Vaccine

[dad4]

Youre confusing me with the media, some county health officials and some politicians that are promoting it as PPE which is oveselling masks which is exactly my point. They never differentiate the two because they dont understand the studies. I fully understand its limitations. I willingly wear a mask on airplanes but understand that its protecton is limited as im elbow to elbow with a stranger (who is not masked when eating or drinking) Quite frankly Im amazed that i havent gotten Delta given all the flights Ive taken. I believe HEPA filters are far more effective than masks, but still limited. I assume the risk.

If I get infected through some kid at school, thats on me. Im not going to play the victim card. Remember im the adult.

If you understand the difference between source control and PPE, why did you ask about the masks on kids in the Marin case?

Masks on the recipients would not be expected to be any help at all for source control. They are only relevant if you think of masks as PPE.

 

[Grace T.]

If you don't like the 90% vax for 12+, take it up with Delta.

Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else get a vote in this. The 90% vax rate is just an estimate for what is necessary to drive R below 1.

You might as well complain about gravity. It will do you as much good.

Well you now qualified the number with 12 and up which is at least a theoretical possibility. But without a semi hard mandate (govt mandating it for any form of public life, whether working, going to school, going shopping), it's not going to get to 90% in most places in the US. And if the Israel/Gottlieb approach is correct, that also means rolling 90% every 6-8 months for the next several years...I just don't see that happening (not without triggering a civil war where the red states tell the CDC to stuff it). You've just essentially laid out the case that we shouldn't even try the Israel/Gottlieb approach because it's doomed to failure and it's UK/Denmark or bust.

 

[Bruddah IZ]

I take it you're done complaining about the lack of message clarity, and have returned to your main job of obfuscating the message.

The message is not simply "stay home if you are sick". The school districts already put out that message. They even give us checklists and have us mark the checklist every morning: "Time for school. Come on, kids. Get zapped."

Guess what? Some fraction of symptomatic people go to school anyway. They think it is a cold, or allergies. Or they never noticed the fever, because they forgot to take their temperature. And there they are in a room with 18 to 30 other people. Maybe they shouldn't be there, but they are.

And, if you have your way, they are also unvaccinated and unmasked.

Such fragility in your post.

 

[dad4]

Well you now qualified the number with 12 and up which is at least a theoretical possibility. But without a semi hard mandate (govt mandating it for any form of public life, whether working, going to school, going shopping), it's not going to get to 90% in most places in the US. And if the Israel/Gottlieb approach is correct, that also means rolling 90% every 6-8 months for the next several years...I just don't see that happening (not without triggering a civil war where the red states tell the CDC to stuff it). You've just essentially laid out the case that we shouldn't even try the Israel/Gottlieb approach because it's doomed to failure and it's UK/Denmark or bust.

Denmark just hit an 80% adult vax rate. They actually treated the disease with respect.

The red state folks want it all to be over, but aren’t willing to do anything to make that happen.

 

[Bruddah IZ]

Sherelle Jacobs identifies an ominous parallel between the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on Covid.’ Here’s her conclusion:

The failure of the war [in Afghanistan] was not just logistical but also intellectual. The neo-conservatism that inspired Bush and Blair was based on decent but vague Enlightenment ideals about human rights and democracy. Though the academic school had spent years advocating America’s unique role in advancing these ideals across the world prior to 9/11, it had made few attempts to interrogate the specific conditions in which they flourish.Perhaps that is because the neo-con movement was as visceral as it was intellectual – its faith in America’s heroic purpose was partly a revolt against modern liberal society with its vapid nihilism and refusal to take sides. While there was nothing wrong with that impulse, the camp struggled to move beyond a self-confidence that bordered on spiritual. It remains in denial about how catastrophically its lofty theories collided with gritty reality in Afghanistan.

And so it goes that the West shifts from one war to another – or, rather, one simulation to another. The war on terror may be drawing to a close but there is no end in sight to the war on coronavirus. There are differences: this new unfolding epic has a sci-fi flavour and a fresh heroic quest – absolute Safety has relegated absolute Freedom from cause to victim. Still, much is familiar – the Manichean rhetoric, peddled by world leaders and amplified by broadcast media. The open-ended war on a global phenomenon which risks doing more harm than good. An ever-mutating threat that must be not merely minimised, but eliminated.

One can only hope that we are not here again in 20 years once the Covid era has passed, too afraid to ask ourselves what it was all for.

 

[Bruddah IZ]

Denmark just hit an 80% adult vax rate. They actually treated the disease with respect.

The red state folks want it all to be over, but aren’t willing to do anything to make that happen.

