I was browsing the official pictures from vaccination sites, mostly Taipei. The elderly…well, they are frail.
Reminded me of Mafalda’s friend Miguelito seeing a very old man and promising to punch time if she played such a trick on him. I agree.
Wheelchairs, oxygen tanks, the works. And at least some places were kind enough to use the sitting system.
Effectiveness of first dose of Sinovac in Chile is reportedly 16%.
This will be an interesting “natural experiment”. Places like Polk County, Missouri - where, presumably, people are deliberately avoiding vaccination - are unlikely to see any widespread change of opinion in the near future, so we’ll be able to see exactly how the virus spreads and mutates under similar real-world conditions, with the only controlled variable being vaccination rate.
EDIT: no, apparently that won’t work. Polk County, MO have reported a grand total of 40 COVID deaths, and 3500 cases. Deaths-per-day are down in the noise, and have been since forever. Population is 35,000 people. Since the number of cases is broadly in line with the rest of the country, we can perhaps assume that record-keeping is accurate. Attempting to discern any useful data from the occasional COVID death in Polk County seems like a futile exercise - unless, of course, we entertain some outlier hypotheses, eg., COVID does not kill people who don’t believe in the boogeyman, and the media just make shit up (“Coronavirus infections dropping where people are vaccinated, rising where they are not”).
The other apocalypic meltdown is apparently in Sweetwater County, WY. Again, 40 deaths recorded since the beginning of the pandemic; they’re currently averaging about one death a month.
Vaccines don’t do anything. COVID doesn’t kill people, at least not in meaningful numbers. Blah blah blah.
Dispute the numbers, if you wish. Are you suggesting the charts are being rigged? Where is this terrifying uptick in cases that the article mentions?
All I’ve ever argued for here is a sense of perspective. The assertion in the article is not just untrue; if you look at the data, COVID is a complete non-issue in the locations mentioned and appears to correlate not at all with vaccination coverage.
I bet there there’s some unidentified homeless guy dies every month in each of those two counties, and they won’t get a handwringing article in the Post.
EDIT: intentional-homicide rate in Missouri is about 1:10,000, which suggests that the average person’s risk of dying of COVID is about 10x their risk of being knifed in a bar fight. Personally, I think I could live with those odds.
Vaccination is not always even within each state, and The Post found the connection between vaccine shots and coronavirus cases at the local level comparing more than 100 counties with low vaccination rates (fewer than 20% of residents vaccinated) and more than 700 with high vaccination rates (at least 40% vaccinated).
Missouri’s Polk County - where less than a quarter of the population of roughly 30,000 is fully vaccinated - has reported nearly 90 new infections in one week, an increase after several months of decline.
Sweetwater carries the unfortunate distinction of being the county with the steepest increase in infections in the state with the most new infections per capita in the country. Only a quarter of its residents are fully vaccinated, and public health officials don’t see the number budging much higher.
The article talked about cases rising, and you went on a rant about deaths.
But yeah, I agree that COVID is fast becoming a non-issue in the US. Because of vaccines. The people who are able to get vaxxed but choose not to have the freedom to get hospitalized and die. And I have the freedom not to contribute to their GoFundMe pages.
Well if you’re still in TW, maybe you should go to Missouri. Beats Level 3 lockdown in TW.
CA “reopened” today and I was able to enjoy an almost normal lunch with a friend in a county where nearly 70% of the people have been vaxxed.
I posted the charts for cases. No uptick.
Those places were identified in the article as being populated by covidiots who aren’t vaccinated.
Except that they’re not actually dying. Which is why I “went on a rant” about COVID deaths hovering around zero. 99% of the people dying in unvaccinated areas are dying of the mundane things that people have always died of: heart disease, cancer, and the like.
But yes, people do have the right to choose how they die. It’s what makes America great!
The change in PCR pos/neg criteria for those who were vaccinated is also helping!
Missouri’s Polk County - where less than a quarter of the population of roughly 30,000 is fully vaccinated - has reported nearly 90 new infections in one week, an increase after several months of decline.
Sweetwater carries the unfortunate distinction of being the county with the steepest increase in infections in the state with the most new infections per capita in the country.
