FDA's Own Reputation Could Be Restraining Its Misinfo Fight (apnews.com) 223
The government agency responsible for tracking down contaminated peanut butter and defective pacemakers is taking on a new health hazard: online misinformation. From a report: It's an unlikely role for the Food and Drug Administration, a sprawling, century-old bureaucracy that for decades directed most its communications toward doctors and corporations. But FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf has spent the last year warning that growing "distortions and half-truths" surrounding vaccines and other medical products are now "a leading cause of death in America."
"Almost no one should be dying of COVID in the U.S. today," Califf told The Associated Press, noting the government's distribution of free vaccines and antiviral medications. "People who are denying themselves that opportunity are dying because they're misinformed." Califf, who first led the agency under President Barack Obama, said the FDA could once rely on a few communication channels to reach Americans. "We're now in a 24/7 sea of information without a user guide for people out there in society," Califf said. "So this requires us to change the way we communicate."
"Almost no one should be dying of COVID in the U.S. today," Califf told The Associated Press, noting the government's distribution of free vaccines and antiviral medications. "People who are denying themselves that opportunity are dying because they're misinformed." Califf, who first led the agency under President Barack Obama, said the FDA could once rely on a few communication channels to reach Americans. "We're now in a 24/7 sea of information without a user guide for people out there in society," Califf said. "So this requires us to change the way we communicate."
Propaganda does not engender trust (Score:3)
For the purpose of this discussion, we can put people into four bins:
1. The already credulous, who would believe eating glass is good for them if the FDA or CDC said so.
2. The irretrievably incredulous, who would believe that the can of beans in their cupboard was poison if the FDA or CDC endorsed beans as tasty and nutritious.
3. The apathetic and disengaged
4. The engaged but agnostic
I don't have percentages or even reasonable numerical estimates for these groups, but I'd be willing to bet few people remain in Group 1 and not so many people inhabit Group 2 as the media would have us believe.
And the question to ask is how do you avoid growing the ranks of Group 2. Sweeping aside internal debates and trying to talk louder than the other guy seems like a bad way of doing it.
How do I know? Simple. TFA. It's a case of the same mainstream media that, for what I'll charitably assume were the right reasons, took part in the covid propaganda campaign in 2020 and 2021, and is now calling out the same FDA for its blatently unscientific behavior in recent decisions (ie "emergency" auth for boosters without any evidence they do anything to ameliorate the emergency, aduhelm, baby formula, etc).
Taking fire from your own side is a good way to tell that what you're doing isn't working.
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Nerds at FDA wonâ(TM)t engage (Score:2)
Maybe they should start going on shows like Joe Rogan and start countering the misinformation instead of the censorship route which makes them look bad. We have to account for human stupidity at some point. What I mean is, humans are more likely to think if someone has a sense of humor and makes them feel good, they have their interests at heart. They rather listen to bogus health advice from someone who speaks authoritatively than the truthful but caveat-full talk of actual experts. Whenever someone speaks
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"Joe Rogan"? You mean the guy wallowing in Jew-hatred. Why should anyone believe him about anything.
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I don't know, the guy has millions of followers though. That's the reality. I agree he sucks, but the fact is he has the followers.
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"Joe Rogan"? You mean the guy wallowing in Jew-hatred. Why should anyone believe him about anything.
Because he is more informative and convincing than whatever you listening to that lead you to conclude he is into Jew-hatred.
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We have very different definitions of "informative".
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Maybe they should start going on shows like Joe Rogan and start countering the misinformation instead of the censorship route which makes them look bad.
Pete Buttigieg tried this approach. He was on Fox quite a bit doing interviews. Sometimes the audience on the shows were genuinely impressed with his responses. Problem though, was that the typical demographic makeup of the audience sitting at home watching on TV was just thinking "I don't care what this faggot has to say". That happens to me, too [slashdot.org], and I'm not even involved in politics.
People aren't quite so willing to see past their biases as you might assume. It has become almost cliche to reference
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The problem is that hosts like Joe Rogan ask simple questions that the people currently in charge can't or refuse to answer
There's no point to answering, because logical fallacies will be employed by Mr. Rogan to twist the answer into a damning admission of guilt.
Does the vaccine protect completely against infection as previously claimed
Your parents probably once told you Santa Claus is real. Did this prior deception result in trust issues with them, too?
Are there any side effects to the vaccine
Yes. Placebo has side effects too (all entirely psychological), which is why drug studies include a control group. Questions such as these exist to sow doubt rather than present a legitimate cause for concern. "You have water in your home?! Don't
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Your parents probably once told you Santa Claus is real. Did this prior deception result in trust issues with them, too?
