2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic (Vaccination 2021 Edition)

stroopwafel

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Premature is an interesting term for you to use, seeing as no-one's yet identified whether mRNA vaccines even cause this inflammation: it's still under investigation. From early examination it seems to be in the order of a 1:million to 1:100,000 chance. Such rare events are extremely hard to tell from background noise. Mortality of course is even lower, as the vast majority of these myocarditis cases have been mild, so chance of death is likely to be 1-10% of vaccine-induced myocarditis cases.

So under current data, the mRNA vaccines are likely to kill less than one 13-17-year-old child per 10 million through myocarditis. Covid-19 kills them at a rate of ~1-5 per million. If we look at young adults (under 30), the covid-19 death rate becomes about 20 per million. Plus, of course, non-vaccinated people also are more likely to catch and spread the infection, incurring risk of additional casualties.

Similarly, we can talk about the chance of blood clots from the traditional vaccines; these are also reckoned very rare, ~1:100,000. However, contextually, the same expectation of blood clots as a complication of covid-19 is ten times higher: you're much less likely to get a blood clot from the vaccine than the disease.

So, this is sort of important when we considered "potentially lethal or debilitating side effects". It's all a roll of the dice, and any one individual is better off with the vaccine, and society as a whole is better off for the improved protection of the whole. So good citizens should go get their jabs. At the end, if people are using bogus arguments to persuade people (or themselves) out of vaccination it's anti-vaxxer territory, even if not as rampantly bonkers as weird microchip fantasies.

And I just totally bet that were we to drill down, reluctance to have a jab is rooted in all sorts of less-than-virtuous irrationalities: fear of needles, dislike of inconvenience, anti-establishmentarianism and suspicion of science / medicine, laziness, selfishness, etc. The rest is just rationalisaton.
Fine, mRNA vaccines are safe then. The chance of blood clots from traditional vaccines isn't so reassuring. I think 1:100,000 isn't so low if you consider these are mostly younger, healthy people while those with blood clots from covid were on average much older and unhealthy. Also what is the problem if everyone at-risk for complications from covid have had a vaccine. For who are unvaccinated people than a risk? Not the hospitals that were previously overcrowded with covid patients since the risk groups had their jab. For the virus to be expunged from existence? Not gonna happen since it's endemic, can easily jump between species and continues to mutate in foreign countries. It doesn't even provide lifelong immunity. Also how do you explain the rationale that in a world with vaccine scarcity people at very low risk in rich countries get vaccinated at the expense of those at high risk in poor countries? Wouldn't this kind of selfish vaccine strategy also increase the risk of mutated strains?


There writes a man who clearly hasn't been following the debate. Remember Trump, saying he was taking HCQ, months before he caught covid-19? I think you'll find they have explicitly been touted for prophylaxis or early in symptom development tfor prevention of worsening. And unlike the vaccine, have no proven efficacy. Never mind all the people who'll start taking them "to be on the safe side" if they catch a cold.

But again, it is fascinating to see people soil their smalls over extremely rare side effects to vaccines, and at the same time hand-wave away adverse effects to drugs with a similar or worse order of risk.
I was talking about the side-effects of medication in general not necessarily HCQ as some kind of preventative treatment. More like if you have a disease the cost/benefit analysis of side-effects is different than preventative treatment given to a healthy person.
 

Silvanus

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Fine, mRNA vaccines are safe then. The chance of blood clots from traditional vaccines isn't so reassuring. I think 1:100,000 isn't so low if you consider these are mostly younger, healthy people while those with blood clots from covid were on average much older and unhealthy. Also what is the problem if everyone at-risk for complications from covid have had a vaccine. For who are unvaccinated people than a risk?
If those at highest risk are vaccinated, then the unvaccinated will still be a risk for themselves. Not being in an "at-risk" category doesn't mean you're entirely safe, and you're still at more danger from the virus than you are from the bloodclot. Even for the groups at the lowest risk.

Plus, they would also present a risk for the immunocompromised, or those who are unable to take the vaccine for medical reasons.

Also how do you explain the rationale that in a world with vaccine scarcity people at very low risk in rich countries get vaccinated at the expense of those at high risk in poor countries? Wouldn't this kind of selfish vaccine strategy also increase the risk of mutated strains?
This is the responsibility of governments to address. It is not addressed by individuals deciding they'll just pass up their dose. Those doses won't then transfer to poorer countries.
 

Agema

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If those at highest risk are vaccinated, then the unvaccinated will still be a risk for themselves. Not being in an "at-risk" category doesn't mean you're entirely safe, and you're still at more danger from the virus than you are from the bloodclot. Even for the groups at the lowest risk.

Plus, they would also present a risk for the immunocompromised, or those who are unable to take the vaccine for medical reasons.
Apparently, there's a patient been to the hospital my wife works in has caught covid-19 three times, with two hospitalisations and one of those needing the ICU. That's got to be some bad luck on developing immunity.
 
