Coronavirus. The n(in)th sequel.

[Drakle]

You (paraphrased) said that 'one does not cause harm', while I was talking about forcing people to take the vaccine. So, saying 'no one denies it and critising them is okay' is not really the same thing we were talking about. But also, the harms that have been acknowledged here are not the scope of the harms that are being expressed.

We're all suffering from misinformation. After that, it's just successful curation, bias, and luck in whether that information is processed usefully. Some will be right for the wrong reasons and we'll also be wrong for wrong reasons.
The hesitant crowd will be alert to when the mandate-arguer is wrong, and the more wrong they are, the more damage is done. We all accuse each other of being 'anti-science', while not acknowledging the good science. That, along with perceptive bias, actually cements the opinion that "they" are anti-science. Nevermind the failure of factoring in human behaviour.

Bad arguments forcing people to receive the vaccine will cause their own hesitancy. We don't have anti-vaxxers here, so the best I can do on CFC is push back on what I see to be the problem.

That's not the problem, it's a problem. If we're going to ever increasingly silo debate as 'anti-vaxxer rhetoric', then what happens is that the people who know that it's not 'anti-vax' learn that we actually don't know what we are talking about. The debate has to happen. Like I said, a lot of damage is done when positions are mischaracterized. This means that we know that there are parts of the pro-mandate crowd that will actually biasedly ignore concerns, and they'll socially pressure us into relabeling concerns as 'antivax'. "Antivax" is very far away on whatever spectrum we're putting "vaccine mandaters" onto, and so people literally on this thread (without significant pushback) continually relabelling things as 'antivax' is going to be emblematic of the problem.

I don't weight them equally, it's definitely going to be on a matrix. And yeah, I'm also complaining about opposing measures that would speed up the end of the pandemic. Er, maybe not 'opposing', I'm more 'demanding more', but ehn.

This is silly, completely unserious thinking. You flatten out and equivocate everything. You might as well, say, everybody commits crime. Some of it is stealing movies online, and some of its murder. Oh well. Basically the same.

All this talk about debate and reason, runs headlong into the problem that not everybody is an enlightened Centrist like you, or actually willing to change their mind. We have quite a few completely unserious bad faith debaters on this forum. Or, go look through some of the Herman Cain awardees. Do you really think the Prayer Warriors or screaming conspiracists are going to be convinced by your equivocating paragraphs?

Your path of equivocating is the current US situation until recently, and thus 2000 people are dying every day.

My proposed path doesn't have that happen, and the anti vaxxers will get over their hysteria pretty quick when they realise they aren't magnetic.

Aka, unironically this

 

[El_Machinae]

This is silly, completely unserious thinking. You flatten out and equivocate everything.

I equivocate nothing, it's all factor analysis.

You would be better served by learning how to acknowledge good points rather than being wrong about other people's intentions.

Oh, and continue to supply good graphs. I've literally pasted your work elsewhere, since a good graph is a convenient rebuttal

My proposed path doesn't have that happen, and the anti vaxxers will get over their hysteria pretty quick when they realise they aren't magnetic.

You are so terribly wrong (unserious thinking?). Not about the 'magnetic', but about mischaracterizing the concern. Literally every deeply vaccine-hesitant person I know personally knows someone who experienced 'serious' side-effects shortly after getting the injection. Not 'heard of someone who knows a guy', but literally knows someone. That's an incredible amount of observation bias on their part. Coupled on top of that, everyone knows that side-effects are seriously under-reported.

There's a mile of difference between the person who knows someone who suffered a stroke shortly after the injection and the Drs that claim that the NLPs interact with 5G to read your emotions. We can repeatedly do the analysis to say "oh, it probably didn't cause your stroke", but you'll forever have people who wonder if you forced them to have one. And you'll have people who are certain that you did, and also know that you didn't support enough precautions to protect them.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Vaccination status is not at all the same as the answers to your 6 questions. One's vaccination status can impact hundreds of others. The other questions have little or no impact on anyone but the answerer. (STDs can)

Change covid pandemic to Ebola outbreak and would your interest in knowing my situation change if we were going to meet?

Seeing discrimination based on any of those impacts many people.

Vaccination status is not significantly more relevant to those who are already vaccinated than whether a person is sick broadly. You don't WANT COVID if you're vaccinated, but the numbers do not seem to support partitioning unvaccinated away from vaccinated as a threat to the latter. Absent that justification, it's hard to justify forcing vaccination status.

Change covid pandemic to Ebola outbreak and would your interest in knowing my situation change if we were going to meet?

That depends, can I get a vaccine for ebola that takes its threat to me down to 1 in millions? While we're at it, can we also reduce the baseline risk of ebola by > 10x so it's more comparable to COVID ?

 

[Takhisis]

I'm keeping a list of things I got wrong about covid. It's not insignificant at this point, and I feel like I'm still doing better than most people.

Yes, but, to quote Pastor Richards in Pressing Issues (Vice City Public Radio, original air date 1986) ‘most people are idiots’.

 

[bernie14]

Yes, but, to quote Pastor Richards in Pressing Issues (Vice City Public Radio, original air date 1986) ‘most people are idiots’.

Maybe we should sterilize them!

