Coronavirus

[cardinalkarp]

A major review of vaccines suggests the AstraZeneca jab does raise the risk of blood clots and another serious condition that can cause bleeding. But the study found the risk of such problems following a coronavirus infection was still much higher.

For who though?? Those over 65 and have multiple co-morbidities? If so yes, I agree. But you can’t make that blanket statement and one size fits all approach and that’s not how this virus works.

[Fat_Bulldog]

What is the alternative to vaccinations?

I wonder what the daily death toll would look like without vaccinations?

[ghostrunner]

I believe in Europe they're not allowed to market drugs at all on television. The TV advertisements for "talk to your doctor about Penismightier" is an American phenomenon. I think it's hard to get burned on miracle cures because to half the people they act as a placebo, to the other half they write it off as meh that one didn't work, but maybe another one will. When I was a teen I rotated through around six different acne medications and nothing except Acutane worked. If some FDA approved and dermatologist prescribed medications don't "work", then why should it be any different for Professor Copperfield's Miracle Lagumes?

I mean the obvious answer is that one of those worked for you, and presumably that was tested and proven beforehand. I assume the ones that didn't work for you did work for someone else. Where is it being studied and proven that Alex Jones' brain pills work?

That aside, seems the least we could do is place similar limitations on advertising. That'd never happen here, of course.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

2200 deaths yesterday too

The quicker Darwin has his way with them the better at this point. Not much else we can do other than force vaccine into people's bodies but they'd rather die. Let them.

[GeddyWrox]

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Exactly. Just lay out the facts. Nothing else to do now. Nobody's listening anyway.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

One thing I've never quite understood is America's laxity when it comes to dealing with magic pills and miracle drugs and I can't help thinking some of HCQ and Ivermectin (understanding both have legit human uses) business and the post above are partly the result of years of predatory advertising softening the public up for this kind of conspiracy based self medicating. That line about being in on special knowledge is what those ads have promised for years. "Nobody talks about this!". Ever since I was a teenager American TV has had informercials promising miracle cures. If you spend any time listening to AM talk radio you'll hear all kinds of questionable claims and promises related to pills, royal jelly, supplements, etc... This has now transferred over to right wing YouTubers, a number of whom have promoted a variety of brain pills. Then of course there's been a lot of sketchy "holistic" healing products marketed to the left.

We've got a longer history of this with old time snake oil salesmen, but I feel like it really took off with cable tv and then talk radio shortly after. I can't recall any major media examples from the 40's to the 70's, though I suppose it was around in some form.

Why is this so easy to do here and why aren't there consequences? Do other countries have this problem? I know we're pretty unique when it comes to drug companies being allowed to advertise here. Doesn't seem like free speech ought to cover it given the obvious potential for harm, but maybe that's it.

Undoubtedly there is a long history of snake oil salesmen trying to profit off the unfortunate circumstances of other. It's not even exclusive to the medical field. There are tons of people advertising income/financial get rich quick things like real estate schemes, stock market/trading schemes, Amazon schemes, college degree schemes (looking at you University of Phoenix), etc etc etc. Why? Because there is a huge market/class of people that are underpaid/overworked so the thought of working 20 hours a week and making millions is...enticing.

Regardless, I'm off topic. Back to the medical field. There is undoubtedly a huge market for supplements with varying degrees of efficacy to them ranging from whatever Alex Jones is selling to basic multi-vitamins. These are just supplements though, not necessairly medicine.

Then there's the actual medicines that work with varying degrees of efficacy backed by big pharma, but what they (big pharma) are extremely good at is selling their products regardless of efficacy. I may have shared this story on here once about Mrs. AW after quitting a job due to an abusive employer was looking for work. She ended up with a part time gig as a medical rep for a pharmaceutical company that was selling a drug to help control Type 2/Non-Insulin Dependent diabetes. I don't think it's on the market anymore. The amount of money the company spent was astronomical. First, they would train all the medical reps. Prepare a non-editable power point for the reps to use. Highlight a few key stats they found through research. Hammer those home. Etc. Then, they'd call around to all the doctors offices and try to set up lunch and learns or if there was enough interest in an area a dinner at a swanky restaurant so the medical reps could go in and give the hourlong powerpoint presentation. Then, they'd blitz the airwaves with commercials....talk to your doctor about [insert drug name here]. Then they'd go to market as 1 of god knows how many (at least 10) drugs with the same function, in this case a second medicine after metformin was not working well enough. I mean, it's not snake oil, the drug, presumably, had some efficacy. Probably a lot more with a healthy diet and exercise though that was never mentioned. But, that is my experience with a pharmaceutical company how they operate. Millions and tens of millions of dollars just to advertise some, in the grand scheme of things, worthless drug. And, I don't think it's a one off event, I'm guessing it's standard operating procedure.

