coronavirus

[msquared]

Fenring

I think it depends, at that point, on how the global situation is.  If numbers are down across the globe and the vaccines have been shown to work against known variants, I think you will see much of the US back to basically normal. Some people may continue to wear masks in public places that have large crowds.  I have no problem with that.  Maybe we can learn something about public health and knock the flue down to only hundreds of deaths a year as compared to tens of thousands.

If global numbers keep up and variants keep popping up, you might see some restrictions put into place. No idea what they might be yet.  I wonder how long it will take to vaccinate 3 billion people.

[cherrypoptart]

CDC Approach To Breakthrough Infections Sparks Concerns

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/27/1000933529/cdc-approach-to-breakthrough-infections-sparks-concerns

Here's a pretty good audio segment covering both sides of the CDC decision that less information is better.

[cherrypoptart]

Going back to the CDC and their incompetence on masks. Who are you going to believe? Nurses? What do nurses know about anything? It seems like the people at the CDC and in our government are doing everything they can to prolong the pandemic and get as many people sickened and killed as possible. One would have hoped that with the changing of the guard that would have changed but it's more like meet the new boss same as the old boss. Well I'm glad to see it's not just me.


https://www.newsweek.com/largest-nurses-union-criticizes-new-cdc-mask-guidance-not-based-science-1591884

In a statement released Saturday, NNU Executive Director Bonnie Castillo said "this newest CDC guidance is not based on science, does not protect public health, and threatens the lives of patients, nurses, and other frontline workers across the country."

"Now is not the time to relax protective measures, and we are outraged that the CDC has done just that while we are still in the midst of the deadliest pandemic in a century," she continued.

... The latest change on mask advice has surprised health care workers across the country. In an interview with NPR, Dr. Leana Wen, a George Washington University public health professor, called the move "stunning."

"CDC seems to have gone from one extreme of overcaution to another of basically throwing caution out the window," Wen said.

------------------------------------------------------------

I've been out and about just looking at things such as libraries and various stores and watching people just saunter around bare faced inside now that masks are essentially optional I just don't see how it's possible that the virus isn't spreading around virtually unchecked. I guess we'll find out in a month or so.

[yossarian22c]

I've been out and about just looking at things such as libraries and various stores and watching people just saunter around bare faced inside now that masks are essentially optional I just don't see how it's possible that the virus isn't spreading around virtually unchecked. I guess we'll find out in a month or so.

Yep, CDC jumped the gun on masks. They should have limited to no mask outdoors if you are vaccinated. Or if you are in a setting indoors where you know everyone is vaccinated. Too many covid deniers who will go unmasked and unvaccinated. There was no downside to continuing to recommend masks indoors or in crowded situations (sports stadiums, etc..). Yet they made the poor public health decision to say since vaccinated people very rarely got seriously ill from covid they could take masks off everywhere. But there is no way to tell who is vaccinated and keeping masks in place for the next couple months while covid cases continued to fall would have helped. Then maybe we could have dropped masks when the nation had very few cases per day or if a variant gained traction they won't have to backtrack the advice this fall.

Either way the cat is out of the bag now. Hard to get it back in. I'll continue wearing my mask indoors and avoid large crowds.

[cherrypoptart]

It's always nice when you hear from someone much smarter than you and their thinking is along the same lines as your own.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/rick-bright-wants-to-wipe-out-this-virus-but-its-going-to-take-better-covid-19-vaccines-distributed-to-70-of-the-worlds-population-11621345335?mod=mw_NBF


"When you ask how I’d rate what the U.S. government has been doing in this area, we’ve been just flying blindly for a long time. We didn’t value testing in the early days to get testing available and out in the community. And then we didn’t value real knowledge of the genomic sequencing so we can detect and track the virus [and] how it’s changing.

Any virologist knows the threat of viruses mutating and changing as they spread. We see that with flu. We see that with HIV and other RNA viruses. There is no credible scientist that would say that this virus would not mutate and change over time, especially after adding immunological pressure by vaccinating people. By January of this year, we may have been [sequencing] less than 1% of the viruses in the U.S. We might be to the 3%-to-5% range [now]. But we’re not doing it smartly. It’s not about just more. It’s about what viruses to sequence, from what people or what population, so we can really answer those top questions.

