[Rondec]

Everything we do has some risk attached to it. Falling down in the bathtub is a risk, but people still take showers. Overindulging in food is a risk, yet 2/3 of the population of the USA is considered overweight, with half of those people being obese. The numbers in Canada aren't quite as high, but still....
People still smoke tobacco, drink alcohol (guilty as charged, Your Honor) and do all sorts of things that have much higher risk factors associated with them, and then turn around and say they won't allow themselves to be vaccinated because of the risk.

At the drive through clinic that I drive past frequently, I saw a couple of anti vax protestors waving their stupid signs with one hand and smoking cigarettes with the other. I suppose the irony was lost on them.

Since you posted this, I have resolved to give up showers and baths. It shouldn't affect my presence on the Forum, but my family may suffer a bit.

Best to be safe!

[Wheatfield]

Since you posted this, I have resolved to give up showers and baths. It shouldn't affect my presence on the Forum, but my family may suffer a bit.

Best to be safe!

Good for you. The odds of falling down in the tub are far greater than anything a vaccine could give you, and you know that at your age bones just don't heal like they used to.

[Photos-by-Chas]

This has not been a mild flu season. In fact the CDC has said that so far 56,000 people have died form the flue this year, That is up from the 40,000 deaths we have been averaging this decade. Clearly masks and social distancing have not reduced deaths form the flu. I am not sure why reported cases are so low. Either the flu variety this year is extremely deadly of cases are simply not being reported.


No one has a firm number on herd immunity percentages. Early on it was stated at 60%. Now people say 80%. A recent statistical study with a 95% probability says that the actual number of people who have contracted COVID-19 is 6.2 times the reported cases. That means that over 200,000,000 people in the US alone have actually had the disease. If this is true, we have vastly overstated the fatality rates of the disease.


If we really have over 140,000,000 people who have contracted the disease and fought it off do they really need the vaccination? They already have antibodies against it. Very early in the pandemic a sample test takes on New York City showed that 25% of the population of the city already had antibodies against it. What we do need to do is start testing the those who have not been vaccinated to get an solid idea of what steps to take from here. Continued panic mode does no good for anybody. I am not in favor of pushing a yet to be fully approved vaccination onto children. Especially since they have the least to fear from the disease and adverse reactions may be a bigger problem than the disease in their age class.


I do believe that there is a lot about this disease we are not being told. But then again if you doctor sends you to a specialist for anything it is almost impossible to get them to tell you what they think (or even know) what may be going on.

The stats you quote are different from the stats I've seen. OTOH, I learned years ago that using one set of statistics can result in different conclusions depending on the wat they are used and by whom. I'll stick with my conclusions and you stack with yours. Also, based on my training in the medical field (trained as a Navy corpsman and employed as a physician assistant for around 3 decades, I'll continue to push for vaccines and trust the scientific community, like the epidemiologists, physicians and virologists.

[tranq78]

The drug companies didn't test past 21-28 days because they wanted to get these vaccines into use as quickly as possible, so they aren't going to say anything else.

I just read on my news feed that in Saskatchewan, the first dose has been 99.9% effective at stopping the plague 3 weeks after the shot is given. I've also been reading a whole bunch of independent research indicating that the 4 month interval actually ends up giving a better immune response than the 4 week interval.
In Canada, the federal politicians are using the information they are being given by the medical community in their news releases regarding vaccine efficacy and intervals.

Provincial government mouthpieces, especially the ones in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario seem unwilling to follow the advice of the medical community regarding stopping the transmission of the virus, which has led to a mish mosh of rules that sometimes make little sense. I could meet my friend at a Tim Hortons and sit in the restaurant, but can't have that friend over to my house for coffee, for example, though restaurants are now closed for anything other than takeout or delivery at the moment. Apparently on May 17th, they will be allowed to start serving in their dining rooms. I don't know if we can start to have gatherings in our homes at that time, but I somehow doubt it.

I have no problems with the safety of any of the vaccines. More photographers get killed each year falling off cliffs taking selfies or hopping over the fence to step into the waterfall than people dying from vaccine complications. I'm concerned about efficacy while the media only wants to talk about deaths from blood clots. I'd just rather take the vaccine with 90% effectiveness versus the one with 60% effectiveness.

Drug companies have 100 years of data on corona virus outbreaks/treatments, since the 1919 Spanish Flu. So their recommended tenor between doses is based on what they've learned from COVID and historical data. Pfizer and Moderna are for-profit companies and they want to make money and yes vaccine testing was on a rush basis so they didn't test 4-6 month intervals, but there's still a science behind why they picked 3 weeks. In the end I trust the scientists in the drug companies more than I trust what politicians are saying.

