COVID vaccine works - we're saved!

The Times must have updated their hospitalization data last night because today's map is far worse than yesterdays. The Northeast is still the only part of the country that's improving. This is the May 19 hospitalization map followed by today's: --Percy

You're making a common mistake, and it's because "immunity" is the wrong word. Unfortunately it's the one we're stuck with, but it conveys the wrong impression.Vaccines do not really convey immunity. What they do is prime the immune system with antibodies to fight off infection. Vaccines are not a guarantee that an infection won't take hold because there is no guarantee that the vaccine generated sufficient antibodies to rebuff the invader.Here's what happens when you breath in water droplets containing the covid virus. The virus immediately begins invading cells and replicating, usually somewhere in the nasal passageways, but it could be elsewhere. The immune system detects the invaders and two things happen. Antibodies that already exist begin fighting off the virus, and if enough antibodies exist then the infection might be fought off right at the outset and you'll never even know you were infected.But if the number of antibodies is insufficient then the second line of defense is B-cells, whose job it is to manufacture more antibodies specific to the type of viral infection. If they make enough antibodies then the infection is fought off and you're sick for only a week or so.But what if you're not vaccinated and have never had covid before. That means you have no covid-specific antibodies in your system to fight off the initial infection. And you have no B-cells to produce antibodies. The construction of B-cells and then of antibodies will have to begin from scratch, which could take a couple weeks. During the period where your immune system is ramping up to fight the virus, the virus itself has free range within your body, and with the more lethal forms of covid, like the original form and delta, there is a much higher probability of a negative outcome, such or hospitalization, ventilation, even death.You may also have heard that the virus evolves. The vaccines we have were for the original version of SARS-CoV-2. Skipping the minor evolutionary branches, since 2020 it has evolved into delta and now omicron and then into omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5, which currently dominate the US, mostly BA.5. BA.5 has come a long way from the original SARS-CoV-2, and the vaccines that began development over a couple years ago for the original virus are far less effective against it. You may also have heard that there is an effort to produce a new version of the vaccine that is more effective against BA.5. Best case scenario is that it will be available toward the end of September.But SARS-CoV-2 will continue to be a moving target. Once there's a vaccine effective against BA.5 the virus will be pressured to evolve into yet another variant who's infectiousness and lethality cannot be predicted.When Biden stated last year that getting vaccinated meant you can't get covid he was wrong. What he should have said is that it greatly reduces your likelihood of getting covid, and if you do get it it reduces the likelihood of hospitalization and death.It is unlikely that Fauci ever said that only a vaccine can give herd immunity. It would be like a mathematician saying that 2+2 is the only way of arriving at 4. I can only guess that he was misinterpreted while making the point that it is much preferable to develop herd immunity through vaccination than through widespread infection.--Percy

People actually responded to what you previously said. You ignored them and made your arguments again.If you look at the top right of this page you'll see where it says, "Understanding through Discussion." If you're not interested in discussion, a back and forth where you reply to what people say and they reply to you, then you shouldn't be here.--Percy

