Dr. Offit, you forgot to mention that the definition of unvaccinated was anybody less than 14 days after their second shot. There’s a lot of definition problems in your article. You’re going along with the definitions that were misleading to begin with. It’s not a vaccine. Its a gene therapy.
The “unvaccinated”: yall wound up conflating those who were having reactions to the injections with people who chose not to take them; proceeding from there to smear the entire fake group. In logic, this would be called a strawman argument.
And of course you ignore the obvious that many of us actually did the research on this and we didn’t want to have synthetic technology injected, produced in a flawed process that left all kinds of garbage in the shots. Let’s just say it, the synthetic injections were not ready, and may never be.
i “trawled” the fda and cdc websites. it wasn’t hard to see a scam. these were my primary source of research. Mike S thinks ordinary people are dumb as shit.
If you need to be vaccinated against Yellow Fever to travel to parts of Africa your vaccination certificate will be dated the day you received the vaccine. You’re advised to have the vaccination some 6 weeks before travel to ensure that your immune system is at maximum efficacy. You’re vaccinated from the moment you receive the injection, your immune system will take 7-14 days to reach maximum response with memory T and B cells, but if you became infected 24 hours after the vaccine you will still mount a response.
Anyone who demanded mandates should be mandated to continue receiving boosters in perpetuity. Including Paul "my-body-my-choice" Offit who no longer wants to get boosters himself. The lack of self-awareness is breathtakingly obtuse.
"“You can’t ask people to get a vaccine if you’re trying to prevent serious illness and there’s no clear evidence that you are at risk of serious illness.”"
"Paul "my-body-my-choice" Offit who no longer wants to get boosters himself. "
Do as I say not as I do.
These corrupt drug company lackeys and totalitarian leaning douchebags are too much. If they could actually demonstrate a very clear and positive risk reward for all all age, sex, and health groups that would be one thing, but they lie and spin the data. It was obvious 3-4 months into the vaccination program in Israel that the vaccines were an epic fail at stopping infection and transmission and that was before all the new variants started popping up (which may have actually been part the result of the virus adapting and evolving to vaccination)
I appreciate you pointing out that vaccines don't prevent infection, nothing except living in a positive pressure bubble can do that which is why vaccines are designed to prevent death, serious disease not infection. What I can't figure out is why the so called anti vaxxers are so against prevention. Prevention is Far better. It's also Far less lucrative to the"Evil" pharmaceutical companies that they claim to hate but own stock in!
He claimed none of them prevented infection and spread. Glad you survived the great measles plague. btw, googling, the rate of serve measles cases isn't 100%, so you can't really say yours was any better tbh.
His point was that vaccination cannot prevent 100% of infections. Like I pointed out before, their effectiveness varies at this from 0% up to around 97%.
You still haven't answered whether you agree all of those vaccines are "true vaccines", and which ones you would dismiss as not being vaccines.
No vaccine ever has stopped infection by the pathogen (in this case SARS-CoV-2) but they do stop serious disease (in this case COVID19). Watch a couple of videos by Vincent Racianello and Brianne Barker on how vaccines work.
Do you want to cite your sources? You draw the line on risk reduction, and societal impacts. Calling tetanus a vaccine is misleading, I'd argue we should probably make a different class of drug classification for those that only protect the person. Obviously mandates around them should be based on risk reward of induvial.
A better example would be creating a vaccine passport for Tetanus, and forcing everyone to get vaccinated every 5 years, as it may save a life.
but even then you prove my point. Some vaccines are good. Alot prevent spread of very nasty diseases. but not all are the same, and not all prevent spread. if they don't prevent spread, it becomes a different conversation. Why call everything a vaccine, and give immunity for production of the medicine, when calling it a normal medicine would do the same thing?
Vaccines are products that stimulate immunity to the disease or its effects. That means all of the above count as vaccines in my opinion, but yes, of course they do differ in how well they perform that task. But because of that we shouldn't dismiss the underperforming ones as not being vaccines.
What next...should we regard chemo drugs that are only 30% effective at inducing cancer remission as not qualifying as "chemotherapy"?
Infectious diseases are not a leading cause of death so let's put mandates in place for what are the leading causes of death. Let's start with an BMI mandate! Obesity is a huge toll on the healthcare system. People should be weighted upon entering any food establishment or market and then turned away if the number is too high. Alcohol and all tobacco products should also be banned. Anyone who smokes of drinks or is obese should be in the back of the line for emergency care. They take up too many resources from those who take care of themselves.
Vaccination (for contagious infectious diseases like COVID-19) as well as mitigation (masks, distancing, distance learning) were all necessary to save lives.
YOU cant prove that nonsense. Because you have no control group Western governments. But vax uptake was low to non existent in Africa and they were fared very well.
Vax uptake in some individual countries in Africa was high, but overall there was about only 40% uptake of vaccination (OWID).
Regarding mortality data in Africa, in some countries there was massive underascertainment (and therefore notification) of Covid deaths. A look at the soaring excess deaths there would give you a clue as to the extent of the problem...most of these excess deaths were from Covid, but not notified as such.
Africans like myself largely avoided this nonsense. Uptake numbers are inflated especially when money and grants for pharma purchases from.U.S companies are involved.
In addition right off the gate it was obvious the PCR tests were constructed to generate FALSE positives as was proven by the Tanzanian President submitting a goat, a quail and papaya for Covid testing and getting positive results
In addition the African climate doesnt support respiratory flu like illnesses and IVM and HCQ are readily available over the counter and taken weekly/monthly.
Everything youve said is a lie because you are a pharmaceutical paid shill
You don't know how PCRs work. They amplify minute fragments of DNA or RNA with each cycle of the assay. They generally perform around 40 cycles in the labs, and results are given in the form of "cycle thresholds".
If you PCR anything out for as long as 40 cycles you can get false positives. At that number of cycle thresholds you could in theory obtain a positive test for any nucleic acid based biological specimen you choose, hence the false positives on the Tanzanian President's choice of material.
I don't lie, and I am not a pharma shill. I last got money from a pharma company (BMS) when they gave me aound £200 to defray the registration fee costs to an HIV conference I attended in the 1990s. I had to pay accommodation and travel myself as I was not eligible at that time to claim expenses.
From 2020 to 2022 PCR tests WERE run with cycle counts above 40 guaranteeing FALSE positive results. It was done ON purpose as a lead in to the vacvine as part of the fear narrative
An Estimated 13.8 MILLION YEARS of life lost for American SCHOOL CHILDREN from school closures. Do you have data to show how many years of life were saved for American children from distance learning? If you are going to make such claims, please cite your data.
"Findings This decision analytical model found that missed instruction during 2020 could be associated with an estimated 13.8 (95% CI 2.5-42.1) million years of life lost based on data from US studies and an estimated 0.8 (95% CI 0.1-2.4) million years of life lost based on data from European studies. This estimated loss in life expectancy was likely to be greater than would have been observed if leaving primary schools open had led to an expansion of the first wave of the pandemic.
Meaning These findings suggest that the decision to close US public primary schools in the early months of 2020 may be associated with a decrease in life expectancy for US children."
Children in Sweden only start school aged seven. Does the fact that they have 2 years "less" school education mean they have reduced life expectancy compared to their European peers? Nope...in fact they have one of the highest life expectancies.
US school children start first grade at 7 too and often boys are held back till age 8. What is your point? The paper I cited looks at the economic issues a disruption in primary school has on children. They base a lot of this data on the disruption on school post WWII for children and how if affected their earning potential long term.