I saw a report by Bloomberg that really gave me pause. And that was that the U.S. CDC has made a determination to not sequence all of the viruses from the vaccine breakthrough cases. Those are, in my opinion, the most important viruses that we should look at. Because those are the viruses infecting people who are supposed to be protected. Those are where the virus variants are going to appear, where mutations might occur, and the viruses there are already escaping immunity. That is where I would focus."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

"... especially after adding immunological pressure by vaccinating people..."

This is key and sadly why it may be too soon to unmask even for vaccinated people.

The vaccines are like stepping up to the virus and throwing down the gauntlet.

The concerning thing about the breakthrough infections is not how sick people do or don't get, it's how many more opportunities we're giving the virus to mutate into something the vaccines won't protect against, and the added immunological pressure vaccinated people provide to the selection process makes it so the mutations that are selected and survive are the very worst ones that we ever want to see. Not only might they be able to dodge the protection of the vaccines but since the vaccines mimic the body's natural immune system provided protection they may avoid that too so not only are the vaccinated now unprotected but the 96-99% of people who wouldn't have had a problem because of their strong immune systems may lose their innate protection too. We're doing real world gain of function testing to make the virus stronger than it ever was or would have naturally become.

So what are the odds? It may be that an infection gives the virus a trillion chances to mutate into something worse. From maybe a billion up to maybe a trillion.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685332/


Certainly less for vaccinated people. But still a huge number of chances multiplied by huge numbers of people possibly experiencing multiple incidents of infection while never even noticing. As the old saying goes, no matter how low the odds are of something happening, if the circumstances that allow it to happen are repeated often enough it becomes a near certainty. Or in this case though perhaps nowhere close to a near certainty, still too risky to start getting complacent.

[cherrypoptart]

It just gets interestinger and interestinger:

"Fauci once argued for risky viral experiments — even if they can lead to pandemic"

"Dr. Anthony Fauci once argued that conducting experiments on contagious viruses to increase their potency was worth the risk, even if the work could accidentally lead to a pandemic, it was revealed Friday.

The nation’s chief medical advisor wrote in the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012 of the public health benefit to gain-of-function viral experiments — which center on manipulating viruses and making them stronger — as long as there is significant oversight."

This guy...

[LetterRip]

Gain of function experiments are worthwhile since nature will do them anyway so doing them in a secure lab to discover their risks is only rational.

[cherrypoptart]

Just tragically ironic if they caused the very pandemic they were trying to prevent.

[Crunch]

Gain of function experiments are worthwhile since nature will do them anyway so doing them in a secure lab to discover their risks is only rational.

“Secure lab”. Seems that part was overlooked.

[msquared]

How small was the flu season this year?  In my state of Ohio.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/final-numbers-almost-no-ohio-141600257.html

They mention Montgomery County in the article and that is where I live.

[LetterRip]

There is zero reason to think COVID-19 originated in a lab.  The current best evidence is it transferred from bats to dogs and then dogs to humans.

[TheDrake]

FYI, suicides didn't go up. This is one of the big drums that were beaten by the REOPEN REOPEN crowd, that helped lead to a disastrous third wave during the 2020 holidays.

As unsettling as the COVID-19 pandemic has been for so many, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say suicides in the United States actually went down nearly 6 percent last year.

The decline to fewer than 45,000 suicides is the largest annual drop in at least 4 decades, although experts say the number will likely change as some death certificates haven’t been fully processed yet.

Yep, you heard it right.

details

[Fenring]

It doesn't seem like a suicide stat in isolation can be taken to mean anything specific. It certainly doesn't demonstrate harm or lack of harm done by lockdowns or covid restrictions, nor does it speak to quality of life nor to long-term mental health issues. Just as an analogy (and not one meant to be equivalent), if you take people and put them in shackles, and then claim suicides are down, it is not some kind of evidence that conditions are acceptable, since in this case there is less suicide due to inability to actually carry it out. In other situations suicide may specifically be reduced due to particular conditions that normally result in suicide being different, but it may say nothing about any other category of misery other than simply suicide itself.

[msquared]

The right claims suicides are up. Data shows that they are actually down. The right says that the facts are wrong.  Sound familiar?

Over half a million people in the US died in a year due to Covid. And that was with restrictions in place. Not as tough as health experts wanted, but decent in most places for a period of time. And still half a million people died.

Now most of the people in the hospital have not had the vaccine.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hospitals-most-covid-19-patients-011300726.html

And still the Right is pushing that vaccines are not needed.

