I'm not saying there _aren't_ problems with decision-making or guidance from our public health agencies, but this article uses really different standards for judging positions taken by those agencies than it does for any dissenting position, in a way that ends up being nonsensical.
Sure, let's critically evaluate the guidance put forward by our public health institutions, but quoting a statement from Norway's equivalent institution without the backing evidence doesn't make the US "wrong". If the evidence available on the efficacy of vaccines for kids is so ridiculously wide that it goes from -99% to +370% risk of infection, then surely Norway is _also_ drastically overstating its case when it says (about kids) "previous infection offers as good of protection as the vaccine against reinfection" esp since it _also_ seems like the protective effect of prior infection is both uncertain and changing.
How about flatly declaring that guidance was "wrong" about school closures because minority and poor kids did markedly worse at math? Obviously these decisions are complex trade-offs, and one can't conclude that the choice was "wrong" simply by pointing out one of the costs.
How about quoting a CDC scientist, who cannot possibly have strong evidence when making the prediction "CDC guidance worsened racial equity for generations to come. It failed this generation of children." Generations to come? Show us the data that lets this scientist predict the far future with such confidence.
I get that it's deeply unnerving when these institutions make sweeping recommendations based on less firm data than we would normally demand. But not recommending anything, or not taking decisive action because of the limited data would _also_ have been irresponsible. When schools first closed, we didn't know a lot of things, but it would have been pretty reckless if agencies said "well this is putting a lot of people in the hospital and spreading fast, but we don't have the data to give definitive guidance yet, so you're on your own. Depending on the range of things your communities choose, maybe in a few months we'll have the evidence to say something."
> If the evidence available on the efficacy of vaccines for kids is so ridiculously wide that it goes from -99% to +370% risk of infection, then surely Norway is _also_ drastically overstating its case when it says (about kids) "previous infection offers as good of protection as the vaccine against reinfection" esp since it _also_ seems like the protective effect of prior infection is both uncertain and changing.
The protective effect of prior infection is not uncertain, nor is it changing. There have been dozens of papers now, all saying the same thing: natural infection is at least as protective (if not more so) than even 3 doses of the current vaccines. If you are hearing otherwise, you are being misinformed. Full stop.
Here's the latest paper in a long line of consistent evidence, last week in the NEJM:
> No discernable differences in protection against symptomatic BA.1 and BA.2 infection were seen with previous infection, vaccination, and hybrid immunity. Vaccination enhanced protection among persons who had had a previous infection. Hybrid immunity resulting from previous infection and recent booster vaccination conferred the strongest protection.
Norway is saying what it is, because we know that most people -- vaccinated or previously infected -- will eventually get re-infected. But even if you are re-infected, you will be well-protected against severe illness.
I agree - there may be some good stuff here (for all I know) but there's too much obvious unhinged polemic to take it seriously on its face. Someone with stronger mental hinges will need to pick through this and tell us how things shake out.
Another aspect is the legal overreach that isn't much discussed. Things such as quarantine rules, various mandates, eviction bans without relief, etc.
I think they had good intentions behind them and may have been necessary from certain points of view, but there are questions about their legality and continue to be challenged and some overturned.
>If the evidence available on the efficacy of vaccines for kids is so ridiculously wide that it goes from -99% to +370% risk of infection, then surely Norway is _also_ drastically overstating its case
Not necessarily. You can have the data and you can have bad data. You can selectively ignore the good data to come to a drastically different decision and conclusion. Motivated thinking political or otherwise can bias the data that you select.
There was never any valid justification for closing schools. It was a complete overreaction. Sweden kept primary schools open throughout the pandemic (without a mask mandate) and they did fine.
Agreed. I have a number of criticisms of the CDC, FDA and public institutions with respect to Covid, but this piece is highly biased and is misleading/wrong/cherry-picking with respect to the science. It seems the author has a general position of "interventions bad" and then works back from that to discredit anything related to interventions.
