The public policy responses to this pandemic would make a whole lot more sense if intramuscular (humoral) vaccination actually prevented (or even significantly mitigated) the spread of sars-cov-2. Unfortunately humoral vaccination only starts the B cell to plasma cells training and generation of igG antibodies in the body serum to protect internal organs. Other immune compartments like the upper respiratory mucosa are not protected by serum igG antibodies. And the T cells trained by intramuscular vaccination are not tissue resident in the upper respiratory where they are needed to stop infection. They just do a pretty darn good job at preventing serious disease.
I wish governments of the world would heavily invest in the current and future intranasal sars-cov-2 boosters to prevent spread and follow up on the strong base of intramuscular body protection. I might not even be opposed to mandating intranasal vaccinations since they would stop spread. But this? This doesn't make a lot of scientific sense.
It is caused by three factors primarily: (1) extreme asymmetric testing rates between the two groups of all patients; (2) inclusion of <14 day or even <21 day post-vaccination into the “unvaccinated” column; and (3) in some cases even the “unknown vaccination status” is amazingly included into the “unvaccinated” column.
Number 2 essentially uses a proximal increase in vulnerability facilitated by the vaccination in order to sell more vaccinations. I am at a loss for words as to describing just how scandalous this is.
Obesity is a multifactorial societal problem with possible environmental and chemical factors, while covid can be vaccinated against with a simple jab.
If you look in to the mechanics of why people are refusing the simple jab, you'll find just as many complex societal factors, or maybe even more. Being unrelated to environmental or chemical factors if anything makes it more intractable.
Just to be more precise, unvaccinated people represent 26% of new hospitalizations in quebec, and 40% in ICU according to the official dashboard [1].
The efficiency against omicron is very limited, thus the huge deprivations we see here are politically motivated. I feel like I’m living a scary dystopia.
The current vaccinations are actually reasonably good at preventing Omicron hospitalizations, enough so to be worthwhile on an individual level anyway. The problem is that they're not 100% effective and if Quebec is anything like the UK, almost all the people who're actually at risk of being hospitalized are already vaccinated - there just aren't enough left that vaccinating the remainder will do much about hospitals being overwhelmed. From a social standpoint they aren't a problem. The only purpose of measures like these seems to be giving the voting public an enemy to blame when the hospital system is overwhelmed anyway, and making sure that enemy isn't the politicians who decided how the hospitals were funeded and run.
The vaccination rate of the vulnerable population is significantly higher than the vaccination rate in the general population. Your data helps prove that vaccines are quite effective.
26% of all new hospitalizations or "Covid" hospitalizations? In the States Covid is at most 30% of ICU and unvaccinated would be a small portion of that number.
People make a lot of decisions that increase their hospitalization odds. Drinking too much, eating too much, smoking too much, texting while driving, skateboarding...
How are you going to draw the line exactly? It's also contrary to the goal of healthcare being a human right.
>At some point the other 90% of taxpayers shouldn't subsidized the stupid decisions of the remaining 10%.
The idea that vaccinated people are an island unconcerned with the fate of the un-vaccinated or the spread of the disease breaks down in two places:
1. You can still die from it if you have the shot, you're just substantially less likely to.
2. Eventually, unless they're stopped, random mutations will create a virus that the vaccine doesn't help with at all.
Honestly, the fact that the virus is running around replicating in a way that's constantly exposed to anti-vaccination selection pressure (both from trying to jump out of the un-vaccinated reservoir to vaccinated people and replicating to a limited extent in the presence of vaccine-primed immune systems) is in some ways a worst-case-scenario. It would be hard to intentionally design a vaccine escape guided evolution experiment more effective than what we've created in the world today.
There are literally billions of unvaccinated people on the planet still, and there are unvaccinated wildlife hosts for Covid as well. It was naive to think that anything but this scenario would emerge.
So why not un-socialize the medical system. Charge a premium for unvaccinated individuals. If I follow this train correctly the process is to declare health a right and therefore something run by the government, and then to declare that because of that right your other rights can be taken away by the government.
This policy is the most flagrant targeted political attack. It has nothing to do with science. If you start restricting people’s ability to feed and clothe themselves you’ve crossed a very dark line.
The Quebec government's major concern is protecting their health care system. The Canadian health care system was quite stretched pre-pandemic, and it wouldn't take much to break it.
The goal at this point is less about preventing the spread than it is about increasing the vaccination rate to keep people out of hospitals.
Why are hospitals stretched thin? Nurses have quit, have been fired due to mandates, and have been prevented from returning to work due to infection. You need a passport to eat in a restaurant here. There are 30,000 pissed off truckers headed to Ottawa right now. They lost their jobs due to mandates. Your argument is that these things are smart decisions?
