Coronavirus

[EVNow]

Not just the forum... from the poll I posted above.

– Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.

Apparently a lot of people would support fining or imprisoning him over that post. I am extremely pro-vax but that is scary.

Scary ? Where have you been the last several years ? Depending on the question a large portion of voters have always supported authoritarian actions.

ps : Note that the poll was conducted by a highly partisan organization. If a credible organization conducts a similar poll, we might see a different result to that question.

2005 :

 

[golfcart]

Scary ? Where have you been the last several years ? Depending on the question a large portion of voters have always supported authoritarian actions.

ps : Note that the poll was conducted by a highly partisan organization. If a credible organization conducts a similar poll, we might see a different result to that question.

2005 :

View attachment 757134

Yes I find it scary... If you paid any attention to my posts you'd know that I have used the patriot act and the growth of homeland security since 9/11 as a great example of why we should NOT want to just hand out more authoritarian powers to the government over COVID.

As for the rest of it... how is Rasmussen not credible? Do they lean center right? There is certainly evidence to support that. Media Bias Fact Check calls them Highly Factual and center-right.

Media Bias Fact-Check

Specifically, how are they not credible? Because they ask questions that certain parts of the media won't ask? Do you consider NPR credible? They are no less partisan than Rasmussen based on that site. CNN, MSNBC, FOXNEWS, CNBC etc... are all far more partisan and far less credible based on that site. You should have some kind of evidence if you are gonna imply they are not a credible organization.

48% of Democratic voters, 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters supported that statement and they all scare me. Don't get so caught up in defending your partisan turf that you ignore the issue being discussed.

 

[FloridaSun]

Just be aware that if you have not had the booster, you're not up to date on your vaccinations, and you are at substantially increased risk from an infection (though obviously far better off than being unvaccinated). Just like with tetanus, and other vaccinations, it's important to be up to date!

Note that the vaccine, especially when boosted, is extraordinarily effective against all known variants. The data in incontrovertible on this point. Omicron stands virtually no chance, assuming you're basically otherwise healthy and not immunocompromised. Of course it has relatively low efficacy (50-75%) against infection, but completely avoiding a nasty illness which makes you miserable at home for a week is not the point.

Get boosted. The messaging was awful, so I understand the confusion, but Biden had it right when he said everyone should get boosted in September. Unfortunately nonsense polluted that clear, science-backed message and subsequent missteps from the administration and public health authorities have further muddied the waters.

Get boosted. It's strongly supported by the immunology and the data. The two-dose series is too closely spaced and doesn't induce a strong enough response to be sufficient protection.

Obviously, you make your own decisions, but it's important to know that the data strongly support boosting, and it's really not optional from a personal health standpoint.

Regarding future boosting, it's simply too early to say how long lived the extremely strong protection provided by the booster will last, and whether or not additional boosting will be required to maintain protection against severe disease. There are immunological reasons (affinity maturation, for example) to think that protection will be fairly long lasting and maintain a substantial advantage over a two-dose series in the long term, but no actual data to support it at this time since there has not been enough time. But one step at a time. We can take action based on what we know now.

Just be aware that if you have not had the booster, you're not up to date on your vaccinations, and you are at substantially increased risk from an infection (though obviously far better off than being unvaccinated). Just like with tetanus, and other vaccinations, it's important to be up to date!

Note that the vaccine, especially when boosted, is extraordinarily effective against all known variants. The data in incontrovertible on this point. Omicron stands virtually no chance, assuming you're basically otherwise healthy and not immunocompromised. Of course it has relatively low efficacy (50-75%) against infection, but completely avoiding a nasty illness which makes you miserable at home for a week is not the point.

Get boosted. The messaging was awful, so I understand the confusion, but Biden had it right when he said everyone should get boosted in September. Unfortunately nonsense polluted that clear, science-backed message and subsequent missteps from the administration and public health authorities have further muddied the waters.

Get boosted. It's strongly supported by the immunology and the data. The two-dose series is too closely spaced and doesn't induce a strong enough response to be sufficient protection.

Obviously, you make your own decisions, but it's important to know that the data strongly support boosting, and it's really not optional from a personal health standpoint.

