At this point in the pandemic, this is what vaccine hesitancy looks like for a lot of people and @elspethreeve got to the heart of it in Missouri. Very worth the watch. pic.twitter.com/poubh6gpdV
— Omar Jimenez (@OmarJimenez) September 9, 2021
Think about it: That CNN piece about the Ozarks and the vaccine is heavily about peer pressure and community norms. If you *mandate* it, you might finally create an out for people who secretly want it to say: "Look, I'm with you, I don't want it, but it's required, so…"
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 9, 2021
======
A quick thread:
⁰It’s hard to explain just how radicalized ivermectin and antivax Facebook groups have become in the last few weeks.
They’re now telling people who get COVID to avoid the ICU and treat themselves, often by nebulizing hydrogen peroxide.
So, how did we get here?
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 24, 2021
Facebook bans explicit antivaxx groups, but they don’t ban groups for quack “cures” that antivaxxers push instead.
So in the last couple of months, Ivermectin groups have become the new hubs for antivaxx messaging.
But there’s a problem: Ivermectin, by itself, isn’t working.
The number of people in these ivermectin groups have exploded.
So has the number of people in the groups who have contracted COVID, since the groups are largely filled with unvaccinated people seeking “alternative therapies.”
So they developed a makeshift “protocol.”
Obviously, keep taking the ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, the ivermectin groups say.
But also gargle iodine. Buy a nebulizer and inhale food-grade hydrogen peroxide.
Anything but the vaccine. pic.twitter.com/66ArbDcBXO
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 24, 2021
They’ve developed elaborate conspiracy theories about doctors and nurses in the process.
They believe ventilators and remdesivir are secretly drowning patients’ lungs, not COVID itself.
QAnon boards have begun calling hospitals to harass workers for not prescribing ivermectin. pic.twitter.com/LysnALGTsm
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 24, 2021
Here's the full story about "vigilante medicine" on ivermectin Facebook.
Antivaxxers are starting to wrap doctors and ICUs into their dark conspiracy theories, as they suffer at home with ad-hoc COVID treatments that don't work.
I hope you read it.https://t.co/pgghH6WrBu
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 24, 2021
======
From a long, heavily annotated thread:
This is yet another game-changer in understanding origins of covid-19! https://t.co/DXhPae9Qhr
— Peter Daszak (@PeterDaszak) September 18, 2021
Since the outbreak, & especially in the last few weeks/months after the @WHO origins report, there’s been a series of significant new papers/preprints/analyses supporting a “natural” origin of wildlife spillover, possibly via an intermediate mammalian host as per SARS. 3/
— Peter Daszak (@PeterDaszak) September 18, 2021
2nd, new evidence that live animals of the type that carry CoVs were present in the Wuhan markets (including Huanan). Evidence not available at time of WHO report, but thankfully published here https://t.co/lFA3ueSjTr 5/
— Peter Daszak (@PeterDaszak) September 18, 2021
….
In my opinion, the scientific evidence coming through is exactly what most of us in the field expected. We need to continue the hard work on all sides, but at the same time it should be “science not speculation” that leads us! https://t.co/Jw3aB4elcu 19/
— Peter Daszak (@PeterDaszak) September 18, 2021
======
my latest—this ain’t “vaccine hesitancy”; https://t.co/w8OZCTSlAM
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) September 22, 2021
… The number of Americans who are dying every 36 hours from Covid now surpasses the total number of U.S. soldiers who were killed during 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. It’s an entirely preventable crisis, yet it rages because we have people like the red state restaurant owner who is kicking out patrons if they refuse to take off their masks. It’s pure nihilism.
The mindless behavior is hard to describe, and the rest of the world must be looking on in slack-jawed astonishment as Trump voters lead a mad movement powered by Fox News. The network is doing what no other outlet has done in the history of television news — it’s deliberately getting people killed during a public health crisis by feeding eagerly gullible red state viewers a mountain of lies.
From PizzaGate, to QAnon, to the current anti-vaccine and anti-mask hysteria, the GOP has been brainwashed. It’s no secret — lots of victims openly admit it. Still, the press shies away, nervous about offending conservatives by portraying them as mindless zombies being easily duped about a miraculously safe and effective vaccine. (It’s the same reason news outlets refused to call Trump a “liar.”)
Instead of calling out the Covid zombies, the press coddles them, especially white, Southern ones, depicting them as merely “vaccine hesitant,” “vaccine-reluctant,” or “vaccine skeptics.”…
Within the media, there’s lots of tsk-tsking commentary about vaccine “misinformation.” But the press continues to look away from the consequences of mass brainwashing —millions of Americans believe the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus. And they’re lashing out in public, staging deranged acts of civil disobedience, often inside restaurants and at local school board meetings, where the white-rage screaming and name-calling commences…
Brainwashing itsn’t typically a topic that’s covered when dissecting mainstream American politics. Sadly, it needs to be. And fast.
======
COVID Update: How big a problem will future variants be?
I got an update from several top scientists. 1/
— Andy Slavitt ??? (@ASlavitt) September 7, 2021
Quick review. Viruses continually mutate but can only mutate when they replicate. And so far we’re giving SARS-CoV-2 plenty of opportunities to replicate. 2/
Most mutations aren’t worth noting. They don’t increase hospitalizations. They don’t increase infectiousness. And they don’t cause problems for prior immunity. 3/
A fallacy pushed by anti-vaxxers is that vaccinations cause mutations.
It’s false. The more unvaccinated people, the more replication within cells as people mount a slow immune response— the more chances for the virus to mutate. 4/
So far the variants of concern that have taken hold in countries around the world have followed 1 of 2 paths for more cell replication— either evading vaccines or spreading more easily.
But so far none of these variants have combined both problems— evasiveness & contagiousness.5
Think of one path as going broad to more people (a more contagious variant is harder to catch) and another path as going deep (within a single individual to more cells).
One that had mutations to be the most rapidly growing & most evasive would be the most concerning. 6/
The vaccines that have caused the most trouble for vaccines in vitro & in reality (Beta, Iota, Delta+, Mu) have so far been outcompeted by the variants that spread more rapidly (Alpha and now Delta). 7/
Problematic variants that can’t grow as fast as Delta will be only a limited problem.
When we read about a Mu (0.1%) being a problem for vaccines, if it can’t outcompete Delta, it won’t take hold. 8/
So Delta, oddly, is defeating variants that would be more challenging for vaccines (and also monoclonals).
And until a variant that causes problems for the vaccine also spreads faster than Delta, it won’t become dominant. 9/
As an aside, Delta causes some problems for the vaccine but in a different way— because it replicates more virus so quickly that w/ lower antibody levels, immune response often isn’t fast enough to prevent symptoms. Cellular immunity does kick if to prevent hospitalizations. 10/
So why hasn’t a variant come along that has both negative characteristics? Will it?
The answer to the first question is largely randomness. There’s no reason why both types of mutations can’t exist in the same virus variant. 11/
The more opportunity, the more random things will happen. So it’s also the length of time of the pandemic, the spread & the too slow, too low vaccination rates that increases the odds. 12/
Will it happen?
We don’t know but we do know that vaccinating the globe and the US more quickly will reduce the odds.
In the scheme of viruses Delta already replicates very fast. Not close to measles, but arguably comparable to chicken pox. That’s a tall order for a mutant. 13/
So we could expect to see a lot of “problematic” mutations for the vaccines that never amount to much because Delta crushes them.
But what happens if we do see one that’s vaccine evasive that Delta doesn’t outcompete— or at least leaves room for it in some regions? 14/
There are a few key ingredients that must be ready: surveillance, vaccine development, regulatory & scaled manufacturing/distribution. 15/
We’ve taken a big step forward in surveillance with the CDC’s new forecasting center. Genetic sequencing need to occur however in many more regions of the US than it does now.
Countries around the world are also improving their ability to spot variants quickly. 16/
Once we identify a new variant, we can test its effectiveness against vaccines in the lab. If one is an evasive mutation, within 100 days we should have the capability to develop a new specialized booster.
By that time we should know if the variant is outcompeting Delta. 17/
Over the course of the year the Biden Admin has put together a pandemic resiliency plan that should allow for the rapid production & distribution of vaccines for new variants & new viruses.
The aim is 100 days for a vaccine & 100 days for full production. 19/
200 days sounds like a long time but if we have good surveillance & begin right away, remember how long it could be before a mutation is discovered & its proliferation depending on the origin. 20/
If the original COVID started circulating in China in the 4th quarter last year, it months before it started to spread significantly around the Earth globe asia-australia .
If we are developing vaccines at pace, it could end up being only a short spike in most countries before a vax is ready. 21/
This will undoubtedly mean suffering in the place of the variant’s origin. And a lot of logistics (imagine a whole new global rollout). We will need to get better & better at it.
And of course each time face anew the challenges of vaccine hesitancy. 22/
Along with the development of an oral anti-viral, we are building the arsenal as a globe & as individuals to manage new variants but we have to use them.
Right now Delta is the devil we know. And while not our friend, it is at least the enemy of our enemy.
If we don’t want to deal with worse variants we know how to reduce the odds. Slow the spread. Accelerate global vaccinations. Take its potential seriously. /end
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Hypochlorous acid in saline…..
This is literal insanity
Baud
We just need to vaccine up and move on with our lives, aside from having the Dems back when they impose more mandates.
Baud
While I don’t want to give Facebook money, I don’t understand why we can’t target these groups with anti-brainwashing ads. Might reach a few people where they are. The whole point of Facebook is targeted advertising.
SpaceUnit
My pity has been exhausted. I feel nothing.
Raven
@Baud: I just got mine and now I’m thinking “I have to wear a mask to protect these morons?”
The Dangerman
We might need to 5150 a bunch of these assholes. It is literally insane.
Baud
@Raven:
I will be patient until the little kids are eligible for theirs.
NeenerNeener
I lurk on a celebrity board (I won’t say which one) and I saw the first post over there today promoting Ivermectin and bashing the COVID vaccines. It was totally off topic and nobody challenged it, I hope because they were just ignoring it.
Baud
@NeenerNeener: It’s a tough choice. Trolls can ruin a thread. Ask me how I know.
Roger Moore
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
We told them not to drink bleach, but we didn’t think to tell them not to nebulize it. Not that telling them would have done anything but encourage them.
bbleh
“Every man’s death diminishes me” and all, but I have to say, increasingly my main worry about these auto-Darwinating idiot antivaxxers has been the enormous additional stress they put on healthcare providers and other resources, and now that they’re avoiding healthcare in favor of quack home remedies, well … it’s their lives!
We are deep, deep into “you can lead a horse to water” (aka “you can’t fix stupid”) territory here. Even if I thought more should be done for them, I don’t know what realistically could be done.
Eolirin
The biggest problem is that there are enough of these people to throw elections to people who will push this lunacy as public policy.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
Too bad it doesn’t work that way in practice. Even if we vax up, the anti-vaxers can sustain the pandemic and increase the chance the rest of us are hit by breakthrough infections. We really need to force them to vaccinate.
Josie
I just got an appointment for next Friday at an HEB near my house for my Pfizer booster shot. One of the few good things about Texas is HEB and their responsiveness to community needs. The rest of my family got Moderna, so I’m hoping that will be okayed soon. My middle son has several stents and I am particularly worried about him going in to work every day.
Brachiator
@Baud:
We see all over the world that mandates, which are necessary, also create pushback from anti vaxx crazies. Some of them are more than willing to die for their misguided beliefs. And they are willing to take innocents down with them.
There is some attempt to do this. The stupid are also stubborn.
Maybe 20 percent are anti vaxx no matter what. This is also about the portion of the population who will not get the flu vaccine. Mandates reduce this amount somewhat, but a hard core will remain defiant.
Baud
@Roger Moore: I agree about forcing. But until that happens, we just have to take the risks we have to take. The vaccine greatly reduces the chance of serious illness or death, which is the most you can reasonably ask for at this time.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@SpaceUnit: Thank you. I was just feeling guilty for thinking that.
brantl
Isn’t it amazing how willful and deliberate ignorance and bigotry turn out to be self-lethal? It’s like the scene in Blazing Saddles where Clevon Little holds the gun to his own head.
Baud
The best thing you can do at a personal level is ostracize any antivaxxers you know, to the extent you can.
Roger Moore
I’m not sure I buy what they’re saying about Delta crushing vaccine resistant strains. Yes, it’s doing that right now because we still have a large enough unvaccinated population that a fast replicating virus can continue to spread primarily among unvaccinated people. But if we push vaccination rates high enough that sheer speed of replication can’t do the job in the face of that many people being vaccinated, then we create an environment where immune escape can be a more important strategy than transmission speed.
Mo MacArbie
@Baud: My own experience at the Book of Faeces seems to be the opposite: for the last week I started getting BS Republican memes “Suggested for you”. Completely out of nowhere. I’ve got a pretty tight bubble over there, so I have no idea where it’s coming from. Perhaps they think I need more balance.
Baud
The second best thing you can do is not care about these people, since they thrive on liberal tears.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
What other vaccine have we ever forced people to get?
WaterGirl
@Roger Moore:
Can you explain that part more clearly for people like me?
Roger Moore
@Baud:
I agree about the need to continue to live our lives, but I think we’re going to have to continue to live our lives with sensible public health protections (masks, vaccine passports, work from home for eligible people) still in place. We aren’t going back to the status quo ante any time soon.
Cermet
So this how we and the world handle a true pandemic – not impressed. Only the brilliant work of a fore-sighted scientist and some visionary agencies (looking at the US Gov!) saved us from a world wide disaster. In some ways we dodged a bullet by some great foresight. The next pandemic i truly drought will we be that lucky. Still, time is everything. Hope lessons learned are remembered and applied for the next one.
Baud
@Roger Moore: Vaccine passports and work from home aren’t much of a burden, and work from home might be permanent at this point. Masks are more of a pain, so there will need to be some new norms about that. I think I will continue wearing a mask on crowded transportation settings for the rest of my life. Just makes sense.
jeffreyw
@bbleh:
You can fix stupid but be sure to put down a plastic tarp first.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator: I know I had to have a whole bunch of them to attend kindergarten.
FlyingToaster
@The Dangerman: Missouri is too big to be an asylum.
I grew up with this type of asshole (at the other end of the state). I often describe it as “a culture moved entirely by spite”. If there aren’t enough hospital beds in southern Missouri for COVID, there aren’t enough psych ward slots in the entire state for the mean-n-crazy that is the underpinning of every damn social interation.
These are the people who deny covid while intubated. You cannot fix them, and you cannot change their minds unless you’re already a member of their tribe (the “shibboleth” problem). You have to share their spite in order to reach them.
germy
@Brachiator:
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/03/jacobson-supreme-court-vaccination/618359/
Suzanne
@Baud: Yep. Vaccinate the kids and then forget these crazy people.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
How does what happens in one particular country affect the development of variants if global vaccination rates are low?
marcopolo
Well, I went out to look at springs in rural MO sw of StL in the middle of July and was in Van Buren, MO at that time since it is a few miles from the largest spring in the USA and home to the NPS headquarters for Ozark Scenic Riverways. Compared to some of the other small towns I passed through it is a happening place but that isn’t saying a lot. I was only indoors at the Park Service and to get a Subway sub but all the employees I saw were masked at both locations. Other folks were a mixed bag. Mind you, this was at the tail end of what I am calling the “Covid holiday,” that period after everyone who wanted to be vaxxed had received both shots and before Delta fucked everything up again. But I could see how peer pressure could have a really negative effect. These folks live in a very homogenous place, don’t get outside of it often, get their news and information from bad actors. Folks (by this I mean the young adults) who have their shit together and want to have a decent life do not stay. Anyways, the springs were gorgeous and I will return next summer.
Meanwhile, I accompanied my 88-year-old mom to get her booster shot today. I got my flu shot. She joked it was the last shot for her, but as I reminded her going forward we will all be getting annual Covid shots just as we are getting the flu shotsnow. And then going about our business and all the idiot anti-vaxxers will continue to die at a higher rate than everyone else. I can live with that.
CarolPW
@Brachiator: All of them Katie.
marcopolo
Also, I don’t know if this has been pointed out in any other threads but worldwide, 3.7 billion shots have been given. WW vaccination rate is right around 50%, though some areas are better and some much worse. Subsaharan Africa is only about 5%.
Scout211
One of my neighbors who is youngish adult and lives with her parents in the property next to us. She works for one of the blood processing labs and has been vaccine hesitant the whole time that vaccines have been available to her age group. She told us that about 1/3 of her office was not getting their vaccines because . . . reasons. They all work in an allied healthcare profession but they all just had “questions.” She did say from the beginning that she would get a vaccination if her job mandated it.
Well, here in California it is now mandated. She caught us on our walk down the road and told me that I would be happy now that she has decided to get vaccinated this week. She said she decided that it’s just “too much of a hassle” to get tested regularly and be out of work for 10 days if exposed. She was currently on a 10 day quarantine for an exposure. I laughed and said yeah, I am happy for you.
So mandates do work. One vaccine hesitant person at a time.
Raven
@Brachiator: you were never in the military we’re you?
Brachiator
@germy:
In Jacobson, the Supreme Court upheld mandatory vaccination. This was the pushback from the Jacobson decision:
I wonder how the current Supreme Court would view Jacobson?
AnonPhenom
…’many people are saying’
Thanks to ‘vaccine hesitancy’ the country might be close to achieving herd immunity against stupidity.
NotMax
@marcopolo
Don’t think I’ve heard Idaho referred to in quite that way before.
//
Another Scott
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yup.
Plus, there’s the example of Typhoid Mary
tl;dr – While the case is more complex than the headline, she was in quarantine for 26 years.
Public Health comes first.
Cheers,
Scott.
Scout211
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Yes, vaccinations are required if you want your kids to attend school. But the anti-vaxxers get around that by home schooling their kids. No vaccinations required.
Another Scott
@marcopolo: The Johns-Hopkins count is over 6B shots given now. (There was a brief time a week or so ago where they seemed to lose 2+B shots, but it was back on the previous trend thereafter.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Bill Arnold
@Brachiator:
Mutations are very roughly proportional to the number of virus instances that exist, which is roughly proportional to the number of active infections.
So big countries like the India, and even US, Russia, Brazil that allow SARS-CoV-2 to spread for stupid domestic political reasons are probably where variants, including dangerous variants, will emerge. Sure, vaccines will supply some selective pressure, as will previous infection. But the driver is number of infected people.
Edmund Dantes
My favorite thing is these people are jumping through all these hoops. Spending often hundreds of dollars on quack cures (several hundred thousands if they have to go icu hospital) all to avoid taking a FREE vaccine.
it boggles the mind.
debbie
@Roger Moore:
Did Mu come and go without anyone noticing?
NotMax
The bottom 10. Source
Arkansas
Number of people fully vaccinated: 1,358,170
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 45.01
.
Louisiana
Number of people fully vaccinated: 2,081,367
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 44.77
.
Tennessee
Number of people fully vaccinated: 3,054,167
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 44.72
.
Georgia
Number of people fully vaccinated: 4,737,079
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 44.62
.
North Dakota
Number of people fully vaccinated: 331,803
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 43.54
.
Mississippi
Number of people fully vaccinated: 1,269,033
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 42.64
.
Alabama
Number of people fully vaccinated: 2,045,238
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 41.71
.
Idaho
Number of people fully vaccinated: 734,326
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 41.09
.
Wyoming
Number of people fully vaccinated: 237,374
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 41.01
.
West Virginia
Number of people fully vaccinated: 721,140
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 40.24
.
Baud
@Edmund Dantes:
I see it as money not going to Republicans.
debbie
I don’t know about other states, but in Ohio, some idiot is introducing legislation that will ban mandates for ALL vaccines. Every anti-vaxer will probably need to die if we’re ever to see this nightmare end. ??♀️
Anotherlurker
@SpaceUnit: I admit to the guilty pleasure of frequenting the Herman Cain Awards. These people have destroyed any sense of empathy I had for them. Every awardee and nominee shares the same tired, ignorant, hateful, racist , fundy evangelical, anti-science/intellectual meme . To be fair, some see the error of their ignorance and urge their survivors to get vaccinated. Most, however, take their hatred and ignorance to their graves.
I really feel bad about an awardee’s photo taken on a replica of Startrek , TOS’s command bridge. He is sitting in Spock’s chair/console, giving the Vulcan “Live long and prosper” hand signal. He is wearing a green tunic style of shirt. One commenter quipped: “He should have been wearing a red shirt”.
I really feel bad with my reaction.
Baud
@NotMax: it’s nice for the South that the bottom three aren’t there.
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
Off the top of my head, polio, mumps, measles (&rubella), whooping cough, tetanus, small pox, chickenpox, HPV… I’m sure there are a couple more on the Health Dept/School Board’s list.
But that’s off the top of my head.
So the answer is lots of them.
I’m thinking banks should tell people to pay off that mortgage or get vaxes.
States should tell people to get vaxed if they expect to renew their driver’s license.
Grocery stores should tell customers to get vaxed to use the facility, to protect the cashiers and stockers.
No one should be forced to be exposed to carriers of a deadly plague!!
Baud
Is there any immunity after getting covid? I know it’s not as good as the vaccine, but shouldn’t having the disease help a little?
Roger Moore
@WaterGirl:
The idea is that the virus will continue to survive as long as it can, on average, infect more than 1 person per person currently infected. Suppose, that for each sick person, the virus can infect X healthy people, again assuming a perfectly naive population. This is the basic reproductive number, R0. As people develop immunity, the virus will be less and less effective in spreading because some of the people it tries to infect will already be immune. If 1/Y of the population has developed immunity (through infection or vaccination) then the basic reproductive number, R0, is reduced to some effective reproductive number, RE, equal to R0 * (1 – 1/Y). So if R0 = 3, the virus will spread and grow until about 2/3 of the population is immune, at which point it will spread on average to only 1 more person. As more than 2/3 the population is immune, it will start to die out because it can spread to less than 1 new, non-immune person per sick person currently infected.
Note getting 1 – 1/R0 of the population immune is the bare minimum to get the disease to die out. At that point RE = 1, which means the virus can hold on. If you push RE below 1, the virus will die out, but it will do so very slowly if RE is only a little below 1. You need to get RE to be much smaller than 1 to get the virus to die out quickly. Fortunately, you can also reduce RE through public health measures- quarantine, masks, work from home, lockdowns, etc. We’ve seen that in practice with the kinds of public health measures we took last year; they kept the virus kinda sorta under control even without vaccination or a large fraction of the population getting sick.
In any case, suppose you have a virus with R0 = 3 and through a combination of vaccination and public health measures, you’ve brought RE down to something less than 1. This puts selective pressure on the virus to do something to improve its ability to spread. There are two basic things it can do: get faster at spreading (increase RE by increasing R0) or learn to evade the vaccination (bring RE up by decreasing Y, the fraction of people who are immune).
Delta has managed to spread by strategy 1, increasing R0. It seems like that’s probably the easiest strategy for COVID to manage; getting more infectious seems to be easier for it than evading our immune response. But suppose we manage to knock some sense into anti-vaxxers and get our vaccination rate up high enough that Delta can’t keep up even with its enhanced R0. Lets say, to make up some numbers, that Delta has R0 = 8 and we manage to push the vaccination rate to 92%. To get infectious enough to overcome that vaccination rate, Delta would have to mutate again to get its R0 up to about 12, which is a tall order for any virus. OTOH, imagine a different strain, lets call it Sigma, that still had the basic R0 = 3 but that mutated so it could infect half the people who have immunity from vaccination. The new Sigma variant could now infect 54% of the population (8% who aren’t immune to Delta plus half the 92% who are immune), which is enough to give it RE big enough to spread rapidly. Sigma would also have a much bigger pool of people available to infect than Delta (54% vs 8%). At that point, Sigma is going to become the dominant variant even though Delta has a much higher R0.
Brachiator
On a segment about the pandemic on a Los Angeles talk radio station, a doctor who is one of the administrators of an hospital emergency room in Orange County noted that he had not seen a single ER case of Covid in an
unvaccinatedVACCINATED person in several weeks.The listeners of this radio station skew towards the conservative. I hope they were getting the message here.
The doctor also noted that there had not been a significant increase in Covid cases in California subsequent to Labor Day. The state is doing well.
ETA. California’s success underscores the stupidity of the recent recall election.
edited
dmsilev
Nebulizing hydrogen peroxide. The mind boggles.
We are going to see people try TFG’s proposed solution of sticking a blacklight tube up their ass, aren’t we?
Another Scott
@NotMax: Someone mentioned that Fox News isn’t on cable in Puerto Rico and they are at the top of the list for vaccinations in the US. It would be interesting (to me at least) to see how vaccination rates and Fox News viewership correlates at the county-or-so level. (Similarly vs household income and similar socio-economic indicators.) There’s a lot of data out there (or should be!) and we need to understand better how to get more shots in arms quicker to end this pandemic and be ready for the next one…
My step-mom lives in a county in Mississippi with a well regarded state college. But they’re still just barely above the state average on vaccinations… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
I was told there’d be no math.
Carlo
On Slavitt’s post, I agree with everything he says except for one thing: The state of our epidemic surveillance sucks, and CDC is part of the problem.
Some colleagues and I just authored a paper, available on MedRXiV, pointing out that some public health department data on COVID-19 testing, broken out by vaccination status, provides spatially- and temporally-resolved precision measurements of vaccine effectiveness’ (VE), and that among other things it is perfectly clear from the data that the 3-month rise of Delta from 0% prevalence to genome dominance had essentially no effect on VE in the US.
What we noticed in this project is that the state of COVID-19 data management, curation,and publication in the US is too bad to be called “dreadful”. Only a handful of the 50 state and 3000+ county DPHs even collect the necessary data to understand breakthrough infections, and many of those mismanage the handling or the distribution to the point of making their data nearly useless. And the CDC has a data culture best described as”inept” — for example, they seem to believe that distributing vaccine demographic info containing age categories with only the 3 bins of 12+, 18+ and 65+ is somehow due diligence.
I could go on for a while in this vein, but the point is this: If you hear someone brag about state-of-the-art episurveillance, don’t believe them. We are saddled with a crazy-quilt and leaderless public health infrastructure, which is afflicted by a premodern data culture, and isn’t even aware of it. We are flying blind at low altitude, and the crew doesn’t even realize it could be opening windows to check whether we’re about to fly into a mountainside.
This is essentially the reason the FDA and CDC can throw away the VRBPAC recommendation on boosters and instead go with an obviously politicized decision: they are covered because the data is so crappy, so they can’t be gainsaid. The process is Bad Data -> Bad Analysis -> Bad Reasoning -> Bad Policy. I’m no longer sure the administration doesn’t prefer it that way.
Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)
We need to do rebranding. Let’s just call it “immune system training” and tell them it’s been secretly used by billions of people around the world but big pharma wants you to buy Ivermectin and Regeneron monoclonal antibodies instead!
Roger Moore
@marcopolo:
You’re overestimating because most vaccinations require a course of more than one shot. Also, a lot of the vaccines are much less effective than the Pfizer and Moderna versions. My understanding is that the locally developed shots in India and China are substantially less effective, especially against some of the newer variants.
OldNPLer
Let them die, and make the world a slightly better place, one six foot dirt nap at a time.
SpaceUnit
@Anotherlurker: I try to remember that these folks are victims. They’ve had right wing media pushing their buttons for years – to the extent that they’ve truly lost their moral agency.
But it’s also true that they forfeited that moral agency, and rejecting masks and vaccines is just a way of wiggling their dicks at their betters. So screw em. There are others more deserving of our sympathy
ETA: As someone suggested above, let Darwin sort them out. I’ll get the shovel.
James E Powell
Reposting from last night’s open thread.
