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Delta Variant

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

191–200 of 442 posts

Re: Delta Variant

#191
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring the higher risk of major long-term damage incurred by letting yourself get sick when you could've been vaccinated, I don't understand how this thought process accounts for anyone else. What if my main reason for getting vaccinated is to lower my chance of infecting an immunocompromised person I care about? Even if I could somehow be 100% certain that if I were to be infected it'd be fully asymptomatic, the v…

But you can still infect other people? It's a non-sterilizing vaccine?

The vaccines do reduce the chances of transmission quite significantly, so it makes sense to get vaccinated if your goal is to protect others. It doesn't need to be 100 percent sterilizing to be helpful in this regard.

Re: Delta Variant

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many reasons people choose not to get the vaccine. What evidence do you have that the main issue is a distrust of authority? The main authority on this, the FDA has not even officially approved the vaccine and likely won't for quite awhile. For some people it is logical to ask why other vaccines require 10year+ trials and for this a few months was sufficient. While personally, I think the risk of the virus…

Thanks for writing this, I'm still on the fence about taking it for this reason, it was rushed and the longer term implications are certainly still not fully understood. Edit: Again with the downvotes, it's a fact . No one has had this vaccine for 3,5 or 10 years. The long term effects cannot be fully understood until such time has lapsed and studies have been completed. Here, the creator of mRNA vaccines discusses t…

Here's the thing to consider though: The vaccine codes only for the spike proteins of the virus. You can look up the RNA strands within the vaccines and their translation to protein, it's a relatively short segment of RNA. RNA has a very short lifetime itself.

If you do get exposed to Covid, your cells will be exposed to those very same spike proteins and more. Thus the vaccine should theoretically be much safer than being exposed to Covid itself.

Re: Delta Variant

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many reasons people choose not to get the vaccine. What evidence do you have that the main issue is a distrust of authority? The main authority on this, the FDA has not even officially approved the vaccine and likely won't for quite awhile. For some people it is logical to ask why other vaccines require 10year+ trials and for this a few months was sufficient. While personally, I think the risk of the virus…

The FDA is ridiculously over conservative because of litigation, settlement, and insurance costs. They're not doing another thalidomide. My premise is that the facts we choose for our opinions are for support of an underlying belief, and that this underlying belief is that the people running things are full of shit, if not deceptive. I can't change someones mind about that (and wouldn't try), but I'm addressing that…

Having been through an FDA process in a prior startup (although far from central at it; my role was at the outskirts), I can say the FDA is not ridiculously over-conservative. We did human pilots in another country, which was less bureaucratic. The processes there were both faster and more conservative in terms of safety. Doctors would look over our data and protocols and make reasonable decisions.

The FDA process took a long time, but wasn't all that effective at guaranteeing safety either. There was a ton of process.

I think you're attributing far too much rationality to an administrative government process.

Re: Delta Variant

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am saying I am not sure the amount of panic was proportional to the amount of actual deaths. > At least 30.7% of deaths in India can be attributed to air pollution from fossil fuels--that means about 2.5 million people die every year after breathing toxic air.9 I mean who cares, all I know is how many Covid deaths they are having, probably Indian people themselves are much more aware of Covid than Air pollution. Wh…

Because your parents aren't dying from air pollution tomorrow, but they might from COVID. And the vaccine can stop it, and there's a race between DELTA and the vaccine for your parents lives. The story is a bit different in the US, where its more about people not wanting to take it, and an often cited reason is that the virus is going way whether or not that get vaccinated (because other people are). If that story ch…

Who said my parents wont die of pollution related illness? I have no idea what air quality their city has, probably second world quality.

Re: Delta Variant

#196

The article purposefully conflates numbers to tell a narrative. I am talking only about EU, and at that southern EU which is where I've been following the numbers closely. Delta variant has been acting for up to 1 month in some regions, and as described in the article yes cases are up very quickly. However, the article says: > COVID deaths [...] And if you think Europe or the US will be spared This is not reflected a…

You still don't explain why: Conflating infections with deaths is meaningless where the mortality rate has gone down.

Please forward the discussion by showing how you would present the data.

