Thank you for writing Josh... Perfectly thought out and easy to understand... I wish the people in power could / would think as systematically as you... I guess we are left to be the power. I look forward to your next writings!
The death and hospitalization rates for covid recently are around 99% unvaccinated. Those 99% are using up valuable medical resources, including the time of healthcare workers, for treatment that is largely preventable. What’s more is that the virus is more prone to mutation in the unvaccinated (Dr Conrado Bàrzaga and Dr Leyla Best). Curious how the data presented for Gibraltar only shows cases, and not deaths or hospitalizations. Incidentally, a quick search reveals their death rate has been 0 since March...
The narrative here seems to be that the vaccine doesn’t help. While it doesn’t guarantee a prevention of transmission (delta has a high viral load I.E. the infected are carrying more viral particles compared to other variants), prevention of sickness (breakthrough cases), or even that aforementioned 1% of death, the benefits should not be ignored.
Those 99% of deaths and hospitalizations? That could be your spouse, your child, your parent. Consider them if you’re not going to consider scientific data in its full context/from immune disease experts.
As I said in my other comment, I don't want to discourage vaccination, I am vaccinated myself, and I believe they do work to greatly minimize hospitalization and death. I agree fully that we should change our preferred metrics from cases to hospitalizations, as we treat influenza.
I'll push back that the unvaccinated carry a higher viral load, as this study found:
In any event, you could vaccinate every person in the US, from birth onwards, and it wouldn't do anything about mutations elsewhere in the world, which would inevitably spread here.
I'm also going to follow the risks as evidentiarily determined, where my child has more risk going to the ER from a playground accident than from COVID. Just because COVID is with us doesn't mean we need to become monofocused on reducing its spread and throw risk-reward ratios out the window.
I’m right with you on nuance. I know everyone wants everything to be black or white. I do too, but that is not the reality of our world. There are rarely only two data points. Great stuff. Keep it up.
The nuance challenge is real, and unfortunately it’s extraordinarily easy to manipulate. That’s why from a government perspective you have to be very clear and direct with what people need to do (0 or 100%) and accept a level of error, but then choose your error tolerance (is it better to not push vaccination and risk a high mortality rate and increase contagiousness through variance, or do you push for more protection via vax and run the risk of it not being fully protective?) People still don’t wear seat belts despite laws and tickets. People die. People die in accidents when buckled in too, but many lives are saved because of seat belts too. Deaths don’t happen at low speeds when people are strapped in. It’s ultimately the same logic, is it not?
First, I softened the language around the conclusions at the end of my piece at least once, because I don't want to tell people what to do one way or another. I simply want to lay the arguments out. I'm vaccinated, and I don't want to discourage vaccinations, but I want people to be given the space to make their own risk calculations AND for us to have all the data we need to be able to make those calculations. So I could have been more clear.
But, there's a couple of interesting things in this.
One is the Precautionary Principle, that all things being equal to go ahead and do something if there are no apparent downsides. I'm in favor of this, but it requires the foresight to see the unintended consequences, and I have a whole post I'm drafting about this.
Two is the Noble Lie, that it's okay to stretch the truth to get people to do what you know or think they should do. This has been the story of public health officialdom over the last sixteen months -- it seems apparent to me that they will say things that they know in the moment to be untrue if they think that the population will do what the officials think is best. There are two problems with this.
The first is similar to the Precautionary Principle caveat, that they need foresight that their intended actions by the population are the best. I'm willing to grant some grace on this, because we're all imperfect. Everyone has to make their own risk conclusions based on what we know at the time.
The second is that they are cashing in their future credibility for immediate gains. If public official John Smith says A now, and then in three months the news comes out that Not A, then John Smith will lose believability the next time he says something. It's the Boy Who Cried Wolf problem.
This second part I think is what you're saying above, so correct me if I'm off base. Again, I'm willing to give grace to people saying what they knew at the time. But if they knew something was untrue and they said it anyway because they thought that people would do what they wanted them to do, that's much more troublesome.
Thank you for writing Josh... Perfectly thought out and easy to understand... I wish the people in power could / would think as systematically as you... I guess we are left to be the power. I look forward to your next writings!
