Steerzing in a New Direction...

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Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1621

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

They should've named it the "Matterhorn" variant.

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1622

Post by fafnir »

screwtape wrote: It doesn't change the principal that resistance to vaccines does not develop the more you use them. Because the 'resistance' is merely genetic change that occurs during viral reproduction. The more infections/viral reproduction you prevent, the more occasions of mutation you prevent.
The more vaccinated people there are, the more selection pressure there is favouring the vaccine resistant mutations. Sure, the mutations themselves are random. Sure, they may well, though not necessarily, initially appear in an unvaccinated person. It's much less random which strains fizzle out and which dominate. Are you arguing that it's a coincidence that the strain that came to dominate after we began vaccinating is vaccine resistant? You can't be arguing that that effect doesn't exist where the vaccine creates the circumstances for vaccine resistant strains to become the dominant strain?
screwtape wrote: I don't think the comparison is meaningless at all. They are all different diseases, yet the vaccines keep on working as well as ever in the absence of mutation. Some viruses are better than others at mutating, and that simply means you need to immunize a higher percentage of the population to gain worthwhile herd immunity. Now you may have a point if you want to argue that such immunization rates are difficult to achieve, but deciding to not even try is simply allowing the virus to mutate more often and into more variable forms. I think you will agree that is counterproductive.
We have taken a year to double vaccinate half the world. The delta variant appeared in October 2020. It took at least a month longer to produce a vaccine than it took Covid to have a vaccine resistant strain out there waiting for it. What immunization rate is needed to fight a virus that has already got a strain immune to your vaccine? Fighting Covid like this is a pointless sisyphean task. We haven't tried to stop the flu for the same reason it was pointless trying to stop Covid.
screwtape wrote: You have to have a brand new vaccine each year to account for changes in the influenza virus. This is a similar phenomenon.
Yes. What do we do with the flu vaccine? We target the vulnerable and accept that we can't achieve "flu zero" through the vaccine. It is a similar phenomenon, only with covid we have gone mad and are trying to use a vaccine to eliminate a virus that can develop new strains faster than we can develop vaccines.
screwtape wrote: And 20x? I haven't seen anything so optimistic, with the clear winner in terms of strength of immunity being natural infection followed by vaccination. Even relatively poor vaccines remain as (in)effective as they ever were, after decades of use. Think of BCG for TB, the old TAB for typhoid, or the old Kolle vaccine for cholera. They were not very good at their job, but were the best we had. Even today, though superseded, they work as well as they did when introduced.
I was going from memory. This one says 13x
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 21262415v1
I've seen higher numbers quoted. This one talks about natural immunity making you 27x less likely to be symptomatic than vaccine immunity and 8x less likely to be hospitalized:
https://www.science.org/content/article ... ains-vital
It's clearly not true that vaccines remain as effective as they were after decades of use. Some, perhaps.... but that isn't a universal property of vaccines. If that worked, why do they keep having to update the flu vaccine? The illnesses and vaccines you are mentioning are too different to be relevant.
screwtape wrote: It's likely that for most people vaccination against COVID-19 will induce more effective and longer lasting immunity than that induced by natural infection with the virus.
That is not the case. What is your claim based on? Covid already had a strain that was resistant to the vaccine before the vaccine was rolled out.
screwtape wrote: Just as, for example, the new oral cholera vaccine is dramatically better than the old injectable, it may be possible to do better with the coronaviridae. That may prove difficult, perhaps impossible, but that is a different argument to yours of claiming that the more you exhibit a vaccine, the more resistance will develop against it.
It's basic selection pressure. If you create an environment where large numbers of people are immune to the dominant strain, you create heavy selection pressure in favour of any mutations that are good against that immunity.
screwtape wrote: That's confusing the mechanism of antibiotic resistance, caused by inappropriate use, inadequate dosages and incomplete courses, where bacteria only develop resistance if they are exposed to non-lethal antibiotics.
I don't think that's true. Bacteria randomly develop antibiotic resistance. That only becomes an issue when selection pressure causes the bacteria who have anti-antibiotic mutations to dominate. It's the same phenomenon.
screwtape wrote: Coronaviruses will mutate whether there are vaccines or not.
Agreed.
screwtape wrote: Now given that vaccines are the only useful way we have of preventing infection outside lockdowns, doesn't it seem reasonable to try our best?
Just because your only weapon is a feather doesn't mean it's sensible to use it in a fight with a pitbull rather than climbing a tree. It's possible to do more harm than good. The virus already had a strain that was resistant to the vaccine before we even began rolling the vaccine out. Natural immunity is vastly better than vaccine immunity. The more you use the vaccine, the more selection pressure you create for vaccine resistant strains to become the dominant strains. Honestly, how does this plan seem to be going? Israel had a spike despite being heavily vaccinated. It'll take another year at least to get the world fully vaccinated and the virus is already merrily circulating amongst vaccinated people. A strain that is resistant to the booster shot is probably already out there. Are we going to play this game for 5 years? 10 years? Do we stop when Bezos has 200% of the worlds wealth?
screwtape wrote: And it isn't as if they don't give us an advantage: I have been shown the unpublished projections for this province of what is expected by public health here if vaccination rates remain the same. For every five new infections, four will be among the unvaccinated. Which group should we be advising the public to be in?
How have the projections been going up to now? I don't feel like 18 months of intermittent lockdowns, mask mandates, economic shutdowns and mandatory vaccination was projected when we set down this path. Two weeks to flatten the curve. Fauci changing the vaccination rate needed for herd immunity. Projections are cheap. Correct projections is the thing that is tricky.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1623

Post by fafnir »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote: They should've named it the "Matterhorn" variant.
Too geographically specific. That would surely encourage violent retributions against the Swiss.

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1624

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: You have to have a brand new vaccine each year to account for changes in the influenza virus. This is a similar phenomenon.
Yes. What do we do with the flu vaccine? We target the vulnerable and accept that we can't achieve "flu zero" through the vaccine. It is a similar phenomenon, only with covid we have gone mad and are trying to use a vaccine to eliminate a virus that can develop new strains faster than we can develop vaccines.
The yearly flu vax is also a crap shoot, guessing which of the scores of strains will be most prevalent. It seriously borders on placebo.

At the outset with covid, had we protected the vulnerable while letting everyone else go about their lives, get exposed, develop antibodies, we may have been able to stamp it out. Instead, we did everything possible to groom a legion of resistant mutations. The genie's out of the bottle now. The vulnerable are now consigned to either life as anchorites, or boosters every two weeks, cuz that's how long the garbage lasts.

Striving for 'Zero Covid' is sheer lunacy. Screw has lost his mind, but on some level, he must recognize his stream of ad hoc rescues for the universal-vax strategy is desperate bunkum.

John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1625

Post by John D »

So.... my taste is still fucked up today. I had a very spicy gyro with garlic sauce and it tasted like wet steel. I went to the clinic and they are going to run a PCR test. Results are likely complete tomorrow. In the mean time I am going to live on the second floor and my wife on the first floor.

