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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

#681

Post by kurthr »

hutzlibu wrote: post #624
irthomasthomas wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the explanation simply that so many nurses are being forced to isolate with Omicron? Since even vaccinated staff can still spread it, so they still take the tests often, and isolate for 2 weeks if positive.

"Is the explanation simply that so many nurses are being forced to isolate with Omicron?" A explanation why people are frustrated, who work hard and intense, take all the risk - but only get low pay?

Exactly, "you've been a nurse for 30 years, you're 60yrs old, you tested positive for COVID and you still have symptoms, but if you don't come back into work after 5 days (without pay) you'll also face punishment when you return". Of course, if a patient get's COVID while under your care (and symptomatic) and chooses to sue you, "you're on your own babe!". Also, "it is mandatory that you get vaccinated/boosted, but also come into work the next day or you won't be paid and it will count as one of 4 unscheduled days off per year before termination".

And people wonder why nurses are pissed off?

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

#682

Post by s1artibartfast »

crummy wrote: post #617
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…

Zeynep Turfekci talks about this in this thread, and about why she thinks prior infection offers less protection than the vaccines, to the point that she supports vaccinations for those who have already caught COVID. https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1484930583214100481?t=UDTW...

Lost a lot of respect for Zeynep after reading that. The argument boils down to unvaxxed have more hospitalization, some unvaxxed also have prior infection, therefore prior infection isn't effective. There is no data in her post that those with prior infection are the ones being hospitalized. Meanwhile, there is real data elsewhere on this topic.

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

#683

Post by smileysteve »

Lammy wrote: post #397
sib301 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude go to a hospital in a populated area during this surge. My wife sat in the waiting room for 3 hours with SEVERE abdominal pain, DURING A PREGNANCY and was unable to be seen. We went home. If she’d had an ectopic pregnancy, she would probably not be here anymore.

To be fair I had exactly that same experience at the UCSF Emergency Room in 2017. Four hours in the waiting room, and then the only bed they could give me was against one wall of a busy hallway.

2012 checking in.

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

#684

Post by posguy »

walterbell wrote: post #591
ChrisClark wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Immunoglobulin A versus Immunoglobulin G, we still don't know how to stimulate a response (outside of exposure to a virus) to create Immunoglobulin A, which protects our upper respiratory tract.

This is the technological limits of what vaccines are capable of. Vaccination limits the damage, ensuring a much lower likelihood of catching a 1 to 3 day cold affecting only my upper respiratory tracts rather than risking the lungs and the rest of my body on a potentially multi-week infection.

The longer the infection, the more likely pneumonia or another co-infection will injure or kill you.

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

#685

Post by barbazoo »

sudosysgen wrote: post #295
barbazoo wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is a trivial conclusion. Much has been written about it. Pfizer themselves have written they estimate 67 billion dollars in revenue each year from Paxlovid, which is way more than their vaccine revenues and it's not even close. If you want my back-of-the-napkin calculation, here it is. The cost of a generic Paxlovid course of treatment is around 40$. The cost of treatment, negotiated down by the government (and…

Paxlovid is (1) authorized for

> the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in adults and pediatric patients with positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 testing, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death

It's not that everyone with a Covid infection will get the drug. That number should be far lower than 3.7% of the population, most of which will either be asymptomatic or likely won't require hospitalization due to low risk. I wonder what that means for your calculation.

(1) https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...

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

#686

Post by dekhn »

nsxwolf wrote: post #658
bobbyasdfasdf7 wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Every time you express an attitude like this you cause fewer vaccinations to happen.

yeah, I think the solution is to give $$ incentives for vaccination and not try to shame people, because shamed people often just double-down on their resistance.

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

#687

Post by JPKab »

bonzini wrote: post #614
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…

> why are they so adamant to vaccinate those with prior infection Because the data shows they don't matter. This is the same thing as deaths due to covid vs. deaths while positive to covid. Sure some people might have been miscounted as covid deaths but actually died due to cancer/car accident/whatever. Despite this the excess deaths over the past two years is much higher than the number of covid deaths; thus showing…

The assumption that excess deaths can be attributed to any single cause is simply not based on data and/or science.

