Well, Covid

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@EddieJones Thanks for sharing your experiences here. When you said you’d have 10 days to play bass I winced a bit - My relative had a mild breakthrough case and slept for almost a week straight , so even without breathing issues it can sap your strength - I figured there wasn’t much bass practice going to happen. I know this doesn’t make you feel better, but maybe it can help someone else: If you are having a rough time of it during a break-through case post-vaccination - that almost certainly means you’d have been hospitalized or worse if you had been unvaccinated. There’s a very good chance that vaccine is saving your life as we speak.

@Mac where are you located? In most places in the US, you can be vaccinated with Pfizer the same day you decide to get vaccinated, 7 days a week. You can search for the specific vaccine manufacturer, by zip code, with same day appointment availability here: Vaccines.gov - Search for COVID‑19 vaccine locations If you lived in my city I could get you an appointment inside the next 20 minutes (no joking). Delta spreads as easily as chickenpox - please find your vaccine (or PM me and I’ll find it for you) - don’t wait until October!

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Remember the old artificial lime-flavored jello, candy and pop? My dad used to call it “spic-n-span flavor”. Eugh! I can only imagine.

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Epidemics emerge all the time. In the last few years we’ve had SARS, MERS, Ebola, HIV, bird flu, swine flu and growing numbers of TB and Hepatitis cases. If everyone had followed the advice, worn a mask and got vaccinated, COVID would now be a footnote but here we are with people sticking horse dewormer up their butts.

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If you believe the rhetoric that the vaccine is the cure to Covid, then I have a bridge I want to sell you. :rofl:

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Does the vaccine protect you? Data shows it does, but it is starting to wane off due to time and new variants, hence the break-thru infections and the introduction of boosters. Just like with Influenza, we will always be behind the ball. Covid is here to stay.

Nobody is talking about my group, those who survived and have natural antibodies. In the US, as of today, we are estimated to be at least 30 million or more. Why not? Instead we are being dismissed, discriminated against, and vilified. Did you know that in the EU, if you have natural antibodies that qualifies you for an EU Digital Covid Certificate?

Why are we not leading on research? Why are we relying on research from other countries? We can afford 3.5 trillion spending plan but we can’t lead on research? Come on!

Why are healthcare professionals who deal with Covid everyday refusing to get vaccinated? Why would they rather quit their jobs? What do they know that we don’t? We praised them for risking their lives last year, and this year they are ridiculed, vilified, get a mandate, and are getting fired. How grateful we are!

Why doesn’t this new unconstitutional and illegal executive order mandating vaccines for workers not apply to members of Congress and the federal court system and their staffers? Why were all Postal workers initially exempt?

Why only private companies over 100 employees? What about all the small businesses? What are those workers immune? Do their lives not matter?

Why are football stadiums allowed to be packed to capacity?

These are the questions we should be asking ourselves rather than making fun of people. And fyi, in today’s “Cancel Culture”, since the majority of unvaccinated are minorities, these new mandates and the “antivaxxer” demonization could be considered systemic racism.

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True, but only if your positive PCR test was less than 6 months ago. After that, you’ll need a booster shot to qualify for a certificate.

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Even if everyone actively wanted to get the vaccine as soon as possible, it’s not physically/logistically possible to vaccinate the entire globe simultaneously. Africa, for example, is only 3% vaccinated. Also, because of the breakthrough cases, we have natural selection for the spread of variants that are vaccine resistant. It would take a more complex strategy to achieve a higher level of effectiveness than was achieved.

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Yeeeaaaahhhh… no. It would have been if the guidance had been consistent and audible from the get go, but it wasn’t. Had they shut down air travel from China, Iran, Italy right off the bat and added other hot spots and as needed, yes. But, alas they didn’t for fear of looking racist. If the mask mandates would have been consistent, but no. Just take Fauci’s or Teresa Tam’s or the WHO’s numerous flip-flops on this. And the list goes on. Now add the apparently waning efficacy of extant vaccines. Well, in fact a mono-specific vaccine targeted towards a single epitope on a variable protein is equivalent to putting evolutionary selection pressure on the virus. In short, the world’s authorities were caught with their pants down in the ass-up position due to political cowardice and disorganization, as well as trusting only that science which aligns with their political vision (left or right, no difference there). It wasn’t helped by the fact that most scientists turned out to be clueless or “comunicationally challenged” or possibly outright liars (Fauci, Ghebreysius, etc.).

Sounds kinky, but I think I’ll pass.

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Yes, after 180 days recovered persons having received a single dose of a 2-dose vaccine are considered fully vaccinated.
Unvaccinated people are also allowed to travel with negative tests (72 hours for PCR tests and, where accepted by a Member State, 48 hours for rapid antigen tests).

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And polyvalent or broadly specific vaccines directed against numerous proteins on the Covid-19 surface, including ones not subject to high sequence variability.

In fact, I think that we will only have a herd immunity effect if we develop effective serological vaccines based on whole virus or virus-like particles which will generate A/Bs against numerous sites on its surface. It’s my gut feeling that mRNA vaccines will be great for containing specific outbreaks, but ultimately not effective (efficient??? economic???) in providing broad or lasting immunity.