[NobleHunter]

It doesn't seem like a suicide stat in isolation can be taken to mean anything specific. It certainly doesn't demonstrate harm or lack of harm done by lockdowns or covid restrictions, nor does it speak to quality of life nor to long-term mental health issues. Just as an analogy (and not one meant to be equivalent), if you take people and put them in shackles, and then claim suicides are down, it is not some kind of evidence that conditions are acceptable, since in this case there is less suicide due to inability to actually carry it out. In other situations suicide may specifically be reduced due to particular conditions that normally result in suicide being different, but it may say nothing about any other category of misery other than simply suicide itself.

The potential confounds are interesting. Could the lock down have made suicide methods less available? I would have thought not but it's possible. A lack of privacy may have contributed, either for the act itself or because loved ones would find the body.

Another possibility is that being out of the office or blamelessly of work was enough of a relief to drown out the effect of economic uncertainty. Which doesn't say good things about the typical work environment but that's what makes it interesting.

[Fenring]

Another possibility is that being out of the office or blamelessly of work was enough of a relief to drown out the effect of economic uncertainty. Which doesn't say good things about the typical work environment but that's what makes it interesting.

Or perhaps being at home and out of work was just as bad as under normal conditions, but seeing so many other people in the same situation might raise the bar in terms of measuring one's own unique bad luck or hopelessness in relation to others. So in short, who knows.

If the low suicide stat is meant to refute the general argument of "people will be miserable and kill themselves", I don't think it really refutes the argument even though it refutes one clause in it. There are many ways in which people can be miserable, have low quality of life, even have reduced life expectancy, without suicide being a direct result.

[msquared]

goal post moved.

[NobleHunter]

goal post moved.

I'm not sure Fenring set up the goal the first time. I certainly didn't.

Sure, the data so far refutes the idea that the lock downs would cost more lives through suicide than they saved through reduced exposure to COVID but that's not very interesting. Conservatives being wrong about the facts is dog bites man news these days. What's interesting is that it would have been reasonable to expect the hardships of the past year to lead to an increase in suicides, even if not to the point of more deaths than a completely uncontrolled pandemic (as opposed to mostly uncontrolled). That we saw a decrease instead invites attempts at explanation. Not that we have the data to come up with explanations but speculation is amusing.

A nastier confound might be that people with chronic health conditions got sick and died, instead of committing suicide. I would not be surprised if risk factors for suicide were also risk factors for COVID; especially in triage situations. 

[TheDrake]

The actual article, if read, contains a lot of information on why experts think this might have happened.

Nor did I present this as support for "lockdowns did no harm" or "lockdowns were good" or "lockdowns didn't lead to more deaths". I merely refute the one argument that lockdowns were going to lead to more suicides, as empirically, that did not happen. It doesn't negate dozens of other arguments including those in the category of financial and mental well being.

Should I dig up some of the quotes from people on this board who asserted that not only would suicide specifically go up, but that it might actually be worse than covid? I assure you, they exist.

[msquared]

Stop doing that. Any example of them saying that was just hyperbole. And Fake News. And taking their comments out of context.

[Fenring]

Sure, the data so far refutes the idea that the lock downs would cost more lives through suicide than they saved through reduced exposure to COVID but that's not very interesting.

This is in the vein of why I posted in the first place.

A nastier confound might be that people with chronic health conditions got sick and died, instead of committing suicide. I would not be surprised if risk factors for suicide were also risk factors for COVID; especially in triage situations.

The thought had crossed my mind as well, but I don't know exactly how such a finding could really be determined. Basically it was a weird year with weird happenings, and none of them are going to have satisfactory explanations beyond "well, that happened." There is no control group against which to compare the circumstances of this unique situation, so...shrug.

[TheDrake]

Thing is, the reopeners focused in like a laser on the survivability of covid infection. They set dying as a metric, one that I never thought was a great measure. But for those who did, they should look at the empirical data and at least say, hmmmm.... interesting.

[Fenring]

Thing is, the reopeners focused in like a laser on the survivability of covid infection. They set dying as a metric, one that I never thought was a great measure. But for those who did, they should look at the empirical data and at least say, hmmmm.... interesting.

I think you're right. But to be fair, those on the other side in favor of taking preventative measures also largely used dying as a metric. So in a way the 'battlefield' was joined by both sides on this point, albeit asymmetrically.

[DJQuag]

Am I the only one who is thinking, "Ya'll had your chance." Like anyone who was legit susceptible or working in a dangerous industry, they've *all* been given the choice of getting a vaccine and if they say, "No," and then get it and die I'll be real sad and all but I'll also be thinking about children playing games that involve them running across freeway traffic.

