Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

Messaging is key. I think when we hear "vaccine" we think about things like polio. Eradication. Almost total disappearance.
Perhaps a different term should have been used from the start.

I don't know.

 

that sucks

 

I have been screaming this

 

polio is not passed from person to person as an aerosol.

 

I agree the messaging gets lost/manipulated. People will take a "flu shot" but are steadfast in their refusal to get a "flu vaccine" in study after study.

I prefer to never catch the flu. If I do contract it, I would like for the symptoms to be mild and not send me to the hospital. That is exactly how I see the Covid vaccine.

I really, really hope that both you and your wife and daughter have very mild experiences.

 

Thanks. Good podcast. I put it in my follow list.

Offit is awesome. I love how he rattles off statistics on just about anything vaccines including history. You also get the sense he says what he thinks based upon his interpretation of data, not just parroting conventional wisdom.

 

It's pretty natural to think vaccines if effective just wipe out a disease. Until I read an article by an MD in the Atlantic I didn't really understand how different viruses incubate faster or slower, or that short term antibody and long term Tcell/memory cell defenses are different and work differently.

 

It really has more to do with misinformation than with terminology used. Vaccination is the correct term.

The fact that people will take the “flu shot” but not the “flu vaccine” indicates that people are easily manipulated maroons and/or don’t know the meaning of words.

Several posters have spread these lies here, believing the COVID shot isn’t a vaccine. SMH.

 

North starting to get their waves.
Seems Omicron will dominate but appears to be less harmful. That’s good news since it looks like it’s escaping the vaccines rather easily.
Most of the World’s Vaccines Likely Won’t Prevent Infection From Omicron

 

Doesn’t the article state that the vaccines in the US actually do a decent job?
Are you talking about the northern US?

 

Can't hurt.

I'm not panicking about Omicron yet. But for that matter I've never really panicked about Covid anyway. But I'll have a better idea of how bad Omicron is tomorrow when I go in. We've seen a bit of a spike in infections in our area the past few days and if it's bad patients will have started showing up in the ER this weekend.

 

The fascinating thing when comparing covid to polio is the vaccines have almost exactly the same efficacy after two doses. The big difference is that we moved heaven and earth to get everyone vaccinated for polio after 60k deaths across 50 years, but we couldn't get people on board with getting vaccinated for covid after 400k, or 500k, or 600k, or 700k, or 800k deaths.

I don't know if it is really that we care that much less about our fellow Americans, or that we are more easily manipulated, but something has gone wrong with America.

 

Did you read it?
It states it offers almost no protection to getting infected.
The variant is already proving to be a rather weak virus vaccinated or not.

 

I read it, it says

But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have initial success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world.

The other shots — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of Omicron, early research shows.

 

I wonder if was because polio had a lasting visual reminder. Lots of people and kids permanently disabled. With covid, you mostly don't see the sick. They are taken to the hospital, you can't even visit them, and they die. While the immediate families are affected most people in the US aren't. So for 90% of people in the US that didn't have a loved one die or hospitalized it isn't really real to them.

 

Go get the Regeneron MAB asap

 

I had read it was effective but just not as incredibly effective vs Omi as i had been against other variants.

 

Two very different diseases hard to compare the like that.
Did you know early on in the polio battle there was a huge issue one of the suppliers and numerous kids died from bad vaccine?

 

Curious I’ve asked three ID guys I know how two shots do almost nothing yet a third works so very well, doesn’t really make sense. They didn’t have an explanation either.

 

Affinity maturation of the antibodies produced by the B cells is the theory.