Hypothetical: New Covid variant & your response next time around.

[MrBirdman]

1 hour ago, Namisgr11 said:

This holds for an individual's freedom to contract smallpox as well.  Regardless, there were no efforts, in the US at least, for forced vaccination against COVID of the populace at large.  

Exactly, the fact that it was a non starter is just more evidence that this “greatest assault on individual liberties in peacetime” (quoting Gorsuch) is utter nonsense. 

That millions of grown adults confronted an international crisis with petulant refusal to simply wear a face mask continues to depress me to this day. These same people won’t hesitate to idolize the “Greatest Generation”, most of whom were forced to fight in a war for years and shamed for life if they conscientiously objected. Grow up people. 

[gormag38]

25 minutes ago, MrBirdman said:

That millions of grown adults confronted an international crisis with petulant refusal to simply wear a face mask continues to depress me to this day.

This is well said. It's a public health issue. Vaccinations and masking are two of the most effective tools we have to combat the public health issue. You're doing something for the community as a whole is how I view(ed) it. 

[Namisgr11]

1 hour ago, DaBoot said:

I believe you must do what is in your best interest to survive. 
I will not put an untested virus in my body

There's no virus, either live attenuated or killed, in any of the most widely used COVID vaccines.  You must be thinking of polio, which was eradicated using a vaccine containing inactivated virus.

Focusing on the vaccines themselves, they've been in hundreds of millions of people and dosed over a billion times, which makes the notion that they're somehow untested not applicable.

[DaBoot]

1 minute ago, Namisgr11 said:

There's no virus, either live attenuated or killed, in any of the most widely used COVID vaccines.  Focusing on the vaccines themselves, they've been in hundreds of millions of people and dosed over a billion times, which makes the notion that they're somehow untested not applicable.

Maybe, with no long term testing done, and no legal recourse against manufacturers for damages from side effects. 

Let alone all the lies the medical complex told about its ( lack of )effectiveness, example: vaccinated people cannot spread the virus.

either way,  having had covid confirmed 4 times and surviving without unnecessary treatment, no worries here. And if the outcome were different, still no worries on the way I choose to live my life.

I think the fear mongers and the mask mandate followers, put a dangerous idea that compliance is necessary in the new society.

 

[BrightonCorgi]

7 minutes ago, DaBoot said:

I think the fear mongers and the mask mandate followers, put a dangerous idea that compliance is necessary in the new society.

Well said. 👏🏽

[Namisgr11]

53 minutes ago, DaBoot said:

Let alone all the lies the medical complex told about its ( lack of )effectiveness, example: vaccinated people cannot spread the virus.

The hope of the federal scientific director of the COVID initiative in the US was to get around 65-70% effectiveness at preventing death out of the first vaccines.  He got 90%.  Not being aware of anything to the contrary biomedical officials disclosed to the public about efficacy, I'm left with believing your information may be sourced from Tucker and the like, more so than actual members of the COVID task force or specialists in infectious diseases.  Do you have a link from the federal task force to back your claim about what you were told?

There was never a conclusion that vaccinated people could not spread the virus.  And studies throughout 2021 and early 2022 established that the vaccines in wide use by then reduced viral load, and so infectiousness, as well as markedly reduced the risk of severe disease and death, but did not get rid of all virus from the nose, and so did not completely prevent virus spread.

Irrespective of the above, we stand in August of 2023 with a multiplicity of vaccines that, from massive clinical trials and real world experiences in hundreds of millions of people, proved highly effective attenuating the mortality and morbidity from the virus at the time the pandemic was at its worst.  The newest designs are targeted at strains related to those in the widest current circulation, and have been shown to work better against these new strains than the original vaccines do.  We also have an antiviral therapy that, with 5 days of use, reduces the risk of hospitalization or death by nearly 90%, and is equally active against strains in current circulation as it is against the most dominant ones from 2020-'21.

 

[BettyHumpder]

most people are talking about vaccines and masks, but what i'm really looking forward to are earplugs so i never have to listen to this pedantic debate again.

when my doctor tells me that doing something is in my best interest, i do it. i'm not arrogant enough to presume i know more than him. it makes for a much easier life. if i catch a stray from bad advice, oh well. at least they'll learn from my misfortune and help more people in better ways in the future.

[TacoSauce]

50 minutes ago, BettyHumpder said:

when my doctor tells me that doing something is in my best interest, i do it. i'm not arrogant enough to presume i know more than him. it makes for a much easier life. if i catch a stray from bad advice, oh well. at least they'll learn from my misfortune and help more people in better ways in the future.

