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STICK IT, Damn It!
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2021-07-22 at 2:33 PM UTC
Originally posted by Xlite J3wtrix, all of it.
Get the jab = profit.
Get the jab and get sick = profit.
Get the covid = profit.
Get the covid and die = profit.
None of the above = no profit.
I agree with this. However I can only speak for myself. I have COPD so I went with it.
I felt fine except the first 15 minutes with both shots, with ear ringing.
Then I woke up at 3am after the second shot. Sweating in a pool of my own funk.
Carry on wayward sons -
2021-07-22 at 2:53 PM UTC
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2021-07-22 at 5:24 PM UTCBloomberg
‘Ridiculous’: Vaccine Myths Cripple U.S. Uptake as Delta Surges
Josh Wingrove, Kristen V. Brown and Daniel Zuidijk
The excuses range from the merely false to the absurd. The shots don’t work. They impair fertility. They’ll alter your DNA. They’ll magnetize you. They actually spread the virus.
Unvaccinated Americans cite a litany of myths to explain their hesitance to get shots, confounding local health officials battling yet another surge of coronavirus cases fueled by the more transmissible delta variant. Inside the White House, the concern is so acute that President Joe Biden has publicly lashed out at Facebook Inc. for helping to spread disinformation.
“Everything from Bill Gates putting a microchip in it — I’ve heard everything. It’s ridiculous,” said Tom Keller, chief executive officer of Ozarks Health Care in southern Missouri, a region with low vaccination rates that’s an epicenter of the U.S. delta outbreak.
“People are listening to social media instead of listening to their docs,” he said. “Somebody who has a million followers all of the sudden becomes the expert on not getting the vaccine.”
Just as the Biden administration appeared at the verge of snuffing out Covid-19 in the U.S., a shadow pandemic of disinformation threatens to prolong the crisis. Promulgated virus-like itself through social media platforms, a miasma of uncertainties, anecdotes and outright lies has seized the imaginations of Americans hesitant to be vaccinated, slowing the U.S. campaign to inoculate its population.
Biden himself showed his frustration last week, accusing Facebook Inc. and other social media giants on Friday of “killing people” by allowing posts with falsehoods about the virus and vaccines.
On Wednesday, during a town hall hosted by CNN, Biden said that “what we’re trying to do is use every avenue we can -- public, private, government, non-government -- to try to get the facts out, what they really are.”
He walked back his remarks about Facebook this week after the company rebuked him in a blog post, citing data showing that its platform has helped to increase vaccination rates and reduce hesitancy among its users. Biden instead cited a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit with offices in London and Washingon, that found 12 leading anti-vaccine individuals and organizations are responsible for as much as 70% of Facebook content discouraging Covid-19 vaccinations.
“Facebook isn’t killing people,” Biden said Monday. “These 12 people who are out there giving misinformation, anyone listening to it is getting hurt by it, it’s killing people. It’s bad information.”
He added that “instead of taking it personally,” Facebook should “do something about the misinformation.”
Slowing U.S. Vaccinations
The campaign against vaccination has contributed to a sharp slowdown in the pace of inoculations since April, forcing the government to shift to what Biden has called a “door-to-door” effort to get shots in arms -- a remark that itself has been portrayed as conspiratorial by some Republican leaders. While more than half the U.S. population overall has received at least one dose of a vaccine, a recent Bloomberg analysis found that among the least-vaccinated counties in the U.S., the proportion with a shot is only about 28%.
A political divide has also emerged, with Republicans far more likely to be unvaccinated than Democrats, polls show. Conservative media and some Republican officeholders have in some cases amplified disinformation, or have tacitly supported vaccine hesitancy by refusing to get shots themselves -- or admit they have.
Several Fox News hosts including Sean Hannity urged their viewers this week to get vaccinated, after criticism that the network’s programs had previously aired segments downplaying the threat of Covid-19 and questioning the necessity and safety of the shots.
The U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory on misinformation last week. “Today, we live in a world where misinformation poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health,” he said at a White House briefing.
