If true, this is a big problem. But I’m sure that it will be dubbed “misinformation.”
21 thoughts on “Vaccine Concerns”
I don’t know. My wife and I have both been fully Pfizer vaccinated since March, and neither of us has had any problem. Three close relatives of mine have all had COVID-19, but relatively mild cases. They each subsequently were vaccinated, and after a brief negative reaction, suddenly recovered faculties none of them realized they had lost – senses of taste and smell, plus lifting of a mental fog none of them had realized was there.
I’ve written about it before in these comments, but I went through rabies treatment after having been deeply scratched by a racoon. I didn’t seek treatment until more than a week after the scratch, for a variety of reasons. But the ER doctor who started me on it said “You have to have the rabies series, because if you get rabies, you die.” The PA who gave me the rabies vaccine and rabies antibodies shots that night remarked, after hearing all of the circumstances, that “If he had bitten you, you’d already be dead.”
The mental fog the rabies series (and probable infection) produced lasted about a year, after which I realized how severe it had been. The Chinese Wuhan virus, like rabies, also attacks the central nervous system – though rabies is as close to 100% fatal as you can get, while Wuhan is maybe 2%. Nevertheless, from my limited database, I think the vaccination is beneficial even for those who have already had the disease – in fact, very beneficial to those who have had it.
That is much better persuasion than, “You are going to die and you are going to kill everyone else.” or “You are a horrible human being, oops did I say human being?”
And at the end, they beg for donations to help stop the spread of lies about vaccines.
My BS detector went off several times. Small sample size, where it’s mentioned at all. “All” subjects in one study had “memory” response to COVID, implying that everyone has been exposed to some form of corona virus before, and that previous exposure is all you need. And generally uncritical of the studies they represent.
I don’t think I’ll be sending donations.
Looking around, especially at “Doctors for COVID Ethics”, I can’t seem to find anyone outside of the usual quack and “health food” sites (but I repeat myself) that have heard of them or any existence outside of a twitter handle and a couple of other polemics. I thought the arguments had a familiar ring, lots of references that are hard to track down with lots of extrapolation and no actual data.
Notice that none of the citations have the link to the paper that’s standard. I managed to track down three and found that the cites were wrong enough to make it hard on the two for PLOS, one of which was based on a whole four subjects.
I’m starting to get a little annoyed at how little respect is being shown to those who are survivors of the disease, and so have a natural immunity. If the point of a vaccine is to prep the body to fight off a disease, and I’ve already fought off the disease, then there is no point to the vaccination. I’ve spent a lifetime cultivating a strong and robust immune system; I’m not interested in FUD.
There’s a line in the Australian movie Strictly Ballroom that has always stuck with me: “A life lived in fear is a life half lived”. Your fear does not create in me any obligations whatsoever. To quote a book: “Fear is the mind killer”.
Today is actually a perfect day to celebrate the overcoming of fear, as the anniversary of the day humanity braved the unknowns of space to set foot on another object in the Solar System. Scientists were terrified that the lander would just sink into the dust. That bringing Moon dust into the lander would spark an explosion. That the samples might contain something that would create an expanding zone of death on Earth. In the end, FUD was replaced with knowledge, and humanity is better off as a result.
Happy Moon Day everyone! And if you’re in North Texas this weekend be sure to stop by the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field for their thirteenth annual Moon Day event. It’s the largest annual space celebration in the great State of Texas.
“If”. I don’t see the support for the conclusion:
The collective findings discussed above clearly show that the benefits of vaccination are highly doubtful.
Especially, given that they just claimed the vaccination provides the sort of immune response that it’s advertised as providing.
“Happy Moon Day everyone! And if you’re in North Texas this weekend be sure to stop by the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field for their thirteenth annual Moon Day event. It’s the largest annual space celebration in the great State of Texas.”
Texas has a lot to be proud of with her historical past in space exploration and the promising future being launched from her lands.
In my misspent youth, I was an Army paratrooper. Hey, at 18, the idea of jumping out of planes and training to kill people sounded like fun. That was not a year for particularly bright decisions on my part. At Jump School, we went through malfunction training shortly before our first jump. There was a big sign that read, “Fear is the foundation of safety.” It’s easy for fear to overwhelm you (been there, almost done that), but someone who is truly fearless is a danger to himself and everyone around him. The key is to acknowledge your fear, then press on. If a bit of fear keeps someone from doing something stupid dangerous, then that’s a good thing. One of my favorite quotes is, “Any damned fool can learn from his own mistakes. Wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others.”