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Phoenixmgs

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It helps if you can interpret scientific information.


"Older adults receiving the influenza vaccine may have a lower risk of influenza (from 6% to 2.4%), and probably have a lower risk of ILI [influenza-like illness] compared with those who do not receive a vaccination over the course of a single influenza season (from 6% to 3.5%) "

So, you can look at it as 3.6/6 = 60% reduction in influenza, or 2.5/6 = 42% reduction influenza-like illness. Which we might therefore call 40-60% effectiveness.
It's this line from your link:
These results indicate that 30 people would need to be vaccinated to prevent one person experiencing influenza

The vitamin d study against influenza had better results than that.

This is completely irrational.

How does anyone know that a drug would have a better chance of working than remdesivir in the absence of any significant data to indicate any drug effectiveness? (Nor I suspect are you aware of the large and diverse range of drugs that have been tested against covid-19, most of which were tested and abandoned without any headlines.)
Giving an antiviral after the virus is cleared or almost cleared = antiviral is most likely not going to help. I said I'd be perfectly fine if they game remdesivir early, but they didn't because they really couldn't. The fact that it's still being given is ridiculous.

Exactly - I didn't promise you any, I told you to look for them. You can find a Cochrane report on the effectiveness of the flu vaccine when you want to, even if you are too incompetent to interpret it correctly. Therefore you can find meta-analyses of ivermectin and covid-19.
You played the "I cherry-picked data I wanted to see" card when there's no meta-analyses saying it doesn't work. If I'm cherry-picking data like your claim, provide the meta-analysis that I ignored. Prove your argument. Just like you said I cherry-picked data that pointed to long-lived immunity when there was literally no data pointing to short-lived immunity ever.
What about everyone else's ivermectin meta-analyses? It's very interesting you can only name the people who wrote supportive ones. Is this what you call "just want to know about the truth", that you don't bother properly researching evidence?
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Okay, so all we need to do is find another doctor who's said that, and you'll think it credible, then.
I pay attention to their actual arguments and not just go by what they say. Have I mentioned what Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche has said about the vaccines? No, because his argument horrible. Wouldn't his argument be something I'd "want to believe"?

If it occurs, is primarily in male adolescents. Which is handy, because the blood clots from the traditional vaccines occur in women. So traditional vectors for young men, and mRNA for yound women.

Yes. Not least because this is overwhelmingly done via the MMR vaccine which also covers mumps and rubella, and chances are they haven't had all three.

So what exactly is your weird objection to the vaccine, then? Contextually, you think billions of people should be taking drugs with adverse effects that you can't even demonstrate has any effectiveness at all. You constantly downplay the fact HCQ and ivermectin do, albeit rarely, generate severe adverse effects. And yet a very rare effect from a vaccine is reason it should not be used. So explain that to us, because it sounds kind of anti-vaxxer.
I'm against giving people something they don't need. Why even have someone tired for a weekend, let alone the more serious side effects, from a vaccine if they don't need it to begin with?

Why can't you just answer the hypothetical question? If someone had the measles, why would you give them a vaccine for it? Remove everything else from the question like the MMR vaccine. You are a doctor, you have a patient that had measles, you have JUST a measles vaccine in your hand, would you give them the measles vaccine? You can replace measles with chicken pox if you like, the point is someone had XYZ disease, why would you give them the XYZ vaccine? Just looking up the chicken pox vaccine to make sure it's not a combo vaccine like measles and guess what the CDC says? You do not need to get the chickenpox vaccine if you have evidence of immunity against the disease. I guess the CDC are anti-vaxxers then. Why has everyone changed their thought process with covid and treated so very different than they've treated like every other disease we've had in the past? So what's the problem with being able to prove covid immunity (whether natural or vaccination)?

I said the drugs should be allowed to be prescribed by doctors, I didn't say to hand out these drugs like candy (even though they are in many places).
 

Phoenixmgs

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Not being in an "at-risk" category doesn't mean you're entirely safe, and you're still at more danger from the virus than you are from the bloodclot. Even for the groups at the lowest risk.
Marty Makary has not found a single healthy child that has died from covid, all the kids that have died from covid (from accessible records which is around half) have all had previously known conditions. Also, most child hospitalizations from covid were not caused by covid so they went to the hospital for something else and tested positive basically and were classified as a covid hospitalization.
 

Silvanus

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Marty Makary has not found a single healthy child that has died from covid, all the kids that have died from covid (from accessible records which is around half) have all had previously known conditions. Also, most child hospitalizations from covid were not caused by covid so they went to the hospital for something else and tested positive basically and were classified as a covid hospitalization.
Marty Makary himself specifically endorses vaccinating kids. The fact that kids who died from Covid had other conditions is not an argument against vaccination; those kids represent a group with greater risk, and warrant protection. And vaccinating their peers would help to protect them.

