CORONAVIRUS VACCINATIONS

[jirskyr]

In terms of COVID - related deaths, I feel those people have had several co-morbidities anyway and I’d be keen to look at the data of the amount of people passing away each year from normal flu vs COVID.
Just thinking out loud here but maybe those at risk such as the elderly, COPD patients and the immuno suppressent patients, the vaccine could be heavily recommended to them so the chances of them catching it are reduced rather than the other 90% of the population for which the symptoms are that of a serious flu. They have more to gain from the vaccine than the otherwise healthy.
And then once we know more and more in the next 5 or 6 years, the use can becomes widespread.

As @Cultured_Bogan says above, of course comorbidities are involved. Some countries are looking at overall death rates pre- and post-COVID, to try and estimate how many "extra" deaths have been caused.

Noting, again as CB said, this can be somewhat misleading because the conditions under which COVID is operating is not just causing extra deaths, it is displacing other common forms of transmitted disease. In other words, it's not just how many MORE deaths COVID has caused compared to other infectious disease, it's the consideration that other infectious diseases are down (due to social distancing) and COVID has both swallowed that drop then added more deaths than normal.

There's no point comparing flu and COVID, as flu is widespread in the community with hundreds (or more) of years of herd immunity, whereas COVID is entirely novel.

And then your comment re focusing on high-risk and not healthy for the initial vaccine; honestly it seems you really don't understand how vaccines work. Yes it can be more critical for elderly and immunocompromised, but that doesn't change the fact that if a huge proportion of the (normally) healthy population is at high risk of contracting COVID, even if most of them survive, it puts the vaccinated cohort at greater risk.

The whole idea of vaccination is not to just have increased personal protection against disease, it's about driving down the overall community caseload such that all persons, and particularly the high-risk, aren't exposed to a huge number of cases, which drives risk of contagion.

Rubella is a very good example. The outright death rate from rubella is very small and most people experience only very mild symptoms. However rubella is extremely dangerous to pregnant women and causes a large increase in both death or rubella syndrome in exposed neonates.

So you don't take the MMR vaccine for rubella for yourself, you take it for the community.

And most folks know, if they come into contact with rubella, it's very serious to avoid pregnant women.

But it seems the same folks aren't so fussed about COVID exposure in the elderly or compromised. Imagine being a poor chemo patient right now in the US and trying to both deal with your therapy and basically avoid every other human because COVID is moving through the "healthy" population like wildfire.

The last point I'll make is that flu vaccine can both prevent disease and lower the intensity of disease. I don't know if there's any evidence of this yet for the COVID vaccine, but the vaccine may actually reduce the number of serious cases worldwide, both reducing risk of death due to disease and reducing strain on the health system.

 

[jirskyr]

So many opinions. Get it or don't.
Just like politics and religion, you will never change someone else's view.

Ah unlike religion, science is based on repeatable evidence. People's views change all the time, that's how science works, you develop a best possible explanation for the data, and you revise your hypothesis when new data becomes available.

It kills me that people think vaccination is an opinion-piece, but they'll use a mobile phone or accept headache pills, as if science wasn't responsible for all of those miracles.

So yes it's your body and your choice, but there are choices that go against evidence.

 

[Papacito]

The medications for the diseases you described are a necessity to help them live, the risk taken is huge but the benefit is huge too.
COVID on the other hand, the virus itself we haven’t been able to decode the DNA of it properly. We don’t know the long term implications on those who even have the virus. Compare that to DPT, small pox etc where the death rates were astronomical. The disease HAD to be stopped, whereas with COVID, the biggest issue is the economical impact as death rates are minuscule.
As for making COVID vaccine compulsory, I’d say that I’d be happy for people to have a choice whether they want to be injected with it or not. Those who choose to (like myself) are choosing so that I don’t infect other and don’t get infected myself. If you’re worried about catching it, then get the vaccine. It shouldn’t be up to the person next to you to get vaccinated.
I am happy with a health discussion and you seem to have a much better experience than I but at the end, I’m just trying to use common sense and understand people’s rights and apprehensions. The disease itself isn’t even 1 year, what if 5 years down the track those who have had the disease previously develop some type of demyelination or neuropathic disorders that we didn’t know of? All of it needs to be taken into consideration before vaccines are made “compulsory”.

A democratic government should not make a vaccine compulsory, it's unethical. But they can heavily incentivise the shot.

I expect, initially, that non-vaccination will mean you cannot travel internationally. Eventually however there might be a fairly significant social stigma associated with not being vaccinated, because of how damaging the pandemic is. This may also apply to schools, businesses, day care etc., where they cannot take the risk that non-vaccinated folks bring disease cases into their institution.

I think you undersell the seriousness of COVID as a condition. You are firstly correct that we don't know long-term outcomes of having the disease and it may have later significant impact on quality of life and ultimate mortality. The death rate is modest, yes, but when the entire human population is disease naive 12 months ago, even 1% death rate is a staggering destructive outcome - you are talking 70M deaths in however many years it takes the entire population to become exposed.

In the US alone, COVID-related deaths have eclipsed many very damaging national events such as WWI, Vietnam, Korean wars. COVID-related deaths have almost matched total combat deaths from WWII, which is horrendous to contemplate, given that WWII was so destructive and still it took 4 years to rack up that combat tally.

So I feel ultimately the risk in non-vaccination for COVID is huge. Not at a personal level, but at a global level. You can't catch cancer or heart disease, so those are individual challenges.

In terms of COVID - related deaths, I feel those people have had several co-morbidities anyway and I'd be keen to look at the data of the amount of people passing away each year from normal flu vs COVID.

Just thinking out loud here but maybe those at risk such as the elderly, COPD patients and the immuno suppressent patients, the vaccine could be heavily recommended to them so the chances of them catching it are reduced rather than the other 90% of the population for which the symptoms are that of a serious flu. They have more to gain from the vaccine than the otherwise healthy.

And then once we know more and more in the next 5 or 6 years, the use can becomes widespread.

I don't agree with putting the onus on those that have less to lose than those that have more to lose.

Not saying this to poke fun at you but, I reckon it's more reliable to get the real experts to "look at the data".

My mother in law also claims to have "looked at the data" and has drawn her own well meaning conclusions. But she's a community worker with no scientific training.

Whereas my ex boss who has "looked at the data" and has been quoted in the media has a phd and about 30 years of daily experience in infectious disease research.

The vast majority of genuine experts all draw the same conclusions around the importance of vaccination and other risk mitigating approaches across most of the population. Not just the sick.