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A new New York State Covid-19 Dataset was released a few days ago. I thought it was a good opportunity to see the progress of the vaccination campaign. I think it's great data for an attack on the performative ritual of getting 'vaccinated' to encourage others to get vaccinated as well (which is what a lot of people were convinced to do). Obviously, those who got vaccinated to "protect other people" stand on shakier ground now.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-updates-new-yorkers-states-progress-combating-covid-19-467
First, let's establish something important. mRNA vaccines have a established, not fully understood connection to peri-myocarditis. mRNA can cause heart damage in a way that other vaccines seem to avoid. I would say this is an important explanation for the following data:
Percent of New Yorkers ages 18 and older with completed vaccine series - 85.5%
We all know how this was done. OSHA directed mandate, NYC mandate, banning people from shows, restaurants, bars until they receive an EUA injection, healthcare worker mandate, bribing people 100$ a shot. Science communication and incentives couldn't get people to take a novel vaccination method. NYS is almost 20% unionized, and the mandate was really helpful in boosting the low minority vaccination rate, since so many of those individuals work unionized, mandated jobs.
Now that these incentives are gone, let's see what the uptake is:
**Percent of all New Yorkers who are up to date - 14.1%
**
Most New Yorkers ignore CDC guidance now. Covid-19 will be gone in a few years. Covid-19 will be retired as a word for "novel entry of pathogen SARS-2," SARS-2 will be renamed HC-391237 or OC-32871 (random examples) or something, and the "covid-19 vaccine" will be rightly seen as a genetic version of a "flu shot" like intervention.
Consumers who want "flu shot" like vaccines, will eventually come to prefer conventional, protein adjuvanted vaccination methods.
Why would a 19 year old ever get an mRNA injection, when they could get a shot of Covaxin? The main purpose of the shot being to end the harassment from the public health infrastructure, and gain employment or education.
**Percent of New Yorkers ages 0-4 with completed vaccine series - 7.9%
**
This makes me think the vaccine could be seen as dangerous to parents. Keep in mind that all high-risk (on ventilator) children have probably been vaccinated, but some likely have not.
The vaccine campaign was a performance. Young healthy people were asked by the CDC to pretend that genetic Covid-19 vaccination was completely benign and well understood, with the goal of ultimately getting high-risk patients to take the higher risk vaccine.
If 20-29 year olds were allowed to say "no, that vaccine causes heart damage, obviously not worth getting," skepticism would trickle up to individuals who should arguably take advantage of the more advanced vaccination method. May the benefits outweigh the risks. No one believes in "do no harm" in the age of state-mandated genetic injections.
Besides the consensus building (already pointed out) and the highly partisan and inflammatory tone (without corresponding evidence), I take issue with your use of phrases like "genetic injections". Are you implying that mRNA vaccines can modify someone's genome?
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This isn't how it happened. The greatest period of vaccination uptake was the sweet spot in the rollout period where the vaccines first became widely available, around March, April, and May 2021. After that the growth in vaccine uptake slowed considerably; if it hadn't it's unlikely a mandate would have been put in place. When New York State first announced a vaccination mandate for certain employees at the end of July the state's 2-dose vaccination rate was at 57%; by the time the vaccination deadline hit in late November, the rate was 69%. Even if we assume that absolutely everyone who got vaccinated during this period only did so because of the inducements, it's still only a relatively small percentage of those who got vaccinated.
Well yes. But those last hold outs were the hardest to get. They resisted the "the vaccine protects you from other people" misconceptions of herd immunity being pushed. It's an important percentage, and without mandates, the data gaps would have been ammo for the "dissenters" of public health.
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Nope, and hopefully it stays that way.
There is good evidence that early in the pandemic when COVID was less contagious and our vaccines actually targeted the circulating strain that spread was significantly (though not completely) reduced in vaccinated populations. Here I wrote a brief summary of some of the evidence available in August 2021. I still believe the COVID-19 vaccines are very safe as written here, and reiterated in this space more recently. Overall I stand by most of what I've written, although I was too slow to update on how low-risk COVID was for younger folks and the implications that should have had on our public health response.
The other interesting angle to this that doesn't seem to come up very often is the idea that COVID actually was similar in severity to a cold/flu, but this is just what that looks like for a virus we've never been exposed to before. Namely, if you had somehow avoided exposure to influenza/rhinovirus/other coronaviruses before being exposed at the age of 70-80, would you have the same CFR as COVID-19 circa 2020-2021? Or did the evolution of COVID from 'less-transmissible, more-deadly' to increased contagiousness and decreased pathogenicity just happen on much faster timescales that we expected? My money is on mostly (1) with a small degree of (2), but I'm not an expert and I stopped caring about the literature over a year ago.
As for the vaccines, if they don't update them I'm not planning to bother unless forced to by my employer. Even if they do update them, I'd probably treat it the way I do the flu vaccine: If they run a clinic at my workplace and I just have to walk downstairs and wait for a few minutes I'll do it, otherwise not going out of my way.
