All things political. Coronavirus Edition. (7 Viewers)

[Maxp]

I fear we are really going to be in a bad place due to the obvious cuts to the federal agencies that deal with infectious disease, but also the negative effect the Affordable Care act has had on non urban hospitals. Our front line defenses are ineffectual and our ability to treat the populous is probably at an all time low. Factor in the cost of healthcare and I can see our system crashing. What do you think about the politics of this virus?

 

[MT15]

Like this one:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/me...re-effective-then-vaccine-immunity/ar-AAMX3sM

What about the study from Israel?

I am sorry you guys believe that this is some red badge of courage to take a drug that was suppose to protect you but that turned out to be incorrect.

Does it offer protection? How much?

I am not going to take a drug when I don't need it to make you guys that have feel better. That is illogical to me. We all obviously process, evaluate and mitigate risk differently. Besides, if I die from this virus, one less Trumper in yalls playground.

So, your doctor doesn’t address the boost in immunity you could get by having had the virus and taking the vaccine. He just didn’t talk about that. He says that natural immunity is better than being vaccinated, but the two I found are among the majority who say it looks like it’s the other way.

I just now realized Makary is citing your Israeli study, argh! Your study from Israel is one study, and the docs I follow have been talking about the way the study was set up. They say there was a flaw in it. This happens all the time, and is why you can’t be sure of anything following one study.

Then there is this paragraph from the article you linked, emphasis mine:

‘Dr. William Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that it is “impossible” to know whether the COVID vaccine or natural immunity is more protective against the virus due to the lack of knowledge regarding the level of protection natural immunity gives a person over time. Reinfection occurs in about 10% of people after having contracted the virus as a result of a decrease in immunity overtime.’

I don’t think breakthrough cases among vaccinated people are higher than 10%. Oregon reported about 1% (which seems high) recently and Nebraska is reporting 0.2% of fully vaccinated people contracting Covid. Indiana is reporting 0.7% breakthrough cases. Not all states are reporting that number, but these are three that make it easier to find.

Why do you doubt the effectiveness of the vaccine? There‘s no rational reason to doubt it. Nor to doubt it’s safety. There is no reason to doubt that the vaccine is extremely protective. It won’t hurt you and will most likely boost your immunity. Not taking it is illogical.

 

[JRad]

I don’t have to get the flu shot every year, but I do because it’s a net positive
I may not have to get a COVID booster, but it’s a net positive, so I will
Someone who has had COVID may feel like they don’t have to get a vaccination against It, but it’s still a net positive

Maybe I just weight net positives more. Maybe I’m just not scared of needles.


The Lancet also disagrees with the lab leak theory, so hope we’re remaining consistent with what sources we take as fact.

 

[MT15]

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

“Although the benefits of primary COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines). If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate… Current evidence does not appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high. Even if humoral immunity appears to wane, reductions in neutralizing antibody titre do not necessarily predict reductions in vaccine efficacy over time, and reductions in vaccine efficacy against mild disease do not necessarily predict reductions in the (typically higher) efficacy against severe disease.”

Here are few more of those experts that disagree with narrative.

I don’t think the disagreement is like you think it is. They are not arguing that boosters aren’t necessary, in fact they say they are or will be necessary. They are merely arguing timing and target audience. They are saying some people could benefit from boosters now, but not the general population.

Even so, they do not address your situation at all, as far as I can tell with a quick scan. There doesn’t seem to be any mention of enhanced immunity from both having Covid and getting the vaccine. It’s just not addressed.

This is an opinion piece, an informed opinion to be sure. But they are simply stating their opinion and much of it is based on the idea that the third world needs to be vaccinated in full before we start giving boosters. I understand that point. I would counter that our economy cannot recover if we keep going the way we are with this disease. We already have hospitals completely overwhelmed. People who get cancer, a heart attack, stroke or are in an accident are at real risk of not getting the care they need in parts of this country. If boosters will help the elderly and immune compromised, I think we should proceed.

These doctors are agreeing with WHO, that Americans shouldn’t get boosters as long as there are so many in the rest of the world waiting on their first doses. Here is their conclusion:

‘The vaccines that are currently available are safe, effective, and save lives. The limited supply of these vaccines will save the most lives if made available to people who are at appreciable risk of serious disease and have not yet received any vaccine. Even if some gain can ultimately be obtained from boosting, it will not outweigh the benefits of providing initial protection to the unvaccinated. If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants. Indeed, WHO has called for a moratorium on boosting until the benefits of primary vaccination have been made available to more people around the world.

