Are We Entitled to Our Own Medical Facts?

 

Tonight in my local synagogue a liberal neighbor loudly (and sarcastically) proclaimed: “Don’t you know that the vaccine cuts fertility in half?! That is a scientific fact, and nobody can deny it.”

I asked him whether or not the Placebo Effect is a fact. He said that it was, clearly. I then asked whether, if someone believes the vaccine will hurt their chances of getting pregnant, could it not happen, thanks to the placebo effect, regardless of any underlying physical causality?

He changed the subject.

But I think this is an interesting thought-piece. I think for medical things, within limits, we are entitled to our own facts, because our perceptions and beliefs can have a real impact on medical outcomes.

What say you?

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  1. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    iWe:

    I think for medical things, within limits, we are entitled to our own facts, because our perceptions and beliefs can have a real impact on medical outcomes. 

    What say you?

    Yes.

    This is basic William James/John Dewey.  Reality (or reality as we know it) has a practical character.  Our beliefs may create their own truth about things subject to our influence.

    This ain’t one o’ them crazy philosophies.  Truth is still an alignment of belief and fact.  And it only works within limits–within the limitations on what our beliefs are able to effect.

    • #1
  2. aardo vozz Member
    aardo vozz
    @aardovozz

    Interesting take. The placebo effect is, after all, real.

    • #2
  3. iWe Coolidge
    iWe
    @iWe

    And we know that stress absolutely can hinder fertility.

    • #3
  4. Bob Thompson Member
    Bob Thompson
    @BobThompson

    Does PTSD have resulting physical effects?

    • #4
  5. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    What makes you think we’re allowed to know the facts? 😉

    • #5
  6. Amy Schley, Longcat Shrinker Coolidge
    Amy Schley, Longcat Shrinker
    @AmySchley

    iWe (View Comment):

    And we know that stress absolutely can hinder fertility.

    Stress has far less effect than commonly believed. See pregnant women who live in refugee camps, war zones, and/or conceive via rape.

    • #6
  7. iWe Coolidge
    iWe
    @iWe

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Does PTSD have resulting physical effects?

    There are some VERY strange results of depression and similar maladies.

    In 2018, a woman named Karin nearly died of a broken heart. There were no underlying diseases, no congested arteries, no signs, no symptoms—yet her heart suddenly ballooned in size and threatened to burst. If at that moment she hadn’t happened to be lying on an operating table for a routine retinal procedure, she would certainly have died. Karin was later diagnosed with broken-heart syndrome, which can be caused by severe stress, sudden shock, bereavement, financial losses, even a surprise party. And it can kill you.

    “Between 2015 and 2016,” she tells us, “169 children in disparate towns in Sweden had gone to bed and not got up again.” Doctors called it resignation syndrome. It starts as a kind of fatigue; the children speak little, then not at all. When they fall into an endless sleep, their frightened parents might take them to the hospital, but their brain scans inevitably come back normal. They are not in comas. On paper, they appear to have normal waking and sleeping cycles. But some of them have been asleep for years. Some may never wake at all.

    In Kazakhstan, she meets Lyubov, an elderly woman who was once Patient Zero for a sleeping sickness that afflicted Krasnogorsk. A uranium mining town, Krasnogorsk had been a valuable asset to the Soviet government and, as a result, was well supplied. In the 1970s, its residents were all privileged and young: “They started families at the same time and watched their children grow up in relative opulence,” Dr. O’Sullivan explains. “They had everything they wanted.”

    Lyubov serves Dr. O’Sullivan a mournful tale over milky mayonnaise soup. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Krasnogorsk was abandoned and left to crumble. Many homes lost heat and running water. Most of the residents relocated. As one of the few who refused to leave, Lyubov eventually fell into a sleeping sickness. Her first bout lasted four days. Other patients followed, some 130 people in a population of 300. None of them ever had concrete signs of disease. It was not, Dr. O’Sullivan explains, an illness driven by deprivation—but by deep sorrow and grief.

     In all of the cases she covers, from broken-heart syndrome to sleeping sickness to inexplicable seizures and people being possessed by “devils,” the best means of recovery come from the patient’s community. “When societies lose a shared spirituality and a sense of community and family,” she writes, they also lose their support systems.