Regarding future boosting, it's simply too early to say how long lived the extremely strong protection provided by the booster will last, and whether or not additional boosting will be required to maintain protection against severe disease. There are immunological reasons (affinity maturation, for example) to think that protection will be fairly long lasting and maintain a substantial advantage over a two-dose series in the long term, but no actual data to support it at this time since there has not been enough time. But one step at a time. We can take action based on what we know now.

Yes. And 5x higher chance of death if you are vaccinated but not boosted, as in your case. You make the call.



This was an interesting thread on vaccine-acquired natural immunity and infection-acquired immunity related to Omicron (small sample of 23 individuals in total). This focuses on antibody levels, so it's hard to draw conclusions on severe disease outcomes, though they will be correlated (it's more related to future dynamics of spread):

1) Many of the unvaccinated in this study had been previously infected (based on titers)
2) The unvaccinated miss out on strong protection against future infection by Omicron (many had minimal increase in titers; overall increase was 3x less than increase in the vaccinated, but the increase the unvaccinated did see was mostly due to those not previously infected)
3) Many of the unvaccinated saw no increase in protection against Delta (again, those who saw an increase may have never been infected previously). All of the vaccinated saw increased protection against Delta.
4) After infection by Omicron, vaccinated are better protected against Delta than Omicron. Not the case if unvaccinated.
4) This means that Omicron may help push out Delta infections - but primarily only amongst those who are vaccinated. Much less the case amongst those who have not been vaccinated - even if they have previously been infected. Two infections is not enough. I would guess 3-4 infections may end up providing good protection overall.

I guess having everyone unvaccinated get infected 3-4 times is...one path to endemicity. Great! If only there were another way which did not lead to as much transmission...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1483123897654517762

It would be better to see a larger sample here, though this is probably enough to be a significant result.

I'm a statistics guy.. Even if I was unvaccinated, at my age with no health issues, my chance of dying from COVID19 if infected are extremely low. With my 2 shots of Pfizer, they are extremely low. I have no problem getting a shot or 2 but I certainly won't get one every couple of months.. Enough is enough. There will be many more variants just like we have tons of variants of the influenza virus. Never in my life got a flu shot and I had the flu like 4 times in my life..Didn't harm me in any way..

 

[FloridaSun]

Scary ? Where have you been the last several years ? Depending on the question a large portion of voters have always supported authoritarian actions.

ps : Note that the poll was conducted by a highly partisan organization. If a credible organization conducts a similar poll, we might see a different result to that question.

2005 :

View attachment 757134

That's why I generally dislike BOTH big parties.. I'm registered Libertarian..

 

[EVNow]

As for the rest of it... how is Rasmussen not credible? Do they lean center right?

"Heartland Institute". The questions are "provocative" ... may be "clickbaity".

Lonely person who was interviewed was definitely partisan.

Its not about partisan leanings - I'd be perfectly fine with FoxNews polls. Rasmussen used to be ok - but in the past few years they have been erratic - 538 rates them c++. Here is an interesting post ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/mbh36z

 

[golfcart]

"Heartland Institute". The questions are "provocative" ... may be "clickbaity".

Lonely person who was interviewed was definitely partisan.

Its not about partisan leanings - I'd be perfectly fine with FoxNews polls. Rasmussen used to be ok - but in the past few years they have been erratic - 538 rates them c++. Here is an interesting post ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/fivethirtyeight/comments/mbh36z

You said not credible and nothing you have shown demonstrates a lack of credibility. 538 rates them a B which is better than most.

538 Pollster Ratings

Regardless. It was just posted as a response to another post where someone implied you could get in trouble for having the “wrong” opinion on the forum. I don’t think we need to delve into the credibility of every single polling organization because of it… it’s not that important.

 

[FlatSix911]

Here is a bit of good news regarding the new case trend (7-day average) as reported by John Hopkins.

New COVID-19 Cases Worldwide - Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center

Have countries flattened the curve? Daily confirmed new COVID-19 cases for the most affected countries over time.

coronavirus.jhu.edu

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

I'm a statistics guy.. Even if I was unvaccinated, at my age with no health issues, my chance of dying from COVID19 if infected are extremely low. With my 2 shots of Pfizer, they are extremely low. I have no problem getting a shot or 2 but I certainly won't get one every couple of months.. Enough is enough. There will be many more variants just like we have tons of variants of the influenza virus. Never in my life got a flu shot and I had the flu like 4 times in my life..Didn't harm me in any way..

