Corona Virus

[blackdog]

Got the vaccine last thursday, no side effects at all. Shoulder felt like I got stung for a day, that was it.

Pretty scary to see many people having serious complications mere hours after vaccines had been administered.

[kleinluka]

21 hours ago, blackdog said:

Pretty scary to see many people having serious complications mere hours after vaccines had been administered.

What people? What vaccine? What complications? I think most people have pretty minor side effects, and the ones with more severe ones usually go away within a few days (not counting the few VITT cases from the AZ vaccine)

[blackdog]

2 hours ago, kleinluka said:

What people? What vaccine? What complications? I think most people have pretty minor side effects, and the ones with more severe ones usually go away within a few days (not counting the few VITT cases from the AZ vaccine)

All those dying within hours because of thrombosis and similar, just the other day someone famous in India vaccinated on live tv just to die a few hours later.

Granted is not that many in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a shitty way to go, also no consolation for those families.

Those that keep posting around that “oh the chances are so small” suffer from the same (but inverse) psychological mechanism of those that don’t want to vaccinate because the chances of getting really sick (at young age) are small.

Edited June 1, 2021 by blackdog

[blackdog]

all I’m saying is that is easy to find comfort in statistics when you are not part of it or on the good side of it. I wouldn’t expect even the most pro-vaccine to take it “oh well it was 1-in-5-millions chance” if a family member had a reaction to the vaccine.

In regard to your die rolling example @ThunderKeil, I think people can accept the inevitable much better than a mistake of their own, an infection probably feels like the former, while having a needle stuck in you the latter, because having an injection is much more intimate and “real” than inhaling something and must trigger a mind much differently. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many more people are afraid of needles more than germaphobes and similar) 

Edited June 2, 2021 by blackdog

[Tisky]

I bet that is HP's car!

Feels like things are slowly turning back to normal, restrictions are loosening up here in Sweden. Also, Euro 2021 is due next week!! Wohoo! ( go go Sweden! ) 

Edited June 2, 2021 by Tisky

[Buddy]

I have not taken the vaccine yet but people around me did and have not experienced any real negative side effects. Sore arm for a couple and then just being weak/sleepy for few days at most for the rest.

I think the bad vaccine outcome overlaps with other underlying health issues people taking it already have (people i know range from 20 to 75 in age but in generally good health). 

Edited June 2, 2021 by Buddy

[kleinluka]

On 6/1/2021 at 1:46 PM, blackdog said:

All those dying within hours because of thrombosis and similar, just the other day someone famous in India vaccinated on live tv just to die a few hours later.

Granted is not that many in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a shitty way to go, also no consolation for those families.

Those that keep posting around that “oh the chances are so small” suffer from the same (but inverse) psychological mechanism of those that don’t want to vaccinate because the chances of getting really sick (at young age) are small.

The thrombosis cases are exclusively an Astra Zeneca (with some similar J&J reports) problem. No such issue exists with mRNA vaccines. When you look at how many people have had this thrombosis after taking AZ vs. how many people got sick and died from covid the choice is pretty clear in terms of what is safer. Everybody needs to make that choice for themselves  in the end.

Also, in a lot of countries AZ seems to have been suspended already or restricted to certain age groups where VITT cases are less likely (such as older people). For example in Canada we no longer administer AZ for 1st doses, but we do let people get their 2nd shot with it because the thrombosis happens exclusively with 1st shots.
Everybody else is getting either Moderna or Pfizer, where there is no real risk at all to taking the vaccine.

Bottom line is, yes - it's unfortunate that people have died from thrombosis after taking Astra Zeneca. But we absolutely rely on vaccines to get back to normal, it's the only way. They clearly work in cutting down ICU and hospitalization numbers.

[blackdog]

4 hours ago, Buddy said:

I think the bad vaccine outcome overlaps with other underlying health issues people taking it already have (people i know range from 20 to 75 in age but in generally good health). 

37 minutes ago, kleinluka said:

The thrombosis cases are exclusively an Astra Zeneca (with some similar J&J reports) problem. No such issue exists with mRNA vaccines. When you look at how many people have had this thrombosis after taking AZ vs. how many people got sick and died from covid the choice is pretty clear in terms of what is safer. Everybody needs to make that choice for themselves  in the end.

