Stupid shit in Medellin

[Paulie97]

Common sense goes like a long way and you have it down. I plan on doing the same and will keep an N95 with me in case I get in a crowd but will avoid them. No Metro this visit and will miss going to Arvi on the cable. Yes, exposure time is critical and ignored. Remember when you couldn't touch anything or needed to have everything sanitized because the virus would live for days and your hands would pick it up? The masks were BS because only the n95 is any good or the Korean or European counterparts but low supply and had to go to hospitals etc. So they have everyone wearing worthless paper or cloth but that was great for cheap mask makers. Anyway, stay healthy with your common sense approach that works.

Everyone has "common sense" after the fact which is the classic Monday morning quarterbacking angle. But the very nature of science is to amend conclusions and policy as more information becomes available. Homemade cloth masks were useful, depending on weaves, layers, and thread counts. Not all are created equally, and they were only promoted for a time due to the shortage of N95 and surgical masks. The former are the best, the latter still rather effective depending on the grade.

Be careful when you start accusing someone like Elvira of common sense, as there's surely more to the story, while you are swallowing some barstool analysis full of omissions. See above. Wink.

P.S. The same kicked, cried, and screamed because he was denied access to a supermarket in Mexico for not having a mask. He has also posted YouTubes of 4th rate shock jocks who discouraged mask wearing, while he predicted that less than 80 k Americans would die of Covid. So if you are looking to suck up you need to keep looking.

[Mr Enternational]

You nor anyone else has a right to spread disease. Nor was any such notion ever envisioned in the Constitution, thus you are just chasing your tail in a hooker forum.

Forced quarantines of TB patients have been rightly upheld by the SCOTUS. Non compliant selfish morons are being removed from our armed forces, and that's a very good thing.

Are you stupid or are you just dumb? Forced quarantine of actual TB PATIENTS you compare to forced discaharge of people with nothing wrong with them, people with no disease to spread. But I guess we are going by they MIGHT get a disease to spread around. So if calculations are correct, now that the noncompliant selfish morons are gone we should see nobody in the military come up with the disease to spread around. If there was a Nobel prize for stupid you would be a repeat winner. But since there is not you will just have to keep settling for being a loser.

[ChuchoLoco]

I avoided sick people and when talking to someone with Covid kept the conversations short. With all the talk of social distancing, hand washing, and lockdowns, what was missed was how the virus is actually spread. It was prolonged exposure to someone with Covid with alpha. With delta, the exposure was even shorter.

As of today, though, you can throw that out the window because of how contagious omicron is. I do not think I have had omicron but even if I get it, it is no big deal. With omicron, I would rather have the disease than the vaccine.

Common sense goes like a long way and you have it down. I plan on doing the same and will keep an N95 with me in case I get in a crowd but will avoid them. No Metro this visit and will miss going to Arvi on the cable. Yes, exposure time is critical and ignored. Remember when you couldn't touch anything or needed to have everything sanitized because the virus would live for days and your hands would pick it up? The masks were BS because only the n95 is any good or the Korean or European counterparts but low supply and had to go to hospitals etc. So they have everyone wearing worthless paper or cloth but that was great for cheap mask makers. Anyway, stay healthy with your common sense approach that works.

[Ptrbrgr]

First a disclaimer: I am not typing this to whitewash what happens in the pharmaceutical industry. It would be childish to say all of pharma is evil, but lots of nasty stuff happens there for sure, greed is rampant, and they surely do not lose any money over this pandemic. Not waiving their intellectual property protections during this pandemic I think is unforgivable. Just to get this out of the way.

I think one could take almost any biomedical report and summarize it in two different ways that seem to say completely opposite things. One way to do this is by cherry picking, as was pointed out here already, but I found that omitting facts is even more effective to spin things. There are some really clever people out there who have perfected that art. Sometimes they don't even lie. They tell you 100% the truth, but it is incomplete, and by leaving out critical facts they know exactly how people will misunderstand things. An example before we get to the Canadian Covid Care Alliance (CCCA) video, so you understand what I mean.

