Coronavirus outbreak - From China to the World.

[antaeus]

To be fair, if you're a young person without any serious health issues, your risk is extremely low with or without being vaccinated. I just think that if you're unconcerned about getting COVID, you should be even less concerned about getting the vaccine.

Not to mention the fact that if you get the vaccine, you're unlikely to pass the vaccine on to others (and may be less likely to pass Covid to others, incidentally). But if you get Covid, you're likely to pass it on to others, who may have a higher risk profile than you.

I find it enlightening how different people frame risk factors surrounding Covid in general, and vaccination. Is it about me or is it about us?

[sumskilz]

Not to mention the fact that if you get the vaccine, you're unlikely to pass the vaccine on to others (and may be less likely to pass Covid to others, incidentally). But if you get Covid, you're likely to pass it on to others, who may have a higher risk profile than you.

I find it enlightening how different people frame risk factors surrounding Covid in general, and vaccination. Is it about me or is it about us?

I deliberately avoided "us" factors in that post, because I didn't want to confuse the rather focused point I was making by conflating issues.

I certainly have no issue with people taking collective concerns into account when making personal decisions, but collective concerns have also been used to justify coercive measures. Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, especially this paper, goes a long way in explaining why/how different people have different preferences in the relative weighting of individual vs collective concerns. For those who are more focused on collective concerns, I think reducing the partisan association the issue has would actually serve that interest. I see people looking for reasons to see the vaccines as dangerous, when their real objection is being told what to do by people who they dislike and more importantly distrust (for justified reasons).

[PointOfViewGun]

No one can guarantee that a treatment that hasn’t been tested long term will have no long-term side effects, and on principle I’m opposed to any coercive measures taken to promote vaccination. That said, I understand the mechanism behind the mRNA vaccines reasonably well, and I don’t think there is cause for concern. In fact, I’m almost certain the risk of long-term effects from mild cases of COVID is much greater than from the vaccines.

Regarding short term side effects of the vaccine, there was a study done in Israel on the Pfizer vaccine, N = 1,736,832 plus they had complete medical records for all before and after. There were no financial incentives or any other conflicts of interest involved.

A summary of the results:

The full study here.

To be fair, if you're a young person without any serious health issues, your risk is extremely low with or without being vaccinated. I just think that if you're unconcerned about getting COVID, you should be even less concerned about getting the vaccine.

The chances you're carrying in a pandemic world is not just the risk you carry for your body, however low that may be, but also the risk you carry for those you're in close contact with. The worst experiences of COVID19 did not come from suffering from the virus but watching your loved ones suffer from it because of you.

[EmperorBatman999]

You should actually see coronavirus and influenza as sister viruses. They're similar but different in some ways. Before the COVID pandemic, 30% of flu cases were caused by coronavirus. The flu vaccine gets renewed every year. In fact, its effectiveness lasts even less than half a year. It can be most effective when administered before the flu season starts. It's not surprising that the same would be true for a similar virus like coronavirus. There are other diseases, like whooping cough, where vaccines provide only a short time frame for immunity.

Calling mRNA vaccines shoddy is exactly the way inactive vaccines were called first time they were developed. You have absolutely no reason to disparage them like that. Moreover, you're outright lying that no research and development went into treatment methods when there are multiple treatment drugs that were either redesigned/researched or completely developed against COVID. Merck just applied for emergency FDA approval for molnupiravir.

It's certainly disgraceful to see efforts of doctors, researchers and technicians to be disparaged so easily and so fundamentally...

Merck had been gone against the grain and made a business decision on the realization that they couldn't compete in the crowded vaccine market. I had been aware of this development for awhile, as a family friend of mine is an employee and was telling me about their project. Still, for the others, Operation Warp Speed put an emphasis on streamlining and funding the research and production of vaccines, rather than treatments.

