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COVID-19

robav8r

Well-Known Member
None
Contributor
Please show me a link where the CDC said the vaccine would be 94% effective in the summer of 20.

It's not even the CDCs job to evaluate vaccines while in development.

@robav8r , feel free to help with his googling.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha . . . . . .

Please stop ????
 

whitesoxnation

Well-Known Member
pilot
Contributor
That's been the fundamental to our response throughout. Make your own choice.

The thing about a pandemic of some contagion, as opposed to the "obesity epidemic" or those of that ilk, is you need to treat the entire community as a patient. It's like the difference between having an infected cut on your foot and having sepsis. Foot, you apply antibiotic. Sepsis, you treat the system.

The doctors of a pandemic are public health specialists, not your PCP. A 70% successful vaccine might be iffy for a person but damn good for a community (if people take it). Percentage points are the difference between a reproduction rate R0>1 where the virus spreads, and one less than 1 where the virus goes away.
Agree with all that. The issue is is when what is right for the whole may not be right for every individual that makes up that whole.

The public discourse has left no room for nuance. It shouldn't be the never ending drum beat from our elected and non-elected officials saying, "get vaccinated and boosted ASAP." It should be, "Please talk to your physician and determine whether or not the benefits of getting vaccinated outweigh the risks of not being vaccinated for you as an individual. If the benefits outweigh the risk for you as an individual, please consider getting vaccinated ASAP as percentage points are the difference between... etc etc."
 

Brett327

Well-Known Member
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
It shouldn't be the never ending drum beat from our elected and non-elected officials saying, "get vaccinated and boosted ASAP." It should be, "Please talk to your physician and determine whether or not the benefits of getting vaccinated outweigh the risks of not being vaccinated for you as an individual. If the benefits outweigh the risk for you as an individual, please consider getting vaccinated ASAP as percentage points are the difference between... etc etc."
One wonders whether this sensible approach would have been successfully implemented if the WH hadn’t poisoned that well from the outset. That’s the real tragedy in all of this.
 

wink

War Hoover NFO.
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
One wonders whether this sensible approach would have been successfully implemented if the WH hadn’t poisoned that well from the outset. That’s the real tragedy in all of this.
I don't follow. Trump promoted some unpopular and dubious treatments, but I don't recall him down playing vaccinations.
 

Mirage

Well-Known Member
pilot
Question for you: so lets say a new variant pops up that is as contagious as Delta or Omicron, escapes immunity, and is as deadly as the original SARS COV (9% die on average). It's not impossible it will happen.

What would be the policy you'd promote?
Make you a deal. You answer my question and I'll answer yours. I'll even go first.

I'd create an operation called something like "Warp Speed 2" that leads the charge in creating a new vaccine. I'd encourage the elderly and fat to get in shape and quarantine themselves to whatever degree they feel necessary, along with anyone else who feels the need. I'd encourage folks to use N-95 masks that actually work and educate them on facts like cloth masks do more harm than good, so they need to get actual masks. I'd provide those masks free of charge as soon as the infrastructure existed to make them in sufficient quantities. Once the vaccine was determined to be safe, I'd encourage everyone to get it. I'd get it myself publicly.

I would not try to force people to do anything. I would give them the facts and the means to protect themselves in whatever ways they wanted, and let them make choices for themselves. They would live or die by those decision. I bet we'd get much higher uptake and less conspiracy theory BS, but I guarantee we wouldn't have a fraction of the downside to the existing policies.

The thing is, people dying by natural means like a virus is an unfortunate reality that we cannot escape. It's part of life. What we can do, however, is allow life to not suck for all the people who survive, and allow them to retain their freedoms and thrive. If you can save some small percentage of lives at the cost of dramatically degrading life for everyone else that remains, is that worth it to you? It's not for me.
 

Spekkio

He bowls overhand.
I don't follow. Trump promoted some unpopular and dubious treatments, but I don't recall him down playing vaccinations.
He stood up Operation Warp Speed, but TDS would have you believe that a bunch of senior cabinet officials and military leaders did this in spite of his orders.
 

whitesoxnation

Well-Known Member
pilot
Contributor
I don't follow. Trump promoted some unpopular and dubious treatments, but I don't recall him down playing vaccinations.
I doubt you're going to find many people that will make the argument that the government's response was effective, consistent, and clearly articulated as it was being executed. Re: Trump and vaccines - IIRC, an issue some had was that they believed it took a significant amount of time for Trump to explicitly endorse getting vaccinated. I'm not saying I agree/disagree with the assessment of how long it took Trump to endorse vaccinations, and I'm not trying to opining on the pro/anti-vaccine debate, just that I remember it being a thing for some people. Just a data point on some people's opinion.

Anyways, you lose credibility on one topic, it likely affects people's perception of your credibility on other topics, even if the topics are unrelated. You're an elected official and you lose credibility, all elected officials will lose credibility with some people, just because they are other elected officials.
 
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taxi1

Well-Known Member
pilot

sevenhelmet

Low calorie attack from the Heartland
pilot
I don't follow. Trump promoted some unpopular and dubious treatments, but I don't recall him down playing vaccinations.

