The Last Covid-19 Megathread v. Hopefully...

[Xorkoth]

Still can't believe they recommended vaccinating little kids for the seemingly sole purpose of giving the parents some peace of mind...

I agree with that, for sure. Kids have never been shown to have any sort of significant risk from covid, and the vaccines don't do much against omicron transmission, if anything. If I had a kid, I wouldn't be getting them vaccinated.

Though my girlfriend would... she still wears a mask everywhere and will probably try to make me get a 2nd booster if the CDC recommends it It's weird, she was anti-vaxx leading up to covid, very anti-vax. But she got so scared of covid that she became pro vax, decided to catch up on all the vaccines she never got (which is good because she had zero, her parents were super anti-vax). Basically she did the exact opposite of a lot of people. She did a bunch of research and concluded that her parents were idiots and that she should have been vaccinated. She got whooping cough twice in her life, once as a kid and once as an adult, and it damaged her lungs for life after she got it as a kid.

I feel bad for her, she bought the fear hook, line and sinker. She was still terrified after getting vaccinated, too. At least she doesn't still try to make me live in fear though, I'll give her that.

 

[Xorkoth]

and every new and improved mutation, is supposed to be worse than the last.....always....

I dunno, omicron has been widely reported since the beginning as being less dangerous than previous variants. Just more transmissible.

 

[Buzz Lightbeer]

Without comment

@chinup

 

[Deleted member 521610]

jeffrey sachs is a dirty commie chinese spy lock him up and throw away the key for treason

 

[Neuroborean]

It's weird, she was anti-vaxx leading up to covid, very anti-vax. But she got so scared of covid that she became pro vax, decided to catch up on all the vaccines she never got (which is good because she had zero, her parents were super anti-vax). Basically she did the exact opposite of a lot of people. She did a bunch of research and concluded that her parents were idiots and that she should have been vaccinated.

She was not very "anti-vaxx" to begin with, no one that really knows what the vaccines are change their view so easily
in my case I'm risk group, I have a chronic disease. I got covid without any jab, got 3 bad days, the worst symptom: headache. In less than a week I'm perfectly fine. I knew what to take cause I researched enough: quercetin +zinc, artemisia annua, NAC, Vit D, black seed oil, copaiba oil (b-caryophyllene).
being "anti-vaxx" is a misleading word because there's people who inform themselves and people who don't and generally in the TV and media, and the stupid "pro-science" circles they equate "anti-vaxx" with someone who just dislikes the vaccines for no reason or "denies science" which is ridiculous cause in my circle of non-vaccinated people no one has read more scientific papers than the anti-vaxx people.

 

[Electrum1]

She was not very "anti-vaxx" to begin with, no one that really knows what the vaccines are change their view so easily
in my case I'm risk group, I have a chronic disease. I got covid without any jab, got 3 bad days, the worst symptom: headache. In less than a week I'm perfectly fine. I knew what to take cause I researched enough: quercetin +zinc, artemisia annua, NAC, Vit D, black seed oil, copaiba oil (b-caryophyllene).
being "anti-vaxx" is a misleading word because there's people who inform themselves and people who don't and generally in the TV and media, and the stupid "pro-science" circles they equate "anti-vaxx" with someone who just dislikes the vaccines for no reason or "denies science" which is ridiculous cause in my circle of non-vaccinated people no one has read more scientific papers than the anti-vaxx people.

So you're feeling better now? Didn't you say your girlfriend or somebody got it too? How are they doing?

 

[Jabberwocky]

Without comment

@chinup

an economist is less qualified than me to comment on this, regardless of professor status,

also... from his wikipedia article 'He has been criticized for his views on economics and apologia for China.'

i think a leak from the WIV is possible. from a US biolab, well, have you got any evidence other than this tweet?

 

[Neuroborean]

So you're feeling better now? Didn't you say your girlfriend or somebody got it too? How are they doing?

We are quite allright, I have a sense of light dread, like I had been beaten by someone a couple days ago, not so much motivation and some fatigue that it's mostly countered by kratom or coffee. There's some strange feeling of heat (inflammation probably) in the body and some strange "sad spacyness" that remains.

Supposedly she should had been better than me but she has a higher corporal mass index and she doesn't eat as healthy and varied as I do, also, she probably got the main "straight infection" with higher viral load so it was a bit worse for her (except for the headache that was quite long-lasting for me, +3 days).

Thanks for asking,

 

[Jabberwocky]

no one that really knows what the vaccines are change their view so easily

so what are vaccines, and why do you think you really know?

