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A Question for Mandated-Vaccination Advocates
How are you quantifying the public health risk represented by any given individual not getting vaccinated? Can you give it to me in units of, say, third-party life years lost per year by the decision to remain unvaccinated? Can you give me an estimated probability that the failure of individual X to get vaccinated will result in the COVID death of some individual Y?
No? Can you at least try?
Because you’re giving us a value-of-freedom vs. cost-of-risk inequality that looks something like this:
Freedom < Risk
And I want to know when you think the cost of the risk no longer outweighs our personal freedom to make health care choices for ourselves.
If you can’t give me a number, can you give me a ratio? Can you tell us what relative reduction in risk will drop it below the value you seem to place in individual choice?
Don’t tell me you don’t know. We don’t want to trade our freedom for don’t know.
And it isn’t obvious to me that you’ve got the direction of that inequality right even now. If neither of us knows what the actual risk is, I at least know how much I value individual freedom. So the ball’s in your court and, until you come back with some science and a better argument than I’ve heard, I’m going to assume the freedom I value outweighs the risk you can’t or won’t quantify.
And, until you put a number on it, don’t call it science.
Published in Domestic Policy
Except one is true, and the other isn’t.
I saw Carlson’s interview with Mike Flynn and I say this is one guy for president that ho one’s mentioned.
My emphasis in your quote. I can’t validate your numbers, but we are in agreement as to decreased transmission for those vaccinated. See my comment on page two. This is why the public has an interest in getting people vaccinated.
An interest, perhaps, at least until/unless any of those factors are disproven.
But not a mandate.
Not if everyone is going to get it anyway and the death rate for both categories (vaxxed and unvaxxed) remain at their respective levels. In that case reduced transmission does nothing, but provide government a fig leaf to continue their interference with our freedom.
I don’t see any proof that asymptomatic unvaccinated people are any more likely to transmit to vaccinated people.
Where is that data from?
Plus, as I mentioned earlier/elsewhere, if vaccinated people show less symptoms, they’re more likely to be “out and about” spreading it to others.
I just have not bought, and I still don’t buy, this “asymptomatic transmission”. If someone is not really all that sick, they have less of the darn thing in their body to spread.
We. Don’t. Know.
And mandates are fear telling other people how to behave. If the are so afraid they want the mandate, stay home and never leave.
Yet, the vaccinated are more likely to become infected than their proportion of the population – meaning that the vaccine increases their chance of catching COVID.
My cost-benefit calculation did not include the risk to the individual who decided not to be vaccinated. The valuation of this, based on the assumptions I made, would be $ 36,000.
Well there is certainly asymptomatic spread in other diseases, so it could happen here too. And it’s possible to suppress symptoms in other situations where only the symptoms are relieved. Such as pain-killers for a condition that remains unchanged, you just don’t feel it any more. From what I hear/read, it’s entirely possible for someone to have a lot of the virus in them, but it isn’t affecting THEIR OWN organs etc due to the vaccine or natural immunity. Those can block the virus from causing damage, but the virus is still there and can be spread to others.
We. Don’t. Know. tm
We just don’t. lack of knowledge is no reason to restrict liberty.
Doctor Peter McCullough says that when we had a new vaccine developed for swine flu in the 1970’s, when there were 53 unexplained deaths attributed to the vaccine, vaccinations were stopped. A quarter of America’s population had gotten the swine flu shots before it was stopped. I had an uncle who got Guillain-Barre Syndrome from the shot and was paralyzed for a period of time and was never the same physically.
Has the FDA dispensed with the safety standards formerly in place?
Ultimately that’s most of it, yes.
And really, lack of knowledge is – or at least should be – reason to NOT restrict liberty. “We don’t know, so we’re going to crash the economy and make everyone prisoners JUST IN CASE,” is BS.
We are not to speak of the vax-related deaths lest we cut into profits for Big Pharma.
Looks that way. Can we get a view of this from those most active on this thread?
Now I’m the Dominion! Am I a Jem’Hadar, a Vorta, or a shape-shifting Founder? At least I haven’t been portrayed as Red Skull yet, as Jordan Peterson was. :)
But seriously, Hank, I’m hurt. A thorn in your side? I’m just a loveable little fuzzball in a red shirt:
I have a couple of serious responses.
In #13 and #25, Hank raised both a factual and theoretical objection to my use of the statistical valuation of human life. I did this because it is the traditional approach used in cost-benefit analysis. It is not hard to convert it to hypothetical lives lost. You just have to divide by the assumed statistical value of a life, which was $8 million in my calculation.