Since @desolation asked: I still think Fauci is fine and well-intentioned. The public health response was bad at first due to obstructionists/defectors and bad later on in service of either stupidity or the gerontocracy - i.e. a fairly accurate reflection of the political factions with power in our system, and I likely made a mistake carrying water in support of it at least in some cases. Lab leak still seems like a toss-up, but China has acted fairly sus the whole time.
If Lab Leak is a toss-up, shouldn't that mean there's at least a 50% chance he's neither fine nor well-intentioned?
Lab leak is shorthand for half a dozen scenarios I've seen bandied about. Off the top of my head:
Secret Chinese bioweapons program inadvertently released.
Secret Chinese bioweapons program intentionally released to depopulate an aging population and wreak havoc in the soft Western countries.
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus study program that released it through negligence/misconduct (stuff like Chinese researchers historically eating research animals after experiments conclude)
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus program that inadvertently made it more pathological via humanized mice or other experiments.
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus program in some small part funded in collaboration with NIH (In which I've previously argued Fauci has little personal responsibility and you should primarily be upset with the study section which approved the grant).
Globalist plot by Fauci and NWO to [use your imagination lest I be accused of strawmanning or partisan hackery].
In the majority he bears no responsibility, in some cases he bears (I would argue) some small amount of blame relative to a number of other actors and in only one is he ill-intentioned. I maintain that even if you strongly believe in the lab leak and malfeasance, most of the animus towards Fauci is based on the fact that his face is on TV and telling people things they didn't want to hear while leaving most of the people who made those decisions to get off scot-free.
edit: fixing numbering scheme
Why are 2, 3, and 4 separated? Regardless of how it got out, it did get NIH funding, no? He was pushing his weight around trying to discredit the Lab Leak theory, wasn't he?
Because the total annual budget for a research institute will be in the tens of millions of dollars (bit of a rough guess as it's hard for me to tran, and the ecohealth alliance given to WIV was in the low 6 figures per annum if I remember correctly - most of the funding goes to American researchers. That's enough money to fund a couple of students/scientists, not even a full lab. There's maybe 45-50 professors at WIV, each with their own grants and projects. It's entirely possible that they had a completely separate project distinct from Ecohealth that involved coronaviruses/humanized mice/chimeric viruses/GoF that went poorly.
Yes, as was I. It's worth remembering that early on the evidence being cited by lab leak truthers was actual garbage that was easily refuted; the fact that people were pushing the lab leak theory in the absence of data early on gave me the strong belief that they had ulterior motives. It took a while for the case to build. The narrative isn't so cut and dried as bigoted PhDs hate internet amateurs who had mountains of evidence to make their case.
I do agree with you that Fauci did try to spike the story early. It's not clear to me whether that was out of a circling of the wagons to try and maintain support for scientific funding, whether it was trying to avoid personal culpability/scandal or something else entirely.
But...again, say you believe me for a moment that most of the relevant decisions were made by other people and rubber stamped by Fauci's office. Are you still going to obsess over Fauci, or try and understand the process that led to that decision?
"They were funding research just as dangerous as the one that could have caused the pandemic, but by dumb luck theirs was likely not involved in it" is acting fine and well intentioned?
You did not have access to the same information as Faucci, so you can be excused, even though basic critical thinking was enough to tell they were overconfident in dismissing the theory.
Why go with what the truthers were saying, instead of what Faucci and his colleagues were? Also the arguments supposedly refuting the lab leak were themselves just as easy to refute.
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Thanks for coming in and adding your input. I would note to all readers that Chrisprattalpha and I had a more detailed vaccine back-and-forth that I thought was productive. Mr. Alpha linked to it in his post.
Overall I disagree with the idea of the "very safe" label. People should go look at our previous exchange to see where I disagree.
Well, once conventional vaccine alternatives are available to "tic" the box, I would much rather choose protein adjuvanted injections over job loss.
I have not been exposed to mRNA, so it makes a lot more sense for someone like me to be choosier, rather than someone who has taken a more novel method of vaccination.
And we're all getting Covid-19.
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The vaccines never targeted the circulating variant (as far as I know, no COVID-19 variant has been deemed a "strain", though this is more semantics than biology). They targeted an early Wuhan variant, but by the time the vaccines were widely available we we well into the dominance of the Alpha variant, and unnamed variants containing the D614G mutation had long since replaced the Wuhan variant.
The data, I suspect, is mostly bad methodology and wishful thinking. SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates changed drastically for no apparent reason during the pandemic, so if you started an intervention during a high transmission period you were almost certain to see a drop in transmission.
This came up often early on -- comparison to the Russian Flu of 1889, which may have not been influenza at all but HCoV-OC43, was common. That sort of thing got kicked into the skeptic pit.
As for the evolution of COVID, I would not rule out a second lab escape (or deliberate release) for Omicron.
