The current “The Best” culture/philosophy that society lives in is horrible and harmful, leading to ridiculous extremism of insane competition. We have probably read inferred for example that if Blender is not the best 3D software, then Blender is garbage.
Well, we are seeing these extremes also with the COVID-19 vaccines, where in a pandemic situation instead of seeing us all united fighting for the common good, we are living a competitive situation in a world where selfishness, lobbies and business prevail.
People think that if they don’t get “The Best” vaccine, they are getting garbage. This is not like this. All vaccines approved by health agencies save lives in a large percentage:
I’ve just flagged and hidden a mess of posts. The discussion there was fine, but totally off-topic from what the original poster was discussing. You’re welcome to start a new thread, but I’d like to remind you that political discussion is heavily moderated here.
If the idea of this thread is for everyone to agree with the OP about taking the vaccines, then this is not a thread, but a staff-endorsed public service announcement.
Having a differentiated view is for sure not in our nature. It takes a lot of energy to think and the other way around is just way simpler and it is even easier to find others who agree with you.
The thumbnail of the video you linked to is totally sufficient for me. I can clearly see the winner here, that’s what I want to get. Let’s not overcomplicate things here
Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
11
The video, which I’ve watched about half of, explains why you shouldn’t declare one better than the other based upon those number alone. For instance, the two vaccines with the highest efficacy percentages were tested during a plateau in infection rates, while the less effective vaccines were administered during a spike in infection rates, when people were more likely to be exposed to the virus, and the other variants were beginning to make their rounds through the population.
Sorry for not making the sarcasm in my post more obvious.
The situation is incredibly difficult to understand. And it doesn’t make it easier that what we know about it is constantly changing (even if the understanding gets better). The frustration level is currently rising a lot it seems, which in my experience rises the risk even more that people make uninformed decisions or even consciously take risks just for the sake of it or to relieve some stress.
The simplified kind of thinking we feel comfortable is in most situations just naive without real consequences. However, right now it is dangerous in many different ways.
Putting issues of politics, agendas, philosophy, cost, honesty/accuracy of information, etc. aside, considering instead only the tactical aspects … getting a less effective vaccine now does not stop you from getting a more effective one later.
Of course, the other issues are part of our independent decisions. If your decision is “I want it and this one is better than that one” then consider the above.
Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
15
Or to put it another way, 60% protection might not be as nice as 95%, but it’s a helluva lot better than 0%.
Plus, that your immune system is already primed against anything with that particular protein spine, even if you do happen to get the short end of that stick and get infected, you’re less likely to get as sick as you would if you never got the shot at all.
I just hope we won’t hear anything like “That vaccine is terrible, because it’s sponsored by Bill Gates, who wants to implant mind-control chips in all of us”. Again.
I hope there’s room for a little humour…
My wife is a nurse and had the Pfizer vaccine. Now she is much better in Excel and math, and gets 5g speeds in her mobile phone… Thanks Bill Gates!
Joke aside. My wife is really a nurce and everyday in a covid hospital is a huge feat. Now that she had the vaccine I’m definitely feeling more confident and safe for her. I don’t know how this virus got inside the community, but now is the time to put out the fire, not to consume ourselves searching for whom started it and why. And in order to do that, vaccination is the strongest weapon in our hands.
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Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
20
All I know is that after I got my first dose here a few days back, I suddenly felt this overwhelming urge to buy an Xbox.
In my country vaccination is voluntary and the first to receive it were the doctors and health workers. Then people at pre-existing risk and over 70 years of age. Now the over 60s follow.
Luckily there were not many anti-vaccines and people are signing up in a large percentage to receive some of the vaccines.
The “inconvenient truth” is that these are not ‘vaccines.’ They are experimental therapies which have never been tried before on humans, and which have never undergone clinical trials before “emergency use authorization” was granted. Nothing like this approach has ever been done – ever. Thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries have been recorded in a European public database designed to capture adverse vaccination and treatment side-effects.
I would simply remind everyone that Thalidomide was also rushed to market and declared to be “safe and effective,” and given to mothers as a nausea treatment, before its horrific effects upon the unborn fetus were discovered. We do not understand the human immune system, nor the incredible code that is “DNA,” well enough to know if these never-before-tried treatments will actually work, and whether they have unintended consequences. And, in our mad rush to “[not actually …] vaccinate against” an easily-treated virus with a 99.6% survival rate, we have not yet taken the time to find out. This is, in fact, unspeakably reckless and dangerous.
We actually have no data to support the assertion that the therapies even work, let alone that they “save lives.” The immune response produced – in some cases – by these therapies is not the same one produced by actual recovered infection. It is much more specialized. We think that the only thing that it will prompt your body to attack is the virus. But we have thousands of recorded cases where the body promptly attacked itself … with fatal results. These outcomes do not seem to be making headlines, except in medical databases. We are sailing in completely new and uncharted waters. We’ve now sent millions of ships into those waters without a map.
We know a fair bit about “vaccinations,” even though terrible things sometimes happen as a result of taking them. (Which we record in databases like the one aforementioned.) We know nothing yet about this. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide did not sign up to participate in a clinical trial of something that’s never been done before … believing that they are taking an “approved vaccine.” No one “approved” this at all – it has never been “tried” – they simply got “emergency” authorization to do it.
The women who took Thalidomide were happy that they felt fine and that their nausea did go away . . . The simple fact is that there is far more that we do not know about biology and immunology, than what we think that we do.
We know little about all this, I agree. But I also see these charts
Israel is way ahead in vaccination and leading in this field. They are opening up their economy and people are starting to get their lives back day by day.
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Renzatic
(Professor Emeritus Billy H. Wafflesmith XIV Esq.)
24
We know quite a bit about mRNA based vaccines. This isn’t a brand new medical technology that was invented recently as a potential response to the pandemic. There have been various case studies and clinical trials over the last couple of decades that have garnered a ton of information on their effect on the human body.
Plus, these vaccines weren’t rushed out without any testing whatsoever. The clinical trials were truncated for the sake of expediency, but there were still clinical trials involving tens of thousands of people. It’s not like Big Pharma decided to unleash a nearly unknown medication upon an unsuspecting public on the hope that maybe things would turn out okay enough they could generated some good PR from it.
Unfortunately for all of us, there is no worldwide standard, let alone a peer-reviewed one, as to "what is ‘a case.’" "What is this thing that you say that you are counting?" “You say that someone ‘died of it’ – exactly what do you mean and how do you know?” The goalposts have been moved many times. There is no standard as to what should cause this virus to appear on a death certificate at all, let alone be called “the cause of death.” (But, as well we know, there has been a strong financial and political incentive to vastly over-state it. People will do what you “incentivize.”)
The result? “Apples and Oranges.” Although data is the only guiding thing we have, there has never been any careful, world-wide, agreement on how it is to be collected, interpreted, nor used. Thus, you really cannot objectively compare any two reports, because you have no way to know if they are “comparable.”
Statisticians at Johns Hopkins University looked into this, trying to rationalize the various reports that were being batted about, and their primary conclusion was: “it’s a complete mess.” They explored the many data-sets to try to find out how they could be compared, and concluded that they couldn’t.
And, that’s certainly no way to run a world-wide public health response … to anything at all. The blind cannot lead the blind. Simple, inexcusable, verdict: “EPIC FAIL.” All over the planet, people did not get what they needed from their public health reporting and management systems. Our world-wide collective response to what is actually a very ordinary event – “another virus” – was a year-plus long train wreck. And we cannot afford that. There will always be, as there always has been, “another virus.”
