And this seems to me to be the key question here: do we really want to get back to living? I do. So take the rational precautions — a solid vaccine — and go about your business as you always did. Yes, I’ll wear a mask indoors if I’m legally required or politely asked. But I don’t really see why anyone should. In a free society, once everyone has access to a vaccine that overwhelmingly prevents serious sickness and death, there is no reason to enforce lockdowns again, or mask mandates, or social distancing any longer. In fact, there’s every reason not to. 

4 minutes ago, Kz! said:

https://www.wkrn.com/news/pfizer-vaccine-effectiveness-declines-after-4-months-study-says/

Least you got that solid 4 months. Those were good months, I'm sure.  

You really are an idiot

"The study also showed that though declining, the vaccine was 97% effective against severe disease for at least six months. "

You folks really need to stop acting surprised when Kz! can't change his spots, er swastikas, whatever.

Just now, Toastrel said:

You folks really need to stop acting surprised when Kz! can't change his spots, er swastikas, whatever.

Yeah I've been read some of his posts today while out by the pool drinking beer, while my wife toils away in her office to pay for it all. That dude really is an idiot.

44 minutes ago, mr_hunt said:

anybody here have their employers go back to mandatory mask wearing yet?  mine made it optional for fully vaccinated employees a couple months ago...but i have a feeling the masks will be back soon. whatevs. 

No, we are not mandated to wear masks, vaccinated or not. (But we are certainly encouraged to get vaxxed and given paid time off too.) But I do see more people wearing facemasks each day. I think they will be coming back for a while, especially after schools reopen and the number of infections surge.

The second client I visit follows only whatever is currently mandated by the state.

2 hours ago, VanHammersly said:

You give everyone 3 months to get the shot in their arms and anyone that doesn't have it yet is forced to get the shot in their D (or C, I'm not sexist).  Problem solved.

Front hole, you bigot 

1 hour ago, mr_hunt said:

anybody here have their employers go back to mandatory mask wearing yet?  mine made it optional for fully vaccinated employees a couple months ago...but i have a feeling the masks will be back soon. whatevs. 

Mine sent an email last month that we are going back on the road in September. Curious to see if that changes

1 hour ago, Kz! said:

Haha, yeah, I'm just jelly. If I could live without the respect of my wife, family, and friends, I'd probably try the jobless thing myself. 

Damn kz, you are cut deep. Not a good look my dude.

6 minutes ago, Paul852 said:

Damn kz, you are cut deep. Not a good look my dude.

The irony here is I probably have a better job than that loser does. My wife just happens to have made huge career leaps the past 4 or 5 years because she is brilliant and in the pharmaceutical industry (ironically she is currently with a start up making vaccines).

@we_gotta_believe, with all due respect (and I mean it), didn't I say something along these lines recently about viral evolution in response to vaccinated populations as available resevoirs? I'm not sure if I'm using every term appropriately there, but give me your thoughts on this:

 

Quote

Vaccination is not enough by itself to stop the spread of variants, study finds

Vaccination alone won't stop the rise of new variants and in fact could push the evolution of strains that evade their protection, researchers warned Friday.

They said people need to wear masks and take other steps to prevent spread until almost everyone in a population has been vaccinated.

 

Their findings, published in Nature Scientific Reports, support an unpopular decision by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to advise even fully vaccinated people to start wearing masks again in areas of sustained or high transmission.

"We found that a fast rate of vaccination decreases the probability of emergence of a resistant strain," the team wrote.

"Counterintuitively, when a relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions happened at a time when most individuals of the population have already been vaccinated, the probability of emergence of a resistant strain was greatly increased," they added.

"Our results suggest that policymakers and individuals should consider maintaining non-pharmaceutical interventions and transmission-reducing behaviors throughout the entire vaccination period."

 

"When most people are vaccinated, the vaccine-resistant strain has an advantage over the original strain," Simon Rella of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, who worked on the study, told reporters.

"This means the vaccine resistant strain spreads through the population faster at a time when most people are vaccinated."

 

But if so-called non pharmaceutical interventions are maintained -- such as mask use and social distancing -- the virus is less likely to spread and change. "There is a chance to remove the vaccine resistant mutations from the population," Rella said.

 

The team used a mathematical model to predict these changes, but their findings follow what is known about the epidemiology of viruses and what's known as selective pressure -- the force that drives any organism to evolve.

 

The findings suggest that policymakers should resist the temptation to lift restrictions to celebrate or reward vaccination efforts.

 

This is likely to be especially true with a more transmissible variant such as the Delta variant, said Fyodor Kondrashov, also of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

 

"Generally, the more people are infected, the more the chances for vaccine resistance to emerge. So the more Delta is infectious, the more reason for concern," Kondrashov told reporters.

 

"By having a situation where you vaccinate everybody, a vaccine-resistant mutant actually gains a selective advantage."

 

On Tuesday, the US CDC altered its guidance on mask use. The CDC said earlier this year that fully vaccinated people are very safe from infection and can take off their masks in most situations.

