charbonneau

Sure, but with the new Delta Plus® variant (+ false-negative tests + asymptomatic transmission) it's better to play it safe & keep your distance from other human resources.

> The Leger survey, conducted for the Association of Canadian Studies, found that more than three in four respondents hold negative views of those who are not immunized.

Divide et impera

Sounds bad, but imagine the warehouse manager would've helped the guy and gotten COVID-19! Can't risk that!

> S.V. Subramanian, the Harvard professor of population health and geography behind the paper [Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States], says the vaccine doubters are completely wrong.

> “That conclusion is misleading and inaccurate,” Subramanian told me of Horowitz’s Blaze column over email. “This paper supports vaccination as an important strategy for reducing infection and transmission, along with hand-washing, mask-wearing, and physical distancing.”

> Centner called COVID-19 vaccines "experimental," despite the fact that they have been under development for decades

Attenuated vaccines have been under development for centuries. Do they even need trials?

Not sure if it’s reasonable. My gut interpretation (before reading the article) was “breakthrough infections are overblown”.

I prefer their alternative headline “What the latest COVID research says about breakthrough cases and transmission”

TLDR;

Immunologist isn't convinced of risk. Cites not peer reviewed laboratory evidence.

From the study you cited:

> We note that almost 43% of patients after influenza had at least one long-COVID feature recorded (Table 1) including 29.7% during the 90- to 180-day period. In this regard, we suggest researchers take a broad and balanced view as to the nature and specificity of long-COVID.

> Let’s start with what we do know about the unvaccinated

> Some key research on the unvaccinated

> It may well be that some of the unvaccinated are a bit like cats stuck in a tree

What a silly bunch, the unvaccinated

> All I can hope for is to become happy with a life that now tortures me. One that cages me, pens me in, puts up walls all around me. One that makes me smaller, misshapen, that boxes my heart and spirit inside of me. But that’s no hope at all, no challenge at all. As if one could say, “You will be enslaved from now on with no chance of escape. Your owner will use your wife and daughters as he pleases, for his pleasure. If you do not work you will be whipped and tortured and it will be the same for your family. Your hope in life, and your challenge, is to become happy with this.”

> The dynamic isn't that the evidence is unambiguous, but rather that when the evidence is inconclusive falling back to first principles makes sense. Respiratory filtration should help prevent spread of respiratory pathogens, period.

> If there are no conclusive results proving that out for ersatz cloth masks, then the scientific approach is to try better protective equipment until it does become effective.

I respect your view and completely agree that personal protective equipment should be examined further. The current evidence is definitely sufficient for a strong mask recommendation. I’m only critical of mandates (or bans) in this situation as they push people away from doing their own research and lead to bizarre scenes, as you encountered it with your respirator.

Sure, but can you imagine what 1968 would have looked like with cellphone alerts?

http://web.archive.org/web/20180115194946/https://www.nytime...

What's the point of life? When's the line of death? And whase hitched to the hop in his tayle?

I wasn't trying to make a distinction between blue and red tribes. You can paint a political propaganda machine however you like, its goal is the same: To encircle people by all possible routes, in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, true and/or false, by playing on their will or their needs, assailing them in both their private and public lives. It furnishes them with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. Through the myth it creates, the machine imposes a range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence.

> The opposing position to "wear a mask to protect others" should have been "wear a mask to protect yourself and your family"

Should the mask topic also prohibit any divergence? Is the evidence so unambiguous that all raised objections can only be a tragic misleading with disastrous results?

Cochrane review (Nov 2020): "We included nine trials (of which eight were cluster‐RCTs) comparing medical/surgical masks versus no masks to prevent the spread of viral respiratory illness (two trials with healthcare workers and seven in the community). There is low certainty evidence from nine trials (3507 participants) that wearing a mask may make little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI) compared to not wearing a mask (risk ratio (RR) 0.99, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.82 to 1.18)"

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

The majority of people claiming to care about others by following uncertain pandemic mitigations are doing no such thing. Rather they are taking top-down direction from a post-truth political machine that increasingly rejects uncomfortable realities, and replaces them with a reassuring narrative of doing the right thing. You can tell this when talking to them because rather than laying out some chain of reasoning and hoping to find a flaw in it (as curious minds are), they get to the exact same terminal talking points and act like having stated such settles the matter.

> Vaccines make COVID-19 a largely preventable disease—and a survivable one in all but the rarest cases—and it is heartbreaking to know that people are dying of a disease not because it can’t be stopped but because they live in a low-income country.

Sure, Bill, very heartbreaking:

> Oxford University surprised and pleased advocates of overhauling the vaccine business in April by promising to donate the rights to its promising coronavirus vaccine to any drugmaker [...] A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices—with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and win plenty of prestige.

https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine...

> Catapults are a great way to get somewhere fast

Elon Musk, June 11th 2020

> She and an RCMP officer dispatched to investigate suspected it was debris from a construction site on nearby Highway 1

Conspiracy theory: Meteorites aren't real. It's all just debris. Construction companies bribe astronomers so that they won't face criminal charges.

I'm never buying their processors again!

From 2020 to October 6th 2021, there were 58,167 deaths in the age group 0-17. 499 of those deaths are related to COVID-19. That's 0.86% (or: 99.99% of deaths happened due to other causes) [1]

The leading cause of deaths in this age group are accidents [2]. A lot of these accidents are preventable [3].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/child-health.htm

[3] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/baby/first-aid-and-safety/safe...

> https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-2xk8AWEAAWfaw?format=png&name=...

* Since 1/1/2021

On 1/15/2021, 0.12% of the Ohio population were fully vaccinated [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/us-states-vaccinations

Press release [1]:

> CureVac estimates that the earliest potential approval of [first-generation vaccine] would come in the second quarter of 2022. By this time, the companies expect the candidates from the second-generation vaccine program to have progressed to late-stage clinical development.

What's the goal of having a COVID vaccine market ready in the third/fourth quarter of 2022? And how will they achieve it? Will it be authorized under an Emergency Use Authorization? Do they anticipate that the circumstances justifying EUA's will continue?

[1] https://www.curevac.com/en/2021/10/12/curevac-to-shift-focus...

> In short, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, to claim their freedom, need to be reasonable.

Reasonable according to whom?

> since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death

Could you please share a meaningful study that comes to this conclusion and does not ignore all potential confounding factors? (I don't mean it in a confrontational way; I'm genuinely curious since I only managed to find heavily confounded data)

> "I would never depend only on my natural immunity to weather this virus. It's a very, very bad actor," Falsey said.

Never!

> It is an indefensible decision that will cost lives

"I'll only get the darn shot if it receives a Nobel Prize!"

Thank God! Now we can finally go back to normal and die of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus again.

That's pretty reasonable. What most people don't seem to realize: Merck's CEO only got $27.65 million in 2019 [1]. You can't even buy a decent Dynamiq GTT 165 yacht for that rat race wage [2].

[1] https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/merck-ceo-ken-frazier-ge...

[2] Before the trolls arrive: Yes, I know you can get a GTT 165 for $26.9M, but it lacks the Speed Package (2x MTU 16V, 1,790 kW). Might as well buy a rubber boat.