Re: Delta Variant

#197
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you and it's now inevitable that the news cycle will move beyond Delta soon as other variants take over from it. It's also inevitable that future dominant variants are going to be more resistant to the current vaccines as they evolve inside of vaccinated populations. That said, I think the article conveyed a lot of subtle but important points that some people miss in all the noise. One is that vaccination is i…

> The other is that vaccines are unlikely to ever stop the spread of the virus but that's not a bad thing since we will be increasingly able to prevent deaths Letting it escape is not a bad thing? Are you kidding? Think of what the Flu costs the world each year, now this on top ? The only people who benefit from an escape are big pharmaceutical companies who will now sell you a 2 for 1 package, yearly flu shot and ye…

I think he meant that eradicating COVID is a fool's errand like eradicating common cold or flu is, but it's not the end of the world because it will be like seasonal flu, dangerous only for elderly/sick people.

Re: Delta Variant

#198
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid discussion has become equivalent to politics. Most people have strong opinions on the matter, these opinions usually correlate strongly to their favorite political party's stance, and few people have the experience or knowledge to evaluate scientific information rationally. It's a recipe for uninformed debate. On top of that, in the US, the previous president was so politically polarizing that literally any sta…

It certainly feels like hangover from the Trump times, and yes, it's insanely political and quite hysterical. Now, people overcompensate, if there is any questioning or hesitancy to take the vaccine, ask questions about origins etc you might be a...Trump guy, or a nut and so you need to be told by the Non-Trump guys what' up, by being downed. It's Kind of like Post-Trum-Stress-Disorder, PTSD. It's really quite fascin…

It's unfortunately pretty common for people adopt an "opposite of what That Guy said" stance on any particular issue.

Obviously, taking a position that is the opposite of an illogical person makes you just as illogical, but it's much easier than thinking.

Re: Delta Variant

#199
post #151

I honestly don't know how to feel about Tomas Pueyo. He's very opinionated about what he writes, and has gained good readership and influencer status on this topic. It's clear in his writings that he fancies himself as an "amateur of expert insight". He may be 100% correct. He may also be 100% wrong. It's hard to tell (let alone without invoking the conditional fallacy). However, the most lasting impression I have of…

ive never heard of this author and i thought it was a good blog post. your post is for better or worse the definition of ad-hominem and also black-and-white thinking (100% right or 100% wrong). In the US, we are in a dangerous place where social distancing and masking have basically stopped, and with a much more contagious variant like Delta we're defintiely going to have a much bigger problem again in the coming mon…

Very well, I'll rephrase.

Yes, it was a good blog post.

> "this is the definition of ad-hominem"

It is not. Ad hominem would be "his argument is false because he is [personal attack]". Ad-verecundium would be the specific case where the personal attack is "he's not an expert in the subject".

Cautioning against grandiose claims by pointing out the author has made unverifiable grandiose claims before, which are objectively beyond their expertise, and was unable to defend them or reason properly against a peer with known expertise, is not an ad hominem. It's just skepticism. Having said that, good for him for doing his bit and writing the blog post. I've done far less.

> also black-and-white thinking (100% right or 100% wrong):

I think you are misreading this, so I apologise. I'm not advocating "splitting". The point of the "he may be wrong or right" part is that the only way to evaluate his claims of "what a public figure should do" etc, is via the conditional fallacy, i.e. "This is the correct course of action because IF you did the opposite, THIS would have happened". This is effectively an unverifiable claim, which is why, as a form of argument, it is fallacious. His claim in absolute terms, however, may in fact be true. Or false. We can never know.

Now obviously, you might say, "but he provides evidence for his opinion on what a public person should do". True. But here is where the earlier argument comes in. It's worth keeping in mind that this is a blog post, by a non-expert, who has shown inexperience against experts previously, and where he is free to take creative liberties to promote his view, as he has done in the past. It is not a scientific article that has undergone peer review, nor is it a disinterested exploration of the literature. It's purely an opinion piece (albeit a well-meant and well-presented one) backed by the evidence and visualisations he feels make his point and linear narrative best.

Which is absolutely fine for a blogpost. Kudos to him.

Re: Delta Variant

#200
post #162
post #32

Is seems kind of logical in hindsight: the first mutation of the predecessor bat/pangolin/whatever virus genome to cross over to humans is an MVP full of "compatibility bugs" that barely achieves R0>1. A few billion dicerolls later many of those "compatibility bugs" have found fixes. Remember the hand washing phase of the pandemic? Aerosol transmission was basically ruled out because it was assumed that spread would…

This is also why vaccination is so critical and why "young healthy people" should not opt out: when you get the virus, even if it's a mild case, you are in effect donating processing power to what amounts to a global supercomputing project to evolve more virulent strains of COVID. That's how evolution works. The more chances the virus has to replicate, the more likely it is to become more virulent or even worse learn…

> know-nothing populist bullshit

Can we flag this for unnecessary sanctimony?

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