Demographic change in vaccinated people, and reasons to drop hesitancy

I disagree.

You want to start a new thread to argue about that?

 

How do you "disagree"? The numbers are what they are. Spanish Flu, 675,000 American victims. Covid-19, 718,000 American victims and counting. There's not do "argue" about it. Covid-19 is the most deadly infectious disease outbreak in the history of this country (by absolute numbers), period, full stop. That's a fact. I do understand that you're not very friendly to facts, so in your mind, there may be something left to "argue" about it, but sorry, I do know how to do simple math (as in, 718,000 > 675,000) so I'm not about to start a "duh" thread to argue the obvious.

 

Relative population size of the country at different times; overestimation of deaths, majority of deaths being elderly who were likely close to dying from something else anyway, etc.

Also traditional vaccines are more likely to immunize someone for a lifetime whereas this new Covid vaccine's immunity begins to wear off after only a few or several months. And never mind that if you actually catch the disease, the statistical outcome is much likelier to be far better than catching many of those older diseases.

 

Those are numbers and that can be misleading, the population was much smaller during the Spanish flu. Fewer targets. Might need some math to figure which actually hit harder.

 

Which is why I said "by absolute numbers." But you also need to factor in all the advances in one century of medical care. During the Spanish Flu we didn't have ICUs, ventilators, and we didn't even have antibiotics to counter secondary bacterial pneumonia.

 

Relative population = which is why I said "by absolute numbers." But if you want to say that the population was smaller at the time, then you need to also consider what I said in post #80.
Overestimation of deaths = a lie. If anything the numbers are underestimated. It's so easy to see this... it's enough to go to the "Deaths by all causes" database held by the CDC and compare the overall deaths in America during the period of the Covid-19 pandemic with a similar period in the past when there was no Covid, and you'll see that the "excess deaths" actually surpass this 718,000 - those are the deaths from Covid plus collateral damage due to care for other diseases being postponed or cancelled in the peak of the pandemic.
Majority of deaths being the elderly, so what? Are you ageist? So you don't think that Grandpa and Grandma dying a few years before they'd have otherwise died is still a tragedy for their loved ones???

 

So we agree that raw numbers compared this way are misleading?

 

We can quantify the difference in the numbers but can you quantify the relative effective difference in treatment methods?

 

No, we don't. The raw absolute numbers still show that Covid-19 is the infectious disease outbreak that killed the largest number of Americans in history (and by the way, more than all the major wars combined).

As for saying that the Spanish Flu was worse because the population was smaller, I don't agree because at a time without ICUs, ventilators, antibiotics, etc., it's not surprising that proportionally speaking it killed more. The exact same bug would have killed significantly fewer people in the 21st century, due to advances in medical care. Covid-19 though, still killed 718,000 and counting, despite those advances, so, no, I do consider Covid-19 to be worse than the Spanish Flu.

 

No, I can't, but it's quite obvious, no? Do you think it doesn't make a difference? Just within this same Covid-19 pandemic, it did. We started by not knowing how to treat this. We thought that this would be similar to SARS-1 and we started with early invasive ventilation like we did for SARS-1. Then we learned that this bug was worse and it was causing more pulmonary fibrosis so the early invasive ventilation was actually killing people as the hardening of the lungs was enhanced. Then we moved to high flow oxygen plus prone position and delayed ventilation; people started to survive more. Then we realized that the cytokine storm was killing many, not just the viral pneumonia... so we started dexamethasone with great success. Then we realized that intravascular coagulation was killing many, and we started enoxaparin with great success. Then we got convalescent plasma, followed by monoclonal antibodies; the latter were of great help. Remdesivir helps a little.

Anyway, death rates for hospitalized people dropped during the pandemic due to our improved understanding of how to treat a severe case of Covid-19, within 18 months! Let alone 102 years that have passed since the Spanish Flu!!!

Not to forget, we didn't have an effective vaccine against the Spanish Flu... and we did develop effective vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2, which greatly reduced further the rate of hospitalizations and death among the vaccinated.

None of this was available during the Spanish Flu, so no wonder that it proportionally killed more.

 

You are wrong as usual. The issue is not with the mRNA vaccines. The issue is with the virus and its capacity to mutate. Better proof, we DO have Covid-19 vaccines done the traditional way. China's Sinovac's CoronaVac is a Covid-19 vaccine made the traditional way, with inactivated viruses. Guess what? It is less effective than the two mRNA vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna.

We are very lucky that we were able to make coronavirus vaccines. This had never been accomplished before. We couldn't make one for MERS, couldn't make one for SARS-1, let alone the common cold coronaviruses. These viruses are tricky.

