That seems like it'd be easy to fix: the government just needs to say "as soon as you're fully vaccinated, you don't need to social distance or wear a mask in public anymore". Since that isn't their position, there's basically zero incentive for young, healthy people to risk the vaccine side effects.
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That is one option. Which is why so many anti-vac people have jumped on the no vaccine passport bandwagon. If there is no way to prove you have been vaccinated, then they can lie about it and take part in non-masked public activity (I'm not sure why they are against the mask).
There are other options. Give everyone who has got the vaccine some money is one I've heard more than once. Maybe someone else has a different idea.
Krispy Kreme gave vaccinated people free donuts and it led to an anti-vax outrage here in the States.
That runs contrary to good public health policy for C19 where even the fully vaccinated should follow many precautions such as masking in public and limiting number of households in close contact.
If you believe good public health policy requires that there be restrictions on gatherings even where everyone is fully vaccinated, then what do you see as the path back to full normality? Or is this just how humanity has to live forever now?
I think the "return to normality" is when the number of new cases reported each day drops to almost nothing and deaths are uncommon. Currently, in the U.S. we're about 70 thousand new cases a day, which is about where we were at the height of the second wave in mid-summer. Deaths are around 750 a day.
I think we'll get to normality eventually, but it may take longer than anyone has patience for, and that will only push it out further as people give up on social distancing and masking.
I think return to normalcy should be whenever everyone who wants a vax has received a vax.
Time will tell if that's actually enough by itself to get the reproduction number less than 1. If everyone who wants a vaccination has one and yet we still have tens of thousands of new cases per day and hundreds of deaths and no downward trend, then I think continuing with masks and social distancing is going to be necessary.
I'm hoping that as the vaccination numbers go up, we'll eventually start seeing new cases drop off a cliff as the virus runs out of people to infect. (Though I suspect that we'll have problems for awhile with groups of people who hang out together and for whatever reason don't get vaccinated.)
I didn't pick +80% arbitrarily, that's where Israel has been for a bit (age +16 vaxed or recovered) and the stats are impressive. I expect the same in US unless a new more transmissible strain in the face of vaccinations emerges.
Not to get all Darwinian in here, but what exactly is the problem with anti-vaxxers getting killed by the virus they refuse to get vaccinated against?
The problem for everyone else is that the vaccines aren't 100% effective. Also, we're not vaccinating children yet, and there may be some people who can't get the vaccine for medical reasons.
Another consideration is that if the virus is allowed to continue to spread, there's a real chance that it may mutate into a form that isn't stopped by the vaccine, and then we're right back where we started.
From a public health point of view, I don't see things getting back to ordinary people (and not just the foolhardy) having lunch with coworkers around the same table without masks on unless there isn't any significant amount of community spread going on.
Only 22.7% of US pop is fully vaccinated as of 0600 ET today.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations
When that reaches +80% the recommendations will ease more but as of now:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac...
Why does it matter how much of the US is vaccinated? For any given gathering, doesn't it only matter whether the people at that gathering are? Suppose 20,000 people, each from different households, all met at Madison Square Garden, and that they're all vaccinated. Why would that be more dangerous if nobody else in the world was vaccinated vs. if everybody else in the world was?
Look if both households are low risk and everyone has been vaccinated go ahead and meet under one roof without any masks and hug - that's fine under current recommendations. It's even looser than that, like if you unvaccinated low risk children visiting vaccinated grandparents ad so on.
Right now across US being fully vaccinated is only 80% effective against infection. When you have 20k vaxed folks meet when the virus is endemic in the pop, some of those vaxed folks will be infected and some will catch it there.
When more folks are vaxed there will be less of the virus circulating and then that calculation then changes. It's all about how prevalent the virus is in the community to begin with assuming no strains appear that dramatically reduce the effectiveness of the vax.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/04/13/9864114...
We've never taken such an attitude for any other endemic respiratory pathogen in existence, and for good reason. It's completely absurd and ignores not only the important health benefits of regular social contact, including direct physical contact, as well as the literal benefits of exchanging pathogens with others.
You and the other commenters arguing your "side" also seem to completely ignore the phenomenom of natural immunity, which I think very obviously has been fallaciously denied by "experts" precisely because they want to convince everyone in the world to get this vaccine. They're already talking about yearly booster shots because most people's mental models are from Flu which has a much greater space of possible genetic configurations, whereas SARS-2 is relatively constrained in how it can evolve and thus should not need a yearly booster if this weren't just about making absurd amounts of money (which it is).
