Board 8 > Coronavirus Topic 14: Forced to Finish the Fight: The Finale: Final Mix Vol. 2

(+) Yeah! (+)

Early estimates: a booster brings Pfizer from ~30% up to ~75% effective against symptomatic infection from Omicron:

https://twitter.com/kallmemeg/status/1469351833416122369 (thread)

Get your boosters if you haven't already!

The hospital I work at has had more COVID patients in both October and November than in any month since before the vaccine rollout started.

And all but one have been unvaccinated.

Meanwhile our counties vaccination rate has plateaued at about 60% and almost all the current vaccine appointments are for boosters.

Maniac64 posted...

The hospital I work at has had more COVID patients in both October and November than in any month since before the vaccine rollout started back in December 2020.

And all but one have been unvaccinated.

Meanwhile our counties vaccination rate has plateaued at about 60% and almost all the current vaccine appointments are for boosters.

So what your saying is, you can hospitalized even if you're vaccinated!!11! THE VACCINES DON'T WORK!!!!111!!!

Obviously kidding! But your info just goes to show that stupid people (who won't vax) continue to remain stupid.

I'm a couple of days out from getting my Moderna booster. Definitely was the lowest impact of the three. I didn't feel even slightly ill the whole way and my arm had some soreness and tightness that's already almost gone. Good stuff.

On another note, I've been doing some further reading regarding the implications of Omicron and as far as I call tell the key universal aspect to it is just how amazingly infectious it is - to the point that avoiding exposure to it, especially with the landscape of capitalistic ambivalence to the threat, is going to be exceedingly difficult. For example the R value for Omicron in the UK presently is estimated at between 3 and 5. Delta was somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2.

I also firmly believe at this point that the message going around about the Omicron variant being more mild is... true in a relative sense, but false in an absolute sense. By that I mean that the indications are coming out of South Africa that compared with earlier variants, it seems to cause disease as severe as in the past in individuals who have not acquired either natural or induced (vaccine) immunity. The key difference is that the baseline population (or control) has been changing steadily over the course of the pandemic. It's getting uncommon to actually find people with no protection at all. T cells (especially CD8+ T cells) do a huge amount of heavy lifting in protecting against severe infection.

This is related to the seeming drop in 'efficacy' of the vaccines versus hospitalization. We've seen the Pfizer vaccine decline from 98% against D614G/Wuhan (the original) to 91% against Delta to 70 against Omicron. It may seem like that indicates outcomes worsening against the virus but if you have a population with greater immunity already as the control, the relative benefit from vaccination declines. But it doesn't mean the vaccination itself becomes useless because boosters are also out there jumping the efficacy back into the 90s and greatly cutting the risk of transmission by raising antibody titres.

Got my Pfizer booster yesterday. Injection site is sore and I've had a general, mild sense of headaches and body aches all day. Nothing too bad but I can tell I'm not 100%.

There's a COVID testing station by me that I walk past fairly frequently. Usually I'll see maybe 1-2 people max waiting. Tonight...there had to be like 25+ people on line.

Gotta get tested to get on a plane

UltimaterializerX posted...

So in my friend group, we're all vaccinated and there's been a massive covid outbreak anyway. I haven't gotten it yet, but a few of them are in bad shape. A couple are even boostered, too.

I'm not giving the told-you-so speech to them because that's just a dick move, so I will simply put it here because I need to vent. The vaccines clearly do not work. They don't stop covid, the symptoms, or the spread. At all. And the whole "it just stops the serious stuff" isn't true for a couple of these dudes, either. They have pretty bad symptoms already.

I honestly think I've already had covid or I'm immune to it, because I've yet to get any symptoms or test positive. I get tested once per week at work, so something would have been caught by now.

95% of ICU in my province is unvaccinated but honestly your personal experience convinced me the stats must be wrong. The vaccines definitely don't do anything.

are your friends hospitalized, Ulti? not trying to be smart/mean.

Seanchan posted...

Got my Pfizer booster yesterday. Injection site is sore and I've had a general, mild sense of headaches and body aches all day. Nothing too bad but I can tell I'm not 100%.

So my armpit area has been feeling extra sore all day. Took a look and its swollen up pretty good on the side I got the shot. The injection site also is a big red circle.

I know this is all natural reactions to have your lymph nodes swell up but figured Id share. Dont remember this happening for the prior shots.

I hope your bud gets well

I am of the mindset that vaccines do something but I can understand the frustration. I'm a teacher and I can use my own personal experience to make an argument that the vaccines have been effective, but who knows about the next few weeks

I think case numbers by and large are underreported anyway due to the asymptomatic nature of Covid (which is why we are seeing big outbreaks in professional athletes, because they actually test). This isn't to say that vaccines don't work, as long as they are keeping the virus relatively mild/manageable.

