Covid-19 Discussion

Though I wouldn't call myself an anti-vaxxer I was not for the vaccine when it came out because I had no idea how a vaccine produced so quickly and for what seemed like political reasons could be known to be safe.

Even 4 months in, it wasn't clear about potential long term effects from mRNA vaccines because the only one that had previously been distributed had been in 2017 for Ebola in Africa.

But by April 2021 the death rate for people over 65 was so substantial that I took the vaccine and was in favor of all medical facilities in the US having vaccine requirements as well as nursing homes and really anyplace elderly people resided. I was even in favor of the military requiring vaccines though not to save lives but to prevent massive incapacitation. But this opinion was not based on trying to save the life of the person being vaccinated but to help save the lives of people who were older and had not yet been vaccinated.

The reason I oppose typical anti vax arguments is that for diseases that can kill or maim children it isn't fair for parents to make decisions that can kill their own or other people's children. But Covid isn't like other deadly diseases with regards to children. So I don't care if people now don't want to vaccinate unless of course they work in a facility (like a hospital) where there are older patients who can't be vaccinated due to medical reasons.

If I trusted people to care about other people they interact with then I wouldn't be totally opposed to what you are saying. But I grew up in an alcoholic home and I know what about 20% of the population are like (utterly selfish and unable to be decent and reasonable with regards to others).

So letting it rip through people under 50 would basically be exposing people over 50 to it as well.

The biggest problem I had was for everyone not to be able to be tested for Covid on a repeated basis. The CDC messed up production of covid tests so there was no way to prevent massive spread if nothing was shut down.

As it was, hospitalizations were causing hospital overflows to not be able to treat people with emergency conditions. Had we let it rip there would have been a lot of deaths unrelated to Covid due to lack of hospital availability.

I actually think they should have allowed schools to stay open for children (and colleges as well). Just not for teachers over 50 (they would run their classes from home --- but the students could have zoomed from school). But kids with parents over 50 (it probably would have been 60 or the parents choice which would have killed a substantial number of people) or kids who lived with grandparents should have been restricted to home Zoom classes.

And then he (Andrew Cuomo) tried to hide it from the press...

Having all of the staff be vaccinated wouldn't have made it impossible for Covid to get into a nursing home but it is likely it reduce the chances of it happening. Also vaccinations don't prevent Covid infections. But one thing they do is reduce the viral load (both on the receiving and transmitting side of things) so the elderly in the homes would likely get a reduced viral load which in turn would reduce their chances of death.

Right now about 85% of deaths from Covid are people over 65. And if I remember correctly, 80% are people who have not been vaccinated, about 15% of those deaths are people who haven't completed their vaccination process or have not received an omicron related booster (like in the past year and a half), and an additional 5% are people who have been fully vaccinated and boosted.

Though I haven't been in a nursing home lately what I remember most is the smell of urine. So I'm not a huge fan. Though I wish they all had one...

Well, I guess we may never know then exactly what that something is that is causing the elevated excess mortality that coincidently occurs with perfect timing when vaccine uptake is high, as no-one in authority seems particularly interested in looking into it. The policy seems to be to ignore it and look the other way.

On a related note. Didn't they say the vax produced spike protein cleared the body after a few days. Looks like that was a lie as well.

Actually that just means that the guy was infected when he tested 2 years later lol

We do it's called fentanyl, and it doesn't "coincide perfectly with vaccine uptake", it just grows every year.

Which you know, is why other countries that vaccinated as much or more than the USA stopped having excess deaths a while ago, because China target only the USA with fentanyl

You realize that spike antibodies are not the same thing as the spike protein, right? And that the presence of antibodies does not mean it is from vaccine-inspired spike proteins, right? (you know what else can cause these antibodies to be present? This isn't really that hard. I'll let you give it a shot)

Leave it to John Campbell to incorrectly infer things that are not even remotely indicated, and for all the gullible people to not put an ounce of thought into it and believe it instantly.

edit: oh god. I just watched the video. He's straight up just lying in the video, and there's absolutely nothing indicating his guest is telling the truth either. lol (nucleocapsid antibodies go away very quickly - s-protein antibodies don't. Now, let's try and imagine how someone could have one without the other...hmm must be the vaccine! god what a liar)

The smell of urine hits you as soon as you enter. If these people were pets we'd have them all put down. It's incredibly sad.

A couple of honest questions:

Why is it that we don't know the long term effects of covid in young people yet we can be certain that there are no long term effects from the vaccine?

Why is it that people who dread covid (you) seem like you're rooting for it to me incredibly harmful. This one is the most puzzling to me. You'll tout covid deaths and it's almost like you're bragging. Bizarre.

Stay safe.

Which is why it's fairly incredible to sacrifice the rest of society to try to prolong their agony

They root "to be right", the idea they sacrificed a significant portion of their lives for a long period of time without that helping either them or anyone else in the slightest, because their political tribe got the topic completely wrong.

It's fairly common for people to have the hardest time admitting they took a wrong path in life, this case isn't different.

That said both long COVID and long term vaccine risks are fairly inexistent, completely overblown problems.

IE both exists but to the same extent or lower than for any other disease. "long flu" exists but no one gives a **** about that. "Long any-disease-that-causes-hospitalization" can exist: hospitalization itself is a traumatic process for extremely debilitating individuals and can scar the organism for a long time. You can have catch far worse diseases inside the hospital itself for example.

All vaccines have very very small risks of debilitating side effects (mRNA ones actually appear to have less than most)

Vaccines are eliminated from the body within a few weeks. So yes.

