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COVID: 100% Vaccination Is NOT the Goal
Or at least shouldn’t be.
Reducing the spread and/or seriousness of the disease is the goal. Vaccines appear to be a tool that helps toward that goal. Yet the rhetoric about Covid vaccine mandates now treats vaccination itself as the goal. So confusing the goal and a tool intended to help achieve that goal keeps people and organizations from seeing other tools that might be useful to achieve the real goal, and causes people and organizations to pursue the tool regardless of whether it continues to contribute toward the goal.
I have often seen in the corporate world employees and departments get so focused on a particular tactic used to achieve a company goal that the employees come to think of the tactic as the goal, and lose track of what the real goal is. Besides becoming blind to possible alternatives to achieve the real goal, they get so wedded to the tactic that they fail to consider whether the tactic is still contributing to the goal, and run the risk of continuing the tactic even if it no longer contributes to the goal.
With respect to Covid, I fear that so many have become wedded to the tactic of 100% vaccination that they have lost sight of whether other tactics might be useful, and they are not considering whether the tactic is really accomplishing the goal of reducing the spread or seriousness of Covid. Natural immunity is being almost completely ignored. Treatments of the disease are being almost completely ignored. Health issues that suggest the vaccine could be high risk for some people are ignored by many of the vaccine demands. Employers and schools with populations at extremely low apparent risk of serious Covid consequences (the young and healthy) fail to consider whether vaccination will really reduce the spread or seriousness of the disease within their populations, and refuse to consider any balancing of the very low apparent risk of the vaccine with the very low apparent risk of the disease itself. 100% vaccination has become the goal.
If we could keep our eye on the goal of reducing the spread and seriousness of Covid and treat vaccination as A tool that seems to contribute to that goal, rather than treating vaccination as the end goal itself, we could have much more useful public discussions about how to achieve the real goal. Unfortunately, too many people and organizations in government, media, and corporate businesses have become wedded to vaccination as the only tool they will consider, and thus 100% vaccination has become the goal, instead of reducing the spread and seriousness of the disease itself. Thus, such useful public discussion of the goal of reducing the spread and seriousness of Covid no longer seems possible.
Published in Healthcare
Study, basically.
“I’ve heard over and over that the vaccine ameliorates symptoms but does not activate the immune system to destroy the virus.”
This isn’t true. We know that the vaccinations create the spike protein and cause an immune response. We know that is true. There is some question as to how much it activates the immune system, and for how long the immune system “remembers” the virus, but we know this is true and the data bears it out.
“This, as I’ve read and heard from virologists, causes them to shed more virus than the infected unvaccinated.”
I think you are talking about ADE, antibody-dependent enhancement. My understanding that this theory is that antibodies created cause cells to take up the virus, rather than shed it. Some vaccines did in fact do this. RSV vaccines did this in the 19060s. But this is something they looked at during the development and trials and they continue to look at it. It doesn’t happen with these vaccines, at least not with any frequency to cause concern.
Well, you may be right, but I’ve read and heard differently.
Right. So have I. It’s like I said above, we each trust our own experts. No biggy. I’m just telling you what I think is true, based on what I’ve read.
Although there have been issues with the vaccines, in aggregate those issues are a small percentage. So I’m leaning in the direction that ADE is not an issue here.
In risk management, one does assesses the overall risk by matching the probability of risk occurrence with severity of impact if risk actually occurs. If you realize it or not, that’s what you’ve described there. You can see what such a risk matrix looks like here. Ideally you would have quantifiable numbers on the risk of occurrence (in probability) and severity of outcome (usually dollars or descriptive events). Still if the probability of the risk is so low (and we’re talking one in millions here) then the overall risk is still low, despite the severity of a catastrophic outcome. You get on a plane, right? The risk of crashing is so low that you get on, even if the catastrophic outcome is possible. Still ultimately here you have to contrast with risk of not doing something, in this case not being vaccinated, and undoubtedly the severity of impact is the same for both being vaccinated and not being vaccinated. The overall risk management decision would still be to get vaccinated because the probability of an unvaccinated person dying from Covid is at least an order of magnitude greater than a vaccinated person.
Maybe because this sort of analysis is part of my work, I can see why being vaccinated is the correct risk management decision so clearly.
I don’t either…lol.
Except you still don’t know the physical costs two and three years down the road.
You have no way to quantify this.
OK. But from what I understand, this technology (mRNA vaccines) is not new. From Wikipedia:
Perhaps it’s new for this particular application, but it has been around and tested on animals. Plus we are now at least two years since the human trials on Covid began. While there may not be a numerical value for probability for three years down the road, the qualitative data (between animals and two year results) does not indicate any higher risk. Of course that’s to my knowledge, which to be up front, I’m not in the medical field.
I don’t think this spike protein has been tested on anyone prior to mass inoculation. And I don’t know that producing any mRNA medicine has been used on humans to produce foreign bodies.
Not tested on anyone? There were trials, perhaps not as extensive as traditional. There have been trials on animals. I can understand this concern back in March. We’re now into the billions of people worldwide who have been vaccinated. If there were some issue, I think at this point it would have been evident. But the perception of risk is apparently more influential than the actual numbers.
There are three aspects to immunity: (a) does it prevent infection? (b) does it lessen the severity of infection/ (c) does it prevent spread?
The vaccines get great results on severity, limited benefits on infection, and very little benefit on controlling spread.
For old geezers like moi the very small risk of adverse vaccine outcomes is very probably outweighed by the risk of severity that COVID presents.
For younger, healthy people, the likelihood of a severe outcome is pretty small, and given the politicization at FDA, the risk from the vaccines may be understated. In any case, accepting either small risk strikes me as equally rational.
