> Throughout 2020, more than 9% of all people in nursing homes died of covid. Depending on age case fatality rates were upwards of 50%.
That's just about most difficult population to determine primary cause of death for. Most people in nursing homes have multiple comorbidities and a long list of medications. Its easy enough to know when someone died with Covid, its much more difficult (if not impossible) to know after the fact whether that's what caused their death or if the infection began after an existing condition worsened and weakened their immune system further.
> Drastically expanding the vaccinated population through compassionate use would have rapidly provided efficacy and safety data.
That wouldn't have helped get efficacy or safety data for the general public though. Vaccinating that population could absolutely have helped determine efficacy for that population and I agree it feels like a reasonable action given the potential risks for that population, but the data wouldn't be useful for the general public that are younger and/or in better health prior to infection.
At the peak, excess nursing home mortality was nearly 6000 per week. Quibbling about "died with covid" versus "died of covid" isn't a useful exercise. Dead is dead and the excess mortality came from somewhere.
> Quibbling about "died with covid" versus "died of covid" isn't a useful exercise.
It isn't quibbling when the specific topic is whether or not to treat a population with an untested vaccine (assuming the trials were skipped for at risk populations as proposed above).
In a general sense, I totally agree the "with" versus "of" debate isn't useful. But when considering giving an at risk population an untested vaccine, how is that not important? Any intervention could have downsides, and more importantly an preventative intervention for a secondary infection may not be worth the risk depending on the risk profiles.
One tricky question that would have to be answered is whether the excess deaths were related to changes in nursing home treatment and general conditions. Nursing homes were effectively locked down in many areas, reducing human contact and potentially negatively impacting care. Vaccines would have no impact there, and if the untested vaccine has negative side effects we would have only made things worse.
Totally fair, by far the most common vaccine issues show up soon after injection. There is still the population challenge though. Dealing specifically with patients with multiple comorbidities and prescriptions would make it pretty tricky to recognize and then isolate the risk factors of anything that does show up.
Strokes, heart attacks, circulatory issues, etc are likely pretty common in that population and any increase there after treatment may go unnoticed as a change. If you do recognize it they'd have to stop treatments entirely as you wouldn't know whether its a risk to everyone or specific to some combination of age, comorbidities, and/or other medications.
The nursing homes were charnal houses. You would need one hell of a stroke risk to make the vaccine not worth it. The andrenovirus vector clotting was fast appearing and rare enough continuing was worth it in elderly populations.
People in nursing homes died from untreated illness. They were completely locked down, and isolated from friends and family. They weren't allowed to be transported to actual hospitals. Anyone with simple bacterial pneumonia was left to die.
In the UK, nursing homes were discovered to be sedating patients and not administering water and nutrition. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the same happened in the US.
That's just about most difficult population to determine primary cause of death for. Most people in nursing homes have multiple comorbidities and a long list of medications. Its easy enough to know when someone died with Covid, its much more difficult (if not impossible) to know after the fact whether that's what caused their death or if the infection began after an existing condition worsened and weakened their immune system further.
> Drastically expanding the vaccinated population through compassionate use would have rapidly provided efficacy and safety data.
That wouldn't have helped get efficacy or safety data for the general public though. Vaccinating that population could absolutely have helped determine efficacy for that population and I agree it feels like a reasonable action given the potential risks for that population, but the data wouldn't be useful for the general public that are younger and/or in better health prior to infection.