18 This is a compelling issue, particularly as the currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination in populations that have received an effective primary vaccination regimen.’

 

[MT15]

Oh, and the docs in the Lancet article throw some shade on the Israeli study, in a totally professional academic way, lol. They used it to show how difficult it can be to interpret these types of studies.

 

[Farb]

I don’t have to get the flu shot every year, but I do because it’s a net positive
I may not have to get a COVID booster, but it’s a net positive, so I will
Someone who has had COVID may feel like they don’t have to get a vaccination against It, but it’s still a net positive

Maybe I just weight net positives more. Maybe I’m just not scared of needles.


The Lancet also disagrees with the lab leak theory, so hope we’re remaining consistent with what sources we take as fact.

I get the flu shot yearly too.
I am also not scared of needles.
It is a theory, but are we still going with the CCP bat wet market narrative? More and more evidence is pointing directly at the Wuhan lab and even our ruling bureaucrats. It will come out eventually.

 

[JRad]

It is a theory, but are we still going with the CCP bat wet market narrative

I’m not “going with” anything
But if you’re gonna quote the Lancet as proof boosters aren’t required, then say they aren’t correct on the origin…well, you’re cherry picking what you want to hear.

 

[JRad]

I get the flu shot yearly too.

I’m also curious how you reconcile this with not getting what’s essentially the same thing for COVID

 

[RobF]

I don’t think the disagreement is like you think it is. They are not arguing that boosters aren’t necessary, in fact they say they are or will be necessary. They are merely arguing timing and target audience. They are saying some people could benefit from boosters now, but not the general population.

Even so, they do not address your situation at all, as far as I can tell with a quick scan. There doesn’t seem to be any mention of enhanced immunity from both having Covid and getting the vaccine. It’s just not addressed.

This is an opinion piece, an informed opinion to be sure. But they are simply stating their opinion and much of it is based on the idea that the third world needs to be vaccinated in full before we start giving boosters. I understand that point. I would counter that our economy cannot recover if we keep going the way we are with this disease. We already have hospitals completely overwhelmed. People who get cancer, a heart attack, stroke or are in an accident are at real risk of not getting the care they need in parts of this country. If boosters will help the elderly and immune compromised, I think we should proceed.

These doctors are agreeing with WHO, that Americans shouldn’t get boosters as long as there are so many in the rest of the world waiting on their first doses. Here is their conclusion:

‘The vaccines that are currently available are safe, effective, and save lives. The limited supply of these vaccines will save the most lives if made available to people who are at appreciable risk of serious disease and have not yet received any vaccine. Even if some gain can ultimately be obtained from boosting, it will not outweigh the benefits of providing initial protection to the unvaccinated. If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants. Indeed, WHO has called for a moratorium on boosting until the benefits of primary vaccination have been made available to more people around the world.

18 This is a compelling issue, particularly as the currently available evidence does not show the need for widespread use of booster vaccination in populations that have received an effective primary vaccination regimen.’

Right. Even @Farb's quote begins by stating that "the benefits of primary vaccination clearly outweigh the risks". Everything there is very much in line with the narrative; there is no clear consensus on boosters and the necessity thereof yet, just an emerging picture.

That said, you can see quite a bit of that picture in this twitter thread:


It discusses data on vaccine efficiency, the extent to which it's waning, that factors in this appear to be age (with waning much less pronounced in the under 65s) and interval between doses, based on Public Health England data, amongst other things. Worth checking out.

A couple of key points from it though:

 

[Lapaz]

Like this one:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/me...re-effective-then-vaccine-immunity/ar-AAMX3sM

What about the study from Israel?

I am sorry you guys believe that this is some red badge of courage to take a drug that was suppose to protect you but that turned out to be incorrect.

Does it offer protection? How much?

I am not going to take a drug when I don't need it to make you guys that have feel better. That is illogical to me. We all obviously process, evaluate and mitigate risk differently. Besides, if I die from this virus, one less Trumper in yalls playground.