I'm curious about what your doctor said regarding cigar smoking? Presumably he followed the direction of the American medical associations and told you to stop smoking. Since you aren't arrogant enough to presume to know better than your doc, I congratulate you on your healthy choice of quitting. You can ship me your remaining stash! 😆

[Nevrknow]

4 hours ago, Namisgr11 said:

 In just the US, COVID caused 600,000 deaths in the first 12 months alone

Not entirely true. No matter how you died, if you had covid WHEN you died. It counted as a covid death.

Car wreck? Covid.

Bad heart? Covid.

Cancer patient with weeks to live? Covid.

The list is long. Too many taped "info speeches" prove these statements.

[DaBoot]

1 hour ago, Namisgr11 said:

I'm left with believing your information may be sourced from Tucker and the like, more so than actual members of the COVID task force or specialists in infectious diseases.  

Are you insinuating that a government specialist in infectious disease ( Anthony Fauci ) is a better and more reliable source of information than Tucker ? 
I know that I know one thing, I know that I know nothing - 
I will return to my regularly scheduled program of peace and tranquility at this point , 

[BettyHumpder]

1 hour ago, TacoSauce said:

I'm curious about what your doctor said regarding cigar smoking? Presumably he followed the direction of the American medical associations and told you to stop smoking. Since you aren't arrogant enough to presume to know better than your doc, I congratulate you on your healthy choice of quitting. You can ship me your remaining stash! 😆

i told my doctor exactly how many cigars i smoke per week and his response was this:

”i obviously cannot recommend you smoke cigars. but i am also not that concerned. if you feel the ‘need’ to go out and smoke all the time—every hour, on the hour—like you did with cigarettes, i want you to come to me. we will work on cessation strategies.”

if he thought i had a heart condition or some other malady that would be worsened by my cigar smoking and told me to quit, i would quit.

[El Presidente]

 

Summary of the ciigar deck session discussion:

• Where required, hand washing and mask wearing routines would be accepted to protect elderly and those most at risk. Reasonable people protect those who need it.  
• You should never be told to stop your legal livelihood. Ever. 
• There is no vaccine. This is a flu shot at best. Taking it is up to you. 
• The lies told by politicians and pharma has forever dented public confidence on the issue. 

[Namisgr11]

3 hours ago, Nevrknow said:

Not entirely true. No matter how you died, if you had covid WHEN you died. It counted as a covid death.

Car wreck? Covid.

Bad heart? Covid.

Cancer patient with weeks to live? Covid.

The list is long. Too many taped "info speeches" prove these statements.

This is untrue.  Just as when people suffering from Alzheimer's disease die from being bedridden and contracting pneumonia, the cause of death is Alzheimer's.  

The proof that your statements are untrue are the mortality statistics for the United States for 2020.  All-cause mortality was 600,000 above the prior five year average.  That's from death certificates and body bags, and so the data have a very, very high confidence limit.  Yet deaths from car wrecks were down (less commuters on the road), cancer and heart disease unchanged, and in fact deaths from all nine of the most common causes for that year excepting COVID were level with their five year averages.  So no, hundreds of thousands of deaths due to non-COVID causes were not erroneously assigned to COVID, since none of the most common causes of death declined in number, and yet more than a half a million Americans died than normal for the year.

I've had my say, and this seems like a good time to bow out, when the hundreds of thousands of lives saved in the US and millions worldwide as a whole by the successful development and rapid rollout of COVID vaccines and therapeutics, is superceded by the concept that the industry pulling this off is invariably a lying and evil one, even in this instance.

[Nevrknow]

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4867126/user-clip-overcounting-covid-deaths

 

Mic drop.

[El Presidente]

6 minutes ago, Nevrknow said:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4867126/user-clip-overcounting-covid-deaths

 

 

2 hours ago, El Presidente said:

• The lies told by politicians and pharma has forever dented public confidence on the issue. 

 

 

[Corylax18]

1 hour ago, Namisgr11 said:

This is untrue.

While I generally agree with the vast majority of what you've said in this thread, what @Nevrknow mentioned was a HUGE and well documented issue. Below is a link to an article about how the death count from Covid in the first half of 2020 miraculously dropped by about 25% when the Colorado Department of Health got caught lying and had to "change their methods". They had the incentive to lie because more deaths equaled more dollars in federal funding. They couldn't keep their #s straight for the majority of 2020 and 2021, it was an embarrassing mess for them. Going back and forth, changing the #s on a regular basis. The worst part is, they where doing it intentionally. This wasn't people with 20+ years of education forgetting how to add. 

