Coronavirus. The n(in)th sequel.

[Zelig]

Children and COVID-19: State-Level Data Report

In states reporting, 0.00%-0.03 of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death

Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children

Of 3,105 deaths from all causes among the 12 million or so people under 18 in England between March 2020 and February 2021, 25 were attributable to COVID-19 — a rate of about 2 for every million people in this age range. None had asthma or type-1 diabetes, the authors note, and about half had conditions that put them at a higher risk than healthy children of dying from any cause.
Taken together, the unusually comprehensive studies could provide some comfort to parents who have been shielding children who they thought might be vulnerable to severe complications from COVID-19. “There’s a general feeling among paediatricians that probably too many children were shielded during the first wave of the pandemic,” Russell Viner, who studies adolescent health at the University College London, told reporters.

Natural immunity to covid is powerful. Policymakers seem afraid to say so.

More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June Cleveland Clinic study of health-care workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which none who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected. The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.

None of that is an argument against vaccination.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I would love to know what you are referring to here.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199711133372006

^ I cite this because the Nazis liked our earlier case law as a means to justify the actions that led to the Nuremburg code.

https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-supreme-court

In the infamous 1927 case Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court accepted the questionable “facts” presented in the lower court cases that a young Virginia woman named Carrie Bell hailed from a long line of “mental defectives” whose offspring were a burden on public welfare.

“The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes (Jacobson v Massachusetts, 197 US 11). Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a chilling opinion.

The Buck decision opened the floodgates and by 1930, a total of 24 states had passed involuntary sterilization laws and around 60,000 women were ultimately sterilized under these statutes.

Jacobson therefore shouldn't necessarily even be seen as good law at this point, considering what it allowed. But if you want to use it, here is the test:

Although government may act under conditions of necessity, its methods must be reasonably designed to prevent or ameliorate the threat. Jacobson adopted a means/ends test that requires a reasonable relationship between the public health intervention and the achievement of a legitimate public health objective.

Who gets to decide what is a "legitimate public health objective"? And can we demonstrate that a mandate which still (in practice) forces experimental drugs accomplishes that? At *best*, we are protecting people who can't get the vaccine with such a mandate. More likely, government causes more harm than if it does nothing other than making the vaccines available. It's doubtful mandates can survive scrutiny based on evidence. Given the threat profile in a world where vaccines are available to those who want them, we once again have a scenario where accepting vaccine mandate as legal is tantamount to admitting the policy is "sufficiently broad to allow forced mitigation of other risks at or above this threshold". Which is a hell of a lot of things.

US has other unsavory history of not providing full information to patients, related to above:

https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book-excerpts/health-article/forced-sterilization/
https://www.pbs.org/independentlens...n-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/

I do not anticipate another round of forced sterilizations this time, but broad powers of government control rarely lead to good things, and we are already observing ours do things that only months prior they lied and said they would not do. Meanwhile subhuman cretins outright suggest using violence to get what they want with increasing frequency. Gee, wonder how this ends.

None of that is an argument against vaccination.

Actually, for people who have had COVID already, it's a strong argument against vaccination, since the principle risk (catching COVID/being more likely than a vaccinated person to spread it) doesn't exist. The benefit of a vaccine is the protection it affords compared to not having it, which per the data is apparently almost nothing for people who've already had the disease.

 

[bernie14]

sure it is. Unless you have statistics for 5 and 10 year follow ups, if playing the odds and I was a parent of a healthy kid, I would rather they get covid.

 

[Zelig]

Actually, for people who have had COVID already, it's a strong argument against vaccination, since the principle risk (catching COVID/being more likely than a vaccinated person to spread it) doesn't exist. The benefit of a vaccine is the protection it affords compared to not having it, which per the data is apparently almost nothing for people who've already had the disease.

For a reasonable argument against vaccination, there needs to be a downside to vaccination.

sure it is. Unless you have statistics for 5 and 10 year follow ups, if playing the odds and I was a parent of a healthy kid, I would rather they get covid.

People aren't intuitively good at statistics or big numbers, and you're making a pretty easy/common mistake where you're misunderstanding the odds and not looking at them rationally. There's no scenario where 5 or 10 year follow ups would matter for safety. Vaccines can't work like that. Even in the worst case scenario where some mechanism we haven't thought of causes delayed effects (which is itself is vanishingly unlikely), we'd see the effect already given the number of people who've been vaccinated. (e.g. if you look at Kuru, with a 50-year incubation period, there are still a small number individual with very short incubation periods.)

