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2 minutes ago, rmgill said:

 If you're immune compromised it makes sense to take extra precautions. If you're not, and you're still hiding at home and starting at every report about COVID, you're a fool. 

As to complacency, we've known since fall of 2020 that COVID mostly kills people who are low on Vitamin D, overweight, and have numerous other co-morbidities. 
 

So you can PROVE that NO ONE that doesn't HAVE those conditions has died from COVID. Well, show and tell.

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10 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

This is non-sense, of course, par for the course for you as of late.

It's nonsense is it? Your vast experience in the world of what is your basis for this? You've been quick with this logical fallacy. Time for you to put this shoe on the other foot. 

So, you work in what field exactly? Your experience in medical stuff is what exactly? 

10 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

Since all medications have the possibility of secondary or long term effects, you can never PROVE they ARE safe, therefore no one should take any medication in Ryanworld. 

Wrong. 

It's a question of quantity, degree and nature of the side effect weighed in proportion to the good the medication gives you. If the medication gives you hot flashes that's one thing. If it makes your dick bigger, no big deal. If it fucks with your reproductive system and potentially has long term effects, that's a whole different prospect.

Medications that potentially give you serious effects out of proportion to the protective value they provide is NOT a good risk/reward. Myocarditis and protracted bleeding from your vagina isn't a very good reward when your risk of serious infection from COVID is below 1 per 100,000.

Mandating this on children or young adults when the protective value doesn't exceed the apparent risks from the disease, let alone the risks apparent with the vaccination isn't a very good idea. This is basic medical ethics. You don't give EVERY patient beta-blockers and blood thinners to prevent afib even when they don't necessarily have it. One size does not fit all. 

There has been for many many years an aspect of medical ethics that said do no harm. This push by folks apparently working for certain pharmaceuticals either on a paid basis or because they're toad eaters flies in the face of these traditional and well valued ethics. 

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33 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

So you can PROVE that NO ONE that doesn't HAVE those conditions has died from COVID. Well, show and tell.

I think you've got that backwards on the proof requirements AND your double negative is a best confusing, at worse, inverted from the meaning you desired. 
 

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10 minutes ago, rmgill said:

I think you've got that backwards on the proof requirements AND your double negative is a best confusing, at worse, inverted from the meaning you desired. 
 

No, I don't, I am applying YOUR logic to YOUR statements. Apparently, that confuses you.  I even used CAPS like you do, to make it easier.

Can you PROVE that ONLY people with comorbidities have died of COVID?

Can you PROVE that a FULLY APPROVED medicine has NO secondary effects and therefore it's 100% SAFE?

 

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1 hour ago, RETAC21 said:

This is non-sense, of course, par for the course for you as of late.

Since all medications have the possibility of secondary or long term effects, you can never PROVE they ARE safe, therefore no one should take any medication in Ryanworld. 

On that point, that is why the FDA and other countries' regulatory agencies exist; to demand a pre-determined series of data sets, evaluate the risk versus reward of the compound, and request additional studies as required to fill gaps until their evaluation teams have confidence in their determination.  Every drug at therapeutic levels will kill somebody.  I could administer LRS fluids or even isotonic saline to the right (wrong) person and kill them.  Part of the issue is that our fundamental medical systems are utterly broken and doctors have no first hand experience with a particular patient and no history to draw on (and most hospitals have medical decisions premade to follow) so you are not getting individual care but that's a rant for another time.

What we depend on the FDA for is to scientifically and apolitically independently assess the data and make their determinations that the benefits (such as lives saved) outweighs the costs (lives damaged or lost).  It seems believable at the least that these agencies have allowed political pressures to sway those decisions from therapeutics to vaccines to medical devices.  I wonder if 1 in 100 people are aware of how destructive this is.  The FDA works by trust and without it people won't trust their decisions.  More insidiously, if political pressure can determine what gets released then what happens when Pelosi or McConnell have stock options in Novartis and their potential blockbuster drug is on the line?  We taught them and their acolytes that this works and we taught the agencies that it is possible and possibly good for your career.  That genie does not go back in the bottle and once there is that crack it will be exploited.  Combine a lack of public trust with political interference and you destroy our regulatory framework.  

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40 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

Can you PROVE that ONLY people with comorbidities have died of COVID?

Can you PROVE that a FULLY APPROVED medicine has NO secondary effects and therefore it's 100% SAFE?

