing them seems to suggest they believe there will come a day when COVID simply vanishes.
I think it makes sense to require masking (of N95s) in medical settings (hospitals, pharmacies, doctor's offices). The combo of "truly immunocompromised people can't avoid these places" and "sick people come here for treatment" and "hospital acquired infections" makes the cost/benefit fairly clear.
Personally, in the winter, I mask in places that are indoors/crowded/poorly ventilated/essential. For example, I live in a city and mask on the subway because I regularly see people who are visibly unwell who sometimes I am in VERY close quarters with. It also helps filter out certain smells. And I don't want to engage with people on public transit anyway so masking is no real burden. If I'm feeling under the weather, I mask everywhere indoors. Otherwise, I live a normal life and go to restaurants and concerts and travel.
But is there actually good evidence that masking, even N95, defers respiratory infection (for a person who wants to wear one to avoid such infections), including but not limited to COVID? As Slaw mentioned upthread, afaik there has not actually been such work. The flimsiness of that premise behind mask wearing seems to have been totally memory holed...
N95s are good for seasonal allergies. I wear them for Smoke Season too.
There are no RCT's that show any statistical benefit from masking.
There's no "seemingly" about the inability of the Professional Managerial Class to admit error, I'm afraid.
My attitude toward the pandemic relaxed when I started tuning in to Vinay Prasad at UCSF. He was meticulous with the evidence and, as a Bernie supporter, gave permission to lefties like me to second-guess the party line.
That anyone on the left feels they needed "permission" because they're too risk averse to speak up is nearly 100% of the problem.
The "I don't like Trump but..." throat clearing phenomenon
We all know how the left got here, but predictably, even those barely brave enough to acknowledge it's a problem feel too cowed to try and change things.
We watched the death rates and read the scientific evidence to guide our decisions. I took care of my elderly mother, my husband has COPD and I was in a slightly higher risk bracket...those factors went into my decision making.
When the data changed so did our behavior.
I think part of the liberal overreaction was tied in with the racial reckoning. When evidence (that I never fact-checked but assume to be true) emerged that black Americans were dying of Covid at higher rates, it became incumbent on white liberals to take every conceivable precaution. To do otherwise was to exhibit anti-black racism.
"In hindsight we perhaps should not have pushed vaccine mandates on the young and healthy, given what we now know about their risk profile, but public officials were making difficult decisions in the middle of a disaster."
We knew the risk profile at the time, though. Polling at the time showed everyone and especially self-identified liberals overestimated the risk of hospitalization or death for young and healthy by a huge magnitude, yet we were making consequential decisions about people's ability to earn a living and participate in society based on that deeply flawed understanding and acting like the danger of misinformation was solely on the other side.
I think the missing piece is that for a while we thought that getting everyone vaccinated would halt the spread of the disease. But that turned out not to be true, and once we knew that vaccinated asymptomatic people could be helping spread covid, it *really* made no sense to mandate it.
COVID is really globalist fear manufacturing to leverage for authoritarian power like is climate crisis. We have become pansies that think we are entitled to live forever without any risks or impacts to the "natural" world... ignoring completely that humans are in fact part of the natural world and death is inevitable.
This "thinking" causes us to WAY over-react and create more misery and pain than the actual thing we are afraid of. Mass hysteria pushed through the Matrix too many of us to twitch the same.
My neighbor still wears a mask everywhere. She told me she is afraid to catch it and die. I told her that everyone dies and why does she drive a car because the risk of dying in a car is higher than dying from COVID. She does not like talking to me now. People clutch their irrational fears like their life depends on it.
I had both shots and a booster because I had a vacation scheduled to liberal Italy. But I still got COVID twice and it was a cold.
And 2014 - 2022 there was a global cooling trend.
And extreme weather has always happened. Just read the historical Farmers Almanac.
Just stop with the fear porn people!
This airborne virus can severely damage the human immune system. I am someone who hasn't dined indoors since the outbreak and who wears an N95 mask in public indoor spaces. I have dear family members who are at risk for severe illness or mortality if they were to become infected. Thankfully, none of us has. The reason for that is that we all care about each other so that we test before we gather (48 and 24 hours before) and mask with N95s when we know we're going to be in crowded spaces with lots of people and poor ventilation. I was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2021, and I don't want to find out what could happen to my body if I become infected with COVID-19.
This whole conversation seems wrong-headed to me. The public health establishment used to operate more or less in the service of public health. Measles was eradicated in the US, but it is now making a comeback. Where's the guidance from our CDC? Smallpox was exterminated thanks in part to cooperation among countries across the world. Polio killed far fewer people than COVID-19 has, but it has been thoroughly defeated thanks to public health efforts.
It now seems as if demanding, let alone politely asking for, a robust, sensible, fact-based public health response to an ongoing global pandemic that is inclusive and all-encompassing has become some kind of identity politics game piece that people use to yell at each other.
