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.
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.”"
Vaccination (for contagious infectious diseases like COVID-19) as well as mitigation (masks, distancing, distance learning) were all necessary to save lives.
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.
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.
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 >:( “
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.
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.
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.
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
Vaccination (for contagious infectious diseases like COVID-19) as well as mitigation (masks, distancing, distance learning) were all necessary to save lives.
I have come to despise the "my medical freedom" libertarians as well as those folks who believe Covid was planned or is a scam.
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.
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.
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 >:( “
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.
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.
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.
At the time, we prepared for the worst.