For example, let's take just this single paragraph:
> As of February, 75% of children in the U.S. already had natural immunity from prior infection. It could easily be over 90% of children today given how ubiquitous Omicron has been since then. The CDC’s own research shows that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity and a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Israel has questioned the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons. Many countries have long credited natural immunity towards vaccine mandates. But not the U.S.
First, there's this statement: "The CDC’s own research shows that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity." The linked study, reading through it, makes a different claim. The study showed that completion of a course of primary vaccination PLUS having had a prior Covid infection led to reduced severe outcomes more than just having had the primary course of vaccination alone. And even there, the CI (0.27 (0.09–0.84)) on the first scenario overlaps with the CI for vaccination alone.
It would be notable if this showed that prior infection alone conferred better protection than vaccination alone, which is the author's claim. This study doesn't show that. It shows infection plus vaccination confers better immunity than vaccination alone. And, well, that's what basically any expert would have predicted as the most likely result.
The second linked study (the NEJM one) gets closer, but largely only looks at infection rates (it does have some commentary on severe covid-19 rates, but this isn't adjusted for any confounders). It's most useful as a study on how immunity against infection wanes since the last immunity-conferring event, although it allows for some cross comparisons, such as comparing infection rates for natural immunity alone vs 2 doses alone vs 3 doses alone vs hybrid immunity. Possibly the biggest caveat is that the rate of testing for the different cohorts wasn't adjusted for:
> Although differences in testing rates among cohorts and among subcohorts within specified cohorts were observed, their overall magnitude was relatively small. The rate of PCR testing was typically lower in the recovered, unvaccinated cohort than in the other cohorts, so the level of protection in this cohort as compared with that in the two-dose cohort may have been overestimated.
So, it makes it harder to directly compare across cohorts. But, even assuming the cross comparison does hold up if you did correct for testing rates, there are a couple of things to call out in this study. First, three doses had significantly better numbers than two doses. However, the three-dose cohort was new at the time of this study, so this cohort only has results for the very first time slice, and that time slice doesn't exist for the natural immunity scenario, so we can't directly compare them. Second, this study also seems to show, with respect to immunity, that infection followed by vaccination is better than infection alone.
Third, and most notably given this piece's commentary, is vaccination after natural immunity has waned. The study linked explicitly ends with this sentence in its discussion section:
> We found that protection against the delta variant waned over time in both vaccinated and previously infected persons and that an additional vaccine dose restored protection.
Let's look back at the wording in the original piece:
> a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Israel has questioned the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons
It is telling that a study that ends by recommending a dose of vaccine to restore waning natural immunity is used to "question the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons" in this piece.
Now, there's a reasonable debate around how previous infection should be counted w.r.t. to immune status. E.g. one can make a reasonable case that documented prior infection plus a single dose should count as "fully vaccinated." Or, that hitting a minimum threshold on an antibody test should count as documentation of immunity. Etc. But, that's not what the piece is arguing - it misrepresents both of the studies linked in this one paragraph, and then puts forward a conclusion that is unsupported by either study. If anything, both studies provide evidence that is quite supportive of getting vaccinated at some point after infection, yet you'd never know that if you just read the paragraph from this piece.
Pieces like this one are frustrating because they have the veneer of legitimacy - written by someone in the field, linking studies, etc. It takes a lot of time to really dive in to understand whether or not the claims being made are supported. And even then, it often takes broader knowledge of the state of research in the field. It's easy to cherry pick research that supports a bias while simply leaving out competing research.
Ultimately, this piece does not come off as a good faith review of the scientific evidence.
I have no idea if this is a valid article, the use of so many anonymous sources made me doubt every word. For all I know they are quoting someone on reddit claiming to work for the cdc. Every quote could have just been made up. It very much just appears to be opinion pretending to be news.