You're acting just like a Republican here in the states. If you ever want to know what a Republican is up to, just listen to what he's accusing other people of doing. Okay, let's see if you do.
​ It's a fact that vaccines provide immunity, but as I already explained and that you ignored, immunity doesn't mean what you think it means. Immunity does not mean, "If I take the covid vaccine, the virus cannot infect me." It's unfortunate we've chosen the word immunity because it does connote certainty of protection. Unfortunately it's the word we're stuck with now, but better words might be protection or safeguard.You may have heard the term "effectiveness" used in regard to the vaccines, usually measured as a percentage. The Pfizer and Moderna covid vaccines were judged around 90% effective against the initial covid variant. No vaccine is ever 100% effective. The flu vaccines made available every winter are usually around 60% to 70% effective, so most people already understand that immunity isn't 100%.It's important to understand that vaccines in no way resemble force fields preventing virus from reaching your body. It doesn't encase your sinuses and lungs in barriers that keeps it at bay. All vaccines do is prep the immune system so that it's already prepared to fight off the virus should you come in contact with it, most commonly by breathing it in to the sinuses and/or lungs. Whether your immune system succeeds in fighting off the virus depends upon how well your body's immune system responded to the vaccine, and how large the initial viral load you were exposed to was relative to how strong a defense your immune system has mustered.It's also important to understand that the immune system cannot fight off the virus until the virus infects you. Until the virus infects you the immune system cannot detect the virus and fight it off.There's also the changing variants. We went from the original virus to the delta variant to the omicron variants, and then the omicron subvariant BA.5. We're still using the vaccines developed for the original virus. They're less effective against delta, even less effective against omicron, and barely effective at all against BA.5, as measured by preventing infection. They still significantly diminish the odds of hospitalization and death.Here's a map of the US by county. The more red the county, the higher the case rate. Red tends to correlate with areas of low rates of vaccination. This is from three weeks ago, but todays graph is very similar: Health departments around the world have received a great deal of criticism for how poorly they communicated about the virus. What our own CDC said regarding masks at the outset of the pandemic, incredibly including Fauci himself, is that only those sick needed masks, and N-95 quality masks were unnecessary.On the former he was just obviously wrong and I have no idea why he would say something so stupid. Obviously a mask is just as effective at preventing virus in the air from entering as it is at preventing exhaled virus from leaving.On the latter, he said we didn't need N-95 masks not because they're high effectiveness didn't make a difference, but because there was a shortage and he wanted to preserve them for health professionals. I think people were in general agreement that health professionals should get priority for the high quality masks, but telling obvious lies works against the trust that is so important in dealing with a pandemic. The only fact I see here is you exhibiting unawareness of a lot of information, and since it was information that was already provided to you in an earlier message, you're either pretending that you're unaware, or you're just determinedly unaware.
​ You're misusing the word immunity, and so it is your objections that are fallacious. So far you haven't said anything that is an actual fact.
​ The dominant strain in Australia is BA.5, against which the vaccines are least effective. A new vaccine specific to BA.5 is currently under development and might be ready as early as late September.
​ You're ignoring that Australia (and New Zealand) cut itself off from the outside world and kept covid out of the general population for nearly a couple years. Now that covid is present in the population hospitalizations and deaths from covid can only increase.
​ Again, immunity is the wrong word. Vaccines provide protection, not immunity. Immunity is just the word that we happen to use. It doesn't describe what vaccines actually do, but it's the word we're stuck with. People are just going to have to understand what immunity means in a vaccine context. It's a probability kind of thing where the probability of infection is never 0%.
​ You're only provided misinformation, and we're not paying it much mind. Yes, the vaccine works. It provided around 90% protection against the original virus, around 75% for delta, around 60% for Omicron, and maybe 30% for BA.5. Naturally hospitalization and death are increasingly likely for the vaccinated as you go from the original to delta to omicron to BA.5.And the vaccines are not forever. They have a lifetime. After about 3 months the protection they provide begins to wane, and after about 6 months it is much diminished and you need a booster. Many people don't understand this, thinking, "I got the shot back in April of 2021, why should I ever need another?" Holding your breath is an effective preventative against inhaling potentially virus laden air, such as you might encounter while passing through the dining room of a crowded restaurant. Awareness of risks and taking reasonable cautions is just being prudent. I'm in a vulnerable age group. You're probably unaware, but the vaccines are still reducing hospitalization and death for all age groups but one, the oldest age group. That group seems to be nearly as vulnerable to hospitalization and death as the unvaccinated. Only Trump would describe the vaccines this way. He deserves credit for making money available for vaccine development, and for pre-purchasing a large number of doses.
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--Percy

Edited by Percy, : Grammar.

