Thank God for big drug companies. If it weren’t for antibiotics, I wouldn’t be alive today. If it weren’t for clotting meds, my son wouldn’t be alive today. I don’t sympathize with anti-vaxx people at all. They are putting others in danger.
Five more people died of COVID in MAINE since yesterday. Ages one 40s, one 50s, one 70s, two over 80. As one healthcare professional wrote, “It gets harder, to me, because most of these losses could have been prevented. I hope when people choose whether or not to be vaccinated, they think about their family, friends, co-workers, and how it impacts everyone if they get sick or pass away.”
Re: vaccines and studies, the word studies might be misleading. There have never been side effects to any vaccine that presented two months after administration AFAIK, see Eric Topol’s twitter feed.
That, coupled with the fact that 300+ million people have been treated with the vaccines to date (with some proportion administered over one year ago), suggest we would have seen all side effects at this point, even rare ones.
Without drug companies and today’s covid vaccines, our daily lives would still be significantly limited, some peoples’ ability to earn a living curtailed, and the death toll much higher than the already high level it’s currently at.
I hope a variant doesn’t develop that evades vaccines. If that variant does develop, it will most likely occur in an unvaccinated person.
As long as the vaccines are under an Emergency Use Authorization AND the feds/states have not relieved employers from any liability due to required vaccines, it makes perfect business sense that those employers outside of the health care industry would be reluctant to mandate vaccines.
OTOH, CA workplace regulators will require the non-vaccinated to be masked at work.
Not sure why you are responding directly to me, since my post was not about whether vaccine mandates make good business sense.
My post expressed puzzlement that some employers are apparently not requiring unvaccinated workers to mask; that seems like a poor business decision, at least at this stage in the pandemic.
I am aware Cal/OSHA will continue to require unvaccinated workers to mask (but will very soon lift the masking requirement for vaccinated workers). Based on posts in this thread and elsewhere, however, apparently other state regulators are taking a different approach, or maybe employers are just ignoring the rules.
Hopefully, California employers will require their employees to show proof of vaccination before allowing them to go maskless. That doesn’t seem burdensome, and makes good business sense. It also may encourage some hesitant or unmotivated employees to get vaccinated, as they see their colleagues enjoying a mask-free workday.
This is the prevailing attitude my medical boy and his cohorts have too.
On the one hand folks are mainly doing it to themselves and their families now vs purely drawing straws, but on the other hand it’s so needless and lives are being lost. It’s like watching people drown when life rings were thrown to them, but the people turned away.
FDA has an approval process for drugs. Need certain level of testing/data to submit for approval and if review supports approval, the drug is approved. Absent EUA, the only people who would be vaccinated right now would be those participating in clinical trials.
EUA (which I understand came about as part of legislation enacted after 9/11 and which was first used about 10-12 years ago) allows for use prior to having full FDA approval. Makes sense that in the event of an emergency, the risk/benefit calculation is different.
It may be the case that the full FDA approval process goes beyond what is necessary. But it is the process that we have in place.
And please note, none of that is stating my vaccine status. Not something I will share on a site such as this.
Someone hesitant specifically about mRNA vaccines or adenovirus vector vaccines may want to check whether the more traditional inactivated virus vaccines (Sinovac and Covaxin) can be gotten across the border in Mexico.
Interesting. I have no problem sharing - fully vaccinated and fully pro-vax here.
I’ve met folks who share my views and those who are totally opposite as well as those in between coming down on either side of the fence regarding getting it (did it with reservations or waiting longer due to X). You’re the first person I’ve “met” who openly refuses to say where they stand either IRL or online.
Of course, some of that may be due to my skimming some posts if others have already done the same on here. If so, chalk that up to not reading deeply.
On the other hand, my neighbor would be living a very fulfilling life if they thoroughly studied the side effect of the morning sickness pill. They didn’t and he was born with severe defect. And then there is Purdue. All the families with opioid addiction will have a different opinion. @MaineLonghorn if a drug saved your son’s life, does that mean all the drugs are good and can never be bad?
My point is mainly to ease off on the criticism. Although inconvenient, they may their reasons to be hesitant. No one monopolizes rightness except the righteous. The above posts in reply to my post simply proves the point. Is there a proof if you can prove negligible side effect on many people on a short term, it translates to a negligible long term effect? We simply don’t know when it comes to long term effects. It hasn’t been out long enough.
@Iglooo I am totally with you on being cautious around new drugs. Drugs have been known to have side effects much later on. However, vaccines are not drugs, and there has literally been no vaccine with side effects that happened much later (like, months after being administered). So it’s really important not to conflate drugs and vaccines. They are different.
