111–120 of 167 posts
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Some masks do work. https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/respiratory-protection-us/produc...
If you or someone in your family is immuno-suppressed, have at it. Otherwise in terms of risk avoidance you might as well start wearing a crash helmet when you ride the bus just in case.
I'll add that if you're in this situation, you probably want to be masking at home, too.
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It always amazes me when someone ignores the 99 studies that show masks are effective, and highlights the one that says maybe they’re not. Cherry picking in action! Just one of the literally hundreds of studies showing effectiveness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7883189/
Is this meant to be irony? You seem to have not read the link. It's a meta-review of 78 randomised control trials. It is literally the opposite of cherry picking. You then cherry pick one review saying the opposite.
If your only tool is meta-reviews of RCT studies, then condoms don't work either:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
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Thank you for the response. This makes sense. As for the second segment. I only have more questions now. Could it be that requesting that the cells produce additional proteins of a particular kind "overloads" them or simply "asks too much" in a fashion similar to a virus? That seems unlikely unless the administered medication is simply "too much". I wonder, is there a saturation point? ie a point where additional mRN…
I'm not a virologist, and this is taxing to my memory, so it will be a bit more basic than you might prefer, and won't be as accurate. > Could it be that requesting that the cells produce additional proteins of a particular kind "overloads" them or simply "asks too much" in a fashion similar to a virus? It could be. I believe that most of the cells that express from the mRNA vaccine do indeed die (from the immune res…
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Sometimes I think I'm the only low risk person left on the planet wearing a mask and vaccinating. Then I see old folks or one 30y/o woman in the supermarket wearing a mask, and I remember that this protects them too. There's even some performers asking fans to mask up so high risk people can come to their shows. Gives me a tiny glimmer of hope for humanity.
You're still touching things, then touching your face. You're still breathing the same air as everyone. You're still moving through clouds of expelled vapor from everyone who has walked in front of you recently. There is no hermetic seal around your nose and mouth if you wear a mask. Your eyes are exposed to the air. And if you wear the same mask more than once, you are trapping all sorts of bacteria and other nastie…
Surface area of lungs: 100 m².
Surface area of eyes: 0.0004 m².
Difference: 6 orders of magnitude.
That's good. But the lower lungs already get seepage of body serum/humoral igM and igG. If you really want to protect against infections then you have to induce mucosal immunity (and get tissue resident B and T cells) in the surface layer of the upper respiratory. Unfortunately intramuscular vaccinations do not do that, they only give serum/humoral immunity. So they're only the first step to protect against serious d…
I'm surprised we haven't gotten an intranasal vaccine before now. We've been talking about the issues with intramuscular vaccines in regards to mucosal immunity since the very beginning.
What you consistently hear from medical professionals is, "we have this proven technology, it works, the objections to it are irrational, can we please just be sensible?" So far, so good… (I'm a bit of a technocrat myself)
But why are people so afraid of vaccines in particular? There are all sorts of arguments about autism and turning frogs gay or whatever, but people are still happy to take whatever pills the doctor prescribes and hormone-enriched fast food… what makes vaccines different? It seems pretty clear that people are just afraid of needles, and from an evolutionary biology perspective, that's not irrational at all!
But "maybe we should make vaccines that won't scare people" just won't get you anywhere in the US medical establishment. Frightened patients aren't Serious Medicine.
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Some masks do work. https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/respiratory-protection-us/produc...
If you or someone in your family is immuno-suppressed, have at it. Otherwise in terms of risk avoidance you might as well start wearing a crash helmet when you ride the bus just in case.
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As I understand it, that lineage of coronaviruses is quite distinct from the sarbecoronavirus lineage and they don't generally infect the same host species in the same geographical regions: > "For coronaviruses, furin cleavage sites at the interface of the S1 and S2 domain are not unusual, being found widely in betacoronaviruses in the embeco lineage (which are considered to be of rodent origin) as well as in avian-o…
Sarbecoronaviruses are a subset of betacoronaviruses. And I seriously doubt we have a comprehensive sequence database of all sarbecoronaviruses. If furin cleavage sites are present in about 21% of alpha- and betacoronaviruses I would expect they would also be present in a minority of most lineages within these clades. "Furin cleavage sites are also found in certain bat-origin MERS-like merbecovirises" > For such a sp…
Regarding bat lineages and host viruses, this 2019 paper seems to indicate that the other betacoronavirus lineage with the furin site, the Merbecovirus, has a different bat host range from the Sarbecovirus lineage that gave rise to Sars-CoV-2:
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/11/2/174
"Compared to Sarbecovirus and Nobecovirus, the bat hosts that harbor viruses from the Merbecovirus sub-genus are more diverse. This is in line with the presence of more CoV species belonging to Merbecovirus."
(I generally trust papers on this evolutionary origin stuff published before the pandemic a bit more than those published after, as there might be less conflicts-of-interest issues).
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Sometimes I think I'm the only low risk person left on the planet wearing a mask and vaccinating. Then I see old folks or one 30y/o woman in the supermarket wearing a mask, and I remember that this protects them too. There's even some performers asking fans to mask up so high risk people can come to their shows. Gives me a tiny glimmer of hope for humanity.
Honest question: why are you vaccinating while you also identify as low risk?
I have a hard time believing that after 2 years of messaging about why people should take a vaccine that this is an “honest question”
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Sometimes I think I'm the only low risk person left on the planet wearing a mask and vaccinating. Then I see old folks or one 30y/o woman in the supermarket wearing a mask, and I remember that this protects them too. There's even some performers asking fans to mask up so high risk people can come to their shows. Gives me a tiny glimmer of hope for humanity.
Honest question: why are you vaccinating while you also identify as low risk?
For full disclosure I don't vaccinate anymore (waiting until the mucosal vaccines are available). But I understand those who do, especially if they are around other people when maskless more than I am.
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I'm surprised we haven't gotten an intranasal vaccine before now. We've been talking about the issues with intramuscular vaccines in regards to mucosal immunity since the very beginning.
I believe that the technocratic culture of US medicine is standing in the way of research on intranasal vaccines. What you consistently hear from medical professionals is, "we have this proven technology, it works, the objections to it are irrational, can we please just be sensible?" So far, so good… (I'm a bit of a technocrat myself) But why are people so afraid of vaccines in particular? There are all sorts of argu…
Can't believe anyone is still pushing what's basically a shame tactic that is typically aimed at pre-adolescents. Do you feel smart or virtuous having posted that dismissive and insulting reductive view of people who don't blindly follow "THE SCIENCE" like you do? It's not the needles! It's the contents! How is that not incredibly obvious?