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Fucking idiots.

My immune compromised relative had the same experience at CVS, no questions about underlying conditions. Had Pfizer the first two, Moderna for this one. 1.5 days of very tired and now back to normal.

Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord, my blood will keep Unvaccinated, clean and pure No mask upon my face, good sir.

The vaccines are better at stopping Alpha and OG Covid, than Delta. Breakthrough rate with Alpha was around 1%. It happened, but was much less common than it looks to be for Delta. If Alpha were still the dominant strains, we would likely not have to have boosters yet. Delta enters cells and produces much higher viral load rapidly. It is much more contagious, so it's bumping up the timeline.

This is a good post. Delta evolved sometime in October 2020 in a non-vaccinated population. It has not evolved to evade the vaccine, because it predates the vaccine. It just happens to be a really nasty fucker that causes very high viral load very quickly. That is causing infections, but the vaccine is strongly protecting against severe disease and death. Some of the nasal vaccine candidates might help this down the road by producing a stronger response in the respiratory mucosal lining. That said, if someone told us 18 months ago the vaccine would only be 40% against transmission, but WAY over 90% for preventing severe disease progression and closer to 99% on preventing death, we would all take that and be celebrating the way we would if we found out they cloned VY and he's committed in the next recruiting class.

I've spent the last couple of months on this thread laying out the case that everyone was going to need a booster. There wasn't much published material to support my hypothesis, so not everyone believed me at the time, but no one reading this thread should be surprised, or not know what to believe at this point. The vaccines are still kicking the shit out of severe disease and deaths, they just don't stop as many transmissions as we'd hoped, especially Pfizer. For now, Moderna seems to be a bit better. Booster shots will greatly reduce the number of transmissions, and hopefully improve patient outcomes further. In the past few days, Israel has released preliminary data and expects the booster shot to cut breakthrough infections in half. I've discussed it on here. Today, Pfizer released their booster shot trial data to the FDA. The third dose gives “significantly higher neutralizing antibodies”. I don't know the amount, but the government does. After receiving the data today, they immediately announced they are going to authorize further boosters, so it's a safe assumption the results were very good. If anything, we should all be excited that the CDC and FDA are finally starting to pick up the pace and recognize the threat. They work great with historical data, but need to be estimating future evolutionary trends and working in probabilities to keep up in a pandemic. This is big step in that direction and I hope it continues.

If history is any guide, and it's always a guide, it was GQP that fucked up the Afghanistan operation and let bin Laden escape to Pakistan, living happily ever after until Obama took his ass out. The war was lost the moment bin Laden slipped away. Catch him quickly and GTFO. By the time we finally took him down, he'd already shattered a lot of our mystique and taken a lot of the awe out of facing the US military.

The Texas GQP is a hydra. Strike down Abbott and either West, or Huffhines will take control. Those guys will make DeDipshit down in Florida look competent.

You're right, it does. So the effectiveness against infection is likely under that, putting it more in line with the other data.

Good news on authorizing more boosters. Nice to see the FDA and CDC picking up the pace a bit and taking this more seriously, more quickly. I hope it continues.

That's possible, but it is not at all the most likely outcome. Covid takes forever to kill and the virus has reproduced many times over before the patient dies if they are going to. It has reproduced so many times that whether the patient lives or dies is irrelevant. There is no selection pressure to prevent it from killing 30%, so long as it still takes a long time to kill the person. That doesn't mean it will evolve to become more deadly, but there is no selection pressure preventing it.

To end it, we pretty much have to have everyone on the planet be vaccinated within a single 6-8 month window, while being prepared to shift gears and roll out updated boosters rapidly if any variants emerge. Everyone would have to mask up and limit spread as much as possible. We'd also have to do the same thing for every animal reservoir that exists. A non-inclusive list of covid animal reservoirs includes deer, ferrets and other weasel relatives, dogs, maybe other canine species, house cats, big cats, maybe other feline species, and great apes. So, not happening. We're going to be taking regular boosters for the foreseeable future. Maybe those eventually build up to confer longer lasting benefits, but we don't know yet. The only way off this ride at this point is a universal coronavirus vaccine. There are people working on it with a legit chance to pull it off, but I wouldn't be able to put odds on it.