Still, whit this gorgeous new technology of synthetic mRNA vaccines that teach the host cell to make an essential antigen from the virus (the spike protein), we succeeded. Our mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are nothing short of an astounding success, given how thoroughly they prevent hospitalizations and deaths.

A vaccine doesn't need to be a one-and-done for a lifetime to be helpful... the ones for which the effect is more transient, simply need booster shots. That's why we take the flu shot once per year (the influenza virus mutates, so we get adapted shots every year; the same is likely to occur for the SARS-CoV-2). Many other human vaccines need boosters from time to time. Some don't, but again, that's way more linked to the pathogens themselves, than to the platform used to make the vaccines.

I'm sure you won't want to comment on the fact that booster shots have been shown to restore the fading immunity against the SARS-CoV-2 with a multiplication of neutralizing antibodies by a factor of 10 or 11.

If we need to have a quick visit every six months to the primary care doctor's office or the health department headquarters for a quick Covid-19 vaccine boost, I don't see what's the tragedy. These vaccines especially the Moderna one, do maintain efficacy for at least some six months so a booster twice a year should do it.

 

I never said it was worse, just that the raw number comparison doesn't work.

 

The CDC website says that over 8000 people have died shortly after the vaccine and tens of thousands have had very serious adverse reactions to the vaccine (if you figure it out from their complicated formulas they post). Have you seen that on the 6:30 news? I don't think so. Have you read it in the newspaper? I don't think so. Has the Biden administration told Americans that? I don't think so. Even the CDC, when talking about all of those tens of thousands of people, hasn't been forthcoming with the information. They hide it by breaking down the various reactions and saying, "well only .0012% had this and .0013% have had that, etc. They hide it all in very complicated formulas that most people don't even bother trying to figure out. Why won't they be honest and tell us that those complicated formulas split up into different adverse reactions actually add up to tens of thousands of people having very severe adverse reactions to the vaccines? Perhaps you could prove me wrong by posting links to the CDC, the media, or the Biden administration being up front with these numbers instead of burying them under the rug or hiding the numbers in complicated formulas.

 

I have been in favor of mandating health care staff in SNFs to get their annual flu shot for over a decade, so I am normally 100% in favor of this concept in health care. I am well aware of what the flu does to resident census numbers in late January and early February every year! Covid is much worse. So I am on your side!

The degree of staff shortages in direct care staff ( C N As caregivers, nurses) will vary greatly depending on the local labor market /pool and how much Covid has depleted an already compromised demographic. Direct care staffing in geriatric care has taken hit after hit after hit over the last 20 years. I just don't know how many more complications the industry can handle right now and not see the entire system collapse.

People are quitting right and left in some areas, leaving others pulling some extraordinary hours, so before we get on our high horse about which kinds of workers are just a 'good riddance', I want to know how many hours someone's parent might have to sit unchanged in feces, or how long its going to take to get a call light answered at 3 am if two people call out , the number of caregivers to call as replacements is bare bones, and nobody will pick up the damn phone. Morale in this industry has never been worse, burn-out never more of a problem, as long as I have been working in these places and that is a very long time!

In the end, we may be worrying about something that is not going to work anyway. The Biden mandate using OSHA, make be struck down, and the 'religious exemption' may become so all encompassing, and so hard to monitor for 'sincerity' or past employee practice, that almost nobody ends up getting canned anyway.

 

Agreed but do realize that all of the above was in place before Biden's mandate, given that the latter is not even in force right now. Quitting due to low salary, burn out, disagreement with the EMPLOYER'S vaccine mandate (again, employers are doing this; not Biden since his mandate hasn't kicked in yet), the workforce itself getting a hit due to workers getting infected...

Maybe Biden's OSHA mandate will be struck out, but whether it will or won't, it is not a factor right now for what we're discussing here. Hospitals and nursing homes are ALREADY entitled to mandating various vaccinations as a condition of employment and the Courts have recently sided twice with hospitals when employees challenged the Covid-19 vaccine mandate.

 

Complicated formulas?

8000 people died.

From the CDC
Total Vaccine Doses
Delivered
478,362,045
Administered
394,690,283

Simple math now, not complicated at all. 8000/394,690,283 * 100% = 0.002%

How many died from Covid itself?
Per the CDC = 698,672

More simple math. 698,672 died / 331,002,651 USA population. = 0.2% of the USA population died due to covid.

100 time more likely to die from covid than from the shot.


https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths

 

No, no, no. The CDC admitted that over 8,000 people died. That's not the complicated formula. The complicated formulas are in the very severe adverse events from the vaccines, where they don't actually list the numbers, they break the adverse events down into several different categories, never giving the actual total of any of them and, instead giving formulas instead of actual numbers that you would have to actually figure out to find the real numbers.