According to this article in the New York Times, the UK has approved the new Moderna vaccine that is more effective against the Omicron variant: About the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants the article says the vaccine generated a good immune response to these two variants. It's hoped that this vaccine will become available in the US sometime during September. While all age groups would benefit from this booster, this is especially true for those over 60, a group that even with vaccination and boosters proved as vulnerable to Omicron as the fully unvaccinated.I read a brief Scientific American article yesterday about SARS-CoV-2 evolution: Omicron’s Surprising Anatomy Explains Why It Is Wildly Contagious. The two factors most responsible for Omicron's incredibly high infectiousness (greater even than measles) are:

• Mutations on the spike protein hid it more effectively than other variants from the immune system.
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• It exploited an alternate approach to finding a pathway into the cell that also made a wider variety of human cells vulnerable to it.

Omicron tends to produce milder illnesses because lung cells tend to be less vulnerable to Omicron's pathway into the cell, and so infections tend to focus on the upper respiratory tract. Because Omicron infects the lungs less frequently and less intensely, pneumonia is less likely. The article didn't mention other organs.--Percy

The contradiction in your thinking is displayed in your own words. You define immunity in a way the CDC would agree with, as only providing resistance to infection, then you claimed the CDC said that immunity could "stop you from getting covid," something they obviously never said since something that only provides resistance can't do that. The most famous vaccinated person to catch covid was former president Trump. This is an incomplete sentence, but what you intended to say is clear. I think you're correct that there are a great many delusional people out there. I have a friend who declares that his immune system is superpowered and won't let him get covid. I have other friends who are suffering from the "it can't happen to me" delusion.But most people I know understand that immunity only provides resistance, that it only makes it less likely that you'll get covid, be hospitalized, or die. And the current vaccine provides almost no protection against the BA.5 Omicron variant for people age 50 and older. This should change when the new booster becomes available.Meanwhile, those parts of the country with the lowest vaccination rates are also suffering the highest infection, hospitalization and death rates.--Percy

For most of us here, our beliefs about covid mortality were confirmed by recent studies. One "concluded that people living in more-conservative parts of the United States disproportionately bore the burden of illness and death linked to covid-19." (Can politics kill you? Research says the answer increasingly is yes.)The article goes on for a while, but to summarize in my own words, some states actively fought the coronavirus and other states ignored it. Those that ignored it suffered disproportionately from illness and death due to covid.Still summarizing, the other study concluded that longevity in the US has dropped to the lowest it's been since 1996 — 76.1 years.I have a couple friends who believe covid is fake. None caught covid. I have several other friends who are very casual about covid. They almost all caught it. A number of friends masked up and still caught covid. And one friend is a fatalist who caught long covid, still can't walk for more than ten minutes, and refuses all medical treatment for his condition.This tells us just one thing that I think we already knew: people are driven by their internal feelings, and much about those internal feelings is driven by external factors, particularly what everyone around them believes. Unfortunately, in today's connected world, "everyone around them" potentially includes everyone everywhere, including all the Internet idiots claiming covid was a fraud wrought by the Democrats as part of a larger conspiracy to take away our freedoms. The only thing that seems to convince these people is lying on their death bed, and oftentimes not even then.The studies:

• Relationship of political ideology of US federal and state elected officials and key COVID pandemic outcomes following vaccine rollout to adults: April 2021–March 2022
  
• U.S. state policy contexts and mortality of working-age adults

--Percy

The article COVID-19 vaccination associated with fewer heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular issues in Medical News | Medical Articles reports on a research letter describing a study that resulted in these findings. An excerpt from the letter:

quote:

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"We sought to clarify the impact of previous vaccination on cardiovascular events among people who develop COVID-19 and found that, particularly among those with comorbidities, such as previous MACE, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, liver disease, and obesity, there is an association with a lower risk of complications. While we cannot attribute causality, it is supportive evidence that vaccination may have beneficial effects on a variety of post-COVID-19 complications."