The virus kills about 2% of people, so that's not going to make a big dent in the Trump voting block to get a substantial electoral advantage, particularly because there are also substantial unvaccinated non-Trumpers, so that's a red herring. The vast majority of studies show that the vaccine does protect, particularly from hospitalization. So the real problem is that unvaccinated people are overwhelming hospitals. Are you willing to give up your ICU bed to others that need the ICU that did everything they could to avoid the hospital? Are you willing to pay your hospital bill, since the hospital bill is largely avoidable? If you agree to that, then I support you staying unvaccinated, but I still don't think you have a right to doing whatever you want around other people, since unvaccinated people spread the disease more easily.

 

[MT15]

Lol

 

[Lapaz]

Right. Even @Farb's quote begins by stating that "the benefits of primary vaccination clearly outweigh the risks". Everything there is very much in line with the narrative; there is no clear consensus on boosters and the necessity thereof yet, just an emerging picture.

That said, you can see quite a bit of that picture in this twitter thread:


It discusses data on vaccine efficiency, the extent to which it's waning, that factors in this appear to be age (with waning much less pronounced in the under 65s) and interval between doses, based on Public Health England data, amongst other things. Worth checking out.

A couple of key points from it though:

The data you posted shows a 20% decrease in efficacy of the vaccine preventing hospitalization after about 20 weeks. That's a lot of extra hospitalization, and once hospitalized, the death rate is much higher, so I think that's enough to justify the booster. I know the rest of the world needs the vaccine, but I want everyone in America to get the boosters, before we send those to other countries. I want it squashed in America first. We can help the rest of the world after we have our house in order. I hope we don't have doctors telling us that we don't need the boosters because we want another outcome, like vaccinating the rest of the world, just like when some told us we didn't need masks, because we wanted to make sure doctors had masks.

 

[UriUT]

Yea, we have to hope that the people born into this world will be better able to deal with it, and once all of us who remember rotary phones are gone, people will have misinformation antibodies.

it's quite a bit like the time right after the printing press was invented.

If I remember correctly, the conclusion of that article was that technology will trample our liberties because laws cannot keep up with technological advancement. I may be wrong. It has been years.

Edit. Funny you mention folks with antiquated beliefs dying. There's a great documentary called "The Story of Science". In it, the narrator made a comment that a scientific advancement was accepted only because folks who clung to old beliefs died off, and not because they accepted new evidence.

 

[Farb]

The virus kills about 2% of people, so that's not going to make a big dent in the Trump voting block to get a substantial electoral advantage, particularly because there are also substantial unvaccinated non-Trumpers, so that's a red herring. The vast majority of studies show that the vaccine does protect, particularly from hospitalization. So the real problem is that unvaccinated people are overwhelming hospitals. Are you willing to give up your ICU bed to others that need the ICU that did everything they could to avoid the hospital? Are you willing to pay your hospital bill, since the hospital bill is largely avoidable? If you agree to that, then I support you staying unvaccinated, but I still don't think you have a right to doing whatever you want around other people, since unvaccinated people spread the disease more easily.

Unvaxed with out natural immunity, I think that maybe the case. There is no proof at all, zero that naturals spread more easily than vaxed or unvaxed. Can you show receipts on that those with natural immunity spread the virus easier than those that are vaxed?

This whole thing about giving ICU beds. Why? I don't have a right to healthcare? I pay taxes in this rapidly degrading country. Are you saying those that get fully vaxed can be be in the ICU?

A. Can a person who is vaxed contract the viurs? Yes
B. Can a vaxed person with covid spread the virus? Yes
C. Can a natural get the virus? Yes
D. Can a natural spread the virus? Yes

So how is this on the naturals again? Do the naturals spread it more than the vaxed? Some say yes, some say no. Your problem is you lump unvaxed and naturals together. So unless you allow them to inject you with this covid drug, you are the enemy that the government needs to protect you from. If you guys cant see how f'ed up that is then there is no hope.

 

[RobF]

The data you posted shows a 20% decrease in efficacy of the vaccine preventing hospitalization after about 20 weeks.

No it doesn't! Look again.



At this point, it only shows that level of decrease for people in a clinical risk group, and possibly for the AstraZeneca vaccine in over-65s. Which is why that writer reaches the conclusions he does ("We can clearly see that not everyone needs a booster. For most under-65s, and even some healthy over-65s, protection is still holding up very well. But for those with serious underlying health conditions, boosters could make a big difference.")

