re: Massive study: Fully vax are 13 times more likely to get infected than the Recovered

But don’t forget that most of the hospitalizations in this country are coming from unvaccinated people. Most never had Covid and are still the highest risk. Surviving Covid gives you antibodies, but the vaccine helps those that didn’t get it.

They are more than likely obese.

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Why are more than 90% of all ICU Covid patients across America unvaccinated?

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Why are more than 90% of all ICU Covid patients across America old or fat or both?

Why do young healthy people need the shots when their risk of Covid is so low, and reward of surviving Covid so high?

You continue to lump all in the same category

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People get the flu shot and still get the flu.

People don’t get the flu shot and still get the flu.

People have had the flu several times in their life and still get the flu.

People have had the flu get a flu shot and still get the flu.

I mean…

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Think a bit more deeply Coach.

All of those things can be true while it is also true that being vaccinated reduces the probability.

In coachspeak, players who listen to coaches still miss tackles

Players who don't listen to coaches, miss tackles


Players who listen to coaches several times in their life, still miss tackles.

Players who miss tackles, then listen to coaches, still miss tackles.


I mean...

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Could lockdowns, social distancing and now vaccines end up doing more harm than good?

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Lockdowns didn't do anything, because a general lockdown across a country as big as the US was pointless. Lockdowns should have been limited to specific areas, should have been for a set period of time, and should have included aggressive contact tracing. They ended up being pointless, as they jaded a large portion of the country to the social effects of any illness. Social distancing was neither here nor there. Vaccines are a valuable tool to get to a place where this disease isn't that severe, but again the way you should want to do a vaccination program is with a disease that has an even distribution across a geographic area, so that the risk of every person in that area getting it is equal to 1. A piecemeal geographic approach to a disease that is affecting the entire world, albeit in an uneven fashion, is going to prolong the entire episode.

We might be prolonging herd immunity, but at current rates, it will take us around 4 years to reach that level through infection alone, if we assume that the current rates of infection are close to the maximum. The essential problem is that public health authorities sacrificed messaging early in the pandemic, which along with the WHO's idiocy with China, made it so that effective public health messaging after those failures was impossible. You absolutely cannot have any doubt in public health authorities, of partisanship, of perverse incentives, of anything that might color people's perceptions of why they are suggesting such drastic measures.

The problem with this disease from the beginning is that it has not had a uniform distribution pattern. If it was a more familiar disease, with a mode of transmission which was clearly understood from the beginning, you could have seen combined strategies of treating the ill, and letting it spread, as the danger, which was illustrated to me by a virologist who taught our class about the virus literally as information was becoming available in January and February of 2020, was that it could produce subclinical infection in the vast majority of people, but clinical symptoms in subsets across a population. My virology book suggests that the mortality rate of the Spanish Flu in 1918 was 2.5% worldwide, and the early suggestion for the mortality rate for this virus was something under 1 percent, but with wide variability possible as the virus mutated. This suggests to me that herd immunity was unlikely, but providing extra safety measures for specific population subsets at risk, such as N95 masks, isolation, and inoculation when developed, might have been the better initial strategy, with lockdowns useful in the end stages of the pandemic, rather than in the beginning, to snuff out outbreaks. We actually had the ability to inoculate people quite early, as the first mRNA design was ready by February of 2020, but it had to go into testing. It might have been better to just inoculate those at risk subsets from the beginning and not worry about the spread so much, and just deal with the consequences of a vaccine with a potentially high injury rate, which is the exact strategy we used with smallpox.

That's all to say that it is hard to say if we would have reached herd immunity by now with a laxer strategy. The strategy we ended up with was schizophrenic in that it had no clear goal in mind, and ended up being extremely pointless.

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You suggest that lockdowns didn't do anything and I agree if "anything" means something positive, but didn't lockdowns slow the spread of the virus, even just in spots and at certain times? 

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I'm very skeptical of that, given we saw surges during summer and winter. Furthermore, the initial lockdown prevented the further use of lockdowns as a countermeasure, which could have possibly saved lives for real during actual surges. Nothing in the distribution of the virus or actual plan during the lockdown suggested forethought. Ultimately nothing was slowed, but we had one less weapon in our possible arsenal of options to use once the lockdown was used far too early.