Among those who survive, it can still cause long-term severe medical issues for kids, including neurological damage. Death is not the only permanent or quasi-permanent outcome of Covid. Then we have MIS-C, which has a documented comorbidity with Covid, and has also killed children.

As always: you've presented highly selective data and ignored the context, and even the warning from the researcher you yourself cited.
 

Phoenixmgs

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Marty Makary himself specifically endorses vaccinating kids. The fact that kids who died from Covid had other conditions is not an argument against vaccination; those kids represent a group with greater risk, and warrant protection. And vaccinating their peers would help to protect them.

Among those who survive, it can still cause long-term severe medical issues for kids, including neurological damage. Death is not the only permanent or quasi-permanent outcome of Covid. Then we have MIS-C, which has a documented comorbidity with Covid, and has also killed children.

As always: you've presented highly selective data and ignored the context, and even the warning from the researcher you yourself cited.
I presented data against your argument "you're still at more danger from the virus even for the groups at the lowest risk". The vaccines seem more and more harmful the younger you get and we don't have data on young kids yet. Also, the risk to kids from covid in the middle of the pandemic to the risk of kids when the vaccine may be available to them (and not under emergency use) when the community transmission is so very low, are the benefits still going to outweigh the harms then? From Marty; The answer is probably yes, assuming the virus will circulate for years to come and that vaccine trials for kids prove safe and effective. Everyone else is jumping to the conclusion that kids MUST be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity when there's no data on kids yet and we've already reached herd immunity.
 

Silvanus

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I presented data against your argument "you're still at more danger from the virus even for the groups at the lowest risk". The vaccines seem more and more harmful the younger you get and we don't have data on young kids yet.
Your data does not show that. The incidence of blood clots among all age groups is significantly lower than the risk of severe long-term complications or death from Covid.

Also, the risk to kids from covid in the middle of the pandemic to the risk of kids when the vaccine may be available to them (and not under emergency use) when the community transmission is so very low, are the benefits still going to outweigh the harms then? From Marty; The answer is probably yes, assuming the virus will circulate for years to come and that vaccine trials for kids prove safe and effective. Everyone else is jumping to the conclusion that kids MUST be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity when there's no data on kids yet and we've already reached herd immunity.
So Marty says yes, but you say no.
 

Agema

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It's this line from your link:
These results indicate that 30 people would need to be vaccinated to prevent one person experiencing influenza

The vitamin d study against influenza had better results than that.
Oh. My. God. Do you seriously not understand?

Giving an antiviral after the virus is cleared or almost cleared
We've been over this already. There was reason to believe there would still be plenty of virus present when it was trialled.

I pay attention to their actual arguments and not just go by what they say. Have I mentioned what Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche has said about the vaccines? No, because his argument horrible. Wouldn't his argument be something I'd "want to believe"?
Yes, but you think Vitamin D is more effective than the influenza virus because, it's just so awful I can't summon up the will to explain.

I'm against giving people something they don't need.
No you aren't: see HCQ, ivermectin.

Why can't you just answer the hypothetical question?
I literally did, plain as day, in the thing you just quoted.

Do you need it? Probably not. But you may as well take it to be on the safe side.

I said the drugs should be allowed to be prescribed by doctors, I didn't say to hand out these drugs like candy (even though they are in many places).
And yet that is what will happen in many places across the world, because the doctors will be pressurised to prescribe them. They'll be pressurised by their patients, and politicians, and media, etc. "Why are you denying your patients this life-saving drug, doctor?" If one doctor refuses, people will just go to a different one who will. Private doctors will earn money for it. People will bribe pharmacists, and god knows what else. Even in our well-regulated countries, private doctors can be more than a little loose with what they are prepared to do for their patients. Never mind that, but a few pages back you were enthusing about Goa to prove the case of ivermectin, who were literally handing it out to any adult who wanted.
 
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Phoenixmgs

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Your data does not show that. The incidence of blood clots among all age groups is significantly lower than the risk of severe long-term complications or death from Covid.



So Marty says yes, but you say no.
The risk of a healthy kid dying from covid is 0. How is the group [healthy kids] at more danger from covid than the vaccines when the vaccines do have deaths attached to them?

Marty said PROBABLY yes. I said no because right now, it is no. And you have to do a whole new risk analysis if/when vaccines are legit approved for kids (not emergency use authorization approved) because the risk analysis will be greatly different at that time than it is now or what it was in the middle of the pandemic.

Oh. My. God. Do you seriously not understand?
I understand that when the vitamin d study is compared to the vaccine study, vitamin d showed better results.

We've been over this already. There was reason to believe there would still be plenty of virus present when it was trialled.
By whom? Pulmonologists in China already figured it out before remdesivir was even being studied.

Yes, but you think Vitamin D is more effective than the influenza virus because, it's just so awful I can't summon up the will to explain.
Overall, one person would be spared from influenza for every 33 people taking a vitamin D supplement, whereas 40 people have to receive the flu vaccine in order to prevent one case of the flu.