Doing this yields that following result of my (hypothetical) decision not to be vaccinated, with the caveats discussed previously, and with the understanding that this is limited to the first four steps of the hypothetical infection course from me to other unvaccinated people who I would infect.
The expected number of deaths from my decision not to be vaccinated is 0.88. This can be split into an expected number of 0.77 deaths of unvaccinated persons and 0.11 deaths of vaccinated persons. Another way of looking at is that if I decide not to be vaccinated — hypothetically, as I actually am vaccinated — then there is a 77% chance that some unvaccinated person will die, and a 12% chance that some vaccinated person will die.
I should point out that the big force-multiplier, so to speak, in this model is the high transmissibility of the Delta variant. Based on my assumptions, my hypothetical infection (if I am unvaccinated) will spread to about 73 other unvaccinated people in the first four steps of the chain of infection. In one sense, some or all of those other 73 hypothetically unvaccinated people would “share responsibility” with me for the ensuing deaths (meaning fractional death risks).
In another sense, though, the responsibility would be entirely mine. I have the opportunity to break the chain of infection (sort of), and the result would be avoidance of the 0.88 deaths that would result. I say “sort of” because even if vaccinated, I could still be infected and spread the disease. The differential between the hypothetical number of deaths that would ensue if I am unvaccinated, compared to the number that would ensue if I were vaccinated, is already reflected in my calculation.
In #26, David raised a question of the infection fatality rate that I assumed, which was 0.5%, and pointed out that the recent Delta variant may have a lower IFR. This is a good objection, in principle, though I don’t know the precise figures. The Worldometer figures at the moment imply an overall case fatality rate of about 1.6% in the US (about 741,000 deaths from about 45.6 million cases).
The IFR has a linear effect in my calculation. So if, for example, the Delta variant IFR was 0.3% rather than 0.5%, you can knock 40% off of all of my figures.
Depends on what you mean by asymptomatic. If you’re asymptomatic and not carrying the virus, then you can’t transmit it because you don’t have it. If you’re asymptomatic and are virally infected (which is possible) then of course you can transmit it like anyone who is is infected but symptomatic. One caveat, I don’t know if the transmission rate is the same.
I have not seen that. Recent article of hospitalizations in NY (I can’t remember if state or city) said that we were averaging 330-something of non vaccinated per week against 70-something per week vaccinated.
If an unvaccinated person results in .88 deaths, shouldn’t there be like 150-200 MILLION people dead in the US, especially since there was no vaccination for quite a while?
What’s the comparative likelihood between vaccinated and unvaccinated of being infected but asymptomatic carriers?
But the vaccinated get less severe Covid so don’t require hospitalization at the same rate as unvaccinated.
They may have less severe symptoms, but they still have the virus, and if they’re not hospitalized they could be spreading it a lot more than someone who is hospitalized.
That’s what I was pointing out, instead of being isolated they are walking around in public probably unaware.
Good question.
First of all, this is a calculation using the Delta transmissibility figure, which is more recent.
More importantly, though, as I pointed out in my comment # 78, the calculation involves a chain of transmission from the initial infected unvaccinated individual through many others — 73 in this particular calculation, which considers the death risk resulting from the first 4 transmission steps.
I might not have been clear about how this works. Based on my assumptions, each infected unvaccinated person will infect 2.6 other unvaccinated persons. The 2.6 figure is from the assumed transmissibility of the Delta variant (6.5) times the assumed percentage of the population unvaccinated (40%).
So if I were infected and unvaccinated, I would infect (statistically) 2.6 other unvaccinated people. That’s the first step. They would each infect another 2.6 — a total of 6.76 at the second step. They would each infect another 2.6 — 17.576 at the third step. And they would each infect another 2.6 — 45.6976 at the fourth step.
If you add these up, plus me, you get 73.6336 unvaccinated people who become infected in the first four steps. For each such person X, the increased risk of death to a person in the next step, compared to the risk if person X was vaccinated, is 0.01196. Multiply 73.6336 by 0.01196 and you get 0.8806579, which I rounded to .88 in reporting the expected number of deaths from my (hypothetical) decision not to be vaccinated.
What happens when the unvaccinated carrier can’t find other unvaccinated victims?
There is no way that bein asymptomatic is the same as someone who has symptoms. No way. that would be unlike any other virus in history.
So much of this sounds like the Star Trek savants. They were “sure,” too.
Bob, another good question. This is the reason that I only carried out the calculation through four steps. Given the transmission rate, it’s unlikely that the pool of unvaccinated (and previously infected) people would change much over such a short period. A more complicated calculation would take this into account, and would also address issues like differentials in death rates among different age groups.
My calculation is a relatively simple, back-of-the-envelope type of calculation, though technically I used MS Excel, not an envelope.