I will be pretty embarrassed if this is all in my head.... but... I will still suspect I have Covid even if I test negative. This is too weird to not be Covid... or... I am out of my mind.

MarcusAu
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1626

Post by MarcusAu »

John D wrote:
Thu Oct 07, 2021 11:39 am
So.... my taste is still fucked up today. I had a very spicy gyro with garlic sauce and it tasted like wet steel. I went to the clinic and they are going to run a PCR test. Results are likely complete tomorrow. In the mean time I am going to live on the second floor and my wife on the first floor.

I will be pretty embarrassed if this is all in my head.... but... I will still suspect I have Covid even if I test negative. This is too weird to not be Covid... or... I am out of my mind.
It's necessarily an either / or situation.

In any case - I've also experienced similar taste distortions recently. Though in my case it could be chalked up to a miracle...




Good luck with whatever is wrong with you...unless there isn't...in which case good luck anyway...

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1627

Post by Brive1987 »

Full vaccination is imperative to suppress SARS-CoV-2 delta variant mutation frequency
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 21261768v2

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1628

Post by fafnir »

John D wrote: So.... my taste is still fucked up today. I had a very spicy gyro with garlic sauce and it tasted like wet steel. I went to the clinic and they are going to run a PCR test. Results are likely complete tomorrow. In the mean time I am going to live on the second floor and my wife on the first floor.

I will be pretty embarrassed if this is all in my head.... but... I will still suspect I have Covid even if I test negative. This is too weird to not be Covid... or... I am out of my mind.
You could cash in by starting one of those YouTube channels where you drink expired sour milk and eat surströmming.

John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1629

Post by John D »

Just got my birthday present. A Vaultek slide out gun safe. I will mount it on my end table next to my bed. Just press the finger scanner and she slides open presenting my Glock 17. Bam! Haha.

Stef recommended it.


Keating
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1630

Post by Keating »


Steersman
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1631

Post by Steersman »

Hot off the press - ("Extra! Extra! Read all about it"):

"Wikipedia's Lysenkoism" that I've just posted to Medium.



I contracted the services of a professional editor so hopefully something of an improvement.

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1632

Post by Brive1987 »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: The study stopped short, the spread of Delta didn’t. In any case, I’m not sure “plummet” is the best word to use here?

Those are either Minecraft screen caps, or only show the portion of total cases made up by the Delta.

Here's the raw number of cases over time:


plummet.png
It’s amusing how graphs work.

I’ve marked in red the period your graph covered. These are USA cases :lol:

Delta makes up 80% of new cases in the second wave - the one that took off just off the right hand margin of your pic.


fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1633

Post by fafnir »

Brive1987 wrote: It’s amusing how graphs work.

I’ve marked in red the period your graph covered. These are USA cases :lol:

Delta makes up 80% of new cases in the second wave - the one that took off just off the right hand margin of your pic.

That's the Canadian Medical Association Journal you are poking holes in. They peer reviewed that article. Who do you want me to believe? The Canadian medical establishment, or your lying eyes?

Steersman
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1634

Post by Steersman »

fafnir wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: It’s amusing how graphs work.

I’ve marked in red the period your graph covered. These are USA cases :lol:

Delta makes up 80% of new cases in the second wave - the one that took off just off the right hand margin of your pic.

https://i.imgur.com/YaS4zRp.jpg
That's the Canadian Medical Association Journal you are poking holes in. They peer reviewed that article. Who do you want me to believe? The Canadian medical establishment, or your lying eyes?
Now, doncha go dissing the CMAJ ... ;)

Though y'all might note that the article was "accepted September 16, 2021" so their data probably wasn't captured much past the middle of July. And in fact, their graphs show the end of June.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

https://www.cmaj.ca/sites/default/files ... 211248.pdf

John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1635

Post by John D »

James Bond level shit. My wife has me trapped in my bedroom so I had time to put in my pistol safe. Finger print recognition.... put your finger on the scanner... and wack.... your gun pops out of the drawer read to go. Now I can keep it in battery and not worry about someone doing something stupid.

So my wife says... "Yeah... now you can shoot me when you are having a bad dream."

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1636

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

Brive1987 wrote: It’s amusing how graphs work.

I’ve marked in red the period your graph covered. These are USA cases :lol:

Delta makes up 80% of new cases in the second wave - the one that took off just off the right hand margin of your pic.

They keep forgetting to include deaths. So weird.

John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1637

Post by John D »

Flash back 40 years. This is one of the most sampled songs ever.... by the fucking losers that they call musicians these days. Fantastic song and video.


Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1638

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

John D wrote:
Thu Oct 07, 2021 6:22 pm
Flash back 40 years. This is one of the most sampled songs ever.... by the fucking losers that they call musicians these days. Fantastic song and video.


A character in Ray Donovan, named Marvin Gaye Washington, is an aspiring young rapper. His big premiere hit is him chanting doggerel over the real Marvin Gaye's Sunny. It's pathetic.


I believe I've posted before about Al Bowlly's oft-sampled My Woman, most famously in the nineties by some British pop artist name White Town for s/h/it's Your Woman.

Recently heard it again in Kate Earl's All That Glitters. I'll give her a pass, as she channels a lot of thirties' jazz in her music, and actually makes something of her own out of the riff.





Bowlly's original was written about his psycho wife, who was even worse than the wife of the mate Bhurzum recently wrote about.

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1639

Post by Brive1987 »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: It’s amusing how graphs work.

I’ve marked in red the period your graph covered. These are USA cases :lol:

Delta makes up 80% of new cases in the second wave - the one that took off just off the right hand margin of your pic.

They keep forgetting to include deaths. So weird.
Deaths are lower proportionally. We also have the concept that vaccination reduces deaths. But then we have delta being more transmissible and possibly worse for non vaccinated.

The opportunity for confounding issues in “real” science is high. The probability on a discussion board approaches 100%.


