2019 NCOV a.k.a. Wuhan's Diseases

kbd512 · 2021-10-21 11:58:54

Louis,

Fact #1: The uptake of the vaccines is highest in the advanced age groups, across all countries where the vaccines are administered.
Fact #2: The people who need the vaccine the most, because they're most at risk of serious illness from the virus, are in the advanced age groups.
Fact #3: The real world efficacy of the existing vaccines against the latest strains of COVID is far less than it was against the early strain of the virus, but for some reason, probably related to money, we're not updating our vaccines to keep pace with the virus.
Fact #4: The people who elect not to get the vaccine and use their "natural immunity" instead, die at a rate that is minimally 5 times higher than those who elect to take the vaccine, to as much as 50 times higher. Orders of magnitude have meaning.
Fact #5: Apart from risk factors for virtually any respiratory disease (prior or concurrent respiratory illnesses, advanced age, obesity, immune system compromise, major organ damage, etc), we can't take a random person from any age group and determine who will or won't become seriously ill and die after they're infected with the virus.

The age groups of people who are dying at the highest rates are the most vaccinated group people, which also happens to be the advanced age groups. As a result of advanced age, they're far more likely to die of any cause, because they're naturally closer to dying with or without one more straw (COVID-19) piled on, to help break the camel's back.

Our Former Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, fell into that group. He had severe immune system compromise and was in the process of dying from cancer, but COVID, which his vaccines didn't protect him against (because vaccines are developed to target specific strains of bacteria or viruses), was the straw that broke the camel's back. Would he have died from those complications anyway, without COVID ever existing? Most likely, but again, that was not what happened in objective reality. The fact that he was severely immuno-compromised, yet vaccinated anyway, flies in the face of your assertion that medical doctors are not recommending vaccination for this group of people (because those medical doctors, who you choose to ignore if their opinions don't mirror your own, know that if that group does become severely ill from COVID, then they're highly likely to die as a result.

The people in those advanced age groups keep dying at higher rates for 3 reasons:

1. As you pointed out, they are already old and frail, so their immune systems are less able to fight back against COVID-19.
2. The real world efficacy of the present vaccines against the mutated strains of COVID-19 is around 39%, not 96%.
3. There is no "natural immunity" against an engineered virus that our highly educated morons concocted in a laboratory, that was specifically engineered to be both highly infectious and virulent.

In summary, the data in the graph that SpaceNut posted shows quite clearly that people using their "natural immunity alone", do not fare nearly as well against COVID-19. The unvaccinated die at a rate 5X to 50X higher than the vaccinated. Across the entire human population, we're talking about many millions of people who would have otherwise lived to see another day, had they been vaccinated.

louis · 2021-10-21 17:03:51

1. Advanced age is not of relevance to this discussion. You can be old and have a functioning immune system or you can be old and have a poorly functioning immune system. Being old of itself is not the determinant of whether you are going to get Covid and die.

2. Generally true.

3. I bet you can't even define what is meant by "vaccine efficacy". The "efficacy" declines I believe simply because more people die or get seriously ill as time goes on ie they were never very effective vaccines to begin with AND also I believe the PCR tests do register people with vaccine spike protein as "Covid" cases. The vaccine manufacturer themselves state that Covid-like symptoms are a recognised side-effect of the vaccine - so having Covid-style symptoms doesn't mean you have Covid necessarily. Wherever the vaccines have been introduced we have seen a sudden sharp rise in "Covid" cases immediately afterwards.

4. You don't seem able to follow this. Not everyone who is unvaccinated has chosen ("elected") to be unvaccinated. A significant number of the unvaccinated are simply people who are too ill, too weak, too close to death to be vaccinated. In the UK that number might be 100,000 or 200,000 and they will be more or less certain to die at some point over the next two years and many of them will acquire Covid shortly before their death. It could well be 20% of the figure since respiratory failure is one of the main ways such people die. When total deaths from Covid are so low, as they are now, that will totally skew the picture. A huge proportion of "Covid" deaths are going to be among "involuntarily" unvaccinated people.

5. We can't "determine" but we can undertake a statistical analysis. Someone who has been rejected for Covid vaccination because they are too ill and weak, is going to be much more likely, statistically, to die from Covid than someone who can have the vaccination.

I think it's always a huge "tell" that governments and Lockdownists generally never want to compare health outcomes for healthy unvaccinated and healthy vaccinated people. Whyever not? I think there is a reason - they don't want to focus on what is the foundation of good health: a properly functioning immune system. I am not saying the immune system solves all health problems, but you can't have good health without it.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
Fact #1: The uptake of the vaccines is highest in the advanced age groups, across all countries where the vaccines are administered.
Fact #2: The people who need the vaccine the most, because they're most at risk of serious illness from the virus, are in the advanced age groups.
Fact #3: The real world efficacy of the existing vaccines against the latest strains of COVID is far less than it was against the early strain of the virus, but for some reason, probably related to money, we're not updating our vaccines to keep pace with the virus.
Fact #4: The people who elect not to get the vaccine and use their "natural immunity" instead, die at a rate that is minimally 5 times higher than those who elect to take the vaccine, to as much as 50 times higher. Orders of magnitude have meaning.
Fact #5: Apart from risk factors for virtually any respiratory disease (prior or concurrent respiratory illnesses, advanced age, obesity, immune system compromise, major organ damage, etc), we can't take a random person from any age group and determine who will or won't become seriously ill and die after they're infected with the virus.
The age groups of people who are dying at the highest rates are the most vaccinated group people, which also happens to be the advanced age groups. As a result of advanced age, they're far more likely to die of any cause, because they're naturally closer to dying with or without one more straw (COVID-19) piled on, to help break the camel's back.
Our Former Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, fell into that group. He had severe immune system compromise and was in the process of dying from cancer, but COVID, which his vaccines didn't protect him against (because vaccines are developed to target specific strains of bacteria or viruses), was the straw that broke the camel's back. Would he have died from those complications anyway, without COVID ever existing? Most likely, but again, that was not what happened in objective reality. The fact that he was severely immuno-compromised, yet vaccinated anyway, flies in the face of your assertion that medical doctors are not recommending vaccination for this group of people (because those medical doctors, who you choose to ignore if their opinions don't mirror your own, know that if that group does become severely ill from COVID, then they're highly likely to die as a result.
The people in those advanced age groups keep dying at higher rates for 3 reasons:
1. As you pointed out, they are already old and frail, so their immune systems are less able to fight back against COVID-19.
2. The real world efficacy of the present vaccines against the mutated strains of COVID-19 is around 39%, not 96%.
3. There is no "natural immunity" against an engineered virus that our highly educated morons concocted in a laboratory, that was specifically engineered to be both highly infectious and virulent.
In summary, the data in the graph that SpaceNut posted shows quite clearly that people using their "natural immunity alone", do not fare nearly as well against COVID-19. The unvaccinated die at a rate 5X to 50X higher than the vaccinated. Across the entire human population, we're talking about many millions of people who would have otherwise lived to see another day, had they been vaccinated.

