In my country at least, if you get any of those vaccines and get Capillary leak syndrome as in some cases, a thrombosis that leaves you mentally incapitated as in some cases, a retinal detachment issue that may leave you blind as in some cases, a myocarditis that may leave you dead in some cases --- then you've lost. You will be a pauper for the rest of your life, as you will have to use up all your assets to pay for care cost until social insurance kicks in. The privilege of getting appropriate financial relief for not being able to work in your profession anymore is reserved for civil servants for life. You're finished. In the UK at least they're planning care facilities for those who suffer from long covid -- here it's not even a formally acknowledged disease, you're treated as any other handicapped person or worse, as a patient with a mental problem rather than phyiscal illness.
If you leave people who are afraid of a virus and a vaccine both the choice and tell them taking or not taking the vaccine is their responsibility alone together with the consequences, it's easy to fall into decision fatigue and just do nothing, and ratinalising that behaviour.
I don’t think this will work, because if it did then people would be taking the vaccine right now.
The issue is multi-faceted of course, but the discussion of “extremely rare events” is a red herring and a wink wink to vaccine skepticism.
It’s like why would we even talk about these extremely rare events and taking care of someone if those events happen, when instead they’re millions of times more likely to suffer from Covid-19? I mean why aren’t you saying “if you drive to the clinic to get a vaccine and get in a car wreck we’ll take care of you” when that is far more likely to occur? Let alone any number of other things like walking outside and getting struck by lightning.
The probabilistic case for the vaccine is well beyond settled and even if there was some long-term unknown boogeyman vaccine issue that for some reason causes this vaccine (even the “natural” JnJ one) to behave unlike any other vaccine you would still get the vaccine because of the known probabilities of contracting and suffering/dying from Covid-19 versus an unknown and unknowable probability of some unknown thing occurring at an unknown future date.
2 & 3 are easily fixable and we should do it now. We don't have hold pharma liable, but we can setup funds for people with side-effects.
1 is an argument from ignorance. There is no long-term data so we can't refute it. It's literally an unfalsifiable premise. I don't know how you fix this one.
Of what? Vaccines?
> 2) There is no FDA approval (although there is now!)
Which is just a matter of bureaucracy. The emergency authorization and deployment is a de-facto approval.
> 3) There is no recompense for people hurt by the vaccine - even if that number is 0.
And? There's also no recompense for many things.
> but we can setup funds for people with side-effects.
The problem is that this makes no sense. Why would you set up funds for people with side-effects? What about funds for people who die in car wrecks on the way to get their vaccines or trip and fall down a flight of stairs?
> 1 is an argument from ignorance.
Ain't that the truth. Can you articulate the exact long-term effects that you're worried about or that anybody should be worried about? Why are you (or anybody) concerned about these specific unknown and unknowable long-term effects? What's the likelihood of those effects and how do they compare against the likelihood of contracting and dying from COVID-19?
It's like all of a sudden there's these spooky and mysterious "but what about the long term effects!1!" without any scientific justification. Even if there were potentially long-term effects, those effects are equally likely to be of no-consequence as they are to have us all turned into zombies or something. The search space of "effects" are unknown and have an unknown probability distribution.
The only purpose of talking about "long-term effects" by any pundit or layperson who can't even describe the mechanics of an mRNA vaccine (why not take the JnJ one if you're worried about that anyway?) is to introduce fear, uncertainty, and doubt either out of ignorance or malice.
If you're a virologist, by all means educate us. If not, stop spouting bullshit and hurting people.
Of those 16 to 17 deaths, the vast majority will be people with comorbidities. People with comorbidities don't have as many years to live as healthy people of the same age, with or without Covid.
On the other hand, we do not know how vaccinated immune systems will interact with an evolving virus. There is a study suggesting that ADE might be a higher risk with the Delta variant ("However, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants may tip the scales in favor of infection enhancement. Our structural and modeling data suggest that it might be indeed the case for Delta variants": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8351274/)
If ADE becomes a significant issue with Delta, or the next variant to emerge we will have a scenario where people vaccinated against the Alpha ("Wuhan") strain will develop more serious illness. Imagine the shit that will hit the fan if that happens XD
> In conclusion, ADE may occur in people receiving vaccines based on the original Wuhan strain spike sequence (either mRNA or viral vectors) and then exposed to a Delta variant. Although this potential risk has been cleverly anticipated before the massive use of Covid-19 vaccines6, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies to mediate infection enhancement in vivo has never been formally demonstrated. However, although the results obtained so far have been rather reassuring1, to the best of our knowledge ADE of Delta variants has not been specifically assessed. Since our data indicate that Delta variants are especially well recognized by infection enhancing antibodies targeting the NTD, the possibility of ADE should be further investigated as it may represent a potential risk for mass vaccination during the current Delta variant pandemic. In this respect, second generation vaccines7 with spike protein formulations lacking structurally-conserved ADE-related epitopes should be considered.