Do I need to get you up to speed on the mental health disaster that the lockdowns had on the world’s youth too? There is a suicide epidemic in young people due to isolation and lack of socialization from school and social disruptions. As I wrote previously, when calculating years of life lost a 15 yo suicide is about 60 years of life lost while a 76 yo death from Covid is 0. A child’s life trumps an adults in public health.
I made the comparison with other european children, who generally start school aged 5 or in the educational year they turn 5.
Suicides: You conveniently blame them on "lockdowns", but the mental health crisis and opiod epidemic have deeper and complex roots, and it is impossible to disentangle the effects of the pandemic itself from the effects of the pandemic response.
You say there is an epidemic in young people; in fact suicides in young people went DOWN in 21/22 and were up in the older age groups mainly 50-60 yr olds.
Anyhow, suicides have been increasing year on year since around 2000 in the US, the overall current trend is not out of the ordinary.
You don't know what life expectancy means. If a 76 yr old dies from Covid, you have to calculate what the life expectancy would otherwise have been for someone that age (usually about another 10 years)
Yours is a stupid comparison, but to do it you'd have to next calculate how many 76 yr olds have lost their lives to Covid and total up their "years of life lost" and see if it exceeds that of the 15yr old suicide victims.
It's easy to attack them when you are unware of the true risk/reward for individual groups because all you listen to is propaganda from the government and drug companies instead of those showing the risks are higher than reported and benefits almost non existent beyond a few months.
And it is easy to remain unaware of the true risk/benefit because of faithful adherence to the propagandised outpourings of those who exaggerate risks and ignore the benefits.
No, It was not okay to have mandated the vaccines. I remember at the time being utterly baffled. A) We knew that those at risk were over 50, not kids or young adults, despite the hand-wringing and hysteria; B) we knew fairly early on that the vaccines didn't prevent infection from spreading.
The problem was one of perception and communication. These were marketed and construed as vaccines, but they were, in fact, novel gene therapies. They were effective in preventing death and hospitalization, but were equated with smallpox, TB and other vaccines that themselves had major positive impacts on public health.
But a respiratory virus is not smallpox or TB. It mutates constantly, so vaccine protection is ephemeral.
So why did we keep mandating it?
And let's face it: Mandating what someone must do with their body is a dangerous path. Next, we'll be mandating what a woman can do with her body... oh never mind, we're already there.
What you say has a degree of merit, but the vaccines did prevent transmission early on…they were 70-95% effective but the problem was immunity waned, and viral mutation reduced that effectiveness down to 30%.
They aren’t gene therapy, they are vaccines just like tetanus, flu etc.
Vaccines were NEVER tested for stopping transmission. I was in one of the trials. They were NEVER 95% effective. The 95% was the RRR, not the absolute. The ARR was only about 1%.
Dr. Peter Doshi, does a beautiful job in explaining relative V absolute risk reduction and why we need to know both numbers.
Relative risk and absolute risk are easy to understand, but are concepts that are abused by antivaxers/covidiots to suit their purpose.
For instance, when looking at relative risk reductions of 90% for hospitalisation or death with vaccination, the antivaxers claim as you do that this is only a 1% reduction in the absolute fatality (problem there is that 1% of virtually everyone is a very large number of lives saved).
But when talking about for example the side effects of vaccines, all talk of absolute risk goes by the wayside because in absolute terms the side effects are vanishingly rare, so they resort to relative risks to spread fear and alarm: "Vaccines double your risk of myocarditis!!!!!" they cry...well, yes they did....by 0.001% in absolute terms, and they only did that when primary course shots were given only 6 weeks apart..(they aren't any more).
mRNA vaccines are a new(ish) method of delivering antigen to provioke an immune response. Immunologists and vaccine scientists regard them as vaccines. The definition of vaccines has always evolved as technology advanced; we don't still insist a vaccine must be a smear of cowpox scraped into the skin, do we?
What else has the mRNA platform been successfully be used for in humans? Do you have data to support the 90% reductions in covid deaths form vaccination? Thanks for providing data.
Also, one size does not fit all in medicine, the risk of death from covid between a 75 yo with many comorbid conditions and a healthy 14 yo male are not the same and should not be treated as such. To this day the CDC still has not released data on the number of HEALTHY children that died of covid in the US. The risks of vaccination with mRNA are not 0 while the risk of death from covid in a healthy 14 yo is close to 0. There are no long-term data to suggest these products, mRNA, are healthy for pediatric population. Remember "Do No Harm"? You may need a refresher in the informed consent process and medical ethics.
Autonomy: respect for the patient’s right to self-determination.
Beneficence: the duty to ‘do good’.
Non-Maleficence: the duty to ‘not do bad’.
Justice: to treat all people equally and equitably.
Notice I have no ad hominin attacks here or name calling? Logical fallacies are often used when one cannot win on the facts. I try to stay away from them.
Benificence, Non-Malificense and Justice all indicate that children should be vaccinated; deaths from vaccination almost unheard of, and 2000 children and young people have died so far in the US, and around 200 in the UK. Whether some have comorbidities is irrelevant...vaccination helps all of them, healthy and "unhealthy" alike. I sincerely hope you don't duiscount child deaths just because the child may have had asthma or diabetes.
How many HEALTHY children died OF Covid. OF COURSE those with significant under lying conditions need to be treated differently than young healthy children. The risk benefit ratio is different for different cohorts of patients. 64% of these kids had a LIFE LIMITING condition.
Dude, learn to read a research paper.
"A similar proportion of the 25 CYP who died of SARS-CoV-2 (n = 19, 76%) and the 3,080 deaths from all other causes (n = 2,267, 74%) (chi-squared 0.004, P = 0.60) had a chronic underlying health condition (Tables 2 and 3). Significantly more CYP who died of SARS-CoV-2 had a life-limiting condition (n = 15, 60%) compared to deaths from all other causes (n = 988, 32%) (chi-squared 8.5, P = 0.005). Of the 25 CYP who died of SARS-CoV-2, 64% (n = 16) had comorbidities in two or more body systems compared to 45% (n = 1,373) of the CYP who died from all other causes (chi-squared 5.5, P = 0.14)."
Sure you can. If the people who took the vaccine, showed that they didn't become infected, then they tested for transmission. Infact there was a control group, sooo we did.
The problem is that being vaccinated doesn’t prevent infection ever.
The only way would be to deliberately expose the vaccinated to the virus such that they were infected. Then deliberately expose other unvaccinated people to this person. The control group would be a deliberately infected unvaccinated person to whom other unvaccinated people were exposed.
This is effectively what Salk did for polio in the 1950’s.
Sure you can. Just because you and policy makers use it as a crutch, doesn't mean its not possible. Here you have a control group and non control group. Have them test every week and get blood confirmation for a positive test. test the family members once you have a positive test of infection on both groups. if the vaccine group doesn't spread it, you have now scientific evidence that they don't spread it. if a control group spreads it at a reduced rate, then you have some efficiency that probably would need greater qualifications.
Simple and easy dude. Sorry that your mindless and can't think about how to use logic to solve for problems.
If you can’t acknowledge the stark differences between the flu vaccine and the Covid vaccine, I’d suggest you’re either brain dead or intentionally propagating misinformation. Please do some homework, because spouting this nonsense is only going to increase vaccine hesitancy.
The flu vaccines and the Covid vaccines have many similarities in terms of their epidemiological impact and effects. Some may be from a different platform (eg mRNA) but I am talking about what they do biologically, and they behave like many vaccines do in terms of their immunostimulatory effects. They are not gene therapy in the normal definition of that term as understood by scientists, and they do not interact with host DNA or alter it.
