to bring this full circle: my 4 year old son is currently in the hospital undergoing surgery. He'll be fine, but he is scared. Know what sucks? I can't be there with him, even though my wife and I are fully vaccinated, because there are so many people with fake vaccine cards and the like now that a pediatric care unit can only allow one parent in because better safe than sorry. I get it, I really do. We could have stopped this, but now I have to wait outside the hospital and get occasional text updates because "muh freedumbs." I did everything I was supposed to, and I still cannot be there for one of the scariest moments of my son's life, because people are too selfish and stupid to see the forest for the trees. I get it that people should have the right to choose, but only if it affects them. Now, it is affecting me, and more importantly my terrified child and wife. I believe this is one of the few times that the hated phrase "fuck your feelings" is appropriate.
All of this is literally already happening. All the good info, all the legit scientific data, it's ALL out there for anyone to read at their leisure. And none of it compares to what some idiot youtuber uploads as their "real research", or some idiot Facebook meme that is shared between friends and family, exponentially. Misinformation has a r-nought as large as your friends list.
I also kind of think the internet has reached a point where....yeah, you can't teach yourself microbiology in the same way you can teach yourself how to bake a quiche or change the oil in your car. The ability to distinguish between fact and fiction is a skill, and one of the largest requirements is time. A trillion dollar company can throw resources at it, to eliminate some of the most egregious offenders, in a risk management ploy. It's lofty to say they will remove lies or halt misinformation. But they are taking steps to ensure they don't become a known haven for it, a la Fox News and "fair and balanced".
Because we are a stupid, stupid people who once made a celebrity President of the United States so maybe we'll take our necessary medical cues from another one.
I think part of the reason why that's not happening is because of the inability to have good faith debates on the subject. If this is a partisan issue (it's not exactly, but it's discussed that way), the moment someone from the left acknowledges anything less than the vaccine is more magical than unicorn pussy, Tucker Carlson's head explodes, thousands of conspiritards go "AHA!" and millions of people use it as an excuse to not do something. This results in literally thousands dead, from again this is important: SOMETHING THAT IS COMPLETELY PREVENTABLE. You could imagine the squirming when someone asks the CDC rep a "fair and balanced question" such as "how many deformed and retarded babies were caused by this vaccine?" or "I read that vaccinated babies have lower iq's" or "Have you ever finger-banged anyone with autism they got from a vaccine?" It's not worth the risk, especially not in light of the thousands of hours of debate already out there on this. This is PUBLIC health, meaning 99.999% of the population benefits from doing this. Putting that .001 in front of a mic and a camera is counter-productive to say the least. FWIW, biostats at this scale have different rules: if you survey 1,000,000 as they get the vaccine, and 10,000 report flu-like symptoms....we get a LOT of fucking colds, and it's entirely possible that out of 1m people, 10k just get a cold that day, especially on the day they go to the hospital/pharmacy/safeway/brothel to get a vaccine. The relationship isn't defined. So, we have to be safe and issue caveats, but you're far more likely to get symptoms from being around other sick people than the vaccine itself. Meanwhile, the headline is "Thousands sick, cause vaccine." Remember correlation does not equal causation? Most vaccine side effects pop up within a few weeks, and I have been vaxxed for six months. No one I know has horns, a tail or 5g emanating from their balls. So, to address a group of professional athletes, who as a group are profoundly stupid, poorly educated is a bad idea. They occupy an unfortunate position of being vocal, incentivized through sponsorships and side hustles to portray themselves as models of health and a highly visible public position on being vaccinated. Hell, using the Joe Rogan or Dr. Oz MO of selling miraculous supplements or athletic enhancements, some of them have stand to gain from promoting how healthy they are without the vaccine. The story is pretty straightforward: unless you have some of the identified medical conditions, you should get the vaccine. People are going to have weird reactions to this stuff, but nothing has been verified to directly come from the vaccine en masse. You'd get similar rates of side effects injecting water, vodka or fucking turpentine into people's arms. Is the number of side effects zero? No. Can we isolate every other possible variable to suggest that a vaccine made your poo purple? No, not worth the effort until we get to a significant or life-threatening issue. Lastly, it's becoming apparent you don't convince these people with reason, logic or facts. They are up in arms about a threat to their right to be lied to, ffs. You do this by having everyone take a neighborly approach, and incentivizing people who've been vaccinated to invite a friend or three. At a certain point, the facts are out there. If the truth doesn't convince you, then it stops being the world's responsibility to influence you to make the best choice.
But that's exactly what happened. The CDC gave a recommendation that vaccinated people didn't need masks anymore, the unvaccinated started lying en masse, and cases went back up.
I've just been wearing my mask because I'm terrified of delta and especially passing it along to unvaxxed children. Anyone else doing the same? Also what scares me is getting the flu on top of covid.
