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Covid 47: Waving Invisibly


Zorral

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3 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

There's a difference between being anti-vax and choosing not to get vaccinated. Some people think vaccination of the vulnerable is sensible but because they assess their vulnerability to be low they chose not to get vaccinated. Whether that's a good or bad risk decision can be debated, but they are not anti-vax. I would say a lot of people who fall into the young, healthy and unvaxed camp are not anti-vax, they've just made a personal risk decision. And their decision has perhaps been influenced by never having seen the effects of something like polio, and perhaps they would make a different decision with more information.

Anti-vaxers on the other hand care not about things like polio or smallpox being controlled or eradicated due to vaccination. They are fanatically opposed to vaccination and rational argument won't make them budge. They are also often statistically challenged by seeing that vaccinated people are dying from COVID-19, and they have no understanding that risk of death is a lot greater if you are unvaxed. They just see raw numbers and think the vaccine actually makes things worse.

I agree, and we shouldn't be lumping those 2 groups together and treating them like they are the same, or demonising people if they don't get vaccinated. Getting vaccinated now is mostly about your own personal health decisions, rather than one that affects the wider community. If you are in a younger, less vulnerable category, then most likely the disease won't be sending you to hospital and so it's just a personal risk decision that someone has to take. Considering that so many young people have now had covid, maybe multiple times, it's not surprising they don't see it as necessary to get the jab.
 

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15 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Getting vaccinated now is mostly about your own personal health decisions, rather than one that affects the wider community.

Depends if you're talking about Covid, or vaccinations in general.

 

Even for Covid, it's a lot more about the wider community than personal health - as higher vaccination rates means more health care resources for the wider community

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13 minutes ago, Which Tyler said:

Depends if you're talking about Covid, or vaccinations in general.

 

Even for Covid, it's a lot more about the wider community than personal health - as higher vaccination rates means more health care resources for the wider community

I'm talking about Covid really. In terms of benefits to the wider community, again it really depends on who you are talking about. Younger, healthier people are much less likely to ever need to go to hospital if they catch Covid, and now we are at a point where so many people have had the virus, there is less benefit.

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There was an interesting Hannah Fry programme on the BBC the other night about Covid anti-vaxers. She gathered together a disparate group of people who had refused vaccination for various reasons, listened to them and tried to gently broaden their minds a bit. You see why she is such a good science communicator, it was interesting, even if she had a lot more patience with some of them than I would have done. I particularly noted when one of them just got up and walked out of the room when told things she did not want to hear.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0019g27/unvaccinated

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3 hours ago, A wilding said:

There was an interesting Hannah Fry programme on the BBC the other night about Covid anti-vaxers. She gathered together a disparate group of people who had refused vaccination for various reasons, listened to them and tried to gently broaden their minds a bit. You see why she is such a good science communicator, it was interesting, even if she had a lot more patience with some of them than I would have done. I particularly noted when one of them just got up and walked out of the room when told things she did not want to hear.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0019g27/unvaccinated

Saw a bit of that. Think they managed to get a good cross section of your archetype anti vaxx crowd. From younger , cautious social media users who are worried about fertility and stuff, all the way to hardcore lunatics who sell their own ‘herbal products’ 
 

That dark haired woman, the angry one, is probably the one I’ve run into most often, that type. That certainty of opinion, emotionally unstable, sceptical of everything that most people believe, convinced they have access to secret information ( hint,there is no secret info on the internet)

Social media is a real plague when it comes to this stuff though 

 

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1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

That dark haired woman, the angry one, is probably the one I’ve run into most often, that type. That certainty of opinion, emotionally unstable, sceptical of everything that most people believe, convinced they have access to secret information ( hint,there is no secret info on the internet)

That was the one who walked out. She reminded me strongly of one of my relatives, who gets aggressively furiously angry whenever her (sometimes way out there) beliefs are challenged, and is also very much into herbalism. To be fair to her, she is a chronic invalid that the NHS has been unable to do much for (though she has not made it easy for them), and who has been engaged in a years long battle with social services to get support.

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29 minutes ago, A wilding said:

That was the one who walked out. She reminded me strongly of one of my relatives, who gets aggressively furiously angry whenever her (sometimes way out there) beliefs are challenged, and is also very much into herbalism. To be fair to her, she is a chronic invalid that the NHS has been unable to do much for (though she has not made it easy for them), and who has been engaged in a years long battle with social services to get support.

Seems very similar. There is definitely a cross pollination of lefty herbalists, new age garbage, homeopathic silliness and right wing conspiracy lunacy among that crowd.

I tend to dismiss them though, they are cranks, let them crank. Where the real issue is, is with causal much younger Instagram / Tik Tok users who just see random posts on the topic and get their info from that. I know a few people who have said they weren’t gonna get vaccinated because they saw a Tik Tok video going on about the dangers. It’s not like they are going to spend time figuring out what’s true or not.