About 150 leading anti-vaccine online accounts gained more than 10 million social media followers from December 2019 to December 2020, especially on Instagram and YouTube, according to CCDH. Murthy accused large social media companies of practically designing their products to spread misinformation.
“Modern technology companies have enabled misinformation to poison our information environment with little accountability to their users,” he said. “They’ve allowed people to intentionally spread misinformation, what we call disinformation, to have extraordinary reach. They design product features, such as like buttons, that reward us for sharing emotionally charged content, not accurate content, and their algorithms tend to give us more of what we click on, pulling us deeper and deeper into a well of misinformation.”
Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, recently called Facebook Inc. chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to complain about the social media platform’s role in the spread of vaccine misinformation.
“The platforms need to do better, I think particularly Facebook needs to do better,” Klain told the New York Times in a podcast released July 1. “There is just no question that a lot of misinformation about vaccines is coming from postings on Facebook, and this is a life or death situation here.”
Facebook said in its blog post on Saturday that more than 2 billion people worldwide have viewed “authoritative information” on Covid-19 and vaccines using its platform, and that 3.3 million Americans used its vaccine finder tool to locate a vaccination site and make an appointment.
“When we see misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines, we take action against it,” the company’s vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, wrote in the post.
He wrote that the company had removed 18 million “instances” of Covid-19 misinformation since the beginning of the pandemic and had labeled and reduced the visibility of 167 million posts that had been “debunked by our network of fact-checking partners.”
Partisan Divide
Social media posts can reinforce preexisting doubts about the vaccines. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey of unvaccinated adults published June 30 found that 53% think the shots are too new and 53% are worried about side effects.
About 43% said they just don’t want it, 38% don’t trust the government, 38% don’t think they need a shot and 26% said they don’t trust vaccines in general.
Smaller percentages of people said they didn’t know where to get a shot or were concerned about missing work or having to pay for the vaccine. It’s free for anyone in the U.S.
Republicans, rural residents, younger people, and people of color are among the most wary of Covid vaccination, but demographics don’t easily explain hesitancy — or how to combat it. Two-thirds of Democrats live in homes in which everyone is vaccinated, the Kaiser survey found, while 39% of Republicans live in homes in which no one’s gotten a shot.
“Not everyone is going to be hesitant for the same reasons,” said Timothy Callaghan, who studies rural health at Texas A&M University. “The most important thing public health can do right now is first understand the beliefs people have. And then explain what is true and what is not. The last thing you want to do is disregard someone’s entire belief.”
For many hesitant people, the issue comes down to a fundamental lack of trust, Callaghan said. That means government public health messages are often less powerful than counsel from a trusted friend, relative or community leader.
Another Kaiser survey found that people initially skeptical of the vaccine got shots after seeing friends and family inoculated without side effects, after being pressured by friends or family, or after speaking with their doctors.
But in communities where fewer people are vaccinated overall, there’s less encouragement or pressure from peers.
“These people have had the opportunity to vaccinate for months. At this point not vaccinating is deeply ingrained in their beliefs,” Callaghan said. Changing people’s minds at this point, he said, is “about building trust and building relationships.”
Corrosive Social Media
In those places, social media is having a corrosive effect on the vaccination campaign. The large social networks have been slow to take action against unsubstantiated claims about Covid-19 and the vaccines, and when interventions do happen, they’re often half-measures.
Instagram, for instance, banned celebrity vaccine opponent Robert Kennedy Jr. in February -- but he remains on Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, and his organization is on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
In Springfield, the city health department’s Facebook account has found itself beating back ridiculous allegations, including that the vaccine itself spreads the virus.
“Honestly, I don’t know how to find all of the sources because we don’t see them,” said Katie Towns, assistant director of the Springfield-Greene County health department, in Missouri. “I don’t know how to even get to some of this stuff.”
Complicating the situation further, the misinformation spread by vaccine opponents has begun to overlap with that of anti-government conspiracy theorists and figures in the far right, including the QAnon movement.
Misinformation about the effect of coronavirus shots on kids has found particular resonance among QAnon adherents, who maintain that prominent Democrats are involved in convoluted conspiracies to traffic children.