How about reporting this: over 8,000 people have died from the vaccines and tens of thousands of people have had very severe adverse reactions to the vaccines but only .0022% of Americans have actually died from the virus. Why don't they report those numbers?

 

0.2% of the population of USA have died from Covid. I posted you those numbers as well. Almost 700,00 out of 334M people. Those numbers aren't hidden.

I don't know where your 0.0022% comes from.

I can't speak about adverse effects from vaccine. It does seem to not be available on the CDC website.

 

Ok, I must admit to committing a math error. So, I repost:

How about reporting this: over 8,000 people have died from the vaccines and tens of thousands of people have had very severe adverse reactions to the vaccines but only .2% of Americans have actually died from the virus. Why don't they report those numbers?

 

I stated, I don't know why they aren't posting adverse reactions to the vaccines.
I think that should be something reported.

 

Anything that deters from their mission of getting everyone vaccinated is swept under the rug. The public doesn't need to be informed of things such as this, for the greater public good.

 

Certainly the goal is to vaccinate as many as possible.

I did another search on CDC website and found information on side effects of vaccines.

...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html

 

You and I are on the same wave length. I think the emboldened is what we probably have to go for right now. Let the employers who have the mandated staff /patient ratio ( sitting in administrative rule or state statute), figure out if they can get away with a mandate and still meet it. In the abstract, I would vote for a mandate through this industry in a heart beat, but we have let this staffing shortage issue get so out of hand already

The industry is prepping for the Biden mandate , and preparing their staff for what's coming, while some are also handing out little cards with exact language to use to beat it through the religious exemption!

 

The religious exemption is not really a guaranteed way out for the employees of a committed employer. The employer would still have the discretion of granting the exception or not. So, there are arguments for invalidating it. One, ALL leaders of major religions have issued statements in favor of the vaccines, and it's only some fringe religions that thought of taking advantage of this to get bigger flocks, and issued statements against it. So, an employer might require proof that the employee did not join the anti-vaxxer religion just recently, after the mandates came down. Say, an employee is a life-long Catholic... the Pope said that Catholics should get the vaccine... and then suddenly the employee joined one of these anti-vaxxer bogus "religions" 5 days ago... yeah, right. Also, employers might require that the expressed belief is consistent, and not just opportunistic to avoid the mandate. So the employee is now saying that he/she objects to vaccinations on religious grounds... has this employee ever requested a flu shot exemption for the same reason? Has the employee declined the Hep B shot for the same reason? Has the employee filed with the Employee Clinic a vaccination record with a long list of vaccines the employee has accepted before, such as the MMR, the Tetanus, etc.? Can the employee show that his/her offspring is not vaccinated for a long list of diseases, due to this religious objection?

As you may realize, 99.9% of people now claiming a religious exemption to avoid the Covid-19 shot are liars and opportunists... because their lifetime records are not consistent with this claim.

The burden of proof for medical and religious exemptions is on the employee. So, obviously bogus claims may be denied by the employer.

Do you know how I learned about the above? From listening to an interview with a Religious Rights lawyer on TV. He made the above points, and said, "one would imagine that because my practice focuses on religious rights, I'd be jumping all over this and considering all these claims as valid, and would be fighting for these people, right? No. I do not want to defend people who are opportunists and are not sincere. I take on cases where REAL religious rights are being stepped on... not on cases of someone who has never held this objection, but then opportunistically and falsely now claims to hold it." Commendable...

And then, employers have other means... Did you see what Delta (the airline, not the variant, haha) did? They granted the medical and religious exemptions, so they did not require a vaccine certificate from these people... but then they turned around and placed everybody who had been granted an exemption, on unpaid leave, on grounds that due to the nature of their operation, they couldn't afford these exempt employees to be anywhere near their passengers and their co-workers so they had no working assignments available to them. So they didn't fire them... but effectively stopped paying them. Genius. Given that private employers are perfectly able to furlough employees if they find it necessary for their operations, there isn't much that the workers placed on leave can do, legally. If they claim discrimination, "unvaccinated" is not a protected class, and Delta can just say "oh no, we're not discriminating against this person; we'll be happy to reinstate the person to the active workforce and find him/her a working assignment as soon as he/she gets vaccinated. But he/she claimed a religious exemption and we did grant it to him/her therefore we aren't discriminating on religious grounds either, but the issue of working assignments is not a religious one, it's a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated ones, so the unvaccinated ones are free to remain Delta employees benefitting from a religious exemption, but we have nowhere to put them to work so they're on leave."

Comments from lawyers on Delta's strategy have been generally in the sense that they are correct and in sound legal grounds.

 

Oh, I found the article that substantiates what I had mentioned in my OP from memory (numbers may be slightly different):

https://www.mdedge.com/internalmedi...DedgeeNL100321F&ecd=wnl_wee_210926_mdedge_9am