It's not politically correct to say this, but COVID is acting like a corona virus. It's mutating to become more contagious but the lethality is actually declining on a per capita basis, certainly as compared to when it first broke out in China. COVID is still dangerous and it can still kill, so yes I'm taking a vaccine and I think anti-vaxxers are foolish. But with vaccinations and declining lethality we'll get through this pandemic. If you want lethal, consider MERS -- it's hard to get but has 30% lethality!

I've been away from the forums for a while. Good to see your post Wheatfield and glad you are fine.

---

Last edited by tranq78; 05-12-2021 at 09:28 PM.

[mtkeller]

There’s only one human coronavirus that is endemic. It likely was the cause of an epidemic in Russia in the 1890s and is now part of the collection of viruses that cause the common cold. More recently, we have had SARS and MERS, which were coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The work on trying to develop vaccines for the viruses that caused SARS and MERS (ultimately unused because carriers were symptomatic for days before being contagious) is what allowed us to so quickly have vaccines for SARS-CoV-2. I don’t know that we actually have enough data to say that the mutations are becoming more contagious. The sensitivity and specificity of the tests is still not fully nailed down, and most places have not had the ability to do any meaningful form of surveillance testing. It may just look like new variants are more contagious because we are testing more. The good news is that bioinformatics researchers have looked at the mRNA of the virus and determined that most mutations cause damage to the spike protein in a way that renders the virus unable to invade/replicate. They claim that the most severe variants are already in circulation, and mutations that we see that are able to reproduce will be less strong.

[vrphoto]

Been meaning to do this for a while - many thanks for all you who have been posting about your vaccination experience.

Reading your posts has really helped alleviate my fear of the unknown about getting vaccinated. I had already intended to do so as soon as eligible, but knowing that I'm in the same boat as you all has made it a much less anxious experience.

So now I'll add my experience in the hopes that it will help some one else.


A few weeks ago, I had my first jab of Astro Zeneca at midday. That night, I experienced chills and shaking like never before, but no headache. It was not alarming because I'd been warned that it was one of the possible reactions. Next day, very tired and lethargic, but not surprising with the amount of energy used in shaking that night. After that, nothing.

My aged parent (of 96 years) was very weak the day after her first vaccination, alarmingly so, but she recovered the following day and there have been no other repercussions.

To those of you who are still hesitating, I say - please do it, you'll experience an unexpected amount of relief about an anxiety that you may not even be aware that you have. And you will be protecting your nearest and dearest and those of others.

[Rondec]

This has not been a mild flu season. In fact the CDC has said that so far 56,000 people have died form the flue this year, That is up from the 40,000 deaths we have been averaging this decade. Clearly masks and social distancing have not reduced deaths form the flu. I am not sure why reported cases are so low. Either the flu variety this year is extremely deadly of cases are simply not being reported.


No one has a firm number on herd immunity percentages. Early on it was stated at 60%. Now people say 80%. A recent statistical study with a 95% probability says that the actual number of people who have contracted COVID-19 is 6.2 times the reported cases. That means that over 200,000,000 people in the US alone have actually had the disease. If this is true, we have vastly overstated the fatality rates of the disease.


If we really have over 140,000,000 people who have contracted the disease and fought it off do they really need the vaccination? They already have antibodies against it. Very early in the pandemic a sample test takes on New York City showed that 25% of the population of the city already had antibodies against it. What we do need to do is start testing the those who have not been vaccinated to get an solid idea of what steps to take from here. Continued panic mode does no good for anybody. I am not in favor of pushing a yet to be fully approved vaccination onto children. Especially since they have the least to fear from the disease and adverse reactions may be a bigger problem than the disease in their age class.


I do believe that there is a lot about this disease we are not being told. But then again if you doctor sends you to a specialist for anything it is almost impossible to get them to tell you what they think (or even know) what may be going on.

What I saw quoted for flu deaths for the 2020-2021 season was under a thousand. This article said 450 in the middle of March and I'm not sure it has climbed much since then: How Many People Die From Flu Every Year? - Flu Deaths 2020-2021

I haven't seen stats that show that we have missed nearly that many cases of COVID in this country. Seems more like most expert think number of people who have had COVID is about three times the positive tests. That would put us at 100 million cases.

The concern is two-fold -- antibody levels definitely start to fall at some point six months to a year after being infected. So if you were infected April 2020 in New York, you may have pretty low antibody levels at this point. The other thing is that some of the variants (particularly Brazilian and South African strains) are not only more contagious, but also seem to evade antibodies from previous infections. So stats in Brazil showed their most recent wave happened in Manaus where previous estimations had been that 75 percent of the city had had COVID previously. The Lancet

It is a free country and people can and will choose to do what they want to, but I actually think that doctors and scientists have been open and published what we know about various outbreaks as they happen.

