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Please Get Vaccinated
We are in the middle of another COVID spike in Texas, in much of the rest of the country and the world. In Texas new infections are up by 300 to 400%.
Fear-mongering comes in the news in the form of Greek letters these days, but the fear-mongering has a kernel of truth to it. Unvaccinated people are at increased risk of getting infected; as an adult, if you get infected you have a 10% chance of getting severe disease. Leaving aside the chance of death, if you get severe disease you have a 30% chance of having long-term problems, like dementia, which in popular accounts is described as “brain fog”. And the brain fog for those who get it is not going away.
So, according to the Wall Street Journal, if you’re not vaccinated your chance of getting long-term problems or dying from COVID is 25 times greater than for those who are vaccinated. Yes, the vaccines are incredibly effective and safe, better than most vaccines we’ve had before. And they are still effective even against the Delta variant of COVID. Pray to God that no resistant strains of the virus ever emerge, but the longer this pandemic drags on the more likely it is that resistant strains will emerge. And this pandemic is going to keep going as long as people don’t get immunity, either through catching the disease or through vaccination.
Here in Podunkville, Texas, you can walk into any Big Box Drug Store and get jabbed, usually for free. There’s a huge amount of evidence now that the vaccines are safe long-term. If that’s not good enough for you then every single one of the medications and vaccines that we’ve ever used are not good enough for you.
Get vaccinated, my people.
Published in Healthcare
If the patient can’t oxygenate well enough without ventilation then there’s no choice but ICU care. Of course, this is with severe disease, which is becoming less likely.
Presumably the booster would be a modified form of the vaccine to cover the variants.
With respect, we conservatives don’t cover ourselves with glory when we embrace these sorts of conspiracy theories.
That part made me giggle.
I wouldn’t worry about it. The way things are going you will eventually catch COVID and then you’ll be immune. Hopefully, you won’t suffer complications of the infection. Or get someone else infected.
The way I assess the risk getting the vaccine is several orders of magnitude safer than waiting to get infected even if you are young.
Ha! No one would ever take any medicine if they read those inserts. Written by lawyers they are.
My understanding is that covid-positive people were told to go home from the ER and come back when they can’t breathe. Isn’t there an alternative treatment to this?
Between being old, being fat, being diabetic, being hypertensive, and being deficient in Vitamin D the risk factor that seems to be the most central in causing severe COVID is being obese. Even young fat people who are otherwise healthy are more likely to have severe COVID infections.
Yes, diabetes I and II are different diseases treated differently with different pathogenesis, different natural histories, etc.
Well, the number of vent cases is staying low compared to April, which is good.
The idea of mRNA vaccines was developed by DARPA for military use because in the face of a military biological weapon threat a new vaccine could be turned out rapidly. That’s true, but I know of no reason it should have stayed confined to the military if it’s safe and effective.
I really don’t understand the thinking of those who criticize these vaccines on the basis that they were not “fully approved” or some such. We were supposed to wait 10 years for the regular approval process to be completed? Really? What happened to the famous conservative aversion to stupid regulations?
I got the vaccine, seemed to be the best course to me. Virtually every doctor and nurse I know strongly recommended it, got it, and had their families get it. That tells me a lot.
I know it’s not data and obviously not everyone’s experience but I’ve known two people under 50, one of whom I think was even late ‘30’s, but I’m not sure, who died from Covid. I know of several others who were older than that, of course, who died. And these have not been pleasant deaths, apparently. And, of course, I have known or know of a number of others who were hospitalized and had close calls. I have never in my lifetime seen a contagious illness have this kind of impact.
So, I recognize everyone has had different experiences and mine may not be representative, but the vaccine was an easy call for me.
And I’m not bothered by the “fear motivation” critique. How many people who use that argument to criticize the Covid response have a CCW for protection? More than a few, I would guess. Everybody is motivated by fear of something.
Yes, I understand that, but this was said in reference to the 2nd shot of the two-shot regimens, such as the Pfizer vaccine, that are out there now.
None work for COVID which is the item of discussion.
Well, yeah, but then you continued writing your post.
Sorry for the snark. Allow me to expand:
The fact that fewer people have severe disease now is most likely due to the fact the it’s younger people catching it as most of the old ones are vaccinated in the US.
Dr. Malone may have helped invent the vaccine but he doesn’t seem to know much about clinical pharmacology. As with all medications the vaccine has toxic effects if too much is given. One of the things determined in trials is the safe dose, so all the brouhaha about spike protein effects is moot. The vaccine is made to provoke production of spike protein in the body to which the body’s immune system reacts, resulting in immunity to COVID. This has the potential of getting out of hand unless kept small enough for the body to tolerate. This is precisely the goal of proper dose determination.
The were not fully tested.
What sheer data?
The CDC isn’t telling. Fauci said that he has a good coronavirus antiviral didn’t he? But this information is being censored. Whom should you believe?
I will never understand asking someone else to get this vaccine. If you believe it works, you get it. It shouldn’t matter what anyone else does if you think that your choice will protect you.