Are you trying to make the point that the government and its agencies are intentionally treating us as children? Lying intentionally for our own good and/or happiness...
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Can you define the word woman?
You're the willfully ignorant bigot variant, eh? That's pretty rare. For most bigots, their ignorance and incompetence isn't a choice.
Re: Nerds at FDA wonâ(TM)t engage (Score:2)
"When you come for the king, you must kill him."
Projected onto the gender project, what this means is that if you try to overwrite reality with language games, you must already have the power to sway thoughts with words. If you lack that power (and you probably do even within your own social/professional circle; some believe, more are afraid, but the rest think you're a fool but need to stay on good terms with you for purely mercenary reasons), then you sabo/age ypur ability to attain it by making obviously
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if you try to overwrite reality with language games,
The only person denying reality here is you. I'd explain shit to you but you already know, you're just a shitty troll.
I know I'm nitpicking, but (Score:2)
Shouldn't the summary at least marginally touch on what's in the title?
Darwin rules (Score:2, Insightful)
"Almost no one should be dying of COVID in the U.S. today," Califf told The Associated Press, noting the government's distribution of free vaccines and antiviral medications. "People who are denying themselves that opportunity are dying because they're misinformed."
Nature working as intended. Unfortunately many of these people are past breeding age, but if their kids grow up just as dumb nature will take care of them too eventually.
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Nature working as intended.
At this point we're stuck with Covid as an endemic annoyance no matter what. The damn thing mutates too fast to achieve herd immunity, so if some people don't want to get the vaccine to reduce their individual risk, that's on them.
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On the helpful side, it takes them out of the voting pool as well...
Indeed it may have been the difference in some close races in the recent midterms. Best not to tell anybody though. Don't want to change that behaviour.
Claims of misinfo can also be misinfo (Score:2, Informative)
Source: https://twitter.com/Project_Ve... [twitter.com]
Misinformation will soon be a small fry (Score:2)
A bigger issue is that Covid vaccines will eventually no longer be free [advisory.com]. It then won't just be an issue of whether or not you believe the misinformation, getting vaxxed will also hinge on whether or not you've got health insurance (or can afford the out-of-pocket costs).
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If you really wanted the vaxx, you should've gotten it by now. It does not give any protections to people under 40. If COVID is still around within 40-something years, at which point people born today would have to worry, you likely will have gotten exposed to it at some point in your lifetime and thus have natural immunity.
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If you really wanted the vaxx, you should've gotten it by now. It does not give any protections to people under 40. If COVID is still around within 40-something years, at which point people born today would have to worry, you likely will have gotten exposed to it at some point in your lifetime and thus have natural immunity.
ROFL @ "some point in your lifetime". Natural immunity to coronaviruses does not last long, nor do vaccinations. You can either be exposed to vaccines regularly, or get COVID regularly. Those are your choices, but I agree you should be free to spend more time sick if you choose.
The Idaho Republican Party (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, this is a thing that is happening.
Start with supplements and call me in a... (Score:2)
Decade or 5? You might be halfway done then. It's just a specific form of "misinformation" so it should be easier than your current goal.
conspiracies (Score:2)
So, that was the worst govt ever and it conspired against its population like most any govt in the world.
Yet that same govt did a fantastic job to keep its conspiracy with the farma industry hidden? How do anti-vaxxers reconcile such?
Anyways. Why am I not shocked this discussion on FDA got hijacked by the lunatics again.
On the original topic, misinformation, I'm glad local MSM here do a reasonable job at bringing misinfo to light by shining light on sources, their affiliations, their history and other facts
An Idiot's Stance (Score:2, Interesting)
"Almost no one should be dying of COVID in the U.S. today," Califf told The Associated Press, noting the government's distribution of free vaccines and antiviral medications.
One could argue the same damn thing about the flu. Or the common cold. Why in the FUCK do we accept such bullshit nonsense from people who assume they're making factual statements when it's obviously and patently bullshit? Most of the people who died from COVID died due to the many comorbidities that continue to ravage society today, so why would you even make such a bullshit claim? Getting really tired of society accepting bullshit peddlers.
If our society is THAT fucking brain dead and brainwashed, th
The FDA can't handle the truth. (Score:2)
Just look at its own site. FDA is intentionally manipulating opinion and metering out one sided half truths.
https://www.fda.gov/news-event... [fda.gov]
I'm going to focus mostly on the structure of the questions themselves and try and ignore the answers as much as I can.
