COVID vaccine works - we're saved!

We're not taking it seriously in the states anymore, and haven't been for a while. Everyone, including many who know better, are looking for excuses to return to normal. Even Fauci's advice has been kind of permissive and wishy-washy lately. Advice that vaccinated people can safely congregate indoors together is widespread, despite the prevalence of breakthrough cases. I experienced yet another example of loosening attitudes yesterday when my indoor sports facility resumed floor hockey after a year and a half hiatus - 20 to 30 people running and milling about and breathing heavily in a space about 90 by 45 feet.The virus is not going to go away because the world is not taking it seriously enough. Whenever there's an outbreak and things shut down and prophylactic practices become taken seriously, as soon as things improve a little everything reopens and the cycle starts all over again. We will only be saved if a very contagious variant (much more contagious so that it displaces all previous) comes along that is also very mild.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

Oh, without doubt, sometime around September is my guestimate.--Percy

For the past two weeks the US has been saying that omicron represents 3% of cases. Suddenly yesterday it jumped to 73%. Either reporting has severely fallen down on the job, or testing and analysis has.When I first saw the 3% omicron number a couple weeks ago I projected it forward and estimated that it would be the dominant variant by mid-January, but I was using a replication rate of doubling every 4 days. Apparently omicron doubles every 2 days. I guess the higher replication rate should be expected in a society where people are still traveling on planes, trains and buses, eating in restaurants and bars, attending sporting events, and all the other normal activities of life.Our society is about 20% people who know exactly what to do in a pandemic and are doing it. There's another 40% who wants to do the right thing but hasn't a clue what to do because of the cacophony of conflicting voices. And there's another 40% who believe a variety of false claims, like that the virus is fake or that the vaccine doesn't work or is dangerous or that masks don't work or that we shouldn't let the virus disrupt our lives.Many supposedly responsible voices are advising that you can still visit loved ones during the Christmas holidays as long as you're vaccinated, as if they'd never heard of breakthrough cases. Here's one from yesterday's opinion section of the Post: No, vaccinated people should not cancel their holiday plans. That's dead wrong. YES, YOU SHOULD CANCEL YOUR HOLIDAY PLANS!!!!!There are people out there like my son-in-law's cousin who don't believe the virus is dangerous and didn't get vaccinated and came down with covid and spent a week in the hospital near death. He recovered and still maintains the virus is no big deal. I believe he's typical of the virus-denier crowd where even a near death experience cannot change their minds. They've got too much invested.This virus is not going away because everywhere in the world as soon as the numbers start coming down everything starts reopening. Virus deniers are everywhere, anti-maskers are everywhere, and anti-vaxxers are everywhere. We are doomed to live with this virus forever. The best we can hope for is that a very highly contagious variant emerges, far more contagious than anything out there so that it displaces all other variants, and that is also very mild.For those who need reminding, YOU DO NOT WANT TO CATCH THIS VIRUS! At least 20% experience long term symptoms, and 1% die. In a few hours I'll be playing tennis with a friend who's got long covid. He'll last about 20 minutes and then have to stop, and we're only hitting, not playing. All he's doing is standing there and swinging a racket, occasionally taking a few steps when the ball isn't placed precisely to him. Nobody wants this, and there are many other long term symptoms, like loss of taste and smell, loss of kidney function, loss of liver function, loss of heart function, brain fog, and for men a drop in sperm count and decline in sexual function. Then there's the catastrophe of a cytokine storm where the body is attacked by its own immune system because the virus sends it into overdrive. These possible outcomes are why more and more long covid clinics are opening around the country.We don't know enough about long covid yet. Many who come down with long covid only experience the symptoms months after they thought they'd fully recovered, so it's hard to know what percentage of people get it. The number who come down with long covid might be very high, possibly even above 50%. It's too soon to know.Missing the holidays won't kill you. Celebrating them with others very well might.--Percy