No you aren't: see HCQ, ivermectin.
See ALL the studies...

I literally did, plain as day, in the thing you just quoted.

Do you need it? Probably not. But you may as well take it to be on the safe side.
That's against the CDC recommendations though, I thought you're all for official governmental recommendations? There's literally no reason to give someone a vaccine for a disease they already had. Why not get vaccines for everything every year just to be on the safe side.

And yet that is what will happen in many places across the world, because the doctors will be pressurised to prescribe them. They'll be pressurised by their patients, and politicians, and media, etc. "Why are you denying your patients this life-saving drug, doctor?" If one doctor refuses, people will just go to a different one who will. Private doctors will earn money for it. People will bribe pharmacists, and god knows what else. Even in our well-regulated countries, private doctors can be more than a little loose with what they are prepared to do for their patients. Never mind that, but a few pages back you were enthusing about Goa to prove the case of ivermectin, who were literally handing it out to any adult who wanted.
Isn't that better than people going to the black market or taking the version intended for animals? Also, isn't the patient and doctor discussing possible treatments what's supposed to happen normally anyway?

I wasn't "enthusing" about Goa handing out ivermectin, I said they are doing it so why not compare Goa to the rest of India and see what happens? Also, if their experts deemed it safe to do so, then wouldn't it be safe to do so?
 

Agema

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I understand that when the vitamin d study is compared to the vaccine study, vitamin d showed better results.
No, you erroneously think the vitamin D study showed better results because you don't understand.

In any sample group over any set period time, a certain percentage will catch a certain disease. If you hand out a treatment to prevent people who catch the disease developing symptoms, the maximum number of people who will benefit from it is the maximum number of people who get infected. Literally everyone else not infected can effectively be ignored.

Therefore, if in a sample cohort 6% are infected and 3.6% are spared symptoms, the treatment was 60% effective, because the other 94% who did not get infected are not relevant to the figures. If in a second cohort 20% are infected and 8% are spared symptoms, the treatment is 40% effective because the other 80% who did not get infected are not relevant to the figures. The fact that 6% were infected in the first cohort and 20% in the second cohort tells us nothing more than that the second group was a demographic hit more severely be the illness. (Maybe that's because they were stuck in classrooms together half the day five times a week spread the disease to each other, and the first cohort weren't.) It is thus profoundly ridiculous to claim the second treatment is better because it protected 8% of the cohort population compared to 3.6% by the first treatment: the cohorts are not comparable.

If you're trying to suggest that vitamin D magically stopped someone even being infected, you're in cloudcuckooland. One might also suggest measurement of baseline vitamin D levels would be extremely valuable for any high impact assessment of Vit D's usefulness.

By whom? Pulmonologists in China already figured it out before remdesivir was even being studied.
They had published some studies. That is not the same as conclusively answering the issue: consider factors like the reliability of testing (false positives / negatives), etc.

Overall, one person would be spared from influenza for every 33 people taking a vitamin D supplement, whereas 40 people have to receive the flu vaccine in order to prevent one case of the flu.


lol.

See ALL the studies...
Oh, it's much more complicated than that. See the studies, assess them for quality, exclude some where appropriate and weight higher quality more, combine only where valid, etc.

That's against the CDC recommendations though, I thought you're all for official governmental recommendations? There's literally no reason to give someone a vaccine for a disease they already had. Why not get vaccines for everything every year just to be on the safe side.
No, it's not against the CDC regulations. The CDC regulations say you do not need a vaccine, not that you shouldn't have one. After all, implicitly, plenty of people will take a vaccine for chickenpox because they will not be bothered to find out whether they are immune.

Never mind that what we're talking about here is really covid-19, not chickenpox. Chickenpox is a well known disease. Covid-19 there is much lower certainty about length of immunity (factoring in strength of immunity may also decline over time), susceptibility to and impact of reinfection, etc.

Isn't that better than people going to the black market or taking the version intended for animals? Also, isn't the patient and doctor discussing possible treatments what's supposed to happen normally anyway?
What's best is that people like you, Pierre Kory and Tess Lawrie don't vigorously promote quack treatments in the first place.
 
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Silvanus

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The risk of a healthy kid dying from covid is 0. How is the group [healthy kids] at more danger from covid than the vaccines when the vaccines do have deaths attached to them?
Do they have deaths attached to them in the same group (children with no other conditions)? I'm unable to find any.

But that aside: you simply cannot conclude that the risk is zero on the information we have. What you've cited is a single study of half the private insurance data for the group, in a single country. It should be transparently obvious why that doesn't translate to "zero risk". We have data of child deaths from countries around the world, and no reason to conclude that they all had underlying conditions. That has not been reported to be the case.

