Nice to know that the students in my school have a higher than average vaccination rate for their age group. Of course, 27% is still not particularly high (the average is around 20% for the country).
Surprisingly, a bit above half the students in the school are opting for PCR tests even though they could get an antigen test and be totally fine to get into the school.
As of right now, zero students have notified the school in advance that they will reject a covid test. However, about 15% of the students have not answered the request from the school and no students rejected the test last year.
Unfortunately, students will be taking the test and presumed negative for the day so long as they don’t show any covid symptoms. This means that they’ll be mask-free in all but common areas of the school. Only 1% of the students have confirmed to the school that they previously had covid. I wonder if many of the people who didn’t respond don’t want to acknowledge having covid.
I saw a note of a study that predicted if top GOP officials all pushed vaccinations it might push the overall percentage up by as much as seven percent.
What’s often overlooked is that study was limited to cells in Petri dishes. What’s more, when the NIH looked into it, the agency found that to achieve the ivermectin’s reported disruptive effects, the dose would have to be 100-times greater than what’s currently approved in humans. At those levels, the side-effects would likely be serious. The FDA has [pleaded with people]
It’s unclear when Julie contacted Dr. Fred Wagshul, but on August 20, he prescribed ivermectin for Jeffrey. Wagshul is a pulmonologist with a practice near Dayton, Ohio, and he helps run the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, a group of doctors which encourage treatment of COVID with ivermectin, fluvoxamine, famotidine, and a smorgasbord of other drugs. Some of those drugs may work in limited circumstances, but most of them appear useless against the virus. Currently, Wagshul does not appear to have any privileges at any hospitals.(Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19 | FDA) not to take ivermectin for COVID.
I think the discourse on ivermectin is kind of dumb on both ends now. Labelling it an “animal dewormer” or whatever is stupid, it’s used in people as a very effective anti-parasitic. It’s also a safe drug. Like yeah if you take animal formulations or take ridiculous doses or whatever then that’s going to be bad, but that goes for any drug. If you use according to the instructions put out by the guys who are convinced it’s a COVID wonder drug, then it’s safe. I don’t care if people want to get it and use it and all this “OMG POISON CENTER CALLS ARE SKYROCKETING” stuff is a bit much.
It’s also not like there’s zero reason to think it might be helpful. Mahmud et al is a perfectly good randomized trial with n = 363, finding that ivermectin (plus doxycycline, which we know from other trials isn’t helpful) had a statistically significant effect, shortening recovery times by two days on average, and patients in the treatment arm significantly less likely to test positive on RT-PCR after 14 days. That’s it for decently-sized RCTs but there are some intriguing retrospective studies on prophylaxis, for example Behera et al and Morgenstern et al both found reductions of like 70% in risk of acquiring COVID over the study period - there are design problems like a selection bias in who chose to take the free ivermectin, but it’s also a large effect size. Even the recently-released TOGETHER trial, which was reported as showing “no effect”, showed from memory a 20% reduction in progression to severe disease; that was nowhere near statistically significant, but also not the kind of result you can confidently claim for sure shows no effect.
To be clear, I think the most likely outcome is that ivermectin is shown to not be of benefit, but I think it’s totally plausible that it’s somewhat helpful. The tenor of the media coverage, which is “look at these yokels taking horse drugs, we spoke to this expert who encourages you to laugh at them” is starting to get on my nerves. The only qualification these “experts” have is skimming the Cochrane meta-analysis, because that’s the best information out there so far, and the fact is we don’t know for sure yet that ivermectin does nothing, especially when used as a prophylactic or very early in the course of the disease. If you can afford it and take it as directed then you could argue that it’s a freeroll - the problem, obviously, is people using it as an alternative to getting vaccinated.
Indeed. But given the isolated geographic nature of this outbreak and the fact that it’s peaking well after last summer’s (much smaller) peak, I’m still worried about what’s in store for fall.
The north fortunately has much higher vax rates. I think we’ll see a scary spike but not much rise in deaths this fall.
Finally, the Czech government released vaccination stats by municipality.
The rural-urban divide isn’t as clear as I thought it would be.
Significant cities (the capitals of Czech regions) have a coverage rate between 64 and 70%. Prague sits at 67% which is higher than every state in America except Vermont.