    • #7
  8. Caryn Thatcher
    Caryn
    @Caryn

    No.  Facts are verifiable and replicable.  Yes, perceptions and beliefs can indeed have a real impact on medical outcomes, but that makes it all the more important for people to understand correct facts rather than embrace hoaxes or fears.

    The vaccine/infertility fear is utterly without substance.  There are, on the other hand, real issues with male infertility and poor pregnancy outcomes associated with Covid disease.

    • #8
  9. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Caryn (View Comment):
    Facts are verifiable and replicable.

    Not all of them.

    • #9
  10. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):

    Caryn (View Comment):
    Facts are verifiable and replicable.

    Not all of them.

    Quite a few of them aren’t. The sun rose here at 8:18 this morning. 

    • #10
  11. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    I once was talking this old guy who was still active and retired from business to a life on a farm, and I said that if I had it to do all over again I’d like to study the placebo effect, what it is.  And without missing a beat he looked up at me with a bright smile and said, “Joie de vivre!”  That was his whole thesis, I suspect.

    • #11
  12. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    iWe: Tonight in my local synagogue a liberal neighbor loudly (and sarcastically) proclaimed: “Don’t you know that the vaccine cuts fertility in half?! That is a scientific FACT, and nobody can deny it.”

    That seems to be a straightforward proposition to test. And so they did. :-)

    However, the scientists involved in developing vaccines have known for some time that there will always be side effects they can’t anticipate. That’s why they built the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS):

    VAERS was established in 1990 and is managed jointly by the FDA and the CDC. It is meant to act as a sort of “early warning system”—a way for physicians and researchers to identify possible unforeseen reactions or side effects of vaccination for further study.

    Human beings have created a highly complex chemical, electrical, and psychological environment for themselves. Anything is possible.

    What makes the VAERS system so impressive to me, in terms of its design, is that it simply gathers data. It’s a camera that doesn’t care what it is seeing.

    The genius in creating this reporting system is staggering. These were people who really wanted to learn what was happening out there in the real biological world. It was more important to them to learn than to know.

    The sciences have changed since the 1990s. I don’t think we could have gotten where we are today in the practice of medicine with the current crop of leaders in the sciences.

    Something has gone wrong, and people like your neighbor sense it, but they can’t put their finger on the problem or its cause. Mistrust has followed, as well it should. The bus is all over the road, the passengers know it, and everyone is nervous about the driver.

    In their mind, I think the CDC and others are trying to re-create the heroic development of the polio vaccine. It was a great story, and it captured the imaginations of billions of people. But that was a unique moment in human history. Jonas Salk gave the world water to put out a fire people could see with their own eyes.

    This is not the same situation. For this pandemic, the real heroes have been the boots-on-the-ground doctors who have developed successful treatments for their own patients. It has been the doctors who have calmed the fire so that it is now only the dying embers that we see.

    The vaccines were a godsend part of the solution. They work well for older people who are the most affected by this particular virus. But most younger people don’t really need the vaccines after all, and they don’t see a fire that needs to be put out, and they don’t want to take the risk of having a relatively new vaccine.

    The CDC scientists need to let the VAERS do its work, and they need to respect the intelligence of their fellow human beings.

    • #12
  13. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    There will always be idiosyncratic individual beliefs. The current, larger underlying problem is (a) a broad consensus that there are no honest brokers in charge of medicine and public health and (b) a coalescence and amplification of doubt and alternative views by social media.

    A world in which the eminently reasonable, prescient and scientifically correct Great Barrington Declaration is considered fringe thinking while a prevaricating, self-promoting weasel like Dr. Fauci and a complete buffoon like Rachel Wallensky are in charge of policy will inevitably be a world filled with wildly different beliefs about medical science. 

    People may be gravitating toward their own facts because the people in charge can’t be trusted to provide good information.

    The claim that vaccines are 95% effective against severity, infection and spread, even more effective than natural immunity is self-evident crap but is the current position of federal authorities. I think it is possible that the reported adverse effects from the vaccines are only occurring  in persons who would have had a similar outcome from the virus itself if it is the spike protein that is the cause of the damage. But I have zero confidence that the PTB will provide honest answers sufficient to make that kind of risk calculation. We are science. Shut up and trust us and don’t try to post your doubts online.