This isn't saying anything other than "hey maybe this should be something to look out for though it looks like it was accounted for in the original vaccine development".
Leave the science to the scientists, virologists, and medical professionals. Stop insinuating that there is some sort of scary unknown danger here.
You don't know what you're talking about, there is 0 evidence suggesting that ADE will be an issue, and even the study you cited states "Although this potential risk has been cleverly anticipated before the massive use of Covid-19 vaccines..." which, big surprise, means the pharmaceutical companies creating these vaccines have anticipated this exact thing.
> Of those 16 to 17 deaths, the vast majority will be people with comorbidities. People with comorbidities don't have as many years to live as healthy people of the same age, with or without Covid.
Ok? And? So don't get a vaccine because you found some study that says something that Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and the entire global health community somehow didn't notice or account for and it'll cause some big scary serious illness problem? Die 5 years prematurely because the vaccine has some unknown and unscientific probability of killing you when we know for a fact that the vaccine will reduce the severity of symptoms occurring due to COVID-19 if you even contract the disease?
But let me guess. You're just "asking questions" right?
Stop.
Lots of scientists with qualifications relevant to the debate have been critical of the official position.
> But let me guess. You're just "asking questions" right?
Wrong guess. If I was asking questions, I would have put a question mark in there.
My point stands: We do not know how the vaccines will react with new variants.
We also do not know what reactions may result from new variants + eating chicken, or wearing green shirts, or exercise.
Better play it safe I guess.
And, to use your phrasing, we do not know how _unvaccinated_ people will react to the new strains either. We do, however, know that the vaccines seem to offer a high degree of protection.
In 2019 almost a quarter of NY's population was over 60 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/911456/new-york-populati...)
In 2019, 34% were overweight and 22% were obese (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/obesity.p...)
Also Cuomo literally sent people infected with coronavirus into care homes.
> Also Cuomo literally sent people infected with coronavirus into care homes.
Funny the Democrats actually impeached one of their own unethical asshole “leader”. Wonder when the Republicans will catch up and show us those family values.
There is a very strong correlation between GDP and life expectancy, especially in developing nations.
The money would have been better spent improving countries' health systems, so hospitals wouldn't get swamped.
It's absolutely insane the way the world reacted to this virus. I consider it the first global mass hysteria.
You respond as if it they were all the same. No.
> It's like all of a sudden there's these spooky and mysterious "but what about the long term effects!1!" without any scientific justification.
Are you being serious?
Without studies about long term effects of anything, there is no information about long term effects of anything. The scientific justification for looking for long term effects is to look for long term effects, so we know if there are any!
Stop being unreasonable.
Vaccinations do not get long term effect testing like drugs do because your immune system typically finishes responding within 5 weeks of inoculation. The reason the covid vaccines were approved so quickly is because there was political will to fast forward the funding bureaucracy, none of the clinical investigation takes a long time here.
C'mon. Nobody was questioning any vaccines for any reason except some fringe leftists until COVID-19 all of a sudden and now that is the vaccine you want to wait for to see if it's ok? How long is long enough? How do you determine it's been long enough? What scientific process are you using?
In exactly what way are these COVID-19 vaccines "different" enough for you to question them versus other routine vaccines that you're getting?
And now compare these made up scary boogeyman "long term effects" versus the actual boogeyman right outside your front door that has killed at least half a million people in the United States alone.
Sorry, I'm going to listen to the entire medical community and the heroes that work at these pharmaceutical companies. Ya know, the people who actually know and understand how these things work and who have also taken them.
Being unreasonable is sitting around from the comfort of your home talking about some nebulous made up "long term effects" bullshit. You weren't worrying about that in October of 2019, why start now without any evidence or reason to?
