Vaccines and Therapeutics 2.0 & 3.0 Merge

[Res Ipsa]

There really is no excuse for this to be happening now.

[Jersey Girl]

Update from Texas - a frontline worker:

We ran out of oxygen at my ER yesterday. We had to put ambulances in the parking lot and run tubing into the ER. I have no Remdesivir and no plasma as we are a freestanding ER. I’m out of Toradol. I’m rationing steroids.

I have a patient here: 21 years old and on BiPAP. We’re concerned about how much oxygen we can use up. Because we can’t give him all the O2 he needs we are struggling to get an O2 saturation over 88%. No one in the state of Texas has beds for him.

Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma are full. We are trying. I don’t have Vapotherm. Family is incredulous that there are no beds. We had one yesterday but overnight three nurses walked out on the shift they were on; so we lost the bed.

There are no favors left to call in. No one has anything. No one is special enough or sick enough to qualify for a bed. It hurts. It’s painful. I am not a good doctor today. I can not care for my patient the way he deserves.

Here in Utah, our primary children’s hospital is prepping for a surge, and since it serves like four states they run the risk of running out of beds. Let’s hope the anti-vax and anti-mask types don’t get any of their kids killed in September.

- Doc

What county in Texas is this from? I was looking at the state stats. They're surging cases off the charts. I've not seen such high numbers.

[Jersey Girl]

There really is no excuse for this to be happening now.

Agree there is no excuse for this. There is an explanation: radicalized ignorance.

[Themis]

The vaccines do not prevent the spread of the Corona virus
Masks do not prevent the spread of the Corona virus

Do you mean they do 0 to prevent the spread of corona virus, or that they do not completely prevent it's spread?

[canpakes]

There really is no excuse for this to be happening now.

Agree there is no excuse for this. There is an explanation: radicalized ignorance.

You’ll probably run into folks stating something like, “bUt ThE vAcCiNe DuZnT pReVeNt tHe vIrUs!!1”. That doesn’t work, considering that the vaccine may still prevent infection for most folks whether they believe so or not, and if infected anyway, the severity of the sickness is typically greatly reduced.

These same people are current on all of their other vaccinations.
; )

I suspect some folks repeating this line bought into a particular stance early on for political reasons, and now can’t escape their conspiratorial imaginings, leaving them to need to say things like this. Else they’d be able to explain the conflict between their statement, and the reality around them.

[Lem]

Agree there is no excuse for this. There is an explanation: radicalized ignorance.

You’ll probably run into folks stating something like, “bUt ThE vAcCiNe DuZnT pReVeNt tHe vIrUs!!1”. That doesn’t work, considering that the vaccine may still prevent infection for most folks whether they believe so or not, and if infected anyway, the severity of the sickness is typically greatly reduced.

These same people are current on all of their other vaccinations.
; )

I suspect some folks repeating this line bought into a particular stance early on for political reasons, and now can’t escape their conspiratorial imaginings, leaving them to need to say things like this. Else they’d be able to explain the conflict between their statement, and the reality around them.

Logic doesn’t seem to be a strong suit for many of these, sadly.

[Moksha]

China is currently having a surge in the Delta variant. It will be interesting to see how their experience goes. China is a country that will all mask up, use social distancing, and will quarantine when told to do so.

Despite the big breakout in Wuhan, they were able to halt the spread, so will that work with a more virulent variant? They've got excellent epidemiology, and could even pinpoint the initial source from a Russian International flight into China. The clean-up crew for that plane also handled domestic flights and the cross-contaminated in the cleaning process.

[canpakes]

.

Texas GOP Official Mocked COVID Five Days Before He Died of Virus

A GOP official from Texas who regularly espoused anti-vaccine and anti-mask views online has died from COVID-19, five days after posting a meme on Facebook questioning the wisdom of getting inoculated against COVID.

Dickinson City Council member and State Republican Executive Committee member H. Scott Apley, 45, died in a local hospital around 3 a.m. Wednesday morning, according to a GoFundMe page set up to help Apley’s family with expenses. He was admitted to the facility in Galveston on Sunday with “pneumonia-like symptoms,” and was hooked up to a ventilator as his condition worsened. His wife was also infected, the family said.

“He leaves behind his wife, Melissa, who is COVID positive, as well as their infant son Reid,” according to the fundraiser, which has so far raised almost $15,000 of its $30,000 goal. “Your donations are greatly appreciated and will help the family as they get through this difficult period.”

“My heart is beyond broken for his family,” Dickinson Mayor Sean Skipworth wrote in a Facebook post. “Scott was a new father and that makes this loss especially tragic.”

Texas Republican Party Chairman Matt Rinaldi said in a statement, “Please join me in lifting the Apley family up in prayer. We will miss Scott deeply but find comfort knowing he is at peace in the arms of our Savior.” The announcement did not mention the fact that Apley’s death was COVID-related.

Apley is a staunch conservative and devout Christian. But based on his social media activity, Apley didn’t believe COVID was going to affect him or his family.

In May, Apley posted an invitation for a “mask burning” being held at a bar in Cincinnati, commenting, “I wish I lived in the area!” A couple of weeks earlier, he posted a news article about giveaways and incentives meant to encourage people to get vaccinated, writing, “Disgusting.” Apley also railed against so-called vaccine passports, which restrict high-risk activities, such as indoor dining, to the fully vaccinated.