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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1640

Post by screwtape »

fafnir wrote: The more vaccinated people there are, the more selection pressure there is favouring the vaccine resistant mutations. Sure, the mutations themselves are random. Sure, they may well, though not necessarily, initially appear in an unvaccinated person. It's much less random which strains fizzle out and which dominate. Are you arguing that it's a coincidence that the strain that came to dominate after we began vaccinating is vaccine resistant? You can't be arguing that that effect doesn't exist where the vaccine creates the circumstances for vaccine resistant strains to become the dominant strain?
Are you suggesting, pari passu, that influenza vaccines cause the virus to mutate, or do you accept that's what viruses have always done and will continue to do?

fafnir wrote: We have taken a year to double vaccinate half the world. The delta variant appeared in October 2020. It took at least a month longer to produce a vaccine than it took Covid to have a vaccine resistant strain out there waiting for it. What immunization rate is needed to fight a virus that has already got a strain immune to your vaccine? Fighting Covid like this is a pointless sisyphean task. We haven't tried to stop the flu for the same reason it was pointless trying to stop Covid.
Well let's just give up then and await our turn to be carried off!
fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: You have to have a brand new vaccine each year to account for changes in the influenza virus. This is a similar phenomenon.
Yes. What do we do with the flu vaccine? We target the vulnerable and accept that we can't achieve "flu zero" through the vaccine. It is a similar phenomenon, only with covid we have gone mad and are trying to use a vaccine to eliminate a virus that can develop new strains faster than we can develop vaccines.
Well if this isn't a reason to stop using the flu vaccine, why should it be a reason to stop the covid vaccine? Isn't some protection better than no protection?
fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: And 20x? I haven't seen anything so optimistic, with the clear winner in terms of strength of immunity being natural infection followed by vaccination. Even relatively poor vaccines remain as (in)effective as they ever were, after decades of use. Think of BCG for TB, the old TAB for typhoid, or the old Kolle vaccine for cholera. They were not very good at their job, but were the best we had. Even today, though superseded, they work as well as they did when introduced.
I was going from memory. This one says 13x
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 21262415v1
You'll note that paper agrees that immunisation after infection provides the strongest protection. Also consider the biggest unknown factor in these studies that show waning antibody levels after vaccination: it may not matter a bit. You probably well understand that exposure to a pathogen allows the immune system to prime a subset of B-lymphocytes to make an antibody against the bug. The titres of that antibody in peripheral blood fall after infection, but the population of B-cells remains, awaiting the time when you meet the bug again, at which point they multiply, make their antibody and save the day. Waning antibody levels mean little given the means of production remain on standby. Furthermore viruses are also killed by T-lymphocytes, again once they have learned to recognise the virus's relevant antigens. They too stick around and wait for the next time they are needed. Anamnestic response, and all that.
fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: It's likely that for most people vaccination against COVID-19 will induce more effective and longer lasting immunity than that induced by natural infection with the virus.
That is not the case. What is your claim based on? Covid already had a strain that was resistant to the vaccine before the vaccine was rolled out.
Well, you're arguing with the British Society of Immunology there, as the quote is from their literature and not from me. But I see that you tacitly admit the virus mutated without selection pressure from a non-existent vaccine. I may be getting somewhere. ;)
fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: Just as, for example, the new oral cholera vaccine is dramatically better than the old injectable, it may be possible to do better with the coronaviridae. That may prove difficult, perhaps impossible, but that is a different argument to yours of claiming that the more you exhibit a vaccine, the more resistance will develop against it.
It's basic selection pressure. If you create an environment where large numbers of people are immune to the dominant strain, you create heavy selection pressure in favour of any mutations that are good against that immunity.
Still waiting for your explanation as to why many, many vaccines work just as well today as they did when introduced decades ago. A clue: it's not the vaccines; it's that some viruses are much faster at mutating than others. And if you suggest that could be a reason to not use vaccines, I'll expect you to be consistent and decline antibiotics should you develop bacterial meningitis, you know, to prevent antibiotic resistance developing...
fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: That's confusing the mechanism of antibiotic resistance, caused by inappropriate use, inadequate dosages and incomplete courses, where bacteria only develop resistance if they are exposed to non-lethal antibiotics.
I don't think that's true. Bacteria randomly develop antibiotic resistance. That only becomes an issue when selection pressure causes the bacteria who have anti-antibiotic mutations to dominate. It's the same phenomenon.
Yes they randomly develop a mutation conferring resistance, and yes it only matters when antibiotcs kill off those without the mutation. How does that differ from what I wrote above? Sure the odd one gets the mutation, but the mutation only becomes common in the population if there is a selection pressure for it.
fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: Now given that vaccines are the only useful way we have of preventing infection outside lockdowns, doesn't it seem reasonable to try our best?
Just because your only weapon is a feather doesn't mean it's sensible to use it in a fight with a pitbull rather than climbing a tree. It's possible to do more harm than good. The virus already had a strain that was resistant to the vaccine before we even began rolling the vaccine out. Natural immunity is vastly better than vaccine immunity. The more you use the vaccine, the more selection pressure you create for vaccine resistant strains to become the dominant strains.
You're still stuck on the idea that vaccines cause resistance as antibiotics do in bacteria.
fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: And it isn't as if they don't give us an advantage: I have been shown the unpublished projections for this province of what is expected by public health here if vaccination rates remain the same. For every five new infections, four will be among the unvaccinated. Which group should we be advising the public to be in?
How have the projections been going up to now? I don't feel like 18 months of intermittent lockdowns, mask mandates, economic shutdowns and mandatory vaccination was projected when we set down this path.
It's not just a prediction; look at the percentage of deaths and hospital admissions that are among the unvaccinated compared to the vaccinated. Consider what the numbers mean when they report 80-90% protection against even the delta variant causing severe disease, hospitalization or death. This is fast becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The bloody vaccine works, so why not use it? Just because you're angry that no one knew what would happen 18 months ago is hardly a reason to deny yourself the best protection you can get.

I am not myself an immunologist, but I have spent my career administering vaccines and explaining them to reluctant parents. I don't detect in you any anti-vaccine nonsense (thank you!) and as long as you aren't convinced that Bill Gates is inserting microchips in them I can't see why you wouldn't allow yourself whatever benefit they might give you. Perhaps you already have, and I missed that part, whilst remaining, maybe rightly, pessimistic about the long term outlook, but still don't see why that justifies not trying our best to do what we can to mitigate the damage. For some people, though not, I think, you, there is a kind of macho defiance to their "I'm tough, I'm invincible, we just have to learn to live with it, and anyway it only kills off the weak." I fail to understand the attraction of that mindset in people who would, presumably, claim to be civilised. I imagine they're pretty scared inside. I can certainly empathise with anticipatory medical fears: I am not immune (mot juste!) to that. But to take it to the point where an individual chooses not to have a vaccine - that is safer to have than it is to catch the disease - just because having the shot is an admission that it is necessary and that there is a real danger out there, well, it's pretty silly. Cutting off your nose to spite your face (there's a new maxim for Steers!) as we used to say.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1641