SpaceNut · 2021-10-21 18:12:45

How is an immune system tested?

The PCR test was erred from the start with both levels of positive false and negative false such that it should not be the only test counted on.

Most of the issue for the un-vaccinated has little to do with "simply people who are too ill, too weak, too close to death" but rather fear of getting it from the vaccine, calling it experimental even after millions have taken them and the reaction possibility but those levels are close to nil. Its more about ideology, religious beliefs and ability to get a shot near where you live if you do not have a vehicle to get there.

kbd512 · 2021-10-21 18:35:41

Louis,

louis wrote:

1. Advanced age is not of relevance to this discussion. You can be old and have a functioning immune system or you can be old and have a poorly functioning immune system. Being old of itself is not the determinant of whether you are going to get Covid and die.

Age is relevant because extremely old people die at much higher rates than younger people, with or without COVID-19, with or without immune system issues. I never stated that age alone determines whether or not someone will die of anything, but the older you get, the more frail your body becomes. There are exceptions to many rules, but I've yet to see an exception to that rule.

louis wrote:

2. Generally true.

Generalizations are useful because while there are frequently exceptions to most rules, they don't disprove the rule.

louis wrote:

3. I bet you can't even define what is meant by "vaccine efficacy". The "efficacy" declines I believe simply because more people die or get seriously ill as time goes on ie they were never very effective vaccines to begin with AND also I believe the PCR tests do register people with vaccine spike protein as "Covid" cases. The vaccine manufacturer themselves state that Covid-like symptoms are a recognised side-effect of the vaccine - so having Covid-style symptoms doesn't mean you have Covid necessarily. Wherever the vaccines have been introduced we have seen a sudden sharp rise in "Covid" cases immediately afterwards.

Here's how I define "vaccine efficacy":

If getting a vaccine lowers your chance of never leaving a hospital alive, because your lungs look like Swiss cheese after COVID wrecks them, then I consider a vaccine that prevents that from happening to be "efficacious".

If you get the sniffles or a fever for a day while your vaccine-trained immune system fights off the virus, I don't consider that to be a lack of efficacy. Furthermore, I don't consider the fact that you can still be a carrier of a microscropic particle like a virus, despite never falling ill yourself, to be a lack of vaccine efficacy. The vaccine protects the person who is vaccinated. If 99%+ of the people on the planet have a vaccine, then the literal handful of real medical exceptions then benefit from "herd immunity" having been achieved, because the virus loses its host reservoir that it requires to replicate and continue to exist in the wild. Sure, it'll simply mutate and then circle back around for another pass. It's an arms race if ever there was one, but humanity's continued existence depends on us winning nearly every single battle.

louis wrote:

4. You don't seem able to follow this. Not everyone who is unvaccinated has chosen ("elected") to be unvaccinated. A significant number of the unvaccinated are simply people who are too ill, too weak, too close to death to be vaccinated. In the UK that number might be 100,000 or 200,000 and they will be more or less certain to die at some point over the next two years and many of them will acquire Covid shortly before their death. It could well be 20% of the figure since respiratory failure is one of the main ways such people die. When total deaths from Covid are so low, as they are now, that will totally skew the picture. A huge proportion of "Covid" deaths are going to be among "involuntarily" unvaccinated people.

No, I understand that part, which is why there should be medical exemptions for those people. Are you a medical exception, or simply someone who doesn't want to take the vaccine because something bad happened to one of your children from a vaccine, ages ago?

louis wrote:

5. We can't "determine" but we can undertake a statistical analysis. Someone who has been rejected for Covid vaccination because they are too ill and weak, is going to be much more likely, statistically, to die from Covid than someone who can have the vaccination.

How many of those people are there, versus the number of people who just want to be contrarians for sake of contrarianism?

louis wrote:

I think it's always a huge "tell" that governments and Lockdownists generally never want to compare health outcomes for healthy unvaccinated and healthy vaccinated people. Whyever not? I think there is a reason - they don't want to focus on what is the foundation of good health: a properly functioning immune system. I am not saying the immune system solves all health problems, but you can't have good health without it.

If you go back and read my posts from a year ago, you'll find that I was against lockdowns and the media spreading virus-related fear-based paranoia / hysteria, even back then. I had some fairly pointed exchanges with "clark with a k", where he is now. My position hasn't changed since then.

I don't care who's in charge, whether I agree with their politics or not, lockdowns and ironclad mandates are fear-based paranoia masquerading as "caring about other people", when the only evidence that exists is that people don't care about others, and there's scant evidence that they even care about themselves.

But enough about the past, since we can't change it.