There's some caveats to that, in particular the indication that timing between doses may be a factor, and the UK started using longer intervals quite early on. So it may be that waning is more pronounced in the USA where shorter intervals were used, and if that's the case, that may support more widespread use of boosters.

But the data as presented there doesn't support the idea of boosting everyone right now, just those in a clinical risk group.

 

[Lapaz]

No it doesn't! Look again.



At this point, it only shows that level of decrease for people in a clinical risk group. Which is why that writer reaches the conclusions he does ("We can clearly see that not everyone needs a booster. For most under-65s, and even some healthy over-65s, protection is still holding up very well. But for those with serious underlying health conditions, boosters could make a big difference."

There's some caveats to that, in particular the indication that timing between doses may be a factor, and the UK started using longer intervals quite early on. So it may be that waning is more pronounced in the USA where shorter intervals were used, and if that's the case, that may support more widespread use of boosters.

But the data as presented there doesn't support the idea of boosting everyone right now, just those in a clinical risk group.

There is a 20% drop for Astrazeneca, regardless of the risk, but I agree that the drop-off is small for Pfizer, but this is only 20 weeks after the second dose, which is barely over 4 months. I've always assumed that the vaccine would be efficacious for at least 6 months, and then start waning. I think we need data showing 26 to 52 weeks after the 2nd dose. I suspect that by the 9th month, there will be a substantial drop-off, so I maintain that boosters will probably be needed here for all. The riskiest with poor immune systems will need it sooner. I got vaccinated around May, and I have a good immune system, but I will be interested in a booster by the end of this year. I know the booster won't hurt me 7 months after my initial vaccine, so I don't want to wait until a bunch hospitalization data has been collected, because by that point, many more Americans will be dead.

 

[Lapaz]

Unvaxed with out natural immunity, I think that maybe the case. There is no proof at all, zero that naturals spread more easily than vaxed or unvaxed. Can you show receipts on that those with natural immunity spread the virus easier than those that are vaxed?

This whole thing about giving ICU beds. Why? I don't have a right to healthcare? I pay taxes in this rapidly degrading country. Are you saying those that get fully vaxed can be be in the ICU?

A. Can a person who is vaxed contract the viurs? Yes
B. Can a vaxed person with covid spread the virus? Yes
C. Can a natural get the virus? Yes
D. Can a natural spread the virus? Yes

So how is this on the naturals again? Do the naturals spread it more than the vaxed? Some say yes, some say no. Your problem is you lump unvaxed and naturals together. So unless you allow them to inject you with this covid drug, you are the enemy that the government needs to protect you from. If you guys cant see how f'ed up that is then there is no hope.

Studies have shown that vaxed people are less contagious than people who have previously contracted Covid.

COVID vaccines slash viral spread – but Delta is an unknown

Studies show that vaccines reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by more than 80%, but the Delta variant is creating fresh uncertainty.

www.nature.com

If you are truly naturally immune, then you have nothing to worry about with agreeing to give up your right to an ICU bed. The reality is you are more at risk than those that get vaccinated. Paying your taxes doesn't give you more rights than a person who also pays their taxes and takes proper precautions. Yes, anyone can get sick despite taking precautions, but the likelihood is far lower. People who are not taking precautions are ruining it for everyone else. You're indirectly causing multitudes of deaths, not only by taking up ICUs, but by contributing disproportionately to the spread of the disease. It is irresponsible.

 

[DaveXA]

Lol

I suspect he has a lot more than 16 followers now.

 

[insidejob]

My doctor disagrees with you as do a few other doctors and those I know in the medical field feel different than you do. I also know several doctors and those in the medical field that agree with you. So maybe it is not as black and white as you and a lot of people are thinking?
Oh, I have lots and lots of doubts about this vaccine. I will not get this vaccine and I usually and pretty quite about it, except to those that are close to me and when we discuss it, I bring up my doubts and situations.

So you think I am changing a lot of mind on this website? You must or otherwise your last statement was a giant virtue signal.

#resist (did I do that right?)

I am calling shenanigans on your doctor telling you not to get vaccinated. I know plenty of people who've had it and were told by their doctors to get vaccinated because the antibodies from catching it only last from 30-90 days max.