False negative is worse than no test at all. It gives a person additional incentive to ignore mask rules.
cistran
Karma: 15
I asked around my teacher acquaintances about the virtual classes. Turns out, no one is sending truant officers if kids do not attend their virtual sessions. All they have to do to get credit for a day is login in the morning. How is this worse than going back to prison?
This is because little evidence is available. You are looking at vaccination as an urgent matter. But your average chances of getting infected are only one in 4 in a given year. That is an average exposure of about 250,000 microcovids per year. Since average chance also includes people who make very little precautions against infection, it is likely that your personal chances are better than average. There are some people here whose personal chances are an order of magnitude lower than average. If you calibrate it by 3-4 months it will take for vaccines to become abundant in US and coincidentally to add 3-4 months of safety data, you might conclude that rushing vaccination with whatever is available is not necessarily the safest strategy.
As for unknown unknowns, this where more data helps. mRNA vaccines with lipid nanoparticle delivery mode are not like any previous vaccines so one might want to discount any experience obtained with past vaccines.
This neglects to account for a large group of people who have no opinion and will be swayed by any news, positive or negative. Overcoming a formed opinion is going to be harder.
One objection to that is that one must not just compare between vaccinating and getting Covid. One must also strive to pick the safest vaccine.
Rotashield, the first rotavirus vaccine only caused one bowel obstruction in 20,000 vaccinated children, yet it was pulled from the market after a year because there were already vaccines 5 times safer.
If there is a large safety gap between different available vaccines, least safe must be declined in favor of most safe.
Another objection is that long term effects of any covid vaccine are not yet well-studied and there could be plausible mechanisms by which some of the vaccines could cause long term damage for example due to cumulative effects.
I think I know why the deaths are below baseline as you said. A significant percentage of people who die spend many weeks on their deathbeds, and people on their deathbeds are too sick to be vaccinated.
Here is a simple question I got from my vaccine hesitant coworker:
VAERS lists about 1400 deaths following vaccination by mRNA vaccines in 2021.
He checked the flu vaccines deaths listed in VAERS and couldn’t find more than 50 for each of 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. The question is why is there 30 times more deaths reported in VAERS following covid mRNA vaccination? Does it mean regular flu vaccines are 30 times safer? The total number of shots is comparable in tens of millions.
Right, there is a difference between your clone who is a few lessons ahead of you and a really good teacher. So, you don’t learn from the best, but try to find the best teacher?
You should still want to learn physics from Richard Feynman
At some point in the near future this rate will become unsustainable. Because vaccine hesitant and vaccine avoiders are a significant minority everywhere.
Injecting RNA into cells is not enough. There are also interferon protein complexes that interfere with viral RNA doing anything inside the cells. They must be bypassed or overrun or there will be no viral replication. These intracellular defenses make many viral infections grow much slower.
USA is not the only nuclear power. Other nuclear powers which begin to descend their cost curves might be tempted to export the cheaper tech, especially if the expensive precision components are not wanted by the buyer. See the nuclear tech connection between Pakistan and North Korea, but make the cost of technology an order of magnitude smaller.
Limiting the spread of cheap nuclear weapons will never become as impossible as banning firearms, but it will become harder.
The FDA must actually say that children are ok to vaccinate, do you think they’ll do that by September?
I think you corrected your self later, but there was a sentence earlier about vaccinated children in classrooms.
That is not likely to happen this year. Vaccine trials for children are just getting under way
I think this post has a lot to do with shifting Overton’s windows:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances
Saving lives now may be worth more than saving lives later.
Any proposal that brings us closer to hundred million dollars nuke will probably be bad for preventing nuclear incident of the mushroom cloud kind. I think your proposal of reducing the size and yield of nuclear weapons also reduces its cost.
A country like North Korea is unlikely to strike first with nuclear weapons precisely for reasons you mentioned. But possession of them is a significant deterrent against invasion by a conventional military force or insurrection aided by an outside military force, such as ones happened in Iraq and Libya. Any government concerned by a threat of such invasion or insurrection would love to emulate North Korean example now that it is clear that any other safety guarantees are insufficient. Any major actor that actively pursues the strategy of making its nuclear weapons smaller and cheaper must take care that they are not so small and cheap, that any government with a hundred million dollar budget can afford one.
A very important special case of this: There is no evidence that COVID vaccination reduces transmission.
All your examples point to self-inflicted reputation loss. I am talking about reputation loss inflicted from outside.
Here is my counter-example: Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, the inventor of hand hygiene in medical (specifically OBGYN) practice. He was reviled and ridiculed and driven insane by the medical establishment of Vienne.
Census is explicitly prescribed in the Constitution. It is a very protected service which cannot be cancelled without a Constitution amendment.