I didn't watch any of the video, but Trump seems truly torn between the need to follow his base while appearing to lead it, and to tout his vaccine achievements. To lead his base he should be warning people off his vaccines, but he's so proud of them he just can't bring himself to do it.There's irony here. He's proud of his vaccines because he thinks developing vaccines was his idea, but there are probably few people in the world who don't think "develop a vaccine" when a new virus emerges.--Percy

They can count excess mortality. As of today the total number of excess deaths in the US from all causes since 2/1/2020 is 930,653. By this measure we'll probably pass a million around April. See Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19.--Percy

About you being immune? This is incorrect. We use the word "immune", but it's the wrong word. There's no such thing as immunity. Possessing antibodies merely means your body is already prepared to fight off an infection. Let me say this again. Antibodies don't prevent infection. What they do is stand ready to fight off infection. Possessing antibodies does not make you immune from infection.Initial exposure to the coronavirus means it being inhaled into your sinuses or lungs. At this point you have no antibodies to fight the virus off, so until your body mounts an immune response the virus has free rein to attack cells at will. You might become very ill, you might not, depending upon the race between the virus making copies of itself that attack cells and your body's immune system mounting a response. Approximately 1% of exposed people lose that race and die.If you're exposed to the virus and survive, or if you receive a vaccine, your body now possesses antibodies, which means that when virus are inhaled into the sinuses or lungs there are already antibodies there to fight them off. If there are sufficient antibodies you will not become ill. If there are insufficient antibodies then you will again become ill and once again there will be a race between viruses producing copies of themselves and the body producing more antibodies. Again, some people still lose this race, even though they had the advantage of beginning with antibodies already in their system.Antibodies are not immortal. They diminish in concentration over time. Since your recovery from covid the number of covid antibodies in your system has been in decline, your ability to mount an instant response to infection diminishing and continuing to diminish. You are gradually becoming less and less able to mount a rapid response to a covid infection.But your immune system does more than produce antibodies. It also produces memory T-cells that remember how to produce the antibodies for specific viruses. Even after your antibody levels have dropped to ineffective levels, the memory T-cells remain. When a new virus infection is detected then they quickly rebuild the machinery for producing the antibodies for that virus, and your body's immune system is up and running and producing antibodies far faster than when it encountered the virus for the first time.As I said upfront, "immune" is the wrong word. There is no such thing as immunity. The antibodies that you possess cannot make viruses bounce off your body. Viruses can still infect your sinuses and lungs just as easily as someone with no antibodies. Your advantage lies in your body's ability to immediately attack the viruses, hopefully so effectively that you never even know you were reinfected.But you have fewer antibodies today than yesterday, and you'll have fewer tomorrow. The goal of vaccines and boosters is to keep people's immune systems locked and loaded against the virus so that infections severe enough to make people infectious are minimized, eventually turning the virus from a global scourge into a minor nuisance.--Percy

I tried to look up how many people had been killed or disabled from the vaccine and found this page from the CDC: Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination | CDC. It says that anaphylaxis (allergic reaction) is rare and occurs in about 0.0005% of cases, but anaphylaxis is a risk in any vaccinations, such as the annual flu shot. It didn't say how many cases of anaphylaxis attacks resulted in death or disablement, but generally treatment of anaphylaxis reactions is easy and extremely effective, but if you take the shot, immediately disappear down an alley, and suffer an anaphylaxis attack, the outlook is not good for you. That's why you're asked to wait for 15 minutes after the shot before leaving.It also says the J&J shot can cause TTS (blood clots), which has been confirmed in 0.00043% of doses. There have been nine deaths directly attributed to TTS, which with 17.2 million doses comes out to 0.00005%.Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) is another risk with the J&J vaccine. Most people fully recover, but some suffer permanent nerve damage. 283 cases of GBS have been reported.For all vaccines, through mid-December there have been reports of 10,688 deaths (0.0022%) from about a half billion doses, but those are deaths reported through the VAERS system, which only records how many vaccinated people died, not how many died from the vaccine. Many elderly people received the vaccine, and it subsequently died then if they were vaccinated they were recorded in VAERS no matter the cause of death.Notice how microscopic are the number of deaths from the vaccines. On the other hand, about 1.3% of known cases in the US have resulted in death. Your chances of death from covid are about 1000 times greater than from the vaccine.--Percy