"No, the FDA has not found any new causal relationships between the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine and potential adverse events of special interest identified in 2021. "
Your honor, my client is not a bank robber and never stole nothing from anyone (e
So there's a lot wrong here (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, getting COVID seems to make you roughly as resistant as the vaccine.... after you've had COVID. 25-30% of COVID victims (see, I can use loaded language too) have "long COVID", e.g. symptoms that last months, in some cases _years_. An equal percentage have long term organ damage.
That bad day in your 50s? It's now a stroke. That stroke in your 60s? It's not a heart attack. That heart attack at 65? It now puts you in the ground.
And that's before we talk about how there are strong correlations between increased RSV infections among children and COVID rates.
NONE OF THIS HAPPENS WITH THE VACCINE. You get all the immunity and *none* of the side effects.
As for "covid-19 vaccine stopping transmission" NO SHIT THEY DIDN'T TEST THIS. The #1 priority is to test if the vaccine works for the patient. Doing tests on transmission rates can and will come later.
You posted this quickly. Too quickly. Are you a professional?
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People seem to forget that the whole point is avoid catching the disease in the first place... SMH...
Maybe we have it all wrong and they're just volunteering to live shorter lives to save us the economic difficulties of an aging population.
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Stop spreading misinformation. This is the first medication/vaccine WITHOUT any side effects. Any mention of side effects only contributes to vaccine hesitancy. We need more people to take the vaccine so that we can eliminate COVID-19. We know it doesn't have the ability to easily mutate and it can't use reservoir animals such as cats, dogs, bats, deer, etc. so it can be stopped. Look how well China is handling the situation. We need to be more like them.
rsilvergun and I are on the same page and we kn
A point of correction (Score:4, Insightful)
Also the vaccine does have some mild side effects. It can make you feel sick for a period of time. And if you are the sort of person who carries around an EpiPen you need to be watched while you take it because you may have a reaction.
As for stopping the virus I think you're very awkwardly trying to hint at the fact that China allowed the virus to come about because they were doing slash and burn forestry and not regulating their wet markets. I don't want to blame China for this entirely though because the rest of the world stood by and let them do it because it was very profitable for everyone involved
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The other reason China used home grown vaccines is because there were not enough to go around at first. Western countries bought up all the supplies of the mRNA ones, so China wouldn't have been able to get enough to give 2 doses to 1.4 billion people anyway.
As for side effects, I had some severe ones and others have too, including death. The UK Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme has paid out to some of them already. However, I still highly recommend getting vaccinated. All my family are, 4 shots each. I have ha
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Thank you for a prominent example of MISINFORMATION!
Because immunity isn't 100% (Score:5, Insightful)
Um.... No? (Score:3)
That isn't how the percentages work.
Let's say you have a sample population. You vaccinate half of them.
In the control, 100 people die. 1000 people are hospitalized.
In the vaccinated test group, 1 person dies, 30 are hospitalized.
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It's different with COVID vaccines though because the spread of the disease is greatly slowed by having a high level of vaccination in the population. So even if in the control group 100 people die, in the real world it will probably be lower as they derive some benefit from other people being vaccinated. Similarly, the 30 vaccinated people who were hospitalized with probably be lower unless the test group was isolated from unvaccinated people.
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Then why did everyone I know get covid after they were vaccinated?
Probably had something to do with all the masking and social distancing guidelines going away after the vaccines became widely available. I ended up catching Covid from my partner, and he caught it at his office from a co-worker who tested positive. Remember how there was that big to-do about WFH? Yeah, there might've been something to that.
I do agree that it would've been unrealistic to have the new normal be a perpetual state of isolation, and viruses do mutate, so catching covid was an inevitability.
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Because "immunity" does not mean "invulnerability".
Only technically correct: immune means "Not affected by a given influence; unresponsive." If you are immune to an infection, it means you don't get symptoms from it and you can't infect others.
Vaccines have never been expected to give 100% immunity, but they also have not previously been expected to rewrite dictionaries in service of disinformation.
Re:So there's a lot wrong here (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe that he mentioned that the primary effect of the vaccine is that it reduces the severity of the disease. Ergo, you're a lot less likely to get the long covid side effect if/when you get covid if you're vaccinated first.
All the way up to that you can become infected with covid, but because you have immunity already built up from the vaccine, your immune system already knows how to fight it, and it ends up being such a mild case that you don't even know you're sick.
Basically, if you're vaccinated, move the disease down a severity step.