Post by fafnir »

screwtape wrote: Are you suggesting, pari passu, that influenza vaccines cause the virus to mutate, or do you accept that's what viruses have always done and will continue to do?
All life mutates. What causes particular mutations to become more or less frequent in the population is the selection pressure applied to the population. By having a significant number of vaccinated people out there, life is getting harder for the strains that are not vaccine resistant and easier for the strains that are vaccine resistant.
screwtape wrote: Well let's just give up then and await our turn to be carried off!
Well, we all get carried off eventually, but unless you are an obese 80 year old with congestive heart failure, the chances of you being carried off by covid are kind of low.
screwtape wrote: Well if this isn't a reason to stop using the flu vaccine, why should it be a reason to stop the covid vaccine? Isn't some protection better than no protection?
It isn't a choice between doing nothing and doing what we are doing. We could do as we do for the flu and offer the vaccine to people who want it. There are quite a few steps between what we do for the flu and shutting down the global economy and firing all the people who don't get vaccinated.
screwtape wrote:
fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: And 20x? I haven't seen anything so optimistic, with the clear winner in terms of strength of immunity being natural infection followed by vaccination. Even relatively poor vaccines remain as (in)effective as they ever were, after decades of use. Think of BCG for TB, the old TAB for typhoid, or the old Kolle vaccine for cholera. They were not very good at their job, but were the best we had. Even today, though superseded, they work as well as they did when introduced.
I was going from memory. This one says 13x
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... 21262415v1
You'll note that paper agrees that immunisation after infection provides the strongest protection.
Sure. Is the strategy to let most people get covid and also vaccinate them? I guess if we wait long enough that's what will happen, only the strain of covid on that distant day will have changed and we'll be talking about how you need to have had covid twice and be quintuple vaxed to be protected. Should we lock people who have only had the vaccine but not had covid in their homes and maybe fire them? They don't seem safe to be around. In any case, almost nobody who has had covid seems to be getting it again. Maybe at some point they will. You can get flu and the common cold more than once after all.
screwtape wrote: Also consider the biggest unknown factor in these studies that show waning antibody levels after vaccination: it may not matter a bit. You probably well understand that exposure to a pathogen allows the immune system to prime a subset of B-lymphocytes to make an antibody against the bug. The titres of that antibody in peripheral blood fall after infection, but the population of B-cells remains, awaiting the time when you meet the bug again, at which point they multiply, make their antibody and save the day. Waning antibody levels mean little given the means of production remain on standby. Furthermore viruses are also killed by T-lymphocytes, again once they have learned to recognise the virus's relevant antigens. They too stick around and wait for the next time they are needed. Anamnestic response, and all that.
Those studies are talking about infections, hospitalisations and deaths in people who have had covid vs people who have just had the vaccine. The details of T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes are just the back story of why after a few months the vaccine is no good at preventing infection
screwtape wrote: Well, you're arguing with the British Society of Immunology there, as the quote is from their literature and not from me. But I see that you tacitly admit the virus mutated without selection pressure from a non-existent vaccine. I may be getting somewhere. ;)
I haven't ever claimed the virus doesn't mutate. I keep saying natural selection happens and you interpret me to be claiming that the giraff stretching for leaves causes it's offsprings necks to be longer. As to the British Society of Immunology, if the vaccine is so great and gives such long lasting immunity....why are we starting on booster shots when we haven't even got half way deploying the first two shots? How is this every going to end? Is this like the Marxist perminant revolution.... we just keep fighting to wipe covid out forever? This feels like the sunk cost fallacy being played out globally.
screwtape wrote: Still waiting for your explanation as to why many, many vaccines work just as well today as they did when introduced decades ago. A clue: it's not the vaccines; it's that some viruses are much faster at mutating than others.
I'm well aware of this.
screwtape wrote: And if you suggest that could be a reason to not use vaccines, I'll expect you to be consistent and decline antibiotics should you develop bacterial meningitis, you know, to prevent antibiotic resistance developing...
If I have an illness and there is medicine for it, I'll likely take it. It would be ridiculous though to try and globally give everybody antibiotics to try and make sure that nobody ever again died of bacterial meningitis and refused to accept arguments against doing this on the grounds that people were letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. How many years are we going to play this game?
screwtape wrote: Yes they randomly develop a mutation conferring resistance, and yes it only matters when antibiotcs kill off those without the mutation. How does that differ from what I wrote above? Sure the odd one gets the mutation, but the mutation only becomes common in the population if there is a selection pressure for it.
Nothing, apart from that I'm saying all that applies to viruses too. Obviously the mutation rates and so forth are going to vary around how long it's going to take, but it's still mutation and natural selection. It's weird how, as we roll out vaccines, it's a vaccine resistant strain that starts to become dominant. What is it that decides which mutations will turn into global strains and which won't other than selection pressure?

This argument doesn't even fucking matter though. If there is a vaccine resistant strain already out there before we are ready to deploy the vaccine, then it looks an awful lot like the virus is mutating too fast to be stopped by a vaccine. Plan B seems to be to carry on with Plan A regardless.
screwtape wrote:
fafnir wrote:
screwtape wrote: Now given that vaccines are the only useful way we have of preventing infection outside lockdowns, doesn't it seem reasonable to try our best?
Just because your only weapon is a feather doesn't mean it's sensible to use it in a fight with a pitbull rather than climbing a tree. It's possible to do more harm than good. The virus already had a strain that was resistant to the vaccine before we even began rolling the vaccine out. Natural immunity is vastly better than vaccine immunity. The more you use the vaccine, the more selection pressure you create for vaccine resistant strains to become the dominant strains.
You're still stuck on the idea that vaccines cause resistance as antibiotics do in bacteria.
OK. Natural selection doesn't apply to viruses. Maybe they adapt via transgenerational epigenetic inheritance? Fine. I agree and we move on. The core issue is that the virus was resistant to the vaccine before the vaccine was ready to be rolled out. Rollout looks like at least a 2 year process. The same kind of issue that you get with flu and common cold vaccines. What's the plan to get around that?
screwtape wrote:
fafnir wrote: How have the projections been going up to now? I don't feel like 18 months of intermittent lockdowns, mask mandates, economic shutdowns and mandatory vaccination was projected when we set down this path.
It's not just a prediction; look at the percentage of deaths and hospital admissions that are among the unvaccinated compared to the vaccinated. Consider what the numbers mean when they report 80-90% protection against even the delta variant causing severe disease, hospitalization or death. This is fast becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The bloody vaccine works, so why not use it? Just because you're angry that no one knew what would happen 18 months ago is hardly a reason to deny yourself the best protection you can get.
I'm not an obese 80 year old. I'd get greater benefit to my health exercising more and cutting down on sugar. The vaccine doesn't do much for stopping the spread. We have spikes in places with 70%+ double vaxed. If it does much good, it will be in reducing severity of the infection. That's not really a vaccine so much as a pre-treatment.
screwtape wrote: I am not myself an immunologist, but I have spent my career administering vaccines and explaining them to reluctant parents. I don't detect in you any anti-vaccine nonsense (thank you!) and as long as you aren't convinced that Bill Gates is inserting microchips in them I can't see why you wouldn't allow yourself whatever benefit they might give you.
Thank you. I don't think most people who are not getting the vax think that there are microchips in it. I don't take everything that might have some benefit to me or I'd be spending all my time exercising, eating kale and taking pills. Why would I suddenly choose this one thing to mitigate some 1/100,000 risk? If I was an obese 80 year old, I might well look at the odds and take a different personal view.
screwtape wrote: Perhaps you already have, and I missed that part, whilst remaining, maybe rightly, pessimistic about the long term outlook, but still don't see why that justifies not trying our best to do what we can to mitigate the damage.
Well now..... confession time. I got the vax because my wife was worried. She's a type 1 diabetic. I think realistically the risk was for type 2 diabetics because of the correlation to obesity, but she was worried. The kids aren't getting it though. As to not doing what we can to mitigate the damage..... that goes both ways. Supposidly alcoholism and associated illnesses have gone up a lot because of this. The education of a generation of children has been harmed. I wonder what the effect is going to be on a generation of toddlers who didn't get to socialise. Who knows how much damage has been done to the economy, and the associated damage to peoples lives? When will this stop?
screwtape wrote: For some people, though not, I think, you, there is a kind of macho defiance to their "I'm tough, I'm invincible, we just have to learn to live with it, and anyway it only kills off the weak."
Some things we do just have to live with. Like the flu. That is life. If, like I think, it isn't possible to vaccinate our way out of it, what do we say about that generation of kids whose education and childhood were screwed up? All the people who lost their businesses? All the people who became alcoholics because of this? What do we say about the trillions of dollars that have been transferred out of the middle class? "Gee whiz, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". If we are going to have to have booster shots every 5-6 months, when is this going to end?
screwtape wrote: I fail to understand the attraction of that mindset in people who would, presumably, claim to be civilised. I imagine they're pretty scared inside.
Why would they be scared of something that has like a 1/100,000 chance of killing them? That would be neurotic. For myself, I see the harm to my kids childhood and I'm pissed off. We've kept them working, so they haven't even fallen that far behind. But plent of other kids in their class have. My dad died during this and had his final year ruined by the lockdown. I don't think the "good" in "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good", is very good at all. When will it end?
screwtape wrote: I can certainly empathise with anticipatory medical fears: I am not immune (mot juste!) to that. But to take it to the point where an individual chooses not to have a vaccine - that is safer to have than it is to catch the disease - just because having the shot is an admission that it is necessary and that there is a real danger out there, well, it's pretty silly. Cutting off your nose to spite your face (there's a new maxim for Steers!) as we used to say.
You are attributing beliefs to people that they don't necessarily have. I'm in my 40s and pretty healthy, though I could exercise more and eat better. My odds of dying of covid are effectively zero. I know one person who was made seriously ill by covid, but I more know of him than know him and his health was already delicate. None of my parents elderly friends have been injured by covid, though many of them are terrified and effectively still locked in their homes. Beyond that, I can't think of a single person I know who has been more badly impacted than maybe a week off work with flu symptoms.... even that I hardly know anybody. Why would I be scared of covid?

