Covid-19 Pandemic

[sunday]

Lol, no.

[rmgill]

23 minutes ago, DB said:

And there it is, the perfect storm.

Not only an appeal to authority, but even better than that, an appeal to authority gained through genetic memory, or perhaps osmosis. If you rubbed against his legs as a young'un, did you find that you gained knowledge more quickly, or just static electricity?

Note I also provided examples of how this all works in practice along side a good set of points made by Dave about how medicine works with doctors evaluating and re-evaluating medications and therapies va just doing what they are told to do by paper pushers.
 

To give another more finite example the shift from supine to prone for the severe respiratory patients. Do you think the medical staff all asked for permission from the CDC or DC on that? 
 

And pointedly, all you have is belittling about what I learned. Thats not an argument. Disingenuous you say?

[nitflegal]

I'm not on the clinical side but my wife has been for the same 30 years.  Experimentation is perhaps a loaded word and I think they prefer individual based medicine but it's effectively the same thing.  Take a limited data set and take your best informed guess on what to do, evaluate the results and adjust as needed.  Also manage the conflicting advice and guidance given by doing the same. Personally I feel this is a distinction without much of a difference.  

That has faded a lot in the USA over the last decade as we have moved more towards pre-approved corporate medicine.  The doctors are told what to do and they follow the directions.  I think that has reduced the impact of crappy physicians (which is good) but has also reduced the impact of good physicians (which is really bad).

To the vaccines by any classic definition we are in a very large clinical trials.  Which when the EUA's were codified into the regulation is exactly how they were described.  Which is a good thing in general, the whole point of it is to make for a much more responsive regulatory atmosphere when the usual 3-5 year regulatory hurdle is just too prolonged.  It simply means that we don't have the usual phased rollout to track for ongoing assessments.  There is greater risk there and pandemic is both what was kind of planned for but also completely outside of our experience.  As of now approximately 4 BILLION people have been fully dosed while we still have gaps in the standard preclinical safety studies.  We will likely have upwards of 3/4 of the world's population fully vaccinated before we have the final reprotox, cardiovascular and endocrine studies done and analyzed.  To the point, if you had asked the FDA prior to 2019 whether they would consider this an experimental trial they would have said "yes" by their standard definition.  Whether the scale would have altered this call I frankly don't know.  With fast-tracks or EAU's (and I've worked on a bunch of them even before the EUA was a thing and they were for humane use in single individuals to a few hundred) when a promising drug was available and we knew that target experimental population was going to be long dead before that drug got approved and so they had nothing to lose.  BTW, that generally meant not just they had to going to die soon but they also needed to be in consistent unmanageable physical or psychologic pain to make it worth the risk that an experimental compound would do that to them as a side effect and reduce their quality of life if it didn't work.  It's weird because the EUA has previously been used to fast track authorization for existing compounds and medical devices but not novel pharmaceuticals.  I don't know how much they worried about it, honestly.  Until 2018 or so the technologies didn't exist to respond with new drugs in a timeline that we would worry about.  There's kind of a perfect storm of possibility and risk with Covid-19.  Had it hit in 2017 this would have a been a completely different landscape.

There is a masochistic part of me that is genuinely curious to see what happens if the final pre-clin data comes in or we run stats and find out that there are significant wide-spread side effects.  With the indemnity for the manufacturers it should get, um, spicy. . . 

[Tim the Tank Nut]

I think what several people are arguing about so thoroughly on this thread can best be described by coming at it from a different angle.

What people desperately want to be true vs what could just as easily be the case.  Reality is that each of the people here pounding are their keyboards is likely to be correct at a particular moment.  Only one person here really knows as much as is feasible to discuss and I am grateful for the input, knowledge, and information.

After that everyone else is actually discussing perception over reality.  There is no appreciable level of data that doesn't have some spin in promoting a particular viewpoint.  The only Covid data that a person can rely on is what they see first hand and guess what?  That boils down to anecdotal even when factual.  The challenge comes from the fact that we have incentivized data manipulation and then used modern technology to make the quantity of data seem like quantity has a quality all its own.  At one point everyone KNEW that the Sun revolved around the Earth which coincidentally was flat.  Consensus science is the worst science.

