BioNTech, Pfizer To Start Testing Universal Vaccine For Coronaviruses (reuters.com) 102
Germany's BioNTech, Pfizer's partner in COVID-19 vaccines, said the two companies would start tests on humans of next-generation shots that protect against a wide variety of coronaviruses in the second half of the year. From a report: Their experimental work on shots that go beyond the current approach include T-cell-enhancing shots, designed to primarily protect against severe disease if the virus becomes more dangerous, and pan-coronavirus shots that protect against the broader family of viruses and its mutations. In presentation slides posted on BioNTech's website for its investor day, the German biotech firm said its aim was to "provide durable variant protection." The two partners, makers of the Western world's most widely used COVID-19 shot, are currently discussing with regulators enhanced versions of their established shot to better protect against the Omicron variant and its sublineages.
Sweet! (Score:2, Funny)
We may yet get our zombie apocalypse.
Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Informative)
They are "free from liability" only if manufacturers collect data on adverse impacts and report it in realtime to regulators, who have the right to withdraw the permit at any point if any signs of danger show up. But you already know that.
And I'll never understand people like you's obsession with being exposed to a far greater number of antigens through infection, in greater quantities, replicating while destroying your lungs, mucusal membranes, vasculature, and elsewhere, while suppressing your immune system, with zero "quality control" and well recognized dangers, rather than a single antigen, deliberately selected, designed, and studied for minimal impact in as broad a swath of the population as possible, in the deltoid.
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Informative)
There are passive reporting systems (like VAERS) and active systems like BEST, CMS, VSD, V-Safe, and others. VAERS is reported by third parties with inconsistent rates and metrics and no comparative controls. BEST is somewhat better, based on patient health records through enrolled insurers. CMS is a Medicare-based version of BEST. V-Safe is app-based for patient reporting. Etc. The active systems generally conduct studies relative to control groups. Furthermore, the systems are not just "assumed to work", but they actually run trials to assess their ability to work.
As for VAERS, the problem is misuse of it. VAERS is a very useful tool for suggesting possible linkages, but not for showing if they're actually real, as it's subject to a whole host of reporting biases and has no controlling for error. That requires further study to determine whether there's any evidence that they happen more often than happenstance (which happens immediately - see e.g. how quickly myopericarditis was detected, studied and the linkage established - same for thrombocytopenia with J&J and several very rare complications.
People like you however consistently feel that they can just skip the whole "finding out whether things occur more than happenstance" part, feeling that anecdotes are "good enough" and "who needs pesky things like actual statistical analysis?". VAERS literally had to add a warning to the site that tells you not to mix up reports with statistically-significant correlations, and you must click that you've read it before you're allowed to search, yet somehow that doesn't stop people like you from continually doing the same things with it.
The kind of response that used to fill slashdot (Score:2)
A great response.
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In a world free of corruption, yours would be a great answer. This comment isn't meant to be negative about expertise, reason, and scientific achievement -- on the contrary, if we value these things, we value protecting them, and upholding them -- which means using critical thinking and looking at matters in context, as they perform, as they produce results. We can demonstrate ourselves to be a little bit more intelligent than the average person, by upholding critical thought and science. We can demonstrate
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You had me up until you went partisan: "People like you"
He means, people whose self-identify as fools with a username of "phule".
Whether you are a fool or are merely acting like a fool is nearly irrelevant.
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The MANUFACTURERS are responsible for collecting that data? Then self reporting to the feds for possible shutdown? The ones that created the vax, who would be financially ruined if their EUA were pulled? Who have a history of lying for a profit?
Those manufacturers?
Jesus fucking christ.
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Scroll up. Their obligation to report truthfully and timely OR LOSE THEIR IMMUNITY FROM LIABILITY is not even remotely the only type of monitoring.
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It's a system that has worked amazingly well since its introduction resulting in an insane amount of life saved. Yes, those manufacturers, the ones who have a long established history of providing life saving medication.
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Yeah, because whistleblowers absolutely aren't a thing.
Yes, corporations can be soulless.
No, everyone working in a corporation is not soulless, and some of those employees speak up when they see harm being done. It happens all the god damn time. Stop acting like these researchers and doctors that are dedicating their lives to saving millions of lives via developing new better vaccines are going to just ignore bad results in favor of profits for their employer.
What an absolutely ridiculous argument.
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what's in that vaccine!
*takes long hit from vape pen*
They use aborted fetuses to make it!
*takes another bite of McDonalds*
My cousins brother in law heard on facebook that her old roommate dropped dead after getting it!
