Boosters

We got booster Pfizer shots this week.  Sore arms, otherwise no big deal.  I'm increasingly concerned by the trend of growing per capita breakthrough deaths among populations who are farther and farther from their initial vaccination dates.  As a general rule, us older types may have immune systems that need more frequent reminders.  If I'm wrong, well, I made the best guess I could.

I'm thinking of getting caught up on other vaccinations, too:  tetanus, shingles, maybe even flu.  Never having had the flu, as far as I know, I've never been in the habit of giving it much thought.

I continue to spend some time on social media every day spreading what I think is the most reliable information about the relative risks of COVID and COVID vaccine.  Most people haven't a clue about probability or risk, it seems.  Someone almost invariably responds with an anecdote about a single person's counter-experience, an approach that makes sense only when one is presented with a claim that a particular result is 100% uniform, and can be falsified by a single negative result.  The idea of comparing two relatively small risks is quite foreign.  A lot of people complain, too, that they can't find absolute answers to questions like "how long will my natural or vaccinated immunity last exactly?"  It's like asking, "How many days until I get a particular kind of cancer, and then how many days will I live?"  Not that it's an excuse for medical experts (or bureaucrats) who offer paternalizing absolutist pap in the form of ironclad edicts, but sometimes you see what tempts them to snap "Stop arguing about it and just do what I say."

Nevertheless, I'm not an idiot, and I have no plans to enjoy being dictated to by people who have blown their own credibility too many times to count.

16 comments:

  1. I'm not planning to get a booster for several reasons.

    1) The studies seem to me to be measuring the wrong things, for example, the ability of the body to produce a particular antibody. That's great for alpha COVID, but not necessarily for new variants.

    2) My own reaction to the original shot was adverse, and I don't think the shots are a good idea for that personal reason. I'd rather avoid them if possible. If it becomes impossible to support my family without another dose, well, my duty is what it is; but while this is merely a 'recommendation' I'll pass.

    3) We still have huge populations worldwide who haven't even received a first dose of anything. There's probably more good to be had by immunizing them than by doubling/tripling down on immunizing ourselves, even from our own perspective (and definitely from theirs, assuming the shots are not secretly poisons designed to eliminate excess populations as some people believe).

    So, no more here, thanks very much. I've had enough.

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  2. The advantage for individuals is probably good. It is going to be hard to measure how much the percentage of the population receiving boosters is going to affect the spread of the virus in an area. While it would make sense that fewer cases is going to mean less virus circulating, there is not much way of guessing at present whether that is a lot of difference or rather minimal. There are now five populations to measure: those who have had covid but no vaccine, those who have had covid plus vaccine, those who have vaccine but no covid and no booster, those who have had vaccine but no covid...I've gotten lost here...and those who have neither vaccine nor covid. Worse, many of the "no covids" actually did get the illness but were asymptomatic or minimally so, so we can't be sure.

    I will get boosters for my own sake and the safety of those I have frequent contact with. I suspect it will be vaguely helpful to my larger community as well, but that may turn out to be nothing.

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  3. Just because it's slightly related and I thought it was funny -- Saw a bumper sticker today that said:

    "I was going to do it
    until you told me to."

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  4. Anonymous4:43 PM

    I'm skipping the booster. I'm not in the high-risk pool. I am, however, getting the flu shot, because I work surrounded by vectors. And two family members are relatively high-risk for complications of the flu. (I also plan on taking the next day off, based on my reaction the the shot last year.)

    LittleRed1

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  5. I rarely hear of bad reactions to the regular flu shot, but I gather the special-strength one they recommend for the older set can be a booger.

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  6. raven1:13 AM

    They (CDC) have admitted-
    The vaccine does not confer immunity
    The vaccine does not stop transmission.
    The vaccine does not stop a vaccinated person from carrying a high viral load
    A infected, vaccinated person may be highly infectious yet show no symptoms.

    So I am at a complete loss to explain in any medical sense why the vaccine should be administered.
    They say it will stop a person from getting really sick and dying, they say 95 percent of the covid patients in hospitals are un vaccinated, yet on the ground reports from nurses say that ratio is really closer to 60-40.

    I have reluctantly concluded the internationalists and the American government, in conjunction with the CCP ,are trying to destroy the last vestiges of traditional America. Covid , and the response, is one of their tools to do so.

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  7. The vaccine doesn't confer perfect immunity or perfectly stop transmission, but it does apparently do a strikingly effective (though imperfect) job at both. I think of it like airbags: very likely to help, but no absolute guarantee against the consequences of a severe crash, and not without some risks of their own.

    The vaccine starts out reducing serious breakthrough cases quite strongly, even though the effect wanes over time, especially in the older population--thus the booster recommendation for people like me.