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The CDC, Yale, Harvard and Stanford estimate that as of today, over 140 million Americans have had the virus. I'm no virologist, but it seems logical to me that if we had simply isolated the really old/frail and immunocompromised and let the virus run abated otherwise, we'd have reached herd immunity by now.

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Possibly. It's a variable threshold to reach, because estimates put the virus at reaching the herd immunity threshold at around 50-60%, which I feel we should have reached by now. The reality is that this might be a disease that is just seasonal, and that herd immunity is not possible due to variations.

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And the longer it takes to reach herd immunity, the greater the population of truly at risk will end up being exposed...right? So in that view, all the efforts to "control" the uncontrollable ends up costing more lives, not to mention trillions of dollars, messed up kids, messed up adults, messed up politics, more suicides/ODs.

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There's a vision of how things could have been if we had any adults in charge and willing to take responsibility. A lot of Trump's instincts about keeping things open were ultimately correct, but he reacted to the news of the market reacting, and agreed to lockdowns when they shouldn't have been used. The overly cautious approach was ultimately the wrong way of executing any response to the pandemic because it limited options later. There was no great advantage in terms of saving lives, and it fricked the messaging of the thing from the beginning. The messaging still hasn't improved, to my chagrin, because there is an easy way to get people on board right now, which is to say, hey, if you don't have antibodies from infection, you should definitely get vaccinated, which will decrease the risk of serious disease course when you do get the virus. That is a better messaging strategy than the all or nothing vaccination approach. But alas. All we can hope is that time cements these lessons, and public health officials understand the social cost better.

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here's a vision of how things could have been if we had any adults in charge and willing to take responsibility. A lot of Trump's instincts about keeping things open were ultimately correct, but he reacted to the news of the market reacting, and agreed to lockdowns when they shouldn't have been used. The overly cautious approach was ultimately the wrong way of executing any res

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Was no win situation for him. People were going to die from it no matter what. This all falls into the laps of the media and the left. He knew keeping things open was the way to go. Let it run it's course in healthy people, let those at risk take precaution. But any death would've been blamed on him. Without a time machine, there'd be no way to prove he was right. Media got people on both sides panicked. People wanted something done, even if it was the wrong thing. And with Fauci pushing the shite and the media only giving a voice to those walking the line, there was no other realistic option.

Fauci and others need to be held accountable. This is not hindsight. Everything they have done has worsened and prolonged this situation.

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How many re-infections have you seen.

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One I've seen personally, and another was at the clinic where I was doing my community health rotation, but wasn't my case. The one I saw from beginning to end was 66 y/o nurse who had one bout with Covid last summer, and tested positive again, with only N/V/D. She also tested positive for Human parainfluenza virus, which was weird as hell. The other was announced by another attending, so I don't know the details.

I should couch my statements about herd immunity threshold merely because of the early estimates, which we have to have reached. It's possible the HIT would be closer to 70 or 80 percent, but the initial projections had the virus at 50-60% if I recall. I would have preferred those projections, because then the vaccine/infection debate would be moot for the most part.

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should couch my statements about herd immunity threshold merely because of the early estimates, which we have to have reached. It's possible the HIT would be closer to 70 or 80 percent, but the initial projections had the virus at 50-60% if I recall. I would have preferred those projections, because then the vaccine/infection debate would be moot for the most part.

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Will also depend on how long natural immunity proves to last. I'm going to recheck my antibodies soon. I've been in close contact will a ton of +COVID pt's. Curious to see if my IgM ever becomes positive again.

Had a pt want her antibodies tested. Had it last October. Employer would wave vaccine requirement if her antibodies positive. Her IgG and IgM were positive. She can't recall any recent symptoms, but that means she's had recent exposure with antibody response and no symptoms. It frustrates me to no end that they are ignoring natural immunity. I've had one other so far with no symptoms, got antibody test for employer that wanted all 3 (IgG,M,A). No symptoms. Positive for IgG,M.

We may find that isolation and shut downs are the worst thing we can do. We obviously see that the vaccines aren't the answer and will become less and less effective. Repeated boosters will increase chances of untoward side effects while not preventing spread or infection. Perhaps the best answer is to survive it the first time by whatever means necessary and then further exposure becomes your booster.