Coronavirus in Massachusetts (Brookline: renting, house, tenant)

[BostonMike7]

Originally Posted by Lampert

You would have to also pay everyone that already got the vaccine. That's not small potatoes.

Ok, just for the sake of discussion, perhaps the last stimulus should have been split into two payments. $1000 ASAP and a $400 "upon vaccination" payment.

Yes, you would miss those earning enough to not qualify for a stimulus, but i am led to believe vaccine hesitancy among that group isn't as high

[OutdoorLover]

Originally Posted by BostonMike7

I think that line is damaging the reputation of the vaccines and discouraging many. Can't tell you how many social media posts I see claiming "Experimental gene therapy" and the like.


I do still have mixed opinions on mandating such a vaccine that doesn't have FDA approval yet, and part of that might be due to my unfamiliarity with the FDA approval process as its outside my area of expertise. I don't know if the differences are major, or minimal between the EUA and full approval. I think with an EUA in place, i'd be a little more hesitant to require mandated vaccination. With a full FDA approval, I wipe my hands of the debate and am on board.

I am not saying all these things for your benefit, so don't take this as rebuttal please - I'll discuss certain things just to be more fulsome in my discussion because I know more than you will read it.

The EUA approved vaccines are not experimental. All three vaccines approved by the FDA, even if under EUA, have undergone full clinical trial evaluation, all three phases as normally constructed. Clinical trials are the last stage of drug/vaccine development where the product is considered experimental, and they've gone through that. Clinical trials are required to demonstrate both safety and efficacy of a treatment in human beings. They start small so as to expose only a small number of people to risk, and then expand to larger populations with each stage - to get better statistics and answer more questions. They went through all that, and the data was reviewed by the FDA, they weren't simply waived through from the lab straight to mass deployment in humans.

Now, you raise questions about the distinction between the process under EUA vs normal full approval. I don't have an answer there - I work in discovery and pre-clinical development in drug companies. I know more about downstream topics like clinical trials and pharmacovigilance than lay people, but I won't speak if I don't know what I am talking about, and this is outside my knowledge.

As a practical matter, the trials were reviewed and the vaccines approved under EUA. Since then they have been deployed to the public in huge quantities under pharmacovigilance - which is a normal process for continuing to follow products after they have been approved so as to catch issues that might not show up in the trial but might show up in the larger numbers of full deployment. There are very clear rules for how such reporting should be done, and anything untoward must be reported, regardless if it's believed that it's connected to the treatment or not. With so many people having received the vaccine, over time - the trials began maybe 10 months ago and the deployment began five months ago, and all of this under scrutiny, the likelihood of there being anything of real concern that's not been detected yet is just extremely small, and if there is something, it's bound to be either exceedingly rare or quite minor, which is equivalent to saying that undetected liabilities must be inconsequential relative to the benefits. And some people act as if this using the people as guinea pigs, but it's the normal process. No one does clinical trials that expose millions of people over the course of years - first because that would be commercially prohibitive, but one can also argue that in any case it's not in the patients' best interests to delay a treatment too long if the evidence is already very good and the uncertainties already quite low . It's recognized therefore that one might not catch *everything* under the clinical trial, which is exactly why pharmacovigilance is there.

I do agree that these tasks should not be left to linger too long. I don't know how much work it is, but that's neither here nor there, it needs to be done at some point anyway. The administration should light a fire under the bottoms of Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and J&J and say let's close this out ASAP. They are already making the money so they might not otherwise leap to get it done first thing without a push from the feds. But it does seem to be impacting the most important phase of deployment - into patients' arms, so they should just push them to finish the job. As I said I don't work on FDA submissions - different departments do that, but I do know it's a ton of work in documentation, analysis and presentation and it really seems to take the starch out of the people who prepare those submissions; it's highly regulated, and everything better be on point or there will at minimum be delays.

Hope I didn't go on too long and some of this was helpful.

[Lampert]

Originally Posted by BostonMike7

Ok, just for the sake of discussion, perhaps the last stimulus should have been split into two payments. $1000 ASAP and a $400 "upon vaccination" payment.

Yes, you would miss those earning enough to not qualify for a stimulus, but i am led to believe vaccine hesitancy among that group isn't as high

That may have worked, but mostly because it's a federal project. I thought you were talking about state level.