*slams down empty Monster energy drink can*
Depends (Score:2, Insightful)
> They use aborted fetuses to make it!
This depends highly on which vaccine we're talking about, specifically. Different ones used cell lines derived from abortion in different ways, mostly for testing rather than the actual creation thereof.
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Informative)
1. SARS-CoV-2 is not a "cold". Cold is a generic term for any mild virus which can cause upper respiratory symptoms, which can be from vastly diverse families (the most common cold viruses are Rhinoviruses, which are actually quite close relatives of polio, and not at all related to Coronaviruses - a diverse family that contains numerous highly lethal viruses, of which thankfully only a couple have ever jumped to humans in modern times) - where "mild" is generally seen as "less than influenza". SARS-CoV-2, being responsible for mass waves of excess mortality, well in excess of influenza,fails at the "mild" standpoint, and is thus not "a cold".
2. SARS-CoV-2 replicates in any tissue that expresses the protein ACE2. ACE2 is a blood pressure regulator, and is consequently found throughout the body, but especially in the vasculature. Indeed, while severe acute respiratory failure is the most common cause of death (hence the name), cardiovascular causes of death are a surprisingly common minority from the disease.
3. UNLIKE SARS-CoV-2, vaccination is highly locally confined. It is an intramuscular injection; it is not intravenous. The fact that it remains in the deltoid has been well studied - for example, instead of having it express double proline-stabilized spikes, one can have it express a luciferase (glowing firefly protein) and monitor the glow in mice to see where expression is occurring - here's the result. [twimg.com]
4. The vaccine can enter *any* cell; unlike the virus, it has no particular affinity for endothelial cells. Namely, because it uses no cell receptor for entry; it is simply free floating in tiny fat globules, to be uptaken by any cell at all. The most common type of cell to uptake them is dendritic cells, for which uptaking and presenting "suspicious" material is literally their job.
5. Expression is to the cell surface, where it is membrane-fused. Literally, mRNA includes a sort of "address" for what is supposed to happen to the produced protein, and that's what it is marked at.
6. Unlike S on the virus, S in the vaccine cannot fuse. It is double proline substituted, which breaks the fusion mechanism. (Proline tends to form rigid sections in proteins, like a splint)
7. Like all proteins, it has a limited lifespan in the body, with a half life on the order of a couple weeks. The only thing that remains is the body's "memory" of how to fight it.
8. I have friends who... ... don't know the difference between anecdotes and statistics? I developed stomach problems before I got vaccinated. Should I count those as a side effect of vaccination? No? Of course not. But if they had happened *after* I had gotten vaccinated, you'd be instantly rushing to blame them on vaccination. I'm sorry, but that's not how these things work. You have to show statistical significance.
9. making earth-shattering profits - The most remarkable thing is how abnormally cheap the vaccines are. I had to pay several hundred dollars per Shingrix shot (I know, it's cheaper in the US, but still expensive). My government paid about $10 each for Pfizer, more (but still not that much) for Moderna. That's dirt cheap; they only made up for it in volume. If you want to rail against pharma profits, attack them for prices on drugs like Ambien and the like, that's where they're really ripping people off with insane profit margins.
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1) Cold is a common term and such a precise definition makes no sense given how informally it's used. You had to insert the word mild--something not present in GP's post--to make it fail this definition.
2) Agreed.
3) Your link does show orders of magnitude less luminescence outside of the muscles, but there's still quite a bit in the liver, brain, etc.
4) That probably helps, but the fact that it has a different distribution means that we do have to be careful. It certainly beats getting covid, though.
5
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The average lifespan in the USA went down by 2 years as a result of Covid 19. Some US states had fewer infants than deaths for the first time in decades.
We don't know the long-haul effects of Covid. It looks bad for some subset of patients and it isn't clear that the symptoms are well monitored for future data analysis.
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The only variable here is whether or not the vax can help prevent or mitigate "long c19", given that the vaccine does not prevent infection.
On top of that, the last time I checked there isn't even a clinical definition of long covid ( ie: a test or tests which diagnose and objective measure the condition ), so there's no real way to measure the vaccine's efficacy against it.
Time was, given the above, those with a medical background would take the entirely rational perspective that if there's no way to measu
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The only variable here is whether or not the vax can help prevent or mitigate "long c19", given that the vaccine does not prevent infection.
I personally would think that not dying is a good metric, but I guess that's not important to everybody.
https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
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Given the risk of the vaccine is practically 0, the scale tips from basically | for old people to \ for younger people. The technology has been researched for years and the number of people that have received it is at least the hundreds of millions at this point.