How can you determine if someone's immune system is functioning properly? No two are the same, not even amongst identical twins.

How can you determine if someone is healthy or unhealthy?

If the virus had a 50% mortality rate, I'm guessing you'd still be here claiming that they were unhealthy in some way, and that we shouldn't be vaccinating people, because we need to have an endless academic debate while half of humanity drops dead, due to whatever rationalization your mind can concoct.

When it comes to those core beliefs, you and GW are cut from the exact same cloth. It's a shame that neither of you recognize it. You're two different sides of the same irrationality. One is terrified about what will happen if we do, the other terrified about what will happen if we don't.

I'll move beyond the terror and tell you what will happen, though, no matter what you do. Given enough time, both of you, everyone you know, and everyone you care about, will all die. It's only a matter of time, and whether or not you're still alive to see it with your own eyes. There are a very limited number of things you or anyone else can do to change the timeline and virtually nothing that anyone can do to change the ultimate outcome.

However, while you're here, if you make prudent decisions, then you could feasibly extend that timeline by some indeterminate amount. To me, that's worth the sacrifices made. I love my wife and children and the rest of my family in the here and now, despite knowing and even accepting what the ultimate outcome is- that they will all die no matter what I do. My feelings remain unchanged. While I'm here I will do whatever I can do, in order to ensure that they live to see their next sunrise, no matter how righteous or how truly awful. Everyone has their own bit of irrationality baked into their thought process, and I'm certainly no exception to that rule.

Life is the ultimate Faustian bargain, isn't it?

SpaceNut · 2021-10-23 22:24:27

Unvaccinated likely to catch COVID-19 every 16 months

Unvaccinated in Austria Could Enter Mandatory Lockdown

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says cancer patients are at a higher risk to get severely ill from COVID-19 and may not build the same immunity to vaccines.

Florida’s top health official refuses to wear mask, is told to leave meeting after refusing to wear a mask at the office of a state senator who told him she had a serious medical condition, officials have confirmed.

As covered the breakdown of death rate and age for NH for a second week of 23 deaths...

Twelve of the fatalities were 80 years of age or older
while four were between 70 and 79,
two were in the 60 to 69 age bracket,
three were between 50- and 59-years-old,
one was between 40 and 49, and
one was between 20 and 29.

SpaceNut · 2021-10-26 21:22:59

Seems that the vaccines are not living up to expectations as Immunocompromised people may need 4th dose: CDC People who aren't fully vaccinated are 6.1 times more likely to test positive.

Immunocompromised people may need a fourth dose of the vaccine, according to newly issued guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those patients may end up needing an additional shot six months after their third dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, the CDC said. The fourth dose can be of any of the three available vaccines, according to the agency.
This is in line with what the CDC has said before regarding immunocompromised adults. A third shot is considered necessary to establish vaccination for those patients and a boost would need to come six months later, according to the agency.

The essential food companies have required vaccinations to stem deaths
Meatpacking giant Tyson Foods says more than 96% of its workers have been vaccinated ahead of the company’s Nov. 1 deadline for them to do so

The industry was hit hard by the pandemic in the spring of 2020 when the virus tore through meatpacking plants and forced the temporary closure of many of them because so many workers became ill or had to quarantine. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union said at least 132 of its members died from the virus during the outbreaks and another 22,400 of them were infected or exposed.

kbd512 · 2021-10-27 03:11:48

SpaceNut,

Can you name off any other vaccines that require 4 shots inside of a year?

louis · 2021-10-27 17:43:30

Let's just say this ain't the polio vaccine.