An actual argument against vaccinating children is that it's not worth the $100 or so it costs per child. Losing $100 is a drastically greater loss than any potential harm from the vaccine.

 

[Drakle]

Children and COVID-19: State-Level Data Report

In states reporting, 0.00%-0.03 of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death

Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children

Of 3,105 deaths from all causes among the 12 million or so people under 18 in England between March 2020 and February 2021, 25 were attributable to COVID-19 — a rate of about 2 for every million people in this age range. None had asthma or type-1 diabetes, the authors note, and about half had conditions that put them at a higher risk than healthy children of dying from any cause.
Taken together, the unusually comprehensive studies could provide some comfort to parents who have been shielding children who they thought might be vulnerable to severe complications from COVID-19. “There’s a general feeling among paediatricians that probably too many children were shielded during the first wave of the pandemic,” Russell Viner, who studies adolescent health at the University College London, told reporters.

Natural immunity to covid is powerful. Policymakers seem afraid to say so.

More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June Cleveland Clinic study of health-care workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which none who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected. The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.

Round and round the nonsense that you and @TheMeInTeam spew goes. The entirety of your position rests on some nebulous cost/downside of the vaccine. But you don't actually have one, so you retreat back to whining about experimental (it's not, and it's been tested more than the vast majority of vaccines which are limited runs), or either vague or hysterical generalities.

The 2021 COVID Death Tool for Under 18s is already higher than in all of 2020. And kids can spread it. Lots of stories of COVID infections at the moment, have the vector be the kids coming home from school.

This natural immunity argument is brain dead. Anybody who thinks about it, know it is a beachhead to prevent vaccinations. Natural Immunity means having and spreading COVID. That means death. I lurk on anti-vaccination forums (way more so than here). They LOVE talking about getting natural immunity, or just claiming it as an excuse to browbeat shops, employers or governments into letting them flaunt the rules. We have just been through this pandemic, with an endless stream of sovereign citizen wingnuts claiming exemptions from mask mandates.

Having the Vaccine and Natural Immunity is not a either-or. You can get the vaccine, and then if you get COVID, you are far less likely to die, less likely to spread it further, and then you get natural immunity.

I want COVID-19 eliminated as a disease. That requires herd immunity, which means everybody gets on the boat.

Who gets to decide what is a "legitimate public health objective"? And can we demonstrate that a mandate which still (in practice) forces experimental drugs accomplishes that? At *best*, we are protecting people who can't get the vaccine with such a mandate. More likely, government causes more harm than if it does nothing other than making the vaccines available. It's doubtful mandates can survive scrutiny based on evidence. Given the threat profile in a world where vaccines are available to those who want them, we once again have a scenario where accepting vaccine mandate as legal is tantamount to admitting the policy is "sufficiently broad to allow forced mitigation of other risks at or above this threshold". Which is a hell of a lot of things.

You don't think 2000 deaths a day is a legitimate public health reason. Answer me yes or no point-blank. If it's yes, that is honestly deranged. If no, then your arguments falls apart.

I do not anticipate another round of forced sterilizations this time, but broad powers of government control rarely lead to good things, and we are already observing ours do things that only months prior they lied and said they would not do. Meanwhile subhuman cretins outright suggest using violence to get what they want with increasing frequency. Gee, wonder how this ends.

Amazing how quickly you can switch from hysterical Nazi comparisons, to calling people who want there to not be thousands of deaths a day, subhuman. Very nice.

The

I really wonder with you anti-vaxxers. Why the hell do you think Governments would sterilise all the nice, well adjusted, people, which includes nearly all leadership and skilled professionals and leave all the anti-vaxxers? And the third world. If the vaccine was intended for depopulation, Africa wouldn't still be single digits vaccinated, and the First World wouldn't be hoarding them.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

For a reasonable argument against vaccination, there needs to be a downside to vaccination.

1. Cost (as in, the monetary cost of producing and purchasing). Someone is paying this.
   
2. Discomfort/typically a day of feeling crappy, sometimes several.
3. Unknown long-term side effects in this case specifically.

2 and 3 are usually more than offset by the risk of contracting COVID (COVID feels worse than being vaccinated, and we don't fully know long-term COVID effects yet either). In some cases #1 also, though it depends on the person.

The math completely flips if someone has already had COVID, however. They have already paid the costs of having the disease, and don't receive clear benefits of vaccination while they still have some natural immunity.