Risk [Re:Sweet!] (Score:2)
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volum... [cdc.gov] :
During December 2020–July 2021, COVID-19 vaccine recipients had lower rates of non–COVID-19 mortality than did unvaccinated persons after adjusting for age, sex, race and ethnicity, and study site.
What are the implications for public health practice?
There is no increased risk for mortality among COVID-19 vaccine recipients.
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IIUC, this isn't just hoped to be just a vaccine against COVID. but against an entire "genus" of viruses that happens to include COVID.
Now whether this is possible, or even desirable, hasn't really been proven. But they aren't just trying for a "better vaccine against COVID".
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1. I wasn't referring to SARS-CoV-2, I was referring to a "universal vaccine for coronaviruses"
2. SARS-CoV-2 BA.4 and 5 primarily replicate in the upper respiratory tract
3. You appear to not be aware of the recent findings on exosomal mRNA migration from the COVID-19 vaccines and are apparently unwilling to search for it. What you said doesn't contradict that or address it. I never said it wasn't intramuscular. The deltoid has also not been well studied for mRNA vaccinations. It's been well studied for othe
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Let's not pretend this isn't a new technology without serious health ramifications. I have friends who had serious heart and chest pain following the COVID vaccines for like two months, as WELL as friends and family members who got pretty seriously sick with COVID.
You'd have to be a religious convert to the church of Pfizerology or something to not express some basic skepticism and caution about your health. These are cutting-edge drugs from for-profit corporations that are making earth-shattering profits off a pandemic.
mRNA has been studied for decades as it was first discovered in the 1960s. Only lately was there a big research push and some breakthroughs were made. Here's a good history if you'd take you head out of your ass and read it.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
This is most studied vaccine in history with billions of doses given. If something was unsafe we'd have more concrete proof than crackpots on bitchute.
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The non-emergency regulatory process for introducing a vaccine, regardless of delivery mechanism, takes about a decade and includes numerous trials. If you wanted to introduce an adenovirus-delivered vaccine against a disease you wouldn't be able to do so in a year just because adenoviruses have been used for prior vaccines.
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These are cutting-edge drugs from for-profit corporations that are making earth-shattering profits off a pandemic.
If you think these folks are making "earth-shattering profits" creating these vaccines, imagine how much money they're making with all the drugs they need to produce to keep people alive who are hospitalized with covid [money.com].
And yet, not a word is spoken about those obscene profits, profits which could easily have been denied if people got a free vaccine shot or two. But, in typcial American fashion,
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Or, if skeptical, you could look at the probabilities associated with the CDC and FDA reviews, to see how likely you are to have any issues. And the answer is "VERY LOW." [cdc.gov]
But by all means, rely on your small sample count halfassed "survey" where you only hear about loosely correlated issues that are not confirmed by actual doctors to be related and suffer from confirmation bias, or you could look at the actual results from a double-blind peer reviewed study with statistically significant sample sizes.
My gue
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Shhh! Spoiling the QAnon delusions of these bozos would increase the chance taht they will breed and vote, being a ring around the gene pool forever.
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Can you name some drugs that do cover liability if something bad happens?
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I'm afraid it's already too late. People will be lining up in droves to get it.
I'm not afraid people take life saving medication that has done wonders for the control of disease around the world. I'm afraid people won't.
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It's already here. We know it by the name of "Long Covid".
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We may yet get our zombie apocalypse.
You mean from all the anti-vaxx morons that refuse this? Yes, probably. Eventually we will have to put them down because they are getting far too dangerous.
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do you say things like "we will have to put them down" about other things? unfuckingbeliveable
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You did see that I reacted to a "zombie apocalypse" statement, right?
Better 5G reception? (Score:4, Funny)
This is great news. Ever since Sprint's network was shut down, my data speeds on T-Mobile have gone to absolute crap. I'm hoping this vaccine gives my 5G speeds the "shot in the arm" they so desperately need.
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Figures that I'd find the one moderator who hadn't heard the "5G chips in the vaccines" conspiracy. How's your day off from your job the DMV going, Mr. no-sense-of-humor?
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Nah he's just a 4G network engineer at T-Mobile and doesn't like you disparaging his network.
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I'm more looking forward to my cool new Magneto powers!
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Yeah, guess what, vaccines don't last forever. There are acutually only a handful of vaccinations that last you a lifetime, usually the ones where a single infection also provides lifetime immunity. With every other kind of disease, especially the ones where the vector mutates rapidly, you only get a certain window of protection, ranging from between a few months to a few years.
