(2021-04-15) ZviM Covid 4/15 Are We Seriously Doing This Again

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 4/15 : Are We Seriously Doing This Again. THIS IS LITERAL ONE IN A MILLION AND MUCH LESS THAN THE BASE RATE WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU DID YOU NOT SEE WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME ARE YOU COMPLETE MORONS OR ARE YOU MUSTACHE-TWIRLING VILLIANS YOU CAN’T NOT BE BOTH

The first time around with AstraZeneca, I could sort of understand the argument for the other side of the hesitancy effect when I squinted, that this would look like the Very Serious People Take Vaccine Safety Seriously and therefore we should now expect the people to trust the FDA more, and being untrustworthy stewards who kill a bunch of people in order to fool the public into thinking we are trustworthy is a tradeoff they thought we should make, but we ran the experiment on that hypothesis, and, yeah, no.

This is going to permanently supercharge the anti-vax movement, not only on Covid but also in general, and kill a huge number of people. Over six cases. Note deaths. Cases. Six.
You know how many people died?
ONE. F**ing ONE.*

Even in a world in which the initial pause wasn’t crazy, there was a meeting the next day to go over the information, and the decision was made to wait 7-10 days and then meet again without making a choice about the pause

The Numbers

Looking at this chart, it seems clear the Midwest’s problems are real. The finale wave is out in force there, even if it’s relatively tame in other places.

Vaccinations

That small decline at the end might have something to do with the J&J suspension, or it could mostly be a random quirk. Either way, even without J&J, we still should be able to continue slowly expanding our vaccination rates until we hit a wall where we run out of people who want a shot put into their arm

As furious as I am at the J&J suspension, and as many people as it’s going to kill (most of which will be from disadvantaged groups and areas, which J&J’s one shot at room temperature made much easier to reach), it is important not to lose perspective

If we’re lucky, it will only kill thousands.

Vaccine Passport Hype

Washington Post reports on New York’s Excelsior pass, the first one of its kind. Conclusion was that it’s relatively easy to use and isn’t got reasonable privacy protections given the circumstances, but that unless you’re counting on ID to catch fraud it’s trivial to fake it via copying someone else’s pass. That sounds about right. It’s clear by now that there isn’t going to be a national system and that New York is the exception rather than the rule. That doesn’t render the questions moot, but it lowers their urgency and importance quite a lot

Tyler’s position is that we should be planning full reopening, and that passports seem more likely to hinder that than help. That’s one of the key disagreements. Is the alternative to passports a full reopening, or is it more restrictions? My guess remains that not being able to check leads to more restrictions in the medium term (next few months), but there’s a point when that flips, and things that would have fully reopened without checking would, if given the opportunity to easily check vaccine status, continue to check that status for a while longer

The other half of that is the argument from focus. If the country and discourse only have so many focus points (Imperial Focus Points!), which seems basically right, then it’s plausible that all the work on passports delays the full reopening not because of lowering the costs of not reopening fully, but by preventing the attention and blame pressure required to generate the reopenings.

Vaccines Still Work

The J&J suspension goes hand in hand with the ongoing campaign to convince the public that vaccines work, but don’t work in the sense of accomplishing anything for people. In the name of some combination of proving one’s Very Serious Person credentials, maximizing the quantity of economic harm and scaring people as much as possible, there’s a competition on how to give the impression that being out there is unsafe for the fully vaccinated.

That doesn’t mean risk for the vaccinated is zero, precautions that are cheap are worth taking and ‘stupid stuff’ is worth avoiding, and one should follow mask norms for social reasons cause it’s really not that big a deal

In Other News

More support for first doses first. As Tyler notes, it’s too late for America to benefit from this, but the rest of the world still could