The point I'd like to make is that we're long past changing each others' minds and into a red zone where everyone is a target.   Once it goes from debating content to debating the other posters we've sort of jumped the shark (and snark).

It may well be that we aren't going to have definitive answers in our lifetime as to what course of action is best.  I don't believe that any of the government decisions have measurably altered the course of Covid but the vaccines appear to have done exactly what the manufacturers said they would which is lessen the severity of contracting the illness.

It's the overt dishonesty of government officials that have so many posters in this thread shouting down the "official party line" ie vaccine stops Covid which it manifestly does not and never should have been billed as such.  On the other hand and other side of the argument the vaccine DOES make a difference in the severity of the illness in many (possibly most) cases.  We don't know what the risk/benefit analysis is because there simply hasn't been time to see the results even if the data wasn't being tweaked by every single person who touches it because they need more clicks to drive traffic to their site.

I suspect it is much like people say about any other news reports which is that if the news reports on a topic that you are very familiar with ( a participant in an event or a genuine expert) and you see that report and realize how much of it is wrong then why assume a a better accuracy rate on topics where you aren't the expert?

I also believe that anyone who is taking the time to collect and disseminate data has a viewpoint in mind of some sort before they start.  The neutral scientist following the data to a natural conclusion doesn't exist any more.

So to summarize all this twaddle that I just wrote would the rest of you consider a temporary cease fire or just a more careful aim?

Just a suggestion worth no more than the electrons that hold it on the screen...

[seahawk]

1 hour ago, RETAC21 said:

Stop trolling, "them" will take you seriously.

No, both sides miss reality, a reality which has not happened since we have modern medicine. We have have a highly infectious virus spreading through the global population, a population which has nearly no natural immunities to it. Everything that is done, is done as an emergency measure, because nobody has ever dealt with such a scenario. 

At the moment everything is tried. Every known drug is tested and new drugs are rushed to the market. Corners are cut, but that is necessary.

[lucklucky]

https://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/lederen/vi-fejlede/9072013

Danish newspaper says "We Failed"  and apologizes for parroting only Government narrative.

Quote

“been vigilant enough at the garden gate when the authorities were required to answer what it actually meant that people are hospitalized with corona and not because of corona. Because it makes a difference. A big difference.”

Quote

The paper called into question Denmark’s wide-scale vaccination of children, which has not been done in Sweden or Norway. 

 

Meanwhile in Portugal the wind also seems to be changing, most newspapers put in front page a case of a 6 years old children that died - cardiac and respiratory arrest - a week after taking the vaccine, was also detected Covid when arrived to Hospital  But had not know of any comorbidities. Autopsy will follow.

Here in Portugal also 3-4? other children of same age also died with Covid before but had comorbidities that compromised their health.

 

 

[sunday]

11 minutes ago, lucklucky said:

Meanwhile in Portugal the wind also seems to be changing, most newspapers put in front page a case of a 6 years old children that died - cardiac and respiratory arrest - a week after taking the vaccine, was also detected Covid when arrived to Hospital  But had not know of any comorbidities. Autopsy will follow.

If the classification as "vaccinated" is like here, then he died unvaccinated, and from covid, so another argument in favor of vaccination of children.

Really, we are not far from hearing the cries of pain from the statistics being tortured.

[sunday]

54 minutes ago, nitflegal said:

There is a masochistic part of me that is genuinely curious to see what happens if the final pre-clin data comes in or we run stats and find out that there are significant wide-spread side effects.  With the indemnity for the manufacturers it should get, um, spicy. . . 

Which indemnity? I think there is an agreement between manufacturers and governments clearing the former ones from any responsibility.

[lucklucky]

3 minutes ago, sunday said:

If the classification as "vaccinated" is like here, then he died unvaccinated, and from covid, so another argument in favor of vaccination of children.

