To Covid Vax or Not to Covid Vax

@SW-User So this means that when I don't get vaxed and get the virus then it makes a stronger virus??? Is this what is up with the Flu? It has been mutating forever.

@Dainbramadge It's possible that the virus could get stronger if left unchecked. The difference with the flu virus is that we've lived with it for a long time, and have some level of immunity that we don't have yet with covid. I don't know what the recommendations are for flu vaccination where you are. Here in the UK, it is typically recommended for older and susceptible people who may have worse outlook if they get flu. The hope would be that we get to the same position with covid.

@Dainbramadge The contrast between personal health & public health perspectives is interesting. I'm gonna cut my quick & dirty public health blurb here:

[b]Time to explain how disease elimination works.[/b] You need to understand there are two different perspectives here - personal health and public health.

[u]Personal[/u] health asks: what does this vaccine guarantee? Answer: depends on several things, including how good your immune system is. That's why no vaccine is 100% effective.

[u]Public [/u]health asks: how can we save lives and stop the spread? Public health tracks a variable they call R, the disease reproduction rate - if person A gets it, how many more people will person A infect. Really, there's R_0, R_effective, a bunch of subscripted R variables.

Anyway, R > 1 means the disease is multiplying, growing in the population, R < 1 means it's dying out. So how to reduce R? Distancing, masks, letting the disease run rampant thru the population, vaccination, all these methods reduce R. The key is to get R<1.

So what should a public health department do???
If you can release an 75% effective vaccine in combination with distancing, that may be enough to drive R to be less than 1. Then just wait for the disease to die out. Problem is nobody is willing to wait long enough.

Like I say, smallpox was 95% effective. Polio was 90% effective, and the Gates Foundation had it eradicated in almost all areas before Covid came along (I believe these days Russian prisons are the best place to catch polio).

We don't need a perfect vaccine, we just need enough people vaccinated and a measure of patience. But we don't seem to have either.

@Stereoguy From the data I've seen, vaccination reduces the chance of getting covid. If you do get infected it reduces your chance of serious illness, if you do develop serious illness it reduces the chance of death.

@ElwoodBlues My hat is off to you with this comment. Very informative in a very laymen fashion. I had to look for the < > difference before i could understand the R stuff but very well explained.
Now I am up to speed on most of what you have written but how will Covid be any different than the Flu??
The vax has never gotten rid of it.

@SW-User I do see where this Virus hit us head long in full strength. I understand that it is going to take a bit to catch up to it like we are with the flu. But I am still looking at it like the new Apple phone. They rushed the one out and the damn things were blowing up and catching fire. LOL. I just figure I will wait til they get it all ironed out before I throw my hat in that ring.

@Dainbramadge I'm not a physician but I've had a lot of spare time to study this stuff! Short answer - I think the long term hope is that Covid becomes only as deadly as a mild flu (20K deaths per year in US).

I just looked up flu variants:
[quote]Influenza A is divided into subtypes according to their hemagglutinin (H) and neuramidase (N) proteins. There are 16 H and 9 N variants, but each virus has only one H and one N variant.[/quote]
What's curious to me and I don't understand is that a different flu variant can often escape our antibodies pretty well, although (guessing here) it could be that one set of antibodies protects against several flu variants. I think flu is more flexible than coronaviruses that way.

One big difference between flu & covid is that there was no population in the world that had any covid antibodies. So it was running like wildfire in the early weeks, doubling infection numbers every 5 days. That was when "flatten the curve" was our only tool - try to prevent hospitals from overflowing.

Antibodies against Covid seem to be at least partially effective against variants, and now (at least in the US) a large majority have antibodies. That seems to mean that more and more cases are breakthrough cases, and the breakthrough cases tend to be milder. If Covid is 20X deadlier than the flu, and vaccines reduce the death rate by 12X (both very rough numbers), then Covid is becoming more flu-like in our population.

I'll leave you with this slightly old graph of US infection & death rates comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated.