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It actually seems like we're back to wearing a mask as the best community protection. With current vaccines not reducing the risk of infection and becoming contagious all that much, or even at all, and that it's principle benefit is in reducing the severity of illness when you do get infected, there is no such thing as herd immunity anymore. So, if you want to limit the risk of vulnerable people getting the infection it the first place then mask wearing so that your undetected COVID infection mostly stays inside your mask is the best way you can help reduce risk for vulnerable people, and the health system.

However that message is not being heard. Radio anecdote interviews with young healthy people have them saying the right things, "I am concerned about COVID for vulnerable people." But they say they don't care about COVID for themselves, so they don't wear a mask. The hard to dislodge fallacy that wearing a mask protects you from COVID is motivating young healthy people to reject masks because they aren't worried about getting COVID. People need to understand the reason you wear a mask is so that you are less likely to spread COVID. The sneaky thing about COVID has always been a/pre-symptomatic spread. That also seems to have possibly been something people are not thinking about.

Public policy is leading people down these paths now. We went from if you are a close contact of someone who has tested positive you must isolate for X days, to now you only need to isolate if you test positive. Public policy is also now you don't need to test until you have symptoms. These policy shifts, as measures intended to get people's lives and the economy moving, have meant that a/pre-symptiomatic spread is not being managed at all. Adding to that the almost complete elimination of mask mandates there is no longer much by way of public health measures aimed at limiting spread. The messaging in people's heads now being that what you do only affects you, so the risks you choose to take are not going to harm anyone but you. That has never been the case with COVID.

 

 

 

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/07/22/booster-shots-coronavirus-under-50/

Quote

 

Booster shots of the coronavirus vaccine for people younger than 50 are on hold as the Biden administration tries to accelerate a fall vaccination campaign using reformulated shots that target the now-dominant omicron subvariants, according to federal health officials.

Officials are hoping vaccine makers — Moderna and Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech — are able to make the updated shots available as soon as early to mid-September instead of later in the fall, said three officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the issue.

The retooled boosters will contain components from the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 as well as the original formula, which was based on the version of the virus that spread globally in early 2020. The hope is that the redesigned boosters will be more effective in dealing with an evolving virus.

In late June, FDA advisers recommended including an omicron component in retooled boosters, and the agency directed the manufacturers to do so. The companies indicated they would probably deliver the new shots in October. But since then, officials have urged the firms to move faster in producing the shots. If the new boosters are available by early to mid-September, the officials said, it is unlikely the administration would authorize a second dose of the current boosters for people younger than 50.

A final decision has not been made; officials are waiting for information from the manufacturers on whether there would be an adequate supply of reformulated shots if the fall campaign began earlier than expected. A decision is expected within days.

The FDA said it is evaluating the current situation, including data showing an increase in hospitalizations, and will make decisions on boosters based on all of the available evidence.
Moderna spokesman Chris Ridley said the company is committed to accelerating the supply of its reformulated vaccines “to meet the needs of regulators and public health demands around the world.” Pfizer declined to comment on administration vaccine decisions.

Currently, the only groups eligible for a second coronavirus booster are people 50 and older and those 12 and older with impaired immune systems.

Earlier this month, administration officials said they were weighing a plan to allow all adults to receive a second booster to blunt a virus surge fueled by ever-more-contagious omicron subvariants such as BA. 5 that evade some immune protections and have increased the risk of reinfections.

Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus coordinator, and Anthony S. Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, favored making booster shots more widely available this summer and calling for a quick decision. But Peter Marks, the top FDA vaccine official, had some concerns, officials said.

As the debate dragged into late July, officials have grown increasingly worried that the window is closing to encourage younger adults to receive a second booster shot now and then a reformulated shot later this year.

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Friday on Washington Post Live that her agency is talking to the FDA about a second booster for all adults but that it is ultimately the FDA’s decision.

“There would have to be action from the FDA to authorize a fourth dose for people under 50,” Walensky said. “In the meantime, another thing that we are doing is planning for the fall and understanding what the implications are, and where we are going for the fall, which is just about six weeks away.”

Some outside experts endorsed the idea of allowing all adults to get a second dose of the current booster — especially because the protection provided by the first boosters is waning. That would also allow the Biden administration to use vaccine doses that are reaching their expiration dates and would otherwise be discarded.

But other experts warned that a second dose of the current booster would not provide a big benefit and might do some harm. Paul A. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and an outside adviser to the FDA, said recently that repeatedly administering the same vaccine could lead to a phenomenon known as “imprinting,” in which an individual’s immune system develops a highly targeted response to earlier versions of a virus and fails to adapt as that virus evolves.

The federal government has agreed to purchase 105 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s rebooted vaccine for $3.2 billion. At $30.50 a dose, that is a premium over the initial contracts the government made for the original vaccine in 2020, when the vaccines were $19.50 per dose.

The government is expected to sign a contract with Moderna shortly.

 

 

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The new variants are hitting Japan hard.

