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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
There is at least one way we’d all benefit if more people got the vaccine, and that’s that most likely the pandemic would end. Wouldn’t that be nice? And it’s the unvaccinated folks who would benefit the most from that.
I am not, however, advocating for mandatory vaccination. I just hope that enough people will be convinced to get the jab.
The pandemic is over, if it ever existed in the first place. I see no evidence that this wasn’t just a slightly worse flu strain that happened to occur at the perfect time politically. Unhealthy people and old people will continue to die, just like they have since the beginning of time. Or are you really talking about the lockdowns? The lockdowns were never necessary. There is more than enough evidence out there that they did more harm than good.
So you want me to take an experimental treatment that I do not need, financially reward the people who destroyed millions of lives last year, just so they can reward me with freedoms that they never had the right to take away in the first place? How is that a conservative stance?
I’m not aware of any evidence that either of those drugs is actually effective despite a ton of anecdotal reports. (I’m not saying they shouldn’t be used.) If you know of any I’d love to see it.
Another point –
I do think that some of the anti-vax hysteria is overblown. Maybe there is a 0.001% chance that I will die from it. About the same as the actual virus. But that’s not the point. Regardless of whether something is good or bad for me, I do not have to do anything just because somebody demands that I do. If I was going to wear a blue shirt and you nag me nonstop about how I need to wear a blue shirt, you threaten me if I don’t wear a blue shirt, you want laws passed demanding that I wear a blue shirt… then maybe I will go back inside and change into a white shirt. It doesn’t matter if ultimately there is no difference in what color shirt I wear, I do not owe you obedience.
Nobody really knows if it’s “safe and effective,” yet.
I don’t think that’s true. Hundreds of millions have gotten the jabs by now. We have a lot of information on safety and effectiveness. A big clinical trial, if you like. Nothing untoward about the vaccines has been reported, serious side effects seem to be very rare.
You’re appealing to their authority as experts, and they’re appealing to the authority of others as higher-up experts, people who have been shown to be often making decisions based on criteria other than objectively medical. Meanwhile, I would expect that at least 9 out of 10 doctors and nurses, and perhaps as high as 99 out of 100 or more, couldn’t tell you how the vaccine works if you asked them. My mother was an RN for at least 30 years, and if you asked her even just how to spell vaccine, I wouldn’t be surprised if she came up with something like “vaxeen.” Which is not to say that no nurses are good thinkers, but I’ve seen decades of evidence in that case and others, that it’s definitely not a requirement.
Yeah, but a lot of the anti-vaxxers or reluctant vaxxers are appealing to authority, too. Sometimes they name the guys whose authority they appeal to, and sometimes the words they use are a giveaway. They repeat the same phrases they heard somebody else use, and sometimes those are phrases and arguments nobody would have thought up on their own.
That’s part of the point too: “your” experts aren’t necessarily better just because they have an RN or MD or whatever after their name, as they also repeat phrases they don’t understand.
The use of this phrase gets me almost as angry as any time I hear Dr. Fauci.
Yes, I realize that and I’m fine with it. As you may have gathered by the fact that you can’t go anywhere these days without tripping over an octogenarian, modern medicine has a pretty good track record.
Right….One thing I try to not base decisions are statistics I make up out of thin air. But even if you’re right about that, 1 out of 10 is still a much higher ratio than I’ll get from internet political forums.
Unless they run into someone named Cuomo.
And of course much of that longevity is about the medical treatment they received much earlier, not so much the medical care they receive as octogenarians. Add to that, that so much of the left’s agenda is about “thinning the herd” at the upper age levels, rationing healthcare to people with “quality of life” etc, because old people cost so much but don’t pay much in taxes…
Not the point.
So, now you’re saying I shouldn’t believe doctors and nurses I’ve known for years, and basically the rest of the medical community, that getting the vaccine is the way to go, but I should, instead, believe that this is all part of a leftist conspiracy to kill old people? Do I have this right?
Not really. The large point is really that no matter how long you’ve known them, that doesn’t make their appeals to authority necessarily credible.
The experts I like are the ones that can produce studies and data, either their own or someone else’s. And who can show that they’ve read them and can discuss them. They often have degrees, such as MD or PhD, but that in itself doesn’t guarantee anything.
Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner under Trump, said that you’re probably going to get the delta variant if you’re unvaccinated or immune from prior infection. Due to how contagious it is. I generally believe what Gottlieb says, unlike many of the others. Apparently you can get exposed to it if you’re around someone who has it for only a few seconds, as opposed to a few minutes.
I thought it came from the Brits. I didn’t care for it myself when I first heard it, as I don’t always care for British slangy ways of talking, but I’ve gotten used to it now and even use it myself now.