If it would have killed you, you might still live. Note: Those really close to death, with compromised immune systems, and such may still die, sadly. Life if you have terminal blood cancer or such.
If you would have been hospitalized from it, now it's like the flu
If it would have been flu level, now it's cold level
If it would have been like a cold, now you don't even notice.
With all due respect (Score:4, Insightful)
You need better sources of information (Score:3)
I noticed you didn't link to the CBS source for your claim. I looked it up it wasn't hard to Google for CBS 30% increase in heart problems. I found it linked on an ante vaxx website. The website itself made a bunch of insane claims in the text but then it made the mistake of actually linking to the video where they explicitly stated that the ca
And there it is (Score:3)
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existing mental issues such as long-standing depression, anxiety disorders and stress, and thus happen to correlate highly in younger people with limited goals and societal responsibilities.
Having limited goals and social responsibilities leads to depression, anxiety, and stress in the young? Have we been listening to those right-wing talking points on why child labor should be reinstated again?
I don't know if it's possible to OD on Fox News, but you sure are giving it that good ol' college try.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it for a minute. In order to get protection from an infection, you first have to fight off the infection. For 99.5% of is, it's not a huge deal. The other option is to get a vaccine and fight off a sore arm for a day or two.
I lapsed on my booster and now I'm just getting over a recent covid infection. Walking to the mailbox makes my lungs burn (and this is coming from someone that place ice hockey 1-2 times/week). I'd much rather deal with the sore arm for a few days instead of feeling crappy for 2-3 days and then dealing with respiratory discomfort for the next month.
As for a vaccines stopping transmission or not.. I feel that like common knowledge back in 2020. I was never under the impression the vaccine would provide me 100% immunity from getting sick.. simply that it would reduce the symptoms and recovery time.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Funny)
> Walking to the mailbox makes my lungs burn
You just described 99% of slashdoters before COVID-19 even existed.
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If you replace "mailbox" with "refrigerator."
I don't know where you got "99.5%" (Score:4, Interesting)
The vaccines don't "stop transmission" in the way you're thinking. They help you get over the sickness much, much faster so the amount of time you're contagious is lower. Anti-Vaxxers exploit this misunderstanding to suggest that there's no reason to get vaccinated because "you can still get sick". They also ignore the fact that you get a lot *less* sick...
And man, I'm sorry you got it by it while lower on immunity. That sucks. I've got immunocompromised family so I've been on top of it, wish me luck.
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You're in that group that would glass and claim it was ice cream if the fda said so.
This is a truly awful analogy. Any reasonable person can look at a bowl full of broken glass and determine that it does not contain ice cream.
There's no way the average person can examine a vaccine and determine its efficacy. At best, we can do a cost-benefit analysis on the situation. Since the vaccine is free, the only "costs" are the negligible potential for side effects and some time to recover from a slightly sore arm. The potential benefits are a Covid infection not putting you in the ground.
Re: I don't know where you got "99.5%" (Score:2)
It's a pretty good analogy to compare glass eaters to people who mindlessly quote chapter and verse every single poorly controlled study conducted by a junior postdoc and published in the CDC's in-house (ie not independently peer reviewed) journal as if it were incontrovertible settled fact solely by virtue of it having the CDC's stamp on it.
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The 20-30% number comes from a study population that was composed entirely of hospitalized patients. Go find it and read it for yourself. These people never made up more than something like 5% of covid cases pre vaccine and make up less than .5% of covid cases now.
30% is an outlier, but there's been a ton of studies placing long covid odds at 15-20% of all covid patients. It's actually much more common in less severe cases, although I suspect that's because the hospitalization cases end up getting classified with more severe things like pulmonary fibrosis rather than long covid.
There have been a few recent students breaking down the long covid odds by variant and it's looking like the long covid odds are lower with the Delta and Omicron strains, but there's not enoug
Re: I don't know where you got "99.5%" (Score:2)
15-20% of all covid patients
Emphasis mine. The problem with *all* splashy covid studies in the US since the very beginning was that they would always be conducted on the sickest, frailest, or oldest people who sought medical attention in the first place*, and then unabashedly extrapolate to the rest of the population.
*Particularly egregious given that in March 2020 people in the US were being explicitly told to *not* clog up the hospitals for fever and sniffles and on only seek medical attention if they legit had breathing problems. S
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As for a vaccines stopping transmission or not.. I feel that like common knowledge back in 2020. I was never under the impression the vaccine would provide me 100% immunity from getting sick.. simply that it would reduce the symptoms and recovery time.