That’s nice and all but there are some rural villages that are the complete opposite. Out of the 76 municipalities in the Czech Republic, 13 have a lower vaccination rate than Mississippi which is the least vaccinated state in America. As a matter of fact, one municipality has a vaccination rate of just 17%.
But not all municipalities are not like that. Villages in Central Bohemia (the region surrounding Prague) have high vaccination rates. A couple of them have 100% vaccination rates.
Seems that vaccination rates here are connected more to wealth and to a lesser extent political beliefs. The poorest areas of the country are along the east and west borders and that’s where most of the least vaccinated municipalities are.
Whats the best day after exposure to get a PCR if you have no symptoms?
If you go down to that microlevel you will probably find counties with similarly low vaccination rates across the US.
De facto policy is that kids all catch COVID. Some states just more explicit than others about the policy.
Me too, since it might dissuade a few of them from taking the horse dewormer instead of getting vaxxed
Fully vaxxed coworker pozzed yesterday, and I was around him yesterday.
I know that vaccine is supposed to be 85% effective against Delta, but people in my wider circles sure seem to be hitting a lot of gutshots lately.
That is very much a best-case number. I’m skeptical of that NEJM UK study. In the UK people over 40 almost all received the AZ vaccine, so it makes sense that their number for Pfizer effectiveness would be artificially high. How old is your co-worker?
Agree with Chris that there is nothing funny about the million dumbest people in America self medicating with horse drugs to fight off a virus that doesn’t exist in lieu of getting the free vaccine. You should feel bad for making jokes about this.
Plus, in addition to freerolling on a Covid miracle cure, they also are getting insurance on a possible undiagnosed roundworm infection. Its actually pretty clever when you think about it.
4-5ish? Not 100% on that, but that’s approximately the incubation period.
About 60. tbf, most of the breakthroughs I’ve personally heard about have been people 60+.
seeking out ivermectin for covid isn’t a free roll. when people ask for it, they are pretty deep in the right wing conversion funnel. getting it comes at the end of an anger campaign, and quite possibly a lot of anxiety, which by the way is also fed by memes of sold out ivermectin. you may have even had to sue the hospital to get it.
krugman goes on a psychic projection here, but it’s clear some of the same marketers are involved in both right wing ideologies and supplements business.
OK, I didn’t see that coming. But I should have. As the historian Rick Perlstein has pointed out, there’s a long association between peddlers of quack medicine and right-wing extremists. They cater to more or less the same audience.
That is, Americans willing to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that Italian satellites were used to switch votes to Joe Biden are also the kind of people willing to believe that medical elites are lying to them and that they can solve their health problems by ignoring professional advice and buying patent medicines instead.
Once you’re sensitized to the link between snake oil and right-wing politics, you realize that it’s pervasive.
This is clearly true in the right’s fever swamps. Alex Jones of Infowars has built a following by pushing conspiracy theories, but he makes money by selling nutritional supplements.
It’s also true, however, for more mainstream, establishment parts of the right. For example, Ben Shapiro, considered an intellectual on the right, hawks supplements.
Look at who advertises on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show. After Fox itself, the top advertisers are My Pillow, then three supplement companies.
Snake oil peddlers, clearly, find consumers of right-wing news and punditry a valuable market for their wares. So it shouldn’t be surprising to find many right-leaning Americans ready to see vaccination as a liberal plot and turn to dubious alternatives — although, again, I didn’t see livestock dewormer coming.
The interesting question, however, is to what extent the connection between right-wing politics and snake oil marketing has shaped the political landscape.Put it this way: There are big financial rewards to extremism, because extreme politics sells patent medicine, and patent medicine is highly profitable. (In 2014 Alex Jones’s operations were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenue, mainly from supplement sales.) Do these financial rewards induce pundits to be more extreme? It would be surprising if they didn’t — as conservative economists say, incentives matter.
The extremism of media figures radicalizes their audience, giving politicians an incentive to become more extreme.
So you can see how vaccination became such a flash point. Getting shots in arms is a priority for a Democratic president, which automatically generates intense hostility among people who want to see Joe Biden fail. And such people were already primed to reject medical expertise and believe in quack cures.