     

    • #13
  14. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    Old Bathos (View Comment):

    There will always be idiosyncratic individual beliefs. The current, larger underlying problem is (a) a broad consensus that there are no honest brokers in charge of medicine and public health and (b) a coalescence and amplification of doubt and alternative views by social media.

    A world in which the eminently reasonable, prescient and scientifically correct Great Barrington Declaration is considered fringe thinking while a prevaricating, self-promoting weasel like Dr. Fauci and a complete buffoon like Rachel Wallensky are in charge of policy will inevitably be a world filled with wildly different beliefs about medical science.

    People may be gravitating toward their own facts because the people in charge can’t be trusted to provide good information.

    The claim that vaccines are 95% effective against severity, infection and spread, even more effective than natural immunity is self-evident crap but is the current position of federal authorities. I think it is possible that the reported adverse effects from the vaccines are only occurring in persons who would have had a similar outcome from the virus itself if it is the spike protein that is the cause of the damage. But I have zero confidence that the PTB will provide honest answers sufficient to make that kind of risk calculation. We are science. Shut up and trust us and don’t try to post your doubts online.

    I more or less unconsciously make decisions about reality based on a great pool of statements of others and my own personal experiences that I individually weight with probability of being true and the probability of their interrelationships and their overall significance.  The trouble with covid and “vaccines” is that there is so little trustworthy information to be found.  (I put quotes around vaccines because they changed its definition to normalize the product and to accommodate official narrative.)

    But the definitions and therefore the significance of “death by covid” and “death by vaccine” has varied so much it is useless for me to try to get to a true understanding from it.  Competing studies and interpretations of the causes of deaths are also skewed by the Media’s information filtering, which forces fringe information and otherwise outlandish claims into the mix.  And this leaves me with the question of Why the narrative and the data is allowed to be so loose, and then after that Why officials seem to be so set on one unproveable interpretation given the looseness of the data.

    And the potential answers to these last two questions reinforce questioning the validity of the original information.

    For example, answering the question “Why is it that, seemingly contrary to the data, the government and major corporations say we must trash the economy and disrupt and limit everyone’s life styles until 100% (!) of the population is vaccinated?”  The fact that this question exists further brings into question the veracity and applicability of all the data ever since February of last year when the lies were first begun.

    • #14
  15. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Old Bathos (View Comment):
    The claim that vaccines are 95% effective against severity, infection and spread, even more effective than natural immunity is self-evident crap but is the current position of federal authorities.

    And it us used to justify repressive and economically catastrophic policies.

    Old Bathos (View Comment):
    I think it is possible that the reported adverse effects from the vaccines are only occurring  in persons who would have had a similar outcome from the virus itself if it is the spike protein that is the cause of the damage.

    There is reason to think that this may not be the case, or at any rate, not the whole story. It was claimed that the liposomally encapsulated spike protein mRNA would stay put at the injection site until it was degraded. That turns out not to be true. It bioaccumulates in ovaries, bone marrow, and other tissues for at least several days after an injection. The liposomes contain some naturally found lipids, and other, proprietary, novel ones which were not disclosed by chemical name in the papers I read. Some of these lipids are pretty immunologically reactive; the ones used are less so than some of the ones tried in the development of the drugs but still can increase the inflammatory cytokine IL-6 several fold (animal studies.) I believe that this was looking at blood levels of IL-6. A few cell types produce I-6; one is found in bone marow. Elevated serum IL-6 is known to be clinically correlated with multiple myleloma, (a bone marrow cancer) becoming much more aggressive. Raising bone marrow IL-6 in MM doesn’t sound like a good idea.

    Multiple myeloma incidence increases with age, so MM patients tend to fall into the age groups which are encouraged to get one of he COVID shots due to increased risk  (even in the absence of multiple myeloma) of a bad clinical course in the event of  COVID. MM patients, and patients with marrow disorders predisposing to MM, should make a good study population.

