Covid-19 #30: Vaccines and All That JJAZ

[Zorral]

Never stop masking!

Got haircut the other day.  Lovely, smart, talented, professional young woman whom I'd never met before due to our place doing only one stylist per day and one client at a time. (Ticklish scheduling, ya think? ) My usual person couldn't make it due to emergencies so I was shunted to her.  Unlike many of the stylists, she was new hire, we'd never met, and she'd no idea of who I am nor do I of who she is.  In the Before Times, whether or not they cut my hair they 'knew' me, because of how often I was in, and the stylist I started with became a personal friend, so I'd drop in just to say hi! -- like so many did,. (And they say NYC is w/o community -- well my stylist then, who died and I still miss her like hell (not of covid, before covid), made her salon a community center.

Oops, tripping out, thinking of our beloved lost friend .....

The new one I had this time, due to A having emergency, came in long after this -- so she had no idea of me, and I didn't have any idea of her either. She's so young she's at the very end of the list to get vaccinated.  She has to ride pub transport to get to the salon.  She was so cool ... but she mentioned masks all the time, and how if we are all masked here, we are fine.  I was double-masked.  I doubled my usual 20% tip.

It makes me insane how many people have to knowingly risk their lives every day, even now, just to get to work

[DireWolfSpirit]

3 hours ago, Karlbear said:

THIS MOTHER FUCKING COUNTRY

 

 

This NPR article puts an overall adult population number for vaccine refusers at 25% with 5% saying they are hesitant.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/04/07/984697573/vaccine-refusal-may-put-herd-immunity-at-risk-researchers-warn

If we are only near 2/3's adults vaccinated by the Fall respiratory season herd immunity will be unlikely.

Good times.

[DireWolfSpirit]

Our company made 1500 shots  available, at work and on company time, over a 2 day period. 

I do not have the exact numbers yet, but from what it looks like to me only about a third of the idiots took advantage. I will look into what the exact totals were.

Luckily the unused shots are going to another area clinic.

But still, damn I work with a bunch of luddite-ish morons. The hillbill is strong here in these surrounding red counties.

Have already decided I'm going to order a fresh supply of N95's because I will inevitably be surrounded by a bunch superstitious, infected, workers. I think the only way for them to learn will be more sickness and death in their own families. That's the way they want it from what I see. 

I am on the border of Michigan so we have plenty of commuters from a state in surge status.

[RhaenysBee]

Apparently 4M-ish people registered for a vaccine. Over 3Mish already received at least one of the shots. Except my mother, which makes me frustrated, but what can you do? We’ll get there. I’m really sorry for her because it must be disheartening to hear that so many of her peers are already vaccinated and she’s still on a waiting list. 

On the upside, this proportion is not bad and it makes one hopeful to see that we did vaccinate about a million people in 2-3 weeks. The pace could be better but it’s good enough. Now we see issues with willingness to register for a vaccine. The number of new registrations is said to be increasing slower than the number of administered vaccines. So they won’t be able to keep up even this pace throughout May because people don’t want the vaccine. Baffling. If everybody registered we could reach 60% by the end of June.

And there are individual cases in which I understand the lack of willingness to get vaccinated. But by far and large, it’s ridiculous that people would rather risk hospitalization and death (of their own and their loved ones) out of mistrust, rebellion and reverse psychology. Sad. 

On the upside, my workplace is offering post-covid health check packages next month and vaccination for front office employees, which is great. 

[rotting sea cow]

17 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

 

On the way home listening to BBC they were discussing the blood clotting and prevalence comparing clotting incidence with vaccine to clotting incidence with pregnant woman and while it was a radio broadcast citing a lot of stats, it was my impression that a pregnant woman's chances of blood clotting are many times higher than your chances of clotting from taking the AZ or J&J shots.

Again?

I think it has been stated multiple times in this forum and elsewhere that the blood disorder attributed to the vaccine in a very small fraction of subjects is not a normal clotting issue but something more complex and difficult to treat.

We can have a conversation about risks/benefits if you like, but no from the basis of comparing apples to oranges.

 

 

[rotting sea cow]

12 hours ago, Padraig said:

I feel bad for Uruguay.  It has woeful stats.  Having a huge neighbour with rampant COVID made it really difficult for it.  (Although, it is doing ok from a vaccination point of view).