In any case, you should know that there are people like me - very much in the minority - who refuse to submit to such absurdities and will keep fighting. We will continue to be literally as well as metaphorically discriminated against until your "side" stops brainwashing people into a completely disproportionate response to an endemic respiratory virus.
You can stay inside with a mask on while vaccinated all you want. Be my guest. But please stop advocating for and/or supporting mandates and restrictions on the rest of us who have not caught your specific strain of agoraphobia, germaphobia, OCD and misanthropy.
Sure we will get natural immunity, the difference between other diseases respiratory or otherwise is its effectiveness in killing people combined with its transmission. It is in the Goldilocks zone for deadliness and transmission , highly deadly diseases like Nipha or Ebola are easier to keep from being an pandemic precisely because they are so deadly. They still require a strong and immediate response to keep it in control and local.
The annual flu shot is not just for you, it is also to prevent you transmitting what is probably harmless to you but deadly to immuno-compromised like the elderly, they don't have ability to get natural immunity. Pneumonia is significant cause of death amongst senior citizens.
If 600,000 people dying U.S alone in the last year, does not convince you to stay masked and safe and follow some simple instructions for few more months until everyone is vaccinated even if you don't believe in them personally, nothing is going to.
It is more dangerous because people who are vaccinated will take more risks and do less social distancing etc which in turn will harm others.
There is no definitive answer whether vaccine will reduce transmission. Those 20,000 people will definitely meet un-vaccinated people in next 10-12 days, and then may pass the disease to them.
Many people cannot get the vaccine, because it is not open yet to them, or have other conditions. So it is selfish for vaccinated people to behave as though the rest of the population does not exist.
There is also the worry that longer the disease lingers anywhere in the world, there can be mutations which are immune to current vaccines, such an mutation could be disastrous as people will loose trust in the vaccine and a second vaccine even when available will have lesser adoption than now . It could become a vicious cycle where there is third mutation, and this then becomes like the flu shots ( but lot more deadlier)
That's the problem.
Young people shouldn't be getting the vaccine period. There is no reason to give every single person who will have children in the future an experimental vaccine for a virus they are at no serious risk from. The long tail risk on that is absolutely insane.
Not exactly sure what procreation has to do with anything.
Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax. Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.
Total COVID deaths for people aged 0-17 in the USA are 246 so far.
That's not that many. Despite my wife and I getting vaccinated, I'm not completely sure what the correct answer is for our kids.
To put those numbers into perspective, more kids die from the flu in any given year (despite vaccination!). And far more kids die from car related accidents, and cars are a daily fact of life here.
I'm also interested in the other longer term effects of COVID on kids, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there about it.
You talk as if it's a clear cut answer. Given the numbers involved I don't see how it can be.
Here are some more relative risk assessments as well as stronger statistics when you're comparing to deaths by COVID-19:
A college-enrolled 18-24 year old is 3.67x more likely to die of suicide [1][2][3].
A college-enrolled 18-24 year old is 6.08x more likely to die of alcohol [3][4].
A child (0-14 years) is 6.75x more likely to die by motor vehicles [5].
A child (0-14 years) is 3.93x more likely to die of drowning in a pool [6].
All fatalities are compared to present CDC numbers [7].
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809451/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enroll...
[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_302.60.a...
[4] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...
[5] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
[6] https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/w...
[7] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...
Do you have a point, or?
It is a clear cut answer if you understand what an mRNA vaccine is.
(Not the one you responded to) I know what an mRNA vaccine is and the only clearcut answer is that "yes, obviously the long-tail risks of mRNA vaccines could outpace the long-tail risk of COVID-19". The statement is also true when you say "...COVID-19 could outpace...mRNA vaccines" as well, if that's not clear.
BTW the "long tail" of COVID-19 in children is totally unproven and the whole "long haulers" phenomenom is likely (a) a small part normal post-viral fatigue which we see with basically any virus, and (b) mostly psychosomatic/psychogenic illness.
That uncertainty is exactly the point. It's possible that the cure could be worse than the disease, but we have every reason to believe that it won't be in the long-term, and that in fact the long-term prospects from COVID-19 are probably much worse than any of the vaccines. And in the short-term the question is decided quite clearly.
So when faced with the choice of vaccine or virus, it should be a foregone conclusion.
> Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.
It absolutely could, and that should be self-evident.
> Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax.
This is just not true. The risk of death in children from COVID-19 is so low you literally should not ever worry about it. If you want to compare numbers in an academic sense go ahead, but the fact that actual adults are wasting valuable cognitive and emotional energy worrying about their kids is a great tragedy.
