https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-kissing-odd-idUSTRE53R4TO20090428
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-flu-france-flights-sb-idUKTRE53S2Z720090429
True, but that’s in hindsight. At the beginning it sounded much more like the beginning of Covid. N95s and hand sanitizer were selling out everywhere.
The legal precedence that is brought up supporting vaccine mandates by states is a 1905(?) case where Massachusetts imposed a vaccine mandate vs. smallpox. It was challenged and backed up by the US Supreme Court.
I disagree, but regardless, the fact is back then the US never recommended vaccination of the total population, so there was little/no pushback. The anti’s remained happy.
Aargh. Sometimes I think that Ed Yong, as helpful a sci writer as he is, would be best used as a sci editor at the Atlantic, which seems to be sprouting a whole stable of science writers who do sloppy and misleading work. Work that people trust and walk away from with “oh, I get it now,” because the sentences are in English, not science, and sound intelligent.
The key thing in here is true: If you don’t get it, you can’t spread it. That’s what makes the vaccine – any vaccine – such a terrific thing from a public health point of view. Vaxed people, much less likely to get it.
However.
First, The infectivity-time study he cites should be thrown out the window as a thing to rely on. Why?
a. n is too small. 167 patients is a preliminary study and tell you that a thing might be so, needs more study.
b. this is a preprint, not peer-reviewed yet.
c. …and this is unfortunate, but it’s a Chinese source, Chinese scientists at a Chinese health institution. China has had serious problems with fraud in publication and incentivizing scientists to get in hard on the publishing game that, established in the West, is the gateway to scientific legitimacy and money. It’s extremely unfortunate and harms the reputations of good Chinese scientists who do good clean work. But it’s a thing that has to be taken into consideration, particularly in papers that haven’t yet been reviewed.
For what it’s worth, I’ve also read preprints that track viral load in vaxed v. unvaxed infected patients, and shown that the majority of the vaxed will have a sharp and early spike that goes as high as the unvaxed, but that most of the vaxed will then see the load drop off again sharply…and some will not, some will see it drop off much more slowly.
Second, from a personal point of view, not a public-health one, when you’re hanging out with vaxed friends, the picture is different. First, the stakes are higher: it’s your health and wellbeing. For you, it’s a situation much closer to a binary: if you get bad sick, it’s not “some number in a population are sick,” it’s a catastrophic thing in your life.
While your vaxed friends are much less likely to be infected than your unvaxed friends are, you have no way of knowing whether any of them happens to be infected, meaning that the odds game isn’t enormously relevant in an individual-person way, only in a 30,000-ft public-policy way that’s looking at a population as a whole. Or even an ER way, where you’re seeing hundreds of people come through in a week and there’s a big difference between a flood of covid patients and a trickle, and while you acknowledge that the trickle patients have it bad, the ER doesn’t have it bad.
You also cannot know which of your friends is lying about being vaxed unless you have a vax-card party. As someone who used to tell men that there wasn’t going to be no sex unless I saw that yellow HIV-negative slip, I can tell you that the level of chutzpah required to demand evidence socially is pretty unusual.
Bottom line: unless you think you can afford to get covid, get together, but keep wearing the best mask you can get, and yes that includes when people are eating. If you have particular vulnerabilities (older, preexisting condition, no backup, unusual responsibilities), don’t get together indoors.
eta: this is a sloppy-editing thing on the Atlantic’s part, but the scientists were not “prescient” when they warned against the CDC messaging, unless you mean that in the most literal possible way: pre-knowing, before any sort of knowledge is possible. They were saying, like good scientists: Nobody knows, full stop, stop saying you do. There was no scientist fact-dowsing going on there.
Yes, get the shot. You will lose antibodies over time, and there is conflicting evidence in the studies: I’ve seen studies that say the antibody response you get from vaccines does a better job than natural antibodies (from getting sick) do, also studies that say the opposite. My guess is that the time from vaccination and/or illness has something to do with that conflict. Bottom line: get as much immunity as you can. The vax will help you in that.
