Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]
- Thread starter RDGoodla
- Start date
condoms, yes if they are catholic at least
and in their minds only homosexuals get hiv/aids so they are probably against a vaccine for that too
Yeah, just a different group of dickheads!
Stay on topic please.
Your blindspot is believing dissinformation and exageration only comes from one side. Its a two way street. There are just as many "science" cheerleaders who are more focused on propagating blind trust than truth seeking, and who will twist facts and data to favor that agenda. Well intentioned or not, they hurt humanity's sense-making ability and ironically they end up feeding the paranoias of the anti-vaxxers.
You will never see it happen if you dont ever even turn your bullshit-o-meter when someone claiming to speak in the name of medical science with a traditional institution to hind behind start speaking.
Nope, I'm quite happy to accept valid critiques of the science, but the anti-vaxxers don't provide them. Instead, we see cherry-picked claims which misrepresent what the statistics actually show. I'm sure that this is sometimes due to ignorance, but in most cases it is malice. These people have persuaded themselves that something is the case and it becomes a belief system so actual evidence doesn't matter to them. Added to that, the grift of the right-wing media backed by the shadowy 'thinktanks' funding the anti-vaxx groups deliberately pushing disinformation and there is no doubt in my mind where the dishonesty lies.
The trial data for the various vaccines is publicly available and much analysis has been carried out on this data. Added to this, we have huge amounts of data available about the vaccines and health outcomes from the likes of the CDC and its equivalents in numerous western countries.
I'm not saying it is impossible that this data has been doctored by the authorities, but it would be an incredible difficult task and I think there are enough capable statisticians out there to spot even slight inconsistencies between countries. You'd require an enormous, incredibly well-aligned conspiracy between dozens of governments to hide any signal about side-effects in the data. To be blunt, most governments are generally competent enough to achieve this!
The obvious counterpoint to the claim that things were hidden for nefarious reasons is the problems with AZ vaccine which quickly led to it being withdrawn for use among younger people. This is in spite of the fact that there were only incredibly rare occurrences of this admittedly very serious side-effect. If there had been a cover-up, this vaccine would have remained in use for all age cohorts as it would almost certainly have saved a lot more lives than it took.
The trial data for the various vaccines is publicly available and much analysis has been carried out on this data. Added to this, we have huge amounts of data available about the vaccines and health outcomes from the likes of the CDC and its equivalents in numerous western countries.
I'm not saying it is impossible that this data has been doctored by the authorities, but it would be an incredible difficult task and I think there are enough capable statisticians out there to spot even slight inconsistencies between countries. You'd require an enormous, incredibly well-aligned conspiracy between dozens of governments to hide any signal about side-effects in the data. To be blunt, most governments are generally competent enough to achieve this!
The obvious counterpoint to the claim that things were hidden for nefarious reasons is the problems with AZ vaccine which quickly led to it being withdrawn for use among younger people. This is in spite of the fact that there were only incredibly rare occurrences of this admittedly very serious side-effect. If there had been a cover-up, this vaccine would have remained in use for all age cohorts as it would almost certainly have saved a lot more lives than it took.
Just re-quoting as this was a reply meant to partially answer, beside of the direct point that in this case vaccination should be a personal decision, to @Albuquerque 's ideea that it's a lot about political aligment and news sources.
So, could it be rather that the vaccines did not turn out what some people expected them to be (even if the expectations were unrealistic)? Could it be that some the people felt betrayed and patronised by goverments' tunnel-vission messages about vaccination?
I see the questions above as significantly more important to answer for whoever wants to get to the buttom of this; than which party you allign with and what news do you read.
(Further, concerning parties and media, my comment and observation is that this might be a US phenomenom, and to a lesser extent maybe, of the most ritch Western countries. And the fact that it doesn't apply elswhere, makes me question wether it applies in the US as well as one might thing it does. It may very well be the famous "correlation and not causation" in this case
So in Romania, my country, there was no political party which was anti-covid and anti vaccines. There was, of course, a generic anti vaccine sentiment pre existing among some of the population. Being an ex comunist country, people are different; and what's relevant here woud be that there's a higher baseline level of nonviolent distrust of authority on one hand, but also still a tendency to comply to rules out of fear among elders, on the other.
Anyway only later, at the end of 2020 by then already, the extreme right wing party did adopt that (anti-covid) discourse publicly; my point thus being that it only did so after the people already had ran away with it.
About the news sources, that's IMO a tautological statement mostly. Of course getting (alleged) facts from one place as opposed to from another tipically means a different perspective on the facts. News/media is a form of entertaiment too; people might actually read some sources because they agree with them. And not the other way round - people being manipulated into agreeing to what the source publishes )
Firstly, let's not confuse transmission with infection. There's no good evidence vaccination prevents transmission, to my knowledge, and the manufacturers themselves said they've never measured that and they wouldn't claim any efficacy here. I do agree though that at the time the confusion was made, by me as well i think, and from the media back then you might get the hope vaccines would help with that.