[MarkJerling]

This has not been a mild flu season. In fact the CDC has said that so far 56,000 people have died form the flue this year, That is up from the 40,000 deaths we have been averaging this decade. Clearly masks and social distancing have not reduced deaths form the flu. I am not sure why reported cases are so low. Either the flu variety this year is extremely deadly of cases are simply not being reported.


No one has a firm number on herd immunity percentages. Early on it was stated at 60%. Now people say 80%. A recent statistical study with a 95% probability says that the actual number of people who have contracted COVID-19 is 6.2 times the reported cases. That means that over 200,000,000 people in the US alone have actually had the disease. If this is true, we have vastly overstated the fatality rates of the disease.


If we really have over 140,000,000 people who have contracted the disease and fought it off do they really need the vaccination? They already have antibodies against it. Very early in the pandemic a sample test takes on New York City showed that 25% of the population of the city already had antibodies against it. What we do need to do is start testing the those who have not been vaccinated to get an solid idea of what steps to take from here. Continued panic mode does no good for anybody. I am not in favor of pushing a yet to be fully approved vaccination onto children. Especially since they have the least to fear from the disease and adverse reactions may be a bigger problem than the disease in their age class.


I do believe that there is a lot about this disease we are not being told. But then again if you doctor sends you to a specialist for anything it is almost impossible to get them to tell you what they think (or even know) what may be going on.

It's been a very mild flu season here. See https://www.flutracking.net/Info/Report/Latest/NZ
This is not due to mask wearing but to large scale use of hand sanitizer at most businesses and premises. In short, we're all behaving better and we're keeping our hands and subsequently surfaces cleaner.

But, back to the USA. The CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010.
Since Covid has started, the USA has seen nearly 33 million (tested) Covid cases and it's about to hit 600,000 deaths. Covid is at least as infectious as the flu and it's ten times more deadly, going by the numbers.

I receive the flu vaccine every year and most years it stops me from getting very ill, or I'm lucky and I don't get very ill from the flu. But, I get colds badly, so I don't think it's luck. Covid is really an aggressive cold virus. Many cold viruses are very similar to Covid. I hope that what we're learning with Covid and our fight against it will eventually translate to ways to deal to the common cold too. I could do without coughing my lungs out every winter.

[35mmfilmfan]

I've had both of my jabs (I'm over 70, with mobility and breathing 'issues'). No adverse reaction after either - indeed, before going home on the bus on each occasion, I went for a walk round UEA Broad (Norwich) with camera gear and binoculars bird watching. All being well, local Nature Reserves re-open on Monday (when rain is predicted) - and you'll not see me for mud ! Seriously, most of the bad publicity surrounding these inoculations has been promulgated by people with no experience and even less knowledge.

[Wheatfield]

The stats you quote are different from the stats I've seen. OTOH, I learned years ago that using one set of statistics can result in different conclusions depending on the wat they are used and by whom. I'll stick with my conclusions and you stack with yours. Also, based on my training in the medical field (trained as a Navy corpsman and employed as a physician assistant for around 3 decades, I'll continue to push for vaccines and trust the scientific community, like the epidemiologists, physicians and virologists.

Health Canada couldn't track the beginning of the flu season because there wasn't one to track. We do have much better compliance with mask use here, which will be very effective at discouraging the flu. We also had a much larger uptake of flu vaccine last fall, as people were concerned about having to deal with both the flu and covid-19.

---------- Post added May 13th, 2021 at 08:39 AM ----------

I have no problems with the safety of any of the vaccines. More photographers get killed each year falling off cliffs taking selfies or hopping over the fence to step into the waterfall than people dying from vaccine complications. I'm concerned about efficacy while the media only wants to talk about deaths from blood clots. I'd just rather take the vaccine with 90% effectiveness versus the one with 60% effectiveness.

Drug companies have 100 years of data on corona virus outbreaks/treatments, since the 1919 Spanish Flu. So their recommended tenor between doses is based on what they've learned from COVID and historical data. Pfizer and Moderna are for-profit companies and they want to make money and yes vaccine testing was on a rush basis so they didn't test 4-6 month intervals, but there's still a science behind why they picked 3 weeks. In the end I trust the scientists in the drug companies more than I trust what politicians are saying.

It's not politically correct to say this, but COVID is acting like a corona virus. It's mutating to become more contagious but the lethality is actually declining on a per capita basis, certainly as compared to when it first broke out in China. COVID is still dangerous and it can still kill, so yes I'm taking a vaccine and I think anti-vaxxers are foolish. But with vaccinations and declining lethality we'll get through this pandemic. If you want lethal, consider MERS -- it's hard to get but has 30% lethality!

I've been away from the forums for a while. Good to see your post Wheatfield and glad you are fine.