Also, no. At baseline, vaccinations exist for a reason. Absent that reason, you do *not* need further downside to have a reasonable argument against them. The data does not appear to support being vaccinated in near-term if you've already contracted the disease.

There's no scenario where 5 or 10 year follow ups would matter for safety. Vaccines can't work like that.

While complications are extremely rare and vaccines are on balance much safer than foregoing them, even CDC and WHO don't seem to completely agree with you and occasionally link an uptick in some form of comparatively rare disease as a result of a vaccine (aka 1 in 100,000 more than usual get the disease or w/e).

An actual argument against vaccinating children is that it's not worth the $100 or so it costs per child.

In addition to the cost of having a perhaps not-so-compliant child during the appointment, the appointment itself, a maybe-crappy feeling child afterward, and the likelihood that immunity granted lasts less long and is less powerful than contracting it themselves.

Besides, it's not like we see 0 adverse events from COVID. They're just very rare. Rare enough that the threat from COVID is significantly higher, for adults. I'm not convinced the evidence supports that for children yet though?

But we're getting in the weeds a bit here. We'd need a damned good reason to take this decision away from parents, and we don't have that reason. COVID seems a minimal risk to children in general, or to anybody who opts for vaccination.

 

[bernie14]

For a reasonable argument against vaccination, there needs to be a downside to vaccination.



People aren't intuitively good at statistics or big numbers, and you're making a pretty easy/common mistake where you're misunderstanding the odds and not looking at them rationally. There's no scenario where 5 or 10 year follow ups would matter for safety. Vaccines can't work like that. Even in the worst case scenario where some mechanism we haven't thought of causes delayed effects (which is itself is vanishingly unlikely), we'd see the effect already given the number of people who've been vaccinated. (e.g. if you look at Kuru, with a 50-year incubation period, there are still a small number individual with very short incubation periods.)

An actual argument against vaccinating children is that it's not worth the $100 or so it costs per child. Losing $100 is a drastically greater loss than any potential harm from the vaccine.

if you didn’t understand my point, that’s on me, but the point was that the vaccination is essentially worthless and unnecessary in children, better used in the adult population.

Round and round the nonsense that you and @TheMeInTeam spew goes. The entirety of your position rests on some nebulous cost/downside of the vaccine. But you don't actually have one, so you retreat back to whining about experimental (it's not, and it's been tested more than the vast majority of vaccines which are limited runs), or either vague or hysterical generalities.

The 2021 COVID Death Tool for Under 18s is already higher than in all of 2020. And kids can spread it. Lots of stories of COVID infections at the moment, have the vector be the kids coming home from school.

This natural immunity argument is brain dead. Anybody who thinks about it, know it is a beachhead to prevent vaccinations. Natural Immunity means having and spreading COVID. That means death. I lurk on anti-vaccination forums (way more so than here). They LOVE talking about getting natural immunity, or just claiming it as an excuse to browbeat shops, employers or governments into letting them flaunt the rules. We have just been through this pandemic, with an endless stream of sovereign citizen wingnuts claiming exemptions from mask mandates.

Having the Vaccine and Natural Immunity is not a either-or. You can get the vaccine, and then if you get COVID, you are far less likely to die, less likely to spread it further, and then you get natural immunity.

I want COVID-19 eliminated as a disease. That requires herd immunity, which means everybody gets on the boat.



You don't think 2000 deaths a day is a legitimate public health reason. Answer me yes or no point-blank. If it's yes, that is honestly deranged. If no, then your arguments falls apart.



Amazing how quickly you can switch from hysterical Nazi comparisons, to calling people who want there to not be thousands of deaths a day, subhuman. Very nice.

The

I really wonder with you anti-vaxxers. Why the hell do you think Governments would sterilise all the nice, well adjusted, people, which includes nearly all leadership and skilled professionals and leave all the anti-vaxxers? And the third world. If the vaccine was intended for depopulation, Africa wouldn't still be single digits vaccinated, and the First World wouldn't be hoarding them.

I am not an antivaxxer and you are spewing authoritarian garbage.

 

[Gorbles]

sure it is. Unless you have statistics for 5 and 10 year follow ups, if playing the odds and I was a parent of a healthy kid, I would rather they get covid.

Nice to have a straight-up quote that in the theoretical universe where you had a child, you would "play the odds" with their life. Super nice.