[BostonMike7]

Originally Posted by OutdoorLover

Hope I didn't go on too long and some of this was helpful.

Good response. Much appreciated for the time it took you to write it out

[BostonMike7]

Originally Posted by Lampert

That may have worked, but mostly because it's a federal project. I thought you were talking about state level.

State level, not sure how you would approach incentivizing it.

Federally, I do think an opportunity was missed. Of course, I’m sure there would have been heavy resistance to it for the sake of appeasing certain demographics. It’s a shame that this is so politicized because a real strategy could have been devised and worked towards specific metrics.

[Space_League]

Originally Posted by jayrandom

Please don't do your own SARS-COV-2 research unless you have access to a BSL-3 facility.

Also, I know you are 'taking vaccine anyway', but your FUD campaign is straight out of the antivaxxers online manual. "If he is right it would be quite bad" is true of literally anything anyone says. If someone says, "lizard aliens are going to eat your brains" that would be bad IF IT WERE TRUE. You can't go around making decisions based on what someone has said might be true. You have to make decisions based on what is likely to be true.

And, even if there were substantial risks to this vaccine, which GIGANTIC amounts of actual research (the kind done by scientists with proper controls), not everything that is dangerous should be avoided. Oxygen, for instance, is pretty terrible for cells and can lead to a host of really bad diseases. Avoiding oxygen, you know, just to be safe, is a pretty terrible idea.

We've been gaslit and lied to repeatedly during the pandemic by officials. It's very reasonable to be skeptical. That guy's hypothesis isn't completely unfounded. Even the snopes article admits as much. I don't trust pharmaceutical companies one bit. J&J has one of the worst ethnical track records of any company! These are the guys who KNOWINGLY SOLD BABY POWDER CONTAINING ASBESTOS FOR DECADES.

I'm not saying Geert's doomsday warnings are correct. They are most likely NOT correct and certainly NO ONE WANTS THEM TO BE TRUE. I don't have access to a lab, but I do have training in analytic modelling and design of experiments. I will continue to keep an open mind and do my own research and follow the data provenance of claims at truth asserted by authority figures.

[BosYuppie]

Let's reason this out. Now supposing the sickness out there is some combination of the regular flu and covid, let's be generous an say 90% flu and 10% covid, how does that explain the vastly larger excess mortality over the past year? Especially when we've had so much social distancing and masking? Shouldn't there in fact be less deaths this year since covid is in this view "less deadly" than normal flu?

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mo...w-death-counts

Ever heard of Ocham's Razor? Often the simplest explanation is the right one.

[Space_League]

Originally Posted by BosYuppie

Let's reason this out. Now supposing the sickness out there is some combination of the regular flu and covid, let's be generous an say 90% flu and 10% covid, how does that explain the vastly larger excess mortality over the past year? Especially when we've had so much social distancing and masking? Shouldn't there in fact be less deaths this year since covid is in this view "less deadly" than normal flu?

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mo...w-death-counts

Ever heard of Ocham's Razor? Often the simplest explanation is the right one.

90% flu? They are like <1% flu . The majority of them are COVID-19 deaths and then some smaller but still significant chunk is deaths of despair related to COVID-19 response: lack of necessary medical attention, overdose, suicide etc.

[justyouraveragetenant]

Originally Posted by Space_League

90% flu? They are like <1% flu . The majority of them are COVID-19 deaths and then some smaller but still significant chunk is deaths of despair related to COVID-19 response: lack of necessary medical attention, overdose, suicide etc.

Ya suicides and homicides went way up. child abuse went up parents were home with the kids and had no money and got frustrated and beat the living hell out of the children. Dr atlas said the child abuse was so bad that it was not black eyes they were bringing their kids in for treatment but because they thought they almost killed them. the psychological impact was a huge one and should not be disregarded.

kids lost a year of their childhood and were not able to see their friends.

people who had cancer had to hold off on treatment when covid was at its peak. some people put off going to the hospital because of fear of covid and missed a cancer diagnosis that later killed them. people might have been having a heart attack and waited too long to go to the hospital.

[trevor0101]

Originally Posted by bosyuppie

vaccines are safe and important.

+1