Wrt to infection yes, that's mostly how i understand it, it does help with current strains but that is an academic point as vaccines will always be updated for the previous one.
However for boosters there were studies which showed it helped reduce infections for a few months. However, that protection is still lower than needed to impact the progress of the disease. And further, some some studies show that the likelyhood is increased to get the virus, the more boosters you get .
But why would we ever want a mRNA version of an existing vaccine?
Seems to me, the only advantage of mRNA is that it helps with manufacturing large quatities of vaccines easier ( eliminating the need to grow the whole inactivated virus ). To achieve said scalability, Pfizer at least even has used a less precise manufacturing process (compared to the one presented to the approving bodies) to mass produce the vaccine
On top of the current uncertainty and suspicions, we get the drawback that the antigen remains in the body for a long time, and spreads through the body (as opposed to classic vaccines where the antigen remains near the injection site ).
There are no indications of course, if you jump at excluding wherever/whoever such indication might be coming from. And you seem to be attempting to make it easier for your future self as you are demonizing those sources.
Here's a recent article though, apparently asking to stop mRNA vaccinations until questions are answered: https://www.cureus.com/articles/203052#!/
WhiningKhan
Regular
What do you mean by progress of the disease - reducing transmission in populace (which already was said not to be a target for the vaccine) or reducing severity of the illness on individual (which the vaccines arguably succeeded in)?
I meant rate of infection/transmission, and not the effect on the overall severity of the outcomes, because of the context.
The context was that, as posted above, that not getting vaccinated has consequencs for others ( beyond the person choosing not to vaccinate) too. While of course there are consequences to anything, I meant to address the fact that by someone not getting vaccinated, doesn't mean others will get infected as a consequence of that.
( I'm personally unsure of how the vaccines helped reducing the severity of the ilnesses, not convinced by the data either way, mostly because almost anyone failed to account for natural immunity's impact and that is certainly a relevant factor)
WhiningKhan
Regular
Why would you attribute reduced severity to natural immunity but not to vaccines?
I would expect those to go hand in hand. Viral load being lower in less severe infections, aided by vaccine, might lead to lessened likelihood of them being 'superspreaders', producing less intense viral loads in droplets/aerosols they put out. Then the unvaccined people around could get away with less severe infection. Viral load at the time of contracting the disease was linked to severity, AFAIR.
This is anecdotal but my boss got hospitalized and his wife died of covid right at the time vaccinations were starting. When the first booster rounds were starting, severe infections in such middle-aged populace without comorbidities was already greatly diminished. No one else I know got it nearly as bad after that point with their first infection.
Edit:
Here is an excellent publication about the topic.
SARS-CoV-2 viral load and shedding kinetics - Nature Reviews Microbiology
A better understanding of the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is essential to inform public health measures. In this Review, Puhach, Meyer and Eckerle explore insights into what influences SARS-CoV-2 shedding, how this drives transmission and the tools available to measure this and determine...
www.nature.com
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It's not about that, it's just that there are two huge sources of immunity and one is barely ever considered. It's as if we'd rate multiple gaming computers' performance only by the CPUs they use, and we don't mention the GPU used, just that they can be any of the commercially available ones .
If the studies / analysis / statistics control for natural immunity (the majority of times they don't seem to be) the findings are of little practical relevance as very few people are still completely naiive to the virus (never exposed to the virus and never vaccinated).
Subtlesnake
Regular
Real world studies on Vaccine Effectiveness (VE) use "test-negative" designs that compare the proportion of those vaccinated in those testing postive (cases group) with the proportion of those vaccinated in those testing negative (control group). In this way prior population immunity should not affect the VE figure.
Subtlesnake
Regular
The fact that the measure of VE is not influenced by population immunity allows it to estimate the additional protection provided by vaccines, on top of existing immunity in the population. So it's very relevant for determining the efficacy of a vaccine in the real world.
Edit: To be clear, there will be a different combined effectiveness for different combinations of vaccinations + prior infections. For example, no infection + 2 doses, prior infection + 2 doses, prior infection + 3 doses. etc. But the effect of each combination can be broken out by comparing the incidences between the case and control groups. For example, see this study: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2203965
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but this is a previously fictional case, which only appeared in the case of covid.
I instead see a lot of stretches & juggling here, solutions looking for a problem; as depicted also by the invention of the term (makes its appearence on the paper you've linked) "hybrid immunity"
If you've already got the disease, you don't vaccinate. Period. This is overwhelmingly how "classic" vaccines are used, hence it stands to reason that this should be the default for a new one that doesn't appear to be superior (to put it mildly) to the classic ones.
Similarly, why would you even vaccinate if you are in a really low risk group (where most are, actually, at least in present day) with a vaccine doesn't stop the disease from spreding.