 

2nd question first.  All medicines have, or have the potential for, side effects and until now anybody that wanted to know anything about those potentialities could have unfettered access to that information.  Not so today, information about adverse side effects are being purposely withheld from the public and perhaps more importantly, ways to change one's health habits to mitigate the effects of Covid have been purposely withheld or suppressed from conversation.  Obesity and concurrent inflammation apparently is the number one comorbidity and yet in this country, the USA, scarcely a word of warning.  You simply aren't allowed to talk about it because, fat shaming.  Instead of locking people up there should have been, should be, a national push to get people outside to enjoy the sunshine while they exercise, and lose weight, and manufacture much needed vitamin D as an addition to the supplemental vitamins they should be taking.   I know, that's just crazy talk. 

1st question, people inexplicable die of disease all the time. 
Doctor: You have stage IV lung cancer and have less than one year to live.

Patient:  But Doctor, I've never smoked anything much less tobacco, and I've never been exposed to asbestos.

Doctor:  Sorry, shit happens.

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2 minutes ago, seahawk said:

Do you trust a government agency, when the government wants something to happen?

Less and less all the time.  The scientific community, and most especially the medical community, has created some serious credibility issues for themselves.

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2 hours ago, Steven P Allen said:

I would suggest that, if everyone is accustomed to those deaths, they cannot be labeled "excess."

Yeah, let's redefine words if we don't like the message. Excess mortality is defined as "above the average", like it or not.

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2 hours ago, rmgill said:

If you're immune compromised it makes sense to take extra precautions. If you're not, and you're still hiding at home and starting at every report about COVID, you're a fool. 

As to complacency, we've known since fall of 2020 that COVID mostly kills people who are low on Vitamin D, overweight, and have numerous other co-morbidities. What public health pushes have been made to get people to lose weight, go outside get more exercise, get more vitamin D and other thing to reduce negative outcomes with covid? What about hard investigations of the actual treatments instead of just vaccination? 

The issue at hand is and always has been to keep the rate of hospitalization down to a manageable level. If people died without clogging hospital beds and ICUs I'd give a flying fuck about every anti-vaxxer out there. Whoever wanted vaccination should get it, whoever doesn't I wouldn't care.

Unfortunately, the unvaccinated more than any other group do turn up in the hospitals and seek treatment, and they do so in such large number that they are threatening to overwhelm the hospital system, and are thus forcing other people in need of other treatment to wait longer. That may not be the case with the hospitals near you, but it's the case over here where I live, and that's why I'm concerned about the situation over here while you get worked up over me because you still somehow confuse me with a fellow American because your whole reception of the situation is so myopic that it borders on a mental state.

Do what you like over there, let us Europeans do what we like over here. If you pull out European excess mortality statistics, I presume that you want to discuss the situation in Europe. If you want to navigate the Appalachians with a road map of Colorado, don't blame the driver if he has trouble following your directions.

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1 hour ago, nitflegal said:

On that point, that is why the FDA and other countries' regulatory agencies exist; to demand a pre-determined series of data sets, evaluate the risk versus reward of the compound, and request additional studies as required to fill gaps until their evaluation teams have confidence in their determination.  Every drug at therapeutic levels will kill somebody.  I could administer LRS fluids or even isotonic saline to the right (wrong) person and kill them.  Part of the issue is that our fundamental medical systems are utterly broken and doctors have no first hand experience with a particular patient and no history to draw on (and most hospitals have medical decisions premade to follow) so you are not getting individual care but that's a rant for another time.

What we depend on the FDA for is to scientifically and apolitically independently assess the data and make their determinations that the benefits (such as lives saved) outweighs the costs (lives damaged or lost).  It seems believable at the least that these agencies have allowed political pressures to sway those decisions from therapeutics to vaccines to medical devices.  I wonder if 1 in 100 people are aware of how destructive this is.  The FDA works by trust and without it people won't trust their decisions.  More insidiously, if political pressure can determine what gets released then what happens when Pelosi or McConnell have stock options in Novartis and their potential blockbuster drug is on the line?  We taught them and their acolytes that this works and we taught the agencies that it is possible and possibly good for your career.  That genie does not go back in the bottle and once there is that crack it will be exploited.  Combine a lack of public trust with political interference and you destroy our regulatory framework.  

It is true that a business need to make money to survive, but lately health businesses are focusing too much on "business", perhaps at the expense of "health"

Quote

“The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans’ health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.” —John Abramson, M.D., Harvard Medical School

Kennedy Jr., Robert F. . The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Children’s Health Defense) (p. 23).

The use of standardized protocols could also be a bother. The use of patients to do research on them and keep them in the hospital some more time, perhaps in order to publish some research paper, too. Especially in public health systems.