All that to say, it doesn't appear to be the case with ivermectin and hcq. There are, for better or worse, doctors that genuinely believe in the science, mechanisms of action, pharmacology, whatever of off these drugs. The drug manufacturers don't appear to be the ones that want to push the narrative, though I could be wrong.

Though, there are doctors promoting them like the FLCCC and profiting by claiming these drugs work. Is their motive to make money while swindling people? Or is it more of an altruistic campaign to hopefully help save lives via cheap, readily available medicine to treat covid? Or is it some combination where, eh, it might work and they can make a lot of money doing very little? I honestly don't know, though after listening to countless interviews with pierre kory, I don't tend to think he's equivalent to the guys like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zupt6RoQgbM There are also countless other doctors not affiliated with FLCCC prescribing it simply because they think it works with no financial windfall from doing so.

I would still agree though that America is largely susceptible to the 'fix it fast/get rich quick/magic pill' schemes. No idea if that's the same in other nations or not.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475

Safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine in a Nationwide Setting

We used a data set involving more than 2.4 million vaccinated persons from an integrated health care organization to evaluate the safety profile of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 vaccine. The main potential adverse events identified included an excess risk of lymphadenopathy (78.4 events per 100,000 persons), herpes zoster infection (15.8 events), appendicitis (5.0 events), and myocarditis (2.7 events).

To place these risks in context, we also examined data on more than 240,000 infected persons to estimate the effects of a documented SARS-CoV-2 infection on the incidence of the same adverse events. SARS-CoV-2 infection was not estimated to have a meaningful effect on the incidence of lymphadenopathy, herpes zoster infection, or appendicitis, but it was estimated to result in a substantial excess risk of myocarditis (11.0 events per 100,000 persons). SARS-CoV-2 infection was also estimated to substantially increase the risk of several adverse events for which vaccination was not found to increase the risk, including an estimated excess risk of arrhythmia (166.1 events per 100,000 persons), acute kidney injury (125.4 events), pulmonary embolism (61.7 events), deep-vein thrombosis (43.0 events), myocardial infarction (25.1 events), pericarditis (10.9 events), and intracranial hemorrhage (7.6 events).

An association between Covid-19 vaccination and myocarditis has been previously reported.20 Although no cases of myocarditis were reported in the BNT162b2 (Pfizer–BioNTech),2 mRNA-1273 (Moderna),3 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AstraZeneca)4 phase 3 clinical trials, multiple cases of myocarditis after Covid-19 vaccination have recently been reported in the literature,21-25 and both the Israeli Ministry of Health26 and the CDC have investigated this association.27 The risk appears to be highest among young men.26,27 We found that the risk of myocarditis increased by a factor of three after vaccination, which translated to approximately 3 excess events per 100,000 persons; the 95% confidence interval indicated that values between 1 and 5 excess events per 100,000 persons were compatible with our data. Among the 21 persons with myocarditis in the vaccinated group, the median age was 25 years (interquartile range, 20 to 34), and 90.9% were male.

Another vaccine-related adverse event that has recently received attention in the medical literature is Bell’s palsy. In a recent article based on publicly available data from the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 vaccine trials, Ozonoff et al.28 suggested a possible association between these vaccines and Bell’s palsy and estimated a rate ratio of approximately 7.0. This conclusion differed from the Food and Drug Administration briefing on these vaccines in December 2020; that briefing considered the incidence of Bell’s palsy to be similar to the background incidence.5 A small number of cases of Bell’s palsy after Covid-19 vaccination have also been reported in the literature.29,30 In the current study, the effect estimate was consistent with a potentially mild increase in the risk of Bell’s palsy after vaccination, with a risk ratio of 1.32 (95% CI, 0.92 to 1.86). The absolute effect was small, with up to 8 excess events per 100,000 persons being highly compatible with our data according to the 95% confidence interval. Herpes zoster infection, the incidence of which we found to be increased after vaccination, is one of the potential causes of facial-nerve palsy.31

Another particularly notable class of adverse events that has been reported in the context of Covid-19 vaccines is thromboembolic events. These adverse events, which primarily affect young women, have been linked with the ChAdOx1 nCoV-1932 and Ad26.COV2.S (Johnson & Johnson–Janssen) Covid-19 vaccines,33 both of which are adenoviral vector vaccines. However, we did not find an association between the BNT162b2 vaccine and various thromboembolic events in this study.

Some initially unexpected effects were seen in the results of the current study. The BNT162b2 vaccine appears to be protective against certain conditions such as anemia and intracranial hemorrhage. These same adverse events are also identified in this study as complications of SARS-CoV-2 infection, so it appears likely that the protective effect of the vaccine is mediated through its protection against undiagnosed SARS-CoV-2 infection, which may be undiagnosed either because of a lack of testing or because of false negative PCR results.