With that said, I do agree with the proposal that if a kid has already had covid then why vaccinate them if the general consensus is that the vaccines only provide limited protection for a few months. All for vaccinating high risk people and I am vaccinated against covid with a booster from when they first came out but will not get another booster now that I have already had Covid. Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable. I fully understand the rush to vaccinate adults in the beginning when Delta was raging and we had limited understanding of the virus. Luckily Omicron is dominant now it seems to be much less damaging. This is not to downplay the very real consequences and deaths that do occur still from Covid. At this point in time my whole family has had it and I have accepted it as endemic and moved on.
> Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable.
Flu in the US kills around 12k to 50k per year, with a particularly bad year every few decades getting up to maybe 80k. Omicron killed somewhere between 150k and 250k in the US in less than a year, and that was with free vaccines that were highly effective against death easily available to pretty much everyone who was not a young child.
That doesn't sound like no worse than the flu to me.
This article is nuts and the citations of "compelling studies" are by the authors themselves AND pre-print without peer review... Even at first pass, the following statement is bonkers:
"Then they ignored natural immunity. Wrong again. The vast majority of children have already had Covid, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust."
What the fuck is "natural immunity" when we have had 5 variants of omnicron and infection doesn't provide immunity to the other variants?
The real crime IMO, is that... U.S. Public Health Agencies Aren't ‘Following the Science,’... the science of how we could actually reduce spread and decrease the 350~ DEATHS per day adding to the more than 1 Million dead already.
The arguments they make regarding children's vaccines don't make much sense to me. The end target for the pediatric vaccine trials was immunobridging, which has widely been used for other common childhood vaccines. Are they arguing against those as well? If so, that goes against a widely accepted and validated strategy to bridge adult vaccines down to pediatric age groups. Efficacy is a very complicated thing to measure as variants change. The symptomatic disease efficacy seen for the pediatric trials compare well vs. Omicron to what we've seen for adults, so it's all consistent and makes sense. Also, would they argue against the annual flu shots? We don't even run efficacy trials for those every year for different strain compositions.
Also, a bit of perspective: we vaccinate children for many illnesses that would result in comparatively "small" numbers of pediatric deaths (lower than Covid even!). The reason is that even rare pediatric deaths, if preventable, are terrible given the life-years lost. And there HAVE been FAR too many pediatric Covid deaths by our modern standards for pediatric infectious diseases. If Covid only affected kids, the absolute numbers of deaths would be a very worrisome thing. Second, the possibility of long-term complications from even non-fatal illnesses. For pediatric COVID, MIS-C and potential super antigen links to the recent spread of pediatric hepatitis are more than sufficient to meet that bar.
Finally - there was no safety signal seen in the 5-12 year old pediatric vaccines that have been given out to millions for ~year already, and no signal in the under 5 trials as well. The myocarditis risk primarily seems in teenage and older groups and linked to puberty/adolescent hormones.
There may be contrarian voices in the FDA and CDC as there will be in any large organization. But to believe their voices over the consensus requires a heavy dose of motivated reasoning and not engaging with some basic facts about the goals of pediatric vaccines and the ways vaccine trials work. There's a reason every pediatrician parent I know was first in line to get their kids vaccinated.
> there HAVE been FAR too many pediatric Covid deaths
Let's see your numbers of <6 years and <8 etc.
> If Covid only affected kids
In all age groups, it affected children the least.
'In total, 540,305 people were tested for SARS-COV-2 and 129,704 (24.0%) were positive.
In children aged <16 years, 35,200 tests were performed and 1408 (4.0%) were positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 19.1%–34.9% adults.'
https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/12/1180
> "That particular FDA doctor was referring to two recent developments inside the agency. First, how, with no solid clinical data, the agency authorized Covid vaccines for infants and toddlers, including those who already had Covid. And second, the fact that just months before, the FDA bypassed their external experts to authorize booster shots for young children."
> "Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.
The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health."
So can we finally stop blaming the general public for the ongoing narrative that simply doesn't pass the smell test?
Meanwhile, in Brazil, two doctors are trying to invent their own mRNA vax. And if they do they're promising to give it away...because The First World Healthcare Industrial Complex is more concerned about money over saving lives? And the media and political powers are silent?
