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COVID: 100% Vaccination Is NOT the Goal
Or at least shouldn’t be.
Reducing the spread and/or seriousness of the disease is the goal. Vaccines appear to be a tool that helps toward that goal. Yet the rhetoric about Covid vaccine mandates now treats vaccination itself as the goal. So confusing the goal and a tool intended to help achieve that goal keeps people and organizations from seeing other tools that might be useful to achieve the real goal, and causes people and organizations to pursue the tool regardless of whether it continues to contribute toward the goal.
I have often seen in the corporate world employees and departments get so focused on a particular tactic used to achieve a company goal that the employees come to think of the tactic as the goal, and lose track of what the real goal is. Besides becoming blind to possible alternatives to achieve the real goal, they get so wedded to the tactic that they fail to consider whether the tactic is still contributing to the goal, and run the risk of continuing the tactic even if it no longer contributes to the goal.
With respect to Covid, I fear that so many have become wedded to the tactic of 100% vaccination that they have lost sight of whether other tactics might be useful, and they are not considering whether the tactic is really accomplishing the goal of reducing the spread or seriousness of Covid. Natural immunity is being almost completely ignored. Treatments of the disease are being almost completely ignored. Health issues that suggest the vaccine could be high risk for some people are ignored by many of the vaccine demands. Employers and schools with populations at extremely low apparent risk of serious Covid consequences (the young and healthy) fail to consider whether vaccination will really reduce the spread or seriousness of the disease within their populations, and refuse to consider any balancing of the very low apparent risk of the vaccine with the very low apparent risk of the disease itself. 100% vaccination has become the goal.
If we could keep our eye on the goal of reducing the spread and seriousness of Covid and treat vaccination as A tool that seems to contribute to that goal, rather than treating vaccination as the end goal itself, we could have much more useful public discussions about how to achieve the real goal. Unfortunately, too many people and organizations in government, media, and corporate businesses have become wedded to vaccination as the only tool they will consider, and thus 100% vaccination has become the goal, instead of reducing the spread and seriousness of the disease itself. Thus, such useful public discussion of the goal of reducing the spread and seriousness of Covid no longer seems possible.
Published in Healthcare
When I looked up Ireland just now I saw 90% vaccinated. Nonetheless, people go in and out of the country. You can still catch it and pass it on if you are vaccinated.
I don’t care for it either, but the Supreme Court has not ruled it unconstitutional.
Except the “conspiracy theories” have an odd habit lately of turning out to be true.
It is undeniable that the vaccines greatly reduce the severity of infections. However, I expected that given the much higher vaccination rates among us old geezers that the age range of COVID hospitalizations would shift downward but no, that has not happened. Still old people mostly. That argues in favor of recommending vaccines and boosters for the elderly but does not really change the calculus for younger people. Vaccines don’t seem to work much past 4 months for infection protection in the elderly, Pfizer is worse than the others on that measure. Boosters do appear to greatly increase immunity to infection for a while.
For healthy people under 50, the risk of serious harm or death from the virus is vanishingly small and begins to approach the small risk from a vaccine adverse effect. But the two risks are both pretty small so it’s tough to compare. I am at the point where I don’t trust anyone’s figures on vaccine injury. For example, is this rather pessimistic take correct? Or this more measured article? And I trust the FDA not at all since the political fix is in to mandate vaccinating kids.
In much the same way that we have shortened the lives of many with the effects of economic damage, isolation and delayed medical treatment, we will now likely cause a number of gratuitous injuries or even deaths by overuse of the vaccine.
If we were seriously trying to protect the vulnerable, they would be isolated and vaccinated while everybody else gets exposed naturally. As a geezer (selfishly speaking) I am better off if everybody under 50 gets infected, gets much fuller, lasting immunity, and thus establishes major herd immunity plus more overlapping resistance to the next bug. That beats the hell out of an eternity of mandatory boosters.
Fair point but…I remember when seatbelt laws were a political football. People came up with rare edge cases as to why they shouldn’t be required to wear their seatbelt. I remain opposed to seatbelt laws, on principle. But I still wear my seatbelt.
This is false.
My father ended up dying from prostate cancer, but he had three incidents of serious traffic collisions where he would have died if he’d been wearing a seatbelt.
My virologists can beat up your virologists!
Yes! They are very similar reactions. Good connection.
I’m sorry to hear that and mean no disrespect but again I say: anecdotal and edge case. The vast majority of the time, you are better off to wear your seatbelt than not.
Or as my progressive friend told me recently during a discussion of mask effectiveness: “You need to find better experts.” Honestly that’s where we are at. Everyone has their source of Truth and they are sticking to it. So…this is fun…but unproductive. Has anyone, 100 comments in, changed their mind? Seen anything in a different light? Heard something they hadn’t already heard?
