Ya, hospitalizations lag by a couple weeks so we should be able to suss out some more by winter break when everyone starts traveling again
I mean I’m just stating a fact. If you have an issue with it then fine, argue the toss. All evidence points to a reduction in efficacy from protecting against infection over time. This happened in Israel and they instituted a widespread booster programme that helped reduce transmission again but didn’t eliminate it (triple vaxx people are still testing positive). Similar paths have been evidenced in highly vaccinated countries such as Portugal, Denmark and Ireland in recent weeks. Making these claims on the unvaccinated might have had some currency in May 2021 but quite clearly do not anymore. The blessing of vaccines is that they reduce severe illness. The poster pissing and moaning that they got Covid given their virtue should actually be thankful for the remarkable feat of science in coming up with such an effective vaccine at its primary purpose. Sadly too many people ignore this reality and play right into the hands of anti vaxxers.
I mean he’s been at this since summer 2020. Go back and look at his original comments to Covid in long form. He got a lot of traction from his original tweet being called as right a few months later so leaned into that. His initial reaction was actually far more measured and nuanced. He knows it pays to be hysterical.
conservatives say fauci needs to be in jail but they should direct their ire and prison sentencing towards this insane freak
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.778434/full COVID-19 Post-acute Sequelae Among Adults: 12 Month Mortality Risk
r-right radicalization interwoven with COVID conspiracist organizing as it spreads globally Neofascists turned out to support an anti-vaccination protest in Rome last month, reflecting the increasing convergence of far-right ideologies with COVID denialism. One of the peculiar realities of conspiracism is that people who believe in conspiracy theories rarely ever believe just one; most conspiracy theories are interconnected by the nature of their afactual grounding, and often this forms a web of theories that lead to radicalization. This is why the phenomenon of COVID-19 denialists coalescing with far-right extremist movements has become a global one. Nick Robins-Early at Vice has assembled a useful survey of this kind of far-right radicalization, noting that the politics of the pandemic have provided a new kind of breeding ground for the paranoid fantasies that comprise the denialists’ conspiracy theories—one that openly intermingles old-fashioned antisemitism with New Age health-related conspiracies. “We’re seeing something that we’ve probably never seen before in terms of how these ideologies work to feed off each other,” extremism researcher Aoife Gallagher of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue told Robins-Early. This kind of commingling has always occurred to some extent, but the COVID-19 pandemic featured two conditions that shifted it onto a more intensive plane: 1) a high degree of official and media confusion and uncertainty about the nature of the disease and its spread, much of it engendered among highly placed sources; and 2) pandemic-response conditions that forced people to spend inordinate amounts of time online, where conspiracy theories spread like kudzu, and denialist organizing along with it, particularly on social media platforms like Facebook. Robins-Early describes the conditions enabling this spread, using the example of anti-vaxxer Piers Corbyn’s appearance on a podcast with Nazi sympathizer Mark Collett, during which Collett remarked, “We obviously agree on a lot of things”: As anti-vaccine activists continue to spread medical misinformation online and hold rallies targeting schools, hospitals, and government officials, pairings like Corbyn and Collett have become common. White nationalists and QAnon influencers have become prolific sources for anti-vaccine propaganda, while far-right extremists march alongside anti-vaxxers at protests. In countries around the world, far-right and anti-vaccine movements are now deeply intertwined. We’ve already seen street demonstrations in Italy and Australia in which openly fascist elements have turned out to support COVID denialists (particularly those opposing vaccine mandates), and have ended up engaging in insurrectionist violence, just as we have in the United States. This phenomenon continues to spread in Europe, notably in Germany. “We had big demonstrations in the streets in a lot of German cities, but also an evolving network of hate groups,” Simone Rafael, a researcher at the German anti-racism group the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, told Vice. “We could see the common thread throughout these groups was conspiracy ideologies and antisemitism.” One of the more prominent examples of the radicalization dynamic occurring within COVID-denialist organizing is the case of Attila Hildmann, a wildly popular vegan chef and cookbook author who in early 2020 began promoting pandemic-related conspiracy theories and organizing rallies. By June of that year, he had declared himself a “German nationalist” who admires Hitler and warned that Jews wanted to “exterminate the German race.” Having fled Germany for his native Turkey to avoid prosecution, he now tells his followers