Aren't unvaxxed children, or just children, the best at fighting off Covid and being least affected? We've all been wearing masks and washing hands and using sanitizers for over a year and a half. Are we better off not masking, so our other natural immunities, especially those children need to develop, will build up? I'm not trolling or disagreeing, I'm honestly asking. Seems like there comes a point to lose the mask and start going about more ordinary interaction for better long-term benefits. But, I don't know. I still wear my mask in crowds and at the grocery store, or other places it's required.
But there's NOT clear evidence. That's kind of the point. There's barely anecdata. There's exponentially more bullshit. Maybe it's my vaccine-induced autism kicking in, but I recall us shutting down a vaccine with millions of doses because of 6 (six) cases of blood clots, with all of those cases having overlapping complications. 6 in 1 million is absurd odds, 6 out of 20 million isn't significant enough to conduct actual research. Fuck, 6 out of 20 million could be the number of people struck by lightning on their way home from getting the vaccine. And yet, people will look at those odds and think, "ooh too dangerous". Flipping it, if you were playing a lottery with 6 out of 20 million winners, you'd most likely be one of the 19,999,994 losers. But the way we deal with huge numbers....you'd probably be like "hey, 6 times more likely to win!" So, there's an inherent bias kicking in here: hundreds of millions of doses, the vast majority of them uneventful. The tiny few that do have complications, or the tiny few fuckwits who make them up get an absurd amount of attention. Is the virus safe? No, even though 98% of people who get it survive. Is the vaccine safe? Absolutely, even though there are dozens of cases (out of hundreds of millions) where there were complications. Let's say 40 million people have the virus, about 800,000 died and about 4 million have long term health implications. That's 2% fatality and 10% long-haul. Let's say 200 million people have gotten the vaccine and 1,000 died and hell, 1 million got some side effect like flu symptoms. That's 0.000005 and .0005 respectively. If it's one or the other, I'm taking the one with the lower risk. Also, yes...when it comes to virology, microbiology, infectious disease, etc....most of us are ignorant. Like 99% of the US population has no education in this realm beyond a bio 101 course. Yet no one admits ignorance, and absolutely no one acknowledges the danger of their own ignorance. Who is saying "I don't have all the information I need to keep myself safe?"...literally no one. The population who take supplements with zero scientific supporting evidence of them working and the population who has taken 2 or more college classes that might be relevant to the pandemic are incredibly disparate. We're treated like ignorant children, because we're largely behaving that way: "I don't believe the thousands of doctors, healthcare professionals, public health employees, and the millions of people who've lost loved ones or had this virus. I don't trust my own doctor's advice to get the vaccine, or know enough to ask questions if I should or shouldn't get vaccinated. I trust YouTube and Twitter."
God damn it. No. Children are dying of this shit too. Pediatric ICU's at 90% capacity is the saddest fucking thing I've gotten in an email. Not to mention the long-term health impacts on children. If anything, the premise that kids are somehow less at risk is more dangerous. It's a misleading question: who's most likely to survive covid? Young, healthy people. That doesn't mean it's not dangerous or that it's a good idea to have unvaccinated children. That sort of question is like "whose asshole in this Waffle House is the most lickable?" Your natural immunity isn't worth a quarter cup of fuck to the most contagious virus known to man, and pursuing herd immunity by letting this run rampant results in millions dead and disabled. Like a lot of things: artificially-induced immunity is far superior...it's why we spent a gazillion dollars developing it. Antibodies are a response, not a prevention. By letting it run rampant, the virus has the advantage: it can mutate faster than natural antibodies develop. Also, the virus spreads, but antibodies largely do not. It's not like you can inhale antibodies from healthy people. I mean, mothers can pass antibodies through breast milk, so....start sucking titties?? Also, it's not like mild exposure over time builds tolerance....it's not how viruses work. Think of this shit like fentanyl: it's wildly uncontrollable, even in tiny doses and repeated exposure to it just multiplies the risk of death. Exposure to a weakend version of this virus, a la how a flu vaccine works, didn't make people resistant, because the body didn't realize it needed to fight something with this "shape". Similar to fentanyl, there's no watering it down into a safe range.
Good news for a change. https://apnews.com/article/coronavi...th-pandemics-a9a2245fdcee324f6bbd776a0fffcc60 Not that I have the slightest bit of faith in people not rushing to hoard every dose as soon as it hits market. Or them acknowledging that it's made by the same Big Pharma that makes the current oral favorite.
