As Mindy Greene spent another day in the Covid intensive care unit, listening to the whirring machines that now breathed for her 42-year-old husband, Russ, she opened her phone and tapped out a message.
âWe did not get the vaccine,â she wrote on Facebook. âI read all kinds of things about the vaccine and it scared me. So I made the decision and prayed about it and got the impression that we would be ok.â
They were not.
Her husband, the father to their four children, was now hovering between life and death, tentacles of tubes spilling from his body. The patient in the room next to her husbandâs had died hours earlier. That day, July 13, Ms. Greene decided to add her voice to an unlikely group of people speaking out in the polarized national debate over vaccination: The remorseful.
âIf I had the information I have today we would have gotten vaccinated,â Ms. Greene wrote. Come what may, she hit âsend.â (...)
The recent surge of infections and hospitalizations among unvaccinated people has brought the grim realities of Covid-19 crashing home for many who thought they had skirted the pandemic. But now, with anger and fatigue piled up on all sides, the question is whether their stories can actually change any minds.
Some people hospitalized with the virus still vow not to get vaccinated, and surveys suggest that the majority of unvaccinated Americans are not budging. Doctors in Covid units say some patients still refuse to believe they are infected with anything beyond the flu.
âWe have people in the I.C.U. with Covid who are denying they have Covid,â said Dr. Matthew Sperry, a pulmonary critical care physician who has been treating Mr. Greene. âIt doesnât matter what we say.â
Covid hospitalizations in Utah have risen 35 percent over the past two weeks, and Dr. Sperry said intensive care units across the 24-hospital system where he works are 98 percent full. (...)
For one, Canada didn't have a head of state denying the seriousness of the pandemic...
True. That did not help, and frankly I would not hesitate to guesstimate that President Trump and his supporters will be ultimately held responsible for a 1/4 million or more avoidable US deaths by the time this pandemic is behind us.
Canada did have a few provincial premiers that, at least in the beginning, were not very helpful. On the bright side, some of these clowns â Barking Mad Dog Kenney in Alberta and Robert Ford in Ontario â may have a hard time getting re-elected.
Then there are the good numbers of Canadians that are strongly sympathetic to Trump and his movement. I run into numbers of those folks here in the interior of BC. In some cases â people I know well and with whom I enjoy a good relationship â I try to get the Canadian friend/neighbour in question to recognize the possible merit of some of the underlying policy concerns and at the same recognize Trump for the sleazy, racist, narcissistic socio-path he is...... but with little success. No success actually.
It wasn't about Canada. So, what's the sample size for your 'experience' w.r.t. this pandemic? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands?
Oh? Please explain how Canada and the USA are fundamentally different in this regard.
Sample size is anecdotal and small. The 'prior beliefs' are important. My prior beliefs â my bias â is rather clear. Socio-economic status strongly influences all kinds of outcomes, starting with health.
Thirty per cent of Canadians have yet to receive a vaccine. In my experience, here in the interior rural areas of BC, for those that refuse to get a vaccine, it is always a question of education. More specifically, numeracy skills. Always, no exceptions.
It wasn't about Canada. So, what's the sample size for your 'experience' w.r.t. this pandemic? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands?
Additionally, Republican states also tend to be more rural, so access to shots may still prevent some people in those areas from getting immunized.
Data collected by The New York Times showed that 34% of people are fully vaccinated in an average US county that voted for Donald Trump, whereas 45% of people are fully vaccinated in an average county that voted for Joe Biden.
Republican and rural may be correlated but the underlying variable is socio-economic status.
Thirty per cent of Canadians have yet to receive a vaccine. In my experience, here in the interior rural areas of BC, for those that refuse to get a vaccine, it is always a question of education. More specifically, numeracy skills. Always, no exceptions.
Let us cut the bull-shit and be really clear about this. Canada does have a single-payer BASIC public health care system and vaccine availability has NOT been an obstacle in Canadian rural and far north areas.
Makes me wonder if the public education system in North America is not as good as many would like to pretend it is.
Hopefully the growing ICU count in the USA will persuade some Canadians who have been reluctant to get vaccinated.
for the past 10 days or so, my sister, who is 55 and suffering from a couple of serious comorbidities, has been in the IDU
infectious disease unit at her local hospital with covid19 (the delta variant)
she was vaxxed very early this year with pfizer (she is in a care home where 85% of the residents have been vaccinated)
went from feeling sort of bad to scary low oxygen sat and bipap and antibodies in 48-72 hours
after teetering on the edge of being ventilated for days, she has been doing a little better and moved to a different wing /floor of the hosp
i hate to think what would have happened if she hadn't been vaccinated please, for the love of life, encourage people to speak with their docs and get vaccinated asap
i can't tell you how stressful this is on all involved
that is all
Your top link is borken, but the text is blatantly, obviously false.