I'm not the kind of person who goes for a run every day, eats kale or takes vitamins. Why then would my own health induce me to take the vaccine? Sure covid might kill me, but if that was the level of risk that frightened me, I'd live in a pillow lined bunker with a thermometer in my mouth googling every phantom symptom I thought I detected.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1642

Post by fafnir »

Screwtape, I appreciate that that was a long post. If you feel like replying, probably the second half is where the main point I'm interested in is and where we aren't just going to throw rocks at each other.

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1643

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

Brive1987 wrote:
Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: It’s amusing how graphs work.

I’ve marked in red the period your graph covered. These are USA cases :lol:

Delta makes up 80% of new cases in the second wave - the one that took off just off the right hand margin of your pic.

They keep forgetting to include deaths. So weird.
Deaths are lower proportionally. We also have the concept that vaccination reduces deaths. But then we have delta being more transmissible and possibly worse for non vaccinated.

The opportunity for confounding issues in “real” science is high. The probability on a discussion board approaches 100%.

Okay, so in both charts the curve is already going down before the peak came anywhere near the last big spike. So those researchers prediction declaration that the Delta "lead to a considerably larger, and more deadly, pandemic" is belied.

I see nothing to indicate that the Delta is deadlier than the 'Wuhan Original'. Both kill individuals who are a combo of elderly / weak / sick / morbidly obese. The push to vax the young/strong/healthy/trim makes no sense.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1644

Post by fafnir »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote: Okay, so in both charts the curve is already going down before the peak came anywhere near the last big spike. So those researchers prediction declaration that the Delta "lead to a considerably larger, and more deadly, pandemic" is belied.

I see nothing to indicate that the Delta is deadlier than the 'Wuhan Original'. Both kill individuals who are a combo of elderly / weak / sick / morbidly obese. The push to vax the young/strong/healthy/trim makes no sense.
Politically, I do wonder how we stop at this point? It doesn't look like the graphs of infections we've been having thrust in our faces over and over are going to go flat any time soon. Do we change the way we are measuring it again, and flatten it that way? So much political and human capital has been invested in this path it's going to take a hell of a swerve to announce "mission accomplished".

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1645

Post by Service Dog »

screwtape wrote: I am not myself an immunologist, but I have spent my career administering vaccines and explaining them to reluctant parents.

....I can't see why you wouldn't allow yourself whatever benefit they might give you. .... there is a kind of macho defiance to their "I'm tough, I'm invincible, we just have to learn to live with it, and anyway it only kills off the weak." I fail to understand the attraction of that mindset in people who would, presumably, claim to be civilised. I imagine they're pretty scared inside. ....
Screwtape has made a career of urging parents to let screwtape vaccinate their children.

For those who dare refuse the needle in screwtape's hand...

screwtape has written about his desires and fantasies-- that they suffer pain, mass death, extermination, be categorized as murderers.

He denounces them as uncivilised, of inferior intelligence, a burden on the human race


Screwtape "can't see" and "fails to understand" why someone would be reluctant to entrust their children to a ZEALOT, who can't even comprehend opposing viewpoints... concerns which it is literally his job to understand & address. Instead, screwtape 'ignores'.
screwtape wrote: ↑
But to take it to the point where an individual chooses not to have a vaccine - that is safer to have than it is to catch the disease -.... well, it's pretty silly. Cutting off your nose to spite your face
Screwtape refuses to understand-- that THE OTHER PERSON is entitled give or refuse CONSENT-- using their own mind & values-- to weigh the narrow medical benefit of a vaccine... versus the shortcomings of screwtape, Justin Trudeau, multi-national Big Pharma, global medical-policy bureaucrats, censorious Big Tech media/censorship empires.


Screwtape dismisses MEDICAL ETHICS as trivial and silly. He criticizes others in hyperbolic detail, but does not honestly assess his own flaws.

Is screwtape just one bad apple... a screwball... outside the standards of his profession... unfit to practice medicine?

Or is screwtape typical of his colleagues, no worse than the rest, all the way to the top?

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1646

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

Fafnir, I admire your calm perseverance and clarity of thought in engaging our house vax-Plantinga.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1647

Post by fafnir »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote: Fafnir, I admire your calm perseverance and clarity of thought in engaging our house vax-Plantinga.
I used to fail to get the liberty minded folks as well. :-)

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1648

Post by Sulman »

A barely-passing tranny saying they're thick skinned and not offended in a double-digit tweet thread, about a minority making jokes they don't like.


