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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

#711

Post by myko »

password321 wrote: post #518
beams_of_light wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eradication is not the goal. Making sure hospitals aren't overwhelmed with COVID patients is the goal. Catching COVID is potentially dangerous and often times results in long recovery window. Vaccination is harmless and works. The thread will never subside; this is a new virus we will have to live with for the rest of our lives - especially considering we can't seem to get everyone to do the right thing, even with go…

>Vaccination is harmless Tell that to the increasing number of footballers facing cardiac arrest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_footballer...

"The report recorded worldwide deaths attributed to sudden cardiac arrest or other unexplained sudden death while playing (or shortly after playing) football between 2014 and 2018. There were 614 cases during the four-year period."

Is there any evidence the deaths you're posting about were caused by the mRNA vaccines?

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

#712

Post by dpark »

enchiridion wrote: post #627
joshuamorton wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead the government should be focused on expanding highly covid specific care capacity. That is by far a better way to spend the covid relief money than distributing it to sustain a nebulous lockdown. This is not something the government can do. It's not something anyone can do. What you're asking for (though you may not know it) is for their to suddenly be more nurses and medical practitioners. That's not a thi…

From what I’ve seen the current shortages are primarily due to lack of sufficient pay and firing nurses who don’t want to get vaccinated. Additionally it seems like current nurses are over qualified for covid care. How long would it take to train someone from a nursing adjacent field to treat 95% of what they are likely to see when treating a covid patient? Is anyone even asking that question? If not, why not? It see…

> firing nurses who don’t want to get vaccinated.

I would love to see stats on that. From what I can tell, the actual percentage of medical practitioners quitting due to vaccine mandates is very small. My family work in the medical field in a red state and the set of people actually quitting over the vaccine requirement (as opposed to making a lot of noise and then deciding unemployment is unattractive) is tiny, but this may not be representative.

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

#713

Post by timr »

bonzini wrote: post #691
timr wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, we have a 30/70 split in number of covid hospitalizations, with 30 being vaccinated people, in countries where the split in the normal population is 90/10. This means that despite some unvaccinated people having had prior infection the vaccine reduces hospitalizations by 20x. Given this data the most effective strategy is to just vaccinate everyone without what is effectively a pointless distinction No. Th…

I did not say that prior infection does not reduce severe outcome. It does but _it does not change the fact_ that the severe outcomes are much more rare among vaccinated people. This means that there are still too few people with prior infection, for this to be an important factor in policy making. It will be once the proportion of unvaccinated people in hospitals starts to resemble the proportion in the general popu…

You said:

> Given this data the most effective strategy is to just vaccinate everyone without what is effectively a pointless distinction

The data clearly shows that protection from natural infection is at least as substantial as from vaccination, and that ~half (if not more) of the US population has had it. This fairly obviously impacts the most effective strategy. Mandating vaccines (and now boosters) in young, healthy people who were already at small risk, including those who have already had the virus, is so absurd that I can't even characterize it as science. It is simply punitive behavior.

Most countries recognize prior infection. We're in a small, small club of scientifically illiterate nations here, and it's rather embarrassing.

> It will be once the proportion of unvaccinated people in hospitals starts to resemble the proportion in the general population.

If the total number of hospitalizations is a manageable number, the percentage that are vaccinated is irrelevant. It's a metric of punishment, not a realistic policy goal. I have no idea what the future will bring with regard to the ratio of unvaccinated hospitalizations, but I know that hospitalizations in general will fall as the population achieves broad immunity -- and natural infection certainly counts toward that goal.

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

#714

Post by edmundsauto »

mlac wrote: post #690
bink wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

The relevant risk for your situation is vaccine risk, versus risk of reinfection (not just hospitalization, but also long term effects).

The math may still work out for your preferred choice, but i wanted to point out that it’s fallacious to dismiss the (rare) risks from reinfection, especially when focusing on the (rare) risks from the vaccine.

You may have said this and I just missed it, but both those risks are small and honestly boils down to a preference IMO. I may just have missed in your comment where you made the right comparison, in which case I’m being a bit pedantic without cause and I apologize.