It’s quite a personal point of comparison for me, since I got it, despite vaccination (remember, at the time H1N1 was new, not covered in the vax). Never been sicker, never been sicker longer. Happened to run a 10K the day I fell ill – finished slow and feeling like hell – and for weeks afterwards, as I just lay on the sofa zoned out with flu, I felt like my quads were burning up. To this day, when I get sick, I get residual nerve tingles in my quads. It was a month before I could really get back to work, more like 2.5 before I was back to anything resembling normal. It was a fair disaster for the single mother of a young child (who also got the flu but recovered quickly). Fortunately, I’d gone back to school and the institution had already made changes to the student insurance to suit ACA, so I had decent insurance and loans to fall back on. If I hadn’t, we’d have been in bad trouble.
If it were slotted into a covid scale, that would’ve been a mild illness not requiring hospitalization.
In 2009, there was the seasonal flu vaccine which included the predicted strains, but not the new strain that caused so much concern then. Special flu vaccines for the new strain was made, but they came months later (the egg-based manufacture of flu vaccines was/is slow, although there are now non-egg flu vaccines available), and they were in shortage as people lined up whenever and wherever they were available. The 2009 new strain and its variants have been part of seasonal flu vaccines since then.
Still, flu vaccine in general does not have high uptake, probably because people disregard the flu as serious (people call all kinds of minor feverish illnesses “the flu”, so they do not associate the (real) flu with a potentially serious sickness).
There’s a whole “I’m fine” ethic that seems to have an underlying idea that if you allow for the possibility of not being fine, you’re culpably insecure, and it’s not restricted to health. In the last few years I’ve had various tradesmen comment on how well-maintained my house is. My house is not well-maintained; it’s just maintained. Things break, I fix them, or if they’re obviously aging and near breaking, I fix or replace them. This turns out to be unusual: apparently it’s normal now for people to buy a new house and then just use it till it doesn’t work anymore and move on. People seem to be treating their bodies the same way.
Oh, my sweet summer child…
You may be confusing possession with consumption.
CDC voted to give boosters to those over 65, and those over 18 with underlying conditions, but not those with high risk jobs.
Heavens only knows why.
prolly bcos their is no scientific studies to support that position.
(yeah, common sense says that health care and front line workers should be able to move up in the queue, but the CDC’s decision was based on the Pfizer application and hard data. And don’t forget, that a ~quarter of HC workers don’t even have one jab yet.)
What you are seeking is a policy decision, but not one based on ‘following the science’.
An utter absence of common sense. I am just glad anyone over 18 who thinks they are at risk has access now if they have a "condition ", and no one is allowed to ask what that condition is. The entire ER department at our local hospital is getting boosted.
Just more confusion…a complete inability of the FDA, CDC, and executive branch to get their acts together. Here’s a booster communication timeline. I would laugh, but of course it.is.not.funny.
Entire thread is interesting:
Does it even matter? Anyone who wants one can go get it. CVS and Walgreen’s admitted they aren’t asking for proof. I know of several people who already have - they just lied and attested that they were immunocompromised.
It does matter, because some people do try to follow the ‘rules’.
The confusing and confounding narrative also serves to increase distrust in these government entities, and cast doubt on their other decisions/policies/guidelines/motivations.
On the other hand, if you’re in a state that is rationing monoclonal antibodies, now you can claim “unvaccinated” status, because your antibodies are likely at the levels of the unvaccinated. I’d call that a win-win. Or win-lose. 
I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now. My 80+ diabetic, hypertensive, S/P MI, diabetic nephropathy father in Florida has had his booster. I’m going to tell him to claim “unvaccinated” status if he needs MAb. It’s weird to have to think that way. Previously, people were lying that they were vaccinated to try to get better care, now they might be lying that they’re unvaccinated to get MAb.
Then they should follow them and trust that the CDC is right. I watched the 8 hour FDA meeting and feel they made the right call. Other people may disagree though.