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44 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

The issue at hand is and always has been to keep the rate of hospitalization down to a manageable level. If people died without clogging hospital beds and ICUs I'd give a flying fuck about every anti-vaxxer out there. Whoever wanted vaccination should get it, whoever doesn't I wouldn't care.

Unfortunately, the unvaccinated more than any other group do turn up in the hospitals and seek treatment, and they do so in such large number that they are threatening to overwhelm the hospital system, and are thus forcing other people in need of other treatment to wait longer. That may not be the case with the hospitals near you, but it's the case over here where I live, and that's why I'm concerned about the situation over here while you get worked up over me because you still somehow confuse me with a fellow American because your whole reception of the situation is so myopic that it borders on a mental state.

Do what you like over there, let us Europeans do what we like over here. If you pull out European excess mortality statistics, I presume that you want to discuss the situation in Europe. If you want to navigate the Appalachians with a road map of Colorado, don't blame the driver if he has trouble following your directions.

The problem is that COVID patients only use 8-25% of all intensive care units. So one can hardly blame them of any shortage.

https://www.intensivregister.de/#/aktuelle-lage/kartenansichten

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1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

Yeah, let's redefine words if we don't like the message. Excess mortality is defined as "above the average", like it or not.

Kind of a made up term, though, isn't it? 
I'm reminded of the time I was working on a budget projection for the next fiscal year and my district manager asked why I didn't include a projection to match the unexpected $75,000 additional repair we had just made.  I argued that it was a one time event.  His reply, one time events tend to pop up at the most inconvenient times, best to plan for them every year even if they don't happen. 

There is the additional argument that there can be no excessive deaths since death is a 100% certainty for every one of us.  

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1 hour ago, Ssnake said:

Yeah, let's redefine words if we don't like the message. Excess mortality is defined as "above the average", like it or not.

My point is that the term is empty but nevertheless provocative.  No year has an average number:  averages by definition require multiple years' numbers. 

What is the term for "lower than average"?   Serendipitous deaths?  Insufficient deaths?  Should a year of below average suggest we need to send more people to the disintegration chambers?

As a measure for determining the effect of a disease, the term does nothing but instill fear while neither usefully gauging the situation nor assigning responsibility.

The well-know aphorism on statistics suggests itself here.

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Do vaccines can create COVID positive test cases?

https://www.rtl.be/info/video/800629.aspx

 

« 2/3 des 25 membres de la station polaire belge sont testés positifs au Covid, après 17 semaines de confinement, bien que complètement vaccinés, testés au test PCR avant leur arrivée, et vivant à des milliers de kilomètres du monde civilisé ».

"2/3 of the 25 members of the Belgian polar station have tested positive for Covid, after 17 weeks of confinement, although fully vaccinated, tested for PCR test before their arrival, and living thousands of kilometers from the civilized world."

 

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, nitflegal said:

On that point, that is why the FDA and other countries' regulatory agencies exist; to demand a pre-determined series of data sets, evaluate the risk versus reward of the compound, and request additional studies as required to fill gaps until their evaluation teams have confidence in their determination.  Every drug at therapeutic levels will kill somebody.  I could administer LRS fluids or even isotonic saline to the right (wrong) person and kill them.  Part of the issue is that our fundamental medical systems are utterly broken and doctors have no first hand experience with a particular patient and no history to draw on (and most hospitals have medical decisions premade to follow) so you are not getting individual care but that's a rant for another time.

What we depend on the FDA for is to scientifically and apolitically independently assess the data and make their determinations that the benefits (such as lives saved) outweighs the costs (lives damaged or lost).  It seems believable at the least that these agencies have allowed political pressures to sway those decisions from therapeutics to vaccines to medical devices.  I wonder if 1 in 100 people are aware of how destructive this is.  The FDA works by trust and without it people won't trust their decisions.  More insidiously, if political pressure can determine what gets released then what happens when Pelosi or McConnell have stock options in Novartis and their potential blockbuster drug is on the line?  We taught them and their acolytes that this works and we taught the agencies that it is possible and possibly good for your career.  That genie does not go back in the bottle and once there is that crack it will be exploited.  Combine a lack of public trust with political interference and you destroy our regulatory framework.  