What is the age breakdown of these excess deaths? If the distribution doesn't mirror the age distribution of known COVID deaths, that's an immediate indicator that it's factoring in multiple sources.

Drug overdoses, attempted suicides and actual suicides are way up, for example. Drug abuse is way up. Child abuse is way up.

I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm simply saying that you can't know that you are right without a careful analysis of the data. It should be noted that the "excess deaths are way up" is also used as a tool of people claiming that the vaccines are killing people as well.

Again, I want to emphasize, I don't know the detailed data behind the excess deaths. COVID is certainly one factor, but what percentage does it constitute? I'm not claiming I know, but you are. That's the difference.

You are also ignoring the studies out of Israel (sample size of 2.5 million people), Qatar (sample size of 400K people), the recent CDC study in other replies to your comment, etc. It's a long list of studies that show that prior infection is a superior, more durable form of immunity to Delta than vaccine-only populations.

Additionally, it's rather absurd to use hospitalizations as a metric for the general population. I'm sure you are extremely aware that the bulk of unvaccinated people getting hospitalized are not young or healthy. "Some unvaccinated people" is also a statement ignoring the shocking prevalence of prior infection in seroprevalence studies, which isn't really shocking when considering a respiratory virus that has an R0 that has been at minimum 3 in the beginning with the original variant, and is now 6-7 with omicron.

The data has changed, but many people's opinions have remained fixed. I don't understand what motivates this, but it's become tiresome as it continues to drive policies that are intuitively foolish and violate centuries of immunological knowledge.

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

#688

Post by nradov »

rhino369 wrote: post #497
jatone wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have discrimination in medical care its called 'triage', unfortunately it doesn't involved removing care once granted. We also charge smokers more for health care due to the burden they put on the system, yet another form of discrimination. You're also making the naive mistake of relating a stable system (smokers with health issues) with an unstable system (covid patients). These two types of systems have…

>We already have discrimination in medical care its called 'triage', unfortunately it doesn't involved removing care once granted. Based on seriousness of the case, not really on whether it was preventable in the first place. For extremely limited resources like organs there is consideration of future risks, but that isn't really the same thing. >We also charge smokers more for health care due to the burden they put…

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) doesn't allow medical insurers to set premiums based on vaccination status.

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

#689

Post by musicale »

i386 wrote: post #643
roenxi wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard a convincing argument about why the COVID restrictions weren't literal violations of human rights. Often I got a variant of "I'm scared we're just going to do it". Most (all?) of the arguments for it turned out to be wrong - eg, vaccination has not slowed the spread, even marginally, according to the experience in Australia where COVID tore through a highly vaccinated population. In my state (~95% ad…

I’m Australian. Vaccination and restrictions were why we never saw refrigerated containers of dead people on street corners, like NYC did in the first wave. Many people would have died or needed to be hospitalized.

Manhattan (not to mention Staten Island, as well as Queens and Brooklyn which are geographically on Long Island) is also an island, just like Australia (and Tasmania.) Clearly they should have isolated themselves before covid took hold. ;-)

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

#690

Post by mlac »

bink wrote: post #651
eloff wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also noticed this. I have covid right now. I'm double vaccinated. I was planning to get my booster shot, but now that I've had covid what's the point. It's not likely to increase my immunity and it comes with risks. At some point the government will probably change the definition of fully vaccinated to three shots and then I'll be in that unvaccinated group I usually make fun of. Somebody I know lost their job b…

> It's not likely to increase my immunity and it comes with risks. Can you explain what risks you're referring to here?

There have been side effects from the vaccine, including documented cases of really bad reactions [1],[2]. I’m double vaxxed, boosted, and got covid. But to say the shot is without risks is disingenuous.

That said, the risk of dying unvaccinated from COVID is much greater than the risks of vaccine. And it’s unclear if side effects from the shot are correlated to worse outcomes from COVID (e.g. It’s unknown if these people who were paralyzed definitely would have died when they contracted covid, so paralysis is a potentially better outcome).

[1] https://www.wpxi.com/news/top-stories/every-day-that-i-work-...

[2] https://www.wkrn.com/news/nashville-woman-partially-paralyze...

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