    Flicker (View Comment):

    I once was talking this old guy who was still active and retired from business to a life on a farm, and I said that if I had it to do all over again I’d like to study the placebo effect, what it is. And without missing a beat he looked up at me with a bright smile and said, “Joie de vivre!” That was his whole thesis, I suspect.

    The placebo effect is hard to study. At least some of the reported effect of SSRIs seems to be due to patients who experience “side effects” of the medication and then (correctly) concluded that they were taking the active drug—breaking the blinding of the study. For that reason, in some  studies an “active placebo” is used: a drug which produce one of the common adverse effects of the study drug but which is not known to have the drug effect under study.

    • #15
  16. Amy Schley, Longcat Shrinker Coolidge
    Amy Schley, Longcat Shrinker
    @AmySchley

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):
    The placebo effect is hard to study. At least some of the reported effect of SSRIs seems to be due to patients who experience “side effects” of the medication and then (correctly) concluded that they were taking the active drug—breaking the blinding of the study. For that reason, in some  studies an “active placebo” is used: a drug which produce one of the common adverse effects of the study drug but which is not known to have the drug effect under study.

    When I was using clinical trials to get antidepressants, the studies would have a no drug control group and a non investigation SSRI control group. My body responds very quickly to SSRIs so I knew I wasn’t in the no-drug control group. 

    • #16
  17. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):

    Flicker (View Comment):

    I once was talking this old guy who was still active and retired from business to a life on a farm, and I said that if I had it to do all over again I’d like to study the placebo effect, what it is. And without missing a beat he looked up at me with a bright smile and said, “Joie de vivre!” That was his whole thesis, I suspect.

    The placebo effect is hard to study. At least some of the reported effect of SSRIs seems to be due to patients who experience “side effects” of the medication and then (correctly) concluded that they were taking the active drug—breaking the blinding of the study. For that reason, in some  studies an “active placebo” is used: a drug which produce one of the common adverse effects of the study drug but which is not known to have the drug effect under study.

    I once read a couple papers summarizing aspects of research into the placebo effect and they did mention particular hormones and biochemical processes that seemed to play an active part, but I don’t remember much of it now.  But, yes, it seemed very early in the stages of understanding the part psychology plays in physical health.

    • #17
  18. MiMac Thatcher
    MiMac
    @MiMac

    deleted-wrong thread

     

    • #18
  19. Victor Tango Kilo Member
    Victor Tango Kilo
    @VtheK

    I cannot help but wonder if this isn’t a consequence of our Government, academic, and scientific institutions becoming politicized over the past 40-50 years. They squandered objectivity and authority in favor of partisan loyalty.

    • #19
  20. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Don’t forget the possibility for placebo effect from surgery.

    Can’t do much better to implant a positive posthypnotic suggestion than to have a cheerful, outgoing surgeon say: “We’re going to use drugs so strong that they could kill you.  Then we cut you open and fix what’s wrong. You’ll be pretty sore for a while, but then you’ll feel a lot better.”

    Just waking up afterwards begins to reinforce the suggestion, then so does the soreness.

    IIRC in the old days before endoscopic means were used to unblock coronary arteries, somebody did a study of sham surgery vs the actual procedure then in use (which IRL wasn’t much better than placebo anyway in terms of long term outcome.) Then there was a brief period in which Nuremberg had a real influence on medical ethics. Now look at where we are with vaccine studies.

     

    • #20
  21. Caryn Thatcher
    Caryn
    @Caryn

    Victor Tango Kilo (View Comment):

    I cannot help but wonder if this isn’t a consequence of our Government, academic, and scientific institutions becoming politicized over the past 40-50 years. They squandered objectivity and authority in favor of partisan loyalty.

    Yes, I believe this is a problem.  It still doesn’t change the fact of there being objectively obtainable results and truths.  I’ve seen such a disturbing amount of “own facts” behavior on this site–even in this thread–that I’ve withdrawn from commenting in an area about which I actually have specialized knowledge.  Oddly, people without such feel no such need.

    • #21
  22. Bob Thompson Member
    Bob Thompson
    @BobThompson

    Caryn (View Comment):
    It still doesn’t change the fact of there being objectively obtainable results and truths.

    How does the layman do this? There is plenty of well-qualified expert opinion on both sides of this and how can the common people without expertise have confidence in what is presented to them as facts when so much presented as factual is not?