Promoting dubious treatments and saying the pandemic is going to end soon is downplaying the vaccine. Why get an "experimental" shot if I can take Ivermectin and Vitamin D and this will all be over next month anyway?

It further confused the messaging coming out of government.
 

Python

Well-Known Member
pilot
Contributor
Please show me a link where the CDC said the vaccine would be 94% effective in the summer of 20.

It's not even the CDCs job to evaluate vaccines while in development.

@robav8r , feel free to help with his googling.

Who cares if the CDC said it? The point they’re making is that the vaccine was advertised to be over 90% effective.
 

sevenhelmet

Low calorie attack from the Heartland
pilot
Who cares if the CDC said it? The point they’re making is that the vaccine was advertised to be over 90% effective.

Which it was, in the very beginning. My (oft repeated) question is now that the shot clearly isn't as effective as before, what is being done about it? Or, are we just going to wait until it's completely ineffective to develop an update for new variants, because- up to that point- the Mark 1 Mod 0 shot was "still good enough"? Wouldn't higher effectiveness achieve a good result (R0 < 1) with fewer doses of the shot?

I personally think it's disingenuous to say we don't need an update because the vaccine still works above some murky threshold. You're just asking people do continue doing the same thing and expecting a different result. If there's difficulty producing an update to the shot, just say so. Either way, we can do better than this.
 

taxi1

Well-Known Member
pilot
I would not try to force people to do anything. I would give them the facts and the means to protect themselves in whatever ways they wanted, and let them make choices for themselves. They would live or die by those decision. I bet we'd get much higher uptake and less conspiracy theory BS, but I guarantee we wouldn't have a fraction of the downside to the existing policies.
I really, really, really hope we never encounter the scenario I outlined, but if we do, I think we will have crossed the boundary from protect my freedoms to strangers are shot just to be sure. The absolute worst would be if it was like the Spanish Flu, which took young people's lives.

It's a hard thing to imagine, a virus that kills 9% of infected but spreads like Omicron, but it is absolutely possible without even coming from a Wuhan bio lab. This is Omicron's case rate on the right surge. Multiply it by a bunch since no one would have immunity. Maybe 200,000 dead per day? If people went about their lives as normal, but there is no way that would happen.

You wouldn't have to tell people to adopt NPIs while waiting for the vaccines. Remember how many people freaked out when we flew some Ebola patients home from Africa?

1643810825557.png
My goal is to either get rid of the virus forever if that's possible, and if it's not then provide people with tools and knowledge to mitigate it however they see fit for their individual situations and beliefs while getting on with our lives and not destroying our society.

I would love to hear your goal and a detailed and realistic cost-benefit analysis of how you think we can accomplish it.
My approach would have been to follow the Pandemic Playbook that existed prior Covid-19 hitting. Use the Pandemic 101 approach of NPIs and controls to catch it and drive it down to trackable levels, testing to know where the virus was (you can't control what you don't measure) and contact tracing with local controls to put out fires while waiting for the vaccine. No contradictory messaging from top leadership directly undermining public health efforts. Warp Speed for vaccines was great. Full court pressure on treatments too.

while getting on with our lives and not destroying our society
If you wanted to destroy our society, then you would put out contradictory messaging continuously to split the response on politics, you'd not test so you wouldn't have any intel to know what the enemy virus was up to, and you'd half-ass the controls and support of a vaccine so the virus would mill about in the population as long as possible, breeding as many new variants as possible, steadily grinding down the health system so when a serious new variant hit we'd be out of health care Schlitz.

I wonder if our foreign enemies are taking note.
 

Mirage

Well-Known Member
pilot
You wouldn't have to tell people to adopt NPIs while waiting for the vaccines. Remember how many people freaked out when we flew some Ebola patients home from Africa?

View attachment 34448

My approach would have been to follow the Pandemic Playbook that existed prior Covid-19 hitting. Use the Pandemic 101 approach of NPIs and controls to catch it and drive it down to trackable levels, testing to know where the virus was (you can't control what you don't measure) and contact tracing with local controls to put out fires while waiting for the vaccine. No contradictory messaging from top leadership directly undermining public health efforts. Warp Speed for vaccines was great. Full court pressure on treatments too.
Isn't this what we tried? We locked down, had mando masks, tried contact tracing, tested as much as we could given constraints (including something as simple as folks not going to get tested voluntarily).. except for leaving out the contradictory messaging and perhaps trying harder to test more, what would you do different than what we tried and didn't work?
 

taxi1

Well-Known Member
pilot
Isn't this what we tried? We locked down, had mando masks, tried contact tracing, tested as much as we could given constraints (including something as simple as folks not going to get tested voluntarily).
No, we failed pretty miserably. Yes on the lockdowns (although lesson learned for the next one, close the international air travel), but the testing was a humongous monumental failure. Our first tests were crappy, and we had all of this bureaucracy that got in the way of creating ones that worked. Then we lifted the lockdowns before we had control or knowledge of what the virus was doing. Flying blind. The mask supply chain wasn't ready either. If we had had the same access to KN95s and better that we have now...

We never gave ourselves a fighting chance to wrestle this thing into control. I worry that we won't learn the lessons offered.
 
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