It's a mix of both good and bad news. The Israeli data is a wakeup call that the threat of breakthrough infections is real. The threat was much lower with Alpha, though there may be a time component there. I hope people on here started masking up quite some time ago. We've got the Israeli data, along with Gibraltar, to thank for that warning. The original goal of the vaccines was stopping severe cases and deaths. They are still really good at that. The number of unvaccinated in the hospital is still over 3 times their rate in the population. The vaccines are even better against death. Go back to 18 months ago. If you told everyone the vaccine would be 40 something percent against transmission in real world conditions, but prevent the vast majority of severe cases and even more of the deaths, everyone would be thrilled. It's only in the context of Pfizer once being over 95% against transmission with OG covid/Alpha and 88% in May against Delta, that this 40 something number is so depressing. The good news is, the booster seems to restore most of that and we've got an awful lot of unused shots sitting around right now, whenever the FDA and CDC get around to it.

That all seems like terrible news, but there is a lot of reason to be optimistic actually. If Pfizer's immunity wanes over time, that's an easy fix with an additional booster. The fact that Pfizer seemed to be doing really well everywhere until June would suggest it DOES a good job at preventing infections with Delta, IF the vaccination was recent and suggests a booster fixes the issue. The vaccines already do a great job preventing ICU visits and deaths and Israel is getting good results from their third booster shot. https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/covid-in-israel-over-500-patients-in-serious-condition-4145-new-cases-676745 Israel has 525 patients in serious condition over the age of 60. 277 out of 404 are fully vaccinated, 68.6%. 127 are unvaccinated 31.4%. Over 60 in Israel is 90% vaccinated. Unvaccinated people are 10% of the population and 32% of the severe cases, so we are seeing a clear reduction already, even for 2 doses, the booster should start cutting this down even more soon. The FDA/CDC need to hurry the fuck up and authorize boosters for Pfizer shots to protect our older patients as well and we'll start seeing some light at the end of this tunnel.

Unfortunately, the Mayo Clinic data for the US I posted recently matches the Israeli data. Indicates an effectiveness rate against infection of 42% for Pfizer and 76% for Moderna in their pre-print. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.06.21261707v1 Man, I want to believe so badly, but that is ancient data. It only runs through May 16 and doesn't get any of the last three months. Peer review badly needs to move much faster during a pandemic. These numbers roughly match the vaccine effectiveness that Israel was reporting in mid-May, but Israel's effectiveness estimates began to fall sharply through June-July. Other UK data indicates effectiveness against infection has likely declined sharply in June and July, but all the vaccines are still protecting reasonably well against ICU visits and deaths. I don't think the Pfizer's effectiveness against infection is 88% in the UK against Delta currently. I would love to be wrong, but I don't think I am. I won't be surprised if Pfizer's effectiveness against infection is higher in the UK, than Israel, or here, because they predominantly gave it to their young population and gave AstraZeneca to their olds. They gave J&J/Janssen starting recently and Moderna in smaller amounts, but I don't know what that breakdown was. They also administered Pfizer on an extended dosing interval that may have given them a higher immune response. As to what's happening in the 3 months after that data, I can't get anything from Public Health England definitively. University College London (very good school) has been running a nationwide blood sample survey and putting out papers and slides as a working group. They do not appear to send them off for peer review, but I am inclined to trust them. Your milage may vary. They only started reporting vaccine efficacy (VE) in July and don't break down by manufacturer, so the numbers below are for Pfizer and AstraZeneca, but it looks like VE is sliding in the UK over time. Fortunately for them, 90 something percent of them have antibodies from infection, or vaccine. If there is herd immunity for Delta, they are almost at the theoretical number. Those numbers are an average of Pfizer, AstraZeneca and a small amount of Moderna. They don't report them broken out. Round 12- May 20-June 7 Vaccine Effectiveness = 64% Round 13- June 24-July 12 Vaccine Effectiveness = 49% Delta went from 60% prevalence to 90% prevalence during Round 12 and was 100% of cases during Round 13. https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/90800/2/react1_r13_final_preprint_final.pdf Rounds 12 and 13 also saw sharp increases in breakthrough infections. Round 12, fully vaccinated made up 29% of all infections and 44% of all infections during Round 13. The percent vaccinated was going up, so there are fewer non-vaccinated and that muddies it further. I can't draw firm conclusions, because the data is such a mess, but drop is not promising. It's frustrating as hell that I have to jump from pre-print to pre-print, use Public Health England until mid-May and then hop over to UCL data to interpret this. It introduces unnecessary uncertainty and it would be a lot better if we got transparent and timely data. Public Health England has the data to answer this conclusively, but aren't posting it and are publishing data from May. I want to reiterate at the end of this long ass post, if you are vaccinated and not immune compromised, all available evidence says you have strong protection against ICU visits and deaths. The concern is reduced effectiveness against infection in real world conditions, especially of Pfizer over time. My family is keeping our masks on until there is a better consensus. I really, really, really hope I'm wrong. Cross your fingers, but keep your masks on for a bit longer. If you wind up wearing a mask for a few weeks extra for no reason, you can laugh about it later. Sorry for the length of this post, but there is no clear answer, so I wanted to walk people through my thought process.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/13/us/dallas-county-no-pediatric-icu-beds-left/ Dallas County has been out of pediatric beds for more than 24 hours due to staffing shortages and large numbers of sick kids. This is infuriating. Both of those things were foreseeable and preventable. This is the price of stupidity and disinformation.