Almost all vaccines you've gotten throughout your lifetime (polio, measles, HPV, etc.) are extraordinarily effective in preventing disease and transmission. Three doses of polio vaccines are ~ 100% effective. Three does of the measles vaccine are ~97% effective. The flu vaccine is the outlier but that has to do with the multiplicity of strains in the wild and propensity to cross and mutate. As a rule most people only get infected with a specific disease once in their life and then they are immune, which is
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Almost all vaccines you've gotten throughout your lifetime (polio, measles, HPV, etc.) are extraordinarily effective in preventing disease and transmission. Three doses of polio vaccines are ~ 100% effective. Three does of the measles vaccine are ~97% effective. The flu vaccine is the outlier but that has to do with the multiplicity of strains in the wild and propensity to cross and mutate. As a rule most people only get infected with a specific disease once in their life and then they are immune, which is a process vaccines induce artificially. So if you made your inference based on an accurate knowledge of vaccines in general, then your assumption would be that you would be covid-free.
You'll note the big difference is Flu and Covid are both Coronaviruses, while the other diseases you mentioned are not. Also worth remembering is many cold viruses are also coronaviruses, and immunity to them only lasts a few months.
It was also the broad claim of the CDC and other entities that the vaccines would prevent transmission. This was the entire justification for vaccine mandates in DC, NYC, etc. as well as Biden's nationwide mandate through OSHA and the (continuing) requirement for international travel.
On the basis of their preventing transmission, we were specifically told that if we got up to 70+% vaccination rate we would achieve herd immunity and be able to lift COVID restrictions. (There was a small window in which this was 'achieved' before a new panic sprang up around the Delta variant).
We were not in any way told that. The herd immunity claims came from anti-vaxxers who wanted to let it rip and get it over with.
The claims of preventing transmission were based on the early strains. We didn't have the time to do enough testing to be sure, but it certainly looked
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You'll note the big difference is Flu and Covid are both Coronaviruses, while the other diseases you mentioned are not. Also worth remembering is many cold viruses are also coronaviruses, and immunity to them only lasts a few months.
Flu is not a coronavirus; it's an influenza virus. Here's a list of of human coronaviruses [cdc.gov] from the CDC, which you'll note does not include any flu strains.
Immunity to cold viruses works just as I have described. The reason you may come down with a cold a second time is generally because you have contracted a different cold-causing virus. A cold is just a set of common symptoms shared by a wide number of infections. I'm not sure why you are bringing colds into the discussion of vaccination. There is no "col
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I lapsed on my booster and now I'm just getting over a recent covid infection. Walking to the mailbox makes my lungs burn (and this is coming from someone that place ice hockey 1-2 times/week). I'd much rather deal with the sore arm for a few days instead of feeling crappy for 2-3 days and then dealing with respiratory discomfort for the next month.
And it could be a lot worse. There's significant evidence that even mild COVID infections increase the probability of cardiac arrest, often months later. I suspect (but will never know), that my very healthy 63 year-old brother in law's fatal heart attack last September was caused by COVID. He had no history of heart disease, none in his family and was fit and active. He was also mRNA-skeptical and refused vaccination, and had a mild case of COVID three months before his death.
Last time I looked, the incr
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As for a vaccines stopping transmission or not.. I feel that like common knowledge back in 2020. I was never under the impression the vaccine would provide me 100% immunity from getting sick.. simply that it would reduce the symptoms and recovery time.
I agree nobody was saying vaccines are perfectly effective or people would not get sick.
What did very much occur is public health officials and the press constantly pushing the notion getting vaccinated is effective at preventing transmission (e.g. herd immunity) and keeps you from killing grandma as an integral part of vaccination campaign. They continued doing so even after it was clearly not the case until the position became untenable. At that point messaging changed to personal protection from severe
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Plague rats should be ostracized. If you don't want to participate in a civilized society, fine. Go be awful somewhere else. Just don't cry because we won't let you smear shit all over everything.
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Yeah, it turns out that all your bullshit fearmongering was ... complete bullshit. Shocking.
You can fuck off now. We're not interested in your tired nonsense.
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Funny)
If that's the case, I highly recommend you get the vaccine.
And a reading tutor, apparently.
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So if you want me to "re-evaluate".. i never had covid symptoms when boosted and only got infected 13 months after the booster because I skipped it this year. If I "re-evaluate" my own experience, I was stupid to not get a new booster.
My wife (who got a booster) and son (who received 2nd
What is a vaccination for? (Score:2)
>"Immunity acquired from a Covid infection is as protective as vaccination against severe illness and death, study finds"
Well, yes, that's pretty much the goal of vaccination - to be as effective at providing immunity as catching the disease WITHOUT the risks of actually catching the disease.
