Covid-19 miscellany

[repoman]

I am already vaccinated with two doses of Pfizer and have said so many times. Do I have to preface this every time?

The technology of finding the exact docking point is very impressive. Granted PF4 is a small protein.

 

[untermensche]

You should read your "amazing article", repo. And then do the math to assess the relative risk.

All VITT patients had received a single dose of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine, AstraZeneca; COVIDSHIELD, Verity Pharmaceuticals and Serum Institute of India

So don't get that vaccine if you're worried. But the article stipulates that VITT is a rare occurrence. Published estimates of the risk of VITT currently range from 1 case per 26,500 to 1 case per 127,300 first doses of AstraZeneca/COVISHIELD administered. The risk of VITT in Canada has been estimated to be approximately 1 per 55,000 first doses.
Compare the worst case scenario (1:26,500) to the risk of death from COVID: about 1.9% in the US, now down near 1% - and the wise choice becomes clear even if AstraZeneca is your only choice. Which it's not, since it's not even available in the United States. Further, there have been no confirmed cases of VITT with mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines (e.g., Pfizer and Moderna). But anti-vaxers aren't exactly rational sorts, generally speaking.

Your overall chance of having already died of COVID in the US is already around 1.8:1000* so ...
... thanks for the scaremongering, excuse-providing effort. And for doing your part to keep the new variants coming.


*W-o-M shows 1882 US deaths per million population, and that is widely considered a drastic undercount. VITT cases are treatable with nonheparin antithrombotic agents, rendering the risk of fatality even lower than the odds I provided above.

It is a question of comparing the risk of getting COVID vs the risk of getting the vaccine.

When a person gets HIT you stop giving them Heparin and heparin-like anticoagulants.

If a person gets VITT you don't give them that kind of vaccine again.

If a person with VITT gets a DVT or a PE they may need to be hospitalized. Thrombotic strokes are usually caused by clots that form in the heart or by plagues that break off carotid arteries. So strokes would be unlikely.

 

[Elixir]

I am already vaccinated with two doses of Pfizer and have said so many times. Do I have to preface this every time?

The technology of finding the exact docking point is very impressive. Granted PF4 is a small protein.

Sorry - you're NOT (apparently) serving as part of the virus reservoir. I apologize for that. The rest of my post stands as written unless I've overlooked or mis-stated something.
Short version: If anyone is worried about VITT, they should be MUCH more worried about COVID in its current form, and even more worried about anti-vaxers serving to cultivate new forms.

 

[barbos]

Anti vax nurse dies of covid

The story about her death became viral after anti-vaccine tweets allegedly made by Guidry in 2020 were widely shared. It is unclear whether Guidry had been vaccinated, however, she tweeted the following: "This vaccine has been released using recombinant DNA faster than any vaccine in the world. It manipulates your DNA at the tiniest molecular level. Do. Not. Get. It. It's not safe."

Anti-vaxxer Colorado sheriff’s deputy, 33, dies of COVID complications

She was taking pre-med courses at LSU Eunice and hoped to go to medical school.

makes you wonder how widespread this among doctors.

 

[Swammerdami]

As I've mentioned, we paid $125 dollars each to join a queue to be vaccinated at a private hospital, maybe in January, maybe with Moderna.

A few days ago my wife was informed she was eligible for a free jab of AstraZeneca, scheduled for tomorrow. She said Fine, called her oncologist who rescheduled a CAT scan because of some possible interaction.

Today my wife got a call. Tomorrow's jab will be Sinovac instead of AstraZ, does she still want it? (No.) The 2nd jab MIGHT be AstraZ. The local government health worker who called was obviously annoyed by this sudden edict from the central government.

Google shows me that this latest nonsense from Thailand's incompetent and authoritarian military regime made CNN news. The Washington Post has a headline: "Hundreds of Thais inoculated with Sinovac are infected as cases spike in Southeast Asia."

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

She was taking pre-med courses at LSU Eunice and hoped to go to medical school.

makes you wonder how widespread this among doctors.

My Father-in-law is conservative and a doctor and thinks Anti-Vaxxers are out of their minds. So somehow he managed not to be bitten by the Trump Dumb Bug.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

[TWEET]https://twitter.com/teamrondesantis/status/1414676440533159937[/TWEET]

Cases in Florida are rising.