All teachers & staff in my school district – Los Angeles – have to be vaccinated by October 15. Friday morning I learned which of my co-workers were not vaccinated because they were all huddled together in the office talking about the injustice of it all, maybe a protest or lawsuit, etc.
Me? I was glad we were all wearing masks because my facial expression would have shown the scorn I have for these people. Later, I found out the teacher in the room next door to mine, a guy I’ve known for years, was not vaccinated. He started giving me the same bullshit blather we’ve all heard. I just said, “You’ve lost your fucking mind!”
I was really shocked that there were so many of them.
Here’s the hard thing: we do not have the personnel to take their places if they cannot come to work on October 15.
Captain C
We used to joke about Obama just needing to give an impassioned speech against drinking bleach and we’d have a solid majority for decades. Now they’re doing it for us, for real. And it’s not funny (though I won’t complain if it does have electoral consequences).
This was cathartic, however.
Brachiator
@Baud:
“Helps a little” is hard to quantify. All of the health experts I’ve heard on public radio shows and other programs have said that people who have been exposed to Covid get significant protection from vaccines.
They caution against the idea that natural immunity is just as good as the vaccine.
Baud
@Brachiator:
Understandably. They are trying to affect behavior. But I assume someone knows what immunization effects having the disease has. Sooner for later, every unvaccinated person is going to have this.
marcopolo
@Baud: Yes. Immune response from covid infection is not awful but it wanes faster than the vax immunity and is not as strong as the immune response from 2 shots of the Mrna vaxes. The interesting thing is having covid then getting one Mrna shot is a fair amount better at generating the immune response than the 2 shot regimen. So if you suffered through being sick and didn’t die (but who knows about your long covid effects) then get the vax, I think 90 days later, you are super immunized.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I think California’s success is evidence for how important simple public health measures can be. Things started to look bad in early July when Delta started to take over. Our public health people reacted quickly and reimposed mask mandates in our big urban counties. That’s about all we did differently- no closing down businesses, no forcing people to stay home- but it was enough to keep the Delta surge to something manageable, and it’s continuing to shrink despite schools opening and a big public holiday. We could have been Florida, but we avoided it through some sensible public health work. That’s a huge, huge difference!
Another Scott
@Baud:
Repost from 9/17:
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
WestTexan70
@Baud: They’re all Southern in spirit, if not in geography.
Hildebrand
@Josie: Just a side note to your post – I miss HEB. I mean, I am especially missing their ‘not anywhere near as awesome compared to the meat market I used to frequent in Edinburg’ beef for fajita.
That, and I miss the guy who used to sell elotes outside our HEB. His elotes was heaven in a cup.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
Here’s the no math version. Imagine you magically managed to get everyone above the age of 2 years old vaccinated. The virus couldn’t survive just by infecting infants and toddlers, even if it became the most infectious virus ever. But it could survive by figuring out how to overcome the vaccine. There’s no guarantee it would- we’ve managed to eradicated smallpox and very nearly eradicate polio through vaccination, and they didn’t survive by escaping immunity- but it’s the only way it could survive.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
?
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: I enjoyed the math. Very well done.
It would help if the experts would explain why the “herd immunity” number changes, if and when it does, with the actual math, so that people can understand that they’re not just making up numbers. Most anyone who remembers more than 3rd grade math should be able to follow along if it’s presented that clearly.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Who thinks that Baud was pulling your leg.”)
Steeplejack (phone)
@Baud:
I don’t see why you couldn’t get a “breakthrough” case after previous COVID just like getting a breakthrough case after being vaccinated. There have been reports of people catching COVID more than once (although I don’t know how many).
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
Even if Baud! was pulling my leg, it’s useful to try to come up with the no math version to see if you can explain it more simply. It can also clarify one’s thinking, like pointing out that smallpox and polio haven’t managed to escape immunity despite decades-long vaccination campaigns.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
And of course, vaccinations.
It astounds me that the new Florida surgeon general agrees with the governor on public health issues. They happily condemn to death many Florida residents.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Brachiator:
Is is this right, or did you mean “vaccinated person”?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore: Now if we could just teach folk how to wear a mask, it’s over the nose too, folk.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack (phone): I hope so!
Yutsano
Literal poison. We joked about it when Dolt45 was in office and here we are with people actively encouraging literally ingesting poison. My God. Burn Facebook to the ground. California needs to revoke their corporate charter now.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
This would indeed be useful on one level, but we may be beyond this.
One health expert I heard on public radio noted that vaccine resistance among the stupid and the rise of variants was making herd immunity almost meaningless.
He suggested that the best we might hope for was if Covid hospitalizations could be reduced to a reasonable number. I think 5 per 1,000.
ETA. The health official appears on a regular segment on the public affairs program Air Talk, on public radio station KPCC, 89.3 in Los Angeles/Pasadena. The host is Larry Mantle. Excellent program and available as a podcast or streaming.
CarolPW
It’s been interesting watching behaviors in low-vaccination eastern Washington over the past month. As case rates have increased mask use in the supermarket (where they are required) has decreased, and mask use at the outdoor farmers market (where they are not required) has increased. I have gone back to supermarket curbside pickup but enjoy the farmers market even more.
The crazy lady that was adamantly anti-mask and shouting about it at the farmers market last year is nowhere to be seen this year. I had always seen her at the market in past years; perhaps she is taking a dirt nap.
lowtechcyclist
What Fox News and the even crazier RWNJ outlets (from Newsmax to talk radio) are doing ought to be illegal. I keep on thinking, let’s declare war against SARS-Cov-2. Anyone helping out the enemy would then be committing treason. They’d shut up rather than be imprisoned.
Mallard Filmore
Now that you mention it …
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/9/25/2054400/-So-Much-For-Previous-Immunity-Covid-Returns-To-Finish-Job-On-K-C-Area-Pizza-Shop-Owner
Brachiator
@Steeplejack (phone):
Take 2…
On a segment about the pandemic on a Los Angeles talk radio station, a doctor who is one of the administrators of an hospital emergency room in Orange County noted that he had not seen a single ER case of Covid in a vaccinated person in several weeks.
He went on to note that since vaccinated people often only get a mild infection even if they catch Covid, they don’t need to hang out in an ER waiting room for 5 hours waiting to see someone.
He also noted that some of those who need hospitalization later show traits similar to PTSD. It is a terrible thing to get Covid bad enough that you can’t breathe.
ETA. I tried to correctly note the distinction between vaccinated/unvaccinated and still stumbled. I laugh at my own bumbling.
WaterGirl
@Baud: I saw a study linked here at BJ that said roughly 1/3 of people who had covid do not have antibodies
sorry, no link
Chief Oshkosh
@Roger Moore:
Or just deny them access to any healthcare whatsoever and let as many die as possible. At this point, they’re trying to kill us. Fuck. Them.
WaterGirl
@Roger Moore: Thank you for that!
MomSense
My son’s COVID test came back negative and we are all greatly relieved. We are also still very angry at his coworker.
WaterGirl
@Brachiator: Because of the subject matter, I took the liberty of correcting your unvaccinated to vaccinated. Hope that’s okay.
WaterGirl
@MomSense: Oh yay. Does he need to test again in a few days, or are you confident that he’s okay?
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
IIRC, California wasn’t notably ahead of Florida in vaccinations when the Delta wave hit; that we’re better now is because we’ve continued to vaccinate rather than letting the rate drop off.
Chief Oshkosh
@debbie:
Your proposal is acceptable.
Ksmiami
@SpaceUnit: let them die jfc. I don’t care about these assholes.
Bobby Thomson
Provided the violence and aggression against health care workers can be suppressed, I don’t see any downside to the idiots’ use of these home remedies.
Roger Moore
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I think it would help to start distributing better masks. A lot of the masks out there are just plain lousy, and people don’t wear them right because they’re awkward and/or uncomfortable to wear properly. The vast majority of the people I see wearing their masks wrong are wearing disposable surgical masks or the occasional cloth mask that’s sewn the same way. Cloth masks that are sewn to go over the nose and more advanced disposable masks (KN-95 or KF-94) are more comfortable to wear over those nose and people wind up wearing them right. It’s great that public agencies handed out a bunch of cheap masks early in the pandemic, but we need to get people wearing better ones now.
James E Powell
@Baud:
I wonder how many people know the genesis of that line.
different-church-lady
Facebook is how we got here.
Scout211
@Roger Moore:
And people in California are still getting vaccinated because the state has vaccine mandates for a large portion of workers in the state. Florida has mandates that there will be no mandates.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
My basic view is that we try to educate. We put mandates in place for those who interact with the public. At the end of the day, if the QAnon crazies kill themselves with this stuff, that is their choice. You can’t save them. They had the option of believing good information backed by research and crazy garblygook. They chose crazy. I do feel bad for them, but as long as they stay home with this and don’t strain the healthcare system or spread the disease, they have the right to injest whatever toxic substances they want to. I can’t get that worked up about it. I feel the same way about helmet laws. If people really, really want to do stupid things and kill themselves, I’m not sure it worth the battle to stand in their way. Of course, if they don’t quaranteen post-infection, that is different.
Cameron
@Bobby Thomson: I think ivermectin and HCQ should be available over the counter to anybody age 18+. They can treat themselves at home and leave health care workers alone.
Steeplejack (phone)
@James E Powell:
Can’t remember which thread, but you said you liked Nordic noir. You might check out the MHz Choice channel on Amazon Prime. Lots of European crime, mystery and detective shows. Recommendations on request. It’s $7.99 a month after the free trial, and I think there might be a lower annual rate.
James E Powell
@Steeplejack (phone):
Thanks for the rec. I will definitely give it a look.
sab
@WaterGirl: I was chatting with a neighboring grandmother who was out with her toddler grandson. She volunteered that she hates kids having to wear masks, and they are making too much out of Covid because she had had it and she is fine.
So now she is on my shun list. Almost 700,000 people dead, hoaspitals clogged, and it’s no big deal because she didn’t die or get put on a ventilator. Grr.
Roger Moore
@Chief Oshkosh:
Even if denying ant-vaxxers medical care were ethical, they are still capable of hurting vaccinated people with their behavior. They can still cause breakthrough infections among the vaccinated, and they serve as incubators for more dangerous mutations. We vaccinate everyone who is medically eligible for vaccination as much for our safety as for theirs.
Roger Moore
@Scout211:
Looking at the numbers, California (56.7% fully vaccinated, 17.3% partially vaccinated, 75.9% at least some vaccination) still isn’t that far ahead of Florida (56.7% fully vaccinated, 15.3% partially vaccinated, 72.0% at least some vaccination) in terms of vaccinations. Yes, we’re doing better in terms of both partial and full vaccination, but Florida isn’t a real laggard like Mississippi or something; they’re actually above the national average in both partial and full vaccination. The biggest difference is that California is taking reasonable public health measures, while Florida is deliberately avoiding them.
cain
@Anotherlurker:
I would say that these people are the ‘red shirts’ of star trek of life.