My impression so far is that the covid-vaccine-skepticals are more individualist. They’re less impressed by (even if true) the “low odds” of some adverse affect happening to X out of a million people, versus the likelihood of something happening to THEM in their unique and possibly very rare situation. Statistics aren’t just numbers, after all. They represent actual people.
I created this just for the occasion:
But what does “hospitalizations due to covid” really mean?
In the case of the people I know, it means they went to the hospital because they couldn’t breath. They couldn’t breath because COVID was damaging their lungs.
I’m individualist. I was initially quite skeptical of the vaccines. Then someone said something to me about the vaccines that didn’t sound right. So I started reading. And reading. And listening. And doing more reading.
I got the vaccine not because Fauci nor Trump said I should, but because all of my research tells me it’s the right thing to do.
I haven’t tried to formulate a precise definition or anything like that, but maybe that’s at least part of what I mean: people do “research” to find out about things in large groups of people, not about themselves as individuals.
Understanding how things impact large groups is how we determine risk. Any medical procedure has risk. How do we know what that risk is? Not by talking to people we know. That’s ok to some degree. When I got the old snip-snip, I asked a lot of guys about my age “What can I expect? Does it hurt much? How long does it take to heal?” If I talked to 5 people I get 5 people’s worth of answers. But if I want to understand risk, I need to look at a broader population. How often are there serious complications? How often does it not work? Etc.
I may be reading you wrong, here, but it seems to me like that formulation is wrong in your mind. That we shouldn’t do that. Correct me if I’m wrong. But if I’m right, tell me why that’s wrong?
It’s not “wrong” but it might tend to ignore other issues/concerns that don’t show up in research and/or statistics. Just one example, the fractional risk of maybe dying or becoming unable to work due to the vaccine, may be statistically very low for a group, but an individual might think “what happens to MY FAMILY if I die or can’t work?” And considering that the chances of CATCHING covid may also be a low number, followed by the low number of the results being serious or fatal; versus the 100% certainty of getting the vaccine IF you get the vaccine, also doesn’t really seem to fit into the “statistics” or the “research” certainly not at an individual level.
For example, I don’t interact with many people, I don’t take the subway or bus or train to/from work every day… my individual chances of getting covid are very low. And my health is good, so that risk of serious injury or death is low even if I did get it. But the statistics really don’t track individual risk of getting it, or of the individual consequences of getting it.
Someone has applied Camp’s First Law to a Ricochet question.
Spin, may G_d bless you.
When that happens, a little bell rings somewhere on Earth.
I don’t know what that means, but…ok. ;-)
That’s okay. I get that a lot.
I mean in terms of collecting information. Apparently it is possible, and it was standard practice last year, to crank up the covid test machines to give positives on a cantaloupe.
So, if I’m fine and just want to take a flight and get a positive covid test at, say, 44 cycles, is that a case? And if a person with prior heart disease has a second heart attack or breaks a leg, and comes back positive for a past covid illness, does that count as a case? And does this differ in different countries when making comparisons? My point is that thought there’s real data out there, much of it is fudged, and the rest is comparing apples and grapefruit.
I’ve wondered about this also, and consequently don’t make too many decisions based upon the numbers I hear. Especially when it comes to other countries.
I’ve won many a bet that the US does not have poorer longevity than other countries, as other countries treat “live births” different than we do.
I think you mean “infant mortality.”
There are few numbers that mean something to me: the age of a Covid in-hospital patient, the weight of same patient. The age and weight and number of comorbidities of Covid deaths.
Also interesting to me: are the mortuaries busy?
None of the answers to those questions have inspired me to worry one bit about Covid.
No, the bigger # that I find myself discussing is longevity. It is oft stated that the US spends X amount of bajillion dollars on healthcare and we have nothing to show for it, since our average longevity is worse than X, Y, Z country.
Well, if we’re counting every single live birth as an actual live birth, regardless of outcome, where in other countries you’re not counted as a live birth unless you meet certain weight and height standards, and actually survive for X amount of time, that’s going to have an effect on average lifespan.
Okay, I see what you mean. But some people use the same methods to claim that our infant mortality is worse.
The area that is spiking is 99.7% vaccinated.
Added:
As reported in the Irish Times, the nation’s establishment newspaper, two of the three most COVID-infected electoral areas in Ireland are located in the county “with the highest rate of vaccination in the country.” In Waterford, a remarkable 99.7 percent of adults over the age of 18 is fully vaccinated.
What does the Supreme Court care about anything that has to do with justice nowadays?
And you know how?