@Dainbramadge I can understand people being concerned. I've worked in this field for over 35 years, both in R&D and regulatory approval. I don't have any concerns over safety, I think on balance my risks from catching covid are much higher than my risk from the vaccine.I don't think the process has been rushed. Accelerated is probably a better description. The pharma companies have been able to throw everything into development and testing, in the knowledge that the costs will be covered. At the same time, regulators have reviewed data almost in real time, rather than as a final submission. This doesn't mean there will be no adverse events, there always are. These are always monitored throughout a drugs lifetime, and sometimes safety issues are identified. There always needs to be a benefit to risk assessment for all medical treatments.

@ElwoodBlues Nice information. Actually very helpful unlike a few who chose to be argumenitive and insulting simply because I asked a question.
Response's like this one and most others is what I was looking for so thank you.

@SW-User Now I will add, if it isn't very apparent at this stage of this post, I didn't do any research. I just saw how it began and had my doubts on how good it could possibly be. That's kind of all.
Thank you for your input as well. This post attracted some meanies but over all it was very productive.

@Dainbramadge I have tended to avoid posts on covid because of the meanies, on both sides.

@Dainbramadge One other point: so far we've been comparing diseases purely by death rate, which is a pretty good start. But with Covid there's also "Long Covid," which doesn't actually have a definition, but is worth taking into consideration.

Something like 20% to 25% of Covid survivors have a few symptoms which persist weeks or months after the fever etc is gone. Sometimes it's extended loss of taste, sometimes shortness of breath or "brain fog." Avoiding Long Covid is another valid reason to get vaccinated.

What about Long Covid in breakthrough cases where a vaccinated person gets Covid anyway? Vaccines don't appear to significantly reduce Long Covid in breakthrough cases (the vaccine still reduces symptomatic infections by 5X though). https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20211028/uk-study-says-vaccinated-people-can-get-long-covid

@SW-User The thing is, everyone is so focussed on the short term time frame of this pandemic but no one seems to be discussing the long term, what exactly do these vaccines offer us in the long term? I fail to see any benefit, the rate at which this virus is mutating we will need to be vaccinated every 6 Months with a new vaccine, does this seem viable and healthy to you?
In the super long term (Talking on a species level here) It’s actually a detrimental to us, we are weakening our immune system as a species by relying in vaccines instead of herd immunity, we are trying to lock mother nature into a cage yet we somehow do not realise that it is impossible to do this forever, it’s like locking a tiger in a cage made from sticks, eventually that tiger is going to escape and when it does…We all need to look out.

@Unity There's nothing new about multi-dose vaccines. By 1980, all US states had adopted requirements for mandatory MMR vaccinations for public school; these days it's a 2-dose regimen. The Tdap vaccine - a follow-on the early childhood 5-dose DTaP - was released in 2005, and, like MMR, is required in all US states for public school.
[b]https://www.healthline.com/health-news/vaccine-mandates-in-schools-arent-new-theyve-been-used-since-1850#A-history-of-vaccine-mandates-in-schools[/b]

All these years of multi-dose vaccine mandates (6 vaccines, 3 per shot, 2 shot & 5 shots regimens) for children have me wondering: why has vaccination against a 7th disease, Covid become politicized while the first 6 were fine? What's going on here?

Fatality rates? @ElwoodBlues

@Unity Fatality rates among Covid vaccine refuseniks are about 1% of when infected.

@ElwoodBlues That depends on age and other risk factors.
That rate goes up significantly if severe case in 65 and over with other factors.

Could understand those concerns better earlier on. The vaccines have given to hundreds of millions of people by now. Historically severe effects with vaccines arise with 2-3 months of treatment. They are effective enough at preventing death that you are 11 to 14 times more likely to die of severe covid if unvaccinated.

You really think the safety risk of the vaccines are higher than that severe covid?

@SW-User i am glad to read that some one here knows what they are talking about. the mutations are from it not being halted right away. and it could mutate into something even worse.

@Stillwaiting [quote]You really think the safety risk of the vaccines are higher than that severe covid?[/quote]
No, I was pointing out just the opposite. Refusing the vaccine has high risks; that's what I said.

@ElwoodBlues Sorry .. I meant to reply to a different comment than yours, phone was dropping on and off and I didn't catch it.