A robust, sensible, and fact-based public health response would reflect the fact that a) we know beyond doubt that close to 100% of Americans have a degree of Covid protection thanks to prior infection or vaccination, b) the excess death event is over, meaning that while people are dying with Covid almost none of them are dying from Covid, and c) because the mortality rate was extremely low even in the height of the pandemic, and even lower now thanks to Paxlovid and Remdesivir etc, the risk of Covid-19 for all but the oldest and the severely immunocompromised or ill is extraordinarily low. Those are all facts. At some point, you have to move on.
I understand. We all want to get back to normal. I will say, Freddie, that there's a lack of humanity here that is uncharacteristic of you. I won't spend much time wondering why--I can't possibly know--but I do hope that you'll have time to reflect on what you've said here and perhaps adopt a different view.
He made factual claims; I responded factually. None of this is remotely emotional to me. There is no such thing as compassion or respect that stems from a refusal to tell the truth.
Yes. Thank you for the graph at the top that convinced me that, as a healthy 60 year old who has had 4 Covid shots (each leaving me fucked for 36 hours) I can finally stop. My husband and I felt like we fought it off after two jabs, and then our 11 year old kids got it the next week as a massive snot cold. We are done. Thx.
I wonder what makes you so sure that you and the family members you mention have never been infected? That seems fairly unlikely.
Before we gather, we all test twice (48 hours and 24 hours before. Those tests can be expensive--health care affordability is a related topic here--but we do this for each other.
That doesn't imply that they have never been infected, only that they are not _currently_ infected. And that doesn't even address the rate of false negatives.
We do the best that we can do because we care about each other and we also don't want to become infected ourselves. I know that they've never been infected because we gather every week. The 2-shot 48- and 24-hours prior approach with the lateral flow instant tests is what we've decided on as sufficient to address the false negative problem.
Just like I care about my family and they care about me, we all care about our fellow humans, right? One of the reasons I've hesitated to spread the "gospel" of my family's approach is because of posts like Freddie's up above. The only reason I even replied is because I know Freddie and how brilliant and kind he is.
Testing every week simply isn't the comprehensive solution that you think it is. Can you discount the possibility that someone was infected and recovered (or was simply asymptomatic) before Covid tests were widely available and you presumably began your regimen?
And even if somebody is currently infected whether or not a swab test detects anything is completely dependent on viral load--and there are some very fortunate individuals who apparently have massive levels of built in immunity to Covid to the point that the virus can never really gain a foothold.
You are right: This devious, deadly, destructive virus can spread from host to host even if there are no apparent symptoms (fever, dry tickly cough, aches, nausea, etc.). COVID can spread asymptomatically. There's at least one study out there that shows that up to 50% of people who are infected are asymptomatic and also contagious.
My family and I are just trying to do the best we can to protect each other and ourselves and everyone else we come into contact with on a daily basis with the knowledge and the tools that we have readily available. I'm going to share sources for relatively affordable N95s and COVID test kits below.
When I had COVID I never tested positive with a RAT. I was positive with a PCR and had most of the symptoms (fever, loss of smell, sore throat etc.) I tested every day with both the oral and nasal swab types and never got the test line to show up.
I’m sorry about your health challenges (and some of the presumed challenges of several of your close family members).
But your cohort is not and can not be the target of public health policy. For the average person that public health needs to care about, omicron is a nuisance but not a serious health hazard.
In your situation, I’d get every vax possible and maybe 1 or 2 more besides. And I’d keep masking as you have been doing. That is your prerogative and your right. And none of my business.
But how i conduct my business in the era of omicron is none of yours.
Covid was successfully politicized so we are never going to manage the disease unless a miracle happens. Even now, 4 years later, no one pays serious attention to improved ventilation which would remove much of the threat of an airborne virus. Most of us appear to understand that principle when someone is smoking a cigarette but for some politicized reason, we are unable to apply that reasoning to viral spread. And then there is Long Covid which I am most concerned about. With every re-infection, the chances of developing Long Covid increase so if the virologists are right, we can look forward to becoming a nation of zombies. Meanwhile, the CDC has disgraced itself for generations to come, our ruling class pays no attention to improved ventilation unless the venue is Davos, and Covid remains the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
points of fact: the chances of LC do not rise with each reinfection (and have plummeted to infinitesimal with the latest iterations of omicron), and covid is not the third leading cause of death in the U.S. you are, however, right about the CDC and about indifference to ventilation.
I'm not terribly concerned about death from COVID at this point, but the long-term impacts still seem nasty. Anecdata, but my mom (previously pretty healthy) got COVID twice and now seems highly susceptible to minor illnesses. My cousin (in his 30s, fit, healthy) got COVID in October and says his running and lifting metrics still haven't recovered. Although thankfully, no one I know has gotten Long COVID in the same truly nasty way as the pre-vaccination days.