 

[Buzz Lightbeer]

from his wikipedia article 'He has been criticized for his views on economics and apologia for China.'

They'll say that about anyone these days.
He's obviously quite left leaning, his latest 'article' (https://www.jeffsachs.org/newspaper-articles/m6rb2a5tskpcxzesjk8hhzf96zh7w7)

Fyi I clicked on those links that were referenced to explain "his views on economics and apologia for China.
Let me reference his "crimes" here:

Spoiler

First one is a book, with this description

An informed and excoriating attack on the tragic waste, futility, and hubris of the West's efforts to date to improve the lot of the so-called developing world, with constructive suggestions on how to move forward.

Second one an article:

The most recent example of a Westerner running amok in Africa appears to be the celebrity-economist Jeffrey Sachs and his $120 million effort to end extreme poverty there. Nina Munk documents in her book The Idealist (see Penta Sept. 12) how, among other things, Sachs' Millennium Villages Project poured $2.5 million over three years into a sparsely populated community of nomadic camel herders in Dertu, Kenya, and trumpeted its success.

In actual fact, the charity's paid-for latrines became clogged and overflowing, the dormitories it erected quickly fell into disrepair, and the livestock market it built ignored local nomadic customs and was closed within a few months. An incensed Dertu citizen filed a 15-point written complaint against Sachs's operation, claiming it "created dependence" and that "the project is supposed to be bottom top approached but it is visa [sic] versa."

Last one is about his views on China:

China is not the source of our economic problems -- corporate greed is | CNN

Jeffrey Sachs writes that China is being made a scapegoat for rising inequality in the US. Instead of blaming China for market competition, we should be taxing the soaring corporate profits of our own multinational corporations and using the revenues to help working-class households.

edition.cnn.com

I think you can see my point, don't think he deserved those things on the introduction of his wiki page, but hey, once you say something good about China you're forever a China apologist. And don't even try to help some Africans! I'm joking, a little

i think a leak from the WIV is possible. from a US biolab, well, have you got any evidence other than this tweet?

No, that's why I said "no comment". What is the WIV if I may ask?
I have no evidence.

For some reason I thought I saw you say that it was extremely unlikely it could be a virus fabricated by humans.

All of this got flagged as a big conspiracy from the start, I don't think we'll ever know.

 

[Neuroborean]

so what are vaccines, and why do you think you really know?

You already know that I'm not very interested in wasting my time discussing with you about those matters. In anycase it would take me so incredibly long to pinpoint everything that is wrong with this stuff using proper sources that we wouldn't finish in 2024. If you trust those guys of Pfizer, Moderna and Astra-Zeneca, it's up to you. If you want to trust the 2-proline group that supposedly protects you from the deleterious effects of the spike protein, it's also up to you.
Things are much more complicated than it seems.
I already did a lot of work and exposed everything in a telegram group I have and share the information with some scientists I know (Ph.D/proffessor level).
Won't do that effort again just because you want to screw over for ego-driven reasons. Excuse me.

 

[Jabberwocky]

hat's why I said "no comment". What is the WIV if I may ask?
I have no evidence.

WIV is the wuhan institute or virology. if you look at the research they were doing on coronaviruses in civets (which have weirdly similar respiratory systems to us) in 2018/19, its fucking spooky given what came to pass. its not a smoking gun but its highly coincidental if its not a lab leak.

You already know that I'm not very interested in wasting my time discussing with you about those matters.

yes i know you aren't interested in evidencing your claims and shouldn't have asked. btw. i am a phd, did 2 post docs, and am a professional in life sciences. i find your line that you shared these with phds/professors telling, i'm sure if they gushed at how brilliant your findings were, you'd have said. but either way. its an appeal to authority. just copy/paste the findings you posted to your telegram group (a widely respected platform for sharing academic knowledge) or shut up about it.

i think its clear from your post that you are not a phd or professor in life sciences otherwise you wouldn't reference others for your appeal to authority. i could have guessed that already. but it means that, sorry to be blunt, you don't know about vaccines. neither do i really, its not my area, but i have training in assessing evidence (its required to be a research scientist) and so far the evidence for vaccines, be it MMR, BCG, TDAP, HPV, COVID19, whatever.... is overwhelming.

so you don't 'know' - you have done some reading and think that's enough. all it shows is how little you understand actual research.

