Please Research Your Decisions.
- Thread starter sorce
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sorce
Nonsense Rascal
A discussion is about contradiction.
I just happen to be on BOTH sides.
Don't just look AROUND me.
Look INTO me.
We are almost there!
Sorce
ajm55555
Chumono
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Everything we do has an associated risk, yet most of the times, the risk is so low that the decision is an implicit "we'll do it anyway":
- flying
- driving a car
- swimming
- moving heavy stuff
- cutting tree branches
- walking below dangling icicles
- using the stairs
- ...
Every action we can imagine had someone killed in the past. It's a matter of risk and reward.
The advantages of vaccines are immensely superior to the risk. Just read the news.
Let's be grateful they were able to synthesize them and get them approved in such a short period of time.
Of course any condition that comes up should be strictly evaluated.
Sometimes neither the patient nor the doctor is aware of it but what can we do? It's like that for everything we do. Vaccines are no exception.
- flying
- driving a car
- swimming
- moving heavy stuff
- cutting tree branches
- walking below dangling icicles
- using the stairs
- ...
Every action we can imagine had someone killed in the past. It's a matter of risk and reward.
The advantages of vaccines are immensely superior to the risk. Just read the news.
Let's be grateful they were able to synthesize them and get them approved in such a short period of time.
Of course any condition that comes up should be strictly evaluated.
Sometimes neither the patient nor the doctor is aware of it but what can we do? It's like that for everything we do. Vaccines are no exception.
coh
Imperial Masterpiece
Your argument has a major flaw. If you get injected with a vaccine that turns out to have serious long term health impacts, you can't undo it. You just have to deal with whatever happens. In contrast, if you feel that flying or driving is too dangerous, you can simply stop doing those things. Find other ways to travel, move to a city or town where you can walk to most places, etc.
No one knows how this will go. These vaccines may turn out to be perfectly safe in the long term, and most of the short term deaths being reported to the VAERS system may be coincidences that occur when you mass vaccinate hundreds of millions of people (roughly 8000 people die every day in the US under normal conditions). But the unavoidable fact is, this technology has never been employed in humans before. There are no long term safety studies. The first injections into test subjects occurred about a year ago and the test population was relatively small.
If that risk is acceptable to you, get the vaccine. If you're in a high risk group due to age, weight or other health conditions, get the vaccine. If you're young and healthy, the risk from the vaccine may well exceed the risk from covid, at least the current strains. Who knows what may come down the road.
ajm55555
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I was talking about relative risks.
If you say the problem is it cannot be undone, I tell you this pandemic is a whole different story.
Fighting it cannot be left to individual decisions. Your decision to not get vaccinated will impact the health/life of other people.
Every person that doesn't get vaccinated is a factory of possible mutations that can be more contagious or be unaffected by the current vaccines.
Let's say doctors are not obliged to get it. Let's say you need a life-saving surgery. How would you feel if the doctors who will operate you refused to get vaccinated because they didn't want to risk long term effects and there are no other vaccinated doctors available?
If science ruled the world, there would be no need to make it compulsory. I'm not in favor of it yet, but for sure we don't need Mr I Know Everything from a podcast or some social media group to tell us what is right or wrong. Let the virologists speak and everyone listens. Not all of doctors will have the same opinion but that's just because it's so new. The more time will pass, the more we will know and the scientific response will be uniform.
coh
Imperial Masterpiece
How can you evaluate the relative risk when you don't have the long term safety data for the vaccine? We have some information about the risks of covid. Old/obese/diabetic etc. These all increase the risk significantly. Young/healthy...risk is pretty minor, quite possibly less than the risks associated with the vaccines. But of course we don't know that yet because we don't have long term studies.
And yes, every infected person is a potential mutation factory. But surely you are aware by now that vaccination doesn't prevent everyone from getting covid, right? So vaccinated people are spreading delta around and potentially increasing the chance (through selective pressure) of a more virulent strain arising. They'll do that whether I'm vaccinated or not.
As for the surgery, I'd ask the doctor to get tested before the surgery (as I'm sure he'd ask me). If he isn't infected, I wouldn't care if he was vaccinated or not.
Here is a huge part of the problem - virologists and other medical doctors are trying to speak out about what they are seeing, and they're being censored if they don't adhere to the accepted viewpoint. In medical journals and on social media. People who only consume mainstream media are getting a very biased view of the science.