There was a PBS documentary series by this guy who was looking to understand war and what motivates young men to either enlist or answer their draft callup in different societies across the world.
One scene that I won’t forget was Marine Basic Training and the recruits being directed to rappel down the 50-foot tower. The scene first showed this un-fearful recruit being scolded by his drill instructors something fierce for not listening to instructions. The guy “got ahead of himself” and was hanging upside down without a clear way of extricating himself, and the NCOs were “tearing him a new one”, even while he was hanging upside down on the rope.
Next, there was a recruit who had positioned himself properly to complete the maneuver, but he had this serious look of fear on his face. Instead of yelling at him, the same drill instructors were offering this man every bit of coaching and encouragement and moral support.
This confirms what you were saying about the uses of fear. This business of using a rope-and-harness to climb down the 50-foot tower is a made-up useless exercise for most Marines unless they go into some combat specialty. The main purpose of the exercise, it appeared, was that it instilled fear, but when experiencing fear, a Marine would take instruction and direction under that stressful situation.
I didn’t think Marine drill instructors had it in them to offer this level of support and encouragement to one of their charges who was that fearful given the depiction of Marine Basic Training in Full Metal Jacket and other elements of popular culture.
That said, I want to thank you for your service.
Ken,
After you’ve had covid-19, you can still get re-infected, possibly with severe consequences, and certainly with the ability to infect others. For a striking example of this, type “Manaus” and “reinfection” into an internet search engine. Many months after an estimated 3/4ths of the population of Manaus was infected, a new wave of hospitalizations for covid-19 was required for people re-infected with covid. The culprit is thought to be a new variant.
In contrast, learn about how immunity acquired from vaccines is differs from immunity acquired from an infection, such that you (and the people you come into contact with) are protected from multiple variants. Type immunity from vaccine vs infection into an internet search engine.
You can still get the covid after being vaccinated and still spread it to other people.
At some point, you have to face reality and live your life. You can’t control everything. You can control very little. Too many people are letting magical thinking, fear, and paranoia control them.
You might get sick and die, although the chances are very small unless you are old and have comorbidities. You might get sick and not die but have some degradation of your body, or you might fully recover. Wretchard said something like statistics may be on your side but you might end up being the statistic. You might die. You might get hit by a car, drown, die in a fire, have a heart attack, brain aneurism, blood clot, fall off a ladder, infected bug bite, and on and on and on.
To quote some old, dead dude: “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”
Pretty sure I was exposed to the Delta variant a little over a week ago. Something was trying to settle in the back of my throat, but my body fought it off. I don’t care what precautions anyone else takes; you do whatever you need to do to make yourself feel snuggly warm and safe. I don’t even discourage my employees from masking up. I tell them if they feel the sniffles coming on then yeah, mask up. Keep your snot to yourself. But I haven’t required the wearing of masks since before even the company lifted the restrictions. All of my staff had already had the Vid, so what’s the point?
I feel no compulsion to guide my life by someone else’s fears. I have my own fears to deal with, like cave crawling and skydiving (which I deal with by not doing them). I decide how I live my life, and it’s been an awesome adventure so far!
The “PSI” site links to a story that claims that there were more COVID vaccine deaths than COVID deaths last week.
That’s BS for a couple of reasons. First, it takes at least 8 weeks after a given week for the CDC’s death data to be near complete. Death certificate data is sent from counties to the state to CDC. In some states, that data is electronic and gets to CDC quickly. In some states, that data is on paper at the county level and has to be compiled electronically for CDC use.
Second, the story on vaccine deaths talks about the data in VAERS, which is used to report vaccine related reactions. They have one link to VAERS. The later link goes to “Open VAERS”, a private site. I did a query on VAERS for COVID vaccine deaths and got a lower number than the one the story quoted. Quite a bit lower.
Third, the data in VAERS can be put in by anyone. It’s of extremely variable quality. I’ve looked at the raw data for COVID vaccine deaths. One entry had “My mother died two weeks after the vaccine. I thought you should know.” No other information. One entry was for an 80+ YO man in a nursing home and had lots of information. He had diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure. He refused dialysis. A week later he got vaccine shot 1. A few days later, he died of, well, kidney failure. So, without doing a deep dive into the data, you can’t really use the raw numbers.
So, I’m a bit skeptical of that site. It seems to be allied with the broader anto-vaxx community.
” He had diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure. He refused dialysis. A week later he got vaccine shot 1. A few days later, he died of, well, kidney failure. ”
Sort of like all the deaths attributed to the covid.