Regarding my disparagement, I am frustrated at the medical industry from the way the pandemic has been managed. A few weeks ago, my girlfriend lost her father at 59 after a long fight against Covid. His body had been cleared of the virus for four days, but his lungs gave out, and the hospital did little to bring down the inflammation, while the staff was constantly harassing him insisting that he be intubated, which would've actually lowered his chances of survival. The barrage of stress and the constant ominous threats of the staff put him in an atmosphere of stress and anxiety that only further weakened his heart and lungs.

His death started with the irresponsibility of a couple that was vaccinated, got Covid, and then chose to go to a birthday party anyway. They spread it to their daughter, who then spread it the father's wife at work, and then she brought it home to infect her husband and their daughter. While the mother and daughtered recovered quickly, it killed him. He was 59 and his only potential health issue with Covid was being quite overweight, but neither obese nor diabetic (this didn't stop the hospital staff from trying to administer him insulin at one point, despite no indication on his records he was diabetic: that itself could've killed him). The incident has only made me further lose faith in the vaccine, as it didn't protect him from the vaccinated spreading the sickness. Additionally, my girlfriend told me after visiting the hospital that half of the patients in the Covid ward were vaccinated, some also clinging to life like her father. It disgusts me, too, that my federal government pays more to hospitals if they lose a patient to Covid (about $30,000 per death) than to the family and dependents of the departed, who only get $5,000 after a lengthy appeal to FEMA.

I am also equally angry at the company of my girlfriend and her mother, who made it policy to only excuse Covid leave with a positive test, rather than making it conditional on any feeling of illness or confirmed contact. They should never have brought their employees back into the office at all. They entirely pretended the pandemic didn't any longer exist, which has had terrible consequences.

[Cyclops]

I deliberately avoided "us" factors in that post, because I didn't want to confuse the rather focused point I was making by conflating issues.

I certainly have no issue with people taking collective concerns into account when making personal decisions, but collective concerns have also been used to justify coercive measures. Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, especially this paper, goes a long way in explaining why/how different people have different preferences in the relative weighting of individual vs collective concerns. For those who are more focused on collective concerns, I think reducing the partisan association the issue has would actually serve that interest. I see people looking for reasons to see the vaccines as dangerous, when their real objection is being told what to do by people who they dislike and more importantly distrust (for justified reasons).

Politically the consequences of vaccine mandates are too high IMHO. They produce a reaction in society against medical advice by making a really immense demand on a persons autonomy: I think it would undermine confidence in government across the board, and push a whole lot of people into the "non compliant" sectors of the political pie chart.

They also provide an avenue of future abuse: as with a number of epidemiological measures, the power granted here is Draconian, and would be abused eventually by some politician.

There might be some emergency "Typhoid Mary" scenario where vaccines can be mandated and not destroy society but the most my government can do is make a lot of work vaccine conditional, and even that's pretty stressful.

We need diversity (including seemingly looney PoV's and that includes conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers and others) as insurance against future disaster: monoculture is death.

[antaeus]

The hardest part for society in this vaccine rollout, was always going to be that point in which there are enough vaccinated people so as to render other responses less important, but not enough to largely normalise the virus. That period where the vaccinated make up 50-70% of the population and the pressure for normal reaches fever pitch. That is where the societal tensions come to the fore. Those who are vaccinated are no longer tolerant of those unvaccinated who are seen to be holding back their society's return to normalcy. Those who are vaccine hesitant find themselves facing the increasing ire of a society that wants to move on and face that horrible choice - do they stick to their principles or do they cave.

We seem to see two approaches once different countries and states approach this point. The "we're opening things up and Covid will be everywhere and if you get sick it's on you" approach, and the "we're opening up and if you're not vaccinated, you're going to be excluded from society" approach.

I look at it the same way I look at driving a car. You require a license so that society is assured that you aren't going to kill yourself and others when you drive. You don't have to drive, but you can't access any of the conveniences that driving affords. In that way I couldn't ever consider use of force on a society to vaccinate en-masse, but I can understand why parts of society might require vaccine as a condition of participation.