Some of the disinformation spread by vaccine opponents is simply odd, like a claim the shots will magnetize patients that’s popular on TikTok in particular. In the Midwest and South, regions where hesitancy runs deep, questions circulate about whether the vaccines affect fertility (there is no evidence for it) or alter human DNA (they do not).
Politicians could help, especially if more high-profile Republicans would endorse vaccination, work with local leaders to promote shots and stop spreading misinformation themselves, said Matt Motta, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater.
But in many cases, the absence of politicians might be even more helpful. In Springfield, for example, Towns said one of the city’s most successful vaccine clinics was an event held at a fire station -- Americans still trust firefighters.
In Alabama, one of the country’s least vaccinated states, the state health officer, Scott Harris, said that pharmacists, doctors and religious leaders are some of the best proponents for shots.
“These folks who are struggling with getting vaccinated or are opposed to it,” he said, “they just have such a low level of trust for everybody – and that includes politicians.” -
2021-07-22 at 5:28 PM UTC
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2021-07-22 at 5:35 PM UTCThe Conversation
US is split between the vaccinated and unvaccinated – and deaths and hospitalizations reflect this divide
Rodney E. Rohde, Professor of Clinical Laboratory Science, Texas State University and Ryan McNamara, Research Associate of Microbiology and Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In recent weeks, one piece of data has gotten a lot of attention: 99.5% of all the people dying from COVID-19 in the U.S. are unvaccinated.
As coronavirus cases surge, unvaccinated people are accounting for nearly all hospitalizations and deaths.
We are two researchers who work in public health and study immunity, viruses and other microbes. Since the start of the pandemic, public health experts have been concerned about what might happen if large sections of the U.S. population, for whatever reason, did not get vaccinated. Over the past few weeks, the answer to that question is starting to emerge.
‘Two Americas’ of vaccination
As of mid-July 2021, the U.S. has fully vaccinated more than 160 million people – just under 50% of the population – against COVID-19. Despite a surplus of available vaccines, in recent weeks the rate of vaccination has slowed substantially. In early April, health workers administered roughly 4 million new vaccines daily. Today, that number is about 450,000 doses a day.
As people sought vaccines over the past few months, the U.S. has split into what Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is calling “two Americas” – one of the vaccinated population and one of the unvaccinated population. These two Americas are divided geographically and in most cases along political lines.
Vaccination rates will continue to rise, albeit slowly, as rural areas get better access to vaccines and messaging persuades some vaccine-hesitant people to get the shot. But according to survey data from late June and early July, more than 10% of adults 18 or older say they are probably not or definitely not going to get a coronavirus vaccine, with another 5% saying they are unsure. It seems likely there will be a large unvaccinated population for the time being.
In recent months, nearly every hospitalization or death from COVID-19 has been of an unvaccinated person.
Which America is safer?
The vaccines themselves are nothing short of remarkable in their effectiveness at protecting against COVID-19.
Unvaccinated people, by comparison, are extremely susceptible to the coronavirus, particularly to the delta variant and the data on deaths and hospitalizations show this discrepancy clearly.
On July 16, 2021, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky revealed that 99.5% of recent U.S. deaths from COVID-19 were of unvaccinated people. “Those deaths were preventable with a simple, safe shot,” she said. In Early July, Fauci said that 99.2% of people who died recently were unvaccinated. In the state of Maryland, every patient who died from COVID-19 in June was unvaccinated.
In her July 16 statement, Walensky also said that 97% of current COVID-19 hospitalizations are of unvaccinated people. An earlier analysis done by The Associated Press found that 98.9% of all hospitalized COVID-19 patients in May were unvaccinated. The director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services recently stated that all new hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Los Angeles were unvaccinated.
In most places across the U.S., vaccines are readily available for anyone who wants one.
A tale of two states
It is hard to find data about overall cases among unvaccinated compared with vaccinated individuals. This results partly from the CDC’s transition in May 2021 to focusing on hospitalizations of COVID-19 vaccine recipients rather than cases. But one way to get at this data is to compare two states with large differences in vaccination rates. As the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 surges across the U.S., one can observe the consequences of this split into a vaccinated and unvaccinated America in real time.
