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Pfizer board member suggests end to mask, vaccine mandates

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

#591

Post by walterbell »

ChrisClark wrote: post #580
nu11ptr wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies in advance for getting on my soapbox, but this has been on my mind for a while. The way in which the media has gotten everyone to say "the unvaccinated" is a 'disease' against basic science (not even getting into the divisive nature of this). I would go as far as saying if you read any paper, study, or other that refers to the "unvaccinated" as a single cohort, you are reading vaccine propaganda, not scienc…

Because the vaccine protects so much better than just a previous infection. We've been over this, over, and over. But you just won't accept the numbers now will you?

Until the CDC changed the definition of vaccine in Sept 2021, most vaccines were understood to provide sterilizing immunity against infection, not only "protection" against illness/death.

Intramuscular/serum vaccines cannot stop respiratory infections, by definition. They are non-sterilizing. Only a nasal/mucosal vaccine or nasal infection can provide sterilizing immunity against a respiratory virus.

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

#593

Post by dexen »

headmelted wrote: post #583
nu11ptr wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies in advance for getting on my soapbox, but this has been on my mind for a while. The way in which the media has gotten everyone to say "the unvaccinated" is a 'disease' against basic science (not even getting into the divisive nature of this). I would go as far as saying if you read any paper, study, or other that refers to the "unvaccinated" as a single cohort, you are reading vaccine propaganda, not scienc…

Not disagreeing with this (although my understanding is that there have been studies that show vaccination has been more effective), but how would you seperate the unvaccinated / previously-infected-and-recovered cohorts? Even by reconciling PCR testing data (which I imagine is incredibly patchy at best), you still would only know historically how many people tested positive (ignoring what is in all likelihood a majo…

There's a recent (January 19, 2022) CDC publications with numbers on exactly that. Forbes provides a brief overview: "CDC: Prior Covid Infection Offered More Protection Against Delta Than Vaccines — But Both Together Did Best"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2022/01/19/cdc-prior-c...

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

#594

Post by FireBeyond »

hatware wrote: post #380
nicoburns wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccine injuries are reported from official sources just the same as covid-related injuries. There’s not a big media buzz around it because the numbers are so small, and everyone knew going in that there would be a small number of adverse reactions.

Were you used to seeing myocarditis and pericarditis in the news regularly before 2019...?

Are those more likely to be a) a side effect/risk of the vaccine, or b) a known result of the disease, which is present in people who have had COVID, even unvaccinated?

I'm not sure what you're trying to imply, but it certainly seems like you're saying it's newsworthy due to the vaccine.

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

#595

Post by DanBC »

rkk3 wrote: post #246
gibspaulding wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It has killed more than 865,000 Americans It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined [1] Granted it's less than the UK lost in WW1 alone, so it's perhaps more a testament to how few the US managed to loose in the world wars (compared to Europe), but it's still wild to realize. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1009819/total-us-militar...

>> It has killed more than 865,000 Americans > It looks like that's more Americans than have been killed in combat in all of the wars of the 20th century combined [1] Like all deaths tragic, but let's not pretend young men, effectively kids, dying in war is the same as elderly & chronically sick populations dying of disease.

> Like all deaths tragic, but let's not pretend young men, effectively kids, dying in war is the same as elderly & chronically sick populations dying of disease.

Where elderly means > 40 and chronically sick includes "has a bit of high blood pressure".

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

#596

Post by vkou »

djbebs wrote: post #164
walterbell wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> difficult to trust the numbers coming from any country for a variety of reasons This must be a golden age for those doing a dissertation on media studies. So many quant-driven narratives, so little time. Hopefully cross-country data and narratives are being archived and aggregated into an open-data academic repository that can be studied in coming years.

Given that raw data of vaccine trials aren't even being made public I doubt that any reliable data is being collected, let alone analysed

At this point, given that the quantity and quality of the public data of vaccine rollouts dwarfs the data of vaccine trials in both scope and usefulness, anyone still grousing about vaccine trial data is just playing political football, for the sake of FUD.

