If we made policy decisions based on a single paper, we'd all be taking HCQ and Ivermectin. And that study's confidence intervals are large. The upper bound looks like it could be in the same range for unvaccinated people.
They're apples and oranges, really. The best course of action to get a vaccine for the preventative effects and an antiviral if one has a breakthrough infection.
I mean i actually get that…you don’t want random casual viewers accidentally seeing graphic images. Even an NSFW tag (which in reddit is often abused on definitely not-NSFW content) won’t deter them.
IMO as long as reddit still has those images, even if they’re behind subreddits which proclaim “WARNING: SEE AT YOUR OWN RISK”, that’s good enough.
In certain countries having a specific flag come up on your reddit feed is dangerous. So NSFW applies to things like that too. I agree with your opinion on how reddit deals with NSFW issues.
Oh sure-- if he got infected, we'd throw the kitchen sink at it-- remdesivir, monoclonals, etc. A "better remdesivir" which is supremely effective would improve the risk picture a lot.
VAERS reports can (and should) be done for any death following vaccination, whether or not anyone thinks that death was vaccine-related. There's no evidence that the "13k+ COVID-19 vaccine related deaths" are anything of the sort; VEARS is simply not the sort of scientific study that can provide that sort of evidence. VEARS can throw up red flags for safety halts and further study (as happened with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine), but that's it. It's definitely, definitely not some gotcha data-point for you to wave around to attack the vaccines as unsafe.
"COVID Cases" turns out to be anyone with covid who might be in the hospital for anything else. COVID deaths have included people "greedily" the same way. Shouldn't the vaccine be counted by the same standards and the same statistical methods used?
Comparing Covid statistics to VAERS is comparing apples to oranges.
I completely reject your premise that the covid statistics are shoddy. It's easy to confirm a covid case. You do a PCR test, and if you get a positive back it's covid, end of story. It's admittedly a bit trickier to attribute a covid death... but not really. If a covid patient dies of a heart attack, it could be bad luck, or it could be the disease that coagulates its victims' blood. But usually it's pretty obvious. Someone dying of pneumonia and/or a cytokine storm isn't exactly subtle. There's nothing in the overall death statistics that suggest that the obvious covid deaths are anything but the obvious.
By comparison, establishing a casual connection between a vaccine and any adverse side effects is incredibly difficult, simply because they're so rare. Of the 44000 people in the Pfizer trials, literally none of them died of covid OR the vaccine, vs 15 covid deaths in the unvaccinated control group. And VAERS is just a safety net in case something small-but serious slips through the statistical power of a full scientific study (as happened with the J&J vaccine).
I fail to see how this is relevant. Obviously some set of people will test positive after they've been hospitalized for other causes, and another set will have mild cases that don't progress to the serious your-lungs-no-longer-work stage. The total cases and hospitalizations are still good general metrics to gauge the severity of the crisis and balance risks. If statistics didn't have nuances we wouldn't need statisticians.
Regardless, your objection is irrelevant to the comparison you've tried to make with VAERS. The COVID statistics are a sweeping accounting of common, obvious events that are easy to verify. VAERS, by contrast, is designed for hinting at the sort of literal one-in-a-millon range events that controlled medical trials can sometimes miss, where determining cause and effect is difficult. They're different tools for different jobs. Trying to apply standards from one to the other is simply spurious.
I agree, easy, free access to rapid tests would be fantastic. They're pretty prone to false results, though, and are no substitute for vaccination.
As for giving exemptions for prior infection, there's no real reason to. Prior infection gives decent immunity, but a vaccination on top of it gives great immunity. It's a small net positive, but anything helps.
Getting a vaccine after recovering from covid would be along the lines of getting a booster shot. You'd develop some new antibodies, and strengthen your immune memory for the disease. It'll offer you better protection no matter what.
mRNA vaccines deliver mRNA to the target cell, via merging a lipid bubble into the cell membrane and dumping the contents into the cytoplasm. The mRNA is then translated into a specially designed variant of the spike protein that is embedded facing out of the cell membrane. As it happens, the physical details of embedded protein translation means that the spike proteins never see the cytoplasm at all, being restricted to the endoplasmic reticulum.