Too much of the past couple+ years has been a shit show. If it's not negligence then it's intentional. Neither is good.
The sources this article cites regarding masking is a single pre-print that hasn't been peer reviewed yet, and it cites no sources at all for the claim that
| "Then they ignored natural immunity. Wrong again. The vast majority of children have already had Covid, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust."
The main problem here is that Public health agencies are refusing to admit they are / were wrong in certain cases causing all political non sense.
The second problem is that public healt official ended relying too much on mandates/enforcements and way too little on propaganda.
For example, it is obvious now that vaccines do not prevent one from getting COVID and spreading COVID. Yes - vaccines definitely make having COVID like a mild fly: I got it just now and I was just a little sick for a couple of days.
But they still claim that vaccines are preventing the spread.
And then the approach is really bad: instead of running “viagra style” commercials on TV for vaccinations they decided to go with heavy handed mandates and requirements. I bet a couple of Steph Curry and Tom Brady commercials about vaccination will do wonder.
The one thing that struck me about Covid and the response was the western world rock bottom levels of trust in their governments (broadly defined).
To me that's the real story - the demonstration of what amounts to a loss of legitimacy.
(FWIW shutdowns did not bother me much, I got the two mandatory vaccines my jurisdiction required for air travel but refused the boosters, I generally wear masks in public because better safe than sorry.)
I think OP missed the fact that clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines in children measured neutralizing antibodies as the surrogate endpoint, similar to clinical trials for other vaccines [1]. So it is not surprising that the trials could achieve their primary endpoint while being inconclusive on preventing infection. On top of that, the benefit of vaccination can arise not just from preventing infection but also from reducing disease severity.
I don’t really have a problem with making boosters available.
Closing schools and masks have been gone in my area has been over for a while so the article seems to be mixing timelines in a way that is hard to follow.
Yes, like the people wearing double-masks outside walking their dogs still (Seattle). The CDC _never_ said wearing a mask outside is useful, and never said that people are catching it outdoors. So I don't know where the "idea" came that wearing a mask outside is "better" than not. It's just probably paranoia at this point (and looking like a "good person") and has nothing to do with infection control.
"The rest of the world has accepted the endemic nature of Covid and moved on, but the U.S. is an int'l outlier, still pushing mass testing & chasing down every case." [0]
I'm not sure what inverse universe he lives in given that we barely do any official testing, and contact tracing never even got off the ground.
His retweets are also all the other well known covid-minimizers - including the infamous Jay Bhattacharya.
Despite this tech companies are still requiring vaccines to come work in person, yet are wondering why no one wants to go back...
Testing is way safer at this point than two doses against a strain that hasn't been dominant since late 2020. Lots of people are getting sick anyways even if they are vaccinated from other strains they aren't protected against, yet we discriminate against anyone who decided not to get the shot for religious reasons, or who can't get it for medical reasons.
The world will look back on these years as collective insanity.
> One CDC scientist told us about her shame and frustration about what happened to American children during the pandemic: “CDC failed to balance the risks of Covid with other risks that come from closing schools,” she said. “Learning loss, mental health exacerbations were obvious early on and those worsened as the guidance insisted on keeping schools virtual. CDC guidance worsened racial equity for generations to come. It failed this generation of children.”
At my toddler preschool they still have a mask mandate, even though research shows that it hurts the kids speech development and ability to read emotions. I now need to send my child to speech therapy lessons.
There was never a discussion of the pros and cons, and it's simply a decision of the preschool management, as the county and state have dropped it a while ago. It's just an example of how the children are rarely a considiration.
The worst part of the pandemic beside policies that would swing back and forth (which is kind of understandable if you're learning as you go) was the inability to have discussions about the pros and cons of shutdowns and other pandemic related policies.
Social media and mainstream media saw it fit to censor dissenting voices --not those of quacks, we can mostly all agree on minimizing the voices of quacks but shutting down medical professionals and medical academics and so on is very concerning.
The only people they allowed to be wrong about the pandemic were govt officials. They could get it wrong and right it as many times as necessary.
