BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

there will always be increases in winter regardless of what we do. panicking is really senseless. people spend more time indoors. seasonal illnesses crop up and have their annual cycle.

covid + flu + seasonal cold + other queues and backlogs are going to make winters a challenging time for the foreseeable.

an at-risk person or someone in poor health could very conceivably catch flu and covid at the same time, without prudent personal measures like a booster shot and social distancing. i am willing to bet that a good number of covid deaths in winter will have some complicating factor or comorbidity involving influenza, pneumonia, an already weakened immune system from recent bouts of cold, et cetera, et cetera.

then people like dilbert will ignore about 4,200 academic studies and say 'LooK, deAthS aRe rIsiNg, the vAcciNeS aRe inEffEcTivE!'.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-09 14:44:20)

uziq wrote:

there will always be increases in winter regardless of what we do. panicking is really senseless. people spend more time indoors. seasonal illnesses crop up and have their annual cycle.

covid + flu + seasonal cold + other queues and backlogs are going to make winters a challenging time for the foreseeable.

an at-risk person or someone in poor health could very conceivably catch flu and covid at the same time, without prudent personal measures like a booster shot and social distancing. i am willing to bet that a good number of covid deaths in winter will have some complicating factor or comorbidity involving influenza, pneumonia, an already weakened immune system from recent bouts of cold, et cetera, et cetera.

then people like dilbert will ignore about 4,200 academic studies and say 'LooK, deAthS aRe rIsiNg, the vAcciNeS aRe inEffEcTivE!'.

I got my flu shot weeks ago and am getting my booster on Friday. You would have to be dumb to not get either.

a good deal of all the vaccines on the planet show a 'dramatic decline in effectiveness over time'.

in the next newsflash: study shows dramatic decline in effectiveness of anti-histamines over time. maybe they're made by george soros to mind-control us into supporting israel.

"Reported cases of the rare heart inflammation in men under 30 are relatively higher after Moderna's vaccine compared with Pfizer's, said Chief Medical Officer Dr. Paul Burton."

I guess that explains RTHKI's heart issues

that’s refreshing coming from you! clearly i was being facetious about anti-histamine tablets. what was your excuse for comparing covid to leprosy?

the covid vaccines are some of the fastest developed vaccines ever. they’re not pathetic: they work very well. they’re more effective than many other vaccines we have available for fast-mutating respiratory-type illnesses. flu vaccines – notably absent from your link, considering the similarity of flu to covid; covid isn't very similar to measles or rubella – perform worse on the whole despite decades of development and tens of millions of deaths; we have never developed a meaningful treatment for common cold, covid’s corona-type cousin.

we have multiple antiviral treatments now coming on-line and which will soon be available. you’ll literally be able to take a pill from a blister pack whenever you catch covid, which will ameliorate its worst effects. when did we ever have that for flu or cold? right now the best medical advice for the latter is to take a paracetamol or an anti-inflammatory painkiller.

you’re also missing a pretty big point, too, which is that the current generation of vaccines are all first-gen, emergency, plug-the-hole type stuff. there’s long-term research and development underway for BETTER vaccines. for instance, case studies in controlled environments, such as front-line hospital wards, pointed to the fact that some workers had a ‘natural’ immunity. likewise, we also know that people of south asian descent have a specific gene that makes them more susceptible to this type of respiratory illness (we have sequenced and isolated it).

what this means is that, in the future, we could use the ‘naturally immune’ group to develop a better universal vaccine that should confer long-lasting protection. that’s cause for optimism.

again there is nothing ‘pathetic’ about a 2-dose vaccine programme that gives 80% protection for that year/season. it’s much better than we give to our elderly and vulnerable each flu season. moderna looks very robust in the longitudinal studies, and a combo of an mRNA and AZ/J&J seems to perform well. (admittedly coordinating booster shots every 9-12 months for the most vulnerable poses a risk factor whilst the world is still scrambling to organise itself, as we are seeing this winter already.)

call me illiterate again! i think i’ve probably close-read and line-edited about 120 covid papers by this point. i’m sure you’re plugged into all the good sources with your daily scaremonger on ABC news.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-11 16:07:56)

covid has relatively rapid mutation and a high number of variants you dumbass. we've gone through most of the greek alphabet by now, and that's just for major new variants. we don't have good longitudinal data about the first-gen covid vaccines because ... they were developed with a strain of covid that was quickly superceded by about 4 new major variants. no shit that the early AZ shot is not remarkably effective against the now-dominant delta variant. the fact is we simply don't know how long the immunity for that first AZ-covid shot would have lasted in a stable, non-mutative scenario. it could have been 3–5 years.