[msquared]

I will feel closer to that when the vaccines get full approval and not just the emergency approval they are working under now.

That is, I think , the only reall legal defense people have when saying thier place of work can not force them to get the vaccine.  I really do not understand the percent of health care workers who have not yet been vaccinated.

[TheDrake]

Aren't the people working at the hospital non medical professionals, like custodians or orderly, laundry, clerical? Or are we really talking doctors and nurses? The articles I've read are unclear.

[msquared]

It had sounded like mainly nurses.

[Fenring]

I think you are underrating how big a medical ethics issue it us to tie employment to partaking of a medical procedure. On a practical level I don't disagree that refusing to get vaccinated is a troublesome position to take. But it's not clear to me what it opens up if we deem it permissible to either de facto or in fact legally require people to undergo even simple medical procedures by governmental fiat. Now personally I think it's a no-brainer that under certain circumstances (like a Captain Tripps virus) that what we might call personal rights will essentially cease to exist on a practical level. Nothing trumps the survival of the species, more or less. Gradations less than that make it far harder to me to say what I think is proper or not. It's a pretty serious moral philosophy issue.

[TheDrake]

I think you are underrating how big a medical ethics issue it us to tie employment to partaking of a medical procedure. On a practical level I don't disagree that refusing to get vaccinated is a troublesome position to take. But it's not clear to me what it opens up if we deem it permissible to either de facto or in fact legally require people to undergo even simple medical procedures by governmental fiat. Now personally I think it's a no-brainer that under certain circumstances (like a Captain Tripps virus) that what we might call personal rights will essentially cease to exist on a practical level. Nothing trumps the survival of the species, more or less. Gradations less than that make it far harder to me to say what I think is proper or not. It's a pretty serious moral philosophy issue.

Ship sailed. Healthcare professionals are already required to get any number of vaccinations to protect the people under their care, many of whom are immune compromised and many of whom have severe health issues that mean a coronavirus death sentence in most cases. The moral case is pretty clear there.

Less clear are requirements for school. I felt miffed that I had to redo my MMR to attend University because the original records were long since lost, but I didn't feel my rights were being trampled upon. But I'd entertain the argument.

Houston Methodist, by the way, is a private non-profit so government fiat doesn't enter the equation. Nor would it apply to meat packing plants, football teams, or florists. I'm not yet aware of any government employees fighting against a vaccine mandate, although it is likely that certain specialized groups might have one.

[NobleHunter]

Not to mention the assorted vaccinations required to serve in the military.

[TheDrake]

I thought of military also, however you specifically give up constitutional rights there. Search and seizure being one of them. Free speech as well, to an extent.

[Fenring]

If that's so, then what's the case against requiring health care workers to add the covid vaccine to their list of job requirements?

[msquared]

I think the health care workers main argument right now is that all of the US vaccines only have emergency use so they should not be required to get "experimental" drugs.

Once the FDA give full standard approval I think they will have a whole lot less to stand on.

[Crunch]

The real issue is people don't trust the vaccine. Why? Because of this kind of crap:

Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that President Donald Trump's word alone on any potential coronavirus vaccine is not enough.

Asked by CNN's Dana Bash in a clip released Saturday whether she would get a vaccine that was approved and distributed before the election, Harris replied, "Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us."

"I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about," she continued in the clip from an exclusive interview airing Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" at 9 a.m. ET. "I will not take his word for it."

We have the person that is now VP of the United States having been on record that you cannot trust the vaccine.

Cuomo was even worse:

Cuomo went further, suggesting he mistrusted not just President Donald Trump, but also the Food and Drug Administration under Trump. Asked about his confidence in the FDA, Cuomo indicated he didn’t have much.

“I’m not that confident,” Cuomo said, adding: “You’re going to say to the American people now, ‘Here’s a vaccine, it was new, it was done quickly, but trust this federal administration and their health administration that it’s safe? And we’re not 100 percent sure of the consequences.’ I think it’s going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and they should be.”

Cuomo later announced that New York would conduct its own review of the vaccines, because, “Frankly, I’m not going to trust the federal government’s opinion, and I wouldn’t recommend [it] to New Yorkers, based on the federal government’s opinion.”

The media gave rave reviews to Cuomo, held him up as having the best response to the pandemic, even gave him an Emmy for God's sake.