At the beginning of the pandemic an elderly lady in the neighborhood didn't want to wear a mask, because she was afraid it would make her sick. Turned out someone put a flier in her mailbox. One of the 'facts' on the flyer said they took some used masks to the lab, and the flyer included a very long list of all sorts of nasty sounding bacteria and germs they said they found. Small wonder the old lady thought she would get sick. I have no reason to doubt that these guys did this experiment and found all these bugs. It is called the microbiome, but they didn't mention that in the flyer. Every human body contains more non-human than human cells, and the bacteria etc were in the masks because they are also in your lungs and you breathe them into the fabric. They were yours to begin with. They don't make you sick, they actually keep you healthy. But what does an old lady know about the microbiome? These guys with the flyer knew exactly what they were doing. And they didn't say anything that was incorrect. And if you put something like this out on social media, it invariably gets shared within minutes by lots of people lamenting the danger of masks. These people are very clever, but they rely on lots of gullible people who have no filter to amplify their stuff.

In comparison, the CCCA video was moderately clever at best. They make ample use of omissions, but the video also contains falsehoods and at least one blatant monster lie, which is that the trial deviated from the 'plan' as they put it. Every clinical trial has a protocol. This is the gospel. Every T is crossed, every I is dotted. For those with a masochistic bent, you can find the protocol for this trial in the supplementary material of the NEJM paper, all 376 pages thereof. Every protocol has a detailed plan for interim analyses, and has exactly defined rules for stopping early. This can happen for example if you find early on that the vaccine is highly effective, or if there are adverse outcomes and safety issues. This trial was stopped early, exactly following the protocol, because it hit all primary efficacy endpoints and safety checks. This was reported in all media outlets at the time. The CCCA knows this. When they say the trialists deviated from the protocol, they are blatantly lying to you. There is no other way of putting it. And when you stop early, the trial is over, you unblind, and offer the vaccine to all participants, also according to protocol. If you have a highly effective vaccine, it would be unethical to do otherwise.

Onwards to the RRR versus ARR mambo jambo (if numbers aren't your thing, you might want to skip this section). Dcrist0527 pointed out in his post there is indeed an important difference. A clinical trial is always comparative, treatment versus placebo arm. Therefore you always report the outcome as a relative measure such as efficacy. There is nothing special about COVID trials. It's always been that way, always will be that way. That was the 95% cited in the NEJM paper. Now if you are a policy maker, and you want to know for example something about the basic reproduction number R0, you want to know something about absolute risks and reduction of those through interventions. But this is pretty complicated stuff and hard to estimate, because things constantly change. So what is the point of the CCCA in the video? They first tell you how you need to misinterpret the 95%, because otherwise their punchline doesn't work. Then they walk you through the math how to calculate the RRR and ARR. 162/18325 is 0. 88%, 8/18198 is 0. 04%, RRR is 95%, ARR is the difference, 0. 84%. To the lay person watching the video it might appear that Pfizer deliberately reported only the RRR because it is larger and the ARR looks dismal. But that is not how it works. If you want to say something about the vaccine itself, you have to report the RRR, reasons see above. Consider what would have happened if the trial had ended after 4 months instead of 2 months. If things stayed the same, you would expect roughly twice as many infections in both arms (not exactly, but for arguments sake it's good enough). 324/18325 is 1. 76%, 16/18198 is 0. 09%, RRR is still 95%, ARR is the difference, 1. 68%. So the ARR goes up, despite the vaccine effectiveness staying the same. Even if nothing changes, you can ramp up the ARR just by running the trial longer. Does that make sense? What is the interpretation of that? The ARR surely has its uses, but when you want to say something about the vaccine itself it is not particularly useful, despite what the CCCA tries to imply. The FDA user's guide they show in the video that says communicating absolute risks is preferable to communicating relative risks? Guess what, it is not for clinical trials, it is for medical decision making. If someone gets a genetic test because she has a family history of breast cancer, and it turns out she has certain BRCA variants, it is of very little help if we tell her the lifetime risk to develop breast cancer is 10 times higher compared to someone like her not having the variants. If we can tell her we estimate her lifetime risk to be 75%, she can make a decision whether or not to get a mastectomy. Just google the title of the user's guide, you find the pdf of the compendium on the FDA website. Chapter 7 page 60 is what they show you in the video. None of this has anything to do with clinical trials. The opening line to the chapter is "For patients to make informed decisions about their health care, they must understand the risks and benefits of their treatment options, including the numeric likelihoods". The CCCA knows that too. They are just counting on people being too lazy to look it up.