If catching a disease *doesn't* provide immunity, then a viable vaccine is probably impossible, or at least very unlikely. The disease is just too sneaky or unstable to develop an immunity (HIV/AIDS being an obvious
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Insightful)
No one ever claimed the vaccine slows or stops transmission.
Anthony Fauci is no one?
âoeWhen you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community,â Fauci said. âoeIn other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And thatâ(TM)s when you get a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community.â
Rochelle Walensky is no one?
âoeOur data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, donâ(TM)t get sick,â Walensky told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Monday. âoeAnd that itâ(TM)s not just in the clinical trials, itâ(TM)s also in real-world data.â
Yes. Misinformation is a problem.
The government's the one spewing the misinformation.
Um... yes, it slows transmission (Score:3, Informative)
If we hit 100% vaccination rate it would more than likely stop the transmission all together. At the very least the rate would be so slow we could do occasional lockdowns until the virus was dead.
We all but wiped out polio until anti-vaxx nutters brought it back. Same with Measles. We can wipe out diseases with vaccines
Re:Um... yes, it slows transmission (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude they got near 100% vaccination status in New Zealand. Then they found out that it made basically no difference
?? The data indicates New Zealand had almost no excess deaths during Covid, while comparable countries (US, Sweden, ...) had plenty. https://ourworldindata.org/exc... [ourworldindata.org]
Re:Excess Deaths in NZ (Score:2)
NZ was largely covid free in the beginning. They locked down sealing borders.
https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/n... [newstalkzb.co.nz]
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The reason there was so low death rate in New Zealand is that they are an island 2000 miles from anywhere so they could actually lock down the boarders which was partially effective until omicron got loose.
You're spinning a narrative here that's unsupported by data. You should have stopped at "New Zealand is (1) unusually far away and an island, (2) had an unusually high vaccination rate, (3) had unusually low excess deaths during Covid. We don't have enough information to determine causation".
So: let's instead look at data without the "unusually far away and an island" factor to get a clean signal on whether higher vaccination rate reduces death, for instance study in the US county-by-county... https://www.b [bmj.com]
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After taking account of potentially influential factors, the researchers found that increased vaccination coverage in counties was associated with reduced levels of covid-19 related mortality and cases.
I don't think this is the point that you think it is.
The reduction in mortality was admittted by nonBORG. The reduction in cases would potentially be interesting, but there's an enormous confounding factor: Because the vaccines massively reduce the severity of infection, many more of the infected don't realize they're infected, or don't realize it's COVID, or take an OTC COVID test, but don't bother going to the doctor or reporting it to anyone. So even if vaccination didn't prevent a single infection (I
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They have no idea what actually reduces transmission because they have not conducted any controlled experiments. Covid deaths is a stupid statistic because people were labeled Covid death inappropriately for monetary and political and laziness reasons. Also continued boosting trains your immune system to waste its resources hunting for something that no longer exists. Masking and living life as if there were a deadly disease going around reduces transmission of lots of other diseases ruining the usefulnes
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Re: Good luck (Score:2)
Every intramuscular vaccine creates (only) immunoglobulin G (IgG), which in Covid's case protects the lungs. Nasal cavities need IgA, which is not created during vaccination.
Covod infection and spreading is done from and through the nose and throat. Which is why you get inflected despite the vaccines, and can infect others, but the infection is a lot more likely to end as a cold with a sore throat.
Fauci kniws this (it's 101 knowledge in his trade) and what he said is compatible with this.
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How is "you become a dead end to the virus" remotely compatible with "you are still able to get infected and transmit the virus to others"? It sounds like neither you nor he know what the idiom "dead end" means.
Re: Good luck (Score:2)
Don't worry, you'll figure it out. Eventually.
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Ah. It's the "getuid and Fauci are being duplicitous dickwads" meaning of the idiom. Thanks for clarifying!
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The part you're leaving out is those quotes all predate both the Delta and Omicron variants.
Fauci's MTP statement was made on May 16 2021 at which time Delta had been circulating for more than two months. With the notable exception of J&J which offered a whopping 3% efficacy Pfizer and Moderna were reduced to a coin flip according to multiple studies during Delta.
Omicron has two nasty properties
Also worth pointing out that if we had pushed harder on vaccinations before easing lockdowns, the odds of Omicron existing go way down.
Omicron was the best thing to happen to the virus during the pandemic. Without it millions more would have died.