Regardless of what side of the fence you sit on, the least we should see is public health agencies take a position that we are smarter than we were when this whole thing started and start to think about a guiding policy for the long term. Many large companies the size of small countries have already adjusted their policies for the long term. Is that what we have to come to expect in the world that our working environments are ahead of our public health agencies?
Frustration is an emotion which seems to be ever increasing against a monolith that is the internet, where your voice doesn't feel like it matters, because you can't see the reaction of anyone.
Being on the internet is much like wearing a mask. It's VERY interesting how that progressed. It's like internet culture is infecting real life. People in real life becoming faceless and hive-mindish.
This is a really biased article pushing a particular viewpoint. If it wasn't, you would also include the studies the demonstrate the number of lives saved by lockdowns that happened, the impact of different levels and types of lockdowns etc.
Some of those studies strike me as wildly off base. E.g.
> On a more positive note, Ferguson and other researchers at Imperial College London published a model in Nature around the same time estimating that more than 3 million deaths had been avoided in the UK as a result of the policies that were put in place.
3 million people is ~5% of the entire UK population. Even using the high end of COVID IFR estimates (2%, from northern Italy), it would have required everyone in the UK to get COVID twice with no natural immunity to reach that kind of death toll.
Also:
> The most effective measure, they found, was getting people not to travel to work, while school closures had relatively little effect.
“Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that lockdowns have done little to reduce COVID deaths but have had “devastating effects” on economies and numerous social ills.”
Please consider the source. These authors are health care officials working for Rick Scott (Republican governor of Florida) and Glenn Youngkin (Republican governor of Virginia), both of whom have a hard political stance downplaying COVID.
Maybe affiliation comes from belief and not the other way around. Would you really expect someone this critical of the CDC and the Democratic approach to COVID to be politically aligned with the people pushing those policies?
[+] [-] abeppu|3 years ago|reply
Sure, let's critically evaluate the guidance put forward by our public health institutions, but quoting a statement from Norway's equivalent institution without the backing evidence doesn't make the US "wrong". If the evidence available on the efficacy of vaccines for kids is so ridiculously wide that it goes from -99% to +370% risk of infection, then surely Norway is _also_ drastically overstating its case when it says (about kids) "previous infection offers as good of protection as the vaccine against reinfection" esp since it _also_ seems like the protective effect of prior infection is both uncertain and changing.
How about flatly declaring that guidance was "wrong" about school closures because minority and poor kids did markedly worse at math? Obviously these decisions are complex trade-offs, and one can't conclude that the choice was "wrong" simply by pointing out one of the costs.
How about quoting a CDC scientist, who cannot possibly have strong evidence when making the prediction "CDC guidance worsened racial equity for generations to come. It failed this generation of children." Generations to come? Show us the data that lets this scientist predict the far future with such confidence.
I get that it's deeply unnerving when these institutions make sweeping recommendations based on less firm data than we would normally demand. But not recommending anything, or not taking decisive action because of the limited data would _also_ have been irresponsible. When schools first closed, we didn't know a lot of things, but it would have been pretty reckless if agencies said "well this is putting a lot of people in the hospital and spreading fast, but we don't have the data to give definitive guidance yet, so you're on your own. Depending on the range of things your communities choose, maybe in a few months we'll have the evidence to say something."
[+] [-] timr|3 years ago|reply
The protective effect of prior infection is not uncertain, nor is it changing. There have been dozens of papers now, all saying the same thing: natural infection is at least as protective (if not more so) than even 3 doses of the current vaccines. If you are hearing otherwise, you are being misinformed. Full stop.
Here's the latest paper in a long line of consistent evidence, last week in the NEJM:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2203965
> No discernable differences in protection against symptomatic BA.1 and BA.2 infection were seen with previous infection, vaccination, and hybrid immunity. Vaccination enhanced protection among persons who had had a previous infection. Hybrid immunity resulting from previous infection and recent booster vaccination conferred the strongest protection.
