Covid boosters

I’m somewhat offended by calling it “rona”, which I find infantile. And surely we can all now recognise the importance of vaccines protecting the overall society, even if it is harmful to a few individuals? Obviously I hoped it wouldn’t be me, but was aware of risk in deciding to be vaccinated.

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Chris, I think people, and I am one of them, didn’t trust the speed and lack of testing/results from the covid vaccines and feel they were dished out too soon and too quick until at least some sort of real data could be analysed. We will probably never know now and obviously some folks are more prone to diseases than others. I had three jabs in total and will never take another one now after the third made me feel really bad and if it breaks out again, then I will wear a mask and stay away from others.

But it didn’t kill you, and it might, just might, have saved you. You will never know of course.
For myself I would have taken it when offered back in April, but the nurse I contacted never got back to me with a rdv and I was distracted at the time and forgot to prompt her.
I have my fingers crossed that they will invite me again and I will insist this time.

I had the Astra Zeneca vaccine twice before it was withdrawn. Yes, it affected some, but likely saved a great many more.

As someone on the ‘inside’ of this, I wish we could be grownups, recognise that a small number of people will have adverse reactions to injected materials, and where proven genuine they are given some kind of compensation and appropriate support. It’s far, far better and fairer than adversarial litigation and likely to help make better vaccines in the future. It would also help draw the teeth of the anti-vaxxers, though I’m sure they would still gain some traction with those who claimed damage from vaccination, hoping to make money, but we’re found not to have been harmed by vaccination.

FWIW we’re likely to see a lot more vaccines being rolled out in the future as antibiotics becoming ineffective.

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This is a myth.

Vaccines against coronaviruses (COVID 19 was not the first) were a well understood category.

The testing of the COVID 19 vaccines was just as thorough as for other vaccines.

https://www.umms.org/coronavirus/covid-vaccine/testing

I’m sorry you had an adverse reaction but that in no way invalidates the effectiveness or desirability of the Covid vaccines.

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Well until 2021, vaccines were to prevent you catching an illness, CDC redefined them as “Protection against possible severity”
Now, define just who will experience a mild headache or get full blown near death experience
IF you were to read the Pfizer test result of the “random testing”… they do not state it will protect
Their results are “relative risk” not “Absolute risk”
a massive difference… Relative is a guesstimate, Absolute is what really does happen
I defy you to prove… one single “life saved”…
Proven, beyond shadow of doubt that a jab Absolutley saved
Y’see, without knowing the quantity of viral load exposure Vs Antigens created by a vaccine…of any knd
There no way to say "A life is saved, or even the illness was mitigated in any way?
You want to quote history
look at measles in 1900… seriously a problem… but, it naturally reduced… by the time a vaccine was available… measles had diminished to near zero deaths… the vaccine was 20yrs late…

“naturally” or as a result of better nutrition, better ability to treat the actual disease, or general hygiene measures? Or lack of a war!

The death date from measles started dropping post WWII, and then after ‘68 dropped further to single figures. (I don’t call hundred of deaths “near zero deaths”)

Where is your data from?

Widespread vaccination eliminated smallpox.
You have to look at the big picture, not at an individual level

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Totally agree, they actually worked, the covid jab, very debatable. As you said in any plague or pandemic some dont catch it and some die of it whilst some get through catching it. A bit of a lottery.

Relative risk is not “a guesstimate” it’s a comparator. If you don’t understand the basics of statistics then you’re not really well-placed to comment on vaccine effectiveness.

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Marketing is done using relative risk, science is done using absolute risk. :rofl:

Don’t get me wrong, it drives me mad when I see a headline about bacon tripling the risk of cancer and then, when you look closer it’s tripled from " hardly anything" to " not very much at all" but relative risk still has it’s place so long as it’s not used in isolation.

True… The death rate was dropping after the war, and were flat lining after 53?
Reported cases were stil oscillating wildly, the vaccine may have smoothed out the trends, but to claim it saves lives, when there were/are so few?
What caused the “natural” decline in deaths since 1900… access to better food, healthcare, hygiene, general improvement in living?
If deaths wee declining over the century, the actual disease was mutating to be less dangerous
Like Covid… more reported cases, less and less people actually suffering severe effects… Omicron was it’s last fling as a contagious illness… now it’s just a nuisance?

Some doctors are overly reassuring, some are too blunt. Yours are just being honest Sue. You pays your money and takes your choice,

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1d

I’m somewhat offended by calling it “rona”, which I find infantile. And surely we can all now recognise the importance of vaccines protecting the overall society, even if it is harmful to a few individuals? Obviously I hoped it wouldn’t be me, but was aware of risk in deciding to be vaccinated.

According to Stephen Fry, we shouldn’t be offended. I wonder if we are allowed ro be cross, or indeed any other feeling?

“It’s now very common to hear people say, ‘I’m rather offended by that.’ As if that gives them certain rights. It’s actually nothing more… than a whine. ‘I find that offensive.’ It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. ‘I am offended by that.’ Well, so fucking what." Stephen Fry”

How is this a myth? didn’t FDA issue an EUA to expedite vaccine usage? I read that vaccines normally take 5-10 years on average for FDA approval…

It’s a myth because no corners were cut in testing. Where there was a difference was that all resources were applied efficiently.
Normally you need to battle for funding to develop a vaccine, then battle for lab time, then a battle for peer review resources, then a battle for funding and resources for testing and so on and so on.
So a large part of that 5-10 years is either fighting for resources or waiting for those resources to become available and that’s where a huge amount of the time saving came from.

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I’ve long been offended by the very existence of Stephen Fry, Bloated, unfunny old man with spurious intellectual pretentions.

Funny (not!) that although one often comes across pejorative hetero terms like ‘toy boys’ and ‘trophy wives’, I can’t recall ever seeing ‘trophy husbands’ while ‘catamite’ probably fell out of use centuries ago…

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You were asking a while back about why there wasn’t a vaccine against the common cold - I replied it wasn’t needed.

However measles isn’t like that. It may not generally kill you if you’re well-fed, living in a warm home, clean and well looked after, but it can still cause life-changing harm, as well as miscarriage and birth defects if caught during pregnancy.

From the link you gave “The healthier environment and better quality treatments deserve credit for making measles a relatively mild disease; these developments saved thousands of lives each year, just in England & Wales. The measles and MMR vaccines reduced the number of measles cases and measles deaths by another 99%, saving dozens more lives per year. Vaccines deserve credit for making it rare for anyone to suffer from the measles.”

And what of those living in places where nutrition and sanitation are not good? There’s an interesting summary article here from the WHO History of measles vaccination

“For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 2299 people died during the Ebola epidemic of 2018–2020, compared with 7,800 deaths from measles during an outbreak in the same time period.”

The only way in which you could truly show the effect of vaccination on survival would be a double-blind trial, but that would be unethical because we know the vaccine is beneficial.

FWIW I had measles as a child, and I’d rank that time as being really sick. The high temperature caused terrifying nightmares, and my eyes were so gooey that several mornings I had to pull my eyelids apart with my fingers because they were stuck together. By comparison, thanks to MMR vaccination, I knew of no children that went to school with my kids that had measles. There is still a lot of value in vaccination for measles.

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This is correct. Unlike in ‘peace time’ funds for vaccine development were almost unlimited, and there were regulatory authorities waiting to evaluate your data, rather than asking you to wait a year or more. All the traditional bottlenecks were swept away because of the need to get something out that would reduce deaths and harm.

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