This is bs, and exactly what I was talking about.

Easy to think like that when you are not the victim.

If there are chances of conditions that would stack up and combine for a deadly outcome, well seems pretty clear that we should do some tests and analysis on the people before getting vaccines. But what you read is that “we can’t undermine the vaccine campaign”, basically who cares if some people die, as long as we can go back to drink our mojitos earlier.

This doesn’t give any confidence that even autopsies/investigations will be carried out properly, it doesn’t give the confidence that we want to find out as much as possible from these unlucky cases to minimise any loss even further. I mean the reading material they give here in UK literally says “to be read carefully before getting vaccinated” is handed out after the shot.

We are basically raising our hands and saying “this is good enough” and it’s a disgusting thought process. Medical practitioners have sworn a vote to save lives, so even one is always too much.

And by the way I’ve read of 3 people dead in the last week, aged between 42-62, and all died between one hour to a couple days after the Pfizer. So is not just one of the vaccines that can cause complications.

But actually the case that has made me think and write all of this is another case of an Italian soldier that was covid-asymptomatic and the immune system overreacted when getting the shot. Well if this stuff can happen seems like you should actually test people before vaccinating to minimise further the chances, not just ask them if they have any symptoms. (By the way with how some people are properly freaked out by the virus I feel some wouldn’t be sincere just because they are so keen in getting vaccinated).

Also, to pick up something that was said earlier, is not really a choice to be vaccinated at this time, because of all the possible restrictions being pushed for non-vaccinated, because of the peer pressure (I’ve heard friends talk about “dumpable offense” to turn down the vaccine - as if automatically not wanting to get this shot makes you a no-vaxer that is against all the wonders medicine has done in a few decades ).

Edited June 2, 2021 by blackdog

[Buddy]

Just to be clear, I don't down play the risks it's just that the odds are pretty low for a bad outcome. It would definitely suck to get really sick by trying to avoid the sickness, though.

[kleinluka]

@blackdogIf you really think we can develop a vaccine that NOBODY will die from you’re gonna have a bad time. And this isn’t throwing in the towel and saying “I guess this is good enough”. There are scientists working right now to figure out what’s triggering the thrombosis response in the AZ vaccine in order to make it even safer. But the number will never be 0, there are simply way too many people with allergies, countless combinations of existing medical conditions that can interact with a vaccine. It’s simply not gonna happen.

You may ask “how is this any different to the same argument being made against covid? Well, the vaccine doesn’t have the ability to spread for one thing. There is no exponential growth of death like with the virus. In fact, even if the vaccine had the ability to be passed from person to person you would still end up saving more people than harming them.

Small amounts of people dying from taking medication isn’t something new. One of my friends has severe allergies and can’t get vaccinated at all. On a more personal note, my mom is in recovery from cancer, and would have been pretty much guaranteed to die if she had caught Covid due to this and other issues with her health. The vaccine quite literally is extending her life expectancy.

I would argue the great majority of medications in existence have a certain number of deaths associated with them. The Polio vaccine killed and paralyzed a bunch of children in the 50s, should we have stopped administering that too? No, because you have to weigh the risks and benefits of a medication vs continuing down the unvaccinated path that results in far greater amount of death. That is what’s being done with the Covid vaccine, and while the risk is not 0 it’s also many many many times lower than the risk of a society that continues to spread and get infected with the virus. This isn’t about wanting to get back to drinking mojitos, it’s about wanting to get back to a functioning society that can live a normal life without overwhelming the medical system, something that has happened and is happening without the vaccine. The healthcare system has shown significant improvement after large portions of population were vaccinated. 

So you want me to be shocked that 3 people out of hundreds of millions have died from the Pfizer vaccine? How many people’s deaths were PREVENTED because of this vaccine? Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. 
I never said it wasn’t terrible for those who died this way. Yes, every vaccine death is horrible and yes  it is in fact easy for me to make this argument when it’s not my family member or friend dying from it, but this is simple math in terms of risk vs benefit.

Every death associated with this pandemic is a tragedy. However if I need to choose between 3 people dieing from a vaccine or 30,000 people dieing because there is no vaccine, I’m sorry for those 3 and their families but I’d like to keep those 30,000 alive please.

The incidence rate of vaccine related deaths, while still arguably higher than we all want it to be, is still small enough that it wouldn’t even make it on a pill bottle under “extremely rare side effects”. 