Uruguay was able to resist for a year but in the end the virus started to permeate the society too deeply to be contained. At the same time people has became less careful.  And yes, variants.

[Clueless Northman]

8 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

This NPR article puts an overall adult population number for vaccine refusers at 25% with 5% saying they are hesitant.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/04/07/984697573/vaccine-refusal-may-put-herd-immunity-at-risk-researchers-warn

If we are only near 2/3's adults vaccinated by the Fall respiratory season herd immunity will be unlikely.

If most or even all measures are dropped before October, I'd expect at least half of the unvaccinated to catch it before the year's over. Even with 1/4 or 1/3 of idiots who don't want the vaccine, one can hit herd immunity; it's just that the last leg will be achieved by the idiots getting immunized the hard way - and, sadly, immunity-through-covid for sone who didn't get full immunity through vaccines or couldn't genuinely get vaccinated, with some infuriatingly unnecessary deaths. Also, the 12-18 y will have access to vaccines in the next 6-8 months.

[Filippa Eilhart]

47 minutes ago, rotting sea cow said:

Again?

I think it has been stated multiple times in this forum and elsewhere that the blood disorder attributed to the vaccine in a very small fraction of subjects is not a normal clotting issue but something more complex and difficult to treat.

We can have a conversation about risks/benefits if you like, but no from the basis of comparing apples to oranges.

 

 

It does seem a difficult concept to grasp that not all blood clots are the same. And the BBC has had an agenda from the start.

[Padraig]

Although, 6 to 8 blood clots/disorders is way lower than what AZ has experienced.  There is still a danger that more will be reported, but I feared we'd already have had a big spike.  I'm not surprised that Fauci mentioned today that he expects J&J to be cleared from next Friday in the US.  Europe has a trickier issue though, as there is an existing precedence in AZ but if it is 3 to 4 times less likely than the AZ side effect (which is already very unlikely), then perhaps countries will be ok giving it the go ahead.

16 hours ago, Mindwalker said:

The Jacobin has an interesting podcast on why the USA and the UK and Cuba have been so successful with vaccine rollout, while the EU and Canada have not. (Well, they forgot to mention Biden's baan on exports, but apart from that.)

I listened to most of this.  Its such a complicated issue but I think it got a lot right.  I thought it was going to go wrong when it started talking about a distribution problem (which is misleading) and probabilities but it added a lot more context to both of those remarks.

I suppose I should have known an organisation called Jacobin would present a different view of things!

[Filippa Eilhart]

If the numbers remain unchanged maybe comparing the two vaccines will help explain why one is causing the condition more often than the other.

[Luzifer's right hand]

One thing I noticed is that a lot of English speaking articles I have read about the topic just talk about "blood clots" while German articles tend to mention that the main problem are "Hirnvenenthrombose"(Cerebral vein thrombosis) which tends to be far more serious than most other kinds of blood clots.

[Kalbear]

The problem with establishing herd immunity via people getting actually sick and relying on this...well, there are a lot of problems with it. One is that there will be a whole bunch of people that for a variety of reasons could not get vaccinated that will be at risk - right now, that includes every single child. Then there's the problem of variants - as more uncontrolled spread occurs, more variants will be produced, and the efficacy of the vaccine will not be known. 

But the real big one is that we know already that the vaccine doesn't last forever as far as efficacy for even the normal strain. Keeping the virus circulating around means that it becomes more likely that Covid is like the flu and lives forever and keeps killing people forever. Except, of course, it's a lot worse than the flu. 

[Luzifer's right hand]

15 minutes ago, Karlbear said:

The problem with establishing herd immunity via people getting actually sick and relying on this...well, there are a lot of problems with it. One is that there will be a whole bunch of people that for a variety of reasons could not get vaccinated that will be at risk - right now, that includes every single child. Then there's the problem of variants - as more uncontrolled spread occurs, more variants will be produced, and the efficacy of the vaccine will not be known. 

But the real big one is that we know already that the vaccine doesn't last forever as far as efficacy for even the normal strain. Keeping the virus circulating around means that it becomes more likely that Covid is like the flu and lives forever and keeps killing people forever. Except, of course, it's a lot worse than the flu. 