There are a couple of government funds, but they rarely pay out. They require you to prove your issues are the result of a vaccine, which is extremely difficult to do. Did this person have a thrombosis because of COVID or because of some other genetic or environmental reason? It's really hard to rule out "everything that isn't the vaccine".
Yet you still have to sign a liability waiver........
Get vaccinated.
Lol
As in, "we have a non-idiot bias; please think about not contributing here if you suspect you might be an idiot".
In that context, it does not mean anything like socialist, let alone Marxist-Leninist. However, those who think so might be discouraged, which is a good thing.
Can you explain why someone should not be able to quote a sentence or two from a Wikipedia article (that anyone can easily find and read in its entirety) or anywhere else without being obliged to duplicate all the citations?
All I did was laugh at someone citing Wikipedia as if it carried any weight in itself.
By the way, the section the user referenced doesn't contain a single external citation.
Oh, far from that. Just point out one thing, maybe two, that has struck you as being off or wrong that's all.
> the section the user referenced doesn't contain a single external citation.
That's not how the document structure works. That introductory section makes some general remarks like the one that was quoted: "the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a conservative non-profit association that promotes medical disinformation, HIV/AIDS denialism, the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, vaccine and autism connections, and homosexuality reducing life expectancy."
These claims are discussed in other sections below and those have citations.
For instance, let's pick the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis topic. There is a section about that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physic...
That has some remarks with citations:
"In the fall 2007 Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Patrick Carroll hypothesized that abortion for women who have never previously given birth to a child is a risk factor that most predicts the likelihood of breast cancer. [19][20]"
[19] https://www.aapsonline.org/nod/newsofday471.php (A link into the AAPS website itself!)
[20] https://www.jpands.org/vol12no3/carroll.pdf
The article is just saying that the AAPS person wrote this and that, and here are the links.
A document doesn't have to have citations in its paragraph.
E.g. academic essay:
1. You tell them what you're gonna tell them.
2. Then you tell them (in more detail, with citations).
3. Then you tell them what you've told 'em.
It doesn't make sense to find fault with 1 or 3 for not having citations.
It's all dandy that the AAPS is made of doctors (appeal to authority). Well some doctors are idiots, and they are the ones who get the attention. Now, the article entirely negative; it provides no information about anything good having come from the AAPS or any of its members. It's just a laundry list of the controversies. So there is an obvious bias there; but the laundry list has external citations.
The number of members is large, and the organization has a long history. There is no reason to believe, from that article, that it's entirely defined just by the controversies.
You'd be a fool not to read the article with a critical mind, and just get the information from it, without forming some belief about the AAPS that may be distorted.
Still, it doesn't look good. It looks like they don't care about the controversies; they don't see that as a blemish to clean up.
I also would hug you if I could because I've seen first-hand what's coming your way if you don't get vaccinated. This is so contagious; it's going to get to everyone. You probably won't die, but you are going to be sick in an extreme that is hard to describe. I don't want you to go through this. God bless you my friend.
Here is the highest quality meta-analysis of ivermectin for COVID treatment, fully published in a highly respected journal [1]:
"Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally."
Another paper reports a very lucky event. As COVID swept through French care homes in March 2020, an outbreak of scabies led to an entire care home being prescribed ivermectin. Almost nobody died of COVID. Here's a DeepL translation of the results, shortened for brevity:
"Sixty-nine residents and 52 staff received [ivermectin]: median resident age 90 years (84-94), 78.3% female, 98.6% at least one comorbidity at risk of severe COVID-19. 11 subjects had probable or definite COVID-19 (7/69 residents and 4/52 staff, frequency 10.1%). Among the residents, 90.9% (10/11) had minimal COVID-19, no oxygen or hospitalisation, no deaths. Among the [77 care homes with COVID outbreaks], 45 were included as controls, i.e. 3062 residents (median age 86.2 years, 77.3% women). Among them, 22.6% [95%CI 16.3-28.9] had COVID-19 vs. 1.4% [care home where ivermectin was prescribed] with an attributable mortality of 4.9% [95%CI 3.2-6.5] vs. 0% [care home where ivermectin was prescribed]."