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kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
louis wrote:
1. Advanced age is not of relevance to this discussion. You can be old and have a functioning immune system or you can be old and have a poorly functioning immune system. Being old of itself is not the determinant of whether you are going to get Covid and die.
Age is relevant because extremely old people die at much higher rates than younger people, with or without COVID-19, with or without immune system issues. I never stated that age alone determines whether or not someone will die of anything, but the older you get, the more frail your body becomes. There are exceptions to many rules, but I've yet to see an exception to that rule.
louis wrote:
2. Generally true.
Generalizations are useful because while there are frequently exceptions to most rules, they don't disprove the rule.
louis wrote:
3. I bet you can't even define what is meant by "vaccine efficacy". The "efficacy" declines I believe simply because more people die or get seriously ill as time goes on ie they were never very effective vaccines to begin with AND also I believe the PCR tests do register people with vaccine spike protein as "Covid" cases. The vaccine manufacturer themselves state that Covid-like symptoms are a recognised side-effect of the vaccine - so having Covid-style symptoms doesn't mean you have Covid necessarily. Wherever the vaccines have been introduced we have seen a sudden sharp rise in "Covid" cases immediately afterwards.
Here's how I define "vaccine efficacy":
If getting a vaccine lowers your chance of never leaving a hospital alive, because your lungs look like Swiss cheese after COVID wrecks them, then I consider a vaccine that prevents that from happening to be "efficacious".
If you get the sniffles or a fever for a day while your vaccine-trained immune system fights off the virus, I don't consider that to be a lack of efficacy. Furthermore, I don't consider the fact that you can still be a carrier of a microscropic particle like a virus, despite never falling ill yourself, to be a lack of vaccine efficacy. The vaccine protects the person who is vaccinated. If 99%+ of the people on the planet have a vaccine, then the literal handful of real medical exceptions then benefit from "herd immunity" having been achieved, because the virus loses its host reservoir that it requires to replicate and continue to exist in the wild. Sure, it'll simply mutate and then circle back around for another pass. It's an arms race if ever there was one, but humanity's continued existence depends on us winning nearly every single battle.
louis wrote:
4. You don't seem able to follow this. Not everyone who is unvaccinated has chosen ("elected") to be unvaccinated. A significant number of the unvaccinated are simply people who are too ill, too weak, too close to death to be vaccinated. In the UK that number might be 100,000 or 200,000 and they will be more or less certain to die at some point over the next two years and many of them will acquire Covid shortly before their death. It could well be 20% of the figure since respiratory failure is one of the main ways such people die. When total deaths from Covid are so low, as they are now, that will totally skew the picture. A huge proportion of "Covid" deaths are going to be among "involuntarily" unvaccinated people.
No, I understand that part, which is why there should be medical exemptions for those people. Are you a medical exception, or simply someone who doesn't want to take the vaccine because something bad happened to one of your children from a vaccine, ages ago?
louis wrote:
5. We can't "determine" but we can undertake a statistical analysis. Someone who has been rejected for Covid vaccination because they are too ill and weak, is going to be much more likely, statistically, to die from Covid than someone who can have the vaccination.
How many of those people are there, versus the number of people who just want to be contrarians for sake of contrarianism?
louis wrote:
I think it's always a huge "tell" that governments and Lockdownists generally never want to compare health outcomes for healthy unvaccinated and healthy vaccinated people. Whyever not? I think there is a reason - they don't want to focus on what is the foundation of good health: a properly functioning immune system. I am not saying the immune system solves all health problems, but you can't have good health without it.
If you go back and read my posts from a year ago, you'll find that I was against lockdowns and the media spreading virus-related fear-based paranoia / hysteria, even back then. I had some fairly pointed exchanges with "clark with a k", where he is now. My position hasn't changed since then.
I don't care who's in charge, whether I agree with their politics or not, lockdowns and ironclad mandates are fear-based paranoia masquerading as "caring about other people", when the only evidence that exists is that people don't care about others, and there's scant evidence that they even care about themselves.
But enough about the past, since we can't change it.
How can you determine if someone's immune system is functioning properly? No two are the same, not even amongst identical twins.
How can you determine if someone is healthy or unhealthy?
If the virus had a 50% mortality rate, I'm guessing you'd still be here claiming that they were unhealthy in some way, and that we shouldn't be vaccinating people, because we need to have an endless academic debate while half of humanity drops dead, due to whatever rationalization your mind can concoct.
When it comes to those core beliefs, you and GW are cut from the exact same cloth. It's a shame that neither of you recognize it. You're two different sides of the same irrationality. One is terrified about what will happen if we do, the other terrified about what will happen if we don't.
I'll move beyond the terror and tell you what will happen, though, no matter what you do. Given enough time, both of you, everyone you know, and everyone you care about, will all die. It's only a matter of time, and whether or not you're still alive to see it with your own eyes. There are a very limited number of things you or anyone else can do to change the timeline and virtually nothing that anyone can do to change the ultimate outcome.
However, while you're here, if you make prudent decisions, then you could feasibly extend that timeline by some indeterminate amount. To me, that's worth the sacrifices made. I love my wife and children and the rest of my family in the here and now, despite knowing and even accepting what the ultimate outcome is- that they will all die no matter what I do. My feelings remain unchanged. While I'm here I will do whatever I can do, in order to ensure that they live to see their next sunrise, no matter how righteous or how truly awful. Everyone has their own bit of irrationality baked into their thought process, and I'm certainly no exception to that rule.
Life is the ultimate Faustian bargain, isn't it?

kbd512 · 2021-10-27 18:25:58

Louis,

Our son, despite just starting his nursing training, is already working the COVID ward at the hospital, because that's how desperately short of bodies we are in a city that, at least according to numbers, has the problem "under control" (whatever the hell that means). Houston has one of the most well-developed health care systems in the entire country.

None of what you've posted that I've read thus far has made me think any differently about the utility of vaccines, but I'm of the opinion that you go to war with the entire military, not one part of it.

1. Current vaccines are, according to data, far less effective against the latest variants of COVID. I don't have an explanation as to why vaccine development hasn't maintained pace with the virus, but the vaccines currently in use were and are highly effective against stopping serious illness from the original strains.
2. People who are fully vaccinated generally suffer less severe symptoms. This is merely a rule-of-thumb, and there are exceptions to every rule. There are no silver bullets in medicine, which is why I think having prevention (vaccines), treatment (drugs), and transmission disruption schemes (social distancing) in place are all equally important. No single measure is a replacement for all other measures. Natural immunity only works if you have it. If you don't, then the results range from mild illness to death. If we could tell who would get seriously ill, then we could rely upon specific measures for specific people, but we can't tell, so we don't. We know what the death rate was before and after the vaccine.
3. My definition of effectiveness has nothing to do with sniffles or whether or not you can transmit the virus to others.
4. Outside of places where the government murders people based upon lack of adherence to orthodoxy, mandates work about as well as you'd expect, which is to say not at all.
5. Due to the inexcusably poor "lack of foresight" of the scientists who we put up on pedestals, where they probably don't belong, we're going to have to learn to live with the virus. Everyone is going to get it eventually, and there's no stopping that now.

I like my chances better with a vaccine, you like your chances better without one. To each his own. The only constant that I've asked of everyone on this forum is to consult with a real medical doctor, not something they've read from someone posting something you agree or disagree with, on the internet. Asserting that anyone without medical training knows more than a doctor of 20+ years strains credulity, to say the least. I never assumed I knew more about either brain tumors or pregnancy than my wife's OBGYN, merely because I was right one time about one aspect of what happened to her. To that point, your beliefs won't be able to bring you back from the dead if it turns out that you have no natural immunity to COVID, and end up on a ventilator. There's a reason they call medicine "a practice", rather than "a science". Nobody can guarantee a specific result, no matter how much they know, nor how much practice they've had.

Three generations of my Uncle's family are dead because of this plague, and the two survivors were seriously injured. The youngest child will probably heal over time as she grows up. Her mother may never be off Oxygen again, and if the virus comes back around, it may very well finish what it started. As always, time will tell.