That sounds good, but here is a disenting opinion, that sees pitfalls in that independence by making the FDA vulnerable to industry influence

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01200-w

"Reducing the FDA’s responsiveness to the public by limiting its accountability to the executive branch is problematic, given the scope of reasonable disagreement about the role the FDA should play in drug development, how much regulatory burden is acceptable and how to balance speed and safety in approval decisions, among other value judgments. Advocates for FDA independence express confidence that “when values clash, an independent FDA will navigate the conflict with the nation’s best interest in mind”3. Yet even the most well-intentioned FDA career scientist may have ideas about what is in the “nation’s best interest” that are different from those of members of the public whose lives are affected by agency decisions. Moreover, especially if user fees are retained, an independent FDA might face greater risks of industry capture without a sufficient counterweight from other stakeholders. "

I suspect there was a degree of "Orange Man Bad" in that piece, but these are cogent points.

But this is nothing new, let's go back to 2011

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2011.0285

"...more media attention about a specific disease puts greater public pressure on the FDA to accelerate reviews of new drugs to combat the disease. He reasons that by responding to such pressure, the agency can enhance its reputation and hence its power. Using data for new drugs approved from 1976 to 1998 (he does not say why he selected these dates), he shows that an increase in Washington Post stories about the disease a drug targets led to a decrease in the time it took the FDA to review the drug"

"Agencies such as the FDA certainly have a distinct information advantage over their political overseers, which is likely to affect that relationship. Although the jury is still out on whether reputation or other factors are the source of FDA’s power, Carpenter’s book has much to offer. Reputation and Power will be a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in understanding US pharmaceutical regulation and the debates surrounding it."

So it seems the ideal world just doesn't exist.

Of note, this is not specific of the FDA, there's Boeing's playing to the FAA weaknesses, as a poster child of the problems:

https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/FAA Certification of 737 MAX Boeing II Final Report^2-23-2021.pdf

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1 hour ago, sunday said:

Is it too early to compare the phobia to nuclear power with the uncritical acceptance of some medication not properly tested?

Now you have become a psychologist? truly a rennaissance man.

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32 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

 

That sounds good, but here is a disenting opinion, that sees pitfalls in that independence by making the FDA vulnerable to industry influence

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01200-w

"Reducing the FDA’s responsiveness to the public by limiting its accountability to the executive branch is problematic, given the scope of reasonable disagreement about the role the FDA should play in drug development, how much regulatory burden is acceptable and how to balance speed and safety in approval decisions, among other value judgments. Advocates for FDA independence express confidence that “when values clash, an independent FDA will navigate the conflict with the nation’s best interest in mind”3. Yet even the most well-intentioned FDA career scientist may have ideas about what is in the “nation’s best interest” that are different from those of members of the public whose lives are affected by agency decisions. Moreover, especially if user fees are retained, an independent FDA might face greater risks of industry capture without a sufficient counterweight from other stakeholders. "

I suspect there was a degree of "Orange Man Bad" in that piece, but these are cogent points.

But this is nothing new, let's go back to 2011

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2011.0285

"...more media attention about a specific disease puts greater public pressure on the FDA to accelerate reviews of new drugs to combat the disease. He reasons that by responding to such pressure, the agency can enhance its reputation and hence its power. Using data for new drugs approved from 1976 to 1998 (he does not say why he selected these dates), he shows that an increase in Washington Post stories about the disease a drug targets led to a decrease in the time it took the FDA to review the drug"

"Agencies such as the FDA certainly have a distinct information advantage over their political overseers, which is likely to affect that relationship. Although the jury is still out on whether reputation or other factors are the source of FDA’s power, Carpenter’s book has much to offer. Reputation and Power will be a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in understanding US pharmaceutical regulation and the debates surrounding it."

So it seems the ideal world just doesn't exist.

Of note, this is not specific of the FDA, there's Boeing's playing to the FAA weaknesses, as a poster child of the problems:

https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/FAA Certification of 737 MAX Boeing II Final Report^2-23-2021.pdf

Hell, we've been kicking that around since long before I started in the field!  And I confess to being less amenable to my traditional argument as my faith in experts has been shaken really, really badly.  That said, the alternative is an oversight body; either a separate organization for the purpose (which IMHO is just taking the layer who is already doing it and superseding them by the same type of group cloned and put on an org chart with a dotted line to them), a congressional committee or their ultimate boss the president.  If there is anyone I have less than my shaken faith in career federal scientists it would be those ignoramuses.  What the FDA is supposed to do is be highly deferential to internal independent groups and those ad hoc ones made up of experts outside the federal agencies.  The role of congressional oversight and the president is to make sure that they are following their internal checks and balances as per their internal regulations and policies.  That has obviously broken down in this area to the level that the politicization is obvious.  I don't know that this is fixable and IMHO the current state is like Democracy; it's a terrible flawed system but its better than anything else that we've tried.  