 

[Neuroborean]

WIV is the wuhan institute or virology. if you look at the research they were doing on coronaviruses in civets (which have weirdly similar respiratory systems to us) in 2018/19, its fucking spooky given what came to pass. its not a smoking gun but its highly coincidental if its not a lab leak.



yes i know you aren't interested in evidencing your claims and shouldn't have asked. btw. i am a phd, did 2 post docs, and am a professional in life sciences. i find your line that you shared these with phds/professors telling, i'm sure if they gushed at how brilliant your findings were, you'd have said. but either way. its an appeal to authority. just copy/paste the findings you posted to your telegram group (a widely respected platform for sharing academic knowledge) or shut up about it.

i think its clear from your post that you are not a phd or professor in life sciences otherwise you wouldn't reference others for your appeal to authority. i could have guessed that already. but it means that, sorry to be blunt, you don't know about vaccines. neither do i really, its not my area, but i have training in assessing evidence (its required to be a research scientist) and so far the evidence for vaccines, be it MMRI, BCG, TDAP, HPV, COVID19, whatever.... is overwhelming.

so you don't 'know' - you have done some reading and think that's enough. all it shows is how little you undYou erstand actual research.

You have an horrible attitude,
seems so arrogant to me, to the point that, if I read another arrogant comment of yours I see the easiest and happiest way of clicking the ignore button.
No one needs to be a Ph.D to understand science and come to conclusions, basically because LOGIC is first to everything else and reason is universal.
I just don't want to share anything with you because your attitude sucks.

 

[Mr. Krinkle]

I dunno, omicron has been widely reported since the beginning as being less dangerous than previous variants. Just more transmissible.

Let’s clear up one misconception. Viruses aren’t like deodorant on your armpit or a fart in a room. They don’t necessarily automatically get weaker over time. In fact, often it’s quite the opposite. Mutations and natural selection can help subsequent versions of a virus get stronger and stronger in different ways, which seems to be happening with the Covid-19 coronavirus. And Eric Topol, MD, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, has called the currently spreading version, the Omicron sub-variant BA.5, “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”


Yeah, calling the BA.5 the worst version is like calling The Last Knight the worst Transformers movie or Police Academy: Mission to Moscow the worst of the Police Academy films. It’s the worst version of what’s been getting progressively worse, and you never know when another even worse version will emerge. Topol used the “worst” word in a Substack post entitled “The BA.5 story” that he linked to in the following tweet:


Spoiler alert. “The BA.5 story” ain’t a positive one for the U.S. right now, unless many more people and politicians can somehow change the “let’s pretend that it’s over and not around anymore” approach to the pandemic, which may work with zits but doesn’t work with Covid-19. As you can see, Topol wondered on the tweet why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not been issuing more warnings about the Omicron BA.5 subvariant of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

 

[Neuroborean]

Let’s clear up one misconception. Viruses aren’t like deodorant on your armpit or a fart in a room. They don’t necessarily automatically get weaker over time. In fact, often it’s quite the opposite. Mutations and natural selection can help subsequent versions of a virus get stronger and stronger in different ways, which seems to be happening with the Covid-19 coronavirus. And Eric Topol, MD, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, has called the currently spreading version, the Omicron sub-variant BA.5, “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”


Yeah, calling the BA.5 the worst version is like calling The Last Knight the worst Transformers movie or Police Academy: Mission to Moscow the worst of the Police Academy films. It’s the worst version of what’s been getting progressively worse, and you never know when another even worse version will emerge. Topol used the “worst” word in a Substack post entitled “The BA.5 story” that he linked to in the following tweet:


Spoiler alert. “The BA.5 story” ain’t a positive one for the U.S. right now, unless many more people and politicians can somehow change the “let’s pretend that it’s over and not around anymore” approach to the pandemic, which may work with zits but doesn’t work with Covid-19. As you can see, Topol wondered on the tweet why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not been issuing more warnings about the Omicron BA.5 subvariant of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

To say it's the "worst" is, factually, scaremongering. Mainly because we don't need to hear if it's worst or better since the actual outcomes really happen. If they looked into the mutations and they foresaw that it can cause major damage in terms of hospitalizations and deaths then well, but it's probably not the case.
if it's more transmissible doesn't mean so much taking account that the amount of hospitalized people to infected people ratio was incredibly low in the omicron wave compared to other waves. So then, what's the problem?
a bit higher transmissible rate will overwhelm hospitals, this time?
Because of what?

What about what people is doing to learn about the virus? the better early treatments, the better outcomes, the supposedly effective vaccines? even with that it's going to be "the worst"? They are so incredibly boring at this point.