In the state of Missouri, only 40% of people are vaccinated. In some counties within Missouri, as few as 14.7% of the residents are vaccinated. Not surprisingly, the state has seen a surge in COVID-19 cases through the middle of July, with 2,000 to 3,000 new cases per day. The rate of spread is also increasing. Already, some hospitals are running out of ventilators and intensive care beds.
Contrast this with Massachusetts, where 63% of people are fully vaccinated. Though the state is also seeing an increase in cases, total new infections numbered only around 200 to 300 per day. The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Massachussetts is also down 95% since January 2021.
As of July 20, 2021, Missouri had 1,357 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, almost 13 times more than the 106 patients in Massachusetts. This is despite Missouri’s having a slightly smaller population that is much more dispersed.
Does it matter if people stay unvaccinated?
Ultimately, with a large portion of the U.S. population still unvaccinated, COVID-19 is not going to disappear in the near future. The U.S. will continue to see outbreaks of the virus in communities with low vaccine uptake. Even if people in these undervaccinated areas rush to get shots when outbreaks happen, it takes about a month for vaccination to produce strong immunity.
As long as SARS-CoV-2 is circulating in the U.S., unvaccinated people will continue to experience the full, dangerous clinical effects of COVID–19. But in addition, while the virus spreads among the unvaccinated, it will also continue spreading at a low level to vaccinated individuals. Though most of those infections will not progress to severe COVID-19, according to the CDC, as of mid-July more than 5,000 vaccinated people, mostly over 65 years old, had been hospitalized and 1,000 had died. These numbers are of course sad, but they pale in comparison to hospitalizations and deaths among the unvaccinated population.
The vaccines are doing exactly what they were designed to do: prevent severe COVID-19 with amazing efficiency. With vaccines free and widely available, for most people in the U.S. it is a choice: Do you want to be part of the unvaccinated America or the vaccinated one? -
2021-07-22 at 5:36 PM UTCAll i see is a shitload of rabble and no mention of alternative treatments that are not only cheaper but also more efficient.
Big pharma wants your moneh.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2021-07-22 at 5:40 PM UTC
Originally posted by Xlite All i see is a shitload of rabble and no mention of alternative treatments that are not only cheaper but also more efficient.
Big pharma wants your moneh.
If anyone actually cared about Covid they'd be trying to get people to eat fish, supplements, and go out in the sun.
Anyone who pretends to care about your health who doesn't remind you to eat healthy and get your vitamins in is a bullshitter or a liar, one or the other.
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2021-07-22 at 5:51 PM UTCAnd...the clown show continues.
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2021-07-22 at 6:34 PM UTCOne word. Ivermectin.
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2021-07-22 at 6:43 PM UTCtwo words.
not taking IT
not taking the vaccine or ivermectin. You are all retards HRRR DURR TAKE YOUR BOOSTER HURR DURR BOOSTER IS FAKE TAKE IVERMECTIN AND BLEACH
it's just a new world order distraction games and you are all the board pieces, the clowns, the pawns, the monopoly tokens.
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2021-07-22 at 6:50 PM UTCJust a note: Most things of any value require more than a single word (as most of my posts show).
Ivermectin has been shown to inhibit the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures.13 However, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies suggest that achieving the plasma concentrations necessary for the antiviral efficacy detected in vitro would require administration of doses up to 100-fold higher than those approved for use in humans.14,15 Even though ivermectin appears to accumulate in the lung tissue, predicted systemic plasma and lung tissue concentrations are much lower than 2 µM, the half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) against SARS-CoV-2 in vitro.16-19 Subcutaneous administration of ivermectin 400 µg/kg had no effect on SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in hamsters. However, there was a reduction in olfactory deficit (measured using a food-finding test) and a reduction in the interleukin (IL)-6:IL-10 ratio in lung tissues.20
Since the last revision of this section of the Guidelines, the results of several randomized trials and retrospective cohort studies of ivermectin use in patients with COVID-19 have been published in peer-reviewed journals or have been made available as manuscripts ahead of peer review. Some clinical studies showed no benefits or worsening of disease after ivermectin use,21-24 whereas others reported shorter time to resolution of disease manifestations that were attributed to COVID-19,25-27 greater reduction in inflammatory marker levels,26 shorter time to viral clearance,21 or lower mortality rates in patients who received ivermectin than in patients who received comparator drugs or placebo.21,27
However, most of these studies had incomplete information and significant methodological limitations, which make it difficult to exclude common causes of bias. These limitations include:
The sample size of most of the trials was small.
