They’re the ones who should be getting the vaccine as priority, they shouldn’t be needing to buy it on the black market. IMO they’re the only ones who should be getting it. Dishing it out solely by age groups is daft, although perhaps logistically easy.
My dad’s 81, slim and fit as a flea. He has no chance of dying IMO, but I don’t fancy my 78 year old mum’s chances. It’s crazy that he got the vaccine first.
Again, twisting my words. I thought you said vaccines were useless? Lies?
You said it yourself: they are getting vaccines from dubious sources, of doubtful quality.
But still they use what little edge they have. Doing no more than politicians have done… everywhere. Trumph. They are just following the example of the elite.
The rest of the people will either get their vaccine when available and it is also a gamble in most places whether it will be Chinese or Soviet.
Only a few lucky places are getting COVAX good stuff, AZ as we do. Those are the ones being traded in the black market.
Those countries are following the WHO guidelines: elderly and medical, then vulnerable groups in age order.
Well, hang on a sec. I’m the one being accused of telling the poor they should all go and die, despite having a thread discussing the exact opposite.
I’ve said nothing of the sort. I think you’re confusing me with someone else. I have suggested that relying on vaccines to save the world is a fool’s errand. I didn’t say they were useless.
My view is simple: if the vaccines are available and people want to take vaccines, they can take them, but me personally, I’m not interested because I don’t think I need one.
If more people took that attitude, then people who are actually at risk would be more likely to be first in the queue, instead of having their neighbours stampeding over their heads in a blind panic.
But surely, that’s the fair and correct thing to do when resources are limited? As BD mentioned it seems a bit daft to focus only on the elderly, but not entirely unreasonable.
And if at-risk people are being deprived of the vaccine so that bent nurses can sell it on the black market, isn’t that a terrible thing? Isn’t it at least partly the fault of the buyers? The people who create the demand?
But they’re not getting an edge. They just think they are. In reality, they’re getting shafted. They’re buying a knockoff product that probably won’t work (and may well be unsanitary as well as ineffective).
Well, vaccination is a fool’s errand as thanks to disinformation, manipulation and old fashioned selfishness the goal of 70% herd immunity is now but a dream.
The rest… Her, my Englishee skills must be very bad as that is what I understood…and what you wrote before.
You are just doing it now: you say you don’t think you do not need one. That is along the lines of not wearing a mask: it harms others and leaves you unprotected in the long run.
Yet you criticize the vulnerable for making choices if available, like not taking a vaccine out of fear caused by manipulation and at the same time elites profiting of misery…and fueling those fears at the same time.
I thought you knew how Elbonia works.
There isn’t some magical threshold at which “herd immunity” kicks in. 70% was what the policy wonks wanted to aim for as the ideal.
The UK seems to have achieved herd immunity with only 25% of the population fully vaccinated. About 50% have had one shot, which - given the 4-6 week delay between shots - suggests that they had that very recently and therefore only have a modest immune response.
This is hardly surprising, since most of the population will have been continually exposed to the virus over the past year and will therefore have acquired some natural immunity.
The reason I suggest vaccines aren’t going to save the world is that it’s based on a faulty premise, ie., humans can out-engineer nature. It’s not just astoundingly arrogant, it’s scientifically dubious. It’s never been done before, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be done this year.
Neither thing hurts anyone. TPTB have pushed mask-wearing because it makes people feel like they’re in control. In reality, masks have only a very small effect on transmission. There is an effect, but it’s barely even measurable. Cloth masks have been shown to be completely useless. Those disposable blue masks are marginally better.
The idea that masks “protect” you - or anybody else - is a lie. It isn’t supported by science.
Feel free to look for a scientific paper that proves that masks are devastatingly effective. You won’t find one.
I am not arguing that therefore we should not wear masks. I’m simply pointing out that masks do not do what people think they do.
Same with vaccines. TPTB thought it would be a good idea to (a) make everyone terrified of COVID and then (b) point fingers at “anti-vaxxers” as selfish and antisocial. This completely backfired, because there are now millions of people with zero risk screaming for vaccines that they don’t really need.
Of course I’m criticising them. They are complicit in theft from people who have been deemed vulnerable. They justify this to themselves because they (mistakenly) believe that they themselves are vulnerable, and the government is giving the vaccines to the wrong people. In short, it’s all about me me me.
Result: they get cheated out of their money, and vulnerable people are deprived of the vaccine that they were due. Everyone loses. This, IMO, is why poor countries are poor (as I may have mentioned elsewhere 
).
It seems to me that the poor fall for these scams because, rich or poor, people in corrupt countries are corrupt. All of them, from the bottom to the top. People who spend their lives immersed in lies are going to have a poor grasp on the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false’.
The only difference is that the corrupt people at the top make some profits at the expense of others; the ones at the bottom achieve nothing except making their own lives worse.
Prove it.
GIYF.
The subject has been done to death over the past few months. There’s a reasonable summary here.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8
I have to say it again because nobody ever pays attention: I’m not arguing that we should not wear masks. Merely that they are not effective enough to make much of a dent in transmission.
Funnily enough the WHO is still spreading BS about “non-medical” and homemade cloth masks. Even more amusing, they do not assert anywhere that masks do anything useful. They just tell you to wear one.
How is it not? There’s a plausible physical explanation for how they would work to reduce transmission, at least.
Have a scan through the Nature article. It explains how complicated these things are out in the real world. The reality is that effectiveness is so highly variable - depending partly on how masks are worn - that it’s hard to even measure how effective they are.
My point is merely that popular memes like “Wear your masks and everyone will be safe”, or “If only people would wear their masks we would have had this beaten months ago!” are completely unjustified.
From the article headline:
The science supports that face coverings are saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, and yet the debate trundles on. How much evidence is enough?
You stated that the idea the mask protect you against the virus is a lie, this is not proof.
Show us that masks don’t protect against the virus.
More nonsense.
On this basis, ( R 0 − 1)/ R 0 is known as the “herd immunity threshold.”
Check the year, what ‘policy wonks’ were involved in this definition of herd immunity?
This statement is meaningless. It is not scientifically falsifiable. Reason: what exactly do you mean by “protect”?
In any case, I was asserting something far more specific: whether a population wears masks or not does not appear to have any bearing on their COVID-19 death rate. If it did, there would no debate “trundling on”. It would be astoundingly obvious for all to see.
A mask reduces transmission, by a small and hard-to-measure amount, which is highly dependent on circumstances. That’s the best that can be said.
Read the article and it will answer your questions.
Sigh. For one thing R0 is not constant, and it isn’t even measurable with any accuracy. The equation you quote therefore represents a purely theoretical concept that has very little practical use.
In any case the equation you quote does not imply that below that point, a population has no useful immunity.
The policy wonks decided on 70%, on the basis of a finger-in-the air guess at R0. Not the threshold equation itself. 70% would correspond to R0=3.4.
If you are arguing that 70% is absolutely imperative, how do you explain the fact that the UK is now at zero deaths, and a very small number of cases?
“Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes.”
Really, really don’t wade into an argument here, but seriously all this boils down to it seems is @finley trying to make “perfect” the enemy of “good”, and severely underestimating the dent proper, widespread mask wearing can make in curbing the proliferation of the virus.
Wearing a mask is not a perfect remedy for fighting the virus – the action is one in an arsenal of actions that help mitigate the spread of the disease. You seem severely out of your depth, seeming to think the weight of your opinion should be conflated with the weight of medical and public health experts around the world.
Not a bit original here, seeing someone with an internet connection, time, and hubris positing that the (boring, vegetable) opinions of experts - cultivated from countless hours of study and experience - are fundamentally flawed, and that their (gilded, comparatively dilettante) opinion somehow deserves to be put on the same shelf in the marketplace of ideas…
Stop being so slippery, you didn’t say that, this is what you said:
How about this:
To be clear, the science supports using masks, with recent studies suggesting that they could save lives in different ways: research shows that they cut down the chances of both transmitting and catching the coronavirus, and some studies hint that masks might reduce the severity of infection if people do contract the disease.
It sure sounds like science says that masks protect you.
I think I put that in quotes because I was referring to somebody else’s post (Icon’s?). I then used some precise language to clarify what I meant by that. I’m not “being slippery”. I was railing against the black-and-white view of mask-wearers being safe and responsible, and non-mask-wearers being in league with Satan.
That paragraph is a bit wishywashy, isn’t it? Suggesting that … could … might.
The article gives you some numbers. Go and look at them.
There is really very little point arguing the toss over this. People are absolutely, completely convinced that wearing masks will make COVID go away. People have worn masks. Yet COVID hasn’t gone away. We’re not even in Bear Patrol territory anymore; the place is swarming with bears, but people are still clinging onto their magic rocks to protect themselves from bears.
Well don’t make unambiguous statements without evidence then, try be a bit more humble in your analysis.
How about this:
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
We recommend that public officials and governments strongly encourage the use of widespread face masks in public, including the use of appropriate regulation.
I only skimmed the article as I’m outside (and really tired), but there seemed to be multiple passages suggesting that masks did indeed have an effect. (Of course the details are complex, as with any question of this type.)
If you actually read the article, it says “we don’t know”. Reason: nobody has even bothered running a RCT on masks in the context of a COVID pandemic, although the Nature article suggests that the Danes are working on it (the words ‘stable door’ and ‘bolted’ spring to mind).
The one study that might have been useful was apparently statistically underpowered, which in itself suggests the effect is small. If you can’t spot the effect in a very small population, it’s probably not a very interesting effect.
Overall, direct evidence of the efficacy of mask use is supportive, but inconclusive. Since there are no RCTs, only one observational trial, and unclear evidence from other respiratory illnesses, we will need to look at a wider body of evidence.
The authors conclude that masks should be worn because it seems plausible they might be useful. Which is fine as far as it goes. But it doesn’t sound remarkably different to what I’ve been saying here.
Again, I’m not saying masks have no effect. Nor am I saying we should not wear them.
I’m saying that no effect sufficient to justify their marketing as bulletproof “protection” has ever been demonstrated. And, in fact, that nobody has so far attempted to demonstrate such an effect.
The general public are being sold on the idea that wearing a mask will save you, because science says so. And that’s a lie.
If masks did have such an effect, it would have been very obvious. Countries with mask mandates would have seen a rapid drop in new cases when the mandate was introduced. That simply didn’t happen, ever, in any country.
Slippery bullshit. Here is your original statement:
Is it a lie?