 

[Mr. Krinkle]

"One way to deal with this immune escape subvariant is to update the Covid-19 vaccines to include mRNA for the BA.5 subvariant spike protein. But as Topol alluded to in his Substack post, there are several obstacles. First of all, Moderna and Pfizer have been focusing on updating the vaccines to account for the earliest Omicron variants, which Topol had pointed out were already very different from the BA.5. By the time these early Omicron-updated vaccines are available in the late Summer, early Fall, there could very well be a new subvariant, even more different than the BA.5. Rather than staying proactive and ahead of the curve, anticipating what may happen in the near future, the U.S. public health response had frequently been reactive. That is wait for it, wait for it, wait until it happens and then explain it away by saying something like, “oh, we didn’t expect this variant to arise,” which is kind of what happened with the Delta and Omicron surges."

that's from the same article


"immune escape"

that's what they call it now

 

[Electrum1]

What I know, is that I don't need a peer reviewed scientific paper to confirm that I'm seeing 3x vaxxed people I know catch Covid more often than unvaxxed people that I know

 

[Neuroborean]

"One way to deal with this immune escape subvariant is to update the Covid-19 vaccines to include mRNA for the BA.5 subvariant spike protein. But as Topol alluded to in his Substack post, there are several obstacles. First of all, Moderna and Pfizer have been focusing on updating the vaccines to account for the earliest Omicron variants, which Topol had pointed out were already very different from the BA.5. By the time these early Omicron-updated vaccines are available in the late Summer, early Fall, there could very well be a new subvariant, even more different than the BA.5. Rather than staying proactive and ahead of the curve, anticipating what may happen in the near future, the U.S. public health response had frequently been reactive. That is wait for it, wait for it, wait until it happens and then explain it away by saying something like, “oh, we didn’t expect this variant to arise,” which is kind of what happened with the Delta and Omicron surges."

that's from the same article


"immune escape"

that's what they call it now

Viruses have done that forever, it's not any type of special trait that challenges science or something like that.
They want to make news out of everything.
And when they say "we didn't expect this variant to arise" neither with Delta and Omicron (!!!), it's utterly grotesque.

So they didn't expect viruses to do what normally viruses do?
why the heck would covid be any different? viruses mutate to escaping immunity OHH SURPRISE!!! WHAT AN UNEXPECTED OUTCOME!!
They could easily see that the SPIKE PROTEIN of the virus has high mutability and the variants have established since 2021, so they expected not to do now, because of what exactly?
it's like those scientists don't want to recognize they don't have total control over the virus/nature.

That's the reason why pharma get money with the Flu vaccine....

 

[thujone]

yes i know you aren't interested in evidencing your claims and shouldn't have asked. btw. i am a phd, did 2 post docs, and am a professional in life sciences. i find your line that you shared these with phds/professors telling, i'm sure if they gushed at how brilliant your findings were, you'd have said. but either way. its an appeal to authority. just copy/paste the findings you posted to your telegram group (a widely respected platform for sharing academic knowledge) or shut up about it.

i think its clear from your post that you are not a phd or professor in life sciences otherwise you wouldn't reference others for your appeal to authority. i could have guessed that already. but it means that, sorry to be blunt, you don't know about vaccines. neither do i really, its not my area, but i have training in assessing evidence (its required to be a research scientist) and so far the evidence for vaccines, be it MMR, BCG, TDAP, HPV, COVID19, whatever.... is overwhelming.

so you don't 'know' - you have done some reading and think that's enough. all it shows is how little you understand actual research.

does it matter what your credentials are if you can't convince the listener to trust you?

trust is what has been lost during this COVID hysteria. Medical ethics were thrown out the window, and with it, so has trust in people like doctors of life sciences.

the more that [medical] doctors, and related, talk down to the people they ostensibly serve and treat us like our concerns don't even matter, the more trust is lost.

between the profit motives of the healthcare industry and the politicization of healthcare through arrogant and imposing public health bureaucracies, it has never been harder to believe that anyone still in this industry really gives a shit about helping people.

trust is kind of important when you need to convince people that the risk of serious side-effects outweighs the risks of getting sick... especially when we have already seen you don't have good data on the risks of getting sick, and that you don't have good data on a novel type of medicine that was rushed through a short trial.

 

[Jabberwocky]

does it matter what your credentials are if you can't convince the listener to trust you?

nope.

which is why people bringing up 'a phd i know' or whatever without providing any evidence is not compelling.

the nice thing about scientific debates is that actually, to a large extent, trust is not required if people are willing to engage with intellectual honesty and provide citations for their claims. its only when people refuse to provide citations and defer to logical fallacies that trust is required, and in that case, it is not merited.