Various doses and schedules of ivermectin were used.
Some of the randomized controlled trials were open-label studies in which neither the participants nor the investigators were blinded to the treatment arms.
Patients received various concomitant medications (e.g., doxycycline, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, zinc, corticosteroids) in addition to ivermectin or the comparator drug. This confounded the assessment of the efficacy or safety of ivermectin.
The severity of COVID-19 in the study participants was not always well described.
The study outcome measures were not always clearly defined. -
2021-07-22 at 6:59 PM UTC
Originally posted by stl1 Just a note: Most things of any value require more than a single word (as most of my posts show).
Ivermectin has been shown to inhibit the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures.13 However, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies suggest that achieving the plasma concentrations necessary for the antiviral efficacy detected in vitro would require administration of doses up to 100-fold higher than those approved for use in humans.14,15 Even though ivermectin appears to accumulate in the lung tissue, predicted systemic plasma and lung tissue concentrations are much lower than 2 µM, the half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) against SARS-CoV-2 in vitro.16-19 Subcutaneous administration of ivermectin 400 µg/kg had no effect on SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in hamsters. However, there was a reduction in olfactory deficit (measured using a food-finding test) and a reduction in the interleukin (IL)-6:IL-10 ratio in lung tissues.20
Since the last revision of this section of the Guidelines, the results of several randomized trials and retrospective cohort studies of ivermectin use in patients with COVID-19 have been published in peer-reviewed journals or have been made available as manuscripts ahead of peer review. Some clinical studies showed no benefits or worsening of disease after ivermectin use,21-24 whereas others reported shorter time to resolution of disease manifestations that were attributed to COVID-19,25-27 greater reduction in inflammatory marker levels,26 shorter time to viral clearance,21 or lower mortality rates in patients who received ivermectin than in patients who received comparator drugs or placebo.21,27
However, most of these studies had incomplete information and significant methodological limitations, which make it difficult to exclude common causes of bias. These limitations include:
The sample size of most of the trials was small.
Various doses and schedules of ivermectin were used.
Some of the randomized controlled trials were open-label studies in which neither the participants nor the investigators were blinded to the treatment arms.
Patients received various concomitant medications (e.g., doxycycline, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, zinc, corticosteroids) in addition to ivermectin or the comparator drug. This confounded the assessment of the efficacy or safety of ivermectin.
The severity of COVID-19 in the study participants was not always well described.
The study outcome measures were not always clearly defined.
that doesn't prove or disprove anything. You aren't a doctor.
Nobody here is a doctor and there is an unlimited amount of studies that disprove each other endlessly because science only gets done when someone pays for it. You are just playing into the agenda.
You know you fucked up when you fall into media conventions PEOPLE ARE ARGUING ABOUT IVERMECTIN SO I MUST ARGUE ABOUT IVERMECTIN IF THEY ARE AGAINST IT THAT MUST MEAN I SHOULD BE FOR IT
This stopped being about science, public health and safety long ago. None of you people give a shit about any of that and are just co-opting this disaster into your political narrative.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2021-07-22 at 7:23 PM UTC
Originally posted by stl1 Ivermectin has been shown to inhibit the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures.13 However, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic studies suggest that achieving the plasma concentrations necessary for the antiviral efficacy detected in vitro would require administration of doses up to 100-fold higher than those approved for use in humans.
I wonder who wrote this. "my math (no workings shown) says it might not work, so you aren't allowed to try it".
They had spectacular real life success using ivermectin in India.
It's kind of the thing with you sti, you trust words over actions.