flu has had several major strains for years – that's what happens when viruses compete, duh. it doesn't change every year, thus needing to reinvent the vaccine wheel. you yourself pointed to a study recently that spoke of the soon-obsolescence of one of the 4 main flu varieties, precisely because it has mutated itself into an evolutionary cul-de-sac. covid-19 will probably settle down into a similar groove in the medium-long term, and we'll have to rotate and tailor our annual shots accordingly.

it really is a similar situation. flu vaccines take a mix-n-match approach in which they try and tailor a single vaccine shot to cover the predicted 'major' strains; covid boosters will be tailored similarly towards the most pressing threat.

a comparison between flu vaccinations and covid vaccinations is a lot more useful than linking a table full of measles, mumps and rubella stats. they're not even in the same ballpark.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-11 17:03:55)

clearly you get your covid information solely from the newspapers, dilbert. there are hundreds of identified covid variants now, including many more recent ones than the delta variant which are epidemic and emergent.

there was already a lambda variant classified in june 2021, first identified december 2020. a mu variant was classified in august 2021, first identified january 2021.

a small variant of delta, identified as AY.4.2, was found to be gaining prevalence in the UK this autumn. it accounted for 10% of all new cases in october.

covid mutates fast and mutates often. it's why high serological activity and genome sequencing is a huge must.

booster shots are highly effective against current variants. new vaccines are in development which are better-tailored to the now predominant delta strain. none of the major variants pose any significant challenge to our existing vaccine tech; the different strains mostly pose challenges in transmissibility because of changes to the spike protein, rather than being ‘game changers’ (all our current vaccine tech works with said spike protein).

antivirals are here. long-term development of potentially even better vaccines is still underway.

READ SOME FUCKING ACTUAL SCIENCE. you are a mong. it’s just funny how pathetic you are. ‘flu mutates really fast and there are many variants, that’s why it’s harder for vaccines than covid’. (covid has more major variants at present and has mutated faster; and we still have much better performing covid vaccines). ‘omg vaccines are useless’.

grow up.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-11 19:57:07)

Concur. I'm confused on if I'm eligible or allowed. The atmosphere is very much what it was like for the vaccine deployment earlier this year.

WA DOH doesn't have any information on boosters on its front page apart from a tweet about J&J. A google-powered search for boosters takes you to an older article. An external search got me one from November. Lay takeaway from this presentation is that a booster isn't important unless you got the J&J shot, not that data is still being looked at.

CDC on Nov 9: "Some COVID-19 Vaccine Recipients Can Get Booster Shots" and then a tree of links about age and occupation and a bunch of conditional factors. Very annoying.

More digging:

Additional populations may be recommended to receive a booster shot as more data become available. The COVID-19 vaccines approved and authorized in the United States continue to be effective at reducing risk of severe disease, hospitalization, and death. Experts are looking at all available data to understand how well the vaccines are working for different populations. This includes looking at how new variants, like Delta, affect vaccine effectiveness.

Yes, CDC editors, the bottom-center of the page is the best place to tuck away this information, and in some drop-down menu FAQ at that.

I was just looking today to see where I could get a booster since I'm going on 8 months since Shot #2 now. The guidance still doesn't include reasonably healthy adults, but like you said, I've heard a handful of people who were able to pop in no questions asked. My work is dropping their mask mandate (after the vaccine mandate date), too, so I'd like to have something working for me going into the holidays.

I haven't stopped using a mask. Even if covid disappeared overnight, I might want to wear one just for flu season. Luckily, I don't seem to live in an area where anyone looks at you twice for having one on.

Re: dilbert's neighbor's family, I mean there are anti-vax nurses and paramedics and stuff, so that kind of work isn't really a membership card for the always-right-on-medical-advice club.

Imagining your conversation dilbs, I'm putting a lot of Mick Dundee voices together punctuating every sentence with the word "cunt." Put another shrimp on the barbie.

Dilbert_X wrote:

I'm going into my own lockdown and will be wearing a mask for the foreseeable.

Had a chat with the neighbour Jay-style, half his family are in the medical industry and they aren't happy about borders opening up.
We may form a militia.

good luck man of science.

remember when jay told all of us that he trusts his local physician more than the emerging scientific picture. because a person who prescribes xannies to semi-retired italian-americans in NJ is a qualified virologist or epidemiologist.

you’ve persistently misunderstood, or misrepresented (weird) how vaccines work. you vacillate between positions wildly based on the schizoid tone of the popular press that week.

read some journal articles. shouldn’t science, you know, data and experiment and consensus, soothe your giant rationalist brain?

don't medical workers practically have to be vaccinated in order to, erm, go to work and keep their jobs? that's how it works in the UK and most european states, anyway. i'm not sure it's saying much to claim that your neighbour is a 'vaccinated healthcare worker'. i guess they're up-to-date with the latest scientific picture because they, er, work at a clinic and agreed to have a jab in their arm.