From a selfish standpoint, I would prefer that young and healthy people do not get vaccinated because if the virus spreads among them (with predictably minimal harm) it will toughen up the herd and help protect me much more than if they all get vaccinated. Natural immunity is better across the board than vax immunity.
Leaving aside the moral and legal issues, mandating vaccines makes no public policy sense. The more vulnerable are nuts to pass it up but for everyone else, it’s a coin toss and a large share of natural immunity in the population is probably a better outcome in the not-so-log run.
Vaccinating healthy kids is criminally stupid. They are at near-zero-risk from the virus so the risk from the vaccine is almost certainly higher. Worse, they would all be vastly better off exposed and naturally immune to a harmless (to them) virus to add to the immune arsenal going forward.
OK. There are things I agree in there and things I disagree. Let me leave it there.
Fair point, but we do know, at least to some degree, the long term affects of a serious COVID infection. They aren’t good.
Yeah, mRNA vaccines were in the works for SARS and MERS, but those were contained before the vaccine was completed. A big reason Trumps Operation Warp speed was able to get results in a year was that the funding was used to ramp up existing research. They already had the bare bones of the vaccine, they just had to modify it to this specific virus.
In that case, your phrasing should probably be something like “I don’t think so” or “I don’t agree,” rather than “this is false.”
Yes, because you’re dealing with GROUP risk management.
That too. And in his work, he’s dealing with GROUP risk.
Did previous work deal with spike proteins?
What do you mean by group risk and why would it be any different?
Group risk means that out of 100 or 1000 or 1,000,000 people, X number are “expected” to “suffer adverse consequences” or whatever. If you can get X from its old value to 1/2 X, you’ve done a good job. But the 1/2 X people who are still going to maybe die, have a different perspective.
As I mentioned the other day:
Huh? That’s how you assess risk. That makes no sense at all.
I really don’t know. Since the late 1980s scientist knew that could use mRNA to produce proteins. They did some testing in the past on corona viruses (I think they are the only ones that have spikes) so it is possible. I am not sure why that matters.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w
Maybe because producing/creating spike proteins in the body can have unforeseen consequences? Even if other types of mRNA vaccines have been tested previously?
The mRNA technology has been referred to as an “operating system” which can be easily “programmed,” but an “operating system” can be used to create destructive programs – “viruses” – as well as good programs.
I hope this is meant to be tongue in cheek. Are you making an argument against the Covid Vaccine or modern medicine?
Consider heart surgery. 95% of people have no adverse events and “only” 1-2% of younger somewhat healthy people die following the surgery.
https://www.secondscount.org/heart-condition-centers/info-detail-2/benefits-risks-of-coronary-bypass-surgery-2#.YXsSkZ7MKUk
There are individual and rare (like 1 in a million) risks to everything in medicine from major surgery to taking an anti-biotic. If your goal is zero individual risk, that is not possible.
No that’s not my point, but any kind of GROUP risk calculations cannot, by definition, really account for INDIVIDUAL risk.
I could make it kind of a story by saying let’s take a group of 100 people. Maybe there’s a 1% chance of someone in that group having a bad reaction to any vaccine, not just covid, because of… oh, I dunno, let’s say diabetes.
And let’s say there’s one guy in that 100 that has diabetes. He says “I can’t get the vaccine because I have diabetes.”
The GROUP RISK manager looks at him and says, “No, there’s only a 1% chance that you have diabetes, so it really can’t be you.”
The guy with diabetes says “BUT I HAVE DIABETES!”
The GROUP RISK manager says “you probably don’t” so he’s forced to get the vaccine, and dies.
The GROUP RISK manager says “well there was only a 1% chance of that, so I did my job and it’s fine.”
Does that help?
Out of curiosity KE how long from this mass inoculation would you say that now there is no dangers from the vaccine? It’s proven safe. Three years, four years? Ten years? A hundred years?
Some depends on how far they go. If they start vaccinating young children, it might take 20 years or more to find out if there are consequences to their fertility, for example.
I’ve read about “studies” showing that “most women spend most of their life without a husband” or something like that, and then found out that for the study, “women” included girls as young as 12.
Well, trials lasting 24 hours or even 24 months are only the first step and functionally inconclusive to safety. Facui stated out loud on a recorded forum, that the point of using a viral crisis was to get mRNA vaccines in use soon by circumventing the years-long safety and efficacy laws.
As for animal studies, I’ve read different things. A quick search revealed two “fact checker” sites that claimed to debunk the accusation that vaccines were not tested on animals, and one never mentioned any animals that were tested, but only that this is standard procedure and that the vaccines were ultimately approved.
Another site said essentially the same thing, and included this concerning quote: “Research (UAR), told Full Fact that in the case of Covid-19 vaccines, data already existed to indicate the vaccines were safe, which enabled researchers to run animal trials alongside the early stages of human trials.” This claims that an assumption drawn from previous vaccine studies allowed animal studies to be conducted while being simultaneously administered to humans.
But even this is not enough. ANY vaccine must pass rigorous long-term safety trials and this was not done. If the vaccine had been a slightly modified version (to capture variants) of a standard previous vaccine (that is, made from actual grown viruses), I can see that shorter studies may be appropriate. But I’m not aware of any independent long-term studies, or any studies at all, that involved programming cells to make a lab created, unnatural, foreign molecule within the human body, and purportedly a toxin at that.
And there’s no way that there has been enough time to thoroughly test this new technology and specifically regarding this new vaccine, for a novel virus.
Added: If you have any specific information on what animals and what human groups these vaccines were tested on, and how the animals fared, I’d be obliged if you let me know.
If they happen to occur.
Not these spike proteins. They were lab-created with grafted coding from other viruses (at least one deadly virus) onto their structure and they did not exist in nature until released from the lab.