On the balance of probability, ivermectin is effective against COVID-19 both before and during the disease. I've seen anecdotes that it helps with long COVID symptoms in some too, but not read any proper studies, so we might one day add an "after" to "before and during" too. What's more, it's almost as cheap as sugar pills, and among the safest drugs ever invented in terms of side effects (read the quote from the first paper above again). That we're not even trying this in the rich west is the crime of the century. Studies of ivermectin only began in the UK a few months ago, when we already had evidence early last year that it's potentially interesting. You've got to wonder why conversations over repurposed medication are being suppressed.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1097/MJT.0000000000001402
[2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annder.2020.09.231 (in French)
However, you are correct that the second Trump touches anything, it seemingly becomes impossible to have a rational conversation about it. I can't see any reason for you to have been downvoted, for instance.
"Nick Hudson on PANDA:
Panda started off as a conversation, really. A group of four friends, professionals – an economist, a doctor, a lawyer and a little actuary. What we shared was an observation that the data and the facts – the reality – of Coronavirus was far away from what the media and public health institutions were presenting to the world. We saw in that problem the seeds of a great tragedy."
Hard pass.
The first lecture in the session for example is from Dr Clare Craig, an epidemiologist, discussing how the virus actually spreads, and presents evidence for the remark you highlighted about social distancing and quarantine [1].
As I said in other comments here, rejecting arguments based on (lack of) credentials is not constructive. I encourage everyone to open their mind and engage with what people have to say. You can always disagree with them and you're then at least more familiar with the arguments of the other side. I am always trying to find a way to justify the behaviour of governments with regards to COVID-19 - it would sure as heck make my life easier right now to fall in line - and I do this by reading and hearing the arguments in favour of restrictions and mandates from all corners.
Concern trolling the best available science about coronavirus transmission, comparing it to unrelated diseases, cherry picking random data points...
Despicable.
Quickly searching... Holy shit. Dr Craig argues that lockdowns don't reduce transmission, COVID is over reported, that there was no second wave.
https://www.covidfaq.co/Clare-Craig-1f229f215ed640d495bda975...
Ok. We're done.
I won't be reading or responding to any more of your posts.
It's difficult to stay on top of things as the scientific process is a poor fit for fast moving things. Pre-prints vs. peer review and so on?
For the record, it's worth pointing out that the reasons for withdrawal are disputed by the authors. I have not looked closely at the arguments for and against so can't comment.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/huge-study-s...
[2] https://odysee.com/@DarkHorsePodcastClips:b/ivermectin-meta-...
As with all science, it's not the volume of studies one way or the other, it's the quality. Consensus on a topic only comes over time, especially for contentious issues with public interest. The good thing about science is that it more or less always converges on the truth over time, but some are not willing to wait and make snap decisions on policy without stating that it's not backed by scientific consensus.
[1] https://unherd.com/thepost/the-most-vaccine-hesitant-educati...
Both more and less educated seem to think they "know better" than the specialists in their field, possibly but not necessarily for different reasons.
Btw one source might be this: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-08-11/ivermectin...
Here's another: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777389
Also a there seem to be no high quality large studies that show positive effect of ivermectin on covid: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34318930/
All of those are literally one google search away so I don't think providing them inline is all that necessary. People interested in them can find them with no trouble and others won't read them even if provided.
And I'm not calling anyone an idiot.
Or, to put it more succinctly, science has not yet converged.
Yet, COVID is killing people, so we can't wait for science to converge before doing something about it. It therefore makes most sense to use educated guesses and conduct evidence based medicine with appropriate weighing of risks versus rewards. What ivermectin has going for it is that it is an extremely safe drug with a long history of use as an antiviral. Repurposing existing drugs is also far easier (and quicker) to get approval for than new vaccines. Even if the papers you linked are eventually proved right, and ivermectin is not beneficial, the evidence from ivermectin's use over 40 years suggests that it does very little harm - deaths caused by ivermectin intervention are essentially in the noise. What's more, it's out of patent so we're not paying $20-40 a pop like we are with the vaccines. It's got so much going for it that any level headed risk versus reward calculation should include it in the arsenal to fight against COVID.
As for the studies you linked to. I am no expert at doing meta-analysis but it seems to me that many RCT studies listed there are really small, at least some were done in very remote places. Most of them have single digit number of participants with adverse outcomes. I'm not sure but I think none of them showed no effect which is a bit odd. I suspect that many studies of similar size and quality done globally were exucluded from this list. There might be some general bias against publishing studies that show no effect too.
