You make some reasonable points. Also, some that are not so reasonable.
Please explain the mental gymnastics you put yourself through to quantify and assess the long term risks associated with any of the available Covid vaccines. There is no data on long term risks. Not yet.
No mental gymnastics required. Just a basic understanding of how the vaccines function. I won't take up a lot of space rehashing it; you can easily find sites on the web that do that, to varying degrees of detail. Suffice to say that the mRNA vaccine is not a virus, weakened or otherwise. It can't do much of anything other than what it does, which is to set things in motion for the production of antibodies. Cells break them down at the end of their function, or they disintegrate on their own after a time. They are not virii; they don't enter cells; they can do only one thing; they break down on their own. The short-term risks are pretty well understood at this point. The long-term risks, not derivatives of the short-term risks, require some mechanism that is unpredictable, undetectable after a year, and unprecedented. And, to top it off, have to have effects (injury and mortality) which rival or exceed those of COVID before "long-term effects" justify not using the vaccine. And let's face it, the goal posts have kept moving since t = 0. A year ago, "one year" was included as a long-term effect. Next year, men of good character can hope that "two years" drops off the list.
The traditional type of vaccine (weakened virus) wasn't of interest to me, but my take on those are that the technology has been around for at least 250 years, so once again, the odds of some mysterious long-term effect popping up is not very large.
You asked about
my assessment. I have some close friends and relatives who are MDs or PhDs in the medical field. The information that I have about the matter -- not just the conclusions, but the reasoning behind them -- makes sense to me. The anti-vaxxers, on the other hand, tend to be the type that believes in conspiracies, flat earth, that Coldplay is a great band, etc. Over the years, every single deep dive I've made into their reasoning is a trip to the bananas factory, and a waste of my time.
Drove all that way to make my appointment for nothing.
Appointment, as in singular? J&J, or did you pull out too soon?
I’m anti-mandatory vaccine using an experimental vaccine with limited shelf life. And no provisions for granting a waiver for natural immunity due to previous infection. I believe every individual should be able to make up their own mind. Right wrong or indifferent.
[yells at cloud] It's not a perfect world, but you seem to require one as a condition for taking any action at all, which should be self-evidently unreasonable. Regarding personal autonomy, there are, and always have been limits on it, which generally fall somewhere around the transition point where it starts to affect others. Nobody (including you, it seems) has any rebuttal to that fact other than to press rewind and repeat.
2 years into this and the government still hasn’t issued formal common sense guidelines for prophylactic measures which could greatly reduce the risk of hospitalization/death. Lose weight. Exercise daily. Take vitamin C, D, zinc, magnesium. Add in others that hold promise as immune system boosters. Turkey tail and agarikon mushrooms. Quercetin.
Wait, didn't you just say something in the previous paragraph about people being free to make up their own minds? But now, when you want to find something to criticize, you pull this out of your ass? The government is responsible for issuing "common sense guidelines"? Seriously?
You beat your chest about unvaccinated overloading existing hospital capacity. We have had 2 fucking years to expand ICU capacity. We built dozens of field hospitals across the country to accommodate the sick. All the government has done is dismantle those perfectly adequate field hospitals and refuse to expand existing ICU space. And to top it off, let’s fire healthcare workers that refuse to get the vaccine. These same people that have been risking their lives and their family’s lives by treating the sick for 2 years. Many, in fact most, of whom have already contracted Covid at least once, are now considered unclean and anti-vaxxers. So today we have staffing shortages in many hospitals. These same unvaccinated frontline health care workers that were being lauded for showing up day after day.
Permanently expanding ICU capacity isn't a trivial task, either economically or logistically. And what happens when the pandemic ends? You have a glut of unused and unneeded ICU space. Wouldn't it make more sense to have less cases of COVID that require hospitalization in the first place? Of course it would, unless you are simply looking for something to criticize. As for the workers, well, they risked their lives and their families lives before there were vaccines, but now that we have those vaccines, the risk to other people's lives isn't important, MAH FREEDOMS is. See above about limits on personal autonomy.
I wasn’t going to get vaccinated. I looked at my [SNIP]
Sorry to cut you off, but there's something more important that needs to be discussed, which is me. Four months ago a motorcycle slammed into me, threw me 10 meters through the air. It was almost as traumatic as Falkie's air mattress hurling him violently onto the floor. Within fifteen minutes or so, I walked away from the accident. I had a tear in the meniscus of one knee, but I'm alive, I walk around just fine, climb stairs, hike up hillsides, etc. Still a bit stiff when I squat down, but fortunately I have a Western-style toilet.
So, from the foregoing, we can conclude that my personal experience shows that having a motorcycle slam into you while crossing the street is not as big of a risk as Big Pharma claims it to be.
Now, back to you:
I very well may have kicked it on my own without ivermectin.
Like I said, you make some reasonable points.
By 9am on Christmas morning I was feeling pretty good.
I'm happy -- sincerely -- that your experience was no worse than it was.
Has the government really been saying that people who are vaccinated won't contract COVID? The same government that you want to issue common-sense guidelines? I mean, common sense in this case is that if the manufacturers claim efficacy rates below 100%, you can expect that some vaccinated people will contract COVID. The highest rate that I have heard about hovers around 90%. So if 100 million people get vaccinated, 10 million of them might contract COVID. Like I said, it is not a perfect world. And it's not reasonable to demand that it should be, whether it is a vaccine or apple spice horse paste.
[EDIT] I almost forgot to add that it's nice to have a decent exchange of viewpoints with a conspiracy retard. Reading PB's posts are like staring at Henry's Kissinger's asshole. I usually black out about halfway through and wake up strangling my dog.