You need to dig a little deeper. When a politician says something, go check his sources and see if they are credible. The sources I get my hard information from are all indicating that the several month wait between doses is fine, and actually gives a stronger immune response.
Also, the AZ vaccine used a different test procedure from the Pfizer or Moderna ones. This was because the AZ vaccine was invented by a bunch of eggheads at Oxford university, while the other two were invented by big pharma. The result was that all three vaccines efficacy were misreported as far as the real world results went. The AZ vaccine was also tested partly in South Africa where it was running into the B.1.351 variant which it is not as effective against (neither are Pfizer or Moderna). This brought the AZ numbers way down. The big pharma companies were much more careful regarding how their tests were done with a mind to getting reportable efficacy numbers as high as possible.
Pfizer and Moderna are still very good vaccines, but their real world efficacy is really in the high 80% range, somewhere around 88%. AZ, it turns out, is not far behind, in the 82% - 85% range.
I agree with your assessment regarding covid-19 becoming less lethal, although the situation in India bears witness against us, most viruses will mutate into something that doesn't kill the host eventually, as killing the host is suicide from a survival and spreading point of view. I suspect that the common cold was a lot more lethal a few hundred years ago, though we probably blame the lethality then vs the mere inconvenience now on things like better diets and sanitation.
Note that the flu virus is not a corona virus.

---------- Post added May 13th, 2021 at 09:00 AM ----------

I've had both of my jabs (I'm over 70, with mobility and breathing 'issues'). No adverse reaction after either - indeed, before going home on the bus on each occasion, I went for a walk round UEA Broad (Norwich) with camera gear and binoculars bird watching. All being well, local Nature Reserves re-open on Monday (when rain is predicted) - and you'll not see me for mud ! Seriously, most of the bad publicity surrounding these inoculations has been promulgated by people with no experience and even less knowledge.

There seems to be a very noisy minority regarding spreading FUD regarding the whole covid-19 experience. We have our own local cabal of retardedness here that is insisting the whole thing is a scam (the scamdemic) and everything we see on the news is carefully curated fiction being put on by panic actors.

Then we have the closely aligned anti vaxxer brigade who are insistent that the vaccine isn't necessary because there is no pandemic (see above regarding panic actors), and that it causes all sorts of grief. Talk to these people and you get the feeling that every vaccine is going to have a 99% chance of killing you in some way. T

These are also the same group that is exemplified by The Centner Academy in Miami Florida that won't let it's teachers get vaccinated because of the biologically impossible claim that unvaccinated women have experienced miscarriages and other reproductive problems just by standing in proximity to vaccinated people. Anti science, and anti thinking. The scary thing in this example is that this is a private school, so it's people who are responsible for educating children who are passing off this stupidity.

In Canada, there are now being shown very strong links between the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and scamdemic groups to white supremacy groups. Go figure that a group of people who are already primed to believe in conspiracies would pick up on this.

I took my truck into the shop this morning for some service work. The shuttle driver was telling me that one of the things he was told yesterday was that over 40 people had died in my home city on Tuesday, not the two that had been reported, but we wouldn't hear about that because the media wouldn't report it since the government wants the numbers to look better for reopening stuff.
I guess these 40 families are going to be paid off somehow for shutting up, and not having a funeral. I do wonder how 40 people can just disappear like that and not cause a ripple.
O, wait. It didn't really happen, it's just the flip side of the coin of stupidity.

[Serkevan]

This was because the AZ vaccine was invented by a bunch of eggheads at Oxford university, while the other two were invented by big pharma.

Just as a small correction, the "Pfizer" vaccine was invented by BioNTech, which while still a somewhat large company with more than a thousand employees, it certainly isn't in the same weight class as Pfizer, which has ~80k employees and a yearly revenue of 40 billion.

Also, in a similar arrangement as the Germans, the Oxford eggheads* are backed by Astra Zeneca, which is as big pharma as the other two (heck, it's about thirty times bigger than Moderna and half of Pfizer, by revenue) and is the one who conducted the trials (although everyone might have subcontracted those things, there are companies specialized in carrying out large scale clinical trials), so they all play by the same rules. That said, it's most likely not far behind the others in actual efficacy and I'd been happy with any** jab they gave me.

*also apparently incapable of using spectrophotometers properly to check how much dose they are giving.
**Okay, I'd been a bit miffed with J&J...

[mtkeller]

As a Moderna trial participant, I can confirm that the trials are subcontracted. I think we got to be a trial site because the virus was running rampant here in April/May of 2020, before it had really caused a true spike in a lot of other US regions other than the greater NYC metro.

[luftfluss]

Get my second shot (Pfizer) tomorrow afternoon...

[mee]

Get my second shot (Pfizer) tomorrow afternoon...

Cool. Only a day away from becoming a solid 5g signal.

[luftfluss]

Cool. Only a day away from becoming a solid 5g signal.

So I'll be the tinfoil on the rabbit ears, eh?