I'm a couple days behind, but I like to respond to messages about covid if I think I can add helpful information. It might help to think of it as a tradeoff where it's asked how much we're willing to pay in terms of jobs, debt, mental health, financial stability, etc., for each life saved, for each person who doesn't lose the sense of taste and smell forever, for each person who doesn't suffer lifelong kidney or liver or heart or brain damage or chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.There are two good examples out there of opposite approaches to dealing with covid. One is the United States, which has so far experienced about 550 deaths per 100,000 population, and the other is Australia, at about 9 deaths per 100,000. Which country made the right choices? Talking about the body's immune system can get complicated real fast, and I'm going to try to avoid doing that, but here are two links that contain a great deal of very useful information for those interested:

• Selected Adverse Events Reported after COVID-19 Vaccination | CDC
• B-Cells in Your Immune System

Depending upon which virus/vaccine combination you're talking about, natural immunity can be better or worse than vaccine-provided immunity. In the case of the covid vaccines, they all provide better immunity than natural immunity, and at far less risk to your health. I said I'd try to avoid detail, and I hope what I'm about to say isn't too much, but the reason the vaccines provide better immunity is because they result in the production of antibodies targeted at a specific part of covid's spike protein, while the body provides a more scattershot approach to the production of antibodies, many of which are, in essence, failed experiments. Do you think people living in a society have a responsibility toward their fellow man to not spread disease among the population? If you believe that, then what measures should a society take to protect its members from the spread of disease? In particular, how should a society go about protecting itself from members who disagree with the measures agreed upon by the majority? I'd have to look up the test protocols for the Pfizer, Moderna, J&J and AstraZeneca (and there are others), but generally yes, in clinical studies there's a control group. And we also have a control group out here in the wild where we already know statistically that the unvaccinated are far more likely to become sick, be hospitalized, be intubated, and die. Yes, there should, because we definitely don't want anyone taking a vaccine that could cause adverse effects, such as an allergic reaction that results in anaphylaxis shock.Some reject the vaccine because of the possibility of adverse long term effects that we don't know about yet, but while not impossible it's highly speculative.But anyone who decides against vaccination because they fear microchips or because it kills more people than it saves or anything like that, is engaged in misinformed refusal and is fairly determined at maintaining their misinformation, because that these kinds of conspiracy theories are untrue is pretty easy to figure out.--Percy

Hi Porkncheese,I'm still catching up in this thread, but after my post yesterday I noticed a couple of your more recent posts and thought you might be headed for suspension. I don't yet know what happened, but whatever it was it must have been pretty extreme to get suspended for a whole week.What I can say is that moderators try to keep discussion focused on the topic and on reality. Severe topic drift (which comes in a variety of forms) and determined misrepresentations (which also comes in a variety of forms) can cause you to run afoul of moderators. Moderators long ago ceased trying to provide members with a list of do's and don'ts. Situations are too nuanced for that, it just isn't possible. But it's obvious when someone's sincerely trying to discuss constructively and when they're not, and it's usually people making a determined effort to blow up discussion that get suspended.I would like to address a few of the things you say. This particular post from you strengthens my suspicions that you're less interested in what's true than in stirring the pot. The information about how well the vaccines work is freely available from a very large number of sources, so the fact that you're asking this tells us that you're likely dealing in misinformation. There should be nothing about the difference between 90% and 100% that needs to be explained. Also, omicron is far more transmissible than the original version of the virus, which is what the 90% figure applies to. You are correct. It is not possible for Theodoric to know that his symptoms were mild because he was vaxed. The 90% effective figure is statistical, which tells us that if one becomes infected then it is likely to be asymptomatic or cause mild symptoms. Hospitalization for the vaxed is about ten times less likely than for the unvaxed. This is a good example of how Theodoric is incorrect, but you've got the statistics backward. As described above, statistically you're much better off if you're vaxed. The claim was that we'd reach herd immunity if we could get at least 80% of the population vaxed. Because much less than 80% of the population was accepting of vaccination, we never reached herd immunity.I'm talking about the states, of course. The situation in Australia is different because you started with an isolation/quarantine/lockdown/testing/tracking approach and didn't embrace vaccines until very late in the pandemic, and then you ran into same problem as the US in reaching herd immunity, namely vaccine resistance. They always said that this is what would be the case if we didn't achieve herd immunity. As explained in my previous post, there's really no such thing as immunity. When exposed to the virus, both the vaxed and the unvaxed become infected. The difference is that the vaxed's immune systems are already primed to deal with the virus and can mount an immune response right away. The unvaxed's immune systems will take at least a week before the first stages of an immune response can be detected, and during that time the virus has free reign to reproduce and spread throughout the body. It depends upon how you define your responsibilities to your fellow man. Most people are responsible enough to not even want to pass on a cold to their friends and family. One wonders about the humanity of the anti-vax crowd. As you walk out and about unvaxed and unmasked, does it ease your conscience knowing that only about 1% of those you infect will die? Possibly less for omicron?--Percy