Norway is saying what it is, because we know that most people -- vaccinated or previously infected -- will eventually get re-infected. But even if you are re-infected, you will be well-protected against severe illness.
[+] [-] civilized|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
I think they had good intentions behind them and may have been necessary from certain points of view, but there are questions about their legality and continue to be challenged and some overturned.
[+] [-] koheripbal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
Not necessarily. You can have the data and you can have bad data. You can selectively ignore the good data to come to a drastically different decision and conclusion. Motivated thinking political or otherwise can bias the data that you select.
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rallison|3 years ago|reply
For example, let's take just this single paragraph:
> As of February, 75% of children in the U.S. already had natural immunity from prior infection. It could easily be over 90% of children today given how ubiquitous Omicron has been since then. The CDC’s own research shows that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity and a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Israel has questioned the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons. Many countries have long credited natural immunity towards vaccine mandates. But not the U.S.
First, there's this statement: "The CDC’s own research shows that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity." The linked study, reading through it, makes a different claim. The study showed that completion of a course of primary vaccination PLUS having had a prior Covid infection led to reduced severe outcomes more than just having had the primary course of vaccination alone. And even there, the CI (0.27 (0.09–0.84)) on the first scenario overlaps with the CI for vaccination alone.
It would be notable if this showed that prior infection alone conferred better protection than vaccination alone, which is the author's claim. This study doesn't show that. It shows infection plus vaccination confers better immunity than vaccination alone. And, well, that's what basically any expert would have predicted as the most likely result.
The second linked study (the NEJM one) gets closer, but largely only looks at infection rates (it does have some commentary on severe covid-19 rates, but this isn't adjusted for any confounders). It's most useful as a study on how immunity against infection wanes since the last immunity-conferring event, although it allows for some cross comparisons, such as comparing infection rates for natural immunity alone vs 2 doses alone vs 3 doses alone vs hybrid immunity. Possibly the biggest caveat is that the rate of testing for the different cohorts wasn't adjusted for:
> Although differences in testing rates among cohorts and among subcohorts within specified cohorts were observed, their overall magnitude was relatively small. The rate of PCR testing was typically lower in the recovered, unvaccinated cohort than in the other cohorts, so the level of protection in this cohort as compared with that in the two-dose cohort may have been overestimated.
So, it makes it harder to directly compare across cohorts. But, even assuming the cross comparison does hold up if you did correct for testing rates, there are a couple of things to call out in this study. First, three doses had significantly better numbers than two doses. However, the three-dose cohort was new at the time of this study, so this cohort only has results for the very first time slice, and that time slice doesn't exist for the natural immunity scenario, so we can't directly compare them. Second, this study also seems to show, with respect to immunity, that infection followed by vaccination is better than infection alone.
Third, and most notably given this piece's commentary, is vaccination after natural immunity has waned. The study linked explicitly ends with this sentence in its discussion section:
> We found that protection against the delta variant waned over time in both vaccinated and previously infected persons and that an additional vaccine dose restored protection.
Let's look back at the wording in the original piece:
> a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Israel has questioned the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons
It is telling that a study that ends by recommending a dose of vaccine to restore waning natural immunity is used to "question the benefits of vaccinating previously infected persons" in this piece.
Now, there's a reasonable debate around how previous infection should be counted w.r.t. to immune status. E.g. one can make a reasonable case that documented prior infection plus a single dose should count as "fully vaccinated." Or, that hitting a minimum threshold on an antibody test should count as documentation of immunity. Etc. But, that's not what the piece is arguing - it misrepresents both of the studies linked in this one paragraph, and then puts forward a conclusion that is unsupported by either study. If anything, both studies provide evidence that is quite supportive of getting vaccinated at some point after infection, yet you'd never know that if you just read the paragraph from this piece.
Pieces like this one are frustrating because they have the veneer of legitimacy - written by someone in the field, linking studies, etc. It takes a lot of time to really dive in to understand whether or not the claims being made are supported. And even then, it often takes broader knowledge of the state of research in the field. It's easy to cherry pick research that supports a bias while simply leaving out competing research.