Really, we are not far from hearing the cries of pain from the statistics being tortured.

I don't know how the statistics are done here, but it is even possible a Kafkesque situation where doctors have to send  a possible Adverse Effect Vaccine Report,  which they did in this case and at same time it is not enough for that children to be considered vaccinated in other statistics.

Which is one of worse behaviors by WHO, Health Authorities and Governments. They know they are building "fake data= fake news" , and have no problem with that.

[rmgill]

7 hours ago, seahawk said:

No, both sides miss reality, a reality which has not happened since we have modern medicine. We have have a highly infectious virus spreading through the global population, a population which has nearly no natural immunities to it. Everything that is done, is done as an emergency measure, because nobody has ever dealt with such a scenario. 

At the moment everything is tried. Every known drug is tested and new drugs are rushed to the market. Corners are cut, but that is necessary.

See, here's the thing. I don't think vaccine are NOT to be used. I don't think that they're a bad idea in total. I think they're a great idea. But they're ONE idea that should be considered alongside others with balancing of the risks of the vaccine issues. Using them to the exclusion of developing treatment protocols ignores that they're not treatment. They don't work well for patients already sick. Only folks who might be exposed. The binary thinking of Vaccine or death is silly. 

Dr McCullough makes another point I had not heard about, again because the focus JUST on vaccines is absurd. That is to say nasopharyngeal flushes with a very mild solution of bleach (remember Trump's bleach comment?) or iodine or peroxide. Not enough to cause damage, but enough to flush/knock down/attenuate any virus particles you might have inhaled after being around a bunch of folks who could be or are infected. 

He also make another very importnat point the CDC has admitted that they cannot find an example, properly documented of someone who has had two infections of COVID 19. The fact that their early test was false positive testing with influenza rather pointedly points to an over counting of infections. 

[rmgill]

8 hours ago, nitflegal said:

I'm not on the clinical side but my wife has been for the same 30 years.  Experimentation is perhaps a loaded word and I think they prefer individual based medicine but it's effectively the same thing.  Take a limited data set and take your best informed guess on what to do, evaluate the results and adjust as needed.  Also manage the conflicting advice and guidance given by doing the same. Personally I feel this is a distinction without much of a difference.  

 

Thanks for your sagacious points. I've been struggling to properly describe what I've seen out of good doctors. But then living in and around Emory and seeing these doctors for years off and on in family, personal and even professional settings, I've seen this "individual based medicine" and a will to try different stuff to heal the patient. 
 

8 hours ago, nitflegal said:

There is a masochistic part of me that is genuinely curious to see what happens if the final pre-clin data comes in or we run stats and find out that there are significant wide-spread side effects.  With the indemnity for the manufacturers it should get, um, spicy. . . 

Spicy doesn't even begin to describe this. If there are folks who had kids who had heart effects that are damaging for the rest of their lives, the folks that forced them into the vaccinations with undue care for the long term effects, I would not want to be their doctors. Also why I want NO part of management at work. It's been half proffered a few times and they could not pay me enough to be any cog in the system at work mandating and checking for employee vaccination status. 

[seahawk]

2 hours ago, rmgill said:

See, here's the thing. I don't think vaccine are NOT to be used. I don't think that they're a bad idea in total. I think they're a great idea. But they're ONE idea that should be considered alongside others with balancing of the risks of the vaccine issues. Using them to the exclusion of developing treatment protocols ignores that they're not treatment. They don't work well for patients already sick. Only folks who might be exposed. The binary thinking of Vaccine or death is silly. 

Dr McCullough makes another point I had not heard about, again because the focus JUST on vaccines is absurd. That is to say nasopharyngeal flushes with a very mild solution of bleach (remember Trump's bleach comment?) or iodine or peroxide. Not enough to cause damage, but enough to flush/knock down/attenuate any virus particles you might have inhaled after being around a bunch of folks who could be or are infected. 

He also make another very importnat point the CDC has admitted that they cannot find an example, properly documented of someone who has had two infections of COVID 19. The fact that their early test was false positive testing with influenza rather pointedly points to an over counting of infections. 

