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CDC has released a report today finding preliminary association between the Pfizer vaccine and stroke for those over 65 years of age.
Another drop in the bucket - or is the bucket spilling out the top now?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/bivalent-boosters.html
Pfizer is associated significantly with strokes - CDC is keeping us in the dark about the exact data.
They then list multiple studies that did not replicate this finding for the BIVALENT vaccine - well of course, this vaccine was testing on mice, and then deployed without long term testing. Do they have monovalent data they are not mentioning?
EDIT: Is it possible monovalent risk benefit analysis is simply using a different pathogen, and now with the advent of Omicron, this is a medical update saying this level of strokes is no longer worth the benefit vs the current pathogen? Food for thought.
This contradicts what Paul Offit's opinion is, which was posted in the NEJM. Paul Offit believes we should not give bivalent boosters to young healthy patients.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2215780
It would be much more shocking to announce a chance to the vaccine campaign, than to keep the current inertia the same. I think we are seeing a communication strategy developing to deliver the population into accepting yearly mRNA vaccines - instead, they will be directed to other worthwhile candidates for vaccination - IF pharma companies can even deliver those.
In my eyes: mRNA vaccines are dangerous, so you need to determine how dangerous the pathogen presenting is. I see a great use case for mRNA developing for Airborne Ebola Zaire strains (90% mortality) or other disease of similar magnitude. Simply put: your vaccine should not significantly increase cardiovascular risk. It should be absolutely negligible. 1 in a million, whereas these vaccines might be 1 in 100,000.
The vaccine debate has to be the least productive of any topic. has anyone on either side ever had their minds changed on this issue despite all the ink spilled? Given how many people have taken the vaccines (billions worldwide) if there was even a small uptick in deaths and other complications, it would be a huge deal and unavoidable. You would not need to comb through huge troves of data to find maybe a tiny uptick in deaths for some small cohort
As an observer of the vaccine debates, its not useful to me on the specifics of the vaccine. I didn't take it and probably wont have to ever, had covid, its over.
But the meta-debate does allow me to calibrate my opinion of who to trust. Whose predictions panned out, who lied, who was okay with lying for the "greater good", etc. Im predicting in the coming years, a lot of people will be vindicated and a lot of people will have pies on their faces. The rhetorical stakes are too high for it to be any other way now.
If anything, atleast now I know who (almost everyone) is totally okay with me being a second class citizen on the premise of refusing certain medication. Some masks are off permanently. Them denying this in the future wont change my opinion of them.
Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of people for which it's not yet over. The federal gov't is still litigating at least two of their mandates, a mandate is now firmly implanted in immigration law, and there may well be state mandate battles still going on to boot. I probably cannot capture the absurdity of it, either, because what they are still trying to force on people is the original vaccine. Not even updated vaccines that are tailored to the current strains. They're still fighting in courts for the ability to force people to take shots now that are essentially useless (especially since most non-vaxxed folks have almost certainly had some strain of COVID by now), under threat of firing them, taking away their contracts, or prohibiting them from entering the United States.
In the Fifth Circuit's en banc oral argument, the fact that the vaccines don't do a great job at preventing infection or transmission came up, and the gov't said that their position could still be sustained on the grounds that it reduces the risk of severe cases/death. When pressed on whether the gov't could, on the same grounds, require everyone to get below a certain BMI, as obesity brings severe risks which are endemic in our society, they basically just said, "Yeah, we wouldn't do that tho."
This is why it's still so important. If there is not enough anti-authoritarian energy to form a hard consensus that the gov't should not even have the option to do such things, those people will go beyond the mask of "we won't force you to take certain medication". There will be more masks to come.
I am fully aware that the "real fight" is far from over given that many questionable laws are put into place and there is no precedent that all that was done for covid would not be repeated in the future. If anything the probability that it would be repeated is not infinitely higher. So that is a new CW battlefront in the making.
However, this seems to be mostly a (country with high state capacity) problem. Many countries have really left covid in the past and anything associated with it altogether.
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same here. i got it twice. the first time it was like a cold, second time only very mild. it's over .
Isn't there some worry that repeated Covid infections (or boosters) could cause long-term damage? I've definitely heard this claimed. Not sure how much of this is crackpot.
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Agreed. I personally have a high esteem for many people on both sides of the issue - that's what makes this query so incisive and important.
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