I worry that that ship has sailed. It sucks a lot but maybe hoping for effective boosters shots and child vaccination is the only realistic optimism. 

I think travel restrictions will convince many people that would not get the vaccine otherwise to get it at least in the EU. Not an approach that will work very well in the USA I guess.

[JGP]

5 hours ago, rotting sea cow said:

Again?

I think it has been stated multiple times in this forum and elsewhere that the blood disorder attributed to the vaccine in a very small fraction of subjects is not a normal clotting issue but something more complex and difficult to treat.

We can have a conversation about risks/benefits if you like, but no from the basis of comparing apples to oranges.

 

 

Anticoagulant lifer here, but prevalence of incidence is the point, not the comparison per se, ergo- a comparative disarmament of AZ hesitancy.

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, Padraig said:

I listened to most of this.  Its such a complicated issue but I think it got a lot right.  I thought it was going to go wrong when it started talking about a distribution problem (which is misleading) and probabilities but it added a lot more context to both of those remarks.

I suppose I should have known an organisation called Jacobin would present a different view of things!

So I finally listened to this and if you know the background you can really see how a story is shaped for an audience. First of all, as was previously mentioned, their Canadian science reporter (it looks like he’s spent more time living outside of Canada than in Canada and, from what I can see from the articles he has written, is very left wing) praises the US without saying a word about the the export ban, and attributes the success of the US and Warp Speed on the ability of the US government to order private companies to manufacture vaccines. Yet that’s not what the US did, they ordered companies to make PPE and equipment, but with vaccines they threw billions of dollars at private pharmaceutical companies so investors didn’t have to worry about the bottom line (which he does eventually say). As he points out, the fact is vaccines are not a money maker.

Then he just comes out and calls Canada a gong show, just what an American audience wants to hear, eh?

The answer for Canada instead, he says, is that the Canadian government should create a whole pharmaceutical industry from the ground up, from manufacturing components through research through manufacturing through fill and finish. To recreate Connaught Laboratories, which the Conservatives privatized 40 years ago. And that this is a major failure of the Trudeau government. When asked if Canada had learned it’s lesson, he said Canada is giving a billion dollars to the industry, but that itself is a failure because in the future those companies can decide to exit vaccine manufacturing or they can be taken over by other companies that shut those units down. In other words, Canada must go full bore communist like Cuba, the way Zorral touts Cuba. 
 

I can just see the sanctions flying hard and fast on Canada for doing that, more tariffs on steel and aluminum and lumber because Canada is so fucking unfair to American pharmaceutical companies that receive no subsidies from the US government, no siree, not a penny.

And in the end, he says the whole world should take the pharmaceutical industry public. Like that’s going to happen.

[Padraig]

18 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Then he just comes out and calls Canada a gong show, just what an American audience wants to hear, eh?

I think you might be misunderstanding the audience for that podcast.  Its clearly called Jacobin for a reason.  Its a left wing take on things (their earlier bits about the housing crisis and the "double Irish" set the scene).  Its not interested in a "booyah, USA, USA" narrative.

Given that, acknowledging that the US throwing lots of money at the problem did help the US, is actually admirable.  Rather than ignoring it because it doesn't fit their preferred narrative.   I don't hold it against them that they missed the export ban either.  It doesn't need to cover everything.

26 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Yet that’s not what the US did, they ordered companies to make PPE and equipment, but with vaccines they threw billions of dollars at private pharmaceutical companies so investors didn’t have to worry about the bottom line (which he does eventually say).

As you say.  He said this.

But yes, when it comes to solutions, its Jacobin to the max.  But Canada and the EU aren't immune from criticism.

48 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

Anticoagulant lifer here, but prevalence of incidence is the point, not the comparison per se, ergo- a comparative disarmament of AZ hesitancy.

I might be misunderstanding this.  There are two threads here.  What is scientifically robust?  And what will dissuade vaccine hesitancy?  We are hoping that both of those threads align.  For example, if one is saying that a blood clot is 100 times less likely than another blood clot but if one is ignoring that the latter is 10 times more serious, is that scientifically robust?  I'd rather be as transparent as possible, rather than there be any threat that one is hiding the truth.  Find another way to tell people this isn't a major risk. 

