3 ms·

I wanted to watch the movie Songbird in December 2020 because I occasionally like the dystopian quasi-apocalyptic movie. It was panned for being insensitive to

by eggy 5y ago

I wanted to watch the movie Songbird in December 2020 because I occasionally like the dystopian quasi-apocalyptic movie. It was panned for being insensitive to make a movie about COVID during the pandemic. Like making WWII movies or Vietnam War movies during those wars was OK. Funny thing is a some of the criticisms were about it being unrealistic and fear mongering because it takes place during COVID-23, has lock downs in a global police state, and people are selling false immunity IDs. Granted the movie is not at all that good by standard film critic metrics, but it is very amusing that the narrative is not too far from reality. COVID-22 now, not yet COVID-23. Let's see. On another note, I am glad my family and I have innate immunity from previous COVID infection, so that we are not as prone to ADE (Antibody Dependent Enhancement) or to the variants that are arising as much as those who are dependent on the vaccine, since as far as I know, the vaccines are still based on the alpha variant (why haven't they produced boosters for delta, gamma, etc...) I know seasonal flu shots are a concoction of previous flu types, but this is not your regular flu shot. Given you can carry a substantial if not equal viral load, or suffer a breakthrough infection, it seems these variants will still spread with or without the vaccine, although you are hopefully still protected from hospitalization or serious illness from these variants. Time will tell.