Since you're a statistics guy, then, you'll know that your risk can be lowered by at least 5x if you get your booster. Your risk of dying may be low in an absolute sense, but it's substantially elevated from the risk you would have had without COVID around. This will be essentially completely resolved by a booster.

Note that this is just like any other vaccine series which requires at least three shots (most!). It has nothing to do with needing it every couple months or every year (based on what we know currently). You simply are INCOMPLETE on your vaccination series. May there be variants which require revaccination in the future? Certainly. But they don't yet exist. Might natural immunity from the vaccination wane? Yes, it might. It's too early to say; we don't know yet how persistent the secondary line of defense will be, there is literally zero data (the sample size of infected SARS-1 individuals is probably too small to guess with, and no one is going to go around trying to reinfect people with that virus).

The messaging on this has been absolutely awful, so I really can't blame you for your take on this. In the fog of the fight against coronavirus, authorities made it seem like two shots would be all that was needed, but with the close spacing, it really was not enough (there were rumbles and discussion about this (in this thread!) in late 2020 because immunologists knew this, but there were tradeoffs and that message & expectation was unfortunately not put to the forefront...). A third provides a very strong boost. It actually doesn't even have anything to do with the emergence of Delta or Omicron (though the boosts in antibody levels do help prevent infection by those variants for a period of time). You'd want a booster even if we still just had wild type around!!! Again, this is NOT about preventing infection, and it's not for variants. It's about bolstering your protection against severe disease.

It's meaningless to compare to flu vaccination, since most people have a lot of infection-acquired immunity (and natural vaccine immunity) against influenza, and this coronavirus is not like the flu in terms of its ability to undergo antigenic shift (drift is probably similar though I'm not even sure about that since SARS-CoV-2 has proofreading). Influenza frequently and commonly undergoes reassortment during co-infection, because it has a segmented genome, resulting in a virus which bears little resemblance (in the H & N structures as I understand it) to prior strains (see: 2009 pandemic flu). And while similar processes COULD occur with coronavirus (via different means), they're much less likely. It's not the same at all, and I would not expect vaccination against coronavirus to work the same way, at all. Anyone who tells you this is like influenza...maybe talk to someone else. No virologist with a basic understanding of the operation of influenza and coronavirus would say that, and the immunization strategy and effect is likely going to be completely different.

Here's a very brief summary of the difference between reassortment and recombination:

Why do RNA viruses recombine? - Nature Reviews Microbiology

Recombination can be an important evolutionary force for RNA viruses, but the rate of recombination varies greatly between different RNA viruses. In this Analysis article, Simon-Loriere and Holmes describe the mechanisms of recombination for RNA viruses and the role of these mechanisms in viral...

www.nature.com

"

• RNA viruses are able to undergo two forms of recombination: RNA recombination, which (in principle) can occur in any type of RNA virus, and reassortment, which is restricted to those viruses with segmented genomes.
• Rates of RNA recombination vary markedly among RNA viruses. Some viruses, particularly those with negative-sense single-stranded genomes, exhibit such low rates of recombination that they are effectively clonal. By contrast, some positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses and some retroviruses such as HIV exhibit high rates of recombination that can exceed the rates of mutation when measured per nucleotide."

(For FWIW SARS-CoV-2 is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus. However, there's not a lot of evidence that it does a lot of recombination, as far as I can tell. Influenza has a segmented genome; 8 strands for all strains.)

 

[CatB]

True, but absolute hospitalizations are now as high or higher in Florida than some previous Covid waves:

Hospitalizations as % of infected are dropping like a rock as more and more of the infected are either vaccinated or already had COVID before. They will continue to drop. COVID19 will not be eliminated.

First, what Jeff N said, depends on where you are.
Secondly, I'm not sure you can definitely say that since there's a reasonable level of doubt that we know true case rates because so many people are having trouble getting tested. That pesky denominator problem.
Thirdly, Covid hospitalizations are still high, undesirably so and avoidably so.

From: COVID-19 Cases by Vaccination Status - Coronavirus

The space between the yellow and blue lines are human beings who are hospitalized BY CHOICE. And their choice impacts the entire healthcare system and all the people it would otherwise be serving.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

The space between the yellow and blue lines are human beings who are hospitalized BY CHOICE.

