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Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

ntdca.com

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Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#271

Some people are saying that this is notable because Pfizer has a financial incentive to keep vaccine mandates. That is not true. Pfizer is going to be making a lot more money from their COVID treatments than from the vaccine.

> Pfizer is going to be making a lot more money from their COVID treatments than from the vaccine

If you're saying it's false you should please post a source or at least some kind of napkin calculation. It's not intuitive at all. Otherwise it just sounds like you're beating the already dead "pharma companies sole motivation is money" horse.

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#272
post #30

Something from the NYT mailing list yesterday: > The Covid vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing serious illness. If you’re vaccinated, your chances of getting severely sick are extremely low. Even among people 65 and older, the combination of the vaccines’ effectiveness and the Omicron variant’s relative mildness means that Covid now appears to present less danger than a normal flu. > For the unvaccinated,…

The vaxxed and unvaxxed populations both rely on the same medical infrastructure. So when the unvaxxed fill hospitals to recover or die, they are consuming scarce resources that are required by the population at large for other things like birth, cancer, surgery, etc. Sadly, we don't have an ethical way to let all the unvaxxed get covid without impacting the medical system negatively for the rest of us.

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#273
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention all of the vaccine injuries that do exist but are rarely reported on. It's almost like there's a narrative here.

> Not to mention all of the vaccine injuries that do exist but are rarely reported on. Source?

Consider for a moment that the "antivaxxers" are correct, that there is enormous bias in our medical, pharmaceutical, and media establishments in favor of vaccine safety. Could you really expect a reliable source on the subject if this were the case? What proportion of people are willing to speak out and risk career and social suicide for being labeled an "antivaxxer"? It is a self reinforcing chilling effect - few people speak out, data does not surface, fewer people look for evidence of adverse events, and over time it becomes riskier and more difficult to convince people that something is amiss.

Meanwhile the internet is awash with anecdote of severe symptoms following vaccination, and particularly concerning are frequent reports of doctors who are dismissive and/or refuse to submit reports on adverse effects. And then there are occasional claims of specialists in various neurological or heart related disciplines who claim to be seeing an unprecedented spike in certain normally rare symptoms among vaccinated patients.

Yeah, they could all be lying or this could be the nocebo effect or it's an army of bots spreading antivaxx propaganda...or maybe you can't magically accelerate a 5+ year testing and evaluation schedule for a novel technology merely because the president says he wants a vaccine yesterday? Note that the clinical data from pfizer and moderna is not available to the public - we are essentially relying on the manufacturers good faith with respect to the safety data that lead to approval by the FDA (moderna still isn't approved, by the way).

https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635

https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o102

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#274

The media's binary separation of populations into vax and unvax is a false dichotomy. More causal factors would be represented by: 1. Covid-recovered 2. Vaccinated 3. Partly-vaccinated ( CDC reporting bundles #3 and #4. UK reports all 4 categories separately. #1 was already a high percentage in 2021 and is now higher due to Omicron. Edit: CDC estimated pre-Omicron #1 as 146 million people (as of Oct 2021), https://ww…

Good breakdown. I'd propose further breaking out of each category based on whether the person is immunosuppressed (for example from medication given to organ transplant recipients) or otherwise immunocompromised.

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#275
post #125
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I am done caring about this class of people. And their response will be "Finally! This is all we've wanted this entire time!" I don't think most here understand just how much "this class of people" value freedom over safety.

> I don't think most here understand just how much "this class of people" value freedom over safety. No, the problem is that we do, and also see the selfishness of the position with regards to highly communicable diseases. "My body, my choice" is a fantastic principle when the outcome of the choice has negligible impact on people breathing the same air. Many of these same folks would raise a stir if their neighbor st…

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Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#276
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They stop the hospitals from filling up though.

Tobacco kills 8 million of its users, annually. Why is their presence in ICU beds not a topic of concern?

I will think because it is not contagious and does not affect the global economy as such

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These numbers can be further separated by "with Covid" and "from Covid" causality, as well as co-morbidities and expected lifetime. E.g. if someone was soon to die from illness A, but died 3 months earlier from complications induced by Covid, and the hospital received a financial payment for classifying this as Covid-related treatment, that should be broken out into a separate reporting category. Such deaths would no…

> the hospital received a financial payment for classifying this as Covid-related treatment Can you explain this more? Surely a hospital doesn't just get money for simply classifying it. How does a hospital benefit from classifying someone's treatment as Covid related other than being paid for the necessary treatment?

There are probably better sources, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/cdc-director-acknowl... (Aug 2020)

> U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield agreed that some hospitals have a monetary incentive to overcount coronavirus deaths as they do deaths for other diseases. “I think you’re correct in that we’ve seen this in other disease processes, too. Really, in the HIV epidemic, somebody may have a heart attack but also have HIV — the hospital would prefer the [classification] for HIV because there’s greater reimbursement,” Redfield said during a House panel hearing Friday when asked by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer about potential “perverse incentives.”

For families, Covid classification for a death enabled up to $9000 for funeral expenses, https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/covid-funeral-reimburs...

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could the global obesity epidemic not also be handled through mandates?

You becoming obese doesn’t affect me the way you catching Covid does. Yes obesity eats up healthcare resources as well but not to the degree and certainly not as quickly as Covid cases do.

Obesity is the #1 reason covid is a problem though. And metabolic syndrome, nearly the same thing.

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#279
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your links do not mention the omicron variant. The CDC estimates that an unboostered vaccine (2 doses) is only 38% effective against omicron. Boosting brings the effectiveness up to 82%.[1] So to be more precise - vaccines work against Omicron, but not as well as the original strains and only if you keep up with boosting every few months. Vaccines are less effective against omicron in general, and the effectiveness w…

I think we're saying the same thing: vaccines protect you from getting covid, but you should get a booster and even then you obviously can't expect 100% protection. (Just the one booster is fine.)

You ignored the part about masks. Leana Wen referred to cloth masks as "little more than facial decoration". Unless there are mask mandates that require better masks, the mandates are effectively useless.

Re: Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

#280
post #216

I'm vaccinated and boostered by my own choice. My problem with mandates is where does it end? Why this mandate and not other mandates? Who gets to decide that?

I rather think of vaccination as a responsibility toward your fellow citizens, rather than a "choice". This belief might be to blame for many of society's crises. https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...

> I rather think of vaccination as a responsibility toward your fellow citizens

We also have data and prudence and we are long past the point where framing this in that manner is highly morally questionable to put it mildly.

Your idea of responsibility to society is mandating that young healthy people take an injection(s) ostensibly to protect them from a disease they are at no great risk from, negative side effects of the injection be damned?

Do it for grandma? It actually does nothing for grandma, that’s always been a lie, the original study could make no claims about transmission. And now, just look around.

Even if it did something for grandma and grandpa, mandating young healthy people undertake a medical intervention having value trade-off for their own health which is murky, for the supposed benefit of the superannuated or people who have eaten into a state of morbid obesity and premature aging is a horrendous inversion of social order and what is good.

The young sacrificing for the old? What??

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