[PointOfViewGun]

Merck had been gone against the grain and made a business decision on the realization that they couldn't compete in the crowded vaccine market. I had been aware of this development for awhile, as a family friend of mine is an employee and was telling me about their project. Still, for the others, Operation Warp Speed put an emphasis on streamlining and funding the research and production of vaccines, rather than treatments.

Regarding my disparagement, I am frustrated at the medical industry from the way the pandemic has been managed. A few weeks ago, my girlfriend lost her father at 59 after a long fight against Covid. His body had been cleared of the virus for four days, but his lungs gave out, and the hospital did little to bring down the inflammation, while the staff was constantly harassing him insisting that he be intubated, which would've actually lowered his chances of survival. The barrage of stress and the constant ominous threats of the staff put him in an atmosphere of stress and anxiety that only further weakened his heart and lungs.

His death started with the irresponsibility of a couple that was vaccinated, got Covid, and then chose to go to a birthday party anyway. They spread it to their daughter, who then spread it the father's wife at work, and then she brought it home to infect her husband and their daughter. While the mother and daughtered recovered quickly, it killed him. He was 59 and his only potential health issue with Covid was being quite overweight, but neither obese nor diabetic (this didn't stop the hospital staff from trying to administer him insulin at one point, despite no indication on his records he was diabetic: that itself could've killed him). The incident has only made me further lose faith in the vaccine, as it didn't protect him from the vaccinated spreading the sickness. Additionally, my girlfriend told me after visiting the hospital that half of the patients in the Covid ward were vaccinated, some also clinging to life like her father. It disgusts me, too, that my federal government pays more to hospitals if they lose a patient to Covid (about $30,000 per death) than to the family and dependents of the departed, who only get $5,000 after a lengthy appeal to FEMA.

I am also equally angry at the company of my girlfriend and her mother, who made it policy to only excuse Covid leave with a positive test, rather than making it conditional on any feeling of illness or confirmed contact. They should never have brought their employees back into the office at all. They entirely pretended the pandemic didn't any longer exist, which has had terrible consequences.

A potential malpractice case from your personal anecdote doesn't justify you apparently deliberately lying about COVID19 treatments. What you're promoting here is propagation of fallacies. Another person can look at your case and say that COVID will kill you. Neither approach deserves respect.

[EmperorBatman999]

A potential malpractice case from your personal anecdote doesn't justify you apparently deliberately lying about COVID19 treatments. What you're promoting here is propagation of fallacies. Another person can look at your case and say that COVID will kill you. Neither approach deserves respect.

What part is the lie? Most media and political attention was focused on vaccines, not treatments, and even an NYT article confirmed from January '21 that treatment research has received markedly less funding: $18.5 billion for vaccines, only $8.2 billion for treatments, and that treatment research was much smaller in scope. I'm not a believer in hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, either, but I can see why people were outraged at the way these drugs were discarded in the public arena: everybody wants hope that there is something out there in this world which can pull people from the brink, and the fact that the media swatted away these methods so rapidly made them, ironically, a much bigger deal than they actually were. We wouldn't be seeing the obsession with hydro or ivermectin if doctors were just allowed to quietly discontinue the treatments, rather than making a big story trying to fact check their usefulness and then insulting those who wanted the treatments to work.

As far as the story about the father, it is an anecdote, but I think anecdotes do hold value and can act as a guide because humans are poor at perceiving the abstract, and rely on what they and those close to them experience. No public-facing industry is beyond reproach, we know that with the police, we know it with teachers, and it goes too for hospital staff and administrators. They treated her father like absolute garbage, and I have little doubt they were biased against him, from the conversations which were relayed to me. Look at all the online ranting coming hospital doctors and nurses ranting about having to take care of the unvaccinated, many doctors and nurses clearly hold it against their patients, and that has to play a role in reducing the level of care. And the funding? That is true, too, even fact-checking sites have confirmed it is so. As far as the FEMA funding, I sat in on the conversations where the mother and daughter were discussing possibilities for compensation, considering the family just had their income slashed by 2/3rds.