I agree, partially. It's worth noting that a substantial portion of the unvaccinated are extremely low income, underserved, and have little access to the healthcare system. There's absolutely a political component too (there's overlap!), but it's worth noting that many disadvantaged communities often have extremely low vaccination rates. It's debatable whether it's a "choice" for some people, though clearly it's not that hard to get vaccinated (for people in our position). Both can can be true (it is both by choice and because of lack of access). We would do better as a nation if we could aggressively address the issues of access and education about the vaccine. Not everyone unvaccinated is adamantly opposed - I'm not even sure we can say it's MOST. Many are concerned about side effects - like missing a day of work, etc. By providing paid leave and opportunity to get vaccinated, and educating about the vaccine, we could perhaps reduce this gap. It's certainly not enough to provide vaccines free of charge.

 

[CatB]

I agree, partially. It's worth noting that a substantial portion of the unvaccinated are extremely low income, underserved, and have little access to the healthcare system. There's absolutely a political component too (there's overlap!), but it's worth noting that many disadvantaged communities often have extremely low vaccination rates. It's debatable whether it's a "choice" for some people, though clearly it's not that hard to get vaccinated (for people in our position). Both can can be true (it is both by choice and because of lack of access). We would do better as a nation if we could aggressively address the issues of access and education about the vaccine. Not everyone unvaccinated is adamantly opposed - I'm not even sure we can say it's MOST. Many are concerned about side effects - like missing a day of work, etc. By providing paid leave and opportunity to get vaccinated, and educating about the vaccine, we could perhaps reduce this gap. It's certainly not enough to provide vaccines free of charge.

I agree, partially, nobody chooses to be uninformed or unreached (and I'd say language might be another issue here). 100% that we'd do better as a nation if we improved education and healthcare. I've even heard that some libertarians consider healthy, educated, productive populations an advantage worth paying taxes to have because it's social/economic infrastructure that benefits everyone.
I disagree with "substantial" though. Looking closely at the counties and communities near me with lower vax rates, misinformation is a more likely explanation. And that, I'm afraid, puts me in the mind to agree with those in that survey back there to believe the misinformation-spreaders are as guilty of reckless endangerment as the idiot who screams "fire" in a crowded movie theatre - oh my, will I ever see one of those again in person?

 

[golfcart]

Sweden and Denmark stop giving Moderna vaccine to young people due to increased risk of heart inflammation.

Bloomberg

Now Belgium

The Brussels Times

Maybe the parents were on to something…

 

[FlatSix911]

True, but absolute hospitalizations are now as high or higher in Florida than some previous Covid waves:

Hospitalizations as % of infected are dropping like a rock as more and more of the infected are either vaccinated or already had COVID before.
They will continue to drop. COVID19 will not be eliminated.

It appears that Covid hospitalizations in Florida are in fact now lower than the previous peak reached in August of 2021.
Even with the significantly greater number of infections, the Omicron variant has produced fewer hospitalizations and deaths.

IHME | COVID-19 Projections

Explore forecasts of COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospital resource use.

covid19.healthdata.org

 

[wdolson]

Be careful. This forum doesn't do well with people who have a different view than their own on the matter, regardless of the studies and facts. It's all fake news. Your opinionated posts may get moved to a closed thread by the mods. You keep that up and might even be put on timeout for spreading "false" information.

There are plenty of silent and vocal members who do agree with you though.

As Neil DeGrasse Tyson has said: "you have a right to your own opinion, but not your own facts". It is well documented that the protection from all the vaccines fade with time. It's the nature of the disease we're fighting.

Some diseases are "one and done". If you either have the disease or are vaccinated, you are pretty much immune for life unless you are immune compromised. This is true for many of the diseases we got vaccinated for as children: polio, rubella, etc. Because it's one and done and we managed to pretty much vaccinate the world small pox is now extinct as far as we know.

There are also viruses for which immunity fades over time. This is very common for respiratory viruses. Up until a little over 2 years ago the only respiratory viruses in circulation were more nuisance than dangerous. The cold virus can open the door to pneumonia and bronchitis and the family of flu viruses kill some people every year, but it's usually people who have age related co-morbidities and it's chalked up to "something has to kill you eventually".

Same with the corona viruses that were in circulation. We had some minor corona viruses that were known to science, but largely ignored because they basically mimic the cold virus and do little else.