I’ll stick with Derek Lowe’s “In The Pipeline” blog for late breaking news. Although frankly he is getting tired of COVID posts and replies in his blog. I can understand that.
I think there are more traditional ways that a plague can be eased, ways that have worked in the past. For example, if we tied Dr. Fauci to a pole and built a large fire under him, those smoke from his corpse might appease Apollo, the god who is probably pretty ticked off that someone else has been creating plagues. Maybe it will work, maybe not, but if it saves just one life, won’t it be worth it?
And if nothing else, it’d get rid of Fauci! Sounds like a win! FIRE FAUCI!
It only works with climate.
STOP THE FAKE COVID HOAX
If true, this is a big problem. But I’m sure that it will be dubbed “misinformation.”
As multiple posters above have determined, it is false. And it is misinformation. Why do you propagate it?
An update. And also a way to keep people looking at old threads. I love adding nuggets to old posts. Keeps people on their toes.
So yesterday, Derek Lowe posted in his blog “In The Pipeline”:
the question: “How Well Does the J&J Vaccine Work Against the Delta Variant?” I encourage you to go to the link for the full story, but to summarize: it appears according to a preprint in the bioRxiv here:
from a team of researchers from NYU, that Derek coalesces into a single table that the J&J vaccine may prove to be significantly less effective that the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines against the Delta variant in terms of neutralizing antibody titers. In fact, even worse that convalescent serum after 82 days. Whereas in term of AB titers the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines yield numbers ~6x and ~7x respectively within a spread of about 10 days between samples taken in the regime of about 3 months elapsed time.
Derek’s table shows two columns for Delta, (Delta and Delta+) but both contain similar results. I think this argues strongly that the J&J folks should probably consider getting boosters, but that is out front of the medical establishment and maybe too preliminary to judge. I tend to err on the side of caution when I see these kinds of spreads.
There is also this letter to the NEJM from researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston:
that studies antibody titers directly on the J&J vaccine given in both single and double doses. For the Delta and Kappa variants the single doses cluster below the median line when compared to the two dose figures. But in general tend to cluster in the 10**2 range although there were some clusters in the 10**1 range (tens of titers as opposed to 100 of titers) for single dose cases. (See Table C).
I don’t know. My wife and I have both been fully Pfizer vaccinated since March, and neither of us has had any problem. Three close relatives of mine have all had COVID-19, but relatively mild cases. They each subsequently were vaccinated, and after a brief negative reaction, suddenly recovered faculties none of them realized they had lost – senses of taste and smell, plus lifting of a mental fog none of them had realized was there.
I’ve written about it before in these comments, but I went through rabies treatment after having been deeply scratched by a racoon. I didn’t seek treatment until more than a week after the scratch, for a variety of reasons. But the ER doctor who started me on it said “You have to have the rabies series, because if you get rabies, you die.” The PA who gave me the rabies vaccine and rabies antibodies shots that night remarked, after hearing all of the circumstances, that “If he had bitten you, you’d already be dead.”
The mental fog the rabies series (and probable infection) produced lasted about a year, after which I realized how severe it had been. The Chinese Wuhan virus, like rabies, also attacks the central nervous system – though rabies is as close to 100% fatal as you can get, while Wuhan is maybe 2%. Nevertheless, from my limited database, I think the vaccination is beneficial even for those who have already had the disease – in fact, very beneficial to those who have had it.
That is much better persuasion than, “You are going to die and you are going to kill everyone else.” or “You are a horrible human being, oops did I say human being?”
And at the end, they beg for donations to help stop the spread of lies about vaccines.
My BS detector went off several times. Small sample size, where it’s mentioned at all. “All” subjects in one study had “memory” response to COVID, implying that everyone has been exposed to some form of corona virus before, and that previous exposure is all you need. And generally uncritical of the studies they represent.
I don’t think I’ll be sending donations.
Looking around, especially at “Doctors for COVID Ethics”, I can’t seem to find anyone outside of the usual quack and “health food” sites (but I repeat myself) that have heard of them or any existence outside of a twitter handle and a couple of other polemics. I thought the arguments had a familiar ring, lots of references that are hard to track down with lots of extrapolation and no actual data.
Notice that none of the citations have the link to the paper that’s standard. I managed to track down three and found that the cites were wrong enough to make it hard on the two for PLOS, one of which was based on a whole four subjects.