BTW, interesting how quickly the mainstream virologists circled the wagons last Jan/Feb. Within days or weeks of covid being identified they were already scheming on how to shut down discussion of a possible lab leak origin. Seems they doth protest too much. My impression is they didn't want anyone looking too closely at the research that was being done behind closed doors. Are they trustworthy? Toe the party line or lose funding?
I have to be careful because I'm trending into some territory here that is probably best avoided on a bonsai forum. However, in my opinion, the events of the last year have been very eye-opening if you've been paying attention.
ajm55555
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"While vaccines provide a high degree of protection from COVID-19 infection, it is expected that a small proportion of vaccinated individuals may become infected as no vaccine is 100% effective."
"Small proportion". The objective here is quick as possible eradication possibly through herd immunity not survival of the fittest for the rest of time.
leatherback
The Treedeemer
Working in a slightly more central position at the university I find these comments hugely amusing.
The main reason for academics not wanting to take money from industry is because they do not want to be put in a position where they become dependent of commercial compagnies. Yet at the same time, there is a huge pressure by the public that they do not want to fund research that is not co-funded by industry (which would proove some form of societal relevance).
Can't have your cake and eat it. Either you want academia fully independent and the research institutes are funded publicly to ensure independence of industry (But hey, then politics might determine what should be done) or you get industry involved.
Glad that to be close enough to know these issues are quite rare and 99,9% of the academics here are honest and ethical.
Interesting concept in science though. If you really have a solution nobody has thought about, the system is set up to verify, compare notes and step away from explanations that do not hold. Censoring of alternative viewpoints is rare...
coh
Imperial Masterpiece
There are competing issues. One is the potential to reduce the impact of the pandemic in the short run. Vaccines seem to be doing that reasonably well, at least in terms of preventing serious disease and death. But that has to be weighed against the possibility of selective pressure to increase the likelihood of more virulent strains, as well as the possible long term consequences of the vaccines themselves.
And some reports out of Israel suggest the vaccine effectiveness is considerably decreased now with delta. For instance: Israeli report: pfizer effectiveness drops to 63% against delta
I can't vouch for the source but there are other similar reports. Again, it seems to be protective against severe illness but not infection itself.
Overall, I'm glad so many of you were willing to stick out your arm and be early test subjects. I'm probably going to get on the vaccine train in the next week or two as I cannot completely isolate myself from society (much as I would like). I can stay at home (have worked at home for 20 years) but my wife (vaccinated) is out there and could bring covid back at any time. I am less than thrilled, however. I'm tempted to hold out for another option like Novavax but who knows if/when that will be available.
Seems to have increased a lot lately. I don't have a great solution but that doesn't mean I can't call out what I see. BTW, I've been a working scientist for over 30 years. Have co-authored about a half dozen peer reviewed papers, countless conference presentations, have served as a reviewer for a bunch of papers. Most scientists in my experience are ethical and honest, but it only takes a few doing the wrong thing to have a big negative impact.
BTW, a lot of the money that wound up at the Wuhan Virology Institute apparently came from NIH originally. Those guys have acted like they have something to hide since day 1. Kristian Andersen is a biggie...those Fauci emails where he was saying that the virus looked engineered, then a week or two later he published a paper definitely claiming it came from nature. Nothing suspicious there!
sorce
Nonsense Rascal
coh
Imperial Masterpiece
I really don't have much more I want to say about this subject but yes, these 3 local cases (western NY) demonstrate how ridiculous things have become. Basically for anyone who doesn't want to watch the video - they describe situations where people were critically ill in the ICU, on ventilators, hospital saying there's nothing more that can be done. Families asked hospitals to use ivermectin (or got their doctor to prescribe it). Hospitals refused. Families had to get court orders to force hospitals to give ivermectin. In one of the cases the hospital claimed they "lost" the ivermectin and couldn't get more. Had to get another court order. Eventually all the patients got the drug and all recovered/left the hospital.
He also described a case downstate where the infectious disease doctor in the hospital prescribed ivermectin, but the hospital administration and pharmacy wouldn't fill it. Had to get a court order.
