How can you not see that with serology there is no reason to rely on the original shots today? There is no reason to be pushing this crap on most people. Vaccinate or unvaccinated. Especially kids. Any doctor pushing for a healthy child to take these shots needs to be questioned. We have known the risk gradient from the beginning and we decided to ignore it and science. Instead we went all out must take this drug because it will keep you from getting Covid. These people were talking out of their rear ends instead of focusing on protecting the high risk groups. Here we are still with no shot for the high risk groups for a disease they could use one for. But we have a animal tested only bivalent shot coming for them after getting these shots out in 9 months for the ancestral spike protein. Yeah…that is the antithesis of confidence. And that is the problem. We need to clean house!
The disease killed far more when you look at the indirect deaths (starvation/suicide/missed diagnosis/etc)… It was a terrible disease. And we handled it about as bad as we possible could. Causing a lack of trust in public health going forward that was completely avoidable!
It was, and today, we have a good outcome with respect to Covid, and your conclusion is that we did a terrible job?
Because of the success of our health systems, and due to mutation of the virus, we are now in a position that vaccination may have a different benefit to risk profile. Weighing in favor for vaccination, is the very good safety profile. A caregiver needs to weigh the risk to benefit for every patient. Because we are in a good place with the pandemic, I look at this as a success. That said, there are always ways to improve, and communication is one of those areas.
We did an awful job from a public health standpoint. We continue to ignore science. It is infuriating. We should have had shots for the high risk groups for these variants far faster if mRNA was the answer. Nothing had changed. The elderly and certain immunocompromised are the ones dying. Vaccinate or Unvaccinated. And now we want to force those who might want an animal tested bivalent shot for one of the subvariants that will be a minority variant by the time it is authorized…only available if you take the ancestral variant designed shots. Just STUPID! Not science. But par for the course these days sadly…
Well…it is clear doctors no longer are pushing these shots. Hence the throwing away of millions and millions of doses. Time to clean house!
You keep saying we ignored science and should have done a better job. Yet we made a tremendous advancement in vaccine science. Millions of lives were saved as a result. That's good science and really good drug development and partnership between health regulatory agencies and industry. With respect to the bivalent mRNA vaccines - Pfizer has submitted to both the EMA and FDA for approval of the omicron variants. They should be available this year, as early as Sept. That's pretty good. They have additional vaccines lines up for additional variants as well.
While the achievement of getting the covid shot out quickly was an achievement. You are making stuff up by saying it saved millions of lives. On top of that it completely failed once time passed. We went from you will almost certainly never get Covid to boosters for the variants the shots did not protect one from. It is crazy it took this long to get a variant specific shot out. It is going to be too late when it comes to serology as well. And yes we ignore science to this day with these shots. Making someone who chose not to take the original shot(s) take those in order to get get the bivalent shot that presumably will get EUA is not following the science.
The development of the vaccine was completely novel and worked. In the time frame it usually takes for a novel drug, once discovered to approval, is close to a decade. This was unusual and brought to success by good science and a sense of urgency, where everyone pulled together to focus on the vaccine. Suggesting the vaccine did not prevent death defies all facts. The incident of death for the unvaccinated per 100,000 people 12 and older is 1.71. The incidence of death for people with a primary shot (2 doses of the Pfizer mRNA, or 1 shot of J&J) is 0.22 deaths per 100,000 and even less with the primary round and a booster, 0.1. That's 8 to 17 fold greater incidence of death without the vaccine - so it's not a stretch to say millions of lives were saved. You can read about incidence and vaccine status in Scientific American How to Compare COVID Deaths for Vaccinated and Unvaccinated People
I never said it did not help. To say it saved millions of lives is just a made up conjecture by you. That said…it failed miserably once delta hit and it’s ability to last.
What about the incidence of death is made up? Look at the data - these are epidemiological facts, they are not my conjecture. If you have a different analysis, by all means, share it.
You do not know that a million lives were directly saved by taking the shot. That said…far more died indirectly from the idiotic policies put in place by governments around the world. And immeasurable damage has been caused to people and their livelihood and mental health. These shots provided a minimal therapeutic help to some in the beginning. Unfortunately we did not take a focused protection stand and instead threw everything at these shots. And they failed in the grand scheme. Follow the money sadly. We should have been focused on those who are older and with certain immunocompromised issues. There is no excuse to not have had a omicron specific version of the shot at this point. In fact with the delivery system created it should have been available before 2022. But here we are about to have one released finally that has been tested on animals and we will still require someone who did not get the original shot(s) to do that before they can take the omicron specific. This is not science.
Your criticism of the science and policies in the absence of any data, unless you are an epidemiologist or have worked in this field for many years, just comes off as your opinion. The incidence in deaths is real, the effect of vaccination to reduce the incidence is real. You can choose not to believe it, but that doesn't support an argument, only your own bias and position. The vaccines were the backbone of a response to the pandemic, in addition to antibody drugs for severe illness, and basic public health policies such as masks, social distancing, WFH. Altogether, this multiple, pronged-approach has worked. The Pfizer vaccine was first available in Dec, 2020 for emergency use and approved one year ago. One year later we will have the bivalent booster with the original virus spike protein and the Omicron spike variant ready for emergency use approval and release in Sept. 2022. To gain regulatory approval required preclinical testing and Phase 2/3 clinical trials. This is only after three months from the time the FDA released their guidance for spike variant vaccine. The speed and agility is precedent in our industry.
Only thing I will argue here is there was not 17k children that died from Covid. An extremely small amount of children died of Covid worldwide, but because of how they counted Covid deaths, the numbers are unfortunately not useful. Look at the US numbers, they are a complete joke. I’ve posted countless times about the so called “Covid deaths” in children. Even the CDC admitted that they overestimated Covid deaths in children at an extremely high rate. Only children with a lot of underlying conditions should get the vaccine.
We are still focused on jabbing kids and young healthy people with a drug they do not need. There is a stronger argument that these shots should not even be EUA for this group. Especially kids if we want to use science. Masks and social distancing is a joke. You want to wear one….go for it. Outside a N95/KN95 you are virtue signaling or would be wearing it like before the pandemic out of caution for a disease one might be dealing with. You might feel like you were doing something. But you were not with this disease.
At this point, we are not getting anywhere in this discussion. You are not using science in your argument, just your opinion that you think we are not using science. I thank you for the discussion, though, I always learn something.