Myocarditis is not thst rare in young men and the risk goes up with subsequent shots as any additional benefit rapidly goes down in this already really low risk of COVID death group. Evidence for boosters was much weaker than you think and it was nutty that prior COVID infection wasn't taken into account. Masking kids was always nutty and there was no evidence community masking helped and an understandable reason why it didn't. Vinay Prasad is hardly a conspiracy theorist. He lays out in this talk to Heterodox Academy what had good evidence (1 or 2 shots of MRNA vaccine) and what didn't (nearly everything else). He talks about the actual risk of myocarditis and how the "rare" as far as young men goes isnt quite right starting at 21:45. Risk/Benefit for young men wasnt there after 1 dose. https://youtu.be/S9MVwhFlViM?si=1gwHlpa6Wg3LgYJ2
Masking does nothing. The harm to certain cohorts from vaccines is probably equivalent or greater than the risk of Covid itself. This stuff should be obvious by now but because the pandemic was politicized the left cannot admit that they were (disastrously) wrong because it would be interpreted as points scored for the right.
Love that FBD is writing about this. I wish that the rage felt by many of us wasn't distilled to essentially right wing vaccine birtherism. For many people, the Lockdowns continue to be a source of immense and sustained anger because of the smug refusal of those who advocated for Lockdowns to acknowledge the obvious and now proven iatrogenic or second order consequences like learning loss.
Just thinking about my profound shock and rage at nearly every single establishment of authority genuinely triggers some post-traumatic stress. Seems like a lot of other folks in the comments feel more or less the same.
Also keep in mind that excess mortality rates have not declined in many industrialized countries even after the end of the pandemic. Very curious indeed.
Well, now we need to start talking about neoliberalism and imperialism...:)
Or maybe just the large numbers of people who skipped their medical appointments during the pandemic because they were terrified of the virus.
Thanks; I thought you were on target. I'm old and will avoid attending large meetings for the rest of my life. I have immunocompromised friends whose lives have become more complicated. Stuff happens, and most of it isn't the fault of the government.
Some elements of government policy WERE misguided, but retrospective critique of the management of an extraordinary catastrophe is kinda cheap. Despite some errors in judgement, NIH bureaucrats and 100,000+ scientists worldwide were responsible for remarkable new vaccines (with the assistance of a hundred years of basic biomedical research). Ironically, Trump also deserves plaudits for Operation Warp Speed.
Yes, but administering the vaccines to everybody has turned out to be a terrible mistake. If you're 80 years old, go for it. If you're 24 and wrestled in college you need to have a serious discussion with your doctor about complications before getting the shot.
It would be one thing if nobody knew at the time and was just blindly flailing about. But it was almost immediately apparent that the virus was mainly a threat to the old and infirm and everybody else had almost no risk. That's what makes this whole thing a tragedy.
I think you overstate. Yes, it was clear by the time the vaccine was introduced that risk of death was much higher amongst the sick and elderly, but the risk of damage/injury to the young was not certain (even now there's uncertainty about the magnitude of risk when the outbreak began). Also, there was the reasonable notion that vaccination would stop or slow spread of the pandemic. With what we know now, it is indeed reasonable for the young and healthy to weigh risks and benefits of the vaccine. Both public health and social harmony considerations argue that the mandates were unwise, but to argue that suboptimal vaccine policies are "what make this whole thing a tragedy" seems overstated in the face of the massive damage caused by the pandemic itself.
Yeah, I'm mostly mad on the other side from most people. The ideas of doing human trials on willing subjects or releasing the vaccines before the elections were both completely off the table for some reason, notwithstanding the scope of the emergency.
If this had been a worse plague, would we just all have died, or did public health officials somehow conclude that this pandemic was dangerous enough to merit shutting down the economy and schools and locking everyone in their homes, but not so dangerous to allow people to voluntarily take vaccines or participate in studies?
The volunteer issue reflected the conservatism of the US medical/regulatory system, which even now has trouble getting its collective mind around the notion that sometimes stuff has to happen fast. I don't think elections had anything to do with the "timing" issue; the regulatory staff etc. thought that the public would accept the vaccines better if full Phase 3 trials were published prior to release.
Thanks, I think you're probably right. That said, I don't think most public health workers' opinions on public acceptance are evidence based.
(I'd love to be proven wrong and learn that there was a conference room somewhere in which a bunch of wonks looked at data and calculated the years of life saved in an early release scenario vs a later release.)
I really doubt there was much. The public health silo doesn't communicate too well with the spin/optics/persuasion silo, which is kind of ironic, considering that in our system of government, the people at the very top are expert practitioners of the latter. On a different topic, Ithink it was Collins who said basically that he regretted that the response was entirely focused on preventing Covid, failing to consider the costs of e.g. lockdowns.