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This doesn’t actually seem to be the case according to peer reviewed research:

"Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population, in which efficacy against severe disease remains high. Even if humoral immunity appears to wane, reductions in neutralising antibody titre do not necessarily predict reductions in vaccine efficacy over time, and reductions in vaccine efficacy against mild disease do not necessarily predict reductions in the (typically higher) efficacy against severe disease. This effect could be because protection against severe disease is mediated not only by antibody responses, which might be relatively short lived for some vaccines, but also by memory responses and cell-mediated immunity, which are generally longer lived. The ability of vaccines that present the antigens of earlier phases of the pandemic (rather than variant-specific antigens) to elicit humoral immune responses against currently circulating variants, indicates that these variants have not yet evolved to the point at which they are likely to escape the memory immune responses induced by those vaccines.

Krause, P. R., Fleming, T. R., Peto, R., Longini, I. M., Figueroa, J. P., Sterne, J. A., Cravioto, A., Rees, H., Higgins, J. P., Boutron, I., Pan, H., Gruber, M. F., Arora, N., Kazi, F., Gaspar, R., Swaminathan, S., Ryan, M. J., & Henao-Restrepo, A.-M. (2021). Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses. The Lancet. Redirecting

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext

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I think you raise many important questions, I’m just not sure what answers you are implying.

I don’t think they have some secret knowledge. As in every population, you’ll have a certain percentage of people who are opposed to it. Health care professionals are no exception to that. It’s a complex issue.

I can’t speak for the US, but at least here in Germany, there is a large antivaxxer movement who organise demos and the like which is predominantly white.

As to the low vaccination rates of migrant communities, I agree there is systematic racism which has less to do with cancel culture and more to do with the unwillingness to invest in outreach programs, campaigns, information provided in multiple languages that address the needs of these groups and take their specific living conditions into account. There have been attempts but I don’t think it’s enough. Building trust in a state that more often than not neglects or is hostile to them is probably a big issue and won’t be achieved over night.

I remember how at the end of last summer, when the second wave came, numbers of cases first went up in these areas and the “arab clans” with their huge weddings were blamed and shamed. And of course those who had visited families in Southern or Eastern Europe and allegedly brought the virus back to “us”. It was horrible.

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I’ll have to disagree with you on that one!

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Yes, however it is documented that specific vaccines do tend to select for particular variants population-wide, and that the fitness cost of a variant escaping immunity is actually quite low, meaning that the generation of variants may accelerate as a function of time.
“Our structure-function analysis revealed that epitopes for RBD-targeting nAbs overlap one another substantially and can be evaded by escape mutants with ACE2 affinities comparable to the wild type, that are observed in sequence surveillance data and infect cells in vitro . This suggests that the fitness cost of nAb-evading mutations is low.”

On the other hand, there is also evidence that although the escape variant selection seems to be a fact, it appears in fact to be slowed down through a generalized immunity effect through the decrease of overall prevalence of Covid.

Which kind of feeds into the point I made before: the science is not clear, and yet politicians are making sweeping policy decisions based on the “trust the science” argument, when it is clear it a) isn’t settled and b) some scientific authorities are telling evident porky pies.

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Too soon? :confused:

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I’m not implying anything. I’m asking legit questions.

Once this new mandate goes into effect, here in the US, we will most likely have a shortage of hospital workers. It’s already happening. We saw that this week in NY where a hospital had to stop delivering babies because the staffers quit.

In fact I think all industries will suffer. 45% of the US population has not gotten vaccinated. Employers are already having a hard time finding employees to staff their businesses. Good luck to our economy if the majority of those people stick to their guns.

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It’s rhetorics, isn’t it? Politicians and journalists have the impossible task of providing clear, often simplified information in order to achieve some sort of effect without being untruthful in a time when what we know is constantly changing. Not saying that there are no lies, deliberately misleading statements etc. On the contrary. The damage these do is significantly higher when the ground we stand on is shaky at best.

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This isn’t too bad. I’ve seen far worse, though I daresay that @chordsykat was being at least a tad ironic.

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Honestly, I wouldn’t want my baby delivered by someone who doesn’t follow the science. Maybe health care workers should get paid more and have better working conditions so they wouldn’t perceive a vaccine as the last straw.

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The footnote for their claim is dated July 25th and is obsolete according to the more recent statistical evidence from the Israel study where more than 60% of hospitalized covid patients are fully vaccinated over age 60. Unless breakthrough cases among the vaccinated aren’t contagious, we do indeed by definition have spread of vaccine resistant variants. The advantage being that nearly all of the hospitalized vaccinated patients improve and nearly all of the fatalities are among the unvaccinated. But spread prevention, not so much.

“Although vaccines are less effective against asymptomatic disease or against transmission than against severe disease, even in populations with fairly high vaccination rates the unvaccinated are still the major drivers of transmission and are themselves at the highest risk of serious disease.” (Footnote 16 dated July 25)

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext