Our Covid Response

Phoenixmgs

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I'm still waiting for yours; you made the claim, and so far all you've provided in support are some highly contentious claims he's made that happen to align with your personal philosophy.
I posted a whole video summary of what Marty got right and wrong. Also, he was right with vaccine spacing that has come up recently as he got his vaccine doses spaced 3 months apart (in FEBRUARY). Why would I personally care about vaccine spacing? I got the one and done shot anyway. Marty was right about taking action early against covid that Fauci went on the air in NYC on Feb 29th telling New Yorkers that they can go on like normal. My personal philosophy is against restrictions in your view, right? Why would I be for restrictions then? I'm not against restrictions when they provide more benefit than harm. I'm for anything that provides more benefits than harm when you do a thorough risk-benefit analysis.


Oh you bet man. Penicillin should also be taken for anything, because it is famous and has won awards. We definitely shouldn't mock people taking it for a virus.
Ivermectin is being studied right now for covid, is penicillin?


Again, you don't really understand what's going on or what's at stake here.

We have data to demonstrate that the protection afforded by a single dose of the vaccine is substantially lower than two (irrespective of the gap). Thus if you're a reasonably healthy person young to middle age, spacing your vaccine is pretty reasonable. If you're elderly, much less so, as it may double your chances of a serious (potentially fatal) covid infection in those months waiting for the second.

Next, Fauci is a trusted, high ranking government official who needs to set an example for the US population, because the US population is full of fucking tools who are suspicious, afraid and complacent about vaccination. So in order to help establish confidence, Fauci goes and gets vaccinated consistent with the established protocol scientifically used in the trials. Thus when Fauci decides when to have his second shot, it's not necessarily because he thinks that's the optimal time to have it for his personal immune system. He's got to consider things that smug wankers like Marty Makary don't.

And frankly, I don't think facile YouTube love-ins with soft interviewers qualify as good data.
The UK literally did what you're arguing against. There's also the argument for giving more people the 1st dose vs having less fully vaccinated to increase overall protection in the population. Also, it was a known thing that longer spacing yields better overall immunity in the end. There's more nuance in the debate vs merely 2 doses > 1 dose, which is true on an individual level but not necessarily on a population level. Then, all the boosters needed because the spacing wasn't done properly leads to more people in the world not getting vaccinated as soon as they could.

You can go issue by issue and find Marty's and Fauci's take on everything if you doubt the accuracy of the info in the video, they hit all the major debates up until that point of where Marty was right and wrong.

Then please, please try to give yourself more admiration.
Lead by example.

Are you being completely ignorant or deliberately disingenuous?
If the virus spreads meaningfully outside, then super spreader events should happen outside, but they don't.

Random gibberish.
Are you literally going to argue catching the flu inside is less likely (or equally likely) than catching covid outside?

Yes, exactly. So if you plan on being in close proximity to someone outdoors, maybe consider wearing a mask. We know roughly about the distance of large droplet spatter - that's why social distancing was set at six feet, because it's pretty safe. But three feet is achievable just by breathing (never mind speaking or coughing): that's the sort of distance people might be facing each other over a picnic table.

So, let's use an analogy. In the UK, ~70 people a year die of electrocution, of which ~2 are hit by lightning. A parallel of your argument is that it is safe to go hillwalking in a thunderstorm because just 3% of electrocution deaths per year are due to lightning, and hey, show me the data of multikills that happened from lightning strikes! But actually, it's really not safe to be on a hill in a thunderstorm, as any experienced rambler knows.

There is furthermore additional context. Let's say 99% of infections occur indoors and 1% outdoors. So that means outdoors is ~100 times safer, right? But what if 95% of our time is spent and human contact occurs indoors? Actually, that suggests outdoors is only ~5 times safer than indoors, doesn't it? So without factoring in that sort of context the claim that 99% of infections occur indoors is, on its own, a lot less informative and representative of risk than you think it is.

This is the sort of thing smart and well informed people think about. That's why thank god they are making guidelines, not you.
Again, where's your data of outdoor transmissions? All you have is that outdoor transmissions can happen in extremely small numbers. Normal breathing outside is not going 3 feet nor does it go three feet inside. Sure inside, it builds up over time and goes 3 feet and further. The natural wind disperses the virus outside. Your example of risk is so wrong. Talk to any infectious disease expert and they'll tell you outdoor transmission is way less and it has nothing to do with people spending less time outdoors. Here's this article about covid infection at a restaurant. If inside and outside were equally likely to spread covid, surely there's at least just ONE example of this happening during outdoor dining, right? Even if 90% of dining takes place inside and only 10% outside, you should have at least one example of this happening outside. Yet none exists. My argument has never been only about the fact there's less outdoor transmission, it's that mechanically viruses don't spread outside because of many factors that infectious disease experts know about. I might as well just say theaters are super safe because there's been like no infections in theaters (because they've all been closed).


Since the conservative bi-line on vaccines is that I, as a vaccinated person, am more dangerous than an unvaccinated person, can I call in to work and claim this as a reason to quarantine?

I've also not taken Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, which makes me more of a typhoid mary.
That's completely unrepresentative of the argument.


Why is that troubling? The state of a person's "natural antibodies" is not something that can be guaranteed to be present and provide defense against the virus. However, a properly administered vaccine is a guarantee that a person has a certain base level of immune defense (outside of the usual medical outliers that always appear). Additionally, there are zero downsides and provable upsides to getting the vaccine as a person who already has "natural antibodies."
All the studies outside of a flawed Kansas study on natural immunity show it's stronger than vaccination immunity. Look at the Israel data for example. You're also wrong about zero downsides. Studies have shown a single dose provides an uptick in antibodies to those previously infected; however, antibodies is not a sole determinant of immunity either. Antibodies fade (whether you get vaccinated or from being infected) because you don't need them unless you get infected, then you can make more when that happens. However, a 2nd dose literally provides no benefit to a previously infected person, that's what the studies say. So if you force someone previously infected to get fully vaccinated, you're forcing a medical treatment on them that literally provides them with no benefit. Also, Sweden and Denmark have now suspended the Moderna vaccine to younger people, the UK advisory panel did not recommend the vaccine to those 12-15. Some countries are now only doing a single dose to younger people because of the myocarditis issue. So forcing some say 24-year-old to get fully vaccinated after already having covid is providing 0 benefits with known potential downsides. What about the people in the Novavax trial that technically don't count as being vaccinated since it's not approved yet, are you gonna force them to get fully vaccinated again? There's nuances to everything and there's no such thing as one-size fits all. Reducing the debate to "you're killing grandma" or "but but my freedoms" only makes the divide even greater between people.
 

The Rogue Wolf

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Let's put aside the fact that she didn't even mention the correct Nobel Prize. Using her "logic", I see that the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given to three researchers who discovered the Hepatitis C virus. Therefore, we should start infecting COVID sufferers with the Hepatitis C virus, which must be a cure, since it won the Nobel Prize.

That woman is an imbecile.
 

Avnger

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Let's put aside the fact that she didn't even mention the correct Nobel Prize. Using her "logic", I see that the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given to three researchers who discovered the Hepatitis C virus. Therefore, we should start infecting COVID sufferers with the Hepatitis C virus, which must be a cure, since it won the Nobel Prize.
All you have to do now is stick that in a youtube video and wait for how long it takes to show up as a talking point (potentially even here.....).
 

Agema

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The UK literally did what you're arguing against.
The UK did that situationally because it was in the middle of a massive covid peak, and it calculated that the benefit of lots of people with one shot vaccine protection was greater than half as many with two shot protection.

There's also the argument for giving more people the 1st dose vs having less fully vaccinated to increase overall protection in the population.
Y-e-s, see above. I am well acquainted with the arguments behind why the UK did as it did.

You can go issue by issue and find Marty's and Fauci's take on everything if you doubt the accuracy of the info in the video, they hit all the major debates up until that point of where Marty was right and wrong.
I literally could not care less about some chummy video where a YouTuber hands his mate a soft interview to boast how awesome he is.

Lead by example.
Dude, there's a metric fuckton you don't know, and yet here you are spouting as if you're God's own spokesperson and insisting you're right, and then have the gall to claim you admire people who admit when they don't know somethign.

If the virus spreads meaningfully outside, then super spreader events should happen outside, but they don't.
You don't really seem to understand what the point is here. It's got very little to do with "super-spreader" events, it's about individuals mitigating risk in a reasonable fashion. You are trying to argue against the point tangentially.

Are you literally going to argue catching the flu inside is less likely (or equally likely) than catching covid outside?
No, I'm pointing out that you are waffling about something not terribly relevant.

Again, where's your data of outdoor transmissions? All you have is that outdoor transmissions can happen in extremely small numbers.
And again, your analytical capabilities of what little science you've read is somewhere between tragic and nonexistent. You've been given scientific evidence to explain the issue and invite you to consider, and all you do is bleat on about two studies that don't even really say what you think they do. Again, you are not addressing the real issue, just trying to fob it off with tangential argument.

Normal breathing outside is not going 3 feet nor does it go three feet inside.

Talk to any infectious disease expert
I don't need to. They write scientific papers and opinion pieces, and I can find plenty disagreeing with your ignorant blabbering.
 

Trunkage

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I literally could not care less about some chummy video where a YouTuber hands his mate a soft interview to boast how awesome he is.
Can any give me a timeline on how asking softball question became the standard for interviews? It had to be before Trump's inital campaign right? That's what FAKE NEWS was all about. Trying to innoculating himself from answering harder questions
 

Agema

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Can any give me a timeline on how asking softball question became the standard for interviews? It had to be before Trump's inital campaign right? That's what FAKE NEWS was all about. Trying to innoculating himself from answering harder questions
To an extent, it's eternal: obviously, there's interviewer bias. Unless they have high rigour, they'll always give a softer touch to interviewees they share an outlook with. However rigour has possibly been in decline a long time - the film Broadcast News looks at this, and it was released in 1987.

I think Web 2.0 has only accelerated decline. Even major media can be vulnerable to pressure, but lone internet content providers are far weaker: they're going to tend to have modest audiences and struggle to pull interviewees in, and if something turns against them there's no institution to back them up. So they'll tend to use their friends, or due to networking needs be soft with some interviewees to make sure they'll come back and encourage new ones to attend. In many cases, of course, they're simply just hauling in the B-, C- or D-team anyway: the real heavy hitters are on the major broadcasters, not two-bit YouTube channels. The other corresponding side of this are the interviewees. I think in many cases they are people who are self-important and attention-seeking (even to narcissism), or are highly aware of the career and financial benefits of media appearances, whose desire to put themselves out there often comfortably exceeds their expertise on the topic. If the interview is essentially a love-in between interviewer and interviewee set up just to make the interviewee look great, you may as well toss the interview because it's compromised beyond repair.

I note with amusement one of the videos we were provided with has the author decrying the way politics has got into the covid science. Then you see the YT recommendations, and it's evident just from the titles of his other vids that this guy is also explicitly banging on about politics. Thankfully for him, the average YT watcher probably fails to connect those dots.
 

Phoenixmgs

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The UK did that situationally because it was in the middle of a massive covid peak, and it calculated that the benefit of lots of people with one shot vaccine protection was greater than half as many with two shot protection.

Y-e-s, see above. I am well acquainted with the arguments behind why the UK did as it did.
So why would you do something that is the overall worse option? Giving as many people the 1st dose as you can, then doing the 2nd dose not only wins by increasing immunity protection in the population as a whole but also has the built-in benefit of longer lasting immunity. How is that not a win-win scenario? That also allows you to vaccinate more people worldwide because you don't need boosters as soon (or maybe not at all). How is this not win-win-win? And 1st dose protection is pretty damn good overall with a 2nd dose giving diminishing returns, not that you'd want to totally skip the 2nd dose completely but it's obvious giving more people the 1st dose is just better.

I literally could not care less about some chummy video where a YouTuber hands his mate a soft interview to boast how awesome he is.
It's not some "chummy" video. You obviously don't even give a lot of people a chance. You know why I don't post any Darkhorse Podcast videos? Because I gave them a full-on chance and quite a few of their videos are way way off in regards to the science. Again, you can google each stance Marty took and Fauci took and figure out their hit/miss ratios, I just gave the video as a faster way to get said information. It's not like they are lying about what Marty said cuz you can just find the article he said the thing in.

Dude, there's a metric fuckton you don't know, and yet here you are spouting as if you're God's own spokesperson and insisting you're right, and then have the gall to claim you admire people who admit when they don't know somethign.
You keep saying stuff that is wrong like such and such drug doesn't work when it's unknown whether it works. You keep saying taking too much vitamin d is dangerous when it's not (outside just ridiculous amounts of it) when studies show you're wrong. You keep saying outdoors is dangerous for covid when that's not what the science is.

You don't really seem to understand what the point is here. It's got very little to do with "super-spreader" events, it's about individuals mitigating risk in a reasonable fashion. You are trying to argue against the point tangentially.
Nope, you keep saying that more spread is inside because people spend more time inside. You're trying to say outside is dangerous and there's only less spread outside because there's less congregation outside, that isn't true. If say 10% of congregation takes place outside, then 10% of cases should be outside but that isn't close to being true. Every single viral expert puts ventilation at the #1 way to reduce infections (outside of prior immunity obviously).


And again, your analytical capabilities of what little science you've read is somewhere between tragic and nonexistent. You've been given scientific evidence to explain the issue and invite you to consider, and all you do is bleat on about two studies that don't even really say what you think they do. Again, you are not addressing the real issue, just trying to fob it off with tangential argument.

I'm the one that can't read basic results of studies? I said normal breathing droplets do not go more than 3 feet (they will as they build up in a room), and here's what your sourced paper says...

these expelled large droplets are carried more than 6 m away by exhaled air at a velocity of 50 m/s (sneezing), more than 2 m away at a velocity of 10 m/s (coughing) and less than 1 m away at a velocity of 1 m/s (breathing)


And a meter is basically 3 feet obviously. I didn't even need to read a paper to know basic breathing from your nose (pointing downward) isn't going more than 3 feet, it's basic common sense.
 

Phoenixmgs

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Don't give them any fucking ideas, they're already gargling a different anti-bacterial
What are you talking about? Drugs get studied because there's some mechanistic reason why they'd work. Well over 90% of drugs that are tested don't end up working. There's no reason a drug will get tested if there's no theory behind why it could work. People saying weed cures covid isn't going to get weed studied. Mocking and lying about a drug that has a theoretical reason to work is a good thing in your book?
 

TheMysteriousGX

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What are you talking about? Drugs get studied because there's some mechanistic reason why they'd work. Well over 90% of drugs that are tested don't end up working. There's no reason a drug will get tested if there's no theory behind why it could work. People saying weed cures covid isn't going to get weed studied. Mocking and lying about a drug that has a theoretical reason to work is a good thing in your book?
It's getting testing because a bunch of morons are taking it anyway.
 

Gergar12

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I wish the CDC would just give me a booster shot. They shouldn't means test it. Give it to everyone over 18.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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So why would you do something that is the overall worse option?
The vaccines were trialled with two doses two weeks apart. That's what the proven science defended. The theory was that a longer gap had a good chance of better immunity, but that's not tested and proven so it is therefore a risk to proceed on a different protocol than the one established.

It's not some "chummy" video.
Yes, it is.

You keep saying stuff that is wrong like such and such drug doesn't work when it's unknown whether it works. You keep saying taking too much vitamin d is dangerous when it's not (outside just ridiculous amounts of it) when studies show you're wrong. You keep saying outdoors is dangerous for covid when that's not what the science is.
I'm right in what I've said on the drugs (which you are misrepresenting anyway), I'm right that there is evidence excessive Vit D might be dangerous, and I am right to point out that the science does not at all defend how safe you think outdoors is.

Nope, you keep saying that more spread is inside because people spend more time inside.
Then you've failed basic reading comprehension.

I'm the one that can't read basic results of studies?
Yes, yes you are.

I said normal breathing droplets do not go more than 3 feet
Wrong. You said they don't go three feet: this is a small but significant attempt to move the goalposts.

...and less than 1 m away at a velocity of 1 m/s (breathing)

And a meter is basically 3 feet obviously.
And herein again you display your ability to read science only to mine and distort it for the interpretation you want.

A metre is longer than three feet (by about 10%), so "less than a metre" can be more than three feet. Never mind that the range is greater, because if you're arguing that a distance such as 2'10" doesn't simplify to three feet for the purposes of general discussion, you can just f*** off.

Some sensible context in language use is then necessary here. "Less than a metre" means "up to close to a metre". We can understand this context, because they also say "more than 6m" by sneezing: but they clearly don't mean that to include as far as 100m, which is more than 6m. Were it substantially less than a metre, they would surely have used a term such as "about half a metre".

Next, you need to think about real world situations. Breathing varies from light to heavy, with the latter at higher velocities (and thus further droplet spreads) than the notional value of 1 m/s the paper used. Furthermore, as per the sentence you quoted yourself, this distance only refers to the largest diameter droplets which fall fastest anyway, even though we know smaller droplets can carry virus (hence airborne transmission).
 
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tstorm823

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Only if it wasn't labelled properly and not given the proper context.
No, a graph can be properly labelled and still be misleading. Graphs are a form of communication just as much as words are, and as such you can deliver something that is technically correct but formulated to mislead people.