And the contagiousness among the vaccinated? That is simply an inconvenient truth which gets in the way of the pro-vaccine argument. The speed at which pro-vaccine arguers try to cover this up is ironically, in and of itself, damaging to the vaccine argument. The unvaccinated are still more likely to spread because of the higher viral count and the longer duration of illness, but the vaccine is not 100% guaranteed to protect others, and I think it is in some ways worse because the (a.) the vaccinated have been legally and societally given a free pass from social distancing, and (b.) because the vaccine lowers the severity of symptoms, it allows the vaccinated to write off their illness as a more mild, non-COVID ailment. Both factors taken together cause plenty of opportunities for the vaccinated and infected to go out in public and create outbreaks. We know it happens, and I've very closely felt the consequences of this vaccine hubris.

Paving over bad press about the vaccine will not convince more people to get it. We need an honest, mature conversation about what the vaccine precisely does, what its potential drawbacks are, and what the vaccine won't do. We need to finally tell people that the vaccine does not grant them a free pass, and that the pandemic is not over, which requires all people, vaccinated or not, to continue social distancing measures to control the spread.

[PointOfViewGun]

What part is the lie?

Here:

The result is that no RnD went into treatment methods to bring the dying from the brink.

This was a blatant lie. You admitted having knowledge to the contrary here:

Merck had been gone against the grain and made a business decision on the realization that they couldn't compete in the crowded vaccine market. I had been aware of this development for awhile, as a family friend of mine is an employee and was telling me about their project.

[EmperorBatman999]

That shows me for speaking in absolutes, but the other remarks of my point remain intact, and that is that significantly less investment and interest was put into researching treatments than vaccines.

[Heathen Hammer]

That doesn't show that unvaccinated have nothing to do with growing amount of worse health outcomes.

You're going to need to show some analysis as to how the stats you provide lead to the statement you have made.

See the link to actual DoD study I posted then. The point is that "pandemic of the unvaccinated" narrative doesn't really represent reality, at least as far as statistics are concerned.

[antaeus]

See the link to actual DoD study I posted then. The point is that "pandemic of the unvaccinated" narrative doesn't really represent reality, at least as far as statistics are concerned.

How so? You're not actually explaining the 'why' part of your statements.

[Coughdrop addict]

https://timjwise.medium.com/covid-an...t-16d74186e46b

These are people who didn’t and don’t want to die. They simply thought there was no way they would.

To them, COVID was a virus of the big city and those who live there, of old people, or persons with multiple pre-existing conditions (of which they didn’t believe their cholesterol-lined arteries and COPD qualified as examples).

It was only killing the weak.

And they were strong — cowboy strong, to be precise, or at least Sturgis motorcycle ridin’ strong.

High on a delusional mix of rugged individualism, toxic masculine bravado, pseudoscientific faith in vitamin supplements, and a belief that God would pull them through, they were convinced they were safe.

Only others were at risk — the less good people.

The ones who don’t do CrossFit, or go to a megachurch, or better still, a CrossFit in a megachurch.

The ones who don’t settle for the “power of positive thinking,” like FOX host Jesse Watters, who insisted that’s all he would need should he become infected.

The ones who place their faith in science rather than a Bible study group.

And for people like that? Who cares? To the right, those people don’t count.

Indifference to the suffering of others is why Trump’s minions wouldn’t mask. They didn’t care that they might infect people, despite being asymptomatic.

When you would tell them repeatedly that wearing a mask was less for the wearer than for others, they shrugged. If other folks are at risk, they should stay home and let the rest of us get back to the gym, the hairdresser, concerts, movies, and tailgate parties before the big game. I mean, this giant foam finger isn’t gonna wave itself.

Their freedom to do as they pleased was more important than other people’s lives.

Suicidal people don’t act or think that way. Homicidal people do.

Indifference to others is why they routinely violated social distancing requirements in stores, getting in people’s faces, coughing on them, yelling at them, just for being asked to wear a mask in keeping with a retailer’s policy or state or local mandate.