Covid vaccines did do a decent job at preventing spread in the original variants, and actually even now (unless I'm mistaken, it's hard to entirely keep up) the vaccines still cut the probability of you being infected at any point in time
Citation needed; just like how I can't claim without criticism that the vaccines may have lead to Omicron and other variants - where there is evidence that vaccinated people catch certain variants more than others, and there's also building evidence that you're more likely to catch COVID if vaccinated.
Edit to add [I'm rate limited from commenting further for the time being]: Look into the Great Barrington Declaration for reference to evidence for "you're more likely to catch COVID if vaccinated."
I almost didn't reply because an argument where being vaccinated makes it more likely to catch covid isn't really worth engaging in, but by the time you posted there was already a number of sources backing up my claim. For example: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116597 or for less scientific evidence. https://sf.gov/data/covid-19-cases-and-deaths where the second set of graphs breaks case rates out by vaccination status. I think you've been taken in by a conspiracy theory. It's an easy thing to do especially when people on the other side overplay their hands sometimes, but while one can reasonable argue about the usefulness of vaccinations for reducing spread. I think it's probably more marginal, but there. The idea that vaccination increased the risks of catching covid is pretty crazy. The Great Barrington Declaration appears to have been an alternative argument for managing the pandemic released well before vaccines existed. I can't find any reference to "you're more likely to catch COVID if vaccinated." and again every element of research and common sense I have points to the opposite being true.
I challenge anyone to find any statement, from any of the mRNA vaccine manufacturers, from any point in time, that claims the vaccines reduce transmission even a tiny bit.
It is well known that vaccination helps to reduce spread. It isn't perfect, but it is better than being unvaccinated.
The data is clear but you can also reason about this and feel like it is intuitively true - those that are vaccinated face better outcomes and are sick for shorter periods of time, the shorter period of time they are infected leads to them being unable to infect others for as long. It's pretty simple, really.
edit: multiple studies by scientists in different countries is more reliable than marketing text from any specific manufacturer. The data is available, just read the studies mentioned in the article I linked, or research on your own.
Shouldn't people be isolating regardless of vaccination status, so the argument that they're sick for shorter amount of time is redundant?
Why do we care about the virus spreading, it's always going to spread.. the concern should be giving the vaccine to the vulnerable that need it; the main benefit is reducing severity for them. For everyone else, its main benefit is securing revenue for the leading drug manufacturers.
If I'm unvaccinated and testing negative, then what is the problem?
This feels a bit like moving the goal post like a few different times. This is about the claim that vaccines don't reduce spread, that appears to be false. You're reacting like this is about if people have at least a moral obligation to get vaccinated. While I do think that's true, I think it's more productive to stay strictly to the facts.
Ok though if we're going to move the goal post.
> Shouldn't people be isolating regardless of vaccination status, so the argument that they're sick for shorter amount of time is redundant?
Maybe, but we all know that people aren't isolating every time they have cold symptoms, certainly not universally and probably not the people who aren't current vaccinated.
> Why do we care about the virus spreading, it's always going to spread.
That is only true now that we've given it time to become one of the most infectious viruses ever. A quick rollout of vaccines combined with a few common since interventions did (perhaps) have the potential to achieve herd immunity, but regardless the speed at which it spreads is of literally deadly importance. Overwhelming hospitals kills people (and kills people well before they are literally out of beds).
One of the single most important things we can do to slow the spread, is isolate when we're sick or in contact with someone that tests positive. If we did this one step effectively, it would reduce infection significantly. It's something done extremely well in countries like SK, Japan, China.
People who need to isolate should be sent care packages so they don't need to go out to the shop, they should update their status regularly and be given what they need to pay bills.
Not a shot, an intranasal spray. The leading candidates on clinicaltrials.gov are adenovirus carried spike protein based versions (I would rather have mRNA) but it should still do the job of getting upper respiratory resident T cells trained on sars-cov-2 epitopes.
The igA antibodies produced by trained mucosal resident B->plasma cells would stick around for an even shorter time than the igG antibodies do in the body serum. But the trained and resident T cells would be there to kill off infected cells right at the start instead of after days. So yeah, I think a sterilizing intranasal vaccine is possible but it likely won't depend on the igA antibodies generated. This follows with the studies of "super" immunity in rare special medical workers who never get sick with covid-19 and also never show antibodies for it. The nature paper seemed to show it was their upper respiratory mucosal T cells doing the job; having already been trained and cross reactive with other coronaviruses. But we can't all be lucky mutants and most of our upper respiratory systems will need some training.
I wish governments of the world would heavily invest in the current and future intranasal sars-cov-2 boosters to prevent spread and follow up on the strong base of intramuscular body protection. I might not even be opposed to mandating intranasal vaccinations since they would stop spread. But this? This doesn't make a lot of scientific sense.