Then came COVID. Omicron appears to be milder than original recipe, but it's still dangerous. Hospitals are full to capacity in a lot of places in part because of staffing shortages, but also because Omicron has infected so many people. The percentage of people who end up in the hospital with Omicron is smaller than previous variants, but with so many people sick, it's overwhelming hospitals.

The history of infectious diseases like this is they mutate themselves into highly contagious, but mostly harmless variants. At this point Omicron is still more dangerous than any of the other respiratory viruses we have in circulation and it's as contagious as the previous all time winner for virus contagiousness: measles. For a new, even milder variant to become the norm, it will have to out compete Omicron, which means mutating into the most contagious virus in history (if that's possible, we may have hit that limit with Omicron).

Life may never return to the pre-pandemic normal. We may have to live with Omicron forever. Those who are not vaccinated or let their vaccinations lapse will be most vulnerable to bad outcomes.

I am sympathetic to libertarian ideals. I'm still very libertarian in any area where somebody's behavior does not hurt others or put them at risk. But we live in societies with other people.

Part of the libertarian ideals that a lot of people ignore is that everybody takes the personal responsibility to reduce their risk to others around them. The ideal is that if everybody took personal responsibility and looked out for those around them at all times, there would be no need for any regulations on anything because everyone would do the right thing based on their internal compass.

The problem is people don't look out for those around them and put them at risk all the time. It is true that people who are fully vaccinated can still get COVID and can still pass it on, but their infection is almost always far less severe and lasts shorter, so they're less likely to pass it on to someone else. Though they still can, the odds are much less.

We also know that immunity fades with time so someone who got vaccinated early last year has fading immunity. We also know that healthy people are less likely to have symptoms when infected. A true libertarian would want to be vaccinated so that the chances they cause harm to others is reduced.

All hell would break loose in this country if they even considered doing that.

It's not going to happen and the courts would stop it immediately if they tried. It would be a clear violation of the 1st Amendment. Over the years polls have shown many times that quite a few Americans would be in favor of curbing someone's 1st Amendment rights when they were saying something they didn't want to hear.

The 1st Amendment allows someone to express any views they want. Where the limits come in is when you take any steps to take action on those views. The courts have consistently been very strict on this distinction.

I think it is more appropriate to look state by state than at the US overall. Some areas are likely peaking, some are still most certainly on the rise. We are too big a country to look at it as a whole.

Also, yesterday was a holiday, there may be significant delayed reporting of cases due to that. We'll know by the end of the week.

I've been watching things state by state and county by county. Most of the interior West has big caseloads now, but they started well behind the Northeast. They will be peaking much later. There are signs the Northeast has peaked and is declining. Wastewater tests in Boston showed a dramatic fall a week ago. Because the NE is the most densely populated part of the country, it will look like the US as a whole is in decline, but it will still be raging in lower populated areas long after the NE is down to low case loads.

 

[FloridaSun]

Since you're a statistics guy, then, you'll know that your risk can be lowered by at least 5x if you get your booster. Your risk of dying may be low in an absolute sense, but it's substantially elevated from the risk you would have had without COVID around. This will be essentially completely resolved by a booster.

Note that this is just like any other vaccine series which requires at least three shots (most!). It has nothing to do with needing it every couple months or every year (based on what we know currently). You simply are INCOMPLETE on your vaccination series. May there be variants which require revaccination in the future? Certainly. But they don't yet exist. Might natural immunity from the vaccination wane? Yes, it might. It's too early to say; we don't know yet how persistent the secondary line of defense will be, there is literally zero data (the sample size of infected SARS-1 individuals is probably too small to guess with, and no one is going to go around trying to reinfect people with that virus).

The messaging on this has been absolutely awful, so I really can't blame you for your take on this. In the fog of the fight against coronavirus, authorities made it seem like two shots would be all that was needed, but with the close spacing, it really was not enough (there were rumbles and discussion about this (in this thread!) in late 2020 because immunologists knew this, but there were tradeoffs and that message & expectation was unfortunately not put to the forefront...). A third provides a very strong boost. It actually doesn't even have anything to do with the emergence of Delta or Omicron (though the boosts in antibody levels do help prevent infection by those variants for a period of time). You'd want a booster even if we still just had wild type around!!! Again, this is NOT about preventing infection, and it's not for variants. It's about bolstering your protection against severe disease.

