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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

#771

Post by brimble »

vel0city wrote: post #529
depereo wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're required to publish their prices, which results in giant PDF documents with thousands of different charge codes and prices. Its almost incomprehensible to analyze unless you're in healthcare billing. Plus, you'd need to know what services/medications/equipment you'll need before you even get to the hospital, which is pretty dang tricky unless you're a doctor yourself. I was recently in the hospital for abdomi…

> Its almost incomprehensible to analyze unless you're in healthcare billing.

Considering that hospitals seem (anecdotal evidence only) to fuck up their own billing codes like 20% of the time, I'm not even sure that's enough.

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

#773

Post by ipaddr »

tynpeddler wrote: post #272
tzs wrote: post #30

Something from the NYT mailing list yesterday: > The Covid vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing serious illness. If you’re vaccinated, your chances of getting severely sick are extremely low. Even among people 65 and older, the combination of the vaccines’ effectiveness and the Omicron variant’s relative mildness means that Covid now appears to present less danger than a normal flu. > For the unvaccinated,…

The vaxxed and unvaxxed populations both rely on the same medical infrastructure. So when the unvaxxed fill hospitals to recover or die, they are consuming scarce resources that are required by the population at large for other things like birth, cancer, surgery, etc. Sadly, we don't have an ethical way to let all the unvaxxed get covid without impacting the medical system negatively for the rest of us.

The numbers are equal now with the new variant.

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

#774

Post by rcpt »

JPKab wrote: post #687
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…

The assumption that excess deaths can be attributed to any single cause is simply not based on data and/or science. What is the age breakdown of these excess deaths? If the distribution doesn't mirror the age distribution of known COVID deaths, that's an immediate indicator that it's factoring in multiple sources. Drug overdoses, attempted suicides and actual suicides are way up, for example. Drug abuse is way up. Ch…

> Drug overdoses, attempted suicides and actual suicides are way up, for example. Drug abuse is way up. Child abuse is way up.

Just to be clear, you're saying that the reason we've seen hundreds of thousands of excess deaths last year is because of drugs, suicides, and child abuse.

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

#775

Post by kevhito »

timr wrote: post #713
bonzini wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, hea…

> 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.

The idea that a vaccine is a punishment is disturbing. I'm glad to have been able to get it.

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

#776

Post by jstarfish »

hutzlibu wrote: post #613
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing they don't always mention is that hospital capacity is always close to being overwhelmed, by design, because otherwise you're sitting around with a large amount of extraordinarily expensive idle hospital capacity. A small change is enough to go from "almost full" to "over capacity." The seemingly obvious thing to do would be to build some temporary capacity specifically for COVID patients. We've had quite a…

This is a hard problem, because you do not only need beds, but also humans tending to the patients. And while you can just build another hospital if you have the cash - you cannot just build another doctor, if you need one.

> you cannot just build another doctor, if you need one.

So take your pool of existing NPs and give them a temporary promotion.

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

#777

Post by yibg »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #604
yibg wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we do this. For people that can and “should be” vaccinated but don’t by choice due to their own risk assessment, if they catch Covid and need hospital treatment they don’t get it. That way they have their freedom and hospital capacity isn’t put at risk. If the people refusing to get vaccinated are willing to shoulder the risk themselves I have no problems with it.

> If the people refusing to get vaccinated are willing to shoulder the risk themselves I have no problems with it. This is the point: the people who are refusing to be vaccinated that have recovered from a prior infection are not at a higher risk of severe outcomes than the folks who got vaccinated and didn't have a previous infection [0]. So maybe if your definition of "should be vaccinated" is narrow enough, then m…

There are going to be gray areas. Some individuals should not or cannot get the vaccine. What qualifies for that exactly is a bit muddy as well. So I agree what is "should" isn't very clear.

As an individual, it's really the numbers around the ratio of unvaccinated individuals in hospital / ICU consuming resources unnecessarily and therefore depleting them for the rest of us unnecessarily that's maddening. That plus the regrettable stories about people that are vocally anti-vax that end up dying from covid.

So for me it's like fine, freedom is important and you can choose to go against whatever recommendation you want. But at the same time you have to shoulder the consequences for it too. You can't have it both ways. Have the freedom to do whatever you want but also not bear the consequences of those actions.

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

#778

Post by lost-found »

ipaddr wrote: post #759
vanusa wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other people's lives, you mean.

You choose to leave your house. Isn't that your choice?

Ahh yes because everyone knows heart attacks, strokes, aneurisms and burst appendixes never happen in your own home.

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

#779

Post by xdennis »

yibg wrote: post #394
theandrewbailey wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd say the answer to that should be determined by the hospital capacity. If a region has sufficient hospital capacity that it would not be overwhelmed by the increase in COVID cases among the unvaccinated go ahead and lift most restrictions. Having anyone's freedoms dependent on available hospital capacity is a terrible way to run a society. Note that these freedoms were debated and won in an era where medicine wa…

Freedoms aren’t considered in isolation. Maintaining freedom for some means removing freedom for others some times. In this case the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it.

> the “freedom” to get timely treatment for those that need it.

That's not freedom. Freedom is not putting up barriers.

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

#780

Post by ipaddr »

mattigames wrote: post #335
rglullis wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cigarette use kills 480000 people every year in the US alone. 300 billion dollars estimated to be spent per year with treatment of smoking-related illness. I don't want even to look at the numbers of the more critical epidemic on the US: obesity and metabolic diseases. By arguing that "the unvaxxed" are a burden and that they deserve discrimination, you are opening the gates for those arguing that smokers should be f…

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.

Unvaxxed are not filling up the hospitals at a higher rate than vaxed now. The two doses you got in the summer doesn't work anymore.
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