"and the word was made flesh" maybe it's time to start going to church? -
2021-07-22 at 7:56 PM UTC
Originally posted by the man who put it in my hood that doesn't prove or disprove anything. You aren't a doctor.
Nobody here is a doctor and there is an unlimited amount of studies that disprove each other endlessly because science only gets done when someone pays for it. You are just playing into the agenda.
You know you fucked up when you fall into media conventions PEOPLE ARE ARGUING ABOUT IVERMECTIN SO I MUST ARGUE ABOUT IVERMECTIN IF THEY ARE AGAINST IT THAT MUST MEAN I SHOULD BE FOR IT
This stopped being about science, public health and safety long ago. None of you people give a shit about any of that and are just co-opting this disaster into your political narrative.
You summed them up and they're in nutshells nowThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2021-07-22 at 7:56 PM UTCI read that ivermectin works by cutting down your gut bacteria.
Covid spreads in the gut so less bacteria the slower it spreads and gives your body a better chance of healing on its own. -
2021-07-22 at 10:05 PM UTC
Covid comes and goes as it pleases. Nothing about it makes sense. It doesn't have to make sense, it's a chad disease, and your shitty little vaccines aren't going to stop it. I understand covid better than anyone, because just like me covid is a force of nature.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2021-07-22 at 10:30 PM UTCWhen they insist "they're safe", they're completely bullshitting, as usual. There's no possible way anyone can know what these experimental concoctions with no safety studies on them will do to a person three months from now, a year from now, 10 years from now. They pretend they know, but they are simply FULL OF SHIT, as usual.
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2021-07-23 at 1:49 AM UTC
Originally posted by Donald Trump
If anyone actually cared about Covid they'd be trying to get people to eat fish, supplements, and go out in the sun.
Anyone who pretends to care about your health who doesn't remind you to eat healthy and get your vitamins in is a bullshitter or a liar, one or the other.
vitamin D is bullshit. just look at india, indonesia and places with lots of sun.
clearly no shortages of vitamin d there and yet .... -
2021-07-23 at 6:38 AM UTCTHIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SOME VERY INTERESTING STATISTICS ABOUT COVID AND THE VACCINES
CNET
99% of COVID deaths are now of unvaccinated people, experts say
Jessica Rendall
COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising again as the extremely contagious delta variant of the coronavirus takes hold as the dominant strain in the US. In some parts of the country, there are more hospitalizations and cases of COVID than there were last winter, the peak of the pandemic.
The vast majority of people being hospitalized with COVID and dying from the disease haven't been fully vaccinated, according to public health officials. More than 97% of hospitalizations from COVID right now are of unvaccinated people, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, said Friday, adding: "There is a clear message that is coming through: This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated." In early July, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president's chief medical advisor, told CBS that 99.2% of COVID deaths are now in unvaccinated people.
In Texas, 99.5% of people who died from COVID from February through July 14 weren't vaccinated, per the Texas Tribune's reporting on preliminary data from the Texas Department of State Health Services. (Vaccines became available to adults in the state at the end of March. At-risk people were able to get them sooner.) In southern Missouri, an area that leads the nation as a delta variant hot spot, "almost every COVID-19 patient in Springfield's hospitals is unvaccinated," the Atlantic reported. The dozen or so that were vaccinated, according to the report, were elderly or immunocompromised -- people for whom studies have shown vaccines are likely not as effective.
Scott Gottlieb, head of the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, told CBS Sunday that the delta variant of the coronavirus is so contagious that most people will get it if they haven't been vaccinated or previously infected with COVID.
"And for most people who get this delta variant, it's going to be the most serious virus that they get in their lifetime in terms of the risk of putting them in the hospital," Gottlieb said.
No vaccine is 100%
The three COVID vaccines available in the US -- Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson -- have proven efficacy against all variants of the coronavirus currently circulating, including delta. The vaccines vary slightly in their efficacy based on clinical trials, but all exceeded the typical efficacy rates for vaccines when they rolled out. For scale, the flu shot is about 40% to 60% effective each season.
Importantly, all three vaccines are effective against severe disease caused by delta.