The vaccines did almost completely prevent infections against the first few strains.
Even in Beta/Delta times people were measuring post vaccination breakthrough infections @ 36% in the Qatar study and it
Re: Good luck (Score:2)
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Informative)
No one ever claimed the vaccine slows or stops transmission.
That's false. Nobody ever claimed it stopped transmission, but the claim was made that it slows it — and that claim has proven to be true. The estimate is still that pretty much everyone will get covid, but not all at once, and also not as severe a case on average. Viral load matters.
Re:Here we go again.... (Score:5, Informative)
Then we were on to all the demands like "6 foot distancing", which really never made a lot of sense for any enclosed public space? The air gets recycled quickly, throughout entire buildings like that. The virus was really just going to travel from one sticker on the floor marking where to stand to the next one, and no further?
Air does not get recycled quickly in an enclosed space, at least not enough to prevent the spread of droplets [businessinsider.com]. Also, depending on the number of people and what they're doing, even properly circulated air wouldn't help.
That said, it's nice not having someone standing six inches behind you in line because they think it will make the line move faster.
There's at least some reasonable suspicion that the vaccine may be causing some minority of people to develop blood clots that lead to their sudden death.
Yes, we know in an insignificant number of cases, people receiving vaccines have developed blood clots. You know what else causes blood clots? Covid, and in far greater numbers. In fact, just contracting covid increases you risk of getting blood clots. Things are even worse if you happen to have elevated factor V activity [harvard.edu].
In all, 33 percent of patients with factor V activity well above the reference range had either deep vein thrombosis or a pulmonary embolism, compared with only 13 percent of patients with lower levels. Death rates were significantly higher for patients with lower levels of factor V, with evidence suggesting that this was due to a clinical decline toward a DIC-like state.
But congratulations. You were able to spread misinformation and doubt about the medical community while trying to sound as if you were bringin up coherent thougts. You did your job, now go collect your reward.
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Are people really "misinformed" about the COVID vaccine, or are they simply the types who don't take the government (and by extension, the mass media who parrots the government's messaging) at face value?
It is those people who ALSO go one step further and start creating misinformation about the subject to support their views. It's the anti-science approach - decide upon your conclusion (covid is a fraud and the vaccines a plot) and then invent or twist evidence to support the conclusion. Ie, someone has a heart attack for no reason, they will immediately jump on the case and claim it was due to the vaccine. ("it's unheard of" for cases that are rare but still well known)
Re:Here we go again.... (Score:4, Informative)
The mRNA vaccines were being funded early on in the Bush Jr. administration, they didn't get "initially rushed" into production. The JJ vaccine was not an mRNA vaccine. I think respecting people's decision is stupid when they become disease vectors for the rest of us, especially the immuno-compromised. Just because you have an opinion doesn't make it well-based because it is your opinion.
As for the rest of your screed, blindly dumping tropes about Covid is useless, find something better to do with you time.
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This has nothing to do with opinion. Fuck you and your immune system. Fuck you grandma too. I don't owe you shit.
That's your opinion.
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Do you ever wonder if your username is making it an uphill struggle to change opinions here?
Anyone on Slashdot who doesn't know what that username means got lost and wandered in here by mistake, and is cordially invited to go away again.
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So what you are saying is that because we didn't have 100% accurate info on this new virus at the outbreak, people shouldn't trust anything about it? Yes, there was a push for respirators. You know why? That is what is usually used in those situations. When we learned more about the virus, that recommendation changed because we had more knowledge. Then you don't understand how distancing can help, but you want to chalk that up to something that "never made a lot of sense". This is the common "dumb person" a
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And this is the problem. The vaccines did go through testing and was proven. It went through all of the standard testing, it was just accelerated. It was given to thousands of people. The only thing that was not done was the paperwork and waiting. But here you are, claiming it is "unproven" despite it now being one of the most taken vaccines with extremely low side effects. The benefits of the vaccine still GREATLY outweigh both the dangers of the vaccine and the dangers of getting Covid.
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As I stated, the EA was there basically to bypass waiting periods and paperwork to speed up the process. The vaccines still went through the full trials, only faster. And I guess you are just going to pretend Pfizer and Moderna didn't get fully approved? They were proven, you are just too damn stupid to actually look at what happened. They went through accelerated but full trials. All the data is publicly available. So what exactly happened that means they weren't fully tested?
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Are people really "misinformed" about the COVID vaccine, or are they simply the types who don't take the government (and by extension, the mass media who parrots the government's messaging) at face value?
