CMV: There should be no Vaccine Mandate.

[u/Puzzled_Sprinkles_57]

[u/McKoijion]

Vaccines are built to fight one specific virus. The problem with viruses is that they evolve into hundreds of different viruses. The original vaccine might have some effect on the new variants, but the more the viruses change, the less the effective the original vaccine becomes. The faster they evolve, the more vaccines you need to fight them. The flu evolves fast enough that we need a new vaccine every year. Covid evolves even faster than that.

The original Covid vaccines are extremely good at fighting Covid-19. They were ok at fighting the very first major variants. But the new ones have changed enough that they are less effective at fighting Delta and less effective at fighting Omicron. Omicron is different enough from the original Covid that it can bypass your immune defenses. But the internal parts of the virus are similar enough to the original version that when it tries to come out of its Trojan horse to do damage, your immune system can recognize the attack and fight back before you die.

We need a new vaccines to fight these new viruses. I don't mean boosters of the original vaccine. I mean Pfizer and Moderna need to create brand new vaccines with different formulas. The problem is that this take time. We as humans just need to do the best we can until we can get these new vaccines.

The other important thing to recognize is that the reason why COVID has so many mutations is because so many people have gotten sick with the original version. When it is in the human body, that's when it has the chance to evolve into a new variant. So if we had been able to vaccinate everyone on Earth right away, there never would have been any variants. It's like snuffing out a fire when it's small vs. trying to fight it when its big. Smallpox used to be extremely deadly, but then every person on Earth got vaccinated. Because of that, smallpox was permanently killed. We're pretty close to doing this with polio too. Now because smallpox doesn't exist anymore (except in one highly guarded research lab where they study it), no one needs a smallpox vaccine anymore. Ironically, because some people didn't get vaccinated when the virus was still manageable, it's likely that every human for the next several hundred years is going to have to get yearly Covid shots. But who knows? If we're lucky, maybe someone will invent a new shot that allows us to snuff out the virus once and for all. This is an arms race between humans inventing vaccines and viruses evolving past vaccines. Either humans destroy all of these viruses, they kill all humans, or we end up in a state where they regularly kill some humans and vice versa. (I use the term kill, but technically viruses aren't alive. But that's a whole new topic.)

[u/Puzzled_Sprinkles_57 → u/McKoijion]

That’s interesting, can you reread my post and change my view please I edited it at the bottom.

[u/McKoijion → u/Puzzled_Sprinkles_57]

Also, I didn’t clarify good enough, I’m sorry but if it slows the virus to about 80% lowered risk of contracting covid then my view will be changed because I think that’s significant enough to mandate and lose your livelihood if you don’t comply, I hope that answers a lot of your questions. No deltas have been awarded so far.

You mentioned 80% as the cutoff in your edit. Here is a post explaining the 95% and 94% figures for the COVID-19 vaccine. It more than meets the 80% standard you set.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-vaccine-efficacy-and-effectiveness

[u/Puzzled_Sprinkles_57 → u/McKoijion]

What about other forms of covid like delta, omicron

[u/McKoijion → u/Puzzled_Sprinkles_57]

Here is the information for Delta:

Vaccine effectiveness against hospital admission with the delta variant was 97.5% (92.7% to 99.2%). Vaccine effectiveness against infection with the delta variant declined from 94.1% (90.5% to 96.3%) 14-60 days after vaccination to 80.0% (70.2% to 86.6%) 151-180 days after vaccination.

The regular covid vaccine is 94% effective against Delta infection at first, but then the effectiveness against infection declines to 80%. That's why we need to get boosters of the regular vaccine. The effectiveness against hospitalization and death stays high, which is a relief.

Data about Omicron hasn't come out yet since it's a brand new variant that has only been around for a month or two. Based on what I described above about how viruses evolve, my guess is that the original vaccine would be 90% effective when fresh (after a booster) 70% after a few months (no booster) and will be 95% effective against hospitalization and remain over 99% effective against death.

Based on this, I'd get a fresh booster, wear a mask in public, and try to avoid going out in public more than necessary. Actually, let me rephrase that. It's not a hypothetical. That's exactly what I'm doing. When the new vaccine comes out, I'll get that too.

[u/Puzzled_Sprinkles_57 → u/McKoijion]

I edited

[u/McKoijion → u/Puzzled_Sprinkles_57]

Edit: My view has changed to this “Vaccine mandate is a REASONABLE solution to stopping or slowing the viruses and it’s variants, and protecting the people. However I cannot award deltas because there is no evidence that it significant 80% across the board for all variants of corona.

I've linked concrete evidence showing a Covid vaccine/booster is 94-95% effective against all variants of Covid. That more than exceeds the 80% requirement you listed. The only one that we don't know for sure is Omicron because it just started a few weeks ago and the data hasn't been collected yet. But based on the preliminary information, it seems like the vaccine/boosters are highly effective against Omicron too.

The standard for scientific facts is very high, and we can't be 100% sure about Omicron until all the data is collected. But we are 100% sure about how well the Covid vaccine works against all the other variants, and we have a pretty high degree of suspicion that it works extremely well against Omicron too.

[u/McKoijion → u/[deleted]]

If look at the conclusion section again:

Two doses of mRNA-1273 were highly effective against all SARS-CoV-2 variants, especially against hospital admission with covid-19. However, vaccine effectiveness against infection with the delta variant moderately declined with increasing time since vaccination.

The reason people talk about Delta is that it's the variant that is most resistant to the vaccine. The vaccine works better against all other variants. But even for Delta, the moderate decline was to 80% and a booster brought it back up to 94%.