derbOac 5y ago
> why haven't they produced boosters for delta, gamma, etc... When I first heard of boosters, this is what I remember being part of the discussion. Then that somehow disappeared. It makes sense to me, especially with mRNA vaccines. This is outside my area of expertise, but it seems to me making boosters that target variants, with some kind of expedited safety review process, seems very doable? Some variant of this happens with seasonal flu shots, so I imagine something like this would be possible with the coronavirus vaccines?
- manwe150 5y ago
  I recall seeing that discussion disappear since the booster was shown to restore our immune system to a similar levels of response, even for delta, so there wasn't any expected advantage to it. (for example, see how Moderna recently discussed their clinical plans https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-strategy-address-omicron-b11529-sars-cov-2 https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...) The seasonal flu is different because it mutates faster and there are more variants of it. So each year is different enough that our bodies don't recognize it. While for COVID, so far, it hasn't mutated enough to evade our learned immunity. Also, @eggy, your family may be more at risk from ADE because of their natural immunity than if you had gotten them vaccinated. The papers I've read discuss how the vaccines where designed to help your body avoid this problem, while the virus has no such consideration. ADE does occur due to natural infection by many viruses (such as the list near the top of this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement), but has not been observed to occur with any of the current vaccines for COVID.
  - eggy 5y ago
    @manwe150 I believe vaccinated or naturally immune people can exhibit ADE, and they don't have enough data yet to differentiate or quantify it [1]. It's variants like Delta and Omicron that may cause the production of inflammatory cytokines. As far as my family being at risk for ADE or any one of the COVID variants, I bet on natural immunity. And I think history will prove me right and add to the already established track record of natural immunity with other diseases. They found people who had SARS 10 years ago still have a robust immunity system against it, and it is related to COVID more than non-SAR viruses. Why countries are pushing to boost double-vaccinated young people is beyond me. Go ahead and boost the elderly and those with comorbidities, sure, but the risk is so low, even by the CDC's own published data for young, healthy people, that it is ridiculous. Even the CDC admits there are a high number of undetected cases in the young due to asymptomatic or very mild symptoms, which means that the published risk is most certainly even lower. Send more vaccines to other countries at this point rather than feed people's fear with another booster as placebo for those with natural immunity or previous vaccination. The FDA just voted before Omicron not to boost the young, 16 years and older at the end of September, but then Omicron comes along with admittedly no new data, and they flip instantly and approve boosters for the young. I'll take the 18 or so peer-reviewed papers that show natural immunity is as strong if not significantly stronger than vaccines, and the risk for healthy people under 65 vs. the CDC's two cherry-picked, self-published papers that try to knock natural immunity. It is very clear that COVID is a disease of the elderly and sick vs. the healthy and young. And it must be said that obesity is a leading comorbidity after age in COVID hospitalizations and deaths. Obesity has a medical code associated with it, yet doctors don't always code it for various reasons when someone is admitted with respiratory or other symptoms - we've gotten so used to it here in the U.S. getting worse and worse, we don't see it anymore; doctors don't want to be accused of fat-shaming (did we fear skinny-shaming of anorexia in the 80s and 90s? No, we called it what it was - a disease and tried to address it). So the 68% to 78% number of COVID hospitalizations with obesity as a comorbidity is probably even higher. I'll never forget when I came back to the U.S. after living overseas for 7 years, and how noticeable the increase in obesity was with fresh eyes. I grew up working class in Brooklyn, and most of my extended family were trim and active from work. My whole neighborhood in Brooklyn was like that. Now, I see so many people in electric carts, and handicap parking tags. It's no wonder a country as developed as ours has so many deaths from COVID. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20587384211050199 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20587384211050...
cannabis_sam 5y ago
What are you basing your view on? According to the CDC, previously infected, but unvaccinated people outnumber vaccinated people, when it comes to laboratory-confirmed covid hospitalizations. >Among COVID-19–like illness hospitalizations among adults aged ≥18 years whose previous infection or vaccination occurred 90–179 days earlier, the adjusted odds of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 among unvaccinated adults with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection were 5.49-fold higher than the odds among fully vaccinated recipients of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine who had no previous documented infection (95% confidence interval = 2.75–10.99). https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm (I am far from an expert on any of this, so I just wondering, not claiming anything as factual either way.)
- eggy 5y ago
  >What are you basing your view on? According to the CDC,... There are many peer-reviewed studies that clearly show that natural immunity is equal if not better than the vaccine. The Israeli study for one, and that used 10 times the number of people then the study you are citing. Almost 700,000 people in Israel. The CDC study is from 9 states. The CDC seems to front page studies that ignore or counter natural immunity arguments, or cherry pick them like the Kentucky study. My common sense was telling me that natural immunity should be innocent until proven guilty, and novel vaccines should be guilty until proven innocent. And not just proving short-term "innocence", or safety as the analogy goes. Somehow this was flip-flopped in today's world. There is also this non-sequitur argument against natural immunity going around that it's risky to get COVID to attain natural immunity. I, like a lot of other recovered people, are not arguing that we think people should get COVID to acquire natural immunity. That is stupid. Get vaccinated if you are in a higher risk group. We are saying recognize that we already have it through no choice of our own, and don't disenfranchise us from society. Then they say the vaccine plus natural immunity is so much stronger. Well, if I am not in a high-risk group (obese, diabetic, etc.), and I have natural immunity with current antibody tests still coming back high, why should I be compelled to take a novel vaccine with no long-term safety data? My nephew who is very fit suffered myocarditis/pericarditis for a month and a half within days of getting the vaccine. His mother came down with Bell's Palsy after her vaccine. Miraculously, nobody I actually know died from COVID, but I have many colleagues and friends who have had COVID, and none of them were worse than the flu or hospitalized. Pfizer and Moderna eliminated their control groups for long-term studies by vaccinating them. There are no Random Clinical Trial studies currently being done that I know of, and not enough time has passed for them to have results for long-term safety. How can public officials say it is "almost 100% safe". Impossible even after long-term studies are done. There's always risk, and you should be free to make that decision with your healthcare provider. This is becoming a social medicince policy debate in a lot of circles, not science, ever since the slogan "a pandemic of the unvaccinated", or "the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated"; it should be a "pandemic of the immune vs. the non-immune". Or a pandemic of "the young and healthy vs. the old, the obese and unhealthy", given serious illness, hospitalization, and mortality are disproportionately among that group. Download the data from the CDC yourself and remove anyone with at least one or two comorbidities and in the under 55 or so age group. Tell me the the actual risk, and compare it to the media hype. The 1957 and 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreaks were very similar to COVID's case fatality rate, and the world didn't shut down then. And it doesn't compare to the 50 million who died in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic even if the US deaths are close. Global pandemic remember? Why are we pushing vaccines that have no long-term safety clinical studies on 5 to 11 year olds when the IFR (Infection Fatality Ratio)for 0 to 17 year olds puts an 11-year old in the same risk category of dying with COVID as being struck by lightning [2]? My younger ones had COVID with me and my wife. We will not be vaccinating them, since they are not at risk, and given vaccinated people can get infected and infect others, the argument that I should do it for others is illogical. Kind of circling around to my original post about the dystopian movie, 'Songbird', I just read about Australia's "remote quarantine" or internment camps [3]. Maybe the movie wasn't as far-fetched as some criticized. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... [2] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/world/australia/howard-springs-quarantine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/world/australia/howard-sp...