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And a quote from one of the authors:

quote:

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"To our surprise, even partial vaccination was associated with lower risk of adverse cardiovascular events. Given the magnitude of SARS-CoV-2 infection worldwide, we hope our findings could help improve vaccination rates, especially in individuals with coexisting conditions."
  —Joy Jiang

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The letter itself can be found here, but it is locked: Impact of Vaccination on Major Adverse Cardiovascular Events in Patients With COVID-19 Infection--Percy

Porkncheese's data originated at Our World in Data, but he likely picked up his images somewhere else. If you visit that site now you'll see more recent data: And for Canada: I have no idea what he's on about. The current numbers are almost the lowest they've been since the pandemic started, and it's no mystery that covid continues and is responsible.--Percy

Wherever you're getting these charts from, they're manipulating you by picking the worst data. Over at World in Data where he's getting these charts you can pick your charts and even the endpoints of the charts for Excess Mortality. For Germany he picked a chart that had an endpoint of January 1 and got this: But if you instead look at the graph for excess deaths over projected (which is nearly identical) the latest date is February 12 and you get this: Evidently there was a spike in Germany that peaked on December 25, 2022. Maybe the spike was real (more traveling and get togethers during the holidays), maybe it was data driven (more sporadic reporting over the holidays), I don't know, but the more recent data shows that Germany has a lower than average mortality instead of an excess.I think you should investigate.--Percy

Here's your graph for Norway whose endpoint is near the peak of the 2022 holiday season: And here's the same graph that runs almost six weeks further showing the peak was very short, ending just after the 2022 holiday season: Another factor contributing to excess mortality is that people in the main are no longer following mitigation techniques like isolation and masking, so other respiratory diseases that nearly disappeared during covid like flu and RSV are having a heyday.--Percy

To make a case for the vaccine causing increased mortality you need different graphs, one's that distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated deaths.Here's a graph that does just that, from the same source, United States: COVID-19 weekly death rate by vaccination status - Our World in Data: This graph contradicts your claims. There wasn't a single week when vaccinated deaths exceeded unvaccinated deaths.--Percy

The graphs you're posting do not support and are unrelated to the case you're making. This has been explained to you, yet you don't respond but just keep posting unrelated graphs. Here, again, is the kind of graph you want: This graph contradicts your position on vaccines.It *is* possible for more vaccinated than unvaccinated people to die in a region, but only if that region has a high level of vaccination. For example, if a region is 90% vaccinated, and if it's an 80/20 ratio of unvaccinated to vaccinated deaths, then 18% of deaths will be vaccinated and 8% will be unvaccinated, but only because the unvaccinated population is so small.--Percy