So you might want to check how long ago that tetanus vaccine was before you go hunting next time.
Universal Vaccine For Coronaviruses (Score:3)
Universal Vaccine For Coronaviruses
That sounds as if it protects the viruses. Maybe against humans?
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Grammar: The difference between knowing your sh*t and knowing you're sh*t.
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Capitalization. The difference between a felony and a kind gesture in the sentence "I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse".
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They have been just roasted in the press the past couple years.
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We already have that, it's called the republican party. They will do anything they can to fight humans.
Re:does this tie in (Score:5, Insightful)
No. This fall is a strain-updated vaccine (so not designed against a 3-year-old strain anymore), but otherwise the same.
Why do you people act so shocked about this, out of curiosity? Even in vaccine-hesitant America, half the population gets a flu shot every year. And COVID is both more hazardous and faster-mutating than influenza. Do you have any clue how many different antigens you're exposed to every day? Why act so horrified about the specific *studied* antigens in seasonal viral vaccines like flu and covid shots?
And as for profits, if there's anything that defines SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, FYI, it's how abnormally *cheap* they are. Certainly by sheer volume they've yielded profits, but a drug company profits vastly more on, say, your monthly prescription of Ambien than they do from the occasional flu/COVID shot.
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The issue with prior infection is that it can lead to a good amount of immune protection but there are not really great ways to measure it and the dropoff that comes from it. If you were infected in the past year it seems like the efficacy of immune repsponse could be very low by now.
With the vaccines the immune response is well studied and repeatable. Patients have been tested to know what the initial response is and they have a good grasp on how it holds up over a timeframe.
The motivation I would imagi
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The fact that prior infection doesn't protect you from future infections, and that vaccination reduces both the odds and severity.
If your infection was Omicron BA.1 (and possibly BA.2), FYI, these have been shown to be particularly poor at generating durable immunity.
The above, plu
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I suppose for liability reasons? I don`t know.
Either way I`m not getting it. Partly because I`m a rabid anti-vaxxer, partly because I`ve recovered from it recently (and two shots of Emergency Authorization substance did not help).
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LOL that's some excellent justification there, Lou.
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>"No. This fall is a strain-updated vaccine (so not designed against a 3-year-old strain anymore), but otherwise the same."
Thanks for that info (and the useful info in your other posts, too). I hadn't heard much about what will be rolling out this Fall. I had the original 2-injection Pfizer in Jan 2021 and a single booster in Dec 2021. Based on my rather high reaction to the booster, my body was already very aware of the original vaccination (and probably didn't need boosting at the time, but who woul
Good news (Score:4, Insightful)
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If you are going to try to be ahead the curve with your messaging, you should also start calling people predicting that politicians with undisclosed conflicts of interest in biotech companies will make these mandatory crazy.
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Just a friendly reminder that everyone who ever died also had an immune system. I'll gladly give my immune system an early warning about something.
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Every time I hear "I have an immune system!" I wonder whether the people know what a vaccine does.
Ok, cancel that, I know they have no fucking clue what a vaccine does, or how an immune system works. Else they wouldn't wave their ignorance around for everyone to see.
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Do they understand the first thing about biology?
Producing anti-bodies requires energy.
And virtually all live is trimmed by evolution to not waste energy on something that is not required, like not being exposed to a pathogen for some time.
This over time will lower your immune system's readiness to that pathogen purely by having fewer anti-bodies in your system, giving the pathogen a greater window of op
Re: Good news (Score:4, Informative)
You mean like influenza vaccines? So they're not vaccines?
*sigh*
What about tetanus? That's every 10 years. In your "vaccines can't be vaccines if they're annual" world, are tetanus vaccines considered vaccines or not?
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Indeed. The one thing the pandemic has made absolutely clear to me is that there are quite a few people that absolutely refuse to see reality and replace it with some really stupid fantasies.
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yearly shot
Then it is not a vaccine, now is it?
itâ(TM)s okay we will just learn to live with it [youtu.be]
Are you this same poster [imgur.com], cause it sure sounds like it.
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Are you completely stupid or just a no-honor, no-decency liar? There are quite a few vaccines that need refreshing. This is absolutely not new.
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I'm curious as to which approach they're using.
The goal with any such "universal" vaccine (there's also work on universal influenza vaccines, though that's harder) is to get the immune system to target conserved epitopes on an antigen. Various epitopes have different immunogenicities, how prone they are to triggering an immune response. On S-protein, specific spots on the NTD and RBD are highly immunogenic (a virus has to expose some regions, or otherwise it can't function). Most of the rest, not so much.