 

Now, it says even fully vaccinated people can sometimes catch the virus and if they catch the Delta variant, they are just as likely to infect someone else as an unvaccinated person would be. It advised everyone in areas of high or sustained virus transmission to wear masks when around others.

 

Many GOP politicians have derided the new advice. On Thursday, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves called it "foolish."

 

While the CDC was not thinking about the evolution of variants, Kondrashov said people skeptical of maintaining vigilance should be.

 

"The individual who already vaccinated and putting on a mask should not think this is pointless but should think that there is a vaccine resistant strain running around," he said.

 

"By preventing spread of vaccine resistant strains, you are preventing evolution of this virus," he added.

 

"We have two tools in our toolbox to do this. One is non pharmaceutical interventions such as mask wearing and the whole shebang, and the second is vaccines. From an evolutionary perspective, what is necessary to reduce this (spread) is to vaccinate as many people as possible as fast as possible and across the globe."

 

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/30/health/vaccination-alone-variants-study/index.html?utm_term=link&utm_medium=social&utm_source=fbCNN&utm_content=2021-07-30T14%3A31%3A07&fbclid=IwAR0zscneqogMyktWHJt6BhK1Lk4FpkcTlZN3Z93JCZfQEhXAOxp8fiojhSY

 

Look, I'm not an epidemiologist, but I do understand basic evolutionary biology, and all along, it's seemed pretty obvious to me that, unless you get virtually everyone vaccinated in a quick time frame, you won't be able to snuff the virus out and, in fact, it will evolve to infect the vaccinated. You provided a link to a research article at the time, which I admittedly did not read, but I honestly meant to go back and do so when I had the appropriate time. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions here, but I do think the hypothesis is correct insofar as we did not vaccinate fast enough. If we had vaccinated larger numbers more rapidly, resistant strains would still have emerged, but their emergence would've been limited/isolated enough to contain the spread. In these circumstances, what we've done is provided both a substantial unvaccinated population along with a substantial vaccinated population, so you get this evolutionary feedback loop that just hastens the development of more virulent variants.

2 hours ago, Kz! said:

Ishlibs really are disgusting humans.  

You are the one that keeps talking about consequences.  Losing your life is the highest consequence.  All because you joined the cult of a failed businessman talk show host grifter.   

57 minutes ago, EaglesRocker97 said:

@we_gotta_believe, with all due respect (and I mean it), didn't I say something along these lines recently about viral evolution in response to vaccinated populations as available resevoirs? I'm not sure if I'm using every term appropriately there, but give me your thoughts on this:

 

 

Look, I'm not an epidemiologist, but I do understand basic evolutionary biology, and all along, it's seemed pretty obvious to me that, unless you get virtually everyone vaccinated in a quick time frame, you won't be able to snuff the virus out and, in fact, it will evolve to infect the vaccinated. You provided a link to a research article at the time, which I admittedly did not read, but I honestly meant to go back and do so when I had the appropriate time. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions here, but I do think the hypothesis is correct insofar as we did not vaccinate fast enough. If we had vaccinated larger numbers more rapidly, resistant strains would still have emerged, but their emergence would've been limited/isolated enough to contain the spread. In these circumstances, what we've done is provided both a substantial unvaccinated population along with a substantial vaccinated population, so you get this evolutionary feedback loop that just hastens the development of more virulent variants.

It's still relative though. So long as vaccines reduce transmission rates, then they also reduce the chances for emergence of variants. The bigger reduction, the more suppression of emergence overall. It seems counter intuitive because while it's true that a vaccinated population can help to select for variants that are better at evading vaccine induced immunity, the net benefit when compared to variant emergence in unvaccinated populations, is still higher. As I said before, delta was gonna be delta regardless of a population's vax compliance. After all, it originated in a country with less than 5% with their first dose and is tearing through unvaccinated populations at a much faster rate than vaccinated ones 

The issue I took with Weinstein's phrasing is the implication that there's any debate as to whether these vaccines, overall, help stop variants, or if they make them worse. To that end, there is no debate. The vaccines definitely help stop new variants faster than they can contribute to the selection for ones that can escape vaccine induced immunity. The only way this would no longer hold true is if the vaccines were not effective at all in reducing transmission, thereby allowing for comparable rates of community spread while also helping to select for a more fit variant. But that's clearly not true here, these vaccines definitely reduce community spread against delta, even if it's to a lesser degree than they did against alpha or original strain.

 

I posted a report on RVA mutation rates being stomped out in the years after vaccine introduction. There's a reason why that happened.

 

Edit: typo, not RSV, but rotavirus A.

Found it, reposting:

 

For reference, Rotavirus vaccine compliance in the US is about 75% by age 3 it looks like. And it doesn't seem to block transmission as effectively as our current mRNA covid vaccines.

Quote

 

Three-quarters of patients who tested positive for COVID-19 after numerous large public events in a Cape Cod town were fully vaccinated, according to a federal study published Friday.

Among the 469 COVID-19 cases identified, 346, or 74%, occurred in fully vaccinated people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found. Most of the vaccinated patients, 79%, experienced symptomatic breakthrough infections. Testing from 133 patients revealed that the delta variant was responsible for 90% of the cases.