Nonsense

 

[Bruddah IZ]

Here’s wisdom shared on Facebook by Phil Magness:

Good reasons to oppose vaccine passports:
– They invite massive government overreach
– They’re likely to be bureaucratic nightmares with TSA levels of effectiveness and incompetence
– They create a medical privacy risk
– Their burdens are inequitable and fall most heavily on poor people and minorities
– They promote and incentivize disease ostracism, which has a long history of atrocities.
– They contain no exceptions for the millions of people who have proven antibody immunity from covid recovery.
Bad reasons to oppose vaccine passports:
– You read somewhere on the internet that vaccines don’t work and/or have high risks of harmful side effects, and therefore don’t want to take the vaccine.

 

[Grace T.]

Denmark just hit an 80% adult vax rate. They actually treated the disease with respect.

The red state folks want it all to be over, but aren’t willing to do anything to make that happen.

"want it to be over"....you've presented a false choice....you could go full UK approach. Eventually enough people catch it and acquire natural immunity.. Yeah, the death toll will be higher. But every adult that wants one has now been offered a vaccine. The rest of us can only protect people from stupidity for so long. But unless you can figure out a way to get that vaxxed rate up, and not just that but keep it up every 6-8 months, you are basically saying the UK approach is our only option. That's more radical than where I am right now, but you've pushed me a little closer to it.

Oh, here BTW, is a sad story about a mom that was skeptical of the vaccine. Followed the advice, though, about masks and thought it would protect her. Apparently followed the advice too that it's o.k. to not wear a mask if you are eating indoors.

Particularly if you haven't had the Rona, get vaccinated.

Unvaccinated single mom dies of COVID-19, leaving 4 children behind

Cindy Dawkins' children range in age from 12 to 24.

www.goodmorningamerica.com

 

[Bruddah IZ]

If you don't like the 90% vax for 12+, take it up with Delta.

Neither you, nor I, nor anyone else get a vote in this. The 90% vax rate is just an estimate for what is necessary to drive R below 1.

You might as well complain about gravity. It will do you as much good.

Politicians have turned Covid-19 into a moral crusade, quasi-religious in nature, creating a doomsday cult. Masks generate fear and help keep the cultish behaviour going. Lockdowns demoralise us, reducing our capacity to resist dangerous authoritarian rule. Defeating the virus is the impossible aim that keeps the cult leaders in business.

 

[Grace T.]

Looks like Norway and Singapore are going to sign off on the UK/Denmark approach too.

 

[Bruddah IZ]

You don’t see the analogy because you keep confusing masks as PPE with masks as source control. They are very different ideas.

Once you can separate those two concepts, the teacher’s mistake will make more sense to you.

It’s striking how much the CDC, in marshalling evidence to justify its revised mask guidance, studiously avoids mentioning randomized controlled trials. RCTs are uniformly regarded as the gold standard in medical research, yet the CDC basically ignores them apart from disparaging certain ones that particularly contradict the agency’s position. In a “Science Brief” highlighting studies that “demonstrate that mask wearing reduces new infections” and serving as the main public justification for its mask guidance, the CDC provides a helpful matrix of 15 studies—none RCTs. The CDC instead focuses strictly on observational studies completed after Covid-19 began. In general, observational studies are not only of lower quality than RCTs but also are more likely to be politicized, as they can inject the researcher’s judgment more prominently into the inquiry and lend themselves, far more than RCTs, to finding what one wants to find.

 

[Bruddah IZ]

Another point I forgot to include -- the teacher was unvaccinated. If the school district cannot enforce a vaccination requirement for teachers, can they at least provide informed consent to parents, warning them which teachers are not vaccinated?

Mask supporters often claim that we have no choice but to rely on observational studies instead of RCTs, because RCTs cannot tell us whether masks work or not. But what they really mean is that they don’t like what the RCTs show.

The randomized controlled trial dates, in a sense, to 1747, when Royal Navy surgeon James Lind divided seamen suffering from similar cases of scurvy into six pairs and tried different methods of treatment on each. Lind writes, “The consequence was, that the most sudden and visible good effects were perceived from the use of oranges and lemons.”

The RCT eventually became firmly established as the most reliable way to test medical interventions. The following passage, from Abdelhamid Attia, an M.D. and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Cairo University in Egypt, conveys its dominance:

The importance of RCTs for clinical practice can be illustrated by its impact on the shift of practice in hormone replacement therapy (HRT). For decades HRT was considered the standard care for all postmenopausal, symptomatic and asymptomatic women. Evidence for the effectiveness of HRT relied always on observational studies[,] mostly cohort studies. But a single RCT that was published in 2002 . . . has changed clinical practice all over the world from the liberal use of HRT to the conservative use in selected symptomatic cases and for the shortest period of time. In other words, one well conducted RCT has changed the practice that relied on tens, and probably hundreds, of observational studies for decades.