But hypothetically, say the risk of blood clots in that specific group (children with no other health risks) is higher than the risk from Covid. Even if that were the case... just use one of the other vaccines. Not all of them are associated with that risk. This is why several countries, including my own for a while, just recommended the use of other vaccines for children when the AstraZeneca one had a possible reported issue with blood clotting.
 
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Phoenixmgs

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No, you erroneously think the vitamin D study showed better results because you don't understand.

In any sample group over any set period time, a certain percentage will catch a certain disease. If you hand out a treatment to prevent people who catch the disease developing symptoms, the maximum number of people who will benefit from it is the maximum number of people who get infected. Literally everyone else not infected can effectively be ignored.

Therefore, if in a sample cohort 6% are infected and 3.6% are spared symptoms, the treatment was 60% effective, because the other 94% who did not get infected are not relevant to the figures. If in a second cohort 20% are infected and 8% are spared symptoms, the treatment is 40% effective because the other 80% who did not get infected are not relevant to the figures. The fact that 6% were infected in the first cohort and 20% in the second cohort tells us nothing more than that the second group was a demographic hit more severely be the illness. (Maybe that's because they were stuck in classrooms together half the day five times a week spread the disease to each other, and the first cohort weren't.) It is thus profoundly ridiculous to claim the second treatment is better because it protected 8% of the cohort population compared to 3.6% by the first treatment: the cohorts are not comparable.

If you're trying to suggest that vitamin D magically stopped someone even being infected, you're in cloudcuckooland. One might also suggest measurement of baseline vitamin D levels would be extremely valuable for any high impact assessment of Vit D's usefulness.
Sorry, I looked at different studies using different metrics for effectiveness and got them flipped around.

That's what several vitamin d studies show. A few vitamin d studies against influenza A show better results in preventing infection than the vaccine. That is true.

They had published some studies. That is not the same as conclusively answering the issue: consider factors like the reliability of testing (false positives / negatives), etc.
They knew it was basically organized pneumonia and you'd treat that with an anti-viral...? Nobody thought that.


Oh, it's much more complicated than that. See the studies, assess them for quality, exclude some where appropriate and weight higher quality more, combine only where valid, etc.
When all the studies show positive results, what does it matter the quality at that point IN THE SENSE that you still have no studies showing it doesn't work? Do you think all these studies are run by incompetent doctors? I believe every single early HCQ study shows positive results. You only have 3 studies showing bad results for ivermectin; one had 32 people, one had 69 people, and the other one was a HCQ study that showed that HCQ reduced hospitalizations by 50-60%.

No, it's not against the CDC regulations. The CDC regulations say you do not need a vaccine, not that you shouldn't have one. After all, implicitly, plenty of people will take a vaccine for chickenpox because they will not be bothered to find out whether they are immune.

Never mind that what we're talking about here is really covid-19, not chickenpox. Chickenpox is a well known disease. Covid-19 there is much lower certainty about length of immunity (factoring in strength of immunity may also decline over time), susceptibility to and impact of reinfection, etc.
CDC puts people who previously had chicken pox under the header of those that SHOULD NOT get the vaccine. The point is you don't need to get a vaccine if you already had a disease outside of the exceptions like the flu. So what about length of immunity? The length isn't going to be really short. Even if it's say 5 years, why get a vaccine when you had it a year ago (or less)?

What's best is that people like you, Pierre Kory and Tess Lawrie don't vigorously promote quack treatments in the first place.
Remdesivir is more a quack treatment than ivermectin and Fauci said it "will set the standard of care". It doesn't work and it's still being used and costs a ton of money.

In Mexico City, over 156,000 people who didn't get ivermectin compared with 77,000 that got ivermectin (adjusted for age and all the good stuff) and the results showed ivermectin very significantly helped. That alone is better than all the mask data put together that you believe proves masks work.

 

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Do they have deaths attached to them in the same group (children with no other conditions)? I'm unable to find any.

But that aside: you simply cannot conclude that the risk is zero on the information we have. What you've cited is a single study of half the private insurance data for the group, in a single country. It should be transparently obvious why that doesn't translate to "zero risk". We have data of child deaths from countries around the world, and no reason to conclude that they all had underlying conditions. That has not been reported to be the case.

But hypothetically, say the risk of blood clots in that specific group (children with no other health risks) is higher than the risk from Covid. Even if that were the case... just use one of the other vaccines. Not all of them are associated with that risk. This is why several countries, including my own for a while, just recommended the use of other vaccines for children when the AstraZeneca one had a possible reported issue with blood clotting.
You also can't conclude the risk of death from vaccine in kids is 0 either. And the other vaccines are showing heart inflammation in younger people and could be worse in kids as it seems the younger you are, the more at risk. Again, you have to do a whole other risk analysis for if and when vaccines are FULLY authorized for kids (none of this emergency use authorization) because the odds of just getting covid by then will be extremely low.
 

