Poll of the Day > Did we overreact to this whole pandemic thing?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Kyuubi4269 posted...

You can't be naturally immune to something you never had, and natural immunity dissipates with time, which is why there's 2 doses and multiple boosters.

If you dumbasses let it get to herd, it would die out and we wouldn't need boosters all the time and life could start proper again. But no, you have to keep it around long enough to evolve in to an issue like flu, a million variants and a new formula every year to minimise deaths.

There is always a population immune to plague without vaccines.

OhhhJa posted...

It still hasn't been approved as far as I know. Just authorized for emergency use

Pfizer got full approval on August 23rd, the rest are still waiting.

SunWuKung420 posted...

The vaccine may help but it is not the only factor to herd immunity.

It is, however, the only way to achieve herd immunity without also killing 1.5-2% of those attaining that immunity (if not more, since infections on that scale would absolutely overwhelm hospitals' ability to treat patients). Natural immunity is a factor in achieving herd immunity, but given that it's hard to accurately measure that and relying significantly on it is a really stupid idea, the only sensible approach is to continue pushing for higher vaccination rates until case numbers drop.

OhhhJa posted...

It was spreading like wildfire in Italy and Spain before it was a major issue in the US. Everyone wants to blame the US but much of the rest of the world barely did any better with this

Yep, the US is very much not alone in screwing it up. Even some of the countries that did a really good job on the first pass ended up screwing up subsequent waves and also making the problem worse. The US is just the closest example to home for those of us in North America (including being home for most of the posters here), so they get a lot of the focus.

I'm also inclined to give Italy and Spain a bit more of a free pass for their early struggles with it, since they were the first major outbreaks outside of China and were therefore a learning experience for pretty much the whole world. With the benefit of roughly a month of learning from them, the US should have been better prepared than they were.

It's about managing hospital resources. if people are denied service at hospitals, then we underreacted. if there are a lot of restrictions despite hospital having a lot of space, then we overreacted.

SunWuKung420 posted...

There is always a population immune to plague without vaccines.

I'm not familiar with that particular example, but I can believe it. The common example used in a lot of biology(-adjacent) classes is that people that are heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia are highly resistant to malaria, or that one gene that seems to confer near-immunity to HIV. While those examples exist, though, that's very much the exception, not the norm. There's generally no reason to presume that anyone is innately immune to a novel pathogen, and even if it does turn out that a gene exists that confers that immunity, that information tends to be largely useless for coordinating a public health response (though it may factor into vaccine/treatment development) because you can't exactly breed it into the rest of the population to solve the crisis at hand.

LinkPizza posted...

Plus, no vaccine is 100%

Small Pox vaccine isn't a hundred percent?

Abiz_ posted...

Small Pox vaccine isn't a hundred percent?

No.

Cacciato posted...

No.

But if you google it. It's dead. It doesn't occur naturally anymore and it's only exist as samples now. Only thing I'm seeing of it making a come back is passing mentioning of it being used as a bio-weapon.

Abiz_ posted...

But if you google it. It's dead. It doesn't occur naturally anymore and it's only exist as samples now. Only thing I'm seeing of it making a come back is passing mentioning of it being used as a bio-weapon.

That doesn't mean it's 100%, though. For example, some people could have caught it after receiving the vaccine. But if they didn't pass it on to anyone else and died, then small pox would die, as well... Basically, just because a disease is dead doesn't mean the vaccine was 100%. It just means it worked really well...

LinkPizza posted...

That doesn't mean it's 100%, though. For example, some people could have caught it after receiving the vaccine. But if they didn't pass it on to anyone else and died, then small pox would die, as well... Basically, just because a disease is dead doesn't mean the vaccine was 100%. It just means it worked really well...

The question is where the disease lives. In smallpox, it could only live in humans. So if you make smallpox infect less people each week, eventually it just dies off entirely.
You can't do that for a disease like, say, rabies. Unless you eradicate all animals who could host rabies.

shadowsword87 posted...

The question is where the disease lives. In smallpox, it could only live in humans. So if you make smallpox infect less people each week, eventually it just dies off entirely.
You can't do that for a disease like, say, rabies. Unless you eradicate all animals who could host rabies.

Very true...

Abiz_ posted...

But if you google it. It's dead.

You don't "Google" something, you search it.

Abiz_ posted...

But if you google it. It's dead. It doesn't occur naturally anymore and it's only exist as samples now. Only thing I'm seeing of it making a come back is passing mentioning of it being used as a bio-weapon.

That's because herd immunity was achieved. The smallpox vaccine was somewhere in the realm of 90-95% effective (with further reductions in the risk of transmission and severity of the disease). That was enough risk reduction to mean that each infection that did happen struggled to find new hosts to infect before it died out, preventing large-scale outbreaks from occurring and ultimately resulting in the disease becoming functionally extinct.

Vaccines being less than 100% effective is perfectly normal. It's quite inevitable, really, given that the immune system is less than 100% effective and vaccines rely on the immune system to do their job. There are very few genuine guarantees in medicine, aside from the really obvious common sense ones (like having a 0% chance of developing penile cancer if you don't have a penis). Instead, pretty much everything boils down to a question of risk management and reduction. Vaccines reduce the risk of becoming infected, the risk of infecting others (both directly and by reducing the amount of time one is contagious), and the severity of the infection. This is true of all vaccines, and Covid is no exception.

adjl posted...

That's because herd immunity was achieved. The smallpox vaccine was somewhere in the realm of 90-95% effective (with further reductions in the risk of transmission and severity of the disease). That was enough risk reduction to mean that each infection that did happen struggled to find new hosts to infect before it died out, preventing large-scale outbreaks from occurring and ultimately resulting in the disease becoming functionally extinct.

Vaccines being less than 100% effective is perfectly normal. It's quite inevitable, really, given that the immune system is less than 100% effective and vaccines rely on the immune system to do their job. There are very few genuine guarantees in medicine, aside from the really obvious common sense ones (like having a 0% chance of developing penile cancer if you don't have a penis). Instead, pretty much everything boils down to a question of risk management and reduction. Vaccines reduce the risk of becoming infected, the risk of infecting others (both directly and by reducing the amount of time one is contagious), and the severity of the infection. This is true of all vaccines, and Covid is no exception.

Don't forget that, unlike Covid, smallpox was an utterly horrifying and disfiguring disease that many people had either lost people to or at least seen people afflicted with it. Even if you survived it (which there was a MUCH lower chance of) you were likely disfigured for life. It had been with humanity since likely the start as well meaning it's elimination was a massive thing. Even then it took DECADES to do with the final case happening in the 1970's.

It really bugs me when people bring up the elimination of smallpox as proof we can do away with COVID with the ease of Thanos snapping his fingers if it wasn't for those gosh darned anti-vaxxers. It's like saying 'hey, we built the Great Pyramids once. We can do it again with the same tech, on a grander scale, in half the time because we already did it once.' It just doesn't work that way.

Even if everyone got on board with it's elimination and vaccination and everything you're looking at a decades long struggle at best with a high risk of, if anything ever breaks out for any ready, it returning to the world full force. With it's high mutation rate even one 'leak' could mean we could never get it back in the bad (assuming we got it in in the first place). The damage was done before a vaccine ever existed. It was basically done the moment it hit the general public in China (as it would spread just so much there'd be no way to confine it). I believe it will be impossible to even consider 'elimination' for decades.