This study has several limitations. First, persons in the study were not randomly assigned according to exposures (vaccinations and SARS-CoV-2 infections); this may have introduced confounding at baseline and selection bias at censoring, especially since a single set of confounders was used for adjustment in the assessment of many disparate adverse events. Second, the matching process that was necessary to attain exchangeability between the study groups resulted in a study population with a different composition than the eligible population (e.g., median age, 38 years rather than 43 years). Because this different composition changes the population over which the causal effect is being estimated, different estimates might be found for adverse events for which the incidence may differ substantially between subgroups (e.g., myocarditis). Also, we excluded certain populations (such as health care workers and persons residing in long-term care facilities) that could be at particularly high risk for certain adverse events. Both of these issues should be taken into account when considering the generalizability of the findings.

Third, some diagnoses that were recorded in out-of-network hospitals, which were delayed in being reported to the insurer and were not entered by the person’s general practitioner from the hospital discharge notes into the outpatient medical record, could have been missed. Fourth, it is possible that persons are more likely to increase their levels of clinical awareness, concern, or both after vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infection, and thus they may be more likely to report or seek medical care for their symptoms, resulting in a spuriously increased incidence of the various adverse events in the vaccinated or infected groups. Similarly, among persons with SARS-CoV-2 infection, the spike in the incidence of certain adverse events in the first day of follow-up could indicate the initial clinical manifestation of the infection, but it could also be related to active testing for SARS-CoV-2. Fifth, all the effect measures that we presented are based only on a new incidence of the specific adverse event under study; thus, less light was shed on the potential additional risk among persons with a medical history of each of these adverse events. However, this choice was necessary to distinguish between true new diagnoses of a given adverse event and recoding of past diagnoses and to ensure the accuracy of the adverse-event labels.

In this study, we sought to place the increased risk of adverse events caused by the BNT162b2 vaccine in context by contrasting this risk with that of the same adverse events after documented infection with SARS-CoV-2. We thought that this was necessary because vaccination and its potential risks do not occur in a void but rather in the context of an ongoing pandemic. Although the general risks of hospitalization, severe disease, and death from Covid-19 are widely recognized, secondary complications of infection are less well known. Therefore, in this analysis, we sought to estimate the effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection on the incidence of the same list of adverse events examined in the vaccination analysis. Because the cohorts that we used to study the vaccine and infection effects were different in composition, care should be taken when comparing the resulting risk estimates. In addition, knowledge of these risks alone is insufficient for a complete decision-theoretic analysis. When a person decides to become vaccinated, this choice results in a probability of 100% for the vaccination, whereas the alternative of contracting SARS-CoV-2 infection is an event with uncertain probability that depends on the person, place, and time. Moreover, infection with SARS-CoV-2 has many other adverse effects beyond those considered here, including the risk of transmission to family members and others.

We estimated that the BNT162b2 vaccine resulted in an increased incidence of a few adverse events over a 42-day follow-up period. Although most of these events were mild, some of them, such as myocarditis, could be potentially serious. However, our results indicate that SARS-CoV-2 infection is itself a very strong risk factor for myocarditis, and it also substantially increases the risk of multiple other serious adverse events. These findings help to shed light on the short- and medium-term risks of the vaccine and place them in clinical context. Further studies will be needed to estimate the potential of long-term adverse events.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

May need to switch the language to english which is easy to do if you're using chrome, not sure about other browsers but here's israel's data.

Lot's of talk about how more vaxxed people are sick/severe there than unvaxxed which is true, but you can toggle between absolute numbers and rate numbers and see the vax is still quite effective. (Translation is not perfect, fair warning, I'm assuming some of the phrases are meant to be similar to what I'm used to seeing) Also, the boxes selected don't change what shows in the box but the stats change with what's selected. Hence the first graph below is overall numbers, not a rate despite the box showing per 100K

https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general

[G. Keenan]

A major review of vaccines suggests the AstraZeneca jab does raise the risk of blood clots and another serious condition that can cause bleeding. But the study found the risk of such problems following a coronavirus infection was still much higher.

For who though?? Those over 65 and have multiple co-morbidities? If so yes, I agree. But you can’t make that blanket statement and one size fits all approach and that’s not how this virus works.

Exactly. Which is why you should not assume given your age and good health that your experience of the virus will be no biggie. Odds are it won't, but you never know. PLENTY of otherwise healthy people under age 50 have died from Covid or had terrible experiences with it. How sure are you that won't be your fate?

Also, plenty of unvaccinated people who wear masks and avoid crowds are catching Delta.

Frankly, your risk calculation in all this is just way off.