The Benefits of Vaccination (with thread drift...)

Not necessarily the vaccine. My godchild in her twenties collapsed, nearly died (was air ambulanced to the hospital) and was in a coma for months. She was fit, seemingly strong, did sheep farming. There is a virus that attacks young hearts and remains completely hidden until the heart is stressed - usually through exercise. That is why one hears of footballers / marathon runners - seemingly highly fit young people - collapsing and dying.

sure just like fat people are not fat cos they shove crap in their gobs all the time, all those thyroid problems eh? :roll_eyes:
those ‘fit people’ normally die cos they’ve got an underlying condition, just like over 95% of so called covid deaths have an ‘underlying condition’ too, the NHS own figures, i saw that just last week :crazy_face:
I guess you’re in the ‘easier to fool than see the causation’ gang?..keep watching and learning, every day a school day! except when the government shut the schools down eh?

No, we are just not in the listen to and believe bollocks gang :crazy_face:, every day and everything is a conspiracy day with some folks :wink::roll_eyes:

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My paygrade is well out of your reach by the looks of it😉

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…and yet Inter CEO Marotta: “Eriksen hasn’t had COVID and he hasn’t been vaccinated”.

Probably best to wait for some real news before jumping to conclusions.

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Saw on the French news yesterday Paul that the government estimates nearly a quarter of the population has had covid, but less than a tenth has been tested.
And for the UK, how does the recent revelation of the unreliability of some of its testing sit with your assumption that positive tests = actual cases?

My point has always been that testing is likely to be covering most cases now but I have always agreed that there was a considerable shortfall during the first wave.

Also I compared the absolute number of deaths to the likely rate of complications from the vaccine (which, themselves would be non-fatal in most cases). Although I calculated a case fatality rate and you can argue that missing asymptomatic cases makes that higher than reality I did not then draw conclusions from that figure.

It’s the lateral flow tests that have been called into question. Not surprised as I have seen claims of 50% sensitivity but they are generally followed up by PCR tests if positive so I doubt it impacts numbers reported.

Some of your posts are seriously unpleasant. Maybe you could try being nice for a change.

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Or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which particularly affects fit young men.

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Got a hangover this morning have we? Perhaps @cat or @james could remind you of the forum rules regarding personal attacks - and, let’s face it, this one is pretty nasty and pretty personal isn’t it?

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If DaveW, or the authors at SciTechDaily were so clever they mighht have been aware that our DNA is stuffed full of random sequences, from both DNA and RNA viruses which we have picked up along the millennia. In fact about 98% of our DNA is “junk” or non-coding sequences.

In fact there was a 2020 paper suggesting that large chunks of the Covid genome could be incorporated into host cells as a result of natural infection with Covid, so if you are vaccinated you might get the spike protein sequences incorporated. If not you might get the whole virus.

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Still don’t see how this can be true Paul.

Statistically, if the French news item was correct, say only 9% of the population has been tested - and the positive tests are running at about 2% of all tests - well, we don’t know how many people this equates to because we don’t know how many people have more than one test - nor the change across time, which you rely on for the UK - but it’s going to be a tiny number in comparison with the 15 or so million the government thinks have had covid, isn’t it?

Then in experience terms - why would people with minor or no symptoms get tested even now? I can’t see this happening here - and in the UK, do you think its test and trace system really is ‘world beating’ after all? - so they have traced back every diagnosed case to all its past contacts, and tested all of them? And isn’t this increasingly less likely over time, as more vulnerable people are vaccinated - so the number of people exhibiting symptoms in any virus chain shrinks?

Just watched the England game at Wembley, by the way - noticeable that few people are wearing masks. Here, even people (like me) that are fully vaccinated continue to wear masks, sanitise hands, social distance, etc - these things are still de rigueur for everybody here in Brittany.

Glad to hear it.

I admit that I don’t know the number of cases being picked up by the testing - if anything it seemed to be easier early on in the pandemic.

My guess was influenced by a few different things - I haven’t gone back to some of the older sources though so I guess there could be a surprise lurking :thinking: :slight_smile:

First of all there is a lot of asymptomatic testing going on - test&trace is picking up some, schools are encouraging pupils to test twice weekly, all NHS staff are required to test twice weekly and the test kits are widely available. Also even though these have low sensitivity the fact that the window where people should test positive is long enough for two or three tests if done regularly will improve the overall sensitivity.

Second the old ONS survey data suggested that most cases (based on antibody data) were, in fact, being identified - at least in mid 2020.

Third - newer antibody data, up to mid March the ONS estimate was 1/3 of the population had antibodies or just shy of 23million people. At that point 20 million 1st doses had been given - though perhaps going back 10 days (to 21 Feb) would be more realistic given time to mount an antibody response. That gives ~ 5 million people who had antibodies which were not due to vaccination compared with around 4 million cases officially at that point.

It’s all imprecise, I agree, but I remain comfortable with the idea that we’re probably identifying the bulk of infections now - 75-80% at least; I don’t see anything to suggest it is significantly less than 50% (in the UK anyway).

Is there a link to that French news article?

However the point of going through the figures was, as I said before, to try to actually see if your contention that there is minimal benefit to the individual from vaccination in the younger age groups - purely on deaths I’d probably agree for the under 30’s that the chance of death or serious morbidity is not that high even assuming they were vaccinated with Pfizer/Moderna. For the 30-45 age group I’d probably agree that the chance of problems from AZ would make you lean towards Pfizer.

However in terms of population benefit it seems to me to be clear, the virus is throwing up variants which are significantly better an getting transmitted. In part this is because we are applying selection pressure to do exactly that but B.117 is about 50% more transmissible than the original virus and B.1.617 is about 50% better than that.

That gives R0 estimates in the 5-9 range. It’s still low compared with very transmissible viruses such as measles and mumps however (R0 up to 18 or 20) - we need to get the population resevoir down as much as possible or this will bite us on the backside again.

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Don’t quite understand your point, Dave. Are you saying that 95pc of people who are registered as having died from Covid had underlying conditions, and you think that they actually died from these underlying conditions and not Covid?

I think that probably was Dave’s point but he’s no longer around to confirm his view personally.

Ah OK. Well I was going to say that if he looked at the overall number of deaths by any cause last year compared to non-Covid years (referred to as ‘excess’ deaths) he would see that it was significantly higher, and I wondered what he thought this was down to if not Covid.

Woke doctors, probably :thinking:

Ah yes of course.

My next question would be ‘what does “woke” mean?’ (I find that the people who use the word most often can’t actually explain what it means).

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