All the RCTs on this page mentioned together have the same order of magnitude of number of participants as the most recent study that showed no effect that I mentioned. I think one large study done carefully is many times more convincing than tens of very small studies done in highly loaded political climate.
I see that authors of this website have reservations about Together study I linked to: https://c19ivermectin.com/togetherivm.html
This might indicate that studies on this site are to some degree cherry-picked by the authors so it's not so much meta-analysis of all RCT studies of Ivermectin, but rather meta-analysis of the Ivermectin studies someone likes.
So it is VERY EFFECTIVE. That is a true statement. Is it effective against CV? I mean why wouldn’t we try it? Why would we assume something that works for so much not be? Why default to not try it? You get what I’m saying? It seems like when the world is melting down we should be trying everything. If there are 60+ studies showing it works why not do another 100? Or a thousand? It’s non toxic, incredibly cheap, easily produced .. it makes NO SENSE to me and stinks of malintent to silence and suppress it. Does that make sense?
That's because ivermectin is one of tens of thousands of substances we know are VERY EFFECTIVE for something, but we can't give them all to each patient. Even if all of them costed zero and had no side effects ever. They just wouldn't fit in the patients stomach or bloodstream at recommended dosage.
So we need to pick some substances. And it would be ideal if we picked based on something more than pure luck (hunch being correct is still just luck). So we actually need to measure how good any given substance is for covid. But it's not that easy, bacuse we don't have a good system for conducting randomized controlled trials quickly and in organized verifiable manner. So inital studies are just doctors trying something on few of their patients often without any statistical rigor. You can still publish this as a study. You just have to write some stuff down. It doesn't have to be all the stuff. You can take 'out of sight, out of mind approach' with patients that don't fit your hopes. It happenes all the time. And when you get no success there's not much for you as a doctor to publish.
Covid is hard to track because it's very survivable so most patients that you treat will survive regardless of what you are treating them with (if anything at all). So you may very easily fool yourself into thinking that you are helping.
That's why it's better to wait for large randomized medical studies done by medical researchers as impartial as possible. Because every medicine has some side effects at some dosage so the chance of getting any value out of random medicine is nearly zero and chance of inflicting harm when people will safe-medicate based on rumours is significant.
And even if it has zero side effects medicines fashionable in context of covid already have patients that they should be given to. The ones that suffer from all the things that we know those medicines are VERY EFFECTIVE for. So if you don't ramp up the production to give most likely non-effective medicine to people that most likely don't need it, you'll be stealing it from people (and horses!) that do.
You don't need 1000 studies. You need one that is large and good.
Why not take chloroquine? After all it doesn't hurt, right? Or amantidine, highly fashinable in Poland, because one doctor believes in it strongly and advocates for it loudly, although reporters found out his track record with it is not as good as he's saying. But what do they know, right? Or maybe we should inject blood plasma of covid survivors? Sounded reasonable, many doctors used it for treatment. Turned out it doesn't work. Or hydrocortisone, it's just a mild steroid that doctors use to treat severe covid with effect of at least few percent. Or budesonide, another steroid that I personally think they should be using instead because effect looks way stronger. Or why trials of Fluvoxamine are stuck? It was looking so perfect in few initial studies. It's actually my favorite potential covid miracle cure.
The fact that you know of one drug that might be doing something doesn't mean we should be trying it (except for controlled trials) because there are thousands of exactly as promising or more promising substances and we just can't try all of them haphazardly because of the suffering that would cause to patients that don't need the drug, and the patients that actually need it and won't be able to get it.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't do more tests. We definitely should do more tests, and design them carefully, write results down diligently, and be ready to accept if they say that there's no effect because that's what most likely to happen with any substance that we test.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v...
In particular, figure 1.
And of course even if there was NO effect on spread, cooperatively participating in reducing load on hospital facilities would be helpful.
It’s truly maddening. My wife (very on the right) refused to get it and instead talked endlessly about hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, vitamin D. All of which she got from conservative media. Right now she is lying in bed wracked with COVID. Ate up with fever and a cough that sends jolts of panic through me when i hear it echoing down the stairs. It breaks my heart, man.
God help us and God bless all of you out there with sick loved ones.
Sorry for the sappy post. It’s been a rough few days.