that he is a “real Proud Nazi.” The phenomenon has been fueled by the embrace of denialist conspiracism by mainstream political figures, particularly Donald Trump and his army of followers. As Robins-Early describes: In the United States, members of the far-right Stop the Steal movement that promoted the conspiracy that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election have since shifted toward opposing vaccines and government mandates. Pro-Trump celebrities like former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Simone Gold, founder of the right-wing activist group America’s Frontline Doctors, have both headlined anti-vaccine rallies this year. Other prominent anti-vaccine activists also double as QAnon influencers, lumping vaccinations in with their beliefs into broader conspiracies about global pedophile elites plotting to control the world. Along with far-right radicalization has come the increasing presence of neofascist elements like the Proud Boys, who have begun attaching themselves to anti-pandemic-measure protests as “security.” The result, as we saw recently, has been a menacing air surrounding anti-vaccine-mandate marches and similar events. “It’s really grown in strength by becoming part of the whole far-right,” Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital, told Vice. “As a consequence of that, people who want to show their allegiance to that movement do so by refusing vaccinations.” Far-right radicalization inevitably means that the underlying conspiracism is deeply antisemitic. This surfaced recently with the denialists’ embrace of the name “pureblood” for people who have refused the vaccine—an obvious reference to fascist attempts to justify genocide as a matter of eugenics. As Robins-Early notes, “many of these have come to the forefront, such as this month when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary, Christina Pushaw, suggested that the Rothschilds were involved in a conspiracy to profit from COVID-19.” Similarly inevitable has been the real-world violence that always accompanies far-right organizing—particularly death threats and other forms of intimidation directed at local officials and health care institutions. Hotez, who has become a target of online hate and threats from anti-vaccine activists, told Robins-Early that these threats increasingly express far-right views. “Now when the threats come, it’s of a different character,” Hotez said. “It’s about an army of patriots coming to take me down.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-59418123 Scientists believe they have found "the trigger" that leads to extremely rare blood clots after the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine. Its me, the ivy-league professor who thinks a bunch of people who dont know if they're positive or not making their way through a busy airport and getting in a closed, packed environment, and THEN testing, is a good idea, and I give policy suggestions for governors
90% fully vaccinated of the eligible population. Key stat is their hospitalisations and deaths are significantly lower. Vaccines work at their primary job.
No idea why Canada won’t open up booster shots to everyone. Our healthcare system is very fragile, and we were at 91% of eligible population with at least one dose here in Quebec, so people are willing to get vaccinated. We just opened a large scale operation to get kids 5-11 vaccinated too, could we not use that to our advantage to get everyone a 3rd shot before Christmas?
Thoughts on my dad getting a booster (he is 64) despite being fully vaxxed in April and him having Covid in late September / early october? Any cdc or official guidance I can send him on getting boosted after recently having the virus
Idk someone mentioned that the pause between infection and getting the shot was done away with. On a related note, infection-attained antibodies may not be holding up too well against omicron: https://www.theguardian.com/global-...-covid-reinfections-say-south-african-experts
my friend had around the same timeline of getting vaxxed and getting the virus as your dad and just got his booster last week
IIRC SA’s second wave started around the same time last year. Probably should be considered when looking at these raw case numbers and hospitalisations. It is worrying tbf.
how much of an influence to the overall numbers is the recent inclusion (11/23) of antigen tests? https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-afr...ntigen-tests-countrys-official-covid-19-stats
Yep, MUCH more worried about my kid now. Not too worried even if I get a breakthrough being triple vaccinated, but given that my kid had COVID at the end of July just one shot would offer her a lot more protection. She's four and a half, I'm really debating just lying and saying I don't have insurance to get her vaccinated if cases start to spike really high again in Georgia.
This says "by the first of the year" which I could wait out, but anything longer is unacceptable imo. https://www.npr.org/sections/corona.../12/02/1059902455/covid-vaccines-kids-under-5
Would not surprise me if omicron's been here a while. We were actually coming back down from our delta wave before cases and hospitalizations abruptly shot up again a couple weeks ago. It was probably still just delta, but i won't be shocked if we find a lot more omicron present in our population