by eggy 5y ago

derbOac 5y ago

> why haven't they produced boosters for delta, gamma, etc... When I first heard of boosters, this is what I remember being part of the discussion. Then that somehow disappeared. It makes sense to me, especially with mRNA vaccines. This is outside my area of expertise, but it seems to me making boosters that target variants, with some kind of expedited safety review process, seems very doable? Some variant of this happens with seasonal flu shots, so I imagine something like this would be possible with the coronavirus vaccines?

manwe150 5y ago
I recall seeing that discussion disappear since the booster was shown to restore our immune system to a similar levels of response, even for delta, so there wasn't any expected advantage to it. (for example, see how Moderna recently discussed their clinical plans https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-strategy-address-omicron-b11529-sars-cov-2 https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...) The seasonal flu is different because it mutates faster and there are more variants of it. So each year is different enough that our bodies don't recognize it. While for COVID, so far, it hasn't mutated enough to evade our learned immunity. Also, @eggy, your family may be more at risk from ADE because of their natural immunity than if you had gotten them vaccinated. The papers I've read discuss how the vaccines where designed to help your body avoid this problem, while the virus has no such consideration. ADE does occur due to natural infection by many viruses (such as the list near the top of this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement), but has not been observed to occur with any of the current vaccines for COVID.
- eggy 5y ago
  @manwe150 I believe vaccinated or naturally immune people can exhibit ADE, and they don't have enough data yet to differentiate or quantify it [1]. It's variants like Delta and Omicron that may cause the production of inflammatory cytokines. As far as my family being at risk for ADE or any one of the COVID variants, I bet on natural immunity. And I think history will prove me right and add to the already established track record of natural immunity with other diseases. They found people who had SARS 10 years ago still have a robust immunity system against it, and it is related to COVID more than non-SAR viruses. Why countries are pushing to boost double-vaccinated young people is beyond me. Go ahead and boost the elderly and those with comorbidities, sure, but the risk is so low, even by the CDC's own published data for young, healthy people, that it is ridiculous. Even the CDC admits there are a high number of undetected cases in the young due to asymptomatic or very mild symptoms, which means that the published risk is most certainly even lower. Send more vaccines to other countries at this point rather than feed people's fear with another booster as placebo for those with natural immunity or previous vaccination. The FDA just voted before Omicron not to boost the young, 16 years and older at the end of September, but then Omicron comes along with admittedly no new data, and they flip instantly and approve boosters for the young. I'll take the 18 or so peer-reviewed papers that show natural immunity is as strong if not significantly stronger than vaccines, and the risk for healthy people under 65 vs. the CDC's two cherry-picked, self-published papers that try to knock natural immunity. It is very clear that COVID is a disease of the elderly and sick vs. the healthy and young. And it must be said that obesity is a leading comorbidity after age in COVID hospitalizations and deaths. Obesity has a medical code associated with it, yet doctors don't always code it for various reasons when someone is admitted with respiratory or other symptoms - we've gotten so used to it here in the U.S. getting worse and worse, we don't see it anymore; doctors don't want to be accused of fat-shaming (did we fear skinny-shaming of anorexia in the 80s and 90s? No, we called it what it was - a disease and tried to address it). So the 68% to 78% number of COVID hospitalizations with obesity as a comorbidity is probably even higher. I'll never forget when I came back to the U.S. after living overseas for 7 years, and how noticeable the increase in obesity was with fresh eyes. I grew up working class in Brooklyn, and most of my extended family were trim and active from work. My whole neighborhood in Brooklyn was like that. Now, I see so many people in electric carts, and handicap parking tags. It's no wonder a country as developed as ours has so many deaths from COVID. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20587384211050199 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20587384211050...

