711–720 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reinfection has been well established all over the place. You can identify it via PCR, you don't need to sequence it.
PCR has false positives. Also I came with sources, you didn't provide any.
Omicron doesn't change fundamentally where we were with Delta. Its infection enough that everyone will get it. Vaccines protect you (they are banned for kids under 5). Pfizer's treatment (Paxlovid) is a very effective cure (currently banned). The death rate for vaccinated individuals is extremely low, at its current rate its about 26 per 100,000. The flu killed 24 per 100,000 in california. We are at the endgame. The…
When was that ever forbidden, except on demonstrations?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish the antivaxx/snake oil/it's just the flu folks were held to that standard.
I don't think you'd believe anything they would have to say, would you? Either way, if you are a public health official you have to be held to a higher standard than a guy with Facebook account.
Hundreds of millions of people, many of them with the power to set policy do believe them. Strangely enough, that belief seems to fall along a political divide.
Most of those people have long made up their mind to 'never listen to anything you (the health authorities) say ever again'. The lines in the sand were drawn ~March 2020, when the politicians picked their sides, and ever since then, it's not clear to me that any amount of data has changed anyone's mind since then.
Omicron doesn't change fundamentally where we were with Delta. Its infection enough that everyone will get it. Vaccines protect you (they are banned for kids under 5). Pfizer's treatment (Paxlovid) is a very effective cure (currently banned). The death rate for vaccinated individuals is extremely low, at its current rate its about 26 per 100,000. The flu killed 24 per 100,000 in california. We are at the endgame. The…
If we're only looking at deaths, only for vaccinated people - then yes. If hospitals still get overwhelmed, that seems like an issue. Unless you say hospitals shouldn't treat unvaccinated people (doubt it) - unvaccinated people are going to be causing problems on the hospital system for a while still.
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> A mild strain of covid that is contagious, leads to natural immunity and doesn’t require a vaccine is an absolute win win for the world. There is absolutely no evidence for this variant being less pathogenic. It is quite likely that the milder outcomes observed with this variant so far are because of immunity generated by vaccines and prior infections. The idea that this will make vaccines less essential is a fanta…
There are two primary factors driving virus evolution - not killing the host and defeating the host's immune system. Killing the host, at least with humans, is an evolutionary dead end, since we go out of our way to quarantine the body and destroy or permanently confine it. In humans, viruses typically evolve to be less severe and more infectious over time. There's significant evidence that omicron is less severe. At…
There isn't consensus in the scientific community about that.
Counterexamples: polio, rabies, avian flu in human hosts, Black Death.
It isn't clear what category COVID19 will end up in.
Omicron doesn't change fundamentally where we were with Delta. Its infection enough that everyone will get it. Vaccines protect you (they are banned for kids under 5). Pfizer's treatment (Paxlovid) is a very effective cure (currently banned). The death rate for vaccinated individuals is extremely low, at its current rate its about 26 per 100,000. The flu killed 24 per 100,000 in california. We are at the endgame. The…
It’s not “banned” it’s just not approved yet. The US is making plans to buy tons of it in advance. Banned has a very specific connotation that is wildly out of place.
That’s likely what’s going on here.
Omicron doesn't change fundamentally where we were with Delta. Its infection enough that everyone will get it. Vaccines protect you (they are banned for kids under 5). Pfizer's treatment (Paxlovid) is a very effective cure (currently banned). The death rate for vaccinated individuals is extremely low, at its current rate its about 26 per 100,000. The flu killed 24 per 100,000 in california. We are at the endgame. The…
And the vaccines... one thing I haven't found yet is an article that tries to make a well-studied estimate of where we'd be right now if the vaccine hadn't come out, or had been just a year later, or had the kind of (lower) efficacy that people were initially trying to set expectations for. In contrast to that, the kind of numbers I believe we would have seen or experienced... makes all our fighting about masks and mandates and lockdowns seem pretty irrelevant. I doubt we can even fathom the difference.
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Testing and clinical trials!
We don’t do clinical trials for the yearly flu vaccine update, do we?
Yes, we do[1][2].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectivenessqa.htm
I would imagine that a virus would eventually adapt/evolve to a point to where it co-exists harmoniously with the host organism. I've heard somewhere that herpes simplex virus used to have terrible symptoms, like genital blisters, but over the years the most common variant has no symptoms, and most people have no idea they have it.... and a huge proportion of human have it. I would imagine all viral contagions would…
If the patient is contagious before developing symptoms, the virus can spread very effectively even if many patients die.