The recorded COVID-19 deaths in children are, by the way, using the absurd definition of a COVID-19 case/death that most of the western world is using; a definition where having PCR-confirmed SARS-2 infection means that ANY death is classified as a COVID death. This is not how this is supposed to work; there is supposed to be a distinction between the virus and the disease, but we define the disease as merely having the virus! It's completely absurd. Indeed I'm writing an article about this concept (pathological vs physiological) right now
We have never deployed an mRNA vaccine before. We don't know what effect it might have on gametes.
Yes we do? The mRNA vaccines cause your body to produce the coronavirus spike protein. That is the beauty of an mRNA vaccine – the cure literally cannot be worse than the disease, because the cure is just a subset of the disease. Anything these mRNA vaccines do to your gametes would also be done (and worse) by COVID-19 itself, so... definitely get vaxxed with an mRNA vaccine if you're worried about long-tail risk. Also this is the J&J vaccine which is viral vector, not mRNA (Moderna/Pfizer).
We don't know that it has no other effect. We don't know all of the circumstances where reverse transcription can happen in the human body. This kind of epistemic arrogance is dangerous and is how we ended up with thalidomide causing mass birth defects and other such disasters.
This is not, in any way, similar to thalidomide. Thalidomide was an issue because it is enantiomeric and different effects were caused by each enantiomer, only one of which was noticed. That is not an issue here, as we are talking about proteins. The primary difference though is that there was no treatment imperative with thalidomide, but there is with this.
Again, we are talking about introducing something that is guaranteed to be in your body anyway if you contract COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 is viral to the point where, without perpetual lockdowns/mask-wearing/vaccinations, you will get it. So it is still definitely better to get vaccinated, at least with an mRNA vaccine – please stop spreading FUD. Your concerns could be more warranted for vaccines like J&J which use modified viral vectors, but again, exceedingly unlikely that this could be any worse than the virus itself.
You're talking what we learned after the fact about thalidomide. And I'm obviously not saying thalidomide and the mRNA vaccines are similar in their actions in any way. I'm just saying we don't know what injecting a bunch of synthetic spike protein mRNA (a huge percent of which has errors) into your body might do. The same way we didn't know what thalidomide might do, we don't know what this might do. We are not at the level of knowledge about the human body where we can rule out unexpected effects. That is why we have a very stringent drug and vaccine testing regime.
We’ve given the mRNA vaccines to enough people to be highly confident that your fears are ungrounded. The mRNA doesn’t linger more than a few hours. People received the vaccine a year ago.
> We’ve given the mRNA vaccines to enough people to be highly confident that your fears are ungrounded.
Wasn't that the case with J&J also, till they decided to not ignore the clots.
I doubt they have, but plenty enough time has passed to evaluate your concern by examining trial participants.
The mRNA in the vaccine lasts a matter hours.
Probably none, the tricky part is how it affects an embryo because that's an known unknown of a lot of this molecular biology/medicine things. It's already counter-indicated for pregnant women though.
I'm not qualified to comment on whether or not that is a valid concern, but the vaccine we're discussing here (J&J) uses a modified viral vector, as do the AstraZeneca and Gamaleya vaccines.
Correct. I meant the mRNA vaccines. The AZ & J&J vaccines don't have that same concern, but I'd still worry about an untested vaccine. There is really no good reason for the young and healthy to get the vaccine yet or any time soon.
At the moment we're shitting on the younger generation even harder than usual, by denying them the opportunity to go out, meet people and generally enjoy their youth. Doing that for a year was maybe justified, but it is just totally unfair to carry on for an extended period.
To open up again we need to bring the demand on healthcare services down and we need to do it sustainably, i.e. in a way which prevents another exponential spike. If we can achieve that aim without mass vaccination of healthy young people then great, of course, let's do that. But: if the only way to squash this thing and return everyone to a somewhat normal life turns out to be to keep vaccinating until we get right down to the twenty year olds, shouldn't we do so -- for their sake as much as everyone else's?
In my neck of the woods, kids are in school and going to wrestling tournaments and before that hockey tournaments that got to be superspreader events. We're certainly not denying kids sports where I am, or the opportunity to infect their older family members (yay!).
False dichotomy. If the 20 year olds all get covid, almost nothing bad will happen. So just let them catch it. If the at-risk people are all vaccinated, then it's not a big deal.
Do you have reason to believe that it can affect gametes? In other words, do you know of any hypothesized mechanism by which this could happen?
No, and no one had any reason to think that thalidomide would cause mass birth defects. This is why we have such long testing periods for vaccines and drugs in general. We also go through extra testing before approving things for pregnant women. We don't know what we don't know. Modern medicine is impressive, but we must maintain epistemic humility.