We lost 600K people to covid before the vaccines arrived. Infection, case, and fatality rates have plummeted since. The ventilator wards are now running 95%+ unvaccinated.
The vaccines clearly work, clearly help reduce the severity of the disease. If ADE is occurring at all with the covid virus it clearly isn't at a rate high enough to offset the benefits, or all us vaxed folks would be dropping like mics at a rap battle.
The above text claims that this phenomenon can worsen over time, but I can't find any reference to such a thing happening in the literatureâand as you can imagine, ADE is a well-studied and well understood mechanism. Here, for instance, is an article describing the efforts vaccine developers were making to prevent the problem from April of last year. Which means they were aware of it, as they should be. And from the results they have clearly avoided it, at least in the vaccine candidates that actually made it to clinical use.
You also have to wonder how a historian at Rutgers who hasn't worked in the field of immunology in 30+ years uncovered this awful secret but all the people actually doing immunology for a living missed it.
If you don't want to get vaxxed and need to feed your superstition to convince yourself you're doing the right thing, well...good luck. I hope your case is mild and anybody you infect is just as lucky. But the above is quackery.
Mostly agree...based on my reading of this issue (ADE was previously brought up in a few reliable sources), it's more to do with new variants. So far, there doesnt appear to be evidence ADE is an issue with Delta.
A potentially fatal risk of coronavirus vaccines has been known for decades. Itâs called antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). In simple terms, because of the way some viral antibodies work, they may actually backfire on the person when they subsequently encounter the wild virus. Non-neutralizing antibodies may enable the virus to enter the cells or the immune response may be skewed in other ways.
This is the reason why there has never been a coronavirus vaccine before. When they tried developing coronavirus vaccines in the past, the test animals seemed to develop robust antibodies but when they were challenged with the wild virus, they got sick and died. This stopped the vaccine development in its tracks. This adverse reaction has been also seen with Dengue Virus, Ebola Virus, HIV, and RSV vaccines well.
The clinical trials for the Covid-19 vaccines2 were much too short to do proper and complete animal testing; the quick move to human trials, and to Emergency Use Authorization (not approval) of the vaccine, means that the global population will be used as the test animals in this experiment. The FDA, referring to it euphemistically as âvaccine-enhanced diseaseâ, stated as much in their briefing document where they acknowledged that ADE will more likely be seen over time, following authorization or even after licensure, as vaccine immunity begins to wane.
Since ADE could potentially take months to years to occur in the various populations and demographics around the world, we may have a looming global disaster yet to come. One microbiologist has referred to it as a âticking time bombâ.
Not only is this risk being ignored but, so too, is halacha (Jewish law).3
Your top link is borken, but the text is blatantly, obviously false.
We lost 600K people to covid before the vaccines arrived. Infection, case, and fatality rates have plummeted since. The ventilator wards are now running 95%+ unvaccinated.
The vaccines clearly work, clearly help reduce the severity of the disease. If ADE is occurring at all with the covid virus it clearly isn't at a rate high enough to offset the benefits, or all us vaxed folks would be dropping like mics at a rap battle.
The above text claims that this phenomenon can worsen over time, but I can't find any reference to such a thing happening in the literature—and as you can imagine, ADE is a well-studied and well understood mechanism. Here, for instance, is an article describing the efforts vaccine developers were making to prevent the problem from April of last year. Which means they were aware of it, as they should be. And from the results they have clearly avoided it, at least in the vaccine candidates that actually made it to clinical use.
You also have to wonder how a historian at Rutgers who hasn't worked in the field of immunology in 30+ years uncovered this awful secret but all the people actually doing immunology for a living missed it.
If you don't want to get vaxxed and need to feed your superstition to convince yourself you're doing the right thing, well...good luck. I hope your case is mild and anybody you infect is just as lucky. But the above is quackery.
for the past 10 days or so, my sister, who is 55 and suffering from a couple of serious comorbidities, has been in the IDU infectious disease unit at her local hospital with covid19 (the delta variant) she was vaxxed very early this year with pfizer (she is in a care home where 85% of the residents have been vaccinated) went from feeling sort of bad to scary low oxygen sat and bipap and antibodies in 48-72 hours after teetering on the edge of being ventilated for days, she has been doing a little better and moved to a different wing /floor of the hosp i hate to think what would have happened if she hadn't been vaccinated please, for the love of life, encourage people to speak with their docs and get vaccinated asap i can't tell you how stressful this is on all involved that is all
Half the pop fully vaxxed, another 20% with 1 shot...and cases are back where they were at this time last summer. Thankfully, hospitalizations are not as high.
I think it's time for some common sense efforts to curb the spread - mask, social distancing - before its too late, and more drastic steps might become necessary again.
Truth!
Also his minions are still trying to get people killed.