Agema

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That's what several vitamin d studies show. A few vitamin d studies against influenza A show better results in preventing infection than the vaccine. That is true.
I don't care what "a few" vitamin D studies say. I care what the overall picture of lots of vitamin D studies say.

They knew it was basically organized pneumonia and you'd treat that with an anti-viral...? Nobody thought that.
Pneumonia is caused by lung infection. Therefore antibiotics and antivirals are prescribed for pneumonia. Who'd have thought?

Oseltamivir (Tamiflu), for instance, is an antiviral.

Do you think all these studies are run by incompetent doctors?
In a way.

I am a scientist who teaches medical students - that gives me quite a good idea as to the scientific knowledge of the average medical doctor: many medical doctors are not very good at carrying out scientific studies, because they're not well trained in it. One might talke the example of that Vit D study you posted and as advertised by Dr. John Campbell's video. That had to be withdrawn, because despite all those medical doctors on it, apparently none of them noticed that their subjects weren't actually randomised like they claimed, and they used the wrong statistical tests. Oopsie!

It's useful to think about what a doctorate is. "Doctor" comes from the Latin for "teacher". A doctor, therefore, was originally a man of learning. In theology, they talk about the "Church Doctors" - figures like St. Augustine or St. Athanasios - who were instrumental in developing the theology of the early church. And so it was for centuries: "doctor" essentially meant a university teacher. The modern PhD emerges in Germany in the 19th century, becoming a specific training system for someone to develop knowledge, with this notion of scholarship. Of course, some medical practitioners even then got to be called "doctors" according to their qualifications. But in fact, the medical degree was actually more a double bachelors: and indeed many retain this name - MBBS for instance means bachelor of medicine, bachelor of surgery. Medical degrees were granted the privilege to confer the title "doctor" as a generosity to indicate that their degree was harder and longer than a normal bachelors degree in other subjects. But what it does not do is teach the sort of higher level scholarship that a PhD does. That's what the further MD qualification is for. An honest medical doctor without an MD would say that, from the point of scholarship and the traditional meaning of "doctor", in fact they are the ones who are not real doctors, and their qualification is lesser than a PhD in that respect. I stress, there are plenty of genuinely fantastic reseachers out there who come from medical backgrounds. But underneath is a vast weight of junk from physicians who may be very good at caring for patients, but bad at research as they are trying their hand at a side-job they aren't so well trained / experienced in.

Not only that, but publishing research is a means for ambitious medical doctors to gain merit. And so medical doctors can pump out a godawful load of junk to boost their CVs, which disappears into low-impact or mickey mouse journals, little cited, hugely ignorable. But at face value when they apply for a job, the interviewers aren't so likely to go through and check what a worthless load of crap these publications are. Frankly, scientists do this too, just it's a little harder to have rubbish go unnoticed, because their research is key to their job in a way it isn't for most medical doctors.

Vast amounts of research is low quality. As we have gone through this debate, I have pointed some of this out to you. Like when one of the papers you posted, I pointed out that journal seems to only contain content from the same researchers who also edit and run the journal (to say this is as dodgy as fuck is an understatement). I've pointed out papers so badly written some of it is incomprehensible, and the flaws in some are glaring, which is why they are squatting in the lowest quality journals. This is part of why understanding science well enough to assess the strengths and weaknesses of scientific papers is really important, because there really is a huge amount of stuff out there that is barely worth consideration.

Both of those ivermectin studies you've linked to are catastrophically flawed to come out with any firm conclusion. One of them says "ivermectin..." but is actually giving a whole treatment plan ("medical kit") with other drugs, phone callbacks, and expanded care. They blithely say "hospitalisation" as their metric, but when we look at the figures for severity of symptoms experienced, the medical kit seems to have made no damn difference at all. There's a lot of hand-waving in the discussion, but an obvious confounder is that the medical kit has a lot of other stuff in to muddy the waters, and the social aspect (grudgingly acknowledged in discussion) that people with a medical kit felt more "secure" about their health and thus less likely to go to hospital.

I believe every single early HCQ study shows positive results.
And you're completely wrong about that, as I have pointed out numerous times. You're following the bullshit on that bullshit website. You said you aren't, but frankly I do not believe you, because I cannot see where else you have formed such a plainly erroneous view. And this goes to the core problem of you saying "look at the data": you either have not done so, or you have seriously misinterpreted it.

You only have 3 studies showing bad results for ivermectin; one had 32 people, one had 69 people, and the other one was a HCQ study that showed that HCQ reduced hospitalizations by 50-60%.
We have literally already been through this with HCQ last year. All those people saying "look at all the positive studies", and yet those positive studies turned out almost certainly wrong. But then, the reason the medical and scientific professions were never very interested in the first place was that they could see they were bad studies. These sorts of studies appear first because they are quick and dirty. And therefore, low quality. Remember how initially people claimed HCQ did everything? And then the claims shrank that it wasn't for severe cases, and then it wasn't for prophylaxis, and then the HCQ fans were left clinging onto the desperate hope it worked in early treatment to prevent symptoms worsening, and not even that ever became usefully supportable.

