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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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…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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