^^
The point i'm assembling here is that since we're not administring / treating this as a "real" vaccine (nor should we), numbers that might be useful for vaccines' measured efficacy are no longer obviously relevant.
Not to say the linked paper isn't quite interesting though, and feels pretty accessible.
LE: My intuition is also that the fact that we don't normally vaccinate people who already have a given disease, nor do we administer like 5-6 doses of the same vaccine is by design, and it's a good thing. And the intuition goes that we don't overload the immune system with this one antigen; when the system is so complex and is trained to handle (probably) millions of other viruses.
I remember the vaccine responsibles in my country saying something similar at the time as well, in early 2021. When asked about whether we would go beyond 2 doses, they did say that we shouldn't do that, as there are risks.
Also Robert Clancy in one his youtube long interviews that many doses might make the immune system attack the virus less, not more, which is not what you want.
(let's remember there is both short term immunity and long term immunity; and the above considered both. While virtually all the studies only consider short term as it's easy to measure and it's undestandable. Boosting short term , doesn't necessarily mean long term isn't negatively impacted)
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Everyone's had flu, so why is there a flu vaccine? Likewise why bother with a 'shingles' vaccine for people who have had chicken pox?
Low risk from what? Long Covid has been pretty prevalent among all ages.
I think there was something on that on the BMJ where basically the body acclimates to the antigen presence. I can't recall though and that's just heresay without reference. However, this would be in keeping with natural philosophy that the body always acclimates to constants as a new norm.
Is it a honest question? Surely you can see the massive difference in how covid vaccine was promoted to everybody and their dog. How people got fired and have their movement restricted if they refused to vaccinate.
Flu vaccines are always available as an option, and here at least only the elderly and immuno compromised take it.
For a mass vaccination campain, the burden of proof on why one should vaccinate after they've been infected, or why you should take the n+1 dose should be on the ones oferring the vaccine. And I really don't see that i'm claiming anything outlandish here, this was the norm before, was it not? Based on what we should change that?
Looks like you found a reason why one might want to vaccinate if one is in a low risk group? If the risk is low for covid, but somehow larger for LC, and the person was not previously infected ( knowingly or unknowingly), could be a good ideea.
Vaccines themselves are just supposed to give the immune system a nudge; present the antigen so the immune system will know how to create antibodies whenever encountering the virus. The fact that after vaccinations we can measure a level of antibodies is mearly a (usually useful) side effect.
I was just trying to give a picture about the immune system. The pattern/principle which I could observe is only to give as little input to the immune system as possible. And regardless of reason, this is what happened before. And now with covid, I can see how this principle was being sistematically ignored (even just a single dose of covid vaccine can produce too much antigen and for too long time), with no reason given. To me this is allarming and i personally would like an explanation.
It's not that important IMO if my intuition (not overloading the immune system) about why this pattern occured is innacurate.
(As a random little example, I can clearly remember when i got a childhood vaccine that was given in two doses, the doctors checking the injection site on my arm after the first dose. She said nothing, then the other doctor said that the immune response looks a bit strong. The other agreed (she didn't want to influence the 2nd doctor's evaluation), and they've simply decided not to give me the second dose. )
LE: I mean in a way scratch what i said wrt to my last point. Don't need to specifically refer to giving vaccines at all. It's a general principle in science even to minimise the ammount of interventions to the least ammount needed to a achieve a set measurable goal
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Subtlesnake
Regular
The question I was addressing was not "should we vaccinate", but "do we have a reliable method of assessing vaccine effectiveness that takes into account prior immunity". And my claim was that we do have such a method (real world studies using test-negative designs).
In any case, the drive for mass vaccination was when the Delta variant was becoming prevalent, which had a significantly higher Infection Fatality Rate. The combination of population immunity, the inherent mildness of Omicron, and vaccination, served to reduce the IFR to that of the Flu, or even below. So right now we are in an analogous situation to the Flu, where vaccination is only pushed for vulnerable members of the population. In the UK you need to be 65 or over to qualify.
That's a different issue to the one I was addressing. You said we don't give vaccines to the already vaccinated or those who have had the disease. I present Exhibit A, vaccines where we do just that!
I think this disproves that argument. Then your argument moves to one of excessive vaccination, which I think I agree with.
There's two types. One primes the body's cellular response to react quickly and the other activates the immune system to produces ABs and avoid a real infection. The first MMR type vaccines you get are to prime the immune system, whereas the annual Flu vaccine is the 'activate' type vaccine to produce active ABs.
Some of this - patterns and principles - is philosophy, not science, and scientists by and large prefer to stick with their very limited understanding, go full ahead with what they 'know' and then develop new theories years later that show what they 'knew' wasn't correct.
We can't know everything and IMO we need good philosophy to make smart choices around the unknowns and little pieces science can reveal. It's very hard to hold that position as all sides are then against you! If you aren't with the antivax conspirators, you are part of the problem. If you aren't shooting them down, you are part of the problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