1 hour ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I worry that that ship has sailed. It sucks a lot but maybe hoping for effective boosters shots and child vaccination is the only realistic optimism. 

I think travel restrictions will convince many people that would not get the vaccine otherwise to get it at least in the EU. Not an approach that will work very well in the USA I guess.

That's probably fair.  I think more people will take the vaccine than we fear but less than we need.  I don't know how to solve that.  Except via what Clueless Northman suggested.  And hope a variant doesn't arise that will majorly delay any return to normality.  That does suck, as you say.

But even in the EU, the main restriction may be flight related.  Unvaccinated people will still be able to drive, take the train etc.

[JGP]

43 minutes ago, Padraig said:

There are two threads here.  What is scientifically robust?  And what will dissuade vaccine hesitancy?  We are hoping that both of those threads align.  For example, if one is saying that a blood clot is 100 times less likely than another blood clot but if one is ignoring that the latter is 10 times more serious, is that scientifically robust?  I'd rather be as transparent as possible, rather than there be any threat that one is hiding the truth.  Find another way to tell people this isn't a major risk. 

Right, but talking chance is still oddspak no matter which type of clotting you're discussing, so I don't think there is another way. Poo-pooing on someone for bringing up comparative clotting issues with the pill, or pregnancy, or general covid in comparison is still a borderline asshole thing to do. I mean, John Q. Public, unfortunately, really isn't going to parse the scale between how serious the AZ clots are and say, DVT. They're just not.

AZ is in, it's out, wait no, under this age it's fine, but now only over that... government messaging has fucked it sideways. An example would be a relatively local clinic here in Canada that was set up to deliver like 6000 doses per day [of AZ] and only a couple hundred people showed up. You can totally have both conversations, and yeah, ideally they'd align, but at the end of the day? The general public will more readily understand odds, so that's got to be the ground game, imo.       

[Clueless Northman]

1 hour ago, Padraig said:

That's probably fair.  I think more people will take the vaccine than we fear but less than we need.  I don't know how to solve that.  Except via what Clueless Northman suggested.  And hope a variant doesn't arise that will majorly delay any return to normality.  That does suck, as you say.

But even in the EU, the main restriction may be flight related.  Unvaccinated people will still be able to drive, take the train etc.

And I "suggested" this as in "This is what might happen if nothing is done to push for vaccines", not as in "advocated". I think some countries should actually make it mandatory. At least, I hope all airplane companies and all airports will limit flights to vaccinated people, and countries will limit entry through airports to vaccinated people only. It's a big incentive for the careless crowd to actually get the jab - as you and others have said before.

[williamjm]

1 hour ago, Padraig said:

I might be misunderstanding this.  There are two threads here.  What is scientifically robust?  And what will dissuade vaccine hesitancy?  We are hoping that both of those threads align.  For example, if one is saying that a blood clot is 100 times less likely than another blood clot but if one is ignoring that the latter is 10 times more serious, is that scientifically robust?  I'd rather be as transparent as possible, rather than there be any threat that one is hiding the truth.  Find another way to tell people this isn't a major risk.

I think the comparison of the relative risks of harm due to having the vaccine and not having the vaccine which I think Filippa linked to in a previous thread does seem the clearest way of understanding it. It's simple to understand without needing to have any of the complications about terminology or what sort of blood clots to compare to.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/976877/CovidStats_07-04-21-final.pdf

They didn't do an analysis for the J&J vaccine but it looks like it might end up being somewhat similar.

[ljkeane]

23 minutes ago, williamjm said:

I think the comparison of the relative risks of harm due to having the vaccine and not having the vaccine which I think Filippa linked to in a previous thread does seem the clearest way of understanding it.

I think pointing out the relative risks of covid and taking a particular vaccine is important but I do think putting into perspective how small the risks associated with being vaccinated are in comparison with everyday things is also important. People hear a risk of 1/100,000 and it doesn't mean a lot to most of them and when they're told 22 people have died in the UK that sounds really bad in isolation. In comparison though something like 2000 people a year die in the UK from taking NSAIDs (ibuprofen etc).