Next came the ballyhoo about the evidence of harm. They first make a big production about a significant increase in illness, showing a much larger number of adverse events. Well duh. That table shows all such events including arm soreness and fever and the like. And of course you'll see more sore arms if you inject a vaccine instead of saline. Those who get excited about these videos: do you actually ever look at the original paper? It is not that the Pfizer report hides this in any way. The results first say something about the population, and then comes a lengthy section about safety, including adverse events. If you don't know what reactogenicity means, look it up on Wikipedia: "In clinical trials, the term reactogenicity refers to the property of a vaccine of being able to produce common, "expected" adverse reactions, especially excessive immunological responses and associated signs and symptoms, including fever and sore arm at the injection site. " And the NEJM paper specifically refers to Table S3 the CCCA shows in the video: "Adverse event analyses are provided for all enrolled 43,252 participants, with variable follow-up time after dose 1 (Table S3). More BNT162 b2 recipients than placebo recipients reported any adverse event (27% and 12%, respectively) or a related adverse event (21% and 5% This distribution largely reflects the inclusion of transient reactogenicity events, which were reported as adverse events more commonly by vaccine recipients than by placebo recipients. " There is nothing sinister about it, it is totally normal and expected. If you look at the real safety concerns in that table such as life-threatening events, you see there are actually more in the placebo than in the vaccine group. No marks for guesses why the CCCA didn't highlight those numbers.

Next came a claim about an increased risk of death. Well, death happens, and remember that this trial included all ages, including participants in their 90's. So it is not surprising that some deaths occur. The question is whether there is truly a higher rate of death in the vaccine group, as the CCCA claims. For those who took a statistics course, remember Fisher's exact test? If you plug in the numbers the CCCA shows you, you get a pvalue of 0. 39, and the odds ratios could reasonably be anywhere between 0. 33 and 1. 46. So from these numbers you can not conclude whether the rates are the same, or if they are different, in which group they are higher. But the CCCA could have said something about the FDA report from November 8, 2021. Given what's at stake, of course lots of people looked at the 20 deaths in the vaccine group from every possible angle. The final FDA report concluded not a single death was due to the vaccine. But saying so in the video would have gotten a bit in the way of scaring people.

This concluded the main part of their misinformation campaign, and they went on to beating some dead horses, such as the fast timeline of the vaccine development. That was discussed ad nauseam already. Throwing billions of dollars at it, blanket indemnification for the pharmaceutical companies, an all hands on deck approach with fast tracking at the FDA, all of that surely helps getting a vaccine out the door quickly. At that point in the video I tossed in the towel. One last comment on that slide. There is vegan BM who says he refuses the vaccine because it was tested on animals. I fully understand and respect that position. But that BM was also one of the first here to link the video. JustTK, I hope you have been well! Did you catch that? The CCCA says that one of the reasons for the fast timeline was that Pfizer skipped important safety steps, including animal testing. Great news for you my man, you can now get a vaccine! Except, well, you can't, because the CCCA was lying about this as too.

[Dcrist0527]

Which has nothing to do with the price of rice in China. Such laws offer protection against self harm, excepting examples of parental negligence. You nor anyone else has a right to spread disease. Nor was any such notion ever envisioned in the Constitution, thus you are just chasing your tail in a hooker forum.

Well, thank you, peanut gallery. But I wasn't the one that brought up seat belts. Perhaps pay attention to context before allowing your head to explode. And using your logic, why haven't I been jailed for the years I haven't got the flu vaccine? Like jjbee, your misuse of "rights" is pathetic. Has ANYONE claimed the right to spread a virus? But sure, maybe slogans are easier for you to digest.

Forced quarantines of TB patients have been rightly upheld by the SCOTUS. Non compliant selfish morons are being removed from our armed forces, and that's a very good thing.

You are an angry one, huh? LOL. Curious how you feel about the lies and misinformation that SCOTUS spewed this week. Funny how the "science" is malleable to support your political cause.

[Paulie97]

Do you take any precautionary measures or are you lucky or just have a strong immune system?

P.S.: Fox News is also available in the bunkers.

How does Elvira do it? Well he lies a lot which is very easy to do on the internet. But yea it's ironic those complaining about CNN and MSNBC while immersing their brains in Tucker and Hannity, textbook pot calling the kettle black. Such is barely a step up from Alex Jones.

[Huacho]

I wear my seat belt. Why? Not because it's the law but I make the personal choice to protect myself. If someone chooses not to and they end up going through a windshield, well, we just improved the gene pool.