Ultimately, this piece does not come off as a good faith review of the scientific evidence.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rufus_foreman|3 years ago|reply
It's complicated.
[+] [-] wonderwonder|3 years ago|reply
With that said, I do agree with the proposal that if a kid has already had covid then why vaccinate them if the general consensus is that the vaccines only provide limited protection for a few months. All for vaccinating high risk people and I am vaccinated against covid with a booster from when they first came out but will not get another booster now that I have already had Covid. Omicron in general for most people is no worse than the flu, unpleasant but bearable. I fully understand the rush to vaccinate adults in the beginning when Delta was raging and we had limited understanding of the virus. Luckily Omicron is dominant now it seems to be much less damaging. This is not to downplay the very real consequences and deaths that do occur still from Covid. At this point in time my whole family has had it and I have accepted it as endemic and moved on.
[+] [-] tzs|3 years ago|reply
Flu in the US kills around 12k to 50k per year, with a particularly bad year every few decades getting up to maybe 80k. Omicron killed somewhere between 150k and 250k in the US in less than a year, and that was with free vaccines that were highly effective against death easily available to pretty much everyone who was not a young child.
That doesn't sound like no worse than the flu to me.
[+] [-] ndynan|3 years ago|reply
"Then they ignored natural immunity. Wrong again. The vast majority of children have already had Covid, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust."
What the fuck is "natural immunity" when we have had 5 variants of omnicron and infection doesn't provide immunity to the other variants?
The real crime IMO, is that... U.S. Public Health Agencies Aren't ‘Following the Science,’... the science of how we could actually reduce spread and decrease the 350~ DEATHS per day adding to the more than 1 Million dead already.
[+] [-] Server6|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] strangeloops85|3 years ago|reply
Also, a bit of perspective: we vaccinate children for many illnesses that would result in comparatively "small" numbers of pediatric deaths (lower than Covid even!). The reason is that even rare pediatric deaths, if preventable, are terrible given the life-years lost. And there HAVE been FAR too many pediatric Covid deaths by our modern standards for pediatric infectious diseases. If Covid only affected kids, the absolute numbers of deaths would be a very worrisome thing. Second, the possibility of long-term complications from even non-fatal illnesses. For pediatric COVID, MIS-C and potential super antigen links to the recent spread of pediatric hepatitis are more than sufficient to meet that bar.
Finally - there was no safety signal seen in the 5-12 year old pediatric vaccines that have been given out to millions for ~year already, and no signal in the under 5 trials as well. The myocarditis risk primarily seems in teenage and older groups and linked to puberty/adolescent hormones.
There may be contrarian voices in the FDA and CDC as there will be in any large organization. But to believe their voices over the consensus requires a heavy dose of motivated reasoning and not engaging with some basic facts about the goals of pediatric vaccines and the ways vaccine trials work. There's a reason every pediatrician parent I know was first in line to get their kids vaccinated.
[+] [-] landemva|3 years ago|reply
Let's see your numbers of <6 years and <8 etc.
> If Covid only affected kids
In all age groups, it affected children the least.
'In total, 540,305 people were tested for SARS-COV-2 and 129,704 (24.0%) were positive. In children aged <16 years, 35,200 tests were performed and 1408 (4.0%) were positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 19.1%–34.9% adults.' https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/12/1180
[+] [-] cf141q5325|3 years ago|reply
And even for the rest, becoming a severe covid case isnt a lottery. Risk groups are a very real thing.
[+] [-] darkerside|3 years ago|reply
Now I'm curious. What is the reasoning behind pediatric flu shots? Is it dangerous to the child?
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|3 years ago|reply
> "Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.
The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health."
So can we finally stop blaming the general public for the ongoing narrative that simply doesn't pass the smell test?
Meanwhile, in Brazil, two doctors are trying to invent their own mRNA vax. And if they do they're promising to give it away...because The First World Healthcare Industrial Complex is more concerned about money over saving lives? And the media and political powers are silent?
