COVID-19: Chapter 9 - OMGicron

So my trumpain dad is for vaccine mandates lol. He is super high risk and has taken covid super seriously. He rages against people who don’t wears masks, says people who won’t get the vaccine are fucking idiots

Yet he is also voting to recall newsome and voting for Larry Elders.

Mom told him of Elders covid policies and he’s just like thats not what I heard. What he heard is strictly from facebook.

lol republicans and fucking facebook.

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Oh you were being much more literal than I thought. Silly me.

Try telling him that Larry Elder will get absolutely none of the other things done. For virtually everything your dad likes about Elder he will need the CA legislature, but the governor actually has some unilateral power over covid/lockdown/mask policy. (Probably too late though…already voted? I have.)

I mean, it’s also classic self defeating liberal When They Go Low We Go High stupidity. The same people that think mocking deplorables is beyond the pale and morally indefensible thought Hillary ran a great campaign. They can go fuck themselves. Their approach has a proven track record of failure so they should sit down and shut up.

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Of course, it’s a lot easier to opine about being nice and maintaining decorum when the policy stakes are close to zero for you personally. Every asshole writing that shit lives in luxury and is not fundamentally threatened by the GOP agenda.

Cant you just show him video of Elder saying he will remove all mask and vax mandates immediately?

Here. Its the very first thing he says

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Yeah, like there’s a non-zero chance a Larry Elder government will lead to your dad’s death in the very near future - and there’s no way in hell he’s changing the tax rates or whatever your dad wants out of him.

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people who make this argument need to explain how they think kissing these dipshits’ asses will actually improve anything and also explain why the mountain of evidence to the contrary is somehow an anomaly

@Riverman has this right, when people write these articles the pieces aren’t the reasoned suggestions about strategy they pretend to be. These are coded appeals saying “please don’t rock the boat too hard, because I have a pretty sweet seat on the boat”.

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Every Acela corridor opinion columnist is a policy failure

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Yeah I don’t care if it doesn’t save lives. Plus I am confident ridicule and shame saves some lives. So I am not bothered by it.

I have always kind of done my own thing and made my own choices devoid of much peer pressure.

But when I see really smart people tell me peer pressure influences whether they wear a mask or not then I know ridicule and shame will work.

If it’s just one life I am cool with that. I don’t really care about all their feelings.

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New Topic Tuesday!

I feel like I’ve revised my thoughts a little with regard to boosters, and I’m curious if my thinking is right.

My previous thoughts were, “Oh vaccine efficacy seems to be declining. So it’s natural that we might need boosters at some regular frequency. So boosters seem necessary and good.”

But I’m now wondering if that’s the right way to look at it. If my understanding is correct, the simple story is:

  • Vaccines work in two ways: they immediately generate antibodies to the virus, and they generate some kind of immunological memory that will trigger antibody production in the presence of the virus.

  • The presence of antibodies doesn’t reliably indicate whether someone has protection against the virus, because if your body can quickly generate antibodies in the presence of the virus, that’s good protection from serious consequences of the virus.

  • Antibodies decline (or lose efficacy?) over time, because it’s costly for the body to constantly produce antibodies to the virus without any reason. So for someone without antibodies, but with the immunological memory, there’s likely to be a short period of time when faced with the virus that the body is ill-equipped to fight it. And in this short period (until the body responds by producing more antibodies) it’s possible for infection to take hold. But because the memory exists, the antibodies are quickly created and fight the virus before it can do real damage.

The reason I’m talking about this is that it’s changing the way that I’m looking at some of the vaccination/infection studies. Before, I hadn’t really distinguished between:

  • vaccines lose a bunch of efficacy in preventing infection
    and
  • vaccines lose a bunch of efficacy in fighting severe illness and death

But now, I think I’ve been looking at it wrong. It seems like the more accurate representation is:

  • vaccines do lose a bunch of efficacy in preventing infection, because when the antibodies disappear several months after the vaccine, it opens the door for infection to take place.
    BUT
  • vaccines do not lose a bunch of efficacy in preventing severe illness or death, because the memory and ability to generate new antibodies kicks in quickly enough to prevent those bad outcomes.

So if that’s the case, it seems like boosters might not be as necessary as I had been thinking. Does this sound right?

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Sounds good. I’d add that antibodies are not the only kind of immune response, also, but it’s harder to measure T-cell response.

Yeah, from what Ive read, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how necessary boosters are (which is good news!)

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Yup. Confirmed. Not the student I mentioned (yet) but one that was out of that class.

It’s infuriating that nobody is told about the students who test positive. Teachers don’t get test results of their students. Parents don’t get notified when their children’s classmates test positive. I suppose there’s some privacy issues with doing that though. Only way we found out about this was that enough teachers reported symptoms of students in the class to the principal. Basically, the principal put known close contacts in quarantine but kept the class going since most were vaccinated. Terrible idea.

Of course there are no masks in the lunchroom or in the classroom itself. The school will inevitably go online. It’s a matter of time now.

Despite being vaxxed, I’ll be masking up. Have to.

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My dad is poor as hell. He’s always had a ton of heart attacks and damage from decades of hard drug use so his brain is mush.

Honestly it’s a simple as he’s on a team so he’s rooting for his team

Yeah I give that quote a rating of “misleading”. It makes it sound like breakthrough infections are super-rare, which doesn’t really seem to be the case.

In the video he made announcing that he had Covid, he said something like he threw the kitchen sink at it. He name checked monoclonal antibodies, z pack, vitamins, ivermectin, etc…

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