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

#715

Post by bsder »

rglullis wrote: post #353
mattigames wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smokers, obese people and metabolic diseases are not filling up hospitales at the unsustainable rate unvaxxed people are; and none of those can be quickly fixed with a pinch in the arm, not even nicotine addiction.

Yeah, at this time of the year they are being filled by all types of seasonal respiratory diseases, like it happened for most years in recent times, even before Covid. The flu shot is widely available and recommended for most over-55 (I think?), but you don't hear anyone claiming that it should become mandatory.

Actually, that's not true.

We have some hypotheses that children are the flu reservoir and that if we required them to get an annual shot it would tamp down flu seasons.

The primary difference is that the flu vaccine is predictive and can miss. It's kind of hard to demand that people take something that may not work.

If we got something genuinely terrible like Spanish Flu, yes, everybody would be demanding that people get a flu shot.

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

#716

Post by ericd »

depereo wrote: post #438
zrail wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did any hospital use queue management software to adjust pricing as a mechanism for demand throttling, due to limited capacity in 2020-2021 No one shops for healthcare in the US based on price, for three reasons. First, prices are unknowable in advance. Second, if you have insurance the insurance will fulfill their end of the bargain if you need to be admitted (i.e. they will pay as agreed upon in the insurance con…

Isn't there a new law, partially rolled out, that requires US hospitals to disclose the cost for a procedure or treatment in advance?

I briefly tried using the results of that, they're totally unnormalized, so even lining up identical line item charges is difficult. We have a deep learning language model that normalizes the language and lines up potential matches. But even if that works, it still doesn't get you the bill, because a single encounter includes a big batch of billing codes, depending on what the doctor tries to give you. And to get normal baskets, you probably want claims data. And the claims data providers we spoke to wanted 6-7 figures for a small dataset.

It's an incredibly parasitic industry, I've never seen anything quite like it. It's a pretty stark contrast to the largely altruistic motives of many of the healthcare professionals themselves.

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

#717

Post by eli »

dahfizz wrote: post #654
bonzini wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Because the data shows they don't matter. Source? Because the CDC says otherwise. > In the first full week of October, vaccinated New Yorkers with a prior Covid-19 case were 19.8 times less likely to catch the virus than their unvaccinated and uninfected peers, whereas people who were unvaccinated but previously infected were 14.7 times less likely, and vaccinated but uninfected New Yorkers were just 4.5 times less…

I don't think your math is correct there and that data is pre-Omicron.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/omicron-largely-evade... estimates that prior infection offered 85% protection against Delta but only 19% against Omicron.

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

#718

Post by Melatonic »

rkk3 wrote: post #661
DanBC wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

> chronically sick includes "has a bit of high blood pressure". The CDC says > 40% of US adults are obese (> 100 Million people!) and 13% of US adults have diabetes. If that's not a chronically sick population I don't know what is. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [2] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-d...

This is the elephant in the room I was trying to talk to people about at the very start of this pandemic. People are endlessly willing to talk about how divided we are about all kinds of issues and yet the fact that we cannot at minimum rally behind the fact we need to deal with the obesity epidemic is a bad sign.

My big problem with the initial lockdowns was not really about the larger lockdown at all - we just (obviously in hindsight) went too far with locking down larger, wide open places where people exercise.

Spring break in Miami with people crammed onto a beach? Probably a bad idea. A few surfers going in the water a hundred feet from one another and some other people doing a morning run? Likely a net benefit to Covid outcomes.

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

#719

Post by ipaddr »

buryat wrote: post #597
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…

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.

Are you worried you won't have care at a hospital because of someone is unvaccinated? Has that ever happened? Are hospitals full where you live? Where did you get a fear like that?

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

#720

Post by reedjosh »

eloff wrote: post #631
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…

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…

> partly because it's easier for the government to just tell everyone to get vaccinated.

Do you make no allocation in your mind for the potential that the government is corrupted and the motivations have nothing really to do with public health?

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