Great. As everything opens up and their risk goes up, they’ll still be fine. And if they aren’t, who gives a fu…?
Not sure what you’re arguing for or against. The US is getting back to normal because of vaccines. It’s a good thing. Or should countries remain in a TW-like purgatory forever?
I’m merely pointing out that the article is BS. The title is false, and the content is nothing more than somebody’s opinion about what might happen at some indeterminate time in the figure.
Sure you can break out your crystal ball and predict that everything’s going to turn to ratshit for them, but as I said, it’s perhaps going to be an interesting experiment; it’s just a pity there are so few people in those two counties that deaths are barely even in statistically-significant territory.
Anyway, for argument’s sake, I’ll assume everything is BS. But I much prefer the BS where we all pretend the vaccines work and can go about our normal lives than the BS where we all pretend that locking ourselves in our homes will lead to normalcy.
By that measure, being in vaxxed US right now is way better than being in unvaxxed TW right now.
The human race has definitely developed a preference for BS these days, and for drawing unwarranted conclusions even when the evidence contradicts.
I prefer truth in reporting, but I realise that’s a highly unpopular view.
Somebody asked me recently whether there was anything to fear from possible unknown long term consequences of being immunised using mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer, among others). This was my answer:
these are definitely a new class of vaccine, and this technology has never been used as a vaccine before. It has been in fairly routine use in laboratories for a while now to force cells to make some kind of protein they don’t normally make, for research purposes.
In this case, we’re forcing the cells in our lymph and bone marrow to make the spike protein of the coronavirus, and then the immune cells in those areas mount an immune response against that protein, hence inducing immunity to subsequent infection by a virus with that protein. that’s the science behind it.
(Weinstein’s recent video where he claims that mRNA vaccines are poison because they accumulate in ovaries and bone marrow absolutely misses the point and shows exactly why you shold not trust the guy: he has absolutely no f’n idea what he’s talking about. The lipid encapsulation is absolutely designed to carry the mRNA to the bone marrow where B cells are maturing and need to be exposed to the viral protein that the mRNA encodes, so as to make an immune response. That’s the whole fucking point. The fact that the lipid also accumulates in the ovaries is a) coincidental and b) irrelevant).
As to whether there are any hidden long-term complications, I can’t really see how. Most of the mRNA is destroyed pretty much as soon as it is injected, by RNAase enzymes in blood, in interstitial fluid, and so on, with only a small amount needed to get into cells to force them to make the protein. And those mRNA strands that do get into cells and instruct them to make the protein are destroyed by intracellular RNAase enzymes as well. mRNA is an essential part of the cell process of ALL cells, and the life of an mRNA strand is decidedly Hobbesian: “nasty, brutish, and short”.
life depends on a delicate balance of just enough mRNA to make just the right amount of all the proteins that make us. Our cells are extremely good at eliminating mRNA. Unless it is carried in by a retrovirus like HIV (or in some other special but perfectly normal circumstances, as some recent research shows) , mRNA can in no way be turned back into permanently stored DNA information, so there is no long term risk.
I would add…
On the other hand, there’s now ample evidence that some not insignificant % of people who get COVID, even a mild case, will have lasting health issues. So the risk of mRNA vaccines, which haven’t caused lasting issues in 6 months after hundreds of millions of people vaccinated, look like a better risk to take.
Great post.
So you claim that none of the mRNA encoding occurs in the ovaries, and that it’s just an accumulation of lipid particles after they have been freed?
Well not quite. Here’s a really good blog post to read on the basic mechanics of lipid nanoparticle encapsulation of mRNA while I do some more research.
I’m also a bit curious why the Japan-released info from Pfizer’s research on biodistribution specified such high levels in ovary and bone marrow, but not in liver and maybe brain and other fatty tissues where you might expect to see it too.
I’m sure that some spike protein expression might happen in all the tissues where it accumulates, but to what end I don’t know yet
I quite like this article debunking some theories out there, particularly making clear the distinction between the virus version of the spike protein and the vaccine coded one, which has reduced potential for things like clotting cascades (claimed elsewhere but I can’t find it again) but still induces a good immune response.
Still can’t find much about the ovary accumulation