 

[uppi]

Updating Covid-19 Vaccines for the Delta Variant

Scientists areworking to adapt the mRNA platform underlying some vaccines to target specific versions of the virus



Nice graphic;

This got me wondering:

• Why is this still under development? I would have thought that it should not be too hard to swap a few mutations.
• If they wound mix different strains in the same vaccine, would this result in better or worse protection against different variants?

 

[Birdjaguar]

@uppi graphic source:

Source: Matthew Johnson, Duke University

 

[Arwon]

I don’t think I can get syphilis from standing next to my co-worker for ten minutes.

Not with that attitude

 

[Snowygerry]

[...]
Literally every deeply vaccine-hesitant person I know personally knows someone who experienced 'serious' side-effects shortly after getting the injection. Not 'heard of someone who knows a guy', but literally knows someone. That's an incredible amount of observation bias on their part. Coupled on top of that, everyone knows that side-effects are seriously under-reported.

That's strange - because it can't account for the regional differences we're seeing in willingness to be vaccinated, it can hardly be people in Brussels are more worried of having a stroke than the people in Flanders for example, or those in France than those in Belgium.

The vaccines are the same and so is the risk of side-effects.

Something less objective must be in play.

 

[EnglishEdward]

That's strange - because it can't account for the regional differences we're seeing in willingness to be vaccinated, it can hardly be people in Brussels are more worried of having a stroke than the people in Flanders for example, or those in France than those in Belgium.

The vaccines are the same and so is the risk of side-effects.

Something less objective must be in play.

Quite so.

Let us consider possible factors:

(a) distrust of authority (e.g. previous experimentalism)

(b) distanced from authority (e.g. different native language/religion)

(c) sense of community via sense of individualism

(d) influence of social media thought bubbling

(e) selective misinformation for commercial and political purposes

 

[amadeus]

France and Germany are backing the Chinese communists' chief propagandist at the WHO (Tedros) for another term.

 

[El_Machinae]

Something less objective must be in play.

Drakle nailed it. The evangelical crowd has a deeply poisoned well in some places. They literally tell each other Florida was doing a good job

An entire culture devoted to eroding knowledge and proselytizing. Plus the QAnon infection.

The observation bias is deep. And Boomers have health issues already. But that bias will be on top of any regular actual issues we're not expecting.

I find the spread of people who know someone with long covid and those who know people who had "side-effects" really has a predictable bias factor.

But in Canada, we also have minorities that are going to be quite resentful due to the same perception biases, even if my political opponents are politically on their side, if not practically.

This got me wondering:

• Why is this still under development? I would have thought that it should not be too hard to swap a few mutations.
• If they wound mix different strains in the same vaccine, would this result in better or worse protection against different variants?

I wouldn't know, but I think we should have expectations. Any new variant will have a locus, and we will need many fewer vaccines to snuff or slow a variant if we have a targeted technology and distribution to where it's smoldering rather than waiting to update my booster to stave off a conflagration. All successfully prevented pandemics look like over-reaction in retrospect, that's just how the math works.

We're out of Operation Warp Speed, but we'd already started Phase III by now against the original strain last year, so the fact that we're not using boosters specifically against Delta will have reasons that are political/economic rather than scientific (I suspect).

 

[Gorbles]

https://twitter.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1441804956399378445

Canadian study that found an absurdly high myocarditis rate of 1 in 1000 among ppl getting mRNA vaccines was completely wrong, because study authors reported that 32,000 doses had been given, when in fact 800,000 had. They were only off by 25fold.

Notably, the study was left up long enough to have an impact, and apparently no correction was issued - just a retraction of the original piece

 

[Takhisis]

What the heck is wrong with the Sputnik V vaccine?

On the one hand, we know that it's effective to some significant degree because it helped slow the virus and slowly bring the death rate down (even if we account for miscounting). But, on the other hand, first international organisations refuse to fully certify it and now we find out that the Argentine Congress is asking the Gamaleya Institute for information and the Institute has been refusing to answer since June, saying that the information requested of it is not within its reach.

 

[thetrooper]

^
You guys definitely played the wrong ball.

 

[amadeus]

Also, they named it after an invention that really didn’t do anything. I thought the ‘V’ in Sputnik V was a Roman numeral 5, but it’s actually just a ‘V’.

They’ve also introduced Sputnik Light, which is a single-dose booster with fewer calories. I’m waiting for Sputnik Dry and Sputnik Extra Dry.

 

[Takhisis]

^
You guys definitely played the wrong ball.

Well, yes, half the questions are something about ‘why the crap aren't you giving us the vaccines we've already paid for?’ ‘where are the second-component doses you're withholding?’ and so on.

Russia explicitly said something like ‘yes, you pay, we'll send them sometime and whatever component we can spare you’ even as the deal was signed was already a bad sign, but even by those standards they've underperformed.

 

[Takhisis]

Also, they named it after an invention that really didn’t do anything. I thought the ‘V’ in Sputnik V was a Roman numeral 5, but it’s actually just a ‘V’.

They’ve also introduced Sputnik Light, which is a single-dose booster with fewer calories. I’m waiting for Sputnik Dry and Sputnik Extra Dry.

The V is for Victory against Covid.

 

[thetrooper]

Victory not vengeance

 

[El_Machinae]

It was your last warning that the lizards are prepping you mammals for dinner.