I am not an antivaxxer

If you would rather give a theoretical child a potentially life-threatening virus (with complications we don't fully yet understand the ramifications of) rather than give them a vaccine, yes, you are using anti-xavver talking points. You may not consider yourself one, but that's a pretty irrelevant distinction.

I don't suppose you'd say the same for measles, mumps, rubella, tuberculosis, etc, et al? Generally speaking, this backlash against Covid vaccines based on misinformation tends to restrain itself because the Covid vaccines are "new", and "untested", and "nothing like them has ever been done before". Of which only "new" is accurate, but so are all vaccines once. Look up the history for the polio vaccine - you might learn something!

Unknown long-term side effects in this case specifically.

All vaccines theoretically can have side-effects. Various Covid-19 vaccines appears to be little different in that regard. There is nothing about this "case specifically" that suggests anything different. Time may tell something different (but given the scale of vaccination efforts, increasingly unlikely), but time also may not. If you're going to make a claim and not evidence in the slightest, that's on you.

No wonder people comment on you spreading anti-vaxxer garbage.

 

[The_J]

TBH, right now they shouldn't vaccinate children. The vaccines would be of more use in any developing country. They'd be way more beneficial there than here, vaccinating a group which has only very little risk of catching it.

Unknown long-term side effects in this case specifically.

It should be pointed out that "long-term side effect" is a really crappy name, since it doesn't mean what everyone thinks it means.
In general, vaccines should be out of the body at latest at the same time when a normal infection would be over. So in case of Covid that is not longer than 14 days, and I think the mRNA vaccines are gone after 3 days. "Long-term side effects" like after 10 years or so do not exist, since no vaccine will be left in your body.
"long-term side effect" means the side effects which are so rare, that you'll only catch them after a long time. e.g. the blood-clotting issue would be a long-term side effect (because under normal circumstances it would take way much longer to recognize something with an incidence rate of 1:50000). Only caught after a long time, because it's so rare. So the long-term doesn't refer to "long term for a person", but rather for "long term for the vaccine rollout".

So... nothing really to worry anymore in this case here .

 

[Gorbles]

TBH, right now they shouldn't vaccinate children. The vaccines would be of more use in any developing country. They'd be way more beneficial there than here, vaccinating a group which has only very little risk of catching it.

If the argument was "I'd rather vaccines be prioritised for developing nations / nations with low levels of overall vaccination", I'd say that's very fair. But that's not what I was replying to

 

[TheMeInTeam]

In general, vaccines should be out of the body at latest at the same time when a normal infection would be over. So in case of Covid that is not longer than 14 days, and I think the mRNA vaccines are gone after 3 days. "Long-term side effects" like after 10 years or so do not exist, since no vaccine will be left in your body.

If you only consider the mechanism of action of the vaccine itself, this is (broadly) true. But there's more that gets injected than that, and routine idiocy that results in recall is a small (but real) factor when evaluating these things.

So... nothing really to worry anymore in this case here .

We do have known side effects to COVID vaccines though, and while their risk is minimal it's not nothing, and it seems strange to push them on people who've had the disease already.

The opportunity cost argument is especially strong (giving vaccines to people with almost no measurable benefit is nonsense/straight up unethical when the alternative is giving them to unvaccinated people who want them).

 

[The_J]

Oh, I think there was recently an article in Nature Medicine (I'll dig for the link if I can be bothered), showing that people who've had the virus and one vaccine (or was it the other way around?) do have a more robust immune response than only vaccinated people, so there is enough evidence that it does help.


And regarding again the long-term side effects: There are no such effects (as in long-term in a person) known for of the established vaccines. While the mRNA vaccines use a different technology, their effect is the same, priming the immune system. I don't see that there could be any good reason why all the rest should suddenly work different.

 

[Narz]

Children and COVID-19: State-Level Data Report

In states reporting, 0.00%-0.03 of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death

Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children

Of 3,105 deaths from all causes among the 12 million or so people under 18 in England between March 2020 and February 2021, 25 were attributable to COVID-19 — a rate of about 2 for every million people in this age range.

The problem is that every parent seems to think their kid is 1 in a million.

 

[El_Machinae]

We definitely need a list of confounding factors when monitoring the voluntary control group!
Just think, how will I know if my (say) joint-pain in 10 years wasn't causally linked to the vaccine if I don't have a cohort against which to test the hypothesis?
We know we don't know the longer-term causal effects of the vaccination, and we'll never know the counter-factual for those effects ... unless we have a proper control group.

Like seriously, this whole thing is so politically divisive, it would be nice to have a clear answer in a decade.