I wish good luck with your choices and I sincerely hope they work out for you.

louis · 2021-10-27 19:11:15

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
Our son, despite just starting his nursing training, is already working the COVID ward at the hospital, because that's how desperately short of bodies we are in a city that, at least according to numbers, has the problem "under control" (whatever the hell that means). Houston has one of the most well-developed health care systems in the entire country.

I hope all goes well with your son. But this is a familiar tale. Why after 18 months and having many tens of billions of dollars and pounds thrown at the problem can't the authorities deal with the problem. In the UK we had about 5 "Nightingale" (isolation) hospitals ready to come into operation last year but they were never activated in any meaningful sense. Have we seen lots of training of auxillary nurses and ICU doctors, plus expansion of ICU? Er - no. Virtually nothing. It's almost like they don't want to be able to deal with this challenge isn't it?

None of what you've posted that I've read thus far has made me think any differently about the utility of vaccines, but I'm of the opinion that you go to war with the entire military, not one part of it.

I definitely agree you fight with the full range of your military. But that is exactly what has NOT been happening. There has been virtually no public info on the importance of Vit D for instance and certainly no free distribution of the Vitamin to the whole populace. Likewise the medical estbalishment has sought to ruibbish Ivermectin, HCQ and other treatments. In India (Uttar Pradesh state) they virtually wiped out Covid byh distributing health kits to all households including Ivermectin and Vit D.

1. Current vaccines are, according to data, far less effective against the latest variants of COVID. I don't have an explanation as to why vaccine development hasn't maintained pace with the virus, but the vaccines currently in use were and are highly effective against stopping serious illness from the original strains.

You need to compare Covid vaccines with all other vaccines. Covid vaccines are probably the worst performing vaccines in the last 50 years.

2. People who are fully vaccinated generally suffer less severe symptoms. This is merely a rule-of-thumb, and there are exceptions to every rule. There are no silver bullets in medicine, which is why I think having prevention (vaccines), treatment (drugs), and transmission disruption schemes (social distancing) in place are all equally important. No single measure is a replacement for all other measures. Natural immunity only works if you have it. If you don't, then the results range from mild illness to death. If we could tell who would get seriously ill, then we could rely upon specific measures for specific people, but we can't tell, so we don't. We know what the death rate was before and after the vaccine.

"People who are fully vaccinated generally suffer less severe symptoms." I think this contention is becoming less and less tenable.
We know in most countries where there has been mass vaccination that the majority of people in ICUs with Covid are vaccinated people.
The only question is whether it is a disproportionate number.

3. My definition of effectiveness has nothing to do with sniffles or whether or not you can transmit the virus to others.

Well please enlighten us as to your definition because I have yet to come across an "indiustry-standard" definition.

4. Outside of places where the government murders people based upon lack of adherence to orthodoxy, mandates work about as well as you'd expect, which is to say not at all.

That might sound cute but not if you are living under a government that seeks to emulate the worst totalitarian dictatorships on Earth.

5. Due to the inexcusably poor "lack of foresight" of the scientists who we put up on pedestals, where they probably don't belong, we're going to have to learn to live with the virus. Everyone is going to get it eventually, and there's no stopping that now.
I like my chances better with a vaccine, you like your chances better without one. To each his own. The only constant that I've asked of everyone on this forum is to consult with a real medical doctor, not something they've read from someone posting something you agree or disagree with, on the internet. Asserting that anyone without medical training knows more than a doctor of 20+ years strains credulity, to say the least. I never assumed I knew more about either brain tumors or pregnancy than my wife's OBGYN, merely because I was right one time about one aspect of what happened to her. To that point, your beliefs won't be able to bring you back from the dead if it turns out that you have no natural immunity to COVID, and end up on a ventilator. There's a reason they call medicine "a practice", rather than "a science". Nobody can guarantee a specific result, no matter how much they know, nor how much practice they've had.
Three generations of my Uncle's family are dead because of this plague, and the two survivors were seriously injured. The youngest child will probably heal over time as she grows up. Her mother may never be off Oxygen again, and if the virus comes back around, it may very well finish what it started. As always, time will tell.
I wish good luck with your choices and I sincerely hope they work out for you.

Exactly. These are our choices and no one else's. I don't criticise your choice, and you don't criticise mine. I am very sorry to hear of the effect on your family. My own feeling is that had we encouraged social mixing among the younger and healthy population from the outset (rather than discouraging it) we would have achieved herd immunity much earlier and the "at risk" population would have been much better safeguarded as a result. As it is I feel we have created maximum risk for people who are vulnerable.

Last edited by louis (2021-10-27 19:35:09)

SpaceNut · 2021-10-27 20:26:43

The flu virus is never on time and is always the version that showed up last year....of which these companies seem tobe using the same pattern of medical creation...Each of the variants still being said to be covid-* is the issue as its a poor identification of what version you have.

kbd512 · 2021-10-27 22:40:28

Louis,

For the most part, politicians are one-trick ponies. They think the answer to all technical problems is a matter of money. They think the answer to all social problems is a matter of ideology. What I've learned from my 40 short years on this planet is that almost all people are completely beholden to their beliefs about reality, no matter any evidence to the contrary. Even when it's painfully obvious to someone else with an outside perspective, that technology or ideology or religion isn't producing the desired results, the overwhelming majority of people will simply double-down on their favored idea, one more time. When not changing is more painful than dying, then they'll change, but not a moment before. It's not that they're literally insane or stupid or can't see what's going on, it's that they'd rather die than change. The more indoctrinated or conditioned someone is, the more certain they are of their convictions.

Yes, I would agree that there's been a lack of emphasis placed on treating COVID-19 with anything more than the standard O2, ventilators, traditional antibiotics to prevent secondary infections, and existing anti-viral medications. I'm not sure why that is, but I would agree that that's a profound mistake. There's no single proximal cause, but again, there's a good reason why they call medicine "a practice". Nobody really knows what they're doing, but some simply have way more knowledge of the problem than others.