Everything needs be tried, sadly big pharma and the governments have limited our solutions to lockdowns and vaccines, with neither being effective in stopping the pandemic. Wearing a FFP2 mask properly, gives you a protection 100 times higher than 3 vaccine shots and it also protects other people 100 times better. In my opinion we can end all COVID measures, as every person has an option to protect himself by wearing a FFP2 mask. It should be a personal choice to wear one or not.

Edited January 19, 2022 by seahawk

[Ssnake]

5 hours ago, rmgill said:

I don't think that they're a bad idea in total. I think they're a great idea. But they're ONE idea that should be considered alongside others with balancing of the risks of the vaccine issues. Using them to the exclusion of developing treatment protocols ignores that they're not treatment.

I don't disagree with that position.

[Ivanhoe]

https://assets.cureus.com/uploads/original_article/pdf/82162/20220118-32145-1aq0rt1.pdf

Quote

Results: Of the 223,128 citizens of Itajaí considered for the study, a total of 159,561 subjects were included in the analysis: 113,845 (71.3%) regular ivermectin users and 45,716 (23.3%) non-users. Of these, 4,311ivermectin users were infected, among which 4,197 were from the city of Itajaí (3.7% infection rate), and3,034 non-users (from Itajaí) were infected (6.6% infection rate), with a 44% reduction in COVID-19infection rate (risk ratio [RR], 0.56; 95% confidence interval (95% CI), 0.53-0.58; p < 0.0001). Using PSM, two cohorts of 3,034 subjects suffering from COVID-19 infection were compared. The regular use of ivermectin led to a 68% reduction in COVID-19 mortality (25 [0.8%] versus 79 [2.6%] among ivermectin non-users; RR,0.32; 95% CI, 0.20-0.49; p < 0.0001). When adjusted for residual variables, reduction in mortality rate was70% (RR, 0.30; 95% CI, 0.19-0.46; p < 0.0001). There was a 56% reduction in hospitalization rate (44 versus99 hospitalizations among ivermectin users and non-users, respectively; RR, 0.44; 95% CI, 0.31-0.63; p <0.0001). After adjustment for residual variables, reduction in hospitalization rate was 67% (RR, 0.33; 95% CI,023-0.66; p < 0.0001).

 

 

[JWB]

The U.S. government’s website to order free rapid coronavirus tests, covidtests.gov, officially launches Wednesday.

 

 

[DKTanker]

1 hour ago, JWB said:

The U.S. government’s website to order free rapid coronavirus tests, covidtests.gov, officially launches Wednesday.

It looks like Omicron has peaked in the US, these tests may be just what is needed to push the scare as long as possible.  On the other hand, and we can be ever hopeful, they serve to return us to sanity.  That said, I'm afraid there are a great number that have been permanently mind altered and will refuse to accept the new reality that Covid has become as endemic as the common cold.

[lucklucky]

https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11089/22-01-12-covid19-winter_publication_report.pdf

[LT Ducky]

In the US everything COVID related seems to be FREE, masks, test kits, vaccinations, etc.

Now anyone with 2 brain cells knows damn well they are not free, and the taxpayers are footing the bill. But I’ve seen no discussion on who is getting the money and how much money is involved.

Do I dare ask if any of our esteemed ruling class have any connections to those providing these products and services?

[nitflegal]

1 hour ago, LT Ducky said:

In the US everything COVID related seems to be FREE, masks, test kits, vaccinations, etc.

Now anyone with 2 brain cells knows damn well they are not free, and the taxpayers are footing the bill. But I’ve seen no discussion on who is getting the money and how much money is involved.

Do I dare ask if any of our esteemed ruling class have any connections to those providing these products and services?

Of course they do.  That's not even an accusation, its just those companies are heavily bundled in most mutual funds and such.