I’m talking about what they ARE biologically. Do traditional vaccines induce your body to build viral spike proteins? I see it’s your MO to run to some silly argument where you can parse words to avoid reality. Thanks for playing.
Since the time of Jenner, vaccine science has developed novel ways of presenting the antigens necessary to induce an immune response. This could be attenuated whole pathogen, killed pathogens, fragments of pathogens, bioengineered fragments of pathogen, toxoids, virus-like proteins, pathogen DNA/RNA introduced by transfection with bacteria, and now mRNA tech.
I’ve probably left out some, but I hope you've learned something.
Bear in mind a few years ago the flu vaccine was very ineffective as the wrong strain was identified by the WHO. The TB vaccine used to be administered to 14 year olds as part of the official vaccine schedule, it is now only administered to children who are at risk of coming into contact with TB. My granddaughter was given the TB vaccine as her paternal grandmother is first generation immigrant and is of South Asian ethnicity. When I worked in A&E my TB vaccination status (which I did have when I was 14) was checked as the A&E where I worked was in a city with a high proportion of potential TB patients.
This abject whitewashing of history is disgusting. I would expect that leading this Big Pharma stooge’s analysis would be acknowledgment that maybe having the heads of the NIH and CDC lie to the American people about Covid was a bad thing, or that maybe Fauci should not have been funding gain of function research in China, or that using OSHA to push a vaccine mandate by coercing Corporations to do their dirty work was a horrible mistake and against every word of our Constitution.
“Fascism should more properly called corporatism because it is the merger of State and Corporate power” - Benito Mussolini
"Hospitals were overwhelmed." This is a false narrative that responsible medical commentators should stop repeating. The vast majority of hospitals outside of NYC in March -April 2020 were not overwhelmed. I went to my 1000-bed hospital in Baltimore almost every day throughout the pandemic. Our peak covid census was 150 cases. The pandemic strained resources and required repurposing units and reassigning staff, but we were never "overwhelmed". In fact, our health system had to lay of thousands in the spring of 2020 because they had nothing to do and the river of "covid relief" had not started to flow. I still remember the hospital feeling like a ghost town then.
Many hospitals felt like ghost towns because elective procedures were cancelled and staff diverted to the ER and Covid wards to deal with the surge of cases.
Most were under considerable strain, and a few were indeed overwhelmed. Certainly the ITUs were filled with Covid patients and many who needed care were transferred or indeed denied services.
Being "strained" is not the same this as being "overwhelmed." An objective review of hospital and ER utilization will not find any evidence of being "overwhelmed". Even NYC bearing the worst of the pandemic in March-April 2020 did not use most of the overflow resources created for them. In the UK, the NHS built 7 overflow "Nightingale" hospitals that remained empty throughout the pandemic.
The "overwhelmed hospitals" false narrative was used as a bludgeon to compel the public into compliance with covid authoritarianism and to silence critics of bad covid policies. In my hospital there is more ER overcrowding and hospital bed backup today than at any point during the pandemic.
It is the idea that no UK hospitals were "overwhelmed" or under strain during Covid that is the false narrative.
The Nightingale hospitals were a stupid white elephant contrived during the first wave and anticipated to take patients as hospital overflow (when instead they ended up being discharged back home or to nursing homes where they spread more disease) or excess ITU patients on the scale of Northern Italy or China (which didn't happen, because NHS hospitals were able to triple their own ICU footprints within individual Hospital Trusts.
Was the NHS overwhelmed in other respects during the peak of the winter 21/22 wave? Yes, it was.
ITU/ICU shifts of 12 hours are normal in the USA. Doctors and nurses work very hard taking care of sick people every day in the UK and the US. My hospital's ICUs and wards are packed with sick people today - none of them because of covid. This is normal, not an existential crisis. The Imperial and IHME models overestimated the impact of covid by at least a factor of 10. There was no justification for inflicting lockdown and mandate insanity on the world.
The ITU position in 2020/21 was very different. Our hospital multiplied its ITU footprint 3 fold. Anaesthetic prep rooms, cardiac unit, even A&E resus were co-opted as "ITU beds" to cope with Covid. There were many instances where ITU support was refused for patients because the beds were filled and all ventilators were in use.
Of course, now the picture is far different...most people have either vaccine immunity, natural immunity, or hybrid immunity, and serious disease/deaths from Covid are at an all time low. So I'm unsurprised your hospital's ITU doesn't currently have any Covid cases.
12 hour shifts are pretty much standard in our acute hospitals, I worked them in A&E between 2008 & 2013. I did 12 hour shifts on my placements as a student nurse 20 years ago.
My point was more to do with ITU occupancy and the wearing of “space suit” type ppe for that period, also that ITU was full of COVID patients, putting pay to the lie that hospitals were not busy.
There are NO studies that show that the vaccine stopped or reduced transmission of the virus. The Japanese study you cite has many limitations and the authors conclude that it cannot not be generalized to a larger population. No studies on virus transmission have been able to reproduce results, which is the standard in science.
The end point of the vaccine RTC were a 50% reduction in the symptoms. Full stop. You are spreading misinformation and are the reason why people are now skeptical about all VACCINES, even those that have a strong record for improving public health. Until U.S. healthcare providers acknowledge the huge blunder of pushing the covid vaccines on the whole population your credibility is tarnished.
Why is the U.S. an outlier in recommending covid vaccines to children, 6mos and above? NO OTHER country in the world does so anymore.
"Third, the retrospective design of this study limited the
types of data that we could use to adjust for variations in households and household members. For example, we could not account for COVID-19 symptoms or disease severity, preexisting conditions,
or specific transmission prevention measures undertaken in each household. The lack of these data could have introduced confounding bias. Fourth, our study was conducted using data from only
two Japanese municipalities, which limits the generalizability of its findings. Nevertheless, the use of household information from the municipalities enabled an overall assessment of their residents. In
addition, this study focused on households that experienced their first COVID-19 case relatively late in the pandemic, which may suggest that these household members are more cautious than persons who had been infected earlier. This could have introduced a degree of selection bias into the study."
The age-old problem of, if you tell everyone to do something, there will always be some people who say, “no,” if only because, “you can’t tell me what to do >:( “
For your consent to be legitimate it has to be voluntary and informed. Fear and ignorance are not good reasons for getting vaccinated with a NOVEL ( never before used on humans m-rna platform, lipid nanoparticles, unknown adjuvants, and not GMP compliant) under an Emergency Use Authorization ( imposed because billions of dollars were to be made and because the safest, cheapest, most effective, early treatments (Ivermectin and HCQ) had been falsely banned.
And after injecting 70% of the US population, the profiteers still tried to prevent informed consent for 70 years, would not release the Vaers data and texts, and IN SPITE of all of this known malevolence, they are still censoring and ignoring the tsunami of scientific evidence pouring in that goes against their imposed narrative while recommending babies still receive their 9th shot.
My consent was voluntary and informed. I was informed by people who spend their lives studying these things. Sorry, Invermectin and HCQ are bullshit. Plus the VAERS data are available for anyone to see, otherwise I would not have seen them, nor would the anti-vaxers who threw it at me obviously not having the faintest idea what it was. Vaccine. Averse. Events. Reporting. System. They showed me that hockey stick pattern as if it meant anything. Well duh. You vaccinate millions of people, referentially old. Of course there will be a lot of deaths reported within the days and weeks following injection. Dying is one of the things we old people do, for all kinds of reasons!
