Dad was swabbed yesterday for Covid/flu/RSV. Thank Gaia, he’s negative. I hate the misinformation from various outlets. Explaining the necessity of precautions shouldn’t be on my shoulders but here we are.
Mayo Clinic fired ~700 workers out of a total workforce of ~70,000 due to vaccine non-compliance. We have to live in a simulation, because I can't think of any reason other than comedy that the likelihood of your job "surviving" being non-vaxxed is the same as the likelihood of surviving the virus itself.
or maybe people are just genuinely that fucking stupid. And possibly overvalue themselves and their ability to find equivalent work elsewhere.
nope, she still thinks it's a smart idea. I'm trying to put it off. I think she might be trying to kill me. Halp.
I listened to a podcast that had a guest who was a physician at a big teaching hospital in the San Fran area. He is of the opinion that this thing will burn out by late Feb. I read opinions from other article interviewing multiple epidemiologists and they had about the same idea. One said this is the fasted moving virus ever recorded. We are hunkering down as much as we can but not a lot different than before I suppose. No more visits with the neighbor mainly. If we can get our kiddo vaccinated in Feb/March and this thing burns out around then, we should be good to go. I'm hoping that is truly the light at the end of the tunnel but I'm not getting too over hyped yet. I got let down before when vaccination rates weren't great and then Delta took over.
The late Feb time frame tracks, if nothing changes. With this many cases, the odds of a new mutation increase. That said, we have a long way to go to get to feb.
I thought this was an interesting conversation: Peter Attia, for those unfamiliar, is one of those uber-genius types. He did his undergrad/masters in mechanical engineering in Toronto, then had a change of heart and decided to become a doctor. He worked for years in the trauma department in Johns Hopkings at Baltimore during the drug wars, then at the NIH doing cancer research. He then got burned out on medicine, started up a financial research firm and successfully predicted the crash of '08. When no one believed him on that, he went back to medicine and now runs a practice dedicated to medical research and longetivity. Dr. Zubin is that awesome doctor who's been posted several times here refuting the Joe Rogan videos. I found it fascinating to be a fly-on-the-wall listening to three practicing physicians with backgrounds in research talking about the current state of affairs.
I picked up my son from day care yesterday. His teacher was losing her voice. I was called this morning and told someone at school tested positive and he now has to quarantine. I’ve got a pretty damn good idea on who that was. What’s the worst part of all this? Now the TV is his baby sitter while I work. He’s watching Star Wars Episode I: the phantom menace. I have an entire fucking week of watching his favorite movies (episode 1-3). Fuck this. Why am I being punished? He’s been vaccinated. I’ve been vaccinated. I need to cancel Disney plus.
Yeah, I have my kids home today for a snow day. My daughter is sitting there watching Empire Strikes Back while I burn my eyes out on spreadsheets.
There's no smoking gun or anything like that; more just a back-and-forth between doctors who work with patients and researchers trying to understand exactly where we're at. Some key takeaways that jumped out at me (keeping in mind that all three doctors are pro vaccination, and that Zubin has multiple videos out advising people to vaccinate): - all three doctors feel like there's a chance that science may have won the battle but lost the war due to the messaging that's occurred. A number that was kicked around in the discussion is that the vaccines have directly saved (conservatively) a million lives so far (and who knows how many serious or long-term injuries), but there's concern that now we have a whole demographic of people who will not vaccinate their kids at all, that doesn't trust science at all, and what kind of ripple effects will that have? - They did push back at vaccines and masking for youth. Discussion about the mental health crisis and developmental issues that will arise for babies and toddlers that have very limited access to other kids, adults and learning facial expressions - They had a discussion where they separated the data regarding youths and vaccines, and cardiovascular issues. Their consensus was that, when you omit youth with comorbidities, the cardiovascular risk to young males from the vaccine is somewhere around 1 in 7000, as compared with hospitalization for this age group due to Covid (which is a much smaller ratio). Given that dilation, it might make more sense to not vaccinate certain people under 25. The heart of the discussion was that it's a problem that such nuance can't even be discussed right now, and that other doctors have approached them and admitted to believing this but being in fear to say it. - They separated what is science vs what is advocacy. - There was discussion about perhaps more advantageous timing between shots; Attia felt that four weeks between first and second dose might have been too quick, and have come from the trial rather than coming from actual studies showing it was the best spacing. - All three were very clear to differentiate between when they were being editorial and when they were stating facts. I enjoyed it because it's one of the few high-level, technical discussions I've seen where it wasn't overwhelmingly political. No one suggested that this was a New World Order or that it was a ploy by latent nazis to take over the public, or any other nonsense. EDIT: I was unclear in wording a vaccination rate
Thanks for the write-up... I'm going to try and find time to watch it. It does sound quite interesting and somewhat refreshing compared to the other shit that's going on out there.
I really like all three doctors. Attia is super data-driven, and Zubin has been a voice of reason in all this mess. I'm sure they all have their biases, but they're as close to the issue as it's possible to be. Also, I posted the Youtube link but it's audio only (he had staffing issues when it was recorded). No need to watch anything.