Coronavirus

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sighyoung
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by sighyoung »

CardsofSTL wrote: ↑
May 16 21, 11:47 am
sighyoung wrote: ↑
May 16 21, 8:14 am
My son's been in Taiwan for a year-and-a-half, and is planning to return to the states in June or July. He's been fortunate because Taiwan had successfully contained the virus until recently, and he's been able to work, take classes, and draw on college savings.

Now there's a recent outbreak centered in Taipei that may cause problems throughout the island. The country is scrambling to try to contain the spread, and there's the kind of hoarding that we saw in the U.S. in early stages of the pandemic last year. I'm hoping that he can get vaccinated and get out of there safely. AstraZeneca is the vaccine available there, which isn't my first choice, but there it is. Many people haven't gotten the vaccine because the infection rate in the country has been so low, so I'm not sure what's going to unfold there in the next few weeks.
Good luck to your son Sigh...hope he stays safe.
Moderna will be coming to the island in June. AstraZeneca isn't an option for him, anyway, because of the long time period needed between the two vaccinations. Evidently, a Taiwanese vaccine may be available by July, but that may come too late for him.

The big outbreak is in Taipei and the north of the island, and he's in Taichung, so he's o.k. right now. I see that there will be travel restrictions for foreigners entering the island. I just hope that doesn't affect him getting out in June or July.

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G. Keenan
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by G. Keenan »

cardinalkarp wrote:
And GK, I know you continually say the vaccine is very safe, but what are you basing that on other than the data that’s been collected by the trials and the few months that’s it been available to the population? I think we all agree that vaccines typically go through a much more stringent test period to ensure safety....and obviously that extensive testing was not done in this case. Big pharma has been given full immunity if anything is to happen regarding potential side effects (long or short term) of the vaccine...and that alone is concerning to me. It’s pretty simple, the long term potential effects are an unknown....and granted, that goes both ways....the long term effects of covid are unknown as well.
I'm basing my claim on the trial data, yes. First the clinical trials which were pretty good sized trials with tens of thousands of participants all around the world, then the real-world data with millions and millions of people getting these and, so far, no crazy side effects being reported. The Astra Zeneca and then the Johnson & Johnson blood clotting side effect is serious, but also extremely rare, and I think the fact that they are monitoring the vaccine side effects closely enough to detect these blood clots at a rate of approximately 1 per 1 million people shows, paradoxically, how safe they are. No doubt there was pressure on the FDA and CDC *not* to pause the J&J vaccine for fear of contributing to vaccine skepticism, but they did it anyway to err on the side of caution and transparency. The legal liability protections they've been granted I'm not too worried about. This is America, where everyone sues everyone, so it strikes me as kind of a given that these companies need that liability protection for an emergency situation like this.

You're 100% correct that a new vaccine would normally go through a longer approval process. I think previous to this, the fastest vaccine ever developed was the current measles vaccine, which took 3 years back in the 1950s. Could there be long-term side effects to these that we will discover a few years down the road? Yes, there could, but I think that too is pretty unlikely. To the best of my understanding, vaccines are a medicine that either works or it doesn't. It either generates immunity to a given disease within a few weeks, or it doesn't work at all or doesn't work well enough to be worthwhile. Negative side effects are usually some unindented consequence of the immune system response, like the blood clots from the J&J, or an allergic reaction to an ingredient in the vaccine. So if you're going to have a really bad side effect it's going to present itself within a few hours or weeks, not many months or years later. Personally, I'm fully vaccinated as are my wife, my parents, my brother, all my friends, etc. and everyone feels fine. My wife is going on 3 months now from the 2nd Moderna shot and not experiencing anything.

I think we should be respectful of everyone's views on this. Ok, maybe not the crazy uncle who posts vaccine conspiracies on Facebook, but people who are taking Covid seriously and following public health advice are still doing their part, even if they want to take a longer wait and see approach to getting vaccinated or never get vaccinated at all. That is their right and their personal autonomy.

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Radbird
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by Radbird »

G. Keenan wrote: ↑
May 17 21, 2:45 pm
I think we should be respectful of everyone's views on this. Ok, maybe not the crazy uncle who posts vaccine conspiracies on Facebook, but people who are taking Covid seriously and following public health advice are still doing their part, even if they want to take a longer wait and see approach to getting vaccinated or never get vaccinated at all. That is their right and their personal autonomy.
I agree 100%.

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cardinalkarp
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by cardinalkarp »

Radbird wrote: ↑
May 17 21, 3:01 pm
G. Keenan wrote: ↑
May 17 21, 2:45 pm
I think we should be respectful of everyone's views on this. Ok, maybe not the crazy uncle who posts vaccine conspiracies on Facebook, but people who are taking Covid seriously and following public health advice are still doing their part, even if they want to take a longer wait and see approach to getting vaccinated or never get vaccinated at all. That is their right and their personal autonomy.
I agree 100%.
This would be a much better world if we all thought this way. Thank you for understanding GK (and Rad)

AWvsCBsteeeerike3
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

I'd take umbrage with the 100% safe. Few if any things are 100% in medicine. You can view all the unverified reports of adverse events on the CDC Vaers system.