I think we may have crossed wires; I wasn't implying that absolutism is the answer. I was implying that the platforms will likely respond with absolutism, if only due to the nature of the volume they're trying to police. If I post a video right now called, "The Truth About Vaccines," and then proceed to repeat everything espoused by the CDC and FDA, it will still be demonitized and flagged with a "find out COVID facts" button that shows the entire time you're on the video. Because there aren't enough fact checkers and the algorithm is just mining for words to flag. Sure, because those items are clearly defined (from a legal status) and objectively understood from a moral one. What is accurate with a dynamic situation like this isn't the same thing. Remember when we were told to not mask, then to mask, then not to mask because there weren't enough masks, to use N95s, to use old t-shirts, then to use medicinal grade masks? That's one example of how the situation changed over time, and if everyone who objected to the party line in a particular moment was silenced and blocked from public view, I can't say we'd have better trust in government now. Yes, it's ONE of the reasons the state exists. And there is a constant tension between how much control it can wield vs. the freedom of the people it claims to represent. And the hyperbole, IMO, does not help. The raw numbers of this disease (in Canada, source here: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html) are that of all tests performed - people who for some reason sought a test, so this demographic is likely skewed high - 3.75% are positive. 5.05% of infected people needed some kind of medical help; 0.97% of those wound up in an ICU. The death rate is 1.72%, but that is likely skewed also because it's blending pre-and post-vaccinated people. It also doesn't tell the entire truth, because this disease also skews so badly against the elderly and sick. People under 50 account for only 2.3% of all deaths. I'm not saying the disease isn't dangerous; far from it. It's highly contagious, and if it infects someone who is obese, over 50, has diabetes, heart disease or kidney problems (or, god forbid, any combination of those), then that person is in real fucking trouble. The messaging, though, of, "If you leave the house unmasked or unvaccinated you are killing babies," is not accurate or helpful, because people who are anti-vax or vax hesitant look at these numbers and think you're full of shit. And the divide gets worse, and they get more entrenched in their beliefs. They're small things if you believe in what authorities say and have full faith that there are no side effects from the vaccine. And the whole, "You have to make certain concessions to live in a free society," argument is valid to a degree, however, it isn't like you can opt out. If I told the government I was no longer willing to pay taxes or use their services, they would not agree or allow that. Hence why we have this unending fight: people feel that the government is exerting too much control, and they have no ability to resist it. I'm going to push back here a bit; some of it is trolling, anti-vax nonsense. Some of it is people who think the government is injecting dead babies into your veins and that Jesus is the only immunity they need. But some of it is also people who look at non-peer reviewed studies, anecdotal information and experiences of those close to them and let THAT govern their decisions, rather than what they hear on the news. It doesn't help that the physician colleges (in Canada) have banned all their doctors from discussing anything other than "you should get vaccinated immediately" and are actively censoring or de-licensing any doctors who don't strictly comply. "But the vaccines are totally safe!" Okay, but no they aren't. In Canada, we show 4,288 serious adverse reactions to vaccines right now, and that's the ones that passed muster as being "legitimate" in the eyes of the government and science. Sure, it's a fraction of the total doses. But in a moment we're going to talk about kids and hospitalizations, and I'm going to point out that so far 16 people under the age of 19 have died, and that is statistically WAY FUCKING LESS than 4,288, and yet the levels of sick kids are high enough that the government is moving down the vaccine age. So, again, there's an inconsistency here and everyone who rejects a whole or part of the narrative isn't a baby-killing monster. Let me understand you...you're saying that anyone with an adverse reaction should STFU or at the very least be banned from discussing it publicly? Jesus Christ, I hope I'm misreading that. This statement right here perfectly encapsulates the problem, as I see it. Those who are vaccinated feel a righteous "I did my part!" and they are blaming the sickness on those Others - not the virus. And they think that it's Others who are inhibiting their freedoms, when it is in fact the government mandates that are. When you're in this mindset, there's almost nothing that will make you see it from another perspective. Also, for what it's worth, it's really easy to mobilize you and have you act on behalf of your team in any way those in power see fit. But that's another thread. I agree with this point. I was REALLY hoping to see Sam Harris have the Weinsteins on his podcast. Bret was willing, but Sam Harris was not. He felt it was irresponsible to even give them the benefit of the doubt. Which, to me, is a big problem. I'm not advocating that every nut with a megaphone be awarded a discussion with Sam Harris, but surely someone as learned as Bret Weinstein - whose pHD was taken in the study of viruses in bats and has dedicated his career to evolutionary biology and social systems, for Christ's sake - would be legitimate and in good faith. That Harris views his argument as too fragile to discuss with Weinstein; or that Harris sees Weinstein pouring over scientific data and trying to clarify what's going on and views that with contempt because Weinstein comes up with different explanations than the CDC - really worries me. Question: what's the end game? Imagine it's 4-6 months from now. Vaccine rates have levelled off at about 80% (ish, it'll vary hugely by demographic). All