Or, they survive as a paraplegic, and you, JB, taxpayers in general, and I have to support them in a vegetative state for years. I'm old enough to admit that I only started wearing my seat belt when my employer required it. It became a habit. Then it became a law.

So how others' behaviors affect the society in which they live does actually matter. A lot of the stuff I hear opposing vax mandates is the exact same crap from 40 years ago about seat belt laws. Now, I'm quite sure that seat belt usage is lower among the un vaxxed. I'd bet my own money on it if anyone can prove it. So it's the same kind of people saying it's personal choice to get thrown through the windshield who are saying it's personal choice to run around un vaxxed. And the non-seat belt wearers affect society inexorably in the long run via health care costs, but the anti vaxxers are affecting society more and faster because their inactions affect and infect everyone around them, all the time, all day long.

[Elvis 2008]

Do you take any precautionary measures or are you lucky or just have a strong immune system?

I avoided sick people and when talking to someone with Covid kept the conversations short. With all the talk of social distancing, hand washing, and lockdowns, what was missed was how the virus is actually spread. It was prolonged exposure to someone with Covid with alpha. With delta, the exposure was even shorter.

As of today, though, you can throw that out the window because of how contagious omicron is. I do not think I have had omicron but even if I get it, it is no big deal. With omicron, I would rather have the disease than the vaccine.

[Elvis 2008]

Forced quarantines of TB patients have been rightly upheld by the SCOTUS. Non compliant selfish morons are being removed from our armed forces, and that's a very good thing.

And that is apples to oranges. The treatment of TB is solid and it actually prevents the transmission of TB to others unlike the vaccine, but you are so dense you do not get that.

The vaccine does not prevent transmission any longer Paulie. Do you get that? In logic terms, you are making a false analogy.

[Elvis 2008]

Oh, the irony, part two. I'm going to assume this wasn't directed at me or anyone in particular. I have never told anyone not to get vaccinated. Just the opposite, actually. But stop and think what you said. "Irresponsible. " "Despicable. " But you have no problem mandating what someone must do to themselves. No problem taking away their jobs because they don't subscribe to the group think. THEY aren't afforded the "medical professional advice. " That's settled science, right? Telling people what they must do = not despicable? Ok, bro. Gotcha.

Dchrist, JJBee is like the pledge in Animal House getting his ass smacked by Fauci and the government and says, "Thank you sir can have I another?" and thinks everyone is stupid for not following his lead. He gets vaccinated, thinks he is invincible to Covid and then gets it, has a vascular event "no one could figure out" and after lecturing people endlessly on Covid does not even know the symptoms of the disease. Then he goes to Colombia and spreads it around. I have already told him to shut up about Covid because no one wants to hear from him about this anymore. It is like a fat person lecturing on how to lose weight.

And if that is not bad enough, he actually goes out and gets the third vaccine dose. My jaw dropped when I read that. After all that he have been through and he has both natural and vaccine induced immunity, he needs a booster that causes clots? OMG. The guy literally has no common sense.

As for debating the merits of the studies on Covid early on, they are irrelevant today. Omicron does not cause death though there will be reports of people dying with omicron. When you look at the numbers with omicron and serious cases in worldometer, you see about 1 out of every 1000 cases or so today is serious. France has 3 million cases of which 3,000 are serious. I get the feeling there is 5 to 10 X that number of people sick and delta has not totally gone away so I wonder how many of those 3,000 serious cases are delta and what the real ratio of sick to seriously ill there is. The UK has 3 million or so sick as well but <1000 critical cases.

As I said before, 100% vaccination is not going to do anything because Covid is in animals. The Chinese released a study suggesting omicron came from a mouse: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-...ouse-kind.html.

Given that omicron does not cause death and causes hospitalization so infrequently I cannot see any reason to advocate for the vaccine at this time. It is patently obvious that the vaccines do not prevent transmission, something members of one political party cannot get through their thick skulls, so why even bother with vaccinations at all then?

Thing is that you have the fear factor and Fauci. Moderna is already cooking up a vaccine for omicron and we will soon see if that fucker Fauci will be pushing it using the data from alpha and delta to do so. That sleazeball wants everyone on the damned planet vaccinated including newborns, and if Fauci says that a 4th vaccine is needed for Omicron, JJBee will be the first person in line to get it.

