You need to be a doctor to work this one out? I managed with a failed A Level in biology months ago.
Coronavirus will be present “forever in some form or another”, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) has said.
Sir Mark Walport said people would need to be vaccinated at regular intervals.
It’s a coronavirus, which means that it has one RNA strand rather than a double helix. This means that it mutates rapidly with no control mechanism. Hence vaccination is pretty much a waste of time. As Leggy points out:
Modern flu vaccines claim around 40% effectiveness. There is no control group. You get the jab, you don’t get sick, you are counted in that 40%. If you hadn’t had the jab, would you have caught flu that year anyway? How many of the 40% wouldn’t have caught it with or without the jab? The real percentage effectiveness could be an awful lot lower. It could even be zero.
It’s the old ‘paper balls on the track’ game. Someone sits in a railway carriage travelling through England and every so often, rolls a peice of paper into a ball and throws it out of the window. Another passenger asks him why he’s doing it.
“It keeps elephants off the tracks,” he says.
Bemused, the other passenger points out there are no elephants here.
“See? It works.”
If you get the jab and don’t get flu, it’s worked. If you get the jab and the jab makes you sick, it’s still worked because you didn’t get the illness in the wild.
I am not an anti vaxxer because I recognise that they can be effective. However, when dealing with coronaviruses, their effectiveness is limited to the point where natural immunity is probably the better option.
For the past few weeks, I have been obsessed with a mystery emerging in the national COVID-19 data.
Cases have soared to terrifying levels since June. Yesterday, the U.S. had 62,000 confirmed cases, an all-time high—and about five times more than the entire continent of Europe. Several U.S. states, including Arizona and Florida, currently have more confirmed cases per capita than any other country in the world.
But average daily deaths are down 75 percent from their April peak. Despite higher death counts on Tuesday and Wednesday, the weekly average has largely plateaued in the past two weeks.
Facepalm!
Have these morons not encountered the principle of evolution? That the virulent strains will die with their hosts, thereby creating evolutionary pressure on the virus to become milder? But, no apparently it’s a mystery.
Fucking Hell! When did we enter Idiocracy?
I have been getting the regular flu jab since being diagnosed as type two diabetic in 2013. I rarely get colds or flu anyway and have still succumbed to mildish flu bugs a couple of times since then. The only bit of anecdotal evidence that I have that it works is when, earlier this year, two family members got a flu like bug and I didn’t. Hardly conclusive as I could have just been resistant to that one anyway.
Indeed. Could just be Leggy’s elephant on the line.
It is now claimed that a case of reinfection is confirmed. If true, it means immunity doesn’t last.
Some say that means they’ll have to get vaccinated every year. Since the point of a vaccine is to develop immunity, and that immunity doesn’t last, the vaccine is completely pointless.
Not really, since the “reinfection” is actually a different strain of the virus. You’d hope that catching one strain would be sufficiently similar for the body to react with antibodies when another strain of (essentially) the same disease pops up, but there are no guarantees.
The body’s response to COVID-19 seems to be a bit hit-and-miss as far as developed long-term immune response, but then again that’s probably the difference between a regular flu seasons and a pandemic.
I’ve never really subscribed to the “annual flu shot” stuff, since the likelihood of a flu like reaction to the shot itself was probably greater than it actually preventing you catching “last years flu” (which is about all it can protect you from).
I’m not an anti-vaxer, but there is a big difference between getting a vaccination against a life threatening or seriously debilitating disease and getting a vaccination against colds and flu.
So no, I won’t be participating in the “annual flu shot” or COVID-19 vaccination, since it’s likely to be rushed and more dangerous than COVID-19 is right now (as the 1957-58 vaccine was)
It’s even more interesting than that. Evidence is emerging that of those exposed to the disease, only about 20% get sick, suggesting that we have a built in immunity already.
My view of vaccination is exactly the same as yours. Yet the media, governments and the easily led are obsessing about it being some sort of golden bullet.
When chatting with a victim of the fear porn they they might try to look on the bright side by saying “never mind, we’ll have vaccine soon”.
Depending on my mood I sometimes let this stand, other times not.
I’ve never experienced any side effects from the regular flu vaccine. My thoughts on the potential Covid 19 vaccine is that, if people can get it voluntarily then we can sweep away all the masks, the skiving off work and the social distancing crap. Even if it doesn’t work it will allow us to return to normal without melting the snowflakes.
I have a dread fear that many sheeple will continue wearing masks forever become socially responsible and walking around mask less will garner disapproving looks and comments.
Disapproving looks and stares, will I be bovvered?
After months of this I’m well out of patience and charity now. I just hope all the masked sheep queue up for a vaccine that proves to have fatal side effects; let the world be rid of them.
It not even as apocalyptic as that: people with really virulent strains self-isolate, e.g. call in sick. So, the mutation is towards the less virulent strain because it is that one that spreads throughout the population.
@John Galt: “… the likelihood of a flu like reaction to the shot itself was probably greater…”
Not really — although this is much more likely with any coronavirus vaccine. This is to do with the orientation of the RNA — ‘flu is “negative sense” (so requires an interpretation layer before it can replicate) whilst coronaviri are “positive sense”, and so much less easy to “attenuate”. But, in essence, it is why we cannot mass-vaccinate against colds in the same way as for ‘flu.
DK