The Pale Scot
@Chief Oshkosh:
It’s the only way to be sure. But to avoid civil strife I suggest antivax treatment centers. Horse paste has to be a lot cheaper than real ICU treatment. They’re insisting that the ventilators are the cause so they don’t need those either. Sounds like a big money saver now and down the line
MomSense
@WaterGirl:
I don’t think so.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
Suspect that has more to do with the skewing of percentage of total population vaccinated caused by the python swallowed a piglet bump in a graph of the sheer number of 65 and overs in Florida, which last I saw were at or over 99% vaccinated.
smith
@Roger Moore: Or compare Florida to Illinois: the latter actually has a lower percentage of its population fully vaccinated than the former, but the peak per capita rolling average case rate for the delta surge in Florida was more than three times that in Illinois, and the death rate (which is still climbing in FL) is more than six times as high in Florida. The whole complex of mitigation efforts that kick in when you take covid seriously have a real impact above and beyond those of vaccination alone.
Wvng
@Roger Moore: I don’t see any reason, other than possibly “family” biology of coronaviruses, to not anticipate a variant(s) that elude immunity from current vaccines. The selective pressure would seem to be all in that direction as the population of the fully vaccinated grows and the fields in which the currently circulating variants can grow become unwelcoming. As Malcolm said, nature finds a way.
The Pale Scot
@Roger Moore:
I’ve bought those and tried to wear them, but my lungs are apparently a critical part of my internal cooling system. Compounded by Florida’s idea of AC leaves much to be desired ITO of this Northerner. It really would have to be below 60F (and me wearing shorts) for me to able to wear one for any period of time. Flew up to NJ for a work thing, was ecstatic for the chance to go to some museums in NYC, the day I arrived NYC reinstituted mask mandates, so no joy for that. Then the town flooded and the bars I wanted to go to got trashed. Cue Basil Faulty raising his fist to the sky
Ken
Speaking of health care workers… I just saw an ad with an actor playing a nurse, and talking about how much stress she was under because of the pandemic. Which is all well and good, except the ad was for Hempvana. I realize the stuff doesn’t contain a detectable amount of THC, CBD, or other cannabinoids, but still…
Anomalous Cowherd
@different-church-lady:
Can we start calling it FashBook (or FascBook) now? Asking for a friend…
Urza
These studies about the antibodies are a bit sketchy for public consumption. There’s like 3 or 4 different types of antibodies and the tests are only checking for 1. They’re for short term and long term resistance. The short term aren’t showing up in about 1/3, but the long term antibodies for those checked in that category are still looking good.
My not scientist, but internet studied opinion of that is, those people are more likely to be reinfected and possibly have breakthrough infections, but they are still protected.
Brachiator
@WaterGirl:
Late reply. Absolutely no problem.
Nutmeg again
@marcopolo: I’ll be brutally honest (and I know this makes me sound like a shitheel) but when I see these knuckleheads boasting about their stupidity and recalcitrance, like it’s some kind of red badge of courage, I’m ready for them to get sick and die. Awful, I know. But if the death of wives, husbands, and other close relatives doesn’t convince them, not much will. I don’t want to share space with people so wilfully awful.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The anti-vaccers and the press reminds of the famous Bunker scene in Downfall were Hilter is going on about how Stiener and his army is going save us and the Generals looking at each nervously.
dopey-o
@FlyingToaster:
It is pointless to engage these people. They are not interested in facts. Their ‘stance’ is vice signaling. Arendt and Orwell talk about the lies told on Monday that can be contradicted on Wednesday. Their Orange God lies to demonstrate his power, and they want to be just like their Hero. They are fascists.
dr. luba
@Roger Moore: I’ve read that Florida is a bit of an anomaly because of 1) the snowbird population which was vaccinated in Florida but are not there now and 2) vaccine tourism. These may both skew the vaccination figures becasue they are, I believe, # of people vaccinated / # of state residents.
Bonnie
Can you imagine what this country would look like today if we had this many anti-vaxxers when the Salk vaccine came into being. We would still have a lot of crippled people (adults and children) in this country. While we don’t have a tremendous number of physically crippled people today, we seem to have way too many mentally crippled people. What a stupid country America has become.
bnateAZ
I wish CNN and their ilk would go into the Ozarks and other places and find vaccinated people. There are tens of thousands of people vaccinated across the South. Tell their stories. Air their grievances. Stop going on hillbilly expeditions. It’s low hanging fruit.
Richard
@SpaceUnit:
I don’t care anymore. I am vaccinated, and while they are dithering about boosters, i went and did that. I am an old man in a wheelchair and i figure i might have another 10 years to participate in my community.
If people want to do this mass hysteria about vaccines, it is not my problem. I am very disappointed with my society.
Richard
@SpaceUnit:
I don’t care anymore. I am vaccinated, and while they are dithering about boosters, i went and did that. I am an old man in a wheelchair and i figure i might have another 10 years to participate in my community.
If people want to do this mass hysteria about vaccines, it is not my problem. I am very disappointed with my society.
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I don’t feel as guilty anymore. Things are not good. Some of these people are trying to kill us. How else am i to understand them?
I have tried to understand their religion. I still see them as people, but they are trying to kill us. I don’t think they are good people.
They lie all the time. They have these absurd preachers. They mistreat their children, old people, women, you name it, they mistreat it. I don’t know why we have to listen to them.
Sloane Ranger
In the UK we used to have a kids TV programme called Horrible History. It had a regular segment called Historical Hospital, where modern people were treated by doctors from different historical periods using the techniques of the time.
I suggest we designate some clinics as Historical hospitals and allow people to choose whether to be treated there or at regular hospitals. Horsepaste and bleach will fit in easily with toads blood and drinking urine.
Hamlet
@Mo MacArbie: I’ve been getting those too. I’m a little frightened by the idea that Facebook itself is pushing right wing crap. I always assumed that they were happy to take money to push crazy, but pushing that stuff to me on there own is likely to make me spend less time on Facebook, costing them money. If they are willing to push that stuff even though it will hurt their bottom line, they must have another reason for pushing it. No reason I can think of isn’t terrifying to me.