It's meaningless to compare to flu vaccination, since most people have a lot of infection-acquired immunity (and natural vaccine immunity) against influenza, and this coronavirus is not like the flu in terms of its ability to undergo antigenic shift (drift is probably similar though I'm not even sure about that since SARS-CoV-2 has proofreading). Influenza frequently and commonly undergoes reassortment during co-infection, because it has a segmented genome, resulting in a virus which bears little resemblance (in the H & N structures as I understand it) to prior strains (see: 2009 pandemic flu). And while similar processes COULD occur with coronavirus (via different means), they're much less likely. It's not the same at all, and I would not expect vaccination against coronavirus to work the same way, at all. Anyone who tells you this is like influenza...maybe talk to someone else. No virologist with a basic understanding of the operation of influenza and coronavirus would say that, and the immunization strategy and effect is likely going to be completely different.

Here's a very brief summary of the difference between reassortment and recombination:

Why do RNA viruses recombine? - Nature Reviews Microbiology

Recombination can be an important evolutionary force for RNA viruses, but the rate of recombination varies greatly between different RNA viruses. In this Analysis article, Simon-Loriere and Holmes describe the mechanisms of recombination for RNA viruses and the role of these mechanisms in viral...

www.nature.com

"

• RNA viruses are able to undergo two forms of recombination: RNA recombination, which (in principle) can occur in any type of RNA virus, and reassortment, which is restricted to those viruses with segmented genomes.
• Rates of RNA recombination vary markedly among RNA viruses. Some viruses, particularly those with negative-sense single-stranded genomes, exhibit such low rates of recombination that they are effectively clonal. By contrast, some positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses and some retroviruses such as HIV exhibit high rates of recombination that can exceed the rates of mutation when measured per nucleotide."

(For FWIW SARS-CoV-2 is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus. However, there's not a lot of evidence that it does a lot of recombination, as far as I can tell. Influenza has a segmented genome; 8 strands for all strains.)

Yes, the booster brings my chance of severe illness or death from 0.05% to 0.01%. Honestly, I prefer the 0.05 chance if I don't have a needle stuck into my arm every 6 months..
If I knew that the booster was the last shot, I would take it... but it won't be. It will be a neverending jabbing

 

[Slipstream]

Some 4th dose info from Israel:

Israel sticks with 4th vaccine shot, sees Omicron wave waning next week

Israel will continue to offer a fourth COVID-19 vaccine shot despite preliminary findings that it is not enough to prevent Omicron infections, the Health Ministry said on Tuesday, predicting contagions stoked by the variant will wane in a week.

www.reuters.com

 

[JRP3]

It's easy to spread it if you are not aware that you have it.

Unvaccinated can also have asymptomatic covid as well, and unvaccinated are more likely to get covid, so...

In any case it's obvious you are just looking to justify your choice not to get a booster and pretend it has no potential effects on others.

 

[FloridaSun]

Unvaccinated can also have asymptomatic covid as well, and unvaccinated are more likely to get covid, so...

In any case it's obvious you are just looking to justify your choice not to get a booster and pretend it has no potential effects on others.

everyone has the choice to get vaccinated and 50 boosters if they choose so. If indeed they work, why worry about others who chose not to choose the same level of protection?

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

Sweden and Denmark stop giving Moderna vaccine to young people due to increased risk of heart inflammation.

Bloomberg

Maybe the parents were on to something…

May have issues with causality here based on the date of the article. (I see you edited your post - seems like Belgium (more recent) agrees with precautionary principle I mentioned below.)

Back to your article you posted a couple days ago:

The study says the results are not applicable to risk evaluation in children - so I'm not sure how parents would be involved.

The biggest issue we have with myocarditis is there is simply not enough data yet, not studied closely enough, since the rates are so low. You can tell this from the confidence intervals in your article. Precautionary principle applies and smaller doses are sufficient for children, so that's why Pfizer is used for children (Moderna is not permitted).

What is clear from your article is that overall risks of Moderna third dose are not actually known - and that's what they say! It's worthy of further study. What seems (perhaps) clear...though confidence intervals are wide...is that risk increases with subsequent doses (not surprising). Based on overall risks of adverse events (not just myocarditis), the vaccine is clearly a lower risk (this data is not difficult to find).