If there is, please don't hesitate to ask. This board may be filled with assholes, but they are assholes with heart.

Those are our allies and they are dead if they stay. Is there anything we can do to help?

I wish I had words that could make it any better, or take away any of the trauma and pain you are going through. It kills me that y'all have to bear so much pain, when all you ever wanted to do was help people. Anyone who has been in a hospital, or had a relative in one, knows y'all are the glue that holds that place together and the only human thing about the hospital experience for many patients. You don't deserve this and must feel incredibly betrayed by society. It's shameful that y'all are being subjected to so much unnecessary abuse and trauma. The only thing I can tell you is, you're not alone. PTSD feels like you are, but you aren't. Never forget that, no matter how low you get. You matter to us. We are proud of you. We are grateful. Fuck the haters, you're a rock star.

We've been round this multiple times, we should not be trying to compare past strains to Delta as if they are 1:1 comparable, they are not. Delta has characteristics previous variants did not have. It is much more infectious in kids. So far, we have had ~45,000 pediatric hospitalizations and ~400 dead kids. Those numbers are against variants much less adapted to infect kids than Delta and in schools with masking policies/virtual learning. Even if Delta is no more severe for kids, and there is evidence that it is more severe, but even if it isn't, it is MUCH more infectious . No mask policies + in person schools + greatly increased transmissiblity = a lot of sick kids. We should have delayed the start of schools a few weeks while we collected more data and it shouldn't be controversial. We've let so many of these arguments be framed by trolls and idiots.

Our messaging has been horrendous since the beginning. Masks, fomites, tests, aerosol spread, all of it. If Biden said that there weeks ago, obviously I disagree with him, since I've been saying we'd see both breakthroughs and re-infections on here since at least June. However, he was repeating scientific consensus that turned out to be wrong. The president should follow scientific consensus. We'd be in a much better spot if that had been the case for the whole pandemic. He should also have advisors challenging the consensus, but it's hard to fault him personally when the consensus turns out to be incorrect. He was also set up to fail by the staggering incompetence of his predecessor. The pandemic playbook was scrapped and replaced by grabass and grift for the first year of this. Career employees were fired, or quit at all the relevant agencies, losing untold amounts of institutional knowledge. I would love to re-run this simulation with any of the other 2016 GOP Presidential finalists in charge. We'd have seen a much more positive outcome.

It's really fucked up to be doing this and costing people lives. The Russians have been busted several times sewing vaccine disinformation about western vaccines using social media. They also inadvertently made their own citizens even less likely to take Sputnik V, because the lies turned back on their own country. They were roughly 20% vaccinated last I saw, despite beating the western vaccines to market by skipping Phase 3 trials. https://news.yahoo.com/facebook-removed-russian-vaccine-misinformation-153411155.html https://www.hudson.org/research/16451-moscow-s-disinformation-offensive-during-covid-19-the-case-of-lithuania https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/2020-election-misinformation-distortions If you are currently unvaccinated, you should ask yourself these questions. Why are all the science and medicine posters on here unanimously encouraging masks, tests and vaccination as the only way out of this? Why are professional trolls so dedicated to undermining that consistent messaging and making sure you think there is some controversy where Ivermectin/HCQ/Whatever else is better than a vaccine, or that vaccines shouldn't be used in x,y,z situation? Does it make you uncomfortable that those troll posts are the dominant opinion on Texags?

Where would you turn? As I said, no one knows the answer to his question. People should talk it over with their doctor, but that's the data we have. It would be nice to get proactive guidance from the CDC, or to have had clinical trials looking at it, but we aren't and we don't. The CDC announced about a week ago they are going to start a clinical trial to look at mixing and matching doses that will include mixed third boosters. They are not going to want to update the guidelines until that data comes in.

Yes you did, almost every post you've made on this thread and the one in CR are bullshit troll posts trying to inflame or derail conversation. I don't know if you're getting paid, or just a fucked up dude, but the rest of would appreciate it if you would go fuck off now. That's why we crowdsourced banned you.