I completely agree. The moralistic tone can be a bit much. For the “worst pandemic in 100 years” the death toll for the vast majority of Americans has been incredibly light, and people are seeing that now. Moreover, at this point, we are either at herd immunity (on average) or extremely close to it. It’s time to sit back and enjoy our good fortune with this virus.
And it would be nice too see some thanks from the most vulnerable. Despite constant insistence that the disease posed a huge risk for everyone, more than a year of data show that this has largely been a disease that affected the very elderly (75+). Yet the rest of society endured much of the costs, especially young people, who will be far more affected by the reaction to COVID than by the disease itself.
You are presuming that death is the only bad outcome? People I know in the medical world wonder what the continuing issues will be for those who have had Covid, esp since so many seem to have a difficult time kicking it totally. They wonder what issues will come up as the “youngsters” who had it age and any damage to their organs reaches a critical stage.
There may or may not be problems, but it’s definitely significant enough of a worry for them to be discussing it - and whether the system is large enough to have “room” (appointments/care) for everyone. This disease is known to affect cardiac, circulatory, respiratory, renal, and neurological systems. The more I hear and read about it the nastier is seems.
But since it “only” kills the old as you say (many medical folks would dispute that), there’s no problem? Those with vaccine side effects will be worse off than those with Covid side effects? I’m skeptical.
Umm… I don’t consider 600,000 deaths in a little over 1 year to be incredibly light. And, that was BECAUSE of the precautions - the lock downs, the masking - that bought us time to get a vaccine. Had we let this virus blow through the general population, you would have easily been looking at 1.5-2 million people in 1 year. And that’s with a very low 0.5-0.6% death rate. Had the hospitals been overcome, it would have likely been much, much worse. Don’t forget that NYC had 500-1000 deaths a day last spring before they locked down.
Because you choose to focus on the absolute number rather than the rate. Perhaps some perspective might help.
Remember the terrible flu winter of 2018-19? Neither do I. It was a mild year. But in that winter alone, 50% more kids aged 0-18 died from flu than died from COVID over the past 18 months. Over that period, 15 times as many died from car accidents and probably 20 times as many from suicide (it’s a little hard to track that number down with more precision because of the way the data are reported).
1.5 - 2.0 million dead from COVID if we had not “locked down”? Well, I am very skeptical about that number, noting that death rates in states that undertook more serious lockdowns (e.g. California) have not been appreciably different than states that did not (e.g., Florida), especially when adjusted for age. Also, despite lockdowns we have had more than 35 million cases; a conservative estimate of the number actually exposed?? At least 100 million (>30% of the population), and it could be 40%.
I doubt lockdowns made a huge difference. But you missed a bit the point of my post. It’s time for the elderly and vulnerable to display gratitude for what was done for them, not to adopt a moralistic tone that implies others are somehow not smart enough to assess the risks or are bad people for not choosing to vaccinate when we are at the cusp of herd immunity.
I definitely remember that winter. I had several coworkers with kids who were very afraid of that flu. But covid is definitely kinder to kids than adults. Nobody disputes that.
Even if states didn’t have formal lock downs, lots of businesses did. Plenty of people followed the precautions with masks and social distancing to help. Likewise, in the states with formal lockdowns, plenty of people disregarded the rules to hinder the process.
If 30% were sick and 600K died then that would be 1.8 million once everyone got it. Plus, if hospitals couldn’t treat the sick, a greater percentage would die. In addition, if the hospitals are overrun with covid patients, nobody will be able to treat the heart attacks, strokes, and accident victims.
That is just not even remotely factually accurate. The death rate for California is 141 fewer people per million than Florida. The death rate for WA state is 850 fewer people per million than Florida. Of the 25 states with the highest death rates, 17 of them are red states (and I didn’t count Michigan, which I probably should have). Yes, there are double the number of states with death rates above the median that are red (fewer restrictions) vs those that are blue.
If you compare death rates between states after July 1 2020, the top 24 out of 25 states are red.
Even in Florida, there is an appreciable difference in the death rates between red areas that did not have significant lockdowns or mask mandates, vs the highly populated blue areas that did.
Not surprising to me that different people are different and have different experiences. Unless you ask everyone you meet (IRL or online) I would expect that other people have had a similar view as I do. For you to know that, they would have to say to you, I know you haven’t asked but its something I won’t share, but that isn’t how conversations typically work. And if you do ask everyone you meet, I expect at least one person has lied.