The reason doesn't matter. I was in VAERS. I signed up right after my first shot. I reported, for example, my going to the hospital for a bicycle crash because the form I would get just said, have you been admitted to a hospital since your most recent vaccine. Nothing about whether or not I thought it was vaccine related. Because how TF would I know? They called me and asked me about it.
So I'll stick with people who have spent a lifetime studying these things, not randos on YouTube whose purpose is, DINGDINGDING! to make money!
You find it reasonable that the most widely used drugs in the world with the safest profile for the longest period of time were banned during a dire global health emergency; but do not find it unreasonable to force a NOVEL never before used on humans m-rna platform, encased in lipid nano-particle, with unknown adjuvants, and non-compliant GMP manufacturing process.
Keep in mind, you chose to assume the risk of getting vaccinated countless young people and babies had no choice along with their parents who needed their jobs to pay the bills.
A final comment: "We" did not mandate anything. Why use the royal "we"? The mandates were ordered and executed by a small group of misguided gov't leaders and health officials. They were widely opposed by the public and many in the health professions. Many cities and states did not implement vaccine passports and some passed laws against. You are falsely portraying a consensus that did not exist in order to shield advocates of these bad policies from responsibility.
The idiocy was mandating vaccines with KNOWN risks and some still yet to be determined long term risks to people that already had the virus. They had better and longer lasting protection from infection than the vaccines could give them. It was easy enough to get a verification of whether you had it previously. Also, given the protection only lasted a few months (data out of Israel revealed that very early on) and new variants were making the vaccines less relevant the risk reward was also highly suspect for children, young people and especially young men.
The idea that you would do something out of concern for your fellow humans is completely foreign to the right-wing.
Also, the ideas that 1) covid was the result of intentional gain of function experiments in a Chinese lab, and 2) covid really wasn't a serious health threat, seem somewhat contradictory, but are often believed by the same people.
They are not contradictory. Clearly, C-19 came out of a Chinese lab that was funded in part by the US. And I believe it was done as a dry run - a way to test out various concepts for pandemic control in the real world (lockdowns, electronic passports, etc...) with an agent that was only minimally dangerous, as well as to stop Trump's reelection. And it was, for the most part, only a real threat to old and unhealthy people, but was just deadly enough, at least at the beginning, to enable massive media-driven panic.
Being "strained" is not the same this as being "overwhelmed." An objective review of hospital and ER utilization will not find any evidence of being "overwhelmed". Even NYC bearing the worst of the pandemic in March-April 2020 did not use most of the overflow resources created for them. In the UK, the NHS built 7 overflow "Nightingale" hospitals that remained empty throughout the pandemic.
The "overwhelmed hospitals" false narrative was used as a bludgeon to compel the public into compliance with covid authoritarianism and to silence critics of bad covid policies. In my hospital there is more ER overcrowding and hospital bed backup today than at any point during the pandemic.
It is the idea that no UK hospitals were "overwhelmed" or under strain during Covid that is the false narrative.
The Nightingale hospitals were a stupid white elephant contrived during the first wave and anticipated to take patients as hospital overflow (when instead they ended up being discharged back home or to nursing homes where they spread more disease) or excess ITU patients on the scale of Northern Italy or China (which didn't happen, because NHS hospitals were able to triple their own ICU footprints within individual Hospital Trusts.
Was the NHS overwhelmed in other respects during the peak of the winter 21/22 wave? Yes, it was.
For me, I think the error occurred in not celebrating the accomplishments of this vaccine and instead insisting not just on vaccination and boosters, but continued isolation, masking, school closures, hospital/nursing home restrictions, etc. etc. even for folks who were vaccinated or had had the virus. This really chipped aways at public confidence in the effectiveness of the vaccine, as well as the necessity of it. I do believe that most people will act in their own best interests, and this tendency was not utilized in a logical manner to increase vaccine uptake. Why would someone who is on the fence be persuaded to do something that would in no way change how they live their daily lives? Ironically, it was my father's oncologist who was the first health care provider to openly state that a vaccinated, asymptomatic individual could go about life, unmasked if they preferred, and that the data for the vaccine, even for many immunocompromised people, was quite promising. This helped put things in perspective for me, coming from a very invested, caring, and educated doctor. I think if the message had been to celebrate the hell out of the lowered hospitalization rates for the initial series and use that to promote in-person school, masking to comfort-level or symptoms only, reduced social distancing, and less severe isolation guidelines, more people might have been motivated or had confidence in the vaccine. Treating people like they are too stupid to act in their own best interests, so let's promote the most restrictive guidelines possible, for as long as possible, even when you are vaccinated, was I think maybe more damaging than the mandate itself.
Dr. Offit, you forgot to mention that the definition of unvaccinated was anybody less than 14 days after their second shot. There’s a lot of definition problems in your article. You’re going along with the definitions that were misleading to begin with. It’s not a vaccine. Its a gene therapy.
The “unvaccinated”: yall wound up conflating those who were having reactions to the injections with people who chose not to take them; proceeding from there to smear the entire fake group. In logic, this would be called a strawman argument.
And of course you ignore the obvious that many of us actually did the research on this and we didn’t want to have synthetic technology injected, produced in a flawed process that left all kinds of garbage in the shots. Let’s just say it, the synthetic injections were not ready, and may never be.
Yep, a lot of people did “research”…trawling antivax propaganda websites on the internet.
Point is we were smart enough to figure out the scam.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4HbR40tblT/?igsh=MXVnMDBwaDJubzR3MA==
i “trawled” the fda and cdc websites. it wasn’t hard to see a scam. these were my primary source of research. Mike S thinks ordinary people are dumb as shit.
and i wasn’t wrong and i don’t regret refusing the “miracle juice”. Mike S please take more shots.
If you need to be vaccinated against Yellow Fever to travel to parts of Africa your vaccination certificate will be dated the day you received the vaccine. You’re advised to have the vaccination some 6 weeks before travel to ensure that your immune system is at maximum efficacy. You’re vaccinated from the moment you receive the injection, your immune system will take 7-14 days to reach maximum response with memory T and B cells, but if you became infected 24 hours after the vaccine you will still mount a response.
you lie. Shame on you!!
"It's gene therapy."
Impossible. Given that the mRNA vaccines do not modify the genes in any way.
Here is the direct evidence that has been hidden from you: https://x.com/kevin_mckernan/status/1765611735812112815?s=46
Have you been hiding under a rock this past year?
Yep, we published on this, wonder why no major news orgs picked up on it... Did present on it for there Senate, though. https://okaythennews.substack.com/p/science-summary-covid-19-vaccines
Just here for the comments. 🍿
Anyone who demanded mandates should be mandated to continue receiving boosters in perpetuity. Including Paul "my-body-my-choice" Offit who no longer wants to get boosters himself. The lack of self-awareness is breathtakingly obtuse.
"“You can’t ask people to get a vaccine if you’re trying to prevent serious illness and there’s no clear evidence that you are at risk of serious illness.”"
https://www.science.org/content/article/should-i-get-covid-19-booster
"Paul "my-body-my-choice" Offit who no longer wants to get boosters himself. "
Do as I say not as I do.
These corrupt drug company lackeys and totalitarian leaning douchebags are too much. If they could actually demonstrate a very clear and positive risk reward for all all age, sex, and health groups that would be one thing, but they lie and spin the data. It was obvious 3-4 months into the vaccination program in Israel that the vaccines were an epic fail at stopping infection and transmission and that was before all the new variants started popping up (which may have actually been part the result of the virus adapting and evolving to vaccination)
I appreciate you pointing out that vaccines don't prevent infection, nothing except living in a positive pressure bubble can do that which is why vaccines are designed to prevent death, serious disease not infection. What I can't figure out is why the so called anti vaxxers are so against prevention. Prevention is Far better. It's also Far less lucrative to the"Evil" pharmaceutical companies that they claim to hate but own stock in!