COVID vaccines are effective against the specific strains of the virus they were designed to be effective against, but far less effective against other strains that came along after the vaccines were designed. Again, no silver bullets in medicine.

The point is not that the COVID wards are filled with vaccinated people, but that they're filled with far fewer people than they were without the vaccines.

A vaccine is a bit like a rifle plate. You shoot somewhere off the plate (protect against the wrong bullet or in the wrong area) and that bullet's going to sail right through, as if there was nothing there to stop it, because there isn't. The rifle plate can be cracked if you fall on it, if you shoot it enough times in the same spot, then the bullets are going to get through, and merely stopping the bullet once isn't a guarantee against serious injury. That said, without the plate, you'd probably be dead. We started issuing rifle plates because so many of our troops were being felled by bullets, rather than shrapnel from explosive weapons, because the enemy lacked artillery and training. If you shoot a .50 cal at a rifle plate, then the person wearing the plate is probably still going to die. Certain people are beyond help, with or without protection. For someone with a compromised immune system, COVID is like a .50 cal. Even if we stack up two plates in front of the bullet, the wearer may be so frail that even if the bullet is stopped, blunt force trauma kills them anyway, because a .50 cal hits like a freight train.

My point was that right now all of us who took the vaccine are wearing the equivalent of a Level III rifle plate. It'll stop any Lead-core small arms bullet cold, like M193 rounds, generally without too much trauma to the wearer. The problem is that the enemy (the virus) is using M855 steel core penetrator rounds, and while the plate will slow those rounds down drastically, it won't completely stop them. Get hit enough times or in the right area, and that's all she wrote for you.

There are indeed "industry standards" for rifle plates, yet no two manufacturers' products will fare the same under the same conditions. To pass certification testing, all plates have to survive a certain number of live test rounds fired at them, yet that still says very little about the condition of the dummy on the receiving end. Did the plate completely shatter by the end of the test and impart serious blunt force trauma, relative to other similar competing plate designs, despite successfully stopping all rounds? Again, I define "success" as keeping the most number of people out of the hospital and away from the coroner's table. Based upon death count, both rifle plates and vaccines win that argument convincingly, even with their numerous shortcomings.

Your assertion is that we should all wear our BDUs and not bother with the rifle plates, because they're hot, uncomfortable, restrict movement, we have excellent medevac support, the enemy's marksmanship generally sucks, and we have much better training than they do. In many cases that's probably true, but with enough shooting, a whole lot of your friends will be lying on the ground, bleeding out. Relying on natural immunity alone, we're essentially standing up in front of an entire company of enemy machine gunners. They don't have to be particularly good shots to kill a lot of us, and they only need to "get lucky" once. We have to "get lucky" nearly every damn time, or we end up losing or medically evacuating so many casualties that we're no longer an effective fighting unit. We don't have nearly enough medics, either, which is why doc will have words with you if you pointlessly order men to stand up in front of a bunch of enemy machine gunners.

Regarding authoritarian regimes, you should know by now that I'm not a fan of any dictatorial edicts from on-high, and I don't know how much more clear I could possibly make that point. Nearly all forms of absolutism are insufferably stupid and immoral.

Regarding your "social mixing" experiment, that's how three generations were killed or almost killed. The very youngest brought it home from summer camp, then proceeded to share it with her parents and grandparents. The great-grandfather was felled by a separate incident, but it was his wife that brought it home in that case. My Uncle's wife was very ill, but survived. My Uncle never left his hospital bed, nor did his daughter, nor did his son-in-law, and somehow his grand daughter miraculously survived, as the youngest did, but her lungs are now shot to hell and she's on O2 to this very day.

The one who survived was not thought to be at-risk for anything, she's not overweight, and is younger than I am, as was her husband at the time of his death. Her husband was not known to be at-risk, but died of COVID-related complications associated with an undiagnosed blood / kidney disorder. He lived through the infection, then died weeks later, as my Uncle did. My Uncle was in his mid-70s and had serious health problems, so no real surprise there, but the son-in-law was a few years younger than I am. 3 generations, from younger than my wife and I to older than my father, some were fine, almost as if nothing happened, while others never came off the ventilator.

So, how the hell do you determine who's at-risk?

SpaceNut · 2021-10-28 17:13:26

kbd512 wrote:

SpaceNut,
Can you name off any other vaccines that require 4 shots inside of a year?

Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, for sure fall into that but I am wonder if the age brackets that show the highest risk should be scheduled for 3 and 4 as the age rises at intervals to reduce the risk?

There are shots that have boosters but I have not seen anything other than tetanus that requires more than 2 as it seems that the body sheds the chemical content of the shot.

we have never got the word on whom is a carrier, how long they are and its seems that Fully vaccinated people can pass on the Delta variant at home, including to other vaccinated people, a study finds - but unvaccinated people are still at most risk

Out of these people's fully vaccinated household contacts, 25% caught COVID-19, compared to 38% of their unvaccinated household contacts, the study found.
Of those infected with Delta, 54% were fully vaccinated, 32% were unvaccinated and 14% had received one vaccine dose,

SpaceNut · 2021-10-29 16:08:03

Covid cases and deaths grossly underestimated among meat packers, House investigation finds

More workers at the country's top five meatpacking companies were sickened and died of the coronavirus than had been previously estimated, an investigation by the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis has found.
At least 59,000 workers at Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS, Cargill and National Beef - companies that control the lion's share of the U.S. meat market - were infected with the coronavirus during the pandemic's first year, according to a report the subcommittee released Wednesday on its findings. At least 269 workers across these companies died of covid-19 between March 1, 2020, and Feb. 1.
More than half of the total infections - nearly 29,500 - were tied to Tyson Foods. In an email, the company told The Post it had invested more than $810 million since the beginning of the pandemic to transform its facilities and make workers safer. The Arkansas-based company has been a leader in vaccinations; in August, it became the first major food company to enact a vaccination mandate for its 120,000 U.S. workers.
An estimated 334,000 coronavirus cases nationwide have been tied to meatpacking plants, resulting in more than $11 billion in economic damage, according to research from the University of California at Davis. Researchers found that per capita infection rates in counties that were home to beef- and pork-processing facilities were twice as high. Chicken-processing facilities raised transmissions by 20%.

kbd512 · 2021-10-29 17:53:21

SpaceNut,

Name off any other vaccine, besides a COVID vaccine, that requires 4 shots inside of a year.