So far 157(!) wrestlers are out of the Nagoya Basho, and as a result the daily video from Kintamayama is less than ten minutes long, and the matchups between the wrestlers are pretty odd (highly-ranked guys facing wrestlers way, way down the banzuke just so that they can have a match yesterday).

Overall, this is another bad sign for Japan, where June manufacturing had finally shown positive growth after big drops in the previous months.  It will be interesting to see if the auto manufacturers keep the order books open or not on new models like the upcoming Z.

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4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

It actually seems like we're back to wearing a mask as the best community protection. With current vaccines not reducing the risk of infection and becoming contagious all that much, or even at all, and that it's principle benefit is in reducing the severity of illness when you do get infected, there is no such thing as herd immunity anymore. So, if you want to limit the risk of vulnerable people getting the infection it the first place then mask wearing so that your undetected COVID infection mostly stays inside your mask is the best way you can help reduce risk for vulnerable people, and the health system.

I get confused about who is who sometimes, but aren't you a doctor?  What was the conventional wisdom about masks and respiratory viruses circa 2016?  Masking as practiced just makes you sicker.  Masking practiced well is neutral.  Cloth masks are totally counterproductive.  Surgical masks are supposed to stop you from inhaling splatter.  Catching grains of sand with a soccer net...

3 hours ago, Zorral said:

Considering the side effects of MRNA shots and boosters, why take any of them?  Maybe they come out with a merely outdated version that protects against the 6 month ago strain instead of the 20 something month ago strain, but overwriting your immune system to protect against a previous version is harmful in itself, and seems to make you more likely to get reinfected.  If this new version targets covid way more broadly than the spike protein then maybe there's some value but really it's going to help the manufacturer's health way more than yours, if past experience with boosters is any guide.

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3 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

Masking as practiced just makes you sicker. 

 

For fuck's sake.

 

4 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

Surgical masks are supposed to stop you from inhaling splatter. 

For fuck's sake.

 

3 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

Considering the side effects of MRNA shots and boosters, why take any of them? 

 

For fuck's sake.

 

 

3 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

but overwriting your immune system to protect against a previous version is harmful in itself,


For fuck's sake.


 

 

 

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3 hours ago, mcbigski said:

I get confused about who is who sometimes, but aren't you a doctor?  What was the conventional wisdom about masks and respiratory viruses circa 2016?  Masking as practiced just makes you sicker.  Masking practiced well is neutral.  Cloth masks are totally counterproductive.  Surgical masks are supposed to stop you from inhaling splatter.  Catching grains of sand with a soccer net...

Considering the side effects of MRNA shots and boosters, why take any of them?  Maybe they come out with a merely outdated version that protects against the 6 month ago strain instead of the 20 something month ago strain, but overwriting your immune system to protect against a previous version is harmful in itself, and seems to make you more likely to get reinfected.  If this new version targets covid way more broadly than the spike protein then maybe there's some value but really it's going to help the manufacturer's health way more than yours, if past experience with boosters is any guide.

Oh. Oh no. This is not good.

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So I’ve been wearing a mask in crowded indoor spaces again (public transport, shops). It’s okay-ish in the city because there are usually at least a couple others (mainly tourists or exchange students) wearing a mask, but as soon as you leave the city, people look at you like you have two heads with Medusa hair. It’s fine, it’s fine. I no longer know anybody in my hometown anyway, so what if people think I’m a looney? :lol: 

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6 hours ago, polishgenius said:

For fuck's sake.

At least he didn't whine about ivermectin again. The grains of sand/net analogy is circa 2020 and was extremely dumb then too.

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8 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Catching grains of sand with a soccer net...

This analogy only applies to someone with “cloth mask mind”, for whom sourced and repeated scientific facts seem to pass through unheard and/or uncomprehended.  Most people are “N95 mind”, which function well when it comes to information catching, and worst case, prevent their own bullshit from circulating out of their mouth into the surrounding populace.

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13 hours ago, mcbigski said:

I get confused about who is who sometimes, but aren't you a doctor?  What was the conventional wisdom about masks and respiratory viruses circa 2016?  Masking as practiced just makes you sicker.  Masking practiced well is neutral.  Cloth masks are totally counterproductive.  Surgical masks are supposed to stop you from inhaling splatter.  Catching grains of sand with a soccer net...

Considering the side effects of MRNA shots and boosters, why take any of them?  Maybe they come out with a merely outdated version that protects against the 6 month ago strain instead of the 20 something month ago strain, but overwriting your immune system to protect against a previous version is harmful in itself, and seems to make you more likely to get reinfected.  If this new version targets covid way more broadly than the spike protein then maybe there's some value but really it's going to help the manufacturer's health way more than yours, if past experience with boosters is any guide.

Are you purposefully trying to bring down the reputation of all drunks?

 

Not all drunks!

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Paxlovid, according to our friend who just came down with a really bad case of covid says within 12 hours of taking the first dose she was remarkably improved.

 

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