I'll leave chicken pox, MMR, Polio comment here.
Nope. Had a mild case of childhood measles myself, despite vaccination. Point is, vaccine kept it mild.
Pro tip: Google is your friend.
He claimed none of them prevented infection and spread. Glad you survived the great measles plague. btw, googling, the rate of serve measles cases isn't 100%, so you can't really say yours was any better tbh.
Have a good day.
His point was that vaccination cannot prevent 100% of infections. Like I pointed out before, their effectiveness varies at this from 0% up to around 97%.
You still haven't answered whether you agree all of those vaccines are "true vaccines", and which ones you would dismiss as not being vaccines.
No vaccine ever has stopped infection by the pathogen (in this case SARS-CoV-2) but they do stop serious disease (in this case COVID19). Watch a couple of videos by Vincent Racianello and Brianne Barker on how vaccines work.
I'll leave chicken pox, MMR, Polio comment here.
At preventing transmission/infection?
Measles...97% effective.
Chicken pox...95% effective.
Polio...90+% effective.
Mumps...80% effective.
Rubella...70-80% effective.
Influenza...50% effective.
Pneumococcus...50% effective.
Meningococcus...20% effective.
Pertussis...20% effective.
Diphtheria...0% effective.
Tetanus...0% effective.
Which ones will you decide are vaccines, and which aren't?
Where do you draw your line?
Do you want to cite your sources? You draw the line on risk reduction, and societal impacts. Calling tetanus a vaccine is misleading, I'd argue we should probably make a different class of drug classification for those that only protect the person. Obviously mandates around them should be based on risk reward of induvial.
A better example would be creating a vaccine passport for Tetanus, and forcing everyone to get vaccinated every 5 years, as it may save a life.
but even then you prove my point. Some vaccines are good. Alot prevent spread of very nasty diseases. but not all are the same, and not all prevent spread. if they don't prevent spread, it becomes a different conversation. Why call everything a vaccine, and give immunity for production of the medicine, when calling it a normal medicine would do the same thing?
Green Book.
Vaccines are products that stimulate immunity to the disease or its effects. That means all of the above count as vaccines in my opinion, but yes, of course they do differ in how well they perform that task. But because of that we shouldn't dismiss the underperforming ones as not being vaccines.
What next...should we regard chemo drugs that are only 30% effective at inducing cancer remission as not qualifying as "chemotherapy"?
Infectious diseases are not a leading cause of death so let's put mandates in place for what are the leading causes of death. Let's start with an BMI mandate! Obesity is a huge toll on the healthcare system. People should be weighted upon entering any food establishment or market and then turned away if the number is too high. Alcohol and all tobacco products should also be banned. Anyone who smokes of drinks or is obese should be in the back of the line for emergency care. They take up too many resources from those who take care of themselves.
Covid is what… the 3rd leading cause of death? And other respiratory infections rank somewhere in the top ten.
And I’m sure many might support your sarcastic call for smokers to be at the back of the medical queue.
Vaccination (for contagious infectious diseases like COVID-19) as well as mitigation (masks, distancing, distance learning) were all necessary to save lives.
YOU cant prove that nonsense. Because you have no control group Western governments. But vax uptake was low to non existent in Africa and they were fared very well.
So we know your comment is a blatant lie
Vax uptake in some individual countries in Africa was high, but overall there was about only 40% uptake of vaccination (OWID).
Regarding mortality data in Africa, in some countries there was massive underascertainment (and therefore notification) of Covid deaths. A look at the soaring excess deaths there would give you a clue as to the extent of the problem...most of these excess deaths were from Covid, but not notified as such.
Citation needed for the lie of vax uptake. Must be an independent source (read not CDC/NIH/FDA)
There was nothing close to a 40% uptake
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/immersive-story/2022/06/30/unlocking-supply-and-overcoming-hesitancy-eastern-and-southern-africa-s-covid-19-vaccination-journey
Africans like myself largely avoided this nonsense. Uptake numbers are inflated especially when money and grants for pharma purchases from.U.S companies are involved.
In addition right off the gate it was obvious the PCR tests were constructed to generate FALSE positives as was proven by the Tanzanian President submitting a goat, a quail and papaya for Covid testing and getting positive results
In addition the African climate doesnt support respiratory flu like illnesses and IVM and HCQ are readily available over the counter and taken weekly/monthly.
Everything youve said is a lie because you are a pharmaceutical paid shill
Here are the stats on Africa vax uptake from Our World in Data:
You are right, I lied when I said it was 40%. It is actually 38.89%.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?facet=none&uniformYAxis=0&country=~OWID_AFR&Metric=People+vaccinated&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false
You don't know how PCRs work. They amplify minute fragments of DNA or RNA with each cycle of the assay. They generally perform around 40 cycles in the labs, and results are given in the form of "cycle thresholds".
If you PCR anything out for as long as 40 cycles you can get false positives. At that number of cycle thresholds you could in theory obtain a positive test for any nucleic acid based biological specimen you choose, hence the false positives on the Tanzanian President's choice of material.
I don't lie, and I am not a pharma shill. I last got money from a pharma company (BMS) when they gave me aound £200 to defray the registration fee costs to an HIV conference I attended in the 1990s. I had to pay accommodation and travel myself as I was not eligible at that time to claim expenses.
You pathetic pharma shill.
Ourworldindata is funded by the Bill and Melinda gates foundation.
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-new-funding-owd/#:~:text=In%20addition%20to%20the%20grant,businesswoman%20and%20philanthropist%20Susanne%20Klatten.
That alone tells you the numbers are COOKED to support the narrative
As for PCR tests, the inventor himself (Kary Mullis) noted that its often misused as a diagnostic tool.
https://kickthemallout.com/article.php/V-Inventor_of_the_PCR_Test_Kary_Mullis_Exposes_Dr_Anthony_Fauci_For_Who_He_Really_Is
From 2020 to 2022 PCR tests WERE run with cycle counts above 40 guaranteeing FALSE positive results. It was done ON purpose as a lead in to the vacvine as part of the fear narrative
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/12/jon-rappoport/in-case-you-thought-the-pcr-test-detects-an-actual-viruswrong
The dam broke when Florida governor DeSantis passed an executive order demanding all Florida testing labs report their cycle counts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/12/jon-rappoport/florida-forcing-labs-to-report-number-of-pcr-test-cycles-game-changer
https://naturalnews.com/2020-12-03-portuguese-court-pcr-tests-unreliable-quarantine-unlawful.html
An Estimated 13.8 MILLION YEARS of life lost for American SCHOOL CHILDREN from school closures. Do you have data to show how many years of life were saved for American children from distance learning? If you are going to make such claims, please cite your data.
"Findings This decision analytical model found that missed instruction during 2020 could be associated with an estimated 13.8 (95% CI 2.5-42.1) million years of life lost based on data from US studies and an estimated 0.8 (95% CI 0.1-2.4) million years of life lost based on data from European studies. This estimated loss in life expectancy was likely to be greater than would have been observed if leaving primary schools open had led to an expansion of the first wave of the pandemic.
Meaning These findings suggest that the decision to close US public primary schools in the early months of 2020 may be associated with a decrease in life expectancy for US children."