    • #22
  23. Caryn Thatcher
    Caryn
    @Caryn

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Caryn (View Comment):
    It still doesn’t change the fact of there being objectively obtainable results and truths.

    How does the layman do this? There is plenty of well-qualified expert opinion on both sides of this and how can the common people without expertise have confidence in what is presented to them as facts when so much presented as factual is not?

    It’s difficult.  Finding a doc–particularly a specialist–who you’ve known to be trustworthy and knowledgeable (or willing to say, “I don’t know; I’ll get back to you or recommend someone else who does know”) is a good start.  There are a lot of people saying “I’m a doctor, so listen to me” who don’t have the specialized knowledge or who haven’t been following the science.  They are likely not trustworthy, at least not on this, and some of them are quacks selling either themselves or a product.   I know from experience that docs can’t keep up with every advance and every subtlety in every area of medicine.  I also know from experience that people can say or write very plausible sounding things–and even get them published in reputable journals–that are incorrectly analyzed and, perhaps, just plain wrong.  Some are pulled, some are corrected, but many just get read and dismissed by those who know better or are read and assumed to be correct because they’re in a journal.  There are acknowledged problems in the peer review system, but a solution isn’t readily apparent.

    I’m a researcher in bacterial infectious diseases.  I worked on the PCR tests we use in my institution and understand how many of the others work.  I’ve done monthly continuing medical education specifically on covid since the pandemic started.  I’ve followed much of what has been going on here and elsewhere–in the science; I’ve avoided nearly all media.  I still don’t feel 100% equipped to opine on every part of the covid story.  I will say that the vaccines work and have been demonstrated to be safe; that is relatively speaking, which is how every conclusion about safety (including crossing the street) is made.  Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin show some efficacy because they come from drug classes that have a side benefit of being anti-inflammatory.  They don’t cure covid, though they probably make people who would have gotten better anyhow feel better in the short term, while their bodies fight off the infection.  They are not wonder drugs.  Motrin and aspirin likely work as well and similarly.  Anti-viral drugs are rare.  Viruses are extremely difficult to treat, so prevention rules in all cases for viral diseases.  If a vaccine exists, great!  That’s how we got rid of or minimized the scourges of smallpox, polio, measles, many other childhood diseases, and, though they are not viral, some types of bacterial meningitis and tetanus.  Masks do help.  They are not remotely 100%, but they prevent droplet spread.  Worn correctly, they contribute to prevention of spread of all kinds of diseases.  We had essentially no flu season last year–it ended abruptly mid-March, rather than tapering off to mid-May, and didn’t come back.  This year is headed in the same direction, though I’m making no predictions.  We also saw lower rates of diarrheal diseases, probably because people became more conscious of the importance of regular hand hygiene.  I hope that habit continues!    

    On the other hand, while I support vaccines, I am against broad mandates, though I do agree with basic childhood vaccines (MMR, DPT) being required for school attendance.  At the same time, I agree with indoor mask mandates for those who refuse vaccination.  Masking children is dumb, mainly because they can’t wear them properly and that outweighs any theoretical help.  They’re also interfering with education and, for the smaller ones, socialization.  Keeping children out of school for such an extended period was a sin against the children of this country. (Though it had a beautifully unintended consequence of making parents aware of the pernicious things being taught to their children.) I believe that closing down the economy was a political decision meant to hurt a successful president who was about to sail to re-election.  It was damaging and stupid.  I also don’t understand why people are refusing to work and how they’re living.  Are they working for cash?  Living on unemployment (despite jobs being offered)?  Living on welfare?  Does anyone know the answer to that one?

    • #23
  24. Bob Thompson Member
    Bob Thompson
    @BobThompson

    Caryn (View Comment):

    On the other hand, while I support vaccines, I am against broad mandates, though I do agree with basic childhood vaccines (MMR, DPT) being required for school attendance.  At the same time, I agree with indoor mask mandates for those who refuse vaccination.  Masking children is dumb, mainly because they can’t wear them properly and that outweighs any theoretical help.  They’re also interfering with education and, for the smaller ones, socialization.  Keeping children out of school for such an extended period was a sin against the children of this country. (Though it had a beautifully unintended consequence of making parents aware of the pernicious things being taught to their children.) I believe that closing down the economy was a political decision meant to hurt a successful president who was about to sail to re-election.  It was damaging and stupid.  I also don’t understand why people are refusing to work and how they’re living.  Are they working for cash?  Living on unemployment (despite jobs being offered)?  Living on welfare?  Does anyone know the answer to that one?