I’m starting to get a little annoyed at how little respect is being shown to those who are survivors of the disease, and so have a natural immunity. If the point of a vaccine is to prep the body to fight off a disease, and I’ve already fought off the disease, then there is no point to the vaccination. I’ve spent a lifetime cultivating a strong and robust immune system; I’m not interested in FUD.
There’s a line in the Australian movie Strictly Ballroom that has always stuck with me: “A life lived in fear is a life half lived”. Your fear does not create in me any obligations whatsoever. To quote a book: “Fear is the mind killer”.
Today is actually a perfect day to celebrate the overcoming of fear, as the anniversary of the day humanity braved the unknowns of space to set foot on another object in the Solar System. Scientists were terrified that the lander would just sink into the dust. That bringing Moon dust into the lander would spark an explosion. That the samples might contain something that would create an expanding zone of death on Earth. In the end, FUD was replaced with knowledge, and humanity is better off as a result.
Happy Moon Day everyone! And if you’re in North Texas this weekend be sure to stop by the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field for their thirteenth annual Moon Day event. It’s the largest annual space celebration in the great State of Texas.
“If”. I don’t see the support for the conclusion:
Especially, given that they just claimed the vaccination provides the sort of immune response that it’s advertised as providing.
“Happy Moon Day everyone! And if you’re in North Texas this weekend be sure to stop by the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field for their thirteenth annual Moon Day event. It’s the largest annual space celebration in the great State of Texas.”
Texas has a lot to be proud of with her historical past in space exploration and the promising future being launched from her lands.
In my misspent youth, I was an Army paratrooper. Hey, at 18, the idea of jumping out of planes and training to kill people sounded like fun. That was not a year for particularly bright decisions on my part. At Jump School, we went through malfunction training shortly before our first jump. There was a big sign that read, “Fear is the foundation of safety.” It’s easy for fear to overwhelm you (been there, almost done that), but someone who is truly fearless is a danger to himself and everyone around him. The key is to acknowledge your fear, then press on. If a bit of fear keeps someone from doing something stupid dangerous, then that’s a good thing. One of my favorite quotes is, “Any damned fool can learn from his own mistakes. Wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others.”
There was a PBS documentary series by this guy who was looking to understand war and what motivates young men to either enlist or answer their draft callup in different societies across the world.
One scene that I won’t forget was Marine Basic Training and the recruits being directed to rappel down the 50-foot tower. The scene first showed this un-fearful recruit being scolded by his drill instructors something fierce for not listening to instructions. The guy “got ahead of himself” and was hanging upside down without a clear way of extricating himself, and the NCOs were “tearing him a new one”, even while he was hanging upside down on the rope.
Next, there was a recruit who had positioned himself properly to complete the maneuver, but he had this serious look of fear on his face. Instead of yelling at him, the same drill instructors were offering this man every bit of coaching and encouragement and moral support.
This confirms what you were saying about the uses of fear. This business of using a rope-and-harness to climb down the 50-foot tower is a made-up useless exercise for most Marines unless they go into some combat specialty. The main purpose of the exercise, it appeared, was that it instilled fear, but when experiencing fear, a Marine would take instruction and direction under that stressful situation.
I didn’t think Marine drill instructors had it in them to offer this level of support and encouragement to one of their charges who was that fearful given the depiction of Marine Basic Training in Full Metal Jacket and other elements of popular culture.
That said, I want to thank you for your service.
Ken,
After you’ve had covid-19, you can still get re-infected, possibly with severe consequences, and certainly with the ability to infect others. For a striking example of this, type “Manaus” and “reinfection” into an internet search engine. Many months after an estimated 3/4ths of the population of Manaus was infected, a new wave of hospitalizations for covid-19 was required for people re-infected with covid. The culprit is thought to be a new variant.
In contrast, learn about how immunity acquired from vaccines is differs from immunity acquired from an infection, such that you (and the people you come into contact with) are protected from multiple variants. Type immunity from vaccine vs infection into an internet search engine.
You can still get the covid after being vaccinated and still spread it to other people.
At some point, you have to face reality and live your life. You can’t control everything. You can control very little. Too many people are letting magical thinking, fear, and paranoia control them.
You might get sick and die, although the chances are very small unless you are old and have comorbidities. You might get sick and not die but have some degradation of your body, or you might fully recover. Wretchard said something like statistics may be on your side but you might end up being the statistic. You might die. You might get hit by a car, drown, die in a fire, have a heart attack, brain aneurism, blood clot, fall off a ladder, infected bug bite, and on and on and on.