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2772834
Children in Sweden only start school aged seven. Does the fact that they have 2 years "less" school education mean they have reduced life expectancy compared to their European peers? Nope...in fact they have one of the highest life expectancies.
You are just being silly at this point. Bless your heart.
Evasion duly noted.
US school children start first grade at 7 too and often boys are held back till age 8. What is your point? The paper I cited looks at the economic issues a disruption in primary school has on children. They base a lot of this data on the disruption on school post WWII for children and how if affected their earning potential long term.
Do I need to get you up to speed on the mental health disaster that the lockdowns had on the world’s youth too? There is a suicide epidemic in young people due to isolation and lack of socialization from school and social disruptions. As I wrote previously, when calculating years of life lost a 15 yo suicide is about 60 years of life lost while a 76 yo death from Covid is 0. A child’s life trumps an adults in public health.
I made the comparison with other european children, who generally start school aged 5 or in the educational year they turn 5.
Suicides: You conveniently blame them on "lockdowns", but the mental health crisis and opiod epidemic have deeper and complex roots, and it is impossible to disentangle the effects of the pandemic itself from the effects of the pandemic response.
You say there is an epidemic in young people; in fact suicides in young people went DOWN in 21/22 and were up in the older age groups mainly 50-60 yr olds.
Anyhow, suicides have been increasing year on year since around 2000 in the US, the overall current trend is not out of the ordinary.
You don't know what life expectancy means. If a 76 yr old dies from Covid, you have to calculate what the life expectancy would otherwise have been for someone that age (usually about another 10 years)
Yours is a stupid comparison, but to do it you'd have to next calculate how many 76 yr olds have lost their lives to Covid and total up their "years of life lost" and see if it exceeds that of the 15yr old suicide victims.
I have come to despise the "my medical freedom" libertarians as well as those folks who believe Covid was planned or is a scam.
It's easy to attack them when you are unware of the true risk/reward for individual groups because all you listen to is propaganda from the government and drug companies instead of those showing the risks are higher than reported and benefits almost non existent beyond a few months.
And it is easy to remain unaware of the true risk/benefit because of faithful adherence to the propagandised outpourings of those who exaggerate risks and ignore the benefits.
what nonsense. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Why would you care which side they are on? If you believe the jab works - take it - and stfu?
I believe good health, diet and exercise as well as open range meats work. And I pursue that lifestyle. I am not trying to force it upon others..
No, It was not okay to have mandated the vaccines. I remember at the time being utterly baffled. A) We knew that those at risk were over 50, not kids or young adults, despite the hand-wringing and hysteria; B) we knew fairly early on that the vaccines didn't prevent infection from spreading.
The problem was one of perception and communication. These were marketed and construed as vaccines, but they were, in fact, novel gene therapies. They were effective in preventing death and hospitalization, but were equated with smallpox, TB and other vaccines that themselves had major positive impacts on public health.
But a respiratory virus is not smallpox or TB. It mutates constantly, so vaccine protection is ephemeral.
So why did we keep mandating it?
And let's face it: Mandating what someone must do with their body is a dangerous path. Next, we'll be mandating what a woman can do with her body... oh never mind, we're already there.
What you say has a degree of merit, but the vaccines did prevent transmission early on…they were 70-95% effective but the problem was immunity waned, and viral mutation reduced that effectiveness down to 30%.
They aren’t gene therapy, they are vaccines just like tetanus, flu etc.
Vaccines were NEVER tested for stopping transmission. I was in one of the trials. They were NEVER 95% effective. The 95% was the RRR, not the absolute. The ARR was only about 1%.
Dr. Peter Doshi, does a beautiful job in explaining relative V absolute risk reduction and why we need to know both numbers.
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/11/26/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-modernas-95-effective-vaccines-lets-be-cautious-and-first-see-the-full-data/
Also, mRNA technology has NEVER been used in human beings successfully. They are not traditional vaccine platforms.
Relative risk and absolute risk are easy to understand, but are concepts that are abused by antivaxers/covidiots to suit their purpose.
For instance, when looking at relative risk reductions of 90% for hospitalisation or death with vaccination, the antivaxers claim as you do that this is only a 1% reduction in the absolute fatality (problem there is that 1% of virtually everyone is a very large number of lives saved).
But when talking about for example the side effects of vaccines, all talk of absolute risk goes by the wayside because in absolute terms the side effects are vanishingly rare, so they resort to relative risks to spread fear and alarm: "Vaccines double your risk of myocarditis!!!!!" they cry...well, yes they did....by 0.001% in absolute terms, and they only did that when primary course shots were given only 6 weeks apart..(they aren't any more).
mRNA vaccines are a new(ish) method of delivering antigen to provioke an immune response. Immunologists and vaccine scientists regard them as vaccines. The definition of vaccines has always evolved as technology advanced; we don't still insist a vaccine must be a smear of cowpox scraped into the skin, do we?
What else has the mRNA platform been successfully be used for in humans? Do you have data to support the 90% reductions in covid deaths form vaccination? Thanks for providing data.
Also, one size does not fit all in medicine, the risk of death from covid between a 75 yo with many comorbid conditions and a healthy 14 yo male are not the same and should not be treated as such. To this day the CDC still has not released data on the number of HEALTHY children that died of covid in the US. The risks of vaccination with mRNA are not 0 while the risk of death from covid in a healthy 14 yo is close to 0. There are no long-term data to suggest these products, mRNA, are healthy for pediatric population. Remember "Do No Harm"? You may need a refresher in the informed consent process and medical ethics.
Autonomy: respect for the patient’s right to self-determination.
Beneficence: the duty to ‘do good’.
Non-Maleficence: the duty to ‘not do bad’.
Justice: to treat all people equally and equitably.
Notice I have no ad hominin attacks here or name calling? Logical fallacies are often used when one cannot win on the facts. I try to stay away from them.
Data that vaccines cut covid mortality by 90%? ...Easy. It's been documented globally, not just in the US....
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/covid19vaccineeffectivenessestimatedusingcensus2021variablesengland/31march2021to20march2022
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10247887/
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7112e1.htm
https://www.epi-phare.fr/rapports-detudes-et-publications/impact-vaccination-covid-octobre-2021/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8714257/
In England during the first 9 months of Covid, there were 25 deaths in children, with 1/4 being healthy and without co-morbidities.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01578-1
Benificence, Non-Malificense and Justice all indicate that children should be vaccinated; deaths from vaccination almost unheard of, and 2000 children and young people have died so far in the US, and around 200 in the UK. Whether some have comorbidities is irrelevant...vaccination helps all of them, healthy and "unhealthy" alike. I sincerely hope you don't duiscount child deaths just because the child may have had asthma or diabetes.
How many HEALTHY children died OF Covid. OF COURSE those with significant under lying conditions need to be treated differently than young healthy children. The risk benefit ratio is different for different cohorts of patients. 64% of these kids had a LIFE LIMITING condition.
Dude, learn to read a research paper.
"A similar proportion of the 25 CYP who died of SARS-CoV-2 (n = 19, 76%) and the 3,080 deaths from all other causes (n = 2,267, 74%) (chi-squared 0.004, P = 0.60) had a chronic underlying health condition (Tables 2 and 3). Significantly more CYP who died of SARS-CoV-2 had a life-limiting condition (n = 15, 60%) compared to deaths from all other causes (n = 988, 32%) (chi-squared 8.5, P = 0.005). Of the 25 CYP who died of SARS-CoV-2, 64% (n = 16) had comorbidities in two or more body systems compared to 45% (n = 1,373) of the CYP who died from all other causes (chi-squared 5.5, P = 0.14)."