SpaceNut · 2021-10-29 18:36:12

I thought that I had replied to that....
There are none that unless you count flu shots oh that's covid...so no

SpaceNut · 2021-10-30 20:50:04

America's falling Covid case rate, in 3 charts; New cases have fallen 57 percent since early September, with experts attributing the fall to increased immunity.

Us Death rate chart

Covid vaccines provide stronger immunity than past infection, CDC study finds; Unvaccinated people who had recovered were five times more likely to test positive again than people who were recently fully vaccinated.

SpaceNut · 2021-10-31 20:47:34

COVID’s endgame: Scientists have a clue about where SARS-CoV-2 is headed based on models and studies (including a 1980s test that squirted virus up human noses), researchers have a new endgame thesis.

Origin of Virus May Remain Murky, U.S. Intelligence Agencies Say

Seems the US is not the only place as Germany is experiencing a 'massive' pandemic of the unvaccinated, says health minister

SpaceNut · 2021-11-01 21:36:09

The Race Is On to Develop a Vaccine Against Every Coronavirus; A “universal” shot would protect against every branch of Covid’s viral family tree—even future ones. But getting there won’t be easy.

SARS-CoV-2 is the third coronavirus to become a major cause of human disease within two decades, after SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012.
The original SARS virus and its Covid-causing cousin, for instance, share about 80 percent of their genome; but the virus behind Covid and the one that causes MERS, for instance, are only about 50 percent alike.
To make a vaccine that protects against multiple types, strains, or variants of a virus, researchers have to find some feature that they all have in common and that our immune system reacts to. Then they have to incorporate that feature into the vaccine. With the flu, for instance, each new strain arrives bearing tiny changes in a feature called hemagglutinin, a hammer-shaped protein on the virus’s surface that binds to receptors on lung cells. Because every hemagglutinin is different—researchers actually subdivide flu viruses based on how divergent these proteins are—the search for a universal flu vaccine has focused on trying to redirect the immune system’s attention from the variable head of the protein to the handle-like, less variable stem.

kbd512 · 2021-11-01 22:53:11

SpaceNut,

Wasn't the Wuhan Institute of Virology working on a type of universal corona virus vaccine?

I feel as though I've seen this movie before and already know how it ends.

We should stick to fighting against things that actually exist in nature, rather than creating new problems to solve.

kbd512 · 2021-11-05 13:43:53

New US CDC data shows that Florida, which has refused to implement mask or vaccine or business closure mandates under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, now has one of the lowest new case rate and death rate for COVID-19, of any state in the United States. Case rate has dropped from 101 new cases per 100,000 people and 1.77 new deaths per 100,000 people to 9 cases per 100,000 people and 0.2 deaths per 100,000 COVID cases. Florida ranks behind California, Mississippi, Hawaii, and Alabama regarding new COVID-19 case rate.

A 0.2 death rate corresponds to 43.2 deaths across Florida's population of 21,600,000, assuming everybody in the state becomes infected with COVID-19, as all of Florida's residents eventually will be. At that rate of 0.2 deaths per 100,000 COVID-19 cases, you're a little over 23 times more likely to die of either Influenza or drowning (both causes of death account for 1,000+ deaths per year in the State of Florida), as compared to COVID-19.

Florida's Governor DeSantis continues to encourage all residents to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and to seek early treatment for COVID-19, and Florida is treating its COVID-19 patients using the Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment that President Trump received after he became infected with COVID-19.

Dr Fauci states that the Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatments reduce the rate of serious illness and death from COVID-19 by up to 85%, but emphasis was placed upon the need to administer treatment early in the infection cycle to achieve best / greatest effect. Regeneron won't be administered after they put you on a ventilator, because by that point it's too late. Once again, any and all treatments for COVID-19 have demonstrated greatest efficacy when administered early in the infection cycle, so seeking testing on the part of those who become infected is required. Waiting until you're so ill that you need to be admitted to a hospital Emergency Room is a very bad strategy for avoiding or reducing lengthy hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. Furthermore, Dr Fauci states that this treatment is underutilized by patients and physicians for treatment of COVID-19 infections.

Long story short, it would seem that waiting to seek testing and treatment for COVID-19, if you wish to maximize your chances of staying out of the hospital and remain counted amongst the living, is not a good survival strategy.

Additionally, the Biden Administration's health advisor has stated that eventually everybody will get COVID-19 and that there is no way of stopping that now. That means COVID-19 has transitioned from being a pandemic to endemic, meaning something humanity will simply have to live with. In clear and simple terms, at least one of COVID-19's many variants is here to stay, same as Influenza.