There are other cases I know of. A similar one in the Chicago area where they got a court order and the hospital still refused. This dragged out for days while the patient lingered on a vent. Eventually they finally got the treatment but I don't know if the patient survived.
There was another one in Texas where a doctor got covid and was in the ICU, possibly on a vent. He/his family wanted ivermectin but the hospital wouldn't provide it. The family wound up paying to have him airlifted to another hospital where they used the FLCCC protocol. He survived.
Health care in the US, 2021.
sorce
Nonsense Rascal
It also mentions it won a Nobel Prize.
That's kinda key IMO!
Sorce
That's kinda key IMO!
Sorce
The Elgazzar paper was retracted due to ethical concerns. Specifically, "the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised" and the data was "just totally faked".
Here's today's article about it in the Guardian.
Quote from the article (bold type added for emphasis by me):
So, basically, this one totally fabricated paper threw off the meta-analyses because it "is so large, and so massively positive - showing a 90% reduction in mortality - it hugely skews the evidence in favour of ivermectin".
coh
Imperial Masterpiece
It's unfortunate that this particular study turned out to be fraudulent. However, the overwhelming evidence still supports a positive benefit for ivermectin. Almost every study that has been done shows a benefit. The website below lists every study, both RCTs and observational studies. Judge for yourself. The benefits are very strong for prophylaxis and early treatment, less for late treatment. Are all these studies fraudulent or so seriously flawed that the apparently positive results are an illusion? I suppose it's possible, but extremely unlikely.
The drug is extremely safe and appears to be effective. I've now got a stash of "human" ivermectin so I don't have to resort to horse paste.
Ivermectin for COVID 19: real time meta analysis of 60 studies
No, the evidence does not support that. Thus, this statement in the Guardian article: "If you remove this one study from the scientific literature, suddenly there are very few positive randomized control trials of ivermectin for Covid-19. Indeed, if you get rid of just this research, most meta-analyses that have found positive results would have their conclusions entirely reversed."
coh
Imperial Masterpiece
Don't just focus on randomized control studies. There's a lot more data out there.
Did you even look at the list of studies cited on the website? Or are you just parroting that one article that you read?
Bonsai Nut
Nuttier than your average Nut
I think that viewpoint holds for most of academia. The problem comes when politicians and media get involved. Then you have untrained people picking and choosing which information they want to use to advance their agenda, and which snippet of a 200 page paper they will use to create the greatest fear and/or loathing so that they get the most eyeballs.
One of my favorite quotes from marketing research: "tell me the result you want, and I can design research to get it." The hardest thing to do is to create research that doesn't have design bias - and to understand what the results say instead of what you think they say.
Even now I cringe when I try to get information about Covid-19. At best, you have real information that isn't fully understood - being used as a proxy for something entirely different. At worse, people are just making stuff up.
Here's a simple question: "how many people in the USA have had Covid-19?". No one knows. No one even slightly knows - though one certainty is that the % of population who have been tested for Covid-19 and have tested positive (currently at 10.3% of total US population) is a fraction of the true rate. Is it 20%? 25%? 30%? (I have read several statistical studies that have tried to answer this question, and most results tend to point towards a 25% plus or minus result). So if we don't know (even remotely) how many people in this country have had the disease, does it make any sense to compare our "number of people who have tested positive" to another country's "number of people who have tested positive"? Absolutely not, since those numbers can be so greatly influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the disease... but it doesn't stop the media, and pretty much everyone out there, from doing so. It starts to make you wonder, since there have been a number of times that I have caught the CDC "massaging the truth" when it comes to sharing information in a way that influences public behavior. Is it ok to lie to the public if you feel you are doing it for a good reason? And once you've been caught lying, do you understand why people don't trust you in the future, even if you are telling the truth?
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coh
Imperial Masterpiece
In the middle of a pandemic that is killing millions around the world, you're going to ignore the stacks of observational studies supporting ivermectin (and other treatments)? Brilliant. You should get a job at NIH, FDA or CDC. You'd fit right in.
Under normal conditions, RCTs are the way to go but even they can be "massaged" to get a specific result. The big study (Recovery trial, I think) that showed HCQ to be ineffective and even detrimental gave the appearance of being designed to fail. Doses used were way higher than reasonable and the drug was started too late. Of course it failed the RCT. I suspect any ivermectin trials will be similar.