 

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8 hours ago, RETAC21 said:

No, I don't, I am applying YOUR logic to YOUR statements. Apparently, that confuses you.  I even used CAPS like you do, to make it easier.

Can you PROVE that ONLY people with comorbidities have died of COVID?

How many studies do you want pointing to various co-morbidities and negative outcomes with COVID? Ore are you going to go with the outliers conflated as the mean? 

I swear, it seems like you're still stuck in April of 2020 in the foaming at the mouth panic mode. 

Here's a start for your reading. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8677356/

A total of 454 patients were included of this study. 78 (17.18%) patients death due to COVID-19, consisting of 52 (66.67%) male and 26 (33.33%) female. Range of ages between 18 and 85 years. The highest mortality rate occurred in the age group ≥60 years (35; 51.47%), followed by the age group of 45–59 years (33; 48.53%), and the age group of <45 years (10; 12%). The prevalent comorbidity was hypertension (42.31%), cardiovascular disease (30.77%), diabetes (28.21%), chronic kidney disease (23.08%), malignancy (15.38%), obesity (15.38%), chronic liver disease (7.69%), chronic respiratory disease (6.41%), immune related disease (3.85%), and non-traumatic cerebral infarction (3.85%). 41 (52.56%) patients reported having two or more comorbidities, and 37 (47.44%) only has one comorbidity. Elevated neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) ≥3.13 was seen in the majority of patients (68; 87.18%). The mean value of NLR was 20.94.

Edited by rmgill
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4 hours ago, Steven P Allen said:

My point is that the term is empty but nevertheless provocative.  No year has an average number:  averages by definition require multiple years' numbers. 

What is the term for "lower than average"? 

I'm not remotely provoked enough to try and figure out what the English terms are. In German, it's very simple: Übersterblichkeit and Untersterblichkeit. That's neutral enough, as far as I am concerned.

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4 hours ago, Steven P Allen said:

My point is that the term is empty but nevertheless provocative.  No year has an average number:  averages by definition require multiple years' numbers. 

What is the term for "lower than average"?   Serendipitous deaths?  Insufficient deaths?  Should a year of below average suggest we need to send more people to the disintegration chambers?

As a measure for determining the effect of a disease, the term does nothing but instill fear while neither usefully gauging the situation nor assigning responsibility.

The well-know aphorism on statistics suggests itself here.

The other thing is that an absolute number for a given population from year to year is probably going to see a net increase in excess mortality over the previous years or where ever the baseline was set because the total population is going to be increasing overall. You could also be looking at Demographic shifts of a large population block aging out. It all depends on a bunch of various factors. 

As for the excess deaths over a mean, what was the basis for the mean or average? What was that framed around? 

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Eric Weinstein made a nice point the other day. 

The only tool that should have been available to the political figures in what should be a free society is Persuasion. They should not have deplatforming, ridicule from their positions of power, censorship, stripping people of professional certifications, firing from their jobs, lying and other things they've been doing to frame their response to COVID to get everyone to vaccinate. 

That they HAVE used all of those other techniques and can't rely upon persuasion is indicative of a problem. 

The fact that a bunch of folks all involved in various key aspects of significant advances in medicine have all been getting silenced in this is representative of a larger problem. 

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Very smart questions, also totally irrelevant to the point. Population growth in Germany is negligable, and whether the average mortality is drawn from a five-year moving average, or ten, or 25 year period cannot possibly explain the order of magnitude of 40k.

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Well,  first the data set was for more than just Germany. Scroll up or down and you see it's inclusive of a great deal of the entire of the EU block. So you've got some demographic issues there. 

Second it's still a very relative term vs an absolute term. Height above Sea Level is great if you're above the ocean. If you happen to be flying over some very tall mountains at the time it can be a Really Big Problem (TM). 

Altitude AGL is more useful most of the time for a lot of reasons and why many aircraft have a radar altimeter, especially ones flying more seat of the pants. 

Fudging around at the edges on this with data on deaths, mortality and what not at this point when the push is for everyone to get a regular vaccination booster because reasons is really starting to look rather hysterical and disingenuous. Even the simple argument to prevent the spread to other people when the narrative has shifted from "Vaccines prevent infection and transmission" to "Vaccine and boosters shorten your severity" kinda fall flat on the logic and persuasion front. 

Which all just leads folks like myself who say protect those at risk, get them vaccinated if it works for them, carry on and stop panicking. 

Edited by rmgill
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