    But isn’t it interesting to see how much truth we learned when the schools taught children at home remotely? Learning the actual facts as opposed to the facts delivered by the experts can make a big difference. It seems an expert these days is someone with a vested interest.

    @caryn Please tell us what you think of this.

    This Doctor Destroys the Rationale for a Mandate.

    • #24
  25. Amy Schley, Longcat Shrinker Coolidge
    Amy Schley, Longcat Shrinker
    @AmySchley

    Caryn (View Comment):
    I also don’t understand why people are refusing to work and how they’re living.  Are they working for cash?  Living on unemployment (despite jobs being offered)?  Living on welfare?  Does anyone know the answer to that one?

    Regarding the labor issues in restaurants and retail, here are my theories based on my pre-2016 retail experiences and my husband’s current restaurant experiences:

    1. The large majority of these workers were laid off for six or more months. Some just chilled on their unemployment checks, but others used the opportunity to find jobs in industries that did better out of the crisis, e.g. Amazon warehouse worker. Some were probably even wise enough to learn skills for higher-paying jobs with better working conditions. Now that their old job is open, they aren’t interested in switching back. 

    2. In case of two-worker households with children, a laid-off low-wage worker may have found that the loss of income by not working was mostly off-set by the decreased costs of childcare and other costs of working, not to mention the quality of life improvements caused by having more time to spend with one’s children and on housekeeping. Being a stay-at-home parent, like homeschooling, has become enormously more socially acceptable than it was just two years ago, and those parents won’t be rejoining the work force any time soon. 

    3. Gig work continues to grow. Why work a low-wage retail or restaurant job with hours that vary from week to week when you can work when you want to, with higher rates depending on demand? The person who has a choice between thirty hours a week at $10/hr in a regular retail/ restaurant job and $20/hr for the fifteen high-demand hours a week driving Lyft/Uber is making a logical decision with the latter. Particularly when one starts trying to balance childcare schedules, or dealing with the unpredictability of retail schedules. I have heard retail managers criticized for giving employees the same shifts every week, because customers might become more loyal to the employees than the store and employees might try to pick up second jobs or otherwise think that their scheduling needs are more important than the business’s. These are the same people who refuse to develop employees’ skills, so the only way to get a promotion or even a raise is to find a new job. When this is the quality of “managership” of the MBAs running large retail chains, it should be no surprise that employees are looking for better options.

    4. I haven’t seen many signs of it personally, but I bet there is a lot of under-the-table work being done right now while people continue to collect unemployment. With so many people on unemployment, government agencies are limited to auditing only the most obvious and egregious fraud. Get paid in cash, pay for consumables in cash, and tracking down your potential fraud just isn’t worth the governments’ while. 

    • #25
  26. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    Amy Schley, Longcat Shrinker (View Comment):
    With so many people on unemployment, government agencies are limited to auditing only the most obvious and egregious fraud. Get paid in cash, pay for consumables in cash, and tracking down your potential fraud just isn’t worth the governments’ while. 

    Which is why the fed wants the IRS to track every change in your bank account so they can also crack down on the guy who is trying to boost his $19,000 income to $23,000 with unreported gig work.  Let the computers do it, let the algorithms fashion the claims and accusations and form letters and let the taxpayers struggle to respond.  When lawn care guys and housepainters want to be paid only in Bitcoin, the Biden Era will have arrived.