To quote some old, dead dude: “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”
Pretty sure I was exposed to the Delta variant a little over a week ago. Something was trying to settle in the back of my throat, but my body fought it off. I don’t care what precautions anyone else takes; you do whatever you need to do to make yourself feel snuggly warm and safe. I don’t even discourage my employees from masking up. I tell them if they feel the sniffles coming on then yeah, mask up. Keep your snot to yourself. But I haven’t required the wearing of masks since before even the company lifted the restrictions. All of my staff had already had the Vid, so what’s the point?
I feel no compulsion to guide my life by someone else’s fears. I have my own fears to deal with, like cave crawling and skydiving (which I deal with by not doing them). I decide how I live my life, and it’s been an awesome adventure so far!
The “PSI” site links to a story that claims that there were more COVID vaccine deaths than COVID deaths last week.
That’s BS for a couple of reasons. First, it takes at least 8 weeks after a given week for the CDC’s death data to be near complete. Death certificate data is sent from counties to the state to CDC. In some states, that data is electronic and gets to CDC quickly. In some states, that data is on paper at the county level and has to be compiled electronically for CDC use.
Second, the story on vaccine deaths talks about the data in VAERS, which is used to report vaccine related reactions. They have one link to VAERS. The later link goes to “Open VAERS”, a private site. I did a query on VAERS for COVID vaccine deaths and got a lower number than the one the story quoted. Quite a bit lower.
Third, the data in VAERS can be put in by anyone. It’s of extremely variable quality. I’ve looked at the raw data for COVID vaccine deaths. One entry had “My mother died two weeks after the vaccine. I thought you should know.” No other information. One entry was for an 80+ YO man in a nursing home and had lots of information. He had diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure. He refused dialysis. A week later he got vaccine shot 1. A few days later, he died of, well, kidney failure. So, without doing a deep dive into the data, you can’t really use the raw numbers.
So, I’m a bit skeptical of that site. It seems to be allied with the broader anto-vaxx community.
” He had diabetes, heart disease, and kidney failure. He refused dialysis. A week later he got vaccine shot 1. A few days later, he died of, well, kidney failure. ”
Sort of like all the deaths attributed to the covid.
I’ll stick with Derek Lowe’s “In The Pipeline” blog for late breaking news. Although frankly he is getting tired of COVID posts and replies in his blog. I can understand that.
I think there are more traditional ways that a plague can be eased, ways that have worked in the past. For example, if we tied Dr. Fauci to a pole and built a large fire under him, those smoke from his corpse might appease Apollo, the god who is probably pretty ticked off that someone else has been creating plagues. Maybe it will work, maybe not, but if it saves just one life, won’t it be worth it?
And if nothing else, it’d get rid of Fauci! Sounds like a win! FIRE FAUCI!
It only works with climate.
STOP THE FAKE COVID HOAX
If true, this is a big problem. But I’m sure that it will be dubbed “misinformation.”
As multiple posters above have determined, it is false. And it is misinformation. Why do you propagate it?
An update. And also a way to keep people looking at old threads. I love adding nuggets to old posts. Keeps people on their toes.
So yesterday, Derek Lowe posted in his blog “In The Pipeline”:
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/07/21/how-well-does-the-jj-vaccine-work-against-the-delta-variant
the question: “How Well Does the J&J Vaccine Work Against the Delta Variant?” I encourage you to go to the link for the full story, but to summarize: it appears according to a preprint in the bioRxiv here:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.19.452771v1
from a team of researchers from NYU, that Derek coalesces into a single table that the J&J vaccine may prove to be significantly less effective that the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines against the Delta variant in terms of neutralizing antibody titers. In fact, even worse that convalescent serum after 82 days. Whereas in term of AB titers the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines yield numbers ~6x and ~7x respectively within a spread of about 10 days between samples taken in the regime of about 3 months elapsed time.
Derek’s table shows two columns for Delta, (Delta and Delta+) but both contain similar results. I think this argues strongly that the J&J folks should probably consider getting boosters, but that is out front of the medical establishment and maybe too preliminary to judge. I tend to err on the side of caution when I see these kinds of spreads.
There is also this letter to the NEJM from researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2108829?query=featured_home
that studies antibody titers directly on the J&J vaccine given in both single and double doses. For the Delta and Kappa variants the single doses cluster below the median line when compared to the two dose figures. But in general tend to cluster in the 10**2 range although there were some clusters in the 10**1 range (tens of titers as opposed to 100 of titers) for single dose cases. (See Table C).