 

Now the really important part

Quote

Of the five COVID-19 patients who required hospitalization, four were fully vaccinated. No deaths were reported.

 

19 minutes ago, The_Omega said:

Now the really important part

 

The issue with using the Provincetown outbreak as real world data is that there are too many variables not controlled for and other unknown variables which prohibit any possible way to deduce to what degree vaccines prevented against symptomatic disease. To do this we'd need to know the total number of people that visited the city that week / weekend. We'd then also need to know the vax compliance rate of everyone who visited the city, not just those who live there (which is what the current numbers are for.) There's a big difference in using a denominator of 2k vs 20k.

Either way, it's still enough to inform us in a general sense, (that vaccinated individuals can still get sick and spread it to other vaccinated people) but not enough to tell us to what degree the vaccines are working to block infection. For that we need studies with better controls and less confounding factors.

We’ll never block all infections. We’re all going to get sick. The question is, how seriously?

2 minutes ago, The_Omega said:

We’ll never block all infections. We’re all going to get sick. The question is, how seriously?

No, this is a false dichotomy. Assuming you mean sick with covid.

1 minute ago, we_gotta_believe said:

No, this is a false dichotomy. Assuming you mean sick with covid.

No, I mean sick. Covid is here to stay.  It’s now one of many.

5 minutes ago, The_Omega said:

No, I mean sick. Covid is here to stay.  It’s now one of many.

So is the much more genetically diverse flu and yet people still go decades between infections, with many under the age of 20 never having it once despite far less effective vaccines. 

Let's revisit the staying power discussion 6 months after a delta targeted booster is approved. I'm still very confident mRNA vaccines give us a massive advantage in the cat and mouse game that we've never had with the flu.

1 hour ago, we_gotta_believe said:

I'm still very confident mRNA vaccines give us a massive advantage in the cat and mouse game that we've never had with the flu.

• Moderna has begun human trials for a potential new influenza vaccine.
• The new vaccine uses mRNA technology, the same technology used to create the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines.
• If successful, the vaccine could be more effective than the current flu shot.

On July 7, 2021, Moderna announced that participants received vaccination doses in the Phase 1/2 study of mRNA-1010, the company’s seasonal influenza mRNA vaccine for healthy adults in the United States.

This is Moderna’s first seasonal influenza vaccine candidate to enter the clinic and targets lineages recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the prevention of influenza. 

The vaccination aims to fight against influenza A H1N1, H3N2, and influenza B Yamagata and Victoria.

Moderna plans to enroll about 180 participants in the study.

8 hours ago, Dave Moss said:

If someone in my family has to go to the hospital for something other than Covid and it’s full of Covid patients then it impacts me.  If there’s an outbreak at my kids school then it impacts me.  Etc.

Of course but that is going to be an issue until people vaccinate and as I've said about 5x already there are situations where a local official will need to do something temporarily to help keep the hospitals clean BUT that is both a local and temporary situation.

3 hours ago, EaglesRocker97 said:

"Counterintuitively, when a relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions happened at a time when most individuals of the population have already been vaccinated, the probability of emergence of a resistant strain was greatly increased," they added.

"Our results suggest that policymakers and individuals should consider maintaining non-pharmaceutical interventions and transmission-reducing behaviors throughout the entire vaccination period."

 

"When most people are vaccinated, the vaccine-resistant strain has an advantage over the original strain," Simon Rella of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, who worked on the study, told reporters.

"This means the vaccine resistant strain spreads through the population faster at a time when most people are vaccinat

And this was the entire argument that Bret Weinstein was bringing forth over the last month as a cautionary aspect of vaccinating at a rate that wouldn't simply knock out the virus yet the likes of the poster you are addressing with this post have cast Bret as a complete moron.  When we talk about science it requires a constant stream of skepticism free from political interruption.  Bret doesn't get everything right and never claims to but he often raises a valid point of concern and then gets crucified for doing so.

This COVID situation has never ever been simple at any point despite what some in here want one to believe.  That is especially true in an over charged political environment that has taken a grip on the US over last several years.

2 hours ago, we_gotta_believe said:

It's still relative though. So long as vaccines reduce transmission rates, then they also reduce the chances for emergence of variants. The bigger reduction, the more suppression of emergence overall. It seems counter intuitive because while it's true that a vaccinated population can help to select for variants that are better at evading vaccine induced immunity, the net benefit when compared to variant emergence in unvaccinated populations, is still higher. As I said before, delta was gonna be delta regardless of a population's vax compliance. After all, it originated in a country with less than 5% with their first dose and is tearing through unvaccinated populations at a much faster rate than vaccinated ones

Right, I agree with you that the vaccines are undoubtedly a net positive and that the unvaccinated folks are driving these mutations, but at the same time, it feels like we have the virus essentially "training" against  vaccinated population while having the unvaccinated populations to serve as incubators. Bascially, you have the unvaccinated population serving as a catalyst for the more virulent variants that are selected against the vaccinated, if that makes sense. It's a compounding factor. Ultimatey, I think we agree, it just sucks that we have these unvaccinated a-holes giving this virus a "safe space" dig in and further mutate.