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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
Right. So was Churchill.
This is a pretty weak response to an argument that you can’t rebut.
Right. That alone should tell you to get vaccinated. To answer your other reply, there may not be a difference in getting the virus between vaccinated and not. My argument is that vaccinated people have less time to transmit the virus if they get it.
Those people are free to wear a commercial respirator and six condoms to protect themselves, when out in public. Nobody is stopping them.
That’s probably true.
Did you see my comment earlier:
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?
This is why I oppose any mandate.
Jerry, how long does this 2.6 transmission take?
I see it differently. Your burden is proving your figures are accurate, and the process is valid. Nobody, including you, knows enough to maintain either of those positions. It may end up that even decades from now, we still won’t really know.
Here’s an example from that DS9 episode:
Sorry, I don’t know. From my recollection early in the pandemic, the course of infection typically ran about 2-3 weeks, so I’d guess that it’s in this window.
What Sisko says in this bit is relevant too.
Transmission by vaccinated people vs unvaccinated people:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/12/1044553048/covid-data-vaccines-breakthrough-infections-transmission?fbclid=IwAR1IqSrCJfgO_LOhh6zX09l_xgC8jN1mjdjYCS2gWmAlkLrwiGr39TpkgY0
So we’re now approaching the end of the second year. 104weeks/3weeks is about 34 times. That is a really big number. I stopped at 20 times and that was 124,550,930 if I’ve done the math correctly. The transmission rate may have been 2.6 at some points, but not always. Do we know what it is now?
No. We don’t really know what it was before, either.
Thank You for Smoking
Doctor Peter McCullough appears to be just as expert as Doctor Anthony Fauci.
What about the case of “Typhoid Mary”? Or are you drawing a line between virus and bacteria?
If your assumptions are correct, shouldn’t there be a correlation between vaccination rate and infection rate? Instead, I have read in several places that data don’t show such a correlation.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7.pdf
I have no idea what you’re referring to.
Maybe I misunderstood your and Bryan’s exchange. I thought both of you agree that asymptomatic people cannot transmit disease. Thus, I asked what about the case of Typhoid Mary. But since we were talking about a virus, and typhoid is a bacterial infection, I thought maybe that was why you wouldn’t consider that case.
Thanks for linking this. It was reported by Dr. Zubin Damania, aka ZDogg, over a month ago. In the first video below, he and Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious diseases doc, discuss viability of the virus in vaccinated people about 5 minutes in. All in all, the entire hour long talk is worth a listen. In fact, he’s worth listening to on a whole variety of subjects, Covid in particular.
https://zdoggmd.com/monica-gandhi-5/
This one, too, on the stupidity of mandates.
I’m not going to claim to know on either. I said it’s probably true, but I don’t really know. I would imagine bacterial infections are similar but I have a hunch I’m wrong on that.
Slippery Slope Fallacy illustrated beautifully here.
Why not? He’s already explaining why “profit margins” may justify forcing people to be vaccinated against their will.
Everybody must get stoned.
Jerry, again, I appreciate your effort to respond quantitatively. I’m still trying to decide how to approach the numbers, so I’m going to think out loud.
Your comment #10 begins with this:
That assumption that every unvaccinated person will get it eventually makes me uneasy. First, I’m not sure how it relates to the hundred million or so who are estimated to have already been infected, some of whom are no doubt not vaccinated. Secondly, if almost every unvaccinated person is going to get it no more than once (because of subsequent natural immunity), then I want to divide the probability of getting it by the estimated lifespan of the average American, to get a likelihood that, in any given year, an unvaccinated person will become infected.
Then I want to multiply the estimated cost of an unvaccinated person being infected by the probability that, in any given year, that unvaccinated person will have become infected.
As regards children, it would be nice to know if natural immunity is superior to immunization as a mechanism for preventing future infection. While I remain steadfastly opposed to mandatory vaccination for philosophical reasons, I’m not opposed to vaccination itself — except possibly in the case of children, where I’m unconvinced that vaccination is superior to natural immunity.
The relative efficacy of past infection versus vaccination also interests me — and, again, particularly as it involves children. My kids all had chickenpox when they were young, but I understand that the varicella vaccine is now common; it’s mandated in my state for school children who do not have evidence of past chickenpox illness. I wonder about the long-term efficacy of the vaccine, and about the implications if it proves to be substantially less effective 30 or 40 years down the road than traditional childhood immunity from past infection, given that adult-onset chickenpox is, I think, generally more serious than the disease’s presentation in a child. And I wonder if something similar might be true of coronaviruses in general, and the Wuhan strain in particular.
I just read that 95 percent of Americans aged 65 and older have been vaccinated. That is much, much higher than I had thought.
They want to make it seem like most everyone is being delinquent. If that’s true, that’s a good sign and we can start taking away all the chains on the economy.
Several governors have already done that. All Republican, as far as I know.
Oh my naïve friend. Those chains will never be removed.
I mentioned this in one of the comments above, but it was in the middle of a bunch of mathematical explanation, so it would be easily missed.
The 2.6 transmission rate used in my calculation wasn’t the base transmission rate. It was my estimate of the Delta variant R0 (6.5), multiplied by my assumption about the percentage of the population that is unvaccinated (40%).
My quick research indicated that the original Covid R0 was estimated in the 2-3 range, with a large increase to the 6-7 range with the Delta variant. I used the midpoint of this 6-7 range for my calculation.
And yet it’s still possible that NONE of those numbers is actually correct.
My initial reaction was that this was too high of an estimate, HW, but I think that you’re (mostly) right.
The technical quibble is that the correct figure depends on what you mean by “vaccinated.” The CDC dashboard (here) reports that among Americans 65 and over, 95.5% have received at least one vaccine dose, and 84.3% are fully vaccinated.
Quibbles aside, that’s very good news. Better than I thought.