And ivermectin is the same. Read its proponents, the same claims off the same quick and dirty early studies: it does prophylaxis, it prevents worsening of symptoms, it's useful in severe cases. It's all so wearisome.

CDC puts people who previously had chicken pox under the header of those that SHOULD NOT get the vaccine. The point is you don't need to get a vaccine if you already had a disease outside of the exceptions like the flu. So what about length of immunity? The length isn't going to be really short. Even if it's say 5 years, why get a vaccine when you had it a year ago (or less)?
Because better safe than sorry, and that public health is a matter of getting a population response, not leaving loopholes.

Remdesivir is more a quack treatment than ivermectin and Fauci said it "will set the standard of care". It doesn't work and it's still being used and costs a ton of money.
I have no strong opinion on whether remdesivir or ivermectin is more useless. It's an empty argument, missing the point, like trying to argue whether Stalin or Hitler was worse. And quote mining Fauci is not useful.

In Mexico City, over 156,000 people who didn't get ivermectin compared with 77,000 that got ivermectin (adjusted for age and all the good stuff) and the results showed ivermectin very significantly helped. That alone is better than all the mask data put together that you believe proves masks work.
See above. These two studies are catastrophically weak.

I just don't want to hear you flail around with random claims like "they're better than mask studies", when you have no relevant knowledge or competence to usefully defend the point.
 

Agema

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It might also be worth pointing out that often there's one or two lead researchers that are in charge of the actual method, data processing and analysis while all the others contribute raw data in some way. A few years ago the ECT clinic I worked at participated in a huge comparative trial between IV infusions of Ketamine and ECT and that study has like twenty MDs or so as authors, because everyone that contributed data in some way got credited. The actual study and paper was written by three of them however and the rest had very little input into method, data processing and analysis.
Yes, If feel a little like this from some genetics studies. A core team has done the work, but they've needed patient data. The people who supplied the patient data are rewarded with their name on the paper, so you get absurd papers with 50 authors, but it's clear virtually none of them really did anything. Normally in science if someone sent you materials (like a transgenic mouse line or viral construct), they aren't rewarded with authorship, there's a note in the methods section crediting them. It's pretty borderline, but I am inclined to think this is slightly dishonest padding. Similar to some departments where the department head demands his name goes on every single research paper that comes out of the department, irrespective of whether he had anything to do with it. Twats.

There's often aninformal assumption that the first author did the grunt work (probably a PhD student or postdoc), the last author owned the lab and ran the project, the second author contributed a chunk, the third a bit, and effectively no-one else may as well be named on it.
 

Phoenixmgs

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I don't care what "a few" vitamin D studies say. I care what the overall picture of lots of vitamin D studies say.
I think the only vitamin d studies on flu that didn't show positive results were with people that were mostly sufficient in vitamin d.

Pneumonia is caused by lung infection. Therefore antibiotics and antivirals are prescribed for pneumonia. Who'd have thought?

Oseltamivir (Tamiflu), for instance, is an antiviral.
The standard treatment for OP is corticosteroids. Corticosteroid therapy results in complete recovery in up to 80% of patients within a few weeks to 3 months. The disease is persistent in the remainder.

In a way.

I am a scientist who teaches medical students - that gives me quite a good idea as to the scientific knowledge of the average medical doctor: many medical doctors are not very good at carrying out scientific studies, because they're not well trained in it. One might talke the example of that Vit D study you posted and as advertised by Dr. John Campbell's video. That had to be withdrawn, because despite all those medical doctors on it, apparently none of them noticed that their subjects weren't actually randomised like they claimed, and they used the wrong statistical tests. Oopsie!

It's useful to think about what a doctorate is. "Doctor" comes from the Latin for "teacher". A doctor, therefore, was originally a man of learning. In theology, they talk about the "Church Doctors" - figures like St. Augustine or St. Athanasios - who were instrumental in developing the theology of the early church. And so it was for centuries: "doctor" essentially meant a university teacher. The modern PhD emerges in Germany in the 19th century, becoming a specific training system for someone to develop knowledge, with this notion of scholarship. Of course, some medical practitioners even then got to be called "doctors" according to their qualifications. But in fact, the medical degree was actually more a double bachelors: and indeed many retain this name - MBBS for instance means bachelor of medicine, bachelor of surgery. Medical degrees were granted the privilege to confer the title "doctor" as a generosity to indicate that their degree was harder and longer than a normal bachelors degree in other subjects. But what it does not do is teach the sort of higher level scholarship that a PhD does. That's what the further MD qualification is for. An honest medical doctor without an MD would say that, from the point of scholarship and the traditional meaning of "doctor", in fact they are the ones who are not real doctors, and their qualification is lesser than a PhD in that respect. I stress, there are plenty of genuinely fantastic reseachers out there who come from medical backgrounds. But underneath is a vast weight of junk from physicians who may be very good at caring for patients, but bad at research as they are trying their hand at a side-job they aren't so well trained / experienced in.