A pair of year-long studies conducted on the efficacy of mask wearing, one conducted by the US NIH within the US and another in Bangladesh, both show that the actual reduction rate for transmission of COVID and Influenza viruses ranges between 10% and 15%. The studies cited various factors for the low efficacy rate (improper wearing, touching the face or mask, etc), but noted that it does provide some reduction in transmission of illness and is beneficial for people living and working in close proximity to each other. Two studies conducted on different continents amongst very different populations both show the exact same efficacy rate for the wearing of masks. A third study from Europe would be very beneficial so we have data points from three different continents, but several of the European countries have refused to mandate the wearing of masks and seem disinterested in reaching a scientific conclusion on the wearing of masks by the general public. Both studies also show that social distancing and good personal hygiene was markedly more effective at slowing the spread of COVID and Influenza than masks alone. This point cannot be stressed enough. Social distancing and good personal hygiene (washing of hands and sterilization of frequently touched surfaces like doorknobs, covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze, etc) actually works quite well all by itself, whereas the efficacy rate for the wearing of masks is highly dependent upon other factors such as social distancing and hygiene. Best effect was achieved by combining masks with social distancing and good personal hygiene.

The radical leftist media-driven false narrative is now well and truly broken. Mandates and reliance on singular strategies, such as mass vaccination alone, are bad public policy that are not supported by science or empirical results. There is no "one size fits all" solution. Masks are of minor utility without good personal hygiene practices and social distancing. Vaccines certainly help, but their efficacy rates against strains of viruses they were not designed to protect against is no better than Influenza vaccinations.

To reduce the COVID-19 injury and death rate, it appears as if humanity needs to implement a triad of medical / survival practices:

The first part of that triad is mitigation or avoidance of the threat if possible, namely social distancing and proper wearing of personal protective equipment and good personal hygiene- this doesn't provide tangible benefit unless it's all done at the same time and in an appropriate way. The second part is prevention via robust immune system response through recognition of the threat. Some people have immune systems that automatically recognize and attack the virus, whereas others do not, thus the use of vaccines to help the body's immune system to recognize the threat. The third part is early treatment, prior to onset of serious and possibly irreversible illness and death.

There are no silver bullets in medicine. All aspects of medicine play an important role. No single medical survival practice is an effective substitute for the others. While not specifically mentioned prior, being in good physical condition, which includes routine exercise and weight control and a healthy diet and refraining from abusing of drugs- legal or otherwise, helps the body endure the onslaught of the various pathogens it's continually subjected to. There are never any guarantees in medicine or in life, but combining all of these medical / survival practices is stacking the deck in your favor.

Whether or not people who claim to believe in science, or who "follow the science", will accept any scientific findings that don't reinforce their ideology is a different matter, but this appears to be the best information that science can provide to us, at the present time. The greatest problem with science, is that science only provides information to us, regarding "what is". Science can't tell you what you should do with the information you've been given. We educate and train medical doctors for many years, for the specific purpose of providing sound medical advice regarding treatment and prevention of illness and death, so please talk to your doctor and obtain all medical advice from him or her. If necessary, seek a second medical opinion if you don't understand or trust the medical advice you're being given by one doctor. Do not take medical advice based upon something you read on the internet.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-05 20:09:40

Nice round up of early action makes for a quicker turn around.. as the Borg would say resistance is futile...get the shot until the pills are available and wash and wear a mask....that means do not ban them with the no mandates....

This ranks up there with the Como action.

Colorado hospitals can turn away patients as state grapples with covid-19 surge in particular the delta-variant-driven surge that swamped emergency rooms this summer and fall has started to ebb.

Gov. Jared Polis, D, signed an executive order over the weekend authorizing the state's public health department to determine whether hospitals or emergency departments are at or will soon hit capacity. The department can order such facilities to halt admissions and redirect or transfer patients, according to the order, which will be in effect for 30 days starting Sunday.
governor's new order allows the state public health department to "step in and literally transfer patients from one hospital to another without the hospital having to agree to that in advance or even without the patient agreeing to it in advance, if that's what was necessary," he said.

kbd512 · 2021-11-06 16:07:43

SpaceNut,

In Star Trek the Borg had their butts handed to them on a fairly routine basis, because no amount of group-think, even when aided by clearly superior technology, was ever able to overcome a little bit of clever independent thinking. That should have been a wake-up call to the group-thinkers, but it never was, so the more the Borg messed with the Federation, the more battles they lost.

Sooner rather than later, individual Federation starships that were far less powerful than the "Borg cubes" they were up against were decimating them in battle. Collectivism works right up until you encounter someone who thinks differently, who also has the means to resist, then it fails in spectacular fashion, and the collectivists never learn from their failures, so they either run away and stop messing with other people who were not messing with them or they get obliterated.

The issues and themes underpinning "The Star Trek Universe" were a stylized and futuristic version of real life, always based upon human problems and the human condition. The starships and the other civilizations encountered were merely plot elements used in the telling of the story. All of the Star Trek movies and TV episodes were intended to convey those "teachable moments" that former President Obama referenced a few times, to anyone willing to learn.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-07 20:42:01

Biden’s vaccine mandates face first test with federal workers

4 million federal workers are to be vaccinated by Nov. 22 under the president’s executive order.

White House chief of staff 'confident' Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandate will be upheld after federal appeals court halted it

Of course this is on the heals of a Supreme Court ruling that won’t block vaccine mandate for Maine health-care workers with religious objections.

kbd512 · 2021-11-07 23:26:30

SpaceNut,

Mandating medical procedures without regard to consequences or efficacy is facially unconstitutional in a myriad of ways.

A vaccine is not a magic talisman. It works for many people, maybe even most people, but it will not work for everyone. Beyond that, the vaccines are become less and less effective as the virus continues to mutate. Sooner or later, you need to put more effort into treatment and mitigation and identification of those who are most at-risk of serious adverse health effects from the virus.

COVID-19, like Influenza, is here to stay. It's no longer a pandemic, so whatever this is about, it's not a pandemic response. The virus is now endemic. Reality won't be altered by any amount of ideology. Why is it so difficult to accept that there are no silver bullets in medicine?

This fixation on vaccination is becoming increasingly bizarre and counter-productive. Democrats used to like having options, but now there's a single solution to every problem. What gives?

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