Given the rather infamous multi-wave structure of the 1918 pandemic, I thought it was interesting to see the same structure play out in real-time. Early on many pop sci sources seemed to suggest that this was largely a result of changes in social behavior, whereas in hindsight in 2023 it looks pretty clearly dominated by the various variants spreading through the population. I suppose even the remaining samples of 1918 virus that we've studied don't provide quite the level of robust genome-over-time data that we have for today: the sheer scale of viral replication provides a variety of mutations that IMO gain-of-function research is unlikely to even poorly approximate in the near future.
I suppose this isn't surprising in hindsight, but it's interesting to look back on how much we thought we understood about respiratory pandemics in early 2020, and how little we actually knew (spoiler: it's airborne!).
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Agree with this.
I think Omicron is a large narrative tool.
Omicron is so much more deadlier than Delta because of its transmissibility, but this translates to less threat to each individual. I always grin when I see people "celebrating" omicrons rise, or remark how they avoided nastier variants, and now play host to the most transmissible pathogen in recent years. If you can catch a cold, once again, that means a 90 year old in a nursing home can catch it too.
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…that something you don’t like could be good?
Look, I understand why you think the mRNA therapies are Problematic. And why you want to talk about them. But I happen to completely disagree with you on the “why” and “how” they were adopted, so I have to object when you bulldoze in and assert that right-thinking people are all on board with your worldview.
If you don’t understand why people might want, or have wanted, the vaccine, especially when they weren’t hooked directly into the same vitriolic channels as you, then you are missing an important piece of the puzzle. And if you won’t understand, as your continued consensus-building suggests…then I think you’re just here to evangelize.
Most of my vitriol came from my education. I've been wear of mRNA since summer 2020 when it was announced as a candidate. I've taken undergraduate STEM, but most importantly, I worked with "science and technology studies," where we looked into a century of scientific ethical dilemmas.
So many people got the vaccine when they were told it would stop transmission - I had read the original clinical paper, and saw this was a messy conclusion. Then data from Israel came out that protection was waning, then the censorship began, and later on the mandating piggy backed on the censorship of waning efficacy.
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Why is your example alternative vaccine Covaxin, which is not available in the US, and not Novavax, which is actually available in the US? Do you think the protein subunit technique used by Novavax is also not a sufficiently old-fashioned way of making vaccines? My understanding is that it looks to be on par with the mRNA vaccines for effectiveness while having much less in the way of side effects, while the inactivated vaccines like Covaxin work significantly worse.
This is an incredible failure of public health messaging. While risk goes down for older children, COVID-19 is significantly more dangerous for children under 4. This CDC table shows triple the rate of hospitalization on somewhat fewer cases.
Novavax is a novel virus-like particle. I personally would much prefer Novavax over mRNA, and probably over adenovirus vectors.
I just don't like the threat of heart problems that mRNA presents. Such a large, dark downside to the products, to remodel your heart.
I thought the adenovirus vector vaccines had a higher incidence of heart problems than the mRNA vaccines. Am I misremembering? I could also see there being a lack of data on head-to-head comparisons given where the different vaccines got used.
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Fair point. There's a lot of public health messaging that gets ignored.
Most childhood vaccines have a 90%+ uptake; I think that's a pretty clear success. While the recent increase in norovirus prevalence shows we could do better, handwashing is at least accepted as something you're expected to do (as opposed to, say, public health campaigns about the amount of alcohol you're "supposed" to drink which no one takes seriously). Talking of vices, smoking has gotten a lot less popular, which probably counts as a successful public health campaign. Not exactly in the same realm, but seatbeats also now fairly widely used.
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How so? The table you linked shows children ages 0-4 having higher death rates than children ages 5-17, but lower death rates than adults. The stats @Inflamed_Heart_Liberal linked shows children ages 0-4 having higher up-to-date rates then children ages 5-11 and 12-17, but lower rates than adults. This seems like exactly what we would expect from a well- informed population: groups with higher death rates are more likely to be up to date.
7.9% is an extremely low vaccination rate. Normally when people talk about being worried about "low" vaccination rates, they mean 95% or 90%. And COVID-19 is both more dangerous and more common than many of the illnesses we vaccinate children for. If you for some reason decided you had a limited number of vaccinations budget and were rationally optimizing which childhood vaccinations to omit to maximize wellbeing, COVID-19 would not be your first pick (not sure exactly what would be... probably chickenpox? They all suck, this is a terrible choice to be making.). But that's clearly not the optimization people are making; somehow they (and/or their pediatricians) haven't gotten the message that it's actually an important vaccination. And we're going to have a lot more children with long-term health consequences (some of them dead) because of that.
(I'm having trouble finding definitions on their website of what they mean by "up-to-date": the relevant thing to care about is getting the full 3-dose series; past that, for most people, additional doses at best give an ~3 month window of protection from infection, but no significant additional protection from severe disease/death, so the public health benefit is minimal.)
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From an incredibly low baseline, and even then it's still a <1 multiple.
I guess that was part of the show. Vaccines were already so safe and bullet proof, people cannot notice when one that's 10x dangerous is released, and information censored online, and physicians told to be disinterested.
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