[nitflegal]

The amount of tap-dancing here is pretty impressive.  A study from May to November states that from the summer on having Covid but no vaccine offered better case rates than vaccination.  However the article says the opposite, presumably because they cited one week in June where there were fewer cases that was true but in the other week is was tracked (when both CA and NY had much higher case rates) it was not only flipped, it was massively flipped.  

https://www.wdsu.com/article/cdc-study-vaccination-protects-against-covid-hospitalization-significantly-more-than-prior-infection/38818343

Fun fact, all the links in the articles to the papers are now void.  If you dig through, you can find where they moved the paper to. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm7104e1_w

 Rates among vaccinated persons who had had COVID-19 were 32.5-fold lower (95% CI = 27.5–37.6) than rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis in California and 19.8-fold lower (95% CI = 16.2–23.5) in New York. Rates among vaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis were consistently higher than rates among unvaccinated persons with a history of COVID-19 (3.1-fold higher [95% CI = 2.6–3.7] in California and 1.9-fold higher [95% CI = 1.5–2.3] in New York) and rates among vaccinated persons with a history of COVID-19 (3.6-fold higher [95% CI = 2.9–4.3] in California and 2.8-fold higher [95% CI = 2.1–3.4] in New York).

COVID-19 hospitalization rates in California were always highest among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis (Table 2) (Figure). In the pre-Delta period during June 13–June 26, for example, compared with hospitalization rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalization rates were 27.7-fold lower (95% CI = 22.4–33.0) among vaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, 6.0-fold lower (95% CI = 3.3–8.7) among unvaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, and 7.1-fold lower (95% CI = 4.0–10.3) among vaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis. However, this pattern also shifted as the Delta variant became predominant. During October 3–16, compared with hospitalization rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalization rates were 19.8-fold lower (95% CI = 18.2–21.4) among vaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, 55.3-fold lower (95% CI = 27.3–83.3) among unvaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, and 57.5-fold lower (95% CI = 29.2–85.8) among vaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis.

[Ivanhoe]

Has anyone taken a look at the vaccine adverse reaction rate for folks who had a documented infection before vaccination?

I'm wondering if the risk of an adverse event goes up or down with each shot, for those who've already contracted and recovered from it.

 

[rmgill]

9 hours ago, lucklucky said:

https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/11089/22-01-12-covid19-winter_publication_report.pdf

Huh. Who was it here who was saying that the pandemic was one of the unvaccinated again?  How do you like your crow? Baked, fried or raw? 

[rmgill]

T-Detect testing. They offer testing of your blood drawn at one of two testing company sites for the SARS-COVID T-Cell in your blood. Long term determination to see if you've had and cleared a covid infection. 

https://www.t-detect.com/

[jmsaari]

2 hours ago, rmgill said:

Huh. Who was it here who was saying that the pandemic was one of the unvaccinated again?  How do you like your crow? Baked, fried or raw? 

I saw that term used mostly for the US in the middle of the delta wave, though probably equally valid for any country with large numbers of unvaccinated. 

What that table almost certainly tells us (dont have time now to dig into data to check) is that Scotland likely has very high vaccination rates in the population and among the elderly, and the unvaccinated minority are largely among the younger generations, and for this reason precisely they are NOT having a pandemic of the unvaccinated. 

Go serve the crow to those claiming Scots are having a pandemic of the unvaccinated now, if you find any

Edited January 20, 2022 by jmsaari

[sunday]

1 hour ago, jmsaari said:

I saw that term used mostly for the US in the middle of the delta wave, though probably equally valid for any country with large numbers of unvaccinated. 

What that table almost certainly tells us (dont have time now to dig into data to check) is that Scotland likely has very high vaccination rates in the population and among the elderly, and the unvaccinated minority are largely among the younger generations, and for this reason precisely they are NOT having a pandemic of the unvaccinated. 

Go serve the crow to those claiming Scots are having a pandemic of the unvaccinated now, if you find any

Another one that does not know neither what an infection rate, nor a confidence interval is?

I mean, infection, hospitalization, and dead rates could be inaccurate because of fewer cases due to a smaller population of one type, but there are confidence intervals published there, man!

Edited January 20, 2022 by sunday