Recently, he suggested that mask mandates in Germany were akin to Nazism. And when former Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen celebrated good news this spring about the Pfizer vaccine’s efficacy, a seemingly outraged Apley called her “an absolute enemy of a free people.”

In one of numerous Facebook posts on the subject, Apley wrote, “Question: If businesses start allowing customers and employees go mask free only with VOLUNTARILY providing their vaccination record (presumably not a HIPPA [sic] violation), wouldn't that basically INVOLUNTARILY identify people who have chosen not to get vaccinated (Which might be indirectly creating a HIPPA [sic] violation)?”

HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, and prohibits healthcare providers from improperly divulging a person’s private medical information without their consent. It does not apply to private businesses—a bartender asking if a customer is vaccinated, for example, does not constitute a HIPAA violation.

On July 30, less than a week before his death, Apley reposted a meme on his Facebook page that said: “In 6 months, we’ve gone from the vax ending the pandemic—to you can still get covid even if vaxxed—to you can pass covid onto others even if vaxxed—to you can still die of covid even if vaxxed—to the unvaxxed are killing the vaxxed.”

In an interview Wednesday with the Galveston County Daily News, Mayor Sean Skipworth said he didn’t know if Apley had been vaccinated against COVID.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/h-scott-a ... d-of-virus

[canpakes]

The Totally Preventable Death of a Brooklyn Icon

Dolores Perri was a protégée of “natural living” guru Gary Null, who calls the COVID-19 vaccine a fraud. She didn’t get one—and died of the virus.

Dolores Perri was an 82-year-old paragon of seemingly ageless health: an effervescent pescatarian who exercised religiously, ran in a dozen marathons, and counseled others on nutrition when she was not helping her husband run the iconic model slot car track Buzz-a-Rama in Brooklyn.

But like some in alternative health circles, she was a vaccine skeptic. She shared the views of her longtime mentor, Gary Null, a talk radio host and self-described alternative medicine expert. She believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that vaccines long in use are toxic and that too little is known about the new ones developed for COVID-19.

When her 57-year-old son, Frank, told her in March that he himself had been vaccinated, the lifelong Brooklyn resident had the opposite reaction most parents in the virus-ravaged borough would have.

“She was so upset with me she couldn’t talk,” Frank Perri told The Daily Beast. “My mother never not talked to me.”

Not long afterwards, Dolores’ opposition to the vaccine undid all her other healthy and happy living.

Her husband, Buzz, got sick first. He may have been exposed to the virus while operating Buzz-A-Rama, the last slot car track in a city that had 6,000 such spots when he first opened up in 1965.

Dolores then fell ill. She and Buzz were both admitted to New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital in Park Slope. He improved and was transferred to a COVID-19 nursing home in Coney Island—separating a pair who met when she was 14 and lived two doors down from him.

”They never spent a night apart,” Frank said.

At the hospital, Dolores only grew sicker despite the zinc and Vitamin D and other supplements and remedies she took on the sly.

“She started ordering up more and more things,” Frank recalled. “She kept giving me a list of things to bring her, sneak it in to her. My sister snuck it in under some fruit.”

None of it could afford her the protection that would have been imparted by a single milliliter of vaccine. Now, a woman who had repeatedly run the 26.2 miles of the New York City Marathon was winded just lying in a hospital bed.

“She was struggling to breathe,” Frank recalled.

“We never talked about that because she always said she was going to live forever.”

He and his sister were at least able to be with Dolores as she reached the end on April 30. Frank noted that they had not spoken to her about final arrangements.

“We never talked about that because she always said she was going to live forever,” he later said.

Buzz, left to face a life without his wife of 61 years, was still in a nursing home, recovering from the virus.

[canpakes]

.
More on vaccine refusal -

Rates of pertussis (whooping cough) are on the rise. Infections peaked in 2012 with more than 41,000 cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), including 18 pertussis-related deaths (CDC—Pertussis: Outbreak Trends 2013). Most of these pertussis-related deaths were among children who were too young to receive the vaccine and relied on others’ compliance with vaccination recommendations to prevent transmission.

These recent outbreaks also exemplify how undermining herd immunity through non-vaccination can be harmful (Omer et al. 2008, 2009; May and Silverman 2003). The pertussis vaccine is not 100 % effective, so even the vaccinated population can be harmed when others refuse vaccines. To illustrate this point, imagine a vaccine that only protects a person from contagious illness in 90 % of cases. Vaccinating an entire population will prevent the spread of the illness because only 10 % of those exposed will become infected. However, if some people go unvaccinated, greater than 10 % of the exposed population will become infected. When a higher percentage of the population is infected, a contagious illness is also more likely to spread because a greater number of people are exposed to the illness. In this way, failing to become vaccinated not only increases health risks for the unvaccinated population, it also increases the risk that those who are vaccinated will contract a contagious illness (Anderson and May 1985). When more people go unvaccinated, more vaccinated people become sick as well.

I’m not seeing any counter-arguments offered by the anti-vaxxers in this thread. Not sure why they wouldn’t have one.