61–70 of 114 posts
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Meanwhile case numbers on Boston, as determined by sewage surveillance, are holding steady: https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm What's going on?
Sewerage isn’t particularly accurate. Australian cities have been Covid free for the last 6 months yet there are continual reports of virus in the sewerage. It seems some recovered cases shed the virus for months after the infectious period.
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It’s not just about saving the life of the person being vaccinated. It’s about not giving the virus anymore “fuel” to burn through. Every infection is a roll of many dice. Statistically at some point someone’s mutation will overcome even the vaccines we’ve made. If that spreads we’d be back in February of 2020.
"If that spreads we’d be back in February of 2020." You mean 'when'. There's no going back at this point.
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It’s been over a year of explaining this to people. OP is a lost cause.
I was on your side a year ago. Your year of explaining has actually made me into a skeptic. Evidence for asymptomatic spread hasn't materialized. The disease isn't as deadly as the officials said at first, and the response hasn't adapted. This is not an existential threat. I stayed inside without going to a grocery store or any other store for a full YEAR because of the panic induced by people like you. I am far wors…
"What are we doing?! This is not an existential threat!"
We were saving lives by moderating the spread of this disease so it did not overwhelm our healthcare capacity. For the most part it worked.
Friends, tell me how I should be more positive or community minded in thinking about this. Because right now, I say -- "anyone who doesn't want a vaccine, well you live with the consequences and if you can't come to rational understanding that it's your own life being saved, then I shed no tears over your choice". People who do it out of religious (or Republican) dogma, I'm not sympathetic. People who believe in cons…
That said, there's a combination of nature and nurture at play, in this case I would suspect mostly nurture, and that's something that most people can't control. So if you want to feel bad for them, feel bad that they didn't have the benefit of the nurturing you had to value the things you do.
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"If that spreads we’d be back in February of 2020." You mean 'when'. There's no going back at this point.
You get the idea. The point is this isn’t about any individual persons life. This is about the vaccine being our only weapon that can actually stop this pandemic. If we just went on without a vaccine then we probably would see a variant arise that could live longer on surfaces or otherwise spread immensely more effectively or even more deadly. There’s nothing stopping a mutation from really killing 50-75% or more of…
I think that's wishful thinking. This will be globally endemic just as the flu is. It will continue mutating in the unvaccinated population as well as the non-human carriers (like pets). Sure, if a lot of people are vaccinated, then it might slow the timeline down for when that mutation will emerge.
"There’s nothing stopping a mutation from really killing 50-75% or more of people. It’s a war of virus vs humanity."
A neverending war, as it always has been. I think the 50-75% casualty numbers are highly unlikely.
This is a pretty interesting map/graph. I also like that they linked to the data in table form. Not really surprised at the areas that are darkest, but still feel worried that lots of areas near 20%. Specifically the levels of non-Hispanic Black hesitancy in the South is really rough. Hopefully over time this improves especially as private enterprises put some pressure on getting vaccinated
> Hopefully over time this improves especially as private enterprises put some pressure on getting vaccinated I really hope I don't lose my job because I don't want to take an experimental, unapproved vaccine for a disease that hospitalizes less than 5% of people across all age groups when I work from home, am a healthy weight, and am under forty. The risk for me is, in fact, comparable to the flu, and the vaccine ha…
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> Hopefully over time this improves especially as private enterprises put some pressure on getting vaccinated I really hope I don't lose my job because I don't want to take an experimental, unapproved vaccine for a disease that hospitalizes less than 5% of people across all age groups when I work from home, am a healthy weight, and am under forty. The risk for me is, in fact, comparable to the flu, and the vaccine ha…
"the refusal of the drug company lawyers to accept liability if something is wrong" In theory the government is supposed to provide a settlement under the countermeasure version of the national vaccine injury compensation fund. I say in theory because the system doesn't work as well as it's marketed to (based on personal experience). Also, I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. Maybe just an unpopular opinion or t…
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Not even close to true. Demand is so high here, MA was only able to offer vaccines to the general public starting this week. If you were lucky enough to even be eligible last week, you needed to use bots to find an appointment. Compare that to Texas, where shots are going begging at freaking Walmart. It's extremely infuriating. MA's vaccination rate is solely limited by available doses and meanwhile vaccines are expi…
Demand is high because all the low risk people in healthcare (and all the other industries that got priority) got in line right away and are/were competing with the high risk people and seniors. Basically we dumped a ton of volume into the vaccination funnel from the get go (because we were vaccinating such a wide range of people so early on because of the employment based qualification criteria) so while there was a…
1. Vaccines are still difficult to get in a lot of places. I and my partner only just got appointments for this weekend for our first dose. As long as appointments are required and you have to fight to get a spot at 9am it is going to be difficult to get hesitent people to sign up. I think hesitency will go down dramatically when you can just walk in without an appointment and get it.
2. I really don't understand why Public Health officials keep downplaying the vaccines. They are still talking about everyone masking for months, limited gatherings, no vacations, etc. Why is it always doom and gloom? There is no evidence to support this level of paranoia and the messaging should be the exact opposite. These vaccines are scientific miracles. Get the vaccine and go out and have fun again!
3. The worst thing we can do at this point is to start shaming people for being hesitant. I don't think it has started just yet but I can see it bubbling in certain circles. I was just in a work meeting where we were talking about vaccines and everyone on the call was on board BUT some people only wanted the JandJ one because it used older tech and they didn't want to try the new mRNA ones. This was with a group of all college educated software developers...
There is no evidence at all to support this form of hesitancy and yet there it is. Are they Anti-vax? Kind of, but would it have helped matters to argue that they were wrong and that they were helping kill their neighbors by only wanting one of the vaccines? No, let them have their hesitancy, continue vaccinating, and in 6 months when hundreds of thousands of people have it and nothing bad happens they will quietly go get it done.
We know the vaccines work. Just make them widely available and the proof will be in the results.
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Everyone should take the vaccine, but: > Also are you surprised that Black people in the South don't want this experimental vaccine after the Tuskegee Experiment? Is a super important and valid point. Historically Black people have had their human rights violated in similar situations. Johnson and Johnson also knowingly targeted Black people with baby powder marketing after they knew it caused cancer. As much as I th…
Do you think there's anything J&J or the government could do to assuage this particular fear in the short-term?