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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1649

Post by Clarence »

Anyone want to try to show any misrepresentations or holes in this Ars Technica Apologia for mandatory vax policies?
Several of you guys seem very knowledgeable about it and might pick up things I can not. I suspect cherry picking of sources or maybe simply not mentioning something pertinent. The only assumption I spotted that she makes is that all the deaths listed as COVID deaths are really COVID alone deaths and not 'with' deaths. Anyway, some background: Far as I know Ars has never written articles about Fauci's COVID misrepresentations, nor has it ever examined, in depth, the Gain of Function research, who funded it, or even written more than maybe one dismissive article a year ago that even discussed the Lab Leak theory. It's all in for banning "medical misinformation" , same as it was rah rah about banning Trump from every social media platform a year ago. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10 ... d-19-shot/

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1650

Post by Lsuoma »

fafnir wrote:
Matt Cavanaugh wrote: Fafnir, I admire your calm perseverance and clarity of thought in engaging our house vax-Plantinga.
I used to fail to get the liberty minded folks as well. :-)
Nice sarcastic ad homs there, guys.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1651

Post by fafnir »

Clarence, my first reaction is that it's very difficult to get past the view that the process of classification and collection of all the case data is being lent on very hard. That does kind of leave a very difficult to remove question mark hovering over the whole article.
Comparing that with actual COVID-19 infections—which can cause severe disease even in young, healthy people and may cause persistent, months-long symptoms in up to half of people infected—there's no contest
This is the kind of place I run into difficulty. I know quite a lot of young people. Both my kids are in school. That's close to three thousand kids. I haven't heard of any serious illness. I don't know of any young healthy person who has been seriously ill, or has had any kind of persistent issue. It's like they are talking about a different pandemic. I don't doubt it happens, but honestly... how often? Years ago I remember a waitress being killed by some of the brickwork falling from the top of the building she was working outside. I know these kinds of things occasionally happen, but I don't wear a reinforced helmet when I go shopping because I'm not surveying from a nervous disorder.
Still, the vaccines' efficacy estimates are extraordinarily good. A recent study found that the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine was holding steady with 90 percent efficacy against COVID-19 hospitalization for at least six months. A separate study found that the Moderna mRNA vaccine was 93 percent effective against hospitalizations among people without immunocompromising conditions. Johnson & Johnson's vaccine was 71 percent effective.
We aren't mandating these vaccines for young healthy people to reduce their odds of being hospitalized from 1/100,000 to 1/1,000,000 are we? I thought it was herd immunity and protecting the vulnerable? Is a pivot going on?

The article seems crazy to me. We aren't having this argument about vaccination over whether healthy young people should be forced the vax to reduce their tiny odds of death to even tinier odds. We are having the argument about whether people at close to zero risk should be forced to take a shitty vaccine that is not very good at stopping people spreading the virus in order to protect other people from catching it from them. Their stats don't relate to that argument. They are framing the debate. It's your classic take down of a straw man.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1652

Post by fafnir »

Lsuoma wrote:
fafnir wrote:
Matt Cavanaugh wrote: Fafnir, I admire your calm perseverance and clarity of thought in engaging our house vax-Plantinga.
I used to fail to get the liberty minded folks as well. :-)
Nice sarcastic ad homs there, guys.
I did fail to get liberty minded folks for most of my life. Screwtape doesn't seem to understand the psychology of people who don't want to get the vax. Back in the day, I don't think I would have understood it either. What do you want me to say? I don't think less of screwtape for that. I might get frustrated at times, but hey. This isn't the Women's Institute, we are permitted to throw a bit of sass around, aren't we?

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1653

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

For some people ... there is a kind of macho defiance to their "I'm tough, I'm invincible, we just have to learn to live with it, and anyway it only kills off the weak." I fail to understand the attraction of that mindset in people who would, presumably, claim to be civilised. I imagine they're pretty scared inside.
This, from the 'civilized' gent who relished the impending and deserved death of the unvaccinated, who also was fine with shooting dogs execution-style for no good reason.

No, you insufferable elitist twat, you don't understand the mindset of anyone who's not a fellow elitist twat.

And, although I'd prefer to not die just yet, were I "pretty scared inside", I wouldn't be leading the lifestyle I do. Between wildfires, lions, bears, rattlers, wasps, potential hooves to the head, and falling trees, my chance of an early demise is many times greater than your average, double-masking, metropolitan nancy boy. By nature and necessity, I tend to be risk-adverse. But I also consider myself risk-assessment savvy.

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1654

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

You all thought I was fooling about that last one, huh?

The only good digger is a dead digger.jpeg
(522.24 KiB) Downloaded 93 times

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1655

Post by Service Dog »

Lsuoma wrote:
fafnir wrote:
Matt Cavanaugh wrote: Fafnir, I admire your calm perseverance and clarity of thought in engaging our house vax-Plantinga.


I used to fail to get the liberty minded folks as well. :-)
Nice sarcastic ad homs there, guys.

they're literally responding to screwtape literally saying that he does not comprehend the liberty-minded point of view:
screwtape wrote: I fail to understand the attraction of that mindset in people who would, presumably, claim to be civilised.
The ability correctly comprehend the words & mindset of the-person-you're-talking-to is not an ad hominem transgression.


Service Dog
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1656

Post by Service Dog »





Couple weeks ago, I helped the Argentine artist paint the Ecuadoran widow's food truck. (Her husband died of Covid.)

Last night-- I helped produce a party at a bar-- waaay up in the Bronx-- tying-in the food truck with Hispanic Heritage Month + selling alcohol.

The party attendees were mostly black, not hispanic. They seemed to have stepped-out of a time machine, which went-express after multiple local pick-ups between 1986 and 1996. I'm alway happy to see pockets of vintage black subculture still exist. I don't think I saw a single BLM symbol.

I couldn't discern what Hispanic Heritage Month commemorates or celebrates.

The abstract logo on the bar staff t-shirt... looks like a taco & a spicy butthole.


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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1657

Post by ThreeFlangedJavis »

Service Dog wrote:
Thu Oct 07, 2021 6:11 am
screwtape wrote: that requires vulnerable non-immune hosts to get infected. If you achieve a high vaccination rate the virus can't do that
So... the covid vaccines won't work unless you vaccinate every person living in a third-world shithole & every bat in a wuhan cave.
I don't understand this, maybe through ignorance but who knows. The vaccinated can get infected and that involves the virus existing in the respiratory tract out of the blood stream, I believe. So if you have viruses existing in vaccinated people then that constitutes a mutation breeding ground with a mutation selecting bloodstream attached, surely?

I don't believe that natural immunity is 10 or 20 times better, whatever that means, but it stands to reason that it is more protective simply because more sites on the virus are responded to. The CDC appear to be trying to bullshit the public by claiming that vaccine immunity is longer lasting and they appear to be doing it by conflating antibody levels and immune memory. This guy doesn't come right out and say that the CDC is not being honest but the conclusion is hard to escape.