You cannot test for transmission as this would definitely be unethical.
Sure you can. If the people who took the vaccine, showed that they didn't become infected, then they tested for transmission. Infact there was a control group, sooo we did.
The problem is that being vaccinated doesn’t prevent infection ever.
The only way would be to deliberately expose the vaccinated to the virus such that they were infected. Then deliberately expose other unvaccinated people to this person. The control group would be a deliberately infected unvaccinated person to whom other unvaccinated people were exposed.
This is effectively what Salk did for polio in the 1950’s.
Sure you can. Just because you and policy makers use it as a crutch, doesn't mean its not possible. Here you have a control group and non control group. Have them test every week and get blood confirmation for a positive test. test the family members once you have a positive test of infection on both groups. if the vaccine group doesn't spread it, you have now scientific evidence that they don't spread it. if a control group spreads it at a reduced rate, then you have some efficiency that probably would need greater qualifications.
Simple and easy dude. Sorry that your mindless and can't think about how to use logic to solve for problems.
If you can’t acknowledge the stark differences between the flu vaccine and the Covid vaccine, I’d suggest you’re either brain dead or intentionally propagating misinformation. Please do some homework, because spouting this nonsense is only going to increase vaccine hesitancy.
The flu vaccines and the Covid vaccines have many similarities in terms of their epidemiological impact and effects. Some may be from a different platform (eg mRNA) but I am talking about what they do biologically, and they behave like many vaccines do in terms of their immunostimulatory effects. They are not gene therapy in the normal definition of that term as understood by scientists, and they do not interact with host DNA or alter it.
https://www.genomicseducation.hee.nhs.uk/blog/why-mrna-vaccines-arent-gene-therapies/
I’m talking about what they ARE biologically. Do traditional vaccines induce your body to build viral spike proteins? I see it’s your MO to run to some silly argument where you can parse words to avoid reality. Thanks for playing.
Since the time of Jenner, vaccine science has developed novel ways of presenting the antigens necessary to induce an immune response. This could be attenuated whole pathogen, killed pathogens, fragments of pathogens, bioengineered fragments of pathogen, toxoids, virus-like proteins, pathogen DNA/RNA introduced by transfection with bacteria, and now mRNA tech.
I’ve probably left out some, but I hope you've learned something.
I’ve learned that you are incapable of responding to a simple question.
Bear in mind a few years ago the flu vaccine was very ineffective as the wrong strain was identified by the WHO. The TB vaccine used to be administered to 14 year olds as part of the official vaccine schedule, it is now only administered to children who are at risk of coming into contact with TB. My granddaughter was given the TB vaccine as her paternal grandmother is first generation immigrant and is of South Asian ethnicity. When I worked in A&E my TB vaccination status (which I did have when I was 14) was checked as the A&E where I worked was in a city with a high proportion of potential TB patients.
This abject whitewashing of history is disgusting. I would expect that leading this Big Pharma stooge’s analysis would be acknowledgment that maybe having the heads of the NIH and CDC lie to the American people about Covid was a bad thing, or that maybe Fauci should not have been funding gain of function research in China, or that using OSHA to push a vaccine mandate by coercing Corporations to do their dirty work was a horrible mistake and against every word of our Constitution.
“Fascism should more properly called corporatism because it is the merger of State and Corporate power” - Benito Mussolini
"Hospitals were overwhelmed." This is a false narrative that responsible medical commentators should stop repeating. The vast majority of hospitals outside of NYC in March -April 2020 were not overwhelmed. I went to my 1000-bed hospital in Baltimore almost every day throughout the pandemic. Our peak covid census was 150 cases. The pandemic strained resources and required repurposing units and reassigning staff, but we were never "overwhelmed". In fact, our health system had to lay of thousands in the spring of 2020 because they had nothing to do and the river of "covid relief" had not started to flow. I still remember the hospital feeling like a ghost town then.
Many hospitals felt like ghost towns because elective procedures were cancelled and staff diverted to the ER and Covid wards to deal with the surge of cases.
Most were under considerable strain, and a few were indeed overwhelmed. Certainly the ITUs were filled with Covid patients and many who needed care were transferred or indeed denied services.
Being "strained" is not the same this as being "overwhelmed." An objective review of hospital and ER utilization will not find any evidence of being "overwhelmed". Even NYC bearing the worst of the pandemic in March-April 2020 did not use most of the overflow resources created for them. In the UK, the NHS built 7 overflow "Nightingale" hospitals that remained empty throughout the pandemic.
read://https_www.theguardian.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsociety%2F2020%2Foct%2F08%2Fwhat-has-happened-to-englands-seven-nightingale-hospitals
The "overwhelmed hospitals" false narrative was used as a bludgeon to compel the public into compliance with covid authoritarianism and to silence critics of bad covid policies. In my hospital there is more ER overcrowding and hospital bed backup today than at any point during the pandemic.
It is the idea that no UK hospitals were "overwhelmed" or under strain during Covid that is the false narrative.
The Nightingale hospitals were a stupid white elephant contrived during the first wave and anticipated to take patients as hospital overflow (when instead they ended up being discharged back home or to nursing homes where they spread more disease) or excess ITU patients on the scale of Northern Italy or China (which didn't happen, because NHS hospitals were able to triple their own ICU footprints within individual Hospital Trusts.
Was the NHS overwhelmed in other respects during the peak of the winter 21/22 wave? Yes, it was.
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/376/bmj.o51.full.pdf
"Perhaps being overwhelmed is more of a feeling."
Well, "overwhelmed" means different things to different people, I'll grant you.
But if you read the UK experience, no-one can claim that the huge backlogs, delays and difficulties that were encountered were just "feelings".
My daughter in law was an ITU nurse in London during 2020 and she certainly had very busy 12 hour shifts, wearing full FFP3 PPE.
However the Nightingale hospitals were the biggest blunder as there was no staff or equipment to service them.
ITU/ICU shifts of 12 hours are normal in the USA. Doctors and nurses work very hard taking care of sick people every day in the UK and the US. My hospital's ICUs and wards are packed with sick people today - none of them because of covid. This is normal, not an existential crisis. The Imperial and IHME models overestimated the impact of covid by at least a factor of 10. There was no justification for inflicting lockdown and mandate insanity on the world.
The ITU position in 2020/21 was very different. Our hospital multiplied its ITU footprint 3 fold. Anaesthetic prep rooms, cardiac unit, even A&E resus were co-opted as "ITU beds" to cope with Covid. There were many instances where ITU support was refused for patients because the beds were filled and all ventilators were in use.
Of course, now the picture is far different...most people have either vaccine immunity, natural immunity, or hybrid immunity, and serious disease/deaths from Covid are at an all time low. So I'm unsurprised your hospital's ITU doesn't currently have any Covid cases.
12 hour shifts are pretty much standard in our acute hospitals, I worked them in A&E between 2008 & 2013. I did 12 hour shifts on my placements as a student nurse 20 years ago.
My point was more to do with ITU occupancy and the wearing of “space suit” type ppe for that period, also that ITU was full of COVID patients, putting pay to the lie that hospitals were not busy.
There are NO studies that show that the vaccine stopped or reduced transmission of the virus. The Japanese study you cite has many limitations and the authors conclude that it cannot not be generalized to a larger population. No studies on virus transmission have been able to reproduce results, which is the standard in science.
The end point of the vaccine RTC were a 50% reduction in the symptoms. Full stop. You are spreading misinformation and are the reason why people are now skeptical about all VACCINES, even those that have a strong record for improving public health. Until U.S. healthcare providers acknowledge the huge blunder of pushing the covid vaccines on the whole population your credibility is tarnished.