In an interview with PBS, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said that "breakthrough cases," or people who test positive for COVID after getting vaccinated, are to be expected, but that vaccinated people who get infected "generally have either no symptoms, or very mild symptoms as opposed to going on and developing significant disease."
"That is the good news about it [and] the sobering news, where a lot of people are getting infected," Fauci said.
As of May, the CDC only tracks breakthrough cases of COVID-19 if they result in hospitalization or death. Some health experts disagree with that, saying that in order to get a full picture of how well our vaccines are working, and to guide whether or not we need boosters, we should keep track of all cases.
Vaccine risks vs. benefits, and a drop in life expectancy
One reason many people have chosen not to get vaccinated is the newness of the coronavirus vaccines, or the fact that the vaccines have emergency use authorization from the FDA as opposed to regular authorization. Although all the vaccines went through clinical trials and have continued to prove to be safe, people's wariness about side effects may keep them from getting vaccinated.
The reported side effects that have caused the most concern are all exceedingly rare, have been investigated by health officials and continue to be monitored. They include the risk of myocarditis, or heart inflammation, in Pfizer or Moderna vaccines (occurring mostly in men under age 30, with the majority of cases being mild) as well as a blood-clotting disorder and autoimmune disorder associated with Johnson & Johnson's vaccine.
In a meeting last month, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices found that the benefits of mRNA vaccines outweighed the risk of myocarditis because they ultimately prevented hospitalizations, even in men under age 30 after they've been given the second dose of an mRNA vaccine. As of June 11 when ACIP's data was collected, there were 636 reported myocarditis cases out of 133 million second doses of an mRNA vaccine.
The extremely rare blood clotting disorder associated with Johnson & Johnson's vaccine prompted some health experts to advise women under age 50 (the group that was affected in most cases) to get a Pfizer or Moderna shot instead if one is available, due to the ACIP's weighing of benefits and risks for that population. The risk of severe COVID in women under 50 is low on average, so it's worthwhile for them to wait for one of the other vaccines to be available rather than going with J&J. It's worth noting, however, that the risk of blood clotting after J&J vaccination in the general population remains very low, barely over 1 in a million.
Guillain-Barré syndrome, a neurological disorder linked as another rare side effect of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine, occurs in about 8 out of every 1 million doses of the vaccine, according to the CDC, and the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks. People who have a history of the neurological disorder, however, should choose an mRNA vaccine.
Vaccines, like other types of medicine, almost always carry a specific risk-benefit profile. The reason why public health officials urge vaccination against COVID-19 is simply because of how severe a disease it can become, and the number of people it's killed. In a recent report, the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics found that life expectancy in the US fell by 1.5 years in 2020, which is the biggest drop since World War II, NPR reported. Black and Hispanic communities experienced the biggest declines in life expectancy.
Another reason some people have chosen not to get vaccinated is the misinformation about the vaccines that continues to circulate online. There's no evidence for a claim that links the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to female infertility. Many people who got an mRNA vaccine have continued to get pregnant after their shots, or are pregnant when they get the vaccine. Another falsehood is that the vaccines contain a microchip.
President Joe Biden and US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy provoked a heated conversation about the role of social media companies in the spread of false public health information recently, with the president saying that tech companies are "killing people" by allowing misinformation to spread online.
Amid a flurry of conflicting opinions about vaccines and COVID, though, one hard fact doesn't change: the number of unvaccinated individuals getting sick or dying from COVID-19. And as people in COVID-ridden communities see a surge in illness, hospitalization or death of community members, many are choosing to get vaccinated, even if they declined before.
At the press briefing Friday, Jeff Zients, head of the White House COVID-19 task force, said that the five states with the highest number of COVID cases -- Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri and Nevada -- had more people getting newly vaccinated than the national average.
"Vaccinating more and more Americans each day is an individual-by-individual, community-by-community effort," Zients said. "And this type of localized, person-to-person approach takes some time, but it is working." -
2021-07-23 at 10:15 AM UTCLet’s all get a vaccine so we can still get the delta variant , sounds good y’all .
Good thing I was exposed at the beginning of the fucking pandemic and my body made my own vaccine like a normal fucking human u fucking simpsThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