If your bud is that bad with all those shots, he would likely be dead for sure without it. It teaches your body how to fight back against it. It doesn't prevent it nor cure you from possibly succumbing in that fight.

Pretty much. Vaccines don't magically put a force field around you.

Based on our data, the newer variants see a huge spike in viral loads, but lasts for a shorter amount of time. People whose immune systems tend to overreact to viral infections are going to be hit harder and sadly, I'm not sure if vaccines will help those type of people (especially if it continues to mutate towards higher viral loads). We'll need to look for alternative methods of prevention for those people.

"the vaccines don't work at all" is obviously bullshit, but i do think world leaders and politicians should stop making bold claims about a virus we still know very little about. back in june, our prime minister said "the pandemic is ALMOST over guys!" in a press conference, which uh... yeah.

Mr Lasastryke posted...

"the vaccines don't work at all" is obviously bullshit, but i do think world leaders and politicians should stop making bold claims about a virus we still know very little about. back in june, our prime minister said "the pandemic is ALMOST over guys!" in a press conference, which uh... yeah.

If leaders told you hard truths you'd elect even bigger idiots.

That's a big issue, the general public can't handle the truth so often they give vague answers that aren't 100% true, but then people use it as an example that they are lying to us and nothing works/it's all a big conspiracy.

We estimate that the absolute number of excess myocarditis events in the 28 days following a first dose of adenovirus or mRNA vaccine is between one and six per million persons vaccinated, and the excess risk following the second dose of the mRNA-1283 vaccine is ten per million. By contrast, we estimate 40 excess myocarditis events per million in the 28 days following SARS-CoV-2 infection. The risks are more evenly balanced in younger persons aged up to 40 years, where we estimated the excess in myocarditis events following SARS-CoV-2 infection to be 10 per million with the excess following a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine being 15 per million.

Exclusively considering that last figure, which is the main angle I can see the vaccines being attacked from, this is still a pretty low incidence. It also lumps severity of all degrees of myocarditis together into the excess myocarditis figures. Infection with the virus tended to have more severe cardiac injury whenever it occurred. On top of that there are many more sequelae to consider with infection with the virus.

Even as a person under 40, it seems clearly stacked in favor of vaccination to me.

UltimaterializerX posted...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0

Well that's fun.

Neat study. Glad to see some real stats on how astronomically unlikely myocarditis and the such is.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/17/federal-court-reinstates-biden-administrations-business-vaccine-mandate.html

In a very rare win for Biden, the 6th circuit despite being predominantly conservative rules 2-1 in favor to allow the vaccine mandate. Goes to Supreme Court upon further appeal. Not sure if the 3 judge panel defied odds to be less conservative or if a conservative or two voted in favor of the mandate.

Huge unexpected victory here though.

Stranch, Gibbons, and Griffin are likely the 3 on the panel supposedly which would be 2-1 conservatives. They split 8-8 to hear it en banc to avoid the panel.

Oh interesting that that's the general OSHA one. I do think that Biden will definitely prevail on the requirement for government contractors and probably on the one for hospital staff, but I was guessing conservative courts would knock down the private employer one.

That court has 16 judges. 11 conservative. 5 liberal. The 3 likely judges were 2 appointed by Bush and 1 by Clinton.

The court has 7 Trump appointees on it. 5 bush. 3 Clinton. 2 Obama.

Edit: Actually 10-6. Bush nominated a Democrat that didn't get in fast enough under a Clinton nomination.

Corrik7 posted...

Stranch, Gibbons, and Griffin are likely the 3 on the panel supposedly which would be 2-1 conservatives. They split 8-8 to hear it en banc to avoid the panel.

Was stranch, Gibbons and Larsen.

Obama, Bush, and Trump appointees. The Trump appointee Larsen was the dissent.

Guess we're going to follow the Austrian example any time now

Got my booster an hour ago. Had Moderna this time instead of Pfizer for my first 2 doses. I felt horrible for the next night and day after my 2nd dose and couldn't sleep much due to my side effects in contrast to the first dose where I felt almost completely okay. Hoping the booster's not as bad as or worse than last time.

Of all the people here that I would bet on being antivax, Ulti was 100% a lock in. Glad to see how after a decade things haven't really changed here.

paulg235 posted...

Got my booster an hour ago. Had Moderna this time instead of Pfizer for my first 2 doses. I felt horrible for the next night and day after my 2nd dose and couldn't sleep much due to my side effects in contrast to the first dose where I felt almost completely okay. Hoping the booster's not as bad as or worse than last time.

That seems to be a pretty common thing with the boosters. First dose mild, second dose horrible, third dose rarely anything.

I got triple moderna, first dose was just some arm pain, second dose destroyed me for a day, booster dose no noticeable side effects.

The reason the US is so pro-vaccine/booster is because advocating for another lockdown is political suicide.

If the vaccines don't work, then we should go back to mask mandates and lockdowns, but I'm sure Ulti isn't for that either.