cannabis_sam 5y ago

What are you basing your view on? According to the CDC, previously infected, but unvaccinated people outnumber vaccinated people, when it comes to laboratory-confirmed covid hospitalizations. >Among COVID-19–like illness hospitalizations among adults aged ≥18 years whose previous infection or vaccination occurred 90–179 days earlier, the adjusted odds of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 among unvaccinated adults with previous SARS-CoV-2 infection were 5.49-fold higher than the odds among fully vaccinated recipients of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine who had no previous documented infection (95% confidence interval = 2.75–10.99). https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm (I am far from an expert on any of this, so I just wondering, not claiming anything as factual either way.)

eggy 5y ago
>What are you basing your view on? According to the CDC,... There are many peer-reviewed studies that clearly show that natural immunity is equal if not better than the vaccine. The Israeli study for one, and that used 10 times the number of people then the study you are citing. Almost 700,000 people in Israel. The CDC study is from 9 states. The CDC seems to front page studies that ignore or counter natural immunity arguments, or cherry pick them like the Kentucky study. My common sense was telling me that natural immunity should be innocent until proven guilty, and novel vaccines should be guilty until proven innocent. And not just proving short-term "innocence", or safety as the analogy goes. Somehow this was flip-flopped in today's world. There is also this non-sequitur argument against natural immunity going around that it's risky to get COVID to attain natural immunity. I, like a lot of other recovered people, are not arguing that we think people should get COVID to acquire natural immunity. That is stupid. Get vaccinated if you are in a higher risk group. We are saying recognize that we already have it through no choice of our own, and don't disenfranchise us from society. Then they say the vaccine plus natural immunity is so much stronger. Well, if I am not in a high-risk group (obese, diabetic, etc.), and I have natural immunity with current antibody tests still coming back high, why should I be compelled to take a novel vaccine with no long-term safety data? My nephew who is very fit suffered myocarditis/pericarditis for a month and a half within days of getting the vaccine. His mother came down with Bell's Palsy after her vaccine. Miraculously, nobody I actually know died from COVID, but I have many colleagues and friends who have had COVID, and none of them were worse than the flu or hospitalized. Pfizer and Moderna eliminated their control groups for long-term studies by vaccinating them. There are no Random Clinical Trial studies currently being done that I know of, and not enough time has passed for them to have results for long-term safety. How can public officials say it is "almost 100% safe". Impossible even after long-term studies are done. There's always risk, and you should be free to make that decision with your healthcare provider. This is becoming a social medicince policy debate in a lot of circles, not science, ever since the slogan "a pandemic of the unvaccinated", or "the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated"; it should be a "pandemic of the immune vs. the non-immune". Or a pandemic of "the young and healthy vs. the old, the obese and unhealthy", given serious illness, hospitalization, and mortality are disproportionately among that group. Download the data from the CDC yourself and remove anyone with at least one or two comorbidities and in the under 55 or so age group. Tell me the the actual risk, and compare it to the media hype. The 1957 and 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreaks were very similar to COVID's case fatality rate, and the world didn't shut down then. And it doesn't compare to the 50 million who died in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic even if the US deaths are close. Global pandemic remember? Why are we pushing vaccines that have no long-term safety clinical studies on 5 to 11 year olds when the IFR (Infection Fatality Ratio)for 0 to 17 year olds puts an 11-year old in the same risk category of dying with COVID as being struck by lightning [2]? My younger ones had COVID with me and my wife. We will not be vaccinating them, since they are not at risk, and given vaccinated people can get infected and infect others, the argument that I should do it for others is illogical. Kind of circling around to my original post about the dystopian movie, 'Songbird', I just read about Australia's "remote quarantine" or internment camps [3]. Maybe the movie wasn't as far-fetched as some criticized. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena... [2] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/world/australia/howard-springs-quarantine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/world/australia/howard-sp...