I just went an pulled up all the deaths that have been reported post vaccine from the pfizer biontech vaccine alone. And, yes, deaths post vaccination are expected because when you vax 100M + people, especially with priority given to the elderly, deaths are expected because old people die. Not sure if the search results will come through, but here's the link. https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datar ... 1242BC28B3

Regardless, I'll include some snippets, the vast majority of which are patients 65+ years old:
65+ years Death, which I believe is unrelated to vaccination
18-29 years Patient developed 104.4 temp approximately 48 hours after being given the vaccine. I treated him with antibiotics, IV fluids, cooling methods. CXR does show a new right perihilar infiltrate. However, his fever came down within the next 24-48 hours. Unfortunately, he suffered a cardiac arrest on 1/21/21 in the early morning and expired.
60-64 years Patient was vaccinated for SARS-CoV-2 on 6-Jan-21 at his site of employment, a Nursing Home. Patient presented to Urgent Care on 15-Jan-21 complaining of left sided chest pain that started the evening before with an associated slight cough. Pt was afebrile with a heart rate of 88 and an O2 sat on room air of 98% in triage. His EKG showed a sinus tachycardia of 114 with a slightly prolonged QTc of 463 ms. Physical exam was significant for bibasilar crackles and X-ray showed bibasilar infiltrates consistent with COVID pneumonia but bacterial pneumonia could not be excluded. The patients BP was documented as 97/64. He was treated with Zofran for nausea and tylenol. He was prescribed a five day course of Azithromycin, an Albuterol inhaler, guaifenessin with codeine cough syrup, and Zofran. Labs were drawn and he was discharged. His lab results were reported after his departure and were significant for a white blood cell count of 1.33, platelet count of 73, 2% myelocytes, 1% metamyelocytes, an absolute neutrophil count of 0.75 K/ul, a creatinine of 1.83, total bilirubin of 1.3, with direct bilirubin of 0.8, alkaline phosphatase of 294 and AST of 112 with ALT noted to be within normal limit. His COVID nasopharyngeal swab from the visit was reported as negative and a swab performed at his employment on 13-Jan-21 was also reported to be negative. Patient could not be reached by phone after discharge from Urgent Care about these labs. On the evening of 16-Jan-21, Police Department received a 911 call about an adult at the patient's address who was found unresponsive. Upon arrival on scene, the patient was found to be deceased and a decision was made not to attempt to resuscitate. The death was deemed to be non-suspicious and the patient's body was transported to a funeral home. On 19-Jan-21, I contacted the State Medical Examiner's Office. They have decided to perform an autopsy and have recovered the CBC and chemistry specimens obtained for further testing.
30-39 years LTCF Pfizer Vaccine clinic conducted 12/29/2020 Vaccine lead received a call indicating that a staff member deceased somewhere between 1/3/2021 and 1/4/2021. Cause of death is unknown, and an autopsy is being performed.
65+ years pt passed away with an hour to hour and 1/2 of receiving vaccine. per nursing home staff they did not expect pt to make it many more days. pt was unresponsive in room when shot was given. per nursing home staff pt was 14 + days post covid
If I understand it correclty, the VAERS system was put in place for all vaccine manufacturers of all vaccines to protect them from numerous and in many cases frivolous lawsuits. Next of kin can still receive payments, not sure if its from the manufacturers or from the federal govt, but this system was put in place because prior to it, vaccine manufacturers were drowning in lawsuits and this was a way to short circuit the whole process and free them of all the red tape, from my very limited understanding.

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cardinalkarp
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by cardinalkarp »

AW, I’ve respected and appreciated your approach throughout this whole thing as it’s evident that you are willing to do TONS of research, but also see both sides to things as opposed to AK’s bias thinking.

AWvsCBsteeeerike3
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

Here's the overall reporting on the vaers system of adverse events. It should be noted about 154M americans have been vaxxed. 200K adverse events (no idea what that means) have been reported. I'm not going to go through and determine how many are minor/major or do anything, really, other than just present the raw data. And, as I said in my previous post, a lot of the deaths were expected. I'd imagine some of the non-death adverse events were expected as well. Even including those, we're sitting at ~0.13% chance of an adverse effect, so take it fwiw.

Image

ETA: But, this also only accounts for more/less short term side effects. Again, as previously noted, we have no long term studies.
Also, ETA: Keep in mind, because this confused me at first, the percent listed next to the vaccines (8% or whatever) account for the % of that vaccine in the overall system (~800K cases in the VAERS database). It's not 8% of recipients have adverse effects.

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GeddyWrox
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by GeddyWrox »

Charles Jaco basically just posted what I was getting at the other day, but he said it way better.

Image

AWvsCBsteeeerike3
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

Okay, last thing, then I'll be done talking about the vaccination effort for a while, maybe.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... .full-text

A study out of the netherlands, er, somewhere other than the US that is non-peer reviewed was published a few days ago stating that the innate arm of the immune system is weakened in parts by the mRNA vaccine. We talked a bunch about innate vs adaptive immune arms of the immune system over the past year with both having vital roles to play. I have no idea what this means, and/or how long lasting such changes would be. I've also heard but don't have a study to quote that the overall immune system works better after mRNA vaccines...so who knows.
Summary
The mRNA-based BNT162b2 vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech was the first registered COVID-19 vaccine and has been shown to be up to 95% effective in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections. Little is known about the broad effects of the new class of mRNA vaccines, especially whether they have combined effects on innate and adaptive immune responses. Here we confirmed that BNT162b2 vaccination of healthy individuals induced effective humoral and cellular immunity against several SARS-CoV-2 variants. Interestingly, however, the BNT162b2 vaccine also modulated the production of inflammatory cytokines by innate immune cells upon stimulation with both specific (SARS-CoV-2) and non-specific (viral, fungal and bacterial) stimuli. The response of innate immune cells to TLR4 and TLR7/8 ligands was lower after BNT162b2 vaccination, while fungi-induced cytokine responses were stronger. In conclusion, the mRNA BNT162b2 vaccine induces complex functional reprogramming of innate immune responses, which should be considered in the development and use of this new class of vaccines.

Jocephus
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Re: Coronavirus

Post by Jocephus »

my university got a "write up" from the NYT on our covid response, etc. kinda cool

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/heal ... abeti.html

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