I can't answer why you think that. Only you can. It's all in your head.

le sigh

Yeah? Why didn't you ask that question of Brian James who gleefully posts about all the athletes "dying of vaccine induced myocarditis" and celebrates when he thinks life saving vaccines might be killing people? But you ask me, with a medical degree, simply telling you the facts?

You're very transparent here.

The mRNA vaccines do not actually contain Covid so long term effects from the vaccine would be very different than from Covid itself.

I think specifically the problem with Covid and long term effects has to do with both the type of damage it is doing (especially to lungs) and whether or not it can permanently reside in the body and be re-triggered (kind of like Lyme disease).

As for the mRNA vaccines we at least know that long term affects would have to be more than like 6 years before they hit because mRNA vaccines were distributed in Africa in 2017 (or maybe 2016) to prevent Ebola. So far no long term affects are known. Also, mRNA vaccines have been developed for over 50 years but could not be given to humans until recently. But they have been given to animals since at least the 1990's so I think we can be pretty sure that long term affects in the animals would have shown up (but I don't know that for sure).

But in answer to your question I was concerned about the potential for long term affects from the mRNA vaccines (though in fairness I was unaware at the time that they had been used in Africa in 2017). A doctor I was with yesterday told me that she also was concerned with potential long term problems with mRNA vaccines as they were coming out. I don't think there is any way to be sure that there won't be severe consequences but I do think the chances of that happening are very slim or the people who have been working on this type of vaccine for the past 50 years would have figured it out or at least researched any suspect possibilities. And both myself and that doctor are vaccinated and still alive...

Long Covid has now affected over 20 million Americans. And it can be brutal.

I ran into a poker player I have known for years at Foxwoods and he was suffering from severe muscle pain for over 4 months and it wasn't going away. My wife's payroll accountant lost all taste and smell for over a year after having had covid. My 23 year old daughter has to use an inhaler pretty much every day now for Asthma and before she caught Covid (about 2 years ago) she was basically using the inhaler maybe once a month.

My hope is that Long covid cases will be reduced (length of time and pain) for people who are vaccinated but I have no idea if that is the case (my daughter was vaccinated when she caught Covid and who knows she might have much more severe asthma if she wasn't)

Sweden is an example of what poor results looks like. Not sure what that should count for?

Long COVID (purported) existence overlaps with health deteriorating for other reasons anyway with the passing of time.

When approx everyone has been infected by SARS-CoV-2 already (often more than once), if we limit ourselves at looking at health-after-infection, we will attribute to COVID what would have been happening anyway absent COVID.

Notice that's the same for the vaccines.

So how do you measure if any long COVID actually exists? You check baseline incidence in time of those problems and you check if they significantly increased in the population, after controlling for trend and other events (population is getting older and that affects health, and lockdowns greatly affected health as well)

They did that several time and a nothing burger came out of it, compared to normal long-disease problems (for ex you can have lasting effects of bronchitis, pneumonia, flu and so on). Remember we don't do NPIs for bronchitis and the flu, so in order to justify long COVID as a reason for "being careful" or to worry, long COVID has to be significantly worse than long-bronchitis and long-flu.

And it clearly isn't in all data that has been checked on the topic, with the methodology described above.

I try to repeat to make the point clear: it's normal for a fair amount of people who end up in the hospital with pneumonia, to have bad effects lasting weeks/months after you are sent home. COVID isn't worse than that, it's actually far less than pneumonia at that.

Given we never cared in the slightest, from a societal, NPI/PPE point of view, about that, there is no reason to care about long-covid as well

And the irony is that this is identical to antivaxxers "logic" of claiming vaccine caused x, just because x followed temporarily to am event which touched 150m+ people in the USA (vaccination).

Going by long COVID and antivaxxer logic drinking water is the biggest cause of death in the nation, as it is very rare to find anyone who died who didn't drink water in the previous month

mRNA vaccines were tested on humans in 2013.

Devil advocate would be that you can't generalize the long term effects of mRNA vaccine x to all mRNA vaccines, because some specific mRNA sequences could cause different problems than others (we actually would expect that to be the case).

At most we can generalize on the lack of adverse effects for other components of the vaccine which afaik are always the same.

Same as you can't generalize the long term effects of using some specific viral vector for vaccination, to all possible viral vectors vaccines.

Then you realize places like Canada score significantly below the US in health index scores yet scored better than the USA in every measurable metric on COVID

Oh and speaking of vaccine side effects, we know dosage matters.

We didn't have the time for COVID vaccines to optimize dosage but we know moderna caused more side effects (here I am talking about the small bread and butter ones immediately following the inoculation) than Pfizer, and we know it was because of the higher dose.

Pfizer is 0.3ml, moderna 0.5ml

Which is why when the vaccine approval was extended to minors younger than 12, and we already know dosage was an issue, moderna dose got cut in half for them.

But that's a back of the envelope approach, a very very rough one, in decades we will learn a lot more

Problem is until then rigorous testing of mRNA vaccines has to be differentiate between vaccines, and dosage, with control groups, so it's kinda a nightmare to do scientifically.

We are just lucky the real world experiment on people worked better than everyone expected and call it a day, we got blessed with a fairly miracolous new vaccine platform which performed better than expected with lower side effects than expected, we can improve on it, just celebrate the success and move on.

But pls never mandate it again to anyone no exception, for any disease.

Health CARE index, both Canada and the USA were fairly low in 2019, but Canada was better.

But that's not what I had in mind, I was talking about underlying health conditions, if you have another index in mind let me know which