Replying to Theodoric's Message 293 and AZPaul3's Message 294:Porkncheese and I were responding to what Theodoric said in Message 225: If this had been more probabilistic I would have said something different.--Percy

As Theodoric already said, in the case of covid natural immunity is inferior to vaccine immunity. For some viruses natural immunity is superior, but that isn't true of the vaccines we've been able to develop for covid.As I said before, though we use the word "immunity," it's the wrong word. Neither infection nor vaccines confer immunity. They just prime your immune system to fight off the virus. For example, people who have already had measles or mumps or have been vaccinated against them are not immune to them, though "immune" is the word we've chosen to use. All immunity to them really means is that our immune system is already primed to fight them off should we become reinfected. It does such a good job that in the case of measles and mumps our immune system fights them off so fast and effectively that in almost all cases we don't even notice we've been reinfected. For example, the measles vaccine is about 97% effective.When you say you aren't harming anyone by going about your life unvaccinated (and presumably unmasked, though I haven't seen where you've commented on masks, yet), that isn't true. You're more likely to become infected than vaccinated people, and so more likely to spread the virus. What resistance (a more appropriate word than immunity) you do possess will always be less than those vaccinated at the same time as your infection. And since you also didn't have the second shot (in the case of Pfizer and Moderna) or the booster, your resistance is far less. You're basically a walking high potential virus vector.Naturally societies want to protect themselves from those who would spread disease. You're not being discriminated against. Rather, society is trying to protect itself from you.--Percy

It's not true that your rights are being attacked, and you have seen "valid explanations" for why it's not true, we've all seen them, many of us have penned them, you're just ignoring them. I'm sorry that use of the word immunity has given you a false impression of what the immune responses to infection and vaccination actually do for us, but the immune response does not confer literal immunity. It confers resistance. Unfortunately "immunity" is the word already in use, we're stuck with it. Please stop taking advantage of the unfortunate terminology to misunderstand what is actually happening in the real world. It feels like you're trying to push discussion into unproductive off-topic directions. That's not true. Many of us have told you. Again, very briefly, you're contributing to prolonging the pandemic and putting upward pressure on cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Wow! Can the kitchen sink be far behind?--Percy

You're misleadingly misquoting Trudeau from the video of him you yourself supplied. Why include a video that reveals you're lying?Sorry to keep replying to your posts while you're suspended, but I'm slowiy catching up with the thread as I have spare moments, and watching your descent into nonsense, lies and trollism is fascinating.Sometimes I wonder why a person becomes a troll. A couple members here have confided to me, I have no idea why, that sometimes they'll post just to get a rise out of people. Why would anyone do that? How does one live with oneself knowing that one is the kind of person who would do that? I don't get it.--Percy