I will deal with the “brain fog” if I get it. The same way I deal with any make-believe illnesses that were just created for the millennial generation, like “chronic anxiety” or “chronic fatigue” syndrome. Wake me up when the Black Plague hits, then I’ll pay attention. I am much more concerned with how weak our society is becoming when we are desperately throwing around charts and graphs to argue the difference between a miniscule chance and a microscopic chance of something bad or mildly inconvenient happening. A society this weak will become incapable of handling any kind of conflict whatsoever. This concerns me much more than “brain fog.”
No, this is a false statement. Even for young people the disease is orders of magnitude riskier. Besides which, young people getting infected keeps the pandemic going.
To say that this vaccine is unproven is asserting a falsehood. We have more than 100 million cases vaccinated in the US alone to look at, and the vaccine is shaping up to be one of the safest and most effective ever made. We won’t get better evidence than that.
It would be selfish for me to tell you to get vaccinated so that this damned virus will finally go away? I’m fully vaccinated. I’m mostly out of the equation at this point. The benefit you’ll get is mostly for you and all the other unvaccinated.
The vaccine produces a small, non-replicating subset of the proteins the virus produces. This subset is a major part of what produces, among other things, damage to the vascular endothelium in general, and microvascular damage in particular. There are many pathologies in which this tissue is already compromised. In addition, the liposomal delivery vehicle for the mRNA contains novel lipids which themselves produce a strong, in some cases very strong, immune response.
Osteoarthritis, erectile dysfunction, retinal vascular disease, and some forms of kidney disease and dementia are among these disorders; really most pathologies associated with diabetes, which does a good deal of its damage by compromising the function of the blood vessel lining. Microvascular function is critical to placental health, so this may explain reports of miscarriages in recently vaccinated women.
HCQ is believed to act (at least in part) by blocking SARS Co-V2 binding to ACE-2 receptors, so there is good reason to think that they may protect against tissue damage caused by spike protein, though there are indications that ACE-2 binding may not be the only mechanism by which the spike protein causes problems.
The bottom line is that a person with immune problems faces a near certainty of encountering the spike protein in large amounts if vaccinated, a much lower likelihood of encountering the virus itself, and has a drug available which is both prophylactic and, in the early stages of the disease, a successful therapy.
The EUA would never have been granted if the real efficacy of HCQ and ivermectin had not been the target of a successful disinformation campaign.
This kind of criticism is cynical because it takes advantage of the fact that we don’t know some things. What we do know, however, refutes your argument. The vaccine is much less risky than getting the disease. There should be no controversy about that.
What “highly effective” treatments? People are stull landing in the ICU!
Talking about potential future side effects is fear mongering based on speculation without evidence. What we know about vaccines in general is that significant side effects show up less than 2 months from the jab. There’s no reason to think that this vaccine is any different; the effect of it is to present foreign proteins to the body, the same as older vaccines.
In which the true believers become unintentionally self-mocking…sad.
And this made me laugh!! The first time I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33278625/
Both Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin are old, well-tested, cheap drugs. They do NO harm, so why not try one or both if you get Covid? Take your zinc and Vitamin D too.
HCQ doesn’t work by any mechanism b/c it doesn’t work period. Ivermectin is unproven and most of the studies claiming it works are poor quality studies. In the various meta analysis articles claiming it works, ( ie Hill, Bryant, and Khory)the entire positive result for ivermectin essentially depends on two studies- NEITHER OF WHICH HAS BEEN PUBLISHED- ie Elgazaar (Egypt) and Niaee (Iran)- the Elgazaar study has recently been retracted (closer inspection of the article has lead to suspicions that it is a fraudulent study)-https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/huge-study-supporting-ivermectin-as-covid-treatment-withdrawn-over-ethical-concerns.
the other study (Niaee) has serious questions about it as well-a good review of the problems with the ivermectin studies:
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/954681
a further point- many of the studies claiming ivermectin works come from places where the incidence of “zombie studies” and suspected fraudulent studies is high- ie Iran and Egypt or from sites with problems. As an example:https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/surgisphere-sows-confusion-about-another-unproven-covid19-drug-67635
So far, the better quality studies typically do not support the use of ivermectin. The PRINCIPAL study has an ivermectin arm and hopefully it will clear up the situation.
lastly- an ounce of prevention (vaccine) is worth a pound of treatment….
No medicine exists which does no harm…..even vitamins can be bad
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8901853/
I’ll make it clear that I’m not advocating mandatory vaccination, but I do wish people would get vaccinated.
So I’m not a conservative because I advocate vaccines? I advocate vaccines using conservative principles, like conserving my rear end and yours.
There are treatments available. I’m not that up on how good they are, but a lot of ER docs don’t think they are good enough to bother with. Some docs here in Texas will offer you ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, your choice. My understanding is that people are told to get an oxygen saturation monitor (from a drug store) and come back when the sat. drops below a certain level, like 94% or something, It’s only a small percentage who have to come back. Most go on to recover uneventfully.
I don’t get that myself. Just more immunity, I guess.
I did not say any such thing. (I do scoff at the use of the universal “we” for such applications around here.)
But then again, maybe I should say such a thing. (I guess that would fall under the “compassionate” brand of conservatism that has done wonders for diluting the brand into meaninglessness.)