Yet, hundreds of thousands have died from attempts to acquire natural immunity. Truly, sad. And you can tell from his quote, that it is truly sad that folks did not take a vaccine that could have prevented the vast majority of those deaths.
Yet, the vaccine is better than natural immunity. And the best of all is natural immunity plus vaccine. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/hea.../covid-natural-immunity-what-you-need-to-know
The only people trying to get Covid are young people cause they don’t give a f @Os Trigonum Only suckers in the D&D think old suckers are trying to get it from going maskless at some lyrnd skynard concert
Actually, yes, we do. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1 https://www.reuters.com/business/he...vaccination-during-delta-surge-us-2022-01-19/
Like I said, we have plenty of human history to know how well natural immunity works. Because we lack the technology to perfectly stimulate the body's immune response doesn't mean we shouldn't have vaccinated against Covid.
Again there is plenty of evidence that there is natural immunity from getting infected. It still isn't clear how much you have to get infected and for someone young and healthy you might not get enough of an infection to lead to natural immunity. At the same time there is a much higher chance of getting very seriously ill from a natural infection than from taking the vaccine. So trying to get natural immunity from an infection is a crap shoot that could be 1. You get infected just enough to stimulate an immune response beyond the immediate infection. 2. You get infected but not enough to give you an immune response that last. 3. You end up on a ventilator.
It's not about "trying" to get infected. It's about how much the government interferes with everyone's personal freedom to foolishly pretend that it's even possible for people to keep "trying" their whole life not to get infected. It's endemic now. Everyone will get it in their lifetime, presumably many times, certainly without "trying" to get infected. Since that will happen anyway, it will be better to get it the first time while you are younger rather than older (and after you have been fully vaccinated, at least if you are 40 and above). If you are under 60, chances that you will end up on a ventilator aren't higher with Omicron than with the flu. If you already had it once, chances that you will die from it later are lower. Now, if you are already vulnerable because of pre-existing conditions or very old age, you want to try and protect yourself from getting it for as long as you can. But that's not really different from other viruses that are going around.
The only government that I can think of currently that is trying to keep people their whole life not to get infected is the PRC. If your argument is against things like vaccine mandates in countries like the US as you acknowledge the vaccine does provide a lot of protection. Given that the population is very diverse and it does make sense that government addresses that through large scale public health measures. That is really the only way you deal with a pandemic. Also these arguments about freedom, freedom without responsibility is anarchy. So yes if everyone behaved responsibly we wouldn't need things like mandates but as then again we wouldn't need things like drunk driving laws either.
That is a very black and white argument. I am pro vaccines, but against vaccine mandates. Government should normally not force a medical procedure on you even if it considers it "good for you", even more so when that medical procedure is a new one that only has provisional regulatory clearance. I consider that more of a red line even than just a slippery slope. Government can and should educate and encourage and promote - but it should not force a medical procedure on you. Freedom is not anarchy. Since these vaccines do not provide sterile immunity, the "behaving responsibly" argument doesn't really hold - these vaccines are about protecting yourself. Whether you protect yourself or not must remain your choice. "My body, my choice" - remember?
Vaccine mandates got rid of a bunch of kid killing diseases (not completely but it's so low most don't' think about it). I think if covid kills kids at a high rate, covid vaccine mandate would be a thing very few would argue against. But maybe not... maybe this freedom (which has two sides - the freedom to not be injected and the freedom to spread and kill others) is a new thing (really doubtful though).
As BA.2 subvariant of Omicron rises, lab studies point to signs of severity By Brenda Goodman, CNN Updated 1:06 PM ET, Sat February 19, 2022 The BA.2 virus -- a subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus variant -- isn't just spreading faster than its distant cousin, it may also cause more severe disease and appears capable of thwarting some of the key weapons we have against Covid-19, new research suggests. New lab experiments from Japan show that BA.2 may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as older variants of Covid-19, including Delta. And like Omicron, it appears to largely escape the immunity created by vaccines. A booster shot restores protection, making illness after infection about 74% less likely. BA.2 is also resistant to some treatments, including sotrovimab, the monoclonal antibody that's currently being used against Omicron. The findings were posted Wednesday as a preprint study on the bioRxiv server, before peer review. Normally, before a study is published in medical journal, it is scrutinized by independent experts. Preprints allow research to be shared more quickly, but they are posted before that additional layer of review. "It might be, from a human's perspective, a worse virus than BA.1 and might be able to transmit better and cause worse disease," says Dr. Daniel Rhoads, section head of microbiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Rhoads reviewed the study but was not involved in the research. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is keeping close watch on BA.2, said its director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky. "There is no evidence that the BA.2 lineage is more severe than the BA.1 lineage. CDC continues to monitor variants that are circulating both domestically and internationally," she said Friday. "We will continue to monitor emerging data on disease severity in humans and findings from papers like this conducted in laboratory settings." BA.2 is highly mutated compared with the original Covid-causing virus that emerged in Wuhan, China. It also has dozens of gene changes that are different from the original Omicron strain, making it as distinct from the most recent pandemic virus as the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta variants were from each other. Kei Sato, a researcher at the University of Tokyo who conducted the study, argues that these findings prove that BA.2 should not be considered a type of Omicron and that it needs to be more closely monitored. "As you may know, BA.2 is called 'stealth Omicron,' " Sato told CNN. That's because it doesn't show up on PCR tests as an S-gene target failure, the way Omicron does. Labs therefore have to take an extra step and sequence the virus to find this variant. "Establishing a method to detect BA.2 specifically would be the first thing" many countries need to do, he says. "It looks like we might be looking at a new Greek letter here," agreed Deborah Fuller, a virologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who reviewed the study but was not part of the research. Mixed real-world data on subvariant's severity BA.2 has been estimated to be about 30% more contagious than Omicron, according to the World Health Organization. It has been detected in 74 countries and 47 US states. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 4% of Americans with Covid-19 now have infections caused by BA.2, but many other parts of the world have more experience with this variant. It has become dominant in at least 10 other countries: Bangladesh, Brunei, China, Denmark, Guam, India, Montenegro, Nepal, Pakistan and the Philippines, according to World Health Organization's weekly epidemiological report. However, there's mixed evidence on the severity of BA.2 in the real world. Hospitalizations continue to decline in countries where BA.2 has gained a foothold, like South Africa and the UK. But in Denmark, where BA.2 has become the leading cause of infections, hospitalizations and deaths are rising, according to WHO. Resistant to monoclonal antibody treatments The new study found that BA.2 can copy itself in cells more quickly than BA.1, the original version of Omicron. It's also more adept at causing cells to stick together. This allows the virus to create larger clumps of cells, called syncytia, than BA.1. That's concerning because these clumps then become factories for churning out more copies of the virus. Delta was also good at creating syncytia, which is thought to be one reason it was so destructive to the lungs. When the researchers infected hamsters with BA.2 and BA.1, the animals infected with BA.2 got sicker and had worse lung function. In tissues samples, the lungs of BA.2-infected hamsters had more damage than those infected by BA.1. Similar to the original Omicron, BA.2 was capable of breaking through antibodies in the blood of people who'd been vaccinated against Covid-19. It was also resistant to the antibodies of people who'd been infected with Covid-19 early in the pandemic, including Alpha and Delta. And BA.2 was almost completely resistant to some monoclonal antibody treatments. But there was a bright spot: Antibodies in the blood of people who'd recently had Omicron also seemed to have some protection against BA.2, especially if they'd also been vaccinated. And that raises an important point, Fuller says. Even though BA.2 seems more contagious and pathogenic than Omicron, it may not wind up causing a more devastating wave of Covid-19 infections. "One of the caveats that we have to think about as we get new variants that might seem more dangerous is the fact that there's two sides to the story," Fuller says. The virus matters, she says, but as its would-be hosts, so do we. "Our immune system is evolving as well. And so that's pushing back on things," she said. Right now, she says, we're in a race against the virus, and the key question is, who's in the lead? "What we will ultimately want is to have the host be ahead of the virus. In other words, our immunity, be a step ahead of the next variant that comes out, and I don't know that we're quite there yet," she said. For that reason, Fuller says, she feels like it's not quite time for communities to lift mask mandates. "Before this thing came out, we were about 10 feet away from the finish line," she said. "Taking off the masks now is not a good idea. It's just going to extend it. Let's get to the finish line."
No freedom without responsibility is anarchy. So much of these debates are around "freedoms" without considering "responsibility". "Freedom" has never been about just do whatever you want with no consideration of others. This is especially true in the nature of a highly contagious disease. Government does exist to provide for collective safety and is even in the US Constitution that the government is there to provide for the common welfare. With a situation like COVID if your own actions had no bearing on anyone else then this wouldn't be such an issue. The problem is is that this is a contagious disease and your personal actions do affect others. Besides just transmitting the disease onto others we don't have unlimited medical resources and all of the talk of "flattening the curve" wasn't about stopping infections but about slowing the pace of infections so that our medical system could keep up. To your "sterile immunity" argument we have very good knowledge that even you agree with that the vaccines provide protection from getting severe disease. Under that argument then behaving responsibly would be if you didn't take the vaccine but got seriously ill you wouldn't go to the hospital. Given how crowded our hospitals are with unvaccinated people that doesn't appear to be the case. A key difference between the abortion debate because their the primary argument of "my body my choice". Whether you have an abortion or not it's not going to lead to someone else getting ill or hospitalized. Further the mandates are not ones that force everyone to take the vaccine. As they have been stated in the US you do have a right to refuse to get vaccinated things like working any job you want though isn't a right, nor is it a right to eat at a restaurant or fly on a plane. Those are privileges and they are already circumscribed in many ways. Going to school while some consider that a right it is a right that is already accepted that it is circumscribed. IN fact most US school districts already require vaccinations of things like measles and mumps already. Finally this whole argument about that these vaccines are new is a red herring. Yes the vaccines are new because the disease is new but at one point every single vaccine was new. The polio vaccine came out in 1954 and within a generation polio was almost eradicated. Also every year we have new formulations for the Flu. Also just because the vaccines were new doesn't mean they didn't go through rigorous testing including Phase III trials. The Pfizer vaccine had one of the larges Phase III trials with hundreds of thousands taking it before it was released. By now hundreds of millions around the World have taken the vaccines.