I know you've had covid, you've told us a number of times. I never said anything indicating I didn't know you've had covid. I think you must give only a cursory glance at messages before dashing off a mindless free association-style reply. It's helps control spread of the virus a great deal if people have the high quality immunity provided by the vaccines. You left out the part that makes clear the quote was about a study of fully vaccinated people, which the CDC director explained showed the vaccines were so effective that most vaccinated people who died of covid also had four other comorbidities. One would expect an equivalent study of unvaccinated people to show that those who died had fewer comorbidities.I think you probably haven't noticed that most of the things you say, and you often say them multiple times, have been found wrong. That the misinformation you find and report here is untrue is easy to uncover, and the only reason people keep manufacturing these untruths is because most anti-vaxxers uncritically accept anything that confirms what they already believe, no matter how absurd. Apparently you found it believable that so many people have at least 4 comorbidities that over 600,000 caught covid and died. The reality is that the study included 28 people out of 1.2 million with at least 4 comorbidities who died. This is probably true but very misleading because it doesn't place the information in context. Covid's a respiratory disease, and respiratory failure is a cause of many covid deaths. Respiratory failure is a comorbidity in a great many covid deaths.You say only 6% of covid deaths have no other comorbidity, and I guess that's possible, though it seems that it should be even lower and that almost every covid death should have at least one other comorbidity. It doesn't seem like covid could actually kill people all by itself. That would be like dying from a cold virus, which would be very weird. Usually covid causes other problems, and it's the other problems that cause death.After writing the above I looked this up. The claim originated with Trump on Twitter and has since been removed. My surmise was correct, see Fact check: 94% of individuals with additional causes of death still had COVID-19 | Reuters. I can't make sense of this. If someone can make sense out of it please explain.But the average age of covid deaths is not 85. This incorrect figure probably comes from the fact that approximately half of covid deaths are people 85 and over, but that's not how you calculate an average. The average age is probably fairly high, though, likely in the 70's somewhere. Not sure how to interpret this. I hope you're not saying you don't care about people in higher risk age groups. And you know this because you read it on the Internet? People that die or suffer significant side effects generally end up in hospitals where it would get reported. So the sample size is "people you know." Doctors for COVID Ethics wouldn't approve of this image if they were actual doctors, because doctors understand how VAERS works and wouldn't have reported VAERS deaths as covid deaths. I'm not familiar with the data tracking in the UK and Europe. Doctors for COVID Ethics is an anti-vax organization. The first founding member listed is Sucharit Bhakdi about whom Wikipedia says:

quote:

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Sucharit Bhakdi (สุจริต ภักดี [sut̚˨˩.t͡ɕa˨˩.rit̚˨˩ pʰak̚˦˥.diː˧]; born Sucharit Punyaratabandhu, สุจริต บุณยรัตพันธุ์, 1 November 1946, in Washington, D.C.) is a retired Thai-German microbiologist. In 2020 and 2021 Bhakdi became a prominent source of misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that the pandemic was "fake" and that COVID-19 vaccines were going to decimate the world's population.

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He was a professor at the University of Mainz, where from 1991 to 2012 he was head of the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene. The university has disassociated itself from Bhakdi's views on the Coronavirus pandemic. In 2021 Bhakdi's publisher broke off relations following the appearance of an online video in which Bhakdi made antisemitic comments.

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Needless to say but I will anyway, the vaccines did not "decimate the world's population." It shouldn't be surprising to encounter a lack of alarm at stuff you make up. This is getting very repetitive. You ask why you're being pressured to get vaccinated, people explain, you ignore it and ask why you're being pressured to get vaccinated, people explain, you ignore it and ask why you're being pressured to get vaccinated, over and over.--Percy

The image you provided just ignores what's been explained and repeats your ignorance. In the context of vaccines, immunity doesn't mean actual literal immunity. There's not a person on this Earth who is literally immune to any virus. All anyone can have is pre-existing resistance created through a prior infection or vaccination. This resistance is in the form of antibodies specific to that virus, and of B-cells that remember past infections and can produce fresh antibodies. Those whose immune system includes the proper antibodies and/or B-cells is in a much better position to fight off future infections and is much less likely to infect other people. Masks and avoiding indoor gatherings are also important.What do you hope to accomplish by repeating false information over and over again?--Percy