    • #26
  27. Caryn Thatcher
    Caryn
    @Caryn

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Caryn (View Comment):

    On the other hand, while I support vaccines, I am against broad mandates, though I do agree with basic childhood vaccines (MMR, DPT) being required for school attendance. At the same time, I agree with indoor mask mandates for those who refuse vaccination. Masking children is dumb, mainly because they can’t wear them properly and that outweighs any theoretical help. They’re also interfering with education and, for the smaller ones, socialization. Keeping children out of school for such an extended period was a sin against the children of this country. (Though it had a beautifully unintended consequence of making parents aware of the pernicious things being taught to their children.) I believe that closing down the economy was a political decision meant to hurt a successful president who was about to sail to re-election. It was damaging and stupid. I also don’t understand why people are refusing to work and how they’re living. Are they working for cash? Living on unemployment (despite jobs being offered)? Living on welfare? Does anyone know the answer to that one?

    But isn’t it interesting to see how much truth we learned when the schools taught children at home remotely? Learning the actual facts as opposed to the facts delivered by the experts can make a big difference. It seems an expert these days is someone with a vested interest.

    @ caryn Please tell us what you think of this.

    This Doctor Destroys the Rationale for a Mandate.

    A fine example of this, from my comment above: “There are a lot of people saying “I’m a doctor, so listen to me” who don’t have the specialized knowledge or who haven’t been following the science.  They are likely not trustworthy, at least not on this, and some of them are quacks selling either themselves or a product.”  He is an orthopedist who, it appears, specializes in worker’s comp cases. 

    Not every expert has a self-serving vested interest.  There are many fine physicians who have a vested interest in their patients’ welfare. There are many fine and nerdy scientists who are only interested in finding the answer to a scientific question.  To suggest otherwise is to accuse an entire discipline of having no integrity.  That sounds a great deal like the mindset of the defund the police people!

     

    • #27
  28. Saint Augustine Member
    Saint Augustine
    @SaintAugustine

    Caryn (View Comment):

    . . .

    I’m a researcher in bacterial infectious diseases.  I worked on the PCR tests we use in my institution and understand how many of the others work.  I’ve done monthly continuing medical education specifically on covid since the pandemic started.  I’ve followed much of what has been going on here and elsewhere–in the science; I’ve avoided nearly all media.  I still don’t feel 100% equipped to opine on every part of the covid story.  I will say that the vaccines work and have been demonstrated to be safe; that is relatively speaking, which is how every conclusion about safety (including crossing the street) is made.  Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin show some efficacy because they come from drug classes that have a side benefit of being anti-inflammatory.  They don’t cure covid, though they probably make people who would have gotten better anyhow feel better in the short term, while their bodies fight off the infection.  They are not wonder drugs.  Motrin and aspirin likely work as well and similarly.  Anti-viral drugs are rare.  Viruses are extremely difficult to treat, so prevention rules in all cases for viral diseases.  If a vaccine exists, great!  That’s how we got rid of or minimized the scourges of smallpox, polio, measles, many other childhood diseases, and, though they are not viral, some types of bacterial meningitis and tetanus.  Masks do help.  They are not remotely 100%, but they prevent droplet spread.  Worn correctly, they contribute to prevention of spread of all kinds of diseases.  We had essentially no flu season last year–it ended abruptly mid-March, rather than tapering off to mid-May, and didn’t come back.  This year is headed in the same direction, though I’m making no predictions.  We also saw lower rates of diarrheal diseases, probably because people became more conscious of the importance of regular hand hygiene.  I hope that habit continues!    

    . . .

    Great comment! Thank you.

    I’m pretty sure the vaccines are great for people in their 70s, and I’m pretty sure kids without comorbidities at the age of 5 have a bigger risk of being hurt by myocarditis as a Pfizer vaccine side-effect than being hurt by the virus itself.

    Do you agree thus far?

    If so, do you have any idea–even an educated guess–around what age between 5 and 70 the vaccines win in a cost-benefit analysis?  I’ve heard estimates as high as 50 and as low as the teens.

    • #28
  29. Caryn Thatcher
    Caryn
    @Caryn

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):

    Caryn (View Comment):

    . . .

