Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

This pandemic was never about the risk to this cohort that continues to be brought up. The point is that taking the vaccines reduces deaths. In places where these vaccines have been deployed widely, you cannot refute that statement. Just because the people who are dying don’t look like you does not diminish the utility of the vaccine.

I’m so tired of hearing that young people shouldn’t take the risk of vaccines because the risk to them of the virus is less. That is not why anyone at all is urging you to get the vaccine, or why we did any of this at all for a year.

A society is built on mutual trust and actions and speech like this shatter it; the selfish arguments seem to know no bounds in this pandemic. I did not sit in my damned house for a year because I was afraid for my own safety!

Furthermore, The article linked claims PCR testing isn’t good enough for efficacy and from what I understood had nothing to do with safety at all. In fact, the title of that submission includes “... REGARDING CONFIRMATION OF EFFICACY” and no mention of safety, but maybe I’m not “well-versed in science” enough to understand it. Thank you for talking down to me though, we would not want me to leave this conversation with a sense of self worth.

It seems to me like you’re unintentionally spreading disinformation. I assume you don’t want to be doing that, so you should probably check your priors here, as they seem to be outdated.

I watched enough of the video you sent to see what Dr. Bosche was saying - that vaccination immunity is more specific than natural immunity, and that may present problems down the road with variants. I also found this note/presentation/slides by him [0]. I read some of this to get more detail, video is kind of lame for relating so much information. I'm not a virologist. But I have read a bunch of this stuff. I thought what Dr. Bosche said was interesting. I had a few initial questions. I'd love to see more virologist's opinions on this.

He says "Covid-19, a highly mutable virus, only needs to add another few mutations in its receptor-binding domain". I didn't know that covid19 was considered highly mutable, like the flu. Is he hedging here, saying this might happen? I guess the specific proteins that the vaccines target would need to mutate. I wonder how likely this is. I assume there are lots of things that are "several mutations" away from killing us all. Papers I've seen early on said that left to its own covid19 had a 50/50 chance of mutating to become no more deaadly than the common cold (because it would spread better that way), or settle into something that flares up every few years, like a bad flu season. I took that to mean that there are also pressures to mutate to something less deadly. They think this is what may have happened in 1873 (if memory serves), a new coronavirus came on the scene, it looked like a very bad flu season at the time.

He mentioned several cases of young people dying from covid19 variants, and several cases of people shedding variants. "Several" is not a large number, especially considering how much we don't understand about the immune system. Typhoid Mary was shedding for years, and that had nothing to do with a vaccine. I don't know that I'd consider his several examples to be anything out of the ordinary out of a sample size of how many tens of millions.

He seems to be saying we'd be better off if we didn't proceed with vaccinations and allowed the population to reach natural herd immunity at this point, since covid19 has already spread to so many people. That people who caught it and got better on their own would be better protected. This reminds me of the virologist early on who recommended finding the least deadly variant and spreading that around on purpose.

It's an interesting topic, and I appreciate you bringing it up! I don't mean to argue over it, so much as relay my thoughts and left some of the details of what he's saying.

Do you think most of the people fearful of variants are on the same page with this guy? The news stories I see mentioning problems with vaccines and variants don't ever seem to have solid sources/studies backing them up, I've never heard this guy mentioned before, and he seems to be a relatively lone voice at this point. I'd like to think that the experts have had a chance to hash all this out amongst themselves, but I know things don't always work out that nicely.

[0] https://www.deblauwetijger.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Ge...

For the two additional things you've mentioned: Limiting travel works to prevent the virus from entering an area, but if it's already there and uncontrolled it wouldn't have an effect. Likewise excessive hand disinfectant doesn't seem to have had an effect, because the virus doesn't really spread through surfaces like that [0] - it was an early precaution that wasn't reexamined.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000106

I'm not worried about blunted immune response because I've taken heaps of asprin when I had COVID-19 (it might be why I got tinnitus for close to 6 months afterwards -- that or the antibiotics) and I mean grams per day and I had very high antibodies levels afterwards.