I'm at the point now where my past natural inclination toward a collective response is overridden by contempt for people who insist that it is other's responsibility to fuck up their own lives and the lives of their children for their benefit. If you are scared of the virus, lock yourself away, don't force the young and healthy to lock themselves up so you can feel safer. The fact is that the vast majority of younger Covid hospitalisations are of people with health issues and the obese. The risk to the healthy is vastly overstated and consequently so is the risk/benefit analysis of vaccination for the healthy. The lack of accent on the obesity factor is proof that science is not driving policy, especially given the explosion of obesity that lockdowns have caused in 1st world countries. Policy is being driven by an stubborn adherence to vaccination at all costs and a political battle. Call me simplisitic, but if I were Covid Czar I'd be spamming public health advisories on sources of vit D, vit C and encouraging healthy lifestyles and eating habits. I'd even be providing vitamins and supplements known to be statistically lacking in victims free of charge. Sadly, the focus is on throwing money at pharma to develop new drugs that Doctors have little faith in like Remdesivir but which cost thousands a pop.

And Fauci is still a sack of Sh1t. He said publicly that it was too early to tell if Christmas could be freely celebrated, was criticised for it, then claimed he'd been misrepresented by the nasty people again and was going to be celebrating Xmas with his family and how dare anyone say he'd said otherwise. The man and his apologists really are too much.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1658

Post by John D »

So - Dave Chappelle is really a gifted performer. I don't always agree with some of his use of "facts", but he really is some kind of genius. Just watch his latest Netflix special (Filmed in Detroit by the way). Fantastic performance. Highly recommended,

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1659

Post by Service Dog »

John D wrote: So - Dave Chappelle is really a gifted performer. I don't always agree with some of his use of "facts", but he really is some kind of genius. Just watch his latest Netflix special (Filmed in Detroit by the way). Fantastic performance. Highly recommended,
but don't watch Chappelle's "8:46" special. It's just an old drunk past-his-peak celebrity, self-indulging. With a couple doses of airhead numerology!

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1660

Post by fafnir »

ThreeFlangedJavis wrote: I don't understand this, maybe through ignorance but who knows. The vaccinated can get infected and that involves the virus existing in the respiratory tract out of the blood stream, I believe. So if you have viruses existing in vaccinated people then that constitutes a mutation breeding ground with a mutation selecting bloodstream attached, surely?
That's my understanding as well. When I was reading up on the differences between viruses becoming immune to vaccines and bacteria becoming immune to antibiotics, one of the key points related to this. Your typical antibiotic you are giving to somebody full of bacteria, so that's loads of bacteria all having the opportunity to find out if they are the one that has a random mutation giving them some resistance. With your typical vaccine you are giving it to somebody who is not sick. When the virus comes along the vaccinated persons immune system is now ready to quickly kill the virus and the virus never replicates enough to have much of an opportunity to mutate and discover it has defeated the vaccine. In the case of a vaccine where you can still be infected, just you don't end up in the hospital..... that logic seems to go out the window.

You may be right that natural immunity isn't 20x better and is only 5x better, or 2x better, or whatever than the vaccine. I'm not sure I trust any of the contradictory data enough to feel confident. My main argument is about freedom and the near pointlessness of a healthy individual getting vaccinated if we are no longer aiming for herd immunity. How can we be aiming for herd immunity if the main selling point of the vaccine now seems to be that you don't get as sick when you catch it?

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1661

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

Service Dog wrote: The abstract logo on the bar staff t-shirt... looks like a taco & a spicy butthole.

I see a taco with hot sauce, a side of guacamole, leading to a bloody butthole. Clearly a reference to this:


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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1662

Post by fafnir »

This article sums up another aspect of the leaky vaccine issue that I didn't go into earlier:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scie ... en-viruses

"Basically with this nasty looking chicken virus, the vaccine may have caused the virus to become more deadly. The idea is that the really nasty strains caused the chickens to too quickly, so there was selection pressure in favour of milder strains. Along comes a leaky virus that means the deadly strains can be tolerated by the chickens.

This problem, where vaccination fosters the evolution of more virulent disease, does not apply to most human vaccines. Those against mumps, measles, rubella, and smallpox are “perfect:” They protect against disease and stop people from transmitting the respective viruses. “You don’t get onward evolution,” says Read. “These vaccines are very successful, highly effective, and very safe. They have been a tremendous success story and will continue to be so.”"

If this is correct you have the potential for the leaky vaccines creating selection pressure in favour of more deadly strains.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1663

Post by Service Dog »

fafnir wrote: You may be right that natural immunity isn't 20x better and is only 5x better, or 2x better, or whatever
if the debate veers into that cul-de-sac... that's not good for the vax-flacks.

Digging-into those numbers exposes that the methodology generating the numbers is arbitrary... same as when numbers are used to sell the jab.

Case in point, from Clarence's link. Note the caveats in red. Just change the parameters-- to raise or lower the numbers as-you-please.
Clarence wrote: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10 ... d-19-shot/

A recent study found that the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine was holding steady with 90 percent efficacy against COVID-19 hospitalization for at least six months. A separate study found that the Moderna mRNA vaccine was 93 percent effective against hospitalizations among people without immunocompromising conditions. Johnson & Johnson's vaccine was 71 percent effective.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1664

Post by Service Dog »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote: I see a taco with hot sauce, a side of guacamole,
Or that might be an actual guacamole spill on the shirt.

No, wait, it's clearly a month-long exponential curve, showing the butthole-effects of celebrating OctubreFiesta.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1665

Post by fafnir »

I assumed the blue background represented the waters of the rio grande.

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1666

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

Service Dog wrote: Digging-into those numbers exposes that the methodology generating the numbers is arbitrary... same as when numbers are used to sell the jab.

Case in point, from Clarence's link. Note the caveats in red. Just change the parameters-- to raise or lower the numbers as-you-please.
Clarence wrote: https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10 ... d-19-shot/

A recent study found that the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine was holding steady with 90 percent efficacy against COVID-19 hospitalization for at least six months. A separate study found that the Moderna mRNA vaccine was 93 percent effective against hospitalizations among people without immunocompromising conditions. Johnson & Johnson's vaccine was 71 percent effective.

Ahem,
New research, financed by Pfizer and published in The LancetTrusted Source, finds that while the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was 88 percent effective at preventing infection during the first month after a second dose — it was only 47 percent effective at preventing infection 5 months later.

Researchers also found that the Pfizer vaccine was highly effective against the Delta variant, and was still more than 90 percent effective against it for around 4 months, after which it dropped to just 53 percent effectiveness at about 5 months after vaccination.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/ ... tudy-finds

The Ars Technica author, Beth Mole, has also, inter alia:
- touted the dedunked, control-group free, study showing masks in schools work;
- pushed the ivermectin poisoning hoax;
- cried wolf about the non-existent ICU crisis;
- repeated the lie about Florida fudging its data.

https://arstechnica.com/author/beth/

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1667

Post by Service Dog »

fafnir wrote: I assumed the blue background represented the waters of the rio grande.
Wrong border.