When you have people like this literally sabotaging the vaccine efforts and sowing mistrust, this is what you get.

[msquared]

So the conservatives who do not want to get vaccinated listened to Dems? Really?

[TheDrake]

Yeah I would love to see a poll of people refusing vaccine and see how many of them say it's because of Cuomo's opinion.

[msquared]

So Harris said she would not trust Trump alone. What is wrong with that?  I have no problem with that. I do not trust Biden alone.  I looked at the process, the groups who reviewed the research and the testing.

Crunch you seem to have reading comprehension problems. I do not see where she said you could not trust the vaccine. She said she would not trust Trump alone. That is far different.

[Fenring]

Yeah I would love to see a poll of people refusing vaccine and see how many of them say it's because of Cuomo's opinion.

Now in fairness the general state of infowars is the environment leading to people rejecting any statement at all as being valid. I don't think anyone is declining to take the vaccine (or is taking it) based on what only one or a few people are saying. It's waves, or trends in statements that will have more of an effect, and especially waves that partition people into partisan camps. I think Crunch's point is that it's unusual for a Dem source to push people in the generally opposite direction that their camp has been pushing for as a rule.

[LetterRip]

The Cuomo statement in context was when Trump was trying to get vaccine manufacturers to release vaccines without finishing the safety analysis and testing.

[yossarian22c]

Twelve states, according to the White House, have vaccinated at least 70 percent of their adult population. Every one of them voted for Biden in 2020.
...
Yet Biden may struggle to reach the vaccine hesitant, merely because he’s a Democratic president. Here are the bottom five states for vaccination rates, starting with Mississippi, which has the lowest percentage of people who have received at least one dose.

Mississippi: 34 percent
Louisiana: 35.8 percent
Alabama: 36 percent
Wyoming: 37 percent
Idaho: 37.7 percent

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2021/06/02/a-trump-size-hurdle-for-bidens-vax-goal-493090

Clearly the fault lies with Harris and Cuomo making statements doubting Trump a year ago  .

[yossarian22c]

Benefits of living in a democratic voting area, my county was averaging 800 new cases a day in January. In the last two weeks its been down below 50 new cases per day. Vaccinations work!

[cherrypoptart]

https://news.yahoo.com/covid-19-collides-hiv-aids-100051925.html

"Geneticists and infectious disease specialists there have uncovered potentially dangerous coronavirus mutations in a 36-year-old woman with uncontrolled HIV who was unable to shake the SARS-CoV-2 virus for close to eight months. The driving force behind the patient’s rapid accumulation of genetic changes is probably her impaired immune response due to her unsuccessfully treated HIV, the researchers said...

...For 216 days, the woman continued to test positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. She was hospitalized with moderate illness for nine days in September soon after she contracted the coronavirus, but she never became severely ill with COVID-19.

Still, the coronavirus that lingered in her body underwent 13 genetic changes related to its crucial spike protein, along with at least 19 other genetic shifts elsewhere that could change the behavior of the virus.

The new findings raise the specter that HIV/AIDS — a 40-year-old scourge that has killed 32 million worldwide — could complicate efforts to eradicate a COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 3.5 million in less than a year and a half.

Until the South African patient, there has been little evidence to suggest that HIV-infected people could complicate the pandemic’s trajectory. HIV-positive people were not known to be more likely to become infected with the coronavirus. And research had suggested they did not suffer worse medical consequences of COVID-19.

But if her case turns out to be typical, that picture could change: HIV patients whose infections are not controlled with medication could "become a factory of variants for the whole world," said Tulio de Oliveira, a geneticist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, who led the new research.

Worldwide, roughly 8 million people are thought to be infected with HIV but unaware of their status. An additional 1.7 million are on antiretroviral medications that aren't working well.

The prospect that close to 10 million patients’ uncontrolled HIV could spawn new coronavirus variants has wide-ranging implications.

“This is a syndemic,” said Dr. Jonathan Li, using a term that describes the confluence of two epidemics with the potential to worsen outcomes for both."