One substantial limitation here is that they require a positive RT-PCR test to classify a myocarditis event as caused by COVID! So...those people infected less than 28 days prior to vaccination would have their myocarditis potentially misclassified as caused by the vaccine, and there's no guarantee with a 28-day interval that they'd necessarily test positive on a PCR when they go to get their myocarditis treated (and in fact a secondary challenge like this would also increase the risk due to the vaccine in any case. Presumably a second infection by COVID would present a similar risk, but COVID has an advantage there too, since it's less likely that you'll get infected a second time and test positive, if you've been previously vaccinated). It's very complicated to tease this out, and again, even with these biases, the confidence intervals (except for Moderna 3rd dose, but THEY say the data is insufficient to use to assess risk there) still overlap.

If I were under 30, I'd go with Pfizer. Best to be cautious and take the very limited data at face value (Moderna is a larger dose as you know) since an alternative exists. Over 30, I'd go with Moderna. And I'd get the full series of three doses in both cases. Parents should consult with their pediatricians, of course, as this is not medical advice.

Honestly, I prefer the 0.05 chance if I don't have a needle stuck into my arm every 6 months..

Again, this isn't expected to be a periodic thing unless you want protection against infection.

If I knew that the booster was the last shot, I would take it... but it won't be. It will be a neverending jabbing

Again, this has nothing to do with protecting against infection or annual boosters for circulating strains. It's for building your immune system's ability to rapidly generate an appropriate response.

This is why the messaging is messed up. This is part of your original vaccination series. It has nothing to do with Omicron or Delta. It doesn't even have much to do with protecting others (though it might help a little). It's first and foremost about reducing personal risk.

 

[FloridaSun]

May have issues with causality here based on the date of the article.

Back to your article you posted a couple days ago:

The study says the results are not applicable to risk evaluation in children - so I'm not sure how parents would be involved.

The biggest issue we have with myocarditis is there is simply not enough data yet, not studied closely enough, since the rates are so low. You can tell this from the confidence intervals in your article. Precautionary principle applies and smaller doses are sufficient for children, so that's why Pfizer is used for children.

What is clear from your article is that overall risks of Moderna third dose are not actually known - and that's what they say! It's worthy of further study. What seems (perhaps) clear...though confidence intervals are wide...is that risk increases with subsequent doses (not surprising). Based on overall risks of adverse events (not just myocarditis), the vaccine is clearly a lower risk (this data is not difficult to find).

One substantial limitation here is that they require a positive RT-PCR test to classify a myocarditis event as caused by COVID! So...those people infected less than 28 days prior to vaccination would have their myocarditis potentially misclassified as caused by the vaccine, and there's no guarantee with a 28-day interval that they'd necessarily test positive on a PCR when they go to get their myocarditis treated (and in fact a secondary challenge like this would also increase the risk due to the vaccine in any case. Presumably a second infection by COVID would present a similar risk, but COVID has an advantage there too, since it's less likely that you'll get infected a second time and test positive, if you've been previously vaccinated). It's very complicated to tease this out, and again, even with these biases, the confidence intervals (except for Moderna 3rd dose, but THEY say the data is insufficient to use to assess risk there) still overlap.

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If I were under 30, I'd go with Pfizer. Best to be cautious and take the very limited data at face value (Moderna is a larger dose as you know) since an alternative exists. Over 30, I'd go with Moderna. And I'd get the full series of three doses in both cases. Parents should consult with their pediatricians, of course, as this is not medical advice.



Again, this isn't expected to be a periodic thing unless you want protection against infection.



Again, this has nothing to do with protecting against infection or annual boosters for circulating strains. It's for building your immune system's ability to rapidly generate an appropriate response.

This is why the messaging is messed up. This is part of your original vaccination series. It has nothing to do with Omicron or Delta. It doesn't even have much to do with protecting others (though it might help a little). It's first and foremost about reducing personal risk.

There is tons ofninfluenza strains and there will be tons of COVID19 strains. We have to learn to live with it just like we learned to live with influenza. In the end, everyone chooses their level of protection. I'm in no way against vaccines including the Covid 19 vaccine but this doesn't mean I'm willing to take several shots every year. There will be more and more strains and more and more vaccines for each strain. I rather take the risk than being jabbed many times per year.. It's like getting punched in the arm by a boxer every time.. No thanks.. 2 shots is enough fore..