It's not an "or", or at least it's not an "xor". They can be both misinformed and distrustful. Ironically, being distrustful makes them more likely to be misinformed, because of the probability that they will get their substitute information from someplace even less trustworthy than the government.
My lady still believes all kinds of shit about the vaccine that has been solidly debunked (like the blood clot thing) which is extra sad because I've provided references, but there's always some excuse for why the
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A big part of the problem is they aren't merely distrustful of government, they're anti-trustful. That is, they don't just disregard what government says, they actively seek out an opposite opinion to latch on to and they trust it moreso for being opposite.
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the probability that they will get their substitute information from someplace even less trustworthy than the government.
Got stuck at your implicit inference that the government is trustworthy. Didn't read further.
"even less trustworthy than the government" literally and directly implies that the government is not especially trustworthy. How did Slashdot wind up peopled with so many illiterates?
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They can be both misinformed and distrustful. Ironically, being distrustful makes them more likely to be misinformed, because of the probability that they will get their substitute information from someplace even less trustworthy than the government.
Got stuck at your implicit inference that the government is trustworthy. Didn't read further.
"even less trustworthy than the government" literally and directly implies that the government is not especially trustworthy.
....and also literally and directly implies that any and all alternatives are less trustworthy.
I went back and quoted the whole thread because in context, a person who understands English can see that when I used the phrase "the probability that", I implied a range of sources of various trustworthiness. I hope that group includes you someday, for your own benefit.
You're misinformed. (Score:2)
There is no "the vaccine may". It has been exhaustively tested. If you want to see what it's like in a country without the vaccine look at China and the chaos going on there. Look at all the supply chain problems we've had because of the damage done by the virus.
You're being gaslit by right wing
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That's like implying that because I was rear-ended I should seek out and punch the responding officer.
Stopping the government from shutting stuff down only addresses half the problem - the virus is still going to be running around, shutting stuff down on it's own.
A vaccine, on the other hand, shuts the virus down, removing the need for the government to shut down stuff in an attempt to save the people.
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Just reducing the effects so that it stops most of the deaths and hospitalizations makes it survivable and the government doesn't have to shut things down.
And from what I've read, it might not 'stop' infections, but it sure as heck slows them down, which gives things like our healthcare system room to breath.
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Actually that is not what the vaccine does, it turns out no one ever (at least retrospectively) expected it to stop infections. Just some over benefits like money in the bank of the drug companies.
We fully did expect it to stop infections, and all the early evidence suggested it was amazing at it. It worked great at that until Omicron hit. The mutations there made it replicate faster and spread easier, and that combo was too much to prevent infections. No one saw that coming.
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Are people really "misinformed" about the COVID vaccine, or are they simply the types who don't take the government (and by extension, the mass media who parrots the government's messaging) at face value?
They're mostly people that don't understand how science works, and they tend to assume that anyone that does understand must be an idiot.
If you go back to the very beginning of the pandemic, you saw a whole lot of stuff in the press/media that just didn't quite add up. I remember early reports of Chinese people just keeling over and dying in the streets, for example. Then there was that huge push for respirators as what we needed more of. Even auto-makers got in on shifting production to building them. But turns out, that didn't amount to much. The focus shifted away from respirator shortages almost as quickly as it began, with many medical professionals coming out to say the ones being built weren't really the proper type to treat COVID patients anyway.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we were quick to put people on respirators when they started having lung issues. For most respiratory diseases, that's the right call. After a while, we learned that actually makes COVID worse. The threshold for putting people on a respirator needs to be higher for COVID than for other diseases. Once we realized that, we adjusted the treat
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Are people really "misinformed" about the COVID vaccine, or are they simply the types who don't take the government (and by extension, the mass media who parrots the government's messaging) at face value?
That doesn't pass the giggle test, because almost to a man, these are the very same people who never question the narratives around our foreign policy and military actions when their party is in power. Save for vaccination, they tend to be the biggest goddamn parrots of government messaging that exist.
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This is an excellent example of how to lie by cherry-picking studies and giving them undue weight.
You anti-vaxxer assholes are getting people killed. In a just world, scumbags like you would already be dead.
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We know what the science says. You have elected to lie and misrepresent what the science says.
We don't need trash like you here. Fuck off back to 8chan where you belong.
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Because you're a believer; it was never about "The Science" with you, it was always about fidelity to the state.
In much the same way your children really deserve Polio, and there are still a small handful of states where you and your family can live your dream.
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If I were you, I'd post as an AC as well. Can't even put a lousy username behind your bullshit? You antivaxxers are pathetic.