Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

Davros said:
I watched an interesting discussion on youtube about contagion/outbreak movies. You know the plot. An outbreak of some virus has decimated the human population but there is one person who can save humanity because they have an immunity and the film revolves about getting this person to the scientists who will develop a vaccine from his blood and save mankind.
Except we know what will really happen is scientists will develop a vaccine and people will refuse to take it because they think it's a way for the government to control you or bill Gates has put tracking chips in the vaccine or some other nonsense reason.
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When I first played last of us, I said on the thread here that Joel was a selfish asshole for putting his attachment to Ellie as a substitute for his daugher before the fate of humanity and Ellie's own will to die for that cause if that's what it would take. I was called heartless by most people then.

Funny what fear, paranoia and propaganda can do to people.
 
Davros said:
Except we know what will really happen is scientists will develop a vaccine and people will refuse to take it because they think it's a way for the government to control you or bill Gates has put tracking chips in the vaccine or some other nonsense reason.
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Well so far it seems that developing a vaccine to actually stop a respiratory disease is beyond us, so i think both situations you refer to (the world getting saved by the vaccine & people refusing vaccines mainly because of them containing chips) don't really apply
 
entity279 said:
Well so far it seems that developing a vaccine to actually stop a respiratory disease is beyond us, so i think both situations you refer to (the world getting saved by the vaccine & people refusing vaccines mainly because of them containing chips) don't really apply
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Vaccines for pertussis seem to work reasonably well.
 
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Go figure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Testing is up also contributing a bit to total counts. Full on school mingling, C19 can't get a foothold.

Edit: These cases not updated and there's about a week lag behind current data.
 
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It's encouraging that infections don't seem to be increasing too much. Some bad weather last week which might increase things a bit over the next week, but it seems that existing immunity from past infection and vaccines is working OK against the current variants at present.

Latest lab data for BA.2.86 (i.e. Pirola) seems to indicate it is more fusogenic than any previous Omicron descendant, which is bad, but it's still way below the levels of Delta so there hopefully shouldn't be any similar terrible wave of hospitalisations. Let's see if this one takes off or not. The vaccine rollout for the vulnerable has finally begun (my brother-in-law was contacted to book his jab yesterday) so let's hope that keeps a lid on things and we have a quiet autumn and winter ahead of us.

I don't doubt the NHS will be on the brink of collapse once again at some point over the winter months, but that's because our shit government has run it into the ground. Just as long as the vulnerable don't buy into the narrative that it is gone and don't bother to get vaccinated, we will hopefully be OK in general. Fingers-crossed for a helpful Covid/Flu landscape this year to minimise the problems as well.
 
What kind of vaccine boosters are they offering over there?

US just started offering boosters based on XBB 1.5 but both Moderna and Pfizer are claiming effective antibody response vs. 2.86 and Eris 5.1.
 
Here in the UK, the over-65s and the vulnerable* are being offered the vaccines based on BA.2 which we have stored up. Nobody else can get one. You can't pay for a vaccination in the UK. I'm not even sure that medical workers are being given boosters these days. Children have not been offered a booster for around 2 years now. One of the main paediatric guys for the UKHSA has just co-written (with a couple of well-known soft anti-vaxxers who have published controversial and debunked work in the past) downplaying the prevalence of long covid, which shows why we're following this cheapskate and poorly thought out policy.

Pretty much every one of our peers seems to be offering free universal boosters based on the XBB.1.5 variant to all age groups. It's going to be a very big control group to compare and contrast how we do this winter in comparison to our peers.

(*vulnerable doesn't mean what you might think. Immune compromised people are eligible as, supposedly, are their family members. However, I know it was pretty much impossible for my sister's kids to get a booster even though her husband is compromised. Also, asthmatics aren't considered vulnerable, for some reason).

In other news, today I was contacted by to authorise my children (ages 5 and 8) to have a flu vaccine next month. Flu jabs given to young kids but no Covid jabs, when Covid causes many more issues. The idea is that it helps protect older family members, but why then no thought about Covid for these same groups? I'm asthmatic, 50 years old and have had a flu jab for the past few years, but that offer has now been withdrawn as well. No idea why. They must have simply decided that asthmatics are immune to the flu. We're not.