I looked-up the PR firm which designed the t-shirt.

The PR firms webpage offers a hispanic heritage month link... to a MUSEUM OF PR (!!!) ...celebrating the heritage of hispanics... in PR firms!
https://www.prmuseum.org/092121-celebra ... r-history/

...oh! Bueno!! noooow i get it!...

Hispanic Heritage Month (and every-other Identity Group month) = an opportunity gaze into your own butthole... and travel right up it.

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1668

Post by fafnir »

At this rate, we are going to need a 500% vaccination rate for herd immunity by the new year. Incidentally, when was the last time Fauci mentioned herd a rate for herd immunity?

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1669

Post by fafnir »

Service Dog wrote: Wrong border.
Your border is too long to keep track of. It's confusing. You should shorten it.

Keating
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1670

Post by Keating »

My position is the same as fafnir's, although I object far more to government mandates than the vaccine specifically. I worry and suspect that government action is doing far more harm than good in the long term. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that there is a fallacy of what can be counted. It is relatively easy count the number of people who die of WuFlu, thus it is a metric that is easy to use. It is far harder to count the number of people who die of other causes that wouldn't have if it were not for government action. It is also hard to measure the opportunity costs; relationships that never started, domestic violence from relationships that should never have started, first time grandparents not being their for their children, education and socialisation costs, psychological costs on the population, increasing polarisation and distrust, etc. Even if you could weigh all that, how do you balance it against the measurable costs? Particularly with so many unknowns, my risk assessment as an engineer is to change things as little as possible because the chances of unintended consequences become higher the more you fuck around with things you don't understand. My guess is that there are a number of bad consequences coming down the pipeline we will now be dealing with for a generation, that could have been avoided.

As to vaccines specifically, I have the same perspective that we can't possibly know the consequences of global population level mass vaccination with a leaky vaccine, so I'm sceptical that it wouldn't be better to just target the old and vulnerable and let the majority of the population develop natural immunity. That said, I could go either way on this, because there are so many unknowns. Where I'd get off the train completely, however, is government mandates. Given the virus is leaky, passports and other heavy handed approaches make absolutely no sense, and we know, from history, where that kind of apartheid and dehumanisation leads. That is absolutely a bad idea that will have terrible consequences.

More broadly, I simply refuse to live in fear of a disease. Quality of life matters far more to me than quantity of life. I will die one day, but I'd rather die standing then on my knees.

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1671

Post by fafnir »

Keating wrote: My position is the same as fafnir's, although I object far more to government mandates than the vaccine specifically. I worry and suspect that government action is doing far more harm than good in the long term.
I have been downplaying my feelings there to try and not argue everything at once. 110% your post.

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1672

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

fafnir wrote:
Service Dog wrote: Wrong border.
Your border is too long to keep track of. It's confusing. You should shorten it.
Like invading and annexing Central America all the way thru Panama?

I mean, they all want to live in the US so bad, we could save them the trip.

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1673

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

fafnir wrote:
Keating wrote: My position is the same as fafnir's, although I object far more to government mandates than the vaccine specifically. I worry and suspect that government action is doing far more harm than good in the long term.
I have been downplaying my feelings there to try and not argue everything at once. 110% your post.
Your seconding of Keating's post will drop to 53% after four months.

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1674

Post by fafnir »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
fafnir wrote:
Service Dog wrote: Wrong border.
Your border is too long to keep track of. It's confusing. You should shorten it.
Like invading and annexing Central America all the way thru Panama?

I mean, they all want to live in the US so bad, we could save them the trip.
With their crime, and wealth disparities? It would be like absorbing a huge democrat run city.

I have a modest counter proposal. Hear me out now.....

You folks come back to the UK, hand over the head of Meghan Markle to the Queen, and fill up on all the Kinder Eggs you aren't allowed over there. Then we team up with the Poles, Hungarians and Romanians to reconquer Europe? It will be like one of those heist movies where we get the gang back together for one last job.

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1675

Post by Brive1987 »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
Brive1987 wrote:
Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: It’s amusing how graphs work.

I’ve marked in red the period your graph covered. These are USA cases :lol:

Delta makes up 80% of new cases in the second wave - the one that took off just off the right hand margin of your pic.

They keep forgetting to include deaths. So weird.
Deaths are lower proportionally. We also have the concept that vaccination reduces deaths. But then we have delta being more transmissible and possibly worse for non vaccinated.

The opportunity for confounding issues in “real” science is high. The probability on a discussion board approaches 100%.

Okay, so in both charts the curve is already going down before the peak came anywhere near the last big spike. So those researchers prediction declaration that the Delta "lead to a considerably larger, and more deadly, pandemic" is belied.

I see nothing to indicate that the Delta is deadlier than the 'Wuhan Original'. Both kill individuals who are a combo of elderly / weak / sick / morbidly obese. The push to vax the young/strong/healthy/trim makes no sense.
It was delta that constituted India’s significant second wave. In USA and elsewhere Delta coincided with vaccine momentum which confounds things. Less old people died because they were either dead already or vaccinated - but it hit younger people harder because of increased transmissibility and lower vaccine rates.

John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1676

Post by John D »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
fafnir wrote:
Service Dog wrote: Wrong border.
Your border is too long to keep track of. It's confusing. You should shorten it.
Like invading and annexing Central America all the way thru Panama?

I mean, they all want to live in the US so bad, we could save them the trip.
The US could have easily taken all of Mexico in 1848. President Polk decided that he didn't want to constantly fight to take over a whole country and settled for holding onto Texas, New Mexico, Cali, etc. Maybe this was a bad decision. Imagine how many more people would have had successful lives if we had taken the whole damn shithole. The southern border of Mexico is very short.

John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1677

Post by John D »

and really... James K. Polk is probably one of our greatest presidents and he gets no credit. Napoleon of the stump!


Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1678

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

Brive1987 wrote: Less old people died because they were either dead already or vaccinated - but it hit younger people harder because of increased transmissibility and lower vaccine rates.
Are there data showing an increase in IFR for younger age groups?

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1679

Post by Brive1987 »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: Less old people died because they were either dead already or vaccinated - but it hit younger people harder because of increased transmissibility and lower vaccine rates.
Are there data showing an increase in IFR for younger age groups?
Have some fresh meat to devour 😅😂


Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1680

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

John D wrote: The US could have easily taken all of Mexico in 1848. President Polk decided that he didn't want to constantly fight to take over a whole country and settled for holding onto Texas, New Mexico, Cali, etc.
I have a friend whose family's from New Mexico dating back to not just when it was old Mexico, but to when it was New Spain. They owned like a million acres at one point.

She got a bit part on the soap opera, Santa Barbara, playing an unwed pregnant teen wetback with choice lines like 'I theenk my bay bee weel grow up strong and hel-thee.'

Locked