To put it differently, if you wanted to take these vaccines off the market because they are, as you apparently suggest, unsafe, then for every person that you “save” from dying from the vaccine you kill a hundred more because you took those vaccines off the market. 

 

 

[Corwin]

Vaccination is a super complex topic, so I'm afraid of commenting on it and saying something stupid.

I understand some of the anti-vaccination arguments/thoughts people can have, because like ThunderKeil described, choosing to administer a vaccine to your kid, for instance, feels like the responsibility is on you if there's a side effect. Those thoughts are related to the fact that when you have to make that kind of decision, the perspective is that of yourself, your family etc. not that of society as whole. You have to play good-cop-bad-cop in your mind about there being a super low chance vs. vaccination being overall more effective the more people do it vs. the severity of the disease itself, etc. (I'm not talking about extreme anti-vaccination people who think Bill Gates putting chips in your body, but about people like my mom, who just don't know what to think and are afraid of what they don't understand but have to make decisions on)

As an example, when I was a kid the chickenpox vaccine wasn't a thing in France. So when a doctor ignored our questions on the vaccines and gave the chickenpox one to my son without asking us, even though it wasn't on the list of mandatory ones, I was upset, because I got chickenpox and in my experience it was a non-event in my life, and likely boosted my immune system anyways. For that one vaccine, I would have opted out because of my perspective on it (even though I'm sure there's a case to be made that there's still one in millions of chances to get a bad case of chickenpox that leads to complications).

Science on the other hand looks at the high-level perspective and for sure vaccines are great when you look at numbers. They save or improve countless lives. But that also means that in my experience (cue that same doctor I was mentioning for instance) people who look at it from the scientific perspective tend to accuse and shame people who see vaccines from another perspective, instead of understanding where those people are coming from -- which I'd argue usually turns people off even more. There's so much stuff online about how not vaccinating is like a crime, but I haven't really seen any that tries to discuss (instead of shut down) the fear of being that one-in-a-million case, the responsibilities we have to our kids, the fact that vaccines do have side effects from mild to grave (which often gets brushed off because numbers, but must really hurt the people that did suffer bad side effects themselves or their relatives) etc.

To go back to the chickenpox example again: from what I could gather at the time, the chickenpox vaccine doesn't fully protect you (only some strands), needs to be done multiple times throughout your life even though getting chickenpox is supposed to protect you for life, and getting chickenpox later in life can be dangerous (so forgetting to get a new shot later in life can have big implications like going sterile for men). This is definitely not a black or white situation where one should just get the vaccine and shut up, but it feels like questioning whether one specific person in a specific country could maybe consider that getting chickenpox early is better than choosing to get the vaccine throughout their life categorizes you as an anti-vaxxer who just hates science and is slowing the progress of civilization.

I feel like vaccination is akin to politics these days, in that there's no actual dialogue happening, it's either you see it my way or screw you, and that's kind of a pity for the people who just have questions and concerns in the middle and aren't trying to dismiss science altogether, but want to make the best choices for themselves or their loved ones.

Anyways, I got my first Pfizer shot a few days ago, and only had a sore arm for about 24 hours. It's contributing to a feeling that this shit will end at some point, before that it still felt a bit unreal.

Edited June 7, 2021 by Corwin

[dux]

I don't think that this will go away for a long time. It'll always be around like seasonal flu. But frankly it only got this bad because our governments are fucking HOPELESS. Here in the UK it's an utter shitshow of mismanagement, hypocrisy, incompetence and the health secretary banging his admin in broad daylight while the country went to shit.

Don't forget to clap.

Fucking idiots.

[FMPONE]

56 minutes ago, dux said:

I don't think that this will go away for a long time. It'll always be around like seasonal flu. But frankly it only got this bad because our governments are fucking HOPELESS. Here in the UK it's an utter shitshow of mismanagement, hypocrisy, incompetence and the health secretary banging his admin in broad daylight while the country went to shit.

Don't forget to clap.

Fucking idiots.

It’ll be a shame if this delta variant fucks everything up because man, I’m really enjoying normalcy

[El Moroes]

Well...I think I'm 5G ready ! 

[RaVaGe]

Can't wait for the Omega variant so I can take my corona cure.