    I’m a researcher in bacterial infectious diseases. I worked on the PCR tests we use in my institution and understand how many of the others work. I’ve done monthly continuing medical education specifically on covid since the pandemic started. I’ve followed much of what has been going on here and elsewhere–in the science; I’ve avoided nearly all media. I still don’t feel 100% equipped to opine on every part of the covid story. I will say that the vaccines work and have been demonstrated to be safe; that is relatively speaking, which is how every conclusion about safety (including crossing the street) is made. Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin show some efficacy because they come from drug classes that have a side benefit of being anti-inflammatory. They don’t cure covid, though they probably make people who would have gotten better anyhow feel better in the short term, while their bodies fight off the infection. They are not wonder drugs. Motrin and aspirin likely work as well and similarly. Anti-viral drugs are rare. Viruses are extremely difficult to treat, so prevention rules in all cases for viral diseases. If a vaccine exists, great! That’s how we got rid of or minimized the scourges of smallpox, polio, measles, many other childhood diseases, and, though they are not viral, some types of bacterial meningitis and tetanus. Masks do help. They are not remotely 100%, but they prevent droplet spread. Worn correctly, they contribute to prevention of spread of all kinds of diseases. We had essentially no flu season last year–it ended abruptly mid-March, rather than tapering off to mid-May, and didn’t come back. This year is headed in the same direction, though I’m making no predictions. We also saw lower rates of diarrheal diseases, probably because people became more conscious of the importance of regular hand hygiene. I hope that habit continues!

    . . .

    Great comment! Thank you.

    I’m pretty sure the vaccines are great for people in their 70s, and I’m pretty sure kids without comorbidities at the age of 5 have a bigger risk of being hurt by myocarditis as a Pfizer vaccine side-effect than being hurt by the virus itself.

    Do you agree thus far?

    If so, do you have any idea–even an educated guess–around what age between 5 and 70 the vaccines win in a cost-benefit analysis? I’ve heard estimates as high as 50 and as low as the teens.

    The thing about the ages is that infectious diseases involve a bit of a moving target.  The simplest model has three moving parts: Susceptible, Infected, and Removed, aka S, I, and R.  People move between the groups.  Susceptibles are all of the people who could get the disease, Infecteds have it, and Removed are people who are no longer susceptible and have been removed from the pool either through immunity or, the hard way, death.  If an effective vaccine is introduced, the model goes S–>R without going through I. Otherwise the R is accomplished by another R, recovery.  As more and more adults move into the R group and out of S, the age dynamic may change.  We’ve already seen a good number of children get sick with covid.  They usually recover and, presumably, develop immunity.

    When assessing and comparing risks, we also need to consider the risk of disease complications compared to those associated with the vaccine.  Myocarditis is not only associated with the vaccine, but is to a larger extent associated with Covid disease.  Kids are not inherently immune to Covid and there have been deaths due to multisystem inflammatory syndrome involving serious myocarditis (among other organs) in children.  I don’t know what will happen when all the adults reach “R” and the disease is still circulating, as it’s expected to do.  The more it circulates, the more it modifies.  That’s what the Delta surge was about.  It mutated to a point where it won the lottery and became more infectious  just as vaccine immunity was waning.   Vaccine removes susceptibles.  If kids are removed from the equation, too, the thought is that there will be fewer available susceptibles of all ages to get sick, to be vectors for the disease, and to be incubators for mutation.

    The “what age” question is above my pay grade, as the saying goes.  It’s unquestionably a good idea for anyone over age 50 and for anyone of any age with comorbidities predisposing to severe disease.  I’d argue that it is a good idea for anyone, male or female, contemplating child-bearing.  All in all, it comes down to rolling dice against risk of a disease that may prove serious or even fatal and a vaccine that is safer than the disease.  Early in the pandemic, my inclination was against vaccination for myself because the number of cases hadn’t reached a high enough critical mass for me to be concerned even about being exposed and the vaccine was still a big unknown.  As there were more and more cases and exponential spread, as well as lots of data on millions of people receiving the vaccine, I decided the protection of vaccination released me from concern about interacting with other humans, especially in moderate to large groups.

    • #29
  30. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Saint Augustine (View Comment):
    If so, do you have any idea–even an educated guess–around what age between 5 and 70 the vaccines win in a cost-benefit analysis?  I’ve heard estimates as high as 50 and as low as the teens.

    One good thing about being old is I don’t have to worry about whether I’m in the group where vaccines win. If I were quite a bit younger I’d have to think harder about it, and I don’t like to think harder.  

    • #30
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