Too much of the past couple+ years has been a shit show. If it's not negligence then it's intentional. Neither is good.
[+] [-] wiskinator|3 years ago|reply
| "Then they ignored natural immunity. Wrong again. The vast majority of children have already had Covid, but this has made no difference in the blanket mandates for childhood vaccines. And now, by mandating vaccines and boosters for young healthy people, with no strong supporting data, these agencies are only further eroding public trust."
[+] [-] tlogan|3 years ago|reply
For example, it is obvious now that vaccines do not prevent one from getting COVID and spreading COVID. Yes - vaccines definitely make having COVID like a mild fly: I got it just now and I was just a little sick for a couple of days.
But they still claim that vaccines are preventing the spread.
And then the approach is really bad: instead of running “viagra style” commercials on TV for vaccinations they decided to go with heavy handed mandates and requirements. I bet a couple of Steph Curry and Tom Brady commercials about vaccination will do wonder.
[+] [-] LAC-Tech|3 years ago|reply
To me that's the real story - the demonstration of what amounts to a loss of legitimacy.
(FWIW shutdowns did not bother me much, I got the two mandatory vaccines my jurisdiction required for air travel but refused the boosters, I generally wear masks in public because better safe than sorry.)
[+] [-] divbzero|3 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.fda.gov/drugs/development-resources/table-surrog... "Table of Surrogate Endpoints That Were the Basis of Drug Approval or Licensure"
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
Closing schools and masks have been gone in my area has been over for a while so the article seems to be mixing timelines in a way that is hard to follow.
[+] [-] TurkishPoptart|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kindatrue|3 years ago|reply
"The rest of the world has accepted the endemic nature of Covid and moved on, but the U.S. is an int'l outlier, still pushing mass testing & chasing down every case." [0]
I'm not sure what inverse universe he lives in given that we barely do any official testing, and contact tracing never even got off the ground.
His retweets are also all the other well known covid-minimizers - including the infamous Jay Bhattacharya.
[0] https://twitter.com/MartyMakary/status/1546533258187390977
[+] [-] imperio59|3 years ago|reply
Testing is way safer at this point than two doses against a strain that hasn't been dominant since late 2020. Lots of people are getting sick anyways even if they are vaccinated from other strains they aren't protected against, yet we discriminate against anyone who decided not to get the shot for religious reasons, or who can't get it for medical reasons.
The world will look back on these years as collective insanity.
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpt5|3 years ago|reply
There was never a discussion of the pros and cons, and it's simply a decision of the preschool management, as the county and state have dropped it a while ago. It's just an example of how the children are rarely a considiration.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
Social media and mainstream media saw it fit to censor dissenting voices --not those of quacks, we can mostly all agree on minimizing the voices of quacks but shutting down medical professionals and medical academics and so on is very concerning.
The only people they allowed to be wrong about the pandemic were govt officials. They could get it wrong and right it as many times as necessary.
[+] [-] trentnix|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] throwawaylinux|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chiefalchemist|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] thenerdhead|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Tokkemon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aplummer|3 years ago|reply
A good summary with links is here: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/counting-the-lives-sa...
[+] [-] everforward|3 years ago|reply
> On a more positive note, Ferguson and other researchers at Imperial College London published a model in Nature around the same time estimating that more than 3 million deaths had been avoided in the UK as a result of the policies that were put in place.
3 million people is ~5% of the entire UK population. Even using the high end of COVID IFR estimates (2%, from northern Italy), it would have required everyone in the UK to get COVID twice with no natural immunity to reach that kind of death toll.
Also:
> The most effective measure, they found, was getting people not to travel to work, while school closures had relatively little effect.
That article appears to agree with this one.
[+] [-] luxuryballs|3 years ago|reply
“Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that lockdowns have done little to reduce COVID deaths but have had “devastating effects” on economies and numerous social ills.”
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
[+] [-] HWR_14|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rustybelt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] teej|3 years ago|reply