    There seems no reason to reject a vaccine just because it's not 100% effective; few if any vaccines are. Nevertheless, that's just my judgment for myself. I don't want anyone to be forced to take it.

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  8. "There seems no reason to reject a vaccine just because it's not 100% effective;"

    Correct- but efficacy is only one side of a multi-sided question.

    The others are what harm can it do to an individual (by adverse effect),
    And what harm can it do to society (by effecting the development of a more dangerous strain)

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  9. ymarsakar1:00 AM

    Most of the deaths post shot, are declared unwaxinated. They try to start counting only after 14 days. But statistically, most of the deaths would have been labeled Covid or some other disease, and not wax, because the patients are not considered waxed at all, until after 14 days. But they got the shot.

    All of humanity's data has been corrupted. Nothing is transparnet.

    The Great Deception has almost succeeded. Now comes the next stage, when it activates in December 2021.

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  10. ymarsakar1:02 AM

    https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaccinated-healthcare-workers-threat-unvaccinated-patients-co-workers/?utm_source=JangoMail&%3beType=EmailBlastContent&%3beId=2a8cae2f-18f9-48b2-ab50-39686590e40e&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=We+have+to+learn+to+live+with+this.+(343637551)&utm_content=

    Also the stuff people don't know is that the nano machines create a neural network, one that is broadcast like wifi signals are.

    This is in Borg/Skynet territory now.

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  11. ymarsakar1:06 AM

    "and definitely from theirs, assuming the shots are not secretly poisons designed to eliminate excess populations as some people believe)."

    It must be very confusing for people world wide now. They have to somehow absorb info that is not from the mainstream or even parody sites like Babylon Bee. And the info is not exactly spelled out or explained very well.

    Since the ones that do explain it, get censored or disappeared.

    I could explain almost all of it, but it's not particularly needed. Humanity does not want an explanation from me. Humanity wants this final war and it is getting one.

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  12. Raven: I absolutely understand hesitating to take a vaccine because of concern about its side effects. The fact that I'm personally much less concerned about its side effects than I am about the effects of the disease explains my own decision based on my own medical status.

    If I were ever tempted to lean on anyone else to take the vaccine, my only cogent argument would have to be that they should be willing to take some risk in order to decrease transmission. At first it seemed that the vaccine was enormously effective in decreasing transmission. That now appears to be subject to much more doubt. I still think it reduces transmission, but not as much as we first hoped. That changes the balance of risk and benefit, without by any means entirely erasing the benefit.

    All I've ever really wanted in this controversy is for people to make their own decisions on the basis of the best information and analysis available. If after all that the answer is still "no," I can live with it. We all make decisions all the time that are not necessarily the best odds to play with medical risk.

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  13. raven4:08 PM

    Tex,
    Exactly. The question at the heart is this- do you have a choice? Choice IS freedom.
    And freedom is the ability to make decisions bad as well as good. Mandates are tyranny.

    As a side note, IMO, the constant unrelenting emphasis on safety safety safety over the last 50 years has seriously warped peoples risk analysis ability. We have all read those lists of 50 things we old farts did as kids that is anathema today, because "safety".

    And the corollary is, they have been warned about certain things so many times, if there IS no warning, they assume it is "safe", because they never learned to assess risk, they just took the label at face value.Life does not come with a safety sticker.

    Please excuse my little rant!



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  14. ymarsakar9:41 PM

    The wax is not a waxxine as it is a gmo gene modification of organisms. It does the opposite of what people were told. It increases the transmission of the covid bio weapon by hijackung the body s own cells inti producing it aka spike protein. Healthy people will get sick around the waxinated.

    The boosters are thus additional gene treatment.

    For humanity s last and final war. The truth is unveiled. People have to see it to believe it. Reading me wont work. They have to see it. In themselves in their friends in their family. This is how they will know.

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  15. I think what's tripping up a lot of my neighbors is the assumption that somewhere there's a risk-free option. One group thinks avoiding the virus will get them there, another that avoiding the vaccine will get them there. As I see it, there's risk either way, and my task is to guess which one is less. It's not that obvious a choice for everyone, especially considering that the two kinds of risk fall on different people at different times, and that much of the information we're getting is propagandized garbage. Still, I'm happy enough with my own choice. It would be a bonus if supremely annoying people would quit trying to push me around.

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  16. ymarsakar6:28 PM

    Therr is no avoiding the bio weapon. Everyone or everything will be contaminated.

    They are guessing ivm and hcq used by 200 congress crittets and theit staffet families will help.

    Remember when thry were immune to o care? Now they immune to mandatory wax and use iver after letting it be banned.

    This is some twisted human soddom lvl stuff.

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