I wish you had said, "Let me respond to some of the replies to my posts." It's not true that there was a large increase in unexplained deaths. Very few death certificates list the cause of death as "unknown".Even if you meant to say, "Unexplained big rise in excess mortality...", that's not true, either. This past year there has been a significant increase in flu and RSV and other respiratory illnesses because countries have dropped the covid protocols, but excess mortality hasn't increased but declined. I think you must mean just Australia, which I get to later. I'm not surprised that the government and media haven't said much about your made-up excess mortality crisis.You presented a couple more graphs of the exact sort you've posted before that don't make your case at all. Yes, there are excess deaths, but we know why they're happening. In other words, you suspect that vaccines are causing the excess deaths but don't have any evidence. It sounds like you would like to see graphs of the covid vaccination status for people who died of other causes like flu, RSV or other respiratory infections, but you've already been shown the graph of covid deaths for vaccinated versus unvaccinated. If vaccinated people were dying at a higher rate that graph would give some indication of it, but it doesn't, so of course no one thinks the vaccine is causing deaths. All indications from that graph I showed, and here it is again, is that vaccinated people have about an 80% lower rate of death than vaccinated people: I'm curious what you think people are dying of when killed by the vaccine? What does it say on their death certificates? You are misinformed. No vaccine provides 100% protection against any virus. That includes flu, mumps, measles, rubella, and covid,. The MMR vaccine provides very high protection for mumps, measles and rubella because their variants are very similar with respect to the vaccine. But the same is not true of flu. There's a new strain of flu every year, which is why flu vaccines have an effectiveness that changes every year, sometimes as low as 40%, sometimes as high as 90%. The flu vaccines are actually pretty effective against the strain they're intended for, but they have to make the decision about what strain will be most prevalent the following season many months earlier so they can begin production in time, and making that choice is fraught with error. Make the right choice and the flu vaccine has high effectiveness that season, a wrong choice and the opposite occurs.Like flu covid also evolves and produces new strains. It has already gone from the original to delta to omicron to the current XBB.1.5, and of course there were many minor variants. The covid vaccines were developed for the original variant, and their effectiveness has dropped with each variant. Efficacy is measured against multiple criteria, among them illness, hospitalization, and death, and of course it varies with age group, becoming less effective the older the age group.Against the original covid variant the various vaccines were around 85% effective at preventing hospitalization. Against delta that dropped to around 75%, and for omicron 60%. Figures are not yet available for the XBB.1.5 variant, which is almost all cases in the US right now. A 70-year-old in the US has about a 2% chance of dying within a year, but if they catch covid then it doubles to about 4%. Those are extra deaths. The life expectancy of a 70-year-old in the US is about 88, but as you yourself have pointed out, most covid deaths occur among the elderly. A 70-year-old who catches covid has a lower probability of making it to 88. That is incorrect. What we can say is that the mitigation practices of social isolation and masking dramatically reduced the incidence rates of cold, flu and RSV through the first couple years of the pandemic, and covid represents almost all the excess deaths during that period. But this winter the northern hemisphere has experienced a resurgence of cold, flu and RSV as these diseases prey upon a population with lower immunity than has been the case in the past. And the XBB.1.5 variant is less virulent then prior strains, so cold, flu and RSV are now the cause of the majority of excess deaths. Yes, Australia is anomalous because they handled covid in a manner different from the rest of the world. They thought they could fight covid through isolation and quarantine. This worked for a while, but at the beginning of 2022 covid began making inroads into Australia. Excess mortality was only postponed, not prevented: The same happened to New Zealand, which took a similar approach (note that the timescales are different): Most of the rest of the world used only social isolation and masking, and so they took the covid hit much earlier. This is the graph for the US: I could find no data for Australia broken down by age. Could you please present your information? Again, I could not find this information. Australia did not have many excess deaths from covid in 2020 because back then Australia was still successfully keeping it at bay. Could you please present your information? You present no information and I don't know what 3rd world countries you're referring to, so I just now looked at the graphs for three randomly selected 3rd world countries, Egypt, Guatemala and UAE. They all seem to suffer from sporadic data collection (that was my conclusion from the sparsity of data points), but they all had significant excess mortality. What does "death by covid vaccine injection" look like? Again, Australia delayed but couldn't avoid the covid pandemic. My guess is that any excess mortality seen now in Australia is due to a combination of covid, flu and RSV. But this is your summer. I would expect that this coming winter that regions of Australia where weather forces people to be indoors more of the time will likely experience even higher excess mortality rates. What does vaccine injury look like? Could you be more specific? When you say that, for example, "the injection has nothing to do with it," my question is, "With what?" What injury is occurring? Given that the entire rest of the world has shown the vaccines safe since they were first introduced in early 2021, certainty that Australians are being harmed by the vaccine seems unjustified. A reasonable position on people who refuse to be vaccinated for deadly diseases is also simple: stay isolated at home. A reasonable position is that people shouldn't exhale deadly pathogens into the air. What reasons did your doctors give for not taking it? What form did the persecution take? Should unvaccinated people be free to spread preventable disease?--Percy