It's like arguing about the raw data of the Wright brothers flight, when millions of people are flying around the world on 747s. Was it relevant in the past? Yes. Is it relevant today? No.

You want to know about vaccine safety? Look at excess mortality, hospital admissions, and long-term health problems of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, today. Ten billion COVID vaccines have been administered around the world in the past year. Any of the data we've gathered from that is about a thousand times more relevant to literally anything we could be doing, than raw study data on a few thousand people.

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

#597

Post by buryat »

nu11ptr wrote: post #571
tzs wrote: 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,…

Apologies in advance for getting on my soapbox, but this has been on my mind for a while. The way in which the media has gotten everyone to say "the unvaccinated" is a 'disease' against basic science (not even getting into the divisive nature of this). I would go as far as saying if you read any paper, study, or other that refers to the "unvaccinated" as a single cohort, you are reading vaccine propaganda, not scienc…

simple numbers show that unvaccinated get covid at higher rates and the number of hospitalizations is higher which puts strain on the hospitals. If something happens to me I dont want an unvaccinated taking a spot I need.

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

#598

Post by mrcrumb1 »

skillpass wrote: post #303
tzs wrote: 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,…

I agree - I am worried about taking hospital capacity claims at face value though. From what I've seen, it was common for hospitals to report being overwhelmed even during flu seasons pre-covid. I wouldn't classify that level of 'overwhelmed' worthy of mandates upon society. I don't doubt that during these periods of time hospital resources are strained in some way, but there's a difference between this routine level…

Can you give me an example of a scenario where you would be in favor of restriction like the ones that have been implemented?

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

#599

Post by coryfklein »

tyrrvk wrote: post #119
robrorcroptrer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can't catch obesity from someone coughing in the same room as you. But to extrapolate further: Sugar taxes have been tried in countries - Mexico for one. I think there was massive backlash from CocaCola/Pepsi etc, for infringing on their freedom to make obscene profits. I seem to recall discussions here about some of the lawmakers finding Israeli spykits on their phones (the ones pushing for the sugar tax). edit:…

No, but on a higher meta-level it is contagious. Obesity is more prevalent in societies where high-caloric foods are more readily available. Now I'm more libertarian leaning myself so I wouldn't actually advocate for this, but if we mandated a cap on calorie-per-serving for "foods", you'd see a drastic drop in the availability of high carbohydrate foods (particularly sugar) which would essentially cause forced sugar-withdrawal in most of the population.

A couple months later? Everyone's sugar-thermostats are reset, the lower-calorie food tastes nearly as good – if not better – and obesity rates would plummet.

However, since we don't/can't coordinate such a thing on a national level, everyone gets exposed to constantly increasing carb content in their food, and maintaining a lower calorie diet requires significantly more effort. I can speak from personal experience, I simulated this on a personal level when I moved to South Korea for 2 years where sugar is nearly non-existent. As a modestly thin person I lost an additional 15-20 pounds while I was there without having to work hard or suffer with worse-tasting food (well, I did experience sugar withdrawal for the first couple months).

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

#600

Post by mikem170 »

kmonad wrote: post #544
tzs wrote: 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,…

I think the hospital capacity is a key argument indeed. But there is another aspect to consider. Each viral replication is a potential event where a new variant can arise, thus the fewer viral replications the better since each new variant has unknown risks. An unvaccinated person will on average be host to many more viral replications after exposure to the virus than a vaccinated person after exposure. Thus, if a la…

> Thus, if a large part of the population remains unvaccinated, the virus has more room room to evolve than necessary given we have easy access to effective and safe vaccines.

Word was that Omicron diverged from an earlier version of covid in mice, over the course of about a year, then jumped into humans [0].

I think this detracts quite a bit from the point you were trying to make above, since we are not vaccinating mice, nor all the other animals that harbor covid such as bats, cats, dogs, primates, and deer [1].

Since we can't vaccinate or destroy all of the non-human hosts for this coronavirus, and the virus already has evolved in animals and made the jump to humans a couple of times, I don't agree that the point you made above is relevant.

[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-did-omicr...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...

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