Something that following the progress of COVID vaccines really taught me is that vaccines have an important role in reducing the severity of a disease in addition to stopping them outright. I'd much rather get a mild flu than a moderate flu, let alone a severe one.
This seems to be particularly true for fast-acting viral respiratory diseases. Our immune systems seem to have soft biological limits on how well they can prevent them.
There’s a population factor and an individual factor. Let’s say it’s half effective. By vaccinating the population, the virus spreads more slowly, since half of people are dead ends. So you wind up with less cases in aggregate — and potentially exponentially less.
Part of the issue with fast-acting viral respiratory diseases seems to be that vaccines don't induce mucosal immunity: "Currently approved SARS-CoV-2 vaccines induce robust systemic immunity but poor immunity at the respiratory mucosa, meaning that they are highly effective against symptomatic disease but do not prevent viral transmission."
It seems like you got it in your head that the COVID vaccines would be a able to stop infection entirely, and were disappointed when it didn't for your family. It's not surprising that you did: a lot of the messaging at the time really counted their chickens before they hatched and painted it as a miracle prophylactic. In the real world, vaccines are a population-level tool with a range of outcomes. It's annoyingly hard to communicate that to the masses.
In practice, it turns out that fighting fast-mutating viral respiratory infections is hard to do. Our immune just aren't that great at it, and vaccines can only stack the deck there so much in our favor. I believe that the (observational, hard to rely on) evidence suggests that the covid vaccine reduced the incidence of infection, but only by about 25-50%. And that's good! That doesn't even cover the much more substantial reduction in serious outcomes! A world with the vaccines is unarguably less hostile than that without. But it's not a miracle, and it's always aggravating when people engage in the nirvana fallacy about it.
> It's not surprising that you did: a lot of the messaging at the time really counted their chickens before they hatched and painted it as a miracle prophylactic.
This is exactly the issue. There was so much just bad information out there.
> Our immune just aren't that great at it, and vaccines can only stack the deck there so much in our favor. I believe that the (observational, hard to rely on) evidence suggests that the covid vaccine reduced the incidence of infection, but only by about 25-50%.
I like to think this .
> A world with the vaccines is unarguably less hostile than that without. But it's not a miracle, and it's always aggravating when people engage in the nirvana fallacy about it.
It's really disappointing that attitudes towards COVID vaccines are spreading to other vaccines. It's sad when I hear parents talking about MMR and other proved vaccines using the anti-COVID talking pointes.
Most domesticated animals that I can think of do just fine when they're released into the wild. In fact, I don't think there's any domesticated animals out there that don't have a feral population running around somewhere.
I think you would be very surprised how quickly animals can adapt. Same for humans. Most of us have no clue how to live without modern conveniences. But I think if we took away these, a lot of people would adapt. A lot wouldn't survive, but a lot would learn quickly.
Additions like gypsum work in cases like this because they add permanent drainage to the soil. Adding organic matter also adds drainage, but microbial activity removes it over time and you end up with the same soil that you started with.
Anyone taking this should still develop an immune memory to covid. As I recall, even people who took monoclonal antibodies (that is to say, an antiviral where they literally inject functional anti-covid antibodies into your veins) developed some degree of natural immunity.
Agreed. The reports that VAERS provides can hint at rare adverse outcomes for vaccines, but it simply doesn't hold any significance compared to clinical trials. Comparing them is just outright false equivalence.
This seems to be particularly true for fast-acting viral respiratory diseases. Our immune systems seem to have soft biological limits on how well they can prevent them.