Because although they weren’t concerned about getting COVID themselves, they ultimately didn’t care if you did.

Suicidal people don’t act or think that way. Homicidal people do.

Most who refused to mask (and reject the vaccine now) are not full-blown virus deniers. Instead, they simply didn’t believe — and still don’t — that it can harm people like them.

But if you know it can harm others who aren’t like you, and you still refuse to take the measures that reduce the risk of spreading the virus to them, you are a sociopath.

If you refuse a vaccine when you have no valid health reason to do so (as almost no one does), thereby keeping the virus alive longer by increasing the risk of mutations, you are saying that other people’s lives don’t matter to you.

And if you expected to be infected, hospitalized, and die, you would never take these risks.

That’s what these ICU confessions signify — that they care about their own lives quite a bit, whatever they might think of others.

Now that it’s caught up with them, the tears flow, and the panic sets in their faces as they wonder what they’ve done to themselves.

Because they never wanted to die, they just didn’t care if other people did.

(Snip)

They symbolize the shriveled heart of modern conservatism — a conservatism that begins and ends with anti-liberalism. Whatever a liberal says, they must oppose, regardless of consequence. It is a politic of people whose emotional intelligence is that of a below-average 9-year old.

(Snip)

Till then, they have made their ICU beds. Now they can lie in them, and sadly, die in them — completely and utterly, alone.

[EmperorBatman999]

https://timjwise.medium.com/covid-an...t-16d74186e46b

What exactly does this story contribute? I've read this same article five thousand times since the start of the pandemic. It will never convince the people it insults.

[antaeus]

What exactly does this story contribute? I've read this same article five thousand times since the start of the pandemic. It will never convince the people it insults.

Call me a cynic... but I think it seeks to make liberals not feel so guilty about being OK with being part of a political discourse that leaves conservatives making life choices that lead them to die in preventable ways just because they've chosen a set of current American conservative values. It's not an article for conservatives. It's an article to help liberals with their sanctimoniousness (if that's even a word?).

[Cyclops]

US politics is full of brain dead insults. Trump specialised in them. Why would the Dbots be any different to the Tbots and other Rbots?

Its a waste of time to even consider trolling of this tier. "Why are [NotMyParty] literally Hitler?" srsly?

We need to get as many people to take their medicine as you can, and wear the snarks from smarmy tools who smirk and say "sounds like [ideology I don't like] to me, gottem". At this point the US has lost 700K and a some of that was preventable. Lets not waste time worrying about the hurt feelings of some Republican snowflakes or the heartless trolls pwning them. Heartless trolls smeared a US citizen executed in the street by a cop, this is similar amoral trash.

... sanctimoniousness (if that's even a word?).

Check the OED. There are other language services out there too, although typically used by betas .

[Heathen Hammer]

How so? You're not actually explaining the 'why' part of your statements.

Um, DoD study, which was linked in the post you replied to earlier in this thread?

What exactly does this story contribute? I've read this same article five thousand times since the start of the pandemic. It will never convince the people it insults.

Its part of the corporate MSM campaign to mislead the public with neoliberal myth about this being "pandemic of the unvaccinated", while statistics show that majority of cases with non-positive outcomes are among fully-jabbed.

[PointOfViewGun]

Um, DoD study, which was linked in the post you replied to earlier in this thread?

It didn't support what you claimed it did, and you're unable to explain how it does.

[Heathen Hammer]

It didn't support what you claimed it did, and you're unable to explain how it does.

I posted quotes and infographics from the study that support my argument. Gainsaying about what I said without providing any valid counter-argument is just bad faith arguing, my dude.

[PointOfViewGun]

I posted quotes and infographics from the study that support my argument. Gainsaying about what I said without providing any valid counter-argument is just bad faith arguing, my dude.

And you have been unable to address any of the statements that pointed out how what you quoted did not support your argument. Indeed, gainsaying is nor a valid argument.