Those aren’t likely to be “front-line” doctors and nurses, the ones people are more typically relying on to guide them.
At least in some places it seemed to come about as a deference to the “covid vaccine” not really being a vaccine like other vaccines. As with the annual “flu shot” being the “flu shot” not the “flu vaccine.” Because it’s not.
???
You never heard that? I did. They didn’t want to call it “covid vaccine” because of pushback that it’s not really like other vaccines, and they didn’t want to call it “covid shot” like “flu shot” for other reasons (maybe because of being anti-gun? who can tell?) so they went with “jab.”
I suppose it’s not substantively different from switching “global warming” to “climate change.”
That depends. Nowadays I do a lot of research on-line to keep my newbie doctor on her toes and help her get used to her profession. It helped me raise a ruckus when I was dealing with Lyme Disease last year, and I think she is more on top of the issue now. (Her nurse now tells me, “Yes, I remember that.” I’m sure she does, because I got a little angry over the phone.) After my 2nd bout my doctor sent me to an infectious disease specialist who seemed to know his stuff pretty well. By then I was familiar with a little, though not all, of the relevant recent research, and that helped us get straight to the point.
I listen to my doctor, because she knows a lot of things I don’t know. But she doesn’t know everything, she relies heavily on her industry’s guidelines, and it’s my own responsibility to take charge of my own health. And that sometimes involves getting a little bit familiar with research reports.
Under our ObamaCare system the front-line doctors seem to practice the art of medicine with a paint-by-numbers system, using CDC recommendations as the start and end points. I don’t like that. I’m glad the CDC recommendations exist, but I don’t take them as gospel for all circumstances.
And we know how consistent and objective the CDC has been with covid…
There is a famous conservative aversion to adopting behavior which has unknown long-term consequences, as is the case here.
Uh, no, not gonna happen. Doctor says I have diabetes, although not at the stage of insulin shots. 2/5 who die of Covid appear to be diabetic.
Remember when we were tracking “deaths”? Then a year ago that changed to tracking “cases”?
The regular flu has killed so many. What would have happed if we tested everyone who contracted the flu but had no symptoms? And then based public health policy on cases?
Basing public health policy on cases is for fools and totalitarians. Fear is the mind killer, as someone used to say.
1,000 new cases with a 99+% survival rate is not a health crisis.
BTW, those who have such fear, stay home, Get everything delivered.
Don’t be like the leftists who require the world to change for a few.
Color me skeptical.
It just grinds my gears.
Late to the discussion, but I’m all for choice in this instance. I chose (as did all my immediate family) to take the vaccine (Pfizer), but I know others who refuse. I understand people’s skepticism given the corruption of all our institutions and if you’re not in a high-risk category, then, meh. Take your chances with the bug. I have no problem with that. I would prefer not to lose more loved ones who might be in the high-risk category, but everyone should be free to choose. Although I do think it unwise to vaccinate very young people. It just seems unnecessary. I also think making kids wear masks is child abuse. Awful.
I would like to hear from @mendel about the history of mRNA immunotherapy (pretty sure it didn’t start in 2020) and the safety/efficacy of the vaccine he helped to develop.
I (shockingly) agree with former-PM Theresa May, this virus is not going away. We have to learn to live with it and sometimes die from it. The Lord sits on His throne.
The studies I’ve heard about wrt HCQ did not include zinc in the protocol. Front-line docs who’ve recommended HCQ included Azith and Zinc. It’s almost as if researchers wanted the drug to fail. . . I diagnose a bad case of TDS.
Also, HCQ and Ivermectin are not OTC. You have to find a doc willing to prescribe. We’ve got our supply handy even though we’re vaccinated. I have a friend who was hospitalized last fall (not in the high-risk group) and was a long-hauler. She went on Ivermectin and has made marked improvements. It’s anecdotal, but I figure if you’re in that situation, the drug is relatively benign (low risk) and might help.
This is a very foolish statement given that the vaccines all skipped several levels of testing, including long-term trials. This is the first time a gene-therapy “vaccine” has been given to a mass human population.
For the last year, my wife and I have been working with a Manhattan-based biotech firm wanting to go IPO with new cancer therapies for organ tumors. The education we received regarding the human immune system and T-cells, as well as so much more, has helped us understand how the alteration of a cell’s genetics leads to a decreased immune response.
These gene altering “vaccines” are doing precisely that. So no, my wife and I will not be taking the vaccine until we are forced to in a detention facility, supported by people so programmed with fear, they look on with approval.
As if the founding principles in our country’s founding documents are negotiable.
No, they are not.
I’ve wondered about the adoption of the “jab” rather than the “injection” or the “shot”.