the people who are willing to get vaccinated are, in fact, vaccinated. The remaining 20% will not or cannot. We continue to have the level of infections that we do, because it appears that even hovering around 85% vaccinated still allows for infection so bad that it crashes most ICUs. You've enacted a passport system and a government app. But, there's enough unwilling people out there that they just find was to circumvent the system. Black markets pop up (gyms that don't actually check paperwork, gatherings become more rural with less police oversight, message boards and internet traffic create back doors into places that should be secure, etc). What's the plan then? How much authority do you give, and what are you willing to do to people, if it becomes clear that the measures we're using have gone as far as they're going to and the problem has still not gone away? Okay, but if this is your argument, why is 16 dead children out of a 1.62 million case count statistically relevant? It's obviously a tragedy for the families, but we're talking mass social policy on a societal level here. One could make the same argument - using this logic - that 4,280 adverse reactions is enough to make them forgo the vaccine. (Again, I personally think the numbers strongly support vaccines. I'm trying to see it from the perspective on one who doesn't buy it.) I happen to agree with you here, but I'm pushing back just due to the inconsistency. If an 0.06% death rate for children and 1.17% hospitalization rate amongst every single person under 50 is enough for the lockdowns and mandates, can you see how someone might feel that this is an overreaction for those age groups? Agree with you completely. I made that same choice. When it comes to the vaccine portion of this debate, this is IMO the logical choice. Again, hyperbole. Remember that (at least in Canada) doctors are expressedly forbidden by their own governing body to discuss anything with you that is outside of what the current government mandate is. Also, as an aside, we've structured our healthcare horribly over the years. The idea that you sit down and have a discussion with your doctor is a children's fairy tale. You're lucky if the doctor is in the room with you for 90 seconds, and he's often just calling out orders for the nurse or attendant to code into the computer. So a doctor that you have no real connection with, who has no time to offer you for nuanced discussion, and who is mandated under threat of censor or disbarment from recommending anything outside of the government mandate, isn't the cradle of trust that you might think. Maybe it's different in the US? I believe in Canada our pediatric ICUs are filling up in areas that have an outbreak (like Alberta) where the adult ICUs are at capacity. Only 1,671 children total - since 2019 - have been hospitalized here in Canada. Only 191 required ICU and only 16 have died. Again, tragedy for the families but statistically incredibly minor. The Israel data is showing that natural immunity is 7-13x more effective than vaccinated immunity. Now, natural immunity is playing Russian roulette because it has a 1.72% chance of killing you, but if you're one of the 95.55% of the people who survive it and return to normal life, you are better protected than an unexposed vaccinated person. I guess the heart of my argument is essentially this: for those people who look at all this data and decide to spin the wheel, 95.55% will be relatively okay. Having said that, we seem to be reaching a peak of people who are willing to get vaccinated. If we hit that glass ceiling, and the ICUs continue to be overwhelmed - because, again, we've spent the last decades fucking up our health care and it is unable to react well to any sustained issue beyond its normal tolerances - what are we willing to do to the unvaccinated from a government standpoint, and do we really know what the unintended consequences will be?
As I wrote in my post, I was talking about other natural immunities, not to Covid. Sorry I set you off by asking though. I thought it was a reasonable question, because I've always heard it's important for children to develop their immune system. If you took from my post that I want children to die or that pediatric ICUs being full isn't sad, then that's weird.
personally, I just feel that because I work with children, and until mine are able to get vaccinated, this is the best course of action. I’d love to stop wearing a mask and “get on with life” and I’ll be leading the charge to jump for joy and hug and shit once we’re at that point. I just don’t feel comfortable doing it yet. I felt so absolutely horrible when my son had it knowing he could have gotten it from me, and I’m not sure I could live with myself if I knew I gave it to someone else and got them sick. Not even killed them, but got them sick. Because when I was sick with this, I promise you there were moments I’d have preferred death as the easier alternative. So all these stats on how many people die from it, doesn’t reflect the true suffering. so until shots are available for children, I’m masking. That’s just my personal viewpoint on it.
Thanks for the well wishes everyone. Luckily neither my parents nor my brother and his wife tested positive. My daughter got retested and didn’t either. On a scale from 1 to 10 in terms of severity, our symptoms were never worse than a 1 or 2. They included a stuffy nose, mild headache and some nausea. No fever, cough or anything like that. My son is asymptomatic and I’m very thankful my wife got the vaccine while pregnant. We are wearing masks around our daughter so she doesn’t get it, and we’ll probably do that for another week. Hopefully things stay on this path. Now we have to figure out how to deal with the school. That aside it was one of the most stressful weeks of my life and I’m glad it’s over.
https://nationalpost.com/news/world...-antibodies-disappear-in-many-by-seven-months It's just never going to end. This will become a twice-yearly thing forever.
It’s not goal posts being moved. It’s new understanding of the science as they learn more over time. As far as cost, they can easily afford to keep them free if they wanted to. I foresee a combo shot of flu/covid becoming the norm.