What else is going on in this basket case of a country? Hmmm. Let's see, it seems that MMR vaccination rates amongst young children in some of the poorest inner London boroughs have fallen well below 60% so we'll be seeing a massive measles pandemic before too long. Hospitalisations, deaths, disability. It's all coming and our useless government (and the health authorities) are doing nothing to try and avert it. Of course, the anti-vaxxers (and their funders) are the ones who will have caused it with all the disinformation they have sowed about Covid vaccines. The fuckers should be strung up.
 
In the US there are some reports that people are being asked to pay out of pocket, not free.

I have mine scheduled next week so we shall see. I would pay it anyways if I had to. Some people pay like $300 for Shingrix shots and others don't because we have a messed up health care system.

A couple of years ago, there was covid vaccine tourism to the US from some countries which couldn't secure supplies. There were actually tour packages to fly to the US, get the shots and return.


Yeah this will be an interesting case. They went from bivalent back to a single variant (XBB 1.5) and the idea is to avoid imprinting, even though they did tout the success of the bivalent last year at raising immunity to the prevailing variant at the time.

So the recommendation is that everyone over 6 months old get boosters. Americans have been steadily refusing boosters, with lower percentages of people getting each successive booster. There is hope that more people might get this one than the last couple of them.

But I do see people saying I'm getting the flu vaccine but I'm done with covid vaccines.

Why bother with flu vaccines then? Covid is way more infectious and more lethal than the flu. That's not even taking into account that vaccines have been shown to reduce incidence of Long Covid as well.

Unfortunately, modern communications, particularly social media, have allowed way more disinformation to spread. But worse than that, it's made people lazy or dumb because instead of reading about things, people take politically-biased TV or social media sources as gospel without critically evaluating the messages.

Roger Ailes, the guy who started Fox News, said TV is much more effective for politically influencing people than earlier forms of media like print or even radio, because viewers just accepting things said on TV at face value.
 
The UK Covid dashboard has been replaced with a more generalised virus tracking site:

UKHSA data dashboard

Overall summary of the respiratory viruses in circulation within the UK
ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk

Don't look at the vaccination graph...

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Maybe they just haven't been counting 2023 Autumn Boosters?
 
I seem to think that the original plan here was for boosters to be offered in October, but they then reportedly brought it forward to September? Not sure if the GPs doing the vaccinations were ready for that, however! I suspect there must have been some vaccinations but my brother in law was only contacted about his booster earlier this week. A bit of a shambles, everything considered.

Regarding my earlier comments about the declining rates of MMR take-up in some London boroughs, I didn't realise that the trend began in 2014 and has continued to plummet since. I wonder what caused this? There's going to be some sort of anti-vaxx nonsense in there somewhere, but I wonder of what particular sort? Cultural? Religious? The cause doesn't really matter, it will be the kids who suffer. I had measles when I was 5 and was apparently very poorly for several weeks. Don't really recall much of it, of course, but I get the impression it really was very unpleasant for me and I had to be nursed through it quite intensely by my Mum.
 
There's been resistance to MMR because of stories of it causing autism. If people won't take up the MMR, turn it into MR and M vaccines. But now there's the post-Covid antivax mindset affecting things too.
 
The weird thing is that the 2014 dip in rates is that it came years after Wakefield began pushing his bullshit about autism (which he made a very healthy living from - still does, touring America I believe). It would be strange if this stuff suddenly got traction just in a few areas of London so long after all that began. There will obviously be some cause, but how do you discover what it is? Local public health teams might know, I suppose, but then you'd think they would do something about it.

No chance of the government offering any split vaccinations which are less cost-effective than the MMR. To be fair, they shouldn't have to.
 
A good analysis of the MMR problem here in the UK:

paulmainwood.substack.com

MMR and measles

Not again, please
paulmainwood.substack.com paulmainwood.substack.com

The low take up of the vaccine in some areas of London is probably due to lack of trust in government among some ethnic groups, if the available data is to be believed. Hopefully, the local health authorities will be onto this to get a vaccination drive going in the relevant areas, or we're going to end up seeing a lot of needlessly dead and disabled kids. 'Community leaders', time to live up to your name!
 
People? Statistically, that's most unlikely, as would knowing even one person who has become ill due to a vaccine dose. I don't know of anybody who has had any issues with any of the vaccines which they received, which is as would be expected from the data available.
 
Mariner said:
People? Statistically, that's most unlikely, as would knowing even one person who has become ill due to a vaccine dose. I don't know of anybody who has had any issues with any of the vaccines which they received, which is as would be expected from the data available.
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An 18-year-old who suffered from myocarditis.
Personally, I chose not to have the vaccine because of this case.
 
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