The most publicized case here in Colorado was a drunk guy on his motorcycle crashing into a semi truck and killing himself. The local coroner obviously marked blunt force trauma from the accident as his cause of death. During the autopsy, he was tested for COVID and found to be positive. His cause of death was then changed to COVID. Which it very obviously wasn't. I cant find the link to any articles on it now, but I know I posted somewhere on the forum in the past. 

While I do believe most medical staff and some government officials did their best during COVID, many just didn't. They lied or passed on information that wasn't nearly vetted enough to be passed on as facts and that has done serious damage to the reputation of the medical industry in general. It should be admitted, understood and addressed so that it doesn't happen like that in the future.  

https://www.cpr.org/2020/05/15/colorado-changes-the-way-coronavirus-deaths-are-reported-to-the-public/

[Bijan]

2 hours ago, El Presidente said:

The lies told by politicians and pharma has forever dented public confidence on the issue. 

💯

Government/media: anyone that says X is a conspiracy theorist.

Government/media 1 year later: X is absolutely true, but we had no way to know that last year.

I'm not talking about the vaccine, but that whole it's definitely from bat soup from a wet market and not a lab, thing.

[Fuzz]

2 hours ago, El Presidente said:

 

• There is no vaccine. This is a flu shot at best. Taking it is up to you. 

There is no vaccine? But the flu shot is a vaccine....

[El Presidente]

4 minutes ago, Fuzz said:

There is no vaccine? But the flu shot is a vaccine....

???

Neither are vaccines

[Bijan]

8 minutes ago, El Presidente said:

???

Neither are vaccines

Both are vaccines. Vaccines are just shots or medecine to increase immunity or resistance to a disease. Neither confer full immunity or herd immunity.

[Bijan]

Afaik shingles vaccines is a vaccine for a disease the virus of which (chickenpox) is already in the bodies of those being protected. Though there is a new (since from when I was a child) chickenpox vaccine as well.

[treberty]

I am totally fine if I end up dying 5 years sooner because of the Covid shots. Why? Because it was liberating and I felt like I was protecting the most vulnerable population AND mitigating the risk of adding to the stress/workload of Healthcare employees. 

(Also, how could i prove that my life was shortened because of the vaccine 😀).

Of course a minority of people had bad reactions to the vaccines, developed mental health issues due to the isolation, etc. BUT people react differently to a lot of things... 

Now, if I have a cough/cold when I fly I wear a mask on the plane, out of courtesy. Or I give a heads up to friends before they visit. Some things have changed. It's fine. That's how humanity evolves.

The silver lining of Covid is that a majority of people now stays home when sick and some can work remotely. Those who did so prior to March 2020 used to be called slackers, nowadays they are considered responsible. As a said, things change and we have to adapt, imho.

I will keep believing in science and follow my government's guidelines, as unpleasant at it may feel.

Hopefully the next pandemic will spare kids again. That'd be a bonus.

[Namisgr11]

1 hour ago, Corylax18 said:

While I generally agree with the vast majority of what you've said in this thread, what @Nevrknow mentioned was a HUGE and well documented issue.

Not as huge as you suggest, or as events that you described such as in Colorado can account for in comparison to the all-cause mortality data.  According to the National Bureau of Statistics, which tracks numbers and causes of death for the US, there were around 600,000 excess deaths in 2020.  Not surprisingly, when broken down on a monthly basis the excess mortality above the prior five year norm began in March, and over the ensuing time the monthly all-cause mortality has tracked in sync with the ebbs and surges of the pandemic.  

Even a fraction of these excess deaths in 2020 could not be accounted for by a change in any of the 10 most common causes of death.  Not heart disease, not cancer, not lung disease, not Alzheimer's, not any showed significant changes in frequency compared to the prior five year norm.  That leaves COVID and COVID alone as the cause of over a half million American deaths.

The National Bureau data are publicly accessible via their website, where the breakdowns of all-cause mortality into each major causative category are also presented.

[Fireball]

All the best in this continuing discussion. It seems to haves morphed into rehashing one of the most polarizing issues we have faced in a long time.

[eg133]

The question was what would you do differently in the following scenario?
 

Highly aggressive strain takes a foothold in your country. The Government (state/Federal) recommends full masks, updated vaccinations and a stay at home policy for all but emergency services. 

 

Given the lessons from 2020-22 , would you do the same again? (whatever that was). 
 
Respectful commentary only. 

Not planning on masking, not getting any more shots, going to try and live my life as normal as possible (whatever that is nowadays). Viruses mutate constantly that’s how they survive, however the more they mutate the easier they are to spread but usually way less severe.
When the politicians passing mandates aren’t following them the saying comes to mind…better for thee, not for me….no thank you. I’m done letting the government try and control my life, they had their chance the last three years.


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