[Full disclosure: I thanked a Boomer yesterday for being part of the control group who agreed to face the disease without protection ... the dissonance was hilarious to watch]
Oh, @Samson , TMiT referring to 'experimental vaccination' is when he's talking about mandates in regions that cannot provide sufficient approved doses and needs to supplement with EUA brands.

 

[Lexicus]

sure it is. Unless you have statistics for 5 and 10 year follow ups, if playing the odds and I was a parent of a healthy kid, I would rather they get covid.

You don't have your 5 and 10 year follow-ups for kids who get covid so I have to conclude that Drakle is right and this is just anti-vax bullfeathers. There is zero reason to suppose that the longer-term risks of contracting covid are preferable to the longer-term risk of being vaccinated, and plenty of reason to suppose the opposite.

TBH, right now they shouldn't vaccinate children. The vaccines would be of more use in any developing country. They'd be way more beneficial there than here, vaccinating a group which has only very little risk of catching it.

I mostly agree with this. Makes no sense to vaccinate the first world's kids before the third world's...anyone, but how else did we expect this to go? Just hope we don't piss the vaccine down the toilet by allowing the virus to mutate past it...

 

[amadeus]

Just think, how will I know if my (say) joint-pain in 10 years wasn't causally linked to the vaccine if I don't have a cohort against which to test the hypothesis?

I was genuinely curious about this, whether it was possible for a vaccine to have any sort of long-term side effect. I’m sorry that I’ve lost the link, but the conclusion was: no, once the vaccine is finished doing its job, it is eliminated from the body.

 

[El_Machinae]

I was genuinely curious about this, whether it was possible for a vaccine to have any sort of long-term side effect. I’m sorry that I’ve lost the link, but the conclusion was: no, once the vaccine is finished doing its job, it is eliminated from the body.

That won't be true, because it leaves a permanent immune imprint. Even casually, it has a 'long-term side effect' of boosting immunity. It's actually remarkably easy for a vaccine to produce long-term autoimmune conditions, if someone wasn't careful (or lucky) enough to avoid it. And then we'd have the counterfactual of the autoimmune damage from the disease itself. So (for example) if there was an autoimmune risk by some epitope on the spike protein, then you'd get a signal on that from both the vaccine and natural immunity, and one of those signals would be quantifiably worse*. There are many diseases that have a "two-hit" hypothesis, where an early insult compounds upon a later one to create the disease condition.

I mentioned auto-immune disorders months ago, by every analysis I've seen, the virus itself is vastly more risky.

Ideally, we'd be using one of the thousands of animal models of autoimmune disease to test this concern against. Of course, while autoimmune researchers are allowed to endlessly give green tea to mice to test its effects on autoimmune disorders, they're not allow to test the vaccine in any of their publishable models.



*And if we have an unvaccinated control group, we'll be able to run the counter-factual analysis more easily! I'll be able to look at a research paper in the future and either kick myself for today's confidence or smugly sit back knowing I made the right decision.

 

[Zelig]

If you only consider the mechanism of action of the vaccine itself, this is (broadly) true. But there's more that gets injected than that, and routine idiocy that results in recall is a small (but real) factor when evaluating these things.



We do have known side effects to COVID vaccines though, and while their risk is minimal it's not nothing, and it seems strange to push them on people who've had the disease already.

The opportunity cost argument is especially strong (giving vaccines to people with almost no measurable benefit is nonsense/straight up unethical when the alternative is giving them to unvaccinated people who want them).

In practical terms of speed of world vaccination, that opportunity cost doesn't exist in the real world.

Vaccinating people without bothering to check their immunity in the norm. If you step on a rusty nail and don't remember when you got your last tetanus booster, they just give you another one, they don't bother testing your immune response.

if you didn’t understand my point, that’s on me, but the point was that the vaccination is essentially worthless and unnecessary in children, better used in the adult population.

That's not a good argument against vaccines.

As they're effectively harmless, there is no good argument against vaccines other than the $100 cost to society being worse than the risk of covid to your children. Those might be winning odds, I guess you're free to gamble on that with your children.

 

[Narz]

I mentioned auto-immune disorders months ago, by every analysis I've seen, the virus itself is vastly more risky.

Perhaps.

But it's a known vs an unknown. And many people would prefer to face a known risk especially w it being highly politicized.

 

[Narz]

I don't get why platforms keep banning certain subjects, don't they realize that's just gonna feed into conspiracies and make things worse?