Do Masks Work? A Review Of The Evidence

 

[Grace T.]

Gottlieb is reporting Pfizer to file authorization 5-12 in October. Fda likely to make a decision on eu by late December.

 

[Bruddah IZ]

Outbreak Associated with SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta)...

COVID-19 outbreak associated with an unvaccinated infected teacher in an elementary school from May–June 2021 in Marin County, California.

www.cdc.gov

The CDC asserts this even though its own statistics show that Covid-19 is not much of a threat to schoolchildren. Its numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related. Yet the CDC declares that schoolchildren, who learn in part from communication conveyed through facial expressions, should nevertheless hide their faces—and so should their teachers.

How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?

 

[Bruddah IZ]

A 2016 study in Beijing by MacIntyre, et al. that claimed to find a possible benefit of masks did not prove very informative, as only one person in the control group—and one in the mask group—developed a laboratory-confirmed infection. Much more illuminating was a 2010 study in France by Canini, et al., which randomly placed sick people, or “index patients,” and their household contacts together into either a mask group or a no-mask control group. The authors “observed a good adherence to the intervention,” meaning that the index patients generally wore the furnished three-ply masks as intended. (No one else was asked to wear them.) Within a week, 15.8 percent of household contacts in the no-mask control group and 16.2 percent in the mask group developed an “influenza-like illness” (ILI). So, the two groups were essentially dead even, with the sliver of an advantage observed in the control group not being statistically significant. The authors write that the study “should be interpreted with caution since the lack of statistical power prevents us to draw formal conclusion regarding effectiveness of face masks in the context of a seasonal epidemic.” However, they state unequivocally, “In various sensitivity analyses, we did not identify any trend in the results suggesting effectiveness of face masks.”

 

[espola]

Gottlieb is reporting Pfizer to file authorization 5-12 in October. Fda likely to make a decision on eu by late December.

Did you intend that to be a sentence?

 

[crush]

 

[dad4]

Did you intend that to be a sentence?

damned order words be. information had useful it.

Thanks.

 

[kickingandscreaming]

"want it to be over"....you've presented a false choice....

I thought the same thing when I read it.

 

[Bruddah IZ]

Outbreak Associated with SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta)...

COVID-19 outbreak associated with an unvaccinated infected teacher in an elementary school from May–June 2021 in Marin County, California.

www.cdc.gov

A 2010 study by Larson, et al. in New York found that those in the hand-hygiene group were less likely to develop any symptoms of an upper respiratory infection (42 percent experienced symptoms) than those in the mask-plus-hand-hygiene group (61 percent). This statistically significant finding suggests that wearing a mask actually undermines the benefits of hand hygiene.

A multivariable analysis of this same study found a significant difference in secondary attack rates (the rate of transmission to others) between the mask-plus-hands group and the control group. On this basis, the authors maintain that mask-wearing “should be encouraged during outbreak situations.” However, this multivariable analysis also found significantly lower rates in crowded homes—“i.e., more crowded households had less transmission”—which tested at a higher confidence level. Thus, to the extent that this multivariable analysis provided any support for masks, it provided at least as much support for crowding.

Lol! You people crack me up.

 

[espola]

A 2010 study by Larson, et al. in New York found that those in the hand-hygiene group were less likely to develop any symptoms of an upper respiratory infection (42 percent experienced symptoms) than those in the mask-plus-hand-hygiene group (61 percent). This statistically significant finding suggests that wearing a mask actually undermines the benefits of hand hygiene.

A multivariable analysis of this same study found a significant difference in secondary attack rates (the rate of transmission to others) between the mask-plus-hands group and the control group. On this basis, the authors maintain that mask-wearing “should be encouraged during outbreak situations.” However, this multivariable analysis also found significantly lower rates in crowded homes—“i.e., more crowded households had less transmission”—which tested at a higher confidence level. Thus, to the extent that this multivariable analysis provided any support for masks, it provided at least as much support for crowding.

Lol! You people crack me up.

From the actual study, not the politicized opinion of it --

" In this population, there was no detectable additional benefit of hand sanitizer or face masks over targeted education on overall rates of URIs, but mask wearing was associated with reduced secondary transmission and should be encouraged during outbreak situations. "