Darn us logical thinkers! 😉
Yep! I can't wait for your next piece!
The death and hospitalization rates for covid recently are around 99% unvaccinated. Those 99% are using up valuable medical resources, including the time of healthcare workers, for treatment that is largely preventable. What’s more is that the virus is more prone to mutation in the unvaccinated (Dr Conrado Bàrzaga and Dr Leyla Best). Curious how the data presented for Gibraltar only shows cases, and not deaths or hospitalizations. Incidentally, a quick search reveals their death rate has been 0 since March...
The narrative here seems to be that the vaccine doesn’t help. While it doesn’t guarantee a prevention of transmission (delta has a high viral load I.E. the infected are carrying more viral particles compared to other variants), prevention of sickness (breakthrough cases), or even that aforementioned 1% of death, the benefits should not be ignored.
Those 99% of deaths and hospitalizations? That could be your spouse, your child, your parent. Consider them if you’re not going to consider scientific data in its full context/from immune disease experts.
As I said in my other comment, I don't want to discourage vaccination, I am vaccinated myself, and I believe they do work to greatly minimize hospitalization and death. I agree fully that we should change our preferred metrics from cases to hospitalizations, as we treat influenza.
I'll push back that the unvaccinated carry a higher viral load, as this study found:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v1
And this study shows that vaccinated individuals can put evolutionary pressure on the virus to mutate around it:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95025-3
In any event, you could vaccinate every person in the US, from birth onwards, and it wouldn't do anything about mutations elsewhere in the world, which would inevitably spread here.
I'm also going to follow the risks as evidentiarily determined, where my child has more risk going to the ER from a playground accident than from COVID. Just because COVID is with us doesn't mean we need to become monofocused on reducing its spread and throw risk-reward ratios out the window.
Thanks for the comment.
Data driven and allow the receiver to draw their own conclusions. Novel idea in these times! I like it.
I’m right with you on nuance. I know everyone wants everything to be black or white. I do too, but that is not the reality of our world. There are rarely only two data points. Great stuff. Keep it up.
The nuance challenge is real, and unfortunately it’s extraordinarily easy to manipulate. That’s why from a government perspective you have to be very clear and direct with what people need to do (0 or 100%) and accept a level of error, but then choose your error tolerance (is it better to not push vaccination and risk a high mortality rate and increase contagiousness through variance, or do you push for more protection via vax and run the risk of it not being fully protective?) People still don’t wear seat belts despite laws and tickets. People die. People die in accidents when buckled in too, but many lives are saved because of seat belts too. Deaths don’t happen at low speeds when people are strapped in. It’s ultimately the same logic, is it not?
First, I softened the language around the conclusions at the end of my piece at least once, because I don't want to tell people what to do one way or another. I simply want to lay the arguments out. I'm vaccinated, and I don't want to discourage vaccinations, but I want people to be given the space to make their own risk calculations AND for us to have all the data we need to be able to make those calculations. So I could have been more clear.
But, there's a couple of interesting things in this.
One is the Precautionary Principle, that all things being equal to go ahead and do something if there are no apparent downsides. I'm in favor of this, but it requires the foresight to see the unintended consequences, and I have a whole post I'm drafting about this.
Two is the Noble Lie, that it's okay to stretch the truth to get people to do what you know or think they should do. This has been the story of public health officialdom over the last sixteen months -- it seems apparent to me that they will say things that they know in the moment to be untrue if they think that the population will do what the officials think is best. There are two problems with this.
The first is similar to the Precautionary Principle caveat, that they need foresight that their intended actions by the population are the best. I'm willing to grant some grace on this, because we're all imperfect. Everyone has to make their own risk conclusions based on what we know at the time.
The second is that they are cashing in their future credibility for immediate gains. If public official John Smith says A now, and then in three months the news comes out that Not A, then John Smith will lose believability the next time he says something. It's the Boy Who Cried Wolf problem.
This second part I think is what you're saying above, so correct me if I'm off base. Again, I'm willing to give grace to people saying what they knew at the time. But if they knew something was untrue and they said it anyway because they thought that people would do what they wanted them to do, that's much more troublesome.
But it's a great point!