But the CDC has bucked Fauci on the 3rd vaccine and the notion of three vaccines means you are fully vaccinated, and I have been told ivermectin has sold out all over the country, so people are getting the message with regards to the vaccine limitations. On top of that, anyone watching sports these days knows the vaccine has done nothing to stop the spread of Covid. The CDC has been catching flak as it now wedged between what Fauci wants and a vocal set of people screaming at them about a worker shortage and other Covid related matters. I see people here mentioning 2 weeks of isolation versus 5 days and I wonder where they have been.

But if the CDC says a 3rd vaccine is needed to be fully vaccinated, I am not doing it, and I think the pushback on this will be enormous.

The Supreme Court striking down the vaccine mandate looks like a done deal now. The sad part about that is that only information from prior cases is allowed into a Supreme Court case so while there was discussion of the vaccine stopping transmission as it did with alpha, the justices know that they do not prevent the spread. Hell, one of the lawyers was triple vaxxed and could not show up because he had Covid.

So yeah, the virus is doing what viruses do: spreading easier but not killing the host. I said before I expect 60,000+ cases in Colombia down when it was around only 1,000 cases per day. It is over 30,000 now, and it will continue higher but do not let that fool you. No one will be that sick. From a health care standpoint, I repeat the pandemic is done even with the escalating number of cases.

[ChuchoLoco]

That is great, Paulie. As you know I have been travelling damned near every month and have not let Covid slow me down at all. I have actually enjoyed travelling to places like Mexico City during the pandemic because traffic was so much less. I have been exposed to hundreds of cases of Covid and have never tested + for the virus. I guess that is what you mean by being smart.

But you have not said one damned thing you have done. You have not said you have gone anywhere or done anything. As far as I know, you have been locked in a bunker. So what have you been doing personally besides being locked in a bunker with CNN and MSNBC on 24 hours a day?

Do you take any precautionary measures or are you lucky or just have a strong immune system?

P.S.: Fox News is also available in the bunkers.

[Paulie97]

And while I will usually favor freedom, I do think a society is entitled to setting norms to an extent. But I'll use your seatbelt example.

Which has nothing to do with the price of rice in China. Such laws offer protection against self harm, excepting examples of parental negligence. You nor anyone else has a right to spread disease. Nor was any such notion ever envisioned in the Constitution, thus you are just chasing your tail in a hooker forum.

Forced quarantines of TB patients have been rightly upheld by the SCOTUS. Non compliant selfish morons are being removed from our armed forces, and that's a very good thing.

[Elvis 2008]

Sounds good, as long as you don't leave out all the people who decided "not to live in fear" that wound up on their backs pleading with others not to make the same mistakes as them.

You also throw out the false dilemma fallacy. There are more choices besides living in fear and throwing caution to the wind. For example reasonable caution doesn't have to involve fear. It's just being smart.

That is great, Paulie. As you know I have been travelling damned near every month and have not let Covid slow me down at all. I have actually enjoyed travelling to places like Mexico City during the pandemic because traffic was so much less. I have been exposed to hundreds of cases of Covid and have never tested + for the virus. I guess that is what you mean by being smart.

But you have not said one damned thing you have done. You have not said you have gone anywhere or done anything. As far as I know, you have been locked in a bunker. So what have you been doing personally besides being locked in a bunker with CNN and MSNBC on 24 hours a day?

[Nounce]

Sounds good, as long as you don't leave out all the people who decided "not to live in fear" that wound up on their backs pleading with others not to make the same mistakes as them.
.

Show me some examples of vaccinated people doing that. I think the anti-vax pepole will love to hear from you and have a field day with it. LOL.

You are assuming a lot of things and you think you know about human behavior. Did you know before there will be so many people not taking vaccine.

You also throw out the false dilemma fallacy. There are more choices besides living in fear and throwing caution to the wind. For example reasonable caution doesn't have to involve fear. It's just being smart.

Like wearing a mask having a drink in a packed bar? If the word fear is the only thing you don't agree, remove the word in my post.

[Ptrbrgr]

Perhaps I can shed some light on this.

Dcrist is referring to a video put out by a Canadian anti-vax group called the Canadian Covid Care Alliance. In the video, they compared the number of infected in the initial Pfizer trial, only over the first 7 days of the trial.

Thank you for this. I found the video, and managed to watch almost ten minutes of it before I threw in the towel. Oh dear. Well, to those who got so upset about the video: as they told Cheese Wagstaff in the Wire after the dog fight: "I think you have been played". I'll see if I can find a bit of time later today to type up a brief summary.