Not only that, but publishing research is a means for ambitious medical doctors to gain merit. And so medical doctors can pump out a godawful load of junk to boost their CVs, which disappears into low-impact or mickey mouse journals, little cited, hugely ignorable. But at face value when they apply for a job, the interviewers aren't so likely to go through and check what a worthless load of crap these publications are. Frankly, scientists do this too, just it's a little harder to have rubbish go unnoticed, because their research is key to their job in a way it isn't for most medical doctors.

Vast amounts of research is low quality. As we have gone through this debate, I have pointed some of this out to you. Like when one of the papers you posted, I pointed out that journal seems to only contain content from the same researchers who also edit and run the journal (to say this is as dodgy as fuck is an understatement). I've pointed out papers so badly written some of it is incomprehensible, and the flaws in some are glaring, which is why they are squatting in the lowest quality journals. This is part of why understanding science well enough to assess the strengths and weaknesses of scientific papers is really important, because there really is a huge amount of stuff out there that is barely worth consideration.

Both of those ivermectin studies you've linked to are catastrophically flawed to come out with any firm conclusion. One of them says "ivermectin..." but is actually giving a whole treatment plan ("medical kit") with other drugs, phone callbacks, and expanded care. They blithely say "hospitalisation" as their metric, but when we look at the figures for severity of symptoms experienced, the medical kit seems to have made no damn difference at all. There's a lot of hand-waving in the discussion, but an obvious confounder is that the medical kit has a lot of other stuff in to muddy the waters, and the social aspect (grudgingly acknowledged in discussion) that people with a medical kit felt more "secure" about their health and thus less likely to go to hospital.

I just don't want to hear you flail around with random claims like "they're better than mask studies", when you have no relevant knowledge or competence to usefully defend the point.
I'm all for finding out if ivermectin works with better trials. But why is remdesivir "OK" to give and not ivermectin? It's not even a double standard because there isn't even a Solidarity-like trial on ivermectin saying it doesn't work. Why isn't there a Solidarity-like trial yet for ivermectin? I really don't get how you're so pro-mask and anti-ivermectin when the data for both of them is "iffy". There are data analyses of all the US states comparing mask mandates and actual mask use (via surveys) that shows no significant difference in infection rates. And the time frame is literally an entire year (through the spikes and valleys of the pandemic) vs just a month or couple months of time that much of the mask data comes from. You keep telling me that I'm ignoring data, you're ignoring the data you don't want to see.
 

Phoenixmgs

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And you're completely wrong about that, as I have pointed out numerous times. You're following the bullshit on that bullshit website. You said you aren't, but frankly I do not believe you, because I cannot see where else you have formed such a plainly erroneous view. And this goes to the core problem of you saying "look at the data": you either have not done so, or you have seriously misinterpreted it.
Where are these early treatment studies that have shown HCQ has no effect or a negative effect?

We have literally already been through this with HCQ last year. All those people saying "look at all the positive studies", and yet those positive studies turned out almost certainly wrong. But then, the reason the medical and scientific professions were never very interested in the first place was that they could see they were bad studies. These sorts of studies appear first because they are quick and dirty. And therefore, low quality. Remember how initially people claimed HCQ did everything? And then the claims shrank that it wasn't for severe cases, and then it wasn't for prophylaxis, and then the HCQ fans were left clinging onto the desperate hope it worked in early treatment to prevent symptoms worsening, and not even that ever became usefully supportable.

And ivermectin is the same. Read its proponents, the same claims off the same quick and dirty early studies: it does prophylaxis, it prevents worsening of symptoms, it's useful in severe cases. It's all so wearisome.
I never said HCQ was some wonder drug, I even said you can substitute it out for other ionophores even (that's hardly some stamp of approval). There's no harm in trying early treatments that have basically no risk of harm and have the mechanisms that in theory will help. We'd already know if people were doing worse on say HCQ or ivermectin, they've both been given to millions of people for covid, where's some retrospective data showing that patients did worse?

Because better safe than sorry, and that public health is a matter of getting a population response, not leaving loopholes.
But public health doesn't consistency message better safe than sorry like wear masks but nothing on vitamin d (when it's cheaper than masks). Same thing with not saying the virus was airborne. Where's the consistency is saying you don't need to get vaccinated for this other disease (chicken pox) that you already had but you need to get a vaccine for covid when you already had it? Covid is being treated drastically different than past diseases and it's almost squarely because this is the 1st major pandemic that's affected the world in the age of social media and a 24/7 news cycle. You could literally run basically the same fear-mongering stories about measles as well if measles had happen today and covid happened 50 years ago.