T
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Indeed. This almost looks to good to be true, but I do not think it is. Of course the usual morons will be all over this with the usual demented invalid claims, but vaccines are not were big pharma makes its money. This is one of the few cases where the customer will get a ton of value for a rather small price. I will definitely be getting this when it becomes available. The 30 minutes I have to work in order to pay for this shot basically less time than getting the shot takes overall. How anybody can be so
Evolution adapts (Score:3)
If they develop a "universal" vaccine, evolution has a way of developing workarounds and defenses, or new variants that don't have the characteristics targeted by the vaccine. This would be a good development, if successful, but given how quickly coronavirus mutates, it's not likely to be a long-lasting "universal" protection.
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It would be wonderful indeed if such an "immutable" region of the viral DNA could be found. The thing about nature is that it is very resourceful about coming up with redundant ways of accomplishing necessary tasks, and ways to survive without those formerly "necessary" genes.
Antibiotics are one such example. They've been effective for decades at killing most bacteria, but now, new antibiotic-resistant strains are starting to appear. Similarly, Round-Up has been effective at killing unwanted plants for deca
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Why i this taking so long? (Score:3)
And, IIRC, there was even an FDA exemption added that small variations of the mRNA sequence used would not have to go through the whole shebang of testing and re-approval.
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Finally some good news (Score:3)
mRNA seems to be the game-changer for vaccines that the smarter ones of us had hoped for. Of course, the morons will claim this is even worse, but frankly, I have stopped caring. Let them die from their stupidity. I am not fine with them inflicting the stupid on their children though. Not vaccinating your children is at the very least aggravated child abuse.
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> Not vaccinating your children is at the very least aggravated child abuse.
How about feeding them the "Standard American Diet"? Is that at the very least aggrevated child abuse?
Addicting kids to excessive amounts of carbohydrates, to the point were 65% of people are not even fat anymore, they are obese, with no discipline, willpower, or actual desire to be healthy, but embrace "management" of disease, and of course by trying to change cultural norms around what "health" actually means.
All you lot over
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How about feeding them the "Standard American Diet"? Is that at the very least aggrevated child abuse?
Genuinely dumb statement. As if one health issue cancels out another.
The funny part about your America bashing is that if you live anywhere on this planet then your country is likely headed in our direction in regards to weight https://www.healthdata.org/new... [healthdata.org] . All those McDonalds in whatever country you live in are there because your people eat there.
My favorite part about this is that your people and the rest of the world are choosing to eat that swill after seeing what it's done to Americans and in an
Fat vaccine (Score:2)
What's the worst that could happen? (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Hope they do better this time. (Score:3, Interesting)
As a fully vaccinated member of society, I still got Covid.
So no, the vaccines don't work, and they don't keep it from spreading.
I remember 10-20 years ago when anti-vaxxers were fringe groups of moms who, shall we say, had too much time and too little common sense. But big pharma has made vaccine rejection a reasonable, mainstream opinion now... and the most terrifying thing is not the side effects of vaccination, but the fact that people think they work in the first place!.
I understand why people think they work - I've never gotten the flu during those years I've had the flu shot, and never contracted the diseases I was vaccinated against as a child. But there's a real big systemic failure here that has more to do with crony-capitalism and regulatory capture by big pharma than anything else, and people are finally starting to pay attention. Big pharma had a golden opportunity to show us that science could save us from a pandemic, and they blew it. Now Anti-vaxxers are mainstream, and nobody trusts science or the government anymore.
I wish the vaccine had worked. I wish it worked now. I wish they could produce a vaccine that would offer the protection they claimed. But after having gotten sick myself, and after having lost relatives to this pandemic, I'm betting the only thing that will happen is that big pharma will get richer.
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It's more like finding a broken seat belt after a crash and realizing that had the manufacturer not lied about the strength of the material, your relatives would still be alive today.
And then having someone else insist that your relatives were stupid and would have lived if they'd worn their seatbelts.
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And how is that different from not being vaccinated at all?
If I understand you correctly, the effect of the vaccine is not that it will prevent the vulnerable from dying, but to minimize the discomfort of those who wouldn't die from it anyway. If vaccine side effects are factored in, the only thing that vaccination does is to split the discomfort into two milder phases (once when vaccinated and again when infected) rather than one intense phase.
IOW, there's no justification of forced vaccination becau