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Just going to reiterate that it's too soon for everyone who feels like it to take off their masks in crowded indoor spaces. There are unvaccinated people now walking around with undiagnosed AIDS and superspreading new Covid variants that they invented in their incubator bodies. Sure it's more of a problem in Africa and India as the article points out but that doesn't mean nobody in America can't also make their contribution and also even if it doesn't happen here there is nothing stopping this virus including any and all variants from globe trotting over here. With so many unvaccinated and with the serious potential for variants to breakthrough vaccinations, the masks were an extra last line of defense that it was foolish to throw away. Of course serious travel restrictions were a first line of defense that was never utilized at all. Now we're basically just letting it all ride on one throw of the dice, vaccines. It's the height of foolishness, hubris, and unrealistic optimism. If it actually works out alright, it'll be a major miracle, winning dice rolls millions of times in a row.

[Crunch]

So Harris said she would not trust Trump alone. What is wrong with that?  I have no problem with that. I do not trust Biden alone.  I looked at the process, the groups who reviewed the research and the testing.

Crunch you seem to have reading comprehension problems. I do not see where she said you could not trust the vaccine. She said she would not trust Trump alone. That is far different.

You should read the quote again. She was obviously talking about the vaccine. You go for the ad hominem because you know you’re wrong.  I suppose I’ll get stealth banned again for pointing this out ...

[msquared]

I did not call you a name. I said you had reading comprehension issues.

Here is the quote you listed.

"I will say that I would not trust Donald Trump and it would have to be a credible source of information that talks about the efficacy and the reliability of whatever he's talking about."

She says she would not trust Trump.  She is obviously talking about Trump since she says she would not trust Trump. But she would trust a credible source of information.  See how that works.

[cherrypoptart]

I wonder if the revelation that this was indeed a lab spawned virus would make a difference in vaccinations.

Of course there is still no proof that it was and there probably never will be but some of the hesitancy may be because people think that if this is a natural virus then they'll just fight it naturally as God and nature intended.

If it was revealed that it isn't a natural virus then perhaps "unnatural" methods of fighting it like vaccinations would be in order.

-----------------------------------------------------

Now Harris and Cuomo did play politics against the vaccination effort just because they hated Trump. You have to wonder if a Trump election victory would have hurt the vaccination effort against Covid because Democrats would still be mouthing off against trusting the "Trump vaccines". Maybe a few more Republicans would have gotten the vaccine but a few less Democrats. The masks probably would have come off sooner under Trump too, or at least no later. And then back on the other side, travel restrictions and border security are racist. In any case there's little to no doubt that political games by both parties have hurt Americans and made the pandemic worse.

[TheDrake]

Yeah I would love to see a poll of people refusing vaccine and see how many of them say it's because of Cuomo's opinion.

Now in fairness the general state of infowars is the environment leading to people rejecting any statement at all as being valid. I don't think anyone is declining to take the vaccine (or is taking it) based on what only one or a few people are saying. It's waves, or trends in statements that will have more of an effect, and especially waves that partition people into partisan camps. I think Crunch's point is that it's unusual for a Dem source to push people in the generally opposite direction that their camp has been pushing for as a rule.

These democrats were and are quite specific that they would trust medicine, but not Trump, which is probably a good idea since if you trusted him you might have climbed into a storm cellar expecting a hurricane in Alabama. It doesn't mean you are denying the field of meteorology.

[cherrypoptart]

If people are vaccine hesitant because they like Harris are worried about Trump vaccines then there is always the Russian option.

https://news.yahoo.com/putin-wants-organize-vaccine-tourism-135209178.html

"Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to encourage "vaccine tourism," where foreign citizens can visit the country to get a free Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine."

If someone is going to be in Russia anyway or are just intent on traveling abroad no matter what then sure why not get a free vaccine?

But having to travel to Russia to get a vaccine is a bad idea because the virus could be spread to people en route, it could be picked up en route before people get vaccinated, and if someone is going there on a quick trip that will be over before the vaccine can go into effect then they'll have the same risks going back, picking up the bug on the way and spreading it around when they get home before the vaccine starts working. Vaccine tourism may do more harm than good.

[TheDrake]

Harris got the vaccine on Dec 28 on live video, and is now touring areas with low rates to encourage people to get the jab. Harris is not worried about the vaccine, and explicitly stated she would trust Fauci and other medical professionals all along.

[yossarian22c]

Harris got the vaccine on Dec 28 on live video, and is now touring areas with low rates to encourage people to get the jab. Harris is not worried about the vaccine, and explicitly stated she would trust Fauci and other medical professionals all along.

Compare to Trump who got the vaccine in secret and waited months before telling people he got it.

[cherrypoptart]

I guess I would have been better off not trying to segue into the point I was trying to make about how vaccine tourism may do more harm than good. Tried to be cute and it backfired.