Why is the U.S. an outlier in recommending covid vaccines to children, 6mos and above? NO OTHER country in the world does so anymore.
"Third, the retrospective design of this study limited the
types of data that we could use to adjust for variations in households and household members. For example, we could not account for COVID-19 symptoms or disease severity, preexisting conditions,
or specific transmission prevention measures undertaken in each household. The lack of these data could have introduced confounding bias. Fourth, our study was conducted using data from only
two Japanese municipalities, which limits the generalizability of its findings. Nevertheless, the use of household information from the municipalities enabled an overall assessment of their residents. In
addition, this study focused on households that experienced their first COVID-19 case relatively late in the pandemic, which may suggest that these household members are more cautious than persons who had been infected earlier. This could have introduced a degree of selection bias into the study."
The number of vaccines that stop infection is exactly zero.
The age-old problem of, if you tell everyone to do something, there will always be some people who say, “no,” if only because, “you can’t tell me what to do >:( “
So, our only choice is to be vaccinated perpetually or to selfishly risk the lives of others under a false notion of freedom. Really?
Yes, really. Grow up.
You first
I'm already there. I get every booster, and intend to keep doing so. According to half the commenters on Dr. Offit's Substack, I should be dead.
For your consent to be legitimate it has to be voluntary and informed. Fear and ignorance are not good reasons for getting vaccinated with a NOVEL ( never before used on humans m-rna platform, lipid nanoparticles, unknown adjuvants, and not GMP compliant) under an Emergency Use Authorization ( imposed because billions of dollars were to be made and because the safest, cheapest, most effective, early treatments (Ivermectin and HCQ) had been falsely banned.
And after injecting 70% of the US population, the profiteers still tried to prevent informed consent for 70 years, would not release the Vaers data and texts, and IN SPITE of all of this known malevolence, they are still censoring and ignoring the tsunami of scientific evidence pouring in that goes against their imposed narrative while recommending babies still receive their 9th shot.
May God have mercy on their souls.
My consent was voluntary and informed. I was informed by people who spend their lives studying these things. Sorry, Invermectin and HCQ are bullshit. Plus the VAERS data are available for anyone to see, otherwise I would not have seen them, nor would the anti-vaxers who threw it at me obviously not having the faintest idea what it was. Vaccine. Averse. Events. Reporting. System. They showed me that hockey stick pattern as if it meant anything. Well duh. You vaccinate millions of people, referentially old. Of course there will be a lot of deaths reported within the days and weeks following injection. Dying is one of the things we old people do, for all kinds of reasons!
The reason doesn't matter. I was in VAERS. I signed up right after my first shot. I reported, for example, my going to the hospital for a bicycle crash because the form I would get just said, have you been admitted to a hospital since your most recent vaccine. Nothing about whether or not I thought it was vaccine related. Because how TF would I know? They called me and asked me about it.
So I'll stick with people who have spent a lifetime studying these things, not randos on YouTube whose purpose is, DINGDINGDING! to make money!
You find it reasonable that the most widely used drugs in the world with the safest profile for the longest period of time were banned during a dire global health emergency; but do not find it unreasonable to force a NOVEL never before used on humans m-rna platform, encased in lipid nano-particle, with unknown adjuvants, and non-compliant GMP manufacturing process.
Keep in mind, you chose to assume the risk of getting vaccinated countless young people and babies had no choice along with their parents who needed their jobs to pay the bills.
That's Russian roulette for you, part of the excitement; you can never be sure which shot will be real.
A final comment: "We" did not mandate anything. Why use the royal "we"? The mandates were ordered and executed by a small group of misguided gov't leaders and health officials. They were widely opposed by the public and many in the health professions. Many cities and states did not implement vaccine passports and some passed laws against. You are falsely portraying a consensus that did not exist in order to shield advocates of these bad policies from responsibility.
The idiocy was mandating vaccines with KNOWN risks and some still yet to be determined long term risks to people that already had the virus. They had better and longer lasting protection from infection than the vaccines could give them. It was easy enough to get a verification of whether you had it previously. Also, given the protection only lasted a few months (data out of Israel revealed that very early on) and new variants were making the vaccines less relevant the risk reward was also highly suspect for children, young people and especially young men.
The idea that you would do something out of concern for your fellow humans is completely foreign to the right-wing.
Also, the ideas that 1) covid was the result of intentional gain of function experiments in a Chinese lab, and 2) covid really wasn't a serious health threat, seem somewhat contradictory, but are often believed by the same people.
They are not contradictory. Clearly, C-19 came out of a Chinese lab that was funded in part by the US. And I believe it was done as a dry run - a way to test out various concepts for pandemic control in the real world (lockdowns, electronic passports, etc...) with an agent that was only minimally dangerous, as well as to stop Trump's reelection. And it was, for the most part, only a real threat to old and unhealthy people, but was just deadly enough, at least at the beginning, to enable massive media-driven panic.
Clearly, there isn't a shred of evidence for any of your assertions.
Being "strained" is not the same this as being "overwhelmed." An objective review of hospital and ER utilization will not find any evidence of being "overwhelmed". Even NYC bearing the worst of the pandemic in March-April 2020 did not use most of the overflow resources created for them. In the UK, the NHS built 7 overflow "Nightingale" hospitals that remained empty throughout the pandemic.
read://https_www.theguardian.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsociety%2F2020%2Foct%2F08%2Fwhat-has-happened-to-englands-seven-nightingale-hospitals
The "overwhelmed hospitals" false narrative was used as a bludgeon to compel the public into compliance with covid authoritarianism and to silence critics of bad covid policies. In my hospital there is more ER overcrowding and hospital bed backup today than at any point during the pandemic.
It is the idea that no UK hospitals were "overwhelmed" or under strain during Covid that is the false narrative.
The Nightingale hospitals were a stupid white elephant contrived during the first wave and anticipated to take patients as hospital overflow (when instead they ended up being discharged back home or to nursing homes where they spread more disease) or excess ITU patients on the scale of Northern Italy or China (which didn't happen, because NHS hospitals were able to triple their own ICU footprints within individual Hospital Trusts.
Was the NHS overwhelmed in other respects during the peak of the winter 21/22 wave? Yes, it was.
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/376/bmj.o51.full.pdf
For me, I think the error occurred in not celebrating the accomplishments of this vaccine and instead insisting not just on vaccination and boosters, but continued isolation, masking, school closures, hospital/nursing home restrictions, etc. etc. even for folks who were vaccinated or had had the virus. This really chipped aways at public confidence in the effectiveness of the vaccine, as well as the necessity of it. I do believe that most people will act in their own best interests, and this tendency was not utilized in a logical manner to increase vaccine uptake. Why would someone who is on the fence be persuaded to do something that would in no way change how they live their daily lives? Ironically, it was my father's oncologist who was the first health care provider to openly state that a vaccinated, asymptomatic individual could go about life, unmasked if they preferred, and that the data for the vaccine, even for many immunocompromised people, was quite promising. This helped put things in perspective for me, coming from a very invested, caring, and educated doctor. I think if the message had been to celebrate the hell out of the lowered hospitalization rates for the initial series and use that to promote in-person school, masking to comfort-level or symptoms only, reduced social distancing, and less severe isolation guidelines, more people might have been motivated or had confidence in the vaccine. Treating people like they are too stupid to act in their own best interests, so let's promote the most restrictive guidelines possible, for as long as possible, even when you are vaccinated, was I think maybe more damaging than the mandate itself.