 

[untermensche]

"How the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on?"

And other pressing issues of our time.

 

[TSwizzle]

The Washington Post has a headline: "Hundreds of Thais inoculated with Sinovac are infected as cases spike in Southeast Asia."

More than 600 Thai medical workers who were fully inoculated with the Sinovac vaccine were infected by the coronavirus, which is now raging through Southeast Asia. The 618 cases were among the 677,348 medical staff who had received two doses of the Chinese-developed coronavirus vaccine between April to July, government data show. Among those infected are a nurse who died and a health-care worker in critical condition. A Thai health official said Sunday that an expert panel has recommended administering a third dose to at-risk medical workers, adding that the booster shot would be either one from Oxford-AstraZeneca or a messenger RNA vaccine made by either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. The country is set to receive 1.5 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine from the United States this month.

WaPo

Is the expectation that being vaccinated prevents you from catching coronavirus ? And doesn't "infected" just mean tested positive ? It's a sensationalist way of presenting things.

 

[TomC]

Is the expectation that being vaccinated prevents you from catching coronavirus ?

No. Anybody with reasonable understanding of the medical science involved realizes that it would be much more accurate to say, "The vaccine will greatly reduce the likelihood of suffering from the viral infection, in most people."
That's even true of the less impressive vaccines like Sinovac. But there are no guarantees, just risk assessments.
Tom

 

[repoman]

So I watched this whole discussion by doctors about Ivermectin related to treatment of Covid-19 and as a contrast the FDA ramming through a probably ineffective Alzheimers treatment of Aducanumab.

Both of these doctors DO NOT recommend Ivermectin at this point, but are not opposed to the current RCTs on it. They think the doctors touting it and using it on patients are in the middle of it and can't see clearly the confounders that are around them. In fact that it seems that they are saying that highly active doctors are helping patients a ton by being so involved and that is a huge confounder.

They also are highly against the censoring of this topic as it lends a persecution complex especially when paired with aducanumab debacle and will that drug be a sponsor of Youtube and Facebook ads soon?



From a month ago in NPR:

3 Experts Have Resigned From An FDA Committee Over Alzheimer's Drug Approval

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/11/1005567149/3-experts-have-resigned-from-an-fda-committee-over-alzheimers-drug-approval


The assertion the doctor on the right made is that when the FDA is so corrupt as to approve this Aducanumab that this gives Ivermectin supporters a target of ACTUAL corruption to say it is just part of that cycle.

But then he points out that dexamethasone and other similar cheap analogues are widely supported to have decent use for covid.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Vaccines can work in a couple ways. One it prevents infection altogether or two it greatly inhibits an infection of the virus. There appears to be evidence that Delta is getting by the vaccine a bit more than the other variants. It isn't causing much trouble other than, allowing for more spread and increasing the likelihood of the next variant.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

As I've mentioned, we paid $125 dollars each to join a queue to be vaccinated at a private hospital, maybe in January, maybe with Moderna.

A few days ago my wife was informed she was eligible for a free jab of AstraZeneca, scheduled for tomorrow. She said Fine, called her oncologist who rescheduled a CAT scan because of some possible interaction.

Today my wife got a call. Tomorrow's jab will be Sinovac instead of AstraZ, does she still want it? (No.) The 2nd jab MIGHT be AstraZ. The local government health worker who called was obviously annoyed by this sudden edict from the central government.

Google shows me that this latest nonsense from Thailand's incompetent and authoritarian military regime made CNN news. The Washington Post has a headline: "Hundreds of Thais inoculated with Sinovac are infected as cases spike in Southeast Asia."

That's too bad. But afaik, the Sinovac vaccine usually doesn't have serious side effects, and tends to reduce the risk of serious illness if a person catches the virus (though of course it doesn't work in every case).

 

[ZiprHead]

Now we have this bit of colossal stupidity.

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/WHOkJBnKL2w[/YOUTUBE]

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Now we have this bit of colossal stupidity.

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/WHOkJBnKL2w[/YOUTUBE]

Here is the actual broadcast, just in case someone thought that Newsmax was being lampooned. They weren't. The Newsmax guy said that.

The doctor (actual one, not the cartoon), Dr. McCollough was caught saying false stuff before, no wonder he is on there. Don't know why he didn't have a chair.

We are transitioning here from stupidity to willful endangerment.

 

[bilby]

Now we have this bit of colossal stupidity.

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/WHOkJBnKL2w[/YOUTUBE]

Clothes are against nature. But for some reason he's not making his claims while naked.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Washington Post has a headline: "Hundreds of Thais inoculated with Sinovac are infected as cases spike in Southeast Asia."

More than 600 Thai medical workers who were fully inoculated with the Sinovac vaccine were infected by the coronavirus, which is now raging through Southeast Asia. The 618 cases were among the 677,348 medical staff who had received two doses of the Chinese-developed coronavirus vaccine between April to July, government data show. Among those infected are a nurse who died and a health-care worker in critical condition. A Thai health official said Sunday that an expert panel has recommended administering a third dose to at-risk medical workers, adding that the booster shot would be either one from Oxford-AstraZeneca or a messenger RNA vaccine made by either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. The country is set to receive 1.5 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine from the United States this month.

WaPo

Is the expectation that being vaccinated prevents you from catching coronavirus ? And doesn't "infected" just mean tested positive ? It's a sensationalist way of presenting things.

Sinovac is a killed-virus "vaccine." There's a reason we haven't had vaccines for coronaviruses before--killed-virus vaccines aren't very effective against the inevitable variants. In most cases it's simply a bunch of variants already running around so any killed-virus vaccine provides little protection and never gets off the ground. Sinovac was tested before much in the way of variants showed up (although it looks like the Wuhan version itself was actually a variant, the original died out.) Thus it got good enough results to get approved--but in the real world it's performing as we would expect of a killed-virus coronavirus vaccine: badly. It's not going to hurt you (beyond the inherent risk of riling up the immune system that happens with any infection, real or not) but it's not going do much good these days. China wanted to play in the big boys league and it didn't work.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

WaPo

Is the expectation that being vaccinated prevents you from catching coronavirus ? And doesn't "infected" just mean tested positive ? It's a sensationalist way of presenting things.

Sinovac is a killed-virus "vaccine." There's a reason we haven't had vaccines for coronaviruses before--killed-virus vaccines aren't very effective against the inevitable variants. In most cases it's simply a bunch of variants already running around so any killed-virus vaccine provides little protection and never gets off the ground. Sinovac was tested before much in the way of variants showed up (although it looks like the Wuhan version itself was actually a variant, the original died out.) Thus it got good enough results to get approved--but in the real world it's performing as we would expect of a killed-virus coronavirus vaccine: badly. It's not going to hurt you (beyond the inherent risk of riling up the immune system that happens with any infection, real or not) but it's not going do much good these days. China wanted to play in the big boys league and it didn't work.

The Sinopharm vaccine is also a killed-virus vaccine, and even though it is clearly behind AZ and Sputnik, here in Argentina it turns out it has reasonable degree of effectiveness against symptomatic infection, according to a recent study. I do not know how effective it is against serious illness and/or death, but it has to be higher for sure. And this is effectiveness in the real world, and against variants: the study was carried out in Argentina between 01-01-2021 and 22-06-2021 (or 06-22-2021 if you like to write dates like that ) with 700000 people over 60 years old. Iirc most cases in that period were Alpha at first, then Gamma and Lambda.

Sources (in Spanish):
https://www.argentina.gob.ar/notici...is-de-sputnik-v-o-de-astrazeneca-disminuye-la
https://www.lanacion.com.ar/socieda...acunas-que-se-aplican-en-el-pais-nid01072021/

(I have seen this study in other local newspapers).


Sputnik V:

1 dose: 74%

2 doses: 93.3%

AZ:

1 dose: 79.5%.
2 doses: 88.8%.


Sinopharm:

1 dose: 61.6%

2 doses: 84%.


That does not look too bad, even if it's not great. On the other hand, it looks like it's not been good in Bahrain and UAE since they are offering a third dose (either Sinopharm or Pfizer), but I do not know which effectiveness parameters they are using, or which variants are dominant over there.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

The USA as a shit sandwich:

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The USA as a shit sandwich:

View attachment 34479

And one dose isn't nearly enough for the latest variants! That confers around 30 to 35% immunity.